'King of Wishful Thinking'
Fetchit sure was taking his sweet time.
Blueblood paced to and fro along his Saddle Arabian rug, giving another idle glance at the grand old grandfather clock. Three minutes past seven. This was a whole three minutes he had been without his morning Darjeerling, customarily brought to him on a silver tray by his servant Fetchit, who was continuing to grow more and more absent with each passing second.
Taking pause, the unicorn noble reflected on the use of the word 'servant'. That was perhaps a poor choice to describe Fetchit; true, he did serve Blueblood, but calling him a servant implied a more menial laborious routine. Something out in the fields, perhaps, tilling and sowing and harvesting and whatever else it was that industrious earth ponies did with their time. But neither could Fetchit be correctly bestowed the title of butler, as he had not the formal training nor discretion of a well-versed butler.
Blueblood plucked a phoenix quill that sat in the inkwell on his escritoire, and wrote a brief note on the first sheaf of parchment in a brief stack: Inquire on well-versed butlers.
Fetchit was more of a lackey, although that word left Blueblood with a poor taste in his mouth with the more criminal undertones conveyed. There was certainly nothing criminal about Fetchit -- not a single piece of silverware or candlestick-holder had mysteriously disappeared during Fetchit's time on Blueblood's estate -- and Blueblood would never dream of taking on such a ruffian low-life under any circumstances. The same went for the term 'underling', innocuous enough to on the surface seem completely neutral so naturally became the word of choice to describe rogues and rapscallions in the hire of more aspiring thugs. He was neither a valet nor a steward, as he performed none of the tasks typically associated with either of those two positions -- well, perhaps not none of the tasks, but some of the finer points of Fetchit's conduct did leave something to be desired. There was 'toady', of course, which perhaps would have been the word other nobles would use for Fetchit (and only when Blueblood was out of earshot), but it would be unkind for an employer to demean his employee with such a term and would also reflect extremely poorly on Blueblood himself.
Four minutes past the hour now. Where could he possibly be?
There was a word that sat right upon the tip of his tongue, a quite stellar and dynamite word indeed, if he could just pluck it off like an infuriating hair -- but much like the theoretical proverbial hair it proved quite difficult to dislodge. The word 'floozy' kept coming to mind, which was completely wrong, and doubly and perhaps triply wrong for Fetchit, but perhaps it was somewhere down the correct path--
"Flunkey?" a voice supplied.
"Yes!" Blueblood exclaimed. "Yes, that's exactly it! That's--"
He had been about to say the word I was looking for, but suddenly he realized that not only should he be alone in his private quarters but that he had spoken none of his ruminations aloud. The violently pink mare that had mysteriously appeared upon his four-poster bed, bouncing on her hooves like an excited filly, did not seem to care that his train of thought therefore should have been impossible to read.
"Hi there!" She bounded over to him, hailing him with a voice as high as a whine of the air let out of a balloon and as sweet as spun sugar. "You're Blueblood, right? Normally I'd bust out my welcome wagon, but that would kinda silly since you don't need to be welcomed into your own house, and even if you did I'm sure your earth pony friend would do it for you. Plus, I left my welcome wagon with him. I'm pretty sure he can take good care of it even if he's never actually seen a welcome wagon before, since I only put cake in all the parts that are supposed to have cake this time."
She stared at him with enormous eyes and an even more enormous smile. Blueblood responded to the only things he was able to pluck out of her hurricane of words. "Prince Blueblood," he corrected her, "and just how did you find your way into my chambers?"
"Oh, it was easy," the pink sugar balloon mare said with the wave of a hoof, "and that's actually what I came to discuss with you, Bluey." She produced a scroll from somewhere within her explosion of a mane and let it unfurl across his rug.
"You will address me as Prince," he said, using the firm tone one often needed to employ with wayward earth ponies, "for I can trace my lineage directly to Princess Celestia herself."
He had been about to add that she may not under any circumstances call him anything so familiar and common as 'Bluey' ever again without him rousing the Royal Guard, but the pink mare interrupted him.
"No you can't!" she blathered, still beaming. "I was looking into the genealogy records that go back all the way to since before there was an Equestria, and did you know that genes and jeans don't have anything to do with each other even though they sound the same but you don't write them the same? Except if you get the good genes that let you get the good jeans when you go shopping for clothes! That's funny, huh? Well, maybe not to you because I don't think I see a single pair of jeans or even a single jean in this whole gigantic house. Anyway, your genes -- not your jeans, because you don't have any -- don't say that you're related to the Princess at all! I saw your name in the records and I remembered you from the worst Grand Galloping Gala ever and I said to myself, 'Self, wasn't this pony saying he was a nephew of Princess Celestia's?' Not that you're a direct nephew but she's more like your great-great-great-great-great-great-great--" She paused to take an enormous inhalation. "--Great-great-great-great-grand-aunt one or two dozen times removed through marriage. And then I said, 'Self, I wouldn't want to look silly saying I was something that I'm not all the time, like the Princess of the Candy Kingdom or a walrus or something,' so I thought you would want to know as much as I did! Aren't you excited?"
Blueblood spluttered. This was outrage! Scandal! Heresy! How dare this ne'er-do-well cast aspersions on his ancestry! "Now see here," he managed, "I can show you precisely in the family tree where--"
"Oh, you don't need to. I found it myself." The bubblegum mare prodded a section midway up the scroll. She had highlighted a connection between two names. With what seemed like bright green crayon. And a couple of buttons and a smiling yellow sticker, like the scroll were some inane dolt's scrapbook.
"See here? It says here that Regalia married Noblesse one-hundred and thirty-one years, four months, and nine days ago, and their son had a son who had a daughter who had three sons and the second one was your father, while Regalia's mother was the daughter of--"
Blueblood stopped her before she could step all the way back up the tree to the Princess. "You ninny," he seethed, exasperated, "that shows I am of royal descent!"
"Buuut, if you look here in the footnotes..." She leaped all the way to the end of the scroll, where many lines of fine printing explained the more complex wrinkles in the ancestry. "...You'll see that Noblesse and Regalia's son wasn't their biological son. He wasn't delivered in a hospital, but on their front steps in a basket with a note that said to give him a good home. Isn't that neat? That you would go out in the morning to get the paper or some milk and there's a foal there too! You could give him some of the milk while you read the newspaper! It'd be perfect!"
Ice water flowed in his veins. Blueblood's hooves scrabbled over the surface of the scroll. He mouthed the words no blood relation, printed in miniscule text among the footnotes. If this were true, the line of royal inheritance would diverge away from him and off to the pony or ponies at the ends of the next eldest and truest descent.
And -- his head grew light and incoherent at the very notion -- he would no longer be a prince.
"But my title! My lands! My wealth! How...?"
"Yeah, I guess either your father or your grandmother or your great-grandfather or your great-great-grandfather wasn't too truthful about everything somewhere along the line. They'll be going to some other pony."
The pink life-destroying mare's manic grin filled his vision.
"But look on the bright side!" she mocked him. "You'll still have your earth pony friend to pal around with! Maybe he can show you how to fetch tea and put in a good word to the next pony who'll be living here and they'll hire you to do the tea-fetching so you can fetch the tea together!"
-/-
Morning sunlight crept through a gap in the blinds and highlighted a grease stain on the kitchenette counter. A blue unicorn added wiping the counter-top off with something more than an old napkin to her list of things to do around the tiny one-room apartment, but it was a low priority. It went below heating up some water for her morning cup of coffee (black, instant, and with the consistency of tar), below throwing out all the empty packages of hay fries and peanut butter crackers, and below starting another argument with her landlord about the little extras he kept adding to her monthly bill that he had assured Trixie were included in the rent.
Trixie should have known better than to trust renting an apartment from a pony with a stained singlet for a cutie mark. Trixie, were she still the Great and Powerful Trixie and not just merely Trixie the Magnificent, her new stage title striking what Trixie felt was a fair balance between ego and humility, might have half a mind to visit some great and powerful vengeance upon him. At the very least, some great and powerful threats to display Trixie's full magical prowess.
Trixie also had to stop referring to Trixie in the third person in Trixie's internal monologue.
A banging on the door and a shout of, "Hey, you!" from Trixie's shady landlord outside distracted her from concentrating on boiling the pot of water. She scowled, leaving the pot of lukewarm water and trotting to the door to give him a piece of her mind.
Before she could unload on him, he thrust a scroll tied with a deep purple velvety ribbon at her. "This came for you," he grunted.
"Trixie is capable of fetching her own mail," she said with a grimace, snatching the scroll from his hoof.
"It didn't come in the mail," he retorted as Trixie opened the scroll, "some messenger had it delivered. Right from Canterlot."
Trixie's mouth moved as she read the contents of the scroll, rapidly forming the words in bursts of short mutters. "...Office of Royal Lineage... due to an unnoticed clerical error, blah blah blah... hereby inform you, Trixie Lulamoon..." Trixie's eyes went wide as she read the next few lines, her voice growing louder and louder with each word. "...unbroken line of relation to Princess Celestia, most noble co-ruler of Equestria and she who guides the sun, thereby granting you rights to lands and deeds and..."
She spoke the final words in a whisper, barely able to believe them.
"...Royal title."
"So," Trixie's landlord said, his voice filled with skepticism, "what does that make you, huh? Some kind of princess or something?"
Princess Trixie Lulamoon. The Noble and Majestic Princess Trixie.
Trixie grinned. Trixie liked the sound of that.
Author's Note
You might not be aware of Stepin Fetchit, but he provides a little bit of additional context to (former) Prince Blueblood's ponyservant.
