//------------------------------//
// Chapter 11: Library Research 
// Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business 
// by McPoodle 
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Chapter 11: Library Research


Celestia slowed her desperate run into a deliberate speed walk as she entered the church library. After making sure that the librarian had seen her, she made her way back to the reference section. She quickly found a thick book entitled Markist Biographical Dictionary (1377-1876), Volume 22: Index. She grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper, and flipped to the end of the L’s.

There were no entries for “Luna”.

She flipped back to the C’s, and easily found the five Celestias who had lived and died before 1876 that had kept their birth names.

Celestia walked over to the desk of the librarian, Canna Table. “Mrs. Table?” she asked. “Do you know if there’s any kind of ‘reverse index’ for the Biographical Dictionary? So I can look up somebody by their first name?”

“Well, why don’t we take a look together?” the lady with skin the color of aged porcelain answered. She slowly made her way over to a group of low tables with small drawers stacked atop them. She approached one such drawer, pulled it out, and stepped through the punched index cards it contained before carefully withdrawing one. “Here we go,” she said, walking with the card and Celestia in tow back to the reference section. “An inverse index to the original edition and first supplement, written as a thesis project by B. Bookman in 1922.” She pulled out a hand-bound volume with cardboard covers, the title in the form of a fading typewritten label that was peeling off of the front. “Give that back to me when you’re done, so I can re-stick that title. And be careful with it!”

“I will,” said Celestia, carefully taking the volume from Mrs. Table and returning to her…table.

Opening the book to the L’s, she soon found the Lunas.

All thirty-five of them: Luna [Adams], Luna [Ashley-Cooper], Luna [Baldwin], Luna [Beaufort], Luna [Blackwood], Luna [Boyd], Luna [Cavendish], Luna [Cooper], Luna [Churchill], Luna [Cornish], and twenty five more.

All individuals with “Luna” as their only name, just like the “Celestia”s.

And yet nobody has ever noticed them before, thought Celestia. They have to be important, because none of them died before the age of three. This was highly unusual—the dictionary was ridiculously thorough in including all Markists to have died before 1877 anywhere in the British Empire, and of course all Markists were given their names at birth. Celestia remembered that infant mortality from the Middle Ages was something like 25%, and it didn’t drop below 10% in developed countries until the Twentieth Century.

But that was not a statistic applied to anyone named Luna. Like the Celestias, the Lunas were spared infant mortality. They were special.

But that didn’t mean they were spared any misfortune. After borrowing a calculator from Mrs. Table, Celestia was able to determine the ages of death: 16, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 13, 15, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 13, 14, 13, 13, 15, 13, 13, 15, 13, 14, 13, 13, 13, 13 and 13. The reason there were so many fewer Celestias than Lunas was because the average life expectancy of a Celestia was 60 years. The Lunas only made it to 13 unless they were ridiculously lucky.

Luna—Celestia’s Luna—turned 13 in two days.

The Celestias got their mark at the age of 13. 13 years and 5 days, to be exact. And if the Equestrian Luna was meant to be the Princess’ unnamed sister, the one who became the Demoness Nightmare Moon, as referenced endlessly by the dreams that the human Celestia could never tell to anybody…

After wiping the tears from her eyes, Celestia got up and retrieved all the volumes of the Biographical Dictionary (original and first supplement), laid them out on four different tables, and started looking up entries in chronological order. The vast majority were in the same format as the first:




[Beaufort], Luna. (2 April 1381 – 7 April 1394). Member of the English nobility. Mark: white crescent moon on a midnight blue background. Bluish-grey skin, sapphire blue and Persian blue hair. Loving daughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford.




And that was it—no cause of death listed at all. Like it shamed the Faith to admit how she died. But later centuries were not so discreet.

Luna [Thomas] (18 August 1577 — 23 August 1590) was burnt as a witch after wandering into a Catholic town—surely there was more to the story than just that. Luna [Keyes] (27 September 1599 – 2 October 1602) was killed by the men of Staveley when they caught her trying to burn down the town. Luna [Cavendish] (11 December 1670 – 6 May 1684) was committed to Bedlam after attacking the Lord Mayor of London with a carving knife at the age of 13 (and 5 days), and it was in Bedlam that she died a year later, after numerous attempts to kill her handlers and fellow inmates. Further tales of mental disintegration continued, and with the presence of exact birthdates, the exact age of each mental breakdown, if not outright death, could definitely be pinpointed: Age 13 and 5 days.

Celestia had seven days. Seven days to save a sister she had ignored all her life from madness and death.

“It’s not fair,” Celestia muttered to herself as she kept reading.

And then there was Luna [Adams]. As documented in the first supplement of the Biographical Dictionary, this Luna was visiting a military training camp in Kansas with her father Resolute Skipper on February 28, 1918—America had entered World War I a year earlier, and Camp Funston was one of several locations where soldiers were being frantically trained before being shipped to Europe. Funston was also the location where Markist conscientious objectors were being detained, and Resolute was there as part of a government committee ensuring their fair treatment.

That night, Luna disappeared from the home the family was staying at. A few hours later, “with the eyes of a madwoman,” she had attempted to break into the camp infirmary. It took a dozen men to take her down. She was put into a straightjacket and shipped to Danvers State Insane Asylum, where she was committed under the diagnosis of “dementia praecox” on March 5th. (That was apparently the term for what was now known as juvenile-onset degenerative schizophrenia.) The whole time she was bragging to anyone who would listen about how she had almost caused “the end of the world”.

And there was a possibility that her claim was not completely ridiculous. In the aftermath of Luna’s rampage, affairs at the camp were thoroughly re-organized. As a result, one of the Markists being held at Camp Funston, Clean Sweep, was allowed to act against an extremely virulent strain of the flu that he had identified in one of the quarantined patients; he called it “Spanish Influenza”, after a song popular at the time. Thanks to Clean Sweep’s efforts, that strain was isolated and eliminated. There is no telling how many people around the world might have gotten sick from Spanish Influenza if not for him and, indirectly, Luna.

Luna [Adams] died in Danvers Asylum on November 9, 1921, almost four years after being committed—a record for the Lunas. She spent all of that time screaming her lungs out and attempting to kill everyone around her, although she seemed somewhat calmer in absolute darkness. Also, she left behind a diary containing entries right up to her breakdown.

Celestia needed to read that diary. She asked Mrs. Table if she could track it down. Mrs. Table countered that it would be a lot of work, and unlikely to succeed. Celestia said “please” and flashed her most-pitiful pout at the helpless librarian. Mrs. Table began the first of thirty-two calls to libraries around the United States, eventually finding a copy at the University of South Carolina’s legal library, a legacy donation from 1962 that the library had no idea what to do with. It would become the exclusive property of the Canterlot Church Library when it arrived by post in a week—the very same day as Luna’s scheduled breakdown. Not even Celestia’s charm powers could sway a stern Presbyterian on the other end of a staticky phone line, so Celestia had to rely on a higher force than herself to provide her only hope in saving her sister from a horrible fate: the U.S. Postal Service.

She decided to tell no one of what she had discovered; convinced she could handle this crisis on her own. Princess Celestia would be so proud.

Or perhaps she’d be in utter despair that her namesake was following right in her hoofsteps.