• Published 10th Oct 2012
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Whom the Princesses Would Destroy... - GhostOfHeraclitus



Behind the scenes of a perfectly normal visit to Canterlot lies chaos. Also, custard.

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Chapter 4

It was now much much later. So late, in fact, that the term 'early' was beginning to take precedence. Doctor Golden Dawn dabbed the cotton swab held in her practiced telekinesis into some more tincture of iodine and applied it to her squirming patient.

"Ow," said Dotted Line, wincing. The attendants who had arrived in the aftermath had managed to separate him from his saddlebags and the thick silver chain that signified his office, but no power in Equestria could get the, now quite battered, thermos out of his hooves. The thermos was his link to a better, saner world. A world with tea in it. A world with sunshine, laughter, and the distant but invigorating prospect of a scone. But no jam. He had, he thought in the vague way of the recently concussed, gone quite off jam. And custard. And when he got home, which should be any week now, his pantry would have to undergo a culling. Just in case.

"Please hold still."

"It would be easier to—ow—hold still if you weren't doing—ow—that all the time," said Dotted resentfully. He was the last patient and the only one who required any particular medical attention. The Board had, at most, a scrape or two, but were otherwise quite unharmed. They had stayed in the impromptu triage center in the corridor just outside room 7a just long enough for various species of ichor to be brushed out of their coats and had long since departed. Apparently, as was customary after a successful dimensional untorquing, they had departed for a meal of stewed broccoli, which was traditional for reasons too obtuse to explain, and as many potently alcoholic drinks as they could stomach, which was traditional for reasons too obvious to explain. Dotted, still a bit fuzzy in the head, made a mental note to send the Board a case of his family's very finest private reserve. They had deserved it.

"Serves you right, Dotty. What on Celestia's own Equestria were you doing charging a big monster like that?" replied Golden, giving him a look somewhere between concern and annoyance. They had known each other for a great many years, and this wasn't the first time she had to piece him together after a brilliant plan turned out to be not quite as brilliant as originally thought.

"Seemed like—ow—the thing to do at the time. You know. For—ow—Equestria! That sort of thing. Civil servants take the same oath as the Royal Guard, you know. To serve the sisters two, and all that."

"Yes, but you weedy bastards aren't chosen for martial prowess, now are you?"

"That's some—ow—bedside manner you have there, Goldie."

Doctor Golden Dawn gestured, grandly, around the hallway. As grandly as was possible, anyway. The corridor was largely quite unharmed, but there wasn't much to gesture at even in the best of times. Drab institutional walls. Uninspired and uninspiring objets d'art. A wardrobe that had seen better days and, possibly, better centuries as well. As she understood it, the battle never left the dimensionally transcendent dorm room, but at one point a tentacle broke out from behind door 7a and scooped the unfortunate wardrobe up. Once it turned out not to be food, it was ejected back out. With some force.

"Do you see a bed here? No. You do not. So, shush. You are lucky to be alive."

"We did banish it in the end, you know."

"No. Professor Abacus banished it."

"I helped!"

"How, pray tell?"

"Providing tactical distraction at the opportune time, of course."

"You mean by being chewed on?" said Golden tutting as she inspected the many scuffs and scrapes across her friend's head and shoulders. "Well that seems to be it. Report any nausea, craving for blood and/or flesh, dizzy spells, and dreams of vast sunken cities, and try to hold off on fighting any more fell gods for at least forty eight hours."

Dotted grinned weakly and gestured towards a grotesque protuberance on his left temple. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

"What? Oh. The brain-worm of The Disemvoweled One? Well it's dead, the ether took care of that, so it'll do you no harm. Not that there was that much brain for it to feast on, of course. Wait a few hours, and it will separate on its own. Should be painless."

"And I'm supposed to carry the damned thing on my head? Why can't you remove it?"

"I can remove it, Dotty, but not without taking along with it a portion of your skull."

"I'm quite attached to my skull. Sentimental reasons, you understand."

"I assumed as much."

"So I get to keep this thing on my head until tomorrow? I look ridiculous!"

"For you that's a high bar to cross, but yes, a bit more than usual. I guess we could convince the good professor to part with a specimen. Attach it to your other temple. You know. Symmetry," said Golden, grinning wolfishly. Dotted, in turn, replied with a glare that said that, school chum or not, Golden was perilously close to the edge. She merely grinned wider still. Much like Leafy, it had been decades since Dotted's death glares had any appreciable effect on her. Well, not entirely true. They did make her nostalgic. Before the situation could escalate, possibly into an exchange of embarrassing college anecdotes, they were interrupted by Leafy Salad who ran into the hallway as if the assembled hordes of Tartarus were after him.

"Dotty, we got—what's that on your head?" he said.

"My pet brain worm. I shall call him Jeff," Dotted replied.

"It's female, actually. The males are microscopic. The term, I think, is extreme sexual dimorphism," said Golden, primly.

"Jeffina, then," said Dotted shooting her a look. "So. Leafy? What have we got? Please don't tell me it's a problem. I don't think I can handle any more."

"No, no we got—what happened here? What happened to the wardrobe?" he asked gesturing at the stricken thing, now more kindling than furniture.

"It got damaged in transit," replied Dotted, his expression deadpan.

"Transit?"

"Yes. Transit from right there where it was standing, to that far wall there. Short trip, lots of damage. You know how it is, you order a parcel from across Equestria and it's always in the last leg of the delivery that some bright mailpony decides to feed it through a woodchipper. Similar thing here, only tentacles were involved. Well, one tentacle, but it was quite a big one."

Leafy looked worried. He turned to Golden, who was suppressing, with considerable difficulty, a grin and asked: "Is, uh, is he okay?"

"Physically? He's fine, modulo the odd scrape or bruise," Golden replied grin having finally won. "Mentally? He was like this when I met him, I'm afraid."

Dotted glanced from one of his oldest friends to another and briefly considered murder. He had a way with words. The eulogies at their respective funerals would be quite moving, he'd make sure of it. Finally, reluctantly, he gave up on the idea. He quite liked Leafy's wife and, now that he thought about that, Golden's marefriend too. They didn't deserve it. Instead he settled on:

"He's right here, you know, and he'd quite like for you two to stop your little routine. Leafy, will you please tell me what it is we got? An award? Free donuts at Pony Joe's? Court summons? A complementary set of Wonderbolts memorabilia? The advanced reader's copy of Daring Do and the Styigium Scepter? Oh, please let it be that last one."

"A letter. Well, transcript of a letter from Twilight Sparkle to Her Highness. Just arrived by dragonfire."

"A stirring tale of friendship problems conquered, no doubt?"

"A, uh, change of plans," Leafy replied, with the air of someone building a house of cards. On quicksand. During an earthquake.

Dotted covered his eyes with a hoof. He took a breath, cradled his battered, scratched, and dented thermos and said "Okay. Hit me."

"She's going to be staying with her parents during her visit."

Leafy Salad was impressed. Dotted managed to curse without drawing breath or repeating himself for four whole minutes before he had to resort to making up brand new and especially foul oaths and curses. After a while, the stream of invective petered out and Dotted merely sat in fuming silence. Eventually, he seemed to plateau at some new baseline of anger, where he appeared normal, even quite calm, with only the errant twitch or tic betraying how close he was to taking hostages.

"Okay," he said. "Is their house covered with chocolate fondue?"

"No."

"Any other sort of comestible?"

"No."

"It is in Equestria?"

"Uh, yes."

"Not inhibited by any sort of malign spirit?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Brilliant! At last, something goes according to plan. Broadly speaking, obviously. Very broadly. How's the security situation?"

For the first time today, Leafy actually look relieved.

"Excellent. They are expecting Her Highness, Princess Cadence to visit in roughly the same period, so all the usual precautions are already in place. Night Light and Twilight Twinkle have been briefed, and they know how to act, not to open parcels, how to deal with the press, and that sort of thing."

"A royal visit too? That's tricky. Why is she there?"

Leafy looked perplexed for a moment, then looked at Golden and tried to gesture surreptitiously at his head. She shrugged.

"Because," Leafy began in a puzzled voice, "she's their daughter-in-law? Remember? The wedding? You got drunk and then we all shared a cocoon until it got blown up by weaponized love? Are you sure that brainworm didn't, uh, get to the creamy center, as it were?"

"Pretty sure," Dotted replied. "Sorry. It's been a long day. I do know she's their daughter-in-law, I was just wondering why she's there now of all times. Doesn't matter, I guess. Right. Well it all seems sorted. I think I'll head to the landing platform. See it all through. Make sure Twilight gets here safely. After that it's all in the hooves of the Princess. Metaphorically speaking. After all, what can possibly go wrong now?"

Leafy winced. He was not, by and large, a superstitious pony, but it was impossible to live as long as he has without developing a firm belief that the universe listened for sentences like this. After all, just as you think you see a light at the end of the tunnel...

"Dotted! Thank Celestia I found you!"

...it turns out to be an oncoming train. And the train is on fire.

Spinning Top rushed into the room. If she looked bedraggled this morning, now she had reached the level of being utterly wrecked. Utterly wrecked, by the standards Spinning used, meant that a minute examination of her mane, possibly by using a magnifying glass, would reveal the need for it to be brushed.

"Dotted!", she said again, "you simply must—what's that on your head?"

"Jeffina."

Spinning looked desperately at Golden and Leafy Salad who, in turn, made a placating gesture with his hooves. The sort that, between the ponies that knew Dotted well, means something along the lines of, "He's no more crazy than usual. Just go with it."

"Right," she said, looking back, uncertainty clinging to her words. "You simply must talk to the reporter from Equestria Daily. There's all sorts of wild rumors going around about how Ms. Sparkle is some sort of starchild: half-alicorn, half-dracoequus, and half-dragon. I'm delaying everything with the promise of a press conference that will reveal all, but I thought to give Equestria Daily an exclusive first. With luck, that'll get the less scrupulous reporters to try to get the contents of the interview by subterfuge. It's going to be a mess. That should buy us enough time to run damage control. But before we do that, you have to squash all the crazy rumors before they get really out of hoof."

Dotted line smiled the brittle, cheerful smile of somepony who's not merely on the edge, but is actually dancing and capering on it.

"Oh no. We can't have that. Fine, where is this reporter?"

"Just down the hall, uh, the thing on your head?"

"Jeffina, yes."

"Right. Jeffina. Can you leave it here, please?"

"No chance. Sentimental reasons, as Golden Dawn here can tell you. Where I go, she goes!"

With these words, Dotted sauntered down the hallway, rounded a corner and came face to face with a green-coated and orange-maned earth pony mare. She had been named Hot Scoop by affectionate, if unwise, parents. The moment she clapped eyes on him she launched into a breathless sentence that had clearly been prepared in advance:

"Hot Scoop for Equestria Daily, Mr. Secretary. Do you have any comment for our evening special edition regarding the shocking allegations that—What in the wide wide world of Equestria is that thing on your head?"

Dotted beamed at her, his smile guileless, and his eyes soaked with innocence. The look, in short, of a liar, born and bred.

"Well—may I call you Hot? Yes? Thank you—It's a decorative brain leech, my dear Hot. Avant-garde body-modification fashion. All the rage. I am surprised that a pony of your caliber—no, no I don't say that to all reporters—hasn't heard of it. Why, I personally heard tell that no less an authority than Photo Finish declared decorative brain leeches to be THE trend for this season. And you haven't heard this from me, you understand, but Lady Cloudsdale..." and so it went, the original question all but forgotten. After all, you can write about Twilight Sparkle being Discord sent back in time to stop himself any day of the week. Fashion trends, on the other hand, are precious perishable goods. While most ponies decried the frivolity of the modern press, Dotted relished it.

* * *

It was now much, much, much later. Late enough that Celestia had raised her sun. Dotted peered at the glowing orb hidden between a few errant wisps of cloud. His slitted eyes were dull and, frankly, so was his mind. It had been a very long day. The words of the Prayer To Greet The Sun came to his mind, unbidden. It's amazing how the things from your foalhood stay with you, whether you want them to or not. He shook the words aside. She didn't want to be worshiped, he knew. Even if she deserved it.

He settled back onto the marble bench, hugged the dented, scarred, slightly slimy and tragically empty thermos to himself, like a foal might a stuffed animal, and leafed through his papers. A report from the foreign office explaining that, with aid from the PM, they'd managed to convince the rest of the world that, no, Twilight Sparkle isn't going to be coming for them in a cloud of numinous flame. A report from Leafy that all the security precautions were in order. A copy of Canterlot News Nightly with, and here Dotted allowed himself a smile of triumph, the headline, "FASHION SENSATION SWEEPING THE NATION." The report on Twilight, Lovechild of Discord, was pushed back onto page seven. Three column inches, sandwiched between an ad for liniment and last week's crossword solution. The smile became a grin.

Dotted put the papers back, and glanced around. He was on a marble bench that some thoughtful architect had left near the doorway into the palace proper, just on his right. On his left was a delicately arched bridge that connected the palace to the landing platform. The platform itself was a disk of stone held aloft by a cantilever of delicately sculpted marble and, Dotted knew, a few dozen carefully threaded spells. The center of the disk was kept bare for the sky chariot that would bring Twilight Sparkle, but the rim was occupied by an astonishing number of Royal Guards, each scanning the sky with practiced eyes. Far above, Dotted knew because he arranged for it, a wing of the best fliers in the Guard was patrolling. And somewhere, hidden from view, was a number of unicorn mages particularly skilled in the more sneaky forms of magic keeping an eye out for surprises. And, of course, the Princess would be here at any moment. Both of them, in fact. Luna was staying up late. Dotted yawned. So was he. Very very late.

He sighed. A very long day, but everything is finally going to go well. As long as he didn't think of what was ahead. Another day of struggling with the damned treasury. Fresh idiocy from Sky Slicer. Celestia knows what else. He pushed those thoughts aside. He'll think about that later. For now, he'd just bask in success. Of a sort. He pulled the thermos closer and waited. He'd see it through.

* * *

Twilight stepped off the chariot, pleased that she'd get to see her beloved mentor. The weather was wonderful, if a bit cold this early and this high up, and she had plenty of time. Perhaps even enough time to take a stroll along the streets of Canterlot itself and buy...what was it, again, a decorative leech? Rarity had burst into the library just moments before the chariot arrived, clutching an early edition of Equestria Daily, and talking incredibly fast about keeping up with some trend or other. Unfortunately, this was after the all-important First Coffee, which Twilight needed to be in any way equine, but before the almost-as-important Second Coffee, which Twilight needed to be in full use of her faculties. As a result her friend's words were a bit blurred. If it weren't for the bag of bits Rarity had pressed into her unresisting hoof, Twilight would half suspect she dreamed it all up. Seaweed wraps she understood, and even mud baths to an extent, but decorative leeches? Fashion is a funny thing.

She took a moment to thank the pegasuses pulling the chariot and wave at the guards that awaited her. There really did seem to be an awful lot of them. She trotted over the bridge towards the palace, the guards just ahead and just behind her, scanning the sky. Raising her eyes slightly to admire the early morning sky, she noticed a flight of pegasuses just overhead, flying in lazy circles. Funny. It seemed early for flight practice. She put those thoughts aside. Maybe she was just used to Rainbow Dash and her deep and abiding love of naps.

Not far from the door she saw a pony supine on a marble bench. It was a short, but heavily built gray-coated unicorn stallion with a frazzled black mane and a complex expression that managed to find room for frustration, misery, relief, and dejection all at once. One hoof cradled a battered, scratched, scarred, slimy, and altogether abused thermos, as one would a foal and another held the pony's head, as if its owner was half-expecting it to burst.

Twilight felt sorry for the poor fellow. Normally, she wouldn't stop for anything or anypony when on her way to see Celestia, but there was something about the intensity of expression that arrested your attention. Besides, this gave her an excellent opportunity to work on her cheering up technique. Friends cheer up their friends when they are down. She didn't need a Friendship Report to figure out something that simple. Thus, it followed that to be a good friend, Twilight would have to learn how to cheer somepony up.

In Ponyville, however, practice was exceptionally difficult. Pinkie never let anyone be in a bad mood long enough for Twilight to make even the most basic of checklists, let alone set up a proper experimental protocol. Pinkie herself was rarely in a bad mood and Twilight felt, quite strongly, that cheering her up was for, ah, advanced students. Very advanced and exceptionally brave. Practicing basic cheering up on her would be like trying to learn mountaineering on Mt. Canterlot itself, viz. not advisable in the slightest. Not that this fact stopped the Cutie Mark Crusaders, of course. Oh no. Luckily the tree sap held them fast to the cliff face long enough for Rainbow to come and rescue them.

Well, here was a pony who embodied the very ideal Form, as Broadwithers would put it, of a bad mood. The perfect subject! Even better, Pinkie was safely distant in Ponyville. She was still hard at work trying to make courgette muffins taste anything but awful. And best of all, Twilight had a perfect cheering up line. From a book, even! Admittedly it was one Rarity was much taken with, but that's not important right now. Seize the moment!

She approached the pony, and tapped him awkwardly on his back. "Uhm, there, there," she essayed on general principle. That that was what ponies said when they wanted to cheer someone up, wasn't it? "Chin up." That was another one that mystified her, but it seemed to be the sort of thing you said under the circumstances. Now, she judged, it was time for her to let loose with the really cheery line. She could hardly wait. "Tomorrow is another day, right?" She paused, quite interested to see how the Cheering Up effect would manifest itself.

The pony was quiet for a moment, and then lifted his head, gingerly, to regard her with eyes that were twin pools of misery and dread. "Oh, sweet merciful Celestia," he wailed, "not another one!"