With our plan ready and everything all planned out in the most haphazard and vague way that barely made our plan a plan at all and more of a guideline that didn't even seem like a smart idea to follow, we began phase one of the plan: getting out of our dull surroundings. Which they were. I mean, it was a dark cave with almost no light and a big wooden door.

Now, earth ponies are known for two things: just ‘knowing’ how to make food better than any other member of the pony race all the way from the very beginning when the actually have to grow the food to cooking it, and their strength. In the few times that I have hung out with her, I’ve seen AJ knock down trees and smash rocks with her hind legs like it was nothing, never mind the stamina she had that enabled her to go all day long with no problem.

And no, that wasn’t a sex joke. I do not recall having any type of sexual relations with that mare.

But Celestia wasn’t Applejack, and just being an alicorn didn’t translate to having superior strength. After all, Rainbow Dash could still outwrestle Twilight, as I had learned after kind of asking the purple alicorn just how strong she was and got RD’s competitive nature going along Twilight’s inquisitive one. When those two things combined, it was frightening to behind. After losing in every contest of strength from hoof wrestling to weight lifting to a pegasus, Twilight was forced to conclude that just getting some earth ponyness didn’t make her a world class weightlifter.

However, the sun goddess was not Twilight Sparkle. Celestia was a being that counted her age in millennia and had worked hard in the past to carve out a safe haven for her little ponies in a place with so many problems in ye olden days she needed to create her own personal Hell just to hold them all. On top of which, she had more than three times Applejack’s weight, and although all the cake she ate went straight to her flank, the rest of her body was in top physical condition for a creature of her size. Meaning she could have hoof wrestled the biggest stallion in Ponyville, let him use both hooves to her one, and still fallen asleep from how little effort she needed to put into the contest of strength.

So when Tia turned and bucked the wooden door holding us prisoner, it didn’t fall down. The door exploded in a mess of wood and metal bars that would have put a stick of dynamite to shame. The wooden pieces flew outward in a spray, at speeds that turned the splitters into deadly projectiles that left three of our guards squealing in pain from what might as well have been pointy wooden bullets from the force they had been launched with.

Then Celestia leaped over the two fallen guards and one full-on corpse that had completely stopped moving to the lucky one that had been standing off to the side of the door. As the alicorn went at the troggle that was still breathing, I snatched up one of the guard’s fallen spears in my teeth, then jumped over to one of the thrashing pigs while transferring the thing to my hooves and jabbing the creature in the throat to shut the thing up in the permanent kind of way.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the troggle Tia was flying towards raise his spear at the alicorn and fire a blast of magic. Celestia’s hooves took on a golden hue for a moment and she battled the attack aside with one of them before bringing the other down right on his head. A sickening crush soon followed, and my nose was treated to the smell of burning flesh while I finished off the other injured troggle.

Behind us, Sunset just stared at the sight with wide eyes and a mouth that threatened to fall open. “W-Wow, you actually, I didn’t think you would…that you could…”

Celestia apparently picked up on the meaning of the girl’s stunned rambling, because she turned back to her a moment later with a hard look in her eye. “While I am always one to favor peaceful solutions above all else, I will do whatever is necessary to keep my little ponies from harm,” she said before walking up to the slightly shorter girl and her determined expression became one of amused motherly care. “Even the disobedient ones that walk on their hind legs and wear such garish clothing.”

Then the pony princess looked back further down the hallway, and the wall of golden energy she had created a second before breaking down the door winked out, allowing for sound to make its way deeper into the hall once again. The link we currently shared told me that the whole thing had most the alicorn about three percent of her remaining magic reserves.

Sunset just hugged her jacket and rubbed her arms. She obviously didn't like the attention Celestia was giving her...or maybe it was the dead bodies making her nervous. “Yeah well, let’s just get phase two going so we can get the hell out of here and I can go back to having a real coat instead of this thing,” she mumbled before pulling out her piece of human tech and going to the ap all iphone’s came with before covering the lower end completely.

Then, we waited.

Sunset tapped her foot impatiently.

Celestia got the burnt remains of man-pig brain off her hoof.

I turned to Sunset and was unable to keep my curiosity in check.

“Mind if I ask you something?”

She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What?”

After taking a second to collect my thoughts on just how I wanted to put this without sounding too…stalker-ish… “Look, you know I know certain things about the lives of ponies…like you…”

Sunset waved her hand around in the ‘get the point motion while talking. “Yeah, yeah dimensional bleeding gave people in your world an idea for a television show, get to the point.”

“Actually, you were in the movie,” I told her, which made Sunset stand up a little straighter for some reason. “But…it never really went into explaining just why you came back to Equestria in the first place.”

For some reason, a pang of guilt shot through Celestia’s heart, and I glanced over at the alicorn as she lowered her head just a bit while Sunset rolled her eyes like the question was one of the stupidest she had ever heard. “Because I wanted to come home,” the human explained before her expression turned a bit darker. “But of course when I got there, I get all the news about Princess Luna, and the new Princess Twilight Sparkle.”

The girl’s hands became like claws as they dug into her jacket. “And it...it... I was gone for two years, just two fucking years, and in that time Celestia just up and gets a whole new apprentice to replace me,” she grumbled as her eyes moved over to the alicorn for a moment with a frown forming on her face. “Two years I’m gone…and you just go and make her an alicorn! You just take some nobody from off the street and just give her the Element of Magic!”

I moved to argue with the girl in Twilight’s defense, but the tears leaking from her eyes stopped me. I backed off as the girl with the red hair gave Celestia a pleading look. “Two years and…I know I made a mistake, but…you raised me since I was a child! You taught me everything I know about magic! And…and when I try to think of my mother, yours is the only face I can see, so why…WHY DID IT JUST TAKE YOU TWO FUCKING YEARS TO REPLACE ME?”

Our former prison echoed with Sunset’s question and Celestia’s recoiled from her former student’s words while fear for the girl made the closest thing to a concerned panic Celestia was capable of at the moment fill the alicorn’s link that she had with my mind. Then the princess looked over to me with and got herself under control. “What did she just say?”

Sunset’s whole body jerked as if struck, and she whirled around to face me in terror. “No…you can’t…please don’t tell her what I said,” she begged. “I…I just forgot myself. I can behave, I can be the person she wants me to be. Just…just…please…”

I could only stare at the girl with my mouth hanging open before Celestia’s question made me close it. “Sunset, what’s wrong?” she asked in concerned confusion before looking over to me. “What is it? What did she say?”

I looked over to the human’s pleading eyes, then felt the alicorn’s near all-consuming concern for the girl next to her, and gulped. Even if God himself appeared and said I could turn back into a guy at that very moment and got to live happily ever after with everything I could ever want if I just translated their conversation, I wouldn’t have taken Him up on the offer. “She says you need to have a nice long talk after we get back to Equestria,” I told her as evenly as I could before looking back to the iphone laying on the floor. “And now we probably need to start the waiting game all over again.”

The second time around, I intended to keep my mouth shut.

Okay pop quiz, you’re surrounded in a big creepy and rundown castle with an uber pony princess that can blast away anything short of a demigod, but her gas tank was pretty low and alicorn magic had been turned into a gas guzzler thanks to anti-magical fog.

So, what do you do?

Well, if you choose to let Celestia go full tilt boogie on the bad guys and just blow holes in every wall until you either found the mystical thingamajig that powers the local evil overlord, or evil overlord himself…you just failed.

Oh, and hooves sucked when it came to sneaking around, what with all the clippity clop sounds that they made in confined spaces that tended to echo. So doing the last of that thieving assassins creed…other stealth game thing, wouldn’t be too smart either.

So, what’s the other option?

Simple.

You tell the big evil overlord exactly where you are, like the three of us were doing as Celestia wrapped Sunset’s phone up in a myriad of spells before hurling it out of the castle’s first floor window into the sky above Tambelon with her magic. After it reached the apex of Celestia’s throw, the three magic spells the goddess cast on the iphone activated.

All of Tambelon was lit up by the miniature sun’s worth of light that Celestia’s first spell provided, banishing the shadows around the walled city and turning what had appeared to be a dark blue brick to simple gray stone covered in dust in the light of day. The second and third spells activated a second later, slowing the phone’s descent from on high to a crawl more akin to an angry creature with wings might do when she’s got a divine wrath level of fury and wanting to put on a show to make everything in sight piss itself before praying to mercy from their impotent god. Then the third spell kicked in as the recording on the phone began to play.

Okay, well technically the recording was playing from the moment we threw the damn thing out the window, but there was a good five minutes of silence recorded on the thing since I couldn’t figure out how to get a recorded sound to play while rigged to a timer and we all needed time for the phone to reach a height that would allow for maximum effect.

“INSOLENT MONGRELS! YOU THINK TO CAPTURE ME? TO IMPRISON ME? I AM SHE WHO COMMANDS THE HEAVENS TO BOW AT A WHIM! I AM THE ONE WHO BANISHES THE DARK INTO THE CORNERS OF THE WORLD! I AM THE SUN! LET ME WHO CALLS HIMSELF LORD OF THIS CITY OF REFUSE COME AND FACE ME! COME AND FACE YOUR DEATH!”

Although the spell that amplified the sound of the phone was the same that Luna and Celestia used to produce the Royal Canterlot Voice, there seemed to be something…missing from the whole thing. Maybe it was the fact that it was coming from a machine and Celestia had been speaking at a normal tone when we recorded it, but…

I had heard the Canterlot voice being used in anger before, back when I had the Alicorn Amulet and Celestia came to Ponyville thinking I was going to hurt the girls. While it hadn’t done much to me at the time thanks to my brain being high on red kryptonite and knowing I could take on the world with one wing tied behind my back, the memories of hearing her talk like that made me pretty uncomfortable. The Royal Voice wasn’t just some spell that pumped up the volume, it carried with it a twinge of magic that amplified the speaker’s authority as well. So when Celestia used it back in the day, the unspoken…something that made a person’s entire body shake and still left an impression even now that we were all buddies.

The iphone didn’t have that…which I was a little glad for I guess. I didn’t want to be prostrating myself every time I went to AJ’s farm out of some misguided respect to the ghost of Steve Jobs.

But, the loud sound did its job and we watched from our unused corner of the castle as dozens of the troggles ran out into the courtyard and through the gates towards where the recording of Celestia’s voice was coming from. A few others made their way onto the ramparts to take potshots at the glowing orb of light, and considering the sphere was three times Tia’s size and as bright as the sun, I was certain none of the attacks would ever clip Sunset’s phone.

“I did not see the donkey, nor this goat these creatures defer to,” Celestia mumbled. “Are you sure he can’t have more than the number we saw leave just now?”

I shook my head. “I never said that it would get them all out of here, but there’s no way he has more than a hundred of these guys. Just look at his own house, it’s a mess. They don’t even have the manpower for a good housekeeper.”

“Or he just likes the stupid and dusty décor,” Sunset the Snarky quipped as she toyed with the magical spear taken from the prison guard.

Celestia apparently heard the tone of the comment and understood it wasn’t important. She looked Sunset up and down for a moment. “Stay close to me unless we encounter resistance. I could not bear it if I were to lose you a second time.” As Sunset just gaped at the alicorn’s words, Celestia turned to me. “I must save the rest of my power in case the worst comes, is there anything that you can do to protect her?”

About the only thing I could come up with was acting as the girl’s bodyguard. Like, take a bullet kind of bodyguard. My shell could probably handle a few hits of whatever magic those spears had. Maybe. “I’ll stick close to her.”

“Alright, since the local lord’s main hench-pony is still in the castle we’ll stick to the clean areas and head upstairs,” Celestia announced before taking the lead. “Omnifarious, please make sure nothing manages to sneak up behind us. If we can’t find the bell or Grogar inside of twenty minutes, I will break through the castle and close the outer wall’s portcullis.”

Thanks to the fact the vast majority of Grogar’s castle was obviously unused and anywhere that didn’t get foot traffic had a heavy amount of dust on the floor, we were able to cut the first bit of our search to a mere ten minutes. It only involved heading upstairs and find a pair of skinny troggles coming down the stairs with the donkey behind them.

They froze for an instant.

Celestia didn’t.

She didn’t charge up and use her giant earth pony strength or anything like that. Doing so probably would have gotten her killed what with trying to attack creatures with spears on stairs which were definitely not built for horses of her size to use. So she used her telekinesis.

Not in the pick up the bad guys sort of way, or an even more obscene use of power that would have done something like crush their bones into powder. Instead, the helmets on each of the troggles heads glowed with Celestia’s golden light, and then shot off their heads to ram into the other’s now unprotected skulls at speeds approaching that of a bullet.

They both began to collapse in a heap before their spears took on a life of their own thanks to Celestia’s magic, and pointed their blade’s at the donkey’s neck before the bodies of the guards even hit the ground. The whole thing took maybe two seconds, and colored me quite impressed.

“Now good sir donkey, if you might direct us to a large ancient bell hidden somewhere in this castle, I might see fit into releasing you, despite the part that you have had in abducting ponies from their homes,” the alicorn told the shorter creature in a voice that sounded respectful, and yet…creepy thanks to it being so matter of fact.

“B-Bell?” the donkey I had decided to name Jackass stuttered as he looked down at the spears pointing at his throat. “I’ll never tell you ponies anything!”

As the alicorn frowned at the donkey’s resistance to her intimidation tactic, I frowned and pointed a hoof towards Jackass’s lower regions. “Spear him in the balls princess. He doesn’t actually need them to talk, and it might actually help with the voice.”

Sunset looked over to me with a raised eyebrow while Jackass let out a terrified shriek as one of the spears was repositioned. “No mind control this time?”

“The bells are in the watchtowers on top of the castle!” Jackass politely informed us as quickly as she could while trying to protect himself from a gelding.

“Well I’ll be,” the human mumbled before shoving her spear into the donkey’s vision. “How many guards?”

The donkey looked over to the human, and I opened my mouth to translate, but didn’t get the chance to before he started talking. “Stupid human! Lord Grogar lets no one near his sacred bells!”

Although the fact that the evil overlord didn’t feel the need to post guards had his obvious weakness did kind of intrigue me, not to mention gave me a good idea of the goat’s stupidity, something that really caught my attention was that the donkey had responded to Sunset’s question without me having to be a go-between. “Wait…you understood her?” I asked. “How the hay do you understand English and speak Equestrian?”

“Umm…what I’m hearing coming out of his mouth is English,” Sunset said.

“It’s the belt,” Celestia answered before my mind could start working on the answer to the mystery of how we were hearing two different kinds of languages coming from the donkey at the same time. “It’s enchanted to allow him to talk to creatures of several different languages. I think there’s a resizing enchantment on it as well.”

Sunset Shimmer smirked. “Thaaaaaaank you Celestia,” she said with a smirk that made me think she wasn’t talking to the giant pony just then. “Now hand it over Jackass.”

As Sunset touched the top of her stolen spear to the donkey’s nose, I found myself having to restrain a smirk. I know she tried to kill Twilight and all while under the effects of dark magic, which I will admit does tend to mess with your moral compass unless you ran on the stuff like me, but I was starting to really like the two-legged-pony.

“Allow me my student,” Celestia told the girl before she reared up as the spears were removed from around the donkey long enough for the pony goddess to smack her hoof in-between his eyes.

After the donkey collapsed in a heap, a golden glow surrounded his belt and I watched it become larger, probably big enough to fit Celestia. Then the princess detached the piece of optional clothing and floated it over to Sunset. The second the girl took it in her hands, the size readjusted and she exchanged the belt she had one for the new one.

Sunset looked over to the horse goddess. “So, can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?”

While Celestia was answering in the affirmative, I was left wondering if Sunset’s human world had movies that mirrored my own and tried not to snicker. Then, once the girl had made sure she could talk Celestia’s head off, Sunset checked her watch to see there was a good five minutes left before Tia’s spell burnt out and the pig-men would know they had been duped.

I got to be the one to ask the obvious question. “So, what now?”

“Considering the bell is in a tower, it would be best to fly out the nearest window and search for it from the air. We can close the portcullis and deal with he troggles on the wall as well, that should allow us time to search the towers surrounding the castle for this bell.”

“Alright,” I agreed as I went through the basic steps of the plan in my head and didn’t see any holes.

Two minutes after we managed to get out of the castle and make a break for the wall, I was wondering if the fog surrounding the city was actually some kind of marijuana fumes that I had inhaled too much of because…I HAD ACTUALLY THOUGHT CELESTIA HAD A GOOD IDEA FOR A MINUTE!

Don’t get me wrong, Tia’s a real nice pony and a bazillion times better than any human leader that’s ever existed (Gandhi included), but when it comes to the times when the chips are down, end of the world, thirteenth hour kind of stuff, Celestia might as well be the fuck everyone over with her sheer level of stupidity pony! Hell, the reason Equestria’s history books are missing a few pages is probably because she doesn’t want her little ponies to know just how many times their glorious leader brought the world to the brink of destruction with her crisis situational incompetence!

Take the problem we faced upon exiting the castle…

Celestia blew a nice alicorn-sized hole that was even big enough to slide her fat ass through. Then, she let Sunset Shimmer ride her bareback again, which is really making me wonder about the nature of their relationship, and we flew out to close the gate.

Then it was WHAM! BLAM! ZAM! and a massive energy shot from behind us, left Celestia’s floating in an oversized plastic bubble (or magic really) and I was flying as fast as I could to grab onto Sunset before she turned into a red smear on the pavement! Oh, and by the way, when you’re a changeling that’s low on gas and surrounded by a evil stoner smoke that’s making it hard to fly, humans are heavy!

“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sunset yelled as I wrapped my forelegs around her waist…that kind of slipped a bit and ended up on her breasts.

“It’s called saving your fat rear!” I grumbled while the human struggled in my grip and I was left wondering if my actions would just leave me with a sexual harassment lawsuit, or actual criminal charges for touching a teenager.

Although…considering Sunset was actually older than Twilight…well, okay going down a dark path here, better jump off while I can…

Um…oh right! So thanks to the stupid redhead’s struggling and the cheating magical maharaja mist, me and Sunny hit the ground, with her sliding a few inches on the stone in front of me.

What was the cause of our predicament?

Well, apparently my good-natured idea to follow Tia’s lead and thus become stupid, which is a real thing by the way because following someone else’s instructions causes certain thinking parts of the brain to shut down, made me completely forget about that goat everyone had been talking about for oh…since we got to Tambel-rambel-bamble-amamamon!

You know, the evil goat overlord that we thought was either going to be leaving the castle (which he didn’t), or still in his throne room waiting for some poor idiot to report in and get killed for his mistake (which also didn’t happen).

OOoooooh no!

See, the evil goat overlord had been standing on the roof of his little stone box of a keep probably glaring at our distraction and wondering why it wasn’t shooting back when Tia just flew right out into the sky above his courtyard it was all wham, bam thank you ma’am and the goat of darkness fucked the sun goddess over royal.

So…yeah. We were in trouble

After I caught Sunset, she thanked me by struggling until we crashed landed on her face, knocking her more senseless than Pinkie Pie. Celestia was trapped in the magical bubble of…entrapment, and I was pretty much coasting on empty, what with the only magic I had being a tiny spark from Tia’s soul keeping me going.

Not gonna lie, really thought we were screwed at that point.

Inside her bubble, Celestia turned around to look at me and Sunny. “Omnifarious, is Sunset alright?”

I declined to answer the question, because that was the time that Grogar finally decided to make his entrance and well, it kind of took up all my attention.

He stood at the edge of his keep’s roof for a moment, and then leaped down to the stone courtyard causing enough of an impact to crack the stone around him as he landed in a crouch. Then, he slowly rose to his full height, more like some kind of predator than something that’s considered the main meal in a third-world country.

He also sure as hell didn’t look like any goat I’d ever seen!

Hell, he didn’t even look like the stupid stagehands that Iron Will had working for him! For that matter, he even made Iron Will look like a punk!

A scrawny punk.

You know the kind, the ones with the taped together glasses.

Grogar. Was Huge. About twice as big as a pony huge, with one hell of an underbite. What made it even worse was that the goat’s extended jaw was lined with a row of jagged teeth and two massive fangs that looked more like sabers than teeth, and climbed all the way up to frame his nostrils. It made him look like some kind of vampire with all the pointy teeth on the bottom of his mouth instead of the top. As for his horns, they curled around and ended with their points sticking outwards from his face. He couldn’t just butt someone with those horns, the damn things would let the bastard gore an opponent while his fucking wolf teeth would let him tear into their flesh and finish them off!

The rest of his body was covered by thick, bushy fur that hid any musculature. Although judging by his thick legs and body, he had plenty of it. And his hooves were thick and developed like any hardworking stallion that didn’t bother with getting a pony pedicure like the vast majority of Equestria.

And he had all of this, along with a goatee at the tip of his chin, and a fucking golden bell that glowed with magic runes attached to a thick collar decorated with golden disks.

Good God did G1 fuck up on your design, I thought to myself as the massive creature approached us. On the other hand, if they had gotten everything right, the little girls would have probably had nightmares.

I had been expecting some braying goat the size of a regular pony, that got its fucking head stuck between trees when it charged at the talking equines like some Saturday morning cartoon villain. What we got instead was something that would shatter the tree, crush the pony under its hoof, and then reach down to bite the little thing’s god damn head off before using its bones as toothpicks!

“So long has it been since I’ve had a satisfying meal, surviving on nothing but the collected ether of the Dark Realm,” the creatures gruff voice growled at our party. “How I’ve longed to feel the sweet taste of a pony’s magic, to rip the soul from their little bodies and devour it whole. To hear the symphony of screams as I create death, from life.”

Well…someone went to the Darth Vader Villains School of Badass, I told myself as I slowly got to my feet…or hooves…whatever. I would have come up with a much cooler comeback line that would have totally put goat guy in his place but…well, Tia had asked me to check on Sunset and I was that gallant hero who always did what his princess needed him to do.

Plus, I was kind of scared shitless and was really hoping Sunset had just been holding out on us with her demon goddess fire magic powers. So, running over to the girl and shaking her awake was priority number one.

“Sunset! Sunset wake up!” Oh God, please don’t tell me she’s dead, I thought.

The girl let out a moan, and slowly opened her eyes. “Ugh, what happened?”

I didn’t have a chance to answer before I felt a rush of magical energy flow into me a second before Celestia spoke. “Take Sunset and close the portcullis,” she commanded me evenly as if she were actually the one in control of the situation, and not down to about fifteen-perfect of her full power. “Then the two of you need to fly up and disable Grogar’s bell. I will deal with the goat.”

It wasn’t the words that calmed me down, it was what I felt from the little Tia inside my head. Despite Celestia being what she was, I had gotten a harsh lesson since starting this little journey on how she was just as emotional and…well, human as any other pony.

And what I was feeling from her that moment was complete confidence in her abilities, and the situation, despite the fact she was completely at the mercy of Grogar.

So…I left her to die at the hands of the giant goat monster and led Sunset towards the gate as fast as my holy hooves could take me. As we ran, I couldn’t help but look back at the sight as the jackass overlord took his sweet time just walking up to the alicorn, doing what was probably the evil goat version of a strut.

“FOOLS! YOU THINK TO ESCAPE ME? I WILL SHATTER THE BONES IN YOUR LEGS TO PIECES!” the goat’s voice thundered as I felt Grogar begin to gather his magic.

The threat got a rise out of my link with Tia as she went from calm to terrifyingly furious in the space of an instant. Despite the confinement of her magical sphere, she managed to rear up, and the courtyard was illuminated with a blinding light coming from the alicorn’s horn that fried the retinas of the troggles looking down on us before the goddess’s words rang throughout the city with an air of authority that shook me to my bones.

“YOU WILL NOT TOUCH ONE HAIR ON MY LITTLE PONY’S HEAD!”

The sound of an explosion that followed Celestia’s Canterlot Voice and shook the ground beneath me, and my mouth dropped as about a hundred people’s head canon’s were confirmed by the sight of Celestia standing cloaked fully in her solar radiance while flames rushed out from her blazing form and over the place in all directions to cover the ground for fifty feet around her in a carpet of fire.

Thankfully, Sunset got the wall’s gate controls and slammed the damn thing holding the gate open away so the bars came down to close with a bang because all I could do was stare and think…

Holy shit, she really can go super sayian!

Author's Notes:

and in case your wondering yes, as of MLP comic 20, Celestia really can do that.