Celestia Goes West

by DungeonMiner

Chapter 20

The dragon continued to be a problem.

As they descended into the darkness of the dungeon, the dragon continued to heckle them at every turn. Ambushing them with a single breath attack before slipping away. He never stayed long enough for the party to burn through his legendary resistances and hold him still, and catching him in the flooded levels turned out to be completely impossible, just because he could dive into the murky water and hide. Beyond the swampy rooms, where the party moved through a crystal-encrusted cavern, the dragon still managed to hit them with an attack before slipping away again, striking in the rooms that had access to spaces big enough to hold his dragon form.

Because, of course, the dragon could shapeshift.

The dragon managed to slip into small cracks in the walls, hiding as the party passed him by, before leaping out, taking his natural form, and blasting them with acid before retreating down the hallways as a bird, flying too fast for the party to have a hope of catching him.

Luna had to admit she was impressed.

Dreadmane would mount the dragon’s head on her wall with pride and respect.

Luna looked out the window of her bedroom and pondered how exactly to deal with the problem. As she sat on one of the manor’s balconies, relaxing in the afternoon sun, the occasional flash of cameras from the journalists below reached up at her. They swarmed like starving rats at the sewer grate, hungrily snapping any picture they could to feed their various “newspapers,” though, for some reason, Luna didn’t feel the need to care about them today.

Instead, she focused on the dragon.

A dragon with the capability to shapeshift left her with few options. They could hide nearly anywhere and then ambush them from anywhere. Even if the monster only managed to strike at the party once a day, it still cut into healing resources that they couldn’t afford to lose. Yet, the party had to spend them simply because the breath weapon did too much damage for the party to ignore.

Ignoring the dragon was out of the question. Capturing him to fight was proving impossible, and while the idea of trying to trap the dragon had been floated at the table, they had very little to try and bait their trap with. The dragon would ignore any sum of gold they left out and didn't even think about budging for any meat or food. Instead, the dragon seemed out for revenge and wanted all of them dead before anything else.

At the same time, the terrible news was that the trap was the best idea the party had. If they could close off the dragon’s escape and force it into a fight, then they’d have a chance of bringing it down.

The question remained, however, how were they going to pull that off?

Luna frowned as she mulled it over before deciding that she needed to talk this out with somepony.

Luna glanced back down at the writhing mass of ponies below her balcony and regarded them for a long moment. A newspaper that came out not long ago said that Celestia had started playing Ogres and Oubliettes, and Luna heard through some old contacts that the company had a sudden sales spike.

A thought crossed the nocturnal alicorn’s mind, and a smile grew on her face. This would be a fun little adventure, and it would undoubtedly boost sales of some of her new favorite books.

She rolled off the lounging chair before she got up and teleported to the sidewalk just outside the gate.

A flash of light and the distinct pop of teleportation was the only warning the journalists received before Luna was standing, facing away from them, not five feet away. She didn’t stop, didn’t even acknowledge the ponies behind her, but merely began walking back into town.

They exploded into questions behind her, all trying to get a word in.

“Lady Luna, what’s your opinion on Princess Twilight appointing a Royal Spymaster? Especially ones whose records are near to non-existent?”

“Lady Luna! Lady Luna! Is it true your sister has become a shut-in to play ogres and oubliettes all day?”

“Lady Luna! Are you aware that you’re a foot shorter than you used to be?”

Luna said nothing.

She walked into town with her entourage, waving at the locals who crossed her path before making her way down to her now-favorite bookstore.

The alicorn entered the building with no fanfare and walked onto the sales floor. She immediately made her way to the back where the fantasy books waited for her and perused them, looking for a sequel to the Wyvernrider book she picked up about a week ago.

She picked up the paperback and examined the cover for her audience, and then nodded before she walked over to the coffee shop inside.

Caramel wasn’t there at the counter, but she did see a mare standing there. “Two things,” she said. “First, I would like a Lungo dropped into a mocha with a red-eye chaser, please. Second, could thee hold this book for me until I get back?”

“Uh, absolutely, Miss Luna.”

“Miss? Not Lady? Well, that’s an interesting development,” Luna thought to herself but nodded. “Thank you,” she said before she made her way to the restrooms.

She approached the mare’s room door before she paused and turned back to stare at the crowd of ponies behind her. “Do you at least have the dignity to let me have a moment of privacy? Or are you such animals that you need to be sent to the moon before you give me space?”

The journalists blinked before they all took a few steps back.

Luna nodded, satisfied, as she stepped inside.

The moment the door closed, and she was sure that she was alone in the bathroom. She teleported out of the bathroom. Luna appeared just outside the store, out of view of the windows, before she cast a Transform Image spell.

With a pulse of magic, she no longer appeared to be Luna. Instead, she appeared as a navy blue pegasus. She flapped her wings softly and flew her way inside, avoiding the crowd of ponies that hovered around the bathroom before she made her way back to the coffee shop. The mare behind the counter stared at the group around the bathroom but turned to face the pegasus illusion as Luna approached.

“Hello, what can I get you?”

There was a ring of magic, and the book Luna set down on the counter floated to her hoof. “I am wondering how my Lungo, Mocha, and red-eye is coming along.”

The mare behind the counter blinked. “Miss Luna?”

The pegasus winked. “Can thou lay blame at my hooves for this?”

The mare glanced back at the crowd at the restroom door. “No, I suppose not.”

She quickly began to prepare the caffeine monstrosity Luna ordered before Caramel finally walked out from the backroom. “Oh, Caramel, there you—”

He answered with his head slamming into the counter.

“Uh…” the mare said.

“Sorry, Beans,” Caramel muttered. “Thistle’s been hard on me this week again.”

Luna raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“Well, aren’t you going to tell Luna about it?” the mare, apparently named Beans, asked. She glanced over at Luna’s illusion before she turned back to Caramel. “I heard her when she said she’d deal with it for you. She could definitely take care of it.”

“I don’t want ex-royalty involved,” Caramel said. “That’s not going to make things better. It’s just going to Thistle angrier, and he’ll get on my case even worse than he already is. At best, he just fires me at the point. Otherwise, he might cut my pay and make me work even harder.”

Beans handed Luna her cup of coffee. “Um, here you go, Miss Lu—”

Luna shook her head before she cast another image spell, Creating a new voice. “Thank you,” she said.

“Uh, absolutely, Miss Lullaby! Have a wonderful afternoon!” Beans said, catching on, thank the Sky.

Luna took her book and began walking over to the check-out line. She chewed her lip as she thought about what she had just heard.

Calling Caramel over to help her meant his boss did hold it against him, and Caramel himself refused to have her help. The alicorn could fix it for him very quickly, but he simply refused to be helped. How was she supposed to work with that?

What’s worse, he seemed to want the job. He must truly love working in the coffee shop if he wished to keep his position that badly that he’d be willing to put up with his boss acting like this. She frowned as she bought the book and made her way outside, Transforming her Image back into her true self as she left the building.

She must have overstepped. She shouldn’t have asked Caramel to take her to the books like she did.

“Oh, Luna, why do you keep doing this? Why do you always ask for a little too much and ruin everything?”

Luna pushed the thought aside. She made a mistake and could recover. Beating herself up about it would not help. The question was, what could she do to help fix this? Obviously, interacting with Mr. Thistle would not solve the issue according to Caramel’s wishes. Instead, she needed to figure out how to help him without going against his wishes, but the question was, how?

She needed to research this.

---☼---

Everypony gathered around the table, and Luna smiled as they got together. This was not a game night. Instead, Luna got in contact with Rolling and managed to put together an impromptu get-together.

Luna offered to host again, mostly because she didn’t want to subject one of her new friends to having their home flooded by paparazzi on an off chance they found out. Still, the others brought food; sandwich vegetables, potato chips, hayfries, cupcakes, and drinks.

The lunar sister would have preferred to grill some of the vegetables on a proper grill, but that would leave all her friends in full view of the camera ponies, which would defeat the purpose. So, without too many other choices, they grilled in her kitchen.

“Hot behind!” Sundance said through clenched teeth as he brought a sizzling frying pan around Ivory and began serving the vegetables onto open sandwiches.

Rolling rubbed her hooves together. “Wonderful!” she said. “Some Sundance cooking is just what the doctor ordered.”

“You need to let it sit five minutes,” the earth pony warned, “so cool it a second.”

Ivory picked up a bag of chips and began using telekinesis to split the pack into portions for everyone. “Oh, she’s just excited. You know that she basically eats hayburger and nothing but hayburger.”

“Lies, slander, and only a touch of hyperbole!” Rolling responded as she grabbed a single chip off her plate.

Platinum hovered over the plates and handed out soda cans to everypony while Luna glanced around at her gathered friends. “I have to assume then that thou work in a kitchen, Sundance?”

He nodded as he pulled a kitchen knife that he brought himself. “What gave it away?” he asked, smiling. He got to work slicing up a cucumber into wafer-thin slices. “But yes, I went to culinary school and then wasted that degree by working at a Rockcarrot Bar and Grill.”

“Hey, I like Rockcarrot.”

“Sure,” he said, “but it’s not the cutting edge of gastronomy or anything like that.”

“And how long have thou worked at this Rockcarrot?” Luna asked.

“I’ve been at it five years now,” he said. “The jobs okay, but working in a kitchen will kill you eventually.”

Luna frowned. “How couldst thou say so?”

“Oh, it’s just food service,” he responded. “Everypony needs their food out as soon as possible, if you get one thing wrong you have to do it over, everypony else in the kitchen is terrible at their jobs if not outright incompetent. From what I’ve heard, that’s basically the normal experience of the average food service worker.”

Luna furrowed her brow. “And dost thou not demand better conditions?”

“They wouldn’t listen to us,” Sundance said with such casual disdain that Luna frowned when she heard it. “You have to remember that most cooking in a kitchen today is done by recipe. If we complain too much, they’ll just fire us all and hire ponies that can follow a recipe, which is not a terribly high standard.”

Luna frowned. “That is not how it should be.”

“That’s how it works, though, Luna,” Ivory said. “There’s an excess of ponies looking for a job. So any good businessman will try and hire the pony that will do the job for the least amount of money. If they can’t find any pony locally, they’ll hire somepony from the next town over. At the cost of a train ticket, they’ve hired a pony with a lower standard.”

Luna blinked.

“It’s not about lower standards. It’s about the corporations,” Platinum said. “Companies like that have so much money that they can bully whoever they want and do whatever they want. You want to know where evil is in the world. It’s in corporations.”

“Oh no, here we go,” Caramel muttered.

“You see, we need to do is dismantle the corporations completely and—”

“Platinum, we don’t want to hear it. I’m sure even Luna knows where you stand on corporations and what you think about them,” Rolling said with a sigh.

“I’m sorry if the voice of the revolution bores you, Rolling,” he responded, but he didn’t push the conversation any further.

Meanwhile, Luna thought that she understood what was happening a little better. “Let me ask ye a question, then. How many of ye would rather quit your job but don’t?”

Every hoof but Rolling’s went into the air.

Luna slowly nodded. “I see,” she muttered.

She smiled and began moving the topic to something else, but she already saw the writing on the wall.

Employment was becoming more difficult in this era, and she already knew it’d be nearly impossible to enforce any kind of law that cracked down on this sort of behavior. At the same time, changing these rules would be a massive hit to the entertainment industry, and she knew that bread and circuses were many times enough to keep a civilization happy. Messing with either pillar would spell devastation.

On the other hoof, it wasn’t her place to dictate law anymore, and raising a classist revolution the year after Twilight took the throne seemed, well, mean.

A grand sweeping change isn’t what was needed right now. Instead, she needed to help these ponies right here.

The real question was how?

Being a better employer seemed like the most immediate answer, but Luna wasn’t running a business, and being retired typically meant that you weren’t working at all, but…

She had to think about this, try and figure out what to do.

For now, Luna enjoyed the company of her friends and ate and drank.

“So, what do we think we can do about the dragon?”

Comments

[Haradion]

I've got to admit, I know it's the B plot. But I love Luna playing DnD. Maybe because I love the game myself and also really like Luna as a character. But it's just brilliant. I hope the iinevitible moment when one of them breaks and let's the press know doesn't hit too hard.

I feel like Lunas solution might be to hire them herself. After all she could use a chef. Etc. And it would fix the surface problem of giving them a better employer,whilst also fill in up an otherwise empty house. It would also seriously hurt the group and the power dynamics are all over the place. Especially if I really do smell romance. But Luna strikes me as just naive enough to try it. Afterall she's the Goddess of the Moon. Hyperbolically speaking. Shes always going to have wierd power imbalances with people she meets.

It's nice to see Luna just having fun, having hobbies and having a gang of friends. Part of me doesn't want to see the inevitable drama and just let her have nice things.

[djthomp]

He nodded as he pulled a kitchen knife that he brought himself. “What gave it away?” he asked, smiling. He got to work slicing up a cucumber into wafer-thin slices. “But yes, I went to culinary school and then wasted that degree by working at a Rockcarrot Bar and Grill.”

You know you've found a real chef when they pull out their own travel kitchen knife while cooking in someone else's kitchen.