//------------------------------//
// Bite 2: Math 
// Story: Bites: Short Tales of Princess Celestia, Princess Luna and The Royal Naptime Law 
// by TheAnonymousT 
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For the last past few hours, Luna had been awfully...quiet. The silence was unnerving, frankly, given the kind of antics Celestia usually had been putting up with. After searching half of the castle, Celestia found Luna in her room sitting at a desk, hunched over a scroll and writing furiously with a feathered quill.

This couldn't be good.

“Luna, what are you doing?” Celestia asked cautiously.

“Math, my sister,” Luna said pensively, not taking her eyes off of the paper. “Math.”

“May I see?” Celestia asked slowly.

“Hush,” Luna said softly. “A genius is at work.”

Celestia trotted over to the desk and looked over her sister's shoulder and watched as Luna carefully scripted integral signs, paying careful attention to their elongated “S” shape. Once she was finished she quickly scrawled a few greek letters and parenthesis signs to the right and filled in numbers above and below each integral sign.

“The integral from zero to pi over three of the integral from one to twice the cosine of theta...of the function r cubed...dr d theta is equal to...hm...” Luna mused, writing furiously beneath the problem.

Celestia tried to catch a glimpse of what Luna was writing, but her hoof was covering most of it.

“Aha!” Luna exclaimed suddenly. “The cosine has been doubled!” She furiously crossed out everything she had written, except the problem itself, and started from scratch. After a few minutes, Luna let out a cry of “Eureka!” in triumph, allowing her quill to fly out of her magic's grasp backwards, hitting a slightly disgruntled Celestia.

“I solved the problem, dear Sister! The answer is seven sixteenths of the square root of three plus five twelfths of pi!” 

Celestia, having had quite the mathematical training from back in the days of the alas never successful Equestrian Space Program, took a look at Luna's solution curiously. Luna leaned back in her chair, crossing her forehooves proudly.

“Luna...” Celestia said. “This...is a three line solution.”

“Pure elegance!” Luna rejoiced.

“Yes, but--” Celestia said slowly. “The first line...is just the problem. The last line is merely your solution. But all the second line says is...'blood, sweat and tears'.”

“Oh, yes, one of my finer proof techniques,” Luna said. “I sometimes write BSAT for short.”

“But—that's not even real math!” Celestia exclaimed. “One cannot just write random numbers down and proclaim them to be the answer! That is...blasphemy!”

“Do you mean mathsphemy?” Luna said, giggling. 

Celestia groaned. “This is no time for puns, Sister. Here—let me show you how it's done.” 

Celestia picked the quill up from off the floor and copied the problem carefully onto a new section of scroll. She carefully evaluated the inner integral, then the outer integral, writing each step as she went. Simplifying, she at last came to her answer after about five minutes of deliberate calculation and two minutes of careful checks. “Seven sixteenth of the square root of three plus five twelfths of pi!” she proclaimed triumphantly.

Luna giggled. “That's what I said!”

Celestia compared her answer to her sister's. Sure enough, they were identical. “How...?”

“Blood, sweat and tears,” Luna said mysteriously.

Suddenly, Celestia didn't even want to know.