She's standing in an idyllic green field. It's a warm spring day.

She feels...small. And—quadrupedal.

Next to her is a creature that looks vaguely like a very small, very neotenous horse, whose facial expressions are nonetheless difficult to mistake.

"This is a larger expenditure of Nirvana's intervention budget than I expected," she says dryly.

(She is not having any feelings about being utterly in the power of the gods of Good. That would not serve Asmodeus.)

She is, presumably, also a small neotenous horse. That's hardly the worst thing about this situation, especially if she actually is in Nirvana. On the other hand—

"I still have my sorcery," she says, "or something like it. Petitioners don't usually keep any magic, right?"

"No," she says, "but petitioners or not, this is very likely a Good god's doing. We must assume everything we see and hear has been optimized to turn us against our Lord's interests. I advise doing nothing as long as possible; our Lord's pride will not permit Him to suffer His greatest servants on Golarion being turned into ponies."

She does not say that, while Asmodeus will certainly avenge the slight to His pride, His vengeance need not actually involve getting them back. It would also be beneath His pride to spend too much on that. And there are worse possibilities, as well, that she dare not voice to Abrogail. She, (hopefully) alone of all mortals on Golarion, had an idea of what was actually at stake in the contest for Cheliax. And while the torments of Asmodean Hell would certainly never include ponies, Mephistopheles would love to have her think she was in Nirvana being broken into an instrument of Good. He might even actually do it, and then sell the result to Iomedae.

The thing that really serves Asmodeus, right now, is probably for both of them to stop existing. She doubts that's an option.

"I swore to let Asmodeus have his fun, as long as I could have mine, but it seems like our mutual entertainment may be coming to an end."

"Did somepony say FUN?! I love fun! Do you want to have fun together? Are you new here? I haven't seen you before, and I know everypony in Ponyville! What's your name? My name's Pinkie Pie. Do you want to be friends? I think this calls for a PARTY!!"

The odds of this being the work of Mephistopheles are increasing rapidly.

AAAAAAAHHHH wait she still has her magic and can Greater fucking Teleport a thousand miles away from here.

"Hey! Wait!" says the horrible pink demon thing, which is already at her destination. "Where'd you go? Do you not want to be friends? That's okay, Twilight didn't want to be friends with anyone when she got here either. We'll still throw you a welcoming party! Do you like—"

Abrogail lights her on fire.

"Oh!" she says, more a shocked giggle than a cry of pain. "I've never felt anything like that before. I like it!"

What the Abyss—you know what? Disintegrate.

Touch AC: lol you thought

Power Word Stun. Disintegrate.

Dodge that, Caydenspawn.

Pinkie Pie explodes into a mess of confetti and streamers that somehow get all in Abrogail's mane.

Sigh. At least it's gone.

"Hey! What'd you do that for, you meanie?" says a shrill voice from behind her.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

"You know what?" she says aloud. "I'm not sure what powers decided to inflict you upon me, but I am not going to give Them the satisfaction."

"If you wanted to be left alone you should have just said that, silly!" says the pink pony, and trots off.

She Teleports back to Aspexia's location.

"We are being fucked with in a manner frankly uncharacteristic of Nirvana," she says. "It was already at my destination when my first Teleport completed. It professed to enjoy being lit on fire. When hit with a Disintegrate it turned into confetti" (she plucks a streamer from her mane) "and immediately reappeared behind me. Fucking Chaotic Good."

Aspexia shows no outward sign of horror at the fact that Abrogail immediately attempted to torture, and then kill, a presumably Chaotic outsider that had already demonstrated unexplained capabilities.

"I had come to the same conclusion," she says. "There may be such beings in Elysium, and no doubt many powers there Who consider tormenting Asmodeans with inane silliness to be turnabout and fair play. It could also be—Baphomet, or Someone of that sort. Only Asmodeus, among the Evil gods, has the dignity to show His nature so openly." It isn't Baphomet, but that name is a useful substitution for Who it actually is that doesn't reveal anything dangerous to Asmodeus' interests in the worlds where the danger hasn't already happened.

"My magic appears to work normally. Do you have a tuning fork for the Material, or Avernus, or any other civilized plane?"

If they aren't already in Hell, they shouldn't try to go there until she's learned more about the situation. If Mephistopheles has taken over, she'd be better able to serve Asmodeus trapped in Elysium as a pony.

"No items, no spells, and praying for new ones doesn't appear to work." It's dangerous to admit to Abrogail that they're beyond the range of Asmodeus' power to grant spells and likely also His sight, but it is, unfortunately, a feature of the situation that she could hardly conceal for long.

"What's your guess as to whether we're—in something Mindscape-like, or a real place? And as to whether we're alive in the sense that dying would send us to Hell?"

"If this is the work of a Good god then we are probably alive—there is not actually any god that can snatch my soul from our Lord's grasp and survive. Living mortals may be dealt with more freely. Similarly, sustaining a permanent Mindscape would be a fairly extraordinary expenditure. If this is, as I guess, an attempt at containment by someone unwilling to just destroy or imprison us, we've most likely just been dumped in a really distant part of Elysium. I assume that the Polymorph can't be dispelled, or else they wouldn't have bothered, and it probably isn't worth the spells to try."

This is all true, except for the part where the gods of Good probably had nothing to do with this and therefore whatever follows that conditional-clause is irrelevant. Permanent Mindscapes on living mortals are expensive, but Mephistopheles (or Anyone else) can comprehensively control the sensory inputs of a petitioner for as long as He likes.

Alter Self back to her usual human form?

Nope.

That's suggestive of them being under Baleful Polymorph. Aspexia said not to bother, but—not being able to Alter Self is going to be annoying. Dispel dispel dispel?

Nope.

... Alter Self to a different pony form? (She chooses Aspexia's; it's easier to target a form you've actually seen and she's sure as Hell* not turning into the horrible pink thing.)

(*A more literal expression in Cheliax than in most places.)

Works!

"Huh. Assuming you just did what I think you did, that's...outside the range of things I was expecting. I suppose that magic is known to work differently on different planets, and if the dominant species on this planet have this form instead of being humanoid—it's plausible that Alter Self would work that way."

It is suggestive of them being really, really fucking far from home, though. Perhaps even that the Iomedaens just destroyed their souls like sensible people and now they're being simulated by an alien power outside Creation altogether. She's going to mentally live in the world where that isn't true, for now, not because she's unwilling to face it but because if it is, there aren't any useful actions she can take anyway.

"Another planet as in not a Good afterlife?" That would be great.

"I know what you're thinking. No."

"You can't, actually, give me orders. Besides, I'm sure there'll be room for Asmodeus' church in my new pony empire."

"Until such time as our Lord has bestowed the rule of Infernal Cheliax on another Thrune, which did not seem likely to happen anytime soon last I checked, you are bound by contract to give your life, if necessary, to ensure that it remains an Asmodean state."

"As far as anyone on Golarion is concerned, I did. What's the difference between one Asmodean state and another, anyway?"

"We were ordered to establish another Asmodean state on Golarion, and the way of Asmodeus is to obey, not to do what you like and then convince yourself that it benefits Him."

(This order is news to her.)

But of course. Golarion is Rovagug's prison; this is what the literal name of the planet means in Infernal. It's also where prophecy is broken. And Asmodeus holds the key to Rovagug's prison, a fact which, while undoubtedly not literal, still has to be true somehow.

Perhaps Asmodeus fought for Cheliax like the fate of the world depended on it because it did.

...no, that can't be right. Iomedae and her puppets wouldn't have been allowed to prosecute the war if it had risked Rovagug's release. But maybe, if Asmodeus can't maintain the security of Rovagug's prison, the key reverts to Someone else. Or something like that.

Abrogail doesn't say anything, but Aspexia is very good at reading facial expressions. Shit. Now is not the time for Abrogail's loyalty to be in doubt. Under the circumstances, she wouldn't normally even care, except that she doesn't have spells, and Abrogail still does.

"I will consider your duty discharged if you can get me back to a place where Asmodeus can give me spells," she says. "As for what Asmodeus Himself considers to be your duty, I suppose you will find out eventually. He does still own your soul. Personally." Even if he loses all the rest of Hell.

(Although the same ought to be true of her, and she still isn't sure that Mephistopheles hasn't somehow ended up with them both. Perhaps He and Asmodeus made a trade—their souls for more of what Asmodeus valued in the new Hell, or something like that. In that case she shouldn't try to oppose Mephistopheles' hypothetical aims, lest she retroactively make the bargain more expensive for her Lord—)

Hmm.

Flesh to Stone.

No one on Golarion would have had much of a chance of landing that spell on her in combat; otherwise, she would have been a statue a long time ago.

Of course, she isn't in combat. She's unbuffed and itemless, and though she's also younger, in this form, it isn't enough. Her flesh is stone.

She might regret that. But Aspexia was looking pretty likely to just be a damper on her—activities. (She's careful not to even think the word 'fun', lest she re-summon the pink fun demon.) And Asmodeus—well, she's near-certainly outlived her usefulness to Him. If He'd like to spend the resources on tracking her down just to torture her, He can—but He seems to have more important things to worry about.

She walks off in a direction that looks like it might lead to civilization.

Eventually Abrogail will encounter a pastel yellow winged pony singing to herself as she picks flowers and puts them in a basket on her back.

"Eep!" she cries when she sees Abrogail, immediately ducking behind a large basket of apples.

What fresh torment have the gods of Chaos prepared for her now?

"Hello?" she says, in a voice that would sound downright timid to all but a few people on Golarion.

"Hello," replies the yellow pegasus, peeking out from behind the apple basket. "I'm sorry, you scared me."

"Do you know which way the nearest town is?" she asks.

"Oh no," she says. "Are you lost? Maybe my friends and I could help you get home."

"I doubt that," she says. "I just want to know more about where I am."

"Okay," says Fluttershy uncertainly. "You're near Ponyville. In Equestria," she adds, when this doesn't seem to be the answer Abrogail is looking for.

"What plane is this?"

"I don't know what that word means. You should talk to my friend Twilight. She knows a lot of stuff. She's the most talented unicorn in all of Equestria!"

Abrogail is not actually sure that she wants to come to the attention of the most powerful wizard in the country, even if the country is fucking cutesy pony-land. Looks can certainly be deceiving. And assuming, of course, that that's what's being said at all.

"Your friend Twilight," she says. "What's the most powerful spell she can cast?"

"Well...I don't know," says Fluttershy. "She defeated an Ursa Minor? That was supposed to be really impressive."

That doesn't help her at all. "Can she teleport?"

"I think so? But only across Ponyville, I don't think she can go to Canterlot."

Fourth circle, then. If she actually was the most powerful spellcaster in the country, then—well, the country has a new most powerful spellcaster. More likely she's lying about that part; most peasants can barely distinguish a fourth-circle wizard from a god. But, at any rate, Abrogail isn't worried about coming to her attention.

"Yes, I think I'd like to meet your friend," she says.

Fluttershy is, at this point, distracted by a small round winged creature making purring noises and sniffing at an apple by her feet.

"Oh, hello little guy," she says. "Are you hungry?" She squishes the fallen apple with a forehoof to allow the creature access to the soft interior of the fruit.

The creature ignores her and heads straight for the full basket of apples sitting nearby, somehow devouring the entire thing in a few seconds of frantic buzzing.

what the FUCK—Magic Missile.

(The parasprite dies instantly.)

Fluttershy rushes over to the fallen parasprite—

—and then looks up at Abrogail with a glare that could paralyze a full-grown dragon.

"Fix him. Now."

Abrogail is much harder to Intimidate than that. She did, after all, previously work with Aspexia Rugatonn.

"I just saved your entire town's harvest and quite possibly both of our lives! Haven't you ever seen a deceptively-cute-exponentially-multiplying-creature* before?"

(*A two-syllable word in Taldane and Federation Standard.)

"What do you mean? Look at them, they wouldn't hurt a fly!" She bends down to the ground and lets another one nestle in her mane.

She starts to remind herself that she doesn't actually care about these people and if they all get eaten by the adorable spawn of Deskari it'll be kind of funny actually, but it turns out that, unfortunately, she now also lives here.

Let's try that again, with more subtlety. Charm Person.

"Please put it back in the forest where it belongs," she says. Presumably, unless there's an active rift to the Abyss that the things are emerging from, the fact that everything hasn't already been overrun means they have some predators in their natural habitat.

"...okay," she says, and coaxes the parasprite out of her mane and back towards the edge of the Everfree Forest.

"Let's go find Twilight," she says, and starts to walk toward Ponyville.

Twilight Sparkle, this apparently being an actual name that someone gave their child, lives in an enormous tree near the center of Ponyville. When they arrive, however, the door is answered by a tiny purple-and-green dragon.

"Oh hi, Fluttershy," he says. "Who's this?"

"I'm Abrogail. I'm from very far away. Is Twilight here?"

The dragon has sort of the right coloration to be a havoc dragon. It's not evidence against this being somewhere in Elysium, at any rate.

"Oh, cool! How far away? Like Manehattan*?"

(*Abrogail will hear an appropriate horse-related Taldane pun on the name of Absalom.)

She's had undispellable permanent Tongues since she was twelve years old and rarely even notices the actual language she's speaking. That, however, will get her to pay attention.

Tongues usually achieves a reasonably idiomatic translation. It doesn't make puns. Something is up with this place. 

"Farther than that, I think. I was hoping Twilight could help me figure out exactly how far, actually."

"Well, she went down to Sugarcube Corner to check on the preparations for the Princess's visit."

Todo: find out vastly more about this so-called princess, beginning with whether she's as hopelessly naïve as her subjects.

She hasn't mentioned being a queen yet. She doesn't exactly have a queen's power to call on anymore, in exile and with the Iomedaens having stolen her country, and mostly it hurts to think about, but even queenship in exile might get her a more useful conversation with the local royalty than she would otherwise have.

"Thanks, Spike!" says Fluttershy, and heads off toward Sugarcube Corner.

"You're welcome! Good luck!"

When she reaches the garishly decorated building, she enters the door at a run, sliding across the floor and coming to a halt in a sitting pose. 

"Twilight! Pinkie! Come look, I met a new pony!"

oh no

"Oh! Welcome to Ponyville! What's your name?" says the purple unicorn who is presumably Twilight.

Pinkie Pie doesn't say anything, just narrows her eyes suspiciously at Abrogail. Her eyes, apparently moving independently of her head, perfectly track Abrogail's every movement while she continues to stuff her face with cake.

"Her" Infernal "Majestrix Abrogail Thrune, Queen of Cheliax, blah blah blah and so on, presently in exile."

"I've never heard of anywhere called Cheliax—and Princess Celestia is the ruler of all ponies."

To-do: find out how true that actually is on a scale of Taldor to ten.

"Yes, it's probably very far away. I wanted to see if you could help me figure out where I am in relation to anywhere I know. And I wasn't originally a pony. I was—" she makes a Silent Image of her human form.

"...why don't we take this back to the library? Fluttershy, your job is to make sure there's still some cake left for the Princess tomorrow."

"...okay..."

"So, what exactly do you think happened?" Twilight asks Abrogail when they're back at the library. This is probably an 'ask the Princess what the fuck' type of situation but the Princess won't be here until tomorrow and Twilight's curiosity cannot in fact wait that long.

"I was the queen of a country on the planet Golarion. Ponies there don't talk—actually, the animals we call 'ponies' only look vaguely like you—like us," she corrects. There was a war. I was—magically imprisoned—and when I regained awareness I was four-legged and furry and standing in a field a couple miles from here. I thought at first I was in Nirvana—"

Twilight now has additional questions. She's going to interrupt before the list gets too long to keep track of.

"Hold on," she says. "What's a 'star-that-moves'? Stars don't move—well, the firmament moves, but they're attached to the firmament, unless you mean shooting stars, but I don't think you could live on one—if you could even live on a regular star, which—"

"Well, that answers some of my questions about this place," Abrogail says. Namely that they probably aren't on the Material. "A planet is an enormous ball of rock, so big that it seems flat from its surface. They orbit their sun like so—" Silent Image of Golarion's solar system (with the planets dramatically magnified).

Abrogail isn't really considering the possibility that Twilight thinks her world is flat and is wrong about that. There isn't actually a time in Golarion's recorded history before it had someone who could teleport to space and instantly verify its shape; she doesn't know this to be something that societies without the benefit of teleportation habitually get wrong. (No doubt some peasants back home get it wrong anyway, but Twilight is supposedly a wizard.)

This is all very fascinating but Twilight is distracted by a comparatively minor aspect of the situation.

"Could you do that illusion spell again? I want to watch you cast it."

"No; I have a limited number of castings per day and at this rate am likely to need all of them."

"Aww." Unfortunately that makes sense. "We'll have to exchange spells later. Anyway, that's definitely not how our world works. Princess Celestia moves the sun, and Princess Luna moves the moon."

Wizards in this world just share spells??

—if the thing about the sun is true, then probably this world is in fact some kind of divine domain or enormous demiplane, with 'Celestia' and 'Luna' as the gods and/or archmages responsible. (This would be a ten on the Taldor scale.)

"Do your people die of old age, and does anyone know what happens to their souls when they die?"

"We do die of old age. Well, except the Princesses. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'soul', but I think dead ponies are...dead, they don't go anywhere else that we know of."

"Hasn't anyone ever tried scrying them?"

"Doesn't work. Scrying spells are finicky over long distances even within Equestria, though, I wouldn't expect it to even if there were something to see."

Mortals, then, with an unknown relationship to the afterlife system and suspiciously bad scrying. Maybe they go to the normal afterlives and Celestia just blocks scrying lest any of her little ponies be traumatized by learning about Hell. Abrogail isn't going to tell them either, though for entirely different reasons.

"Anyway, I'm trying to figure out what plane I'm on, either to try to get home or at least have a better idea of what to expect here. You've helped me narrow it down a lot but this world still doesn't match any of the planes we know of."

"I think I understand what you mean by 'plane' but I wasn't actually aware there were others. Certainly not that you could travel between them."

No Plane Shift either. Between that and the scrying it seems slightly like Someone doesn't want them to be able to leave.

"There are a few dozen known to us, depending on how you count. There's magic for getting between them—I can cast the spell but it requires an item attuned to your destination, which I don't have."

"I think we should probably ask the Princess about this," says Twilight. "She'll be here tomorrow."

"Alright." Abrogail considers it a lot likelier than she did five minutes ago that the 'Princess' knows anything about the planes; unfortunately, She probably knows more about them, and her, than Abrogail would in fact prefer.

Then Twilight can proceed to grill Abrogail about her world's magic for the next several hours!

aaaaaahhh she isn't even a wizard she's a sorcerer she doesn't know anything about magic she just does it

She manages to avoid setting Twilight Sparkle on fire. She needs local allies, and the damned* creature would probably just enjoy it anyway.

(*She wishes.)

Mister Rooster wakes Fluttershy at the earliest crack of dawn. She stretches as she gets out of bed, brushes her mane, and then gets to work on feeding all of her animal guests their breakfast. It's a big day today! The Princess will be here!

...at some point she remembers the new pony she met yesterday. The strange foreign princess-or-whatever, who had seen an adorable harmless creature and immediately killed it. Fluttershy had protested, but then she just—stopped.

Wait, what?

Oh.

She hastily apologizes to her tiny mouse friends and immediately gallops for Ponyville.

A few minutes later Twilight's door is kicked in and five ponies barge into her bedroom to rescue her from the evil enchantress.

"What the hay, girls?" says Twilight, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

"She enchanted Fluttershy to forget she's evil!" says Rainbow Dash, who's hovering over the stirring Abrogail in a vaguely threatening pose.

...she probably should have refreshed the Charm Person at some point, shouldn't she?

"I did nothing of the sort," she says. Luckily even seconds after being woken up she still has better Bluff than any mortal in Equestria has ever encountered.

"Hold on, what do you mean, 'evil'?"

"You murdered my poor harmless parasprite!" says Fluttershy, pushing Rainbow Dash aside to get in Abrogail's face. "There's no way I would have been friends with you after that if you hadn't enchanted me!"

"Wait, that's what this is about? Parasprites are gross!"

FUCK. Why did it have to be that one who's willing to be sensible about this?

"She's right," she manages to make herself say. "I reacted after it had devoured an entire basket of apples in less than a round. We have similar creatures where I come from. If it had been allowed to multiply, they would have eventually consumed your entire food supply and possibly more."

"She could be right," says Twilight. "I need to check my books." She heads downstairs and returns a minute later with a book.

"'Parasprites are small winged creatures known for their rapid, asexual multiplication and voracious appetites,'" she reads. "Blah blah blah...'In spite of their innocuous appearance, keeping even one is dangerous, as that number will soon grow.' Pinkie, how did you know that?"

"Everypony knows that!"

"Awww..." says Fluttershy. "It was so cute..."

"You still mind controlled her!"

"Girls. What do you mean, 'mind control'? There are spells you can cast on an object to make it seem more or less desirable, but actual mind control is serious dark magic that it should be possible to detect."

Her Bluff is so good that it makes other people invent excuses for her.

"I admit I cast a spell on the parasprite to make it seem less appealing to Fluttershy," she says with very well-feigned repentance. "I'm sorry, I should have just talked it through, but it was dangerous, as we've already discussed, and I was worried the creature itself was having unnatural effects on her. You can check me for dark magic if you like." She's suddenly really curious about what that test actually checks for. She dispels herself just in case.

Twilight takes a small piece of crystal and holds it near Abrogail while casting a spell. Nothing happens. 

"She's clean," Twilight announces.

Abrogail put Detect Magic up for that but does not have nearly the Spellcraft required to interpret it. 

So it didn't detect her Evil alignment aura or the fact that her magic comes from the blood of Hell in her veins. What is it looking for, necromancy? Who the fuck does mind control with necromancy?

"Sorry," says Twilight to Abrogail with a slight nervous laugh. "Looks like they overreacted a bit."

"Hold it right there," says an orange earth pony with a pronounced country drawl. "I'm still not sure there ain't somethin' fishy about all this."

"I'll ask the Princess about her," she replies. "I mean, not that I wasn't going to anyway, but—in the meantime, I appreciate your concern, but I'm fine. Remember Zecora? We already learned this friendship lesson once. She's not going to hurt me or mind control me or anything."

(This is true. Abrogail kind of vaguely objects to it being true, but she isn't going to cause problems while the local god-queen is in town.)

"Alrighty then," says Applejack, and the five ponies file out of Twilight's bedroom.

A little while later trumpets herald the arrival of Princess Celestia, an enormous white winged unicorn twice as tall as an ordinary adult pony, riding in a flying carriage drawn by armored white pegasi. All the ponies gathered in the town square for her arrival bow as she steps out of her carriage, her ethereal iridescent mane fluttering in a nonexistent breeze.

—they all bow except Abrogail, who curtsies slightly in a manner appropriate for one monarch greeting another on the latter's territory. Also, this would be a great opportunity to look at a bunch of people with Aura Sight. (Disguise Self will hide the glowing eyes.)

None of the ponies have visible auras except for Twilight's presumed adventuring party, who all have faint auras in various flavors of Good. Celestia's aura is Neutral Good, with the quality of an outsider's rather than a mortal's, and unsurprisingly bright enough to blind her.

"Your Highness," says Twilight, trying to continue looking at the Princess and not at Abrogail conspicuously not bowing. "This is Abrogail, the Queen of Cheliax, which we think is in another plane—"

Twilight's voice suddenly seems to fade into the background.

She is not Intimidated but aaaaaahhh why is the god-empress looking at her.

"I know who you are," says Princess Celestia in Infernal. "I know what you've done. I do not believe that that is who you are, nor are you here to be punished. But if you try to hurt my little ponies, you will fail. Do you understand?"

okay now she's Intimidated

"I do. Why am I here?" she answers in the same language.

"This is an informally-reciprocated-consideration for a—" fuck this language. "A favor for a friend," she continues in Equestrian. (Infernal, of course, lacks the word 'friend'.) "She could not let you go free anywhere Asmodeus could reach you, but did not wish to imprison you forever. Here you are safe from Asmodeus, you cannot hurt anyone, and you might, perhaps, learn true friendship. At least, that is what we hope."

So Iomedae has dumped her in Nirvana, even if they're not calling it that and even if it isn't actually the same place Neutral Good petitioners go. She peers at the sun symbol on Celestia's flank. "You wouldn't happen to be related to the goddess of redemption and the Sun that I'm familiar with, would you?" she says.

"I think," says Celestia, appearing deep in thought for a moment, "that I was once a petitioner in Her afterlife, a little girl transformed in death into her favorite animal. In truth I cannot really remember. That was a very long time ago. I do remember my sister and I deciding to leave. We had—a number of disagreements with the powers there. So, no, I am not the Dawnflower, similarity in symbolism notwithstanding."

Abrogail is kind of curious about what differences of opinion She has with Sarenrae, but this conversation is probably on a time limit and she has more important things to say.

"Am I free to leave?"

"You may leave Equestria if you wish. You may not go back to Golarion, or to Hell."

"Which does remind me: where is Aspexia?"

"Turned to stone at the edge of the forest a few miles outside Ponyville."

"That rather violates the spirit in which you were both sent here, I think."

"She would honestly have preferred eternal petrification to what you have in mind for us, I'm quite sure. That isn't why I did it, but it's true."

The Princess sighs. "She is, from what I've heard, a very strange person. You may be right. I'll speak to her, and if she truly would prefer death to redemption, I will give it to her."

Would Sarenrae do that? Chelish theology textbooks explicitly say no but she has no idea of the actual answer. Celestia did say she had some differences of opinion with Her.

"—I didn't even know there were other planes, though it makes sense," Twilight is still saying. "Did you know about them? Do you know why Abrogail ended up here?"

"Yes, Twilight," says the Princess. "She is from another plane, and she was a queen. But she wasn't a very good queen; she was very mean to her people, and she's been sent here to learn about friendship. You shouldn't treat her any differently than any other pony. I promise she won't hurt you or your friends. Perhaps you can all learn something from each other."

(Oh, right, Time Stop. She wasn't aware you could pull other people into one, but it seems like the sort of thing a god ought to be able to do.)

The infantilizing description of her is infuriating. She's really quite tempted to test what, exactly, is preventing her from hurting anyone. Celestia didn't say 'you will die' or 'you will be punished' or 'we will give up on your redemption and send you to Hell'. She just said 'you will fail'. Are they all just immune to violence the way the pink one seemed to be?

Unfortunately, she's heard enough of Aspexia going on about the way gods see the world to grasp that when a god makes a threat like that, you obey, even if the mechanism of enforcement isn't clear. It might be enforced by your entire universe retroactively not existing.

...Aspexia, faced with this particular situation, would disobey anyway, so that this timeline retroactively wouldn't exist. Does Abrogail want that also?

Well, bad as her current situation is, it's probably better than going to Hell after having lost Cheliax to the Iomedaens.

"Why didn't you tell us there were other planes?" asks Twilight.

"That's a much more advanced part of your studies than you've reached yet. Most places outside Equestria aren't safe for little ponies. Now, I do have some other ponies who have been waiting to see me, but I'm excited to finally meet your friends!"

She's back at the library, for lack of anywhere better to stay. She's actually beginning to like Twilight, and not even in a want-to-torture way. Well—slightly in a torture way, but one where she'd be genuinely disappointed if Twilight got permanently damaged.

She does, nonetheless, require some correction. Twilight Sparkle, for all her bookishness, has somehow never read a proper romance novel. A quick examination of the library reveals that this may not be her fault—Equestria doesn't seem to have any. None that she would permit to be published in Cheliax, anyway.

It's a shame whatever transported her here didn't let her bring a Bag of Holding.

"There was one I read recently," Abrogail finds herself saying, "about a beautiful and all-powerful queen and a brilliant young wizard apprentice oblivious to her own talent..."

Yes, that's exactly why she chose this particular novel to summarize.

"It's not like that!" protests Twilight. "With Celestia and me—we're not—"

"Obviously not," says Abrogail. "Good queens aren't allowed to have any fun."

Twilight is mostly confused by this. Any flirting that may have been intended goes so far over her head it's out of her telekinesis range.

"I don't see how the Princess being, uh, bad, would result in anyone having more fun."

"I do!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

"Would someone," she says after a moment, "please explain what the Abyss is up with her?"

"You really shouldn't ask," says Twilight. "Believe me, I've tried."

"What do you mean, what's 'up' with me? My head is up, silly! Unless I'm upside down." She leaps up so that she's somehow hanging from the ceiling. With hooves.

Twilight is probably right but she's going to ask anyway. "I mean, how do you manage to instantly teleport in whenever anyone says the word 'fun'? And that sort of thing."

"I didn't teleport! I've been here the whole time, silly!"

Twilight was right about not questioning it. She continues with her retelling, eventually reaching the part where the queen takes her lover, now more feared than the queen herself and on track to become a Power of Hell while still mortal, to a grand gala in disguise as a common courtesan.

"And this is the part where I yelled 'SURPRISE!!' and killed the spy who was about to ruin the whole party!" says Pinkie Pie, who is still on the ceiling.

"I know I just told her not to question you, but, uh, what?"

"That is not in fact what happens," offers Abrogail.

"Yes it is! Weren't you there?" she says, dropping off the ceiling and rotating implausibly in midair to land on her hooves next to Twilight.

"...so, context, the queen in this book was almost certainly written to flatter me. But it is, as far as I know, entirely fiction. Though this did not stop me from sending out agents to scour Cheliax for anyone, of any gender or species, at all similar to the other protagonist. They had not yet found anyone satisfactory when they were interrupted by the war."

(Nearly all authors who attempt to write Abrogail into their work to flatter her are tortured to death. Not even for insufficient flattery, just for frankly awful characterization. This particular author was uncannily spot-on. She was eventually executed for heresy—but not by Abrogail.)

"Did you look in Corentyn?"

what

Twilight is deeply confused about many things, including in what world any of that could possibly be a flattering portrayal of Abrogail, but she's distracted from that for a moment by an ✨idea✨.

"Story time paused," she says. "I want to see if we can use Pinkie Pie as a tuning fork for your home plane, since she's apparently been there before."

"Of course I haven't been there, silly! Nopony who isn't a Princess has ever left Equestria and returned!"

"Then how do you know what Corentyn is?—it's a city in Cheliax," she adds for Twilight's benefit.

"Because someone who has been there is also me, and everyone who's me knows everything that anyone who's me knows!"

There is, at this point, a knock on the door.

Yeah it seems like doing science to Pinkie was probably not going to turn out any better than last time.

"Come in," she says.

Fluttershy enters, carrying a sickly-looking, featherless bird on her head.

"She's sick and I don't know how to fix her," she says.

"Hi Fluttershy—is that the Princess's bird?! You need to return her immediately!"

"Yes," she says in an even smaller voice than usual. "She's sick. I just thought I could help her, but—nothing is working..."

"Can I see the bird?" she asks. She thinks she recognizes it, from the heraldry of the Padishah Empire; perhaps Celestia borrowed yet another piece of Sarenrite symbolism despite supposedly being a completely different entity.

Fluttershy sets it down in front of Abrogail.

"Idiots," she mutters to herself. Disintegrate.

"It's a phoenix," she explains. "It's supposed to burst into flames and then regenerate every so often. Probably it would have done it of its own accord soon enough. I just gave it a little push."

Sure enough, the ashes begin to float into the air, gathering into the shape of a bird, which in a flash of light transforms into a majestic red-and-orange bird with its wings spread wide. It flies over to Fluttershy and perches on her head.

"Thank you," says Fluttershy happily.

"Alright," says Twilight. "We need to get this back to the Princess before her guards notice." She and Fluttershy head out.

Abrogail follows them rather than be alone with Pinkie Pie.

"Oh, there you are, Philomena." The bird lifts off of Fluttershy's head and flies over to the Princess, hovering nearby.

"I'm sorry, Princess," says Fluttershy. "I only took her because she looked sick and I wanted to make her better."

"it's okay. But next time, you should ask before trying to help like that. I would have told you that rebirth is a natural part of her life cycle."

"Although, really, she should have done it months ago. She was getting kind of annoying about it, if you ask me."

"Yes, Princess," says Fluttershy. "It was Abrogail who actually regenerated her, though."

"Thank you," says Celestia to Abrogail, quite sincerely, then switches to Infernal. "Though I worry that you may be teaching Fluttershy that violence is the solution to all one's problems."

"Well, it usually is."

Days pass, then weeks, and Abrogail's permanent background outrage at being trapped in the land of friendship and ponies gradually fades. Minds are funny that way; whether or not she can live here, she does, and she goes on doing it even though the Abrogail Thrune who was Queen of Cheliax would have sworn she would rather die. That said, there is one regard in which Equestria continues to infuriate her: it's all fake. There's endless petty social drama, but no one ever gets tortured over it. There are monsters in the woods, but they're basically harmless. Even the local adventurers don't appear to have ever seriously risked their lives for anything; it's a miracle Twilight got to fourth circle even given her résumé, which would sound fairly impressive in Golarion, if you didn't know anything about Equestria, but—

—well, Abrogail isn't sure what she's more baffled by: a timid yellow pony who can successfully Intimidate an adult red dragon, or a world in which the biggest threat that the adult red dragon posed to the nearby town was the smoke from its snoring.

It's this, moreso than any lack of royal status or god-enforced injunction against hurting people, that has her still planning to leave. Luckily, Twilight was stunningly easy to manipulate* into continuing her research into interplanar travel, and it looks like the project might just be possible.

(She hasn't mentioned to anyone that if Rarity ever makes it to Golarion with her diamond-locating spell, she could probably buy the planet. Even with just the diamonds Rarity gave her for "research purposes", Abrogail could probably buy Cheliax back from the paladins if she promised to have nothing more to do with Asmodeus.**)

In the meantime, she's started writing a romance novel. A proper, Chelish romance novel, mostly just an amalgamation of the plots of several of her old favorites, but surely a vast improvement on the drivel currently available in this place. The reception it gets will be informative about ponies as a species; on Golarion, Chelish fiction does have something of a cult following outside Cheliax, even in Good countries—unless the government bans it. She's not sure what Celestia will do.^†

(*) Actually, there's no way Twilight wasn't going to research it once she found out it was a thing, Abrogail or not.

(**) Even Abrogail is aware that returning to Golarion while denouncing Asmodeus is probably a bad idea for her.

(†) Whether or not Celestia decides to censor Abrogail's novels, she will certainly read them.

And so, one afternoon a few weeks after her arrival, Abrogail is suddenly accosted by a tiny yellow filly wearing a mane-bow larger than her entire head.

"You have to help me! Twilight said you could help me. Please will you help me?" she says rapidly, in a country accent that identifies her as probably one of the Apple clan.

What. 

"Uh, how?"

"Diamond Tiara's cuteceañera is today and everypony in my class will be there but they all have their cutie marks but I still don't because I'm no good at—"

Acid— no she will not hurt the little ponies. 

"Slow down, child. What the abyss is a 'cutie mark'?"

"Wait, you don't know—?" She glances at Abrogail's flank. "Hey, you don't have your cutie mark either!"

"Well, the last person to call me cute got t—" no she will not traumatize the little ponies either "—old off for it."

Apple Bloom just looks confused. "No, a cutie mark doesn't have anything to do with being cute," she says. "It sym—symbo—has to do with your special talent. Everypony—well, every grown-up pony—has one...how old are you?"

Her special talent is torturing people, which would be both difficult and potentially traumatizing to small ponies to depict in a tattoo on her butt.

"I'm twenty-one," she says. "But I've only been a pony for a few weeks—I have no idea if ponies mature like humans at all."

"I'm eleven," volunteers Apple Bloom. "What do you mean, you've only been a pony for a few weeks? What were you before? What's a human?"

Probably about a human maturation timeline, then. At the very least, not off by an order of magnitude, and given that it's that close it's probably exactly the same, for the same bizarre reason that all their cities are named with Taldane horse puns.

"I was a human," she says. Really she would have thought this obvious from context but children are very stupid. "A kind of person from very far away. When I came to Equestria I was transformed into a pony."

"Oh!" says Apple Bloom. "Well, only ponies have cutie marks, not griffins or zebras or anyone else. Maybe you have to discover your special talent as a pony, and you just haven't yet. You will eventually."

She doesn't actually care. "What did you want my help with?"

"Well...Twilight said you might have a spell that could give me a cutie mark, since hers didn't work...but maybe you could just come to the party with me instead? It won't be so bad if I'm not the only one there without her cutie mark. And you're a grown-up so no one will make fun of you."

She was planning to drop by the party anyway—she does genuinely enjoy petty social drama, however silly the Equestrian version is—but she has too much pride to be visibly coaxed into it by an adorable little filly.

"I do have a spell. What cutie mark do you want?"

"Well, almost everypony in my family has something apple-related..."

She Prestidigitates a literal apple blossom onto Apple Bloom's flank.

Slightly more than one hour later

"Oh, hey, Apple Bloom! That's a nice cutie mark. How'd you get it?"

"Thanks! I, uh—"

"Oh, wait. I meant, that was a nice cutie mark. Did you get someone to magic you a fake cutie mark? Hey, everypony—"

(Abrogail, across the room, has noticed these events and is heading toward the scene.)

"Abrogail did it for me," she says. "And she's a more powerful unicorn than even Twilight Sparkle and she doesn't have a cutie mark either!"

"An adult blank flank?" says Diamond Tiara, squinting in disgust at Abrogail. "Ew, gross."

Quickened Hold Person. Inflict Pain.

The spell doesn't do damage or leave a mark, and the Hold will stop her from screaming. It will be a moment or two before anypony else notices that anything is wrong with Diamond Tiara.

"I do have a special talent," she whispers in her ear. "It just isn't appropriate to advertise to little ponies."

She dispels the pain after a round and walks out of the party. The Hold will expire soon enough.

My faithful student, Twilight Sparkle,

     This letter is for Abrogail. Please give it to her.

The rest of the letter is in Infernal.

While torture in the name of friendship* may be, strictly speaking, better than what you were doing in Cheliax, it has, nonetheless, no place here. That is to say: if you ever find yourself intending to deliberately inflict pain on someone, you should, instead, not. This is your only warning.

     Celestia, Princess of the Sun, etc., etc.

(*) Loanword from Equestrian. Tongues doesn't work on writing, but Abrogail can guess what it means.

May it please your majesty,

     Have you met Diamond Tiara? Every filly in Ponyville has been thanking me for "making her nice". I was even invited to join the "Cutie Mark Crusaders". They don't know how I did it, but frankly I think the balance of my actions were Good (gah!). Iomedae would have done it.*

          Abrogail Thrune II

(*) No.

The first seventeen attempts at interplanar travel without a tuning fork either did nothing or dropped them somewhere maximally uninteresting: usually either starless vacuum or the midst of an infinite ocean that Abrogail identified as probably belonging to the outer reaches of Elysium. It isn't the actual travel that's hard, really. The spell structure is just a Teleport rotated into higher dimensions; the only reason it's seventh circle for arcane casters is because, if you aren't a god, building a spell structure in five-dimensional space is impossible without some extra scaffolding. The hard part is targeting. The memory-based search component of an ordinary Teleport doesn't work at all (this was the first thing they tried), and while it would in theory be possible to Plane Shift by the five-dimensional equivalent of dead reckoning, like skilled casters can do in three dimensions with a Greater Teleport, the resulting spell would be extraordinarily difficult to stabilize and also pretty difficult to use. (See: five-dimensional dead reckoning.)

(A different ex-Chelish person might therefore have reasoned "well then let's put it in an item" and thereby made an Amulet of the Planes without ever really comprehending that she was reinventing magic lost since the Age of Legend. But she isn't here.)

Twilight's original idea of focusing the spell on a living creature instead of a piece of metal has been done before—not that anyone present knows it, but Abrogail does know Dismissal, which works on the same principle. Unfortunately, Abrogail doesn't seem to have any traces of the Prime Material left on her.

There is, of course, one idea left. Her very first, in fact.

Pinkie Pie does actually seem to have some sort of a foreign magical signature on her! It's really hard to tell where it's coming from, but there's definitely something there that shouldn't be on an ordinary earth pony.

"Spike, take a note."

"Interplanar travel experiment number eighteen, using Pinkie Pie's magical signature to target the spell."

"Spike, as usual, notify the Princess if we aren't back within fifteen minutes."

She touches the metal rod connected to the magical apparatus connected to Pinkie Pie with one hoof, and touches Twilight with the other, and—

Plane Shift.

They're in a dimly lit cave. The air is hot and filled with choking fumes, but these features of the environment are barely noticeable next to the sudden sourceless feeling of oppression—like their souls are being crushed under a thousand tons of stone.

She doesn't bother to ask how the fuck. Plane Shift out. (They did make a tuning fork for Equestria before starting these experiments.)

Nope.

Twilight collapses, staring off into the middle distance without seeming to see anything, eyes wide open and glassy.

Without even thinking she rushes to Twilight's side—Mind Blank. Planar Adaptation.

This does nothing at all.

"Whoopsie!" says Pinkie Pie, seemingly unaffected. "I didn't think we'd end up this late in the timeline!"

"Get us the fuck out of here."

And then she, too, nearly collapses as the realization hits her that she's probably been in Hell all along, Asmodeus has been having His fun, waiting for her to actually start to like friendship-and-ponies land, before revealing the truth—

Hell is the destruction of hope.

"We need to go this way!" She starts walking in the direction of slightly brighter light.

Abrogail lifts the still-limp Twilight, who feels ten times heavier than she ought to be, onto her back and follows Pinkie, for lack of any other available action besides 'curl up and wait to be tortured'. It takes a lot of effort not to curl up anyway.

Ahead there's a larger chamber, with a pool of lava in the floor from which the light is coming. Above the lava a naked woman is bound to the wall with spiked chains; in spite of her appearance, it's somehow obvious that Abrogail and her friends are looking upon a god in the seat of Her power.

Her hair is pink.

"Surprise."

Well, she is surprised. This is not a place that should exist in Hell. This is not a person who should exist in Hell, if she's drawing the correct inferences from the pink hair and the catchphrase. She can actually feel the oppressive weight of—how deep are they, exactly? Planar Adaptation works fine in Avernus and Dis—not lessen precisely, but become more endurable. There is a sense, in this goddess's presence, that no pain can really hurt her, that she can suffer but not break, it will cleanse her and then everything will be okay.

That is definitely not the way Hell works. It's the way Cheliax tells some people that Hell works, but Abrogail was never that sort of person, nor that dumb.

"Hi! It's so nice to finally meet you in person but Twilight is having a really bad time, so I'm afraid we have to go! Could you make us an exit please?"

It's not actually Her fault that it's impossible to leave Her realm under normal circumstances. It's just that you'd have to go through Caïna, and the Lord of the Eighth doesn't allow visitors.

"I'm going to get in so much trouble for this but"—Gate.

She gets her ass through the Gate without spending precious seconds on being surprised about anything. The other side is recognizably Dis, although it feels like Dis-with-Planar-Adaptation and she didn't actually cast Planar Adaptation on herself—

"What the actual fuck."

"I was about to ask you the same question."

"Are you—?"

"You? Yes." She's suddenly way more self-conscious of being a tiny cute unicorn than she's been in a long time. "Don't ask, I don't know. Though I suspect Iomedae of being responsible."

(Twilight looks a little bit better; she's aware enough to slide down off Abrogail's back and stand on her own legs, though she still seems withdrawn and isn't speaking.)

Her eyes go unfocused for a second.

"It wasn't the Iomedae I know, though if there's more than one of us there's probably more than one of Her.'

"You can Commune with Iomedae?!" Is this even actually Hell. It continues not to feel like it.

"No, of course not. This is Hell; I am in fact a devil and not a very doompunk* angel. I cannot talk to Iomedae, at least not without a Plane Shift, just to Someone who can...I suppose this must look very strange to you if you're from a normal timeline. Though I must now wonder if there's actually any such thing as a normal timeline." She gestures at her other self's general poniness.

(*) The original Baseline word, now loaned into this Abrogail's dialect of Taldane.

"Lastwall suddenly acquired working guns and at least one secret archmage out of nowhere, conquered Cheliax, and dumped me in a very distant part of Elysium ruled by a unicorn demigoddess where everyone is various kinds of tiny horse. Maybe now that I'm somewhere normal my fucking Alter Self will work"—Alter Self?

Nope!

"You have a curse on you that prevents you from taking any form other than pony. I could probably break it, but I don't think I should."

"Why the abyss not?—not that being a pony is that bad, but—"

"It's obvious if you understand decision theory."

She's been around Aspexia Rugatonn long enough to maybe guess what her alt means by that. "Wait, we're cooperating with Iomedae now? What the Hell happened—and I mean that literally, what happened to Hell?" She only now notices that the cobblestones aren't silently screaming at her.

"About two hundred years ago, a teenage boy from an advanced Lawful Good society outside Creation suddenly appeared near a Chelish Worldwound fort..."

[The rest, as they say, is history.]

"It could very well be that the only difference between our universes is that in mine he ran the other way and ended up at an Iomedaen fort instead. And might also be a girl."

"Nope! Totally wrong! Although in this universe Alexeara Cansellarion was a girl. It didn't help."

(No one else even noticed her come through the Gate.)

"Wait, there's a pony Pilar? How would that even work? Do Elysian ponies even have masochism?—Is the purple one Carissa?"

"No, silly, my special talent is cheering people up! In most places that doesn't require me to enjoy torture!"

"From what you've mentioned of Carissa they share a talent for spellcraft but no other discernable similarities."

"And ascending to—oops! I wasn't supposed to say that!"

(Twilight is still too out of it to really notice this, although possibly not too out of it to go 'wait what?!' several days later.)

"I don't know what's up with her. At least when people on Golarion are like that we can reliably blame Nethys."

"Actually, in Pilar's case it was Cayden Cailean. Though maybe Cayden Himself was cursed by Nethys, I can't rule it out."

"Like I said, my special talent is cheering people up! That includes everyone watching us from an angle you can't see! Hi, by the way!"

"I highly suggest not asking unless you are a god. I have at least 10 Wisdom on you and still would have preferred not to know."

"I think I gave up on asking when she Plane Shifted us into Nessus. In an alternate universe."

"Getting between different copies of Creation isn't categorically different from getting between different planes." That much isn't infohazardous. "I wouldn't expect a Plane Shift to do it without Nethysian bullshit, but a Wish could if you knew how to specify where you wanted to go."

"In that case I expect we'll be Wishnapped home by our local demigoddess slightly more than fifteen minutes after we arrived, so you'll have to give us the quick version of the tour."

She looks quizzically at her alt. "'Home'?" she says, and the point is made.

And then there's the feeling of a spell that they could in theory resist but in practice have no hope whatsoever of resisting, and they're in Celestia's throne room in Canterlot.

She looks kind of annoyed.

Things are quiet in Ponyville for a while after their misadventure. Twilight seems significantly better the instant they're out of Hell, and appears to recover fully within a day or two, but she never speaks of interplanar travel again; neither, for that matter, does Abrogail. It's not because she expects the endeavor has been cursed by some power beyond her comprehension—if anything, the strange alternate Hell, where her counterpart had become a senior devil of some kind while still visibly being herself, would be among the best places in the Great Beyond for her to go if she decided to leave Equestria. But she was there, and she didn't stay. Why not? Well, she couldn't have resisted Celestia's Wish—but she cannot, despite her best effort, figure out why she didn't even try.

She does contemplate asking the Princess to send her back, even if only temporarily. Her conversation with her alt had been cut rather short, and it's not as though Wish diamonds are expensive here (if Celestia even needs them). She hasn't seen the Princess since the first trip to fake Hell, though. Maybe she can ask at the Gala.

🎵 "At the Gala!"

"No, no, no, no, no. Wait until we're actually there, girls."

"Sorry, why do any of you even want to go to this gala? I wouldn't have imagined you to be the royal ball type." Even for her, a Palace event where she isn't Queen and can't torture anyone afterward sounds honestly pretty dull.

"To spend time with the Princess, of course. I've barely gotten to see her since I moved to Ponyville."

"I'm going to make friends with all the animals in the royal gardens!"

"I'm gonna sell apple treats to everypony in Canterlot and raise enough money for Granny Smith to get her hip fixed."

"Duh! The Wonderbolts will be there!"

"It's the biggest party in all of Equestria, silly!"

"Well, I'm going to meet my Prince Charming."

"...have any of you ever been to a royal ball before?"

Possibly in Equestria things really do work like that. But in her experience, nobility are the same everywhere. Chelish ones aren't even necessarily the worst.

(They have not.)

"Okay. Twilight, this is possibly the worst night of the entire year to have a private visit with the Princess. The entire reason anyone goes to these events is to have the monarch acknowledge their existence for one round, and there will be thousands of people who feel they're owed such a thing. It's miserable. When I was Queen of Cheliax, I used to go to all the Palace social events in disguise; it was the only way I could enjoy myself at all. Celestia definitely does not have time for you."

"Fluttershy, what kind of garden is this? Does the princess import rare animals from all over the world, or are we just talking about a royal deer park—you're herbivores, why do you even have a deer park—nevermind. And if it's the latter, why do you care? You live next to an actual forest with manticores and fucking dragons."

"Applejack, nobles don't eat apple pie."

"Dash, do the Wonderbolts even know who you are?"

"Pinkie, people don't go to galas to have fun. At least not your kind of fun." Abrogail's kind of fun, perhaps, but Abrogail's kind of fun is mostly illegal here.

"And Rarity, in spite of your name and entire personality, you are a commoner. If a nobleborn stallion shows interest in you, run. Or at least know what you're getting into."

Twilight sighs. "You're probably right. Still, it would be rude to the Princess not to go after I asked her for so many tickets."

"Actually, the dragons and stuff scare a lot of the animals in the Everfree Forest, so there's not very many of them, except for the ones that stay with me. The royal gardens have every peaceful creature in Equestria, great and small."

"Don't eat apple pie? That's crazy! They will once they taste my family's recipe!"

"Of course the Wonderbolts know who I am! I won the Best Young Fliers Contest last year!"

"That's silly of them. Maybe they just need someone to show them how much fun a real party is!"

"My Prince Charming won't care who my parents are. I'm just as proper and ladylike as any princess."

In Cheliax, it was actually relatively easy (relative to most places in Golarion) for a commoner to enter the nobility by service to the Crown or marriage, in large part because the death rate among Chelish nobility was so high. There are actually quite a few romance-novel heroines who manage to marry above their station by outscheming and/or murdering their rivals.

This is not Cheliax, for better or worse, and Rarity is not a Chelish romance-novel heroine. Unfortunately, Abrogail can't really just explain this to her.

"Hey Twi, how are we gonna get there?"

"I've been working on these spells that turn an apple into a carriage and mice into horses..."

Speaking of Chelish folk tales about common girls marrying into nobility by murdering their rivals, what the fuck?

(She's distantly aware that the Chelish version of that story was modified from an original that presumably contained less murder, but she has no idea what it contained instead.)

Also, there's apparently a species whose name translates as 'horses' rather than 'ponies'. Are they sentient? Again, what the fuck.

"I can take five in a Teleport," she says. "Figure out among yourselves who has to ride in the Bag of Holding."

"But you weren't even invited!"

"I wasn't here when tickets were handed out," she says. "Besides, I'm still foreign royalty. I don't need a ticket."

Teleport.

They land by the side of the road about a hundred yards from the castle gates, near the back of a long queue of elegantly dressed ponies. Spike climbs out of Twilight's Saddlebag of Holding. (Rainbow Dash elected just to fly.)

"Whoa, you all look amazing!" Spike says when he sees the assembled ponies.

"I can't believe we're finally here! This is going to be the best night ever!"

Suddenly, music starts to play from no apparent source.

"At the Gala!" she starts to sing.

"At the Gala!" replies a chorus of ponies who weren't there a moment ago, without missing a beat.

Did they plan this, or is this just a generalization of whatever supernatural ability Pinkie Pie has?

Fluttershy takes off into the air.

"At the Gala! in the garden,
I'm going to see them all—"

Yeah okay.

"I'll see you around, girls," says Abrogail, and dimdoors inside the castle's outer walls.

She finds herself in a garden decorated with a dozen or so life-size statues of ponies. The only other non-stone pony in the garden is a sky-blue alicorn standing by the opposite wall. He makes brief eye contact with Abrogail, then moves out of her line of sight and isn't visible again.

However, one of the statues looks rather familiar.

What.

Are...are all of the statues Celestia's petrified enemies? She didn't think Good people did that.

Well, she can test that. Not on the demon-looking thing over there, obviously. Maybe on this armored pegasus with her wings outstretched.

Stone to Flesh.

She surveys her surroundings rapidly and then leaps from the pedestal, pinning Abrogail to the ground on her back with an expert motion that doesn't injure her but does leave her basically unable to fight back or spellcast.

"Who are you and why did you unpetrify me?" she asks.

"You wouldn't know me; I just wanted to see if all these statues were Celestia's petrified enemies, or only some of them."

"I'm not her enemy; are you?"

"It's complicated. Will you get off of me?"

The pegasus rises a few feet into the air, allowing Abrogail to stand. Abrogail will notice, once she can see more of her, her familiar-looking sword-and-sunburst cutie mark.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," she says aloud.

She ignores that remark. "Again: who are you?" she asks. "Besides evil; I know that much."

The truth is probably sufficient here, but is unfortunately not all that believable. "I was sent here by someone who's probably an alternate universe version of you," she says. "For—redemption, or failing that containment, I suppose. The Princess knows my background and is okay with it. Why are you a statue and not a god?"

That's...well, it doesn't seem likely, but it's almost too weird to be a lie.

"I commanded the Equestrian forces in the war against Sombra, uh...what year is it?"

"1001."

"One thousand and—a thousand years since what?" She's fairly sure she didn't go back in time.

"Since Nightmare Moon was banished, as I understand it. I've only been here a few months."

"Nightmare—what happened to Luna?" she asks with a sudden look of deep concern.

"You should really ask someone else that," she says. "She's back now, though, and fine as far as I know. As of last summer."

"I think I need to talk to the Princess," she says, having completely forgotten her original intent of explaining her backstory.

"It's the middle of the Grand Galloping Gala; good luck."

"I'll do it later, I guess," she says. "Excuse me." She takes off into the air at a speed that would make Rainbow Dash cry, with no particular destination in mind.

That was kind of a baffling interaction, but not actually the most baffling she's had recently. Whatever. Let's see if this party is actually worth crashing.

Equestrian nobility are far less vicious than their Chelish or even Taldane counterparts, but for the most part are every bit as frivolous. They're roleplaying being Good instead of being Evil, but it's exactly as fake and Abrogail hates it just as much.

Also, no one seems to believe her claim to be foreign royalty.

It's because she doesn't have wings, isn't it. She's been here long enough to be aware of the pony racial hierarchy.

...can she Alter Self into the Princess?

No.

(Mechanically, this is because Celestia is an Outsider, not because she's been deliberately prevented from taking a form that has both a horn and wings.)

Well, she has a supernatural ability to grow temporary wings whenever she wants.

Checkmate, Celestia.

For some reason, this seems to make people anxiously avoid her!

—until, eventually, she's confronted by an actual alicorn with a mane like the night sky.

"WE HAVE HEARD," she says, in a voice far too loud for the room they're in, "THAT THOU HAST BEEN IMPERSONATING US."

"Who are—oh. Right."

She dismisses the wings.

"In fairness, I don't actually look anything like you."

"WE DID NOT SAY IT WAS A GOOD IMPERSONATION."

"NONETHELESS, WE HAVE NOT BEEN SEEN IN EQUESTRIA IN A THOUSAND YEARS, AND THERE ARE FEW WHO REMEMBER OUR TRUE APPEARANCE. AND THERE ARE NOT MANY ALICORNS...WHY DOST THOU WISH TO IMPERSONATE AN ALICORN AT ALL?"

"I was a queen," she says, "where I came from."

"AH," she says, "WE KNOW WHO THOU ART. WE SUPPOSE WE ARE NOT ONE TO CHASTISE THEE FOR THINE ENVY."

"...MAY WE ASK THEE A PERSONAL QUESTION?"

"You may if you don't shout it, though I don't promise an answer...also, are you using the royal 'we', or does Celestia also want to know?"

"Sorry," says Luna, much more quietly. "We did not speak aloud for so long, it is difficult to conTROL OUR—sorry. Our volume. And no, it's just, uh, me."

"How do you endure it?—the shame of what you've done," she says, even more quietly.

"That's easy," she says. "I don't feel any. If Celestia or Iomedae think I've done something shameful, that's their problem."