“And this is the center of Ponyville, the town hall!” Twilight chirped excitedly. The human grunted apathetically in response. The purple unicorn and her friends had caught up to him shortly after he had pranced into the town proper, and ceased his frolicking after noticing some of the locals shooting him approving smiles. Nix had temporarily forgotten what sort of world he was in; he had immediately traded his joyous traverse for a jilted trudging.

Her friends, meanwhile, had all traded in their previous looks of confusion, fear, and distaste for openly saccharine ones of acceptance and happiness. Except for the orange one with freckles. From the corner of his eye, he occasionally caught her upturned mouth wavering before suddenly reforming, her eyes flickering suspiciously to either side. And the blue one in the cape and wizard hat had an expression more closely akin to the glib satisfaction of a villain finally seeing their machinations come to fruition than one of warm joy. He was gonna have a lot of fun with her.

“Hey, Hillbilly,” he said out of the blue, pointing in a random direction. “What’s that building over there?”

“Ah, oh, err,” she gulped, attempting to slough off the effect of his sudden attention. “That’d be Sugarcube Corner, sugarcube. It’s where Pinkie works.” She paused, pressing a hoof to her chin thoughtfully as she glanced upward and to the left. “Now ah wonder where that mare has gotten herself off to?”

Nix abandoned his trudging and sauntered with surprisingly lithe grace over to the earth pony, his black duster swaying slightly, before he dropped into a slight crouch to match his face with hers. His piercing, light blue eyes regarded the pony’s face solemnly from behind the few strands of straw-colored hair that draped across his vision. Rainbow Dash and Rarity shared a small look–for quite different reasons, they both noticed the sudden change in his movements. Rainbow felt herself coiling up, steeling her muscles for any sudden movement out of the human. Rarity pondered putting him onto a walkway wearing the finest bipedal ensemble she was already in the process of thinking up.

“You know,” he said softly, tilting his head. Applejack’s nervous eyes met his in a few quick glances before finding something else to focus on. “Lies work best when you meet the eyes of the puh-person you’re lying to.”

The orange mare suddenly focused her full attention on the human with a glower. “Ah wasn’t lyin’! Pinkie really does work thar! Ah mean, lookit the darn thang!” She swung an accusatory hoof towards the building.

“That wasn’t what I was talking about,” he said, his eyes following the direction of her hoof. “You know-” The sight of what looked like a damned gingerbread house threw off his train of thought. His mouth dropped in shock and mutely attempted to form words. The group fell into silence.

“Uh, I don’t see what’s so special,” Rainbow finally uttered. “I mean, yeah, it looks a bit weird, but-”

A small cloud of dust shot up where Nix had been crouched. In an instant, he had covered the ten yards between Applejack and Rainbow Dash without anypony registering his movement. He appeared right before the hovering pegasus, surprising her and causing her to instinctually shoot up both her hooves in a boxer’s stance. He snaked his hands between her hoofs with sickening speed and grasped her cyan shoulders, shaking her roughly.

“Don’t you see, Scratchy?” he pleaded, his voice suddenly desperate.

“Scratchy?!” her voice scratched out in dismay before her brows began to crease in aggravation at the uninvited contact.

“Yes, Scratchy!” he interjected with a gruff whisper. “It’s all so clear to me...”

Rainbow Dash flicked Nix’s hands off her shoulders and crossed her hooves as she hovered over him, one of her eyebrows slowly raising in an implied query. “Well?” she asked in a not-so implied manner.

The human’s arms dropped limply to his sides. “I...I’m already dead.”

“Oh, dear, no! If you were dead, you probably wouldn’t be moving,” Fluttershy offered helpfully with her softly subdued voice. “Unless you were a zompony-”

“AND THIS IS TARTARUS!” he interrupted with a shout. Twilight abandoned all pretext of civility and began a grumbling, quiet self-oration about crazy primates and pleasing the Princess. Nix simply continued. “A candy coated, insufferable Hell, concocted as an eternal punishment for that one time I stole a lollipop from that kid that sat next to me in fourth grade!”

“That never happened,” Applejack pointed out plainly.

“Alright, maybe it didn’t, but I wouldn’t remember it anyway,” Nix retorted. He jabbed a finger towards his blonde-haired temple. “But it could ha-”

In Equestria, meteors are rare, far more rare than in other realities. There was, of course, the annual Dancing of Souls night–newly reinstated after Princess Luna’s return–that entailed a prismatic shower of shooting stars glancing across the twinkling night sky in great, beautiful number to celebrate the passing of those lost. Rarer still were the occasional feisty stars that took it upon themselves to cut an arc through the dark blue evening canvas after sensing particularly powerful emotions in the family and friends they left behind. And yet more rare were the spaceborne chunks of rock and metal that escaped both princesses’ notice and burned up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere.

But by far, the most rare meteor was the live pony one. In Equestrian history, there were only two recorded instances of this phenomenon. ln the first instance, a certain white unicorn’s rocketing descent towards the ground was allayed in the second recorded occurrence of another phenomenon, the Sonic Rainboom. The second instance–having just occurred a few seconds ago–involved a lime green unicorn impacting violently with a certain human’s chest from great height, and at great velocity.

The two beings stared dumbly at each other from the crater of impact, neither immediately realizing either their situation, or the gravity of meteoric impacts upon Equestria.

“Sorry about that, Rib Dasher!” a grey pegasus called out from a few dozen yards overhead. Her lazy eye bobbed nonchalantly beneath the straying hairs of her blonde mane. “My hooves were thinking real hard about holding onto you, until they weren’t!” Her head lolled to one side distractedly, and she floated off through the air, leaving the human-unicorn pair to their personal crater.

Nix rubbed his ribs dejectedly, slowly healing them, before his squinting eyes caught a pair of bright green irises through the cloud of dust. A poisonous slug of a smile lurched slimily across his face in sudden recognition. His sky-blue eyes glowed mischievously.

“My, my, Dancie, so forward,” Nix goaded. “Although it’s nice of you to drop in.”

“No...no flying,” she whimpered out in a voice that even he had a difficult time hearing. The light green unicorn clutched at the human more tightly and buried her head in his shoulder. His eyes widened in temporary shock before he refocused himself on the task at hand–making Ridge Dancer feel ten times more awkward than she ever had in her life.

“Dancie-”

“She just landed on the train and I thought she could get me back to Ponyville-”

“Dancie-”

“-but there were clouds and the spinning and-”

“Dancie-”

“And the muffins. Oh my Goddess, the muffins!” Ridge Dancer mewled and buried her head deeper into the human’s shoulder as her eyes scrunched up more.

“Dancie, do you mind, uh, pulling your damn horn out of my collarbone?” the human asked finally. Her eyes shot open and she jerked her head back.

“Did you see that?! She was all fwoosh through the air, then she tackled him and stabbed him in the shoulder!”

“Shhh, Scootaloo! We’ll get caught!” Applebloom hissed in a whisper to the light orange pegasus before peeking her head above the bush that she and her two friends had hid behind.

News about an alien coming to Ponyville had made an overnight splash in the small town, most of which had turned out onto the train platform to greet his arrival. The Cutie Mark Crusaders were no exception, and had even happily gone to bed early the night before–to the great shock of their assorted siblings and parents–so that they could be there for the train that bore him to the tiny village.

Saw him, they did. Sweetie Belle had commented that he seemed really scary, but it was Scootaloo who suggested that he might actually be Evil, with a capital ‘E’. One idea flowed into another as they chatted excitedly about it; however, Applebloom beamed with no small amount of pride over coming up with the idea to get their cutie marks in alien hunting (just in case the alien actually was Evil with a capital ‘E’).

They had thus been shadowing the weird creature and the group of five friends–plus Trixie, who Applebloom was fairly certain didn’t count–for the entire day as it stretched on into the late afternoon. This led them to their current spying.

“Maybe we can-” Sweetie Belle started, before lowering her voice to a whisper, “Maybe we can ask the orange-maned unicorn about alien hunting?”

“Ah dunno, Sweetie Bell. She doesn’t really look all that ‘cool’ right now...” Applebloom muttered. The alien was currently chasing the bright green unicorn around the plaza, shouting wildly.

“Just hold the Hell still, Dancie!” it bellowed loudly.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she screeched desperately.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, I’m just gonna wipe the blood off your horn! It’ll freak out the damn locals! And that’s my job, so hold the fuck still!”

“Nonononono don’t touch my horn!”

The girls watched in amazement as the alien suddenly became a streaking blur, shooting up puffs of dust at his feet as he overtook the unicorn and grabbed her head.

“It’s fast!” Applebloom whispered harshly. She was beginning to have doubts about a career in alien-hunting.

“Psh, no way,” the pegasus filly said dismissively. “I bet Rainbow Dash is way faster than that thing is.”

“You would say thaht,” the earth filly retorted flatly.

“Uh, what is it doing to her?” Sweetie Belle suddenly squeaked. The three fillies snapped back to attention.

The alien had the unicorn in a headlock, and was straining to clean her horn off with the end of his shirt while grunting at her to hold the Hell still. Applebloom briefly wondered just what “the Hell” was and how one would go about holding it down, before dismissing the thought as something only aliens knew about. Instead, she remembered something else.

“Ah think ah’ve seen somethin’ like that before.” Her two friends looked at her questioningly. “Mah sister has a coupla picture books she keeps under her bed, and it’s got some stallions doin’ thaht to unicorn mares and some such.”

“I could ask Rarity about it later?” Sweetie Belle offered helpfully before returning her attention to the alien and its prey. A dark green aura enveloped the lime mare’s horn.

“Meh, whatever.” Scootaloo’s mouth quirked into a frown. “And she isn’t a very good alien hunter. Guess she’s not so cool after all.”

“Don’t. Touch. MY HORN!” the unicorn shouted as her telekinetic aura suddenly surrounded the alien. The creature shot like a bullet through the air, it’s odd black cape flailing crazily behind it, before it slammed into a nearby vendor cart. It was thankfully unoccupied, as the cart exploded violently into a shower of wooden splinters upon the alien’s impact.

“Oooh!” the three fillies cooed in unified awe as their eyes widened.

“That. Was. AWESOME!” Scootaloo screeched as she jumped out of the bushes. Applebloom shared a glance with Sweetie Belle before they both hauled off after their friend, towards the incredible alien-slaying mare.

Twilight’s mouth worked soundlessly, flexing crimson cheeks, as she suddenly looked away from Nix and the green unicorn. She had easily deduced that ‘Dancie’ was one of the two Royal Guards identified as stewards for the human in Celestia’s letter, based off of the human’s familiarity with the mare. What she hadn’t been prepared for was, well, the human’s familiarity with the mare. He was currently doing something to Ridge Dancer’s horn that quite a few of her romance novels failed to openly describe on their circuitous path to subtly hinting about. Even Trixie seemed aghast about the human’s ‘showmareship’. A brief glance to her friends confirmed that they shared her embarrassment. Well, all except for one of her friends.

Rainbow’s chest shuddered violently as she began to snicker. The fit quickly morphed into a full-blown seizure of laughter as the multihued-maned pegasus collapsed to the ground, clutching her stomach.

“Man...he...” she wheezed out in between fits of mirth. “He really doesn’t...haha...know anything...snfff...does he?!” The blue mare shortly abandoned all attempts at further communication and submitted herself wholly to the maniacal fit of giggling. Twilight merely frowned down at her friend.

She was interrupted from her short pedestal of righteous reproach by the very loud sound of someone’s personal property being destroyed. Twilight jerked her head towards the noise. A pair of denim blue leggings poked out from underneath a pile of wooden debris and the cloud of dust that had once been somepony’s livelihood. She sighed loudly to herself, even as she was inwardly thankful that Princess Celestia had gifted her a surplus to her monthly stipend to ‘offset the cost of Phoenix’s intractability, and keep the Royal Accountants on the tips of their hooves’. Even still, she now had to explain to some innocent pony that their personal property was destroyed by an interdimensional traveler under her charge. She frowned temporarily before her lips quickly morphed into a thoughtful purse. She could at least leave out the “how” and “why” and spare herself some embarrassment.

Her thoughts were dashed viciously by the terrifyingly familiar sound of a shrieking trill.

’Oh. Oh, no. Not them. Not-’ Reality crushed the lavender unicorn’s hopes with cruel efficiency as three small fillies burst out of a nearby bush and sprinted towards the lime green unicorn in the center of the plaza–Ridge Dancer, Twilight corrected herself, remembering the mare’s name from her time in Canterlot.

The fiery-maned unicorn looked taken aback by the three squeaking blurs as they bounced around her, peppering her with an endless, incoherent babble of lightning fast questions. One of her forehooves lifted itself timidly as she shied back in confusion, her emerald eyes flitting between the flurry of fillies with growing panic.

“Girls,” a soft voice called out, “I think, uh, maybe you should calm down a little.” The eyes of the three fillies widened considerably, and they immediately zipped away from Ridge Dancer before sitting obediently before Fluttershy.

“Yes’m,” snapped Applebloom with a tone of sharp discipline.

Twilight shot her friend a grateful look, earning her a shy smile from the yellow pegasus. Rarity and Applejack canted forward slightly.

“Come on now, girls. Ah think it’s high time we got you fillies home,” the orange earth pony stated.

“Yes, Sweetie Belle. Even if you were given the day off of school, I greatly doubt you’ve had time to complete your homework, what with you following us around all day.” A knowing smirk graced Rarity’s pale lips.

“Aww, do we hafta?” Applebloom whined.

“Yes!” Rarity and Applejack snapped in unison. The orange mare turned momentarily to Twilight and uttered in a hoarse whisper, “We’ll be back later, fer thaht thing at thaht place.” She punctuated the sentence with an exaggerated wink. Twilight suppressed a wry smile.

“Fine,” Sweetie Belle muttered dejectedly.

As the four headed off, Scootaloo glanced furtively to her right and left, trying to avoid notice. Her emotions ultimately betrayed her as her gaze eventually met a pair of violet irises beneath a multicolored mane.

“Hey, don’t look at me, kid,” Rainbow Dash said with a grin. “As cool as you are and as much as I like ya’, this Nix guy is way too funny. No way am I gonna miss a second of his screw-ups.” Scootaloo pouted, summoning a conciliatory smile from her idol. “Hey now,” Dash comforted, “that look is so totally not awesome I may just have to hang out with you all day tomorrow to show you how coolness is really done.”

“You mean it?!” Scootaloo beamed.

“Sure thing, squirt. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, even if there is an alien invasion.” She playfully ruffled Scootaloo’s magenta mane with one hoof.

Rarity paused before the corner of a side street and swung her head over her shoulder. “Come along, Scootaloo. Your parents’ house is on the way to my old home.” Scootaloo spared Rainbow one more shining grin and a gleeful flutter of her wings before romping off after the keening white unicorn.

“And you can tell us about unicorn horns on the way!” Sweetie Belle chirped excitedly. Rarity nearly tripped over her own hooves. Twilight heard grumbled muttering, something about “when you’re older”, before the trio rounded the corner. She turned back to the green unicorn in the center of the plaza.

”Conserve energy, you said. It’ll be fun, you said,” Nix complained as he continued flashing his blades mindlessly in front of him. The glint of their repeated slashes formed a steady half-sphere of silvery, arching whips lashing haphazardly through the air before the human. An endless throng of demons threw themselves at the human blender with reckless abandon. A veritable cornucopia of severed demon limbs littered the ground at his feet. He considered pushing out of the narrow ravine that harbored him and Loki so the damned things he was cutting could at least flank him, giving him something to dodge to allay his boredom.

“You’re doing great, newbie!” Loki called out from behind him. He was leaning on his bo staff, a bemused look on his face as he took intermittent puffs on his cigarette. “One thousand demons down, about a hundred and thirty million to go!”

“You’re not even helping!”

“I’m on break,” the god said simply. “Labor laws, and such.”

“Stop screwing around!”

“Hey, your mother came to me.”

“And yours came on top of me. That’s not the point!”

“Ooh, ouch.” Loki faked a wince. “Point one for the combustible birdy.”

“I’m fucking serious, Loki, we have a mission!” The throng of demons were slowly pressing Nix back as he swiped his swords with increasing speed. The unending onslaught of the defiled beings was less a factor in Nix’s slow retreat than the growing pile of bodies at his feet. Demon corpses smelled bad. Really bad. The demons had to crawl over a heaping levee of their own dead to even get at him, but the human was still slowly backing away from the growing stench.

“Not even I’m crazy enough to defy labor laws. Have you ever even met a government lawyer before?”

“Loki-”

“They’re like skinwalkers, only they absorb your soul through paper forms and fine print-”

“Loki-”

“And don’t even get me started on wage garnishment. Do you know how little gods make-”

“Motherfucking goddammit Loki!”

“We are one,” a dark voice intoned. It didn’t so much speak as it did buzz through Loki’s and Nix’s skulls, like flies circling rotting meat. “We are many. We are-”

“WE KNOW!” the two of them shouted, exasperated. The damn thing had been tooting its own horn for the last half hour or so.

At the outburst, Nix’s swinging swords slowed, and a miraculously unamputed demonic limb found its way through his blows and caught him squarely in the face. The inhuman force behind the strike sent him sailing backwards as his rudely dislodged sunglasses arced high through the air. He rolled backwards and planted both his swords into the blackened rock beneath his feet to slow his reversed momentum. Bright sparks shot out from his swords’ marriage to the ground below as he continued sliding backwards. Loki’s pale hand–poking out of a curiously well-tailored black sleeve–caught his shoulder and immediately stopped him. Nix remained crouched, swords buried half deep in the earth.

He glared at the demons, taking particular note of the darkly tinted eyepieces soaring high in the air towards him. “Those motherfuckers knocked off my sunglasses.”

Loki’s opposite hand gently planted itself on his other shoulder, and the god lifted his face somberly to the reddened sky. “Oh, Lord, please heal this fashion emergency,” he said sarcastically.

“That’s it,” the human declared, his knuckles whitening around the hilts of the half-buried weapons before him. His eyes became a furnace of multihued flames, flicking rapidly from red to orange, yellow, white, and finally blue. He quickly swept the blades through the ground at his sides, the tips of the weapons finally escaping the surface a meter behind him. The wound they dealt the ruined earth ruptured in a circle around him and his immortal friend, releasing a flickering blue light from the circular fissure at their feet. His eyes sparked more brightly and burning wings erupted from his shoulders with a glaring flare as he drew his swords up and stabbed them violently into the earth.

The glowing light of the carved circle tremored momentarily before shooting upwards into the sky, barely missing the pair of floating sunglasses as they passed the threshold of the outburst of energy. In the blink of an eye, the ravine housing Nix and Loki began to crumble before the light blue energy exploded outward. The ravine, and the horde of demons closing on the pair, simply evaporated. The light spread from the epicenter with unimaginable speed, tearing mountains of rock from the soil below at its passage and hurling their gargantuan masses high into the air with sickening ease. Those demons not immediately turned to ash by the explosion of light found their innards immediately liquified by the cacophonous shockwave that followed shortly thereafter.

As the light dissipated, the human casually sheathed his swords. The twisted earth beneath his feet shuddered from the impact of trillions of tons of rock slamming back into the ground. As the tremors settled, he lazily tossed a hand behind him, the appendage swirling through the surrounding dust and catching his sunglasses as their downward trajectory passed his waist on their way to the ground. Nix brought the dark glasses slowly up to his face. He was then interrupted from the horrors of thinking up a witty one-liner by the slow clap of a certain intolerable Norse god of trickery.

“Bravo, Phoenix! Bravo!” Loki clapped him on the shoulder. “But, why didn’t you do that to begin with?”

“You said to conserve our energy and-” Nix cut himself off. The god merely pointed at his own chest and shrugged, a very wide grin planted across his face. “Oh, fuck you, Loki.”

“Wait, were you really gonna cut through a hundred million demons by hand?”

“Fuck you.”

“Just swing your blades around until everything died a few thousand years from now?”

“I’ll swing my blades around until you die.”

“Is that you offering to flail your tiny ‘blade’ around until I die a little death?” The god winked.

“Fu-” Nix stuttered. “I hate you.” Even still, his lips fought the urge to curl upwards at their corners. He’d be the first person to admit that Loki was a bastard, maybe even a bigger prick than he was. But he’d also be the first person to leap to the god’s defense. He barely even noticed that his face had lost the battle against his futile stoicism as he grinned openly at the old Norse god, his friend, before he gave a rueful shake of his head and began to turn around.

He was abruptly, forcibly shoved to the side by said friend without warning, and skipped a few dozen yards across the blackened glass soil before coming to a rest.

“Loki, what the fuck?!” Nix stood angrily and turned back towards the god.

Darkness. And splinters. Darkness and splinters. Nix groaned, more out of annoyance than from physical damage. Closing his eyes exasperatedly, he tested his lifeforce, and found the meager trickle had recovered from his morning display. He spat a short curse over his lack of power before channeling his lifeforce. Fire immediately consumed his entire body, burning to ash the numerous shards of wood that had pierced him. White licks of flame immediately danced around his wounds as he shot a fist through the quickly burning debris that covered him. Blackened chunks of wood exploded outward from his blow, and he stood slowly amidst the pyre of the ruined cart in the dying orange light of the imminent sunset.

His eyes glowed with a harsh blue light as dark orange wings burst from his shoulders. “I am Phoenix, and it will take more than weak attacks to stop one such as me!” he shouted, channeling his inner energy through his voice in the best façade of the Royal Canterlot Voice he could manage. “And also, you ruined another one of my shirts,” he added quickly in the same booming tone. His wings disappeared and the glow in his blue eyes retreated from a wild spark to a meager flicker. He gazed disgustedly at the bonfire around him, and with a flick of his wrist the flames immediately winked out. He turned his attention to Dancie, who was standing in the center of the plaza with Sparky. The two looked at him like they had been caught with their hoof in the cookie jar.

“Seriously, Dancie,” he said in his normal voice, splaying his arms widely. “What the fuck?”

“I-I’m sorry!” she whimpered, looking away and pawing one hoof at the ground. A lock of her deep orange hair fell over her eyes as she awkwardly examined the granules of dust at her feet. Nix merely sighed.

“Whatever, at least it wasn’t marble this time,” the human said with a dismissive wave of his hand–Dancie winced–before snapping his fingers. Ten canary yellow shirts, encrusted with jewels, appeared in the air above him and began to fall. His eyes widened.

“Agh, Demon Fashion!” he exclaimed. “Kill it with me!” His fiery, dark orange wings immediately burst from his shoulders again, and every airborne product of posh, primrose polyester paused perilously in place for a second before their cloth turned to ash. The multitude of gems previously embedded in the fabric of the awful things clattered dully to the earth below. Twilight suppressed a grimace over the death of her first, and last, foray into interspecies fashion design.

Nix, meanwhile, focused on his clenched hand. The skin of his thumb and his middle finger whitened as they pressed against each other with unimaginable force, and he stared intently at the pair of digits as he focused sharply. He grinned in sudden victory, and the coiled spring of their mutual pressure finally sprung; a loud snap! rang out across the center plaza of Ponyville.

Nothing happened.

Nix’s pleasure evaporated, and he palmed his forehead.

“Remember, your heart is still in a delicate condition. Don’t do much to strain yourself,” the Canterlot Hospital doctor admonished.

“But ohv course, doctor. I weell do no such ting,” she intoned soberly, raising a glass of cranberry juice to her lips. Shortly before the liquid met her lips, the dark red juice swirled into a deep black and began steaming. She swallowed a mouthful of the new fluid hungrily before her eyes shot open widely. The strange drink tasted oddly familiar, scalding as it was.

“Sacrebleu,” she muttered miserably; the motion of her hooves clutching her pained chest summoned a sense of deja vu from the orange-coated serving mare. Her heart monitor started chirping excitedly as the doctor’s eyes widened.

“Fuck it.” Nix surrendered to his nature, and forcibly ripped a wormhole to his pocket dimension. The sun dipped perilously on the horizon before righting itself as a black bundle of cloth winked into existence before him. He snatched it out of the air, removing his dark grey trench coat and hanging it off of Dancie’s horn. A furious glower appeared on her face before she stamped down the urge to introduce the human to the myriad mineral veins that ran deep below Ponyville’s surface. Nix quickly traded out his singed top for the newly summoned one before tossing the burnt shirt aside and plucking his duster off of Dancie’s face.

“Thanks, coat-rack,” he muttered before turning to Twilight. “So, next stop is the field where you all go cow-tipping to allay your boredom?”

“Oh, no.” Fluttershy summoned the words from the depth of her very shallow pool of courage. “That was outlawed centuries ago so our bovine friends could get some sleep.” She smiled up at the human, who simply stared blankly at her.

A knowing smirk appeared on Twilight Sparkle’s face. “No, I think it’s time to show you to the library-”

“I hate reading.”

“-where you’ll be staying until you find your own place.” Twilight paused. “Hopefully sooner rather than later,” she groused inaudibly.

Nix lit up a smoke. “Fine. Lead the way, Sparky.”

Author's Notes:

Right, uh, party. Yeah, that. In lieu of explaining why there hasn’t been one yet, let me direct your attentions to this video. Aww, isn’t she so cute you just immediately forget everything I said I was gonna do with this chapter?

(Editor’s Note: Yes, she is. Dissenters will be immolated with extreme prejudice.)

On a more serious note: I have the scenes for my chapters playing in my head. I have no idea how many words it will take to describe said scenes until I burp them unceremoniously from my own brain. It was my general understanding that there would be a party at the librarian’s treehouse two chapters ago. But, as any reader who’s been here from the beginning might have noticed, lingual economy is not my strongpoint. Nor is story pacing.

General plan of action right now is to begin writing the party, which blossomed into chapter-worthy length after a few rude thoughts inserted themselves into my carefully uncrafted narrative, along with correcting a few errors in previous chapters that others have pointed out to tighten up the narrative (haha).

After that? I’m guessing a bit of farm work, maybe some Everfree Forest with a side of Swordspony...actually, a lot happens. I’m not even gonna try to predict when my chapters will end anymore.

But I’m really, really sorry it took so long to update. I’ll work on that. As always, if anything about the story rubs you the wrong way or just seems off, feel free to comment or shoot me a PM. Trust me, anything you can find will probably make this story better in the long run.