Royal Duties

by biasedeyes

Detailing a Dimensional Detour

Rainbow Dash cleared her throat. She turned, to say something to Princess Celestia, but paused, seeing the look on her face. She started walking back and forth in front of the mirror. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, five. Soon, very soon, she would ask Princess Celestia if they couldn’t go into through the portal and get Twilight now. She was sure that she could do it, just dive in through the mirror and fly Twilight through whatever was taking her so long to recover the Element of Magic from Sunset Shimmer, back before the portal closed. She closed her eyes briefly, imagining it, then opened them again so she wouldn’t run into anything. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Twilight stumbled through the portal, dazed and tired after saying goodbye to her (new?) friends. She was stunned by how similar they were, and also how her body no longer seemed to be in a stable position. She dropped back to the normalcy of four hooves and the regular(?) faces of her five friends(?) surrounding her. They were all glad to see her.

“Sunset Shimmer. Is she all right?” asked Princess Celestia.

Twilight replied that she was going to be just fine, and in good hands. It wasn’t until Rainbow Dash asked that she realized that nobody (nopony!) knew what hands were here (a silly mistake, she should have known, she’d blown her cover...).

Luckily Spike chose that moment to exit the portal from behind her (strange, when she could have sworn he entered just ahead of her). She turned and smiled to see her number one assistant as he lifted himself up onto two legs, flexing his claws happily (of the two of them, she thought, he would be more comfortable in a human body, and she in a dog’s, which was... ironic?).

Twilight’s friends followed her as she made her way towards her bedroom. She tried to explain what had happened beyond the portal, but her thoughts were muddled, and she really just wanted to sleep. Which was probably why she ended up turning around at just the right moment to run into some(pony).

She turned around to see a handsome (pegasus!) stallion smiling at her.

“We’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this!” he said, helping her up, before snapping back to attention and walking off.

His voice brought back memories of another world, where front legs were noodly arms, and bodies were tall reedy things, and of one noodly-armed reed in particular. Twilight blushed in spite of herself. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“He’s a new member of the castle guard. Flash Sentry, I think.” replied Cadance. Of course it was! “Why, do you know him?” she continued.

Did she? Was he the same here? Her friends were basically the same in both places, but was everypony? He seemed the same, and even that line reminded her of alternate world Flash...

“Not exactly.” she replied, surprising herself with the possessiveness in her voice. This wasn’t even the same Flash, probably!

Unfortunately, her tone also surprised Applejack. “Oooh. Somepony’s got a crush on the new guy!” she said.

“No, no I don’t.” Twilight flatly denied, but all of a sudden Rarity was in front of her, studying her expression. Twilight tried to turn her face away... was she blushing?

“Ooh, she does, she absolutely does!” Rarity crowed, after only a moment’s study. Twilight tried skittishly to meet Rarity’s eyes to deny it, but in the end opted for simply closing her own and trotting past Rarity. A denial in body language, if not in expression.

“Don’t be ridiculous!”, she said. She really shouldn’t be. “I don’t even know him!” That was, true, right? “He just...” How could she phrase this?

As it turned out, she didn’t have to. Pinkie Pie came to her rescue once again. As she rattled off an explanation that was accurate to the letter, Twilight became less embarrassed about the Flash Sentry duality. Her embarrassment for the laws of causality steadily mounted instead. As Pinkie Pie finished, she hazarded a question, not really expecting a sensical answer.

“How did you know that?”

“Just a hunch.” replied Pinkie, smiling widely at Twilight before bouncing off.

Twilight sighed and rolled her eyes. Remembering an identical incident in the other universe, she smiled. Trust a Pinkie in any universe to have uncanny intuition.

The next morning all the princesses, Prince Shining Armor of the Crystal Empire (or Twilight’s brother, Shiny), and their guests (namely, Twilight’s friends) breakfasted together, as much as nine ponies could when each had vastly different habits. By the time Twilight got to the table (she may have spent a little time before breakfast looking at a passage on the prismatic etherium in one of the books she’d brought along, in an unsuccessful attempt to determine how the alternatively-magical devices she’d found in the other universe worked), Rainbow Dash had already consumed most of a prime selection of all a royal breakfast in the Crystal Empire had to offer. Twilight hadn’t even finished selecting some of the remains of what had been piled onto the plates of Rainbow Dash and Spike (and also the rest of her friends and fellow royalty, who had served themselves as well, but whom she doubted had made a considerable contribution to the serving dishes’ emptiness) when Rainbow Dash finished, gave a loud belch, and announced her desire to go out and explore the Crystal Empire. Applejack, who up until now had been uneasily trying to eat daintily (which, for her, apparently consisted mostly of looking hungry and attempting to consume the food without having to put it in her mouth), hastily agreed with Rainbow’s sentiment, and sped up her own eating speed considerably, making an uneasy truce between eating with daintiness and for sustenance which ended with her leaving promptly with Rainbow while half the food lingered on her plate. Pinkie finished soon afterward, but stayed to trade pleasantries (well, more like non-sequiters) with the princesses. The princesses themselves seemed interested enough in her friends’ lives, but Twilight wasn’t sure it wasn’t just polite interest. Her brother ate as he normally did still with pretty atrocious table manners (better than Twilight remembered, but terrible for a prince). At least he wasn’t talking with his mouth open. Be that as it may, though, he didn’t talk much through the whole meal, though he seemed glad to see her. After Fluttershy finished her meal, she quietly inquired how the townsponies were doing after their scare with Sombra, to which Cadance replied proudly “Why don’t you see for yourself?”, which Fluttershy immediately did (she may have thought Cadance was commanding her to).

A little after that, Twilight realized that Pinkie had left too, and also that she was all out of fruit, which she replenished from the serving dish. Shining Armor stood up and took his leave (he was the captain of the Crystal Empire guard now), and it was just Twilight, Rarity and the (other) princesses.

Rarity was just ending the story of how she became Sapphire Shores’ go-to costume designer and single-hoofedly civilized the Diamond Dogs (Twilight remembered it a little differently). After she finished, and received congratulations from all three of the princesses, Princess Celestia embarked on a story about civilizing a race of her own (Aurochs, which, as Twilight understood from the story, were ancestor to the cows which roamed around Ponyville today). Twilight noticed that some of the refinement and restraint which the princess normally exhibited was gone, and she smiled widely as she recalled her exploits. Rarity, for her part, became more and more flabbergasted, eventually shooting Twilight an ‘I-believe-you-now’ look halfway through the story. When Celestia finished, Rarity was already wearing her enviable poker-face, which she used to congratulate Celestia in turn and excuse herself. Twilight hoped her opinion of Celestia hadn’t been too badly damaged.

Then it was just the princesses, and Luna told her take on the story of the Aurochs, which included a more critical view of Celestia’s actions. A little while in, Cadance began chiming in to justify or condemn decisions long since made, which quickly turned into gentle ribbing of both the princesses for their past mistakes. Luna’s story suddenly began to get a bit more exaggerated in turn.

“Then Celestia said to the new Auroch chief, she said,” exclaimed Luna, retelling the end of Celestia’s story, when she had solidified peace with the new Auroch government, “she said, I bull-eive we shall get on quite well together, now that we can respect each other’s cow-stoms. I can horn-estly say that I wish you a reign of many mooooo-ns!”

All three princesses broke out in laughter, and Twilight herself had to crack a smile. Luna’s ending of the story matched perfectly with Celestia’s, so much so that she could almost imagine... but no, Celestia wouldn’t do that. She turned her attention back to her waffles.

Twilight was just swabbing up the last of her syrup with the final piece of waffle (she had found that the waffles absorbed syrup so well that cutting them along the ridges, as she usually did, was no longer practical. Luckily, since they absorbed syrup so well, bisecting the ridges to split each cell into four presented no spillage problems. Unfortunately, her waffle had also more or less reached the syrup saturation point, making swabbing a challenge.) when she heard Celestia request that she join them when finished, and saw the other princesses standing off to the side of the table. She popped the last bit of waffle into her mouth and followed them into an adjoining room.

It was a room with a small table and a nice view of the empire stretching below them. Celestia’s magic held the door open for her, and shut it after her.

The ponies found their places around the table, and Celestia looked at them all in turn before speaking.

“All of you know, to some extent, the reasons that I call you here. First though, I’d like if you could fill us in on what happened to you in detail, Twilight” she said, turning toward Twilight and speaking to her in a way which made Twilight giddy with excitement.

Twilight did her best to relate exactly what happened on her trip through the mirror. The few glances she spared to her audience seemed to indicate that they were surprised at what had happened, but mostly Twilight focused on the middistance and did her best to process the weird events of yesterday and explain them in an understandable way. Sunset Shimmer had stolen her crown and fled to the alternate dimension. When Twilight followed her, she found her appearance changed to one more suited to the plane. After working through the resulting disorientation, she had figured out that the crown had been taken into custody by local law enforcement, and would be awarded only to a pony (or ‘body’) chosen by a vote of every(one). In order to avoid disrupting local customs, she had participated in this rite which gave strange precedence to the uninformed, and briefly described the challenges she faced. Fortunately, there were alternate versions of her friends behind the portal (also, somewhat fortunately, no alternate version of her around to blow her cover, but still... she wished she’d gotten to talk to alternate her...), and they recognized her and helped her as best they could. After Twilight had earned the crown, Sunset Shimmer defied the local tradition to take the crown regardless, and with it quite a bit of power, but Twilight had been able to summon a specter of her own powers with her (alternate?) friends. Finally, she found herself explaining how she had looked up at her (true?) friends and the princess after falling back to newly restored hooves and stopped, blinking. Three horned, winged ponies stared at her.

“Now that you’re finished, I feel I owe you a more... complete explanation than I gave your friends.” Celestia said. She looked nervous, not looking directly at Twilight, and Twilight realized that she was still incredibly embarrassed about a mistake which was not millenia old, and was still very much. Twilight was struck with the sudden fear that if Celestia gave her her own kingdom, that this sort of embarrassment could be hers, quite soon.

“The mirror is a relic from before Luna’s banishment, a portal to the land of the ‘humans’...”

“Humans?” broke in Twilight, “I thought they were called Bodies!”

“In any case, my sister was always better with such portals,” continued Celestia, “so it languished in her absence. I left it that way for hundreds of years. It was only recently, when Sunset evinced an interest in such things, that I brought it back out.”

“We traveled together to the land of the humans. Luna had told me they were an intelligent race, but savage... It was only when we arrived that I truly got a taste of how savage they were. Sunset and I used magic to cloak ourselves as humans, and set out to learn something of them... though their horses are no match to us for intelligence, they treat them as nothing... use them as transport while beating them. Even worse, they... attack their own kind, as ponies used to do, but even more savagely, and over differences as small as coat color. The fact that you saw so many different colors while you were there is a good sign, perhaps their race has grown more civilized.”

“After we returned, when Sunset Shimmer expressed her desire to join them and learn their ways... I tried to break the portal, to tear the gateway away from the other world. It... didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. The portal still worked, though only on certain moons. My enchantment spell became entangled with the mirror as well, as you experienced. Unfortunately that meant Sunset no longer needed my permission to adopt their form; she escaped to that dimension, and I couldn’t find her. That was several decades ago... I actually brought the portal here because I had hoped that she had mellowed with age, and that we could go to her for some help, as she is a formidable magic user... She must have sensed your element through the portal... The fact that she’s still so young means that I either slowed the passing of time beyond the portal when I broke it, or humans live much longer than I thought.”

“Which brings us to the question I wanted to ask” said Luna. “Tell me, have you, the rightful bearer of the element of magic, ever known it to have such power, by itself?” Luna asked Twilight.

“Well, no, but Sunset Shimmer said it gained power by passing through the portal.” Twilight replied.

At this, Luna’s eyes narrowed, and she began to tap her chin with her hoof. After a moment she began to speak, slowly.

“Tell us,” she asked Celestia neutrally, “do the Breezies still migrate through Equestria?”

“Of course!” said Celestia, seemingly taken aback by such a simple question, though Twilight knew precious little about breezy migrations, except from breezy tales. “Their last time through was six years ago, I always instruct the weather crews to provide the correct conditions! Their next migration should be...”

Luna dismissed her with a hoof wave, tension leaving her expression. “That is good... I think that Sunset Shimmer has unwittingly uncovered something we could not, namely what exactly happened to your portal.” Luna’s expression suddenly darkened, and she slipped into the Royal Canterlot Voice “THOU HAST CREATED A BASTARD UNIVERSE BETWEEN THE PORTAL’S TERMENI! A FRAGILE REALM WHICH SWAYS TO OUTSIDE INTERVENTION! WITH COUNTERPARTS FOR THOSE FROM BOTH DIMENSIONS!”

Luna caught the stares of the other ponies at her outburst and took a deep breath, quieting herself before continuing. “A simple portal, even to a dangerous dimension, might be kept safe if kept secret. There are ways to shield such things from prying eyes, though my sister has never been adept at that category of magic.” she muttered to herself. “For example,” she turned, adressing Celestia, “if thou had managéd to make the portal closèd with the phases of mine moon without invoking thine shadow world the problem might be solved.” Luna hissed the words ‘shadow world’ as though they were worse than an insult.

“A portal like this though, through an intermediate world... the central world tugs at the fates of each dimension, trying to pull them both into itself, and ultimately, together.” Luna continued. “Really, thou shouldst have known this might come to pass.” she muttered at Celestia sullenly.

“I did... but, other concerns... it didn’t seem important at the time.” said Celestia lamely. She held her head up beneath her sister’s scorn, but her cheeks were flushed red with embarrasment, the ear not covered by her hair folding back.

“In any case, this is not so much of a disaster as it might be, and I shall strive to resolve it posthaste.” amended Luna, softening in the face of her sister’s discomfort. “It is good I was informed so soon, and I believe there are more pressing matters which my sister has called us here to attend to.”

“Ahm, yes.” said Celestia, recovering. “Actually, Cadance can introduce this better than I can...” she continued, looking to Cadance.

Cadance straightened and began to talk about troop deployments all over Equestria, and what it meant for national security. That’s when Twilight found out that her ascension had stressed Equestrian politics to the breaking point.