“What do you mean, how many granddaughters do you have?” Luna asked, baffled. “As far as I was ever told, Father only had two foals- Celestia and myself.”
“But then why is she an alicorn, too?” Loki asked, waving a hoof around frantically in the vague general direction of Twilight Sparkle. “The little ones told me that all alicorns were members of the Royal Family. How many children did my son have, and why did no one bother to tell me about them? I only found out about you and your sister involuntarily- someone should have said something!”
Twilight was beginning to look quite alarmed, and Loki was getting frantic, so Luna stepped in. “Grandfather, this is Princess Twilight Sparkle, who I told you about? She wasn't always an alicorn, much as you were. Those foals were correct in that she is now a member of the royal family, although as far as I know she is not biologically related to us. She was born a unicorn, but her power eventually became so great that she was able to become an alicorn, with the help of her friends. But even though she has been a pony since the day of her birth, even the least powerful alicorn is still exponentially more powerful than the strongest unicorn, so she she had to learn to control her magic all over again. Imagine, if you will, Grandfather, that your magical abilities had quadrupled or even quintupled in the space of several hours- it would be like needing to learn how to walk all over again. Twilight's powers, after she became an alicorn, were much, much stronger than anything she had ever tried to wield before. That is why I hoped that she might be able to help you learn to control your own powers.” Turning to Twilight, she continued.
“I apologize for not giving you more of a warning about this, but neither Celestia nor myself knew about his arrival until several days ago.”
“Neither did I,” Loki interrupted.
“Well, yes,” Luna agreed. “Grandfather had even less warning than we did. But given the nature of the situation, you will have to forgive me for not giving you more details.”
“But Princess,” Twilight protested. “I don't know how to help him! I tried to tell you before, but I don't know anything about non-pony magic!”
“Well, he is an alicorn now,” Luna replied.
“Um...” a small voice spoke up. All three adults started- they had completely forgotten about the foals. Sweetie Belle seemed unnerved, but steeled her courage. After all, she had been around the older ponies with her sister enough to know when Twilight was nearing her breaking point. “Mr. Loki can use his magic. He fixed my ankle and helped me get the mud off after Di- I mean, after I fell.”
“Is this true?” Luna asked Loki, who shrugged. It felt weird, doing a movement like that in a quadrupedal body.
“Well, yes, I suppose so. She was injured and upset, so I used the same spell I would use on myself after a battle, or after I'd had a confrontation with my brother or his friends.” Belatedly, he realized what that meant. “Oh! My powers are back!” Excited, he tried to lift a smallish boulder off to the side of Twilight's house... and failed. His horn briefly glowed, but quickly sputtered out, the backlash from the failed spell sending him face-planting into the ground. Groaning, Loki staggered back to his feet.
“What the-?! I don't understand! It was working a few moments ago!”
Luna tapped a hoof on the ground thoughtfully. “Grandfather, did you notice that the magical backlash this time was less violent than it was back in Canterlot Castle?”
“I still hit the ground,” Loki pointed out.
“Yes, but you stayed more or less in the same place,” Luna replied. “I think... and this may be incorrect, but I think there is a binding spell on you, and that it is beginning to weaken. That is why you were able to help Sweetie Belle. Your powers slipped through the spell that time. This time, your magic was stopped by the spell, but because the magical matrix is weakening, you were only thrown to the ground instead of propelled backwards.” She stopped for a moment, lost in thought. “As far as I know, it is possible to create a strong binding spell that is on a time control, although I have never attempted to perform one. I also am not sure what would happen when the spell began to weaken.”
“Star-Swirl the Bearded wrote about the effects of poorly-cast binding spells in one of his books!” Twilight exclaimed. “I do not remember which one exactly, but I can look it up for you, and then we can run some tests!” There was an excited sort of glee on the purple mare's face that made Loki want to back away slowly.
“What I do not understand is why my magic was able to work when I used it to heal Sweetie Belle's ankle,” Loki mused. “If there was a binding spell placed on me, it almost certainly would have caught that, since a healing spell takes more power than a telekinesis spell. If that was case, the barrier would have caught the healing spell and let the telekinesis spell through. Unless, of course, the spell-caster was remarkably incompetent, although if he or she was at that level of uselessness I confess I find it improbably that they managed to successfully cast anything.”
“What if it was meant to let some spells through and not others?” This time, it was Scootaloo who spoke up. “I mean, I don't know very much about magic, but in the latest Harry Trotter book, Nightmare Nocturne cast a spell on Harry that only let him cast really simple spells like using his horn as a light. What if a spell like that got put on Mr. Loki?”
“Scootaloo, the Harry Trotter books are a very inaccurate representation of magic! For one, nopony is strong enough to survive splitting their soul even once, let alone into seven pieces like Nightmare Nocturne. And magic school is absolutely nothing like Mugworts!” Twilight said, scandalized. “If anything those books are offensive, speciest propaganda. All the Earth pony and pegasus characters are either evil or incompetent, and I, for one, found the portrayals of the zebras, penguins, and griffons offensive in the extreme.”
“Scootaloo has a point though,” Apple Bloom interrupted. “Granny Smith told me once that when she wuz a filly there was a bad unicorn who used her magic t'steal stuff and hurt ponies. When she finally got caught the sheriff used his own magic to bind hers so she couldn't do bad things anymore.”
“Oh, the Chianti case,” Twilight replied. “Yes, that did happen, but Shiny Badge's magic wasn't strong enough to contain hers for very long and it wore off. If Chianti had been an alicorn it is very unlikely that it would have worked in the first place. Of course it was all moot a few weeks later when she got hit by that train...”
“Maybe a unicorn didn't cast the spell,” Loki suggested darkly. “Perhaps the Allfather or his wife did before I was sent here. I was weakened enough that I might not have noticed. Or perhaps one of my granddaughters did it.”
Luna looked horrified and angry at the same time. “Grandfather, are you accusing me-?!”
“No, no,” Loki consoled her. “But you said it yourself. I heard what you said to Princess Twilight here- you did not want her to tell Celestia about me being here. And after what I have seen of my elder granddaughter's behavior over the past several days, I do not blame you in the least.”
“You would accuse Princess Celestia of cursing you?!” Twilight burst out in shocked fury. Loki smirked.
“Ah. I see Luna dear has not told you everything. Now why is that, I wonder? Because she did not want to upset you. Well, little pony, allow me to enlighten y-” he never got to finish his sentence. Luna had swept him and Twilight up in her own telekinesis and unceremoniously stuffed the both of them into the library, slamming the door behind them.
“That was very reckless!” Luna admonished. “First you wander off, then you go around announcing your presence, then you accuse my sister of putting a binding spell on you! You are correct in that I did not tell Twilight the whole story, because I wanted to give you a chance to explain it yourself!”
“...oh,” was all Loki said.
“And you-!” Luna rounded on the other mare. “I am well aware of your fondness for my sister, but did you have to antagonize my grandfather immediately? We do not know what is causing his magical mishaps, and if I may be so bold, Celestia has not done anything to particularly endear herself to our grandfather!”
“Indeed,” Loki snarked.
“But that is not an excuse for what you did back there! You should not have gone off alone,” Luna rebutted.
“But I was not alone, I was with the little ones,” Loki replied. “The small unicorn- Sweetie Belle, I believe her name was-? was injured, so I helped her and went with all three of them to confront the source of those injures. I did nothing wrong- rather, I did what I wish someone had bothered to do for me when I was that age.”
“That's not the point!” Luna exclaimed. “Nopony knows that we are currently not in Canterlot, and if word that you were out here by yourself, or worse, in the company of foals, then ponies might get the wrong idea of your intentions.”
Loki quickly picked up on the implications, and bristled in indignant disgust. “If you are accusing me of having perverse intentions- I would never do something so disgusting and dishonorable! If you were not my granddaughter and my powers were not bound I would slay you where you stand for such an insult.”
“No, that's not what I mean!” Luna exclaimed, horrified. “Not at all! But certainly you must have noticed the stir your arrival caused in the palace. I merely meant that if somepony realized that both of us were gone and then noticed that you were out and about without me, and hanging around with fillies, they might get the idea that you had kidnapped me, or were looking for blood sacrifices or a snack!”
“Oh,” Loki replied, somewhat mollified. “I thought you were implying... never mind.”
“Will somepony please just tell me what the buck is going on?!” Twilight interjected.
Outside of the Ponyville Library, the three fillies stood, trying to process what had just happened. “Did... did Mr. Loki just accuse Princess Celestia of cursing him?” Sweetie Belle asked, eyes wide.
“Ah think so,” Apple Bloom replied. “He seemed nice but maybe he really is just a crazy pony.”
“I don't know,” Scootaloo answered. “Princess Luna looked really scared when he brought up Princess Celestia. Maybe she really did do something to him!”
“To her own granddaddy?” Apple Bloom asked skeptically. “Ah dunno... it just don't sound like something Princess Celestia would do.”
Scootaloo uncertainly shuffled her hooves. “What if... what if there's more to Princess Celestia than what we learn in school? What if she's not as nice as everypony says she is?”
“What are you talking about?” Apple Bloom asked.
The pegasus filly took a deep breath. “You guys know my dad... doesn't have a lot of money, right?”
The other two nodded- it was the reason that if they did anything together they usually went to the farm or to Rarity's shop. Scootaloo lived with her father in a dilapidated apartment complex on the edge of Ponyville. After Scootaloo's mother passed away, the stallion had taken on two jobs to help provide for his daughter, but it wasn't enough; not with the debt that his wife's medical treatments had incurred towards the end of her life. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Scootaloo looked deeply uncomfortable. “Well, uh... last Hearth's Warming I got a box of stuff from the Equestria Widows and Orphans Fund. Ponies donate things to be distributed to foals who won't get lots of presents. A lot of it was really boring- old toys and books, and horseshoes that don't fit. But there was a textbook from Austroolia in there, too.”
“A textbook?” Sweetie Belle wrinkled her nose. “That's a boring present.”
“I thought so too,” Scootaloo continued, “but then when I got the feather flu I didn't have anything better to do so I looked at it, and I really learned a lot! Did you know that Princess Celestia attacked Austroolia like a thousand years ago because she thought the king of the kangaroos disrespected her? The war killed like half of everyroo in Austroolia.”
“But that was a thousand years ago...” Apple Bloom protested. Scootaloo shrugged.
“Maybe. But the griffon who lives across the hall says that even more recently Celestia invaded his homeland. And he thinks she had the penguin emperor assassinated.”
The three fillies were silent for a moment. It had been all over the news- the previous year, the Emperor of Pengin had died under suspicious circumstances. The official cause was ruled to be structural failure of the ice-bridge that collapsed while the emperor's procession was on it, but many penguins (and penguins, and griffons, and other species) suspected a terrorist attack or other foul play. But this was the first time they'd ever heard of anypony thinking the benevolent ruler of Equestria was involved.
“He really thinks the Princess did it?” Apple Bloom finally said. Scootaloo nodded.
“Yeah, although you could ask him yourself. We could go visit him! If we're going to save Mr. Loki we're going to need a grown-up's help and we can't really ask our families.”
Sweetie Belle, however, was skeptical. "I just don't think that Princess Celestia would do something like that!"
Scootaloo rolled her eyes. "Come on, Sweetie, you saw how Mr. Loki reacted to Twilight! I don't think it's a coincidence! He said his powers were acting up, right? She must have done something to him to keep him from using them!"
"But then what are we supposed to do about it?" Apple Bloom said. Scootaloo grinned.
"Remember in history class we learned about the Penguin Freedom Front when Pengin was invaded by the griffons?"
"Yeah. So?"
"Maybe we can get our cutie marks in stopping unfair punishments!"
“And you think this griffon guy might be able to help,” Apple Bloom was warming to the idea. Scootaloo nodded vigorously.
“Mr. Grayfeather is really smart! If the Princess is really up to no good and is out to get Mr. Loki, he'd be able to help us. And if we can save Mr. Loki, we'll get our cutie marks in saving our country from a bad pony!”
That was all it took. “CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS PATRIOTS! YAY!”
To Be Continued