The Problem

The Problem

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A unicorn in a white lab coat walked through the halls of the castle of the Crystal Empire. His face was stoic and calm, but his rushed movements and tensed posture drew more than a few curious glances from passersby. Held tightly at his side was a black briefcase with a complex lock on it. He navigated the halls quickly without pause and arrived at the Throne Room, where he was admitted inside after a brief exchange with the guards. He trotted down the faded pink carpet until he reached the Crystal Throne, where he stopped and bowed before the alicorn sitting upon it.

“Princess Cadance,” the pony murmured. “I have the results you requested.”

Cadance cringed at the grim look on the pony’s face. “How bad is it, Doctor Endo?”

Endo’s ears drooped. “Bad.” He hovered the clipboard over so she could see.

Cadance took the clipboard and looked over the figures. There was a fair bit of technical jargon on it, but the flatline on the graph told her all she needed to know.

“Zero?!” Cadance said. “Not even a tenth of a percent?”

Endo hung his head. “I’m sorry, Your Highness, but it appears there is a powerful magical obstruction in your oviducts. Conception will be impossible until it dissipates. I’m sorry, but for all intents and purposes, you’re completely barren.”

Cadance closed her eyes. She took several deep breaths, trying hard to keep her face from twisting.

“Damn you, Sombra…”

Endo nodded. “The signature of the magic matches his to the letter. A cruel parting gift of sorts, I’d imagine, though I can’t say for sure.”

Cadance almost screamed. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go! The most basic ability a pony had, and it’d been taken from her without them even knowing! Hadn’t she and her subjects been through enough already?!

“This isn’t fair,” she whispered.

Endo looked away. “I’m very sorry.”

The throne room rumbled ominously, and the air around Cadance thickened into a pink haze. A corona of white light formed around her eyes as she struggled to keep her composure.

Endo took a step back. “Your Highness…”

Cadance growled. The rumbling and haze gradually died away, but when she spoke again, her voice echoed with barely restrained power.

“Is Shining affected, as well?”

Endo gulped. “A-actually, there’s a b-bit of good news there.” He cleared his throat. “Our tests show that Prince Consort is completely healthy! No abnormalities of any kind. This leads us to believe that the effects are not contagious.”

Cadance let out a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank Celestia for that, at least…”

“Indeed.” Endo shifted back and forth. “I have to return to the lab now, but if I might be so bold, I would counsel you to inform Equestria of this. There are too many involved for it to be kept a secret for long, and I imagine your aunts would prefer to hear about it from you.”

Cadance slumped down in her throne. “Your counsel is noted, Doctor. Thank you.”

Doctor Endo bowed, then turned and left the throne room. As soon as he left, Cadance groaned and lowered her head into a facehoof.

“It just never ends, does it?”

Cadance sat alone in the ancient archives beneath the castle with her nose buried in a book with a green and red eye on the cover. To her left was a teetering stack of ancient tomes three times her height, and to her right was a massive pile of scrolls. She continued to pore over her current book a moment longer, before then snapped it shut and rubbed her temples.

“Ironic,” she muttered to herself. “The bastard did more research on love than anything else so how he’d know how to fight it. Heavens above, this is supposed to be my special talent, and even I didn’t know some of the things he found!”

The Mad King Sombra had been a lot of things: violent, tyrannical, sadistic, power-hungry, devious… but he was also brilliant. His notes were methodical and detailed, building off of base concepts and formulas that even left Cadance scratching her head. It was depressing to think how much good he might’ve done had he not been a sociopath… but at least he’d written everything down.

“Not that it’s helping much.” Cadance pounded the table and groaned. Not for the first time, her thoughts turned to sending word to the south for help. Doctor Endo had been right that Celestia would inevitably hear of this, but Cadance was kind of the authority on Love, so she wanted to at least try to solve the problem herself before she got others involved.

“I’m not going to run home crying to Equestria at the first sign of trouble,” Cadance muttered. She got up, stretched, then trotted over to a nearby chalkboard. “I’d never let live it down if there was a simple solution I would’ve seen, had I actually bothered to look.”

Scratching her chin, Cadance took a few moments to recall all she understood about the curse that’d banished the Crystal Empire for a millennium, filling in the gaps with what she’d just learned from Sombra’s journals. Once she had a decent picture in her head, she started writing out diagrams and equations, intent on coming up with a counter-curse.

“All right,” she said with a deep breath. “Let’s take this from the top.”

It took hours upon hours of brainstorming. She quickly filled up the board in tiny font, then after erasing it for the fourth time, she abandoned it and switched over to parchment. She filled up over a dozen pages in no time at all, all the while cross-referencing Sombra’s journals with her own knowledge of Love magic. She came up with a few ideas, most of them centered around the idea of undoing the damage that’d already been done, but she quickly realized that was the wrong way of going about it.

“There isn’t a single damn thing here that’d so much as mentions infertility!” Cadance shouted. “Either he didn’t write it down, or this is a side effect to something else he was trying to do! I’m basically trying to resolve the unanticipated result of an unknown spell that had unforeseen consequences! ERGH!”

Her head hit the desk with a dull thud.

“This is like grasping at vapors,” she groaned.

Cadance stayed like that for a few minutes, miserable, fatigued, and frustrated beyond belief. She’d been at this for so long already, and had almost nothing to show for it. She couldn’t afford to wear herself out on this project, though, so perhaps it was time to call it a day.

Then, as she sat back up and scratched her stomach, she suddenly got a ludicrous, silly, absurd idea.

“Snrrrk,” Cadance grinned and stifled a giggle. “Oh, now that would be funny! I’d almost pay to see that…”

But to her surprise, Cadance found that the idea remained stuck in her mind, stubborn and unwilling to fade away. She continued think about it for a while longer, and amazingly, as unlikely, hilarious, and ridiculous as it was, she abruptly realized that maybe, just maybe...

“This is so stupid,” Cadance mumbled. Yet even as she said this, she was already reaching for a fresh quill and parchment. She drew out some formulas, did a little bit more research, then racked her brain for a hole in her reasoning, but she couldn’t come up with anything that would prevent it from working. All the pieces were in place, all the necessary players were in their positions, all the required components were readily available. It was just a matter of making the necessary arrangements.

“This…” Cadance stared dumbly at the parchment before her. “This might actually work.”

She sat up straight as the implication of those words hit her.

“It might actually work!” she yelled. She cheered and threw up her hooves in victory. “It might work, it might work, it might work!”

Cadance gleefully danced in place, spinning around and laughing. This was it! The answer she was looking for! She knew she’d figure out a workaround! She just had to think outside the box!

Cadance chuckled to herself as she put away her notes and headed out of the archives. She’d keep looking around for something a little more proper, of course but if nothing else panned out, then this really was a potential solution. She couldn’t believe that something so hilarious could actually be anything of the sort, but there it was.

Yes, if nothing else, this was a viable Plan B...

...so long as she could convince Shining to do it.