Moon stood defiantly in the doorway, lecturing the MHC, which means basically fighting with Glossaryck, which usually ended in fighting Rhombulus or Hekapoo.

"Now you're all going to need to act like adults-"

"They're my children." Glossaryck said.

"Well they certainly act like it."

"Not my fault they're a group of ungrateful-"

"Glossaryck, they're acting like children!"

"They are children-"

"What's your excuse?" Hekapoo asked.

"Oh you just listen-"

"Listen to what? All due respect, you're not helping in the slightest."

"Oh please Hekapoo, what exactly are you doing to aid this situation?"

"I'm thinking about this logically with a level head, unlike you!"

"Hekapoo, that's enough!"

"Oh I'm just getting started you little-"

"Hey guys! Would anyone like pie? Of course you would! Let's head into the situation room and I'll make us some delicious pie while you work things out." Nova cut Hekapoo off, a fake smile sweet as sugar.

"I suppose pie couldn't hurt." Moon said, leading the commission to the situation room, where the fighting ensued.

"I suppose we can't prevent that."

"We can't exactly dance around the issues either."

"Then we'll have to bake around the issues." Nova snapped and the huge book of spells sat on the wooden table in the kitchen. She flipped open to her Grandmother's chapter, and Nova grazed over her card, where her mother sat with icing on her face, a sight that made Nova chuckle a bit. Her Regal, prim and proper mother, both a baby and covered in frosting. Nova flipped through the chapter, where she found the pie crust recipe.

2 cups wart-corn sand

6 tablespoons cold, unsalted, pig-goat fat into 1/2-inch bit

1 teaspoon smile sand

1/2 teaspoon Frown sand

2 tablespoons ice water

"Well we better start before there's a civil war to deal with."

"What-What are those ingredients?"

"Haven't you seen a pir recipe? Or pretty much any baked goods in general? These are standard ingredients."

"Of course. I should have known, nothing here is normal." He earned a glare from Nova, and he shrunk.

"Ok, since now that's settled, let's start. We whisk the dry ingredients in a bowl. You do know what a whisk is, right?"

"I-I know what a whisk is."

"Then here you go. Ingredients should be under the sink." Nova pressed a whisk into his hand and pointed to a stack of mixing bowls. Marco just nodded, and went to figure out what the Earth equivalent of the Mewni ingredients were. He tasted the wart-corn sand and decided on flour. He looked at the labels, and decided, thank you very much, he would not be eating sand. He mixed the ingredients, the Frown and Smile sand looking like- well, sand.

"So..what is Smile sand?" He asked Nova, who was cutting up Pig-Goat fat, which looked an awful lot like butter to Marco. She took out a spoon, heaped a spoonful of the Smile Sand, and put it in his hand.

"See for yourself."

"It-It's literal sand."

"From the books I found in the library, humans eat cheese with maggots. Sand would be an upgrade." Needless to say, the comment about maggot cheese didn't necessarily ease his appetite for the sand in the spoon. He took a deep breath and reluctantly put the spoon into his mouth.

"Is this sugar?" He asked at last.

"It's Smile sand." Nova wasn't pushing at all, or being edgy. She just shrugged.

"Sure it is. What's it made of?"

"Smile sand comes from the Smile Sand Caves, and you can find Frown sand by the river. My Great-Grandma Estrella found it. Comes from crystals."

"That's...actually kind of cool."

"I can take you to find it sometime. We're running low."

"Really?"

"Sure. Why not? It's just by the Hill of Flags."

"Hill of Flags?"

"I'll show you it sometime. It's pretty overkill, considering its purpose."

"Do I want to know?"

"Why wouldn't you?"

"It says in the recipe to use a monster bashing club to roll out the pie crust."

"What else would you use?" Nova asked.

"I've sure got a lot to learn, huh?"

"Yeah. I guess you do. Now throw the Pig-Goat fat into the bowl."

"On Earth we have something like this called butter. Smile sand is similar to sugar. Wart-corn sand is kinda like flour."

"Cool. We could try making the recipe using both ingredients. Battle to the death."

"A pie battle to the death. With Pie catapults and pie-bombs." Nova laughed, stirring the Pig-Goat fat into the dry ingredients.

"Yeah. Pie catapults. Rover said Mom would make those."

"Has she ever showed you?" Marco asked, covering his hands in wart-corn sand, Nova following in his steps. She followed the instructions and molded them into discs before kneading in the ice water.

"Yeah. Once or twice when I was little. She stopped doing those kind of things after a while. A year or two ago I suppose. She could make killer pies too. Literally. At this point I would just throw a strawberry death pie into the situation room."

"Why don't you?"

"Mom never wrote the recipe down, and she didn't get it from Grandma Comet. She believed in peace and pies, not war and weapons. Unfortunately her attempts ended badly." Nova sent mist over the dough to cool it, and rolled it out with a rolling pin.

"The recipe is a bit...outdated. We use rolling pins now. Health codes and stuff."

"Huh?"

"No more run-of-the-mill monster bashing clubs." She said, and they both laughed. Through her laughter, Nova rolled out the dough and put it into a pie dish. Marco tossed it into the oven once he stopped laughing. Nova turned the temperature to 350 degrees and set the timer for 40 minutes.

"We'll put in the filling after the crust bakes. We should start working on that. Hekapoo likes the red Solanaceae. It's worth a shot to get us on her good side." Nova flipped a couple pages ahead to the recipe, and put together the filling and when the timer beeped, she took it out of the oven and poured the filling into the middle, before starting cutting up the rest of the dough. She crisscrossed it and then took the string left and held it in her hands.

"Over, Under, around and through, grab the little Mewni rabbit, pull him through, pinch it, and fold it, and tie it in a bow, like two little bunny ears made out of dough." Nova sang softly, folding the scrap into a butterfly, which was placed on top of the pie. She turned away from Marco and slid the pie into the oven again.

Star was pacing, holding the page she's swiped from the library. She'd studied it more than she had anything else, and she still didn't understand. It was a vague description, which she threw the paper out of the window in frustration. She could hear the MHC fighting rather loudly below, which wasn't helping. She sighed and lay down in her bed, holding her pillow over her head. She was scared. it wasn't the fighting, she'd become used to that. It was Marco and Nova. They'd disappeared, and Star had seen a portal, so she figured they were safe, but that didn't stop her from being paranoid. She groaned and grabbed onto her swiped scissors. She opened them and cut open a portal that glowed golden.

Nova and Marco pulled the pie out of the oven, and Marco was about to take it out. Nova stopped him.

"We aren't quite done yet." SHe cut 2 slices for them, and then rested her fingers on top of the crust.

"Curse thee who takes a bite, to sleep like it's the depth of night." She whispered, and it poofed a dark midnight blue, but the pie remained the same. Nova carried plates and Marco carried the pie out to the Situation room, where they passed it out. They ducked out right after, and Nova stopped Marco from walking away, and she waited a minute before shoving the door open. Everyone in the room was passed out, their heads slumped on the table.

"Sure sure they're asleep?"

"Sure as Smile sand." Nova said, and she hopped on top of the table and put her hand on her hip, to prove her point.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"Grandma Comet used spells like that all the time to influence diplomats. It wouldn't surprise me if she used them on the Magic High Commission once or twice. She despised meetings with the bigots."

"I wouldn't go that far."

"They had a meeting last week trying to convince Mom to reinstate the Solarian program."

"What?"

"Solarian Warriors are basically designed to kill off monsters. My little respect for Grandma Solaria is because of the magical potential she had, and the amount of magical genius the process to create the warriors had."

"Geez. A bit harsh."

"Not really. Her chapter is full of her experiences as the general of the army, and ways to annihilate monsters, and properly dispose of them. I wouldn't say it was harsh."

"You sure know a lot about your family. And magic."

"I've read the book of spells 28 times, and I'm halfway through my 29th. I better."

"Do you have a chapter?"

"I do. My title is...demeaning to say the least, so I changed it myself. I'm Nova the Oracle now."

"You're the Princess."

"Yeah. If you went the easy way, it would be easy. But I'm a bit of an overachiever. I've written 16 volumes of spells, with 800 spells in total. My chapter has included the highlights so far. Mainly my ways to predict and my tarot decks. I've risen from practically another one in a million to have the potential to be legendary. Now the easy way is to fill up your chapter with a few spells that have no potential for anything and do nothing else but the bare necessities, which will result in you being superseded. I won't risk it."

"You're the one who put the whole Magic High Commission, including your mother, to sleep. They're going to kill you when they wake up."

"That's the thing about the spells. They'll have no memory of it, and the argument prior."

"I have a feeling that would seriously backfire."

"Either way they're none the wiser."

"I guess you could say so."

"So are we going to argue, or eat some pie?" Nova asked.

"Pie."

"No-brainer. Let's go."

Marco grabbed his piece of pie, and Nova did the same. He started to eat, and Nova stopped him before pointing to a window. She opened it wide open and climbed out, before beginning to scale the vines growing along the side of the castle, climbing up to a small pink tower, sitting on top, swinging her legs. The rose garden was below, the roses climbing up trevises, fountains spewing water. Marco followed her to the roof of the abandoned rose tower.

"This place looks pretty abandoned."

"Yeah. It's been like this since as long as I can remember. Kinda sad, actually." She paused, overlooking the rose garden, mostly abandoned since as long as she could remember.

"But the most important part about the garden is still the same." Nova pointed to the roses, the sunset illuminating the scene in an angelic glow. Nova's hair flapped in the breeze, the black roots of her hair growing out, like Moon said. She hadn't redyed it since then, although Moon told her to. Moon hadn't noticed nor cared, at least not then. To give her some credit, she had been maybe a tiny bit preoccupied with the magic high commission trying to kidnap her daughter, although you couldn't give Moon too much credit for anything else.

Marco and Nova sat on the rose tower, Mewni's 2 moons eventually rising from the horizon and lighting up the Kingdom. It didn't necessarily shed light on Mewni, it illuminated what beauty was there. Nova's face was framed by her hair, and Marco could have sworn he saw her cheeks glowing. Not like, complexion glowing, but like a flashlight covered with a piece of tissue paper.

"Nova, your face is-"

"Oh no." Nova tapped on her cheeks, and it stopped, before moonlight took over again.

"Don't worry. It happens sometimes." Nova said, kneeling on the roof. The evening slowly dropped in temperature, and Marco glanced over at Nova in the moonlight. He took his hoodie off and wrapped it around her shoulders, and she glanced at him. Marco looked away, but she took half of the hoodie and wrapped it around him. They sat there for a long time, the moon's shining light downward.