//------------------------------//
// Guess Who 
// Story: Game Night 
// by Sozmioi 
//------------------------------//


The wild continuity calls for help!


A wild continuity appears!






I laid out five applications in front of the princess. "I've narrowed it down to five candidates: Bill Toupeé, Ring Field, Table Turner, Teapot Dome, and Tammany Hall." I leaned forward. "I'm not sure what magic lies in a name, but those last three are rather suspicious."

Luna's eyes glazed over, and she spat, "Names."

It occurred to me that she had hardly ever said anypony's name in my hearing. "How many names do you know, princess? Of anyone you first met since you were in the moon."

Luna thought for a moment. "You, Twilight Sparkle, Cheerilee. Macidexia, Pearl. Spitfire, Wing Span. Steadfast, Polished Armor. Princess... all I can think is Miasma Credenza, but I know that's not it."

"Mi Amore Cadenza, or Cadence. And Twilight's brother is Shining Armor."

"He's her brother?"

"Yes. What's the name of the scion of the ancient unicorn royalty?"

She closed her eyes and thought. "I can picture him, but I'm not sure of his name."

"All right. What are his colors and cutie mark?"

"He's white. Blue mane, and a crown."

"Yellow mane and tail, and a compass rose. His name is Blueblood."

Luna went on, "Our chamberlain is Pristine. Chanticheer. General Cherry. Queen Celeste and king Bubble, and prince R-something."

"Those are general Chere, king Babar and prince Arthur. And if you remember them, you had better remember the old human lady with them."

Luna sighed. "Does it matter? I do not think she will live to our next meeting."

"She has access to radical life extension magic. She has appeared roughly seventy for around eighty years. And she can visit any time she feels like it. Her name..."

"I get it!"

I had not frayed her composure like that since she had been Nightmare Moon. I looked down at the papers. "I have an idea for game night. Just the two of us."

"About names? You seem to know all of them. It won't be fair."

"It won't matter. The game I have in mind shows you everything you need to know, but you need to pay attention to it. You will learn them, and it will be fun."

She sighed.





Letters went out. Records were checked. Questions were asked. Cards were made.

I set up the trays in her outer chambers as customary; she woke late and came out with a yawn. "I am tempted to restore the moon to lying opposite the sun. I must rise at all odd hours."

"Must you? I remember that the sun kept moving for a few days while Celestia was unable to do anything about it."

"It was not shifting properly with the seasons. Moreover, It will be some hundred years before the moon has been properly trained in its course.  And the effects of Discord linger."

The idea that Celestia could handle the moon when it was to rise or set in the daytime occurred to me but seemed rather poor taste to suggest.

"I see. Well. Today's game is 'Guess Who'. I have prepared identical sets of cards for one hundred ponies it would be good to recognize and know a little about. We each secretly pick one, and alternate asking yes/no questions to narrow down who the other's pick was. The questions should be about information on the cards."

She examined them. "So many pictures, so fine, so fast - how did you get this?"

"Photography? I was able to pull most of them from the archives. And there's a unicorn on staff who makes copies."

Luna looked over the array, murmuring 'photography'. Then she looked up to me. "Are you sure this is going to be fun?"

"We'll see. If not, it's still useful effort. You need to know many of these, and it would be good to know the others. I've made my pick; you may ask a question."

"Male or female?"

"Male." I answered. "Has yours ever been married?"

She looked down. I'd laid out our trays randomly, and couldn't see hers very easily, so she could look at it all she wanted without giving its identity away. "Yes. Noble or common?"

"Noble. Is yours a unicorn?" There were enough more unicorns present than either of the other types that this was not really a wasted question.

She replied, "No. Is yours?"

"Yes. Pegasus?"

"Yes." I swept through the cards and turning those that didn't match. I was looking for a married pegasus. She continued, "Duke or higher?"

"Lucky you - yes, and now you've got it down to just four. Is your pony's coat blue, green, gray, or white?" Either way, I was looking at a dozen ponies.

"No. Is yours Duke Complex Cause?"

Ah. She correctly figured I'd go for the one she'd most conspicuously missed recently. "Yes! Who was yours?"

Luna replied, "Frozen Breath, one of the guards outside this door right now..." quieter, she added, "whose name I did not recall until I saw the card." She levitated his card up and read, "He is married to Dancing Leaf, also a pegasus, and has a daughter, Dandelion, an earth pony. His cutie mark is a gust of wind across a snowflake."

We reset our cards and tried again.

Then Prince Blueblood arrived. As proper as the announcement and request to enter were, it was nonetheless a serious intrusion.

Luna stood. "Welcome, my nephew!" I suddenly noticed how well she'd been doing at using an indoor voice when with this she suddenly stopped. "What brings you to our chamber at this hour?"

He blinked. "It hardly seems an inappropriate hour for you, dear aunt. Would you prefer three o'clock in the morning?"

"This hour specifically. I mean to ask, what do you want?" Blunt.

"A little bird told me that your advisor was gathering information about various ponies, noble and common. Some of my peers were... concerned and curious."

"You do not have the power to converse with beasts."

"I, ah, it is an expression referring to rumors. Rumors that are wondering just what he is doing."

Luna stared at him. The silence grew uncomfortably long. Then she said, "I want to remember their names better. So we are reviewing." She added, "Would you like to join us, so you can reply to these rumors in full knowledge?"

Luna conjured another set of cards and gave them to him (I was glad that I had left him out of the deck). "Pick one secretly. I have mine, so Omar, you may ask me."

I nodded. "Is their cutie mark of something that occurs in nature?"

"Yes... Prince, are you ready?"

He hesitated. Princess Celestia arrived, unannounced, through the window. She walked up and kissed her sister on the cheek, accepted one in return. By the time she had sat down at her sister's right side, she had taken stock of the situation.

"If you don't mind my momentarily interrupting your game..."

Luna interjected, "You may join if you wish."

"Thank you for the offer; maybe I shall. I came to ask about the music for the welcoming ceremony the tuesday after next. I had commissioned a suite of processionals, ceremonial interludes, and fanfares for you, so you would not have to wait to have something of your own. When things did not exactly go according to plan around your return..." she paused, slightly awkwardly. It was the first time I had seen her fumbling for words. She glanced at prince Blueblood.

Luna suggested, "They weren't finished, because you thought I'd take a year or so to recover?"

Celestia coughed. "Yes. So, for the moment, I propose that we look afield." She conjured a tray of small tubes. "Madame Flaubert left us this 'microfilm', on which is drawn, extremely small, what she considers her world's cultural canon. These have the music; perhaps we can find something." Celestia looked to her sister.

Luna considered. "I would as you say like something of my own, and if the new music is poor, and the old music is out of date... yes, we can listen to foreign options." To me, she asked, "Her world is your world, is it not?"

I nodded. "I presume you would like moon- or night-related music?"

"If any exists."

I laughed. "No fear of that. But I'm not very familiar with the sort of music that might be suitably... well. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata had better be in there." And I began singing it. I'm not that good at singing, and I'm nowhere near good enough at piano to have learned it properly, but I knew how to bang out the beginning.

In half a minute, around when I got to the end of what I knew, princess Celestia had found the relevant item in the films. She projected the page onto the floor, and momentarily an invisible piano started playing it - not with a lot of expression, but accurately.

She lay down and closed her eyes.

Luna looked down at the game, and just began reading the cards silently to herself. A few phrases in, she whispered, "Have you picked someone, prince, or are you not playing?"

Blueblood blinked at her in near shock, and shook his head.

Luna then softly asked me, "Is the second letter of the name in the first half of the alphabet?"

"Uh, yes. Why that question?"

"It makes me read all the names again. That is the point, is it not?"

"Ah." And so we continued the game, watched by an amused Celestia who was near-napping at her sister's side, and an irritated Blueblood.

After three minutes, Luna said of the music, "Enough. I can see a place for this."

Celestia concurred, "Yes! We are off to a good start. Any further suggestions?"

I thought back to college days, with my classical-music-playing roommate. "Hmm. There are a ton of nocturnes of all sorts, but since they're buried inside other works, it's not so simple to find them unless that is very well indexed. If we had a computer, that would be simpler."

"Thank you for reminding me!" Momentarily, Celestia summoned an iPad. I blinked rapidly - they'd only been out a few months, in a different world altogether with which we had no consistent trade, so I really didn't expect her to have one. Seeing my confusion, she explained, "Another gift, from prince Arthur. I have not thoroughly looked through this. I did find one promising title in its library: We Like The Moon."

I gagged, my tongue fumbling in my haste to object. The result was a bit of a fortissimo 'Bleah!'

That over-the-top response shattered Celestia's straight face, revealing the puckish grin behind.

I sighed. "God, Celestia, you are such a troll. If you actually played that, she'd banish you to where the sun don't shine!"

Luna found this exchange very amusing, but Blueblood's horn was sparking as he restrained himself from pulverizing me. Even so, he could not contain his words. "I say! This is the most egregious case of Lese Majeste I have ever seen! How do you countenance it?"

Celestia's laughter subsided and she assumed mock seriousness once more. "He has been the absolute ruler of an entire cosmos larger than Equestria, which I suppose puts him above me in rank."

Now that she was trolling him, I was ready to keep my face straight. And what she said was, I suppose, technically true, if 'absolute ruling' includes 'being the only living thing'. Blueblood began to have an aneurysm until he saw that Luna was suppressing laughter.

Princess Celestia continued, with an openly silly tone, "Do you have any other musical suggestions, your imperial highness?"

"Princess, please. I am not an emperor. Though I have discovered in the past few weeks that I am a pope whether I want to be or not, so I guess you might say 'your holiness'."

Self-importantly, "Hmph! I do not use honorifics for Discordian popes."

"Ah. Well, then."

Blueblood's brain broke. "Dis...? If you accept that... could any of the extreme and unsettling facts about mister Green that I can present have any effect?"

Celestia finally grew serious. "The joke was that everyone is a Discordian pope. But if you have any extreme and unsettling facts to share, I would be very happy to hear them."

Luna added, "As would I."

I added, "Same."

Celestia interjected, "But first, music?"

Off-balance, I said, "Buh. Ah, there was something by Britten, that was pretty good. Had to do with the ocean or something."

As she began doing something complicated and magical with the microfilm, she said, "Go ahead."

Blueblood coughed. "First and least seriously, he has on two occasions entered a house of ill repute."

Oh. That.

Luna asked, "House of ill repute?"

"Prostitution."

The heat fled the room as Luna said, "I do not know what methods of discretion my sister relies upon, but I had thought sending an intermediary to make my inquiries and arrangements at three o'clock in the morning would be adequate. I find any who obsessively watch the comings and goings to be odious in comparison with the trade itself."

Blueblood wasn't really equipped to blanch, but maybe it was just frost forming on his face. I might have seemed the same; it certainly felt like it. For all that her voice was calm, this was the scariest she'd been since her Nightmare Moon days, and was the first time since then that she'd hurt me.

Celestia had sat up, and after a few seconds the heat she had begun radiating overcame Luna's subsiding chill.

Blueblood put that behind him and continued, "Were you aware that he has broken a geas?" We all nodded. Blueblood frowned. "Doesn't that mean he is both outrageously powerful and not to be trusted?"

I shrugged. "There was some retroactive fudging around the rule boundaries. You see..."  Celestia coughed, cutting me off. Maybe he's not cleared to hear about this? "Ah, what's your se..." Celestia quickly and sharply whistled the refrain from the song from the first South Park Movie in which Cartman tells another character to utterly cease speaking (using extremely vile language).

I utterly ceased speaking, shocked at the implicit language more than anything else. Also shocked that she'd risk my not knowing it. Then I realized I really shouldn't have had to know it - she was obviously interrupting me. Then I was shocked that I'd even tried to ask him his clearance level, since Celestia surely knew it already.

Blueblood looked to the princess, then back to me, then back to the princess. That something was secret was obvious, but hopefully it wasn't obvious that it was actually a national security issue on a clearance level he was apparently not even allowed to know existed.

He took a deep breath, and presented the last point, sort of. "I don't suppose, at this point, that a massive array of circumstantial evidence suggesting that he was complicit in the invasion by the Vectorian Empire would have any effect on your confidence in him, would it? I ask particularly in light of their upcoming official visit, before which it is critical that we find any spies they may have?"

The sisters looked to each other and shook their heads. Luna said, "If he had done nothing at either of two critical junctures, we would certainly have lost. The empress witnessed both, and she did not accuse him of being a traitor."

"Ah!" He smiled, momentarily relieved more than irritated. "That... that would be an explanation I can actually bring to my concerned colleagues." His smile regained its gritted-teeth nature. "Thank you for your service, Mister Green." He nodded to Luna. "May I beg your leave?"

She nodded, and he exited quickly.

Once the door was shut, I looked expectantly at Celestia, who was once more rummaging with the microfilm. Fortunately, Luna asked what I was thinking. "What in the lowest pits of Tartarus was that about?"

Celestia found what I'd mentioned and put it on. Then, she said, "In the old days, we were new enough that the royal line from which we borrow our authority remained relevant. It was expected that we might both eventually fall and so Equestria would be left to the old royal line until we returned. As I have persisted in surviving, their significance has faded. Doubly so with your return. And so he and most of the nobles cling to enforcing deference. And of course for them to demand deference for themselves, they must demand far more for me than I would ever wish. I have found it unprofitable to publicly conflict with them on this."

She stopped there, inviting response. Luna reasoned out, "So whenever you get him in private, you needle him about it?"

Celestia pursed her lips. "There is more to it than that. You are not aware of the full scope of his spying." With a glance my way, she said to Luna, "He knows more about Omar's personal life than Omar does. Their spies must not continue poking around Ponyville. I think you sent a clear message that will clear them away without revealing what else we actually need them to avoid." What is it that I don't know?

Celestia stifled a yawn. "This is terribly late. Would you mind raising the sun for me in the morning?" Sweet!

"Not at all, if you would take care of the moon next afternoon."

"Certainly."

They exchanged good-nights, and Celestia departed.

Luna and I resumed the game. I was disturbed by Celestia's comment about my ignorance about my personal life.

The music ground to a halt as Celestia turned her attention away. Luna said, "I think that was suitable."

"What?"

"The music."

"Ah. Sure."

"Thou'rt disturbed by what my sister said of Cheerilee?"

I nodded. Did everyone know more than I did?

She stared at me. "She had a most distinctive set of bad dreams recently. More, I will not say. I think it would be kindest to let her go."

Well, I could kind of see that coming. A pity. She's pretty awesome. "Can I have the weekend to settle it in person, maybe, figure something out?"

"Certainly."

I went. As breakups go, this was in the top two. She'd simply decided she wasn't into humanality. Fair enough. Bummer.