The Visitors

Throne Room, Canterlot Castle, Canterlot, Equestria

Princess Celestia was very bored. It was half an hour since Cinderblock had begun his presentation on the development of the architecture of Canterlot and how much more grey and rectangular it could be and the lack of graphs and the fake statistics meant that she could still only assume he was still introducing the introduction to the thing and she was really wishing that she could just let loose and blast him and his presentation out of the window and get onto something that actually mattered. But no, she had promised that everypony could get their turn and as he hadn't actually said anything untoward she still had to hear him out. Besides, there weren't any windows that she didn't like enough to blast him out of.

It was as this point that the entire room began to rumble beneath them, and while something of this nature only usually happened when Luna was awakened in the daytime without the awakener immediately pouring an entire pot of coffee down her throat, the lack of storm clouds above her tower and the fact that it was still as bright a day as it was five minutes ago forced her to assume that there was another cause. She turned her head to look out of the other window, noticing on the way that Cinderblock was entirely ignoring what was going on and was continuing with the presentation that was still as boring as her namesake building material, and got the shock of her very long life when she saw the massive black thing descending from out of the sky, golden decoration glimmering along its many sharp edges. It hung in the sky, before a small blue rectangle slowly expanded into life on its underside and something very small and very dart-like shot out and headed straight for her.

I.S.C Hostile Takeover, Shuttlecraft C-1

The captain was quite looking forward to the coming meeting. The probes had collected much  data from the surface already, especially during the neural scanning, and he hoped that the translation matrix in his helmet was going to work as well as the xenolinguistics team said that it should.  The craft rattled slightly as it turned to land on the spot that had been chosen, which he was told was in a rather nice sculpture garden. There was a thump as the craft settled, and as the ramp came down and he walked out he saw a flash of golden light as the gold royal, or 'Goldie', as he had nicknamed them, appeared along with several of what he assumed were some kind of royal guard, though the plate gold armour and wooden spears he judged to be much less of a threat than their command of the energy. As 'Goldie' approached, the captain could see that they were quite obviously female, and then bowed, though mainly as a diplomatic courtesy rather than as any gesture of respect.

As he rose, he could see that she was looking at him quite curiously.

"Hello," he began, "I am Captain Marott Wills of the Imperial Space Corps, and I bid you greeting on behalf of the Grand Imperium and its subject races. We wish to begin a diplomatic discourse at the earliest possible opportunity, and look forward to a co-operative future together."

"Hello," read the text as she began to speak, "I am Princess Celestia, and I welcome you to the Diarchy of Equestria, and I too wish to begin diplomacy as soon as we can."

"Princess? So you'll be taking us to the king and queen now, then?"

"No, my dear Captain. Princess, or Prince, I suppose, is basically the highest rank there is. Nobody much likes titles of King or Queen around here, mostly because everyone by those titles has turned out to be quite despicable beings. I'm sure your people have similar things from your history."

"Oh, we most certainly do. Well then, let us go inside and begin."

Throne Room, Canterlot Castle, Canterlot, Equestria

Everyone jumped as Princess Celestia teleported back onto her throne in a flash of light.

"Please, exit the castle immediately. This is a rather fragile situation and every precaution must be taken to make sure that it goes as well as it can. I apologise for cutting short the Court but it must be done."

As the guardstallions began to escort the petitioners out of the room, Celestia teleported once more, back to the visitors, and began to lead them into the castle proper.

"This castle itself is one of the older buildings in Equestria. Canterlot was initially constructed by the refugees from ancient Unicornia with the initial intent of resurrecting the nation, but this plan was scuppered when both me and my sister decided that the earth pony capital in the Everfree was a much nicer, less speciesist place to live. Eventually, after my battle with Nightmare Moon, I could no longer live there, and though the unicorns were still much too haughty and speciesist for my liking and the pegasi had softened greatly and would have been nice to live with, I couldn't exactly be cut off from two-thirds of my subjects and so I came to live in Canterlot. My efforts with delegating power to the noble classes haven't gone as well as I hoped in softening them up and I can't pull most of the power back now, so here we are. Speaking of which, we have arrived at the diplomatic offices, and I invite you to take a seat inside while I fetch everypony else who needs to be here."