"Please," the now-former Queen of Shadow Maurelise begged as she dropped to her knees powerlessly, "before you take me in... tell me but one thing: how?" She had to know - what was the secret, the truth of her victorious nemesis's frightening power? The very capabilities that, to the Queen, seemed almost limitless, enough to drive her to relinquish her powers to the very woman she'd come to fear mo-
"Practical effects."
This got a blink out of her. "What?"
"Yeah, uh - pretty much all smoke and mirrors, heheh!" Pretty Sparkle Radiance Glimmer twirled her little scepter in her hand, gem within catching the warm light of dawn through a broken wall beautifully. She winked and smiled and stuck her tongue out just a little. "Sorry!"
There's... there was no way. "You - but I saw you... you tossed my beasts aside with the flick of a wrist when first you showed yourself!"
"Yeah, I'd had some explosives rigged to those spots prior after, after doing some research on previous attacks." Radiance Glimmer examined her nails idly. "Genuinely? Wasn't expecting them to fall for the bait I'd left there, I just chose carrots on a whim."
She'd left bait? Her monsters... fell for mere vegetables? Maurelise's eyes widened. "But - the devastating lasers...!"
Radiance Glimmer started a shrug, paused in the middle, scraped out some dirt under her nail using one of her canines, then finished it. "Yeah, really just more pyrotechnics plus a tranq for the big guy. Get a strong enough light and a set of fog machines to help really sell the 'laser' side of it, and you're in business. You don't wanna know how hard it is to convince building management to install a series of prop windows over all of the real ones for a single stunt."
"But - the transformations -"
"Girl," Radiance Glimmer said after de-dirting s couple more nails, "I've been practicing quick-changing since, what, middle school? Put on a convincing enough light show to get everyone to look away, and it's like you never even moved at all."
Maurelise was just slack-jawed at this point. "You MELTED an entire battalion of my soldiers!!"
Sigh. Radiance Glimmer sounded almost... pissed off. Whatever silly perky earnest energy she'd kept up in every single encounter between the two was gone. "Most of the funds from everyone thanking me for putting an end to your reign of terror once and for all is going straight into paying back the single largest loan of my life. Do you want to know how much sixty near-identical wax figures cost to get made?"
And Maurelise was speechless as the girl strode over, crouching down to lift her chin with her gloved hand. "Honestly, you shouldn't have made your mooks so... identical. Let them wear silly hats or something. Live a little."
The Queen of Darkness had been defeated - no, humiliated - by some well-made practical effects and traps and a particularly clever planner without a single magical bone in her body, to whom she had just completely passed her strength in fear of a hidden true strength the girl simply did not have. She was absolutely and utterly crushed, and it was written all over her face. She hadn't simply lost - she lost in her heart.
Radiance Glimmer grinned, a little sinisterly. "Just plead insanity-by-shadow-magic, it's pretty much become case law that 'shadow powers turned me into a monster' gets you out scot free with everyone if you can prove you had them. After that... well, perhaps you'd like to meet over coffee and talk everything over...?"
... "What?"