Lingering Lunacy

by Jadu

II: Let the Games Begin

Tiny sunbeams filtered in through the blackout curtains of Luna’s bedchamber, and the princess stirred in her bed, drawing the blue-hued covers closer to her. Aside from the uncomfortable encounter with Chrysalis, last night had been fairly uneventful, and Luna had been able to catch a few hours’ rest more than normal. She was thankful, since now that she was growing a bit stronger each day, Celestia was expecting her to at least attend the majority of Day Court proceedings. As Chrysalis had astutely pointed out, magic sustained alicorns more than food and thus could stand in place of bed rest. But sleep was a luxury to Luna—after all, that’s what her subjects were supposed to be doing during her night—and she enjoyed getting as much as she could.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRT! B-B-B-B-B-BRRRRRRRRRRRRT!

“AHHHHHHHH!” Luna screamed, her eyes flying open, jolted by the strident trumpet flourish. “By the verdant orchards of Appleoosa, there had better be a good reason for disturbing my slumber!”

Her eyes refocusing, she noticed a rather young earth pony messenger standing at her bedside, the very cap on his head trembling in fear.

“Forgive me, Your Highness, but I come bearing a message from…” the messenger paused, apparently lost for words. “Your Highness!”

“Yes?” Luna asked, irritated. “You’ve addressed me, what do you want?”

“No, no, you misunderstand, Your Highness. Your sister, Your Highness, wanted me to send you, Your Highness—um, wait, that’s not right—”

“My sister, Celestia, has a message for me?”

“Yes, yes!” the messenger nodded enthusiastically, and the two trumpeters who stood behind him nodded as well. “I’m so sorry, Your Majesty, Princess of the Night…”

“Would you please just tell me what she said?”

“Oh yes!” The messenger motioned to the Pegasus trumpeter, who unfurled his wing and flipped out a scroll. Barely catching it, the messenger nimbly rose to his hind hooves, unrolled the scroll and read aloud in a proclamation-like tone. “Our Royal Majesty, Princess Celestia of the Sun and Daylight, doth request an audience with Our Royal Majesty, Princess Luna of the Moon and Night, so they make partake in the morning custom of privately breaking the fast! Furthermore—”

“Wait,” Luna held up a hoof, cutting the messenger off. “She sent a messenger pony and two trumpeters to blast me out of bed this morning, all to tell me she just wants to have breakfast?”

“It seems to be that way, Your Majesty,” the Pegasus trumpeter replied, stifling a yawn with his wing.

Luna resisted the urge to clap her hoof to her forehead, instead rising out of bed and stretching her wings. “You tell my sister that if she wants me to have breakfast and interrupt the sleeping pattern that I must keep in order to run Equestria at peak efficiency, then she ought to get off her pasty-white plot and tell me so herself.”

“…ought to get off her…pasty…white…” the other trumpeter, who was a unicorn, repeated, scrawling Luna’s words on parchment.

“Don’t tell me you’re actually writing that down?” Luna said incredulously.

The unicorn trumpeter-turned-scribe looked thoroughly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I thought you were dictating—"

”Never mind that!” Luna extended her magic to snatch the parchment away and vanish it to parts unknown. “Just tell her I’ll be down in a few moments…please?” The messenger and trumpeters bowed slightly before dashing ungainly out of the room. The indigo alicorn sighed, turned away from the bedchamber doors and made her bed with magic, even though a servant would normally be in to clean the place later. She opened her closet, extracted her sparkling silver-blue shoes from the clutter, fastened the black moon necklace around her neck, and put on her tiara. After closing the door behind her, Luna jumped on the banister of the spiral staircase and rode on all fours down to the kitchens, giggling like a foal the whole time.

~~~

In a few moments’ time, Luna was sitting across the table from her sister Celestia, enjoying a simple breakfast of cooked oats and fruit imported from all parts of Equestria.

“I particularly enjoyed the welcoming party I had to wake me up this morning, dear sister,” Luna began.

Celestia just smiled and continued to stir her tea with her magic. “I didn’t think you’d wake up for silly old me. I had to get creative.”

“Sending a trio of bumbling stallions upstairs isn’t exactly creative. It just seems—”

“Like I didn’t want to get off my pasty-white plot?”

Luna’s eyes widened, and she stuffed her mouth with an apple to keep quiet.

Celestia took an irritatingly dainty sip of her tea and continued. “No need to worry, Luna, I’m not insulted. There was another reason I needed you awake this morning, though.”

“Lemmegueth,” Luna said thickly around the apple before chomping off a large portion and swishing it to her cheek to chew. “It’th the wedding?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. Yes, there will be some wedding planning today, but we also have ambassadors coming to speak in preparation for the Equestria Games next year.”

Luna groaned loudly and smacked her muzzle wetly into her oatmeal, frustrated. She loved watching replays of the Equestria Games she’d missed while on the moon; the spirit, the nationalism, and the pure thrill of watching ponies compete in sports was highly enjoyable for her. But the logistics of setting up such a huge event would be even more nightmarish than the royal wedding! There would be hours upon hours of pointless meetings as they decided which sports would be televised, discussed the massive security measures on transportation and crowd control, and where the Games would even take place.

“Luna, I know you’d much rather be sleeping than going to these meetings, but you and I need to present a united front as Equestria’s rulers for these ambassadors,” Celestia spoke softly, trying to hide the amused grin that grew on her muzzle from seeing her younger sister face-planted in oatmeal. “Please? For me?”

“Aw riff, fin.”

“Didn’t quite catch that.”

“All right, fine!” Luna sighed, sitting up and spewing oatmeal at Celestia, who couldn’t dodge the slew in time. She could barely suppress laughter as her older sister proceeded to daintily wipe off her face with a cloth napkin. This of course meant she barely had time to duck as a bunch of freckled bananas were lobbed across the table in her direction.

“Hey!” Luna cried, wiping the smashed, sticky globs of banana from her muzzle.

“You wanted a food fight, dear sister. Well, now you’ve got it!”

Foodstuffs of every kind went flying through the air of the dining chamber, Celestia and Luna giggling and snorting like they were fillies again the whole time. Luna half expected their mother to come charging in and demand an explanation for all the racket like the times so long ago. In those few minutes of entertaining abandon, she was almost able to forget entirely about meeting with the silly ambassadors, her encounter with Chrysalis, the royal wedding…all of it.

“Your Highnesses. Your Highnesses! YOUR HIGHNESSES!”

Luna paused mid-throw from hurtling an apple toward Celestia to look toward the voice’s source. An old unicorn who was graying at the withers stood in the kitchen door, looking thoroughly unamused by the spectacle that lay before him. Before Luna could speak, however, Celestia emerged from under the table, chunks of oatmeal sticking in her ethereal mane and somehow absent of her golden tiara.

“Stuffed Shi—I mean, Carrington! Do you have a message for us?”

“Indeed I do, Your Majesty,” the unicorn warbled while Luna ducked under the tablecloth to search for Celestia’s tiara. “The ambassadors from the Equestrian Games are at the front entrance as well as Duke Pompadourus from the Aviarian region.”

“What on earth is the Duke here for? Gryphons have been allowed to compete in the Games for years now; it’s not our fault they’ve sent so few athletes as representation.”

“I daresay, Your Majesty, that he seeks an audience in front of which he might beseech you for holding the Games in his region.”

Luna meanwhile had been searching everywhere under the table—how so much junk managed to get under there while their impromptu food fight had happened was beyond her. She pushed aside an antique soup tureen that by some miracle hadn’t been smashed—simply upturned—and found her sister’s tiara glittering faintly behind it. In her excitement and forgetting where she was, Luna snatched the tiara and smacked her head right on the underside of the table.

“OW, FOR THE LOVE OF TARTARUS!” she roared.

“Luna!” Celestia cried, taken aback by her sister’s uncouth outburst. “Go ahead, Carrington, let our guests in. Tell them we’ll join them in the Great Receiving Chamber in just a few moments.” Carrington padded away, and Celestia knelt down and lifted the tablecloth with her horn to stare at Luna, scandalized.

“Well?”

“Hehe,” Luna chuckled, smiling cheekily. “I found your tiara.”

Celestia’s eyes quickly flicked up to her forehead, evidently not noticing previously she’d been missing anything. She swiped the tiara from Luna’s outstretched hoof and gestured for her sister to crawl out from under the table.

“Old Stuffed Shirt wasn’t too pleased, huh?” asked Luna as the pair of alicorns sauntered out of the dining chamber.

“Carrington simply expects us to behave more appropriately. He holds us to a higher standard.”

“Why won’t you ever call him by his real name, dear sister?”

“He wants to be known by a more dignified name here at court.”

“But he runs a toy shop! His cutie mark is a teddy bear, for Tartarus’ sake—”

“Luna! Language!”
~~~

Oh, by her horn, Luna was bored out of her mind.

Duke Pompadourus had rudely barged in ahead of the ambassadors from the Games Committee, his feathered chest thrown out with an obviously overinflated sense of self-importance. He then began a diatribe filled with a list—he’d brought an actual list written on a scroll of parchment no less than five feet long that was clenched in his eagle’s talons—of reasons why the Aviarian region would be the perfect place to host the Equestrian Games. Celestia kept trying to interject with reasons why this wouldn’t be such a good idea, mainly that the expense of transporting all the ponies who wanted to attend the Games would be astronomical since not all were pegasi, but the Duke refused to yield.

At any rate, it’d been a good forty-five minutes into the Duke’s speech, and the most fascinating thing Luna found about him was that the feathers that ordinarily dangled over a gryphon’s face were fluffed and curled back at an impossible angle, just like his name suggested. Thankfully, she took her constant peering at him to be a sign of continued interest, so she could doodle a caricature of him without detection.

Honestly, how Celestia managed to keep a royal composure when she could clearly see the Committee ambassadors’ impatience and the Duke’s obliviousness was a miracle. Luna had broken her pose of polite disinterest—lifting her face from her hoof—to glance occasionally at her sister, and she swore she saw the pelt around Celestia’s cheeks grow infinitesimally pinker. She’d thought about trying to cut across Duke Pompadourus’ endless talking, but doing so would look somewhat rude since she clearly wasn’t paying much attention. Instead, Luna focused her attention on making the Duke’s caricature as unflattering yet true to life as possible. She was just curling his lion’s tail around to his beak to pick at one of his nostrils when Celestia finally spoke up.

“Duke Pompadourus of West Aviaria!”

By some miracle, the gryphon paused. “Yes, Your Majesty?”

“You have now unreasonably and quite rudely cut across nearly an hour’s time I was to spend meeting with the Games ambassadors, who have so patiently been waiting.”

Luna snorted derisively but quietly. She’d been watching the ambassadors in between doodling breaks, and they’d barely been patient. Two were pacing the floors, clearly trying to get the princesses’ attention, one alternated between checking various maps and her watch, and one cleared his throat so many times Luna had thought to offer him a menthol lozenge. Only one seemed okay with waiting, but that was only because she was intensely wrapped up in whatever game was on her laptop; Luna watched her punch the keys with staccato fury, whispering insults at the screen.

“Your Majesty, I was simply trying to make a case for my home region!”

“We are far from making any decisions on a host area for the Games, Duke Pompadourus, but we’ll certainly take your descriptive argument into account when that time comes,” Celestia said with a smile. The cool edge to her voice indicated that his time here was finished.

Duke Pompadourus got the message loud and clear, but nevertheless seemed hurt. “Well! I perfectly understand when I’m not welcome someplace!” He turned on his rear lion’s paws with a huff and stalked out of the chamber, his ludicrously curled and fluffed fore-feathers bobbing with each indignant step. “And don’t be surprised when I’m not in attendance at your niece’s upcoming nuptials as a result of my treatment here! Good day!”

The guards shut the chamber doors perhaps a bit harder than normal behind the gryphon; flapping noises were heard as he took off through one of the large gallery windows. Celestia stared at the doors for a long time before ushering the ambassadors in front of the two thrones where she and Luna sat.

“I deeply apologize for the delay. I wasn’t sure whether he was ever going to leave,” Celestia intoned humbly.

“It’s no trouble at all, Princess Celestia,” the head of the ambassadors, a dark brown earth pony, replied, bowing slightly and flicking his eyes over to the indigo alicorn sitting beside the white one. “Ah, and this must be your sister!”

Luna happened to look up at that moment and noticed everypony staring at her. Taking the cue, she rose from her throne to introduce herself. “I am Princess Luna of the Moon and Night, Alicorn Mare of the Darkness, co-ruler of the Diarchy of Equestria. Ordinarily I am not awake at such hours, but I wished to present a united front in the name of establishing the Equestrian Games.” Luna caught Celestia’s wink in her direction, indicating she’d done well. Mercifully, most of the proceedings were directed toward Celestia after that point, who admittedly seemed more in charge most of the time anyway. Luna added the final details to her caricature of Duke Pompadourus: turkey wings instead of a pair of majestic, well-preened eagle wings, nonsensical, unnecessary snarled teeth hanging out of his beak, and his fluffy namesake looking like it had been caught on the business end of a lightning strike. Smiling to herself, she rolled it up and set it next to the throne beside her, taking up another piece of parchment for more doodling.

Much to her surprise, words began scrawling across the page as soon as she unfurled it. They were not in her compact script, however; instead, they were in a cramped, ugly scrawl that dashed into being under an invisible quill.

Bureaucracy is the best way to start the day, isn’t it?

Luna’s eyes flickered around the chamber rapidly, wondering why one of the ambassadors would be writing on her parchment from several feet away. She glanced at the one who’d been banging away on her laptop just moments earlier, but the pegasus now raptly focused her attention on Celestia’s face, wings clasped firmly at her sides. Baffled, the princess continued to look around for anypony who could be the culprit when a flicker of green light outside the chamber caught her attention. Luna levitated her reading glasses onto the bridge of her nose under the ruse of pretending to read her “notes” when more words scratched onto the parchment.

Don’t believe that my return was for naught. I make good on my promises, Princess.

“Aunt Celestia! Aunt Luna!”

Celestia looked up from her conversation with the brown earth pony ambassador about advertising during the Games, thoroughly bewildered. “Cadence?”

The Receiving Chamber’s doors burst open and Cadence, multicolored mane askew and pink pelt disheveled, came barreling in at a most unladylike speed. She held a scrap of parchment aloft in her light blue magic, distraught. “There’s been a threat…my wedding…”

Celestia rose from her throne and the ambassadors parted the way for Cadence, who ran right up to her aunt and passed the scrap to her. The white alicorn’s violet eyes scanned over the parchment, mystified. “Luna, I can’t read this. You’re much better at archaic script than I am; can you translate for us?” She passed the scrap to Luna, who adjusted her reading glasses on her nose. This wasn’t an archaic script at all, but rather Arabic letters that were curled in upon themselves and rearranged as Luna glanced over them. Nevertheless, she had to squint to read them, being written in the same ugly scrawl on her own parchment.

“Dearest Princesses of Equestria, my subjects will soon descend upon your city of Canterlot to feed in earnest at the wedding of Princess Cadence and her fiancé. Any attempts whatsoever to repel us will be futile. You have been warned.”

Luna lowered the scrap of parchment from her line of vision to see everypony in the room paralyzed in shock. Princess Cadence was wide-eyed and cutting glances to Celestia, who for once wasn’t the embodiment of alabaster stoicism. Silence hung thick in the air until the white alicorn spoke sonorously in the Royal Canterlot Voice, causing the ambassadors to flatten to the floor in panic. Her rainbow mane snapped like a flag in a gale as she yelled.

“GUARDS! YOU ARE HEREBY SUMMONED TO THE RECEIVING CHAMBER IMMEDIATELY. ALL RANKS ARE TO REPORT, ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY! A THREAT HAS BEEN MADE TO OUR CITY. IT’S TIME TO DEFEND WHAT IS OURS!”

“Find Shining Armor immediately, Cadence,” Celestia whispered urgently to her niece. “This threat may come to nothing, but we will require his adeptness at shield-casting nonetheless.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!” Cadence cried, hurrying out of the room. The guards flung the doors open for her, and the deafening sound of brassy horns and thundering kettle drums reached everypony’s ears as every guard from all parts of Canterlot was being summoned to the castle. Inaudibly, Celestia ushered the panic-stricken Games ambassadors from the room to someplace presumably safe. Luna, however, remained rooted to the spot in front of her throne, staring at her parchment from what seemed so long ago. Words scratched across it once more, and Luna felt her heart drop lower and lower to her stomach as each one appeared.

Let the real games begin.

Author's Note:

A chapter of humorous shenanigans with castle servants ends rather dramatically with a threat to Canterlot. How exciting!
*I realized after writing this that Carrington's name and cutie mark combo ends up being a Care Bears joke--that was a total happy accident I don't know if he'll make an appearance later in the story or not; at any rate, I don't think I'll have to add an OC tag just for him.
*Luna+reading glasses=double the awesome. Seriously, someone ought to draw a picture of this if one doesn't exist already.
*Chrysalis is a sneaky wench, vandalizing court parchment from afar like that!
*If somepony would like to make cover art for this story as well as Naming Destiny, that'd be great. I'm not begging at this point, just asking

Comments

[Phantom Shadow]

Holy cow. This story is amazing. I am hooked and anxious to see what happens. Keep up the amazing work, mate.