//------------------------------//
// Celestial Advice 
// Story: A Dream 
// by totallynotabrony 
//------------------------------//

I held the snowglobe in my hooves.  It seemed to glow from within, a swirling, inky blackness speckled with points of light.  I couldn’t remember exactly why I was looking at it.
“Valiant, what are you doing?” Twilight asked, in her suspicious voice.
“Nothing.”  I put the snowglobe back on the shelf.
Twilight gave me a look, but couldn’t immediately prove that I was doing - or had done - anything wrong.  She turned away to continue reorganizing the library.
My snowglobe collection was hardly taking up much space.  I only had, like, three.  I think Twilight was mostly concerned because I was keeping them at the library.  She was constantly vigilant that I would try to move in again.
Spike came into the room carrying several boxes of books.  He set them down.  “That’s the last of them.”
“Thanks Spike.  The library will be better than ever!” said Twilight.
Pleased with the complement, Spike grinned.  “We make a good team, Sparkle.”
“We sure are, uh, the Dragon.”
“It’s pronounced Thed-ra-gon.”
Twilight shot me a look.  She had started doing that whenever anything annoyed her in the slightest.  What I might - or might not - be behind had gotten her so jumpy that she had just started immediately assuming that I was the root cause of everything.
To be fair, I was the one who had convinced Spike his last name was actually Thedragon.
However, despite her constant suspicion, I was not the one bumping off ponies around Ponyville, and could easily prove it.  Not that Twilight could do anything to me if I was a serial killer, but she hated not knowing things and anyway, blaming me wouldn’t solve the problem.
I didn’t know who the serial killer was, either.  Worse, they were stepping up their game.  Four murders had now happened.  The methods were growing increasingly complicated and ritualistic.  While I didn’t know who the killer was, they clearly had too much time on their hands.
For the moment, though, dealing with them could wait.  Today, we had an awards ceremony to go to.
Twilight, Spike, and I departed the library, meeting Cordoba, Sunset Shimmer, Trixie, Daring Do, Coloratura, Merry May, Cracker, Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Guinness, Skyla, Coloratura, Wind Rider, Lightning Dust, Whiplash, Night Glider, Sky Stinger, and Vapor Trail.
It was kind of a big group, but we had places to go and just the autonomous VTOL aircraft that perfectly fulfilled the transport requirement, in among everything else she had going on.
Her name was Tin Mare, and we had yet to find her maximum carrying capacity.  At any rate, twenty four passengers wasn’t it.
Most of us going to the ceremony had been involved in stopping an existential threat to Equestria a while back.  At least, that’s how I spun it.  At any rate, it was cause for celebration, and so we were all going.
Tin Mare didn’t give a shit.  Awards were simply not things she was programmed to care about.  I asked her to take the group to Canterlot, so she did.
I think Twilight was still privately furious about the wetware R&D that had gone into Tin Mare before the switch to Windows 98, but the benefits of cheap air travel outweighed the drawbacks.  At least it wasn’t a punch to the face.
Merry May was quite a bit more furious about it.  She had been said wetware CPU for a while.  Now, she was a synthetic alicorn with a large penis and a brain visible under glass.  Quite the polarizing figure.  She didn’t really want to see any of us again, but you don’t simply ignore an invitation to Canterlot Castle.
Sunset, of course, was...well, I guess my heterosexual life partner.  We hadn’t gotten married or anything, but had adopted Trixie as a daughter, despite Trixie being a fully grown mare who was also having sex with Daring Do.  Also, we had built Cordoba.
Guinness, Rainbow’s husband, had come along for moral support and brought along their young adopted daughter, Skyla.  Their relationship was not all what it had cracked up to be, but he was too nice a guy to drop her ass like she deserved.
Wind Rider and his Wonderbolts team were antigovernment revolutionaries who nonetheless were coming to a ceremony celebrating, among other things, the successful retention of the Princesses in power.  Even a disrespect of the authorities was not enough to carelessly toss aside an invitation to the castle.
Cracker was Princess Celestia.  Yeah, not many knew that.  I think she thought it was funny.  I wondered how she was spending so much time with us rather than doing Princess stuff.  Probably because she was bored and didn’t care anymore because she’d dealt with any serious challenges to her rule.  Questionable abuse of power aside, she didn't get where she was by being stupid, so I assumed she knew what she was doing and laughed along.
Tin Mare chauffeured us to Canterlot, landing in the castle courtyard as delicately as a seventeen ton death machine could.  Then, we organics went inside for the ceremony.
Some acquaintances of ours, Sunburst and Thorax, were to be awarded the Equestrian Pink Heart of Courage for their part in stopping the latest world-ending scenario.  Everyone else involved was either deemed to have played a smaller part or had already received a higher award for solving past crises.
Celestia, appearing as herself instead of a inconspicuous earth pony with a saltine for a cutie mark, presented the awards.  It was nice to see the ambiguously gay duo getting some credit.  I call them that because Thorax, being a changeling, could be anyone or anything, so Sunburst’s relationship status with Thorax was kind of difficult to define.
The afterparty was chill.  That is, until a dead body crashed through the skylight into the celebrating crowd.
Fortunately, that made it pretty easy to waltz in and start canvassing the scene because everyone around the room was screaming and trying to get as far away from the mutilated corpse as possible.
I thought it might have been a griffon.  Yeah, probably.  The body was so marked up and covered in runes and other paraphernalia that it wasn’t actually easy to tell the species.
“Well, this is a first,” I said.
“I can’t believe they would do this!” Twilight said, looking horrified, but, to her credit, at least coming to see the body.
“Well, I hate to say it, but this looks like they don’t give a shit anymore.  They aren’t limiting themselves to Ponyville, ponies, or mundane feats.  Hell, they even figured out that presentation is the key to taking things to the next level.”  I shook my head.  This was seriously starting to become a problem.  Who could the killer be?
Fortunately, I had not only prepared extra satellite coverage for tonight, but Tin Mare had been on station for overwatch.  I tapped my earpiece.  “Tin Mare, did you see anything?”
“A dark figure appeared on the rooftops a moment ago, but vanished.  Attempting to reacquire visual.”
A chance.  This might be the closest we’d ever been.
Twilight continued to grimace at the gore.  “Oh Celestia, this is bad.”
“That’s no exaggeration,” remarked Princess Celestia, appearing just then.
“So what do you think?” I asked her.
“This is horrible,” she said, as if rehearsed, which it probably was.
I wondered if Celestia could be the killer.  The fact that I was even wondering spoke volumes about what I knew about her.
Of course, she was probably wondering the same thing about me.  Fair enough.
“It might be horrible,” I said, “but what do you think?”  I put extra emphasis.  She knew more than she let on, mostly because the Equestrian government leeched off my satellite feed.
I didn’t, of course, let them at the really good stuff.  I had a second network of satellites that were ostensibly a land monitoring service, the Ocular Topographic Understanding System.  Secretly, though, they were strike platforms containing tungsten carbide rods the size of telephone poles that could impact a target at hypersonic speeds.
Rods From God, as the program was called, still needed a cover story, one that I had invented but not yet implemented.  It involved the Princess distributing phallic genitalia.  I had to be careful, because knowing Celestia, she might think it was a good idea.  
Answering my question, Celestia said, “There’s been a remarkable and worrying lack of evidence concerning this killer.”
That was true.  Even with constant combing of data and camera feeds, we hadn’t found shit.
A reporter stepped up just then.  He raised his camera, saw me, and lowered it again.  Smart guy.
“Hello Mr. Valiant, I’m Timmy Times from the Canterlot Canter.  I was hoping you could tell me your take on this event.”
“This is the fifth body so far,” I said.  “It kinda sucks.”
He’d been polite and respectful, so I returned the gesture.  I’d been trying to turn over a new leaf and be nice.  It, too, sucked, but I seemed to be getting some results recently.
“Did you say fifth?” he stuttered.
“Yeah.”  I put a candy cane in his open mouth and walked away.
I was still working for Santa Claus, as required by the terms of my coming-back-to-life, and the job involved a measured amount of Christmas Spirit regardless of the season.  I was just disappointed that it didn’t come with Christmas spirits.
By which I mean liquor.  I was still new to the job and still learning holiday puns.
Twilight walked with me as I left.  I muttered, “When I catch whoever this is, they’re so going on the naughty list.”
“You keep saying that like it’s some punishment,” said Twilight.  “But the only downside seems to be trading free toys for free coal.  You’re on the naughty list.”
That was kind of awkward, being that I was the chief naughty/nice arbiter and therefore decided who went on the list.
“Twilight, if we succeed in taking down this serial killer and stopping all the other, much more minor wrongdoers in this world, then I’ll be the only one on the naughty list.  I will be the naughty list.  I think we both know I’ve got enough badness saved up to keep me on it for a long time.”
“I understand wanting to stop evildoers,” she said.
“Or kill them,” I said.  “Either way, they’re off the list.”
“I thought you were turning over a new leaf.”
“One step at a time.  Anyway, if we manage to get the list whittled down, that will be a lot less work for me.  If I’m the only one on it, then I basically don’t have to do anything.”
She stopped.  “You’re trying to catch bad guys so you don’t have to do as much work?”
“What’s wrong with that?  If it wasn’t for the periodic monsters around here, you’d be a librarian.”
Twilight considered that.  I left her there and went outside, where Tin Mare waited.  Climbing aboard, I turned on a computer monitor connected to the electronics.  “Show me the video feed.”
Tin Mare played the tape.  Sure enough, a figure dashed over the rooftops and was gone almost as soon as they appeared.  It looked like a pony wearing a cape, but it was hard to tell.
“I think we need to call in the big guns,” I said.
“Figuratively or literally?” Tin Mare asked.
That was actually a good question.  I hesitated, but said, “Figuratively.  Get me the North Pole.”
Tin Mare placed the call.