"...and that's why, in my endless crusade of forgiveness and compassion, I decided to put these three villains in a new reformation program!" Twilight declared to the small crowd that had gathered in the gardens, doing her best to cover the three unconscious bodies being treated by the best doctors she could get in the small time she had before the rumors about her actions started spreading.

"Didn't they survive the rainbow laser already?" Somepony in the crowd asked.

"Yeah, I always thought it was the evil remover."

"I used it as an allegory for my dishwasher soap brand."

"Do not question the ancient powers I control!" Twilight shouted to silence the crowd and then cleared her throat. "As I was saying, these three may have seemed unredeemable at first. And second... And third. But, I'm sure that if we give them just one more chance at reformation, they will become respectable citizens of Equestria."

"And what if they don't?" somepony asked.

"Oh, then they would surely concoct an evil scheme beyond our simple pony minds. Maybe steal the Crystal Heart as a distraction while preparing a spell to release the Pony of Shadows from limbo and adding him to their ranks, becoming an even greater, almost unstoppable force.
Then they would steal the scepter of the dragons to order them to attack Equestria, and do the same thing with the griffons once they recover their ancient artifact, initiating a domino effect that plunges Equestria into total war with all of its neighbors. And while we are busy fighting each other, they will secretly capture all my friends and loved ones and use them as ransom for the kingdom, forcing me to decide between them or my crown and–" Twilight stopped her rambling as she noticed the terrified stares of the crowd after her speech of theoretical doom. "Or maybe they will just try and destroy me directly. Same thing really." She added, not really helping to calm down her scared subjects. "That was all, have a good day!" She shouted far too loudly as she teleported away from her problems and social awkwardness.

The crowd of ponies just stood there, scared and unsure of what to do now, until a royal guard approached them in a mad sprint. "Everypony panic!" He shouted to the confused crowd that just stared at him.
Then the guard pulled out the small guidebook. "Princess's orders."

Everypony followed protocol.

---

“I’m running out of options,” Twilight grumbled as she walked back and forth in her library, trying to come up with somecreature she could get to threaten her kingdom.
“Discord, Trixie, and Starlight aren’t cooperating, the evil trio are in the hospital, I have no idea how I can resurrect Sombra, and I can’t bring back the Pony of Shadows without the pillars. There're no villains left in Equestria!” Then a thought crossed her mind. “But there are some outside of it!”

She quickly looked for the large diary with half of Sunset’s cutie mark stamped on the front and took a quill. “Hey Sunset! How’s everything doing? Are there any magical shenanigans occurring over on your side of the mirror? Any teenage-shaped villains?” She waited for a few minutes until she finally got a response.

“Hey Twilight! Everything’s fine here, I just finished my last exams so me and the girls are planning a slumber party. You can come join us if things are doing okay on your side. I can imagine ruling an entire kingdom probably doesn’t leave you with much free time”

"You have no idea." Twilight growled in frustration. “Why is everything so damn peaceful?! A couple years back something would be on fire by now!”

She sighed and tried to plan her next move. “I don’t think I can convince Sunset to betray me, that friendship laser basically did a reset on her personality. Maybe I could convince the sirens, but I have no idea where they are and neither does Sunset. That Wallflower girl may be corruptible, but without the Memory Stone she’s harmless. Wait, that’s it!”

Twilight pulled out the teacup and turned it back into the Alicorn Amulet. “As soon as someone puts this on, Sunset will have a new villain in her hands, and she will have to ask for my help to defeat it!” She started laughing maniacally at her unquestionable genius and quickly opened a portal to the human world before throwing the amulet through it.

“And now we wait,” Twilight said, sitting on her crystal throne to relax.

[Several hours later.]

“Finally!” Twilight exclaimed when the book started glowing and buzzing. She picked it up and saw a very large message. “Oh great! Things must be catastrophic on her side!” She got comfortable and started reading.

Dear Twilight, you’re not going to believe this.

I met this girl in school that was just recently been transferred to CHS from– actually, I think after everything that happen I either don’t remember right now or never got to ask her. Anyway, it was a sweet girl that seemed absolutely normal, which gave me a massive red flag because, let’s face it, everyone has something weird going on. After introducing ourselves, (she asked me to not mention her name after everything that happened so I will just call her X), I offered X a tour of the school, which made me remember when I did the same thing for the Dazzlings when they came to CHS. Do you remember the Dazzlings? Those sirens we had to defeat with music? I found them again after they escaped the battle of the bands with their voices broken, but hey, they got them back! Minus the mind control, lucky us. They seemed to regret their actions and while still antagonistic, they appear to be more on the side of good now, judging by the song they sang at the festival. I also ran into them today, there was some musical contest in Canterlot we were also participating in, so it was sort of nostalgic and tense (is there a word for that? You should know, or maybe Pinkie can invent it), but also funny whenever Sonata was around. We also ran into the Shadowbolts, I don’t think you officially met them so you may have forgotten about them, they were this world’s Twilight’s old classmates that bullied her and push her towards abusing Equestrian magic and turning into that evil version of herself. (Oh, I miss turning into that angel thing during that fight, it was the best transformation ever!). They also improved their attitude with time, and it seems that Cadence has been guiding Crystal Prep into a better path for the students. Did I ever tell you about the human versions of your brother and sister-in-law? My memory is horrible today, you would think I was under the influence of the Memory Stone again, but that’s impossible since we destroyed it with rainbows. Oh, that reminds me, Wallflower (the girl that had the memory stone) is also doing much better now with her gardening club and I was wondering if you would want to meet her someday. I’m sure that it would do wonders for her self-esteem to have a chat with the princess of friendship and hear your advice.
What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, X. While I was giving her the tour of the school, I noticed that she seemed to be constantly pulling up the top of her turtleneck sweater, which was a weird thing to wear when it’s like forty degrees outside and the goths are dying of heatstroke during recess, like if she was trying to hide her neck for some reason.
It only took a few moments for my brain to come to a conclusion; she was hiding the bitemark of a vampire! Which wasn’t true, I just had been watching a lot of vampire movies with the girls recently during our sleepovers, and it got kind of stuck in my head. Speaking of sleepovers, I had my first one at my house last week! I was so nervous but in the end we had a great time, I hope to get them to stay over more often, sometimes it gets kind of lonely in the apartment, but luckily I have Ray with me to cheer me up. I love that little ray of sunshine.
Anyway, I finish giving X the tour, ending in that shadowy section of the hallways with the malfunctioning lights where you and I had our confrontation when you arrived to this world looking for your crown. Someone should really fix that light, but honestly, now its like a feature of the school. I actually chuckled at that. Could you imagine? “Come to Canterlot high, we boast some of the best dramatic scenarios to accentuate your evil intentions”. I wonder if principal Celestia has been using all of our magical incidents as a marketing campaign, we are getting more and more students every year, but it may just be a coincidence.
Back to the shadowy hallway, maybe it was because of that that X decided it was the perfect place to make her big reveal! Turns out, she wasn’t a transfer student! In fact, she wasn’t a student at all! (dramatic gasp) she was actually a ghost-writer that worked from home, and she had a blog where she theorized a lot about what happened in the school and Equestria. A lot of her theories were very close to the truth. I don’t know if we should be worried for that or not. what do you think? Oh, sorry, I was at the big reveal. And as she told me all of this, she pulled down the neck of her sweater, revealing the Alicorn Amulet!!!
But that’s not the part that truly shocked me, because when I told her that the magic of that Equestrian artifact was way to dangerous for her to control it, (make sure you won’t fall over after reading this, it’s a real shock) she gave it to me. Just like that! No epic magical fight or overlong song about her motivations, she just took the amulet off and handled it to me! Unbelievable, right? Like, who just hands over a cursed artifact that grants magic? especially in the human world! Many would give their firstborn for something like that. I think some have actually done it.
Back to X, it turns out that she found the amulet in her backyard and tried it on, but when it started glowing ominously on her neck she freaked out and came to CHS looking for me. She was so nervous that it took the entire tour for her to build up the courage to show me the amulet, thinking that I would “cleanse” her or something like that with a rainbow beam of magical friendship. Which to be honest, magical blasts, being rainbow colored or not, is our solution to most things. Hey, that reminds me, have you ever wondered why we summoned a giant ethereal alicorn when we fought the sirens? Is that how the spirit of harmony manifests? I have so many questions.
Luckily none of that was necessary, I was proud of X so I invited her to hang out with us some time, she seemed extremely nervous but said that she would consider it, so fingers crossed!
After all that, I took the amulet to the school’s workshop where Rainbow and I filmed a little video. “1300-degree blowtorch vs ancient evil magical artifact. Will it melt?” We got a lot of views thanks to that video.
Spoiler alert: it did melt.

Twilight smacked the book against the table in rage. “Fine! If nopony's going to become a villain, then I will have to do it myself! This day will be remembered as the day Midnight Sparkle took over Equestria!”
As her first act of villainy, Twilight threw the diary as hard as she could towards the window of the castle.

The book bounced off the crystal glass and flew back at her at full speed.

*CRACK*

---

Twilight slowly regained consciousness, finding herself in a hospital bed, surrounded by the worried faces of her friends.

“She’s awake!” Pinkie exclaimed, making her ears ring.

“Lower voices please,” Twilight begged.

“Ups, sorry.”

“What happened?” Twilight asked, trying to remember the events before everything went dark.

“You got hit in the horn very hard, the pain knocked you unconscious,” Starlight explained, and Twilight noticed the dread in her voice.

“Why am I in the hospital? Did something else happen?” Twilight questioned.

Starlight rubbed the back of her head. “Well…”

“You broke your horn.”

“Rainbow!” Applejack exclaimed disapprovingly.

“There’s no point in sugar coating it,” the blue pegasus excused herself.

Twilight was starting to hyperventilate as she tried to look at her horn. “I– I lost my magic?”

“Of course not darling, you’re the element of magic and an alicorn. You’re still perfectly capable of casting spells. It’s just that…” Rarity looked at her friends, hoping that somepony else gave her the rest of the bad news.

“You won’t be able to cast very powerful spells. We need to run a few tests, but the doctors think that you would be stuck in– uhm– unicorn level,” Starlight explained.

“Advanced unicorn level?” Twilight asked hopefully.

Starlight couldn’t look at her in the eyes. “Regular, unicorn, level. But only until we can heal it. Luckily you didn’t break it off like it happened to Tempest.”

Twilight felt a bit of relief. “And how much would that take?”

“A year, maybe two.”

Twilight stared at the ceiling, letting out a long sigh. “Well, I guess it’s for the better. Equestria has remained stubbornly peaceful so it shouldn’t be much of a problem.”

“Yes, and I can assure you, there'll be nothing but peace from now on,” said a voice that Twilight didn’t recognize.

Turning her head to her right, she saw another creature beside her friends. “Girls, why is Discord disguising himself as Grogar again?”

“He isn’t, this is the real Grogar,” Fluttershy explained.

“I heard about what that draconequus did using my face, and decided to come to Equestria with my undead army to teach him a lesson,” Grogar said, like an old man complaining about foals playing in his lawn.

Twilight’s eyes almost popped out of her sockets. “Did you have a large battle against him without me?!”

“Oh, not at all. The Pillars got in my way first and…” Twilight was even more surprised at the sight of the most powerful villain in existence looking embarrassed. “Well, meeting Starswirl again after so many years made me sort of… nostalgic. We started threatening each other like the old times, but then it turned to just bickering, and by the end, we both admitted that we were far too old to keep doing this.”

“So you just… stopped?” Twilight asked incredulously.

“With the condition that the draconequus got severely reprimanded for using my image wihtout my consent. Chrysalis suggested getting a “lawyer” and "press charges". I didn’t know evil could be so organized,” Grogar sadi with a shudder.

“Wait, Chrysalis is ali– I mean, healed?” Twilight questioned.

“Yeah, she, Tirek, and Cozy made a full recovery once they spent a few hours in the hospital getting a bit of magic back into their bodies,” Starlight explained.

“Okay, and where are they?”

“They left Equestria. Said something about giving Tirek’s dad a visit. Ah hope it ends well for everycreature involved,” Applejack answered.

Twilight let out a long sigh and sank a bit more into the bed. “It all ended well then.”

Starlight got closer to the alicorn. “Twilight, you were acting really weird today, and you got a lot of us worried. Is something giving you trouble? You know we wil help you if you just ask.”

Twilight took a long minute to think, and let out another sigh. “Honestly, after today, I think I got it out of my system. But I need to do something.” She moved her head until she spotted her number one assistant. “Spike, could you send a letter to the princesses?”

“Sure. It has been a while,” the dragon said as he got quill and paper. “Ready when you are.”

“Dear Celestia and Luna. Due to a recent incident involving my horn, I will take a one-year break from the rule of Equestria. I will designate adequate replacements for all my duties, but I will need you to raise and lower the sun and moon in my place until I fully recover. My best wishes to you both, Princess Twilight Sparkle.”

Spike finished the letter and sent it with a breath of flames. “Done.”

“Thank you Spike,” Twilight said with a smile.

“Uh! This calls for a party! Like the old times!” Pinkie exclaimed excitedly.

Twilight chuckled. “It does, but I would like to rest some more before that.”

“Okay, we will be close by if you need us,” Fluttershy said with a smile.

“Thank you. All of you,” Twilight said before her eyes closed, and went back to sleep.

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