//------------------------------//
// Rehabilitation 
// Story: Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me 
// by DataPacRat 
//------------------------------//

Fortunately, I was allowed to bring approved educational materials while I served my sentence - and, by some means or other, every element of Twilight's self-teaching reading course passed every criteria for being approved for such a purpose. I wasn't sure if that was luck, a reasonable set of criteria, or if she was so detail-oriented that part of her checklists for assembling educational materials included making sure they could still be used while their audience was arrested. There wasn't exactly much else to occupy my attention, so I decided to become as literate as I could by the time I got out of jail.

On the second day of my sentence, I was told I had a visitor: my accountant. Since, as far as I knew, I'd never hired an accountant, this sparked my attention. The visiting room had an ordinary prison guard on the outside, but the inside had a member of the Guard watching over things; and the pony waiting for me was small, female, dark blue unicorn with a medium blue mane and tail. Her cutie mark was a moonbeam shining through a cloud. As I approached the table, her horn glowed, lifting an abacus from a saddlebag... no, wait - it wasn't just any abacus, it was Abacus. I blinked, and gave her a careful look up and down before settling down at the table. "Well, hello there," I essayed. "I have to say, I wasn't expecting to see you."

She smiled back with complete innocence. "Did you think I had forgotten you? I came by to let you know that you do not need to worry about the fine - I was able to locate more than sufficient refundable tax credits to cover your fine."

"Really, now. That's - good news, then." I wasn't sure where this was going, so let her take the lead.

"In addition, given the importance of your work to the government, I feel confident that I should be able to make arrangements for your community service to be served concomitantly with your job."

"That's nice."

"In fact, I might even be able to arrange for your prison term to be served non-consecutively - one or two days a week for a few months."

I held up a hoof. "Now hold on,"

The Guard interrupted, calling out "Clear." And my 'accountant' shimmered and changed back into the much taller form of Her Royal Highness, Princess Luna.

She was still smiling at me. "Perhaps you would like a medal? Or how about a title? 'Baronet Missy' has a nice ring to it, and it would be so entertaining to watch as you took a seat in the Barn of Lords. I do believe Prince Blueblood might have a stroke." She wasn't using the Royal Canterlot Voice, so I assumed she was trying hard to be discreet about her presence here.

I facehooved. "Ma'am. I mean Miss. I mean Your Highness. I mean- oh, you know what I mean!"

"Too much?"

"If it pleases your royal majesty - I'm trying to maintain a reasonably low profile. Getting mixed up with a public court case where you imposed a sentence that changed the inheritance of several noble titles has already put me in more newspapers than I wanted to be seen in."

She pouted, exaggeratedly. "What's the good of being a Princess if I can't give things from my toybox?"

"If you want to play with toys and turn the peers upside-down, take that title and give it to Granny Locoweed."

She tilted her head, looking down at me with mild befuddlement. "You really don't want it?"

"I may have to play the political game, at least a bit, to accomplish what I actually consider to be important - but if that's what my day job turned into, I expect I would rapidly go quite mad."

"And adjusting your sentence?"

"Would be an obvious bit of royal patronage for somepony who's supposed to be a fairly ordinary cow. I'm treating this as a field test for letting The Dairy run without me being in direct contact for a few days, before I'm gone for a much longer time."

"Ah. I hope you are not leaving us because of what those... ponies in terrible need of lessons on friendship... did. Canterlot is really a very safe place."

"It's not that. Or if it is, it's only a small part. Going away will give all this ruckus time to die down, and my part in it to be - well, if not forgotten, at least shoved into the corner of background news. And - now that I've got all this information coming in to The Dairy... at the very least, I'll need to start investigating some of it in person, if for no other reason than to start calibrating an evidence-reliability metric I've been working out."

The royal nostrils flared in a brief snort. "You're as bad as Twilight."

"If Your Majesty says so, then it must be so."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"We already made arrangements for just about everything I would need." I thought about the spell she had used on a couple of my attackers, turning them from he's to she's - and took a long moment to consider asking whether the Princess could cast it in reverse. I might still be stuck as a bovine, but I could at least get back to my original gender... and I weighed easing my personal gender-identity issues against the possible complications that being granted such an un-hidable royal favor could introduce to my larger projects... and, reluctantly, set the idea aside.

I did have something else that I could ask Luna to do for me. "There is a certain project I had been meaning to get started, but which I haven't been able to figure out how to introduce under the auspices of either The Dairy's public or private sides. But as a quiet royal initiative..."

She nodded in understanding, and I went on. "It involves the production of a certain dangerous alchemical substance. Improper care and handling can easily lead to the loss of a hoof, or worse - but when finished, it has a number of applications. The final product consists of about two-thirds cellulose nitrate, which is produced by exposing cotton fibers to an equal blend of sulfuric and nitric acids; about one-third glyceryl trinitrate, which is made by adding glycerol to a similar acid mix, subsequently gelatinized with ether; and about one-twentieth part paraffin or petroleum jelly. There are a number of precautions which need to be taken in order to prevent accidents of various sorts..." I went on describing how to manufacture a generic sort of cordite from raw ingredients - sure, black powder was a lot easier to throw together, but why settle for an inferior product - and wondered whether it would be a good idea to also have Luna be in charge of putting together a hoof-compatible pistol and individual cartridges... but decided to handle that end of things myself. Most likely, I could get away with having a few lab-techs in the Dairy get the individual pieces put together, compartmentalized so none of them knew what the whole project was. I might have to get a bit of help figuring out a decent trigger which could be aimed and worked with hooves, but had a few basic ideas based on the chest-mounted cameras I'd seen in use.

The next time somebody decided I was a helpless milker, I wanted to have more options than fancy footwork and pulling clever little tricks from hidden pockets - I wanted to be able to stand my ground and simply defend myself, and defend anyone I was with.

Luna had listened to my instructions with wide eyes. "And so, while there are extensive engineering applications, the wide availability of unicorn magic means that Equestrian society might be better served if this substance does not enter into general use. In fact, you may wish to cast a memory-charm to forget anything about it, though you may wish to make a note that glyceryl trinitrate can be a valuable medicine for certain heart ailments, as it acts as a vasodilator."

I stopped, having finished. She simply kept staring at me for a long few seconds, then abruptly shook her head. "I... will need to consider this carefully before I even think about giving you an answer. I am strongly tempted to cast that memory charm on both of us."

I bit the inside of my cheek. "I would recommend against that, Your Majesty - depending on what dangers Equestria faces, it may need every short-term advantage it can get." She looked dubious, and I remembered that she'd already memory-charmed away her knowledge about my original species and homeworld, so I smiled at her. "Besides, I already came up with a signal to send myself if I feel there is a risk of a memory-charm being used on me, and have sent it to myself. If I notice that signal but I fail to remember sending it..."

She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, just underneath her horn. "Maybe I was thinking of giving you the wrong title - how would you like to swap places, and be the Princess and deal with... all this?"

"What, and give up showbiz?" She glared at me, so I answered more seriously, "Think of it this way - while everyone is looking at you and Princess Celestia, dazzled by your glory," she snorted, so I skipped to, "that means I can sneak around behind them without anyone noticing."

She heaved a sigh, looking around at the jail's visiting room. "Things seemed a lot simpler, not too long ago - all we had to watch out for were pony-eating monsters and megalomaniacal villains with obvious weaknesses. The entire... tone of events has changed, of late."

That was an observation which was uncomfortably close to certain of my own suspicions about what was going on - ever since I'd heard Twilight's suspicion about the leader of the Griffin Pirates, I'd been more and more certain that the world I found myself in was diverging further and further from the light-hearted entertainment of candy-colored equines it bore such a superficial resemblance to. So I cautiously diverted her attention from that: "Perhaps this might ease your mind - I consider my initial deal from our first meeting to still be in effect. If you ever feel that my thought processes make me a danger to those around me, or that I'm likely to cause more harm to Equestria than good - then just say the word, and I'll head straight to the mental asylum of your choice."

She looked at me, at the door leading back to the prison, and then back to me. "Thou truly trust my judgment that much?"

"Well - I'd say that I distrust myself that much. I need to have somebody who I can check my understanding of reality against, to make sure I'm not wandering into a true disconnect from the facts... and, since the overall community of peer-reviewed research journals seems to be somewhat lacking, and," I hesitated, then just spoke my mind, "and since you have some first-hoof experience in this sort of thing... who would be better?"

She considered all that for a very long moment... then smiled mischievously. "In that case - I'm going to find something to decorate you with. If not an official medal - maybe some horn-covers, or a royal warrant of appointment as a supplier of cheesecake and ice cream to Celly. Or shall I just send some strapping young Royal Guards to visit you with some of Pinkie Pie's special balloons?"

My eyes widened in shock, and Luna laughed delightedly as I glanced nervously over at the Guard who'd been carefully not hearing a single word of the entire conversation. By the time I turned back to her, she was back to being an ordinary-sized unicorn 'accountant'.

"Now there's a challenge for your clever little mind - to come up with something I can do for you - oh, very well, to you - before I think of the perfect thing."





The rest of the day, I didn't get anywhere near as far on my studies as I'd initially hoped.