The bartender stared down the lengths of Nix’s two pistols, a pair of bored eyes beneath a sandy mane. The stallion loosed a laconic snort before dropping his gaze and returning to his ministrations on the polished glass stein in his hooves, the white rag working tirelessly against any perceived imperfections in its glossy shine.

“I’m not fucking around. This place doesn’t have a worldstream. Where the fuck am I?” Nix had, after a thousand years, just gotten his first real lead in his quest to return home. Then, he had been ripped from said world, and sent here. Had Luna sent him here? No, couldn’t be. He was certain he had read her correctly.

He was terrible at reading people, but lifeforces—souls, as most other sapient species recognized them—those he could do. And her’s was amazing. He felt a nagging sense of familiarity from it, but he brushed that feeling off. She was a goddess, and there was a pretty good chance he had come across her soul in the past in a different reality. He hadn’t lied to Celestia about that; different personalities, completely different circumstances, but between realities, certain gods shared the same soul. The soul-sharing gods themselves usually shared certain characteristics. A kind soul made for a kind god, even though each god may manifest such a trait differently. Sometimes they were cognizant of the link, but more often than not they were completely ignorant of the infinite other physical manifestations of their soul across realities.

Tia didn’t seem to realize that she shared Zeus’s soul, for example. Never mind the fact that Zeus had died on his world. Nix hadn’t killed him, after all, so the god’s soul was still intact. There was a pretty good chance Zeus had remanifested back home, actually. Unless you kill the soul itself or sever its connection to its host, the corporeal form of gods always seemed to restore themselves eventually. Usually. He had a few friends who hadn’t. He wished he could remember their names.

Zeus. Funny he should remember that now. Tia shared a soul with some angry, bearded god who still walked around in a toga even after his cohorts had moved on, adapting to the modern age. He imagined Tia with a fluffy beard of frosting, and stifled a smile as his fingers begged him to pull the triggers on his weapons, aerating the skull of this smug dullard behind the polished, dark wood counters. He denied the digits their desire. The dead tell no tales. He was still mildly annoyed that he had lost his temper with Medusa. But stone. He hated being turned to stone, being trapped. No, he needed this pony alive. And this pony was apparently more interested in polishing a damn glass to a mirror’s shine than paying attention to him.

“I’ll give you to the count of three, and-”

“The Eight Bits bar,” the bartender said dully before shooting him a dispassionate glare. “Ain’t no reason for those here,” he said, nodding to the pistols inches away from his face. “Put ‘em away. Please.” To Nix, the last word smacked of an unspoken threat. If he were at his full strength...

...he wasn’t at his full strength. Whatever. He warily holstered his pistols. He couldn’t sense a lifeforce in the bartender, which meant that it was either an artificial construct—a homunculus—or that he was skilled enough to conceal it.

“There’s no worldstream here. What world is this?”

The bartender merely shrugged. “We get all kinds here.”

Anger flared in Nix’s chest, but he resisted the urge to pull his pistols out again.

“Look, I’m in no mood for games. How do I get back?”

The bartender pony arched one of his brows slightly, then placed his glass behind the counter. He set both hooves on the counter and met Nix’s eyes. “Most just use the front door,” he deadpanned. Oh, Nix was gonna shoot the everloving shit out of this sarcastic motherfucker. His eyes flicked towards the door, and around to the few patrons who sat in shadowed booths. They were all ponies. ‘All kinds my ass,’ he thought, but the fact he was surrounded by equines gave him some modicum of hope. Even a month ago, such a sentiment might have made him laugh. Maybe. He hadn’t done much laughing in the last century. But now he had a lead.

He stalked to the large wooden door at the head of the bar, shot a glance behind him, and stepped through the murky black shadows beyond the door frame. He felt a lurching sensation before his face slammed into a few slats of wood.

Lyra sat on the bench and took a deep breath, the chilled Fall air washing through her like a cold shower. Cheerilee had been so polite. ‘Are you going to be participating in the Running of the Leaves this year?’ she had asked. No, Lyra had told her. ‘How’s Bon Bon doing?’ She’s doing fine, she had responded. ‘The school pageant is coming up...’ the schoolteacher had slipped in towards the end. Even now, Lyra thought her attempt at a confident laugh utterly transparent. Cheerilee could see through her. They all could. She was a fraud. She couldn’t even write a bucking song for some school pageant in some backwater town. To think she one day dreamed of performing alongside Octavia in some grand hall...no, at the Grand Galloping Gala, no less! The nerve. Had she ever been so confident?

No, the music had left her. The only thing her instruments seemed good at these days was collecting dust. They were almost as good at it as her floor was at collecting the contents of ink wells. Bon Bon knew her well enough not to ask about the sudden commotions that sometimes erupted from her bedroom. Her patient silence when Lyra stumbled from her upstairs room, towards the door to their house so she could find her bench—her bench—was both gratifying and insulting to the mint-colored musician. After that first time, Bon Bon hadn’t asked where she was wandering after her fits.

The keening whistle of an arriving train jolted her from her thoughts, and her head whipped instinctively towards the train station just outside the park’s bounds. She waited for a couple minutes, numbly regarding the bare numbers of ponies that trickled from around the wooden building towards Ponyville. Not many found reason to come here, she knew from her year of penitent waiting. That insufferably arrogant pegasus with dark brown eyes still hadn’t found the time to make it back, after all. But he had promised, so she waited.

‘You can just write one for me when I get back,’ he had said. Yeah, right. She hadn’t written any music in months. She was so worthless. Worthless, and surprised when a heavy thump on her bench shot her up a few inches. She whipped her head around and her pupils narrowed to pinpricks. ‘Him. No, it.’ Her jaw worked soundlessly as panic bloomed in her chest.

“Goddammit, why the face? Pocket dimension, different reality, sometimes even walking into a fucking room, it’s always right in the goddamn face,” the dark god next to her muttered in a slurred voice, his jaw mashed into cracked slats of wood. He toppled over and hit the ground on his back, and simply lied there for a few seconds. Her heart thudded sharply in her chest. The human looked over at her, and though the light was gone from his eyes, she knew that it was just hiding behind those pale blue irises. His features erupted with a giddy smile. Oh, Celestia, no!

“Hey, Lyre-Thingy! How ya’ been?” he said cheerfully. The being was mocking her before he ended her. But they said he was gone! She flicked her gaze to his black jacket, waiting for the shadowy tendrils to shoot out and nail her to her bench.

“I-it has returned!” she whispered through her clenching throat.

“Well, now, that’s just offensive. I can handle being called ape, or primate, or tall-dark-n-ugly. But ‘it’? Really?” She...she had offended the dark god. He was already reaching for something in his breast pocket, some weapon of torture to harry her end until her last breath. Her life was over. She clenched her eyes shut and ran from the bench blindly, wailing in despair.

‘Huh, that was fuckin’ weird,’ Nix thought. He finally latched onto a smoke in his pocket as she bolted, plucking it out and lighting it with a small fireball. He winced a little when she slammed face-first into a tree and bounced off. Lyre-Unicorn-Thingy immediately regained her hooves, but wavered shakily as her head slowly turned towards him. Her golden eyes were widened in terror, and she had a nasty gash above the left one. He immediately took a step towards her to heal the wound, but she yelped and tore off through the underbrush towards the town proper.

What the Hell was wrong with her? She acted like he was some sorta monster, like she had...never...His eyes widened. ‘I’m gonna make that fucking bartender’s death as painful as I can,’ he thought grimly as he felt for familiar lifeforces. ‘Huh, or not.’ He felt what was clearly the correct Harp-Butt’s lifeforce moving with surprising speed away from him. And another familiar soul towards him at much greater speed. He turned around and immediately drew power to quicken his reactions. A rainbow-maned, cyan pegasus was diving straight at him in slow motion.

He grinned. If his facial features suddenly flashing to a different expression in real-time threw her off, she didn’t show it. Showing off a new trick, eh, Scratchy? He doubted there was much maneuverability in that cavern that led to Tartarus, and she really did try so hard to impress others. Her wings were moving downward, their feathered tips racing molasses dripping down a wall and losing. Flapping to increase the speed of her dive? In other realities, she’d be tucking her wings to decrease air drag, but things seemed to work a little differently here. Nothing he wasn’t used to. Things change. What was important was what was happening right now.

The blue pegasus’s eyes seemed hard, her brows scrunched down with concentration. So, what’ll it be, then, a last minute barrel roll? He didn’t think she had time to pull up at this distance, but she was a helluva lot faster than Swordspony, so maybe...

Hell, he’d just let the mare do what she wanted to. Maybe it’d even surprise him. He released his hold on his lifeforce and time rubberbanded back to its normal speed. Rainbow Dash became a rainbow-trailing cyan meteor hurtling towards him again. His arms twitched forward. He had meant to cross them, so he could pose in an appropriately appraising manner for her trick.

She slammed into him like a freight train before his arms had even moved an inch. They tumbled a couple dozen yards before coming to a stop, a pair of cyan hooves planted into his shoulders.

“Alright, Rainbow, what the fucking fuck?!” Shit, he forgot to use her nickname. Oh, well, only Dancie seemed to notice. “I could have been seriously injured!”

“You’re back!” she yelled.

“Exactly, my back! It’s killing me. Is this how you treat honored aliens around here?” He had barely felt a thing.

“But, you disappeared!”

“That’s generally what happens when something teleports...”

“No, you don’t understand!”

“Look, as exciting as all this is, we can continue this conversation after you quit straddling my shattered legs.”

With a sudden blush, she looked down to see she was, in fact, straddling the human. She immediately burst off of him.

“Oh, thank God. Now that the heavy ass fucking flying horse isn’t crushing my legs, I may one day heal enough to walk again.”

“Heavy?!”

“Seriously, is Princess Celestia’s Diet for Diabetes a thing?” She seemed unsure how to respond, flicking her gaze rapidly from his eyes to her flanks, and back again.

“Pounds for Ponies? Fruitcake for Flanks?” He narrowed his eyes at her. “How much cake has she been feeding you?”

“What?! What’re you-”

Nix channeled his lifeforce again, increasing his reaction speed. Rainbow’s lips moved at a hundredth of their original speed, and he noted with no small amount of amusement that one of her eyebrows had begun its painfully lazy ascent towards the sky. He waltzed calmly over to the mare and bent down a bit, grasping her by the shoulders. From her perspective, he knew it probably just looked like he had disappeared. He released his power and the blue mare’s eyes widened.

He began shaking her shoulders. “Was it consensual?! Did Cakebeard force you to eat it? SHOW US WHERE ON THE CAKE SHE TOUCHED YOU!”

A cyan hoof clocked him squarely in the jaw. “Nix, what the hay is wrong with you?!” she shouted at him. He barely felt the blow, and his broken jaw almost immediately popped back into place. Man, he felt good. “You’ve been gone for a week!”

He suddenly felt less good. His eyes widened. That bar. Different subspace than this reality, different temporal rules. He had been banking on the same rules to make it back home while his best friend Malcolm was still alive, even though he’d been working at the task for a thousand years. So, a coupla minutes in some bar, and a week goes by in Equine Hell. It made sense, to him. But to the ponies...

“Oh, shit, Dashie, where’s Ridge Dancer?!” he asked hurriedly. He immediately began scanning through familiar lifeforces. He almost wished he didn’t make a habit out of memorizing every one he came across. He’d met quite a few ponies in his short time here. A certain timberwolf pup’s lifeforce was a few kilometers away. If he had a location, he could narrow the search.

The pegasus drew her head back slowly. “What...what did you call me?”

“Dashie, Scratchy, Rainbow Dash, look, I just use that name shit to aggravate others and because thinking up nicknames staves off the boredom! Where is Dancie?”

Rainbow Dash took a few steps back and dropped his gaze, pawing the ground uncertainly. “When you didn’t come back, she went back to Canterlot. She seemed pretty torn up, to be honest-”

“Fuck. Hey, Scratchy,” Nix said, “if you could do me a favor and get your friends together at the library, I’d owe you one.”

“Uh, okay. Shouldn’t take me long...except for Pinkie, if she isn’t with the Cakes. Why?”

“I need to have a little chat with everyone, is all.” He flashed her a small grin. “Just something I need to take care of, first.” He had zeroed in on the lime green mare’s lifeforce a considerable distance away. It would take quite a bit of his power for the round trip, especially since he couldn’t use a wormhole, but by his estimation he figured he could make it. Things were so much fuckin’ easier when he was damn-near omnipotent, but he’d make do.

“Oh, and also, my evil alternate personality is going to take over and I’m going to destroy all of Equestria, Hell, probably your entire reality unless the Elements of Harmony turn me to stone.”

Rainbow Dash’s mouth dropped.

“Fucking with you. I just really need to talk with you all. But first, I really do need to find Dancie. For some damn reason, I get the sense she needs some comforting.” That was an understatement. Even he wasn’t dumb enough to miss how attached his orange-haired unicorn had become. If he had truly been gone for a week...

The pegasus’s mouth slowly formed into a smirk. “Well, hopefully us ‘Element Bearers’ won’t have to wait too long. But still, it’s probably her first time. Be gentle.” She disappeared in a flash.

“Well, that was fuckin’ weird,” Nix muttered to himself. “Wait...oh, goddammit.” He set the thought aside as he focused inward. Teleporting wasn’t so much about focusing on the area you were teleporting to, so much as it was focusing on the matter to be teleported. He deeply wished he could manipulate gravity wells to make a simple wormhole, which was much more energy efficient, but it always seemed to fuck with Tia’s sun.

So instead he opted for the much more rational conclusion: calculating the route of the trillions upon trillions of the subatomic particles that made up his very existence about a hundred kilometers towards the northern mountains that sheltered Canterlot, the slightest mistake in his racing mind’s desperate attempt to fulfill his request being no less than abrupt assimilation with an inanimate object like a chair or a bed. He was reasonably certain of his abilities to know he wasn’t teleporting into a living creature, at least. He steeled himself as the quantum transmutation took effect. His myriad atoms shifted through this world, leaving an empty area in the park where he once stood with a muffled pop as the air rushed in to fill the suddenly vacated space.

Ridge Dancer stared blankly at the marble wall across the hall. She didn’t bother trying to find patterns in the deep green striations that scored the molded rock outside of Princess Celestia’s bedchamber. For all she cared, the wall was as blank as the muted white of her coat under the effect of the guard armor glamification spell. She didn’t bother shifting her hooves. She didn’t care that she would grow stiff after so long holding still, she simply stared at the wall, motionless, a hollow stone statue. An ornament outside of the chambers of a goddess, a functionless husk that served no purpose outside of some banal obsession with tradition. Princess duty was a punishment. She deserved worse.

He had abandoned her.

The second Luna had teleported the human, she felt his soul wink out of existence. Magic that affected souls, be they detecting spells or those that concealed one’s own lifeforce, were strictly forbidden after Nightmare Moon’s banishment, for obvious reasons. She had a very large repertoire of said magic because of her father’s twisted ministrations. One spell she always kept up was the ability to sense the souls of others. And as Luna’s horn flashed, her eyes rolling sarcastically, Nix’s lifeforce had disappeared. Luna had done something with her friend, her only friend. She immediately attacked the Princess of the Night.

The princess had easily overpowered her, and after both parties calmed down, she had convinced Ridge Dancer that she had merely cast a simple teleportation spell. Luna seemed confused, and oddly hurt, when she too used her magic to confirm the absence of the human on their world. Either he had gone, or he was masking his soul from detection. After they returned to Canterlot, Ridge Dancer was assigned Princess Duty again, and nopony had seen hide nor hair of Luna since. Princess Celestia had been raising the moon for the last few days. When the Sun Goddess had left her chambers this morning, she paused for a moment and rested a wing on Ridge Dancer’s shoulder. Ridge—no, ‘Dancie’—had ignored her, continuing to stare emptily at the wall across from her. She ignored the princess’s wing. She didn’t deserve comfort.

Because she was useless. Her friend abandoning her was all the proof she needed. He had simply flitted away from this world at his first possible convenience, like he always said he would when he got his powers back, leaving her behind. Alone. Without a second thought. She was glad the enchanted guard armor didn’t reveal the user’s emotions. Her eyes refused to stop watering, and the enchantment was the only thing that allowed her to be an emotionless ornamental statue outside of Celestia’s room.

She didn’t bother to take her eyes from the wall when the clopping of hooves down the hallway stopped. The slate grey stallion in front of her cleared his throat and stared down his snout at her.

“Private Ridge Dancer, is this how you greet a superior officer?” he asked.

Her hoof raised numbly to her forehead in salute. “My apologies, Guard-Captain Stone Wall,” she replied in monotone.

He frowned at her and looked away. “Tch, no surprise from a charity case like you. Why the princess thinks allowing ponies to play guards rather than shoring up her defenses with qualified candidates is beyond me.”

She should have wilted. Should have been ashamed. Instead, she just didn’t care. She deserved it. “I’m sorry, Guard-Captain,” she mumbled out unconvincingly, still staring through him towards an empty spot on the wall behind him.

“Hmph, as well you should be. I swear, Shining Armor and Glancing Shock were entirely too soft on their-”

His lecture was cut off quite rudely by the door to Celestia’s bedchambers exploding behind her. She felt herself flung towards the far wall, sailing through the air as her glazed eyes focused sharply. She tried tucking herself into a roll such that she would impact the wall in front of her with her hooves, but an invisible force seemed to hold her steady as she hurtled forward. A meter from the wall, she seemed to stop in midair and felt herself repelled away from it, unharmed. Her back thudded dully against something and she felt two limbs wrap around her barrel, underneath her two front legs. She vaguely noted the Guard-Captain ricocheting off the wall, his face grimacing from the force of the impact. She felt a dim sense of satisfaction at this, before her apathy scurried in to replace it. Whatever had caught her turned towards Stone Wall, and one of the limbs holding her released its grasp to motion towards the kneeling Guard-Captain. Dancie’s eyes widened as she saw a peach colored hand at the end of a dark grey sleeve.

“Seriously, Dancie. The fuck is with this asshole?”

She squirmed, attempting to twist around. The arms set her on the ground and she immediately whipped around, staring up into a familiar pair of pale blue eyes beneath a short-cropped mane of dishevelled, strawberry blonde hair. This...this couldn’t be real.

“Private Ridge Dancer!” her Guard-Captain forced out, coughing and struggling to get to his hooves. “Apprehend that monster immediately!”

She remained motionless, staring into those blue eyes.

“Useless, bumbling charity cases,” the grey unicorn mumbled as his horn lit up. Nix snickered to himself as he easily bent the telekinetic threads around him. They impacted harmlessly in the wall and floor behind him, shooting up a few pieces of smoking debris left over from Celestia’s door. The stallion huffed and his horn glowed brighter. A perfect square section of stone was cut from the wall and sent hurtling towards the pair. Stone Wall didn’t like it, but his special talent didn’t allow him to manipulate a smaller section of stone. As much as he disliked Ridge Dancer, he felt slightly guilty about her being collateral damage in his capture of the monster human.

Nix rolled his eyes and with a flick of his wrist the wall bifurcated and swept past him and the shell-shocked unicorn mare in front of him. The two pieces slammed into the opposite side of the hallway, their inside edges glowing orange and bubbling with magmatic heat.

Guard-Captain Stone Wall gaped for a moment before coming to his senses. “Private Ridge Dancer! I command you to apprehend the human immediately!”

Nix pressed a finger on the bottom side of her helmet and lazily flicked it off her head. She shimmered for a second before her coat flashed to its familiar lime green, and a locke of burnt orange hair fell over her left eye. The helmet clattered to the ground at the hooves of an increasingly flustered Guard-Captain. The act seemed to summon Ridge Dancer from her shocked fugue. She lept forward and wrapped all four hooves around the human, squeezing him tightly.

“Help!” Nix shouted. “I’m being apprehended by an exemplary member of the Royal Guard!” Dancie drew her head back and he looked down at her with a grin and a wink. She buried her face in his shoulder and hugged him more tightly.

Nix wrapped his arms around her and glanced towards the unicorn stallion with a smirk. “Unfortunately, I’m going to have to foalnap her.” The light behind his eyes flared up briefly with a cold flame and his features deadened. “And if you ever endanger her life with an attack like that again, I’ll rip out your fucking soul and devour it.”

Nix broke his icy glare with the gray stallion and sighed. “You know, Dancie, kidnapping females from horrible situations is a lot more gratifying when they have boobs.”

She immediately jerked her head back and glared at him, a blush creeping through her cheeks. “But-” she started, before, with a muffled whump! and a rush of air, the two blinked out of existence.

Tremoring slightly, Guard-Captain Stone Wall fell back on his haunches. In a daze, he fumbled clumsily until the helmet fell from his head and clattered to the ground next to Ridge Dancer’s. There, he simply sat, staring blankly and trembling.

‘Those eyes,’ he thought. The two parts of his severed stone wall creaked and crashed to the ground, making the debris that had once been the door to his Princess’s personal chambers shudder and shift. He hugged himself and began rocking back and forth.

“-I do have mammary glands!” Ridge Dancer shouted into a dusty silence. Six pairs of eyes, each a different color, stared in shock from a few couches set around a coffee table in the center of a library. Her eyes took on a blank stare as she desperately tried to avoid meeting the gaze of the six bearers of the Elements of Harmony, her legs trembling as she slowly lost her four-limbed grip on the human. She slid to the ground, her cheeks glowing as red as her hair.

“Ahem, well,” Rarity said after a few short, awkward seconds.

“No, no! It’s not-” Ridge Dancer cut herself off, and glared up at the human. “...You did that on purpose.”

Nix merely shrugged and shot her a grin. “Maybe...” She scowled at him. He turned to the other six mares in the room and clapped his hands together. “So, first order of business-”

“Where the hay have you been?” Twilight demanded angrily, hopping off her seat and stalking towards him.

“Well, funny story-”

“Funny?!” she growled. “Princess Luna has holed herself up in her chambers for a week because you tricked her into thinking she botched her teleportation spell.”

“The Hell I did-” The purple mare stopped in front of him, her mouth twisted in disappointment as her eyes glared daggers and venom and everything bad she could muster up at the human. As his shoulders drooped, he loosed out an annoyed sigh. He really needed a smoke, but he couldn’t afford to summon another pack. Not now. He was already exhausted from his two teleportations, enough that he could sleep for a day. And now this shit. He ignored the purple unicorn and turned to Dancie. He crouched to meet her at eye level.

“Do you trust me?”

The mare seemed a bit taken aback by the question, but nodded sternly.

“You have my word that I will not leave this existence without your express permission. But right now, I need to take care of something.”

With a sniff, she nodded. Most of the other mares flitted confused looks between the two. Pinkie Pie and Rarity shared a small glance and regarded the human with curiosity.

Nix stood. “Sorry, ladies, gonna have to postpone this meeting for now.” He paused and glanced to the side. “But it’s important that we have it. I’ll be back.” Snob and Ms. Pinkamena were giving him small grins, now. He doubted they’d be grinning if they knew what this next teleport was gonna do to him with so little power. He sighed, and winked out of their sight in an instant with a small crack and a rush of air.

Pain. Pain was the only sensation that was allowed to him. It rippled through him, through every limb, every organ, every cell, and screeched its scorching punishment from every atom in his being. He was resistant to physical pain. He had suffered attacks that would level entire solar systems with a grin. But what he had just done had torn apart his very being down to the subatomic particles.

The act of teleporting didn’t require too much energy. The energy intensive part was making sure all his atoms got put back together correctly. And, when he teleported to Princess Luna’s personal chambers, he didn’t have the energy to put himself back together again, not completely.

He would have screamed if the atoms in his throat had caught up with the rest of him.

He landed on something soft in a room that was almost pitch black. He immediately collapsed onto a slightly darker, harder lump in the center of the softness, wheezing and trying to hold his atoms together as his regenerative powers worked overtime to put him back together. The lump immediately jolted and Nix felt his mostly regenerated face mash into something solid, cold, and wet.

“Who dares?!” it cried, a pale blue light suddenly emanating from a dark blue horn, illuminating the room.

Nix stared into a pair of hollow, glum blue eyes a few inches from his own sapphire orbs, nose-to-snout with Princess Luna. Her eyes were bloodshot and slightly puffy.

“Hi,” he croaked out with a wheeze, before his head collapsed into the soft fur of her neck and he blacked out.

Author's Notes:

I should probably edit this before I publish it. And if I were a good writer, I totally would.

Sadly, I'm not a good writer. So here ya' go!

Many thanks to Aku- Akumoka- Akumo-cage-stew for lending me his Eight Bits Bar, from his story I Hate You All. Throw all your lovin' his way for giving me permission, since that isn't the last time Nix will be visiting a certain dry bartender, and various other colorful characters.