"Guardians of Harmony?" Greg gaped at the children barring his way. "You've got to be kidding me! Look, it's nice that you kids made friends with some ponies. I'm glad... really. But you could get hurt—"

"You're the one who's going to get hurt," Melissa told him, "Or you can surrender if you want."

It was just too much for Greg and he began to laugh. “Oh ghod, you're serious! Oh, I... hahaha! I... you..." He broke off into howls of laughter. His laughs shook him so much he had to use one hand to steady himself against Luna's shoulder.

Nobody else was laughing. Melissa was scowling as fiercely as possible for a 13-year-old girl. “We know who you are! You made everybody hate ponies, and you killed people and… and… you’re a villain!”

The horns of the unicorn ponies among the group began to glow. The earth ponies snorted and pawed at the ground. The pegasi flapped aloft. There was a flash of green fire, and one of the ponies became a griffon.

"HOW DARE YOU!" Luna roared at the ponies. The sudden violence of her scream of rage made everyone jump, including Greg. "He is your creator! How can you betray him like this?"

The ponies had the good graces to look at least a little bit embarrassed. Melissa stepped forward. "Maybe he is... but he made them fight just for entertainment. Then you brought them into our world where everyone was against them and just when we thought people might be going to accept them... he went and started a war!"

Cinnamon Chai took a step forward, horn still glowing threateningly. "Our loyalty is to our friends now. When we saw Greg's scouts here yesterday we knew he was up to something bad, and we've come to stop him."

Luna's mane rippled furiously and her own horn lit. "You miserable little nag! You should thank him for—"

"No, Luna," Greg interrupted her. "We don't have time to argue with a bunch of rogue ponies." He waved a dismissive gesture at the group. "Take them out, but don't hurt the kids."

They were just a few children and their magical ponies... but they were also friends and partners who had been fighting wild Equestrian creatures for over a year. Luna was more powerful, there was no doubt about that, but the children had the advantage of numbers, and more importantly, hard-won experience.

At some unseen signal, all the ponies attacked at once. Blasts of arcane energy were quickly followed by a charge of the earth ponies and pegasi. Greg was definitely not laughing then. He ducked behind a cottonwood tree as Luna charged directly into the mass of enemies facing her.

Greg fumbled for his mini tablet. He could pull the level-up trick if he could call up the console quickly enough. He squinted at the screen in the sunlight, desperately trying to find the brightness slider. He had just found it when he heard a heavy impact and Luna slid by him, plowing up the sandy ground of the riverbank. She was on her hooves again almost instantly, leaping back into the fray but she was frazzled and injured... no longer moving with her usual blinding speed.

Greg frantically pawed at his tablet and the screen suddenly became bright enough to be readable. He tapped the console icon and a little spinning circle appeared. “C’mon, dammit!” He glanced up. Luna was getting hammered from all sides.

The unicorns were firing bolts of energy directly into Luna’s half-shield, forcing her to back away, while pegasi swooped down from above, keeping her grounded. Some earth ponies charged her, throwing opportunistic kicks, while the faux griffon circled to attack Luna's unprotected back. She was in deep trouble.

Greg’s tablet chimed and he frantically tapped through the directory screen, looking for the value tables. When he found the level value, he carefully pecked away at the onscreen keyboard. The program wasn’t set up to be easily edited, and one slip could alter Luna’s variables in a possibly disastrous way. He took a second to double check that he hadn’t changed anything but the LVL value, and then hit enter. Seconds later, Nightmare Moon burst out of a whirling vortex of energy, screaming with rage. She slammed two pegasi out of the air with a swipe of one wing and cow-kicked an orange unicorn end-over-end, but an earth pony and the griffon had nearly gotten behind her and were able to get their attacks in on her open flank.

The griffon only got in one savage bite before Nightmare Moon knocked her into the river with a powerful buck, but the blue stallion struck her with a full charging head-butt that knocked the wind out of her and made her stagger several steps to the side.

Greg glanced at his tablet again. There had to be something he could do to help her. But he saw that Nightmare Moon’s energy value had been reduced to 12%. Even though she was now vastly more powerful than her opponents, a few lucky shots could bring that number down to zero. He looked up again just as she took another savage buck to the head that interrupted her as she was raising energy for a magical attack. She screamed in pain and the glimmer around her horn flickered and dimmed.

"Nightmare Moon! Here! To me!" He yelled at her. He knew enough to see that she was losing and that meant their only option was...

Nightmare Moon cleared her opponents with one arching leap, and Greg swung himself astride her shoulders. "Fly!" Greg told her, "Get away!"

"No! I can—"

"Do it, dammit!" Greg yelled, and kicked her flanks like he would have done with a horse. She fled.

The children hadn't expected the fight to go as well as it did, and were totally unprepared for Greg's retreat. There was confusion for only a few seconds as things got sorted out, but by then Nightmare Moon had cast her invisibility spell, and they had lost the opportunity to run her down.

Melissa watched her team's ponies return to their friends and looked joyfully into Cinnamon Chai’s grinning face.

"We won!" shouted a chunky blond boy as he swung his pegasus friend around by her fore hooves as she hovered above him with overflowing exuberance.

"Yes," said a soft-spoken, dark-haired girl as the changeling who had fought as a griffon curled around her affectionately. "But they got away."

"Yeah," admitted Melissa. "But next time they won't."

Greg was, in turn ashamed, embarrassed, and furious. "I got my ass handed to me by a pack of children!" he fumed, pacing the length of the control room back at the base. "Even worse, I dropped the damned map and now the Army Corps of Engineers is out there filling all of those new springs with concrete!" He gestured to the monitors. "Look, they're even sampling the water like they think I put poison in it or something!"

He realized he was ranting to no purpose. Only he and Nightmare Moon were in the room and they both knew well enough what had happened.

Nightmare Moon said nothing... she just watched Greg as he paced.

Sugarberry peeked around the edge of the door. "Sir? Will you be wanting dinner?"

Greg spun on his heel but stopped himself from yelling at the little pony. She hadn't done anything wrong, after all. "Maybe later."

"I could leave some cold meat and cheese in the—"

Nightmare Moon rose to her hooves and stepped to Greg's side. She bent her head until her nose was nearly touching the floor and pressed the side of her neck against Greg's hip. "Go away, Sugarberry," she said softly.

"Yes, Your Highness... sorry sir. Ma'am." She ducked out of sight.

Greg slipped his arms around Nightmare Moon's neck and leaned over, resting his chest and head on the soft cushion of her thick, starry mane. "And worst of all," he sighed unhappily, "I failed you."

"What?" cried Nightmare Moon, shaking off his embrace so that she could look him in the face. "I was the one fighting."

"We're a team," he interrupted her. "My part is just as important as yours. You fought magnificently! One pony against a dozen at once? You did everything you could. It was me... I screwed up. I wasn't prepared for even the possibility of an attack by ponies! What if they’d had diamond dogs with them, or a manticore?"

"I don't blame you. How could you have known—"

"Well, I know now! And next time I'll be ready." He took her head in his hands and pressed his forehead against hers, just below her horn, closing his eyes. "We will be ready, I promise you," he whispered. "No more screwing around... I'll program in macros… maybe even make some dedicated hardware, and we'll train with it until we work together like a single unit. We'll hunt down those damned, traitorous ponies, and you'll show them what you can really do! Little assholes didn't like Nightmare Moon? Let's see what they think of the Dark Goddess! And no more messing around with little parks and pools... we'll start some major changes... things too big to stop!"

He lifted his head and opened his eyes. "What do you think?"

For an answer, she kissed him fiercely and joyously.

The next few months were very busy ones for Greg and Luna. He made plans, did research, and restructured the base's defenses with a far different enemy in mind. Luna scouted locations for their next "events" and patrolled for hostile ponies, mostly at her Nightmare Moon level. She made contact with wild ponies and got what information she could from them about the numbers and locations of “friendlies.”

Greg built a little unit, not much larger than a car key fob, that tied into his larger electronics and could directly change some basic values in Luna’s core code. He thought about altering the code itself to make her permanently overpowered, but after the experience with the dark helmets, he thought that the chance that she would emerge as something unintended or unrecognizable was too great. He loved her the way she was, and wasn’t going to take any risks with her, no matter how small.

Then the day came when Greg's first new plan was ready to be put into execution. He and Luna traveled the first part of their journey via Equestrian teleportation, emerging from a mirror that formed from the case of a server in a Doctors Without Borders aid station near Kasr, Egypt. The gate took only two minutes to grow and Greg timed it to happen in the late evening when nobody would be in the computer room. They slipped out of the compound and into the surrounding desert, meeting with a group of pegasus ponies that had been dispatched earlier, for the second leg of their journey.

Luna flew low over the desert to avoid being seen or detected on radar even though southwest Egypt was one of the most deserted and desolate places on Earth. Their goal was near the border with Sudan, and the region was famous for sudden, vicious little wars. The locals were trigger-happy, and Greg didn't want to spoil the event with fighting.

They reached the mountains of the Gilf Kebir in less than an hour and swooped in for a landing. Greg hopped down, ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, and tried to wrench his clothes back into some semblance of order. Note to Self, he thought, Get a helmet and flight suit before riding on the back of an alicorn flying flat-out again.

Luna simply shook herself briefly and all her fur settled back into its usual sleekness.

"Alright," Greg said, unfolding a small map. "We start here and work our way along the foothills..." he lowered the map and peered into the distance. There was just enough moonlight to make out a distant peak. "...that way. Do your thing, lover!"

Luna bent and touched the ground with her horn. The sands of the Sahara began to ripple and churn.

They moved through the desert, stopping every mile for Luna to trigger the start of another couple of transformations. They had learned that the changes she triggered were limited. They could only transform around a hundred square miles of land at most... less if there were a lot of features that soaked up the energy. But she could direct the shape of the changes and to maximize the area they could affect in one night, she was starting long, narrow strips starting from the path they were taking that rippled out into the distance. By doing this, they were transforming an area of the desert about two hundred miles wide. The length of the area was only limited by how long Luna could keep triggering changes.

The sky began to lighten in the East and she still didn't seem to be tiring.

"Better than I could have hoped for!" Greg grinned as he looked back at the way they'd come. The previously bare mountains were clothed in a dense forest. Cedars and firs covered the upper slopes and a mix of deciduous fruit trees further down. The open meadows and glades were ringed with berry bushes and all manner of edible plants, filling the air with heavy, sweet scents. Waterfalls cascaded down the jagged cliffs and made the dry ravines into swiftly flowing rivers filled with fish. A landscape that had not known more than a dozen rainfalls in the last century had become a lush, green Eden. Already the valley below was filling. In a few days it would be a large lake and the water would flow out the other side and into the desert... making for oases even beyond the bounds of what they'd directly created.

"We can probably cover another twenty miles or so before it gets too light. I don't want to risk getting spotted by a satellite. The plants and water are already making a suspicious cool patch if they’ve got infrared." Greg said, glancing at his watch. "You're not getting tired of carrying me, are you?"

"I'm not tired at all, Greg. What about you?"

"Me neither. In fact, I feel... I don't know... is 'exhilarated' the word I'm looking for? Just look at all that! There's no way they'll be able to ruin it. They'd go broke in a week paying for the bombs, napalm, and jet fuel if they tried!

For once, Greg's optimism was justified. The Egyptians didn't even try to erase the new landscape. They did try to keep everyone out of the area but it was simply too large to patrol effectively. At first it was a few curious tourists and their guides who had come to see the Cave of the Swimmers. Then, as the news spread, the more adventurous (or desperate) types made their way to the new land overflowing with food and water.

The United States offered the Egyptian military tankers full of Agent Orange, but as the herbicide couldn't be gotten to the area before thousands of civilians had taken up residence, Egypt politely declined the offer.

Sugarberry set a tray of sushi down on the table between Luna and Greg. As usual, Luna scooped up all the kappamaki in her magic and began popping them into her mouth the way a kid might do with popcorn kernels. Greg picked up a piece of unagi and chewed it while scrolling through newscasts on his larger tablet.

"How are things going, Sir?" Sugarberry asked.

"Pretty good," Greg said in a tone of voice that only betrayed a little bit of surprise."Oh, they're still a long way from electing me King o' the World, but at least there are some people who are actually wondering out loud if this is such a bad thing. And a couple even said that maybe I'm not such a thoroughly evil villain after all."

Sugarberry was shocked. "You're not a villain at all, Sir! You're only doing good things for humans and Equestrians alike!"

Greg nodded and took another piece of sushi. "Thanks for the vote of confidence. Maybe you should tell that to..." he scrolled down the dozens and dozens of articles and videos that were still howling for his blood. "...how about Greenpeace? They say I've '...destroyed a fragile and unique desert ecosystem.' Or The Guardian... they're accusing me of '...insidious Cultural Imperialism...' Huh... I wonder how they figure that? And for a final bit of lunacy, the Washington Times is claiming I set the place up as an ISIS training facility, for fuck's sake!"

"I'm sure they will eventually realize that the world will be a much better place if they elect you King!" Sugarberry said with conviction.

Greg spit out his mouthful of sushi. "What!?” He paused to cough out a grain of rice that he had nearly inhaled. ”No, no, Sugarberry, I was only kidding about that. Ghod... King of the World? What a miserable job that would be! I just want to make the world better... a place where people don't have to be afraid or hungry or miserable... where there won't be any reasons to ever go to war again."

"I don't see how anyone could object to that!"

Greg sighed again, watching more stories scroll by on the screen. "Yeah... but it seems like damned near everyone does. I guess I'm just going to have to try harder to convince them. Time to bring it closer to home, I think."

Author's Notes:

Thanks again to my phenomenal prereaders and editors WrittenWord333, Jordanis, and Fana Farouche who provided the perfect title for my dinosaur porn novel.