//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: Luna Never Went to the Moon: Equestria's Thousand-Year Swindle // by Rambling Writer //------------------------------// When Princess Luna returned five years ago, I was immediately skeptical. How could a pony, even an alicorn, survive on the moon for a thousand years? I brought up this issue with a few of my friends, other subscribers to Conspiracy Theorist Monthly, and they agreed with me once I had woken them from their alcohol-induced stupors. After all, I wrote manuals for Thaumodyne. I knew what I was talking about. Questions began nagging at me, ephemeral, ethereal, ecereal. Questions that the Court has never satisfactorily answered. What evidence do we have that Luna ever went to the moon in the first place, beyond the shape of the Mare on the Moon that had been extensively documented for hundreds upon hundreds of years? Is there any real assurance that Nightmare Moon had been purified by the Elements? Why were Twilight and Nightmare Moon both going after the Elements? Why had something last used a thousand years ago been lost to time? Why are all of the Element Bearers now in positions of power or even princesses themselves? Why did Luna’s purifying happen out of sight? Didn’t anypony else want to enter the incredibly dangerous forest where reality doesn’t work right? Even though she had ample time to gather them, why did Luna not bring back any gold or jewels from the moon? Why do so-called arcanic “experts” keep telling me that Luna was banished INTO the moon rather than TO the moon and saying something about suspended animation? What the heck does “the stars will aid in her escape” even mean? Why does Starswirl keep telling me to get off his lawn, he wasn’t around when Luna was banished? From these questions came the only logical conclusion: Luna never went to the moon in the first place. Her turning into Nightmare Moon and subsequent purification were all faked, pretty lights we would watch while Celestia and Luna controlled things behind the scenes. And once that idea came into my head, well, the rest of the pieces fell into place easily. Chief among them, the Elements of Harmony and how easy it was to use them. As a manual writer at Thaumodyne, I’ve seen magical devices fail all the time. The bigwigs and the Mare keep saying things about “prototypes” and “loose screws” and “hey you don’t have clearance this area is classified get out of here”, but I know how tricky they are to use. For example, the crystal turbine engine alone encountered dozens of failures before it was put into use by the Crystal Royal Express. And if it took that many tries for a simple engine, with mostly moving parts, to be perfected, how could a purely magical artifact also work? And yet, somehow, a bunch of country hicks from Podunk, Nowhere manage to use the Elements of Harmony properly on the first try? Unlikely. It’s not like they were attuned to their respective Elements or anything along those lines. Obviously, Luna never needed their “help”; this was all planned between her and Celestia. The complexity of the Elements of Harmony is shown in this diagram. Failure of any one Element could doom Luna’s purification. Sadly, the nature of the incident means it’s difficult to research. I attempted to visit the Castle of the Two Sisters, to examine the damage supposedly left by Celestia’s and Luna’s fight that surely couldn’t have been made worse by the passage of time in the middle of a hungry forest. But once I reached the location of the Castle, I found a gigantic crystalline tree-shaped building standing where the Castle used to be, with several individuals lounging around it. Was it really, as the yak taking a nap on the grass outside claimed, best treehouse not made by yaks ever? Was it, as the griffon and hippogriff necking furiously in the suspiciously well-furnished den claimed, a gift from the so-called “Tree of Harmony”? Was it, as the changeling studying on one of the balconies claimed, a symbolic representation of the happy memories collectively shared by a tight-knit group of friends? Or was it just a convenient way for Celestia and Luna to destroy what little evidence remained? The dragon flying around certainly seemed very determined to get me away from there as soon as possible. These suspicions only increased when I knocked on the door to Princess Twilight’s castle (also crystalline — hmm…) and asked to see the Elements myself, for study. What sort of magic could they actually cast? The dragon butler who answered the door looked at me like I’d been living under a rock for the past decade, yet summoned Twilight anyway. Twilight claimed that she didn’t know the status of the Elements, as they’d been somehow in the Tree of Harmony when it was destroyed — not content to merely destroy the evidence, the princesses even destroy the cover-ups! — and she and her friends hadn’t been able to retrieve them from the clubhouse. Convenient, isn’t it? She even said I wouldn’t be able to see them anyway, since they were priceless, unique, irreplaceable artifacts, and she didn’t want me dropping them. At least that excuse was reasonable; it’s not like the Elements grow on trees. But, of course, for further proof, one only needs to look at how quickly Celestia adjusted to the sudden presence of a new alicorn in the nation, as if she knew Luna was returning. Of course she knew; Luna never left in the first place. They had years, decades to plan it all out. And in spite of being out of the public eye, Luna had just as much experience with the modern world as Celestia herself. She simply disguised herself and walked among normal ponies unnoticed. Of course, some of you are probably asking: “Why? Why would Celestia and Luna go to all the trouble of crippling the government for hundreds of years and creating false political upheaval?” The answer to that, my friend, is simple. Read on.