Ivory Scroll found that hands were a lovely thing. While they were not quite enough to make up for the loss of her magic, she would choose them over hooves in a heartbeat. Fine motor skills was not something she had to worry about faking at her age. As a pony, she had nearly two and a half centuries for a possible maximum lifespan. Here, the single sapient animal species — humans — could hope for about eighty. Whether she would still retain her equine vitality or now was faced with the fragility of unmagical apes was an uncertainty she was willing to accept. For an old maid like her, that sacrifice was nothing. She had a job she had married, not a pony. Ivory certainly didn't plan on marrying a person — as they were called here — any time soon, either.
Sometimes, fame was enough. For Ivory Scroll, no better source of accomplishment could be found than making a whole city into her success story. And now she had a whole city, just for that! Everything she now faced was so much better than sleepy, sweet Ponyville. Here, she had a city's worth of excitement in the tumultuous city of Canterly, all of which was located in the even more chaotic state of Florida. There were no herds or princesses to loom over her, only tangles of bureaucracy knotted into the inevitable disaster that a damnation such as democracy set forth. A land where monarchies were taboo did nothing to dim all the renewed excitement Ivory hadn't felt since she was a spry young mare.
It's just a shame that she was three years into her first term, and there was no guarantee she might secure her second victory. This strange ape planet — this Earth — wanted complications in its politics so drastically different from the one she had come from. In the kingdom of Equestria, one only had to tote oneself as a most Harmonious and upstanding citizen who emphasized civil servitude, and knowing who to bow to and saying what ponies wanted to hear. The only trick to Equestrian politics was that Harmony took the back seat of the carriage compared to the real ruling philosophy of Equestria. Celestian ideals were how to go beyond winning simply 'friends' and influencing ponies. Humans were not ruled by any gods that Ivory Scroll could see, and morality was a role that was not always worth playing, at least judging by the history of the nation she lived in or how her peers behaved. To succeed at Amareican politics required real work instead of kindness, and that was wholly refreshing. It at least made up for the gross bias favoring something as grotesque as republicanism over the nobility of civilized forms of government.
Ivory Scroll's mouth curled into a smile, and her fingers paused in their incessant drumming of her desk. Perhaps there was something that could be done to make her next term just a smidge more certain...