Episode:
16: Get Me Out of Here

Traumatised by the events at Polaria, Star plods on with Adam to Castle Avarius with hopes of making it back home. A dangerous plan arises, putting their future in jeopardy.

One week passed whilst Adam and Star made their way to Castle Avarius. They had succeeded in maintaining a low profile, making short-distance jumps across Mewni until they arrived at the crater that was once Castle Avarius. The Dark Magic High Commission had sent out a search warrant matching their descriptions, labelling them rogue sorcerers with illegal magic. From what Adam could tell, though, they were unable to identify their true identities. He could tell by the fact that Dark Star wasn't looking for them, too.

In that time, Star had said little about what happened in Polaria. She was engaging in her usual coping mechanism – denial. Adam avoided bringing up the subject, but anytime he referenced it, or the people who lived there, she quickly avoided the subject. She preferred to act like nothing happened, drowning out her sorrows with her imitation of ebullience. She wanted to act like it was all a big, dumb game where actions did not have consequences.

Because accepting the consequences of her actions was so much harder than pretending that they didn't exist at all.

Adam and Star kept out the way of civilisation religiously during that week period. If there was one small positive to all this, Star no longer questioned his intense dogma about not helping people and keeping to themselves. It was a cruel lesson that Adam had quietly hoped she would never need to be taught. There were a few close calls with Empire Knight search parties, but Adam's stealthy mind coupled with Illusion magic managed to ward them off.

As the pair of them traversed silently through the clearing of the blackened forest, Star accidentally kicked something hard. She just barely caught that it was a bone, a Mewman forearm. It tumbled across the ground and fell off the edge and into the crater. Curious, she followed the path of the bone and looked down into the crater. Her eyes widened.

A series of several skeletons lay strewn out across the bottom of the crater, in haphazard positions. Several of them were humanoid, stripped bare aside from rags of fabric hanging in their ribcages. All of them shared a unique property in common: a pinpoint, precise puncture through the middle of the frontal skull. Evidently, their method of death was that hole in their forehead. For every Mewman skeleton, there was a larger, horse-shaped set of bones, adjacent to every humanoid one. Each of them had a hole in their head where a unicorn horn was meant to be. It didn't take a genius for Star to figure out that these had been people on Warnicorns, so they must have been a platoon of Mewman knights.

'What…happened here?' inquired Star, as she stared at the piles of bones scattered across the ground.

'Oh, that was me,' Adam admitted, scratching his scalp abashedly. Star stared at him. 'When I first got my powers, I was ambushed by a nearby Mewman scouting party. Every dimension is crawling with 'em. I had to take them out.'

Star looked away but said nothing. Whatever emotion was on her face, Adam didn't see it. He walked through the hordes of skeletons on the ground. Reluctantly, she followed behind him. They walked past a Kappa skeleton, its charred bones half-fused into the mud. She gasped in surprise.

'Ludo…!' she exclaimed. 'Did…did you do this, too?'

'No,' replied Adam, slightly offended. 'Dark Star did.'

Star supposed that the Whispering Spell, at full power, could certainly accomplish this. When she had done it herself, when Toffee forced her to, she'd achieved the same result, aside from punching a hole in the fabric of reality. Dark Star was stronger than she was, so maybe her Whispering Spell was also more powerful, too.

'So…how do we find this fracture?' Star asked, looking around the crater curiously. Adam fumbled through his pockets to produce his miniature compass.

'Using this,' he said, showing her the flickering ends of the compass. He pointed it around him, and used it to gauge the direction the fracture was in. 'This way. Come on.'

Star followed him as he used the compass to locate it. Adam already had a good idea where it might be, but his thoughts were confirmed as they began walking towards what remained of Castle Avarius. The pair moved various debris out of the way in order to get through the castle, although it was largely Adam moving objects with magic since Star couldn't use much magic without being noticed. Nevertheless, their enhanced Mewman strength aided them massively.

Eventually, the pair of them made it towards the main throne room of Castle Avarius. It was a miracle even a fragment of it was still holding together. It was only the vague shape of the room it had once been. Without the contextual foreknowledge, it would have been difficult to discern what the room had even been for. Chunks of the ceiling were missing, and the walls were jaggedly fragmented like a poor game of Tetris. Dozens of skeletons littered the rooms, all of different shapes and sizes. Where skeletons were missing, dusty piles of ash sat in their place, inches thick.

Surprisingly, the dinner table was still partly intact. Its legs were smashed on one end, but Toffee's throne was still seated at the far end. The Septarian's skeleton still remained on the throne, jaw hanging open, agape in unprepared shock. Star could almost picture his expression moments before his muscle, skin and tissue melted off his bones.

Adam and Star stood at the foot of the long table.

'It's here,' he indicated, stuffing his golden compass back into his pocket. Star frowned.

'I don't see anything,' she said, walking past him. 'Don't tell me this whole thing was a waste of –'

'Stop!' ordered the warlock, grabbing her by the arm and instantly halting her movement. Adam crept forward a few tentative steps, still holding out an arm cautiously in front of Star. He summoned the courage to reach forward and tap the air with his index finger.

Instantaneously, a network of bright, silvery cracks of light spread across the entire room from the point of contact. It was like a series of hairline cracks in a plane of glass, creating flickering, shimmering lens flares. Star squinted at the brightness of the light reflecting in the fissures.

'Woah…' remarked the princess. She breathed in and shook her head to recentre herself. 'Right. Let's cast this ritual and get the heck out of here.' She reached into her bag, producing her wand, and restoring it back to full power again.

'Careful, Star,' cautioned Adam, taking out his spellbook. 'I don't know how stable this fracture is. It could fall apart if we're not too careful.'

'I don't care, just do the ritual!'

'This ritual requires intense concentration, Star,' he responded bluntly. 'If you can't concentrate, then we might never escape!'

'Fine,' she groaned. Adam held out the pages of the spell in his book in front of her with his right arm and pointed his left arm at the fracture.

'I pledge my soul to throes of magic…' he cast first. Once he finished casting the Seal of Arybailos, he still gasped involuntarily in surprise at the sheer volume of magic that flowed through her entire body.

'Obscura abyssi, audi clamorem meum!' Star began, pointing her glowing wand at the space-time fracture. Its brightness began to intensify.

'Nos sumus plusquam oculo conspicitur,' continued Adam.

'Lava nos in lumine amoris,' she spoke hastily.

'Serve nos a malo supra,' he cast patiently, his cheek marks beginning to glow subtly under the power of his spell.

''Aperi ostium nostrae salutis,'' they cast together. 'Salva nos ab eterna damnatione!'

The pair of them produced a shockwave that reverberated throughout the entire network of cracks. Adam fixed his arm in place to produce continued waves of red energy that contrasted brightly against the space-time fracture. Star kept her eyes on the fracture, waiting for the portal to open, but as the seconds went by, all she noticed was how it didn't.

'So…is it gonna work?'

Adam scowled. 'Just wait.'

So she waited. And waited some more. She waited what felt like hours. In reality, it was probably thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of agony.

'It's not working!' Star yelled, throwing her arms down in frustration.

'I said wait!' he snapped.

'I can't wait any longer! Let's go already!'

'Quit being impatient!' Adam complained, as the red energy shockwaves began to increase in tempo. 'You're making me lose focus!'

Star jumped in front of him, blocking his view of most of the fracture. She began flailing her arms impatiently.

'C'mon! It's not like –'

Before she could finish her sentence, a massive crimson explosion erupted from the centre of the fracture. Both of them were sent flying back in opposite directions across the room. Adam crashed into Toffee's throne and rolled onto the floor, while Star smashed into the wall and sent what remained of it crumbling down to the ground.

'Ugh…' Adam moaned in pain, rubbing his head. Slowly, he got back to his feet and looked up at the fracture. His eyes widened as the shimmering fissures began to seal up by themselves. Hastily, he jumped to his feet and began chasing after them as they disappeared. 'No, no, no! NO!'

Chasing after the fractures yielded no effects, for the weak point in space-time evaporated. The fractures disappeared, swallowed up by the air and scattered to the wind.

Hastily, Adam took out his compass again and examined the readings. It pointed perfectly north. It refused to budge in any direction; it would not settle for even a tiny vibration. Clear. No magielectromagnetic disturbances; no hint of mystions to compel their movement.

Gone.

'DAMMIT!' he yelled, throwing the compass at the debris in front of him.

The compass hit the rocks on the side and bounced back, landing at his feet. Adam groaned and bent down to pick it up, examining the damage. Part of the golden casing was dented, and a sizeable hairline crack ran down the side. Other than that, the compass was still functioned. He sighed and put it back in his pocket.

'Ow…my head…' seethed Star, as she shoved off the rocks pinning her chest. Reluctantly, Adam hurried over and helped her to her feet. 'Ugh. Thanks.'

'You okay?'

'Yeah. 'm fine.'

'Good,' he replied aggressively. 'Because what the hell were you thinking?! If you'd just been a little patient, we could be home by now!'

'I'm sorry! I'm just sick of this place!' she protested. 'I've had enough of this place. Seen enough. I just wanna go home.'

'Well thanks to you, we might never get the chance!'

Star frowned. 'What do you mean? Can't you just try again?'

'No, I can't!' Adam yelled. 'The fracture's gone!'

'What do you mean "gone"?' queried the princess, furrowing her brows deeper in denial.

'I mean gone!' He repeated pointedly. 'The weak point sealed up while I was trying to establish contact with it. Because you got in the way!'

'Oh.'

'Yeah. Exactly.'

'So…what do you we do?' she enquired awkwardly.

'I don't know,' Adam admitted irascibly. 'Thanks to you, we're still stuck here. We'll need to –'

He was cut off by the loud rumbling of rock from above. The two of them looked up in horror as the rest of the ceiling was torn off and raised above their head. A large, hunch-backed humanoid creature was holding the rock in its hands, effortlessly tossing miles away. His torso was steeped in a green gradient canvas of space, populated by stars and great galaxies, shimmering dazzlingly within his massive body. His head was an inexpressive skull, with several jagged swords sticking out the cranium like horns.

Omnitraxus Prime. The Negative version, this time.

'Attention: this is a restricted area,' Omnitraxus notified, his voice impassive and robotic. 'Please leave immediately.'

'Shit,' muttered Adam, as he began to back away towards the doors. 'Omnitraxus must've detected that warp in space-time and went to investigate.'

'Well, he is the Space-Time Guy,' whispered Star, holding up her hands in surrender.

'Error: unable to identify subjects,' Prime stated emotionlessly. 'Subjects do not appear on any public consensus. State your identity.'

'We're nobody!' Adam replied. 'As we are nobody, we're not citizens of the Butterfly Empire, therefore its laws don't apply to us!'

'Correct, you do not exist,' he agreed, much to Star's surprise. 'You are permitted to lea–' the entity's sword eyebrows twitched. 'Subjects identified. Rogue sorcerers, codenamed Heathen. Come quietly, or there will be trouble.'

'Come on, Omni,' Star cajoled, shrugging her shoulders. 'If you let us go, I'll discuss all my space-time problems with you!'

'Negative. I am the law.'

'What the hell did the MHC do to you?!'

Omnitraxus cared not. He swept down and grabbed the two of them with a single arm, picking them up out of the ruins of Castle Avarius and hurling them towards the middle of the crater. Adam and Star hit the ground with a loud thud, before skidding across the ground a few feet backward.

'Warning: you are in violation of multiple Articles of Conduct,' Omnitraxus alerted, as they began to get up from the ground. 'Article 13A – possession of illegal magic; Article 13B – possession of an illegal magical artifact; Article 45 – assault/attempted murder/attempted belittling of a member of the Magic High Commission/Royal Family; and Article 23 – resisting arrest. Sentence: summary execution.'

His eyes began to glow bright green. Vapours of emerald energy seeped out of his eyes as the charge built up exponentially. Two evil green lasers shot out the eye sockets in his skull face, racing towards them in an instant.

Adam was prepared. He held out his hands and produced a large, rectangular purple forcefield in front of them.

Once the laser hit the forcefield, it rebounded and struck Omnitraxus directly in the skull. Not without shattering Adam's forcefield and sending the two rogue sorcerers flying backwards, though. Omnitraxus was left stunned for a few moments, his skull fizzling with energy currents.

'What do we do?' Star cried frantically, as she helped Adam to his feet.

'We run,' he answered curtly, as the two broke into a sprint towards the nearest edge of the crater. They didn't know exactly where they were going, but so long as they were out of Omnitraxus's reach, then it didn't matter.

Except, Omnitraxus Prime resides over all of space-time. Once he had you visually in his sights, you couldn't really lose him. Catching his eye was the surest way to die, and if you wanted to avoid being caught by Omnitraxus, being caught by him even once meant you were exponentially more likely to end up being executed. He was the law, after all.

In short, Omnitraxus recovered from his short incapacitation and began to grow in size again. Once he was twice the size he was before, he spread his hands wide and slammed them together. All Star and Adam were able to see were two ominous darkened green hands enclosing around them. Star held her wand up to cast something at the very last minute.

'Bulla Spiro!'

A translucent pink bubble formed around the two of them, just narrowly keeping them from being crushed by Omnitraxus's hands. Adam enhanced the bubble with a secondary forcefield of his own.

'What's up with this dude?' she asked Adam, as she strained against the force of the entity's hands. 'My Omni's definitely not like this!'

'I dunno what you mean, mine has always been like this,' he said diffidently, perplexed. 'How different do you think he is?'

'My Omni is way more outgoing and talkative,' Star explained, shrugging her shoulders. 'He's not a robot!'

'Maybe he's just different by chance,' supposed the warlock, as he felt his forcefield starting to crack.

Cracks began to spread across the surface of the pink forcefield around them. Each fissure made a hollow, tinny noise, as thought it was holding back the weight of the entire universe.

'How are we supposed to beat Omnitraxus?!' cried Star, worriedly trying to reinforce the bubble.

'I don't know,' professed Adam, holding up his hands. 'I've never seen anyone try. Omnitraxus has taken hits from the Red Queen without so much as a dent.'

'Well…when you hit him with that laser, he was stunned,' Star recalled. 'And…I remember, when I was a kid…the first time I ever cast magic, I electrocuted Omnitraxus's skull. Heh. He was down for the count, and Lekmet had to restore him. Maybe his skull is weak to electricity, or something?'

'Assuming the same rules apply,' Adam pointed out, just as his forcefield shattered and they were left relying on Star's Bulla Spiro. Ultimately, he nodded. 'Alright. You stay here. Keep him distracted.' He reached into his pockets and pulled out Hekapoo's dimensional scissors. 'I'm gonna take him out from the back.'

He hastily ripped through the air and produced a cyan portal, which he jumped through and closed behind him. Adam didn't move a significant distance away; he only appeared a few feet in the air, just behind Omnitraxus. He was high enough to perform a dive, straight into the back of the space-time entity.

A sharp, cold liquid enveloped his muscles within an instant. It was a consistency somewhere between water and vegetable oil, making his hairs stand up on their ends and shiver at the energy scraping his skin. It was like a sheet of cold metal had been shafted onto him, wrapping around his limbs, before jolts of electricity cut through it and licked his limbs.

For a solid few seconds, Adam didn't even know where he was going. Bright, impossible lights buzzed and glared at him, like dozens of phosphenes clouding his vision. Swirls of galaxies, constellations and planets skated across his vision, like shooting stars in the night sky. Dots of inky light and plumes of mist spun around him, as he began to swim through space towards Omnitraxus's skull. Everything felt slightly warped and unreal, his eyes being unable to fully see through the fog laid out in front of him. Each second that passed indicated a stronger psychedelic trip into the body of an almighty god. A god who, by all measures, was nothing more than a lapdog for the Red Queen and the Royal Family of the Butterfly Empire.

Adam knew he had to focus. He was nearly entirely overcome in force by the strange nature of space within Omnitraxus Prime. He noticed the curves of white bone hanging up above, and he swam desperately towards it. The Mewman reached up, his fingers drawing ever closer to his skull.

In the instant his fingers made contact, memories that were not his own began to flash through his mind.

'You failed to locate Toffee, Omnitraxus. He was lucky enough to survive my first attempt on his life, but now he seeks to hide. After all these years, and you still cannot find him?'

That was Moon's voice. Dark Moon. Adam witnessed flashes of her dissatisfaction with him, accompanied by Omnitraxus's shame at his failure. Emotions he could feel that he knew weren't his.

'I've tried my best, your Highness.'

'I'm sure you did,' the Red Queen responded scathingly. 'You will come with me.'

A bright flash later, and suddenly Adam saw a new location. He saw things from Omnitraxus's perspective, as he woke up tied down to an operating table. Prime must've been in a miniaturised form, perhaps his floating head. Adam could feel how weak Omni was, as though all the power in the world had been drained from him. Dark Moon stood over him, an unflinchingly cold look in her eyes. The other members of the Magic High Commission stood around him, with no discernible expression on any of their faces.

'Where…where am I?'

'Stay calm, Omnitraxus,' instructed Dark Moon impassively. 'However…I have gone on long enough tolerating your failures over the years; I require something far more efficient. I need an enforcer.'

'What are you going to do to me?'

'Nothing,' claimed the Red Queen. 'I cannot say the same for my colleagues. Although, I do recall that you wished to settle down with your family?'

'Yes!' cried Omni, struggling in his restraints. 'You…you said you were considering it.'

A wicked smirk stretched across Dark Moon's face.

'I lied,' she said coldly, as the Magic High Commission held him down. Each of them had a draconian kind of medical device in their hands, ranging from hacksaws and chainsaws to laser cutters. 'I would be sorry about severing your prefrontal cortex, but you clearly weren't using it anyway.'

Those flashes of memories began to fade, as Adam felt himself pulled from them. All he could hear of the horrible operation were Omnitraxus's screams, followed by the buzzing of lasers, and the revving of chainsaws. Adam pulled together the last of his wits to cast a spell.

'Brutum Fulmen!'

Arcs of bright blue electricity coursed throughout the bone, conjuring manic sparks that refused to fizzle out. Omnitraxus let out a cry of pain, the most emotion Adam had seen from him after his lobotomy, before his whole galactic body faded away into nothingness. His body dissolved away as he fell to the ground into nothing but a hollow skull mask.

Adam groaned and stepped down from the enlarged skull and onto the ground of the Avarius crater.

'Come on, we gotta lay low for a while,' he instructed Star breathlessly, walking past her. 'I think I know a place we can hide out for a while.'

A disgruntled grimace flashed across Star's face as she turned the next page. Once again, the girl was met with dismay. She could read the words on the page just fine. Understanding them was an entirely different affair. Star, who was longer wearing a Glamour, was getting a headache just reading this. Adam had written detailed notes on the Multiversal ritual spell he had concocted, outlining every detail. The ritual worked by establishing contact with the dimensional bridges connecting the two multiverses, through a space-time fracture, then aligning the fracture to the bridge.

At least, that's what the notes said the spell did, but Star was having trouble wrapping her head round the physics of it all.

It would come as no surprise to anybody to know that Star was not a very studious person. Especially not this area of magic, which she vaguely recalled was referred to as "advanced arcane mechanics" or something.

"By producing and controlling specific target mystions, it is possible to manipulate the space-time fracture to gain access to an elongated dimensional bridge that connects the Positive and Negative Multiverses. Only certain locations in space-time are weak enough to allow the mystions to cross the threshold between realities to shift to the dimensional bridge, though all my experiments on the fracture in the catacombs shows this dimensional bridge is surprisingly stable…"

Blah, blah, blah. Star couldn't really make head or tail out of it. Most of Star's problems could be fixed by throwing spells at it. All she really knew was that these weak points in reality, where space-time fractures could be found, were essential for opening the intermultiversal portal.

Surely there had to be some other way. Some way of crossing the boundary between multiverses without a fracture. Yet, Star's mind failed to come up with any ideas.

In truth, Star considered herself a free thinker. A creative person: the person who brings new, outside-the-box ideas to the table. She drew a complete blank when it came to the technical side of…well, anything. Adam was the guy with the technical know-how.

After all, he did invent an entirely new field of magic. He seemed the only one with the knowledge and expertise to master Multiversal magic.

Star sighed, sitting back in her chair. Echoes of a door creaking in the further distance reverberated through her ears. She looked up. She was sitting at a table in the centre of a grey, rectangular living room. There were no windows on the walls, unsurprisingly, with all the light in the room came from the dingy bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

Abruptly, the doors at the back of the room burst open. In walked Adam, carrying the carcass of a deer over his shoulder.

'I see you're making yourself at home,' he said, nodding at the table she was sat at.

"Home" for them was the former headquarters of the Dímios, hundreds of years underground. It had long since been abandoned, when they were driven out by the Butterfly Empire. In spite of that, the dimensional safeguards were still operational, they merely needed to be reactivated. The safeguard technology kept them safe from prying eyes, particularly Omnitraxus, and once Adam reconfigured it to allow his stolen dimensional scissors through the barriers, it was the best base they could get in the short time they had.

'Did you have to kill a deer?' complained Star, pointing at the corpse over his shoulder. 'Couldn't you have gone for something less innocent?'

'Relax, it was painless,' Adam reassured her, as he walked over to a large metal door to the walk-in fridge. He shoved the deer inside for later. Once he returned, he walked over to sit at the table next to her. 'So, what are you looking at?'

'Trying to figure out how this whole ritual thingy works,' she replied, hitting the side of her hand on the page in frustration. 'Honestly, I am totally lost.'

'Well…I wish I had better news, then,' he confessed, slightly guilty. 'I didn't find any hint of any weak spots while I was out hunting.' He sighed. 'After dropping off the face of the planet for over eight months, I haven't been able to reconnect with any of my old contacts across Mewni. If it wasn't for the All-Seeing Eye, we'd be completely blind.'

'Yeah,' she muttered solemnly. 'Looks like we're gonna be stuck here for a while.'

'I hope everyone back home can get along without us.'

Star's eyes widened in sudden realisation.

'Oh my god! I didn't even think about that!' she fretted worriedly. 'We've been missing for two weeks! They must be worried sick!'

'Relax, Star, I'm sure they're okay,' the Mewman pacified. 'Y'know, I bet Marco is going to the ends of the earth right now looking for us.'

Star couldn't help but giggle at the thought.

'Yeah, I bet he's interrogating someone right about now,' she joked. 'He could make Arybailos kneel with the amount of authority he can exude!'

'He's very tenacious. You can always count on him.'

'Yeah, I couldn't imagine my life without him,' Star admitted, her eyes staring off dreamily into the middle distance. 'Every time I was in a pinch, and I'd turn around, and there he was. Always supporting me. Always giving me advice. Always knowing exactly what to say to cheer me up.' A small tear slid down her cheek, but she hardly noticed it. 'He's my rock. He's…he's the most amazing person I've ever met.'

After several seconds of fantasising about Marco, and his perfect imperfections, Star broke from her reverie. Adam was merely smirking at her knowingly. She frowned.

'What?'

'You couldn't make your crush more obvious if you tried.'

'Pfft! No!' she denied, avoiding eye contact.

'I'm not blind, Star,' he said with a snort. 'I've noticed how much he means to you. How much your gaze seems to linger on him when you think nobody's watching. How excessively you hide our nervousness around him. How much you want to be around him.'

'Okay, I get it,' she gave in, gritting her teeth abashedly. 'Is it that obvious?'

'Yes,' answered Adam bluntly. 'Plus, you're a terrible liar.' Star shrugged in defeat. 'Why haven't you told him how you feel yet?'

'I already did,' Star revealed, much to his surprise. 'Ages ago. Way before I met you. I never really got to hear his response, so I guess…he didn't feel the same way. I was already sure he didn't when I told him.'

'You don't really know that,' he argued. 'After seeing you with Tom, I bet Marco thought you'd moved on from him. Maybe you should be more honest with him, and yourself, and just tell him you still have feelings for him.'

'I can't!' snapped the princess. Her eyes widened when she realised what she'd just done.

'Why not?'

'Because…' she murmured fearfully. 'Because I'm scared. Scared of losing him. I've almost lost him too many times now. I've seen too much, lost too much. I can't bear to lose him, too.'

'Taking risks is better than doing nothing at all,' he advised. 'You know you can't let your fears rule you, Star. You learned the dangers of that with the Dream Entrapment spell.'

'So what do I do?'

'My advice? Seize the moment,' the warlock told her. 'If you don't, you may end up regretting it for the rest of your life.'

Star nodded reproachfully.

'Maybe you're right,' she acquiesced. 'I just…I don't think it's the right time. Not yet.'

'Well I never said you had to do it right away,' said Adam. 'Do it when you're ready. I'm pretty sure Marco is waiting to do the same thing.'

Star frowned.

'I doubt it.'

Adam didn't respond verbally. Instead, he merely gave her smirk full of mirth and cheek. The princess merely rolled her eyes and looked away.

A few hours later, it was time for their evening meal. Adam prepared roast venison from the deer he had hunted earlier, along with a healthy serving of some of their remaining wumpafruits. Ordinarily, Star would be complaining about having the same fruit two weeks in a row, but the tropical fruit was so sweet and addictive that she simply could not complain.

The two of them sat around the table in the living room, which doubled as their dining room as well. For all its size and grandeur, the former Dímios HQ was so sterile and generic that few rooms could serve as living spaces.

'Mmm…you know…' Star spoke up, between chews of meat. If Moon were here, she'd be scorning her for eating with her mouth open. 'I thought you wanted us on a strict diet of wumpafruits only.'

'At first, yeah,' the Mewman responded, taking a bite out the meat. 'But after Polaria happened…well, I kinda thought you deserved better than that.'

At the mention of the discrete fishing town, Star glanced down at the dinner table despondently. Adam kicked himself for bringing up the whole sordid affair, despite knowing it was still a sore spot for her.

'Yeah…thank you, Adam, I appreciate it,' the princess thanked him genuinely, biting the edge of her cracked lips.

'I know you've been through a lot recently,' he acknowledged sympathetically. 'I…I never wanted you to see all that…all that death and destruction. I tried to keep you away from it.'

'It's not your fault.' She took a lonely sip from her glass of water. 'You were only looking out for me. I should have listened.'

'No,' Adam disagreed, shaking his head adamantly. 'I shouldn't have tried to clip your wings like that. Telling you not to help people in need would be like telling you not to breathe. It was a stupid and cruel thing to do.'

'Because of me, we're still trapped here,' Star continued to deflect, stabbing a piece of her venison violently. 'If I had just kept my cool, we could be home by now. It's all my fault.'

'I mean, yeah, you're not wrong,' he admitted disconcertedly. 'But c'mon. I was mad at you for, like, three days. No point getting angry about it, because we've gotta focus on getting back home. Trust me, we'll figure it out. We always do.'

'Hardly,' she disagreed. 'There's no way back. It's not like we can just ask someone where all the different weak points are on Mewni.'

Initially, Adam was going to laugh at the concept. Yeah Star, as if somebody will know that AND be willing to tell us. Those words never left his mouth, because the idea suddenly solidified in his mind. The word of concept ran through his brain, all his neurones firing in succession to determine its possibility and plausibility from every angle. And then it hit him.

'Wait. But what if there was?'

Star sat up in her chair in interest.

'How'd you mean?'

'What if there was someone who could tell us about locations of space-time fractures?' he proposed, furrowing his brow. 'Because there are people who know that. People in the Butterfly Empire.'

'Oh yeah? who?'

'Any member of the Royal Family, for starters. If we kidnap of them, we can coerce them into telling us what we want to know.'

Star's eyes widened larger than gobstoppers. Her jaw dropped for moment, before she closed it in defiance.

'You're not seriously suggesting this, are you?' she challenged, a hint of a disbelieving chuckle lingering in her voice. 'How would we even…sneak our way into the castle? Not only that, but how do you expect we can get the information out of them? Not like any of your fancy torture curses would work on them!'

Adam rolled his eyes at the phrase, "torture curses".

'I've broken in once before,' he disputed, sitting back in his chair. 'It just took some careful planning. All we have to do is watch them for a few weeks, learn their routines, their schedules, the castle blueprints. Everything. If we can find a point when their security is at its most vulnerable, we'd have a shot of infiltrating the castle.'

'This sounds pretty risky,' Star warned, although her voice was few shades more agreeable than before. 'Who would we even kidnap? Moon? One of the MHC?'

'Nope,' countered Adam, with a garish sneer. 'Dark Star. She would know everything about these weak points.'

'Okay, it's confirmed, you've lost your mind,' she retorted, flapping her hands in a mock surrender. 'Not only is this idea super dangerous, but there's no way we'd ever get close enough to her to actually kidnap her!'

'You'd be surprised how laissez-faire she is about her own security,' he claimed, raising his eyebrows. 'She's too arrogant to believe anybody would even attempt to kidnap her. And I doubt she thinks there's much merit in trying.'

'Exactly!' the princess argued. 'There's no way she'd tell us anything, no matter what we tried. Back when we first fought, she suffered several really serious burns and didn't even stutter.'

'I think I could extract the information out of her,' Adam declared confidently, his eyes flickering over to his spellbook at the corner of the table. Star noticed that pretty much instantly.

'What, like Truth Binding? Or Dream Entrapment? Good luck getting that to work.'

'Star, listen.' Whatever it was about the tone in his voice made her instantly shut up. 'It's a long shot, I know. A really, really dangerous long shot. But what else can we do? It's either we take this risk or be stuck here forever.'

Star looked away, pensive. She didn't want to be stuck here any longer; she knew already how little she could bear it. Could she even survive in this place? She nearly died multiple times in the past two weeks, how was she supposed to last months, or even years? If this plan failed, it would almost certainly mean their lives, but if it succeeded…they could finally come home. Doing nothing meant certain death no matter what way you sliced it. It was either a 1% chance of escaping, or a 0% chance of escaping.

Even Star knew which one to pick from those.

'Okay…' she finally concurred. 'Alright, maybe we should do it. We'll need to prepare, though. How long do you think that'll take?'

'At least a few weeks,' Adam decided. 'We need to plan things out to the very last detail.'

Star nodded as she finished up the last of her venison and wumpafruits. Every last variable had to be accounted for.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Adam and Star began to make preparations for their planned kidnapping.

They set up pinboards outlining the layout of the Capitol – the city that surrounded Butterfly Castle – along with notes on information about schedules, itineraries, possible access points, imports, exports, the lot. They set out a blank sheet of blueprints, and as they began to learn more about the castle, they added more to the cross-sectional layout of the castle that they drew up. There were a few differences between the castle in the Positive Multiverse and the one in the Negative Multiverse. For example, there were no pegasus stables in the castle itself on Positive Mewni; they were located at an alternate site.

How they gained all this information was through a few methods. Most of it came from watching and documenting events through the All-Seeing Eye that Adam cast in their living room. The All-Seeing Eye couldn't tell them everything, though. Some information had to be captured more directly.

Intermittently, Adam had to kidnap a guard from any scouting parties that drew too close to the topside access point to their base. From there, it was simply a matter of using the Psionic Wandering spell to extract any information they required, usually regarding the city imports, exports, and other sensitive information like the Queen's spending habits. Adam felt he needed as much information as he could. Once he was done with them, he'd return them to their original spot and let them believe they had some crazy dream, or something.

Star was surprisingly helpful. She offered a lot of insight into the inner workings of the castle, which he supposed made sense since she grew up in a castle herself. It became clear to him that Star had laser focus on this operation. Not a foot stepped out a line with her around, which startled Adam, since he thought he was supposed to be the strict one.

Her guilt and trauma were piling up on top of her, driving her towards the mission. It was scary how much that reminded Adam of himself. And he wasn't so sure he could handle all that ego in one room.

One day, Adam stormed into the room and slammed down a map on the table before Star.

'We have a huge problem.'

Star frowned, folding her arms.

'What is it?'

He slid a brown map across the table and pointed at something on it. Star looked down to inspect it. It was a map of Northern Mewni, containing the Cloud Kingdom of the Pony Heads, the Capitol City, and the ruins of the Pigeon Kingdom and Johansen Kingdom. He was pointing at a circle drawn around the Capitol. She squinted to look at it closer, but she still didn't get it.

'Okay, what am I looking at?'

'Remember when I said I couldn't reconnect with my old contacts?' he asked, prompting a nod from the princess. 'Well, today, while I was out scouting, I ran into Lilacia. Lilacia Pony Head.' Star raised an eyebrow.

'That must've been a shock to the system.'

'For her, yeah,' said Adam. 'But…she agreed to meet with me. So I just got back from that, and she told me something. It turns out…the Butterfly Empire passed a law around a month back to update their import/export network. Now, the Capitol has a massive garrison surrounding it. It's located about five miles in radius out from the city centre. Any and all imports and exports are rigorously checked at their checkpoints.'

'But our plan was to get in through their imports!' Star realised, shooting up from her seat. 'You said one tiny import would go unnoticed!'

'I know what I said,' he derided, rolling his eyes. He sighed. 'The only way we can get in is by taking advantage of their imports, so…we're gonna have to figure out a way to avoid being noticed.'

Star looked away for a moment, rubbing her chin in thought.

'Wait…what if we use the Cloud Kingdom's imports to the Capitol?' she suggested. When he frowned, she continued. 'I know you said before that a smaller import would be better as we'd be less likely to be noticed…but surely now that you have access to the Pony Heads, we can get sneak in that way?'

'I dunno, I'm not sure Lilacia would agree to that,' Adam pondered. 'Besides…with this new garrison, every import is gonna get screened, no matter how big. We'd still get caught.'

'Maybe we can bribe them, or something?'

'Not a chance,' he rebuffed. 'The last person who tried to bribe the Empire guards ended up being hung, drawn and quartered. Droves of people have been executed in the past for bribery, along with any guards who accepted them. They're much too scared to accept bribes, even if they wanted to.'

'Yeah, well, that scouting party we met when we first got here didn't seem afraid of anything,' commented Star. 'Not even to die.' As soon as the thought crossed her mind, she was bulldozed by a tangential idea. 'No…wait, there is something they're afraid of. Someone.'

Adam frowned. 'Who?'

'Dark Star.'

He stared at her for a moment before chuckling. 'Yeah. Obviously.' Despite his laughter, Star kept a strong, confident smile on her face. His humorous expression faded, replaced by a frown. 'What are you suggesting?'

'I could pretend to be her,' the princess suggested. 'I bet Dark Star could… "convince" the guards to leave us alone.'

The warlock sweatdropped. 'You're kidding.'

Star smirked.

'Nope,' she confirmed. 'All I'd have to do is get us past security, then I could just move the crate to a dark alleyway and then, out you pop. I'm guessing there are guards outside her bedroom, right? So from there, we can head up the side of the castle, drop into Dark Star's bedroom, and kidnap her. It could work! Plus…it gives me a chance at payback for Dark Star impersonating me.'

'No way, not happening,' he shot down immediately, resting his back onto his chair. 'That'd be putting you in way too much additional danger.'

'As if this whole crazy kidnapping plan wasn't dangerous already,' the princess scoffed, walking round the side of the table to address him more directly.

'I can't risk putting your life in too much danger, Star.'

'Really?' she scoffed, folding her arms. 'What? So only you are allowed to put your life on the line?'

'Star, it's my fault we're even trapped here,' he confessed, rubbing his forehead in his hand. 'You put your life on the line, and that's on you. But if you get killed? I feel that's on me.'

'Adam, you need to start trusting me. It's never been more important.'

'I do trust you, Star,' he insisted. 'I don't trust myself.'

'Well, what else can we do?' she pointed out. 'This the only option we have. Like it or not, we're both in this together. We have to take a risk. I know I would take a 0.01% chance of success over 0%. Wouldn't you?'

Adam groaned silently and gritted his teeth. If there was one thing he hated, it was Star using his own words against him. He sighed. It wasn't like Star didn't have a point. After multiple weeks of gathering intel, he was confident that the only way in was through their import network. That was their weak point, the only point where they couldn't avoid being vulnerable, garrison notwithstanding.

'Fine,' he ultimately agreed, sighing. 'Just…make sure you're careful.'

'Yessir,' replied Star, doing a mock salute.

As always, thank you very much for reading the latest chapter of 'Star vs the Forces of the Negative Multiverse'!

Sorry I keep forgetting to post it here. I hope you're still reading.

This chapter was mostly setup, of course, but I enjoyed the bits of exposition here and there to further build the world of Negative Mewni. Bringing the story back to Castle Avarius links all the way back to Chapter 1, so I threw in some mirroring here and there because I though it really showed how much things have changed, yet stayed the same.

The trauma of the previous chapter very much still lingers for Star. And for Adam, but the focus is on Star. I think it was pretty obvious how things had affected, so I didn't feel the need to spell it out for you. However, I like that the previous episode, and the trauma that it resulted in, is what led to the events of this episode. I feel it makes Episode Fifteen (which may have seemed like filler) that much more important.

Bringing in Negative Omnitraxus is something I have wanted to do for a while, and I figured, since I had Negative Hekapoo in the last one, why not put Negative Omni in this one? Negative Omni is quite different to his Positive counterpart...he's basically the Red Queen's lapdog and primary enforcer. After being lobotomised, he was reduced to a mindless drone acting on commands alone. He can't think for himself, but he is capable of higher thinking when it comes to carrying out the orders the Red Queen gives him. I didn't want to just explain away his backstory, so I had Adam actually view it for himself. Adam didn't know about it either, since he didn't encounter or hear about Omnitraxus until years after he was turned into what he is. So naturally he wouldn't remember or recall a time when Omnitraxus is different. Admittedly, I should have included some lines earlier back that hinted towards Negative Omnitraxus's nature when the Positive version showed up in Chapter 9, but I'll have to come back to it later.

I hope the fight scene was good. Star was actually the one to come up with the way to defeat Omnitraxus, and I like that. I don't want Adam to solve all the problems, even though it seems he will, considering they're on Negative Mewni, where he's in his element. It only makes sense that Star knows more about how to defeat Omni than he would, since she has more personal experience with her version of him.

And if you couldn't also tell, Lilacia Pony Head (the Negative version) is going to be appearing in the next chapter. I've been dying to do that ever since it was mentioned that she and Adam had been in contact before he disappeared to the Positive Multiverse. She's going to be making multiple appearances down the line; she will be instrumental in the first episode of Volume III (Chapters 46-48, roughly). In this episode, of course, she's going to be helping to smuggle them across the garrison and into the Capitol City. To clarify, the Capitol City is basically the Butterfly Kingdom, but it's been made much bigger. The reason for this is solely because they're not a kingdom anymore, they're the Butterfly Empire, so it really doesn't make sense to keep calling it the Butterfly Kingdom.

I always intended for Adam and Star's base of operations to be the abandoned Dímios Headquarters. That's why I established the Dímios HQ in the Positive Multiverse in Chapters 26-29. And why the Negative Dímios made an appearance in Chapters 35-37. The base is abandoned, although I never stated why exactly the Dímios dissolved in the Negative Multiverse. I'm keeping that ambiguous.

I hope you're excited! This is where it gets crazy. Adam and Star...attempting to kidnap Dark Star to pump her for information?! Mad! It's a crazy plan, but you'll have to wait to see how it turns out. I always wanted it to go this way, because this is my chance to reveal some of her past. FINALLY!

Thanks for reading. I appreciate all the support I get! See you in the next chapter, "Glitz and Glamour"!