Chapter 5
The Ponyville University was a long walk from Fluttershy's cottage, and to make matters worse, the cowpony and pegasus had been forced to take the hilly backroads to avoid attention. By the time they arrived, the bite-wound on Applejack's neck was aching like the dickens from rubbing against the harness straps.
But we made it, she thought as she pulled the wagon rumbling over the bridge onto campus. Hang on Princess Luna, we're almost there.
A stranger's lantern moved in the darkness up ahead, its light sliding across the maze of brick buildings. Applejack felt a jolt of adrenalin reach her heart. “Rent-a-clops,” she whispered to Fluttershy. “Quick, help me get the wagon in here.” The pegasus added her shoulder to the yoke. Together they steered the apple-cart into an alleyway between the music hall and the history building.
A security pony sauntered up the walk in his white shirt and little black tie. This one was a green unicorn who looked like he'd had a few too many candied oatcakes over the years. A lit cigarette dangled from the side of his mouth.
"Doesn't he know those things cause cancer?" whispered Fluttershy.
"Shh!" said Applejack.
The security guard strolled past their hiding space, not even glancing in at them. He finished his cigarette, stamped it out on the ground with a hoof, then started walking away, whistling and jingling his keys with his magic again.
"And now he's littering??" whispered Fluttershy.
"Shh!" said Applejack.
The guard had almost made it around the corner, when a fit of coughing and sputtering erupted from beneath the fruit and blankets on the apple cart. Fluttershy moved to press a cloth over Princess Luna's mouth, but it was too late. The guard had already noticed the sounds coming from the alley. He turned and started walking back to take a look. The lantern hovered before him, and a billy-club came up to join it.
Applejack readied herself for a fight. She was going to have to disable this stallion without seriously injuring him, which was one hay of a fine line to tread. This wasn't one of Dash's adventure books, where a pony could get knocked out with a blow to the head and wake up a little dizzy later on.
Suddenly, Angel Bunny appeared on the ground at their feet.
"Angel!" hissed Fluttershy. "Get back on the cart!!"
Instead of obeying, Angel looked up at her with an expression of pure determination, then sprinted out into the moonlight. He tore across the courtyard like a white lightning bolt, took a running wall-leap off a fountain, and snagged the rent-a-clop's hat in his teeth. Angel was away into the darkness before the security pony knew what had hit him.
"What the hay??" the guard exclaimed, feeling for his hat with a look of disbelief. "Darned research animals!!" He turned and galloped after Angel at full speed, which for him was really not that fast. In fact he looked like he was about to collapse from exhaustion by the time he disappeared around the first corner.
"No, Angel!" said Fluttershy. "Let go of me, Applejack! I have to go after him!"
“Priorities, sugar!" Applejack said, restraining the pegasus gently until she stopped struggling. "You don't have to worry about Angel Bunny. That security pony will never catch him. Our mission right now is Princess Luna. Now c'mon, focus! Where do we go from here?"
"Um, the science hall." Fluttershy scanned the area for a moment. "We'll cut around the side of the art building, along the river path. That should take us right to it."
"Good work," said the cowpony. "Lead the way."
* * *
The massive science hall was designed to look like an ancient temple from the time of the Three Tribes. It was one of the largest structures the cowpony had ever seen.
"The big city comes to Ponyville,” Applejack said with a sour note as they approached along the brick walkway.
Fluttershy strained her neck to gaze up at all the columns and arches in the silver moonlight. "Twilight said it's going to be the second largest school in Equestria. She said it would be good for the town's economy."
"Twi grew up in Canterlot," said Applejack. "So she don't see nothing wrong with Ponyville 'urbanizin' as she puts it. But this ain't Canterlot, and I already know what happens to river towns that turn into river cities. Crime, mayhem, and pollution. Just like Manehattan."
"Well, if we don't get Luna in there right away," said Fluttershy, "urbanization will be the least of our problems."
"Boy, have you got that right," the cowpony agreed. "Open the door, sugarcube."
The yellow pegasus nodded and dipped her mouth into her saddlebag to retrieve a key. She fiddled with the lock for a while.
Applejack paced nervously. "What's the holdup?"
"The bolt turns," said the pegasus, blowing a strand of hair out of her face, "but the door won't budge. I think somepony must have barred it from the inside."
"Twilight said we could just walk right in with that key! Are you doin' it right?"
"I'm pretty sure they taught me how to work a doorknob in med school, Applejack."
Applejack stared at her, then laughed. "Good gracious, girl, did you just sass me?"
"Oh my gosh," stammered the pegasus. "I'm so sorry! I don't know what came over me, all of this is just so intense..."
Applejack waved a hoof. "Don't sweat it, sugarplum. I think a little sass is good for a mare." She trotted up to the portico and tried the lock herself. Sure enough, the door was held fast from the other side. "Gravy!" she muttered.
"What are we going to do now?" said Fluttershy. "Is Princess Luna really going to die out here because some janitor pony put the security bar down??"
A loud, ragged coughing startled the two ponies. It was Luna, struggling for air. Fluttershy hopped up onto the cart and stooped to examine the fallen alicorn. She took her stethoscope in her mouth and moved it from place to place on Luna's side. "It's a tension pneumothorax," Fluttershy said. "I was afraid of this."
"Pneumo-what-now?"
"There's air leaking into her chest and it's collapsing her lungs," said Fluttershy. Luna gurgled and wheezed. "That's why she can't breathe. Quick, quick, hand me a syringe from my bag." Applejack did so. Fluttershy used her teeth to pull the rubber plunger from the barrel, then stuck the open needle into Luna's chest, right under the foreleg. There was the wet hiss of escaping air and Luna's breathing eased up a bit. Fluttershy removed the glass barrel and taped the needle down against the alicorn's dark coat.
"Well?" said Applejack.
"That buys us time, but not much. Minutes maybe."
"It'll be enough," said Applejack confidently.
Angel Bunny reappeared from under a hedge. The white rabbit was covered in twigs, leaves, and spider-webs, but otherwise looked none the worse for wear.
"Angel!" cried Fluttershy, scooping him up. She squeezed the little bunny until his head just about popped off, then held him at foreleg's length and scolded him. "Don't you ever run off like that again! I almost had a heart attack!"
"Great job back there, partner," Applejack said to Angel in a mock whisper.
The rabbit squeaked and grinned sheepishly, placing a paw behind his head. Fluttershy huffed and set him down on the ground. Angel Bunny began to examine the front of the science hall. He looked over to Applejack.
"We're locked out," said the cowpony.
Angel took off again, scrambling up a vine trellis and squeezing through the bars of a ventilation grate.
"Wait!" exclaimed Fluttershy, but the rabbit was gone. "Twice in a row! He did it twice in a row??"
"I never thought I'd say this," said Applejack, "but right about now, that critter is Princess Luna's last and best hope."
A minute later, the ponies heard the scraping of wood-on-metal behind the door, and then a dull clunk. This time when Fluttershy turned the key, the latch disengaged and the door swung open. Angel sat on the ground near the kick-plate, motioning for them to enter. Fluttershy glowered at him, but it was hard to argue with success.
Applejack pulled the whole wagon right into the science hall. The doors slammed shut behind them, casting them into echoing darkness. The cowpony dug around in her saddlebag until she found a lantern and lifted it in her mouth, the magic igniter sparking the wick into flame.
Towering over the two ponies was a huge skeletal monstrosity. Its maw was filled with razor-sharp teeth, its eyes like black, empty caves. Fluttershy emitted a shriek so high-pitched that it was barely audible, and fainted dead away.
Applejack froze, terrified, until she realized that the creature was standing stock-still. She approached with caution. A knee-high fence made of red-velvet ropes surrounded its feet, and there was a brass placard on a wooden stand off to one side. Applejack read it aloud.
"The Saddlesaurus Rex was one of the largest land animals in the late Ponitaceous Period. Scientists believe that it went extinct at least 150 million years ago." She nudged Fluttershy with a hoof. "This thing's just dust 'n bones. We need to get the Princess into the medical school."
Applejack heard a squeak from the little white rabbit, and she turned to see him pointing off into the darkness. "It's been dead a long while, little fella'," she said, "it won't harm you none."
But Angel shook his head and pointed again, beyond the Saddlesaurus display. Now that the cowpony looked closer, she could make out faint forms moving around in the shadowy science hall. They weren't alone in here.
"Y'all better come out right now," said the cowpony, her voice as still as she could manage.
At first, there was silence. Then, a low voice. "Looks like we've been made, gentlecolts."
"Hey, Commander," said another voice. "That rabbit saw us. Maybe we ought to recruit him."
There was a smattering of laughter from every direction in the pitch-black hall.
"Darn it, show yourselves!" shouted Applejack, snorting and stomping a hoof. A bead of sweat ran from her brow.
"I suppose it's only fair, since we can see you two just fine." A gray pegasus stallion wearing dark-purple armor stepped into a single shaft of moonlight. His gold eyes had slitted cat-pupils, and his wings were like those of a bat.
The shadows swirled to Applejack's left and right, and a second and third gold-eyed pegasus appeared. A fourth figure melted out of a solid wall twenty feet behind her.
"The Night Guard," whispered Fluttershy.
"I'm glad somepony around here still remembers us," said the Night Guard leader, flashing a set of very un-pony-like fangs. "Now will you kindly explain what you're doing with our Princess?"
* * *
By the time Twilight made her way up to Celestia's bedchamber, the place was crawling with investigator ponies. They were taking photographs, drawing chalk marks on the floor, and placing tiny flags over bits of evidence.
The room was a disaster. All of Celestia's beautiful furniture was upturned and in pieces. A portion of the ceiling had caved in, and the wall leading to the outside was simply blown away, leaving only a howling void and a starry sky.
Twilight walked amongst the investigators, wearing the white lab-tech outfit that Doctor Stables had given her. Twilight's tag identified her as a pony named "Red Letter." Her job was "blood-spatter analyst."
The floor in the center of the room was one giant, dark stain. Twilight couldn't help but stare. Her mind started thinking up all kinds of questions that she didn't really want answers to. She wondered, for instance, how much of it had come from Celestia and how much from Luna. She wondered how fast an alicorn would have to bleed in order to outstrip her regenerative abilities and actually die from it. She wondered how much the Nightmare had hurt Luna before trying to kill her--
"You!" came a voice. "Purple unicorn."
Twilight's heart nearly stopped. She looked over to see a crime scene pony wearing a trucker's hat. He was scanning the rubble with a beam of light from his horn.
"C'mon, c'mon," he said impatiently, concentrating on his work and barely looking at her. "Gimme a hoof over here."
Twilight glanced around furtively, but nopony else was paying her the slightest bit of attention. She wove through the crowd of investigators and made her way over to trucker hat pony.
He was bright canary yellow, and his tag read: "Trace Evidence." Twilight wondered if this was his name, his job, or both.
"Tilt this rock back a little so that I can finish my scan," he said through a bushy, blue mustache.
Twilight obliged, grabbing the heavy section of stone with her magic and lifting it completely off the ground. The crime scene pony swept his light into the space under the rock, then stopped. He slowly looked up at Twilight, then at the massive rock itself.
"You're a strong one," he commented.
"Oh! I mean...uh...urrrghhh," said Twilight, feigning exertion. She dropped the stone slab to the ground, wincing a little when the thud temporarily attracted the attention of a few nearby ponies. She grinned sheepishly at trucker hat. "I've been working out."
"Me too," said trucker hat. "But compared to you, it looks like I've got a ways to go."
Twilight smiled nervously and tried to make a nonchalant retreat, but the pony continued the conversation. "What a mess, huh?" he said.
"Uh, yeah. That's definitely one way to put it."
"I've been doing this twenty-five years," the stallion said. "Never thought I'd be working a scene in this room."
Twilight let out a genuine sigh. "Me neither."
"You from East Barn?"
"Excuse me?"
"East Barn. East precinct? I don't recognize you."
"Oh, I'm...uh...an intern...from the Ponyville University...satellite...program?" Twilight gave a petrified grin.
"Cool, that's cool," he said, nodding. "We all gotta start somewhere." Then he leaned in conspiratorially. "You know, they're saying it was the dragon who did this."
"I might have heard," said Twilight, checking her sarcasm. "What do you think happened?"
The pony shrugged. "I'm going to wait until all the evidence is in. Never did have an opinion on the lizard, myself. Not so popular around West Barn, though, I'll tell you. Some ponies were convinced he was a rotten egg even before all this. Too bad for the dragon if he's innocent."
Twilight had to agree. "How about this giant pool of blood in the middle of the room?" she said. "I thought the perpetrator was supposed to have immolated the victim."
"Sometimes if a body is flash-vaporized, it can leave a moist residue that is heavier than air. But look who I'm talking to here, expert." He chucked her on the shoulder with a well-meaning hoof. "If you need coffee, it's over there. Better wake up, Red Letter. It's going to be a long night."
Too late, she thought.
Twilight had been worried she might have trouble blending in, but the room was a swarm of activity. She passed mostly unnoticed, especially with her junior credentials signaling to everypony that she wasn't worth talking to. Eventually she found a chance to slip away into an unoccupied corner.
Okay, she thought, here's the plan: try not to dwell on the consequences of screwing this up.
Twilight tuned the resonance of her horn down and the pliability up to produce low-frequency thrums of energy. Then, by alternating in moments of high-frequency energy, she created a rhythm that began to warp the very fabric of reality. She focused the signal with sympathetic pulses from her cutie mark, and suddenly, space and time unhitched from each other. Energy and matter began to flow backwards along the timeline, and Twilight felt a nagging sense of disembodiment which grew stronger and stronger. Keep calm, keep calm, she told herself. Temporal disconnection is always uncomfortable.
It was more than just uncomfortable, though. It was like being dragged backwards down a steep hill, strapped to a runaway apple cart. The unicorn felt a wave of nausea and had to redouble her concentration to keep the spell from fizzling out.
You can do this, Twilight! Focus on what's around you. Pay attention to the space, not the time.
It...it's Celestia's bedroom. Investigator ponies coming and going.
Twilight watched herself leave, walking backwards out of the room. She wasn't seeing with her eyes now, she was seeing with her horn, which reached into the fourth dimension and touched both past and future.
Guards, guards, more guards. Plainclothes ponies, probably Secret Police.
Then there was a blur of motion, and Twilight began to witness the battle between Nightmare Sun and Princess Luna, only happening backwards. The unicorn looked on in fascinated horror.
It beat her so easily, she thought. Even if we get Luna's horn back, how in the world are we going to defeat the Nightmare? A direct hit from the combined Elements might not be able to harm it in Celestia's body.
Twilight sped up the rewinding, then started skipping gaps of time, until she arrived at what she estimated was the beginning of the Nightmare incident.
A bedraggled Celestia combed her hair in the mirror.
It's you, thought Twilight, a lump forming in her throat. Really you this time, my princess. Not that...thing downstairs in the throne room wearing your face.
Something seemed to catch Celestia's eye--something shocking. She stumbled back from the mirror, mouth agape, and turned to stare at her cutie mark. Twilight could see that the princess's legendary sun mark was missing three rays, and then a fourth disappeared, even as she watched. She saw the alicorn rush to escape the room, only to fall prey to some sort of terrible hex trap. Celestia screamed like a wounded animal and crashed to the ground, screamed again, then vomited onto the floor and thrashed around in agony.
She had been like a second mother to Twilight. Now Twilight had to stand here and watch her suffer like this without any way to help. Luna's broken body, facing down the terrifying Nightmare fragment, the intelligence agent with his orbs and his syringes...and now this. Twilight felt like collapsing to the ground under the weight of all of the horrible things she had seen tonight. No more, I'm all done. Please, I don't want to see any more.
Stop it! she ordered herself. Keep it together Twilight! Keep. It. Together! She gritted her teeth as tears squeezed from her eyes. This has already happened! This has already happened. You can learn from it, use it in the present. But only if you focus! Now pay attention!
Celestia had begun to conduct psychic warfare with the enemy. She lay absolutely still except for her violet eyes, which vibrated like she was in REM sleep. This went on for minutes, Celestia's horn glowing bright, then dimming, then bright again. After a while, a trickle of blood fell from Celestia's nose. And then more than a trickle. Celestia began to bleed from her ears next, and then from her mouth.
Twilight sobbed silently to herself, but she didn't look away. She had thought it rather melodramatic earlier when Spike had made his vow of vengeance on Luna's behalf, but now Twilight found herself making a vow of her own. This one wasn't for Celestia, though. It was for the Nightmare. I'm going to destroy you, Nightmare, for doing this, for hurting us like this. I promise. I promise. I promise...
The Princess worked stiff, weak legs to push herself in the corner. She placed the tip of her horn against the wall and began to scratch symbols. It was clear that she was at the end of her strength.
That wall is destroyed in the present, thought Twilight. But not in the past, Nightmare. Come on Princess, I knew you would have a plan. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to save you!
Celestia only managed to scratch out a few lines before she succumbed to exhaustion. Then her neck sagged and her head lay down on the flagstones. She closed her eyes and went still.
BOTH PRINCESSES MUST ACT AS ONE.
Twilight stared at the message forever, as if looking at it hard enough would reveal its meaning. That's it?? Both princesses must act as one?? But it's already too late for this! A feeling of hopelessness swept over her. All this was for nothing then. We've lost.
She tamped it down angrily. No! Celestia is never wrong about this kind of thing. If this was the message she left for us, then it is surely the path to victory. I have to talk to Luna about this. She'll know what it means.
Twilight had barely finished ruminating on this when Celestia's eyes shot open and turned to look directly at her. The alicorn's lips peeled back in a bloody grin.
"Well, well, well," she said. "An interloper, taking a little peek back in time, yes? I hope you enjoyed the show, whoever you are, because it's the last thing you'll ever see." A rippling wave of white energy surged from the Nightmare's horn and a portion of Twilight's spell structure blew away like morning fog. It was a dispel hex—so powerful that it reached across the fabric of reality to strike at her. Space and time ground against each other like gears running in opposite directions and Twilight held onto the spell for dear life.
Impossible! thought Twilight. I was perfect in my calculations! She should never have been able to sense me... But this was Celestia she was dealing with. When it came to alicorns, nothing was a given
Twilight struggled to maintain the structure of the time spell, but a second white energy wave crushed her psychic framework to dust. She managed only a single, clipped scream as reality tore wide open and she went hurtling through the hole.
Twilight fell straight upwards for millions of miles, at a million miles per hour. Planets and stars whirled past, and then she was in an airless vacuum. Twilight grabbed at her throat as the breath in her lungs rushed out into the void. She began to suffocate.
The unicorn heard the splash of water and then she was looking up into a blinding light. Her blurry vision adjusted slowly, and now she could see the masked face of a doctor pony. The doctor held baby Twilight up and swept mucus from her newborn mouth with a cloth. Twilight inhaled her first sweet breath of Equestrian air.
"It's a filly!" said the doctor. "A healthy little unicorn!" He swatted her on the rump and infant Twilight started crying, loud and clear.
"Listen to her," said Twilight's mother, exhausted and covered in sweat. "She's going to be an opera singer when she grows up." Her dad laughed and cried at the same time and reached up to hold his new baby daughter.
Mom, Dad... thought Twilight.
But before Twilight's mind could really process any of this, time and space ground together again, and the world turned sideways. Twilight was back in magic kindergarten, scratching numbers into a piece of paper furiously as she tried to be the first in her class to finish the test. "Done!" she shouted, and all the other foals groaned and rolled their eyes.
Time spun again, and she was yanked backwards into a room filled to brimming with ponies, streamers, balloons, and confetti. "Hi, I'm Pinkie Pie!" said a pink pony jumping in front of her. "And I threw this party just for you!"
Do I know this mare? thought Twilight. Nothing seemed real anymore. She's so familiar...
Then the room was stretching out and warping, and Twilight with it and the buzzing in her ears became the roar of a waterfall. Just when she felt like she couldn't take it anymore, there was a sensation like a giant rubber-band snapping and everything went black.
The next thing Twilight knew, she was waking up on the stone floor of Celestia's bedchamber. She felt delirious and exhausted, but at least her body and mind were both back in the present. Thank goodness for small favors. She tried to get up, but something was wrong with her back legs. I'm paralyzed, she realized in horror. It's the temporal bends...I have the temporal bends! My nervous system is fried from extreme time dislocation.
Twilight looked up and quailed in fear. "You," she said.
"And you, Twilight Sparkle," said Nightmare Sun, standing at the entrance to the bedchamber. "Not that I'm particularly surprised. I thought you might be part of this coup attempt from the very beginning. Spike and Twilight: the perfect team. You forgot one thing, though, my former apprentice. In my kingdom, good always wins, and evil always loses."
Behind the alicorn stood the charcoal-gray intelligence agent. He did not look happy.
The last of the crime-scene ponies fled through the broken doorway, and then it was just Twilight and the enemy.
The purple unicorn swept her gaze across the ranks of soldiers. "Gentlecolts, the creature before you is not Celestia. She's an impostor, the same creature that created Nightmare Moon. You know in your hearts she isn't acting right. You know it!"
"Arrest her," ordered the Nightmare calmly. The Royal Guard began to advance.
Twilight couldn't walk, couldn't even think clearly. It was a small miracle she was still alive. Twilight had no time, energy, or concentration for anything but the simplest of spells. So she did the first thing that came to mind.
With a snap of magic, a bright green watermelon appeared in midair about halfway between Twilight and the Royal Guards. It fell straight down to the flagstone, cracking its rind open and spattering red pulp across the floor. Then another melon appeared in the exact same place as the first, and it fell too, breaking open on the floor. And then a third appeared. And a fourth. The trickle became a flow, and a half-dozen watermelons tumbled from the ceiling all at once, bouncing and rolling in all directions.
"Oh, crap," said one of the guards.
The flood gates opened and twenty-thousand watermelons came pouring down from the ceiling like a great fruit tide. An avalanche of watermelons. A watermelon tsunami.
The guards were simply swept away. They hacked at the rolling sea of melons with their swords and axes, but for every melon they cut in half, a dozen more took its place. The flow was relentless, and the guards found themselves pressed against the stone walls, down onto the floor, or up against the rafters by the sheer weight of so much fruit. They backpedaled into the washroom and hallway, only to find that the river of green melons had followed them. There was no escaping the relentless flood.
Teleport, Twilight! Come on, teleport! the purple unicorn thought frantically. She charged up the spell to take her away from this horror show, but the flow of watermelons pressed against her as well, and she found herself carried along with them. She had only moments before the entire bedchamber filled up with watermelons and pushed her right out of the castle and into oblivion. Teleport, darn it!
And then a heavy thrum of energy caused Twilight's head to jerk up in surprise. Right before her, even as thousands of watermelons continued to rain down, an archway of invisible force formed and parted the green ocean. Nightmare Sun walked through the space, her horn burning with sunlight. She did not look particularly impressed.
Invisible chains of telekinesis began wrapping themselves around Twilight's neck. In desperation, the unicorn dragged herself along the floor with her forehooves, trying to reach her saddlebag, even as the chains snapped taut and dragged her backwards towards her enemy. Come on Twilight, do it! With one final lunge, Twilight snagged her pack. She flung open the clasp as Nightmare Sun lifted her into the air, and six magic dampeners rolled out onto the floor.
The chains binding Twilight were gone in an instant, sucked into the powerful magic vacuum. Twilight collapsed back down to the hard stone floor and gasped for breath.
Nightmare Sun laughed condescendingly. "You've only neutered yourself, Twilight. You cannot cast spells either, now."
Twilight placed her nose inside her pack for a second, emerging with a sparkling gold crown, which she flipped up onto her head. “That's what you think,” she said. The crown's purple, star-shaped gemstone flared so brightly that even the alicorn had to look away for a moment. Before the surge of power had a chance to disappear down into the orbs, Twilight's horn burned with a searing light as she seized the energy for her teleportation spell.
The seconds before disapparition stretched out like minutes as the wormhole of the spell formed. In these precious few moments, Twilight watched in alarm as a wall of compressed magic formed behind Nightmare Sun, focusing and spiraling down around her, exploding with a thunderous roar. The white alicorn rocketed toward Twilight faster than a shot arrow, her face contorted in rage. In slow-motion, she grew closer and closer, aiming her alabaster horn straight for Twilight's heart. The spell completed just as the stiletto-point of Celestia's horn touched her chest.
Both ponies disappeared in a massive flash of purple energy.
The flow of watermelons stopped as if somepony had thrown the faucet closed. The last few tumbled down the fruit mountain and rolled across the flagstone, as the air crackled with static electricity. All around the room, bruised, battered, and sticky soldier ponies were crawling back onto their hooves.
The intelligence agent picked himself painfully off the floor for the second time today. "She could have warned me to step back," he muttered. "But of course not. 'There's no time, sorry chap!'" If it's even really the princess, he added to himself. My gut tells me that the apprentice was right... But whatever the case, it's probably best just to play along for now.
He pushed his way through the piles of fruit to the massive scorch-mark left behind by Twilight Sparkle's escape. "You all certainly made a good show of it," the agent commented to the guards.
"Why don't ya' shove off?" said one of them. "You saw what that unicorn did."
"She made off with my magic dampeners, is what she did," the agent said in a low and menacing tone.
"That's it!" groaned another soldier, this one younger than the rest. "Game over, stud! They've already killed Luna, Celestia is next! She's next! She's probably already dead--" Several other soldiers moved to shut the kid up, but the agent spoke before they could get their hooves on him.
"They won't kill her," said the agent, removing his spectacles nimbly with a hoof and pulling out a handkerchief to clean them.
"How do you know that??" said the kid.
The agent replaced his spectacles, lit a cigarette and took a long, weary drag. "Because who's going to raise the sun if she dies?"
* * *
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Picture Credits:
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