//------------------------------//
// Royal Blood 
// Story: Unfortunately, I Am The King Of Equestria 
// by Sofa King Zill-E 
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A brief history lesson for you, boys and girls...

The position of Royal Spymaster in Equestria has a long history, although admittedly a secret one, as is befitting the nature of the position.  It was never officially called what it was, but was instead masked by the title of Court Jester, and later Celestia's Fool.  When jesters fell out of favor in the courts of royalty, the official name was changed to personal secretary when the spymaster was a mare, and butler when the spymaster was a stallion.

The spymaster, these days, doesn't do much spying his or herself, truth be told.  Instead, she acts as an intermediary between the dozens of agencies that now secretly saw to the safety of the kingdom.  SMILE, SCOWL, BLINK, GROAN, and many other agencies with nonsensical names that formed amusing acronyms did the actual legwork.  However, someone, at the end of the day, had to correlate all of this incoming information, keep the agencies from stepping on each other's toes, and keep the princess up to date on anything important that came up.  The fact that all of these agencies were honestly quite woefully understaffed and underfunded made this even harder all around.  However, Raven Inkwell, and those before her, were vital to the continued existence of Equestria: Celestia had her hooves full just keeping the big, obvious, kingdom destroying evils at bay on top of her various other duties as the leader of a nation.  There was no way that she could do that AND stay on top of that manage every bit of court intrigue, or counter-intelligence op, or any of the other vital tasks needed to protect the nation from more mundane threats, both foreign and domestic.





"First, just to confirm, you don't plan on assassinating me tonight, correct?"

I knew that was a silly question to ask of the pony directly in front of me, but it was my biggest concern at the moment.  I mean, I was getting hungry, sleepy, and I was also in need of a bath.  I couldn't take care of any of those problems if I also had to watch out for someone who wanted to perforate my hide the moment I dropped my guard.

Raven Inkwell gave me an assessing look, then replied, "Full Disclosure: If you had executed the princess, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  You'd have had agents trying to put you down from the moment you stepped into the city.  Since you've kept her alive and well, that has bought you... well, let's call it the benefit of the doubt.  We're waiting to see what you do next: You've talked the talk, so the agencies who report to me will wait until we've seen if you can walk the walk."  While no Maud Pie, Raven was good at keeping her emotions off of her face when it came to business.  However, I got the impression that this was an honest answer.  Of course, this meant that I'd only bought myself time: If I failed to live up to my promises, I'd probably go to bed one night... and not wake up.

Fair enough, I supposed.  I nodded, and then said, "Good.  Now, I need to ask you a serious question, and I hope you'll forgive me if it is overly blunt."

"Blunt questions don't bother me.  Ask away," Raven said with a slight smile.

I cleared my throat, and then asked, plainly, "How many times did Prince Blueblood try to betray Princess Celestia, and by extension, Equestria, during this war?"

Her eyes widened in shock, and then narrowed as she gave me another one of those appraising looks.  It was like she was reevaluating her opinion of how intelligent I was, each time I said something she wasn't expecting.

After a moment, she admitted, "We intercepted a total of three letters that were intended for you, the contents of which indicated a desire to assist you in regards to conquering Equestria in exchange for favorable treatment after your victory.  We recovered a fourth from his estate this morning that was intended to be sent in the near future, but you reached Canterlot before delivery could be arranged."

Shit.  I hate being so good at reading people sometimes.  Even pony people.  It takes a lot of the fun out of life....

Confused?  Shocked?  Can't believe that the Blueblood you know and lo... well, let's be honest, probably mostly just tolerate would actually try that shit?  Well, let me explain something to those who might be fans of Blueblood in PrimeTime: In the prime timeline, Blueblood might have been... well, let's face it, a jerk, but he at least wasn't a traitor, and for good reason.  He lived in an Equestria where he had much fewer in the way of doubts regarding Equestria's safety, and thus his own safety by extension.  He also lived in the lap of luxury, and never had to work for any of it.  He'd never even think to betray Equestria, since he literally wanted for nothing.  Why would he risk everything he had when nothing anyone could give him would ever be better than what he already possessed?  He may not be a very good pony, but he had no reason to betray his kingdom, especially when it had been so good to him.

The Blueblood in the timeline I was stuck in, however, did not live in such security.  Since the Rainboom didn't happen, Twilight Sparkle and friends never joined up and helped preserve the peace of Equestria.  Thus, Princess Celestia was Equestria's one and only defense, and as I'd mentioned previously, she was getting broken down under the strain of all the threats she had to deal with in such a short time-frame.  While most of Equestria was ignorant of this, Blueblood was of the royalty, and thus had a front row seat to watching her many-greats aunt getting worn down to nothing.  Blueblood could see clearly that it wasn't a matter of if, but when she'd fail, and to whom.  Sombra just happened to be the one who drew the winning lot.  Just like how in the other alternate timelines, Celestia was defeated by Lord Tirek, Nightmare Moon, Discord, and even the Flim Flam brothers, in the timeline I was in, King Sombra came out at just the right moment, so he was the one who reaped the benefits of Celestia's exhaustion.

Worse, due to the war, resources were stretched thin: Nearly everything produced went to the war effort.  And if you weren't willing or able to fight, you had to contribute financially.  Everyone was expected to give, especially those who were physically capable, but were just too chickenshit to go to the front lines.  There could be no conscientious objectors in this war: No one was fighting with the intent to kill, and everyone was trying to free mind controlled slaves from the grip of an evil unicorn wizard who was practically Aku, Voldemort, and Sauron, all rolled up into pony form.  If you had a conscience, you fought.  Thus, Blueblood had to pay out the ass in order to keep his ass out of the war.  He wasn't poor by any stretch of the imagination, but he didn't get to live in anything like the luxury he did in PrimeTime.  For some reason, the fact that he did not live in maximum luxury here caused him to experience a sensation bordering on physical pain, in spite of the fact that most ponies would gladly chew off their favorite leg to trade places with him.  Still, that's Blueblood for you.

So, when it became clear that Sombra was almost certain to win, this timeline's version of Blueblood opted to do what any rat does, and leave the sinking ship, and tried to curry favor with Sombra by betraying his country to him.

Sombra wouldn't have been interested in any such deal: Sombra is like an even more hardcore version of Darkseid.  He wouldn't be satisfied with anything other absolute obedience from literally every other lifeform on the planet.  Maximum oppression, everywhere and forever.  The idea of even one being on the planet being allowed to retain free will was intolerable to his ego.  However, even attempted treason is still treason, regardless of whether or not it would have worked.  And for royalty, the penalty is death, usually by public execution, historically.  The higher the limb, the sharper the saw, as the saying goes.

"And you couldn't tell Celestia about those messages," I said, half to her, half to myself.  "After all, there was a war on, and Celestia was on the front lines.  The princess would have to be called back for the trial, since Blueblood is of the royalty, and a trial concerning royalty requires a royal presence.  A public trial that could potentially stretch on for days or weeks, depending on how good a lawyer Blueblood was able to buy... and he'd likely be able to afford the best.  It couldn't be just a show trial with a kangaroo court, it had to be the real deal, with a jury and everything.  And then a public execution, unless somehow Blueblood could manage some kind of plea deal and was just banished instead.  All of this would take Celestia off of the front lines, and she couldn't be spared for a second, let alone weeks.  But worse than that would be the damage to morale: Celestia would be heartbroken that her only other living relative would try to betray her.  The citizens of Equestria would lose faith in their government, since Celestia famously doted on Blueblood, and yet he turned out to be a traitor.  How could Equestria rely on a princess who couldn't even see what was right in front of her?  Worst of all, there'd be a succession crisis: If Celestia suddenly were to pass away, or become too ill to lead, then who would lead the nation if Blueblood was gone?  Normally, that wouldn't be an issue, as alicorns are, if not invulnerable, at least immortal, but with a war on, there was a very real concern that Celestia might die at any time.  I imagine that a number of powerful individuals would jump at the chance to become her official heir once Blueblood was gone.  Even if I didn't march up to the gates of the city while the trial and execution were going on, Celestia'd likely have riots in the street from feuding nobility, if not an outright civil war.  I wouldn't even have had to invade at that point: I could have just sat back with a tub of popcorn and watch Equestria self-destruct."

"Perceptive," Raven admitted, after a moment's pause.  "Very perceptive.  In a way, you may have done Celestia a favor, having dealt with Blueblood the way you have.  Still, his current whereabouts are unknown.  I'll have to..."

"You'll leave him be," I stated, bluntly.  "No one in any of your organizations is to look for him, and no one working for the crown is to lay a hoof on him.

Raven raised a questioning eyebrow, and asked, "What?  Why?"

I shrugged, and said, "My one kindness to Blueblood is that, if he managed to survive the day, he is no longer a threat to me, and is thus no longer worth any further action against him.  He's been... removed from the field of play, and can no longer be a pawn in anyone else's game, so if he exercises at least a little intelligence, he might be able to live out the rest of his life in relative peace... as long as he stays well away from Equestria.  Let everyone think that he's a coward and a fink, but not a traitor.  Unless he somehow appears at the head of an army with the intent of trying to take the throne, he's not even worth thinking about, and I don't care if he's alive or dead."  Funny, 'Bastard' came out as fink.  I'd need to remember that: Fink is a fun word to say.

"Very well," Raven said, after a second's consideration.  "I suppose that's acceptable.  If he ever did return to cause problems in some fashion, the evidence marking him as a traitor to the crown would effectively nullify any threat he represented to you or Celestia."

With a nod, I stated, "Exactly."  I took care to ignore the mention of Celestia in that last comment.  After all, maybe once all my ducks were in a row, and my personal safety secured, I'd actually just hand her country back over to her.  I paused, then said, "Now, I'd like for you to do me one more favor: I'll need a file containing copies of those letters that Blueblood tried to send my way, along with detailed records of anything else that Blueblood did that might have hindered the war effort in even the smallest way.  I won't need it this instant, but I will need it available by dawn, so I'll have it when Celestia wakes up: When she learns of what I did regarding Blueblood, I'd like to be able to demonstrate how I was doing her a kindness in this situation."  I didn't feel super-good about having fucked Blueblood over in epic style like I did, even if it was even more deserved than I'd thought it to be.  Still, that was solely on me, not on Sombra, so it was my burden to bear, and I'd have to own up to it with the big pony in the sky when she woke up.  That said, I wanted to have plenty of ammunition available when we started on that particular argument...

Raven Inkwell nodded, and said, "I can have that information compiled and made available for your review first thing tomorrow morning."

"Good," I said with a stretch.  "In the meantime, I need a bath, a meal, and to retire for the evening, in that order.  It's been an eventful day."





Raven Inkwell waited a full five minutes in the throne room after Sombra's departure, then turned to her right, and addressed the empty air.

"Well?"

The air shimmered for a moment, and then a lavender, bespectacled unicorn mare was standing in front of her.

"I can honestly say that I'm stumped," Twilight Sparkle admitted, and then cast a spell, bringing up several clear panels with words flashing across them at high speed.

"Really?  Explain," the secretary/spymaster ordered.

Twilight turned her gaze to one panel, then tapped it with a hoof, causing the writing on it to hold in place.  "I got a blood sample: I collected a cloth he had used to wash off his face, and I compared it to the sample collected at the Battle of Fielder's Hollow.  As you are aware, when Commander Rainbow Dash kicked him in the face then, a sizable amount of Sombra's blood was spilled, more than enough for what we needed in this case.  I used a spell to compare the two samples.  Perfect match, blood type and all."  What she left out, of course, was what Sombra did in retaliation for that kick: There's a reason why Dashie had a metal wing, after all.

Turning towards another panel, she added, "And I've managed a full spectrum body scan.  Bone structure, muscle mass, the whole deal.  All within the expected parameters.  In terms of the purely physical, he's one hundred percent Sombra.  But everything else..."  She paused, searching for the right words.

Raven raised an eyebrow, and then asked her apprentice, "What about everything else?"

Twilight then closed down the panels she'd been studying, and the brought up a dozen more.  After a moment, she pointed to one and said, "His thaumatic signature, the magical footprint that he leaves whenever he casts a spell is... off.  Not by much, maybe five percent, but that's four and a half percent more than should be possible for anyone.  It's like... the difference between one pony's hoofwriting, and an expert counterfeiting that hoofwriting: Only another expert could tell the difference, but there is still most definitely a difference.  I have no idea why that could be...."

Moving that panel aside, she brought up another one, and said, "And his individual magical aura is completely off-kilter.  Zero percent match, and not just for Sombra, I mean for anything.  I've got nothing I can even compare this to.  I mean, I've got a baseline for Sombra, but even if I scanned every unicorn on the planet, I doubt I would ever find anything like what I'm seeing.  I honestly don't know what I'm looking at, here.  If I didn't know any better, I would think I was looking at a completely unknown species of sapient creature, rather than a pony."

Raven considered that for a moment, then asked, "Could he be using some kind of a spell to scramble the readings?"

Twilight gave that a moment's thought, then said, "There's a problem right there: The spells I used for the analysis were graded to be able to cut through any sort of scrambling or blocking enchantments known to Equine, so I'd normally say that it can't be blocked.  But as he himself said, we've not exactly made a lot of progress in the terms of magic development in more than a thousand years, so even a single new spell might be enough to stump the spells I used for the scan.  Plus, the field of dark magic isn't exactly well-studied to begin with.   There's every possibility that he's using either a hitherto unknown dark magic spell, or just a spell that he developed himself, and either way, we'd have no  means of piercing through it."  She paused, then rubbed the back of her head with one hoof, then added, "But what would be the point of giving such unusual readings, if there is a spell responsible for it?  It would make more sense just to completely block the scans, or give information that is completely unlike his own in every conceivable category, rather than mostly giving out moderately confusing information."

Raven pondered that for a moment, then asked, "Anything else?"

Twilight paused, then brought up another panel.  Rather than this one being covered in letters and numbers, this one had two silhouettes of Sombra moving through various poses, as well as two curved lines in constant, fluid motion.

"Here's the real puzzler," Twilight stated, squinting at the screen.  "His posture, the... way he holds himself, his speech patterns, his standard vocabulary, his... tells, I guess you'd call them, they're completely off.  All of it fails to match the accepted baselines.  Nothing he does comes close to the behavior he's shown in the past.  A literal zero percent match.  And that should be impossible:  I mean, spells can obscure thaumatic signatures and individual magical auras, that's easy enough if you know how.  But I can't imagine any spell could completely change a pony's conscious and unconscious behavior to such a radical degree.  Not even amnesia could account for this: Even a pony with no memory of his past will maintain unconscious habits and speech patterns.  But nothing he says or does matches the accepted behavior of King Sombra.   If I didn't have such clear evidence in front of me that I was looking at the most evil pony to ever exist, I'd say that I was looking at a completely different pony, no, a completely different lifeform altogether, one that just happened to look like King Sombra."  She paused, then added, "And before you ask, yes, I did a deep scan to make sure he wasn't a changeling in disguise, first thing.  He's not."  Twilight paused, then said, "This isn't 'Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck', it's 'Looks like a duck, walks like an caterpillar, and moos like a cow'.  I can honestly say that I have no idea what I'm looking at, so I can't even begin to hazard a guess as to what it all means."

Raven sighed, and then admitted, "It is a puzzle, I'll admit.  Worst of all, this particular puzzle is going to be running the country for the foreseeable future."  She paused, then changed the subject, asking, "How is it going with those... automatons you've been working on?"

Clearing away the panels, the lavender unicorn asked, "The golems?"  Twilight sighed in frustration, and admitted, "I'm at a bit of a bottleneck right now.  The simple ones are alright, I guess: Dumb things that can only do a couple of pre-set tasks, and a few that can hold a conversation, as long as you don't go above words of two syllables, or outside preprogrammed parameters.  But the ones you've been interested in?  The ones that are fully sapient and capable of using offensive and defensive magic?  They self-terminate as soon as I give them their directives, even if directive number one is 'Do Not Self-Terminate Ever'.  Which is a shame: The power that a golem possesses is directly proportionate to the complexity of its mind.  A fully sapient golem would be powerful enough to go hoof-to-hoof with an alicorn, nevermind King Sombra.  But, asides from a few legends from ancient times, no one has managed to successfully create one that lasted more than an hour.  And even the ones in myth and legend tended to destroy themselves once their task was completed."  She paused, then added, "But I've still got hope.  I haven't completely ruled out a fault within the artificial brain yet..."

"Well," Raven said, after a moment's consideration, "keep working on it: It could be an ace in the hole, especially since we're currently stuck with a busted flush.  For right now, it seems that this... Sombra-esque fellow is going to go in a different direction than the one we'd feared.  If he's sincere, fantastic.  If not, we'll know soon enough, I'm sure.  However, until Celestia awakens, is back at full strength, and has been freed of that collar of his, we have no way of overpowering him and retaking the throne.  I just hope that this isn't a temporary condition: If he suddenly goes full tyrant on us before Celestia wakes up, we'll have to kill him by any means necessary..."