Party with a Pony, Part 1
Marco spent almost the entire weekend teaching Star and Bucky how to blend in while they were living on Earth. Bucky was disappointed to find out that he wouldn't be able to openly carry weapons on school grounds (or anywhere, really), but forced himself to be content with his skills in unarmed combat. On the other hand, Star was delighted when Marco showed her a magazine full of Human clothes that would be more comfortable than her formal Princess attire.
Star immediately used the Wand to conjure herself a new wardrobe. She now wore a short-sleeved aquamarine dress with a pink cartoon octopus on the front over pink-and-purple striped leggings and purple dragon-shaped galoshes with white soles. In place of her tiara, she had a red headband with cute little devil horns.
Bucky refused her offer to conjure something for him, opting instead to wear his civilian clothes from Mewni: a baggy cream-colored long-sleeved shirt with a deep V-neck held semi-closed by brown laces, a wide brown leather belt with two buckles, dark brown leather breeches, and black knee-high leather boots. On his forearms was a pair of armored leather greaves, and hanging from his shoulders was a black dragon-skin cape. The golden circlet that signified that he was a Prince still rested on his head, and a pair of curved daggers was concealed on the small of his back, in twin sheaths attached to his belt and hidden by his cape.
"...and that, my friends, is what we on Earth think our Solar System looks like. There's just no way to prove it, because our rockets aren't advanced enough to go that far into space yet," Marco said in conclusion to his most recent lecture on how Humans viewed the Universe. "Any questions?" Star and Bucky were sitting side-by-side on the Diaz's couch while Marco gave each lecture standing in front of them with a giant pad of paper on an easel. The Butterfly siblings gave each other worried looks.
"Do you wanna tell him, or should I?" Bucky asked his sister.
"You tell him. He looked so confident that I don't wanna be the one to burst his bubble," Star responded. Bucky sighed and nodded before turning to Marco.
"Marco, while that presentation on the Human interpretation of the Universe was very entertaining...everything you just said is completely wrong. Like, everything." Marco's eyebrows shot up in surprise.
"What? I get that there are more dimensions besides just Earth, but what else was wrong?" he asked. Bucky was about to reply when all three of their stomachs rumbled. "Hold that thought. You prepare your own lecture while I fix us all a snack." Marco walked off to the kitchen. Several minutes later, he returned with three plates piled high with tortilla chips, thick, gooey cheese sauce, and chunks of cooked and seasoned meat. "Now's a good opportunity for you two to get a taste of my extremely sought-after prizewinning nachos! All of my friends are crazy about them!" he said. Star pulled a chip loaded with meat and cheese off of her plate, placed it in her mouth, and started chewing. Her pupils immediately grew to the size of quarters and she made a high-pitched sound in the back of her throat.
"Oh my corn, these are delicious! Bucky, you gotta try these!" she proclaimed once she swallowed.
"Yes, yes, I will in a minute, Star. Anyway, Marco, while the evidence you gave was very convincing, no dimension can possibly be as big as you claim," Bucky began, flipping the pad of paper on the easel to a rough sketch of Planet Earth with a red circle drawn around it with a few inches of space. Marco took a seat in the spot on the couch that Bucky had vacated. "In reality, there's a limited 'bubble' of space around what you call your planet. Slightly beyond the orbit of your moon, a very dense wall separates this dimension from the space between dimensions, which is a realm of lawless chaos where no creature can survive for long without going completely mad. This wall is riddled with naturally occurring interdimensional rifts, which all intelligent races throughout the Universe have come to refer to as stars. I don't know where Humans came up with the concept of other planets and such, but really the only other celestial body you have is your sun, which is precisely the same size and distance from the surface as your moon."
"I have so many questions that I can tell are going to have to wait," Marco said while jotting down notes. Before Bucky could continue, the doorbell rang. "I'll get it!" Marco opened the door and peered out into the night, but didn't see anyone who could've rung the bell. He then looked up slightly and spotted a floating, disembodied unicorn head that had blue fur and a pink mane.
"WHAT'S UP, HOME FRIES?!" the floating unicorn head shouted in a scratchy yet feminine voice with a ghetto accent. Poor Marco was so startled that he screamed like a little girl and fainted on the spot. Hearing his scream and thinking they were under attack, Star and Bucky came running with their respective weapons drawn. They both froze when they saw who was at the door, Star with the broadest grin she could muster and Bucky with a grimace.
"Great. Just great. And here I was hoping I'd get a respite from the likes of you," Bucky murmured.
Ignoring her brother's look of distaste, Star squealed and screamed, "OH MY GOSH! FLYING PRINCESS PONYHEAD!"
"Well, hello, B-fly! Glad to see you and Buck-Buck are still free birds!"
"So am I, Ponyhead, but what are you doing here? More importantly, how did you find us?" Bucky asked.
"Oh, that was me. We've been keeping in touch through our mirror phones," Star explained sheepishly. "But I still can't believe you're here, Ponyhead! I thought you were confined to your castle after your last mishap?"
"The old man let me out on good behavior," Ponyhead said flippantly. "I'm in, like, this incredibly good mood right now, so how about the three of us go to the Bounce Lounge, like old times?" Normally Bucky would say no to interdimensional travel while their parents were trusting them to stay firmly rooted on Earth, but the Bounce Lounge was one of the few places he would make an exception for, him and Star having made good memories in the small dimension of endless dance parties.
"Oh, alright, just this once," he conceded when Star looked at him pleadingly. "Let's wake Marco up and bring him with us, though."
"Wait, that's not a dead body? I thought that was a dead body," said Ponyhead.
"Not dead. Just in shock," Marco groaned as he staggered to his feet. Introductions were given, in which Star stated that Marco was her best friend, making Ponyhead irked enough that Star had to clarify that he was her best friend on Earth and Ponyhead was her best friend from Mewni.
After dubbing Marco the unfortunate nickname "Earth Turd," Ponyhead regurgitated a pair of Dimensional Scissors from somewhere between her mouth and her limited amount of neck. The Scissors were somewhat plain-looking, with narrow half-moon-shaped blades, curved red handles, and a rhombus-shaped teal gemstone set into the hinge. She used her teeth and tongue to work the blades and opened a portal to the Bounce Lounge. Star, Bucky, and Marco entered the portal first, not noticing Ponyhead glancing around warily before she followed them.
Moments after the portal closed, a second portal opened in Marco's front yard. From that portal emerged three uniformed humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, all of which were built entirely from brass and copper with brown paint. They looked around for their intended target and were about to leave and look elsewhere when the shortest of the three spotted something sparkling in the grass. Kneeling down, he pinched the sparkling powder between two of his fingers and put it into...whatever he had that passed for a mouth. The sensors in that orifice identified the substance as the glitter his target left a trail of when she flew and hovered.
"Glitter. She was here," he stated, the red diodes of his eyes narrowing to slits.
...
Unlike the Earth half of the portal, the portal that opened up in the Bounce Lounge was parallel to the ground. Not only that, but the "ground" was a gigantic purple cloud at least three hundred feet across, in which was embedded a floor space made up of marble tiles that alternated colors like a checkerboard. Scattered around the outside edge of the tile floor was a bar and numerous couches and bean bag chairs, as well as a few dining tables. In the middle of the floor, creatures from all over the Universe danced the night away to music played by a DJ of indeterminate species, whose booth was suspended several feet in the air on a second, much smaller cloud. Ladders and bridges around the edges of the main cloud led to smaller clouds that held either smaller dance floors or more lounging and dining furniture.
Star, Bucky, and Ponyhead tumbled through the portal and landed expertly on the fluffy surface of the cloud. Marco, on the other hand, missed the edge of the cloud entirely and screamed once he saw that he was falling toward a pure black cloud covered in jagged metal spikes, impaled on which were the remains of past victims of similar mishaps. Bucky grabbed the back of his hoodie before he could fall any farther, hauling him back up to where the others stood.
"That has got to be a safety code violation," Marco said, dusting himself off with a scowl. He then looked around, and his eyes widened in awe. "Whoa..." The main dance floor of the Bounce Lounge was surrounded on all sides by dark purple, almost black sky dotted with stars. The farthest stars were the naturally occurring dimensional rifts he had been told about by Bucky, but the much closer ones were free-floating orbs of light that provided somewhat dim multi-colored illumination to the dancers. "What is this place?" Marco asked.
"This, Marco, is the Bounce Lounge, mine and Bucky's favorite place to chill," Star replied as she sank down into a couch. Before she could relax completely, though, her attention was grabbed by something nearby. "Oh, look! A photo booth!" Star grabbed the hands of both Bucky and Marco and hauled them over to the machine in question, Ponyhead floating along behind them. Inserting a coin into the slot, Star shoved her brother and two friends inside before entering herself. They took several photos as a group, but the longer she floated next to Marco, the more strained Ponyhead's smiles became. After the group photos, Star hauled Bucky back outside, leaving Marco and Ponyhead alone with the words, "Now just the two of you. A reminder of the night my two besties became besties!"
"Do you really think it's a good idea to leave them alone with each other?" Bucky asked, sitting down at a table and ordering a drink from a passing waitress. "Ponyhead doesn't seem too thrilled that we brought Marco along."
"I'm sure they'll be fine," Star said, dismissing Bucky's concerns. "See? Here they come now!" Ponyhead zoomed out of the photo booth ahead of Marco, and Star ran off to join her on the dance floor. The troubled-looking Marco, however, just slid into a seat next to Bucky.
"She threatened to impale you if you ruin the night for her, didn't she?" Bucky asked before taking a sip of his drink.
"How did you know?"
"Ponyhead is very protective and a little possessive of Star, especially around potential suitors and our extended relatives," Bucky replied.
"The suitors I can understand, but what do your relatives have to do with anything?" Marco asked, and Bucky sighed.
"Star and I are the product of a union between two of the most prominent royal families on Mewni. Let's just say that almost everyone on Mom's side of the family, the Butterflies, has a stick up their butt. They're stiff and uptight, and think Star is too unruly to be a proper Princess and Queen. She gets that wild side from Dad's family, the Johannsens, who more closely resemble the Vikings from Earth's history. Compared to the Butterflies, the Johannsens are brash, headstrong, and are prone to using violence to solve problems. The two halves of our family are constantly butting heads, no matter how much Mom and Dad plead for them to get along. Well, Mom more than Dad, but that's a story for another time. The point is, Star has been threatened several times by Mom's relatives with being sent to St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Royalty, a high-security facility where troublemaking princes and princesses alike go when their parents are fed up with their antics. They know perfectly well that only Mom has the authority to send her there, so they keep badgering her to just do it and put an end to everyone's collective headache."
"Wow," Marco said, looking over to where Star and Ponyhead danced like no one was watching (what with her lack of an actual body, all Ponyhead was really accomplishing was squirming like a worm while she hovered in the air). With how happy she was acting, it was hard to believe Star had been backstabbed by her own family like that.
"Yeah. Say, wanna go to a place I think might be a little more your style?" Bucky asked, pulling out his own Dimensional Scissors from inside his right boot. Unlike Ponyhead's pair, Bucky's were long, slender, and tapered to a needle point. The blades and handles were both solid gold, with a snake-scale pattern engraved into the handles and a scarlet hexagonal gemstone set into the hinge.
"Sure, why not? The only dancing I can do is ballroom dancing, anyway," Marco replied with a shrug.
"Star! I'm taking Marco to the Amethyst Arcade! Be back at his house by midnight!" Bucky called across the dance floor.
"Okay! Have fun!" Star called back as Bucky opened a bright blue portal, the edges of which looked like they were made of old-fashioned video game pixels. Ponyhead stopped dancing for a moment and noticed a portal open up near the bar, with three menacing figures stepping through.
With a nearly imperceptible squeak of alarm, she said, "Actually, B-fly, let's go with them. I'm not in the mood for dancing anymore. Hurry, before the portal closes!" Grabbing the back of Star's dress with her teeth, Ponyhead flew as fast as she could across the dance floor, just barely managing to slip herself and Star through Bucky's portal before it closed.