On the Fine Art of Giving Yourself Advice

by McPoodle

Epilogue Part 2: Raven’s Apprentice (P. Celestia, P. Trixie)

P. Celestia—Canterlot Castle. Day Eight.

A good third of Canterlot Castle consists of guest bedrooms. Their occupancy fluctuates over time, with some bedrooms going nearly a century between guests. But one suite is never occupied, by direct order of the Princess: The Night Suite.

It is the considered opinion of the castle servants that the Night Suite was created as a counterpart to the Day Suite where Princess Celestia sleeps. The idea is that as ruler of both day and night, she would want to split her time between both suites. But in the end the Night Suite was never used, although always kept clean and tidy for the time when it would eventually be used. It was the only bedroom in the castle that never received any daylight.

Recently, it became haunted, at least according to the maids who were tasked with cleaning it. A pony-shaped depression had appeared in the bed, there was a faint but persistent smell of old paper and, if you were really quiet, you could hear somepony besides yourself breathing in there.

On this day, Princess Celestia waited until the maid was long gone to enter the room with a bowl of celery broth. After entering the room and closing and locking the door behind her—one of the few locks the maids were not provided with keys for—she sat down upon a divan located next to the bed and began to slowly drink the soup. In between sips she would blow the steam into the shadowy form of Raven, a form only she could see unaided. Some of the steam was absorbed by Raven, acting as her sustenance. The whole time Raven wheezed, a sound very audible to Celestia but barely heard by others.

“Are you ready, old friend?” she asked.

Two pale blue eyes opened in the shadow’s head. “I think this form is as good as it’s ever going to get,” she said faintly. The eyes looked up at the ceiling. “Perhaps I should serve you from in here from now on.”

“Now, now,” Celestia chided. “You shouldn’t be burdening yourself with thoughts of service now. It’s my turn to help you. Now brace yourself.”

Celestia walked over to the long-closed drapes, and flung them open with her magic, bathing the room in sunlight. Using her wings, she gently hovered herself in front of the sun. The light of the sun appeared to brighten more and more, and Celestia appeared as a form even brighter within it.

Raven hissed, holding back her exclamation of pain. “Keep going...” she wheezed.

The light and heat increased still more, exceeding anything that the town of Nowhere had ever experienced. The persistent shadow in the hollow of Luna’s bed began to shimmer, then steam, and finally flash out of existence.

Celestia lowered the light to bearable levels. Lying in the bed was now an elderly gray earth pony, with a thin gray mane streaked with brown. Other than her age, she showed no physical injuries.

“You did it,” Raven said weakly. “I’m a pony again. No, I take that back. I am fully a pony again, for the first time in six hundred years.” She sighed, tears filling her eyes as she looked out the window at the beautiful early winter day. “Why?” she asked breathily. “Why did you bother to waste your magic on me, after what I was going to do in Nowhere?”

Celestia sat down on the edge of the bed. “Now Raven, what kind of Princess would I be if I wasn’t capable of forgiving my subjects for their sins, especially if they are sorry? Are you sorry, Raven?”

“With all of my heart,” Raven said, clutching her front hooves together. “I was blinded by my rage. My rage—I won’t try to claim that my daughter was forcing me to do anything, because that’s a lie. And yet, I am so happy that I was prevented from finishing what I tried to do. And the human Rarity...what she braved in facing the Mayor and the dragon, the cleverness and the drama of her scheme to bring the townsfolk back to her side...what a waste to Harmony it would have been had she not survived!”

Raven looked down at her new form, and sighed after she experimentally moved her limbs. “I suppose I should be grateful that I wasn’t turned to my true age,” she said ruefully. “Any chance I can get a neat wheelchair like Mayor John had?”

“I’m sure our two Trixies can whip up something,” Celestia replied. “What do you think of having the pony one as your successor, now that you are mortal?”

Raven shook her head. “Way to rip the band aid off of my fur,” she joked. “But...you’re right. I should be able to get Trixie up to speed in a few years.”

“That will be your first priority,” said Celestia. She walked over to a closet door and opened it. Instead of a closet, the other side showed the interior of Mayor John’s former bedroom in Nowhere. “Your second will be to follow your Ponyville daughter’s precedent, and reform the criminals of Nowhere. That is how you will prove to me that you have truly repented.”

“I gladly take that responsibility,” Raven replied.

“Good,” said Celestia. “Those are your only duties; let the Network report to me instead.”

“The Network” was the name for Raven’s other twenty-two selves, the aides to mayors or corporate executives around Equestria. They hadn’t been affected by the prime Raven’s degradation, because she had severed her ties to them at the moment of the attack.

Raven sighed. “‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’ I’m the originator of that insult. And now it ends up being used on me.” She looked around the room. “I used to know everything,” she confessed. “Now I don’t know the one thing I was absolutely certain of: the date of my demise. As an earth pony, you might have me for another week. Or I might last for another hundred years.”

“Well I hope you stick around long enough to meet Luna.”

“Yes, yes,” said Raven, nodding. “She’s not getting the bed, though. It’s way too comfortable to give up.”

“Oh, I was thinking of having her sleep in a cloud, located right above you.”

Raven wrinkled her muzzle. “She’s going to saturate this whole room with moon-funk, won’t she?”

“Probably,” Celestia said with a chuckle.

---

P. Trixie—Luna’s Suite. Day Ten.

The pegasus in the custodian costume seemed to have particular trouble with the door handle, wiggling it back and forth with his hooves. In reality, this was to signal his identity to the room’s permanent inhabitant. The door unlocked, and he entered, closing the door behind him.

Inside the well-lit room sat Raven on top of the bed, with a shawl drawn around most of her body. “Report,” she said simply to the pegasus agent. When he seemed a bit hesitant she added, “We are secure.”

“I, uh...I got into the subject’s—Rainbow Dash’s—home and examined it from top to bottom when it was unoccupied. The only change I found implemented by the human visitors was this.” He removed a couple pages he had been hiding under his wing. “These were removed from her personal diary. After reading it, I...I concluded that she couldn’t be allowed to read it. So, there it is. You have it...and my resignation. I can’t keep ruining this poor filly’s life.”

Raven glanced over to a large wicker chair which was facing the window. It was mounted on casters so it could rotate, and Raven noted that it turned slightly counter-clockwise before returning to its original position. “I see,” she said, looking back in her broken agent’s eyes. “You will please wait in the next room for me to call you.”

The pegasus fidgeted. “Did you hear...”

“I heard what you said, Agent. And we will discuss next steps when I am ready for you.”

“I...OK,” the stallion said sheepishly, before turning and walking out.

The chair rotated around, revealing Trixie sitting cat-style on the large cushion.

Raven picked up the pages with her mouth, walked across the oversized bed, and passed the pages to Trixie, who placed them before her.

“‘Dear Rainbow Dash, This is me, the Rainbow Dash who involuntarily occupied your body for a few days,’” Trixie began reading aloud, ending with “Transcribed for the little dweeb by Gilda the Griffon.”

Raven sat back on the bed, giving Trixie a mysterious smile when she looked up as her teacher. “So? Did my agent do the right thing?”

“No!” Trixie cried. “This is exactly the wrong thing to do.”

“Really?” asked Raven. “You’ve read my report on Rainbow Dash. Do you disagree with it?”

Trixie snorted as she collected her thoughts. “I...I do basically agree with it. I’ve got personal experience with the costs of an out-of-control ego. But the solution isn’t to hobble her!”

Raven winced.

Trixie sighed. “Sorry. Human idiom. No, what you do is play the game in hard mode.”

“You’re going to have to explain that one to me.”

So Trixie explained what “hard mode” meant. Following it with, “In this case it means explaining things to her, but doing it in the right way. Letting Rainbow know that she has a learning disability, and providing the tools for her to work with that disability, will not make her cocky, because academic reputation means nothing to her. No, what you do is make sure that her teachers refuse to make it easier for her because of her disability. Make it a challenge for her to fight against, and never stop increasing the difficulty the better and better she gets.

“So have your agent put the entry back. And reward him for his insight if he decides to remain in your employment.”

Raven nodded. “That was completely against my former thinking. But it’s absolutely right now.”

“Now while we’re on her case we need to do something about the Sonic Rainboom,” Trixie added.

“I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, Trixie,” Raven told her. “It’s an area that I don’t have a good solution to. The immense symbolic importance that pegasi put in the sonic magi-boom would mean that acknowledging Rainbow’s achievement would have severe negative repercussions to her development, and possibly cataclysmic effects on the stability of the three tribes within Equestria.”

“Again, it comes down to explaining things correctly,” Trixie replied. “Take Rainbow aside, and tell her that the Rainboom is so potentially dangerous that we can’t risk letting the public know about it until it has been properly studied. Which just happens to be true. If she pushes for details, reveal them gradually, until coming all out with the separatist threat if she really wants something to raise her stress levels through the roof. Tell her she can tell anypony she wants, but she shouldn’t actually demonstrate it. Trust her to make the correct judgment based on the facts. This will make her more responsible, and more loyal to the government that has proved worthy of that loyalty.

“After that, call her in every six months or so to a remote location so she can let loose. Actually have government experts there to study the rainboom, as we do need to know more about it: It generates an enormous amount of magical energy, but from where? Can she transfer it to anypony she likes at will? Does it increase her pegasus resistances? For how long? And so on. Over time, we’ll reward her by allowing her to bring more and more trusted friends along to witness her rainbooms—and potentially receive the benefits of them. And so finally, when the time comes when she needs to use her special ability to fight the enemies of Equestria, she’ll be more than ready. And completely confident in her abilities. And finally, we will make sure that the enthusiasm of all witnesses will be tightly controlled. She will be praised for her accomplishments, but not to the point where she starts mistaking it for praise for her existence. And again, she will be constantly challenged with harder and harder things to do with her talent. The result will be Loyalty instead of Ego.”

“And what if something goes wrong? What if she says too much and we have to deny the truth, or one of her friends tries to exploit her?” A moment after Raven asked the questions, she knew the answer.

Trixie smiled broadly. “Any mistake will either be her betraying her loyalty to us and being punished for it, or a friend betraying Rainbow’s loyalty to them. Exactly the sort of experiences that will reinforce her bond to her element.”

Raven shook her head in wonder. “Where have you been my whole life?”

Trixie pursed her lips. “Ma’am, I hope that wasn’t a pick-up line, as that would not only constitute workplace harassment, but also get you into even bigger trouble since I’m under age.”

There was a significant pause before both mares broke out into riotous laughter.