Chapter 38 - The Moon's Lament
It was dusk in Canterlot. A fine evening with no clouds and warm breeze. The kind of evening that made second shift workers look out the window with wistful sighs.
Much like those belabored ponies, the evening was only the start of Princess Luna’s workday.
Having just set the moon rising on its ascent for the night, she returned from the balcony into her private lunarium.
Strictly speaking, according to 300 years of castle history and informational pamphlets, it was a solarium, but that had been a mistake quickly rectified upon her return planetside with the swift aid of a team of architects and interior designers amenable to working in a style they deemed centuries out of fashion. An “interesting challenge”, they’d called it. One cheeky colt had even called their work “manufacturing antiques”. At the time, so soon after her return, his casual comment had cut so much deeper than she’d expected, and she’d been forced to seclude herself for several hours until she could regain her composure.
Appearances were more important than ever in this modern era.
So much had changed in what felt like an instant. What she knew as fashionable, cultured, and vogue was the stuff of dusty records and plays. Plays that, for some moon-forsaken reason, insisted upon butchering her mother tongue such that everything rhymed. The world was bigger, louder, and more complicated than ever. She’d always been willing to let Celestia deal with the more mundane minutiae of rulership, and look where that had gotten her: a thousand years later and a puffed-up ponce of stallion who titled himself a “decor-ordinator” had the unashamed gall to argue with a princess that “blue and silver are not royal colors”.
While she’d been informed that most her preferred methods of retribution were now considered somewhere between “barbaric” and “absurd”, she’d found that the fine social art of blackballing worked just as well among trendy socialites as it had among the artisan guilds of her day.
He had not lasted long after that.
A few strides was all it took to bring her to her desk, one of the few pieces saved and preserved from her old castle in the Everfree. It was a proper desk; sturdy and unshakable no matter how much was heaped upon it (unlike the flimsy gilded thing she’d seen in her sister’s quarters). If necessary, she could (and once had) use it as a bludgeon against enemy siege engines. It still bore the scars of that battle; a gouge down the side that there was no hope of sanding out. It was a small, true piece of home nestled within an expensive replica.
In contrast, her chair was as new as her desk was old. One of Twilight Sparkle’s creations, made by special request (though apparently the mare had crafted so many in the name of ‘rigorous testing’ that she was quite literally giving them away). It was comfortable, yet sturdy, and a commendable recreation of the one that had originally been paired with her desk. She held no doubts it would suffice to subdue a would-be assassin.
The situation with Twilight and her fellow Bearers was a troubling one. Strange abilities, new magic, odd portals. It all stank of Discord’s shenanigans, yet the Spirit of Chaos had sworn, under spell, that his claws were clean. Which left things displeasingly in the realm of the unknown. Celestia’s spells had ruled out any demonic, eldritch, or corruptive influence, but as time passed with little progress made on discovering the true source of the foreign magic, the seeds of doubt began to grow anew. In response, Celestia had promised to “dispatch an Agent of the Crown” (and not explain what that meant, as she often failed to do) to monitor the situation, but that was the last she'd officially heard of the matter. Unofficially she’d heard a great deal more. The castle staff loved nothing more than fresh gossip and there was no shortage of them with relatives or friends in the village at Mount Canter’s hoof.
Some of the stories coming out of Ponyville bordered on the unbelievable… but such had been true even before this latest bout of strangeness, making it hard to tell fact from fantasy from fragments of truth flung out of proportion by the township’s legend of infamy. In times like those she wished her Order of Shadows had survived her absence. Oh what she’d be willing to give for her clandestine network of rumormongers, bards, and tavernkeepers.
Perhaps it was time to bring back the old traditions. If she could only find the time.
A knock on the door roused her from her musings. Peace never lasted and, as ever, there were enemies at the gate. “You may enter.” She held the door open with her magic as her personal aide entered.
“Evening, princess!” The mare stepped out from behind her cart for a brief but low bow, wings spread in supplication. “May the moon shine bright upon you this evening.”
“And upon you as well, Tea Service.” Luna completed the traditional greeting.
The wheels of the cart squealed under heavy load as Tea Service coaxed it across the floor. “Gotcher coffee and the day's first batch of trouble”
Luna allowed herself a groan as she felt the stirrings of a preemptive headache coming on. “Please do not tell me that’s all for me.”
“I’m afraid so,” Tea replied with a shrug and a wan smile. “I skimmed it on the way over. Found a few documents that should have been sent to Princess Celestia instead, but the boys downstairs are getting better at sifting out the right things.” She rolled the cart up alongside Luna’s desk, bearing with it a monstrous pile of what the lunar diarch considered the most heinous thing borne of her sister’s millennium-long rule.
Paperwork.
It was inescapable. There was a form for everything. Every possible aspect of rulership had been boiled and rendered down to an appropriate form. Things had been simpler in her time. There had been paperwork, true, but it was limited to scribes who took down decrees and tax collectors who managed the census. Not these daily piles of parchment tall enough to block her view beyond the edges of her desk.
“Running a country was so much simpler a thousand years ago,” she groused as she lifted the pile from the cart to her inbox.
“Oh?” Tea commented with feigned disinterest. Luna was quite familiar with how interested her attendant was with her stories of the early days of Equestria. The mare could barely focus as she started to prepare the evening’s coffee.
A few minutes delay before tackling the bureaucratic beast would not go amiss.
“Indeed. While friendship and diplomacy might rule today, what you must understand was that in those days, might made right. Authority stemmed from personal power, be it physical, magical, or the wealth to field an army. Between the boons of alicorndom and being inheritors of Platinum's lineage, Celestia and I had all three. Nobles and liege lords acknowledged us as regents because we dealt with the monsters and tyrants that nopony else could. ‘Government’, such as it was, was a matter of one or both of us personally addressing the matter. Monsters invading in the south? I’d hoist my halberd, rally the guards, and ready a warparty. A new wall needed to be constructed around a loyal village’s expanding borders? We’d fly out and organize the laborers, direct the architects, and deter any expansionist-minded neighbors with her warhammer and my halberd. A noble suspected of skimming off their taxes? I would pay them a visit to personally remind them exactly why they paid that gold.”
“With halberd in hoof, I suppose?”
“If need be.”
“How often did it need be?”
She grinned, all teeth. “With refreshing frequency.”
“I see.” The percolator began to sing and Tea poured a cup of dark ambrosia. Luna took it gladly. Despite her name, Tea made excellent coffee.
“Quite so. A direct and simple solution for every problem.” But the warm memories could only buoy her for so long when she was still confronted by the paperwork mountain. “Alas, that is no longer the case. In my… absence—” She danced around the still fresh wound. “— Celestia turned to solving her problems with delegation, creating ministries to handle tasks for her. All she needed to do was send them written orders while she handled more important tasks herself. Then those ministries grew large and bloated and spawned departments which, as decades and centuries passed, divided again and again and again like some kind of insidious slime, seeping into every crack and crevice of government until there became nothing left for a Princess to do except sign forms, approve requests, and make public appearances.”
How she loathed it. It was bad enough that it was dull and tedious, but worse was that the centuries-old bureaucracy had not been developed and refined with a second princess in mind and it was not taking the change well. Even now, months after her return, a good third of her pile was often sent to her by mistake (though Tea’s efforts had reduced that amount). Either they were supposed to go to her sister or were inconsequential trivialities that should have been dealt with at the lower levels. Sometimes there were documents that she couldn’t make horns or hooves of at all, lacking some modern context. What she would give to be able, to be allowed (and wasn’t that a wild thought; that a Princess would need permission) to solve some problems the old fashioned way.
She sighed and let the idle fantasies drift away. It was not to be. Equestria was at peace (mostly) and, for better or worse, her sister’s tangled web of bureaucracy seemed to keep it that way. So she bit her tongue, filled out her forms, and left her restored halberd on its rack.
If a threat came that required a lovingly-sharpened solution, she’d be ready. But until then… paperwork.
“...and here we are now,” she finished lamely and gestured to the pile, realizing that at some point she’d drifted off in thought.
Tea merely nodded and removed the empty silverware.
She only wished—in lieu of more fantastical dreams—that there could be some facet of the system dedicated to sorting out the important documents from the garbage before they were piled onto her desk.
“As usual, I see we’re starting the evening with more junk mail.”
For example, the glossy and eye-searingly colorful pamphlet that crested the top of her inbox like a golden tiara. It was one she knew well. A flyer that, if she bothered to read it, would once again suggest she renew her subscription to Simple Mare's Interior Lifestyle Enquirer magazine, a publication she’d never heard of and certainly never bought in the past. She gave it a magic-enhanced flick that sent it sailing off in Tea’s direction. The mare dutifully caught it and regarded it with all the courtesy it was due.
“Pardon my Prench, your highness, but what the actual buck?”
Her casual candor was a refreshing break from the two-facedly pontifical (from the nobility) or overly reverential (from the staff) language that had become commonplace around the castle, and a strong reason why Luna appreciated her company. Even if it took sharing her special blend to get the mare to open up.
“How do these keep getting mixed in?! This is ridiculous! I swear I told those boys down in admin to catch them before putting together the day’s forms. Is it that hard to pick the junk mail out of a Princess's priority work? I swear this wasn’t here when I checked earlier!” She’d crumpled the paper in her anger, but spread it out again to glare at it. “And would you look at that. Someone’s even gone and stamped it with the official “Priority” seal.”
“No doubt some bored quill-pusher somewhere thinks himself funny.”
Tea snorted. “A real jokester for sure. I’m so sorry, princess. I swear I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Don’t trouble yourself.” Luna selected a quill and inkwell from the desk’s assortment. She needed to get started eventually to have everything done before Night Court was due to begin. “Perhaps if they send enough they’ll eventually bankrupt themselves on mailing fees. Just deal with it like always.”
“As you wish.” Tea tossed it into the fireplace, along with a few other pieces of bureaucratic flotsam that had slipped through, and collected a few things on her cart that needed to be taken away. “Did you have any special requests for breakfast?”
Luna waved her off, her focus on the forms. “Just the usual. You may— no, wait. Have we any more of those muffins Twilight Sparkle sent us?”
“The ones with the berry and nut clusters that Chef Beans couldn't identify?”
“Indeed.” She frowned. “Or has our dear nephew already absconded with them all?”
Tea grinned, a sly and conspiratorial thing that pulled her features sharp. “I do believe there may be two or three that her highness Princess Celestia has squirreled away where Prince Blueblood wouldn't think to look.”
Luna matched her grin. “How considerate. I’ll be sure to thank her later for saving them for me.”
With the dismissal, Tea departed, the sound of the door closing behind her briefly overcoming the crackling of the multicolored flames in the fireplace as they ate through the dross of bureaucracy.
Settling herself into her comfortably firm chair, her mind filled with thoughts of curiously re-energizing pastries despite her attempts to focus, Princess Luna dearly hoped that whatever Twilight and her compatriots had gotten themselves mixed up in would not be Dark enough to require her intervention. Losing such delectable confections would be a travesty all its own.
Stats
Page generated in 0.026 seconds
Total duration
888 users online
394,771 hits today, 1,960,719 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Luna is **hooves on** when it comes to paperwork lol
REALLY good job on this latest chapter. Took a while, but certainly worth the wait. Quite certainly appreciated Luna's reflection on how much things have changed, both for the better and for the worse, in the thousand years she had been gone before her return just over a year earlier (such as how much simpler things were when Celestia and her had the freedom to go out and deal with the problems themselves, but, at the same time, thinking things through and talking things out got better results, even if they took longer). Definitely liked Luna's recall on how blackballing that one noble that disagreed with her concerning "royal colors" felt good AND the dialogue with her assistant. Also appreciated Luna's reflection on the new skills Twilight and her friends have been gaining as of late and the fears of something majorly bad coming where Twilight and her friends might NEED the new skills.
REALLY looking forward to more of this. And I hope you and your family and friends had a Happy Easter.
It's always fun and interesting to see in-depth takes on what characters would be doing in this AU! I've always wondered though how Luna would handle paperwork, Night Court, AND monitoring everyone's sleep; we only really get to see one of them in the Starlight Glimmer episode where the princesses switched cutie marks.
('Snrk'... I'm pretty sure Luna just sent away a secret encoded message. Heheheheh. I'm sure THAT will have no repercussions whatsoever.
And the problem coming back a thousand years later to rule? There IS nothing for you to do, the old ways ARE gone. Her sister had to rule for a thousand years without her. Stuff had to get DONE without her... and Celestia did it. For good or ill.
But yes, I hate paperwork to.
And awesome! I find this story most inspiring and pleasant to read, always makes me smile when I see it again. And I understand their worry, however seriously... none of them have done ANYTHING bad with the plethora of gifts they've received. No signs of corruption, and advancements being made that are helping society. I know the need to be cautious, but careful of being paranoid.)
This setup alone worth its own story.
This Blueblood is very brave to take away Princesses' confections.
Ooo, canon divergence. I look forward to the next post.
11553795
It's only bravery if you comprehend the danger and do it anyway. If you're a moron who doesn't realize that angering a literal Heavenly Sovereign is a bad idea even if she's allegedly your aunt, that's not bravery.
Why do I get the feeling that the "junk" mail is the remnants of her old network trying to get in touch with her.
11559195
It was a message from SMILE. If her old network became SMILE, and that message was for her, then that's definitely a possibility.