//------------------------------//
// Epilogue 
// Story: A Method to his Madness 
// by Luna-tic Scientist 
//------------------------------//

Nightmare Base, lunar farside, twenty years later.


"Hey, Tumble!"

Anneal flinched, the muscle twitch enough to make his hooves leave the ground in the one sixth lunar gravity. He sighed and ignored the mare's shout, trying to recover his focus. Why did I ever tell her my milk name? The annoyance passed and he stared at the console, frowning slightly at the software's predictions. It was really pretty good, as it should be after all the years refining the models, but the slight deviation was getting larger as they approached activation of the containment systems.

"I said--"

"Yes, Pinion, I heard what you said. I'm a little busy right now, what do you want?" Anneal waved his head across the instrument panel, the orange glowing tip of his horn making the control systems glitter. Many of the functions were duplicates of those managed by other ponies at other stations -- the actual, important stations, controlling devices with actual, important functions -- but he had all the cameras. Nopony was going to let a barely adult colt get his hooves on anything vital, but he had the best view.

"I just wanted to see what you are looking at," Pinion said, sounding slightly put out. "They don't need me for anything now that our honoured guest is trying to break free, so I'm down in the bunker with nothing to do." She fluttered closer on dapple grey wings, the tiny motions all that was needed to hold her aloft in the low gravity. "This place is a bit oppressive at the best of times."

Anneal sighed and shifted over slightly, eyes flicking over to the big shield door that had sealed them in. There was a deadness to the whole room, only slightly alleviated by the presence of the other few ponies in this section of the independently hardened complex. "I know what you mean... and I'd appreciate the company right now."

"Do you think it will hold?" She gestured to the walls and their buried layers of spellcraft.

If we need the shielding, things have gone very badly wrong indeed! Anneal kept that thought to himself. "We'll never get to find out. What with the spellcraft Elements and Luna herself with the originals... Discord doesn't have a chance."

"Do you think we'll see her?" Pinion asked, a wistful tone in her voice. "She's not been seen in public for years. I've only seen her in documentaries."

"We have the best view in the house!" With a flourish, Anneal shuffled the video displays across the console, bringing one small window to prominence. "There you go. She arrived an hour ago."

Pinion inhaled sharply and crowded close, stiff feathers pushing him to one side and her muzzle practically brushing the centre of the curved display. It showed the central receiving plaza of the containment zone -- part display ground, part muster station -- full of ponies, zebra and gryphons. Amid the militaries of a dozen nations was a quiet multispecies group, surrounding a tall figure with a star-filled mane and tail. 

"It is her!"

"Of course it is -- you did read the agenda, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I didn't really believe-- Who are the others? It's all ponies in the middle."

"The triplet with the chiropt are FOALs. They've got the real Elements."

"The pegasus with the pink mane? What about her?"

"That's Sunny, Luna's companion." Anneal said that with a shrug. "Whatever that means. She's been seen with Luna before, ever since Celestia passed."

"Huh, she was never in the vids." Pinion shivered. "Interesting choice of name, considering." She narrowed her eyes, switching her gaze from screen to Anneal. "That's... When were you going to tell me?" The excitement transitioned to outrage, her voice going up the registers.

"Shhh!" Anneal's ears flicked back but he grinned. "Keep it down, the booth soundproofing isn't that good."

Pinion's voice became a sharp whisper and she jabbed a wingtip at him. "That's your sire and dam, down there with Luna! Why are they here?!"

"Long story, which I'm not really allowed to talk about." And I'm sure there's more to it than I've been told. "They were on the Express, right when Discord was locked up again. Did some important stuff."

Sudden understanding dawned across the mare's face. "Your sire's mental condition... is... did it happen then?"

"A result of it. They are here as witnesses; Luna invited them."

Pinion's expression changed again, turning to something uncomfortably like awe. "Actual war heroes," she whispered. "Just wait until I--"

"Please don't," he said. "All they want is a bit of peace." He watched her internal struggle, knowing full-well that he was asking too much. This thing was just too big not to tell. "Tell you what, if--" Anneal looked at Pinion seriously, any good humour gone. He lifted a foreleg, prodding her with one hoof in time with the words. "--if you agree to keep this between ourselves, I'll introduce you."

"I've already met your parents!"

"To Luna." He wanted to smile at her shocked expression, but didn't. "After we're done here I'm meeting my parents for the tour, with Luna. I'm allowed to bring a suitable guest." 

Pinion's expression shifted to one of joy. "You could do that?" she asked faintly.

"It's already set up... I was going to surprise you later, but since you are here." He gestured to the master clock, which was approaching the appointed time. On the main screen Luna and the rest of the group were on the move. "Anyway, back off a bit so I can work." She did so and he nodded. "Thank you -- and I'm serious about not talking. It will make my parents unhappy if this comes up in the news." Not to mention that it's covered by the defence of the realm act and it will get me into trouble. "And Luna owes my parents a favour." He gave her a meaningful look.

That seemed to do it. Her eyes stayed wide and full of excitement, but her ears drooped slightly. "Got it. Lips are sealed."

Anneal grinned. "Not trying to scare you--" Much. "--but this is important to me." On the screen the doors to the containment bay were starting to open. He gestured at the thaumic controls, horn flickering. The video windows moved again, bringing up a view of Discord ringed by concentric circles of spellcraft machines. "Right... show time."

===

Luna could feel a pressure in the air, a sense of something massive like a distant thunderstorm. Soon, she thought. I might not be able to feel Discord, but the machines are obvious. At her side, 'Sunny' stirred, her head coming up to point at the big door on the opposite wall. "Glad you came?" she murmured.

"Very much so."

There was excitement to her sister's whisper and Luna hid a small smile. After years of small problems it was nice to be asked to save the world again. "If the equipment doesn't work as intended, it's going to get very exciting very quickly," she said in her normal voice. Are you ready for that, sister? Twenty years in hiding down the drain.

"They will work, MIstress," Chirr said, bouncing up and down in the low gravity and making his panniers rattle. "If not, there's always..."

I almost wish... Luna looked at Chirr with her shadow sight, feeling the promise of power bottled up in the Elements he carried. "Let us hope not; Equestria is still paying for this base. It would be a shame to break it."

Chirr grinned, sharp teeth showing, but said nothing and stepped away from Luna, leaving her and Sunny at the centre of a circle of cleared concrete. Big enough that we might be able to avoid killing them in the first exchange. Just Sunny and I... I wonder what ponies will say about that. 

The rumours had swirled around them both -- foal from a secret liaison, psychiatrist, Panopticon agent, lover, thrall -- but none had latched on to the truth. The closest anypony came were comments mentioning Sunny's colouration and how it matched the earliest known representations of Celestia, but even those went more towards how she was trying to recapture some fragment of her lost sister. The Triumvirate didn't know and the Panopticon denied all knowledge... but it was still a source of constant amazement that the secret hadn't yet leaked. 

At her side, Sunny nudged her with a wingtip and she grunted, stepping towards the now opening door. "Right, let's see if all that money was worth it," Luna said.

"Not your money to worry about, Luna," Sunny said. Her voice dropped to a whisper almost to faint to hear and her lips were as still as a skilled ventriloquist. "Not that you ever helped me with the budgets."

"You enjoyed it, don't try and claim that you didn't. All those numbers and books to be balanced." Luna shivered, then opened a wing and spread it over Sunny's back, and they both entered the containment bay.

===

Anneal stared at the video feeds, arming the high-speed cameras and clearing their buffers. There were dozens of cameras focused on the bay -- wide-angle ones covering every part of the chamber, telephoto ones gazing at specific sections of Discord or the various machines surrounding him, hyperspectral ones operating from the vacuum ultraviolet all the way down to terahertz -- filling the local storage before being sent off to other servers over the horizon and up towards satellite relays and off towards Equestria.  

Discord was there in the middle, as he always was, surrounded by cubic blocks of spellcraft machines. There were twenty of them attached to an icosahedral gantry around him, each inner surface polished to a mirror finish. Heavy cables snaked across the frame, plugging into the back of each module and vanishing into the floor, connecting them to buried homopolar generators and superconducting storage coils. 

They glowed, subtle patterns of rainbow light, coiling and pulsing over the angular globe, filling the gaps between the gantry with a soapbubble film. "This is it," Anneal said, gesturing at the power display. "I've only seen this on video of the test rigs." The light brightened and brightened again, the various cameras either ignoring the light or filtering it to maintain a good image.

"Look at Luna," Pinion whispered. Her mane and tail, always in slow, constant motion, were streaming back from the containment systems, like she was standing in a gale. By contrast, Sunny’s plain hair barely moved; this wind was pure magic, a tiny leakage of the huge energies being marshalled. The soap-film thickened, becoming almost opaque like heavy stained glass, then abruptly exploded inwards and outwards at the same time. The inner spellshock folded around Discord, sinking into what passed for his flesh. The outer...

Anneal held his breath. Rumour coming out of the development teams said that if anything was going to happen, it would be now. Power levels were dropping as the machines returned to their standby state and everything seemed normal... Abruptly he grinned, leaning into Pinion to whisper in her ear. "What do you know, all the scientists were right -- it worked!" The grin faded and he stared at the little window showing Luna and Sunny. I could swear that I saw something--

She sighed and relaxed, all her tension leaking away. "It must have." She gestured at Luna again -- the ex-Princess had turned and was walking away, one wing wrapped tightly around Sunny. "Luna looks happy."

"Yes, she does," Anneal muttered, magic reaching for the playback controls. He spooled back through the feed from the relevant camera, frame by frame, watching as the outer spellshock rolled over Luna and Sunny. There it was, an odd pattern in the shock front, blurred and distorted by the speed of the event. The shape was achingly familiar, something he'd only seen in the history shows his dam and sire used to watch with sad expressions. Must be a better view. Pinion was asking him a question, but he was too focused and didn't hear her.  

One of the high-speed cameras on the other side of Discord had the pair in shot, and he waited impatiently as the relevant tenth of a second of video was copied to his terminal. That was still over ten thousand frames, enough for four hundred seconds of normal recording, and it took a few moments to find the precise time point.

The individual frames were a little grainy from the enhancement required to generate usable images from this short a shutter speed, but it was perfectly clear. Where Sunny stood was the ghostly outline of another pony, as large as Luna and having both wings and horn. A faint echo of a mane streamed out behind the mirage, the mirror of Luna's.

"Rutting tartarus," Pinion whispered. "She's supposed to be dead."

"They never found a body..." Anneal swallowed. ...and she was hidden all this time. Celestia is ancient, she would have had a good reason. He felt his heart thunder in his chest and he remembered the warning he'd given to Pinion. ...and Luna helped her hide. "There's nothing I can do." No access, can't wipe the data... somepony will talk.

"Do? This is fantastic! Just wait until I-- oh."

"Exactly." He smiled brightly at her, eyes slightly wide with suppressed panic. "You want that meeting with Luna now? We can at least give them some warning."

===

Sunny was looking at her, head cocked slightly to one side, as they walked back out of the containment bay. "What?" Luna said.

"You're disappointed."

Luna sighed. "I could never hide anything from you."

"You're bored." Sunny nodded and looked away. "Me too."

Luna came to a sudden halt, waving one wing at Chirr's concerned expression. "Give us a minute, please." Chirr trotted off, taking position in the doorway and intercepting anyone trying to come the other way. "It's taken you twenty years to get to this point. What do you want to do, given your condition?"

"Discord was right, I think. This universe is a trap... it won't be long before our ponies can't grow any more."

"I remember Twilight's panic when she found out the universe was closed and finite!" Luna smiled, expression softening. "You have something in mind?"

"A project. Long term. Do what Discord wanted, only without killing everyone. What do you think?"

Centuries, I'd think. "Our world is happy... the war and our ah, departure brought pony, gryphon and zebra closer together. Your plan has worked and they've not needed us for years." Luna's ears twitched; there was a growing noise from the outer room and Chirr's voice was becoming louder and more stern. "Okay, sounds interesting. I think we should..." She trailed off, staring at Chirr and the agitated group he was holding back.

"That's Neighmann and Equilibrium, with their colt. What's got them so excited? Come on, let's go and find out." Sunny said, giving Luna a nudge.


=== THE END ===