Orbit above unknown planet
12 October 2551 0300 Military standard time
Location: unknown(unable to find reference point)
The probe exited slipspace without difficulty and proceeded to scan surrounding space for possible threats or objects of interest. It "saw" the planet it was now above and, after ensuring that there was no covenant craft anywhere nearby (there wasn't) it used on-board microthrusters to place itself in a stable orbit to gather data from. The planet was approximately Earth-size, had a Nitrogen-Oxygen atmosphere, large continents separated by oceans, evidence of tectonic activity; this was the very definition of an Earth-like planet! There were even signs of civilizations, if not technologically advanced ones. If the probe was capable of emotion, it would have been squeeing with joy. Instead, it continued doing the only thing it knew: watching silently.
After a few minutes of that, something strange happened. Its sensors detected a flash of light, and then there was suddenly an object, somewhat larger than a human but not significantly so, barely a dozen meters from it. The probe turned nimbly with its thrusters in order to bring its optical sensors to bear on the unidentified object. What it saw managed to briefly stall some of the more delicate aspects of its reasoning software.
It was a horse with a midnight-blue coat. Its mane and tail, instead of being composed of hair, seemed to be fields of stars anchored to its body and blowing in a breeze that did not exist. On its head was a spiraling horn, and its back held great feathered wings which it was using to fly as though it were not miles beyond the nearest atmosphere for those wings to push against. In fact, it was out here completely unprotected from the hard vacuum of space. Eventually, the probe decided to fall back on its base programing to watch and record.
Luna was concerned, but also highly curious about this new object. When she had felt its sudden appearance, she came to investigate as soon as she could. The object itself was strangely shaped, a huge, vaguely cylindrical body with odd devices sticking out at seemingly random points. It had turned to look at her with what appeared to be a big camera lens as soon as she teleported in, and had kept the inorganic eye focused on her ever sense. Tia will probably want to see this, she decided. She sent a brief message to the palace guards to wake her sister up and prepare a large balcony, then grabbed the object with her magic and started flying towards Canterlot far below.
Apparently, the object did not want to be moved, since as soon as Luna began dragging it away, it began firing off little jets of flame, trying to force itself back into position. Though the force of the jets was not powerful enough to even slow her down, the suddenness of their appearance almost startled her into releasing her magical grip, and they continued unabated for several minutes as she dragged the uncooperative machine down through the atmosphere.
Eventually, the city of Canterlot came into view, followed by the well-lit balcony she was going to land on, and finally the figure of her sister, and accompanying guards, waiting by the balcony door. As she landed, object in tow, the guards tensed up and she could see Celestia's face go from lovingly impatient to slightly surprised, the only form of surprised she ever showed when given any warning. "Luna, what is it that you've brought home this time?"
"I do not know. It appeared in the night sky without warning, and resisted when I tried to examine it more closely or bring it down here. I was hoping thou would help me uncover its purpose and origin." Though her archaic speaking pattern had become hardly noticeable over the months since her release, Princess Luna still had a habit of long-windedness.
"Well it certainly is strange. Shield?" One of her guards brought himself to attention. "Please have the kitchen staff clear off the Grand Dining Table. It's the only thing we can put this thing on without crushing something." Guardian Shield saluted, and dashed off to get the preparations under way. Most of the servants were asleep, but Princess Luna's habit of midnight snacking meant that there was always someone on duty in the kitchen, so the table was clear by the time the thing, now carried by both princesses, was brought in. Though it had seemed big floating outside, it wasn't until they set it down where it took up the entire grand dining table and then some that the sheer size of the mysterious object became apparent.
Once the groan of stressed wood quieted, Celestia spoke again. "Well, that should keep for now. Please post a few guards at the doors for now. In the morning I will send out a request for ponies that specialize in advanced machinery, but for now I must go back to bed. See you all in the morning." With that, she left.
Despite the supposed fracas the arrival of such a strange object should have caused, the halls of Canterlot Castle were if anything quieter than normal. It wasn't even an eerie quiet; more like everypony just happened to be somewhere else at the time. It was such a peaceful silence that she was almost surprised when it was interrupted by a voice in her ear.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
With a sigh, she sent a bit of magic into her ear, using it to extract a small copper coin. On the face, leaning against the edge, was a figure that had been the cause of much suffering and, more recently, many headaches: Discord. He still kept appearing before her, usually, but not always, in private, but as far as she could tell he and all of his power were still sealed in a statue in the garden. When she had asked him about it, he simply replied "What's that got to do with anything?"
"What do you want now, Discord?" She tossed the coin away, where it flashed midair. When the light faded, there floated Discord, all of three inches tall.
"What do I want? Oh, not much. Eternal chaos. A throne to rule from. Dinner and a movie."
"Get on with it." Though Celestia rarely snarled, she felt Discord had earned her hatred. Unfortunatly, if he noticed that her glare could snuff out stars, he didn't show it.
"Actually, right now I'm more interested in that thing your sister dragged in earlier. It gives me the weirdest feeling, like its intentions are ordered to the point of boredom, but it has a potential for chaos on a scale to rival mine. It's somehow insulting and scary at the same time." By this point, Celestia had continued walking to her room, and Discord had taken to doing backstrokes in her hair. "Honestly though, you really should wash this stuff more. I think I just felt something brush my leg."
As if on cue, a relatively large tentacle erupted around Discord and proceeded to drag him down to the roots of the princess's hair. By the time she reached her room the bubbles and thrashing had ended and she could go back to sleep; the morning would come soon enough, and she still had a very important job.
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Royal Canterlot Castle
19 October 2011 2:45 A.M. Canterlot Local Time
Canterlot, Equestria
The week since the object arrived had been uneventfully busy. More than a dozen ponies had shown up within the first day, with special talents ranging from electrical wiring to automated machines. The first day had mostly been spent setting up equipment, and they didn't get to really examine it until late that night. By morning they had found what appeared to be an access hatch on one end of the body, though it took them another hour or so to figure out how to open it; whoever designed this thing didn't do so with hooves in mind. It opened to a single, somewhat cramped tunnel that ran the length of the device, filled with a tangled rainbow of wiring. There was also two more hatches that nopony had worked up the courage to open due to both being labeled, in common Equestrian for some reason, "Harmful Radiation; Do Not Open Without Proper Protection."
After examining its insides for another six days, they were all truly ashamed to have considered themselves masters of their crafts. The wiring alone was at least decades beyond anything any of them had ever seen, possibly centuries from any sort of mass-production, and they had only the vaguest idea as to what some of the other components did. The external features were apparently sensors of varying use, though Princess Luna herself had pointed out the thrusters that were built into the hull itself, all severely used, of course.
Despite everything the thing had, what surprised the tech-ponies most was what it didn't have: magic. There wasn't as much as a spark of magic anywhere on the thing. Even residual magic from a parts-shaping spell was completely absent. This thing was entirely hoof-made.
It was such an alien object that it took them a moment to notice something had changed: there was a low humming coming from the entire craft, more felt than heard. A quick spell told them what was happening.
"It's building up power!"
"What? Why?"
"I don't know!"
"How much can it take?"
"Is it going to explode?"
"I don't know! lots?"
"Lots of power or explosions?'
"Both! It's already built up enough power to take out half the castle!"
"What do we do?"
"Panic!"
The assembly of science ponies had just begun to run around like frightened rabbits when the entire room was silenced by the sound of a hoof stomp with the volume of a gunshot. Everypony turned to see one of Luna's personal night-guards which had been stationed right outside the door, now glaring at the crowd of science ponies.
"All of you stop goofing off and focus!” the bat-winged pegasus shouted. “The princesses are already on their way here. Start putting stuff back where it's supposed to be, so that this thing will do what it's supposed to do instead of blowing up and wiping out half of Canterlot." They were slow to move, but more shouting seemed to be the best fix for that.
By the time the princesses arrived, the object was exactly how it had been found. Princess Celestia was the one to take charge, of course. "What's going on? All we were told was that the object is doing something."
"Ma'am." The guard saluted her. "The object has suddenly turned on and is building power rapidly. If it were to explode now, the concussive wave would probably level Ponyville from here."
"Well then, we'll just have to stop it."
She began charging her horn with magic, only to be interrupted by one of the scientist ponies present. "Wait!" It took him an awkward second to realize that not only had he interrupted the princess, he had commanded her. "Uh, a thousand pardons, your majesty, but this thing is entirely non-magical in nature. If you use magic to mess one of its functions, there's no telling what could happen."
"Well then what would you have me do?"
"Perhaps erect some sort of barrier around it to contain the blast. If there even is one, that is."
"Hmm… Luna, I may need your help with this one."
Princess Luna looked up from her stance of awkwardly waiting for her sister to come up with something. "Really? What can I do?" She seemed almost excited to have some part to play in it.
"You stand on that end of it, I'll stand on this end, and we'll both erect half of the shield. Everypony else, stand back." Both princesses took up their positions, Celestia at the front, Luna at the back, and produced two glowing shields which met and melded at the center. Celestia's side was an incandescent yellow, while Luna's was a deep purple, and both faded to a sunset-pink where they met.
The minutes ticked by, until enough power had built up that a normal explosion may have managed to breach the sisters' combined shield. Unfortunately, a slipspace drive doesn't explode. Instead, it fired a beam of energy so narrow as to be one-dimensional out the front end of the probe, easily penetrating Celestia's side of the shield and piercing an undefined spot in the air behind her. In an instant, a black sphere manifested in that space, big enough to engulf the whole probe.
The probe itself immediately fired all of its remaining thrusters, propelling itself into the slipspace rupture and somehow entangling one of its apparatuses in Celestia's mane. Before she could scream, she was dragged through the rupture, which closed as soon as the probe was through. There was a flash of light that left everypony's mane standing on end, and a shockwave that rattled the windows of the castle, then silence.
The silence stretched on, each pony trying to process what had just happened. Eventually, the scene was interrupted by the doors bursting open, allowing entrance to a full contingent of royal guards, with Guardian Shield at their head shouting "What caused that explosion? What happened here? Where's Princess Celestia?"
"She's gone." The answer had come from one of the night guards in the crowd of scientists.
"WHAT?"
"The thing that was in here opened some sort of portal and dragged her through it. It was over in seconds; there was nothing we could do."
"No." Everypony looked at Luna, who looked rather distant, like she didn't believe what was going on. "No, that can't be happening. This is just a joke." She flew over the charred and splintered remains of the grand dining table to land at the spot Celestia had disappeared from. "She was always such a prankster. Alright sis, you got us. You can come out now." She looked around expectantly as the shout echoed around the chamber, eventually fading away. "Tia?"
One of her guards came up and set his hoof on her shoulder. "I'm sorry, princess, but we all saw what happened. I don't think that, even as legendary a joker as she was, Princess Celestia would put her subjects through something like that for a laugh."
"No!" nopony alive had ever seen Luna to snap like that. "No! She can't be gone! Who will raise the sun? I can't do it. She let me try just last month, and dawn was five hours late. It only came because she started helping me at the end." She was obviously panicking now, breaking down right in front of everypony. "And what about Cadence's wedding? Tia was supposed to—"
Shield walked up to her and, with a stern apology, proceeded to strike Princess Luna in the face. "Get a hold of yourself! We are in a crisis now, and we need a strong leading figure, not some blubbering foal!" Everypony was shocked that anypony, least of all Guardian Shield, had dared to strike a princess. Some of the scientists had even fainted. Luna herself was staring uncomprehendingly at the armor-clad guard. "I apologize for my actions, and shall turn myself in to await proper punishment."
He had almost left the room when Luna seemed to realize what he had said. "Wait!" He stopped in his tracks and looked back at her, only slightly surprised. "No, you were right. We—I was acting like a foal of three weeks, rather than a Princess of ten thousand years. But no amount of weeping, or lack thereof, will change the fact that I cannot raise the sun on my own. Not yet, anyway."
"What would you have us do, Princess?" Shield and the other guards were standing at attention again.
"Right now, I just need one of the scrolls my sister uses to contact her pupil." She was already sounding much more confidant. After all, she had a royal duty to fulfill, and this would help to make up for all the damage she had caused so long ago. Grief could wait; Equestria needed her.
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Slipspace, en route to deep-space rendezvous
19/10/2551 0300 Military Standard Time
One of her counselors had insisted the Princess Celestia have a Stasis contingency spell installed in the jewel in her Royal Collar. "In case something was to happen to you." He had said, "It would give us all the time we need to get to you." At the time, Celestia had agreed simply to allay his fears, since even Nightmare Moon had not been able to cause her any lasting harm. The idea that anything could make such a precaution necessary was positively outlandish.
At this point, however, she was fairly certain that she could hear him shouting "I told you so!" all the way from his five-hundred-year-old tomb. It wouldn't be too hard, since she couldn't hear anything else. In fact, she couldn't see anything either, and the only thing she could feel was an intense, burning, smashing pain on every inch of her being, as though she were being tossed around in the mouth of a great dragon as it was breathing fire.
When the magic halted her body and mind, it was a welcome respite. She would spend the ride completely unaware, feeling no time pass, and when she woke up she would hopefully find herself in a more hospitable environment.
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Author's notes: I go to Equestria and what do I do? Kidnap a princess and leave another a quivering wreck. But enough about my social life.
The plot will be picking up speed, and to do that, we'll have to spend some more time among the UNSC. But don't worry! Princess Celestia will be there!
Fun Fact: I have almost no preview system. What you see is pretty much exactly how I first type it out, so your reviews are the only feedback I get on how I did. Please review and tell me what went wrong, 'cause I just don't know!
Post-revision notes: Same as before. Small details added/changed. Move along.