Liable For Content

by Sarcasmo

Rating: teen
Tags: Prince Blueblood, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 5870

Blueblood's approval ratings are at an all-time low. To counter this, he tries a new strategy: make himself look good by making others look bad.

No matter what he does, Prince Blueblood is getting less and less popular with the ponies of Equestria. When his approval ratings plummet to an all-time low, his public relations officers suggest a bold new strategy: make him look good by making others look bad; if necessary with vicious slander.

All the thanks in the world to Ferret for editing.

Published 2015-02-01 21:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2015-02-01 21:40:01 UTC

Liable For Content

“This quarter has been rough for us. Even rougher than usual. I'm talking fishing boat lost in the middle of the ocean during a thunderstorm kind of rough. Approval is at an all-time low. When forced to pick between an evening with Blueblood or the bubonic plague, forty-three percent of Canterlotians said... blah blah blah...”

Prince Blueblood picked a small pebble out from under his hoof. It was unusually small, at least half a millimeter under the twelve by twelve millimeter minimum size he had set for all gravel used for castle walkways. The scoundrel who had left it there, no doubt, had counted on his crime being untraceable and therefore himself to go unpunished. The fiend! Blueblood would have to ask the new Captain of the Royal Guard if there wasn't anything that could be done about it. For now he had to content himself with dropping the pebble to the floor.

He looked back up and found the other three stallions in the room staring at him, expecting him to say something, probably based on whatever they had been talking about this whole time. But if they had wanted him to listen, he decided, they should have talked about something more interesting. They should have talked more about him.

“Excuse me, what were you talking about?” he asked.

Everypony sighed. “We were talking about your approval ratings. Like we've done every month for the past five and a half years,” said the one to the right. Blueblood didn't know his name. All he knew was, he was the muscle of the group.

“Oh.” He realized they had apparently been talking about him all along. And they had still managed to lose his interest. The only logical conclusion Blueblood could come up with was the three of them had to be the worst speakers in the history of Equestria.

Still, maybe this was important enough to give them another chance. Maybe they wouldn't blow it this time. “So, how is my approval?” he asked.

“In one word,” said the one to the left of Blueblood, who he mentally referred to as the face, “terrible. Even more terrible than last month. The ponies of Equestria went from casually disliking to actively resenting you. Our research shows that, where they previously wouldn't even cross the street to spit on you, they now very much would. It is that bad.”

Had he been a lesser stallion, Blueblood was sure he'd have gone to a corner and cried. But he was a Prince, and as such required to maintain a certain regal poise at all times.

“How can that be? Why won't they like me?” Blueblood demanded from the three empty faces sitting across from him.

The face provided the answer. “Apparently, it's your public image. The ponies think of you as some sort of snobbish crybaby tyrant, who'd rather lock away his problems than face them.”

Blueblood slammed his hoof into the table. “Those ignorant buffoons! I should make a law mandating for every last one of them to like me. Then I can incarcerate anypony who infringes it.” He peered at the muscle. “I can do that, can't I?”

“No you can't. And not just because it makes no sense whatsoever.”

“But why? Auntie Celestia makes up new laws all the time. And most of them make no sense. Like, who cares about restrictions on magically modifying corn? Only poor ponies eat corn anyway.” He crossed his forelegs and pouted. Why wasn't there ever an easy way out?

“We didn't come here to listen to your ideas about what to do. We have come here to present to you our own strategy.”

Blueblood's ears perked up. The one talking had been the pony opposite of him, the one who hadn't said anything up until now. Blueblood didn't know his name either, but knew he was the brains of the group and that this was going to be good.

“It's simple, really,” the brain said. “Your approval has been going down steadily ever since Twilight Sparkle stepped onto the scene. That's because the ponies view her as a mare of action. So naturally, our course of action should be turning you into a mare of action as well.

“Stallion of action, I mean,” he corrected himself quickly. “We should get started right away. What would you say to doing a bit of charity work this weekend?”

“Charity work?” Blueblood considered. “I don't know. Helping ponies has never exactly been my strong suit.”

“That doesn't matter. It's not so much about actually helping anypony as it is about making you look like you care. You don't have to be good at it.”

“Right, right, right.” Blueblood looked around the room once more. “What kinds of charities where you thinking about?”

“We haven't decided yet,” the face said, “we have some ideas, but wanted to clear them with you first.” He took out and flipped open a folder he had brought with him. “How about working in a soup kitchen next Friday?”

“That depends. What kind of soup?”

The face looked up. “Why does that matter?”

“Well, if I don't know what soup it is, how am I supposed to taste test it properly?”

“You're not supposed to taste it. The soup is for the homeless.”

“Oh, that's what a soup kitchen is. I was thinking of one of those events were you judge different kinds of soup so the commoners know which one most appeals to the royal taste buds. What's that called again?”

“I have no idea,” said the face. “But back to the soup kitchen. Would you be willing to do that?”

Blueblood contemplated it for only a second. “I don't know. That sounds a lot less enjoyable than the other thing. What else do you have in mind?”

“Let's see...” the muscle was looking down at his own folder. “We could go to the orphanage and have you read to the children? I heard of this orange pegasus filly there that looks especially adorable. If we get a picture with her, the newspapers should eat it right up. I can't think of anything that would score more sympathy points than that.”

“I can't work with children,” Blueblood protested. “Children always eat all those sticky sweets, like chocolate or gum. And they're always so hard to get out of your coat. I don't want to have to deal with that.”

“How about the hospital?” the face suggested. “You should feel right at home with the mental patients there. Maybe you could keep them company.”

“Sick ponies? Ewww! I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. Can't you guys come up with anything better than that? What exactly am I paying you for.”

“Perhaps,” the brain interrupted, “we were going about this the wrong way. Perhaps the answer isn't for you to interact with other ponies. If we really want them to start liking you, we should be shifting the focus as far away from you as possible. Wouldn't you all agree?”

Blueblood blinked. “What's wrong with putting the focus on me?”

“Well, let's just say it would always involve you doing something and we wouldn't want you to overexert yourself.”

Blueblood looked down at his hooves and examined them. All the parading he had been doing, not to mention the irregularly sized pebbles had worn down his hooficure. He’d need to have it fixed later on. “I have been working pretty hard this week, haven't I? So what do you have in mind?”

“You know,” the brain started, “it's hard to be good, especially for somepony like you. It's much easier just to look good. But what's even easier is to make other ponies look bad. So why don't we do that instead?”

“And how would we do that?” the muscle asked before Blueblood had the chance.

“Simple. With a smear campaign. We show all the Princesses and other important ponies in their most embarrassing moments and when the public opinion of them lowers, Blueblood's should rise, relatively speaking.”

“That could really work,” the muscle said.

“And we could even save some time if we divided the others into groups,” the face added. “You know, defame the Elements of Harmony as a whole, same with Cadance and Shining Armor of the Crystal Empire. I already have this great idea about a collage in which—"

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Blueblood shouted, still upset at how rudely he, as royalty, had been interrupted. When talking, he always had seniority. That he didn’t know what he was going to say would not change that.

Everypony fell quiet, as was appropriate. It contented Blueblood enough to carry on: “Did I get this right? You want to publicly insult those ponies the public holds dearest, including my friends and family, because it's the fastest way to make me look good? Is that what you're saying?”

He waited for their answer, but they all just looked at him a bit dumbfounded.

“Basically, yes,” the brain eventually managed to reply. The others nodded in agreement.

“And I don't have to do anything for it? That sounds almost too good to be true.”

For a second, Blueblood sat back and daydreamed about all the joy and glory he'd have when he got back into the spotlight. Finally the mares would once again compete to be the first to dance with him at the Grand Galloping Gala. He'd have so many suitors, he'd have to beat them off with a scepter. All the other stallions would envy him and his servants would crawl before him, yes crawl before him, exactly the way they should. Everything would be right again.

The sound of a bell ringing loudly through the castle brought him back to bitter reality. “So does that mean I can go now,” he asked as he quickly gathered his thoughts, “or do you still need anything from me? It's lunch time and I don't want to have that lousy Baron Apple Polish steal the last onion quiche again.”

“Nothing much,” the brain said while flipping through his folder. He soon found the form he was looking for, took it out and placed it in front of Blueblood. “All we're going to need is your power of attorney. The rest you can leave to us.”

* * *

For the rest of the week, Blueblood didn't hear back from them. It wasn't until Sunday afternoon, between two games of croquet, that they invited him over for evaluation.

“Please, sit down,” the muscle offered as all of them took the same seats they had taken the other day. They offered him a small cup of camomile tea, which he declined, and then began.

“You see, Prince Bluebood,” said the brain, “we've run into a tiny problem with our campaign and we are not exactly sure how to solve it.”

“You see,” the face joined in, leaning further onto the table, “we want to be honest with you about this whole thing, which includes this tiny problem, which we hope you won't mind, and since we don't want to beat around the bush and drone on and on, suddenly making a big deal out of something by dragging this conversation out to the point where all of us forget what we were talking about, we must say that, in short, we have... nothing.”

Blueblood looked to and fro between three blank faces. “What do you mean, 'nothing'?”

“Nil, zero, rien, nada, nix, naught, zilch, the contents of Princess Twilight's vanity case.” The face fetched an open envelope full of photographs and dropped it in front of Blueblood. “Look at them. They're goody four-horseshoes, every last one of them. Unless being kind and tolerant towards one another suddenly goes out of style, there's no way we could drag their names through the dirt.”

Blueblood picked up the first photograph of Princess Twilight eating a hayburger. Not only had she managed to smear parts of it over both sides of her face, she was also eating it with ketchup, that ghastly condiment most unbefitting of her royal position. The mere thought of it almost made him faint. “What do you mean? Her table manners are downright atrocious.”

“Be that as it may,” the muscle said, “I don't think many would care too much about that. And it's certainly nothing we can rely on given your... special reputation. We're looking for something a little more juicy. And it's not like we can just make something up. So... Prince Blueblood, are you even listening.”

He wasn't. He was busy flipping through the photographs of the Elements of Harmony, stopping at one of the Element of Laughter gulping down a cake in a single bite. Quite frankly, he couldn't understand how anypony couldn't be repulsed by this.

It took a moment to notice everypony in the room staring at him. “Huh?” he asked.

“I said, it's not like we can just make something up,” the muscle repeated.

“Make what up?” He'd kinda lost the conversational thread. That tended to happen a lot when the topic shifted away from him.

The trio looked at him flabbergasted. “What did you just say?” the face asked.

Blueblood wasn't to sure what to make of it. He scanned their faces for a giveaway if what he had done had been good or bad, but couldn't find any. “I have no idea,” he admitted.

“You just mentioned,” the brain chimed in, “making something up. And I must say that it isn't such a bad idea, seeing as we're lacking in alternatives. I'd even go so far to say it's a brilliant idea, one that may work even better than the original one.”

“It is?” Suddenly Blueblood felt very proud of himself.

“Of course it is. And we've already prepared something, thinking in that general direction.”

He nodded towards the muscle, who took out a large poster from behind himself and unrolled it. It showed a stencil of Princess Celestia, kept in simple colors, glaring sternly at something outside the picture. Under it, in capital letters, was written the single word 'OBEY'.

“What's that?” asked Blueblood.

“This is what we had in mind for our campaign. We'll post a couple of these around Canterlot, subliminally suggesting to any passersby Celestia may or may not be a tyrant watching their every move, who'd love nothing more than to throw them into her secret underground torture cells, and suddenly you don't look so bad by comparison.”

“And you think that will work?

“Of course it will. All we'll need is your approval to print a couple thousands of them and spread them all over Equestria.”

The three of them waited for Blueblood's response. He had to admit he liked the idea, and after all, he had come up with it himself. That way he knew it had be good.

“Alright,” he said. “Do it.”

“Thank you,” the brain said, getting up to escort Blueblood out the door. “This meeting has been most productive. But we'll take it from here. You needn't worry about a thing. We'll get started on everything right away.”

Blueblood didn't give particularly much thought to as to why they were practically shoving him out the door. They said he didn't need to worry about a thing and he saw no reason why he should. He didn't want to concern himself with any more of this. Croquet didn’t play itself and he had agreed on a best of five with the Earl of Mallet after he had beaten him twice.

In hindsight, maybe he should have had a little more interest in the trio, since the moment Blueblood was out the door, they breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“Thank goodness he's on board,” the face said, wiping his sweat-stained brow with a handkerchief. “Have you seen his latest approval ratings? They're down another twenty percent.”

“Twenty percent you say...” The face took a long hard look at their poster. “You know, I've been thinking: maybe we should take it up a notch, just to be sure.”

* * *

The day after they were hung up, the posters had immediately caught the attention of the Royal Guard and were promptly delivered to the Princesses via the new Captain.

“It's atrocious, downright criminal” he said as he led Celestia and Luna to a small room inside the barracks. “I wouldn't even show them to you if I didn't think you needed to see them for yourselves to believe it.”

“Now, now, Captain,” Celestia said, “I can not believe they are really as outrageous as you make them out to be. The only thing those posters could have possibly hurt are feelings. How bad can they possibly be?”

“Well you say that, but...”

They arrived at the room and after a guard had properly saluted them, he opened the door to a very spartan room with a wide table at its center. The captain reluctantly made way for the princesses to inspect the stack of posters he had prepared for them.

“Here they are,” the guard announced. “But I want to warn you again; their subject nature is very offensive and you may not want to view more than is absolutely necessary.”

“Oh, I think I'll be al—”

Celestia laid her eyes on the first poster and instantly froze. Luna had to forcefully shove her aside just to get in a closer view for herself.

“Hmm,” Luna decided upon seeing the first, “I do like the lecherous look on Twilight's face on this one. Whoever drew this was spot on; this is how I would imagine her to look during intercourse. Although all in all the scene is entirely too graphic and I am fairly certain Shining Armor could not bend that way. Have you any better ones?”

She quickly flipped through the stack when her sister and the guard failed to respond. “This one I like. Isn't this the Element of Laughter? What was her name again? Pinkie Pie? And it even has a title: 'What's Really In Her Cupcakes?' I especially like the detail of all the blood on her apron and all those severed pony heads. It is very lifelike this way.”

“Look, there's even one of us,” Luna pointed out, a little further through the stack. “ 'Princest Isn't Wincest.' The two of us in an intimate embrace. I love how sparkly my mane looks. Could I get a larger print of this for my room?”

She left, looking for one of the guards to have it arranged, with neither her sister nor the captain paying any attention to her.

“Are you alright, Princess?” the captain asked Celestia.

She nodded calmly. “Yes. I've seen worse. Not much worse and not for a long time, but I have seen worse. Just get me whoever is responsible for this and we'll deal with him or her accordingly.”

“Very well, Your Majesty,” the captain replied, quickly saluting and then storming out the door already to take immediate action.

He was remarkably effective. Somepony squealed, and not three hours later, Prince Blueblood, without any idea of what he could possibly done wrong, was taken into custody.

* * *

Due to the huge public interest, Blueblood was to be put on public trial only two days later, presided over by Princess Celestia herself as the honorable judge. What little time he had before the beginning of the trial, Blueblood spent with his lawyer devising a strategy to get out of his precarious situation. Although in truth, he could not follow his lawyer's deliberation, couldn't understand any of the technical terms she was using, and eventually lost interest and stopped listening altogether. When the trial finally started and the indictment was read to him, he had absolutely no idea what he was doing there.

He didn't like how everypony in the stands kept glaring at him and especially didn't like the glower on the face of the prosecution. The sober expression on Auntie Celestia's face didn't help either. What was it they all wanted from him? Why couldn't they all leave him alone? Why couldn't he just go home?

“Does the defendant not understand the question?” Judge Celestia asked when she grew tired of his silence.

Blueblood looked around the courtroom. “I don't know...” he said quietly. “Could Your Auntie please repeat the question.”

“The question was, how do you plead?”

He quickly glanced at his lawyer, who merely nodded her approval at the plan they had worked out. He turned back to Celestia. “I plead innocent.”

“Actually,” his lawyer said, “we plead guilty, Your Honor.” She shot Blueblood a sideways glare.

All this was just getting more uncomfortable and more confusing for him.“Guilty? But won't that get me into more trouble?” he asked.

He let his eyes dart between Celestia and his lawyer. Apparently, it wouldn't. Or it would. He couldn't really tell. Either way, he only wanted the entire ordeal to be over. “Fine,” he said, “I plead guilty. I accept this slap on the fetlock and promise to never do it again. Can I go home now?”

Celestia sighed. “No, you can't. First we have to determine the severity of the crime. Only then can I reach a proper verdict. For now, you need to take a seat in the witness stand and make your testimony.”

He did as he was told. The view from the witness stand wasn't any better. Still everypony was staring at him and still he didn't know why or what to do about it. He simply waited for something to happen.

He didn't have to wait for long. “Would the prosecution like to question the defendant?” Celestia asked.

“Certainly, Your Honor.” The prosecutor wasted no time and walked up to the stand right away.

Up close, she actually looked kind of intimidating. That neat bobcut, looking wild and orderly at the same time, made it perfectly clear she meant business. Not many mares had this effect on Blueblood, only the ones that could actually make his life a living hell, like for instance Auntie Celestia.

“So,” the prosecutor began, “since you've already pleaded guilty, I do not plan to have a long line of questions about the details of the crime. Rather, I would like to go down the state of investigation and have you add to it wherever you feel necessary. Is that alright with you?”

Blueblood nodded, regardless of his having no idea what she was talking about.

“Now, prior to the crime you had learned that your continuously declining popularity had reached a new low. Feeling the dire need to do something about it, you decided the best way to level the playing field, so to speak, was to defame everypony more popular than you in the polls. So you printed a number of bills portraying vicious slander that is much too graphic to be presented in this public court. And that's about it, which all sounds a bit concise when you think about it, but sometimes the facts of the case are pretty clear.”

All the while, the prosecutor had trotted to and fro through the courtroom, wildly gesticulating from time to time to accentuate her words. Now she had stopped and came face to face with Blueblood. “That's how it was, wasn't it,” she said, staring him straight in the eye.

He shrank from her gaze. “Kinda...” he said.

“Kinda? What do you mean by that?”

“Well...” He let his eyes roam around the room. “Although I don't really understand what's going and what I am doing here and I much despise how everypony keeps glaring at me, expecting me to do or say something, which I'd much rather see them stop, leave me alone and go home...”

He fell silent.

“Well?” the prosecutor asked.

“Well what?” Blueblood asked.

“Please finish your thought.”

He looked at her perplexed. “But I was finished. All I wanted to say was I'd like people to stop staring at me and asking questions.” He turned towards Celestia. “Can I go home now?”

The prosecutor was left speechless for a moment. “But don't you have anything to say to these charges?”

He raised an eyebrow. “What charges?”

She buried her face in her hooves. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

Celestia looked completely unfazed by all this. She turned to the defense attorney. “Defense, your witness.”

“Your Honor,” the attorney announced, not even bothering to get up, “I think it is best for my client's case if he refrains from talking altogether, or if that proves unavoidable, for him to speak as little as possible. No questions.”

Blueblood was allowed to leave the witness stand and return to his seat, from where he could watch the rest of the court proceedings unfold in the same awkward confusion he had felt the entire time.

At least things were moving far faster from here on out, with witnesses coming and going by the minute, and Blueblood slowly being able to discern a pattern between them. First was the newspaper editor whose machines had been rented in Blueblood’s name. He talked very little, simply calling what the prosecution said plausible, then leaving, with nopony present being particularly impressed by his testimony. Then came the Royal Guards who had found and taken down his poster. They reported their lament in much more detail, which earned them much more excited looks from the onlooking crowd. Last was the Captain of the Royal Guard, who spoke with the most pathos. The entire room was hanging on his lips as he cursed Blueblood’s name and suggested he should be looked inside the darkest dungeon Equestria had to offer, with the key being thrown into the deepest occean or through the gates of Tartarus themselves. By the end of it, everypony in the crowd was cheering or clapping their approval. Apparently, whoever talked the most and the loudest got the most attention and admiration from the courtroom.

But just as Blueblood was figuring all of this out, the prosecution was already making her summation. At her last sentence she glared down at Blueblood who shrank right under her gaze.

“So in conclusion,” she summarized, “the defendant shows no remorse for what he has done or any regards for basic equine decency. He has to be made an example of or it will allow others to follow in his hoofsteps. Thank you, Your Honor.”

Celestia nodded sagely, then addressed Blueblood's attorney. “Defense, your closing argument.”

Once more, she got up to make sure nothing of her statement was lost. “Your Honor,” she began, “do not forget that as a victim yourself, you may be slightly biased against my client, which is something you should consider before giving him the maximum sentence. That is all.”

“Wait a minute!”Although he had only listened with one ear, even Blueblood understood the word sentence. “Does this mean I'm about to be punished?”

His attorney blinked in utter disbelief. “Of course it does. You're on trial. What did you think that meant?”

He didn't answer. With no time to lose, he turned towards Celestia. “Your Auntie, may I say something.”

“I will allow it, as long as you do it from the witness stand.”

He didn't have to be told be told twice. As soon as he had taken his seat, Blueblood started a speech he knew would decide his immediate fate.

“My fellow Equestrians,” he began, “I make no secret that as a member of the Royal Family I oftentimes have considered myself superior to the average plebeian who is roaming the streets of our country, vastly superior even.”

He paused for effect, although the crowd's disgruntled groans were not what he was going for.

“Yes, I had life handed to me on a silver platter and was fed off of it with a silver spoon. There was a literal ton of silver the palace I grew up in and what few things weren't silver in were diamond-encrusted or golden, as golden as my future looked just a few precious days ago before this entire ordeal started.

“Now all I see are clouds hanging over my head, clouds of misery, clouds of despair that block out any and all rays of hope that could shine through to me, making my once bright future look rather bleak. But despite all of this, I refuse to give up hope that things can get better. For you see, I've been separated at birth. Separated from my fellow citizens for whose needs, concerns, and worries I have little to no understanding of or interest in. Which is a tragedy and a definite fault of mine. But one must never forget that what has been separated can be united again and what has grown apart can grow together the way it should be.

“It seems as such that although I have been rich in blood, rich in heritage, rich in looks, and not to mention rich in the original meaning of the word, I may have been poor in one thing, and that is judgment. Just because I found myself superior to you, I considered myself better and you not worth my time. But now that I had the time to think about it, I feel that you were worthy all along and spending time with you is certainly better than doing time. The only thing standing in my way was my ignorance. But I must ask you this: is my ignorance really a criminal act?

“Ignorance is bliss, they say, so it logically follows that the most ignorant of ponies should be the happiest as well. This was the case for me. I was happy until I had to stand trial today and my happiness shouldn't be a crime. Isn't one of the founding principles of Equestria that every pony, no matter its race, beliefs, or gender, should have his or her chance at the pursuit of happiness? How could we let such a minor thing as ignorance stand in the way of that?

“What makes a life a happy life, I ask you. For some it is their career, for others it's their friends and family. Some find pleasure in the finer things in life, others in the simple things. For me it is a little bit of both. My nanna always used to say, 'the next crème brûlée you're having always tastes best' and I lived my life accordingly. Of course we didn't always have crème brûlée. Sometimes nanna would make one of servants go down to the kitchen to make us an apple pie. I have only the fondest memories of it. I used to call them nanna's apple pies.

“I remember a good apple pie recipe one of chefs told me once when I didn't ask him to. The secret, he said, lies in the crust. It has to be just right, not too thin and not too thick. Then there's also the quality of the apples you put into it. Always use fresh ones is something I had to learn the hard way when I was eleven and—”

Once he got going, Blueblood had forgotten the world around him entirely. When his defense attorney snatched him up from behind to drag him back to the dock, he didn't even notice until his haunches were forcefully pushed back onto the bench.

“Your Honor, could I please have a moment alone with my client?” his attorney asked.

She waited for no response and immediately leaned in to ask the question that had been burning on the tip of her tongue for the last five to ten minutes. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“I'm fillybustering,” Blueblood explained. “I've thought about it for almost a few seconds, and I thought the only way for me to get out of all this unscathed is to drone on and on so Auntie Celestia can never reach her verdict and has to let me go eventually. It's ingenious.”

“Yeah... things don't work that way.”

“They don't? Rats!”

Quickly dismissing his hopes at an acquittal, he went back into the stand with only one final thing to say.

“Your Auntie, all I have left to say is I had no idea what I was doing. I rarely ever do. That's why I try my best to do as little as possible all day long. I'm sure you can confirm this from personal experience yourself.

“It's just that...” He sighed. “There were these three public relation managers who said everypony was hating me and that they could do something so everypony would love me again, which I though would be great and wouldn't require me to do anything. How could I say no? I didn't think it could ever hurt anypony and I'm honestly sorry it did. I didn't mean for it. I didn't mean for any of it.”

Like before, Celestia kept the stone-cold face that was mandatory for the duty she was carrying out. “And are these three in this courtroom today?” she asked.

Blueblood took a quick look around, but couldn't spot them anywhere. “No,” he admitted. “I don't know where they are.”

“Thank you, Prince Blueblood. I will consider that before I pass judgment. You may now return to your seat.”

The seconds between him sitting back down and Celestia announcing her verdict were the longest in Bluebloods life. He sincerely regretted having let things get this much out of control. If he could only turn back time, he would do things differently now. But it was too late now, much too late. He was almost too scared to listen. He looked up at his Aunt, who looked so stiff and serious.

“Although I have no trouble believing what you said, ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law. Knowingly or not, those posters were hung up with your permission and for that alone you have to take responsibility. And since your actions, or lack thereof, have made Equestria an uglier place, it has become your civic duty to make it beautiful once more. Your sentence will be two hundred hours of community service. My hopes are that through a couple of hours working at a soup kitchen or an orphanage or a hospital, you can learn how fulfilling a little hard work can be and how it can make the world you live in a better place. Maybe then you can resort to more positive means to raise your image in the eyes of the public than those you have used before.”

Celstia's gavel came down, making the verdict was official and releasing Blueblood from the metaphorical rack he was put on. And considering the actual rack he thought he was going to be put on, all things considered, he had gotten off pretty easy.

He vowed to take this chance at penance and take away as much from the experience as he could. Helping others would be great; he was sure of it. First thing tomorrow morning, he would start his first shift at the soup kitchen and see it for himself. And who knew: if he got even luckier, the soup might even be tastier than he expected.