Princess Equestria and the Eleventeen Fragments of the Friendship Chalice

by GroaningGreyAgony

Lunkheads and Lunarcy

The silo rocket sped along via its Cavolrite antigravity drive, destination Luna. Princess Equestria knocked back a beer or three as she thought about her sworn archnemesis, the enemy of the sun itself... Phantasma Selene, the dark evil pony who lived in the moon and drew huge scary faces on it every month. (It helps when every pony's name is an obvious synonym for where they live or what they are or do. Not like your name, I bet, o BasementDweller ComputerChairFouler.)

For a thousand years, Phantasma had been a constant threat to the safety and harmony of Horsenia, but after all she was stuck on the fricking moon so it was a very remote threat. Even so, however distant the rattled saber, it still had an impressive effect on raising taxes to support the ever-increasing defense budget, and so Princess Equestria had allowed the situation to continue, greeting the occasional meteor shower with rude graffiti painted on the rocks with amused tolerance.

But now, the fragments of the Friendship Chalice were at stake. Equestria frowned as she drank her beer straight from a squeezable rubber tube. It tasted like something that had come out of a weasel. This was intolerable! Even chugging a brewski wouldn't be the same until the Chalice was recovered! True, friendship was magic, but alcohol was friendship lubricant.

She looked out the porthole. The moon was slowly getting larger, and its uniform gray was starting to resolve into patches of subtle color. With no way to speed things up, she rummaged through the seat pocket in front of her and pulled out a SkyStall catalog, flipping idly through pages of platinum gem-encrusted assbaskets, crib-flavored toothpicks, a combination backscratcher and currycomb made from titanium and monogrammed on the handle...

So engrossed was she that she failed to notice a dark figure lurking several seats behind her, inconspicuously reading an entirely black newspaper.

—<§>—

With a soundless roar, the rocket set down on the lunar surface. Dust blew straight away from the exhaust nozzle, but did not billow up into a cloud, there being no air for it to billow up in. A steward strolled down the aisle, distributing to the various passengers the standard enchanted glass bubbles that enabled one to breathe and remain unbloated in the attenuated atmosphere. Equestria accepted one, but considered whether she really wanted to walk about with a doofoid fishbowl over her head—she was Ponygod and had certain standards to maintain. She decided to use her own magic to get by, but tucked the bubble away into hammerspace, just in case.

Princess Equestria trotted into the pilot's cabin to, as she put it, "congratulate the crew on a successful landing." She spied a fit but shy looking stallion in the first navigator's chair, and used her unicorn TK to cop a feel. He leapt out of the chair in an awkward but endearing manner, then stood staring at his athletic rump in adorable confusion. Molestria was pleased—just one of the Pirx of the job.

The main airlock opened with a firm twist of the airkey, and and with one small leap, Princess Equestria stood on the surface of the moon. The sun blazed brightly in the black starless sky, and the gibbous globe of Horsestonia hung over the grey craggy mountains on the horizon, looking like a fragile soap bubble.

Princess Equestria looked up intently at the glorious scene, then frowned. Her horn flared with cosmic energy, and she took hold of the sun, swinging it back and forth in the sky and studying its effect on the phase of the blue-white planet overhead. Her frown deepened. She made a delicate adjustment of a quarter of a degree to the ecliptic plane, tried the sun at a few more angles, then nodded and returned the sun to its proper place.

Smiling with an artist's aplomb and an engineer's complacency, she trotted off through a crowd of fear-paralyzed passengers and spaceport workers.

The spaceport terminal was largely empty at this time of the lunar day, save for one sad decrepit pony holding a tattered sign reading "The Apolloosa Missions were a Hoax!" Princess Equestria made him grow itchy mustaches all over his body, then headed for the information booth, which was being mared by a single moonpony.

The moonponies were furless and maneless, and much thinner and somewhat taller than their terrestrial cousins. They had huge horizontally-slit-pupiled eyes that took up most of the room in their skulls and left little space for frontal lobes. Behind their ears, broad fanlike structures stretched on either side of their heads; these were aetheric gills that helped them make what they could of the rarefied atmosphere. They had three-lobed hooves, six legs, and tails that ended in round mirrors for heliotropic communication at long distances. They were actually descended from Princess Equestria's first childish attempts at making ponies out of durum flour and spittle and they looked like it.

The mare at the info booth was a moonlit bay, and she was playing a moon zither, which you should imagine as being something really exotic and alien looking because I stuck the word 'moon' in front of it. I mean, I could tell you that it has two fretboards of chalcedony and shivering silver strings backlit with a purple iridescence and spiral sounding horns that extended at sixty-degree angles from its resonating chamber and that it's twisted in the middle like a Möbius strip but hey, I have to spend time writing that stuff and you have to spend time imagining it and the Princess is really anxious to get her Friendship Chalice back together, so let's both give her a break.

The bay moonpony sighed as Equestria approached her info desk, tossed her zither gently at the ceiling, where it stuck, then looked up with a cheery fanged smile. "Sorry about that, Your Hayness; this is my second job," she said. "I'm Sarah, Moonlight Sarah. What can I do for you?"

"Map, please," said Celestia. "Preferably one that shows all the secret entrances to Phantasm Palace, along with a schedule showing guard changes and patrol patterns..."

"Oh, has our Royal Hayness done something heinous to your Royal Hayness?"

"Yes, and it's a pain in the 'ayness. Let's have the map, please."

"Here you are; it's a pleasure to serve you. Would you like to hear some more music?" Moonlight Sarah neighed.

Equestria snorted and turned away. Passing by a pair of particularly hunky security stallions on the way out, she used her unicorn TK to feel a cop. Ah, it was good to be Ponygod.

Out on the surface of the moon, Princess Equestria hauled out her magic spinner and gave it a twirl. It spun oddly, as if a pair of invisible noses were sneezing on it at intervals, then settled down into a slow oscillation, pointing first in one direction, then slowly swinging back to point in another. Princess Equestria didn't shit herself for once. She guessed that there were in fact two fragments of the Chalice on the moon!

Ah well, Phantasma wasn't going anywhere quickly—big heavy palace and all that. Princess Equestria chose the nearer target and flew off into the lunar countryside.

—<§>—

Princess Equestria could not moon at first and she had to beat her wings very hard to get anywhere until she figured out that jumping and soaring was most efficient. She was trying to avoid teleporting if she could—it always gave her gas. Fortunately, her powerful rear legs and a set of spring-loaded horseshoes kept her comfortably spaceborne most of the time.

The rugged, cratered lunar landscape was desolate and deserted for the most part, but serenely beautiful nonetheless. Equestria became lost in a long state of dreamishness. The desert scenery gave way by degrees to a settlement of moonponies, with farmlands of indigo crops, glimmering rivers of aqua selenia, and small translucent-domed towns. Equestria smirked. Phantasma was trying so hard to be civil...

As she soared over the inhabited lunar surface, various puns drifted by below her. She passed over a farm where a moonpony vigorously employed a rake on the gritty lunar soil, and others gathered and brought in the ripe crops. She saw a baby cow, perhaps a descendant of one of the test animals employed in Equestria's first attempt at instituting a space program. She remembered the huge cannon she had built, and how the cows gave a dopplered, truncated sound as they disappeared into the sky... She grew wistful remembering those times long past and fell into a sad mood for a while. She soared over a small shack on a hillside, and saw a small distillery that dispensed a bright gleaming liquid. And soon after, she saw a herd of sheep being guided towards their fold by the sinuous walls of a lunar rill...

Princess Equestria shut her eyes and rubbed her snout in annoyance. She was suffering from punburn. She spread her wings to catch whatever molecules of atmosphere she could, lost altitude, and came to a landing outside a stadium-sized crater. Crater Kramden, she read, referring to her map. As she tucked the map away, she saw a swift movement out of the corner of her eye, but as she turned she saw nothing at all, save an empty road and a small copse of lunar brush.

I'm being shadowed by a moon fellow, she thought. She'd have to be careful.

—<§>—

With a single leap, Princess Equestria reached the top of the crater's rim and looked inside. Meadows of blue moongrass greeted her, and on a small hill at the crater's center was a tiny town. She checked the magic spinner, reading it from multiple points on the crater's rim, and verified that the fragment was indeed therein. Another leap brought her to the crest of the small hill, where the entire villageful of daft-looking moonponies immediately clustered around the royal princess, chattering with happy excitement in their crazy moon language.

Princess Equestria wanted to ask what place this was...

"W-"

Speech was failing her.

"W-"

Say what? She couldn't say 'what.' She strained harder. Words wriggled through constrained channels in her mind like silly putty in a garlic press, and finally emerged:

"Princess Equestria desires to know the name of the present locality."

"The tall, imperious princess pony has encountered the tribe of pronoun aversion!" chanted the multicolored crowd. A purple pony advanced with a ceremonial wreath of welcoming to lay at the celestial princess's feet.

The befuddled Ponygod was taken aback. "Surely, use of pronouns and proper names is preferable to constantly varying synonyms...?"

The lavender mare gave a negating headshake. "Composers of stories prefer to vary words, avoiding stultifying repetition!" The small mauve filly caressed a weighty book of synonyms with reverence.

The cream-colored, polychromatic-maned celestial mare neighed in the negative. "Among the words said to be invisible in any language are surely the articles, conjunctions and pronouns. Must an author really count how many times the words 'the' and 'and' are used in paragraphs, and try to minimize the occurrences? Each time a new euphemism for a character is introduced, the reader is further distracted or confused!"

The violet female pony shivered. "Articles? Conjunctions? Duplicated?! Eliminate all!"

Crowd murmured, advanced hostilely.

Surrounded sparkling Equestrian Princess struggled, word chained, Infocom parsed. Forced thought into throat...

"Summon... Elements 'f STYLE!"

Literary burst! Streaming text, typographic elements, syntactic rules, vigorous concise writing, accurate punctuation, dialectic sense, succored angry Ponygod. Tumultous mob fell back, terrified.

Celestial sunraising deity roared angrily, defying stricture...

"I... PRONOUNCE...

"YOU..."

The assembled crowd stiffened into rigid statues of warped syntax, to remain so until an enchanted prince came by to kiss Purple McGrammarFailure on her nose. Also, he had to be wearing turquoise and orange harlequin pants and be addicted to curried sardines in raspberry jello, and must be named "Rudebunk J. Hilartfrunky." And it had to be February 29th on a Thursday during a solar eclipse. In a rainstorm. Otherwise, all those stupid moonponies would be STUCK THERE FOREVER and oh gee what a shame that would be.

Despite the suspended sentence, she thought that had gone well.

She ran to a dais at the center of the village, and there upon a pillow of purple prose rested yet another fragment of the Friendship Chalice! Princess Equestria snorted it briskly into her nostril, then trotted away in satisfaction. Her next stop was the palace of Phantasma Selene, where there would be a wreckening for sure...

---

NEXT CHAPTER: Princess Equestria seriously and actually encounters her ultimate evil nemesis this time I totally swear. Meanwhile... "Rudebunk J. Hilartfrunky." Where have we heard THAT name before?

Comments

[LimeAttack]

It updated! This makes me happy. Definitely keep up the good work.

[nemryn]

Moonponies

[GroaningGreyAgony]

1427312
Thank you for the kind words! Writing this story makes me happy too, though perhaps measurably less sane.

1427547
Moonponies have two hearts, so they love and tolerate you twice as much as a terrestrial pony ever could. Unfortunately, they drown when brought into our thick atmosphere, so you will never know what it feels like to stroke a moonpony's smooth scaly neck and feel its feathery antennae gently palpate you as it snuggles happily into your lap.
But I'm glad you think they're funny.

[nemryn]

1432057
I'm sorry, moonponies!

[Admiral Biscuit]

Is it better to cop a feel or feel a cop? I must know. For science.

[GroaningGreyAgony]

6704467
Depends. Will you risk jail to touch the tail?