The Best of All Possible Worlds

by McPoodle

Chapter 12

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Chapter 12

---

Voltaire was dreaming, and for once it was a good dream.

He was sitting in his box at the Comédie-Française and basking in the applause of a thousand rapturous Parisians over the successful premiere of his new play, A Citizen of Canterlot.

In the play, Sparkle, rebellious daughter of Queen Celestia, fell in love with the British dragon Hornpipe, despite the fact that such a love was the only thing imaginable that the Queen had expressly forbidden. Hornpipe attempted to elope with Sparkle, but they were interrupted by Blueblood, the High Priest, who secretly wanted Princess Sparkle for his very own. Unfortunately, the battle between Blueblood and Hornpipe ended up revealing the reason for Queen Celestia’s ban: Sparkle was in fact nothing more than an enchanted yew tree, brought to life when the Queen learned that she could not have foals of her own. And wouldn’t you know it, Celestia arrived to tearfully lift the ban just as her adopted daughter went up in smoke before her very eyes...

It is the height of madness to expect a dream to make sense, but may I offer up a few notes: First, all the characters were played by humans in pantomime horse costumes, and yet by some miracle the audience was crying at the end instead of rolling on the floors. Second, the character of Sparkle was quite literally an amalgamation of Morningstar and Eveningstar Sparkle, being Morningstar on her right side and Eveningstar on her left side. Third, Celestia was a queen in this play and not a princess, because French drama of the time demanded that the love interest always be a princess. Fourth, if you think the plot is ridiculous, Voltaire thought so too, but of all the different kinds of plays he had tried to write in his career, doomed love stories always worked best at the Comédie-Française. Fifth, Voltaire had a bad habit of thinking he was being subtle every time he added a dig at organized religion to one of his works. And finally, an adult British dragon named Hornpipe, who is somehow small enough to romance a pony...did I mention that this was a dream?

Voltaire probably would have allowed the cries of “Author! Author!” in his head to go on for hours, but gradually he came to notice that the sounds of the audience were accompanied by an odd sort of “bwop!” sound, at first one at a time, but soon building to a virtual chorus of “bwop!”s.

The human realized that he was dreaming, that the sound was coming from outside of the dream, and woke up. Cautiously, he opened his eyes...

...only to see dozens, if not hundreds, of disembodied pairs of pony eyes floating above his bed. As he watched, yet another pair of eyes sprang into existence, accompanied by another “bwop!” sound.

~ ~ ~

The philosopher might have died of a heart attack right then and there, if he did not happen to remember a passing remark Eveningstar had made to him when she was originally showing him the features of his rooms: “Legally, we can’t prevent any curious pony with the ability from scrying you remotely, but this suite has been enchanted with an illusion spell so you will know when you are being watched.” It turned out to be the creepiest illusion spell ever, sure, but it did its job.

Voltaire leapt out of bed, slapped the white cap haphazardly on his head, and started waving his arms wildly through the illusory eyes.

“Get out! Get out! Get out!” he ordered. It took a few repetitions, but eventually he got all of his watchers to leave him alone.

And that was how Voltaire knew that the Princess had officially released word of his existence while he had been asleep.

---

Voltaire checked the door to see if he got another present, and found the rudimentary shaving kit he had asked Rossignol for before turning in a day ago. One top of that was his watch. It took a moment for Voltaire to even remember that he had lent the object to Morningstar’s son at their last meeting. Checking it, Voltaire saw that he had plenty of time to get to the council room before the start of the meeting he had a standing invitation to. Of course, that was assuming that Cognizant had not allowed the watch to run down, but that didn’t seem to be the case: not only was the watch wound, but it appeared to have been well-oiled.

Voltaire failed to note the fact that he had never lent the watch key to Cognizant.

Voltaire wondered a bit about Cognizant while he shaved himself. He wondered how often unicorns had earth pony children, and whether there was any sense of shame attached to that occurrence. Of course, with the power wielded by the Sparkle family, it was possible that no pony dared express their disapproval. And then there was the matter of the earth pony’s lack of a cutie mark. This fact could be seen as a form of rebellion by Cognizant, a refusal to take up the family business of political domination (or magic—in this world, they were evidently one and the same). If so, then he and Voltaire already had a lot in common.

After trading his nightgown for a suit, Voltaire began to make his way down the halls and up the stairs that led to the Princess’s council room. The suit he had chosen was a bright orange in color. Among humans, it was reminiscent of some of the more desperate courtiers at Versailles, but among ponies, it seemed slightly drab. Even Voltaire’s wig was slightly orange, thanks to a jar of tinted talcum powder that the Royal Taylor had included with his clothes earlier. For a pony who knew nothing of modern human fashion a couple of days ago, Rossignol was a remarkably quick and imaginative study. (Voltaire considered that he should probably start calling her “Nightingale”, since the French version of the name made him think of Émilie too much.)

“My little ponies, my little ponies, hm, hm, hm, hm, hm...”

Voltaire stopped in his tracks at hearing the faint singing of Princess Celestia. He cautiously backed up and took a peek into the small room where she was standing. The Princess had her back to him, and was studying a large unrolled scroll of paper, which consisted of multiple genealogical tables. She was using her magic to wield a feather pen to add new entries to the table, with an amused look on her face.

Voltaire stepped away from the doorway and sighed. He had been trying to think of a way to accomplish the goal that he believed she and he shared, to bring her metaphorically down out of the clouds so she could be treated as a deserving mortal instead of as an implacable force of nature. Well and good for an enlightened monarch, but she certainly wasn’t helping things any on her end by referring to her subjects as “my little ponies” and maintaining breeding charts of them where anypony could see.

If he was going to get through to these ponies, if he was going to get through to the Princess, he needed a way to bypass their emotions and appeal straight to their reason. He needed something clever. He needed something imaginative. He needed something...theatrical.

With a snap of his fingers, the human significantly hurried his pace.

Comments

[Destructorspace]

Oh god, why do I not see this ending well?

[Bloodpool]

A minor point: I'm fairly sure that one of the basic rules of scrying an object or a person is that you can't scry said object or person without having seen what you are attempting to scry beforehand. This means that only ponies that have seen Voltiaire in person will be able to successfully scry him. If they hadn't, they'd only see black when they attempted to do so.

[yutz]

1076674 because it wont

[Blank!]

The first part of this chapter was brilliant, absolutely brilliant... "Bwop" indeed! I especially liked "Voltaire thought he was being subtle"

As for the breeding chart, it's amazingly cute...

[nemryn]

1078261
I wasn't aware that scrying magic had well-defined rules.

[Tiroth]

1201021 It isn't well-defined so much as fairly consistent across most fiction that features it. Like most dwarves and elves being lesser copies of Tolkien's version.

[Prime 2.0]

I am struck by how cohesive this chapter is. I mean, in the sense that it opened with a theme that would later be used to advance the plot, and the chapter lasted just long enough for it to do so. At a cursory glance, the dream at the beginning may appear to just have been there to help recognition of Voltaire's plans at the end happen easier, but thinking about it more it may provide foreshadowing to specifics about the play he will write... which would make the dream the play's inspiration, which itself is plausible, and a subtle window into the creative aspect of Voltaire's character to accompany the more explicit descriptions of his play-writing career. That's the best I can express the feeling in words, anyhow; I'm sure that I'm actually leaving out quite a bit of what is contributing to the feeling of the length and content of this chapter intertwining and being so profoundly right. How long did you spend tweaking this chapter to get such an amazingly polished result?

Good lord, I still have 7 chapters left to read and the story is incomplete! If you kept the bar this high in what I haven't yet read(and continue to keep it high in what you will later write), you're poised to knock The Best Night Ever to second place for my favorite fanfic of all time.

[McPoodle]

1209516

I am strongly of the opinion that great art is something greater than the artist, that it speaks through him rather than from him.

I'm not saying that this silly little story is a masterpiece, but it is being received far better than anything else I have written. I've got a story on this site that I labored for months over. I can barely stand to look at it now, and the small number of thumbs up and favorites on it confirms that my opinion of the story is the correct one.

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" came to me on a lark. I toss off a chapter a week without the slightest effort. And it appears to actually be good, even when I re-read it with a critical eye.

You tell me this was a well-crafted chapter.

This chapter is an accident. I wrote Chapters 12 and 13 as one unit, and decided it was too long, so I picked an arbitrary point to split it up. It was never meant to be a separate chapter.

The dream is there because I wanted to portray every aspect of Voltaire's character. He was more famous in his lifetime for his plays and his philanthropy than for his philosophy or writing, so I knew I had to have some sort of play in there. Making it a dream was the only way I could figure out to pull this off.

Several of Voltaire's plays have ridiculous plots identical to the one in this chapter. Substitute Turks for ponies, and you essentially have Zaïre, his most famous play.

That being said, I did free-associate when I came up with the details, so some things make sense, and others do not. Morningstar and Eveningstar do make two sides of a single (Twilight) Sparkle. You have the "forbidden" loves Twilight has for both Celestia and Spike (remember after all who's supposed to be writing this story). Hornpipe is Spike à la Temeraire. I ran across a fairy tale of a princess made of wood somewhere or other, and combined that with one of my favorite stories of L. Frank Baum, The Enchanted Island of Yew, a parody of courtly romances, where a bored fairy gets three princesses to turn her into a mortal knight.

It was only after I came up with the dream that I decided that this would be the inspiration for "The Frog Princess of Fomalhaut". That story was the core around which all of "The Best of All Possible Worlds" was built, but I didn't know how I would introduce it until then.

Let's see...what else...The scenes of Voltaire vs. the giant eyes and Celestia working on a giant breeding scroll with the absurdly-obvious name of "My Little Ponies" just popped out of my subconscious--I thought they were goofy, so in they went.

---

tl;dr version: Yup, all carefully planned. I'm a genius, you know. It says it on my card:

25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m481pgu0KA1qi0ax6o1_500.png

[mebs]

How was Voltaire able to read the title of the scroll? I thought the hat didn't translate pony script. WAS he able to read it? I are confuse.

[McPoodle]

1625838

Heh, good catch. Fixed (now she's singing the show's theme song to herself instead of stamping it on her stationary).

[Organized Chaos]

1625838Although Genevieve managed to eventually read French after gaining the gift of tongues from the pencil.

[Ponibius]

Hmm, now I wonder why Celestia keeps genealogical records? A hobby perhaps or to serve a purpose?

[McPoodle]

1883649

Think of it as her "proof of purchase".

[Sozmioi]

1883649

Preparing for the return of Nightmare Moon, obviously. As previously suggested in this volume, even.

[FashionablyHospitable]

WTHay Celestia? BREEDING?

[LayDownHunter]

The whole 'bwop' business was quite hilarious, but the whole breeding chart business... I really don't know what to think of that...

[ferret]

4086400

Not a big surprise. Hard to keep the population from dying out when you cast a spell banning THAT

[Hurogmeten]

4259272
If you mean sex, no such spell was cast. The implication was that the spell was anti-masturbation.

[Kadigan]

9209923
I still hold it's anti-rape.