I really should have seen it coming. But…well, in my defense, I had no idea as to the limits of alicorn stamina. Still, Celestia keeps herself up for three days with barely any sleep, is probably worried sick about me the whole time, and then gets shoved into a high-tech world to suffer at least a modicum of culture shock. Oh, and she was apparently feeling guilty over the whole Sunset thing. All of that combined couldn’t be good for one’s mental state.

As for me, I was just glad Rarity let us in. I may not have used up any energy when I had my mental breakdown in Canterlot, but I had been up so long it was taking whatever passed for the changeling version of earth pony magic just to keep me going and I had spent a lot of power to make those kids forget about Celestia and me back on the road. I was tired, and more importantly, hungry. Just because my mind didn’t need sleep didn’t mean my body didn’t miss the rest.

“Wait…princess?” Rarity asked as she looked over to Celestia’s crown, and then to the pony turned human. “Your mother is a princess? I thought you said you were an orphan!”

The question managed to shock Sunset out of the daze Celestia had put her in, and it probably helped the princess looked away from her and over to me for a translation. Instead of giving it to the alicorn, I just looked over to Shimmer and sighed. “Hey, I was having to type this junk out on a…magical mirror brick…thing one letter at a time!” I said while coming up with the closest approximation of iPhone that I could in Equestrian. “Mom was a hay of a lot faster than magical horse princess of an alternate dimension!”

Celestia raised an eyebrow at me. “You told them I was her mother?” she asked before letting out a breath and looking over to the shocked girl. “Well…I guess that isn’t too far from the truth when you look at it in a certain way.”

“I…” Sunset managed to get down at herself where her pants had gotten soaked. “I need to go change.”

After Sunset took off to change clothes, or more likely, get some breathing room and time to think, Rarity’s manners kicked in and she invited us into the living room while telling Rainbow Dash to clean up the mess. The diva blamed the athlete’s poor explanation of what was going on during her trip over as the reason for Sunset’s shock. Rainbow griped about it a little, but stayed to clean the spilled tea and ice while Tia and me were shown the main room of the house.

“I’m just glad my sister is with her friends tonight,” Rarity mumbled more to herself than us.

That got a relieved sigh out of me as well. I didn’t know if Sweetie would have been freaked out, or jumped on Princess Celestia’s back for a horsy ride. Considering how much doing it took me to get Rainbow on her back, and what happened during the flight, I didn’t think Tia was going to be letting any other humans ride her anytime soon.

Then the teenager turned off the big screen television and looked around the room before grabbing large pillow for Celestia to sit on…and then quickly ran to get a towel from a downstairs bathroom before coming back to cover the pillow and protect it from being touched by the bare ass of a horse.

After that, she seemed to go into full on manners mode again and offered a quick curtsy, which Tia gave a nod to in return when I explained what it was. Two legs and hands made everything look different.

“Now,” Rarity finally said as she looked over to me. “You know English, but…why can’t you talk? Twilight’s…dog could talk. And why can’t the princess either?”

That question I had to relay to Princess Celestia and wait for the humans to find a notebook for me to write in when I tuned down the use of Rarity’s phone for something faster. When I was finally ready to transcribe the answer,I was kind of curious about the how it all worked myself. My money was on the fact that we had used a different mirror to come to Earthquestria.

“Oh, that,” the princess began while I just did my best to carry the gist of her conversation to the human. “Starswirl created his second mirror to help adjust for some of the problems of the first. When we were traveling, there were a few worlds we came across where we didn’t understand a word the occupants said, and others had inhabitants that were not like ponies at all. So he devised a spell that turned whomever walked through it into the nearest creature of approximate size and gave them a the ability to use of the local language on an almost subconscious level. I doubted Twilight even knew she was speaking human until you came along.”

So that’s why Spike could talk as a dog, I told myself as I finished a bare bones transcription of what Celestia said and showed it to the girls. The first thing they had come across was a guy walking his dog after all. I guess that the mirror must have identified Spike as Twilight's pet, or he just had the misfortune of the dog being closer to the mirror when it made his form.

Then came a slew of other questions about things, like what I was, what was the name of the big horse, if Twilight was okay…and the big one of what we were doing here. I just went with the shape shifter explanation without mentioning the vampirism when it came to me, didn’t tell them Celestia’s name with an explanation of it being impossible to correctly pronounce by humans, and when it came to why we were here…

“You’re here to take Sunset home?” Rarity mumbled.

{If she wants to go. Do you think she wants to stay?} I wrote down after seeing the human's unguarded apprehension.

Rarity sat down on the couch while I relayed what I wrote to Celestia. “Well, the question isn’t whether she wants to, its if she can,” she mumbled before looking over at me. “After we found out the truth about her…being an alien and all, I’ve noticed some other things that are a little…odd when it comes to Sunset.”

I held up a hoof to forestall Celestia’s questions to know what was going on to ask Rarity what she meant via paper.

“Well…her grades on history are terrible, she can’t drive to save her life, and…okay…I don’t know how much you know about human society, but when were born, certain…records are made, like each human is given a specific number for them alone. But…I don’t know if Sunset has anything like that. And without them, I'm afraid of what may befall her after she gets out of high school.”

The fact that a high school kid that wasn’t a senior knew enough about that kind of stuff impressed me a bit, and managed to knock my opinion of human-Rarity up a notch. But considering her parents were gone on a business trip...I had the feeling human-Rarity might have been raising Sweetie as much as her pony counterpart was. {I take it you're talking about her SSN and the like?}

Rarity stared at the page for a few moment, probably wondering how an alien knew that much about her society. “Um…yes. You see, because she wasn’t born here…there might be…problems later on.”

Honestly, I had been wondering where the other Sunset Shimmer was. But if pony-Sunset was in the system, having to deal with stuff like foster homes then…it was a pretty good bet that human-Sunset and her family were dead. All she had to do was say ‘I don’t know’ a lot to people when she first showed up in regards to her parents location and…it would have been pretty easy for her to take the dead girl’s place since they were identical as far as I could tell from the HuMane Five and their pony counterparts.

Then came the awkward silence, apparently showing the limits on Rarity’s knowledge of the subject. A minute later, Rainbow walked in and looked around. “What’s going on?”

“We’re waiting for Sunset to finish washing,” Rarity explained before offering the other human a seat. Celestia just lowered her head, from the weight of deep thoughts or exhaustion, I couldn’t tell.

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “What is she doing? taking a shower or something? Send her an text and ask what’s up.”

“Rainbow, she was in my spare pajamas, I don’t think she even has her phone on her,” the diva replied.

To that, Rainbow had the ultimate answer. “Well just call her and see if she picks up.”

With all the phone talk going around, an idea sprouted in my head, and I quickly wrote it down to show it to the girls. It took a little pen work and some pleading eyes, but Rarity nodded and dialed her cell.

“I’ll get it,” Rainbow replied before she dashed off into the hallway and to the right before I heard the telltale sounds of someone going up stairs as a phone went off with the classic bell ringtone.

I bullshited an explanation of where Rainbow went to Celestia, and then looked to Rarity for a moment before turning my attention back to Tia. “Hey Celestia, what exactly happened when Sunset left in the first place?” I asked, genuinely curious. “And I don’t mean the basic outline you gave to Twilight, I mean the real story, the whole story. It can’t have been that she just...took off to another dimension for no reason. I know foals can be a hoof full and want everything given to them yesterday, but you don’t just run away from being taught by the most powerful pony on the planet, no matter how short-sighted you are.”

The alicorn’s head shot up from where it had been, and she sighed. “That’s quite a long story,” she mumbled.

“We don’t have that much else to do at this point, do we?” I asked as Rarity scooted closer until she was sitting between the two of us on the couch.

Our conversation drew the attention of the human, but I didn’t bother with giving them the rundown of what was going on. After another minute of me pleading, Celestia caved. “Well…it all started when I found her at Canterlot. There had been a fire at one of the houses in in the outer edge of the city, and…well, as you know, we didn’t use pegasi for weather at the time. So by the time the unicorns that responded to the alarm and got to the scene to summon rain and put out the fire…all that was found in the wreckage was a young filly. Apparently, she started the fire when her magic surged and…revealed her special talent.”

The parallel between the filly she was talking about and Twilight was obvious, but I didn’t comment on it. I mean, magical surge that causes mass destruction? While Twilight's entrance exam hadn't had any fireworks, the purple pony had turned her parents into plants and made Spike put a hole in the roof.

“I saw the potential in her and I had been feeling my sister raging against her imprisonment, gathering her power to escape in a few short years,” the goddess continued. “I knew a confrontation with Nightmare Moon was inevitable. At the time, I had no idea that the Elements of Harmony would be awoken one day and any battle would be between myself and Nightmare Moon would end with both of us being destroyed. I didn’t want Cadence to get injured because of my mistakes. So, knowing my end was near, I began looking for my…replacement. Sunset had powerful magic, and her cutie mark was of a blazing sun. It was kind of obvious to me that she was the one.

“Things were going well at first, but…as she grew older, Sunset started becoming more prideful and conceited. She isolated herself from other ponies and began researching dangerous magic-”

I tilted my head. “How is that any different than Twilight?”

The question got a shake of Celestia’s head. “Right, I forgot just how much you know about us,” she mumbled before thinking things over for a second. “If I had to point out the differences in their respective self-imposed isolation… Twilight did it because she has a tendency to become too focused on a task and discounted the importance of interacting with other ponies. Sunset did it because she thought she was too good for other ponies to socialize with.”

“Twilight put the importance in her work over others, while Sunset put the importance in herself,” I summarized. Although Twilight’s problem had been corrected easily enough when meeting other ponies, Sunset had already done such things and probably subbed them in favor of her lessons.

Celestia nodded. “I tried to teach her humility, and…I’ll admit, my failure to do so with Sunset might have made me be a bit too harsh in that respect when it came to Twilight. But I digress…

“I guess my mistake with Sunset began when I showed her the mirror that is permanently connected to this world,” she went on. “You see, when that mirror is not active, it serves another purpose. Whomever looks into it sees themselves in the best of possible worlds. I had hoped it would inspire her to greatness.”

Considering what happened, I doubted Tia’s plan was all that successful. While giving someone who had no hope a glimpse of it would allow them to pick themselves up, people who were more sure of themselves just had their ambitions fueled even. I could almost see Sunset becoming some kind of end justified the means type of person if she saw her end goal like that. “And what did Sunset see?”

“Truthfully? I’m still not one-hundred-percent sure, but when I put in her later actions into account…I think she saw herself becoming an alicorn,” the goddess told me. “Because after that, she became obsessed with the mirror, asking me about it day after day, week after week. But by then I had decided to slow down her training until I could get her maturity catch up with her magical ability.”

“And then?”

“I didn’t account for her…reckless ambition,” Celestia told me. “She snuck into the castle library’s restricted section where I keep the unedited history of Equestria and books on dark magic. There, she found out that I could make other ponies alicorns and started making demands. She started shouting how she deserved to be an alicorn and my equal, if not my better. I let her anger and…the fact she threw a book at me get under my coat. I answered her anger with some of my own when I should have offered compassion and understanding. And then I expelled her as my student.”

I gave Celestia a confused frown. Kicking a kid out on the street when they had nowhere else to go didn’t quite sound like the Celestia I knew. “But I thought she was an orphan. Where was she supposed to go?”

The alicorn shook her head. “Oh, I wasn’t that angry. I had planned to arrange for a place for her to stay in Canterlot if she wished it and…well, after what happened…I keep trying to tell myself that I simply wanted her to see what the world was like outside the castle without my help so that she could grow as a pony, pehaps make some real friends away from the court, but…

“Let’s see, how best to put it?” she asked herself before tapping her chin in thought with a hoof. “Omnifarious, I consider you one of my closest friends because…well, because you act a lot like Sunset once did that day. You yell at me, point out my faults, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you bow to me-”

“Gee thanks,” I deadpanned. “I love you too Tia.”

The comment actually gave the alicorn pause for a moment, and she looked surprised before she recovered and continued “And you're pretty much the only pony I’ve ever met who does since my sister was banished. After a thousand years of nopony telling me no, when Sunset, my own student did it so violently, I overreacted. I let my temper get the best of me and…I do have a temper.

“By the time I had calmed down and thought to go check on her…I had found Sunset had overpowered her guards that were supposed to have escorted her out of the castle and made her way through the mirror.

“As much as I hate to admit it, I was…too afraid to follow. When Starswirl first crafted the second mirror and tested it, he came back moments later, completely horrified with instructions that I must never enter it after we failed to disconnect it from this world. So when Sunset ran through it, all I could do was place the mirror in my throne room in the hopes that she would return in time.

“The terrible isolation she must have felt here, trapped in this world without her magic,” Celestia hung her head and sighed. “I just wish I could tell her…I’m sorry.”

I leaned over to Rarity’s lap and moved the girl’s hands away before speaking into the iphone. “Hey Sunset, you get all that?” If Rarity hadn’t turned on the speaker function to catch our conversation, I was going to kill her.

“…yes,” Sunset’s voice came through the phone in a whisper.

It was more than enough to get Celestia’s attention. She grabbed the thing with her magic and held it close to her face. Considering the thing was still on speaker phone, I kind of felt sorry for Sunset’s ears when the alicorn started practically yelling into it. “Sunset! Can you hear me, she can hear me through the glass brick, right?” she asked me in as frantic a tone as I’d ever heard coming from her, topping even what had happen just a few minutes prior. “Sunset, I can’t apologize for everything that transpired between us, but…I did make many mistakes and…if you would permit me, I would like to do what I can to make up for them.”

“Princess…I…”

“You know she has no idea what you’re saying, right?” I asked the human on the other end of the line. When I could practically hear Sunset flinching at my voice, I let out a sigh. I knew where this had been going since I wrote the instructions to Rarity and Rainbow Dash to call Sunset’s phone. “Look, you can still write in Equestrian, so…collect your thoughts and tell us what you think. It’s not like we’re going to drag you back to Equestria if you don’t want to go.”

I looked over to Celestia for a second. “Um…you’re not, are you?”

The goddess shook her head. “Not if she doesn’t wish it,” she said before looking back to the phone. “If you want to stay with your friends here, I would not force you to return. But I do wish for you to know that there will always be a place for you in Canterlot, Sunset.”

With that little bit of drama done, I managed to turn off the phone before either of them could say something to fuck it up, and wrote something down to ask Rarity. {We’re tired and need some rest. Where’s your guest room.}

The girl with the purple hair gave me a surprised look. “Um…last door down the hall on your left. But…would you mind telling me what the hell’s going on first?”

{Sunset may come home with us. She’s thinking it over. We’ve been up for days and need some rest so we’re going to sleep on it while she does that.}

The prospect of having a horse, and whatever the hell I looked like to the girl sleeping in her house didn’t seem to appeal much to Rarity. However, she did manage to surprise me with an eventual agreement, if a reluctant one. “Well, I suppose I can’t just throw the two of you out on the street…but…are you sure she can even…get in the room? She’s kind of…wide for the door.”

“What are you talking about with her?” the alicorn asked with a raised eyebrow.

It took everything I had not to burst out laughing at that moment. Still, I managed to assure Rarity we’d find a way to get inside without breaking anything, and the girl went ahead to make sure everything was ready for company. Apparently, her parents tended to use it as a makeshift storage room when they came back from their trips and she didn’t want her parents to look like slobs in front of royalty.

When the giant pony didn’t follow, I looked up at Celestia and tried to sound as casual as I could. “Rarity’s offered to put us up for the night while Sunset thinks everything over. Room’s this way.”

“You get some rest. I’ll wait for Sunset to-”

Before the princess could even finish, I rounded on the princess with a frown. “You’re the one who needs the sleep Tia,” I told her with a frown.

“I can manage.”

The alicorn’s steady gaze made me growl. “You’re physically tired and emotionally drained, and…Luna only knows how long its going to take Sunset to make a decision. We need rest.”

“I-”

“And I need to feed of you, now,” I stressed. “I wasn’t that hungry when we got here, but I mind warped a full bus full of kids, flew, and teleported like crazy, and I may not need sleep like a pony, but the longer I keep my body active without having at least some period of relaxation, the more energy it takes to keep me going. Please. I need food.”

Celestia gave me a pained look as she obviously considered her options, then let out a sigh as she dropped her head. “Very well.” Considering how she had reacted to my comments earlier, I was a little surprised it was that easy to get her to agree. But then, she was Celestia. The giant pony princess could Rarity a run for her money in the generosity department.

As soon as we were done talking, I went back down the hallway while Celestia picked up her towel to follow me through the hall and into the room.

Of course it wasn’t just the size of Tia’s ass that was an obstacle for her getting into the house’s downstairs guestroom, the narrow hallway made it impossible for a horse like the alicorn to get inside with her wide turning radius.

There was also the problem of the bed that took up about a third of the room, with a dresser knocking off another two feet. Empty, the place would have been more than big enough for the alicorn and myself to lay down. As it was, Tia didn’t even have space to stand inside the room.

So of course she went and cheated with teleportation. A flash of light, and the bed reappeared inside the living room. That kind of freaked Rarity out a bit, but she kept her mouth from going slack jawed. “I’ll just, um…I should probably go talk to Sunset,” she said before pointing down the hallway and leaving us to try and get settled.

Once we were alone, I closed the door and looked over to the princess. Since the alicorn took up just about as much room as the bed as she turned sideways to lay down in a crouch, I was feeling a real lack of personal space. “Sorry about uh…taking the lead here,” I mumbled while Celestia looked me straight in the eyes.

“It is not the first time I have followed the instructions of another that made sense,” Celestia told me. “Although, most of the time those instructions come as advice instead of orders.” She giggled a bit, which helped with my uneasiness.

I smirked at her. “Last I checked, queen beats princess.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow back at me. “What happened to the king title?”

“Yeah well…the last of my…stallion-ness kind of died when Twilight and I…she got me to climax as a girl, so…might as well stop fighting it. I’m a girl, queen, and all that junk.” I sighed and hung my head in mourning for my manhood. Part of me though the words sounded hollow, and the rest just shouted 'BULLSHIT!'.

I also had to wonder why I had just gone and confessed my darkest secret to Celestia of all ponies. She and I were hardly friends, even if she had walked me through some pretty hard times already. It wasn’t just the last few days either, as she had been the one to make the call on saving me back in the Crystal Empire, I wasn’t stupid enough to think any of the others would have moved without her say-so.

Stupid Celestia and her easily trustable demeanor and gentle voice. Twilight may have had the cute and caring thing going for her, but Celestia got the ’I genuinely feel for you’ type of thing going on. It was just do damn disarming I felt easy about telling the alicorn and her non-judgmental stare anything.

A strange sound assaulted my ears and I felt something soft, yet extremely strong draped across my back before Tia pulled me to her side with her giant wing. I looked up at Celestia, and she just gave me one of those smiles Twilight received about every other time they met. “You are who you want to be my friend, and I do not think that allowing the mare you love to give you joy is anything to be ashamed of.”

The whole mentor vibe thing Tia was giving off made me sigh. I really didn’t want to get into a sexuality crises debate with a giant talking winged unicorn. Mainly because I’m pretty sure a thousand plus year old girly being had plenty of ammunition to shoot down any argument I had.

So, I did the chickening out thing and switched topics. “So um…about that feeding thing.”

When Tia’s face went all apprehensive while her muscles tensed, I had to ask the obvious question. “Is it really that bad for you just to think about?”

“Twilight has…informed me of what your feeding entails,” Celestia told me.

My mind raced with all the possibilities that little sentence could mean, and I only had to wonder if she was being all academic about it, or just bragging about her sex life to a pony who hadn’t gotten any in God only knew how long. Although I hoped for the later, common sense told me that it was probably the former.

Hell, I wondered if there was even a pony big enough to satisfy the oldest alicorn princess. Celestia easily topped my natural form and made every other stallion I’d ever seen look small. If her twice as big and then some dimensions were true all around, then I doubt anyone would have satisfied the horse goddess.

I kinda felt embarrassed about discussing my sex life with the thousand-plus-year-old woman, but then I remembered I had talked about other extremely embarrassing thing with her both days prior, and less than five minutes ago. It had actually been pretty easy so...why not this? “Is that a no?”

“If it is truly required, I will satiate your hunger,” Celestia agreed after another moment of thought before bringing her muzzle to within an inch of mine. She closed her eyes for a moment, and I felt the alicorn’s powerful muscles tense beneath me. “You may begin.”

Then, I inhaled Celestia’s feelings, taking a moment to taste her affection towards me.

Although I knew all the Mane Six, the only ones I had ever fed off, not counting the time at sea when everyone had thought I was dying and all the girls chipped in of course, were Twilight and Rainbow; the former much more than the later. The taste didn’t actually change from pony to pony based on species or anything, but it did according to the level of affection the pony felt for me, or whomever I was impersonating because when a changeling fed, the taste of our food was the emotional connection that our food had for us t that moment.

With Celestia, it was a warm love that brought a special kind of joy to my heart that I hadn’t experienced with either of my other usual donors. Rainbow was more of a devoted excitement and joy while Twilight…well, due to the timing I usually had, Twilight was a blazing fire of passionate joy that I could only hope to equal by feeding of another mare at climax.

But it was the amount of power that I could feel that really drew my focus. It wasn’t the endless ocean of magic I had been expecting. In fact, it seemed rather…low. Even Twilight had more energy at the end of the day than what I could feel from Celestia at that moment.

That little bit of information made me uneasy. The alicorn was beyond tired as I had thought she was when we came into the house. She almost dead on her feet! Yet she was giving me some of her power, after teleporting around like crazy, offering to go to a completely unknown world, and doing a ton of other things to try and help me with little thought to her own health.

…all of a sudden, my little freakout that had lasted the past few days had me feeling very small and selfish.

Of course being curled up next to a creature more than twice my size helped.

I drained the mare for a mere five seconds, and then cut the siphon. Celestia’s entire body shook as she let out a stuttered breath. The warmth in my body lingered as she looked at me oddly for a moment, then turned her attention to her rear for a moment before looking back to me. “That’s it?”

My confusion pretty much forced me to turn on my empathy, as I just got even more lost at the disappointment Celestia was feeling. For some reason, I actually felt insulted. “Umm…yes?”

“From what Twilight said, I was expecting something a little more…pleasurable,” she said after obviously searching for the right word that wouldn’t kill my pride.

“Uh…just what did she say about it?” I asked, a little afraid of the answer.

Celestia’s uncomfortableness grew, and she cleared her throat. “Well, I believe her exact words when I asked were…it was the most amazing experience of my life, my brain literally short-circuits so much I can’t even process information for a good three minutes, and oh Celestia, if we had known about this beforehand, Chrysalis wouldn’t have needed to conquer Equestria, we would have just given it to her in return for a changeling friend for everypony.”

My jaw dropped, and my sympathy died. “Wait…you thought…okay, first off the only way it feels so good with Twilight is because I feed off her when she climaxes, or take multiple siphons!”

“Do you…want to go on then?” she asked hesitantly.

I told her no, and a bit of struggling made her remove her wing.

With the deed done and neither of us in the mood to talk, Tia laid out while I found my own space and shut down.

Trying to connect to the hive mind without a hive mind was, in a word, lonely. Although I had stayed conscious for days while in Canterlot, the difference in being alone when I was in a room by myself and the difference in being alone while trying to connect with the collective unconsciousness of the changeling hive as massive. It was like standing in the middle of a football stadium’s field, looking around at all the empty chairs and unused field some someone had told you there was a game today.

It was creepy. Really creepy.

So I simply floated within my own unconsciousness, thinking of Twilight, Rainbow, and all the rest of the girls.

The more I thought about things, the more guilty I felt.

I knew Twilight had been worried about me, and yet I just let myself get all wrapped up in my own doubts because I had simply denied the truth of her existence thanks to a little mental crisis. I really needed to make it up to her when I got back home. Not just the dinner, flowers, and a movie sort of thing either. It needed to be more than just a big gesture, even if that was a pretty good start to things.

So, without much else to do, I busied myself by reviewing my own memories, of the times I flew with Rainbow, actually had conversations with Big Mac that involved more than two words, played around with Pinkie, and gossiped with Rarity about the ponies around town.

Hell, I even found myself reviewing the few times I went to Zecora to learn a few things about her potion making. Most of the stuff I made exploded or melted whatever I poured it on, but…well, chemistry sucked, and magical chemistry didn’t even try to make sense.

Still, the home movies kept my mind occupied until it was time to get up.

I’m not sure how much sleep we got before a knock at the door drew me out of my empty mindscape. It was still dark outside the windows, but we had gone to sleep just barely an hour after sundown so waking up at four in the morning and still feeling good was well within the realm of possibility. However, my muscles were glad for any kind of break, and didn't protest as much as I raised my head.

At least it was for me, I knew the exhaustion Celestia was feeling needed more than a peaceful six hours. Still, I managed to take some comfort in the fact that we’d be going home in a few minutes and she could at least fall back into her usual routine.

Celestia was the one who called for them to enter, which made me roll my eyes since only one person the whole planet actually knew what she was saying.

Then Sunset shut my snarkiness the hell up when she opened the door with a couple of sheets of paper in her hand. Celestia took them in her magic, and began reading them to herself while I turned to study the human.

Sunset was dressed in her usual leather jacket, skirt and boots combo I had seen in the movie, but that wasn’t what drew my attention. She looked tired, and not just the physical tired either. The redness under her eyes spoke of tears, and the slightly frazzled head of hair showed…okay, well…I had no idea. Just because I was some sort of bug-pony girl didn’t mean I had insight into the female sex’s hair care secrets. It just didn’t look kept. Although the downcast expression didn’t speak well of her mood. But the sadness that just radiated out of her was obvious.

A crumple of paper drew my attention to Celestia as she finished reading Sunset’s letter and pushed the pages aside. The pain on her face had returned, and was mixed with more than a hint of confusion. Whatever Sunset had written, it had upset Celestia like nothing I had seen from her in awhile. She wasn't afraid or angry, more like...hurt.

“Banishment? Return for punishment?” the goddess whispered to the distraught teenager as she stretched her neck towards the girl just a little bit. “Oh Sunset, no! Mistakes were made, but they exist to be learned from. I would never punish you for them, at least not how you seem to think I will.”

The human gulped and looked up at her hesitantly. “Then…what will do with me?”

After I relayed Sunset’s message to Celestia, the alicorn gave her a soft smile. “That all depends on you. If you want, you can remain here. I see that you have at least two wonderful friends that care about you. But, if you come home to Equestria…I will make you my student again. You can come back to the castle, and we will be together again. That is...if you want to.” The little bit of hesitation at the end of Celestia's offer made me surprised. Apprehension was something I was not used to seeing on the goddess.

“But…why? After everything I’ve done…I…Twilight Sparkle banished me from Equestria, she left me here to…to just…”

The banishment comment got a grunt of disapproval from me to show both what I thought of Sunset’s interpretation of events, and Twilight just abandoning Sunset to the human world. I understood that Twilight probably didn’t comprehend just how badly leaving her in people land screwed Sunset over if this world was even half as human as mine, where you couldn’t get out of jail on charges of enslaving a whole town of ponies with a corrupted by dark magic defense followed by a fireworks show to prove your sincerity like Trixie. Even without major legal repercussions, the girl couldn’t have had much of a good time after everything that went down.

“Trust me, she’s going to get one hay of an earful for that when I get back,” I told Sunset, getting a look of confusion in return. But instead of answering the question written on her face, I went with something else. “Look, since you’ve got those teenage hormones and an underdeveloped brain that probably can’t think long-term anymore…I’ll spell it out for you. Here, you’ve got a few high school friends that look ready to go a dozen separate ways come graduation, and little in the way of future prospects once that’s over and your foster family kicks you out on your plot. I’m sure Twilight meant well, but…this isn’t Equestria, and friendship isn’t all powerful here, like it is there.

“Then we’ve got your opportunities back home. In Equestria, you have a bucking goddess willing to help you reach your full potential, because I seriously doubt a unicorn that can teleport and sneak we way through a palace full of guards is destined to end up flipping processed cow meat. Now stop beating yourself up over your mistakes like a human, and move past them like a real pony would.”

I didn’t like playing the whole destiny card since it kind of went against the whole free will thing, plus the fact that it tended to piss on me at every opportunity, but the future of a kid was on the line and I tended to fight dirty when it came to getting children to try and live up to their potential.

Celestia let out a snort. “You’re one to talk about how to behave like a pony. And what was that about cow meat?”

I snubbed Tia’s comment with a turn of my head. “I’m a changeling. We’re allowed to brood and get all aghast every now and then.” It was in the vampiric creatures handbook, page sixty-four. “And you don’t want to know.”

The alicorn took another few seconds to look at me, then rolled her eyes. “So,” Tia spoke up, making Sunset turn her eyes up to the mare. “What do you say Sunset? Do you wish to come home, or stay here?”

“I…yes,” she breathed out after a long pause. “I want to go home. I want to use able to magic, and not have to worry that one day someone will figure out I don’t belong here. I don’t want to have to worry about what a bunch of stupid websites are saying, or if I’ll be able to afford college, or get stuck in some meaningless job for the rest of my life as I struggle to get by.”

After the translation, Celestia’s head tilted a bit before speaking in a harsher tone than I was accustomed to hearing from her. “I see you still have your ambition then.” The comment got a flinch from Sunset, but the alicorn’s gaze lightened. “But…ambition isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if properly guided.

“Now, shall we say farewell to your friends?” she asked.

As it turned out, I had missed a few things during my siesta. Like the arrival of new guests, judging by the five girls waiting for us in the living room.

Sunset had made up her mind to come with us and told the others about an hour into the downtime I shared with Celestia, then Rarity had called the girls so the pseudo-human could tell them goodbye, Pinkie heard about it, and they had all shown up at about nine to throw her a goodbye party.

“It…you really did have a unicorn princess in your guest room,” Fluttershy said breathlessly.

Applejack eyed the alicorn up and down for a minute. “Ah think ya’ll need to change yer descriptions if ya’ll are callin’ yourselves ponies while lookin like that!”

Sunset pinched her nose at hearing that one. “This princess is a bit different than normal Equestrians AJ.”

“Hey Sunny! What happened? You look of a heck of a lot happier!” Pinkie commented as she moved to study the girl.

A light blushed crept up on Sunset’s cheeks, and she glanced over to Celestia for a moment before letting out a sigh and smiling back at Pinkie, although it was nowhere near what the pink-haired girl was displaying. “I…just got some good news is all. Better than I expected, to be honest.” Considering that she had thought that Celestia had come to drag her back to face punishment for just the sake of punishment, I considered her words an understatement.

“Excuse me,” Rarity said as she looked down at me. “If you’re going, could one of you return my parent’s guest bed to its proper place?”

The goodbyes took over an hour, mostly because Sunny’s friends had about half a dozen questions for me and Tia, and I had a few to ask them in turn to find out just what the hell happened after Twilight left.

Apparently, most of the student body of the high school had forgotten about the magical battle between Satan Shimmer and the sparkling angel, and pretty much the entire dance altogether. But, mind magic could easily mess with a pony’s short term memory so they wouldn’t save anything after going to bed. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think it could happen to humans too. Differences in brain chemistry be damned.

In fact, it was almost like magic went out of its way to give science the finger every now and then. This just seemed to be one of those times.

There had been an investigation into everything, but the girls didn’t seem to know much about it. I just guessed without any real evidence, it was filed away in those unexplained crimes folders that the police have; which number more than anyone really likes to admit. Photographic evidence of the girls with ears and wings was written off with words like photoshopped, and everything went back to normal.

On the other side of things, the girls asked a lot about Twilight and Equestria, which me and Sunset answered to the best of our ability in the way of current events and how things worked in a land of magical ponies. It was funny what they thought was unbelievable and what wasn’t.

Magic they believed in of course, but some of them were left scratching their heads at how we could have electricity and pretty modern medical equipment, but still be using things like trains. Of course being humans, they didn’t quite understand the old ‘ponies are traditionalists’ excuse. Plus, with necessity being the mother of invention and magic being the go to thing for ponies, technological development was kind of crippled in certain areas.

The update on Twilight also got a lot of confused looks…even from Sunset. But, that’s what happens when you tell people that pony princesses lived in trees and the extent of their authority was checking out library books.

Well, Twilight had a bit more in the way of responsibilities than that, but I’m the one that got stuck with all the stuff like making boring judgments over the stupidest of disputes and signing all the paperwork.

After that was the reaction of me being Twilight’s boyfriend. Thankfully, no one brought out a Flash Sentry question, pretty much confirming my suspicions that Sunset was keeping quiet on the whole alternate universe that that served as a double for Equestria County, if a bit larger and more populated.

Then came time for the taking of pictures of the actual mystical creatures, Pinkie getting a selfie from Celestia’s back, me having to translate a thanks from Celestia for the help they gave to Twilight while she was in human land, and actual goodbyes that involved more hugging than I liked to admit to witnessing.

Plus, with all the emotional stuff going on, I felt like I was walking into the sixth Star Wars without seeing the fifth. I mean, Han and Leia a couple? What about Luke? Not to mention the weirdo driving the Falcon…it was just too much for even my mind to fill in the blanks. All I really knew for sure was that Sunset was a social pariah back at the school she went to, and the HuMane Five didn't seem to be all that broken up about her leaving either.

By the time we were finally ready to go, the sun had already risen and Celestia was giving it an angry glare out of the window for how it was taking its sweet time getting into the air. Not wanting the midpoint world between human and pony to be destroyed, I managed to speed things up before she tried to help it out and either wipe out the human population by knocking Earth out of Sol’s orbit, or freak out if she learned the sun couldn’t be moved as easily as her star. The goddess was already a bit unnerved by the whole thing.

When the alicorn was building the magic in her horn to create the portal home and I was keeping an eye on Pinkie to make sure she didn’t try running through, Rarity chose that last moment to interrupt us. “And…you’re sure we can keep the horseshoes?”

“We don’t put as much value on stuff like gold and gems as humans do Rarity,” Sunset told her. “The princess said you deserved a rewards and…well, now you don’t have to worry about paying for college.”

The fashionista let out a sigh and shook her head. “I can’t believe that I’m actually going to miss the person who went out of the way to destroy our social lives from the day we first met but…you really have turned out to be an okay girl. You know, espite the whole demonic rampage thing where you tried to kill us.”

Which put her about on equal level with Diamond Tiara when it came to the pony level of morality.

“What do you want us to tell your foster parents?” Fluttershy asked.

Sunset just let out a single laugh. “Are you kidding? Ten bucks says they won’t even notice I’m gone for at least a week. How those two ever got approved is beyond me.”

I snorted. “I’m kind of wondering how you got into the system in the first place.” As far as I knew, foster care wasn’t supposed to last for several years, just until a kid’s parents that were under arrest or something could get worked through the system.”

“Oh that…I just told the police officers who found me squatting in the park my parents had run off and I didn’t know where they were,” she said with a shrug. “They’re still missing so...here I am. To be honest, I think there's also some kind of chameleon effect that goes along with the body transformation that keeps people from asking too many questions."

Celestia looked back to the former-unicorn. “Have you said your goodbyes?”

A nod from Sunset was all the goddess needed to release the magic she had been gathering as she tore a hole in reality before walking through. Sunset followed her, and I dived in after them before using a spell to stick the feet of the girls to the ground and insure no one else ran through at the last second.

The last thing Equestria needed was two Pinkie Pies.

The trip home to Equestria was much worse than the first time. Where before it felt as if I was being sent down a giant whirlpool in the middle of an ocean, this the second time gave me the same amount of nausea, followed by a hard yank and a feeling of being stretched think like a rubber band. Then the tension released, and I found myself slamming onto a cold floor that was much too hard to be wood with an aching everything thanks to the hard impact.

After checking to make sure I was still alive, I looked up and saw something beyond disturbing. For starters, I wasn’t in Celestia’s vault where she kept dimensional traveling mirror #1.

In fact, I had no idea where I was.

The sky was an unnaturally dark blue, not quite nighttime but nowhere near day either. And the whole place was covered with a light fog. Then there was the air, it was stale and full of so much dust I felt like half of what I breathed in was just floating dirt particles. The last thing I noticed that was off wasn’t really anything physical, but my magical senses made me feel like there was a weight behind pressed down on my horn, like someone had put me in the unicorn version of a headlock or something. It was annoying as hell.

Then there was the landscape. I was in an old city, standing in the middle of a stone walkway that was probably a main street or something judging by the fact it had enough width to be a four lane highway. On both sides of the road there were dilapidated houses made of stone and shingled roofs in need of repair. I could see the outline of towers in the distance through the fog, but they seemed weird, with twisted spires on the top of them that hung slightly askew. Some of the towers themselves seemed to even be leaning slightly the higher up they went.

The sound of a hoof striking the ground near me brought my attention back down to earth, and I looked over Celestia as she slowly stood up to twice my height and walked over to check on me. Usually, being so close to her was a little intimidating for me, but having the giant goddess of the sun with me in whatever the hell we were now just helped to calm my nerves. “Hey Tia, I knew the trip to Earthquestria was supposed to just drop us off anywhere, but…weren’t we supposed to come out of a mirror or something on the way home?”

A golden light illuminated the courtyard where we were in, and I had to look away from the alicorn’s horn to get my sight back. “Something went wrong with the return spell,” she mumbled.

“Was it our extra passenger?” I asked before I looked around and found Sunset laying on the ground behind us. The girl was…a redheaded girl in a leather jacket and crappy boots. As in, not a pony, much less a unicorn. I fought down my shock thanks mostly to our situation saying that I didn't have time to freak about about things, and just stated the obvious. “Oh, that’s not good.”

“No, it felt more like somepony pulled us to-” Celestia turned and gasped, then ran to touch the girl with her horn. A second later, an intense glow intensified and I felt the telltale tingling of magic being cast. I winced in sympathy. If I had taken a nasty fall, Sunset was probably lucky not to have broken bones protruding from her body. Although, I wondered what kind of magic Celestia used on her, as my limited knowledge of how healing magic worked said you had to know a few things about basic anatomy of what you were healing, or had some kind of previous healing magic to use as a road map like when Tia kept me from dying in the arctic. Sunset fit neither of those criteria.

Whatever spell was cast on the girl, it did the job of waking her up. “Ugh my head. What hit…” Sunset stopped as she pushed herself up with her hands, then probably noticed the sensation of still having her digits. “What… Why am I still human?”

As Celestia recoiled from the panic in the girl’s voice and face, I looked over to her and did my best to sound reassuring. “Well, we didn’t come through a magical mirror, so I’m guessing the spells keeping you human and speaking…their main language are still active.”

She let out a long sigh, then stood up hesitantly. “Okay…I guess…that makes sense. But…where are we then?”

Celestia’s horn glowed brighter for a moment as she closed her eyes in concentration. A minute later, she opened them to frown at the sky. “I can not feel the sun. Something has happened to block our path to Equestria.”

“Then just open another portal and let’s get out of here!”

Sunset’s angry comment got a confused glare from Celestia, until I translated it for her. Then she sighed and shook her head. “What do you think I just tried to do, my wayward apprentice?”

A chill ran down my spine a I digested Celestia’s words. I did not like the conclusion I came up with. “Are you saying we’re stuck here? And for that matter, where the hay is here? I don’t know how this dimensional travel stuff works, but I sincerely doubt a realm just…moves through whatever the hell you call the space between worlds.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when she shook her head in response to my first question. “You must feel the oppressive aura of this place as well. That is what disrupts my spell, we should find the source and see if we can counter it, or remove ourselves from the range of its influence.”

I looked around at the city, surrounding us, then back over to the alicorn. “Tia, we just landed on a whole new planet. Who the hay’s to say what we’re looking for isn’t on the other side of the globe.”

If there even was another side to the planet we had ended up on. Hell, considering how some things worked in ponyland, I wasn’t even sure if the planet Equestria was on was even round! Take that Columbus, and every other guy who figured out the world was a sphere centuries before he was even born!

“Planet?” Celestia asked. “Fairy, do you not feel the lack of life and harmony around us? This city is floating through the void between words.”

Then my crazy human science reared it’s ugly head and told me how bad it was that we were pretty much standing inside an abandoned sixteenth century city that was floating in space! But my knowledge of the arcane quickly replied no, for we were standing inside an abandoned sixteenth century city that was floating in magical space! Which was much worse as far as science was concerned.

“Well, I suppose it couldn’t get any worse.”

And of course, my comment made things worse.

In fact, it made things worse, in the most ironically bad kind worse way possible. Which was worse on so many levels than simply making things a normal kind of worse, because it not only made things worse, but it did it in a way that made me want to face hoof and shoot myself.

You see, about two seconds after I finished speaking, me and Tia caught the sound of several footsteps coming towards us from the mass of ruined buildings on the left side of the street. Not long after that, a group of bad guys from the set of Star Wars VI came from between the alleys.

Yeah…Star Wars.

It wasn’t the cool ones though, or even storm troopers. No high tech weapons either. They looked like those pig things from Jabba’s palace, the big green minions that Luke Vader-choked on his way into the place, I think they were called gamorreans.

What made it really bad was that they weren’t even good looking gamorreans. The guys at Jabba’s palace may have been fat walking pigs, but it at least looked like they had some muscle on them with their thick arms.

The things walking out from the alleyway had the large belly and huge jaw, but none of the muscle, and their coloring was wrong. They came in gray, tan, dark tan and several shades of brown, but no greens. All in all, they looked pretty pathetic in their short vests and horned helmets except for their spears with the wicked-looking serpentine blades at the end that I could feel tingling with magic. Those actually looked like they could hurt.

Soon as they saw us, the lot of them grunted in pig squeal, and pointed their spears before they advanced. Then they spread out to partially surround us. A second later, I heard footsteps approaching from the other end of the street and even more gamorrean rip-offs came pouring out, making it about twenty odd pig-men with large jaws.

It took me about a second to consider my options. Although I had fed off Celestia earlier, it had just been a snack to tide me over, and the alicorn hadn’t even had that much power herself at the time. With the magical field of the city pressing down on me too, I had a feeling that Rarity probably would have been more useful in a fight than me at the moment.

Then there was Sunset, who was currently a squishy little human that a unicorn could probably outdo in a contest of strength. She needed even more protection than I did.

As for our third member…she was a nearly omnipotent sun goddess who could crush anything short of a fellow deity beneath her hoof. So I wasn’t too ashamed to back up close to the protective deity and wished I had some popcorn to watch her go to town on these losers.

“Okay Tia, thanks for letting me lead in the human world and all, but considering you’re the real dimensional traveling expert here, I think it’s best if you take the lead and do something about our situation,” I told her as the pig-men closed in.

Celestia nodded. “Very well,” the all mighty goddess said before she looked at the small mob that dared to threaten her little ponies with a dispassionate gaze. “I’ll need you to follow my lead exactly to ensure both your and Sunset’s safety.”

We both nodded our compliance, and I had to resist the urge to dance in joy.

Since there were no ponies besides myself and Sunset around, there were no reasons for her to hold back. I was almost gleeful at the thought of finally seeing Celestia, the guardian deity of Equestria, Princess of the Sun cut loose on some bad guys!

Then, the great and powerful goddess sat down, and put her hooves up in a universal sign. “We surrender.”

Both me and Sunset just stared at the sight.

“…DO SOMETHING ELSE!”