//------------------------------//
// "All Ethics are Situational." 
// Story: Sunset Shimmer Goes to Hell 
// by scifipony 
//------------------------------//

White Stockings

Relating the events in your life, even when somepony like Princess Twilight Sparkle assures you that the information you share will not be read for decades by anypony who doesn't need to know it...  Well, it's still hard to do.  Don't think is isn't.  I wish to reiterate at the beginning to you who command my obedience that I will be as truthful as I can be, but I did see things differently than you ponies did.  I will tell it as I saw it.  Read whatever bias into it you like.

I first learned about Sunset Shimmer the way most Canterlot citizens did.  One winter, in the decade prior to the 1000th Summer Sun celebration, Celestia became suddenly and inexplicably ill.  There were rumors of sorcery and monsters in Blueblood Park, but, except for the splashy stories in the rumor rags, nothing was substantiated.  For months, nopony saw Celestia much and then only wearing a voluminous black cloak and hood that hid her form.  Nopony was allowed to approach closely.  Affairs of state were postponed. 

Nopony saw Celestia flying.  That alone was as newsworthy as it was gossip-worthy.  

The balcony of my townhouse in downtown Canterlot abutted the balcony of the Barnyard Bargains and Pony Prance department store magnate Stinking Rich on Neighlead Avenue, one street over.  Every so often, we had our breakfast and read the newspaper at the same time.  

This one morning, I had the Canterlot Inquisition floating in the air in front of me, my cup of Saddle Arabica Primo steaming in front of me.  For a few years, back then, publishers enchanted the front page so that if you shifted the paper side to side it showed what happened about a second before and after the still picture, making it look three dimensional and shockingly alive.

I said, "She had a foal?"  The long-distance hoof-tinted grainy black and white photo had clearly been taken from a rampart of the castle looking into the gardens.  The headline read, "Love Child?"

Stinky put down his newspaper loudly enough that I looked.  He was a slight stallion, golden-colored with a black ducktail mane peppered with gray.  Oddly, his magenta eyes matched well with the purplish-red of his velvet housecoat.  His orange juice looked unsampled.  "Stockings!  Why do you persist in reading that refuse?"

I held up the paper and animated it.  The yellow foal with an enormous flip in her red and yellow mane walked, head held high, eyes-tracking everything, beside the still-cloaked princess.  Her body language said she was in control, not Celestia.  

Stinking scoffed then laughed.  "I'd call you nouveau riche if it didn't make me think of my grandfather.  Seriously, Stockings, if you had been living in Canterlot for more than a year, as presumably that foalish reporter for the Inquisition should have been, you would know that Princess Celestia is renowned for not being a particularly skilled illusionist.  She could not have hidden a pregnancy 8 or 9 years ago.  The foal is not hers."

"Then why are they together?"

"I go with what I've heard and what is corroborated by the Canterlot Court Scribe."  He tapped the paper on the azurite terrazzo tile cafe table.  "She is apparently the ward of the royal physician Dr. Flowing Waters."

Stinking sounded interested in the foal.  In my line of business, information is as much a commodity as any other.  As a colt, I may have thought myself too smart by far to learn anything from teachers or adults, but trying to make a living and the ramifications of my special talent taught me to listen whenever anypony volunteered to educate me.  

Time isn't money.  Knowledge is. 

So I prompted, "But the princess is escorting around the ward of her physician?"

"Duke Pure Snow says Flowing Waters is one of the princess' Kitchen Council."

"The Duke.  Big white fellow?  Associated with the guilds?"

"The one."

"And I take it, this is an unofficial Privy Council?"

"Made up of interesting ponies all over Equestria.  Red Rambler—"

I gasped, not completely unintentionally either.  "The exchequer?"

"Look, Stockings, please don't take this as me dropping names."

I waved a hoof. "No, no."

"Just educating a neighbor and fellow businesspony."

I nodded. As I stated, I was good with that.  I wondered if I could monetize these connections; I'd remember them in any case.  

"Rambler and I attended Manehatten City College together.  He went into the crown service while I took over my father's shipping company, but we still play Queens and Horseponies each weekend."

Cards.  What was a few bits won or lost between financial wizards?

"Rambler pointed out that Flowing Waters is Celestia's conscience, and is responsible for the small tax levy we'll be paying to help the homeless this year."

"A quid pro quo that resulted in her tutoring his filly?"

"We're sure of it.  The tutoring theory is supported by royal notices in the Scribe, but—here is where speculation can lead you astray, as it did the Inquisition.  The Duke has noted that Princess Celestia seems preoccupied with the upcoming 1000th Summer Sun Celebration—"

"But that's not for—"

"If you've lived a millennium, what's a decade?"

I inhaled the aroma of my coffee.  "Good point."  I sipped it.

"Each time Princess Celestia gleefully goes out to battle some monster or deals with the aggressions of one nation or another personally, the peerage worries.  Now the Duke thinks she's worried.  The peerage theorizes the princess is training a replacement and will name this 'Sunset Shimmer' as the crown princess."

I worked really hard and made myself sputter.  "Th-that's preposterous!"  That something concerned Celestia about the 1000th Summer Sun Celebration would prove correct, however.

"I know it.  You know it.  The inbred aristocracy has more than its fair share of lunatics.  In any case, this Sunset Shimmer is not Celestia's 'Love Child'."

With mock drama, I pushed my paper off my table to rustle to the floor.  "Could I offer you some coffee?"

He smiled, showing his teeth.  "Not supposed to... but I do miss it so.  You would not tell my wife, would you?"

Not until the advantage of doing so was worth the cost.  I smiled back as I levitated out the pot and a china mug.

Sunset Shimmer did go on to become a "big deal"... for awhile... but only in Canterlot, and then only if you were a royal-watcher or heavily into the magic arts and sciences.  Her entrance exam into Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns made the news because vines overgrew the castle grounds and damaged the roof and upper windows of the Luna Tower—though the postmortems on that read her spells were mostly illusions—and Twilight Sparkle's literal explosion onto the scene some three years later minimized Sunset Shimmer's position as Celestia's first protégé further.  That Celestia suddenly had an alicorn "niece" in Mi Amore Cadenza, despite reputably being made an alicorn and not born one, cooled the succession issues the Duke had brought up.  The peerage would immediately recognize the alicorn as first in the succession over either commoner protégé.

Sunset had became mostly Celestia's spoiled prodigy "daughter" by the time I became a moth attracted to her flame.  Her imperious attitude, relying on her association with Celestia—even after her reputation had deteriorated in a local scandalous public spat with the princess—had ceased to be even fodder for rags like the Inquisition.  That didn't make her any less potentially valuable to me.  The princess still coddled her in a way she never did her second protégé who proved incredibly scholarly, boring, and almost entirely non-magical.  Sunset Shimmer understood magic.  She used it publicly, and had contacts within the palace from the princess down to the royal guard and constabulary that when she wasn't—

Let's say, impaired—

Well, she had contacts that she could and did manipulate boldly, often with the pony's agreement.  That made her a business asset I could use.  All I needed was a way to make her a customer of my high-priced products so we could exchange... favors.  

Successful business ponies always have multiple horseshoes in the forge.  I could wait.  

I did wait—until I heard about another high-level unicorn.  She was a young mare who ran the security detail for one of my Hooflyn-based business associates who went by the work name Carne Asada.  CA had told me herself that the security mare had come up the ranks through the Ham-Down Baltimare Mercantile Group as an obviously underage filly, but had become such a genius at battle magic that CA had snatched the filly from the ailing Group despite some reservations.  With CA's shipment, being nosy and in full self-interest, I couriered her a question.

"What reservations?"

Her answer: "Esta mare is way too ethical."

I remember being nonplussed, sitting with my courier's transcription on my balcony at breakfast.  When I waved off my winged employee, I saw my neighbor looking.  Or rather, my neighbors.  Stinky had his son Filthy—and this pink mare I later learned was his fiancée, Spoiled Milk—over for breakfast.  Apparently I'd whinnied in dismay. 

I asked, naively and innocently playing my assigned nouveau riche business pony persona to the hilt, "Can a pony be too ethical?"

The three looked at one another.  It was as if I had asked for the meaning of life.  Or maybe I'd asked the final exam question that the teacher had said she'd ask and my asking verified the question had to be a trick question.  

Maybe it was a trick question.

Unexpectedly, the fiancée spoke up, indicating the attraction wasn't simply good looks.  She said, "All ethics are situational," to which both Stinky and Filthy nodded uncomfortably. 

A profound statement. 

I actually visited the Canterlot University library where the very cordial librarian Miss Verdigris found me what she called "good books" on situational ethics.  It was the closest I'd ever been to college.  Book learning had never been my style, but what little I did read proved inspirational.  It validated my business model.  I pinned word of Carne Asada's security mare to the cork-board of important memories in my mind beside the list of Sunset Shimmer's useful attributes. 

Not that security ponies had a long lifetime in the profession.  As it was, Carne Asada's chile pepper-like temperament got the best of her.  CA succumbed to "legal" pressures she could have avoided had she listened to her security mare.  The resultant meltdown of her business lit the newspapers on fire for over a week, and the Hooflyn Royal Constabulary and Post Office literally on fire considering the photos that filled the magazines. 

Surprisingly, her security mare survived the conflagration unscathed, neither mentioned in any newspaper nor in reports my Hooflyn factor could dig up.  

When the mare showed up in Canterlot the next month, I was intrigued.