There were certain advantages to being naturally nocturnal.
Oh, some of them were disadvantages being looked at from another angle. The loneliness which came from having nearly every pony in their beds during the heart of her waking hours could turn into finding privacy with ease -- or at least, ease relative to her sister's time: one of the many things to happen during her millennium of abeyance was the gradual increase of night traffic among the populace. Shops which were closed when she wished to indulge? Why, that simply allowed her to save money -- although the more intelligent breed of shopkeep would pay careful attention to any note written on palace stationery in silver ink and consider a private appointment accordingly. Kitchens which were considerably less staffed for the second shift? That much easier to raid. And so on down the line, trying to find a positive in nearly every fault to come from an existence spent mostly under Moon and generally succeeding -- at least short-term.
But one of the true advantages, something where Luna didn't have to turn her perspective inside-out in order to find a plan in the heart of a flaw, was baths. Uninterrupted ones. Luna enjoyed long soaks in her private indoor pond, the one large enough to house some of the smaller castles owned by those of the Houses -- and 'long' often wound up translating into "Yes, I'm perfectly aware the Sun is up now and I'm certainly sleepy, but the water is so wonderfully hot... maybe I'll just drift off right here..." And then she would, her lightly snoozing form moved by the currents of the channeled hot spring from one side of the silver-lined enclosure to the other. She would often find herself waking up in her bed just prior to the next sunset and suspected some of the new hires among the Lunar Guards had been brought in for either their ability to take another along in a teleport, moving through the between to her bedroom -- or just taken on if they had enough strength to carry her there the more conventional way, leaving a slick trail of water across more than a hundred body lengths worth of marble. There was also a deep suspicion of her sister having buried an Official Royal Coat Dryer somewhere in the palace budget, not to mention servants setting up belly-slide runs in her dripping wake.
But those were consequences for after the bath, and none of them dissuaded Luna from enjoying long hours spent with the heat working into her muscles, relieving the tension which came from sessions spent among the mostly-idiots who kept trying to dominate the Night Court, ponies she was not allowed to do much with beyond shouting them down, occasionally informing them just how very stupid they were, and making them dread the possibility of her going beyond those first two things -- with that last being her chief form of entertainment after the longest of supervisions spent looking over ponies who could barely be trusted to sign their own names. Especially the ones who never completely read what they were signing, or wrote things in the hopes that she wouldn't...
Luna needed to relax after those sessions. Four hours generally did the trick.
However, on this night, her older sister had arrived at the one hundred and fifty-three minute mark. And hadn't left.
Celestia was standing at the edge of the pond, talking. She had entered talking, and hadn't stopped for anything more than a breath before the next barrage -- or, rarely, a polite ten-second pause to see if Luna had anything to add before launching into her own next point. This was, sadly, more than a little typical. The abeyance had wrought a few changes on Celestia as well, and one of those was that a millennium spent in solitary rulership with no equals to talk to had given her a tendency to talk at. Oh, with commoners and those of lower ranks, Celestia communicated (and often subtly manipulated) as well as any pony ever had -- but with the lone local personage on her own level, she had developed a distinct and annoying tendency to use Luna as a sounding board, firing endless deluges of words off her younger sister in the hopes that the echoes would develop wisdom before bouncing back. There were still times when Celestia didn't quite seem to grasp that Luna had an equal voice and role in Equestria's governing, and those times were typically known as 'the majority'. Luna tried to be patient and recognize that Celestia had, in her way, just as much adjusting to do in the wake of the Return as Luna herself did -- but there were nights when it was hard. Especially those nights when she'd been interrupted in the middle of a bath and nothing Celestia wanted to not-discuss seemed to be of very great importance.
"And then there's finding room in the budget for the repairs to the School For Gifted Unicorns," Celestia sighed. "There isn't any, Luna. I thought I'd put aside enough money this year, I really did -- and then this new class came along. At least Twilight only tended to destroy the workroom during her first-year experiments. This group is working together. None of them have learned how to merge their fields and all of them have figured out how to combine their chaos. I swear, I spent a hour checking what was left of the building to see if I could pick up any traces of Discord having given out some personal instruction, but they're doing it on their own with no thought to the consequences, let alone the laws of physics and thaumaturgy... We don't have the resources available for that level of rebuild, not for the fourth time in a semester! At least it's only damage to the structure and no injuries, I'm thankful for that, certainly. But I can't shift bits from any other part of the budget, and if I keep them studying in the castle 'temporarily', we are going to need to repair and replace things a lot more expensive than a few classrooms and dorms..."
Luna's attention had been drifting somewhat faster than her body: those words brought it all rushing back in as a hundred and fifty-five minutes of muscle relaxation work fully reversed within three seconds and then went forty percent beyond in the wrong direction. "They are studying -- here?"
"You try finding somepony in Canterlot who would voluntarily host this crop of first-years -- along with the more experienced disaster-generators above them," Celestia softly groaned. "I was the only pony willing to try, and that mostly because I was fairly confident I could survive anything they came up with and shield any local staff. They've been here two days, Luna. You didn't notice the scorch marks and clouds of multicolored smoke?"
"I had thought the Day Court had a few particularly loud sessions," Luna managed to work in within her allotted ten seconds. First-years in the halls... perhaps using supposed bathroom breaks to explore and -- how close were her own quarters to the improvised classrooms? How good was her security? By the Moon, where had she last left her diary?
"Not quite," Celestia shook her head. "At least when adults make the same mistake three times in a row, they pretend to have a reason for it beyond wanting to see if they could get that loud a bang on every attempt... Luna, I need to find some extra bits if I'm going to restore the building and get them out of here. You don't want to see what they've done to the Solar Courtyard: nothing is getting that stench out. But I've looked at the budget eight times, and it won't shift."
The older of the Diarchy sank to her haunches. She stopped talking.
It took Luna a few seconds to realize that her sister was genuinely -- waiting for advice.
And it felt wonderful.
"Very well," Luna began, managing to force a thoughtful frown. "The first thought would be a tuition increase. You have not raised the rates in some time, have you? Perhaps it is time for the cost of education to reflect the actual expense involved."
Another head shake. "I can't. A number of the students are on scholarship already, so I can't ask for any money from those parents. For the rest, it would be a disproportionate burden."
The frown became a little more genuine. "A small increase in taxes? But just for unicorns, as they are the only ones who would need to think about the money being used for the benefit of their own..."
Celestia groaned again, this time with more feeling. "Do you know what percentage of unicorn children attend the school? Ponies always resent paying taxes for things they feel they're not getting personal benefit from. And there would be cries of my discriminating against those with horns -- never mind the fact that earth pony schools generally don't stand a risk of destroying cities and pegasus facilities can be rebuilt in two hours, largely using free material. I'm really not in the mood to deal with CUNET again this moon."
Luna winced at the mention of Canterlot Unicorns Need Equal Treatment, generally agreed to be the largest, best-organized, well-funded, and most delusional group of self-promoting racists on the continent. "Yes, that I fully understand. Tell me, did their last delegation to you approach in single file?"
"No," Celestia answered, allowing a touch of confusion to spike the flowing borders of her mane. "Why?"
"I had thought that given their extreme need to operate as a single unit, they would simply elect a spokespony and then have the rest of the group stand behind that one in a straight line. With heads lowered and horns sheathed. Using each successive pony as that sheath... Well, since anatomy prevents them from inserting the things up their own rears..." She saw, with some delight, that her older sister was trying not to giggle. "Very well... how possible is it for the school to become financially self-sustaining? I am aware that more than a few of its graduates have made great and profitable contributions to society. Should we be able to claim a portion of that, then --"
The near-giggle died aborning and was buried at the closest available substitute for sea. "Intellectual property, Luna -- what they come up with in their heads belongs to them, even if the theories which led to those thoughts were taught by us. Few of the graduates think to send bits back to their alma mater as thanks: there's an ongoing delusion that I just take care of everything financial and no help is required at all. Besides, why get a research lab named after yourself when it won't last a moon? It's not as if I can count on ticket sales to see the school's hoofball team: the Courts can't even use the things as bribes, not even by telling each other 'vote for that bill and I won't make you go'. Academic publications fall into the same category as post-graduate creations... The school has always operated at a loss, Luna. Education for profit seemed too cruel an idea even in the first days and hasn't become any kinder since. I've always managed to find room in the budget... but this year..." A long pause gave both rulers time to reflect on the costs of recovery from the changeling invasion, including the host of frivolous, time-consuming lawsuits brought against the Solar and Lunar thrones for the high crime of Not Having Seen It Coming.
"...has been a hard one," Luna completed. She spent a few more seconds in drifting thought. "Publish your long-awaited comprehensive and completely unedited biography, then donate all proceeds?"
"You first," Celestia dryly replied. "I'm not quite ready to eviscerate myself over this just yet --" She caught the look on her younger sister's face. "-- Luna, I'm sorry..."
"Forgiven," Luna shakily said, just barely managing to (temporarily) banish the thoughts on how to put a thousand years of internal burial into simple print. "Nor am I. Personal donation?"
The laugh was slightly forced. "I have trouble purchasing my own ice cream." With the slightly more clear humor which came from knowing the next question was essentially nonsense, "You?"
"Don't look at me," Luna sighed. "It's not as if my own income is that much better -- and I attended the Bearers' seasonal card game last night. I swear, sister, if you are holding the Element of Honesty, you should not be permitted to bluff. For that matter, a certain Generosity-Bearer should have pushed that much more of her own bits into the pot on the single occasion when I did have a fieldful I could tolerate. And that is before we get to the way supposed Kindness raked me across the coals with a Princess-high flush that she showed no signs of for the full betting round... There is some comfort in knowing it goes to her animal feed bills, but still, one would think she would have had the courtesy to do more than blush and murmur '...sorry' as she was taking all my mad money for the moon. That beauty hides the face of a card shark and the bite came directly out of my flank."
Celestia did giggle: the sound was more than welcome. "You couldn't get it any of it back from Rainbow Dash?"
"Busted out by the time I arrived." And the weather coordinator had spent the rest of the evening as a combination of cheerleader, random mope inflicter, kibitz squad, and roaming bad advice platoon. "My own fault for being a whole twelve minutes late... I am sorry, sister, but it seems my own ideas are simply not helping you tonight. I can hardly expect one or both of us to invent something worth selling within a week, and I know better than to advise you on simply conjuring resources: the lesson on inflation has not faded, thank you. I can promise to muse on it for some time and perhaps find knowledge in my own nightscape --" in perpetual irony, with her own case, it was more of a dayscape "-- or that of another pony. But for now, all I can offer is whatever comfort you can find from knowing I am also working on the problem."
Her sister nodded. "That does help, Luna. And if you do come up with something brilliant, don't feel you have to wait for me before you start working out the details." She yawned -- then looked a little embarrassed for having done so. "Sorry... I was up too late considering this and up too early to tell you."
"Go find wake-up juice," Luna advised. "I will be retiring shortly anyway."
Celestia rose, headed out. "Good luck, Luna. Maybe dreams will do what thought can't."
And then Luna was alone again, with the water's heat doing nothing at all.
Budget problems... that had been there from the start. They had always tried to keep the taxes light, relying to a larger degree on those products and services the government created directly and sold to Equestria's citizens -- and beyond. For her early time as co-ruler and the duration of the abeyance, Celestia had generally managed to stay on top of things, often in direct opposition to the will of the Day and Night Courts as foolish ponies tried to vote funds for their own districts and raises for themselves without ever caring about who was going to pay for them -- and it certainly wasn't the ponies who had just cast the votes: they resisted any taxes on themselves a thousand times more strongly than they had resisted the invasion, especially for the third who had been found cowered in corners still swearing allegiance to their new changeling overlords. Taxes paid for a good part of the realm outright and helped with so much else -- but few ponies ever stopped to think of the personal benefit they gained by paying those taxes at all. Land, sky, and relative safety: so much a part of the background as to be taken for a granted birthright, with the cost -- effort and financial alike -- needed to maintain that illusion forever overlooked. Separating pony from bits with no personal return on the horizon...
Luna sighed: the sound echoed from the silver. She had to help her sister. She wanted to keep proving she was a viable and valuable part of the restored Diarchy. But as much as anything else, she wanted to get those colts and fillies out of the palace before they made something of hers explode.
What could she do to make ponies give up their hard-earned bits of their own free will?
There are too many charities to form a new one, asking for funds to go towards those whom so many ponies insist on seeing as the privileged, scholarships or no. The alumni have not helped enough and will not. Some of them simply cannot afford to do so. Look at Twilight: all those spell improvement awards from the Equestrian Magic Society and all that does is give her just enough money to consider a card game once per season. Of course, the EMS is supposed to be non-profit, but Tia and I both know... well, that's a problem for another night, along with getting them to realize where they came from in the first place, speaking of alumni who haven't helped and do have bits to spare. Perhaps the only way to get their fair contribution would be to arrange a card game with Fluttershy and let them be cleaned out...
It was an amusing thought, but it wasn't a viable one. The animal caretaker's shyness and face-obscuring fall of mane combined to make determining which cards were in front of her virtually impossible, but it did nothing to assure she would get a decent grouping in the first place. Also, she couldn't trust the EMS members not to cheat. Actually, supervising that herself would take care of the problem, but then she'd still need to get them into the game, the resources to stake Fluttershy with would have to be scrounged from somewhere and would have been better off going directly to the school in the first place because she still couldn't personally do anything to make sure the highest rank of card assembly would wind up in front of yellow hooves. Luna couldn't do anything to guarantee the right pony would win -- well, nothing legal, and she preferred a fair game. If she didn't, she would have hidden her field and used invisible magic in front of two hopefully-unaware unicorns to get her own back. Not that smuggling such in front of Twilight's feel would have been guaranteed to work: she was sure she could have gotten past Rarity, but the librarian...
...no, fair games were best, and the fairest games were the ones where everypony had an even chance. After all, ponies were the most willing to risk their bits to luck when the odds were --
-- fair...
Luna started thinking.
Tia did say not to worry about waiting before getting the details...
And there was nopony around to stop her.
Princess Celestia could wake up rather quickly.
It wasn't a natural ability. In the depths of time, the memory of a before, she had been one for squeezing every possible second of sleep out of existence, especially living in a land ruled by Discord where the five minutes of naptime you'd just barely been able to find could be ended by a hailstorm of elephant tusks at any moment. Or, worse, the rest of the elephant. Which, after it landed, would be very angry about having its tusks be near her and looking to take it out on somepony. Say, her and the others, who would be all too convenient, not to mention half-buried under ivory and unable to dodge.
But more than a millennium of rulership with most of that time spent alone, knowing not only that she was the continent's first and best resort in a crisis, but that everypony else knew it and would wake her accordingly...
She could go from fully asleep to three-quarters awake and faking the rest within five heartbeats. And depending on what kind of news had been important enough to rouse her at all, might have to move even faster than that.
"She's holding a press conference?" Celestia repeated, trying to make sure she had it absolutely right. "By herself?"
"Completely!" Shuffler declared. "In the Lunar Courtyard! There's dozens of press there! She called them herself, I only knew about it because two of Murdocks snuck off and tried to get into her bedroom..."
Ninety percent awake and rising. "Has she banished anypony?"
"I threw them out before she learned about it and I didn't hear any screams! Princess, she held an emergency session of the Night Court, she was teleporting them out of their homes to get the vote in before the Sun rose, she's holding a press conference during the day..."
...which was all Celestia heard before she entered the between --
-- and came out in the silver-shot confines of the Lunar Courtyard.
The open-air assembly area looked strange under Sun. When the Moon was up, regardless of phase, it was bathed in the radiance of the closest, largest Moon in Equestria's astronomical history, as it would have been at the moment of total fullness -- and was for every moment spent under Moon at all. But for an hour under Sun...
...well, there were two ways for the Lunar Courtyard to be active under Sun. The first was a daylight Moon, a rare phenomenon which Celestia had tried out a few times during the abeyance just for variety. (It generally took her about forty years between attempts to forget how lame the previous one had been and thus reach the point of wanting to try it again.) The second...
...everypony in the Lunar Courtyard, with the exception of the two Princesses, was wearing glasses of quartz, ones with the rough quasi-translucency of heavy smoke.
The total eclipse only existed here and was, as with the perpetual dawnlight in the daytime Solar Courtyard, illusion. Normal Sun would return at the instant anypony stepped outside. But it was a very effective illusion and Celestia, who had emerged from the between in a back corner nook she kept empty for such jaunts, out of sight from press and sibling alike, found herself briefly glancing up at the fierce solar corona, allowing herself to be as fooled as everypony else. Her sister was an artist and taking a moment to appreciate the creation was worthwhile.
Taking every other one for listening was making her want to look at the eclipse again.
"... now, during each night, the current total shall be tallied. Upon each rising of the Sun, I and my best teleporters will travel to the most distant parts of Equestria and post the tally, with our fastest fliers handling Canterlot and the more local regions. Thus everypony shall know exactly what they are playing for."
"But how will we know the government isn't taking more than their cut?" one of Murdocks' challenged. "Especially with the rumors about certain ponies getting involved in card games..."
Luna's tension was brief, but visible. (The group movement away from the challenging reporter to create a wide zone of theoretical blast radius took slightly less time than her reaction had.) "Our agents will keep honest totals, and thou may review the math at thine leisure, citizen. I have already said what the government will take: twenty percent of the tally until and unless that cut should somehow reach three million bits. Then a mere ten percent thereafter, which will be put into a fund dedicated towards future repairs and improvements to the School For Gifted Unicorns."
"Well, what if some ponies don't want their bits going to a unicorn school?" the reporter (herself a unicorn) challenged anew, the broken scales on her flank shaking with forced mock outrage. "What do you have to say about that, Princess? What do you think those ponies want to hear in regards to what you're doing with their money?"
(The theoretical blast radius zone became thirty percent wider.)
"I would say to them," Luna slowly forced, "that they are not being taxed. There is no mandate or law demanding that they participate. The bits they spend are the admission fee for play -- the ante for the game, if you prefer, since cards appear to be on your mind. To that degree, if they choose of their own free will to involve themselves, they should be willing to live with where the government's portion of the tally will be spent. And that portion is for this game, as it is where the funds are currently most needed. Should this play be successful, future games might see that percentage go to other places which need the bits. It is your decision to sit down at the table and play. You assume the risk on whether you win or lose. Beyond offering the game and personally awarding the portion which goes to the winner, my only real part in this is to watch as the winning number is drawn a week from tomorrow, when the Sun sets. And I will do so with as many witnesses to such as you care to supply. Thou might even win thyself, lady -- should you be comfortable with where twenty percent of your stake happens to go."
"But twenty percent as three million bits," a reporter from the Trottingham Gazette called out, "would mean twelve million bits to the winner..."
The Lunar Courtyard went silent.
Celestia tried not to look at the eclipse again. It wouldn't help.
"If it reached that far, yes," Luna admitted. "Not that I expect such and it is only the figure I would most hope for, but your math is correct, citizen -- twelve million bits, paid out in eighty equal portions over exactly that many seasons. Should the winner pass in an untimely fashion, their family will receive the remainder over whatever period is left on that calendar. No family, and the will shall speak over all." Just a little too directly, "You will find such details in the one-sheet I had passed out to you before we began, which I see most of you have elected to use for wiping your hooves. Now, for another detail you have no doubt chosen for the collection of dirt stains, the name. I have decided that this shall be called a lottery, for ideally, there will be a lot of bits in it..."
Celestia closed her eyes. That didn't help either.
Luna managed to wrap up the conference without creating any exiles (although at one point, most of the ponies in it were jammed up against the walls and Celestia herself nearly wound up with a Cloudsdale Breeze representative against her front knees) and dismissed the collected corps, who took their usual post-Lunar visit route of scrambling for their lives while trying to pretend they weren't doing so. Few ponies truly felt Luna's temper would erupt in such a way as to create several permanent changes of residence, with a couple of the new addresses located in the shadowlands. Nopony wanted to find out if the assumption was wrong. Celestia had dealt with centuries of a free press and the increasing percentage of horse apple smears populating it: she had learned, if not patience, then at least the ability to swallow back the twenty things she truly wanted to say and allow her frustrations to be soaked out hours later in her own bath. Luna's abeyance had, in some ways, been more of a skip over time than a passage through it, the stone skimming across the surface of the temporal ocean in a single giant hop. She was still learning about the nature of the water she found herself in, still adjusting -- but there were areas where she also insisted that ponies do an equal amount of adjusting to her. In this case, that meant a dedicated press corps composed of those willing to take chances and those willing to report on what might happen if somepony took one too many.
So far, no pony had been banished. Several had wound up desperately shielding their nightscapes from the possibility of follow-up visits.
Celestia, who had managed to remain unnoticed even by the reporter she'd nearly wound up having as a personal hooficurist, slowly trotted up to her tension-riddled sister. And Luna finally spotted her.
"Oh, Tia," the younger alicorn got out. "How long were you there? I thought you would be sleeping in this morning after your duties..." With a small smile that banished half the stress, "And I wished to surprise you this evening. Typical, really -- you have spoiled most of my fun, probably without meaning to." There was no real malice in that statement. "I am not certain I have solved your problem, but I do feel I may have just put a dent in the numbers. Did you hear that part?"
"I did," Celestia slowly replied. "Luna -- you pushed this through without consulting me."
Which got her a shrug. "Gambling has always been the province of the Night Court, sister. If I wish to pass laws regarding gaming and events of chance, I require no consultation with you any more than you need to ask me about the scheduling for most of the Equestria Games events -- courtesy only and perhaps a desire for the opinion of another. I had the idea and I knew it would be a help. As I said, I make no claim to having solved the problem -- but I will insist that it is about to be eased. I have asked no pony to sacrifice funds to taxes. I am simply inquiring as to whether they wish to play a game. Our twenty percent -- and I do feel that is all we will ever see -- covers the expenses of creating the game along with those for the school. I am aware that we will be spending some bits in order to award them. There are printing costs --"
"-- yes," Celestia carefully interrupted. "How is the game to be administered?"
Luna smiled. "Do you recall Star Swirl's Revealer?"
Celestia frowned. "His invention of invisible ink? Of course -- we smuggled a few messages that way." Before Discord had simply tired of that bit of gameplay and wiped out the intercepted papers. Along with --
-- not a thought for this time. "We got it down to the point of a chemical formula with no magic involved while you were -- away, Luna. What about it?"
"I intend to revive the old form." The younger sister made a sweeping gesture with her left front hoof. "I am going to travel to the government printing office. It will be a simple matter to cast the spell on a vat of ink. The printers will then run off a series of -- let us call them tickets, as they are for entrance into the game -- each with a unique combination of numbers. In the hours approaching the drawing, I will gather my strength to cast a very minor spell -- a tiny working which must cover the entire continent. After I draw the winning numbers, I will let the Revealer go. Everypony holding a ticket will see what their numbers are. And one will become richer -- hopefully much richer -- with the school getting whatever is left after our minimal expenses are subtracted. The tickets may be ready by this evening if I am very fortunate -- more likely tomorrow, though -- the distribution will be complete within a day or two if I involve every teleporter with good range that I have under my own command and include myself in their number, the drawing is seven days into the game, and I have set aside a room to hold the bits and guards to watch them."
"Luna," Celestia carefully tried, "I'm not sure you understand --"
The left hoof came up again: wait. "Sister -- they choose to play. The only laws passed created the game and the way it will be administrated. There is no task. There is only -- a chance. Would you ban poker? Wagering on hoofball and the Best Young Flyers competition? This game cannot be rigged: I will see to that. It can only be played -- and if by some dark miracle, nopony chooses to play it, I will cover the expenses myself, so that the government will have used no resources. Even if I have to sell personal possessions, I promise you that the budget shall not lose a single bit from this."
Large dark blue eyes looked at Celestia. Refused to blink. Waited.
And there it was again, the question which was asked in almost every encounter between the siblings, the one Celestia had to keep finding an answer for. The question she woke up every day hoping to find the same answer for.
"I know there was nothing in the historical record about this," Luna quietly added, still not blinking. "I realize I am taking a chance on the new. But as for taking chances..."
The question hung in the air. The one for which there seemed to be no permanent answer.
'Do you trust me?'
Celestia sighed.
"It is -- your attempt, Luna," she said. "Guard it well."
Luna smiled. "Do not fear, sister. I have planned better than you might suspect."
Celestia hoped so, and turned to leave the shadows and strange light of the eclipse -- but paused, facing away from her sibling. "Luna?" She could feel attentiveness perking behind her. "We are, by and large, a herd species..."
And now Celestia could feel the frown. "I do not take your meaning, Tia."
Dearly, desperately hoping she was wrong, "You will."
It was the first night. Luna had stayed awake for far too long in order to complete the arrangements, but completed they had been: the ink had been ensorcelled, the tickets had been printed -- more than she'd thought would be required, but better safe than making repeated trips back or asking ponies to assume new working hours on her behalf -- and the first shipments had begun. (The tickets were green and gold, with the area marked for the future Revealer a pleasing lunar silver.) For now, the various town halls of cities and settlements were being asked to perform the sales, with one of her own Guards standing by at each site in the name of 'We know you would never skim anything away from the children, but let's not even give anypony a chance at the fantasy, shall we?' She had made several of the more distant deliveries herself, at least for those areas she had visited since the Return and had arrival points for. There seemed to be too few of those.
Ponies had jumped at the totally unexpected Royal Visits: news frequently required a day or more to completely cross the continent. (No matter how many of Murdocks' Special Late Edition: Princess Luna Attempts To Bankrupt Populace In The Name Of Unicorn Elitism copies were printed, they still had to travel. On the very dubious plus side, CUNET seemed to be happy.) Ponies scrambled to make their towns presentable. Ponies often needed some very direct attempts at calming down before they would stop randomly racing about straightening the furniture and listen to her, with few of those attempts ever getting through on the first try and most of them only making ponies run about all the faster. But in time, she'd gotten through at every place she'd made a personal visit to, explained the nature and purpose of her lottery, gotten the sales area set up at the most recent town hall on her very abrupt tour, wished everypony luck, and moved on to the next. In the end, she'd gotten all of two hours' sleep, and some of that had been collected on all four hooves while listening to officious local bureaucrats argue over the best placement of the desk and where the temporary-resident Lunar Guard was going to sleep -- a question which had been all-too encouraging.
Of course, some of tomorrow's headlines would probably concern how bored she had been with her own lottery, but that news would need time to travel too.
She would need to -- it was a discouraging thought, but it had to be done if this was to work as best it could -- put in a large number of daylight hours. There were more towns to visit. Some of the Lunar Guards could escort her to those places she had no arrival points for. It seemed to Luna that the more she was out and about promoting the lottery, the stronger that final tally would be. It would have her personal stamp of approval on it and as she'd seen, some ponies did much when they believed such was involved. But it meant being out and about when the majority of normal ponies were awake -- the hours Luna generally used for rest.
It wasn't that daylight hurt her in any way. Yes, she was slightly weaker under Sun, the same way Celestia lost a little strength under Moon: part of the price they paid for the ties made visible by their marks. (It wasn't something most ponies would ever notice, even if that truth ever did somehow happen to spread.) The Sun warmed her coat (although not as much as the Moon did) and gave her its share of life as it did with everything else. The light was not harsh to her eyes. It simply felt, and had since the moment before became after, slightly -- off. It always would. Too many hours spent under Sun gave Luna the feeling of wearing a full-body dress a half-size too small -- one which had been glued to her skin. With her coat trying to grow through the fabric before failing and being turned back to press ever-inwards...
The first collections had brought back -- some bits. The accountants she'd brought in barely needed to labor: a single alicorn and abacus was more than sufficient to handle the flow, and all they did was create double-entry books to record and pointlessly verify her accurate tallies. They barely had any lost lab equipment paid for and couldn't even begin to dream about the closets to house it. And that was going to mean her out there under the Sun for days, sleep schedule upturned and invisible dress getting tighter all the time.
Well, it is for the children.
She had rehidden her diary. Five times.
They'd nearly gotten it twice.
Day -- Moon take it, Day -- Two. And a day in the desert, which should have counted for three all by itself. Certainly the Sun seemed to be working triple-time.
"We heard you were coming, Princess!" the mayor of Appleloosa nervously declared after finally getting out of the Official Royal Greeting Stance. "But we didn't get much warning -- I can have somepony show you around, we've never really hosted -- well, young Braeburn will be happy to give you the tour if you're so inclined. He sometimes likes to start with the pony-drawn carriages..."
"Yes, we have one hanging in our gallery," Luna tried not to yawn. "Did you hear about the reason I was coming, Mayor?"
"Sure did!" came the too-fast declaration. "It's amazing, really -- the news got here late last night, and -- well, come on, you should see it for yourself..."
A perplexed Luna allowed herself to be escorted across dry ground (dust blowing about, working into her coat, she was going to need hours of grooming just to feel presentable, the wasteland made pony-habitable only by the Effect insisting on becoming a near-permanent part of her) to the makeshift-feeling structure --
-- and the line trailing out the door.
The visible portion of the line had fifteen ponies in it. Based on the size of the building -- well, take out the false front which tried to give off the illusion of a third floor that in no way existed, figure in the typical body length of the average pony, if they'd been foolish enough to place the desk on the second story and let ponies wind their way up any staircase -- call it a maximum of fifty more, and much more likely ten or so.
"It's funny, really," the Mayor said. "We're an earth pony settlement right now, Princess -- you know, still getting the Cornucopia Effect laid down and the farms established -- and I wouldn't have thought the populace would care so much about unicorn schools, begging your pardon." That with a nod towards her horn. "We're still more concerned about luring teachers out here with decent salaries -- not that we've got that many young'uns to teach, but the bigger families may not show up until we've got better schools. So you know, if you ever put up a second of those lottery things..."
"It is a thought," Luna allowed. Yes, the settlement could use the boost -- if the first lottery worked at all. But there was a line... "So they are going to help with the first in the hopes of gaining a second?"
"Not sure they're thinkin' that way," the Mayor told her. "I think it's more about the twelve million bits."
Luna blinked. The single lonely cloud in the desert sky lost most of its cohesion. "...what?"
The Mayor now bore that awkward combination of worry and trepidation that came when most average ponies felt they might be on the verge of correcting her. "The -- twelve million bits for the winner? You know -- like it says right here?" He rummaged in his saddlebags, eventually extracting a clipped-out article which Luna took into her field.
She counted the errors. After that became simultaneously overwhelming, depressing, and boring, she switched into an attempt to figure out which ones had been deliberate.
"It only goes that high if fifteen million bits in tickets are sold," she told him, trying not to make the words weary. "We are hardly there yet."
"Oh... but the article..."
"...lacks a certain something in the way of fact-checking, especially considering the writer was present at the press conference and apparently ignoring the answers to all of her own questions," Luna tried not to snap, only partially succeeding. "For now, it is eighty percent of the total and while I cannot tell you exactly where that number is at this time, please trust me that fifteen million is not it."
"I understand," the Mayor decided to say, regardless of whether he did or not -- but then added "So -- if you sold more than that value in tickets, the prize for the winner could be higher?"
The politician's voice had become considerably louder as he approached the end of the second sentence. Several heads turned.
"Yes..." Luna carefully tried. "That was part of it. In fact, the percentage of the total for the winner goes up after that point, as the goal would have been met..."
"You hear that, everypony?" a random settler on the street shouted. "It could be more! Millions of bits more! The Princess said so!"
"Yes, it could," Luna attempted again. "But it is not there just --"
The length of the line doubled.
Then it doubled again.
As it turned out, some fool had put the sales desk on the second floor.
The second night brought forth words never before spoken by Luna in the history of Equestria.
"Would somepony please check my math?"
Several accountants looked up at the blasphemy. Two fainted.
Luna tried not to sigh. "I simply wish to be sure that this total is correct. I believe in my figures. But I am finding it hard to accept that we have collected this level of funds in what truly amounts to less than two days of sales. We are sure no other bits have worked their way in, yes? There have been no donations snuck into the columns?" Surprisingly large donations, given that virtually no alumni could be bothered to do so much as open a letter sent by the school they claimed to love so...
One of the braver accountants approached and took a minute to go over the numbers before carefully stating "Your total is correct, Princess," and getting out of the area just in case that somehow turned out to be bad.
Luna blinked several times. "Then we have collected -- four million, eight hundred and thirty-two thousand, six hundred bits?"
The Most Courageous Accountant In Equestria nodded. Twice.
Luna looked over the calculations one more time. Considered waking Celestia just to tell her -- and then put that thought aside. It could wait. To wit, it could wait until the moment they reached fifteen million. And that was no guarantee, it was possible that most of the potential sales had exhausted themselves in the first just-under-two days and the rest would just be picking up stragglers -- but they at least had a powerful start.
"This idea," she told her staff, "is starting to look -- promising..." They all nodded. Most of them would have done so anyway, and she was all too aware of it.
She wondered why she hadn't seen Celestia since the press conference. Perhaps her sister was teleporting about the continent doing her own part to drive the fundraising along. That would certainly explain part of it.
"We may wish to have one of these every season," she mused. "Say, once for each of the other single-race school chains, so that none will complain about being left out -- and after those are concluded, another for the mixed -- then one for unicorn schools in general which omits the Gifted facility -- and finally we move to a general fund distributed equally to all. If this frees up any portion of the budget..."
Very promising...
The third day found her in Ponyville. She'd also scheduled a visit for the sixth as part of her last-minute Get Out The Bits campaign. And naturally, she was stopping there to make sure the lottery desk was running well. There was no need to drop off tickets: the town was close enough that conventional delivery had been made by afternoon on the first day. It was simply checking up on operations -- and a little bit more.
Part of that 'little bit' had not been surveying the length of the line. But Luna did anyway. It was hard not to, for the thing was right in front of her, ahead of her, stretching out for a few dozen ponies behind her...
"This," Rainbow Dash grumped, "is worse than the first day of cider season!" Her saddlebags were visibly bulging with bits at the bottoms, and her body was just as visibly tensed with stress. Part of that seemed to come from her inability to take off. In Luna's limited experience, the pegasus was hardly ever found on the ground for long periods of time: even when among her friends, she typically hovered a little way from the surface whenever possible, which made it all the easier to read body language that matched the single worst poker face in Equestria. Luna could tell the rough value of the latest card Rainbow had gotten while the pegasus was still arranging it into the layout, and had even figured out that the horseshoe suit was always placed on the right with wings on the left. (Horns and amulets hadn't quite found a permanent position yet.) But now the pegasus was on the ground and seemed determined to stay there. Oh, she kept almost taking off: the wings would spread, begin a tentative flap -- and then be curled back in. But on the whole? Landlocked.
"Are you feeling all right?" Luna queried. She counted Rainbow Dash as a minor friend, even if the pegasus was a rank amateur at pranking who refused to take advice on refining her techniques.
"Other than being bored out of my mind? Yeah. Why?"
Luna got right to the point. "Your hooves have been in contact with the earth since I arrived here."
"I know! Every time I go up, the ponies behind me decide I've gotten out of line and close the gap! I lost my place three times already! I wouldn't have this problem in Cloudsdale, but it's a much bigger city and I heard the lines almost reach the ground! I just -- I just really hate waiting, Princess. I even tried to get up -- early so the line would be shorter."
"And -- you failed?" Luna was well-aware of Rainbow Dash's sleeping habits, having carefully ignored several letters from angry Ponyville citizens on the subject.
"No! I did it! And the line was this long anyway because just like cider season, every other pony had the same thought! Some of them even sent ponies to hold their place in line, which means they're effectively cutting when they finally show up..."
Luna was trying not to smile in the face of the pegasus' open and somehow very humorous-feeling aggravation. "You seem to be carrying a lot of bits."
"Yeah. I'm gonna get a lot of tickets. I know I'm lucky."
Which confused the junior Princess. "You -- do?" The weather coordinator's mark wasn't one of the incredibly rare ones for luck itself: those barely came along once a generation, if even that.
"You know all the stuff I did with the Bearers?"
"Yes."
"You noticed how we're all still around?"
"...of course."
"I," the pegasus declared, "am lucky." And shuffled a little farther forward in the slowly shifting line, moving as if dragging a thousand pounds of chains from each hoof.
Luna's next response never quite made it to her mouth. But if you know you're lucky, wouldn't one ticket be enough...? Instead, she made her way into the town hall's central rotunda. Several ponies stared at her as she passed. Some of that was just for being a Princess, she knew, and some of it was casual identification from the residents of the only town which sometimes treated her as being at least a little closer to normal -- but she had the odd feeling that a number of them had just sensed somepony approaching on their flanks and had been ready to bark something harsh if they'd felt she'd been cutting...
A lavender unicorn mare was managing the sales desk.
That got a blink out of Luna -- a hard one. "Twilight Sparkle? Why are you not at the library?"
"Spike has it," the unicorn sighed. "The mayor asked me to take over this morning. They needed somepony to track the math and help guard the money. Given my position, they thought I could help your Guard do both." She inclined her horn towards the Lunar presence, who looked more than a little sleepy. It had been a hard schedule flip for her staff as well. "Give me a few seconds, Princess... and how many will you be purchasing? Really? Are you sure you really want -- all right, I see your bits, you don't have to shove them at me like that. And you understand that if you try to cast your own early version of the Revealer or tamper with the ticket in any way, it will be voided? Yes, I can see you're a pegasus: I'm supposed to make this speech to everypony... yes, I will 'just take your money'... here are your tickets... and are you sure you can afford -- oh." Twilight sighed as the affronted pony flew off in a huff, with a long green and gold trail of paper almost substituting for a lashing tail.
"Sales seem brisk," Luna noted, trying not to frown after the retreating pony.
"Too brisk," Twilight Sparkle sighed. It seemed to be her dominant mode of expression. "Princess, I know what some of these ponies make -- yes, I know I'm holding up the line, I'm talking to the Princess, I think you can wait! -- or at least how little they insist they make, usually when I'm trying to collect library fines. And they're buying tickets. A lot of tickets. Every last pony seems convinced they're going to win -- okay, just take them already, tamper with them and it'll be your tail, thank you! -- and none of them are thinking about what happens if they don't."
"But -- surely they are making their contribution to the school as well?" Her bedroom had been broken into again. She'd taken to catching her naps in random guest rooms. On hastily-woven clouds near the ceiling.
"They're not thinking about that," the librarian eventually replied after running through another three customers. "I don't think most of them give it any thought." Two additional purchases. "Just the money -- and for some of them, I'm sure the cumulative ticket costs are more than they can afford."
But it's going to the school... Luna's brain protested. Her voice settled for "Does that include yourself and your friends? I know Rainbow Dash is planning to buy a fair number if she can ever reach the front." One of the purchases had featured a familiar background scream as the distant weather coordinator had forgotten herself and taken off yet again.
At that point, Luna's mind just started editing out the sales interruptions within Twilight Sparkle's reply in the name of keeping the memory under ten minutes' length, resulting in "I got one ticket -- I felt like I wouldn't be supporting the school if I didn't, and I don't exactly have enough to rebuild the thing myself. But I had to do something: I cost the budget enough bits when I was a student... Applejack got one first thing this morning as the first pony in line, but that was it for her: one. She said she doesn't have any control over the outcome and she can't read the expression off a piece of paper, so one's all she wanted to risk. Rarity got four, she says she wants to help a little and maybe fortune will smile on her and allow her 'acts of generosity beyond all previous scope'. Fluttershy can't take enough time away from her work to stay in the line and there's just too many other ponies around. Pinkie was -- Pinkie. On the day the news came out, she told me her Pinkie Sense went off. Apparently if she played, she'd win -- and that's why she didn't play. I know that doesn't make any sense, but that's all she had time to say: the Cakes are dealing with some big orders right now and the rest of us will barely see her until they're all filled. But so many ponies believe in her, and that just made the others in the bakery think the winning ticket would be sold in Ponyville..."
Luna had been told about Pinkie Sense. She had politely asked her sister's student for a few charts and studies detailing its workings. The reaction had been -- epic. "Is that tale spreading?"
"Not outside Ponyville," the unicorn sighed. "So far -- until just now."
"Just -- now?"
"There's a reporter behind you."
Which turned out to be a very fair reason for Just Now.
They reached their target on Night Four: three million for the government's cut -- a small portion for expenses with the rest to the school -- and twelve million to the eventual winner. And then, as the counting continued into the night, they exceeded it.
Luna had made a second trip to the printer and performed the first stage of the Revealer's working on a second vat of ink. The presses had been running for hours to keep up with the demand. When it became clear that very little else was being printed, the office had temporarily switched to day and night operation. That had been filed under the Expenses column, but the ticket sales were covering it -- and then some.
She had been doing some design work in anticipation of the actual drawing. Blind field grabs were an option, but her field was on the sensitive side: if there was, say, a ball with a deeply-embossed number on it, there was a chance she'd be able to feel the difference in the surface and register what that number was before pulling it out. Not that it made any real difference as she would be drawing several of those theoretical balls and had no idea which pony was holding the winning ticket, but any opening for an accusation of rigging would bring one from Murdocks and possibly beyond. She was trying to come up with something completely cheat-proof. It wasn't easy.
Cheating was very much on the minds of certain ponies. A pair of unicorn brothers had been arrested under Las Pegasus for selling tickets. Or rather, for selling promises of tickets. Give them your bits and they would stand in line for you, then distribute the tickets to their real purchasers and keep only a payment of a single bit per hundred tickets as compensation for their time. As ponies had been pooling money already in the theory that they could split the apparently-inevitable winnings and the lines were becoming all-day affairs, having somepony else do that part of the work had made sense to a very large number of potential participants. They had handed over their bits, the brothers had thanked them and wished them luck -- apparently in song -- then vanished. Las Pegasus was just where the unicorns had been caught -- nowhere near a line, unless you counted the one stretching out a good distance above them. They were claiming to have been mistaken for another pair of unicorns with partial apples on their flanks who were riding a creaky piece of magitech. Again.
Other ponies had tried their hooves and fields at forgery. A very few of the results almost matched the real tickets exactly, but still had a fatal flaw: they could not be sold at a town hall. (There had been one exception: a truly enterprising thief who had claimed an abandoned office, then told ponies that she'd been sent from Canterlot with an emergency supply, come on up! The line had split in half, and she'd taken in thousands of bits before a weary Lunar Guard finished checking on the status of the non-shipment and went after her just in time.) Others were red, or purple, or made from scraps of paper. Some were literally woven from whole cloth. And there were a few -- more than a few -- rather dim or uninformed (although Luna suspected 'dim') ponies who purchased them anyway.
Ponyville was, for lack of a better term, under siege. While only the locals truly knew about Pinkie Sense and understood it as far as the thing could be worked out, the general idea of 'a prophetess has said the winning ticket will be sold here' had been barely conveyed through the more recent badly-written and unchecked articles. Some ponies -- including ones who had never heard of the Element of Laughter, let alone ever having met the Bearer -- were willing to take a chance on that. And so they converged on Ponyville and got into the line. A line which had now split into a legitimate four in order to handle the greatly-increased traffic -- and still had a five-hour wait for any pony willing to risk it. Which, because one of those lines was going to produce the winning ticket, was a risk so very many ponies had taken...
The town's hotels were overbooked. Ponies were renting out their homes as sleeping spaces. Their bathrooms. Twilight Sparkle had taken pity and allowed a number to crash in the library free of charge as long as they put in an hour of reshelving before they left, which inevitably led to three hours of her correcting their mistakes.
And there were still three days to go.
The lottery had already been a success. Luna was planning on happily distributing the school's initial portion of the total in the morning, getting the students out of her mane, tail and incidentally, her closet, where three had been hiding with two playing dress-up and the third getting her favorite robe down to something filly-sized by tearing apart most of it. She had solved the problem -- and (this was also important) done so when her sister had not. She should have been feeling satisfied with herself. Thrilled. Delighted that the eternal question -- the one she knew Tia kept asking -- was that much closer to being answered once and for all.
But she didn't feel as good as she felt she should have. She felt -- nervous.
Worried.
Feeling that things were -- getting out of control.
"What was the day's total out of Cloudsdale?" she asked a new accountant, one who had been added to her original team to help handle the sheer overflow of numbers.
"Two hundred and eighty-seven bits shy of half a million, Princess," came her reply.
And for the first time, she was scared.
On the fifth day, she postponed some of her early morning appearances, caught up on a few precious hours of sleep, just about emptied both Solar and Lunar kitchens of wake-up juice and, thus temporarily reinforced, teleported to the Canterlot Archives and spent some instructive time with the census data. It only took a dozen columns of numbers to invite the fears deeper into her psyche and half that again before they established their own living space and began inviting friends over to party.
She didn't know the names, occupations, and incomes of every pony purchasing the tickets, of course. But she did know which towns and cities were poorer than others overall, the lower-earning areas clearly marked in the census data for anypony who cared to read the numerical map. And those regions were spending more on tickets than the wealthier ones. Not just more in proportion to their income -- more, period. Those with less money to risk -- had been risking the most of it. Comparing the night-to-night numbers showed those percentages were moving up.
Ponyville didn't skew things so much for those numbers: the poorer were also the least likely to travel, stuck buying tickets in and near their homes unless they were capable of high-speed flight or had a safe teleport arrival point -- something which was becoming harder to come by in an extremely crowded Ponyville. (There were many reports of teleporters coming into their always-empty destination space there to find it very surprisingly filled, generally with another pony. Recoil -- the random-direction movement which resulted when two solids thankfully refused to merge, a movement which got faster the farther the teleporter traveled to find enough space for a pony to arrive in -- had been occurring all over the town, with numerous injuries to both those displaced and those they inadvertently came to a ramming stop against.) Take out those who could manage the feats or who had friends willing to help and the data still held true -- numbers which said too much money was being spent. Money ponies couldn't afford to spend.
And that was the tip of the iceberg. Work hours were being lost. Ponies who should have been at their jobs were standing in line instead. Reports of those who had been paid for standing in line and run instead were going to spread, and that would keep ponies from trusting others who made that offer legitimately. There had been fights as thousands of bits had been handed to a friend who would do the waiting -- fights which had begun just after a question had been raised about how good a friend that pony was, how far they could be trusted. It meant more and more ponies stood in the endless lines themselves, and those ponies still weren't laboring at anything except daydreams. What was that doing to the economy? As a short-term dip in the road, it could be overcome by itself, but there were still nearly three whole days left and some of the areas were now selling under Moon as well...
Because of the lottery, new wealth was not being generated. Existing wealth was being redistributed. Yes, enough had gone to the school, she would make the presentation herself just as soon as she left the Archives. But no matter how she worked the math, the fact remained that several million bits -- eight digits, was there any chance it could reach nine? -- would suddenly be in the hooves of a single pony. Eight digits changing owners that way could be borne. Nine... surely not nine, but... that would be a noticeable hiccup. And what would that do to the recipient's life? How would it change the economy in that pony's hometown? Could the money be gotten back out into the world to do the job it needed to perform, or would it be thrown around in a blaze of waste, parties and strange indulgences and gifts to those who were only friends as long as the gifts kept coming? Even that would even things out a little, yes -- but what would it ultimately do to the pony who won?
There were stories of ponies hauling cartloads of bits to their chosen town hall. Few ponies had that many free bits to their names. Had they withdrawn personal savings from the banks? College funds for their fillies and colts? What would happen if too many ponies took out all of their money at the same time? Luna already knew the answer to that one.
Had some gotten the bits by selling what they already possessed? Like their own homes and land? Because surely when they won (and they knew that they would win, they dreamed of winning, she had been through a hundred of those in the nightscape, walked through total lack of doubt after absolute certainty until the baseless faith had made her want to weep), they could use the tiniest portion of their victory funds to buy it all back...
And then she was weeping, large tears splashing against the columns of figures and blurring the ink.
"I thought you might be here," came from behind her. It was gentle. It was loving. It cared about her deeply and never wanted to see her hurt. It was just about the last thing Luna wanted to hear.
"Come to laugh, sister?" Luna bitterly said. "Come to boast about how you knew better all along, but simply wanted to see if your inferior could manage to destroy the country all on her own?"
Celestia sighed. "You know me better than that, Luna." Sadly, "I hope."
"We are a herd species, by and large," Luna declared to the wall in front of her. She could not turn to face her sibling. "Where we lead, others often follow -- and not always directed by thought. They go to a place because those in charge of the herd said it was safe to travel -- and then two-thirds charge over the cliff while the remainder are dashed against the rocks by the updraft. Why didn't you stop me?"
"Because -- I didn't know the full extent of it," Celestia told her. "I tried something like this seven centuries ago, Luna, in a time of financial crisis. We were having more trouble with the griffons -- a new kind of war: not battle, but economic. They had tried to purchase huge amounts of land, take over businesses from afar and pull strings that way... The genius on their side... I would have very much liked to have him as a friend. He saw things others did not. But he used those things against us, and it very nearly worked. I grew desperate. So I made my own 'lottery', although not under that name and not quite in the same way. Close enough, though. Close enough... and all I did was make things worse. Enough so that -- well, I did not lose the war for us, but the degree of battle I did throw away through my idea cost us much. In time, we won. But part of that was invention and some very innovative ponies on our side, and at least part of the rest -- was simply outliving the opposition. When his voice was gone, most of the griffons reverted to form within two generations, and the few who still followed his ways did not have enough power to dominate. I have his books, by the way -- the originals, with his notes. He left them to me as his honored opponent. You should read them..."
"I will be sure to reference them within my featured chapter concerning How I Destroyed Equestria." The bitterness was not diminishing, and the fear was raising a family and had intentions of adding an extension to the home. "It still does not answer my question, sister. Clearly you knew there were consequences -- and you still let me go ahead with this horrible idea. Why didn't you stop me?!?"
They waited for the rumbles of echoing thunder to die away.
"In part," Celestia finally said, "because I wanted to believe you could seal the flaws where I had been unable to. And that my little ponies had grown up to the point where this would not happen. This is actually better than the first time, Luna: fewer of them are completely invested in it -- and I mean emotionally, although financially is becoming part of it for some. Perhaps in a few hundred years more, we would have been ready... I let it happen because I had hope. Forgive one sister for believing in another."
Luna couldn't even forgive herself. "And because you have a plan?" she challenged. "One of your miraculous all-seeing plans which you formulated as soon as you heard my mad idea, standing ready to save the country from me?"
She could hear the head shake, the soft almost-sound of the mane's energy interacting with the air. "No."
And then she could hear her own hope dying. "...no?"
"My plan -- is to see what you will do," Celestia told her. "It is not such a large dip as it might appear, Luna. It is having an effect -- but you may be exaggerating it in your own pain. If all else fails, or even if it becomes somewhat worse, we will recover."
"As a country!" Luna shouted. "What about ponies channeling all they have wrought in their lives into a single foolish dream! Bits they will never have back! Homes now belonging to others! Existences destroyed -- you can argue they did it in their own foolishness, but what fool of a Princess opened the door and gave them a place to be idiots in? Do we treat my idea as a natural disaster and empty out that portion of the budget? Even that money may not be enough. I am killing ponies, Tia, killing them even as I sit here and look at the numbers which represent their lives draining away into a pit I dug for them..."
She was crying again. She wanted to stop. She hated crying in front of her sister. Hated feeling as if she had changed from one-half of the Diarchy into a foolish filly weeping over a mistake only the youngest would make -- especially when she was sure that was exactly what had happened.
"One will win and all others will lose," she whispered. "And when that happens, even the winner may not have a country worth being such in. Tia, help me... please..."
There was a long silence. The fear invited it in and began an affair.
Finally, "Since the Return, Luna, you have insisted on taking back your half of the throne. You have told me you wish the return of your responsibilities -- all of them. That you can handle being a ruler again. And to some degree -- I have held you back. I know and admit that -- now. I certainly did it for all of the first year and denied every moment. Since then, it has been a trickle flowing, on the very slow way back towards becoming a rushing river -- but it has not reached that point yet. And throughout, you have insisted that you are ready to rule again as Night, besides me as Day. You have told me I was holding you back, and you have been right. The lottery is an idea produced by Night. Gaming is the domain of the Night Court, and you are in charge of that and all it contains."
Luna couldn't turn. Couldn't face her sibling. She simply stared at the wall and felt the tears stop, for they were no longer adequate to the task.
"This is your idea, and your project -- and with that come your consequences," the soft voice told her. "Your throne was the launching point. Yours will be the one to stop it."
And then Celestia was gone, leaving Luna alone in the Archives. Alone with the numbers. The damage, with more of it adding up every second with each fresh ticket vanished into a saddlebag and bits pushed across a desk by ponies who insisted that the government take their money.
The school was saved, as was her own precious privacy and the safety of the words in a diary made out in horrible fieldwriting using an ancient dialect she wasn't sure anypony except she and her sister could still read. Everything else...
She did not wish to be on the Moon again. Would never have wished for another (eternity) thousand years of submergence. But she knew that in a few days, tens of thousands of ponies and more would be wishing that on her.
And it was very nearly enough to make her agree with them.
She got through the presentation of the initial voucher to the school's president. Luna wasn't sure how. She had a vague memory of having smiled in what must have been the right places along with the sounds of cheering children, plus confiscating her favorite foreleg anklets from one particular student on the way out and giving that one a whisper about not only a letter to the parents, but personal visits and frequent checkups to see if any others were complaining of missing possessions. Those were the only things she retained from twenty minutes of pomp, circumstance, and self-loathing.
After that, she had canceled all of her Day Five personal appearances. The lottery was clearly doing well enough without her. She had no hope that it would slow down in her absence. It was alive now, it was breathing and racing and stealing the economic health of her land for its blood.
But she had come to the official counting room at night to find out what the tally on the damage looked like. At the time, she'd felt she had to. It had seemed to be a form of penance.
They had told her a second room had been taken for storing the bits. And it had overflowed into a third.
She'd given them permission to drain her private bath and use the empty pool. It had been the last words she'd had strength for before she'd slumped off to bed, too soul-weary to stay awake through her own night. And then she'd found two sixth-years in that bed.
In the end, she slept in the Lunar Courtyard, with the illusion of the full moon shining down on her.
She didn't want to go back. She wondered if her sister would send her anyway.
Day Six found her back in Ponyville. She had to see.
She also wasn't a fool -- at least, not for things which would not destroy her beloved country -- and had the Lunar Guards prepare her carriage and fly her in. She had heard reports of the town's condition, and knew there wasn't even a single point in the low atmosphere which was still safe for a teleport, not as clogged as the skies were with visiting pegasi. The journey hadn't taken long.
From above, she could make out the buildings. The river. The dam. Major features of the landscape. What she couldn't really see was the ground. Dirt, grass, and roads were blocked out by a slow-moving river comprised from thousands of hues. She had to ask the carriage to dip before she recognized the flow as being comprised of pony bodies.
In her entire life (excluding the abeyance), she had seen five of the incredibly rare metallic coats, and three of those had been in the same family. She saw eight before the carriage cleared the first bridge.
There were several griffons. Multiple zebras. At one point, she almost thought she made out a kudu, and they hadn't even asked Canterlot for an embassy yet. Appleloosa and the other desert settlements had reported buffalo joining the lines as early as Day Three. Albaneigh claimed to have gotten a Diamond Dog, who had quietly stood in line and kept the peace until she left with five tickets of her own. Town halls were making change for currency nopony had ever seen before. If all the tales had included every detail, the only known intelligent non-monster species staying out of it was the dragons, and getting them to part with a single bit even for a chance at tens of millions of them (with an increasing chance of nine digits and ascending -- she was afraid to look) was very nearly a lost cause unless a single participant was guaranteed a rigged game with only one dragon playing, no other tickets having been sold, and a guarantee of extra payment just for the trouble the dragon had to go through in showing up to collect. That level of greed meant keeping what you had, although getting what others had was just as much fun and Luna was now also worrying about anti-scale security for the winner.
As the carriage approached the town hall, the flow began to divide into twelve recognizable lines. All sorts of items had been used to create path-separating barriers. Emergency-made fences. Furniture. Several ponies were standing so still that they almost must have been hired to do so. Some very awkwardly-shaped pinkish shield spells which had to be renewed roughly every thirty seconds: they really weren't meant to work as anything other than domes or anchored blockages of openings and her sister's student hadn't figured out how to keep them existing as free-standing planes of force. The largest pegasus stallion she'd ever seen hovered (somehow) over the whole thing and made interesting sounds at anypony who tried to cut in line.
Ponyville had been calling out for help on several fronts. Food for the visitors -- the later letters had cut to the chase and gone with 'invaders' -- that had been a major concern, and inflation had nearly driven the price of a simple apple past that of a gourmet meal before emergency shipments had arrived to ease the burden. Luna suspected Applejack had been having an extremely good time for a while, although she wasn't going through one now: the junior princess just made out the hat from the air and eventually figured out the earth pony was in the middle of giving three fillies the coat-bleaching chewout of their lives. The youngsters seemed to have been charging for the right to step behind a tree and use it as an emergency outhouse. Luna wondered how it compared to the charges for actual bathroom access. She'd seen that letter too. Twilight Sparkle had been very busy with her writing, although the alicorn wasn't sure how the librarian had found the time between desperate attempts to get the planar field working.
(Manehattan had somehow gotten wind of the thing and written Luna directly, protesting that their status as having the most expensive residences on the continent for the smallest amount of square yardage was fairly earned and they wanted it back right now.)
They avoided the tent cities.
They flew over what other ponies had decided to treat as a free outhouse, and not quickly enough.
Luna had thought about canceling ticket sales outright, but had given up on the idea in a hurry after running it through several ponies' nightscapes. It was an easy trick for her magic: wait for a dream's natural conclusion, then place the inception of a new one. Canterlot has called for an end to fresh offerings of green and gold: what do you think happens next? Link a dozen or so of those dreaming ponies to each other (which was much more complex and even she couldn't keep it intact for long, especially without letting all of them know that there were multiple true minds in their shared nightscape) and see what they agreed on. What they had kept agreeing on was riot. Stop sales and the combined forces of all the Guards might not be enough to keep order in even a single city: spread that across the continent and all was lost. Call off the lottery itself and things might be worse than that.
The reporter who had been behind her when Twilight had spoken of Pinkie's prediction had gone into hiding. Luna really couldn't blame her and was in fact silently advising her to stay there for a good long time.
She was tired of directing her field to enchant ever-larger vats of ink.
She could no longer bear to look at the figures as they streamed in from every settled zone, accompanied by huge weights of bits which the Guards could barely lift.
She closed her eyes and saw the history texts of future generations with her name featured as sole cause of The Crash, although those texts tended to have a copyright date two centuries hence because it would be that long before anypony recovered enough to consider the reinvention of paper.
One will win and all others will lose.
None will win and all will lose.
Celestia thinks I can fix this. Wants me to fix this. No plan. She won't intervene. I'm on my own.
She won't save me.
She won't save them.
I am not fit to rule.
I have no right to be here.
I should still be --
The thought almost came -- but not quite. She still was not that far gone. Even at that point, Luna still felt it was something she would never wish for. But now she could feel the first creeping bits of doubt...
One will win and all others will lose.
None will win and all will lose.
No part of that would save anypony.
All lose...
...all lost...
It was the seventh day, and that day was rapidly approaching its end.
Luna had an extremely accurate internal clock, but that timepiece was only capable of timing two things: the point when it was time to raise the Moon, the moment she had to lower it for the last bit of drop before the appearance of Sun. By flipside definition, she always knew how far off sunrise and sunset were when she cared to think about such things, but it generally wasn't much of a concern given the amount of Sun she normally took a personal interest and presence in. This day was somewhat different. She was keeping a very close mental eye on that ticking clock -- a clock which seemed to be moving far faster than it should.
Much of the waking day had been spent in gathering her field energy for one gigantic push. The Revealer was a minor spell: there were few simpler, and even the most unskilled of unicorns could generally master it. It took almost no energy to perform: the weakest of fields could do the trick a thousand times or more before the smallest droplet of sweat appeared within a coat. But multiply 'almost none' when taken over an area the size of a standard scroll and then multiply that by a continent and beyond... Some of the tickets had been purchased by those coming from outside Equestria's borders, and they would need to be Revealed as well. Total up the square acreage and one of Luna's fainter hopes for the night was that she make it off the Lunar Courtyard's stage before she collapsed. At some point under Moon, she was going to go down: picking when and where might be beyond her control. But she had to make it off that stage and into relative isolation if she could. The press could not see her fall. Citizens should not witness it.
Her mouth had written a voucher her horn could just barely cash, even on that first day.
But she had to see it to the end. There was no other choice. And to that extent, she had spent the day in pulling together every bit of strength she had. The Revealer would take nearly all of it -- and she would need more than it took.
Hours spent in that gathering state. She could not strengthen her field: no pony could without the use of dangerous drugs or -- measures best left ignored. But she could save the energy she used in a normal day and night -- and to that extent, had asked her sister for a single favor, one which had been silently granted: to take back the Moon for a little while. Celestia, who had not spoken to her since the meeting at the Archives, had simply nodded, perhaps realizing how much strength this normally-minor trick was about to use. Probably not guessing at all of it.
Luna strained for hours to prepare, did nothing else -- and finally, as the Sun was being lowered, stepped out into the Lunar Courtyard as eclipse faded into full moon, corona to aura, the stars emerging to serve as her ultimate audience.
The Courtyard was packed, of course. Dozens of reporters, hundred of ordinary citizens on the ground with more in the sky. All of them seemed to have tickets. Some were carrying hundreds.
This was the point of first Reveal. For this night (the youngest of nights) in Equestria, the Lunar Courtyard was the single most important place in Equestria to be.
Luna stepped onto her marble platform, felt the silver of the border as it clicked against her hooves. The crowd -- and especially the press -- was uncommonly silent. Perhaps it was the fact that her field was already swirling about her horn and it was at the absolute limits of a primary corona, threatening to go double with even the slightest bit of extra energy. Or it could have just been because she was the only pony in the world who could give them what they wanted now.
They were giving her the attention due to ruling royalty. She wished she didn't have it.
"Welcome," she greeted them. "I will tell you this before we begin: I had not expected this to be such an -- occasion." This got her a burst of laughter which she in no way deserved, including some from certain members of the press which would normally be in no way sincere -- but even they had tickets. "I realize that some of you are here to file the first stories on the winning numbers and try to track down the winner -- presuming, of course, that it is not somehow you." More laughter. "And I do realize that as soon as the numbers themselves are revealed, many of you will be flying and teleporting off to bring the word to the settled zones as quickly as possible. I will not be offended at my sudden loss of audience, I assure you. However, I will ask that you not head out immediately. As we are being very careful about this process, the numbers will have to be verified. Once that is done, I will cast the Revealer -- and then in time, Equestria will know who won. Should that be one of you -- well, will you not at least stay a moment so that you can celebrate with us?"
Yes, the crowd was definitely in the mood to laugh. Ponies who thought they had a good chance to become multimillionaires were often in good humor.
"Now as you might imagine, it takes a tiny amount of effort to Reveal every ticket in the world," Luna continued. "I would prefer to keep my focus in one place, thank you -- even if that one place is everywhere. So I have asked a friend to conduct the actual drawing of the numbers for me. She will do so by mouth, not with magic, and thus there will be no claim of spells tampering with the results. I have been assured by many that she is the single most suitable pony to provide a random drawing, as they claim she is the most random pony any of them know. Fillies and gentlecolts --" she had never liked that greeting, she felt it demeaned by lowering the ages of the addressed, but there was nothing else "-- the Element of Laughter, Miss Pinkie Pie."
She pronked in from stage left, curls bouncing. "Hi, everypony!" the baker called out, the magical enhancements of the Courtyard boosting and carrying her voice -- not that it truly needed the help. "I'm glad to be here tonight of all nights especially! And yes, I'm honored that Princess Luna asked me to do this and no, I won't be taking any questions right now, and I don't even know where I would take them or which pony I should take them to, so just keep them right where they are and maybe they can take each other out later. Questions have to date, right? Do you think they mostly date each other, or do they go out with exclamation points and semicolons? Because I haven't seen a semicolon in forever... Anyway, hi! How's everypony feeling tonight? Do you all feel -- lucky?"
The audience broke out of the collective daze frequently seen in those listening to the baker for the first time as their reeling minds managed to pick up on the last word, which they applauded on general principle.
"Good, because I don't!" Pinkie declared. "But I didn't buy a ticket, so I don't have to worry about luck. Somepony had to not get one, right? So everypony else can have my lottery luck, although I don't know how much anypony's going to get after you all divide it up evenly... It sure won't be a lot of luck. Or a lottery. I don't think you can even manage an 'l'. But if it helps... Princess?"
Luna, who had been starting to feel a little dazed herself, forced her mind all the way back into focus before losing any of the preparation work. "Yes?"
"Whenever you're ready!"
Luna nodded. "Well, the Sun has certainly set, so this would seem to be the promised time... Now if everypony will look to the right, you will see -- yes, there it is. Yes, there are a lot of balls in the vat and yes, it is more than large enough for a pony to be in there with them. Miss Pie will in fact be jumping into the vat and selecting the balls by mouth from whatever depth she chooses. Seven balls in total will be selected, and those will make up the winning combination of numbers. Those of you with magic may feel free to take five minutes and inspect them with your fields, but I will ask you not to touch the balls in any way. I apologize to those who would use other means, but I hope you will understand that we cannot have physical interference with the lottery equipment -- and all magic used to examine will be negated at the conclusion of the inspection period, just in case somepony very far away tried to sneak something else in. If anypony cares to indulge...?"
Nine ponies took her up on the offer. Two used the chance to try and add their own personal touches and were subsequently removed.
Eventually, after all lingering traces had been negated out and the vat was once again showing as magic-null, the true show was prepared for the road.
"Here we go!" Luna announced with a confidence she was in no way actually feeling. "Miss Pie -- in with you!"
Pinkie jumped. The lip of the glass vat was high, but she was able to vault it with a single pronking bound -- and the inward curve of that upper edge kept balls from flying out on impact. The vat was large enough for all the balls and perhaps three ponies of Pinkie's size: with but one within, she was able to practically swim inside it, mouth open, eyes closed, those details and other bits of her body intermittently visible through the glass. Various semi-muffled sounds emerged as she worked her way past ball after ball, concentrating on finding that perfect random moment...
The curls broke the surface, and a ball was spit out.
A member of Luna's staff field-caught it. "Fourteen!" the mare cried out. "The first number is fourteen!"
And one by one, they emerged. Twenty-three. Six. Eleven. Eighty-two. Thirty-eight. Four. All were verified.
Pinkie had done her part: the earth pony bounced out of the vat, grinning widely. It was Luna's turn.
"You have the winning numbers!" Luna declared. "Now we simply have to see which pony owns them! Those of you sitting close to the front might wish to shield your eyes..."
Luna concentrated. Focused. Pushed.
With the Lunar Guards standing by, watching the audience for sudden movements, as a hidden shield spell went up in front of the stage to intercept anything thrown with the intent of starting the backlash created by hitting her horn while she was working at this level, the junior Princess used her power. All of it. The primary corona went double as the dark blue base became blue-white. Then triple, the energy in direct contact with her horn blazing the same pure white shade as her eyes --
-- all at once can't miss a single ticket anywhere if I miss even one just have to stay conscious long enough to get off the stage and whatever happens after that happens pull it all together every possible fraction of it and then let it all go --
-- every last thaum of magical energy Luna possessed burst from her horn, a dark-blue semi-sphere shot through with stars, radiating through the Courtyard in a split-second before moving to the world beyond, passing through audience and surroundings as if they did not exist -- but leaving the tiniest traces behind on the tickets, which sparkled as the silver patch on every last one vanished...
Luna did not reel. She did not go to all four knees. She stayed upright with eyes returned to blue focused on the audience, and didn't know how she'd done it. But she was vaguely aware of the stars in her mane fading out, and felt the tip of her tail converting back into normal hair. She didn't have much time...
...but she wasn't going to need much.
Ultimately, all it really took was the moment she had required for that observation. Because just as she finished it --
"-- I won!" somepony in the audience screamed. A reporter -- one of Murdocks, the one who had questioned her on that very first day. "Fourteen, twenty-three, six, eleven, eighty-two, thirty-eight, and four! In that exact order! I won! I'm the richest pony in Equestria!!!"
There was a very brief moment of silence, just long enough for Luna to feel another strand change back. And then --
"-- no, you're not!" came from the back of the Courtyard. "Because I won!"
"Well, so did I!"
"Me too!"
"And me!"
"I've got forty winning tickets! Beat that!"
Those words and variations on them were coming from hundreds of pony throats --
-- all of which went silent at the same time --
-- and then came the loudest chorus of Luna's life, with much of the volume seeming to originate from well beyond the Courtyard.
"ALL THESE TICKETS HAVE THE SAME NUMBERS ON THEM!"
Luna looked at Pinkie Pie. Checked with the members of her staff. All of the latter had mustered very practiced expressions of shock, while the baker wore a look of such surprise that anypony would have thought Discord had just conjured a sky full of vanilla milk just for her personal discomfort.
And then the younger of the Diarachy unleashed the other thing she'd been working on all day under Sun. She blinked. A blink of innocent, bewildered confusion.
"I -- I do not know what happened," she declared. "The Revealer -- it has never been spread so far before, with so much power behind it directed at such quantities of enchanted ink..." The next words were necessary. "I am sorry, everypony -- I am truly sorry, but -- I must leave. I have to take my staff and investigate. If we begin looking into this immediately, we should know what went wrong within an hour. If you will all excuse me -- the most important thing is that we work out the error and find out how to fix it..."
And with that said, she left the stage, her Guards flanking her in such a way that the reverting portions of her tail were hidden from public view, and the pegasi among them quickly went aloft to block all clear lines of sight and photography on her mane.
They got back into the castle proper within seconds as the confused babble tried to follow: it was blocked by the closing and locking of the secure door. "All right," she told them, with a special nod of thanks towards Pinkie. "Stall the required amount of time, and then go back with the supposed findings. You have the script... just follow it and any necessary branches no matter what they say or do." Her mane went limp, with some of the light blue hair falling in front of her right eye: she regarded it with dazed interest. "You know, I was never very happy with that color..."
Her knees immediately decided as a four-vote unit that if she could be unhappy with her mane, then they were perfectly justified in resenting the work they had to do in holding her up all day.
Luna collapsed.
She awoke in her own bed, with the sixth-years having been removed. The first thing she saw was her sister's eyes. It took a few seconds to reconcile the sheer amount of concern in them. The raw quantity of worry -- and beyond. The last time Luna had seen that degree of fear in Celestia with her own eyes...
...Luna hadn't been able to truly call those eyes her own any more.
"Fifteen hours," Celestia whispered. "Fifteen hours of doing no more than lying there with the occasional twitch, Luna... drink this, please..." The sunlight of her sister's field brought the water to Luna's dry lips. "Just drink..."
It took a few minutes before Luna felt capable of moving into more of a sitting position. And at that, her assumption turned out to be wrong. Her neck came up and her head made its best attempt at falling off. "Oh, ow... Tia, I think I may have overdone it..."
"You think?" A very light laugh, deeply tinged with fading terror. "If it had just been the Revealer, Luna, that would have been bad enough over that kind of distance with so many targets. Even the smallest spell can exhaust if spread that far. But what you did..."
"It was the only thing I could think of," Luna sighed. Her mane and tail still felt oddly abnormal. Like hair. "Did I get them all?"
Her older sister nodded. "Every ticket in Equestria and beyond showed the same numbers. And that is what nearly sent you out for far longer than fifteen hours."
"All the ink had the same resonance..." Luna wearily tried to explain. "It had already been touched by my magic once: a touch of feel might have still been there to work with. I was sure that when the Revealer reached the tickets, I could couple another spell with it. Move the printing into a new shape..."
"So that every pony won," Celestia gently concluded. "And therefore, none of them did -- or truly lost. How did you come up with it?"
"Pinkie Pie," Luna answered. "Your student mentioned something the Bearer of Laughter had said -- something odd. That the baker knew if she played, she would win -- and therefore, she did not play. When I went back to Ponyville on the sixth day, I sought Pinkie out and asked her what it meant. She was unable to tell me. All she understood was that to play meant victory and triumph was a negative. And there was the possibility that she would have had the one true ticket and the changes to her life would have meant tragedy -- but her? With such good friends to help her through the transition? That did not make any sense. And the only other way it could work was if by winning -- she got less money than she started with..." Luna took some of the offered hay, chewed it slowly, got it swallowed on the third attempt. "The rest...?"
"Not quite yet," Celestia told her -- but the smile gave her part of the answer. "The balls?"
"Rigged -- but not by magic. The Lunar Kitchen flavored a few of them. I memorized the numbers I would use and spent most of the day picturing them before releasing my working, then trusted Pinkie's senses of smell and taste to sort out the proper ones and confirm my choices with the actual balls. Searching by mouth has certain advantages. And if you are satisfied -- again, the rest?"
"Also worked," Celestia confirmed. "You look rather foolish in some of the press articles, I fear... many have been less than kind to you, and I don't think you need to make many guesses before determining who. But after the briefing your staff gave, the press believes you changed the numbers by accident -- and they accepted it because it makes you look bad. Those ponies -- and others -- with tickets have been bringing them back to the town halls and receiving refunds, minus the percentage already taken by the school. For the most part, they have accepted their losses as the cost of a game of chance -- and the ones who are protesting the loudest... well, it is amazing how many of those also wrote the articles. With the aid of your staff, I have spoken to a number of banks and other entities, and will be speaking to more. All who played lost a little, but none lost everything. Those who made foolish sales... they will have their own back in time, and perhaps be a little wiser for the experience. You saved all of them, Luna -- even though you sacrificed some of what you had regained to do so."
Luna sighed. "In the end, it was all I could think of -- which means I have to know: what was your own plan?"
"My plan?"
"You had one. You always have one. Should I have failed -- what was it?"
Celestia looked at her younger sister. Brought her right front hoof up, touched the soft physicality of Luna's temporarily-reverted mane. "Did you research your idea before you announced it?"
"Of course I did. I already told you that, sister. There were no signs of it in the Archives. If I'd known it could lead to disaster, I never would have gone through with it."
"And when I told you I had tried something similar -- didn't you wonder why there had been no proof of that?"
"Yes... but..."
The Solar Princess closed her eyes. "I was humiliated. I did not want to be reminded of it -- and the amazing thing about historians, little sister, is that they generally remember the things told to them by those willing to provide the best funding and guarantee of publication. It escaped the Archives because I wanted it to. I came up with ways to bring the country back after the damage my version of the lottery had done. But I wasn't able to stop that damage. My plan -- was to hope you were better than I was. Because I kept thinking about all the things I had tried and failed with before, and they were all I could think of at all..."
Luna closed her eyes, and could not bring herself to open them again. "You -- were waiting -- to see if I could succeed? Where you had failed? That was the whole of the plan?"
A simple, plain "Yes," that held only the tiniest fraction of the pain behind it.
"But -- what if I hadn't? I know you thought the damage to the country could have been repaired, but the damage to individuals...!"
The gentle hoof shifted her mane again. "I had faith in you, sister."
Luna didn't know where the whispered word had emerged from. She just knew it carried the weight of a millennium borne on three simple letters. "...why?"
"Because in some ways," Celestia told her, "you're a better ruler than I am." Her older sister got up. "But for the love of everything under Sun and Moon, Luna -- if you ever happen to see the shadows left behind in the Archives from where I took away the light sources -- please wait at least a week before you ask me about why I banned tulips..."
She left.
The words stayed behind.
It took more than a moon for Luna to begin living the event down, even if the papers were only able to keep the mockery going for ten days. (Two of those passed while she was still recovering, and she only ventured out when the stars had returned to her mane and tail again.) After that, most of the citizens began to forgive her -- and those who did not never had to begin with: she tried not to be concerned about them and most of the time, almost managed to succeed.
Much of her free time was spent in Ponyville, helping to restore the casual damage done by the temporary overpopulation. It was another form of penance, as was finding ways to discretely channel part of her own funds to those whose losses had been hardest to bear. It was paying for their foolishness, she knew, and it would make it harder for them to learn their lesson -- but since they had almost paid for her own stupidity, she felt it was a fair trade in the end.
In her secret heart, she still felt the lottery could work: a legal limit of a single ticket purchased per player, perhaps, and no more than four draws per year with investment counseling for the winner. But the time wasn't right to propose that, and wouldn't be until something happened which required the revenue with no other source available. Say, the students blowing up most of the Gifted School again.
So at least a few days after the end of the break.
In theory.
And Luna got Celestia a bouquet of tulips for her birthday, all of which had to be smuggled into the country.
It had seemed like the thing to do at the time.
