Even Goddesses need love

As Twilight returned to the dining hall, everypony's eyes locked on the three of them. Celestia was now on her hooves again, while Twilight had opted to give Luna a piggyback ride, whose forelegs draped over Twilight’s shoulders and whose hind legs wrapped around Twilight’s waist to keep herself from falling. Luna’s face was covered in a blush of embarrassment as they made it to the table. Celestia sat down and Twilight knelt down to allow Luna to dismount off of her back. Once Luna was seated and her chair properly pushed up to the table, she then seated herself.

“Twi, what was that weird thing that you were doing with Luna on your back like that?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Well RD, you know how ponies carry their foals on their backs right? And how couples sometimes do it?” at Rainbow’s nod affirming that she did, “ Well, that was the human equivalent, which is called a piggy back ride.”

“Oh, well, that explains why Princess Luna was blushing so much,” Rainbow Dash replied.

“Let’s get back to my story,” Twilight said while clearing her throat.

*******

Jo had, over the past hour and a half, led me to her home town. Although it was getting darker, I was surprised to find that the odd streetlamps we passed, that had been what Jo had called them, were still casting light through the night time’s gloom, despite their age and the lack of any noticeable power source. I looked up and saw the stars glittering in the night. I didn’t recognise most of the constellations, save for a few like Pegasus and Lyra. We had cleared the forest a while ago, so I had a clear view of the night sky. The light from the moon fell on us and I sighed.

“Luna.”I said quietly. Evidently, it wasn’t quiet enough as Jo looked back at me and asked

“What about Vice Principal Luna? And how do you know her?”

“What!? Now I must be hearing things. You know Luna?” I inquired, Jo just shrugged her shoulders.

“She’s the vice principal of the magic and martial arts school Crepusculum. She was my vice Principal. Luna tends to focus on the martial curriculum, while Principal Celestia focuses on the magical.” Jo explained, we both lapsed into silence as I began to process all that I had heard.

Okay, Sunset Shimmer, Principal Celestia, and apparently Luna all exist here. Extrapolating from the information that Jo has provided this is the same world I visited when I was just a young filly, back when I still lived with Princess Celestia in Canterlot. I had been accidently sent to this world, to an escalator high school called Canterlot High, where I met Sunset Shimmer and Principal Celestia. I had not seen Luna at the time, but I guess she does exist.

According to my understanding from what Jo has told me, some thermothaumical offensive spells destroyed everything, though humanity survived.

More amazingly, Celestia, Luna and Sunset Shimmer had somehow survived for over one thousand years. My primary objective: meeting up with Sunset Shimmer and find out what else I had missed. Optional objective: find out the time dilation in relation to Equestria.

We reached the settlement not too long after that. Its tall walls were solid white and smooth, the only opening was a portcullis and reinforced oak doors. At either side a guard stood stoically. As we approached, one of the guards called for the gate and doors to open. The wrought iron portcullis opened, slowly raising to the top of the gate house. The guard waved us through with little trouble or suspicion.

“Welcome home Jo. New arrival, eh? Best take her to see the Principal,” the guard said, to which Jo nodded in response. The guard smiled before returning to his gaze to the wilderness.

“Why would I have to meet the Principal?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, I forgot to mention that the town belongs to the school, and Principal Celestia is its leader,” Jo explained.

“Guess you’ll have to wait till later to meet my neighbor,” Jo said with a large smile on her face.

Walking through the streets I saw many people going about their daily lives, the cobbled roads, steam issuing out of brass, copper, or lead pipes. In the center of town stood a tall clock tower with gears half exposed to the elements, steam expelled from on top of the tower indicating that the clock was steam powered. Jo led me through the streets until we came to a massive and long staircase, which led up a grass bank. After climbing the steps, the school came into view. It was massive, having easily eclipsed the old Canterlot High, though its construction looked roughly the same. Its red bricks the only familiar aspect of the building in this new world. I heard Jo chuckle behind me, as I looked up in awe of the feat of engineering before me.

“Yeah, everyone reacts that way when they first see the school,” Jo added, amusement evident in her voice. Jo’s comment shook me out of my reverie and I looked at her. “Come on, we got to see the Principal!” Jo shouted gleefully as she ran ahead.

“Hey! Wait up!” I called and ran after her.

After running for ten minutes and following the woman in front of me, I placed my hands on my knees and panted while bent over.

While I was composing myself, Jo had knocked on the Principal's door, so I didn’t see the Principal charge at me.

I heard someone shout “Twilight!”, and before I could respond, my world was then narrowed as I was smothered in the breasts of the Principal, who now had me in a tight hug.

“Celestia, I can’t breathe!” I gasped, trying to speak around her massive fun bags, though my voice was significantly muffled by her breasts. My world came back in view as a sheepish looking Principal Celestia was now standing before me with Luna, who had an amused smile on her lips.

“Jo, thank you for bringing Twilight here. You may leave now,” Principal Celestia said. Jo just looked confused at Celestia’s command, but, not wishing to question Celestia’s unparalleled leadership, she left without making any objection.

Principal Celestia wore a plain loose white dress, which extended down to her knees white thigh high socks embroidered with gold filigree patterns, her shoes were brass sabatons while her shoulders were covered by leather pauldrons.

Luna stood off to the side, and was wearing a half plate that had a boob window cut into it, revealing her cleavage, a short leather skirt covered her lower half, though I could swear I was able to see through it. She was also wearing black leather pants, and a long sword hung off her left hip.

“I-”

Celestia interrupted me, “I missed you, Twilight. It has been a millennium and a half since I last saw you. We had lost all hope after the thermothaumical spells hit Crystal Prep. I thought you had died, so I named this school in honor of your memory.”

“I hate to break this to you, Celestia, Luna, but I am not your Twilight. Are you two aware of the many-worlds interpretation?” I asked, receiving a nod of understanding from Principal Celestia and a blank look from Luna, I sighed and continued. “The many-worlds interpretation states that there is a large, or even an infinite number of worlds out there, where every person’s actions and the actions of everyone else all happen and creates a new world for it to happen in. You spot a book you really like the look of, and you decide to flip a coin to see whether or not to buy it. If the coin lands heads up, you will decide you buy it. If it land tails up, however, you decide you won’t purchase that book. In one-fourth of all of the realities, the coin will come up heads. In another one-fourth version of all possible realities, that coin flip came up tails and in another you never even flipped that coin at all. And in the final one-fourth of all realities, the coin is flipped, but lands on its side, landing neither on its head or its tail. I was sent from a reality that is vastly different, I have been here before as a young girl, but that was roughly one and a half thousand years ago. Back when you were Principal of Canterlot High.

Which begs the question, what happened here? Why are you still alive?”

Celestia and Luna’s faces sunk, and both of them began to cry. “Twilight, back in two thousand and sixteen, a few years after you left to go back home, something happened. Sunset Shimmer and your other friends discovered that the portal to your world was leaking Equestrian magic, magic that was seeping into our world.” I widened my eyes in shock.

“They were tasked with making sure that the issues regarding the thaumical leakage was solved, or at least mitigated, and so was tasked further with monitoring the flow of magic through the Equestrian portal.” Celestia got up and moved to a nearby window initially hidden by a bookshelf. Luna stayed where she was, but watched her sister with concern.

“Unfortunately, however, during the Friendship Games, your alternate self ripped open multiple raw and unstable portals to Equestria, whereby further exacerbating the magic flow into our world. Luckily, however, Sunset and your friends managed to stop your alternate self and got her to understand that not only was her relentless pursuit after knowledge hurting her fellow students, what she truly needed was the deep interpersonal bonds she could form with her fellow human beings.” Celestia sighed and slumped before returning to her seat.

“That knowledge was fine, but a life solely devoted to academic pursuits is far less rich and rewarding than if she set aside a portion of her life devoted to the building and development of the deep interpersonal relationships she could enjoy with her friends and fellow humans.”

“However, the damage was done, with more magic than ever flowing into our world, many places throughout Canterlot became fonts of magic. Therefore, now with a self sustaining magical field, the magic spread further over the United States of Equestria, enabling more magical fonts to spring forth. Soon after, our world was saturated in magic, and people who couldn’t do magic suddenly found themselves levitating items to themselves. The discovery of this new energy source and power, by your alternate self, created a new kind of technology and accelerated our development.” Celestia paused to open her desk draw, and drew out three tumblers and a bottle of Applejack Daniels whisky. She poured out two fingers in each tumbler, then offered one to me and Luna before taking her own and downing it. Celestia hissed through her teeth after she finished. Picking mine up, I breathed in the whiskey’s scent and then downed it as well. This action caused Celestia to raise her eyebrow questioningly.

“I used to drink whiskey, back home. As soon as I was old enough my version of you took me to a bar and introduced me to it.” I explained

“Ah.” Celestia replied, seemingly happy with the explanation.

Celestia continued, “At first magic was used for benign and helpful things like improving communication, teleportation for both self-targeted spells and enchanted fixed-location static gateways, giving people an unprecedented access to each continent. Medical-centered thaumic technologies for curing cancer and other ailments, increased human lifespan into the triple digits, cybernetic enhancements and, extremely rarely some, people even gained wings and horns.” Celestia looked to her sister, who had yet to touch her whiskey. asked her “Are you not going to drink yours, Luna?”

“Oh, no Celestia, I wouldn’t want to give myself too much of a handicap for our students.” Luna responded smirking.

Celestia shrugged and poured herself and myself another glass of whiskey each, “While many humans could do magic without horns, those with horns had a level of control most will never attain. Unfortunately, the good that we thought would come from our advancements regarding magic and thaumic technologies didn’t last as many other countries grew jealous of the amount of our magical fonts and, by extension, how much magic we could use, and formed an alliance called TCCS or The Communist Coalition of States; such as Stalliongrad, Chineigh, and many smaller countries like Griffonstone.

They, in their bid for more magic, spurred themselves on to declare war against the USE and its allies Pintland and Caneighda. After years of fighting, further boosting medical, magical energy and weapon tech and when there was no sign of the war stopping, the thermothaumical spells hit. No one knew who attacked first, but the result was the same; Mutually Assured Destruction.”

I fidgeted in my seat as I downed the my new glass. To think spells of mass destruction, could exist or that people would use them. I shudder to think what would happen if they were brought to my Equestria.

“Luckily, Ark Tech, a mega-corporation which led the world in thaumical research, development, and products, created the Arks, underground bunkers designed to hold a thousand people each safe and secure from the thermothaumical devastation and radiation. Each held water, food and other essentials for people to wait out the fallout. Three hundred years later, the Arks opened, afterwards life was rough and the planet was still a wasteland. People would scavenge, kill each other, and fight over what remained of our planet’s very limited resources, Luckily magic still existed, so lots of Post-Sundering technology still remained in working order.”

Celestia played with her glass in her hands.

“It had later been discovered that Ark Tech had performed experiments in several Arks, the most notable was those with horns and everyone who had wings had Arks specifically built and designated for them, each group separated into a single Ark, one for the Mages, one for the Valkyries, to see if these traits were hereditary. Another Ark held a group that were to be genetically engineered and artificially modified to be naturally strong, have a greater amount of stamina, and a natural connection to the earth. As a consequence, this led to the creation of genetically modified humans with those desirable traits, called the Earthmen. The Mages, and the Valkyries, which also started rising to the attention of the human race, howbeit, developed naturally as humans adapted to the magic-saturated world in which they gradually found themselves living in.

While I was listening my attention drifted over to Luna and began undressing her with my eyes.
Luna seemed to notice my stare though, as she was posing in a way meant that accentuated her breasts. Luna took out a waterbag and downed some water, slowly licking her lips.

Celestia sipped on her glass, and glared at Luna “Luna, are you just going to stand there? Don’t you have anything else to do?”

“I might, but I don’t think it can be done here. There’s too many prying eyes here, if you catch my meaning.” Luna purred out wiggling her eyebrows suggestively at me.

Celestia facepalmed, and tried to ignore her sister.

“The Valkyrie’s Ark was much larger and more spacious than the others and contained an aerodrome for Valkyries to fly and exercise their wings. The Mage’s Ark, however, contained all the scientific, magical books and technology and were encouraged to follow magical engineering pursuits and research.”

Luna dropped her sword and Celestia let out an irritated growl as her sister purposefully bent over to pick up her sword, exposing her cleavage.

“Luna, we will discuss this later, but for now stop teasing Twilight.” Celestia said, gritting her teeth.

I quickly spun around to face Celestia, my cheeks burning as I saw that same questioning eyebrow quirk at my behavior.

“Everyone had bookshelves in their rooms, and the Ark itself had a huge library. In the Earthmen Ark, strength and stamina was lauded, books and knowledge regarding botany, geomancy and farming were contained within it and all food was grown inside the Ark, Once they returned to the surface, the Valkyries learned they could walk on clouds and manipulate weather, whereupon they formed the cloud city of New Cloudsdale.

When the Mages walked on the surface, and discovered that they felt and saw the magical energies around them, they found a quiet secluded corner of the wasteland and created a great capital city and named it New Canterlot, a massive magical city, hewn out the earth and moulded by advanced magics around several magical fonts. Largely isolationist, Mages kept to themselves and only rarely left their city, and rarely letting people in for fear of people making the same mistakes that caused the thermothaumical fallout.

The Earthmen, when leaving their Ark and seeing the state of the world, wept upon the devastation and the detrimental impact which human selfishness and greed had upon their world’s environment. They then made it their mission to heal the land and use all their knowledge regarding botany and agriculture to created a fertile forest filled with every tree of every size and moulded their still living trees, the ones which had been stored and grown in the Ark so that they survived the effects of the thermothaumic fallout, into homes.

Eventually Earthmen would go on pilgrimages over the wasteland all over the world, to restore and improve the botanic environment of the world in which they lived. Soon afterward, the founding of these tribes and their cities with which they had the highest concentration of humans like themselves, encouraged other survivors, mutations and other Arks to also built settlements.

Amongst these settlements and cities; raiders, bandits, and other morally reprehensible people surfaced, as there was no longer a government larger than that necessary for the operation of the newly-rising city-states and settlements, which often lacked the resources and people to have anything resembling an efficient law enforcement agency, much less a standing army.

No longer curtailed by fear of punishment, this gave way to years of fighting and tension. Eventually, thanks to the Earthmen’s tireless work to increase and improve the global botanical environment, the world had regained the lushness and botanical fertility again, soil was fertile again and food was abundant.

A millennium had passed during these events, and the Mages had decided that the world was ready to learn about magic again. They sent out teachers, those who would establish thaumic-centered learning institutions like this one. The Valkyrie’s, being a boisterous, competitive, and militaristic people set forth to create martial schools that taught warfare, combat, and self discipline.

Soon towns, like our own Harmony, spread out from these schools. Well, not exactly like Harmony, sadly Harmony is a one of a kind in that it welcomes Mages, Earthmen and Valkyries. Most others lean heavily to majority of one of the races. We, that is Luna and I, are two of the very few humans that have all three traits of Mage, Valkyrie and Earthmen.”

This time Celestia forewent her glass and chugged from the bottle, letting out an unladylike burp once she had finished.

“The Harmony Project was another of Ark Tech’s projects, which they started shortly after the success of the other arks. People wanted to know if the traits of Earthmen, Mage, and Valkyrie could be given to people, to give them a major advantage over other humans, or adapted humans which only exhibited only one of the traits. Sadly only Luna, Sunset, Dean Cadance, and I; just four out of our Ark, which had once been filled with a thousand people, survived the process. Don’t ask me how, as even now, I don’t fully understand why we alone succeeded where others had failed, but this process has made us immortal.”

“Wait, but I don’t see any of your wings?” I asked in confusion.

I watched as Celestia and Luna somehow communicated with each other through their eyes, before mutely nodding their mutual understanding and agreement of the course of action they had decided upon. The Celestia and Luna, lit their horns and in a flash of light; their stature, musculature, proportions, and their breast size had increased. They now also had wings as well as horns. I just sat their and gaped in awed astonishment at their significantly altered appearance.

“We are the results of Project Harmony, and we have decided to hide our true selves behind illusions, Twilight,” Celestia finished explaining much of the important events which had occurred during my absence. I looked over to Luna who was now wearing a very provocative armor set, while Celestia wore a more conservative dress. I felt something trickle down from my nose and I felt my body crumple to the floor as my vision narrowed before utter darkness claimed me once again.

The last thing I heard was Luna saying, “Do you think we over did it?”

“Did you really have to wear that armor?” Celestia asked indignantly.

The bell rung, “Looks like that’s the bell for my next class.”

“Luna, don’t forget to change that armor, and reapply your glamour, We don’t need our students becoming anemic, and don’t forget tonight is your turn to cook! ” Celestia reminded Luna.

“Meemee meme me me mee~” Luna responded and blew a raspberry at Celestia, after she reapplied her glamour, while still wearing her provocative armor.

“Luna, come back here!” Celestia stood up indignantly as she went after her sister.

“Oh it’ll be fine, it’ll be a lesson in fighting with a distraction!” Luna shouted as she exited the room snickering. Celestia returned to her desk and let out a long suffering sigh.