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// Footnotes 
// Story: A Chess Story 
// by Captain_Hairball 
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1 This is a lie, but in Shining's defense: a.) The existence of the human world is lavender-level ultra-classified and eleven-year-old fillies aren't known for their discretion. b.) Shining and Cadence are worried that if Flurry found out the human world existed she'd sneak away to Twilight's palace basement with her stuffed snail and Warrior Humans books tied in a bundle on the end of a stick.

2 The pony game of harmomo is nearly identical to the Terran game of chess, and so that is how I have translated it from Shining's memoirs. Similarly, the griffin game of takestones resembles the Terran game of Go. A certain convergent evolution of games seems to exist, given that similar games have evolved independently in human cultures as well.

In any event: Equestrian rooks are called owls, knights are wonderbolts, bishops are chancellors, pawns are farmers, the queen is the princess, and the king is harmony. The only significant rules difference is that harmony cannot capture.

3 It is unlikely that even Celestia at the height of her magical power could react quickly enough to stop a cannonball in mid-flight, but even with her father in a hospital bed Flurry Heart has not yet grasped that the ponies she admires have any limitations.

4 Shining is omitting the main reason alicorns don’t participate in conventional warfare, which is that while Equus’ other nations tolerate Equestria and the Crystal Empire's alicorns as anti-monster weapons, they none the less think of them as monsters in their own right. Other creatures are bewildered that alicorns allowed their liberty — let alone assigned supreme political authority — and view every one of them as a Nightmare Moon waiting to happen. There is an understanding — tacit in some cases, made explicit by treaty in others — that if the pony nations began using their alicorns for military purposes then the other nations would show them that they have anti-monster weapons of their own.

Shining and Cadence have agreed that Flurry is not yet ready to understand how she is viewed outside of the bubble of safety and love she lives in.