“You know, ever since the whole pony thing started, tons of guys from my home had wondered just what Celestia could do when the chips were down. Goddess of the Sun, ponies using her name like a curse, had some sort of limited all-knowingness, every creature from my neck of the woods figured she must be some all-powerful magical alicorn who could do anything she wanted with a flash of her horn.

“Then comes the wedding, and she gets knocked on her sorry plot! But what do we do? Make excuses! Oh, she was tired from raising the moon for so many years. Celestia threw the fight because she wanted Twilight to use the Elements. No wait! She didn’t want to hurt any of her little ponies so she held back too much!

“But now that she gets her big chance to show off her awesome power with no innocent bystanders around…SHE JUST UP AND SURRENDERS! Good job Tia!”

Sunset groaned and looked ahead at her mentor. “Is he always like this?” I decided not to translate her words for Celestia to understand. Which of course got me a glare from the human, but if Red was siding with Sunbutt, then there was no way I was going to let her in on the conversation.

Hell, I had half a mind to just tell Tia the girl was on my side.

As for the alicorn, she remained silent as the fat but thinly muscled pig-men who looked like the some Star Wars extra alien rejects continued to move us through the perpetually dark and gloomy city that consisted of little more than crumbling houses and towers that looked ready to fall over depending on how high they were. Some even had the top two or three floors built bigger than the several below it, actually creating a top-heavy tower. The whole damn place looked structurally unsound and I was a little worried it would collapse in on us at any moment.

Then there was the atmosphere, and by that I’m not talking about the ambiance, although the fog and leaning buildings did make everything kind of creepy. The very air pressed down on me with an oppressive aura of magic that seemed to just disagree with my presence. It wasn’t outright draining my strength, but it did feel as if I was at the deep end of a very big pool and all that water was pressing down on me. I didn’t need a doctorate in magical stuff to know it was going to interfere with everything from blowing holes in pig-men to flying when it came time for the big fight scene.

But of course, no twisted city of gloom and doom was complete without its big scary castle. Like everything else in the fog filled city of freakiness, whatever kind of play-dough had been used to construct the thing had become warped over time. The walls curved outward at the top, creating a bit of a of looming presence that made the whole thing a little extra creepy with its bent towers and eternal fog. When it came to the actual body of castle itself, the fortification looked like a box of a keep with a tower on every corner, with a fifth, shorter one sticking up in the very center of the square castle. Like everything else in the town, the little castle was also warped in an impossible way. Some parts of the wall bulged outwards, while others sunk in.

When we came closer to the castle and made our way through the outer wall, the mighty alicorn made her move!

She looked up at the castle and let out a thoughtful 'hmmm'.

Then she continued on her way when one of the pig-men slapped her on the rear with his magical pointy stick with its serpentine-bladed spear at the end and grunted at us in a language I didn’t understand. But instead of crushing his skull with her hoof in response, the guardian deity of Equestria just went and moved on, ushering us to come with her.

It was when we got right outside the gates of the castle that our little group finally had some tiny bit of Equestrian normalcy. Which meant it was still pretty weird, but it was the familiar kind of weird that I had been dealing with ever since meeting Twilight Sparkle. Now, it took Star Wars extras dressed in ye olde renaissance fair garb to give me that kind of vibe.

A donkey with a belt wrapped around his barrel that had gave my horn a tingling sensation when I looked at it and a light brown old-timey hooded cap that was a shade lighter than his coat and covered his neck came out from the castle’s outer wall. Although I hadn’t seen much of the other dominate quadruped species of Equestria, the jackass was a lot younger than Cranky Doodle, and in much better shape. He took a look around, then headed down to meet us and our captors. The pig-men to came to a stop and saluted the donkey as soon as he was within a few yards before the one in the lead grunted to him a few times in interdimensional pig-Latin.

The donkey took a quick look across our faces, then settled on Celestia. “A pony, eh?” he said in Equestrian, giving me a bit of a surprise. Although, the strange…nasally sound of his voice made me want to cringe, the fact we had found something able to talk in an understandable language seemed to be a good sign. “Never seen one as big as you before, or with wings and a horn.”

Ever the polite one, Celestia bowed her head towards the ass. “Greetings good sir. I am Princess Celestia,” she said after a moment of letting him look her over. “My companions and I were drawn to your city by accident. You see, I opened a portal home, but our path was redirected here for some odd reason that I have yet to deduce. We meant no intrusion or disrespect, and humbly ask that you allow us to leave in peace.”

A braying, and extremely annoying laugh was the opening of the talking animal’s response. “Stupid pony! All who come within the reach of Tambelon’s magic belong to Lord Grogar!” the donkey said as he looked up at Celestia. “Take the pony and the flutter-bug to the dungeon. If they are like unicorns, then they will make a fine meal for his lordship! And a human’s nimble fingers always give the master pleasure!”

As Sunset cringed at her place in the donkey’s plans, I narrowed my eyes and mentally prepared myself to take one of the guards long spears and shove it so far up the ass’s rear that it came out the other end. Bad guy status aside, the jackass was unbelievably annoying, and had just insulted Celestia. Self-righteous fatass with a penchant to ignore the plight of her subjects or not, I was the only one who got to talk like that to her and get away with it!

“Tia?” I said between clenched teeth. “Let’s-”

The alicorn swung her head around and with the look on her face. It wasn’t a glare, I could deal with those. What she gave me was a look I had encountered during my time in her care that spoke of pained concern. She didn’t even need to ask her question as she looked over to her returned charge of a human, and then back to me before shaking her head.

It shut me up harder than any angry glare promising divine wrath to all who questioned her ever could. After all, Celestia had allowed me to lead the way when we were dealing with humans without any qualms. There, I had been the expert. Here...not so much.

Now, she was asking if I would do the same for her.

So I sighed and lowered my head in compliance while Celestia went back to her conversation with the braying mule…or, donkey really. Mules were the half-breed species between ponies and donkeys. At least back on Earth, I had no idea how that kind of stuff worked in Equestria.

“He intends to make a meal of me then?” she asked in mock surprise when she looked back to the jackass. “Tell me, does your Lord Grogar consume magic, or is he a carnivore in the literal sense?”

The question about his boss made the donkey bristle in anger. “The mighty Grogar does not eat meat you fat pony!” the he berated the alicorn. “He shall devour your magic, as he has done with all unicorns who have come before!”

It was the unicorn comment that did it for me.

All of a sudden, my unease about creepy-town and our situation just clicked with an old, buried memory deep within my mind. Although the names of the boss and appearance of the minions didn’t ring any bells, I did remember an older version of My Little Pony in which the villain had kidnapped unicorns in mid-teleport, forcing them to reappear somewhere inside a creepy city that was covered in fog.

What I had didn’t paint a complete picture, but the blurred information from my childhood memories that stuck around no matter how I tried to repress them told me enough to be worried that our fearless leader seemed to think just marching up to the castle under guard was a bad idea.

But…as much as I hated to admit it…I owed Celestia. Not just for putting her trust in me when it came to our last little world, or the whole Equestria ruler thing, but because of the help she had given me when I was acting like a complete idiot a few days prior. Even if the foolish goddess declined to listen to her all-knowing advisor and turned her attention back to the donkey, I’d play her game until told to do otherwise. She hadn’t exactly done anything wrong yet so, there was no need for me to be hasty in how to handle the situation.

“Tell me then, noble page. What sort of creature is this Grogar that he would take the magic of ponies?”

That much I remembered as well. It was hard to forget one of the only two good villains in the original series. Or…third series. Okay, dating past MLP stuff really wasn’t my forte. And to be honest, I had tried to avoid even that to keep the surprises coming when it came to the show.

“You’ll find that out when he comes to feast on your magic! Troggles, take them to the dungeon!” the donkey ordered.

As the badly named troggles (you know since they didn’t really look like trolls or wore goggles) pushed us forward, I shot Tia a pleading look that begged her to take out these idiots. However, it was met with a shake of her head, followed by the alicorn motioning towards Sunset, then the spears the guards were holding.

So that’s why we’re not doing anything, I told myself as the creature behind me pushed the girl forward. Celestia was afraid of her student being caught up in any fight. Considering we were surrounded on all sides by guys with magical weapons of an unknown power and without the ability to just disappear in a flash of light, I couldn’t really fault the alicorn for her concern.

I just hoped she wasn’t trading the security of Sunset at the moment for our eventual doom.

Thankfully, the aura of oppressive magic that the city was soaked in didn’t increase upon entering the fortress, and Celestia was saved from me chewing her out for making us give up the one thing that might have been our salvation in this situation. That thing being our magic. It was a justifiable assumption really, as when Twilight told me she had confronted the Nightmare a second time during Rarity’s possession, she had found her magic unusable inside some big castle on the moon.

The castle of Grogar looked about as run down as my palace did before its reconstruction, minus the holes. Cobwebs covered nearly every space of the floor that wasn’t in ready use, and what little furniture I caught sight of was crudely fashioned from wood and looked a like bunch of rectangular pieces hammered together.

What little tour we did get ended a few minutes after we went into the castle and were hurried down an exceptionally long set of stairs, into a basement that seemed more like a cavern than anything crafted by the troggles. Our captors led us through the cave to a large wooden door with a barred slit of an opening to see through that was wide enough to drive a pair of cars through.

After slamming the door shut behind us, I heard the donkey’s voice call out from inside the non-jail cell part of the cave.“You four stand guard! I’ll go inform Lord Grogar that we have captured the new arrivals!”

As soon as our jailer turned to leave, Celestia bent down and drew me in close with a wing. “Can you mind control the donkey?” she whispered in my ear.

I considered how much the ass had run his mouth outside of the castle for a second, and weighed him on the heavy side of idiot for actually being threatening to prisoners who hadn’t been that secured all that well. My magic worked especially well on the weak-minded. “Probably.”

“Have him go to his quarters and sleep without telling his master about our capture first,” she ordered. “Make sure he does not remember us upon waking.”

The thought of just how much magic that would drain the little bit of reserve I had left made me groan, but thanks to Tia not giving me some sort of hint about her plan ahead of time so I could poke holes in it…as impossible as that was I’ll admit, I couldn’t just say no. Otherwise, our one good chance for getting out of here would fall apart.

So I jumped up to look through the barred window in the wooden door and called out to our jailer. “Hey jackass!” I shouted in anger, mostly due to getting railroaded into this whole mess.

As the aforementioned jackass turned back to look at me, I locked eyes with him and focused my will. Although we changelings could bend other beings to our will with mind magic, there were also more subtle methods that could be used when our horns weren’t an option. Being in a field that was pressing down on the my power of my horn, I thought it better to get the target in close range by using something else.

That something else being the pegasus ability to influence others with magic that traveled along one of the five senses. Fluttershy did it via sight when she used the Stare on whatever pissed her off like a dragon or cockatrice, and Rainbow had a lesser version when she got overly enthused about something and managed to talk other ponies into pretty much going along with whatever crazy scheme got into her head be it flying in a tornado, stalking Daring Do, or joining up with a pirate.

Unlike Dash though, I actually knew what I was doing, and could control it a hell of a lot better than Fluttershy. Crap like that was a changeling’s talent after all, or part of it anyway; shape shifting was in there somewhere too. Unfortunately, since the donkey wasn’t my friend and didn’t trust me on some deeper level, I would have to use outright commands rather than suggestions. Basically going full on Fluttershy rather than Rainbowing it. That took a lot more power since I would have to suppress his free will just about all the way.

“Come here for a second, I need to ask you something.”

The donkey peered at me for a moment and I could practically see the hypnotic effect work its way through his head. It wasn’t true mind control, not yet anyway, but the demand had been there. But it also had a reason to help get it through to the jackass. First he then grumbled something to himself, but a second later, he was walking closer.

He got up right in front of the bars, and then stopped. “What?”

Hesitation froze me a moment as I tried to calculate how much energy this would take when stacked up against my reserves. Thanks to my little stunt of idiocy back in Equestria, I hadn’t had a real meal in quite some time, and burnt up the vast majority of what power was available to me during my time in Earthquestria. As things were, I had about enough magic to get through a weekend, provided I did nothing overly strenuous.

Unfortunately, mind control wasn’t the cheapest move in my arsenal, and the position I was in made it even harder. While I still had enough love juice to mind warp any idiot under normal circumstances, I really didn’t know how badly the city’s anti-magic field would hamper my powers. Plus, I had to leave enough magic in his brain to wipe the short-term memories upon sleeping. Couldn't forget that extra charge.

If I didn’t use enough, the donkey would either throw off my compulsion completely, or at least remember bits and pieces enough to act suspicious and that would alert others that something was up.

However, magical exhaustion wasn’t anything for a changeling to sneeze at either. While an alicorn or unicorn could let their mana pool run dry every now and again, they could still refill it naturally as long as the core of their magic was still intact and they got plenty of food. Changelings didn’t have that kind of option since magic, energy and the life force of our prey fueled both our magic and bodies.

But, if I messed up with the donkey…whatever plan Tia had brewing was going to fall apart.

So I decided to go the safe route in the case of the donkey and use excessive mental domination, putting the changeling personal health thing on the route that went over the rickety bridge while crossing the chasm of doom. While such a thing had all kinds of hazards in the way of brain damage to the victim, or a kind of Zombie Armor syndrome like when Mom was shacking up with Twilight’s brother (which was kind of creepy when I really thought about it considering who I was dating now) I really couldn’t risk the mental domination up and failing on us with the situation we were in.

I focused my magic and poured as much as I could into the jackass; doing my best to hold back the tiniest drop of power I could to keep me going. The restrictive air of Tambelon made me use about three times as much as normal to open the creature’s mind to my suggestions. “Go to your room and fall asleep,” I ordered the donkey as softly as I dared. I didn’t need to add the command to forget he saw us, the amount of mental magic placed on the creature would cause enough brain damage for that by itself.

Right after I had finished the magic, strength that had been in my forelegs a moment ago just up and vanished. Exhaustion made me break the mental link, and I was glad I had needed to stand up in order to see through the door’s opening, as the support it provided kept me from falling over while my traitorous hind legs trembled beneath me.

For a moment I just stood there on my shaky hind legs, glaring at the jackass and ignoring the spots dancing on the edge of my vision, wondering if it had worked. A few seconds later, Jackass’s eyes glazed over and his head became a little wavy. “Oh…okay,” he said while swaying around a bit.

As my mind slave turned around and made his way out, I stumbled away from the door. The room spun, and I began to think that I might have used up just a little too much of my energy reserves when the black spots on the edge of my vision became more like a creeping darkness that made me feel like I was looking through a tunnel.

“Good, now take his-Fairy?” Celestia managed to get out before my legs buckled.

“Um…is he okay?” I heard Sunset’s voice kind of fade before the world tilted, and I found myself laying on my side.

“OMNIFARIOUS!” Tia’s voice rang in my ears before the world spun around again and I found myself looking into the pink eyes of the alicorn. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

At least I thought they were her eyes. Everything had become a bit blurry by that point.

I moaned and tried to focus my thoughts as I tried to answer that question for myself. What came to mind was not good. As beings that feed on energy that we use in our magic, changelings always have to maintain a set reserve like humans when it comes to food. However, unlike humans and every other natural animal out there, changelings could consciously tap into that food source and use it for other things like magic. On top of which, since physical sustenance was pretty much useless to us aside from a bit of water every now and then, that energy was the only thing that kept us going. There was not a bit of fat or muscle that a changeling’s body could feed off of in the case of a dire emergency like animals could.

“…fari…”

Well that was stupid, I told myself in regards to expending so much of my magic while fighting to stay conscious.

At least, I hoped I was just fighting to stay conscious. I never really did get around to asking the hive mind just what happened when a changeling hit E on the gas meter. Although…if I did go under, there was no way for me to actually feed. Which meant no way to get back up, which meant I’d either spend the rest of my life unconscious…

“…me…”

Well, okay, changelings didn’t really go unconscious, more than likely I was simply losing the ability to see because I didn’t have enough mystical energy to keep my eyes working.

“…eed…”

Which was a hell of a lot worse really. Being trapped in an infinite darkness was not my idea of how to spend any amount of time.

“I’m…”

Death was always another possibility. For some strange reason, I found myself wondering what the hive would do once they figured out I was dead. Without a single voice to guide them, the lot of them could very well descend into anarchy, and either go crazy before attacking the countryside, or even try and create a new queen somehow…or several queens that would fight over leadership until the most militant and nastiest of them came out on top.

“…try…”

Then they’d attack Equestria.

Strangely, that realization actually frightened me more than death.

“…thing…”

As everything went black, I found myself worrying about Twilight.

But before I could get further than visualizing a crying girl, hunched over with tears falling from her eyes, the world exploded in a painful burning sensation. And by burning, I don’t mean itchy rash or skin irritation, I mean blazing, cook your meals and turn your skin into a charred husk fire kind of burning. Out of instinct and a fear of well…I had just thought I died, so Hellfire kind of came to mind what with the premarital sex with a pony and all lying, buffalo murder, kidnapping and all that other stuff. I pushed it away out of instinct with everything I could muster.

There was a bestial scream, which was followed by the sound of an impact as the world jolted back into focus and I heard a much more human-sounding yell of “CELESTIA!” before my eyes kicked back on with the rest of me, and I caught sight of the alicorn falling from the ceiling to impact the ground.

The hell just happened? I managed to wonder before I got to my feet feeling better than I had since coming into town, fully alert.

A bout of awareness flashed through my head, about how worried Celestia had been a moment ago, a rush of panic and terror of having to tell Twilight what had happened if I didn’t make it back, as well as the crushing sadness of one of the few beings she could actually consider anything more than a brief acquaintance actually dying in front of her after getting to know him.

A faint ember of energy sent a pulse of magic through my body, and the realization of what had happened hit me like a hammer. Celestia had given me some of her magic. A piece of pure magic from the very core of her being, without the emotional conduit that changeling’s usually used to scrape and tear the stuff that floated near a pony’s surface. I knew enough about mystical energy transferals from my implanted changeling knowledge that such an act was intimate in the extreme and once removed, was not easily regained.

Hell, I had experienced something close to it before was when I had fed so heavily on a buffalo during my first day as a changeling that it keeled over and died a few days later while inside a changeling feeding cocoon from the loss of energy. But even that had only torn at his core and damaged it so much he died from the shock and loss of life force.

What Celestia had done was more akin to taking a tiny piece of her very soul and placing it inside of me.

“What the hell did you do?” the human demanded as she glared at me.

I tried to clear my head of the shock, but I couldn’t help but look inward and feel the tiny star of power inside me that refused to be eaten away as quickly as my normal meal so much so that it was actually producing its own magic, or to be more precise, drawing power from the alicorn that it had come from. It was a tiny trickle of power, but it was easily noticeable to something like me.

An instant later, I was beside Celestia, and much to my surprise, Sunset drew closer to her as well. But the girl kept a good distance from me. Although the touch of my body was far from comfortable, I ran what passed for a changeling’s hooves across the alicorn’s neck to check for any signs of damage.

What I got was a lot more reassuring. Celestia lifted her head up and smiled. “I am fine you two, if a bit dazed,” she assured me before I…felt the truth of her statement in the tiny spark of magic that was inside of me.

Relief flood through my body, and Celestia’s eyes widened. “Well…that is…unexpected,” she said before looking me up and down. “But I appreciate that you care for me so much my friend. To be honest, I was starting to think any concern for me was based off what Twilight would say upon our return.”

I gave the alicorn a cautious stare. Had she just…

“What are you two talking about?” Sunset asked.

Celestia looked to me for a quick translation, then regarded the human with a cool gaze. “I gave Omnifarious a piece of my core magic to serve as a grounding point for a mystical link between the two of us when he was unresponsive to my commands for him to feed off me again,” she explained simply. “Although since we missed our opportunity to impersonate the captain of this palace’s guard, another method for escape will have to be devised.”

The rather idiotic plan that Tia had come up with for circumventing the castle’s outer defenses by pretending to be caught and led into the dungeon made me groan. “Celestia, the guards outside saw us come in and the donkey leave, there’s no way they would have thought I was him.”

“Those wouldn’t have, but the replacements that came upon their shift change wouldn’t have been aware of such an action and the cell is more than large enough to hide our presence,” she added. “These troggle creatures seem rather dim-witted.”

That point, I had to give her. Still, there were plenty of holes in the alicorn’s strategy; like the amount of time a shift-change would have taken. Considering the fact that we weren’t in Equestria at the moment, I wasn’t going to put my trust in karmic coincidence that seemed to let Celestia’s cockamamie schemes go through without any of the girls getting killed. “Why bother? The doors made of wood and you can still use magic. You can easily knock it open and take out the guards.”

“With the donkey’s stolen form, we could have easily made our way through this place, if not under your guard, then with you wandering ahead to make sure the way was clear. Now, searching for the source of the disruption field and deactivated it before heading home will be a bit more difficult,” the alicorn continued. “As things stand, it appears we will have to resort to more violent methods. Once I take a moment to rest anyway…I’m afraid your reaction to my mystical link caught me off guard and I need a few minutes to recover. We should have at least that much time. We also need to plan our next move. Unfortunately, our jailer was less than forthcoming out this Lord Grogar, or his capabilities.”

As soon as Celestia had stopped talking and rested her head on the ground, an internal debate began in my head. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but…considering who I was locked up with…the similarities were just too many not to tell them about the thoughts that had been on my mind since the donkey had run his mouth.

Despite her aching head, Celestia looked back up to me. “Is something wrong? You seem apprehensive.”

I opened my mouth to explain, and stopped. Another bit of concern sprang from the alicorn, and I frowned at the feeling.

While changelings had the ability to sense emotions, it was an ability we had to consciously activate, like someone inhaling the scent of their dinner to see if it smelled right. Although the magic that created my pseudo-pony form messed with my senses and left it on all the time, I was a normal changing monarch at the moment. And the sense of knowing Tia’s emotions wasn’t like what I got from when I went sniffing around.

The alicorn’s spark of magic inside me pulsed, and I gulped.

Out of curiosity, I used my mystical senses to touch the tiny flame that Celestia placed inside of me and…my eyes widened as I felt myself aware of her. It went beyond a simple ability to judge emotions based on a sixth sense. The bit of herself Celestia had placed inside of me was like a mental mirror image of the alicorn standing on the outside of my body; and one that I was fully aware of.

I knew she was concerned for Sunset, not just her physical well being, but also for her mental state and what the girl must think if the alicorn after being separated for so long. I knew she was experiencing a terrible headache thanks to being thrown off of me moments ago, and…the number of revelations about her at the moment when she touched me with her magic simply kept coming. But it went beyond simple awareness of the psyche and old thoughts. I could feel a…connection with the alicorn, one in which her magic flowed along and into me as well.

Considering the connection, I had to wonder if she was so aware of me as well. Hell, considering that it was just a little piece of her inside my entire being, I had to ask myself if she was completely aware of me instead of the little bit of knowledge I gleaned from her.

One problem at a time, I told myself. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t just give the alicorn back her magic once we were done. There were bigger problems on my plate at the moment.

“Grogar is a blue ram with glowing red eyes and a bell around his neck that has something to do with a bigger bell hidden somewhere within the city,” I told her “Or maybe his castle, it’s been awhile since I saw the story that featured this place.” Hell, it had been years, and I only watched it since there had been nothing on at the time.

But of course, me just blurting out that information only led to Tia giving me an odd look, and Sunset raising an eyebrow.

“How do you know of this Grogar creature? I thought your knowledge of pones was based off the multi-universal and dimensional bleeding effect theory,” the alicorn asked as I a bit of curiosity and a shiver of discomfort ran through her body. Although, I could tell it had more to do with memories than our current situation thanks to the whisper of awareness I had about her ridding shotgun in my soul.

Apparently, the scientific talk about magical theory perked Sunset’s interest, as she jumped into the conversation with a hesitant, but curious look. “Dimensional bleeding? What the hell is that?”

I looked over to her and raised an eyebrow. “What? You thought that every dimension had a Canterlot with a Celestia doing something just...because? I don’t really get it myself, but…apparently, based on proximity each dimension has to each other in…quasi-space…”

“Quasi-space?” Celestia asked with a raised eyebrow.

The alicorn’s expression got a frown out of me. “What what would you call the place between dimensions?” I asked rhetorically. “Where I come from the universe is supposed to be infinite, now I find there’s whole new realities and junk outside of an unlimited area? Then, to top it off, there’s apparently empty space between them. How the hay do you exit an infinite universe and end up in a place between universes? Does this place even have physical laws? How the buck are we breathing? Even if there’s an atmosphere, I haven’t seen any plants! Where’s the oxygen coming from?" I said as I built to the big question about life the universe and how fucked up everything in Equestria was.

“Every natural law of reality I know, even the stuff that Equestria has to follow, like how you need air to breathe, just got left behind when we got here! Not to men-mmmph!”

I looked down at the golden glow of energy surrounding my mouth, then up to Celestia. The alicorn gave me a sympathetic smile, and I found myself calming down from the rush of panic that had gone through my body just from the alicorn’s reassuring presence.

As my heartbeat slowly returned to normal, Celestia looked back to Sunset. “Basically, the closer each realm, dimension, universe, and whatnot are in…quasi-space, the more they resemble each other,” she said taking up the explanation before turning to me. “While the world you entered was an odd human counterpart to Equestria, the world that Omnifarious hails form thinks of us as little more than tales for foals meant to teach morality.”

The explanation wasn’t a lie, but not quite the whole truth either. I was just glad Celestia had decided to go with that route without trying to explaining everything to Sunset. She actually had the technical knowledge to get such things.

Then Celestia regarded me again. “But that still doesn’t explain how you know of Grogar.”

I groaned and sank in on myself. Just because I was talking to a pony princess didn’t mean I liked to talk about this kind of crap out loud. “We just went to a world populated by humans, so don’t you think there’s another pony world floating out there with its own problems worth checking out?

“The…story,” I continued before looking over to Sunset out of the corner of my eye. You know what? I asked myself, screw it. The pony I was worried about upsetting with the cartoon universe information was Twilight Sparkle. I felt sorry for Sunset and all, but considering the pig-men, we were kind of on the clock here with an unknown timer ticking down until one of the underlings actually took a little initiative and told the boss monster we had been captured, I didn’t have time to come up with a nice little back story about how I knew what I knew.

“The show I saw was displayed at the very early hours of the morning when there was nothing else on and nothing to do before it was time to leave for school…or maybe it was only on the weekends, and I was just waiting for the entertaining stuff to come on. I was only about seven or eight, so I can’t really remember it that well. But one of the stories that halfway stuck with me was about a dark city run my a monster goat creature that wore a bell around its neck and abducted unicorns when they tried to teleport.”

I groaned as I tried my best to try and recall everything I could about Tambelon; which I had thought was pronounced Tam-ber-on before the jackass went on about kidnapping unicorns. “Or maybe it was a big bell in a tower…there was something about that too,” I mumbled while rubbing my head with my hoof. “But I don’t remember anything about the troggles, or a stupid donkey, or anything about how they beat him. Hay, I could barely remember the goat at all, much less his name.”

Sunset took it about as well as a person could expect. She cocked an eyebrow and stared at me. “You make it sound like a…television show.”

“It came on one of the stations that ran shows for…foals in the mornings,” I explained evenly while trying to find the proper words in Equestrian. Thankfully, trains had stations in Equestria.

Apparently, Sunset was made of tougher stuff than I thought Twilight was, as she just gave me a disgruntled look and crossed her arms. “Well…this certainly raises some interesting questions about the nature of reality,” the pony turned human mumbled to herself as she leaned against the wall and slowly lowered herself to the floor of the cave. “How many other places like Equestria have there been? Or at least, how many have you seen? And are they all alike? The world I was in had another Celestia and Luna...is there another me out there somewhere? A dozen me? A million?”

As Sunset sat there with her arms crossed, I could almost see how she had been Celestia’s student. She wasn’t as excited about knowledge as Twilight, but did seem to be about as inquisitive in her own way. Hers was a questioning mind that seemed tempered a bit by age…and perhaps the incident that got her kicked out from Celestia’s tutelage in the first place.

Celestia cleared her throat and drew our attention. “Considering the half of this conversation I can understand, I believe we can address such things when we are in a better location,” she said before looking over to me. “And your information is helpful Omnifarious.”

The use of my full name made me tense. Tia only said that kind of stuff when she was trying to convey just how serious she was about something. Usually, she teased me with the girliest version of the name Chrysalis gave me Pinkie could come up with.

“Okay, but…how accurate is it?” I asked.

“It makes sense with everything else I know,” she continued. “Unicorns carry their magic close to the surface of their being. Thus, it is the easiest for other creatures to take so it makes sense that he would go after them. And I did detect the center of this place’s mystical field that is pressing down on our magic was located somewhere in this fortress. Although, your information about the master of this place wearing a bell suggests he either controls the field with it, or it acts as a focus for this Grogar to draw from it.”

I nodded, acting like I understood a bit of what she was saying. “So what’s the plan?”

Celestia took a few more moments to think, but it was Sunset who spoke first. “Well, if this place does have some kind of magical gravity well that draws teleporters and other means of travel to it, then we can’t just run away. We’ll have to shut it down somehow.”

Once I had relayed the translation to the princess, she nodded. “Agreed, but the question is how. I am nowhere near my full strength, and we have lost our chance to move through this castle unmolested.”

I thought to the magical pressure pushing down on me. “Can we locate it by using the field somehow? Try moving to where it’s more powerful? And can we even fight in this?”

The question got an interjection from Sunset in way of a 'not if the field is spread evenly' which I once again had to relay to Celestia before she explained out magical predicament and added, “against a normal unicorn, I wouldn’t be surprised if the magic of this place left them powerless. However, we are far stronger than your average unicorn…most of the time."

As she looked at me, I could tell the comment wasn’t meant to be snarky, but was made out of concern. Celestia was worried about me now, on top of her concern for Sunset, and with good reason.

I had forgotten to factor in the field when figuring how much power to use in controlling the donkey. Once I had drained myself in this environment, everything came crashing down when I realized I didn’t have the power to keep myself going.

“So…any ideas my friend?”

With the ancient goddess asking me a question on…okay, the fact that Celestia was asking me what we should do was just freaking weird that I just stood there looking at her in confusion. “Um…why are you asking me?”

A sigh and a headshake at the ground just made me even more lost. “Right, you’ve only seen things from Twilight’s perspective,” she mumbled before looking at me again. “Considering you came up with a plan that would have crippled Equestria had you bothered to go through with it, and managed to make two armies sit around and do nothing while Luna and I walked into our enemy’s stronghold, to retrieve Cadence and Twilight, combined with the fact that you’re the only one of us who knows anything about our opponent, I think you can come up with a few ideas on how to get out of our current predicament better than I.”

Sunset looked over to me with a raised eyebrow. “Wait…you tried to conquer Equestria?”

I shrugged. “It’s kind of a requirement for getting on Tia’s good side these days.” Memories of Discord being an ass and the alicorn doing nothing ran through my head, but I kept my trademark hatred for the snake with legs down. “If you want to join the club, you’ll have to ask Luna though, I’m just vice chairmare.”

With the joking done, I tried to focus and put my attention on Tia. “Well, you got us past the guards and may have bought us an hour or two before Grogar knows we’re here,” I admitted while sitting down to think.

Escaping the dungeon wouldn’t be hard, Tia could easily just kick the damn door down. Hell, she probably didn’t even need to use her horn. The giant pony’s physical strength could shatter boulders when she needed it to. And the realization of that piece of information came from my head Tia kind of creeped me out.

Still, I managed to focus my mind on the task at hand. That meant devising a solution to our problems. For that, I needed answers to two very big questions. Those big questions were: just how powerful was Grogar, and how many toggles did he have serving under him?

In a perfect world, another group of ponies would have come along to provide a distraction outside of the city to draw some of the troops away and give us time to…okay, in a perfect world they would just show up and do all the work for us. So I needed to focus on the real situation, and what we had to work with.

I thought back to the moment we first arrived in this place, replaying in my head as best I could. For some reason, things were a lot...clearer that I had thought they would be. While my memory was a sort step of photographic for stuff i paid attention to with the intention of remembering, everyday sights were not nearly as crisp.

Tia’s spark drew my attention again, and I found myself wondering if she was the cause before refocusing my mind on the task at hand. If it had somehow improved my memory, or overlayed it with Celestia’s own recollections of what happened, all the better.

I remembered the state of things when we first arrived in Tambelon. The place was an empty, decaying ruin. We had walked down the main street and right up into the castle without seeing a single sign of life. Even some of the streets had been covered in an unused layer of dust while the one we walked on left a trail in our wake. Ergo, the town was probably empty, and had been for some time.

The state of the castle itself was also worth noting. Poor construction was one of its problems, but the fact that it was overrun with filth in many areas but much clear in the used sections was more telling.

Then there was what Celestia had said about not sensing the sun. So sunlight meant no crops. None of the natural variety at least, there were ways to induce the growth of food via magic, but such a process was more of a pain than it was worth.

The conclusions those facts pointed to made me a little hopeful for our chances.

Then there was us.

For starters, we were currently constrained in a poorly constructed containment that consisted of little more than rock and wood. So escape was easy. While the magic field that surrounding the city might have stopped a normal unicorn’s magic, Celestia had said she could overpower it easily enough.

Hell, I had just done that very thing moments before. I also learned just how much extra power it took, and Celestia hadn’t fully recovered from our time together. To top it off, she was feeding me a trickle of her magic to keep me from passing out again. With the weird mystical link it had established, I could tell she was about at half strength, although the magic of the city would hamper any magic she tried to use and thus cut the amount of fuel she had down even further to about a quarter if she compensated for it.

As for Sunset…I had no idea. She didn’t have magic or a pony’s...anything really, but...just casting aside any potential usefulness of the human was just plain stupid without at least looking first.

I turned to the human and frowned. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything useful in that jacket of yours?” I asked. “Like a…fire arm?” The word ‘gun’ being unknown in Equestrian and all that.

“Oh yes, I planned on my trip back to Equestria to be interrupted by some kind of interdimensional kidnapper, so I came prepared,” she told me in a sarcastic tone before she reached into her jacket to pull out her iphone and just jiggled it in her hand. “I’ve also got some homemade lock picks, but considering how old this place is, I seriously doubt they’re going to be good for any of the locks that we find.”

The ‘magical brick’ in Sunset’s hand held my attention for a good fifteen seconds as an idea popped into my head and I looked over to run it by the alicorn. “Hey Tia, can you enchant stuff?”