MAGIC, CONTINUED

lulu

The follow-up to Luna and the sixth Element was going to be a subplot throughout the next arc. Luna is alive, but heavily-augmented, and the nature of the modifications means that her body requires constant power in order to keep functioning. Not that this slows her down any, of course.

TWILIGHT: Professor Luna! …and…friends? I thought you couldn't leave the University!

LUNA: As if such a thing would stop me! No, instead I have built myself a pair of portable batteries, so I may go about as I please.
LUNA: do you get it

'bat'-teries

I made them bat-themed

you may laugh now

(If you know me, you know I love Luna's bat guards. I couldn't leave them out.)

She and Twilight are both researching the new Element — the potential uses for it, how the other Elements react to it, whether or not people who previously were not Element-attuned might respond to it…and of course, how to make more of it.

TWILIGHT: Okay, and…everybody FRIENDSHIP!!

RARITY AND APPLEJACK: [friendship uncertainly]
TWILIGHT: Hmm..still no conclusive results. The properties of this Element are very unusual, almost like…

PINKIE: [sparkling] MAAAAAGIC?

TWILIGHT: …I'm still not calling it that.

PINKIE: Aww :(

This would've become sort of analogous to Twilight's letters from the first two seasons, as she wrote to Celestia about how her friendship lessons brought her closer to understanding the Element of Magic.

Now, what about all that stuff that was foreshadowed earlier?

THE CRYSTAL HEART

I'm going to warn you now: this arc wasn't finished, and it doesn't have a proper ending. I had enough to put in some foreshadowing and setup, but that's about it. Also, it was concieved of pre-season 5 and without any knowledge of the comics — it might've turned out completely different had those been taken into account, who knows! But this is what I had so far.

So, after that post-Nightmare breather, we would've gone on to Sombra and Chrysalis enacting their evil plan. (I skipped Discord for now, more on that later.) Because their stories involved Cadance and the Crystal Empire respectively, I decided to combine them and have the two of them work together, just to make it a little neater.

Let's talk about Sombra first:

never cry while wearing purple mascara

As you might remember, Sombra tried to attack the Crystal Empire State Building many years ago, but failed super hard about three feet in and ended up running off covered in his own nasty purple goo. Despite not being very good at being a supervillain, Sombra was a brilliant scientist who was fascinated by corrupted Elements. The unpredictable nature made them extremely dangerous to experiment with, but Sombra did it anyway, and managed to create his own blend that he was convinced would make a perfect weapon.

Sombra is a simple man, with simple desires: he just wants everyone to worship him and do whatever he tells them. (Is that so much to ask?) He also comes up with simple plans, like "threaten to splash people with EVIL LIQUID until they comply". He really, really should have also come up with a backup plan in case he was the one who got splattered.

His corrupted Element wasn't anywhere near as bad as the Nightmare, but it had the same effect on him as it did on Shining Armor's arm, and Sombra had the disadvantage of having gotten it all over him. He managed to slow it down by continuously augmenting himself, but it was too deep in him to be cut out completely. By the time we get back to him, it's spread so far that he's replaced almost every part of himself, except for his head…so yes, Sombra is basically just a head. An evil, evil head.

Anyway, the Crystal Empire State Building was built on top of a long-forgotten network of underground caverns, once used to store navigational equipment before the invention of Cadance. This is where Sombra fled to, and where he'd set up base after that first disasterous attempt. This is where Chrysalis finds him…

my original design had her in ballerina heels, but that looked way too freaky :C

Chrysalis doesn't have a 100% defined backstory, but essentially she's a robot who was built with a Kindness core. Despite her Element, Chrysalis became increasingly cruel and power-hungry, to the point that she corrupted her own core — instead of Kindness, she's filled with an acidic green substance, which is slowly corroding her from the inside-out.

I hadn't decided how they met yet, but it was Chrysalis who came up with the idea. She stole the blueprints for Cadance's body and took them to Sombra, who had the skill to recreate Celestia's work. During the Nightmare arc, they were busy building a shell that Chrysalis could use to disguise herself, so they could kidnap the real Cadance and replace her before anyone grew suspicious.

With Cadance, they would literally have control over the entire island. Holding the navigation system hostage would get them anything they wanted, and afterwards…well, Chrysalis knew she could disappear, and if Sombra got caught, then that was that loose end tied up very neatly. (Sombra, for his part, was planning on breaking down Chrysalis and going solo as soon as he got Cadance. That's the problem with this kind of villain team-up; they always want to double-cross each other.)

So at the start of the arc, their plan gets put in motion! The switch goes off, but not perfectly — Cadance escapes, and while they manage to catch her again before anyone realizes, she's had enough time to remove and hide the Crystal Heart. Without it, she barely has enough power to function, let alone control the island's navigation.

The two villains are forced to revise their plan: Chrysalis-as-Cadance will claim that the Crystal Heart was stolen, which will cause an immediate scramble to look for it. She'll continue to pose as Candy until either the Heart is found, or Sombra gets Cadance powered back up so they can make her tell them where she hid it. Once they have it, they can continue as originally planned.

DECEPTIVE CADANCE: You mean I have to stay in…THIS…indefinitely?!

SOMBRA: Hey, I worked really hard on that.

Meanwhile, rattled by how thieves apparently managed to pry a giant glowing crystal off of his girlfriend's back without anyone noticing, Shining Armor decides that now is obviously the perfect time to tell his family about his secret relationship with Cadance!

TWILIGHT: Your WHAT

Surely this won't cause any kind of conflict or misunderstandings!

…so on the subject of Shiny and Candy…I've kind of flip-flopped on exactly how robots are viewed in this world, and subsequently how taboo a human/robot relationship would be. It's sort of hovered between 'bots are treated like second-class citizens' and 'they're basically equal to humans and nobody gives a heck' (there were a couple of early moments that implied bots aren't seen as fully sapient, but that got dropped pretty fast). The perils of worldbuilding on the go!

I still haven't really figured it out, so for now I'll say that robot/human relationships are uncommon enough to be somewhat shocking, but not illegal or totally looked down upon. It was a factor in deciding to keep their love secret, but not as much as the gross breach of professionalism and potential career-ender for Shiny. I mean…this is like #2 on the list of Things Bodyguards Aren't Supposed to Do (#1 is 'don't let her get killed').

Regardless, this little revelation is pretty shocking for everyone!

SHINING ARMOR: Oh, Cadance, you were right! I feel so much better now that my family knows about our relationship!

DECEPTIVE CADANCE: Our WHAT

…and this is about where I ran out of specifics! The rest probably would've gone approximately as canon did: Twilight and her friends try to help (in this case with the search for the Heart), but Twi can't get over how different Cadance is acting. Everyone else puts it down to stress from the whole situation, but Twi remains suspicious. Eventually Chrysalis proves her right and locks her in the underground tunnels, where Twilight finds herself trapped with the powered-off Cadance.

Somehow she'd get Candy working again, they'd get past Sombra, and go off looking for the Heart. I hadn't decided yet where Cadance hid it — I kind of wanted it to be somewhere related to Shining Armor, so there could be a big cheesy "he IS her heart!" moment, but I'm not sure how that would work. (Don't tell me it's too sappy, there's no such thing as too sappy.) Maybe the wedding could've been worked in somehow! Shining Armor moves fast when he wants to. :U

It's a shame we didn't get this far, because I was looking forward to writing Sombra and Chrysalis! I imagined them as having this really snarky dynamic where they can't stand each other, but are forced to make nice and work together (for now). They also have the whole "being slowly destroyed by a corrupted Element" thing in common, which I was a bit split about; I figured it could either be something that makes them more sympathetic, or emphasizes that they're so obsessed with taking over the island that they don't even care they're falling apart.

I'd been considering ending the arc with Sombra finally being completely crystallized, and Chrysalis cutting her losses and escaping, perhaps to return another day (dun dun duuuun). That might've been a bit too dark though…

_This gets literally too long for the description's 10k character limit. The last two paragraphs are posted in the first comment