The Invisible Alicorn

by McPoodle

Chapter 2: Bedtime Chatter

Chapter 2: Bedtime Chatter

---

With a gentle “pop”, Luna stepped out of the Earth afternoon and returned to Equestria. She was in a random hallway of the Royal Palace in Canterlot, and the time was nearly sunrise.

The clocks on Earth and Equestria were not yet aligned with each other.

Luna looked down first one hallway, and then another, before deciding on a direction and walking boldly forward. There was a very good chance it was the wrong direction entirely, but a princess never gives that sort of thing away. This time, at least, it was more or less the right direction, and she arrived at her sister’s room just in time.

Without a word, Luna opened Celestia’s door, strode through the large and empty bedroom, and came to a halt alongside the Sun Princess to perform their twice-daily ritual.

With the sun and moon in their proper places for the day, Celestia walked into the bedroom, her sister following. A veritable army of servants had materialized in the room in the space of a minute, and they set to work, combing and smoothing her fur, mane and tail, polishing her hooves and horn, and applying the pieces of Celestia’s ceremonial barding for her appearance at the Day Court. While this was happening, she lightly nibbled at a piece of rye toast with apricot jam.

Luna had a near-identical set of servants waiting to perform the exact opposite operation in preparation for bed, but they were waiting for her in her own bedroom.

“So,” Celestia asked after taking a sip of ambrosia, “how was Earth?”

“It’s…not as bad as you said it would be,” Luna said evasively, taking the opportunity to straighten a loose pinion in her wing, and therefore not have to look her sister in the face.

“Oh dear, that bad?” Celestia said. “Were you chased by a torch-lit mob armed with tar and feathers?”

“I said it wasn’t that bad,” Luna insisted. “I completed my assigned task without interruption.”

“But…” Celestia prompted. She idly lifted a hoof to make it easier on the pony servicing it.

Luna remained quiet for a few moments before finally replying. “But they wouldn’t look at me.”

Celestia put her hoof back down and turned her head to look right at her sister. “They wouldn’t look at you?”

“Yes.”

“But…why? Were they scared of you?”

“Not…” Luna rubbed one foreleg against the other. “Not of me, per se. But from where they looked instead of me, it was the consequence they feared. The consequence of being seen to acknowledge my presence.” A holographic projection from Luna’s horn brought a small robotic contraption to life in the space between the two alicorns. It was flat and roughly circular in shape, suspended in mid-air by four small propellers that produced a hum identical to that produced by a dragonfly’s wings. “They’re pretty good at hiding, I’ll give them that. It took me more than an hour to finally spot one of them.”

Celestia advanced carefully to look at the vision her sister provided from several angles. “What is this thing?” The servants had no choice but to stand and wait patiently.

“An autonomous device for observing humans from afar,” Luna explained. “They fly far overhead, occasionally swooping down when instructed to study something interesting. I suspect that I was so far outside the range of what they were programmed to look for that I was overlooked. Just to be safe, though, I cast a spell upon myself to be only visible to living beings. Oh, and one more thing…” Filaments of light appeared around the object, entering and exiting a whip-like appendage at the top. “The masters of these devices use this invisible frequency of light to control them.”

“Radio,” Celestia said, nodding. “I think the Lagomorphs were the first civilization Starswirl found that used those frequencies for long-distance communication. So, you discovered a population under siege?” At that moment she noticed the servants and unfinished breakfast waiting for her, so she backed up with a bemused grin and returned to her regular morning routine as she awaited Luna’s answer.

“A siege, but a very unusual one. For one thing, the signals controlling these machines came not from the capital of a foreign nation, but from that nation’s own government. And it was a very unequal siege. I crossed into a neighborhood where the average skin pigmentation was significantly darker than the average, and the density of observers was many times higher than usual. There, the inhabitants standing around me stopped pretending I didn’t exist, and actively fled from my presence.” One of Luna’s servants, having finally caught up with her wayward mistress, poked her head inquisitively inside Celestia’s doorway. A frown coupled with a quick shake of the head made it clear that the servant was to return to Luna’s room to await her return.

Celestia’s servants meanwhile had completed their ministrations, and a large mirror was presented to allow Celestia to inspect herself.

“Yes,” Celestia said with satisfaction. “You have performed excellently, as always. You may go.”

With brief but reverential bows, the servants left the room in rapid succession, ordered strictly by increasing seniority. After a calculated pause, the two sisters exited the room as well, their steps directed towards the throne room.

“Well it really comes down to what I suspected from the first,” Celestia informed her sister. “That world is a mess. Now if you could just help me convince Twilight of that fact…”

“No,” Luna said calmly. “This is a world with troubles, true. But I think we can help.”

Celestia stopped in her tracks. “No,” she said firmly, “absolutely not.”

Luna had to catch herself as she passed her elder sister behind. “But Tia,” she said in her most-winning voice as she looked over her shoulder at Celestia, “I really think we have a chance here. Don’t you remember Gunther and Gudrun?”

Celestia rolled her eyes. “Look, Sister,” she said, carefully modulating her voice to avoid sounding condescending. “I know we used to topple foreign governments on a regular basis before your banishment, but there’s a little thing called ‘sovereign rights’ that developed in the millennium since…since…who were Gunther and Gudrun again?”

Luna turned fully to address her sister. “They were the first griffons we ever met, remember? That dragon Scintillus showed them off to us at her clutch party—claimed that she had created them out of pure magic.”

“Scintillus…Scintillus,” Celestia muttered, tapping one golden-shod hoof against her cheekbone. “Ah yes! She wanted to marry you off to her unhatched son, and it took quite a bit of diplomacy on my part to keep her from declaring a vendetta when you refused.”

“Um…right,” Luna said, blushing as she remembered some of the more embarrassing parts of the dragon’s speech on the subject. “And when she couldn’t get the marriage she wanted, she decided to marry her two slaves to each other.”

“Oh, so that was Gunther and Gundrun?” asked Celestia. “I blocked the whole thing out because of the atrocious music and humiliating dance that the two were made to do as their ‘courtship’, to quote Scintilla. They looked like a couple of chickens hopping about, especially with the clothes they were forced to wear.”

“I rather appreciated that dance,” Luna said quietly. “It was just about the only honest element of the entire night. At any rate, I became interested in that particular couple, and I invested time in learning more about them. I never learned where they came from, but I did conclude that their love was genuine. I also determined that the griffon race was as fully capable of emotion and intelligent thought as our own, and therefore that they did not in any way deserve the status of being a slave race of the dragons. So I began a vigorous campaign designed to liberate them.”

Celestia groaned. “Oh no. The Cincinnatus Letters. That was you.”

“Indeed,” Luna said with pride. “I knew I couldn’t interfere directly as a Princess of Equestria without dragging us into yet another expensive war against the dragons, but I did everything I could through the power of words to sway ponies, griffons and even dragons of the rightness of my cause. For that matter, I was the one who introduced literacy to the griffons.”

“Do you know how much trouble I got into when the dragons figured that out?”

From around a corner in front of Celestia, a unicorn’s head carefully presented itself.

“Give me a few minutes, Raven,” Celestia informed her.

With a curt nod, Celestia’s private secretary turned and returned to the throne room, there to keep the peace among an increasingly antsy crowd of petitioners until the Sun Princess’ appearance.

“Oh, it couldn’t have been anything serious,” Luna said with a dismissive wave of a hoof. “I was only giving the griffons what they deserved. Anyway, the campaign failed, and the dragons locked their servants away where no pony could see them anymore. I was sent a rather gruesome memento mori of poor Gunther and Gudrun by Scintilla, with a curt note informing me that she had resisted the temptation to punish them for the actions she had finally figured out were due to me. No, she informed me, the pair had died of natural causes, and they left behind them children who in turn were now her slaves.”

Luna lowered her head and sighed. “I became Nightmare Moon a few years later, but that had nothing to do with my failure to liberate the griffons. Nevertheless, that failure has always gnawed at me, especially after I learned that you managed to succeed where I failed.”

Celestia lidded her eyes as she looked down at her sister. “That is a gross over-simplification. The griffons liberated themselves. They invoked my name as a cover, and very nearly caused a war because of it, but actual pony involvement was in fact absolutely minimal. Far worse was the effect on the dragons.” Celestia’s brow furrowed as she looked off in the distance, remembering some less-than-pleasant memories. “The dragons had become completely dependent on the griffons, first to fight their clan wars for them, and then to lead those wars as their generals. When they liberated themselves, dragon civilization collapsed entirely.” She sighed. “Perhaps that was for the best. Before they started using griffons to fight their battles, dragons employed increasingly powerful magics to war upon each other. There were a few times when they quite nearly destroyed the planet. Did you know that the Windigoes were their creation?”

Luna shook her head. “When did you discover this?”

“A couple centuries into your banishment,” answered Celestia. “They were originally meant to generate suicidal despair in their dragon targets, but have no effect on any other creatures. But their dragon victims reprogrammed their magic into the form we now know, a form that could not affect dragons; they did not care what the consequences on ponies would be.

“The point I am trying to make, Luna, is that the dragons were a threat to Harmony, and Harmony took care of the matter.”

“By removing their ability to think?” Luna asked incredulously.

Celestia shook her head in annoyance. “The greed curse only affects dragons that allow themselves to be consumed by their baser emotions. You’ve met Spike, so you know they don’t have to be like that.”

“And the humans?”

“The situation with the humans is the business of the humans, and them alone. Based on what I tried and failed to do with the dragons, I’m certain that if you were to intervene, you would be condemned by all sides. Promise me that you’re not going to go trotting off and starting any human revolutions, Luna. Doing that will completely justify their government’s distrust of us.”

Luna lightly bit the inside of her cheek.

“Luna…”

The younger princess let out a petulant snort. “Very well, I promise I won’t lead any revolutions while I’m on Earth.”

“And don’t try to free any of their slaves.”

“They have slaves?!”

Celestia sighed. “You didn’t notice all the humans with colorful turbans, dog collars, and the exact same shade of blue eyes? The free humans address them by the euphemistic term of ‘Helpers’?”

“I…may have noticed them,” Luna said slowly, “but I didn’t really pay much attention to them because—”

“Because you were too focused on being ignored.”

“…Yes.”

“So when are you going back?”

“In a couple of hours. I need to see if anybody wishes to hire my services.”

“Excellent,” Celestia said with a satisfied nod. She passed Luna on her way to Day Court. “You’ll be back in time for sunset?”

“Of course, Sister.” Luna proceeded back to her room, her mind lost in thought.

Comments

[AzureShade]

Helpers? O.o

[Fizzy Orange]

I guess this isn't the same Earth as the one from Inn of the Prancing Pony, nor from The Best of all Possible World?

But the Griffon history sounds familiar enough.

[McPoodle]

8081098

Yeah, you'll find out soon enough how different.