//------------------------------//
// Two Workshops, Several Minions, and An Unintended Consequence 
// Story: The Princess's Bit 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

Trixie slowly withdrew the rifling bore caliper, watching the test coil as it passed around the measurement card. She wasn't positive it was as revolutionarily effective as the patent-manufacturer that made it claimed, but it gave a reasonably good baseline as to the quality of the rifling on used barrels.

Trixie's breath came in and out, smoothly, evenly as she engaged in the meditation known as 'focused work'.

And, though she was aware of the prickly gaze of the observing ordnance sergeant and Trixie's guards picking at the back of Trixie's neck, she was more concerned with the simple matter at hoof. And that this was not the most virgin of light cannon barrels.

The falcon's barrel was passing her assessment, but only barely, and only according to the tools she had to hoof. It was clean, at least, Trixie noted to herself as she took the tool entirely out of the falcon's muzzle. There was no blacking on the toothing or the surface of the caliper.

There was a slight sound of raised voices in the front office beyond the armory workshop's half-closed heavy doors, designed to be barred and barricaded in case of mutiny in the fortress proper.

Trixie bent over and grabbed the magnifying rig with her horn-glow, and peered down the barrel, lighting up her horn brightly so that she could see down the length of it, and look for the tell-tale glint of coppering.

Nothing. Nothing but Trixie's new commander's command sergeant screeching something irrelevant at the ordnance mucky-mucks. Nothing Trixie needed to concerned about.

Trixie was concerning herself with this gun in miniature, this falcon. Somepony had loved this gun not wisely, but too well. They must have run their wire-wool brush through it twice a week, and three times on Sundays. Not even all that much in the way of pitting. Better than the other five they'd let her evaluate. It would do, Trixie thought. Well enough.

And the third falcon's barrel, and the second one's as well. She'd have to rebore the second one sometime soon, though, if she had time, and the tools. One or two ordnance rankers were looking over her shoulder and muttering their own evaluation of the trash their superiors had given Trixie permission to evaluate and claim for her new battery. Well sort of, that was what the griffish guards sergeant was arguing about with these ponies' superiors, Trixie thought. The rank and file in the armory didn't hate Trixie the way the rest of the corps of artillery did, but she knew she always had to be careful of their measured eyes. The rankers were always, always jealous of their toolboxes and armory work-space.

Trixie sometimes thought they'd had her transferred out to the harbor batteries to keep her from monopolizing the midnight armory workbenches, messing with their tools, and burning the midnight oil. Then she conquered her irrational paranoia and remembered they were just rankers. It was the other officers that hated Trixie.

She was pretty sure that falcon #3 had been one of her project guns back in the first week of January, although Trixie had to admit that she'd been drinking heavily in January, and sometimes wasn't quite paying attention to which particular weapon she'd fussed with last.

Trixie marked falcon #5 on her paperwork, and marked it above the trunnion, boldly, with a piece of blue chalk, Trixie's. Then she looked up at her guards, and gestured for them to add the barrel to the stack on their heavy haulage cart. The earth pony looked bored. The small hen with feathers like a blue jay that had been buddy-buddy with the big brown and grey griffon sergeant hadn't taken her eyes off of Trixie yet.

Trixie wasn't sure what she thought about having a griffon audience again. But at least it wasn't a particularly flamboyant performance planned for today.

It took three more barrels before Trixie found the fourth falcon for the battery. The exhausted ordnance sergeant was more than happy to have some of his ponies bundle it into the cart that the guards sergeant and her 'ponies' had brought for Trixie, so long as the 'Crystal Guards' ceased to darken his door, which he could finally bolt and lock for the night.

Trixie was mildly surprised when a pair of the armory's minions threw their toolboxes into a second cart that had come, as far as Trixie could tell, out of nowhere, and joined the guards delegation and their cart full of heavy falcon barrels on their trip back to the guards squadron's warrens in the main garrison across town.

Apparently Trixie wasn't welcome in the fortress armory's workshops anymore? She wasn't clear on what had happened in that front office. But the two ordnance ponies were coming with them, and the ordnance ponies' toolboxes.

It was OK, Trixie could find her own workspace, so long as she had the tools.

And maybe a minion or two.





Even the excitement of meeting a living legend faded after the third day of meetings, and it was surprising how much sleep greater turuls required. Lyra got bored while she was waiting for 'Lady George' to awaken, and decided to go explore. Some inquiries revealed a former acquaintance other than Twi- Gleaming Shield in the garrison fortress, and she went looking to find good old Trixie.

Lyra found the artillerymare in the sub-basements. The Sixth Guards had taken over an industrial laundry in the guts of the garrison, the big boiling-cauldrons sitting unused, the long benches covered in bits of tack and carefully arranged tools, pots of unidentifiable substances, and here and there, small cannon resting in improvised cradles, supported by their barrels and cast trunnions.

There was some activity in the darker corners, additional tables and movement, but the spectacle of a full grown mare bouncing up and down on a light carriage, like a foal jumping on her mother's big princess-sized bed, riveted Lyra's attention. Two troopers held either side of the carriage, one in the traces, the other grasping the rear handles like somepony pulling tug-of-war.

Lyra waited by the steps down into the laundry floor, for somepony to notice her presence. The blue artillerymare climbed down off her bouncy carriage, and pointed something out to the panting stallion holding the back of the rig. Lyra's hearing was good enough for a unicorn, but she couldn't make out whatever vehicular wisdom Lieutenant Trixie Lulumoon was imparting to her trooper. They got the hen in the traces untied, and pushed the carriage over to join its twin beside the rear boiling cauldron at the back of the laundry.

Meanwhile, ponies in Lyra's peripheral vision did various industrious-like tasks that frankly didn't interest Lyra at all. 

Finally! Trixie was walking up the stairs, and discovering Lyra blocking her way.

"You! I know you!" said Lyra, smirking down at her ex-classmate. "I never forget a muzzle. Wait a minute, the name will come back to me..."

"Buck you, Lyra Heartstrings. Why are you polluting my workshop? I've got falcons to recondition, materials to prepare, carriages to evaluate, and far, far too many other things to take up our valuable time. That aren't dealing with useless unicorns."

"What, no complaints about how I clearly remember your face, but I can't for the life of me remember your thoroughly unmemorable name? No wailing about the fame of a certain great and powerful dropout?"

The blue mare looked up at Lyra, dead-eyed and bored.

"Bug off, Lyra, I'm busy."

"OK, now I see why Twilight is worried about you, this isn't natural. Can you say your name for me, Trixie? Blink twice if you're not under a spell."

"Private Glenda, please go up there and remove that civilian from the stairs. She's clearly gotten past the guardpost up on the main floor. Blessed Bob Tail only knows how."

Lyra backed up hastily as the small, hard-bitten griffon hen loomed rapidly up the concrete steps with blood in her eye. The blue griffon's lack of bulk was somehow made up by her air of compact menace. Lyra wasn't sure what exactly might have happened at that point, because a series of sharp raps came from the freight elevator doors across the front of the laundry at that moment, sparing her from the wrath of Trixie's underling.

Said blue mare rolled her eyes, and trotted over to the freight elevator, pulling the lever that canterleaved the heavy wooden barrier on its counterweights and gearwork. 

An earth pony in his own set of traces pulled a delivery cart out of the elevator onto the laundry room floor, and hoofed over his bill of lading to the artillery lieutenant.

"Don't think this is over, Lyra!" she yelled over her shoulder. "OK, what is this? We're getting a lot of deliveries this week… oh! My smoke bomb and pyrotechnic materials! Great! Hey, Tinker, Totem, leave off on the springs and those rigs, I could use your help down here, let's get this unloaded."

Lyra gestured towards the distracted officer, and the griffon silently rolled her eyes and turned around to join in on the unloading. She didn't even flatten Lyra when Lyra followed her down the stairs.

"Good, good," Trixie muttered to herself as she looked over the sheath of paperwork, the deliverypony waited impatiently and her swarm of subordinates unloaded various small crates, racks of ampules, and pots. "Be careful with that stuff, some of it is volatile, and some of it is highly poisonous. Don't use your mouths on any of it!"

"Wait, you, deliverypony!" Trixie suddenly said, straightening up. Lyra drifted over to read over her ex-classmate's shoulder, curious.

"My name's not deliverypony, it's Bu-"

"I really couldn't care less, minion. What I care about is that somehow this paperwork indicates that my potassium nitrate has been replaced by white phosphorus. It's got to be an error, nopony would be so-"

The two work-ponies carrying white sacks off the cart froze, and one of them slowly lowered his burden to the laundry room floor and reached over to grab the griffon hen, shaking his head at her to stop.

"Yeah, it's white phosphorus. They said you made a mistake, updated the paperwork properly. Smoke munitions in the EUP are made from white phosphorus. Why do you think I have this placard here?" The deliverypony pointed at a diamond-shaped device mounted on the back of his cart, with numbers way too high for Lyra's vague understanding of how the hazardous handling classification scheme worked these days. They'd just updated the system… there'd been some sort of memo at the Academy just before she'd left for this trip.

Well, at least the quadrant for 'magical hazard' had been left blank…

"No, by all that's holy in the sight of Blessed Bob Tail! Get this shit out of here! You brought WILLY PETE into my workshop! Are you mad, deliverypony?"

"I told you, my name is Bu-"

"Your name is going to be 'Burn Ward, 3rd Degree Section, No Direct Sunlight!' White phosphorus is frickin' dangerous! Where's your ridealong? You were supposed to have a ridealong for this class of material!"

"Oh, horseapples, this is the Griffish Isles, the rules are-"

"The rules are in place for a reason! And I will not work with white phosphorus! 'Willy Pete sticks to foals'," Trixie raged. " I ordered potassium nitrate for a reason, you hopeless foal! POTASSIUM!"

The two earth pony minions had settled into wait-and-see poses, watching the interaction with still faces. The griffon hen had joined them in their little row, see no evil, hear no evil, wait for orders to murder the evil. 

Off to the side, the bat pony had been looking confused at a ten-kilogram white sack in his hooves, but that confusion was slowly being replaced with an ashen expression that sat strangely on his dark lavender coat, and he finally set his burden gently down.

Very gently.

"Well, we've mostly got it unloaded, don't we, Lieutenant Doesn't Want To Know My Name. And I was ordered to deliver this shit, not return it." He went to the back of the cart, and unloaded the last sack of white phosphorus. "There, all off the cart. The rest of this is mostly harmless, or at least, that's what the warehouse pony said. If your ponies want to reload it all, and take their lives in their own hooves by taking it all back to the warehouse themselves, well, that's between you and your privates, lieutenant."

The evil earth pony grinned an evil grin at Lyra's former classmate, continuing after a beat, "But if you do that, I'll report my rig stolen, and you can answer to the MPs. Princess knows, there's enough hijacking in this city that they'll certainly believe me before they do you. Ain't that many Equestrian cits hauling military dry goods in Bleeding Trottingham, now, are there?"

Trixie Lulumoon slumped, defeated. She let the evil deliverypony finish making his deliveries, the triumphant pony left, his tail flagging proudly in the air to advertise his cast-iron balls to the world.

Lyra found herself almost sympathizing with a mare she mostly remembered hating in school. 

"What does a mare need to do to make a safe smoke round in this army?" Trixie mourned, looking back and forth between the deadly pile of white sacks and her minions. One of the two earth ponies shrugged noncommittally. 

"What's so bad about it, Trixie?" Lyra asked, honestly curious at this point. What Lyra didn't know about chemistry could fill… well, chemistry textbooks. "After all, if the Princess's military is willing to use it for something as harmless as smoke rounds…"

"Poisonous fumes," Trixie began from her slump over by the now-closed door into the delivery docks. "Obscenely flammable. As I said before, sticks to pony flesh. Or griffon flesh. Or just about anything. Incredibly difficult to extinguish once it starts going. Ask around. It's nightmarish. Blessed Bob Tail's Incendiary Urination, I have nightmares about the damn stuff."

As the rest of them stared at the pile of white sacks, Trixie's earth pony minions started putting away the other deliveries, and began drifting off to whatever projects that had been interrupted by the delivery drama.

But hey! It was kind of fun playing the straight-mare for once.

Ha! 'Straight'.

Lyra thought for a second, trying to figure out how to play this… "Then why do you use it for laying smoke?" Lyra asked, reasonably reasonable-sounding, over the banging and shuffling noises of the stage-hoofs at work.

"Bloody efficient at makin' smoke, of course," said the small blue griffon hen for the first time. Lyra managed to not grimace at her lines being stepped on.

"Yes, yes, great gobs of smoke," Trixie rose to the bait. "Poisonous smoke, punctuated with impossible to extinguish bits of incendiaries. Trixie would tell you to go ask the Hayward Dragoons what happens when the wind changes, and your own fires blow back in your faces. The ones that lived, will be able to tell you, because even those pyromaniacal moon-lovers knew better than to cook with white phosphorus!"

"Well, you know, inclement conditions and all that rot…" the trooper said. Lyra's ears perked. Maybe the hen was better at the straight mare than Lyra was. And 'inclement'? Just how well educated were these Trottish griffons?

"Again, how often do we encounter 'inclement conditions' in the field?" the blue unicorn demanded, bitterly.

"Every time we set paw out of doors, yeah, right. Look, boss, I need to go 'ave a smoke and Nightlight and me have drill in a couple. You go ahead and finish 'aving kittens, we'll see ya bright and early tomarrer. Come on, Nightlight, I need to blow a cloud."

The two troopers filed up the stairs, off to do whatever it was that enlisted ponies did when officers weren't looking. Smoke? Lyra wondered what it was that griffons smoked… was it any good?

The little blue hen paused as she came up to Lyra, and turned to look at her.

"It sounds like yer some sorta china ov our Derry an' Toms. The sergeants said we were to clap a mince pie on 'er," the griffon guard said, very quietly. "Make sure everyfing's isles and wights? Keep a butchers out, you savvy? Now maybe she's prone to chuckin' a wobbly, or maybe they's just careful like of our dear Derry, but the lemon curd is she's Barley Rubble in the flesh. This 'ere ain't strictly barley, but it's 'arry o'moore to it, if you ken.

"Do ye ken?"

Not really. What? Was- was the hen calling Trixie 'Derry'? Lyra was so confused… maybe she'd hallucinated the hen's prior apparent erudition. 

"Do you mean to say, keep Trixie company?"

The blue hen clapped one of her sharp-clawed avian mitts on Lyra's shoulder, and grinned, saying as she went up the stairs, "You've got it square, Canterlot Fair. Nightlight! Not so potater!"

Lyra watched the two guards leave the laundry, the batpony grumbling about the griffon's impenetrable nonsense, and then she turned back to look at Trixie slumped on the dirty floor, glaring woefully at the sacks of flammable poison. Quiet tinks and taps and mechanical noises marked the activities of the earth pony minions around the improvised workshop floor.

Lyra walked over. She sat down next to the pony who had never been her friend, but at least was a friendly- ok, well, a familiar face. "So, not fond of burning, poisoned foals?"

"I don't even like them when they're not on fire and screaming, no," Trixie said from the pool of pony she'd made on the floor, making a noise halfway between a raspberry and a disturbing giggle.

"I just wanted to make some nice, clean smoke bombs, you know?" Trixie sighed. Lyra was becoming mildly concerned about the pronounced lack of illism. The hen had been right, somepony needed to keep an eye on this mare.

"Trixie, you have with you, two of the best unicorns to ever graduate from the Princess's own academy. You think between Twilight and me, we can't transmute some sacks of white phosphorus into whatever you want?"

Trixie laughed at this from her supine position on the filthy laundry room floor. 

"The only thing that could possibly make this shit more dangerous, would be to let Twilight fucking Sparkle try untested transformative magic on it."





"Wait, back up. What's the name of that last one?"

"Private Nightlight."

"That's going to be uncomfortable, my father's name is Night Light."

"Your father is a twenty-one-year-old gormless batpony named Nightlight?"

"Well, no, obviously… oh, look, one word, not two. That's probably how it got past the registry. I think that the batpony colonies are included in the remit of the Registry of Names? Oh, now that's going to bug me until I look it up…"

"Wait, I thought you told me your mother was also named Twilight something, right?"

"Yes, Dame Twilight Velvet. Third of her name - not in sequence, of course. Usually in rotation with Gleaming or Shining or Twinkle for the firstborn. I'll probably have to name my own foaI Twilight something. Or would it be Shining? Anyways, tradition."

"She married a 'Night Light'? What is he, her own brother?"

"What, no! Ew! You're worse than Lyra!"

"What is he, then, a cousin? Once or twice removed? Because there's gotta be some sorta family tie there, names never get that close with ponies without a family tradition makin' it so."

"We know our ancestries going back twenty generations! Ten in my father's case."

"Ha! So that's when they split off a bastard line, then?"

"Gilda, shut your damn beak and get back to filing."





The big griffon sergeant standing in front of the troop formation looked down at her clipboard. 

"Last item of business! Private Nightlight! Step forward!"

"Marm!"

"You will now be known as 'Bob', per the Captain's instruction. Do you understand, Private Bob?"

"Marm, yes Marm! I answer to 'Bob'!"

The trooper in question went slightly crosseyed, and then looked constipated, and then… SKREEEEE!





"… And then she said the Captain—our fruitin' Captain—picked a special name for me! I nearly echoed right on the spot. It was all I could do to keep myself to a skree," Private Bob bragged to the others in the barracks.

All around Private Bob the other bats listened with intent focus and jealousy. Only matrons of the Night Shift got special names from command! Lucky bat…