//------------------------------// // Chapter 4: Treading the Boards // Story: An Extended Performance // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// The Great and Powerful Trixie readied herself, body and mind, for what was about to occur. As always, this was a numinous moment, when she was still within the dull world of mundane reality, though standing in the wondrous place where it would transform into her special magic. Possibilities glistened around her like a tracery of spiderwebs. Master White-Beard had once told her that there were many possible realities, many ways one's own personal world-line could go, and that one chose the one to make actuality by an exercise of one's own free will. She could almost feel this around her right now. When she was about to begin a performance, that was when she felt closest to the whole wide Universe. She had a lot to co-ordinate. The Great and Multi-Talented Trixie did not use a whole stage crew. She did not need a whole stage crew. All that there was to see was herself, her skill, her props and her magic. This had awed Piercing Gaze when he had realized this -- he had tried to persuade her to work with a crew in his Hippodrome Theatre, and he'd almost convinced her. But that -- that was a chapter in her life necessarily and forever closed. Still, he'd respected her art, and that was a happy thought, wasn't it? He was -- a professional like herself. His respect mattered to her. From a purely professional perspective, of course. The clock ticked down. Her horn glowed softly, and she shifted its emanations into the infra-red. That was a trick Master White-Beard had taught her -- only when she was expending a lot of energy could anypony even see that she was using magic, if she didn't want that pony to know this. This could get a little warm under her hat, but better to do this now than to give the audience a tell while she was performing, later, when the hat might come off at some stage of the act. Her aura reached out and touched the triggers for the first set of fireworks. Just touched ... wasn't time yet. With a cantrip so perfect that she scarcely needed to think the details, she ramped up the volume of her own voice -- a stagecraft version of a spell originally developed by royalty to address a crowd. As she was doing this, she ran over all her props one last time, made sure that everything she needed was positioned properly. Not one unicorn, not even one mage in a hundred could divide her magic as she was doing now. But then, this was part of the reason why she was the Great and Powerful Trixie, the most skilled show-mare of her generation. Almost time now. Three ... two ... one ...now! She began speaking before the curtain rose. This was important -- it gave the audience something impressive on which to focus before they even saw her. One never wanted to let them see her not performing, never wanted to let them focus on the merely mortal mare behind the show. One always wanted to give them her true self, her stage self, the Great and Powerful Trixie. If she sometimes applied this principle a bit too much in her personal life, that was merely the price of fame. The music swelled. The orchestra was the one part of her act she'd never figured out how to do completely by herself, not on a scale that would sound right in a setting this large. If she were in, say, a small town, she'd just slave her gramophone to the sound amplification spell, but this was Manehattan. "Come one, come all ..." she cried, at close to maximum volume, the better to cover the entire square. Her voice was as dramatic, as insistent, as regal as she could make it be. "Come and witness the amazing magic of the Grreat and Powerful Trrrixie! She created a glow as she started to say this, high over the stage and rising over the still-closed curtain. As she knew, the eyes of the audience followed that glow. She rolled out a very small ground-bomb, shielded by just the brief hint of a don't-look-at-me psychic invisibility ... no point overdoing this and attracting the attention of anyone in the audience with the actual ability to sense magic. Part of what made her performance so special was that she could fool other mages. Pop! went her little ground-bomb, almost inaudible over her own voice and the sound from the orchestra, making a bright white flare and a cloud of temporarily-obscuring smoke. If anyone did hear this, they would assume it was the air being displaced by teleportation. Moving quickly, her eyes squinted almost shut to avoid dazzling herself, she simply stepped through the folds of the curtain where they parted -- anyone seeing this would assume that it was the curtain starting to twitch open. The smoke cleared, and there she was. There was an appreciative gasp from the audience at what looked like a smooth and perfect teleportation. Trixie could teleport -- once or twice a day, at considerable effort. No way was she going to do something that difficult as the opening move of an hour-long act. But the illusion that she had so casually teleported established that she was an incredibly powerful mage, in the minds of her audience. Which was, of course, where the magic beyond mere mundane magic always took place. In the minds of the audience. As she made her entrance, she triggered the first battery of fireworks. Master White-Beard had been an expert pyrotechnician -- he could do things with fireworks that should have been impossible, and he'd taught her a significant portion of his own pyrotechnical arts. There was nothing quite as effective or as cheap in terms of real magical effort. They had their own drawbacks -- they could only be used outdoors, she had to be very careful using them, and one could only preposition a limited number for any performance. But they were worth it, when employed correctly. White-Beard would have used purely pyrokinetic fusing. Trixie was nowhere near as good at pyrokinesis as had been her mentor, so she instead used copper wire and tiny electrokinetic sparks. She found this both more reliable and much less likely to cause premature detonations. The first battery worked perfectly, two single-shot skyrockets with pale green peony heads and two vertical spinners mounted perpendicularly to the audience. She was rewarded by more gasps of appreciation. "Watch in awe," she continued, "as the Grreat and Powerful Trrrixie performs the most spectacular feats of magic ever witnessed by Pony eyes!" Second battery, fire! The spinners from the first salvo were still going as several red and green skyrockets shot skyward, a ground bloom flowered to life on either side of her, and she posed dramatically as the peonies and dahlias burst overhead, sparks trailing down. The crowd gasped, cheered, and she smiled in satisfaction as she launched into the first part of her main act. She had the audience, and she kept them. The magic part of her act was a fairly-standard mixture of illusions, productions, restorations, transformations and vanishments, notably primarily for the speed and precision with which she executed them: she almost never made a mistake, and when she did goof up, she made it part of the trick, as if it were some private joke she was sharing with her audience. What made the Great and Powerful Trixie's performance truly special was her patter. It was deliberately outrageous, over-the-top. In her imagination, the Great and Powerful Trixie was the most fantastic mage who ever lived, and she told stories of vanquishing evil warlords, black magicians, dragons, hydras, star-bears and every other sort of foe with a variety of improbable thaumaturgical feats. She illustrated these victories by means of playlets, animated by minor illusions and employing all sorts of little magic tricks. This was her world, the world of her own mind, and it was a beautiful one. Everything was clean and pure and lovely, and she the heroine of every story. It usually captivated her audiences, and this night was no exception. The crowd was in a mellow and magical mood, and there were no hecklers. She was almost sorry about that -- she liked taking down hecklers, and she had a whole sub-routine of her act planned for just that eventuality. Still, this was only an hour-long show, and she packed a lot into that hour. And there was another principle White-Beard had taught her well. Always leave them wanting more. She did just that. *** In Ponyville, many separate parties were breaking up as the participants wended their way to the Town Hall. This morning would come a very special show -- a personal appearance by Princess Celestia at the very moment she rose the Sun. The town was packed with celebrants from neighboring communities, and all the restaurants and food stands were doing the best business they expected to have all year. They had no way of knowing that things were about to get even more interesting. Celestia stood in a back room which had been set aside as her dressing room. She touched up her appearance, straightened her regalia, and smiled at her attendants. Within, she was torn by guilt at what she was about to inflict on the town she had created largely for this purpose: an elaborate decoy, a hidden garrison with two thousand all-too-real and terribly-civilian inhabitants. There's no reason for her to destroy anything here, she told herself. She'll show up, rant a bit, then make for either the old Castle, or Canterlot. It would serve her no purpose to kill anypony. Of course this assumed that Nightmare Moon would be executing anything like sane tactics. Princess Luna had been a master strategist, her own High Lady of War. Luna never would have destroyed just for the sake of destroying, especially a town for which she might have long-term use. But if someone attacked her? Even insulted her? Celestia knew only too well that Luna, even before the Nightmare had taken her, could have leveled the whole town in less than a minute, leaving crumpled ruins and mangled corpses where there had once been a pleasant little rural community. Her current level of power, her current level of sanity: both were unpredictable. The results of her sister's tantrum could be terrible ... There! The imprisoning satellites were gone. Time to run like a coward, she thought, savagely lashing herself with her own scorn as she winked out, reappeared in her War Room at Canterlot. The fact that fighting Luna in downtown Ponyville would have almost assuredly killed every Pony in that town and left nothing of the place but a steaming crater under a rising mushroom cloud did not appease her shame at the utter failure this moment represented. A moment later she felt the flare of power from Ponyville. Nightmare Moon had returned. *** "Thank you!" cried Trixie in honest gratitude. She loved when an audience appreciated her. She might have despised every mare Jill of them had she met them individually and in person, but as an audience, she loved them without reservation. "And now," she said, checking the clock, "the rising of the Sun!" Silence. Some gasps which sounded less like appreciation than like fear. A big dark-brown Earth pony pointed at the sky. "Look!" he shouted. Yes, that was definitely fear. Trixie followed the line of his foreleg. For a moment, she did not realize what she was seeing. It was simply the Moon, the full moon such as she had seen hundreds of times before. Bright, shining ... Then she realized what was missing. The Mare in the Moon was gone.