Spike the Dragon, Royal Advisor and younger brother to Princess Twilight Sparkle, the brave and glorious hero of the Crystal Empire, and all-around swell guy, entered the capital city of Canterlot for his, talons crossed, first true day on the job. The palace was mostly restored after the battle with the villainous group with too many names for itself.
Seriously, Terrible Trio, the Legion of Doom, and the Elements of Disharmony? Spike was glad Twilight had mostly outgrown her obsessive-compulsive freak-outs, because figuring out how to categorize the files for those three was already going to be a nightmare for whatever poor sap she got to…
Right. It was him. Again.
Oh well, Royal Advisor. The gig was too sweet to turn down because of some paperwork. Mostly.
Canterlot was beautiful, as always, minus the still partly-reconstructed palace. And, more importantly, for the first time, it felt like Spike was truly the center of attention in his hometown. Perhaps it was the six armored guards escorting him from the train station to the Palace, or maybe it was his own animal-magnetism (that one, he’d agree), but it seemed like everypony in the city was happy to see him.
It was no Crystal Empire, but it felt good to be appreciated, nonetheless.
The guard-post in front of the Palace allowed him easy entrance, recognizing the legendary hero as he approached, and a single guardsmare escorted him into one of the few completely reconstructed meeting rooms on the first floor.
Happily, Spike didn’t have long to wait. After only a few minutes, a familiar unicorn mare approached. Her coat was a light gray, and her mane a dark brown done up into a bun like her tail.
“Spike?” she asked.
“Hiya, Miss Inkwell!” he called back to Celestia’s personal aide, “Long time, no see!”
“Ha! True enough,” Raven Inkwell tittered, “Have you gotten taller, Spike? Where did that little hatchling go?”
Spike puffed his chest out, and sighed satisfactorily, “He became a stud.”
“Yeah,” Raven was glad she could hide behind her glasses just then, “Let’s go with that…”
“Welp!” Spike pulled out a pad of paper and a quill from underneath his wing, “Time to get started! Thanks again, for doing this, Miss Inkwell.”
She nodded, “It’s no trouble, no trouble at all. And, it’s been a long time coming. If the whole almost-end-of-the-world thing hadn’t derailed the original coronation, we’d have had this meeting sooner.”
“Alright then, so…” Spike prepared to write away, “How do I become you?”
Raven smiled, and began to walk down the Palace hallway, a note-taking dragon hot on her heels.
“The position of Royal Advisor,” she began, “involved not just the creation of the office itself, but folding the old Royal Aide position into its responsibilities. So, in addition to your other tasks – assisting the Princess, tie-breaking Council Meetings, heading diplomatic efforts, etcetera – you will also be responsible for everything Kibitz and I used to do for Celestia and Luna.”
Spike’s tongue stuck out the side of his mouth as he dutifully recorded the information provided. He and Raven passed by the throne room, currently closed off due to repair work still ongoing, and made their way towards the back-quarter of the Palace, a place he’d never visited before, but that he’d heard sensational tales about from Twilight.
The Secretary’s Office. The holy grail of Equestrian paperwork and bureaucracy (at least, until Twilight’s newest civil service reforms went through).
“You’ll basically be the Head of the Palace,” Raven sighed, glancing back at Spike with a pained look, “I don’t envy you.”
The purple dragon shrugged, “Eh. I basically did that for Twilight since… ever. I bet a lot of this will just be that, but on a larger scale.”
“Scale has its own complications, Master Dragon,” Raven popped open a plain, unadorned door, and ushered Spike inside. He suddenly found himself in a room even larger than the throne room itself!
“What…” he tried to grasp the scale of the room, and found himself getting a slight case of vertigo, despite the relatively low ceiling, “What is this place?”
The room could have doubled as an airship hangar, every square inch of its floorspace covered in wood-backed cubicles spaced out between tasteful potted plants and water-coolers, seemingly stretching to the horizon. Ponies of every tribe, shape, and color filled the cubicle-desks, tapping away at electric typewriters like the sound of a rattling old train car. And lining the walls, from where Spike and Raven stood to the other end of the bureaucratic cavern, were office doors of fogged glass plastered with their departments and names of the office’s higher-ups.
Raven swept one hoof out to encompass the monstrosity before her, and gave Spike a toothy grin.
“The Royal Pool Hall!”
He stared, blankly, at the public servant.
She kept the grin, “You see, it’s funny, because…”
Her voice faltered as she took in young Spike’s continued stare.
“Well, it’s a joke, anyway,” she coughed, “Secretary pool, and all that…”
“Right, so, what does this place do?” Spike went back to his notes, “I can’t imagine this place isn’t some sort of super-important office.”
“Well, yes, actually,” Raven began walking along the edge of the room, “This is, technically speaking, your office.”
“My office?”
“Your office!”
Spike seemed to space out for a moment.
“…my office…”
He shook his head, and continued after Raven.
“So, what…?”
“These ponies,” Raven indicated with a nod, “Are your secretaries. Their main job is to duplicate and file every piece of parchment that passes through the Palace. Literally everything goes through them at one point or another, outside of documents with Princess-Grade Security. Their duties will also be expanding, once Twilight’s proposed civil service changes take effect. They’ll be needed for all the new Ministries...”
And so, the tour proceeded. Spike spent the better part of an hour marching dutifully behind Miss Inkwell, seeing the government in action as they went. While in the ‘Pool Hall’, he learned about how it would be his job to schedule meetings between all the various departments and groups who worked at the Palace, from the cooks and chefs, to the janitors and custodians, from the guards, to the paper-pushers. There was nocreature working at the Palace who did not, in some way, answer to Spike, starting tomorrow.
He also started getting familiar with Raven’s filing system, though he quickly realized how primitive the whole thing was compared to Twilight’s organizational zeal, and decided he would have to overhaul the entire thing.
Finally, after touring all the major sections of the Palace, including a quick lunch in the kitchens, Spike and Raven reached the Grand Staircase, where Celestia often stood to greet guests at the Grand Galloping Gala, and where the thousand-year-old staircase had thankfully avoided the ravages of the Terrible Legion of Disharmony. They’d just finished discussing the Royal Calendar, when Raven suddenly turned back towards her successor, and smiled.
“Alright! Do you have any questions for me?”
Spike scratched his head, and looked over the notes he’d been taking all day. He was up to twenty pages, all small claw-writing.
“Just one,” he finally said.
“Shoot,” Raven nodded, happy to help.
He folded his little arms, and said, “So, why is it whenever I see you down in Ponyville, you’re an earth pony, but a unicorn when I see you up here?”
Raven’s eyes widened at the question. She stammered for a moment, and then adjusted her glasses with her magic.
“Oh, that,” she sighed, “Well, it’s a long story. But, sort of fascinating, I guess? See, it all started…”
But, sadly, that story was not to be told today, for at that exact instant, both public servants could hear a wailing cry from up the grand staircase. Barely glancing at one another, Raven and Spike leapt to action, and raced up the Grand Staircase to the next floor.
They came up into a long hallway lined on one side by towering windows of the finest glass, and on the other a long line of office doors. Office doors that were now wide open, their occupants staring out into the hallway where the screams were coming from.
The originator of said screams appeared to be a deranged pony currently racing up the hall towards Spike and Raven.
“Tragedy!” the panicking, white pegasus stallion shrieked, “It’s the end of Equestria!”
Spike got in front of the poor pony, managing to stop him in his mad dash even with wild eyes and frothing lips adding to his maddened appearance.
“Whoa! Whoa!” Spike held out his claws and wings, “Easy there! What’s going on?”
Raven leveled a narrow look at the pegasus in question. “Shovel Ready? What’s going on? Shouldn’t you be down in the Treasury?”
Shovel shook his head, sending spittle flying everywhere. “That’s the thing! There is no Treasury! She’s… she’s…”
The Royal Advisor and former Royal Aide gave one another the same, worried look. Nothing of what Shovel had just said made any sense.
That was, until a moment later, when a far more familiar presence made herself known to them.
“Good afternoon, my little ponies!”
Before the dazed and concerned office workers of the Palace, Princess Celestia strode like a colossus, a shining beacon of light amidst a wine-dark sea. Her ethereal mane waved like a victory flag, both exciting and calming all of her servants and friends.
Yet, what began on every face as a look of relief quickly fell away to further concern, and even a little terror.
The Princess indeed stood tall and graceful in the halls of her soon-to-be former home… but the giant sack balanced on her withers, complete with a large Bit-sign on the side, gave Spike some pause as he realized it was fit to burst.
“Um,” he began, slowly, as he suddenly felt a cold knot fall into the pit of his stomach, “Princess Celestia?”
“Yes? What is… oh! Spike!” the towering white Alicorn smiled genuinely and trot over to where her favorite dragon stood, “How nice to see you. Just taking Raven up on orientation?”
Spike nodded, “Uh, yeah. Say… what’s with the giant sack of… money on your back?”
Celestia blinked. Then, she turned her head about to look back upon the groaning bag of cash. And then, she slowly turned back to stare at Spike.
“The Treasury.”
Well. She was being honest, at least.
Spike gulped, “And ah, why do you have it?”
She shrugged, “I withdrew my pension.”
Shovel Ready screamed, and threw himself through the nearest window. As the glass shattered, every pony who’d been listening in joined in the screaming, and started dashing around in a complete and utter alarm. Spike watched, mostly out of the corner of his eye, as somepony took to setting folders on fire and tossing them into the hall, while a few others had already begun the process of looting their neighboring office’s supplies.
But Spike had something else to worry about, besides the literal pandemonium breaking out all around him.
“Why?” he asked.
“Retired,” was the Princess’s answer, “But, since I’ve been working for over a millennium, I suppose it’s built up quite nicely. I think the National Debt might have gone up…”
Spike simply gaped at her. “You… you bankrupted Equestria!!?”
She shrugged again, “Not intentionally, but yes. Though, I wouldn’t have had to if…”
A fell wind tore through the halls, battering aside the flames and slowly growing piles of debris with its might. Spike had to squint as dust whirled about him, and the lights began to dim. All the ponies in the hall scattered like roaches, for a shadowy cloud was now rumbling through the Palace.
The shadowy form came to a halt before Raven and Spike, before it suddenly condensed down into another familiar form.
Nightmare Moon lifted her head, and roared into the heavens.
“Intolerable!” she cried, “How contemptable! How deplorable! For such an insult, I shall bring about Night Eternal… ONCE MOOOORE!!!!!”
“Luna!?”
But Nightmare Moon only laughed at Spike’s exclamation. “I am Luna, no longer! I have been denied what is mine by right, and I shall be avenged!”
The little dragon shook his head, shot the newly arrived Princess a glare, and cried out, “What!? What happened!?”
The enraged Alicorn sat down in a grand pout, Celestia reaching out to rub her little sister’s withers in sympathy.
“Pah!” she spat, “They took away my pension! Apparently, that’s what happens when you lead a, so-called, “illegal rebellion” against the government…”
Spike frowned. “I thought you were pardoned for the whole Nightmare Moon thing years ago?”
Celestia rolled her eyes and sighed, “She was. This was for a separate rebellion…”
The Nightmare snarled, slapping away her sister’s hoof.
“I was seven! And all I did was try on your crown! I just wanted to play dress-up…”
“Sure, you did,” said Celestia in a tone of voice that loudly proclaimed she didn’t believe that for a moment, adding a near-silent, “Usurper,” at the end.
“Regardless!” Nightmare Moon stood, wings outstretched with menace, “I’m going to blow up the planet. Show those Treasury foals who’s Princess around here.”
Spike bit down on his claw-nails. “Gah! You can’t blow up the world! Celestia! Do something!”
“She’s not going to blow up the world,” Celestia chuckled, “Also, I’m retired. And rich. You go stop her!”
“This is bad, Miss Inkwell!” Spike began tapping his feet, not knowing whether to stay, go, or merely run in circles, screaming, “Like, really bad! What do we do!?”
Here, he looked up at the older mare for help.
And all he got in return was a cold, calculating smile.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” she asked, the light of the sun creating a disconcertingly shiny gleam on her glass lenses.
A glint in Spike’s eye heralded his next idea. “You were Celestia’s me! You gotta know how to calm her and Luna down!”
“Ah, true!” Raven grinned, “But then… what do I get out of it?”
Spike opened his mouth, and then closed it. He blinked, twice, not entirely sure what had just happened. He eventually decided on tilting his head to an inquisitive angle, and simply asking, “What?”
“What do I get out of it?” Raven repeated. “Technically, I’m retired as well. I mean, I do know how to effortlessly solve this crisis…”
“Then you’ll help?”
Raven nodded, “Under the right circumstances.”
“I… I don’t want to think I understood that,” Spike said slowly, his eyes narrowing as he began to realize exactly what this was.
“You scratch my withers,” Raven shrugged, “And I scratch your scales. That’s how this job works, mostly. Did you think everypony got along just because?”
Spike slapped his forehead, “It is exactly like that, isn’t it?” He sighed, and took up his quill again, “Okay. What do you want?”
Spike didn’t fail to notice how placid the Royal Sisters were acting just then.
“Well,” Raven hummed, “Let’s just say there’s been a rounding error. I believe my salary, for purposes of determining my own pension, should have been recorded as 20,000 bits higher that the current paperwork might say.”
Spike dutifully scribbled away. Without taking his eyes off his work, the little dragon said with a little acidity, “And there’ll be a bunch of committees and chairponyships coming up that you’d be good for?”
Raven’s eyes sparkled, “Ah, that would be very gratifying. I’d love to be able to be of service in my retirement, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah… I know…”
“Just the standard sort of thing,” Raven said, tossing a little wink to her accomplices, sitting just behind Spike, “Chairpony of the Thestral Commonwealth, Chair position at Equestrian Mana… perhaps Chancellor of Bale College?”
“Sure, okay,” Spike noted dryly. Then, he raised an eyebrow at the mare, and said, “Anything else?”
She nodded, “Well, now that you mention it. There’s a couple of pieces of advice to the Princesses from one of your predecessors that were accidentally read into the minutes, and would reflect terribly poorly on the Equestrian Government, as well as that predecessor if they were to, say, be up for a position on the Committee for Better Changeling-Pony Relations?”
Spike gave both Princesses an unimpressed look. They each had the decency to look away. Nightmare Moon even whistled.
“Well,” he shrugged, “You’d be up for that one too.”
“Oh? I would? How nice…”
“So, even though Thorax is my friend, I’ll make sure whatever awful advice you gave gets a top-secret label or something.”
He lowered the parchment. “Now, could you…?”
Raven nodded, smiled, and walked up to Celestia. She scratched her chin for a moment, and then pointed to the bag of bits atop her boss’s withers.
“You know, you could probably just take your pension as a lifetime payout instead of a lump sum,” she said, “You’d get more out of it in the long-term. And Equestria wouldn’t go bankrupt in the meantime. And you could share a little of that with Luna.”
Celestia seemed to mull this over a moment. Then, with a flash of golden light, the bag of bits had teleported away.
Next, Raven turned to Nightmare Moon, and said, “Now, ever since you got back from the moon, Celestia created a form under the Amnesty Act of 1104 that would allow you to be reinstated for any and all acts of rebellion or treason, assuming another Princess signs off on it.”
Spike chuckled, darkly. “I remember helping Twi sign Starlight’s. Form AJ-LF-1414-L?”
Raven turned, and nodded, “That’s the one.”
“So…” Nightmare Moon tilted her own head to the side, “I’d get my pension back?”
“Absolutely!”
“With benefits?”
“Definitely!”
“And with the backpay from being stuck on the moon for one-thousand years?”
Even Spike rolled his eyes, “Not that this matters, but don’t push your luck.”
His scowl was quite formidable as the Royal Advisor turned to look at the three mares. He placed his claws on his hips, and leveled a thoroughly pouting glare at them.
“So, what was this supposed to teach me?”
Celestia beamed, “How to compromise with your fellow civil servants.”
“How to manage a crisis,” Nightmare Moon shrugged.
Raven adjusted her glasses menacingly, “And how to Play the Game. Just because you’re technically a civil servant doesn’t mean you can’t play politics.”
Spike sighed, and looked up to Celestia. He met her wily grin with a raised eyebrow.
“So, Princess. What would you guys have done if I’d said no?”
Celestia glanced down to Raven, who waved a hoof at her in a universal “well, go on” motion. The Princess of the Sun nodded, and her face instantly took on a mote of gravity. She sucked in her breath through her nose…
And burst into flames.
“I’d have gone Daybreaker,” she hummed, her own smug tittering made more frightening by the thrumming of her empowered voice, “And, oh… probably set some small fires here and there.”
Spike nodded, a small smile creeping up on his own face.
“That’s all I needed to hear,” he said. And then, without fanfare, he let a quick snort of green fire consume the parchment in his claws.
Nightmare Moon chortled, “Oh ho! Young Spike knows when to burn the evidence? We’ll make a proper Advisor out of you yet!”
“Nah,” he waved her down, “I didn’t even write down those demands.”
Raven frowned, “Then… why did you…?”
Spike chuckled, quietly, and jabbed a thumb behind him.
“I just had to send Twilight a note saying that Daybreaker was threatening to burn her library.”
Silence fell in the halls of Canterlot Palace. Even Shovel Ready poked his head up from the broken window, eyes wide with terror.
Daybreaker/Celestia tried to swallow, but found her mouth was dry.
“You didn’t…?”
A blast of wind and burning ozone rushed past the four mares and dragon as the local air was displaced. Shovel Ready ducked out of the window, and every office door within a half mile suddenly slammed shut. For, right behind Spike, purple magical energy swirled, and Twilight Sparkle appeared before them.
Her eyes blazed with wrath. Her whole form was twisted as she appeared, the powers of the Nightmare clearly flowing through her.
“How dare you…?” her voice snarled with eldritch power, reverberations of terrible fury.
With a crackle of lightning and fire, Twilight's legs grew longer, her coat and mane darker. An aquamarine aura of fire snatched at the air around her. Within moments, there stood Midnight Sparkle, the Alicorn of Friendship… and Daybreaker’s Ruin.
“Wait,” Celestia tried, desperately, to put out her mane, and found the fire would not snuff out, “This was just a lesson for Spike! A misunderstanding…!”
But no amount of pleading would help now. Midnight threw herself at full speed, slamming into the Solar Diarch like a meteorite, and bodying her through the nearest wall. And the one beyond that. And the one beyond that.
Celestia's last, echoing cry filtered back to Spike, Raven, and Luna.
“FUCK…!”
There were several long, long moments after where all they could hear was the sound of two goddesses crashing through the building’s foundations and walls. And then some more. And some more.
It just kept going.
“Ah,” Luna, no longer in her Nightmare form, nodded, “I see…”
Raven just stared, gaping into the Celestia-shaped hole in the wall. She idly wondered what the setback to reconstruction might be, before realizing that she actually was retired.
She felt a little dragon claw tug at her elbow, prompting the former Aide to look back at her successor.
“I’ve learned my own lessons,” Spike said easily, “Mostly from watching Celestia and Twilight handle politics. Yeah, compromise is good. And yeah, sometimes you gotta play the game.”
His eyes glinted, fiercely, with the power and the madness only known to those who’ve survived one of Discord’s Ogres & Oubliettes campaigns.
“But if you got a hammer… like a certain all-powerful sibling with unlimited authority… everypony else becomes a nail.”
The Advisor and the Aide regarded one another in the following silence. Or, near-silence. There was an explosion somewhere in the distance that Luna knew meant the boiler room had just been ruptured by her sister’s body flying through it. She could hear the pipes groan with the impact.
Then, Raven Inkwell gave a low bow.
“The student has surpassed the master,” she smiled.
Spike chuckled, “Ah, quit it! We’re still friends, right?”
“Yeah,” Raven scratched the back of her neck, “Sorry about pulling the whole… “here’s a lesson on Realpolitik” on you. Should have known you already knew how all this works.”
“You were just looking out for me, like old times,” Spike shrugged and held out a friendly claw. “So, what do you say? Let’s go grab a bite and talk about Alicorn-wrangling strategies?”
“Sounds like a plan!”
The two flashed away with a teleportation spell from Raven’s horn, which left Princess Luna alone in the burned-out ruin of the Palace.
She tapped her chin, thoughtfully, as she stared at the space Raven and Spike once occupied. As the Palace shook from yet another impact off in the distance, the Princess of the Night was seemingly distracted.
“I could have sworn she was an earth pony…”