Between the heat, the humidity, and the truly horrifying variety of bugs, it is difficult to imagine a less pleasant place for friends to have a serious conversation than the middle of the jungle. Nevertheless, it was in this sweltering mess that a group of six ponies were walking along while two of them were locked in a tense discussion.
"So," Twilight Sparkle said. "Are you with us, or not?"
Rainbow looked at her, then looked away.
"Not," she said, then started walking away once again.
Twilight gaped and trotted along after her. “But Daring Do is in trouble! We have to go in and save her from Ahuizotl while also stopping him from using the Rings of Scorchero to bring unrelenting heat. You know it’s the right thing to do!”
Rainbow looked back over her shoulder at her friend and heaved a heavy sigh.
“The right thing to do,” Rainbow Dash said sadly, “was to never get involved in the first place. She made it crystal clear that she doesn’t need my help to do it.”
Twilight nearly screamed in frustration. She’d seen Rainbow upset before, but this defeatist attitude seemed out of character for her. Still, she had to at least try again.
“Rainbow, please! Think of what Daring Do would… er… do!”
Rainbow Dash tilted her head to one side while she considered, and Twilight felt a tingle of hope. That tingle fizzled to nothing when Rainbow eventually replied, “She’d probably mind her own business.”
Then Rainbow Dash spread her wings and launched into the air, flying slowly but steadily toward home with her head drooping towards the ground. The remaining five ponies looked at each other, shrugged, and walked along after their friend.
Twilight sighed as she trudged along. She wondered how Princess Celestia would have dealt with this situation. After all, as far as Twilight was concerned, her former teacher was capable of handling anything the world threw at her.
Which was as interesting as it was completely wrong, because at that moment the halls of Canterlot Castle were experiencing what could almost be called a silent uproar, though it required exercising artistic license to do so. Conversation, when it did occur, was brief and voices were kept hushed. The servants scurried to and fro as quietly as possible, while the guards concentrated on standing around and looking important, all in an effort to appear as if everything was normal, that everything was okay.
The truth was, everypony in the castle was nervous and on-edge. Well, almost everypony.
The events had started earlier that day, during the Court of the Sun. Several merchants had approached Princess Celestia regarding the current standards of pricing on the ordinary black bean, which was apparently a much bigger issue than most would ever think.
Half of the merchants had insisted that raising the cost of beans would be absolutely devastating, not only to the economy of Equestria, but also that of their trading partners, causing widespread famine and poverty.
The other half of the merchants argued that, no, this would not be the case. In fact, raising the price of black beans would increase wealth for everypony involved, from the distributor on down to the farmer. From there, the wealth generated would flow to every corner of the world, ensuring a new golden age of prosperity the likes of which had never been seen before.
The only thing the two sides were able to agree upon was that their opposite numbers were absolutely anti-Equestrian, against free trade, and were probably very, very horrible ponies when you got right down to it.
Unfortunately for all within earshot, this had been going on for some time now.
Princess Celestia had calmly, patiently and serenely listened to both sides of the argument until the two sides looked ready to come to blows. She then quieted them with a clearing of her regal throat.
“And what, exactly, would be the proposed new cost on these beans?” she asked.
“Er… I believe we were talking of raising it to one-hundred and eleven bits for ten bags,” one of the pro-increase ponies said.
“That would be ten bags of one hundred pounds, each,” an anti-increase merchant supplied helpfully.
“And the cost now is..?” Celestia prompted.
The merchants looked at each other. There had been an oddly bright note in the Solar Princess’ voice, one that suggested a certain fragility of emotion. But, they all reasoned simultaneously, this is Celestia. She’s never anything but perfectly in control.
“The cost now is one-ten,” a merchant volunteered.
Celestia had stared down at him. He grinned back up at her hopefully. Then the Princess of the Sun surged to her hooves.
“I,” she intoned into the suddenly-quiet court, “have the most horrific headache, and I believe I will be calling for a recess.”
She had stepped down from her throne into a sea of gaping faces, walked serenely to her private entry to the throne room, and announced to the world at large, “I shall take a nap. I will have an answer to your bean… dilemma when I get back.”
Her horn glowed and the door opened. As she stepped through, Celestia paused, then looked back over her shoulder.
“Don’t let me detain you,” she said in a cool voice.
She had then walked with near-perfect calm, betrayed only by a slight twitching of her left eyelid, back to her private quarters, told her guards that she was not to be disturbed (to which they nodded professionally), and calmly shut her doors.
The guards had taken up station at either side of the doorway and prepared themselves for a long, albeit uneventful, wait.
That is, until Celestia’s outraged scream of frustration had shaken the very door frame. This was followed up by a short but loud tirade against merchants and the existence of beans in general. At one point, a vase was smashed against a wall.
The two guards looked at each other, startled and very, very frightened. In an extremely quiet voice, one of them said to the other, “I think we should make absolutely certain nopony interrupts her nap.”
The other guardpony wisely didn’t answer, instead opting for a silent nod. From there, the word had spread, leading to the current state of affairs in which everypony in Canterlot Castle was afraid of making any noise louder than a pin drop.
If Celestia had even the slightest inkling as to what the cultists were up to back at the Fortress of Talicon, she might not have been so eager to take a nap just then. Two ponies in fierce war paint were raising the final Ring of Scorchero towards the top of the small stone spire while other members of their tribe pounded their spears rhythmically on the stone floor. Ahuizotl stood and watched, cackling with mad laughter.
“Yes… Yes!” he cried.
“Stop right there, Ahuizotl!” came a voice from a nearby corridor. Daring Do, intrepid adventurer extraordinaire, stepped out from the shadows, dripping wet and with a large-fanged piranha chewing on her tail. She scowled at the small creature and whipped the appendage, sending the fish back the way she’d come.
Her nemesis roared in frustration. “Daring Do! How did you escape?!”
The pegasus smirked in reply. “With class. Now hand over the ring!”
“Oh, alright,” Ahuizotl said cheerfully. He picked up the ring with his decidedly freaky tail-hand and held it out as if he were going to give it to the her. Daring Do, a look of perfect shock on her face, reached towards it out of reflex. Then he dropped it over the top of the stone spire.
“Oopsie!” Ahuizotl said with a chortle. “It would seem you are too late, Daring Do! Now I shall bathe the entire world in unbearable heat! Ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha~!”
This laughter went on for a while, as the sun above slowly changed from a cheery yellow to a sullen red. Things began heating up.
One of the spear-wielding ponies who had helped Ahuizotl gather the rings turned to his neighbor and said, “Uh… why did we think this was a good idea, again?”
The other spear-pony shrugged and mopped the sweat off of his brow with a fetlock.
Back at Canterlot Castle, an eerie calm had descended. The guards outside of had just started to relax when the doorway to Celestia’s private chamber slammed open with a sound not unlike a cannon going off, rattling several nearby windows and knocking at least one ancient painting off of the wall.
The guard on the right side of the door looked over, terrified, and saw a sight he’d never thought he’d see, and didn’t believe he’d ever be able to forget: Princess Celestia with bed-mane.
Her ethereal mane was as colorful as ever, and the hair still flowed as if on an unfelt wind, but each individual strand seemed to want to flow in a different direction. The effect was a multicolored corona undulating around her head, stretching wider than the door frame. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and the less said about the crease in her cheek from Princess Celestia’s Very Favorite Pillow, the better.
The guard who had been standing to the left of the doorway had missed out on all of this. He’d given a soft bleat of distress when the door had boomed open and immediately collapsed into a faint.
Celestia didn’t register either of her guards. Instead, she inflated her mighty lungs and, in the Royal Canterlot Voice, shouted “Luna!” loud enough to loosen the plaster on the wall across from her bedchamber.
A few seconds went by before another instance of the Royal Canterlot Voice came back. “Yes?” Luna replied from her own rooms some distance away.
“Have you been playing around with the sun?” Celestia’s voice boomed.
“No, I have not.”
Celestia stomped a hoof in frustration. “Well, somepony has! The thermostat is all messed up!”
“It was not me!” came the distant and annoyed reply.
“If it wasn’t you, then who was it?” Celestia demanded, even louder than before. The guard who was still conscious was beginning to develop serious concerns about his hearing. His teeth were rattling in his jaw every time the Sun Princess spoke.
“How should I know?” Luna called back from her wing of the castle. “I was asleep until a moment ago!”
“Hmph!” Celestia said, then turned and marched back into her room. With a quick yank of her magic, the doors slammed shut once again, leaving a very relieved and slightly deafened guard swaying unsteadily on his hooves.
Celestia marched to her balcony, her horn already glowing. As she went, she was muttering darkly to herself.
“Just one nap, just one. That’s all I asked. Can’t even have that. Some idiot has to go around messing with the sun. Who does that? Who thinks it’s a good idea to mess with the sun?” She reached the balcony, glaring at the baleful orb up above, and flared her horn. The sun quickly went back to its normal warm and cheery self.
“Can’t get a moment’s peace,” Celestia groused as she made her way back to the bed. “It was probably Discord… Hmm, no... not his style. Who was messing around, then?”
Celestia’s horn glowed once again as she reached out towards the sun in order to analyze the magical residue that had most recently interacted with it. After a few seconds, she sighed.
“The Rings of Scorchero. I should have known,” she muttered. “Someone out there must really enjoy sweating. Ah, well. I’ll soon fix that.”
Once again her horn flared, sending a beam of magical energy up into the sun. The beam was received, amplified, and eventually shot back down, speeding towards the Temple of Talicon. Ahuizotl, unaware of the bolt of sizzling magical energy currently hurtling towards the fortress, was still caught up in the throes of maniacal laughter, his endurance in this regard being a matter of great personal pride.
“Ha, ha ha! Hahah ha ha!”
“You’ll never get away with this, Ahuizotl!” Daring Do called out, finally interrupting the flow of diabolical laughter.
“And how do you plan on stopping me?” the monster asked. “You are powerless to… Say, is it cooling down?”
Daring Do glanced up, shielding her eyes with her foreleg. The sun did seem to be rapidly returning to its former state.
“Huh,” she said. “I wonder how I did that?”
A moment later, the magical beam, magnified a thousand times over by the power of the sun itself, reached the Rings of Scorchero. The Rings glowed first an ugly red, then a hot white. Everyone in the area wisely took a few steps back as the rings melted into a puddle and ran down the steps, settling into a menacing pool of molten metal.
Ahuizotl stared at the stone spire, which now stood alone and ringless. Then he spun, snarling.
“How did you do this?!” he demanded of his nemesis.
Said nemesis closed her gaping muzzle and smirked, mostly out of reflex.
“Oh, Ahuizotl,” she said with a wink. “You’re so forceful! A mare has to have some secrets, you know.”
And, with that, Daring Do made a break for the exit, easily evading all of the spear-ponies standing in her way.
Back in the fortress, the stone spire disintegrated into sand. The temple started to rumble, and all of the cultists chose the better part of valor and galloped for the nearest exits. Unfortunately for Ahuizotl, he was far too preoccupied to notice any of this.
“Curse you, Daring Do!" he howled, shaking all three fists at the sky. "I shall get my revenge! I shall find you, and when I do, I shall—!”
And that’s when the fortress collapsed on him.
Daring Do never looked back, so she was unaware of Ahuizotl’s fate. Instead, she flew off into the sunset with the satisfaction of another job well done. Which, when you think of it, was kind of silly, since she didn’t really have anything to do with how things worked out. In fact, it probably would have ended the same way if she’d never even been there. Still, the life of an adventuring archaeologist mare is a difficult and dangerous one, so it’s probably for the best to let her have these moments of satisfaction when she can.
Of course, there was the little problem of how to make the day’s events into an exciting book. She would have to figure out a way to explain how she caused the rings to suddenly melt down on their own. It wasn't all that large of a concern for the intrepid adventurer, though. After all, it wouldn't be the first time a little artistic license (for lack of a better word that wasn't “lie”) had made its way into one of her books.
Meanwhile, back in Canterlot Castle, a certain Solar Princess had snuggled back under her covers and was finally able to enjoy her nap. Nopony disturbed her. Nopony would dare.
Two weeks after Rainbow Dash returned home, she wrote the following entry in her journal:
“Dear diary or journal or whatever. A while ago, I wrote about how I learned to respect the boundaries of the ponies I admire. Well, that’s what I started doing. In fact, the more I admired the pony, the more I tried to pretend I didn’t.
“Well, guess what? Spitfire was so impressed by my new ‘cool and aloof’ attitude that she signed me up to the Wonderbolts Rookie Squad on the spot! If this is what happens when I pretend other ponies don’t exist, then I’m going to start ignoring everypony!”
Thus continued the fine tradition of Rainbow Dash completely missing the point of any life lessons that came her way.