Historical Inaccuracy
The Maretime Bay Equusological Museum was closed on Sundays.
The good news was, Sunny Starscout had a key. A privilege of being the daughter of the stallion who'd found half the exhibits in the museum.
She let herself into the building, the glass doors pushing in soundlessly as she stepped inside. It was lit only by the rays of rising sunlight, and the light Sunny could see peeking underneath the office door in the back of the museum.
Good. That meant Dusty would be in his office.
She walked slowly past the displays. The first one, right beyond the entrance, was a set of six statues. The Element Bearers were made larger than life, which suited Sunny just fine. Each one was looking out towards the entrance to the museum, and the Bay itself. Their expressions were full of hope, kindness, and strength.
Briefly Sunny trailed her hoof over the plaque at the bottom of the display.
This exhibit made possible by the generous donations of Argyle.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said softly, and continued on. She paused again when she reached three portraits. Princess Cadance, Shining Armor, and their daughter.
They knew next to nothing about Twilight’s brother. Argyle had dedicated his life to the study of the Elements, and he’d only managed to stitch together a few stories of Shining Armor.
At least now Argyle’s work and his legacy continued, in places like this.
“I’m going to help figure this out,” she whispered to the portrait of Shining Armor, as she gazed up at his strong eyes and gentle smile.
“Somepony there?”
Dusty Inkstain poked his head out of his office, looking around worriedly. His mop of gray-brown mane was disheveled, and the scholar looked like he’d had a few sleepless nights.
“Just me, Dusty.”
“Oh, Miss Sunny.” he smiled, then sighed. “You read my paper.”
“I did. It was… well written, professor.”
He laughed. “You don’t have to butter me up, young mare. You didn’t like it much, did you?”
Sunny dipped her head. “No, not really. I just…don’t like the idea of Shining Armor having an extramarital affair. It seems out of character for him. But you’re just following the evidence.”
“You’ll note that I don’t make definitive conclusions. It would be irresponsible with only one source. Besides, I’m still at the early stages of my research.”
“Can I see your source?” Sunny asked.
“One source, several documents. It’s all secondary, which I wrote in my paper. But about two hundred years ago, somepony by the name of Buried Lede found evidence that Shining Armor had an affair with a mare named Daring Do.”
Sunny flinched. She hated the idea. Shining Armor had been Twilight Sparkle’s brother. He was steadfast and loyal. An affair went against everything she knew of Shining.
But…
“C’mon, I’ll show you the documents.”
Daring Do wrapped her hooves and wings tightly around Shining Armor, even as the walls of the ancient tomb crumbled around them.
“The whole place was rigged to crumble when we took the Rings of Staghornia from the Horn of Eternity!” Daring cried as she pressed herself against his strong masculine muscles. “However will you save us this time?”
“Daring, my dearest mare, I shall use both brains and brawn to do so! Prepare to teleport!”
“But Shiney, the Red Eldritch Stone was activated by the Cult of Goshan, making it impossible to teleport!”
“Oh, you silly mare. You forgot…
Sunny’s gag reflex couldn’t take any more. She placed the page back on top of the open folder on Dusty’s desk, meeting the historian’s eye. He, too, was cringing.
“This is…”
“Atrocious, I know,” he continued. The two of them were sitting in his office, surrounded by walls packed with shelves, each one sagging under the weight of books and papers. “Every fragment that Buried was able to obtain from Daring Do and the Mysterious Hero reads like a vapid dime-store romance, clumsy exposition and all, written by somepony clearly worshiping Shining Armor.”
“But your paper alleges that there might be some historical accuracy to it all? How is that possible, when this is clearly so awful?”
“Because Lede found court filings. I found Lede’s writings tucked away in the Zephyr Heights library. He references several documents that show that the royals went to court to try and bury Mysterious Hero. His conclusion was that there must have been something to the story, otherwise why sue whoever wrote it?”
“There’s plenty of reasons,” Sunny said, staring balefully at the agonizing story fragment sitting on top of the rest of Dusty’s research. “I almost want to go to court to never see that again.”
Dusty laughed. “I know the feeling. But part of being a historian is setting aside our prejudices to find the truth.” He sighed. “I respected Argyle. Looked up to him a great deal, in fact. But if he had any weaknesses, Sunny, it was that he always wanted everything to fit into neat stories. It always bothered him when the ponies he adored turned out to be flawed. Sometimes he struggled to accept facts that didn’t match the narratives he wanted.”
Dusty was looking at her intently. Sunny sighed.
“I’m doing the same thing, aren’t I?”
“A little. But if you’re aware of it, you can usually work through it. It comes down to this; are you a seeker of truth, or do you prefer a cleaner, fairy-tale history?”
Sunny considered.
“I want to help with your research. Tell me everything we know about Daring Do. And Shining Armor.”
As it turned out, there was only a single extant copy of Daring Do’s ancient novels, locked away in the antiquities section of the Zephyr Heights Municipal Library.
Sunny had been forced to pull in her royal connections to even be allowed to read Daring Do and the Terrible Tiara.
“This mare was amazing,” Zipp gushed as she read through the book. Zipp had gotten sucked into the narrative as quickly as Sunny had. “She really fought off three wild boars by herself? While her wing was broken? And still managed to retrieve the Lost Tiara of Pegasopolis? And there’s still three quarters of the book left, how can she top that?” She looked up at Sunny, skeptically. “Are you sure this is non-fiction? It reads more like a novel.”
“That’s one of the few things we do know about her,” Sunny said, her gaze still buried in the notes she’d taken on her turn with the novel. “She wrote under a pen name to hide the fact that her adventures were true stories, not mere fantasy.”
Zipp turned the book to glance at the cover. “So Daring Do was A. K. Yearling?”
“Yep. And she really was an adventurer-slash-archeologist.”
“Seems like a strange career choice,” Zipp noted.
“Says the princess-slash-detective,” Sunny smirked at her friend, and Zipp laughed.
“Okay, that’s fair. So did the book help?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Sunny groaned. “I was hoping there would be some hint of a relationship between Daring and Shining Armor, like some proof they’d met, or were friends, or… anything really.”
Was it possible for the mare she’d just read about to have had an affair with a prince? Possibly. Daring was an adventurer. She seemed to be nearly fearless, and a bit of a thrillseeker. From her interactions with the villains, particularly a dashing but unscrupulous rival archeologist named Caballeron, it was also clear Daring was a shameless flirt.
But there was nothing to indicate that extended to married stallions. Or royalty.
“I gotta say, though, we did learn one thing. Yearling did not write that piece of drivel your friend found,” Zipp said.
Sunny nodded. That was abundantly clear. The prose was (while grammatically accurate) painfully undeveloped, and the expository style was technical, dry, and amateurish. It had none of Yearling’s passion or soul, and a poor sense of character.
“It does add weight to my conclusion. Shining couldn’t have had an affair with Daring, it’s too out of character for him.”
“But not for her, necessarily,” Zipp said, and Sunny grimaced. “Besides, didn’t your friend warn you about coming to a conclusion in the middle of an investigation? You’ll run into confirmation bias.”
“It’s hard,” Sunny sighed. “Shining Armor is… well, he’s not Twilight Sparkle, but he was her brother. Infidelity goes against everything she stood for.”
“You need to prepare yourself, Sunny. There is some evidence it might have happened, even if it’s thin. And ponies don’t always fit into our expectations for them.”
“Okay, that’s fair.” She sighed. “Too bad this was a bust. Any other ideas?”
Zipp pursed her lips. “Yeah. The Harmony Archive.”
The door was made of stone. It was igneous rock, rough hewn of basalt with veins of galena throughout.
“I… can’t… push… it…” Daring grunted with effort. “Can’t… you… use… your… magic?
“Allow me,” Shining said, even as his horn fired multiple beams at the tunnel behind them. Every beam blasted away one of the henchponies chasing them. “Though you should know, technically, that lead, or galena in it’s natural ore form, is resistant to magic. We shall have to use strength.”
He threw his own weight against the stone, and it budged. Somehow the hero managed to keep his horn firing even as he pushed the stone to the side, leaving…
“It’s almost like somepony was taking a geology class when they wrote this section,” Zipp said. “Like, the technical details are almost unbearably annoying.”
“Do you have to keep going over it?” Sunny groaned.
“I do,” Zipp said earnestly. “There’s something here, I’m sure of it.”
“You’re enjoying teasing me, is more like it,” Sunny said, and Zipp laughed. “Okay. So at least this part matches up with what we know of Shining Armor. He was martially trained, and so was probably in good physical condition, as well as being a powerful spellcaster. Many of the stories we have involve him casting magical shields. So he probably could have shoved a stone aside while firing his horn.”
“While Daring Do, certified bad-flank, stood by damsel-in-distressingly?” Zipp asked while rolling her eyes.
“Okay that part’s probably fake," Sunny admitted.
“Right. He—oh! We’re here.”
They were surrounded by office buildings. They didn’t even have Zephyr Heights’ typical architectural flare; instead they were square and boxy.
“Are you sure…” she asked.
“Yeah. Been here before,” Zipp said.
“So what is the Harmony Archive?”
“It’s… well, it’s basically a warehouse. A long time ago, when the races started splitting up, some ponies thought that this might be a bad thing, and our shared history might start disappearing.” Zipp frowned. “And they were right. But they started to save everything they could get their hooves on. Documents, pictures, art, music. Anything. I talked to Hitch; they’ve got something similar in Maretime Bay.”
“Oh! Dusty did mention the original reporter, Buried, found his info in some kind of archive.”
“Right. And if we’re lucky, we’ll find that court case Lede mentioned.”
Zipp led her inside an unmarked office building, where a young pegasus mare sat behind a receptionist desk. Her eyes popped like saucers when the two of them entered, obvious with her recognition.
“A-a-a-alicorn…” she stammered.
Sunny managed a smile. “Sometimes, yeah. Do you mind if we come in? We’re looking into a court case that probably happened in Canterlot, about four centuries ago.”
It took the mare about twenty minutes to get over her starstruck daze, at which point she guided them back to a dusty-smelling warehouse. Stacks of books, documents, and huge bins filled hundreds of shelves.
But their first stop was a computer.
“We’re trying to digitize all of this,” the mare managed. “But it’s not done yet. For now, though, you should probably start here. The UI is pretty simple; just treat it like a normal internet search. And come find me if you need any help.”
Zipp looked right at home as she slid into the rolling chair in front of one of the clearly hoof-me-down computers, booting it up with a flick of her wingtip.
“Divide and conquer? You look up stuff to see if there’s any connection between Shining and Daring, and I’ll try to find the court case Buried Lede found.”
To Sunny’s dismay, it took barely any time to find her first piece of evidence.
“Here. Military missive. To all royal guard operating in the southeastern badlands, be on the lookout for Daring Do. Render her any aid, consider her an agent of the crown, et cetera. Signed, Shining Armor. They knew each other.”
“Doesn’t prove anything bad. Oh! I found the case, it…huh. No, the only digitized document is a list of exhibits, filed motions, and briefs. Looks like even the names of the plaintiff and defendant got cut off. What was the case about again?”
“The royals suing…somepony, I don’t know who, to keep Mysterious Hero out of print,” Sunny said, as she went back to her search. The next was a newspaper article, featuring a picture of both Shining and A. K. Yearling standing next to each other at some kind of gala.
“And that was Lede’s evidence to conclude they were having an affair?” Zipp asked, rolling her eyes. “Thin evidence.”
“That’s what Dusty said. Why else would the royals sue?” she asked, moving on to the next entry in her search. A newspaper article and a photograph of the two of them, side by side. Daring Do receives coveted ‘Friend of the Empire’ award from Prince Shining Armor at Reception Ball. Both ponies were smiling.
Her heart skipped a beat. There was a second picture; the two of them, in the same clothing, dancing at the reception.
“Could be a lot of reasons. Which princess was suing? This list doesn’t have actual documents, just the names of the briefs. We’ll have to dig deeper, and not everything is digitized. We’ll have to go into the actual archives. Have you ever used a microfiche machine?”
She had not.
Deeper in the vast canyons of musty-smelling papers and books, they found two archaic looking brick-shaped machines.
“So basically, the archivists have copied thousands of documents with nearly microscopic print onto big sheets, in order to save space. These machines are like giant microscopes so you can read them.”
“And you know about this because…?” Sunny asked.
“Lots of pre-digitized libraries do stuff like this for old newspapers. It was covered in one of my detective classes. Here.”
Zipp reached out and flipped the machine on, which lit up and started to hum. The wide screen in front lit up with a yellowish white light.
“So you just slide the fiche under the reader light here, and it amplifies the images and pictures up here. You have to practice moving slowly so you don’t lose your place, but it’s not hard.”
They obtained the case number from the list of exhibits, and soon enough had an entire plastic tote full of microfiches.
“This is the boring part of detective work,” Zipp said, smirking. “It’s not all chases and action sequences.”
It soon became apparent that boredom wasn’t the least of their issues. The documents were faithfully recreated on the fiches. But they had been damaged long before that. Charred and torn edges obscured much of what they could see.
“Lots of stuff got wrecked when the races split up,” Zipp said sadly, looking at her own. Sunny nodded. “Oh, hey! Here’s the case title at least. Twilight Sparkle Versus Canterlot University Press. Twilight was the plaintiff? Huh. The complaint is torn off here.”
Sunny skimmed her own half of the records. She’d probably go through more thoroughly, but right now she was looking for anything that stood out to her.
She gulped. Even if it did mean one of her heroes was tarnished, she needed to know.
“Witness testimony from copyright excerpts, free speech experts…hmm. It seems like the suit was a copyright claim. A newspaper tried to publish Mysterious Hero, and… Twilight Sparkle sued them for copyright claims?”
Sunny looked up from her machine. “What?”
Zipp looked stunned, too. “So… Twilight Sparkle wrote that piece of garbage? Why? How? And then she tried to hide it? This makes no sense! Why would she go to court to hide her brother’s affair, after she’d already written about it?”
There was something not adding up. Some clue, some single epiphany that would explain everything. Sunny was sure of it, even if that was probably the same confirmation bias that Dusty had warned her of. If she could only just…
“...here,” she whispered. “Oh. Oh my.”
She started to laugh.
“What?” Zipp asked, sliding her chair over to look at Sunny’s screen.
It was a partially burned remnant of direct examination between Twilight’s lawyer, Stridesand, and some mare named Velvet..
Sand: So you are witness to the production of this story?
Velvet: Yeah. Twilight worked on it for weeks. She was really enjoying herself. For a while I worried that the time she spent writing fanfiction would cut into her studies. She was only eleven, after all, but she never…
That was it. That was all there was to the fragment.
Zipp and Sunny’s eyes met.
“It was just fanfiction?” Zipp asked, her muzzle creeping up in a smile. “That Twilight Sparkle wrote when she was a kid? Idolizing her brother?”
Sunny started to giggle. “Not some kind of royal conspiracy to hide an affair, but…an embarrassed princess trying to hide her foalish fan-girling over her brother?” It was a conclusion Sunny could embrace.
Zipp laughed. “You can’t hide embarrassing stuff as a royal, you just have to ignore or embrace it. Suing the newspaper probably backfired hard.”
“Maybe.” Sunny was just glad she knew the truth. Even if it did mean her hero had once written the cringiest fanfiction ever about her own brother.
“So what do we name this adventure when we publish it? Sunny Starscout and the Fatuous Fanfiction?”
“Shush, or I’ll sue you,” Sunny shot back with a laugh.
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- WaywardSon · 3.3k words · 33 0 · 987 views
- James Pwyll · 11k words · 162 8 · 3.5k views
- RedRanger3142 · 8.1k words · 17 0 · 798 views
- Betty_Starlight · 27k words · 34 5 · 1.3k views
- MasaStormyPonez · 2.2k words · 27 1 · 1.1k views
- Vanity · 5.2k words · 67 6 · 1.2k views
- Rambling Writer · 4.8k words · 193 3 · 2k views
- LysanderasD · 2.9k words · 483 10 · 7.4k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.05 seconds
Total duration
1,039 users online
197,824 hits today, 2,167,270 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.®
(Reads description)
That would be... most unlikely/least likely
Honestly, the part that's hardest for me to believe is Zipp having any degree of formal investigative training.
Great work in all of these. I'm always a sucker for rare character interactions and this collection had some truly delightful examples. Thank you for them.
All of these stories were great- although in the case of the last chapter, I'm a bit confused as to what the rare pairing was. It's common to see fics where members of the mane 5 interact, so it couldn't be Sunny and Zipp. However, when I googled 'dusty inkstain', it seemed to confirm he was an oc who didn't appear in other mlp stuff, so I'm not sure what else the rare pairing could have been.
When it comes to the actual plots of the stories, though, like I said, all of them were great, and I have zero advice to give to something that's already so well-written.
11855012
The rare pairing prompt for the last chapter was Shining Armor and Daring Do/AK Yearling. But I really wanted to write G5 so it occurred to me to write about Daring and Shining... from the lens of a future mystery. It turned out a lot better than I expected, and I really enjoyed writing it.
11855356
Ah! Shining Armor and Daring Do is indeed a rare pairing, so now the inclusion of this chapter in the anthology suddenly makes sense. I had been so focused on the characters we were seeing in the story's present that I hadn't even CONSIDERED the odd pairing might focus on the historical figures seen only in ancient documents.
Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me!