Name’s Candlelit Counsel. When you’re a detective, you see a lot of funny stuff — in both senses of the word — but meeting a princess is still one of the things you remember years later. No, I don’t care that she wasn’t a princess yet. Do you want to hear what happened or do you want to quibble over technicalities?
It’s a valid question. Some ponies really would prefer the quibbling. Anyway, it all started in the middle of a case…
I’d long since committed every detail of it to memory, and still I gazed at the glass display case like it held the meaning of life. One side bore a beautiful razor-edged hole, even though the glass had been enchanted to be able to withstand hammer blows. Crystalline shards strewn across the floor glinted in the sunlight, a lawn of caltrops. Ponies of no particular importance milled around the outside of the police tape in a disorganized herd, all of them muttering indistinctly or trying to take pictures like this was some sort of gala event. I ignored them as I peered into the case. It was empty as the average noble’s head, very much devoid of the diamond it was supposed to be holding, Coltinan I. Even in Equestria, you didn’t get gems that size every decade.
I looked up at the ceiling. A mere four stories above my head was a skylight, set in just the right place so that the light of the sun would shine down on the diamond at noon, a beacon from Celestia herself. (Although, really, the display had been set for that, since the skylight was already there. But I wasn’t about to lose sleep over that little technicality.) What was normally a beautiful, semi-functional bit of architecture now had been marred by a large hole smashed through it. Not the most elegant entrance, but it’d do the job just fine if somepony wanted to shimmy down from above on a rope. If you believed the stories, two or three thieves a year tried to break into the Equestrian Museum through that window. Maybe this particular thief was the first to succeed.
My horn glowed and I flicked at the liquid fabric of the dream. Immediately, all the ponies around me dissolved into smoke, the police tape melted, even the other detectives vanished. I was alone in the cavernous gallery, everything dead quiet. Just the way I liked it. I’d picked up on lucid dreaming in my teens; originally, it was just a way to have fun, but now, it let me play with crime scenes like toys, as long as I fixed them in memory. Naturally, I always spent as long as I needed making sure I had every crime scene completely memorized from top to bottom. I hadn’t thought that much of it, not until Princess Luna herself stopped by one night on a routine dream patrol and praised my skill. That left me in a state of stunned disbelief for several nights, and not just because of what she had said.
But now I had to work. The floor was dream-cold beneath my rump as I looked at one of the entrances to the room. What was it the janitor had said? She’d been mopping down the floors here (I poofed a hazy silhouette of an earth pony into existence, doing exactly that) when the skylight had shattered and a pony had jumped from it on a rope (like so). The pony dropped to right next to the display case like a spider from the rafters, punched it in with a boxer’s kick, swiped Coltinan I, and climbed back out like a caffeinated monkey, all in the course of a minute. The speed would’ve been admirable in other circumstances.
A theft in the middle of the night with a single eyewitness and little evidence. I’d only first heard about it this morning, but my head was already attempting the deductive backstroke, as it was prone to do. It said I had to solve it now, now, now, even though screaming through it like a banshee with no regard for procedure would’ve made me a pretty awful detective. So I forced myself to take a page from the tortoise’s book, slowing down and thinking: which scant piece of evidence here would be the best to look at? After some hemming and hawing and bouncing around, I turned my attention to the glass fragments from the display case. Yes, they were my memories of them, but maybe I’d see something she hadn’t before. Memory could be weird like that.
“So, uh, I guess you don’t need my help?”
I looked up. A certain literally starry-eyed alicorn was standing next to me, one who couldn’t have looked more sheepish if she’d been an actual sheep. She was a hole to two different night skies (one for her body, another for her mane and tail) that had decided to come down and commingle with us. I wish I could give you a better description but… well. You already have a good picture of her. She’s not very memorable once you remove her coat. She’s just sort of there, a butler standing in the corner, normally unnoticed and very deliberately so. Normally Someone that high up, here? Definitely a sign. Of what sort, I wasn’t sure.
She was still talking, in that slightly reverb-y voice of hers. It might’ve been unsettling if she didn’t sound like she’d been caught flat-hoofed. “I’m supposed to-”
“Don’t walk on the evidence,” I said reflexively. Never mind that none of this existed, never mind that I was talking to Princess Luna’s second-in-command, you did not use evidence as a red carpet. I’d learned that from experience.
“Sorry.” Moondog’s hooves made like con mares and vanished, leaving her floating a few inches above the floor. “I know I’m supposed to help with dreams and troubled minds, but you’ve got total control over the dream — nice going, by the by — but you’re still troubled, so, um.” She made a popping noise with her mouth. “I don’t really think there’s anything for me to do here, is there?” Her grin was that of a baker with a single pie for a thousand customers.
“No, I don’t think so.” Moondog could handle dreams better than water could be wet, but having her give advice on detective work wouldn’t go anywhere. Probably.
“Uh-huh.” Moondog flexed her wings, but remained bolted to the floor. “Well. Um. Maybe there’s something I can do. Just- Um. What’s up, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Can’t you use your magic and look through my memories to find out?” I asked; it came out a bit more snippily than I intended. “I’m thinking here.” It wasn’t the first time I’d wished I was telepathic. “Most recent twenty-four hours, if that matters.” Exactly what sorts of filters did that kind of spell have, anyway?
“Well, if that’s what you want.” Something rolled around my brain as Moondog plucked a folder from the air and flipped through it the same way one would a gripping thriller. “So. Big honking diamond, part of some outdated regalia, stolen from the Equestrian Museum. You know, authors never write about museums unless something’s getting stolen from them. Anyway, janitor says a pony rappelled down, wrapped-” She blinked, tossed the folder over her shoulder with a unique disregard, and grabbed another one. A quick look-over, then she said, “Okay, either my spells are on the fritz or something weird is going on. She… tied herself to the display?”
I would’ve sighed if I hadn’t ridden that exact confused train of thought less than twenty-four hours earlier. The janitor’s descriptive skills had been… lacking. “She wrapped a rope around the display for leverage and bucked the glass in while hanging from the skylight. It kept her off the floor, since that’s part of the museum’s security system.” As I spoke, a smoky figure of a pony appeared next to the display and demonstrated.
“Huh. Yeah, that makes sense. So… Thief gets diamond, climbs back out skylight before janitor can stop her. Simple enough.” Moondog tossed the folder away; it flapped like a bird and flew out the skylight. “And you think you’re missing some puzzle piece, probably one of the edge ones, so… this.” She swept a wing out around the room.
“Yes. And I’m doing just fine, thank you. You can leave.” I gave the glass shards one last lingering look, then turned to the display case again. Too bad it was harder to find the shapes of the thief’s hooves from the hole than it was to find a sane royal. We had so little to go on at this moment, even that could be a huge help in-
“I mean,” the still-present Moondog said suddenly, “there really isn’t anything I can do? It’s kinda, uh, awkward for me to just, y’know, leave a technically-bad dream of an unsolved case like this and I know you have it under control but keeping dreams good’s kinda my thing and I don’t like avoiding my thing and-”
On an impulse more ill-conceived than giving a pegasus filly coffee, I ripped Moondog’s mouth off and tossed it away. Luckily, Moondog neither giving herself her mouth back immediately nor protesting without it told me it wasn’t a heinous mistake. “Your- Highness,” I said tightly (was that the right form of address?), “thank you for the offer, but I have this under control. You can move on and forget about me.”
“Well, it’s not like that,” Moondog said as her mouth reappeared. “You could just forget about that-” She pointed at the display case with a wing. She seemed allergic to pointing with her hooves. “-until tomorrow when the investigation continues, and you probably should, but you think it’s so important that you’re trying to figure it out in your sleep. That’s just the way your mind works. And that’s me and dreams. I don’t like leaving them ungoodified, no matter what, even if that means getting you a brainwave on the case. Sorry.” She grinned sheepishly and rustled her wings.
I frowned. “Is this related to you being a construct?” That was one of those things you never really thought about, like what the heck a marshmallow actually is. Moondog the dream sculptor was a background worker for the most part, psychology’s janitor’s assistant, but once you started picking apart Moondog the person, you risked falling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of magical intelligence conundrums. I had tried that once. Once.
“Eh, maybe.” Moondog shrugged. “But I like making dreams, so maybe it’s just me being a perfectionist. Or maybe it is part of me being a construct and perfectionism is just how I express it, oooOOOooo.”
I nodded. “I see.” Sort of. I’d had that thought with cutie marks, as most ponies probably did; did I like combing over crime scenes because of my candle cutie mark and associated talent for illuminating the truth, was I just a persnickety obsessive, or both? Weird to think I shared something so basic with someone who had been literally built two years ago. “In that case, I’m sorry if I was short with you, but-”
“Nah, I get it,” Moondog said, shaking her head. “I don’t really have a Slow setting. Not yet, anyway.” She tilted her head and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe I should make one… Well, being able to ignore stuff like this should probably be a priority first… Anyway, if you want, I could just be a sounding board.”
“Not if other ponies need your help more,” I said. “I’d like a sounding board, but I don’t need one.” Really, just bouncing ideas off of somepony else could give you all sorts of ideas, even if they didn’t respond. Still, the case was too new for me to worry about that.
“Gotcha. Might jump back here between other dreams just to get it out of my head, so see you in… I dunno, an hour.” Moondog nodded and saluted. “Adios, amiga.” Space folded around her like origami and she vanished.
An hour. Whatever that meant in dreams. I shook my head and returned to the glass like a gambler to the slots.
The lines were wrong. It didn’t matter which way you turned it, looked at it, examined it, the lines were wrong.
On the sort of whim natural to dreams, I was standing on nothing near the ceiling to get a halfway-decent look at the skylight. The image wasn’t as sharp as the scene below, since I’d never seen it up close for real, but it was good enough to compare the location of the skylight with everything else. And the location of the break was wrong.
I pulled myself through the hole in the skylight onto a facsimile of a roof that I’d only seen in photographs of the crime scene. Runes (of no particular shape; all I knew was that they were “runes”) had been carved into the frame of the skylight, ready to raise Tartarus if a pony passed through them after hours. Except they hadn’t gone off last night, which was one reason the case was already proving tricky. Another team was looking into it. I pushed aside a hoof-sized rock and peered back down at the display case. Yes, the lines were definitely-
“Um. Hey.” A shadow fell over me; Moondog was hovering right above, some sort of fretful guardian. “Is, is this a bad time?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a fine time.” I jumped catlike back down to the museum floor, where Moondog was already waiting. “I think.”
“That’s good. Thinking is good.”
I snorted, but I was smiling. “Still interested in being a sounding board?”
“If it’ll help. Besides, I know that look.” Moondog cocked a grin of pleasant familiarity. “It’s the ‘I just learned something and I really want to tell you all about it right now’ look.”
Princess Twilight leaned out from behind Moondog. “I’m really good at it!” she chirped, looking far more dorky than any princess should’ve been able to.
“Okay,” I said. “The hole in the display case is here. The hole in the skylight is there. But if you run a rope from the skylight to the case…” A black line dropped from the skylight to the floor. On the opposite side as the hole in the display.
“Ooookay.” Moondog was less than impressed as she looked at the rope. “And that means?”
“I have no idea! But it’s something.”
“Super.”
“You’d make a terrible detective.”
“Good thing I’m not one, then.”
“I know this doesn’t seem like much,” I said as I gazed at the ceiling, “but there’s no way somepony smart enough to get in and out in a minute would take the time to climb over the case for no reason.” My initial drive to examine the crime scene, the entire reason I’d started this lucid dream in the first place, was coming back. When you dug for hours looking for gold, the slightest shiny thing got you excited. Sometimes that shiny thing could even be gold.
“They could walk,” said Moondog. “Or couldn’t they? You said the floor was part of the security system? Does it zap ponies during the night?” Lightning crackled and cackled in minute cracks in the floor.
“No, it just tracks ponies who walk on it and sounds the alarm if it doesn’t recognize their magic signature,” I replied. Although some less scrupulous buildings did have security like that. The burn scar on my left front frog still ached from time to time.
“Well, that’s weak.” Moondog walked over to the case, lightning arcing from the floor every time she lifted a hoof. “Any way this could’ve been broken from the other side for some reason? Magic, maybe?”
“Nope. We didn’t find any traces of magic from spells and the janitor said the thief didn’t have a horn, so it had to have been broken by an earth pony.”
“Or a big, strong pegasus,” Moondog said casually.
“Hmm?”
“It’s not like they don’t have muscles.” Moondog’s horn disintegrated and she put on several pounds of bulk all over, becoming the sort of pony who could bench-press a kegger with one leg. “Maybe they were just a bigger-than-usual pegasus,” she said in a slightly deeper voice. “They didn’t use their wings to throw you off their scent.”
But I shook my head. “Most earth pony strength doesn’t come from muscles,” I said. “It comes from a connection to the earth as part of their own magic. It’s just that the stereotypical earth pony has muscles because the stereotypical earth pony is also a farmer, so they do a lot of physical work which, well, builds muscles.” I didn’t blame Moondog for not knowing; most people didn’t know much about the subtleties of each tribe’s magic and earth pony magic was pretty much nothing but subtlety. “And no pegasus would be strong enough to break through the case, anyway. Enchantment.”
“Oh.” Moondog looked at one of her legs and flexed it. “Physicality is so weird,” she mused as she deflated back to her normal shape. “You walk real good for a while and that makes you better at walking even though you didn’t actually learn anything about walking and wlah. It’s not like writing a lot with a pencil sharpens it.”
I clicked my tongue, paying Moondog the same amount of attention I might pay an ant. This was important. I knew it. Important how? That was a bit trickier. Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a case if it wasn’t tricky. I cast my gaze around the room. Maybe there was a reason the thief couldn’t have gone straight down.
“Anyway, you need a sounding board now? Or do you not want to exercise your jaw just yet?”
“Not yet.” I raised an eyebrow at Moondog. “Exercise has really gotten to you, hasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, but it’s weird!” protested Moondog, flaring her wings. “I can be as strong or weak as I want and-” She groaned and threw her head back like a cold-cocked scarecrow. “Sorry, you don’t want to hear me rant. Might be back later. Be seeing you.”
“You, too.” I trotted off to one of the far corners to get some sightlines, then glanced back. Moondog was staring at one of her legs and flexing it like a bodybuilder as she vanished.
Space vomited up Moondog and she lay in the air above me. “Why do changelings need to exercise?” she said in a quiet voice that wasn’t quite crazed. “Why do changelings need to exercise?” Her eyes were aimed at the ceiling, but she wasn’t looking at it. “Why do changelings need to exercise?”
Just the mare I wanted to see. “Excuse me?” I asked. “Moondog?”
“I can kind of get exercise as a… thing,” Moondog muttered. “But why can’t changelings just turn into a peak-condition version of themselves and stay there?”
“Moondog…”
Moondog rolled over in the air and looked me in the eye. “I know they probably can’t get down to the capillary level. But what shapes them into the ponies or creatures or whatevers they become? Is their magic based on ideas? Do they need to remember to include, say, Applejack’s hat when turning into her or is that a natural part of her shape and they need to work to not include it?”
“Moondog…”
“Dreams are shaped by ideas, so if I want to be something else, I just think of it, and hey presto.” Moondog bubbled out to become an earth stallion slightly smaller than Celestia, one who’d win the hearts of mares everywhere the second they saw him. “So it is. I don’t have any insides I need to worry about and-”
“Moondog, if you’re going to help me, is there any way you could get me a map of the museum?” I asked, my voice a touch strained. Was she always this one-track-minded? I suppose it’d be good for staying focused on dreams. “As complete as you can make it.”
“-glob of energy!” Moondog yelled, holding out the (conspicuously non-fleshy) equivalent of his intestines from a cleft in his body. “Totally amorphous!” Pause. “Oh, uh, yeah. From somepony who works there. Anyone in particular?”
Who would be best? Somepony who went over the museum pretty much every day. So maybe- “The head custodian. Genista. She’s the one who saw the thief to begin with.”
“Sure. What do you need the map for, anyway? Just checking some lines?”
I nodded. “I’m not sure I remember the real museum as well as I should and I don’t want to make an assumption based on this place if this place could turn out to be wrong.” That hadn’t happened before, fortunately; I was very, very careful about that.
“Right. Makes sense. You know what assuming makes out of you and me.”
“Except donkeys are so stubborn because they’re usually right.” They’re smart cookies. Four of the ten smartest people I knew were donkeys, and I only knew six donkeys to begin with.
“…Note to self,” Moondog muttered, “ask Twilight about the origin of that phrase. Anyway, be right back.” He put up a hoof and space flexed like cellophane as he pushed at the air, then he paused. “Wait, quick question. If the alarm goes off whenever somepony walks on the floor, how did the janitor, y’know, janit?”
Hadn’t I explained this already? Whatever. I was used to having to repeat information. Since this was the first time, I wasn’t remotely annoyed yet. “It doesn’t get triggered by anypony on the night shift. Janitors, but also security guards, interns, encha-”
Realization hit me like a lead-lined sack of bricks and the sunlight turned green as the entire dream slipped ever so slightly out of my control. You know the feeling, the way the world reels when you see something that seems oh-so-obvious in hindsight. Except even more, because my perception of the world was the world. I didn’t even need the map anymore.
“Okay, whoof.” Moondog put a hoof to his head like it’d been smashed with a sledgehammer. “Did you solve it? Because whoa did your mindwaves just shift.” He shook his head. “Is this what being drunk feels like? Drunkenness sucks.”
“The custodian did it,” I said to nopony in particular (nopony was a very good listener, particularly in dreams). “She just lied about what she saw.” I looked up at the skylight, ideas already fighting for the privilege of being the first one tested. “She was an earth pony… Maybe…” I stood in front of the hole in the display case, conjured a rock for myself, and hurled it up. It easily soared right through the center of the broken skylight; in buckball, it would’ve been a picture-perfect goal.
“No one tracks the janitors,” I said breathlessly. Which didn’t matter much, since I didn’t need to breathe in here. “She steals Coltinan I, has herself as the witness for an alibi, then throws a rock through the skylight for false evidence. She just got too eager and broke the window from the wrong place. Hay, she didn’t even mention the thief climbing over the case to get to the other side. None of the security magic outside detected anypony because there wasn’t anypony to detect.” I paced, staring down at the floor as strange patterns literally swam through it. “I’ll bet she hid the diamond somewhere nearby, some secret hole she’s only found by cleaning in the corners every night… Maybe there’s a loose panel she found while dusting…”
Moondog twitched his ears. “Really?” he asked skeptically.
“Well, I don’t know what a museum custodian does!” I clicked my tongue a few times and grinned aggressively at Moondog. Zing had taken up residence in my head. “I know it might not be her, but I’ve got a good feeling about this. I’ll bounce it by the rest of the squad tomorrow and we’ll take it from there.”
“Cool-cool-cool-cool, very cool very cool.” Moondog’s nodding was a half-decent woodpecker imitation. “So, uh, anything else you can do with the case, or…?”
“Not in here. Not with what I know now.”
She and I looked at each other, our minds racing equally fast. Then Moondog beamed. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“No,” I said immediately. “No. Absolutely not. No going through her mind. Very bad. No. Fruit of the poisonous tree. You might ruin the case. No.”
“What? Oh, no, nooooooo.” Moondog shook his head. “Mom and I decided that we don’t have jurisdiction for real-world crimes. Twilight’s been thinking of a mindspace warrant, but nothing solid yet.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Crimes can happen in here? Nothing exists in here.”
“Every now and then, you’ll get some chucklehead who thinks they can pull ideas from another pony’s head or plant them, like that DiColtrio play, or just muck around in somepony else’s head because they can, and that’s where we come in. There’s only, like, three or four of them a year, max, but it does happen.”
“I’ve never heard of this.” That it could happen wasn’t surprising, though. I’d never tried to leave my own dream, but if Luna could do it, it was only natural that other ponies could, even if not as elegantly.
“Mom does her best to keep it under wraps. Don’t want to give any ponies ideas, you know? Anyway, I was just thinking: case solved-” A confetti cannon exploded somewhere. “-dream good, me satisfied.”
“Even though you didn’t do anything besides listen?” I asked, bemused.
Moondog flared his wings. “Hey, I just want you to have good dreams. I don’t give a whit as to how they get good. Thanks for doing my job for me!” Then one ear flopped down and he frowned. Staring at me unusually piercingly, he said thoughtfully to himself, “You know… maybe…”
“Actually,” I said, riding a brainwave, “this dream isn’t quite good, not yet.”
“Oh, c’mon, really?” Moondog made a Face. “But we just-”
“I need to relax before tomorrow,” I declared. “So: I want a beach, I want my own private island in the Bahaymas, and I want to not have to do it myself.” Don’t look at me like that. He likes doing this. So why not?
“Ha! Now that’s more my speed.” (See? Told you.) “Want some cocktails, too?” Already, a cool breeze was blowing through the room and the tops of waves were crashing through the windows.
I snorted. “Dream cocktails taste terrible.”
As the floor crumbled to sand beneath our hooves, Moondog turned more serious than I had ever imagined he could be. “Oh, you did not just insult my cocktails.”
“You’ve really outdone yourself this time, Candle.”
“Thank you, captain.”
“I mean, yesterday, the biggest clue was a broken window. Now, we’ve retrieved the diamond and gotten a confession and it’s not even noon. I’ll have to see if I can get you a medal for this.”
“I was just doing my job, captain.”
“Still. If you don’t mind me asking… how’d you do it? Got some sort of secret lurking in your head? Just a brainwave?”
“A figment of somepony else’s imagination gave me some tips.”
“Huh, you, too? I heard that happened to a staff sergeant in the Guard sometime in the last year. Caught a bunch of ponies in the middle of a bank robbery.”
“…I was wondering how she and Luna started talking about jurisdiction in the first place.”