Chapter 7: Show and Tell
Luna knocked lightly on Sara’s door at 6:30 am. She had just returned from raising the Moon in Equestria.
“Give me a second,” came the voice on the other side of the door. “And don’t even think of picking the lock.”
Luna waited a few moments, and then Sara emerged in her school uniform, opening and closing her door in quick succession before locking it again. “Did you peek?” she asked with a scowl.
“I wouldn’t even think of such a thing,” the princess replied, her muzzle held high. “Now eat your breakfast so we can get started.”
The human girl and the ageless pony descended the stairs together. Behind them, on the other side of the locked door, Sara’s room continued to be decorated in the same style it had been for most of her life: pink walls decorated with six-inch tall stickers of Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Princess Luna, showing how they all looked as of Season 1 of the show. Added to this were numerous posters, most of them from the poster book that Hasbro put out: the Wonderbolts, Rainbow Dash breaking the color barrier, Celestia raising the sun, the dragon migration, the Great and Powerful Trixie, the cover of the Elements of Harmony book. Finally, and prominently featured, were posters of Luna: her reading to the Cutie Mark Crusaders during Nightmare Night, and one contrasting her with her former persona of Nightmare Moon. A dream-catcher, died midnight blue, was hung over her bed.
Luna rode to Sara’s elementary school the same way she had rode to her house: on top of Charles’ car. As before, she used a full invisibility spell, to avoid attracting attention.
Sara got out of her car, insulated sandwich bag in hand. She waited until she heard Luna land beside her before speaking. “Remember, roll call ends at 8:40. Don’t show up late and make me look stupid.”
“Princesses are always on time,” a slightly echo-y voice answered her. There was a sudden downdraft of air, and she was gone.
“Um…good luck,” said her father. “In…whatever it is that you’re doing?”
Sara sighed. “I’m not telling you for your safety…and mine. But I’ll tell you all the details tonight. Deal?”
Charles Randall smiled. “Deal.”
A couple blocks away from the school, Luna found The Museum of the Spanish Empire. She found it by following her ears, because broadcasting from a tinny speaker was the same griffon mating dance she had last heard 1112 years ago, at the marriage of Gunther and Gudrun.
A plaque was mounted on the outside wall of the museum beside the speaker. There was also a small television monitor behind bullet-proof glass, playing a video that showed a man and a woman in strange costumes enacting a ridiculous dance. They looked like a pair of chickens.
Luna read the plaque:
The Canary Islands are an archipelago located 100 kilometers (62 miles) off the coast of Morocco. In ancient times, the chain was also known as the “Fortunate Isles”, based on its perfect placement as a supply depot for long ocean voyages. The islands were first settled millions of years ago during the last Ice Age, when water levels dropped enough for people to walk over on a land bridge that was later inundated. It is believed that these original settlers were contemporaries with the builders of Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments. As such, the Canary Islanders would be the last descendants of these peoples, as they were subsumed on the continent by the ancestors of modern Europeans 4,000 years ago.
The islands somehow managed to avoid being visited by the Greeks or Romans, and remained untouched until 1402, when they were discovered by Jean de Béthencourt, a French explorer working for Castilian king Henry III. Béthencourt declared himself king of the islands, with all of the inhabitants as his own personal slaves. This led to widespread revolt. In 1448, Jean’s nephew and successor Maciot Béthencourt sold the islands to Portugal in return for military support to put down the rebellion. What instead happened was that the armies of both Portugal and Castile invaded in support of rival branches of the Béthencourt family, fighting a vicious civil war for control. Both sides conscripted the natives into their armies. The war only ended in 1495, not because one side had captured more islands than the other or because any Béthencourts has survived to claim the throne, but because the Canary Islanders had been slaughtered, down to the last man, woman and child. At this point, Portugal gave up, and the Canary Islands were re-settled by Castilians.
During the near-century when Western Europe was in contact with the unique Canary Island civilization, not one attempt was made to understand it. Inhabitants were made to learn Spanish or Portuguese instead of anybody attempting to learn or document the Canary Island language and with the frequent fires inevitable in warfare, any traces of a written language or literature were obliterated. But everyone, be they Castilian, Portuguese or French would-be king, thought that one dance they did was really neat.
Today, the Canario song and accompanying dance are the only traces of Canary Island culture to survive. So, if this song pleases you, please commit it to memory, so that this last aspect of a forgotten people may live on.
8:40 am.
The classroom Sara Randall attended was made up of half third-graders and half fourth-graders, an arrangement that hadn’t been tried in this school in at least a century. But when half of a school’s student population disappears without a trace, and the government decides to respond to this crisis by cutting education funds in half, you do what you must.
“With roll call out of the way, it’s time for Show and Tell. Sara, it’s your turn this week. What do you have for the class?”
The girl got up from her desk and walked confidently over to a spot next to the open window. “Today, I wanted to introduce you to my imaginary friend: Princess Luna of Equestria.” She said her words loudly and clearly.
She was allowed to stew there for precisely five seconds (as her fellow students got closer and closer to breaking out into mocking laughter) before Princess Luna strode majestically into the classroom.
Thirty-two jaws dropped open in unison.
“Good morning, class,” the horse-sized pony said, standing beside a smirking Sara. “My name is Luna, and I am one of four reigning princesses of the land of Equestria. I am quite learned in the theory and practice of magic, and I thought I would begin by teaching you all a trick that you will all find quite useful. With your permission, Mrs. Bantam?”
“I…I…” The teacher took a few moments to collect her thoughts, and try to wrap her mind around the existence of the being currently addressing her. “You promise you won’t hurt them?” she finally managed to ask.
“You have my word that this spell will only be to their benefit. And perhaps yours as well.”
Mrs. Bantam nodded dumbly.
“If you could all stand up,” Luna instructed the class. “And take out your digital camera devices. We’ll be needing them soon as proof that the spell worked.”
9:12 am.
Mrs. Bantam’s class was walking through the Warehouse District at the edge of town. A tangle of rusty railroad tracks wound between the enormous buildings, most of which were abandoned. Derelicts scattered at their approach, most of them intimidated by the presence of a tall blue horse with a sharp horn and wings like a hawk at the rear of the group. Mrs. Bantam walked beside her. The class was led by young Sara Randall. Drones flew hither and yon between the buildings, searching frantically for the disturbance they just knew were approaching, but somehow could not pick up on their electronic senses.
“There it is,” Sara said, pointing suddenly at a white-washed building seemingly indistinguishable from the others, except for the presence of several faded presidential re-election posters. Each of them showed President Straight with arms raised in victory. “We’re almost there—4 More Yrs!” they read.
“You’ll be leading us inside, right?” Mrs. Bantam asked, grabbing tightly onto Luna’s right wing.
The princess gently but firmly disentangled herself. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “I promised my sister that I would not lead your kind into a revolution…so I asked Sara to do it for me. I will merely be preventing the arrival of any reinforcements.” To the gathered children, she said, “I have the utmost confidence that you will be able to find and free your lost friends.” To Mrs. Bantam she added, “And your son.”
A teary-eyed Mrs. Bantam patted Luna on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said in a choked voice. “Thank you so much.”
Luna shrugged her wings. “It’s the sort of thing expected of princesses. But you’re welcome just the same.” And with that, she lifted herself into the sky with slow flaps of her wings.
“Let’s do this,” Sara said in a quiet voice, more to motivate herself than anyone else. With a deep breath, she raised her arms like she was conducting the members of an invisible orchestra, and motioned them to begin.
An urgent motif in strings, like something out of a Russian symphony, arose out of the vibrations of the power lines above them, soon supplemented by the sounds of drum loops in the vibrations of loose chunks of concrete littering the ground. There was the faint feel of a singing male voice, but the fidelity of the spell wasn’t good enough for the words to be clear, so they had to be supplied by memory.
The class began to march towards the warehouse, past the identical posters of President Straight, heads down and their hands in fists.
The teacher, after hesitating for a moment, followed quickly after them.
· · ·
“GREETINGS AUTOMATONS!” Luna shouted in her Royal Canterlot Voice from the spot she was hovering, turning off her electrical invisibility spell. Drones darted in from all directions to study her, some even turning slightly like a dog’s head when confronted by something incomprehensible. Luna imagined the faces of all of the mesmerized children controlling each drone. “Would you like to go on a chase?” she asked them. “I am very chase-able. And I’m not an American.” She immediately jerked her head to the side, as the spot where it once was was struck by dozens of laser beams. “Catch me if you can!” she cried out gaily, ducking down into the alleyway between two neighboring buildings and flying out of town, a veritable fleet of drones flying behind, under and above her, trying in vain to outfly her. To their pilots, Luna imagined that this was probably just a video game, with the promise of a sweet treat for the first one to take out the enemy. For her, it was the grand waltz brilliante of the sky, a dance she knew by heart.
· · ·
With but a touch, the door of the warehouse slid open with a smash, and 32 angry children and their temporary guardian strode in.
The guards raised their machine guns as Sara stepped forward, staring them down. The automatic aiming devices that they really didn’t need as this close range insisted that there was nothing to shoot at, all while the phantom music arising from the ground, the air, from their very bodies just grew louder, and louder…
· · ·
Above in the sky, a drone’s laser finally connected with Princess Luna—and bounced harmlessly off of an invisible shield.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she called over her shoulder at the offending robot. “I’ve been cheating all this time. It’s a dreadful habit I picked up from my sister. Perhaps a bit more force will be necessary to overcome my defenses?”
The number of drones surrounding the princess increased from dozens to hundreds.
· · ·
In the warehouse, red lights flashed and klaxons sounded. The men with guns looked around them nervously. Sara took this moment to resume her march, right into the midst of President Strait’s lowest-bid private army. The mercenaries kept their guns drawn and aimed, but when the children refused to slow down, they allowed the group to pass without taking a shot. Realizing that somebody was going down, and not wanting it to be them, they put their government-owned guns down on the ground and walked out of the building.
· · ·
“Last stage, I promise!” Luna cried out as she shot straight up, faster and faster. The drones tried to keep up, but the alicorn was far too fast for them, and eventually they reached the limit of their radio control tethers, causing them to drop en mass out of the sky, exploding several minutes later on impact with the streets of the city.
Meanwhile Luna continued to climb, right out of the atmosphere and towards the largest of the communication/armed satellites, the one that coordinated all of the drone control centers in America…
Teri and Charles Randall sat side-by-side on a couch facing their 40” flat-screen television set. Teri had the remote, and idly flipped from channel to channel, while Charles did nothing but hold Teri’s free hand in both of his.
The channel surfing stopped on an image of President Strait looking right into their eyes. “They are ugly and their breath smells,” he told them. “They refuse to look you in the eyes, and they always mumble. Not to mention the fact that they are all weak and forgetful. Oh, and their Social Security fund is destroying the country, and needs to be shut down. It’s obviously a socialist plot—I mean, it has 'social' in the friggin’ name! For all of these reasons, and thousands more that I won’t bore you with, I hereby declare that old people make rotten Americans, and America will only be the greatest nation in the world when everyone 65 years of age and older are dead—and I get all of their possessions. Now, who wants the honor of passing what I just said into law?”
The camera zoomed out, to reveal that the President was broadcasting his visage on a large screen in an ornate building. Included with him in the projected image were eighteen of his Secret Service bodyguards, the crack group who had saved him from assassination time and again. The screen the President was broadcasting on was located at the front of the United States Senate chamber. A chamber made up entirely of people 65 years and older, who were in an uproar.
“This is an outrage!” a man identified as Senator Baker from Missouri declared, shaking his fist at the screen. “We’re the demographic who got you elected in the first place, and you have the gall to turn on us! Besides, aren’t you eighty-se—”
Any further complaints were cut off as a laser cut a hole clean through Senator Baker’s head, and he dropped out of sight.
“Everyone knows that I’m a spring chicken of twenty-seven,” President Strait growled. “And that questioning that figure is an act of treason. So, anybody else?”
“Did I miss anything?” asked the somewhat breathless voice of Princess Luna.
Teri and Charles turned to see that the pony was standing behind them.
“What happened to Sara?” asked Teri.
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. So, it looks like I’m about to witness history.” She waved a hoof at the screen. “It’s not that often that democracies spontaneously convert themselves into dictatorships. The inevitable collapse of humanity should accelerate from this point.”
“Well…I don’t know if I would say that,” Charles ventured in a low voice.
“How do you mean?” asked Luna.
“Well, Rome actually became a good deal more stable when it went from a republic to an empire.”
“Yes, but that is no Augustus. I think we can both agree on that point.”
Charles laughed uncomfortably. “You act like you met the guy.”
“Augustus? Sadly, no. I did meet his successor Claudius, though.”
“Seriously?”
Luna raised an eyebrow. “You’re almost as fond of that word as your wife is. But yes, quite seriously. Claudius said he was going to write down everything I told him about Equestria, but then he was poisoned and I’m pretty sure I saw Nero personally burning all of his books before I left.”
“You are serious.”
“Claudius was a pretty good historian, but very biased against his predecessors, perhaps with good reason. I found Livy’s account of Augustus’ reign to be much more believable.”
Charles shook his head incredulously. “Wait, wait, wait. You read Books 134 to 142 of Ab Urbe Condita Libri? But they’ve been lost for centuries!”
“I’ve got a copy of the whole thing in a trunk back at the palace. Granted, I haven’t touched it in more than a thousand years, but Tia assured me that everything not infected with dark magic has been preserved until the present day.”
“Can…can I borrow it for a while?”
“I don’t suppose there’s any reason I can’t make you a copy.” It was only at this point that Luna noticed the death-glare that Teri was giving both her and her husband. “Oh, are we missing anything?”
On the television, it was now President Strait’s turn to be livid. “I don’t know why I waste my time with you losers,” he snarled. “You keep thinking of excuses to delay and delay my brilliant ideas until they just aren’t good anymore. You and your pussy-footed neighbors in the House are the core of the corruption in this country, a corruption that will not be purged until the people’s will is fully expressed, by making me America’s sole ruler…for life.” He rested his finger above a large orange button.
The television producers, anticipating what was going to happen next, switched to a split-screen view. In one corner of the screen, the President was about to carry out his threat, to make the central concept behind the film Logan’s Run into a work of non-fiction. Other screens rotated between showing random trailer parks and retirement communities (the flinching of one Secret Service agent revealed that that was the current location of his own parents), the entire city of Palm Springs and the entire state of Florida as seen from orbit, and the Capitol Building, framed exactly like that scene in Independence Day when it explodes.
The President pressed the button.
Nothing exploded.
He pressed it five or six more times. And still nothing exploded.
The image on one of the little screens now showed a small room with a couple of rolling chairs, illuminated by the light of multiple television monitors mounted on the same wall as the camera. Suddenly an elementary-school aged girl in a red and white uniform appeared in that room, her arm raised high in the act of snapping her fingers. A few seconds later a couple dozen more students appeared, also by snapping their fingers.
“Excuse me, Mr. President?” Sara Randall asked from the tiny image, which was quickly enlarged by the savvy producer to share the screen with that of the President.
The jaws of Charles and Teri Randall dropped in unison.
Luna took this moment to reach out a hoof and stick it right into Teri’s hair. After poking around for a few seconds, she pulled out a big box of warm popcorn, which she began loudly munching on.
“Go away kid, I’m busy,” mumbled President Strait, as he got out a screwdriver and began to disassemble the box the big orange button was mounted on.
“But Mr. President…” Sara said with the most-ingratiating tone she could muster.
“What?!” the President barked, finally looking up.
“I kinda-sorta broke your unstoppable killing machine.”
“You?”
“Well, I had some help.”
“But you took out my entire network! No hacker in six years was able to accomplish that!”
“That was Luna,” said Sara.
Both Teri and Charles turned to look at the princess. “And how did you pull that off?” Teri asked.
“Magic,” Luna said simply.
“Seriou—?” Charles caught himself. “You’ve got to do better than that.”
“No, I do not,” answered Luna. “Magic is the manipulation of reality through the power of the will. If your satellite is secured with an electronic lock that resists scientific forms of cracking, then you need to apply the correct metaphor. I imagined it as a maze, a maze so complex that it would take years to plot a course through it. But like most mazes, it was two dimensional, so I flew straight to the center and landed, thereby cracking the lock.”
“So in scientific terms, you phased through higher dimensions to bypass the security.”
“I have no idea,” Luna said flippantly. “I’m a mage, not an engineer.”
This whole time, the level of conversation between Sara and the President was far closer to her level than to his. The term “neener-neener” was uttered, and not by the elementary-school student.
“And now I need to ask you a question,” Sara said, cutting off the debate. She reached off camera and pulled a dazed Dia Maria Montez into view. “Actually, my question is for my best friend Dia here. Could you please explain to her why you kidnapped her and tens of thousands of other children across the country, brain-washed them, and then forced them to fight your War on Terror and then start eliminating everybody in America who looked at you funny, all while scarring her psychologically for life?” She flipped a switch in front of her, replacing her image with a recording of children targeting Santa Clarita, children very recognizable to President Strait’s bodyguards. “Oh, and while you’re at it, perhaps you can explain the same thing to your Secret Service agents, since the children you ordered this to be done to included their children, and they just went through watching you threatening to kill their parents?” The smile of triumph as her image re-appeared on the screen was a thing of beauty.
Seventeen Secret Service agents simultaneously pulled out their pistols, aimed them at their boss’ head, and cocked them.
Teri, Charles, and who knows how many other television and streaming news watchers around the world leaned forward in anticipation.
“Now this could set a bad precedent,” noted Charles. “The Roman Empire wasn’t truly doomed until the emperor’s bodyguard decided that they had the power to not only pick the new emperor, but also decide when the old one had outlived his usefulness.”
Meanwhile the President had stopped his stare-down with an eight-year old girl to notice all the guns. “What?!” he screamed, turning on the Secret Service. “You can’t do this to me—I am your GOD! Try to kill me, and I’ll swallow your souls! I’LL SWALLOW YOUR SOULS!”
He had a lot of veins sticking out of his neck.
With a deep sigh, the chief of the Secret Service addressed his agents. “Stand down. I know the temptation is really strong, but at the end of the day, I refuse to lower myself to his level. Besides, killing him is the easy way out.
“If we just get rid of the President,” he explained to everyone in TV Land who was demanding he do just that, “then everyone would try to act like his death had solved everything. We’d pretend that he tricked us into voting for him, that we didn’t know the whole time that he was criminally insane, when the reality is that we believed his lies because we preferred them to the truth.
“Mr. President, you are hereby relieved of your office, which is not really legal, but I’m sure we can find a competent psychologist to make it official without any trouble. He or she will put you away and finally get you the medication you should have been on for the past decade. And then the government can get to the important job of finding all the sane people behind your reign of terror, those who profited from your insanity. The rest of us will deal with our guilt, we will be owing massive favors to all the neutral countries you attacked, and in the end American democracy will survive.”
The President didn’t say anything. Actually, he had been frothing at the mouth for the past couple of minutes, before his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed out of frame.
The television screen went to black, as the unseen producer was left to try and find a title for what had just happened. Because as every television journalist knows, a story doesn’t really exist unless it has a title, preferably one with a horrible pun embedded in it.
“What about the Helpers?” Charles asked the empty screen. “You are going to fix that little mess, right? Because slaves have never been good for the emotional well-being of a civilization.” He turned his head to see that his wife was staring at him. “What?”
“You’re a history professor, aren’t you,” she declared.
“Adjunct,” he said lightly.
“But you said you and your co-workers never get along.”
“Academics is hell,” Charles explained.
Luna, who had spent the last few minutes chewing the inside of her cheek as she thought over everything she saw, finally put aside her half-finished box of popcorn. “Alright, we’ll stay,” she told the Randalls. “Oh, and when am I going to get paid?”
On the television, a series of scenes showed what was going on in the nearly one hundred centers where American children had been forced to operate drones and death satellites for the past six years. Parents were re-united with dazed children, including Mrs. Bantam with her son Ricky.
Sara addressed the camera. “Mom, Dad, could you maybe take in my friend Dia? Until they find the prison where her mom is being kept? And maybe longer?” She mumbled the last part.
The Randalls looked at each other in shock, then got up and ran out of the house, into one of their two cars, and drove away, leaving the front door open.
“We’ll return to ‘President Strait’s Jacket’, right after these words from our sponsors.”
“I’ll uh, take care of the place until your joyful return, I suppose,” Luna addressed the empty driveway. Closing the door, she made her way to the kitchen, and a cell phone that had been left on the table. “Now what was the name of that one place? Round Table, the Last Honest Pizza? I wonder if they deliver.”