Radioactivity

Chapters

Something to Worry About
Panic!
Making Things Right

Something to Worry About

It was a nice day in the Crystal Empire. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and everypony was walking around as if it was summer and they had nothing to do but to enjoy the day. Except for those who were stuck in offices and behind counters, but let’s not get caught up in the details. Besides, it’s not like they were alone in their suffering.

A group of schoolponies from Ponyville were gathered at the Crystal Heart. They weren't sightseeing.

“So, you see, fillies and colts,” Twilight Sparkle said with a proudly uplifted chin as she held the strange device in her hoof and was about to teach her young students something about the world few ponies knew, “If there would be any radiation around us, the needle would move and you would all hear a clicking sound.”

With a knowledgeable grin on her muzzle, she pointed to the dormant needle and the obvious lack of any clicking noises. She was so proud of herself, and with good reason. She'd built Equestria's first ever Geiger counter, and here it was, actually working! A second later, when nopony acknowledged the information she had given them in any meaningful way, she looked at her audience.

Sweetie Belle, Apple Bloom and Scootaloo were sitting in the center of the small group of children that she had taken on a school trip to the Chrystal Empire. Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon were there, as well as that annoying photography-obsessed colt that had given her so many headaches with the school newspaper, but whose name she couldn’t – and didn’t want to – recall. Other colts and fillies were also present, although as long as the count came to twenty when they returned to Ponyville, she didn’t really care who was who. Yet, despite the diversity in front of her, there was one thing they all had in common; every one of the schoolponies was looking at her with big, confused eyes. Something had gone wrong.

“Uhm,” she started before a nervous smile manifested itself on her face, “Are there any questions?”

She looked at the group, whose members were busy glancing at each other in a desperate attempt to find somepony who knew what was happening.

“Any at all?”

Sweetie Belle couldn’t stand the awkward silence anymore. She couldn’t stand seeing Twilight nervously standing there, in front of her, having clearly made a mistake somewhere along the line in the last fifteen minutes. She had to save her big sister’s friend from the awkward situation, only she was too shy to say anything. So she drove her elbow into Apple Bloom’s rib cage.

“Agh! What are you-” Apple Bloom tried to contain her voice to avoid disturbing the lecture, but Twilight was all too happy to hear it.

“Yes!”

Twilight took the lifeline with her hooves, wrapped herself in it and threw a magic floater in for good measure. Apple Bloom had just asked her something, and she wasn’t going to disappoint her!

“What do you want to know, Apple Bloom?” The wide grin sealed the deal.

“I-uhm…” Apple Bloom deadpanned for a second and looked at the ground to avoid Twilight eager eyes.

There was really only one question that Apple Bloom wanted to ask, but she knew that would make things worse than if she’d tell Granny Smith what she saw in the barn last Thursday when she went to look for Applejack. She still shuddered when she thought about it. On the plus side, that one sleepless night, when she stared at the ceiling and those images flashed through her head, translated into the easiest week of her life. It was strange how happy AJ suddenly was to take over all of her chores. For the foreseeable future, even!

“Apple Bloom?” Twilight asked, as the filly suddenly bobbed her head in contemplation of how much she could sell her silence for.

“Huh?”

Apple Bloom awoke from her musing with a gentle shake and looked around. Her smile faded as she realized she was the center of attention; every eye was fixed firmly on her. The ponies around her were waiting for her to relieve them of the agony of silence and a possible random selection by Twilight, while Twilight was waiting for her to actually tug on that lifeline, if she was so kind as to offer it in the first place.

“You wanted to ask me something?”

The look in Twilight’s eyes was terrifying. Apple Bloom had never seen Twilight borderline scared before, but that’s the look she was giving her. That, and she noticed the traces of the first twitches in Twilight’s eyes, which was always cause for alarm. Somepony had to move things along, and it had to be Apple Bloom. She swallowed hard and was racing to find a question that wouldn’t reveal her as stupid or her substitute teacher as poor at teaching, but she was failing hard. Kind of like at math, but everypony knew Earth ponies can’t do math, so that was expected.

Twilight was starting to sweat.

Apple Bloom mentally cursed Miss Cheerilee for having the audacity to fall sick on the day of their excursion. As for Sweetie Belle – no, she hadn’t forgotten her, but the punishment for Sweetie Belle would have to be expertly planned and executed, such was her guilt. She briefly looked at the ground and lowered her head before looking at Twilight again.

“Uhm. What-” She prepared herself. “What is radioactivity?”

Twilight nudged her head back at a slight angle. Her eyes grew but her pupils shrunk. She blinked once. Apple Bloom started shifting around nervously, not sure if she was about to be called an idiot for not knowing that, or if Twilight had just remembered she’d left her fanfics lying around the library again. Mayor Mare still couldn’t look her in the eye.

“Oh, silly me!” Twilight suddenly snapped back to normal, which is a trait of perfectly ordinary ponies. “Here I am talking about radiation and you’re not even old enough to learn that in school!”

A bedazzled array of eyes stared back at her, but Twilight was happy to know the cause of the silence. She shook her head and wiped a nonexistent tear from her eye, all the while snickering at her own quirkiness. Then she looked at Apple Bloom with a thankful smile and started talking.

“Radiation is just the emission of energy as electromagnetic waves or as moving subatomic particles.” She waved a hoof to show how unimportant that was. “But the radiation I’ve been talking about comes from the natural decay of atoms, which are the building blocks of everything around us. Only not just any old atoms, oh no! I’m talking about isotopes! When they decay, they release radioactive rays, such as Alpha, Beta and Gamma rays. Now, there are three...different…processes…”

Twilight trailed off as she noticed that the bedazzled array of eyes hadn’t changed much. Only now some ponies were drooling. Twilight’s jaw cracked open.

“Does anypony understand?” she slowly asked.

A pink hoof appeared in front of her, followed by the anxious body of Pinkie Pie, waving her foreleg around like it was a jellybean.

“Oh, oh, oh!” Pinkie screamed, “Pick me! Pick me!”

“Pinkie? What are you doing here?”

She wasn’t on the train to the Chrystal Empire. But, seeing as she was the only one not having her brain cells realigned by the lecture, Twilight had no choice but to oblige. That, and she was hoping that Pinkie Pie would help bring the young ponies back to normal with cake and whatever drugs she was regularly stuffing herself with. There was no way she could afford to bring the kids back broken. Especially after they made her sign extra papers when she volunteered - nay – insisted to take the kids. And to think she had always assumed Celestia was being sarcastic when she regularly started their encounters by asking if Spike was still alive.

“You don’t have the batteries in!” Pinkie shouted as Twilight begrudgingly pointed at her.

Twilight facehoofed.

“Pinkie!” she shouted, “That isn’t even a-”

Question, she was going to say, but Pinkie was diligently pointing at the side of the Geiger counter, right at the open panel for the batteries.

“Whoa, you’re right,” Twilight said, stunned.

“Here you go!” Pinkie happily presented a pair of industrial-looking batteries that power the Geiger counters.

“How did you-” Twilight started, but realized in time the futility of her question. “No, I don’t want to know.”

Twilight grabbed the batteries, only to see Pinkie Pie happily squee and bounce away. She shook her head again and fumbled with the batteries to slot them in.

“Come on!”

A final, carefully measured kick to the batteries ensured a snug fit, and Twilight once again proudly lifted her head up, a content smirk on her muzzle, and her right hoof high in the air. She was eager to continue the lecture before lunchtime took away the opportunity to teach the little ones some valuable life lessons. Who could possibly go through life without knowing the details of radiation detection?

“Now, as you can see-”

A distinct clicking sound interrupted her. She looked down at the Geiger counter and went quiet. The needle was rising, and with it, the frequency of the clicks. She moved it to the children; it clicked. She moved it to the ground; it clicked. She turned it to the Crystal Heath; it clicked. And the children watched.

The more Twilight told herself not to panic, the more her eyes widened in fear as she looked at the Geiger counter. Her clenched teeth were showing and beads of sweat appeared on her forehead with increasing frequency before dropping down or being absorbed into her fur. She had to get the younglings away as soon as possible, and she had to do it without causing chaos. But then, Twilight did always excel under pressure.

“IT’S EVERYWHERE!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. The kids wasted no time in scattering.

Twilight froze in place and opened her eyes as she heard the unmistakable sound of a few dozen tiny hooves clicking away to the backdrop of high-pitched screaming. She glanced around. The colts and fillies were busy galloping away, some crying, all screaming, much to the surprise of the Chrystal Ponies that happened to be nearby at the time. Twilight blinked, then dropped her head and narrowed her eyes at the thought that she just lost the entire class.

“Well, buck.”

Panic!

“I’m telling you, this is an emergency!” Twilight shouted at her brother and the alicorn that was responsible for him being away so much.

After the fiasco at the Crystal Heart, she had galloped straight to the palace from where Cadence and Shining ruled. The Guards did try to stop her, what with her frizzled mane and psychotic stare that made them draw their spears in defense, but she teleported right past them. By the time they had arrived into the Great Chrystal Hall, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza and Shining Armor were already talking to her; looking surprised, but not threatened. The look Shining gave the Guards for their failure to stop the potential intruder, on the other hoof, made them know their jobs very much were in danger.

“Calm down, Twilight,” Cadence said in her most soothing voice, as she gently put a hoof to Twilight’s shoulder, sending an icy chill down the smaller alicorn’s spine.

Twilight shook it off and retorted, “No! You don’t understand!”

Even Shining jumped at that, not that anypony in the Hall was surprised. He wasn’t the bravest warrior. Or the smartest. In fact, Celestia herself never really knew why she had made him Captain of the Royal Guard. All she knew was that she felt inexplicably happy about it when Cadence brought forth the idea. It was such a strange coincidence that Cadence announced him as her coltfriend a few days later…

“It’s everywhere!” Twilight continued in her usual panicky demeanor. “At the Heart, at the stadium, near the cathouse-”

She paused as her brother and sister-in-law cocked their heads back and stared at her. Without losing a moment, she nervously pointed her hoof at the clicking device strapped to her side.

“In here, even!”

Her bewildered stare and gasping for air combined with the panic in her voice to finally exceed the Twilight Threshold. In that exact moment, even though they had agreed on no particular way to measure it, Shining and Cadence simultaneously dropped their gentle smiles into concerned frowns. Whatever was bugging Twilight, it wasn’t just her OCD. The two exchanged a brief glance to confirm what they were thinking before Shining took a step forward.

“I’m sorry Twiley, I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

He leaned down to look her in the eye and calm her down with his soothing, charming stare, completely forgetting that he was looking at his sister. The Guards thought it was creepy. Cadence had stopped thinking altogether. She zoned these kinds of moments right out. As for Shining; all the screaming Twilight had done as soon as she burst into the hall came back to him in fragments. He didn’t understand her then, and all the noise about radios and activity flashed through his mind to confuse him further.

“We have radioactivity everywhere!” Twilight said out loud, just stopping herself from shouting, before nearly whimpering, “You have to get everypony out of here!”

“Out of where?” Cadence asked as she came closer.

“Out of the Chrystal Empire!”

The desperation in her voice was matched only by the absurdity of her request and the psychotic look on her face. Shining straightened himself back up and stared at her blankly. Cadence cocked an eyebrow.

Twilight looked at them, lingering hope in her eyes that they would finally understand. This was her only option – what else could she do? A nuclear contamination on this scale must have come about at the same time as the Empire reappeared, but that meant the ponies here had been living in it for two years! But then, just as Cadence opened her mouth to ask another trivial question, Twilight’s eyes popped open. Her irises grew smaller and her fidgeting stopped altogether. The thousand-yard stare was only complete once her ears perked up ever so gently, and a trace of a smile drew itself on her lips. A sequence played out in her mind.

The Chrystal ponies had been living in a nuclear contamination area for two years. Maybe more, if the initial disappearance also had something to do with nuclear physics. And they were still alive. She couldn’t call them normal – there’s nothing normal about a see-thru pony – but they were still kicking the glowing dust after all these years. The gold and purple adorned Doctor’s thesis imprinted itself into her mind, followed by the sight of Celestia giving her the Starswirl’s Swirly Beard Award for her research into the innate biological resistance to radioactivity possessed by the walking ornaments. Esteemed academics bowed down to her as the mastermind that she was. Her future was there for the taking!

“Twiley?” Shining poked her gently, as if she was a delicate vase and he wanted to see how far it would lean. “Twiley?”

“Huh?!” Twilight snapped out of her daydream and glanced around.

The worried faces of Shining and Cadence greeted her from the front, and if she had eyes on the back, she would have seen the two Guards standing close by, muscles tense and faces drawn in fear and confusion, ready to intercept her, restrain her or rush her to a hospital. Maybe all three if the need arose, but until she made a sound they weren’t sure if she was going to transform into a Changeling or drop down to the ground unconscious. Cadence cleared her throat just in time to mask their gasps of relief.

“Uhm…” Twilight eyes jumped between Cadence and Shining. Then came the idea. “Radio activity! Yes. Pinkie Pie is running around with a boombox! We need to get everypony out or they’ll get the disco fever!”

Her frantic panting added a nice touch. No way was anypony going to stop her research now! Cadence and Shining again exchanged looks, with the latter adding a know-it-all smirk to tell Cadence that he had known all along what his sister was saying, even if he never voiced his thoughts. This time, Cadence was the confused one.

“Don’t worry, Twiley,” Shining said, full of pride for himself, “We’ll stop her before anypony gets hurt. Guards!”

The two Royal Guards that were keeping an eye on Twilight flew forward to greet their master. They bowed their heads. They’d get the hose if they didn’t.

“Find one Pinkamina Diane Pie – a pink F3 with blue eyes and a pink mane, believed to be rampaging through our great Empire,” he said in a surprisingly commanding, masculine tone that would have made Cadence swoon had she not gotten to know Shining better. At least Twilight was impressed, if her slack jaw was any indication.

The Guards saluted and were already flying out through the doorway when Shining noticed his sister’s admiration. Only it wasn’t enough – the jaw wasn’t all the way down. He had to do better than that! So he narrowed his eyes and raised his hoof menacingly.

“And Guards!” He snapped at them, making them stop and hover in anticipation, with every pony in the room looking at him. “Bring me her head!”

The Guards saluted again, a shimmer of pride and determination sparkling in their eyes for a brief moment, before they sped out to hunt for their pray. Cadence facehoofed. Twilight followed the Guards with her eyes as long as she could, then looked sideways at Shining.

Shining’s face suddenly changed back to its friendly self and he turned to Cadence to gloat. “What do you think honey, did I show some ass-ertiveness or what?” He smiled broadly.

“You condemned your sister’s friend – the Element of Laughter – to death.”

The monotony of Cadence’s voice was on a dictionary level. She didn’t even twitch an eye, or an eyebrow. The need for monotony was too great, and any deviation would risk a volcanic explosion of emotions that the world of Equestria simply wasn’t ready for.

“Yeah, but it was just a figure of speech, I-” Shining defended, before being cut off.

“Like the time you told them to go unleash Tartarus and they freed Cerberus?”

Cadence wasn’t even angry. Or disappointed. Not in him, anyway.

“I-uhh.”

“It’s fine.” It wasn’t fine. “I’ll fix this.”

Cadence spread her wings to fly after the impromptu death squad, when she remembered a little detail of Twilight’s surprise visit to the Empire. She quickly shifted her attention to her.

“Wait. Weren’t you here with a class of fillies and colts?”

Twilight deadpanned.

“Where are they?” Cadence completed her question, already feeling a strangely anticipated sense of dread coming over her.

Twilight gave a weak smile, the kind that revealed that her next words were about to be horseapples, but not lethally dangerous horseapples. She involuntarily bobbed her head to double-confirm that, before she replied.

“They’re… fine.”

The odd break and the strangely fine voice she used at the word “fine” were no longer meant for Cadence – they were there to help Twilight. Sure, she didn’t technically know where the children were, but as long as they were out of the Crystal Empire, everything was fine. And since there was a 50:50 chance of them either being in the Empire or not, she could tell herself she was at least half right.

“Okay,” Cadence said; her eyes narrowing like a hawk’s.

Cadence flew off, forehead scrunched in anger and disbelief, but there was only so much she could deal with at once, and having a regular, non-Bizarro pony murdered by a pair of winged champagne glasses in royal armor took precedence over some missing schoolponies. At the same time, Twilight was already thinking ahead.

Like the brilliant detective that she was, Twilight knew a sequence of events had to have happened a long time ago for the radiation to be so widespread and consistent, but not too long ago since it was still around. If she was going to write a thesis on its effects, or the lack thereof, she had to know where it had come from. As it was now, she had no way of knowing if the Crystal ponies themselves weren’t the ones radiating their wrongness into the world.

“Trying to spread the condition to the whole of Equestria to make themselves feel normal…” she half murmured, half thought, as she pressed a hoof to her chin.

A natural defensive mechanism of that kind wasn’t out of the question, but there was somepony who would surely know where the radiation had come from and whether the ponies living in the Empire had always been radioactive. An alicorn who had to have lived through the initial contamination. There was, of course, an alternative.

Was this Celestia’s doing?

Twilight looked around the garish crystal palace and thought about the Crystal ponies that were living in the Empire. She shrugged.

I couldn’t blame her.

It was difficult to think that Celestia had failed in a quest to rid the world of the Crystal Empire and its inhabitants, but even she couldn’t have known that they would be resistant to radiation - even cockroaches weren’t, no matter how persistent the myth was!

Guess I better go find out.

Just as Twilight raised her hoof to leave, Cadence flew in, as tastefully displeased as the moment she had left. The lack of any clenched teeth and tears of anger spoke volume of her success in preventing the death of Pinkie Pie. Twilight sighed briefly as she felt a tiny ball of disappointment roll from her heart and into her stomach. She mentally swiped a hoof at the ground.

“You’re back!” she nearly squeed at Cadence, who only glanced back at Twilight in passing. “And I – well, I’ve got to go!”

Cadence wanted to mention the kids, but the sight of a happily oblivious Shining Armor in front of her diverted her attention. Wasn’t love also about teaching the young ones about the kindness of strangers in a foreign town and how everypony was good, even if they creeped you out? At least that was what she decided to stick with in case there was a tribunal, although Celestia did always delegate any and all problems to Twilight, so she had that precedence going for her as well. She wasn’t Iron Mare!

Twilight didn’t even consider her class at this point. She was just happy to be left to her own devices and to be free to research the radiation in peace. Nothing was going to stop her now!

“Make sure to stop by the cathouse!” Shining yelled out after her.

Twilight’s cheeks nearly burst from blushing; Cadence felt a bead of cold sweat run down her forehead and the nearby Guards held their breaths for how Twilight would react to this grave insult, delivered in such a chipper tone. Shining’s gleeful smile outlasted their reactions by a good few seconds, though, and Twilight craned to hear to return a smile.

“I will.”

She galloped away and out the gates, forcing her gaze down to miss the eyes and gestures of the ponies around her. The moment she was out of the castle, Twilight summoned the magic of the alicorn princess that she was and teleported out of the Crystal Empire.

“There’s a time and a place for that,” Cadence quickly scolded Shining Armor for making such a poor joke.

“What? I didn’t know Twilight liked cats,” Shining said, astonished that his sister would have grown a new liking.

Cadence shot him an annoyed look.

“That’s not-” she stopped when he turned to face her, completely unaware of the meaning of the word. “Yes, it’s very nice of her.”

It was moments like this that made Cadence reevaluate her choice of a spouse, but she was still banking on the foals and fillies looking like supermodels. Once they had them. If only Shining wasn’t so damn tired all the time. That damn Flash Sentry constantly needed private lessons to help with his training and they really took all the energy out of Shining. He’d always come home limp and exhausted. Walked funny, too.

His dedication to work could really make Cadence furious. But when you’re the princess of Love, you can’t really show it, can you?

Making Things Right

A bright flash of light was all the warning Celestia and Luna had to hide their shipping cards before they witnessed a true sight for the gods.

Twilight Sparkle stood in the center of the Throne Room, legs wide apart, balancing her swaying body. Huffs of breath streamed through her bared teeth at regular intervals and a frizzled mane completed the look Celestia had grown accustomed to. The wide grin and the perky eyes indicated that Twilight was here not due to another breakdown from her fear of failure, but from the sight of a giant carrot mentally hanging in front of her. The only question now was, what was it?

“My dear and faithful-” Celestia began with her most regal voice, only for Twilight to intervene.

“Princess!” she let out a shriek; her head twitched so hard it made the Guards wince. The more entrepreneurial among them questioned just how strong her vertebrae were to deal with that. And how that could be turned into a weapon.

She was about to start blabbering about a possible exciting, fantastic, unbelievable, you-wouldn’t-believe-it- discovery that she urgently needed a luxurious apartment in the Empire for – Why, Cadence’s bedroom would do nicely, thank you very much! – when an annoying noise caught her attention.

The Geiger counter was still chirping.

With a swift move that caught everyone by surprise, Twilight snatched the Geiger counter and threw it to the side in a manner that would make AJ proud and Rainbow swoon. So she had brought some radiation back with her, what of it? All the ponies going to and from the Empire must have brought enough to make a small nuclear reactor by now. The main thing now was for her to focus enough to squeeze some more attention from the Princess. Celestia, obviously. The one that mattered.

Only the counter didn’t stop chirping.

It had been exposed to the radiation, but if there was one thing Twilight was certain about – and she was certain about two things, thank you very much! – it was that she had specifically designed the counter to measure the radiation around it, and to therefore ignore its own contamination. Magic tended to make engineering easier.

And yet, the Geiger counter was making noises.

Twilight slowly looked back toward the device. The cogs in her mind shifted with an audible squeak and a thud, and Twilight shifted her gaze back to Celestia, all hope washed clean from her face.

Celestia scowled. Somehow, she had anticipated this. Not the device on the ground; that was something new. No, that sticky smudge of satisfaction crawling down her brainstem didn’t appear for that. It was the result of Twilight bringing something to Celestia she couldn’t figure out by herself and was now expecting the busiest and prettiest pony in all of Equestria to sacrifice her precious time for in order to explain. It was a masochistic feeling.

“What is that?” Celestia asked, unsure if she should regret the question.

“Huh,” Twilight sighed, confirming her mentor’s fears. “It’s a Geiger counter.”

It was a grim moment. Celestia hadn’t heard of a Geiger counter before, which meant she had no quick answers to give. There was only one way she was going to get Twilight out of her mane and that was to take the dangerous leap of asking her more about it. The words were as painful to pronounce as they were calm on the outside.

“And what might that be?”

Celestia could practically feel the back of her tongue ripping in protest, but the deed was done. The answer wasn’t as dreary or as full of techno-babble as she had expected, though. It was anything but that.

“A Geiger counter is a…” Twilight started talking, frantically looking at the device and back to Celestia, while performing ever more hoof-waving as the explanation unfurled.

Celestia had understood what the device was by the end of the first sentence, but there was no way she was going to stop Twilight in the midst of her panic attack. It was way too awesome! Instead, she quietly nodded along in contemplation to hide the joy she was feeling at the sight in front of her. They say being a ruler is hard, but all Celestia did was delegate problems to others – usually Twilight, – eat cake and work on maintaining the magic that kept the Crusaders from getting their cutie marks. That was the stuff worth living for! Moments like these? Just perks of the job.

“…and now it’s here too!” Twilight finally finished in a loud cry, almost catching Celestia off-guard. Although the way Twilight reached out with her hoof toward her, as if to touch her, would have been enough to snap Celestia out of her daydream anyway.

Celestia chuckled. In part it was to make Twilight feel that she was worrying over nothing, which she was. Another part was to block out the thought of how creepy it would have felt had Twilight’s hoof actually made contact. There was being dependant, and then there was this. And a final, small part, was a genuine bout of laughter at what had just gone down. This was why Celestia never needed a court jester. But now it was time to calm Twilight, lest she throw a fit.

“My faithful student,” Celestia briefly stopped mid-sentence and glanced around at the deja-vu of always saying those exact same words, “You’ve discovered an omnipresent radiation that glows across Equestria?”

“Yes!” Twilight took her answer as added fodder for her panic, instead of the presentation of long-standing facts that it was. “If we don’t do anything about it, we could face horrible mutations across generations of ponies!”

Luna narrowed her eyes. Celestia opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off.

“The more time this radiation is here, the more damage our DNA will sustain!” Twilight started walking in semi-circles to wear off some of the panic. It didn’t work. “If we don’t stop this now, we’re going to end up with foals more mutated that those of the Apple family!”

“And we at least know why those happen,” she was going to add, but held herself back as everypony’s eyes went wide. A strange silence fell in the Throne Room. Somepony had to do something, and who else could it be but the self-proclaimed ruler of Equestria?

“Oh, my dear Twilight,” the happy, motherly voice hid the pang of pain and disappointment well, “It’s always been like that.”

Celestia really did think that Twilight would have read about it in a history book. Or were those banned a few hundred years ago? Celestia couldn’t say. There were some huge bonfires around that time, though, but that was a problem for the past.

“Huh?” Twilight grimaced, just to make herself look more incompetent; Celestia was sure of it.

“Yes. There has always been this radiation, as you call it. What do you think I meant by the Harmony that permeates this great land?”

Celestia outstretched a hoof at one of the stained-glass windows, only remembering that she wasn’t on a scenic balcony when she was already facing the window. It was a nice window, though, full of symbols and whatnot. She forgot what they meant, but they were ornate and therefore royal, somehow. She quietly gulped at the thought of how she would have looked like if she would have accidentally pointed at an image of Discord in the window further down. Now she could at least pretend it was deliberate, so she kept her majestic pose, passing the ball to Twilight with her silence.

Twilight wanted to ask Celestia why she was pointing at a glorified planting calendar that must have been made in a time when most ponies couldn’t read and needed pictures to figure out that forks didn’t belong in one’s eye. Only she suddenly remembered that the Cakes had a whole bunch of paintings in their house. Twilight had never paid them much thought, but now she could distinctly recall the shape of a fork somewhere among them…

“No time for that!” she quietly snapped at herself, forgetting it was rude to talk to yourself in public.

Celestia finally noticed the lack of attention that Twilight was giving her. She was safe from having to come up with a plausible cover-up for her royal and majestic behavior, but now she had to keep it that way, which meant nipping any dissident thoughts in the bud.

“I sense that you’re troubled, Twilight,” Celestia cooed as she took a few slow steps towards her ~~favorite plaything~~ faithful student. “What’s wrong?”

Celestia leaned down to look Twilight directly in her sad, teary eyes. Luna’s hoof started twitching and her wings tried to spread. It took a lot of willpower to hold back the full-on hoof-pumping her body wanted to do as she mouthed “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”

Much to her disappointment, and to that of the Guards, who had been anticipating the same outcome for years, Twilight didn’t see the situation in the same way. She had never been very good at reading these kinds of moments, even if they existed only in the minds of the ponies behind her. So, instead of embracing Celestia, and getting thrown in the dungeon as a result, she shook her head in surprise.

“I don’t understand,” she nearly whispered, “You’re saying that everything is radioactive?”

Celestia bit the inside of her lip. She had given Twilight a fairly strong hint that radiation should be referred to as Harmony, lest the peasants start getting ideas about being poisoned due to Celestia’s indifference to the whole thing. She was immortal, after all. It wasn’t her problem the others weren’t.

Celestia smiled softly, as a silent death-threat to Twilight went through her mind.

“Yes, my faithful student. The Harmony is all around us, binding us into one!” she proclaimed as only she knew how. She stopped herself from adding, “And giving us those awesome glow sticks!” Rave parties just weren’t right until those things came about.

“But…” Twilight started thinking again, which was always a sign of trouble. Celestia ignited her horn and sent a nearly invisible layer of magic onto her own face to stop it from contorting from the growing rage.

What was it now? Why wasn’t Twilight happy? Was she going to pester her about the dangers of Harmony and how something must be done? Will she lecture her on the responsibility of leaders? Cause trouble and mayhem? Or - worst of all – continue talking?! All those questions and more twirled around Celestia’s mind until Twilight finally finished her question.

“Where did it come from?”

Serenity. Tranquility. Peace. Whatever you want to call it, that was what Celestia suddenly felt. Along with a massive weight being lifted from her chest, but that might have just been Discord. Where was he, anyway? Well, now was not the time to worry about that, because that question sounded wonderful. It sounded beautiful. It sounded like an opportunity to end the conversation.

The vision of a Twilight-less Throne Room filled Celestia’s heart with glee, and for the first time in ages – or since the last time Twilight had panicked about something, so three days? – Celestia genuinely smiled, knowing that all will be well. She was almost too relaxed in her retort. She started talking like she was explaining her new weight loss routine.

“Well, there was that whole war with those bipedals a few millennia ago, but I never quite linked it to radiation. What were they called, Youmans? Humounce? I can’t seem to remember.” Celestia looked at the ceiling for a second and trailed off, before she nonchalantly swept her hoof through the air and continued, “Come to think of it, they did keep threatening me with nukes, whatever those were, but I don’t know how I responded to that.”

Twilight was looking at her, eyes wide open, her body turned at an angle, almost as if she was frozen mid-escape.

“Twilight?” Celestia asked quietly, afraid that she had gone a tad too far in her answer.

Twilight whispered, “Humans?”

“What?”

“Humans?” Twilight repeated in the same quiet tone, “As in, apes, only smarter?”

“Y-Yes, why?”

There was something ominous about this, and for the first time in her life, Celestia felt fear.

“And we had a war with them?”

This was definitely the kind of questioning Celestia was expecting to go through before being led to the guillotine, and her body responded by making the next answer as short and to-the-point as possible.

“Yes.”

There was another long silence. Finally, Twilight grew a gentle smile. Than a normal smile. That quickly became a grin.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha…” Twilight started laughing ever louder, before bending one knee to the ground and tapping on it with her other forehoof. “HA, HA, HA!”

Celestia recoiled in slow motion as she regained her composure and started preparing the restraining spell.

“Oh, Princess!” Twilight cried in between bursts of laughter, “You really got me good!”

Confusion. That was all Celestia felt now. Twilight had never talked to her in that way before, and Celestia didn’t know how to react. The annoying screech of radio static in her mind grew until it displaced all thoughts but one. Twilight wasn’t taking her seriously. And if Twilight – Twilight! – wasn’t taking her seriously, who in Equestria had any respect left to give?

The single realization threw Celestia’s perfect world onto a path of disarray so well structured that it didn’t so much rival Discord’s chaotic way as it complemented it. Even as Twilight grinned and wiped at her tear-stained fur with her disrespecting hooves, Celestia already saw visions of burning towers and flaming pitchforks. But underneath the panic induced visions was an underlying truth, or at least it was in Celestia’s mind.

Twilight’s complete and utter ignorance of the glorious ruler was merely the symptom of a deliberate crumbling of order that was already underway. She desperately needed to find the pony that started it. But before she could act on that, Twilight continued.

“Humans were real? Come on!” Twilight clutched her belly for a moment in a moment of genuine laugh overdose. “Oh, that was a good one.”

“It was?” Celestia replied, her mind jumping back and forth from forming an action plan and analyzing Twilight.

“It was,” Twilight reassured her favorite ruler and picked herself up off the floor. “Who put you up to this – no wait, it was Lyra, wasn’t it? I should’ve known.”

And there was the pony. Maybe.

“So, Lyra knows about the humans, does she?” Celestia asked in an oddly monotone voice.

“Oh yes, she just won’t shut up about them,” Twilight happily nodded.

“I see.”

Celestia pulled a scroll from a nearby wall and inscribed something onto it.

“Why?” Twilight asked, as Celestia sent the scroll away in a puff of magic.

“No reason,” her mentor smiled. “No reason at all.” Then she remembered something.

Twilight might have been Twilight, but even she probably knew what she was talking about when it came to radiation. Because science! And who really knew what effects that had on the ponies? Now that the whole of society was at breaking point, Celestia needed to actually do something to prevent it falling apart. If that meant releasing an anti-radiation spell across Equestria, if only to put an end to a panic she was certain Twilight had already started, then so be it!

“Now,” Celestia royally decreed, “Let’s fix that radiation!”

Twilight was happy, but only for a split second. Her eyes suddenly went wide as she realized what she was about to lose if Celestia goes through with that. She quickly leaned into Celestia before the goddess could ask what in Tartarus was the matter with her. For a good minute, Twilight whispered something into Celestia’s ear, and when she was done, she looked at her idol with all the expectation of a filly expecting to be rejected for a dance but secretly hoping for a good answer.

Celestia philosophically stroked her chin and looked at Twilight. She deliberately kept her gaze unfeeling, just to see how long before Twilight started shaking. But Twilight went into freeze mode instead. If she didn’t give her a reply now, she was going to be stuck with her for the whole night. And nopony wanted that.

“All right,” Celestia playfully said. “Here’s what we’ll do.” She quickly whispered something into Twilight’s ear.

Twilight and Celestia shared a friendly smile, each for a different reason, and walked out to the balcony, each building up her magic with every step. Two batponies flew overhead, on their way to Ponyville, spears in hooves. Far away to the North, Cadence dropped her wine glass right past the edge of the dinner table at a stark realization. And the disturbance she felt from the sudden appearance of a giant magical dome over the Crystal Empire was only a part of it.