Every now and then, Raven would receive a rather intense wake-up call that she was working for Twilight now, not Celestia. But when that wake-up call involved free candy, she was fine with it.
Celestia had liked Nightmare Night, but she wasn’t enthralled by it the way Luna had been or Twilight was. Luna, meanwhile, never spent Nightmare Night in Canterlot, instead choosing to shock random small towns across Equestria with her presence. Twilight, on the other hoof, organized a formal festival for Nightmare Night based on Ponyville’s own traditions. The castle square had games galore, a bonanza of booths, a surfeit of sweets, all for Canterlot’s foals and anyone else who wanted free candy (which was most ponies). The castle also got decorated, with jack-o-lanterns in every corner, cobwebs hanging from the rafters, and more. Twilight even encouraged the castle staff to get into the spirit of things. At first, Raven quietly disapproved of that last point. Then she realized she had an excuse to dress up as a vampire during her time at work and nopony could stop her!
Still, work was work, even with only a few minutes left on the clock and plastic fangs in your mouth. Raven not-quite-trotted through the hallways of the castle, a folder containing the usual summaries of the day stowed in her saddlebags (carrying it in her mouth would’ve risked a puncture from her fangs). Filing needed to be done. That sweet, sweet filing. One of the first things Princess Twilight had done was improve the efficiency of the castle’s filing system, for which Raven was eternally grateful on multiple levels. Now, she could actually get things done for once, have everything organized in a state-of-the-art manner! That was one of the problems with immortals: once you got into the habit of doing things the same way for a thousand years, it was hard to get out of that rut if you’d been doing things wrong for a thousand years. And by the time that became a problem for Twilight, well, Raven herself would be dead and gone.
While the decorations in the castle didn’t make it hard to walk, they did make finding where you were going a bit tricky. All of Raven’s usual landmarks were cloaked in cobwebs, spooky veils, and toilet paper (and the latter probably wasn’t even in the official decorations). But she couldn’t degrade herself to the point of asking for directions, oh no. Not yet. She could at least stop and get her bearings, though. She came to a halt not far from a door flanked by a pair of guards, a unicorn and a pegasus. That door was for… some of the conference rooms? Yes, it was. So, then-
“Ma’am?” asked the unicorn. “Do you need any hel-”
“NO!” squawked Raven. “I know my way around my own castle!”
“Well, I’m glad you do, because I sure don’t,” said the unicorn.
“Not even on the best of days!” laughed the pegasus. “You could give him step-by-step directions and he’d still get lost!”
The unicorn gave him a telekinetic clout on the back of the head, but smiled anyway.
Raven nodded. If that was the conference rooms, then Daily Records was… that way. Good. She straightened her saddlebags. “Anyway, happy Nightmare Night,” she said.
“Happy Nightmare Night,” chorused the guards.
Then something above them caught Raven’s eye; she looked up and felt her heart stop as a monster wove itself from the air. A colossal spider, almost a dozen times larger than the average pony, clung to the wall above the guards, staring down at them with shiny, blank eyes. The monster reached down for the guards with two of its front legs. Raven tried to yell out a warning, but her voice made no sound.
Only for it to turn out that the guards didn’t need any warning. The pegasus flicked his ear, possibly in response to some air current, and glanced upward. He froze for half an instant, then propelled himself to the side with a flap of his wings, fast enough to tackle the unicorn of leg range. Somehow, both guards landed on their feet; the unicorn opened his mouth to protest, saw the spider, then promptly grabbed one of its legs with his telekinesis and yanked.
The spider had to be magic, to be able to cling to the wall at that size, but it wasn’t magic enough to completely overpower physics. It fell off the wall at the yank, toppling onto its back on the floor, chittering its mandibles and writhing. The pegasus propelled himself into the air, spear in hoof, and plunged down through the flailing legs, driving the spear right into the… Well, the spider didn’t have a heart. (Did it? How did the circulatory systems of giant bugs work? How did the anything systems of giant bugs work? How did-)
Raven was shaken from her (possibly Twilight-influenced) informational fugue when the spider vanished into mist the second the spear impaled it. The pegasus blinked, then looked at the unicorn. “Uh… you saw that, right?”
“I think I did…” the unicorn replied, tilting his head to one side. “I, I definitely felt it…”
The pegasus turned to Raven. “And you saw it, right?”
“…Yes,” said Raven. Huh. Her voice was back. Maybe-
“Nightmare Night prank,” the pegasus suddenly said. “It’s, it’s gotta be. There’s no way something like that could get this far in without us hearing about it, right?”
“Right, yeah,” muttered the unicorn. Raising his voice, he sarcastically yelled at no one in particular, “Nice one! HA HA. That was great! I love being scared half to death!”
“Anytime,” no one in particular replied.
The unicorn jumped about a foot in the air, but Raven and the pegasus exchanged glances and rolled their eyes. They knew what was up.
Raven kept walking, but she kept her ears turned back. It wasn’t long before she heard a second set of hoofsteps behind her. She looked over her shoulder and failed to be surprised when she saw nopony. But large, icy hoofprints were freezing into existence on the floor only to disappear without melting moments later, like somepony was pacing. “Hello, Princess,” she said, resuming her walk.
The hoofprints noisily galloped to a spot next to her, then kept pace. A chill washed over Raven’s body and she could barely make out a very slight, possibly pony-shaped distortion in the air. “You know you don’t need to call me ‘Princess’, right?” Moondog’s voice sounded.
“I do, Princess.”
A snort. Truth be told, Raven sometimes wondered if Moondog was being a bit too blasé about being a princess; humble or not, she still had a lot of semi-vital responsibilities. But Moondog always seemed dismissive of the title, specifically, while taking everything else about as seriously as someone of her personality could. Besides, tonight was Nightmare Night. Raven could forgive a lot of things on Nightmare Night.
Not everything, though. That distortion was barely anything and she’d get a crick in her neck if she kept looking down at those hoofprints. “If you’re going to walk with me, could you at least give me something to look at?”
“Aw, come on.” But the ice of the hoofprints suddenly spiked upwards into icicles, shattered, and recombined into an animate suit of Night Guard armor. Seeing the look on Raven’s face, Moondog asked, “What?” Her tone of voice was such that you could hear her raising an eyebrow in spite of her lack of eyebrows. “It’s Nightmare Night. Gotta keep with tradition.” She now sounded hollow-space-echoic rather than reverb-echoic.
However, Moondog had misinterpreted Raven’s expression. Raven didn’t mind one iota that Moondog was… “dressing up”, so to speak. It was just that, during a holiday built around fancy costumes, it was hard to not be envious of someone who could do that on a whim (thank goodness even changelings weren’t that good). She covered her emotions with, “I thought you didn’t like leaving dreams.”
Moondog waved a disembodied greave dismissively. “Normally, sure, but during Nightmare Night? I love it! Ponies gawk at me all the time when I’m in reality, but gawking at each other is half the point of Nightmare Night, so I fit right in!” The air inside the helmet split into a razor-toothed grin.
“So why’re you here rather than the festival?”
“Doing a favor for Twilight before I get to the communal, culturally-celebrated holiday schadenfreude. You know those new directives she’s taking with the Guard? Increasing situational awareness and all?”
“Yes.” In the first week-ish after her accession, Twilight had discussed the Guard’s less-than-stellar track record in recent years here and there. At great length. And great volume. And great irritation. Repeatedly. Spontaneously. To anyone who would listen. And several ones who wouldn’t. In her second week, she’d finally realized she was in a position to do something about it and decided they needed to get whipped into proper shape (and based on some of the things Twilight had said, Raven was slightly surprised that that turn of phrase wasn’t literal). Thus began the reforms. It was time for the Guard to have something to do beyond look nice. Whatever grandiose, ultra-powerful villain next advanced on Canterlot, the plan for stopping them would at least have a carriage factor greater than one.
“I’m just testing them. I turn into a big monstery thing, fake a surprise attack on some guards, and hopefully get stabbed to death before I can touch them.”
“And are you getting killed?” Raven asked dryly.
The helmet nodded vigorously. “All the time! It’s great! Usually, they keep me at range and I get poleaxed, but one pair of unicorns hit me with this weird bundle of spells that would’ve paralyzed me if I’d been physical, and several earth ponies have suplexed me. Seriously, they suplexed a chimera. What are they teaching at boot camps these days? Also, uh…”
Moondog blipped into existence within the armor. To Raven’s surprise, she looked a bit sheepish. It was an odd expression on her face, not helped by the fact that in Raven’s mind, no matter how often she’d seen it, alicorns weren’t allowed to look sheepish. “Sorry for cutting your voice off like that back there. It’s just, the whole thing was based on surprise, so you warning somepony, would’ve… kinda gone against the whole thing, you know?” A nervous grin. “I panicked, and… yeah. Sorry.”
It took Raven a moment to remember what Moondog was talking about. “Oh, that? I already forgot about it. It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s not, but it’s still… effh, iffy, taking away your communication like that. Woulda been way worse if I had to keep it up longer.” Moondog tapped her chin. “I could do something to make up for it. You want a cruise? I could give you a cruise tonight.” She glanced sideways at Raven. “No, it won’t take that much time away from other ponies. I’m good at my job.”
Almost on reflex, Raven said Moondog didn’t need to worry, but who the fountain pen would turn down a free cruise? (Besides people who didn’t like cruises in the first place.) “That sounds nice,” she said vaguely.
“Alrighty, then,” Moondog said, flexing her wings. “I’ll be sure to-”
“No, wait,” Raven said as her brain conjured a better idea. “Can you get rid of my reflection instead? Just for tonight.” She held out her cape. “I am a vampire, after all.”
“You’d exchange a free cruise for one-night reflectional invisibility?”
“It’s Nightmare Night,” Raven explained.
“Can’t argue with that logic.” And Moondog lightly bopped Raven on the nose.
A slight chill washed down her body; it was gone almost immediately, but Raven shivered anyway. When she looked down into the overpolished marble floors, she couldn’t see any pony looking back at her. She waved her hoof back and forth; no distortion. Better not let Twilight notice, or else she’d be trapped in a mad scientist’s lab for who knew how long. And tonight, that mad scientist might be dressed up as Daring Do.
“If your lack of reflection persists for more than six hours,” said Moondog, “contact an arcanist, because you’ll be violating several laws of magic and should have a paper written about you.”
“Shouldn’t you have papers written about you?” asked Raven. It was surprisingly hard to look away from nothing, but she managed. “Besides that monolith in the archives.”
“Maybe. But it’s a very comprehensive monolith. Chances are, you can look it up in there already. Assuming you can find what you’re looking for.”
They were almost to Daily Records. In fact, so close, Raven normally wouldn’t’ve noticed the distance at all, except that the usual guard she passed was currently leaning on his pike snoring. His head bobbed up and down in time with his breathing as his ears wobbled this way and that.
Moondog immediately came to a dead stop, her wings quivering. “Oh, come on,” she mumbled. “You can’t just- Hold on.” Her body lost all definition and she flowed over to the guard as a wisp. In a ripple of heatlike distortion, that wisp vanished into the guard’s head. There was no change in his sleep, but Raven began counting.
At nine one thousand, the guard suddenly jerked upright with a yelp, his eyes flying open. He immediately snapped to attention, glancing furtively around, his jaw clenched tight. When he noticed Raven looking at him, he twitched and snapped his gaze forward.
Raven gave him one last look, then kept walking. After a few moments, the air next to her shimmered into a withered, undead alicorn with bat wings and a curved, pointy horn. Brushing his stringy mane from his burning eyes with a shriveled hoof, Moondog rasped, “And I’m back. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Raven looked behind them. The guard was still very insistently standing at attention, although seeing Moondog as a lich meant he’d somehow figured out how to tense up even more. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. Just popped into his dreams — as my usual self! — and asked, ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ Shock did the rest.” Moondog giggled, somehow managing to sound not remotely evil, which was kind of evil on its own. “Wanna see the look on his face?” He morphed into the spitting image of the guard, with an expression like his parents had just walked in on something private. Then he broke down into another giggle fit as he shifted back into lich form. “He’s not gonna be sleeping on the job anytime soon.”
Chuckling, Raven pushed open the door to Daily Records. It wasn’t a big room, but it felt larger than it was. Several aisles of floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets stood before them, stretching out into the distance, if “the distance” meant “about five feet back”. Between the entrance and the cabinets, a pegasus clerk sat at a desk, writing something out on a battered sheet of paper. She didn’t look up when Raven and Moondog entered.
“Evening, Manila,” said Raven, dropping the folder in front of the clerk. “Sorry I haven’t been able to talk for a while, it’s been hectic.” It really was. Under Celestia’s status quo, Raven and Manila Folder had been able to chat for a minute or so just about every day. Now, with Twilight forging a new status quo, Raven was usually either too busy with work or too burned-out from work to stay long. The last time she and Manila had really talked was… whoof. Back when Celestia was still a princess. “Everything going okay?”
Manila stopped writing. The pen fell from her slack jaws. She slowly raised her head; the vacant expression on her face was so haunted that Raven flinched and took a step back.
“Nothing is okay,” Manila said in a distant voice, “for my freedom is oppressive. Where once busywork filled my days with activity, where it could take hours to navigate the organizational labyrinth and put a single folder in its destined drawer, now I can catalog entire binders in mere moments, recover them in scant seconds. But what, then, am I to do with myself between filings? For though my responsibilities vanish, the time in which I must fulfill them does not, and my existence is stretched thin. My occupation is being sacrificed, bit by bit and limb by limb, upon the altar of progress as I become a cog with nothing to turn. At times, brief stints of stimulation encroach upon me, those moments where somepony comes to me with a request that needs fulfilling. How I yearn for them, for I can make myself useful once more, only for efficiency to bring inactivity crashing down upon me once more within seconds. My time stretches into interminable hours of nothing but nothing. Those slim seconds of pleasure break up the monotony to make it all the harsher. Still, I cherish them, for they are all I have. Compared to this void of purpose and abyss of industry, arranging stationery is a neverending font of joy and satisfaction. And you ask, ‘Everything going okay?’”
Raven had a white coat and still managed to blanch.
Manila turned to Moondog, her eyes hollow. “Liches enthrall ponies through necromancy. Enthrallment means constant labor in service of another. Your mind is chained, restrained, unable to muster the slightest thought except at the behest of the one who enslaved you. You cannot scream. You cannot desire to scream. Yet such an existence, where work is guaranteed, would be far preferable to this purgatorial idleness, this fey mockery of life in which I now find myself. I can feel my very thoughts slowly unraveling for want of something new, regardless of how profane. Are you here to bless me with enthrallment, that obscene state of being? For my mind and my body are both ready.”
Beads of sweat were already trickling over Raven’s coat. “Uh…”
“Not bad,” said Moondog, “but if you really want to emulate Lovedraft, you need to crack open your thesaurus and look up as many obscure words as possible. Also, more apostrophes and less vowels.”
“But I didn’t name anything yet,” Manila protested in a much less mind-broken voice. “It’s the names that have all the apostrophes. Like… Shgr’klangt’xmi.”
“Fair enough,” said Moondog. “But, seriously, obscure word thesaurus or dictionary. Look for stuff like ‘naufragous’. That’s like the cherry on top of his writing.”
“Yeah, that’s the part I’m having trouble with,” said Manila. “I figure I’ll get the tone down before I dive into word choice.” She grinned at Raven. “I’m writing!” she chirped. “And from the look on your face, I think I’m getting pretty good at it!”
Raven blinked at Moondog and Manila. “Okay, what did I miss?”
“She wanted to get started writing horror, but had a nightmare about it a few moons ago,” said Moondog. “Bad-faith critics. So I did my thing, and now I’m sometimes a prereader when I stop by her dreams.”
“I had to do something to fill up my free time,” Manila said with a shrug. “I’m not going to fall to pieces that easily, I did pass the archivists’ psychological profile exam with flying colors over a decade ago!”
Raven snorted. “‘Psychological profile exam’,” she chuckled. “Good one.”
Manila’s grin suddenly became haunted. “You didn’t see what the system was like before Twilight fixed it up,” she said in a low voice. “It could drive lesser mares mad. It did.”
Blink. Raven opened her mouth, decided she didn’t want to know, closed her mouth, and nodded.
“But now…” Manila’s smile became genuine again. She snatched up Raven’s file, gave a quick once-over, and flapped off to stick it in a cabinet at one end of the room. She was back in seconds. “Done!” she said cheerfully. “Celestia, having an organizer for a princess is so sunblasted satisfying.” She wiggled her wings in glee.
“Anyway,” Moondog said, “I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve got a few more detachments that need testing. I’ll probably see you both tonight, and…” He saluted. “Adios, amigas.” He dove into the ceiling like it was water, casting out ripples.
Raven stared upwards, but Manila rolled her eyes. “She likes to make an exit,” she said. “It’s like she’s allergic to just plain walking out the door.”
“Maybe she is,” said Raven. She moved her attention back to Manila. “So… you’re writing?”
“Lots of time with nothing to do in it, figured I might as well try something new.” Manila shrugged. “A cosmic horror sort of thing.”
“Can I take a look?”
Manila sat up a tiny bit straighter and she almost smiled. “Sure! It’s still a work in progress, but I have a copy of the first draft so far somewhere in here. Hold on.” She ducked beneath the desk. “Never thought you’d like cosmic horror.”
“After the last few years, having the supermonster be not here right now is a nice change of pace.”
Manila snorted as she came back up, dropping a slim sheaf of paper in front of Raven. “True that.”
Raven stuffed the paper into her saddlebags, but made no move to leave. “So why’s cosmic horror what you’re writing?”
“No idea, actually,” Manila said, shrugging. “It’s just what’s been running through my mind. I read some Lovedraft a while ago, but it never really…”
Catching up was fun, but sometimes you just wanted candy. After a good several minutes of conversation, Raven said goodbye to Manila, got rid of her work stuff, and traipsed into the castle courtyard. A cheerfully morbid party was spread out before her, glittering in the starlight. Foals ran from game to game, with friends or alone, cheering incessantly, while their parents tried to neither get too preoccupied with free sweets nor look disappointed at missing out on some of the games because they were Too Adult for that. (Although a few had grown up enough to discard the fear of being thought of as childish and were partaking with almost as much glee as their children.)
Raven raised her nose and sniffed. One of the downsides of candy was that it didn’t have much of a smell, but she could detect hints of caramel apples. Caramel apples were good. She took a step forward-
“Raven!” said Twilight, making Raven jump with her sudden appearance from above. Twilight, decked out in an imitation of Somnambula’s usual getup, swooped down from the sky and landed right in front of Raven. “I’m so glad I caught you!”
Raven readjusted her fangs. “You are?”
“Moondog told me she ran into you, so I was wondering…” Twilight’s horn sparked and Raven’s heart sank as a quill and a stack of forms appeared between them. “Could you tell me what you thought of Moondog’s surprise attacks and how effective they were before you get to the festival?”
“C-can-” Raven coughed in surprise. “Can it wait a little longer?” she asked weakly. There was chocolate over there, chocolate she was missing out on.
“Well,” Twilight said in a casual voice that really shouldn’t have been casual, “it really shouldn’t, these need to be filled out while it’s all still fresh in your memory.”
Inside, Raven screamed. Why now? Her shift was done! There was candy! She’d been waiting for hours to relax, and now Twilight couldn’t even put it off for an hour? Sweet Celestia. This had come at exactly the wrong time.
…Too exactly…
“It’s not much,” Twilight continued. She began leafing through the forms. “Just type and magnitude of her attacks, composition of the squads she attacked, location, rapidity of response, your own thoughts, that sort of thing. Oh! And you’ll need to fill it out in triplicate, just in case.”
Triplicate. That pushed Raven into assurance. “I suppose I can,” she said, taking a risk. “But any chance you could help me? Just to finish the triplication up quicker.”
“Sorry,” said Twilight, “but I’m busy.” She pointed to the festival. “I’ve got a lot of duties and I can’t leave my subjects-”
Raven narrowed her eyes. “Nice try, Moondog.”
Twilight immediately snapped her mouth shut. Her wings twitched and she turned to look at Raven. “I’m- sorry?” she asked. “I’m sure she’s-”
“The real Twilight would never turn down a chance to fill out paperwork.”
“…Rrrrright,” Twilight said in Moondog’s voice. She reached up and pulled the color from her body, exposing Moondog’s stars beneath. The forms vanished from Raven’s hooves. “Can’t believe I forgot about that. You know, one Hearth’s Warming, one of her friends got her a binder, and she sat around for an hour sniffing it.”
Raven blinked and tilted her head. “…Why wouldn’t you?” That new binder smell was a wonderfully rich smell, it was.
“I know better than to answer that,” said Moondog quickly.
Demand an explanation or change the subject? With great reluctance, Raven decided to change the subject. “You know, some of these scares tonight were pretty tame. Are you planning on stepping it up?” Because, really, from someone that good with illusion magic, you expected a lot more.
“I need to settle in first,” said Moondog, waving a wing dismissively. “I figure I’ll give it a few years, convince Twilight to throw a big banquet some Nightmare Night, and make the centerpiece look like Mom’s severed head. Or Aunt Celly’s.”
The very idea made Raven shudder. “Could you give me a warning when you do that?”
Smirking, Moondog dispersed like a plume of smoke caught in a gust of wind, her laughter hanging in the air. “No promises! Have a nice night!”
“You, too!” Raven yelled to the air. (Some nearby ponies who hadn’t noticed Moondog gave her weird looks.)
Interactions with Moondog were always on the strange side in Raven’s mind, even discounting the usual ones that were in the middle of nightly hallucinations. She was just so… high on life. Happy to simply exist and determined to make the most of it. You either went along with her or were left on the side of the road, scratching your head. And she wasn’t just a princess, she was doing a bang-up job of it. Maybe there was something to be said about her state of mind: carefree when she could be, serious (relatively speaking) otherwise.
That something could be said later, though. There was candy to be had.
Raven glanced at her reflection in a nearby fountain. Still nothing; perfect. Now, where were those caramel apples…