The Invisible Alicorn

Chapters

Chapter 1: Street Scene
Chapter 2: Bedtime Chatter
Chapter 3: After-Work Discussion
Chapter 4: A Round of Job Interviews
Chapter 5: The Dream Police
Chapter 6: Exit Interview
Chapter 7: Show and Tell
Credits and Acknowledgments
Author’s Preface (you can go ahead and skip this one, but it will be included in the test)

Chapter 1: Street Scene

Chapter 1: Street Scene

From above, the human city sparkled on the coastline like a pile of finely-cut diamonds.

Up close, those facets resolved into the corners of hundreds of tall buildings of glass and steel, each one housing one or more businesses contributing to the prosperity of the city’s inhabitants. Inhabitants who could be found walking the sidewalks and driving the streets of this city. For this was the lunch hour, and the weather was perfect, if a bit on the hot side.

The faint sound made by dragonfly wings humming was everywhere.

A large park dominated the city’s downtown area, complete with a tiny pond and safety-approved equipment for the entertainment of human children. Police officers equipped with the latest electronic, offensive and defensive gadgetry for the apprehension of evil-doers vigorously patrolled its perimeter. The parents seemed equally apprehensive, their eyes wandering from face to face wondering, Is he the one? The Helpers remained quiet and docile, ready to move at a moment’s notice. But the children mostly seemed oblivious to the atmosphere of caution. Licensed food vendors sold them sweet treats at discount prices. Miniature versions of fairground equipment kept their hearts pumping to the addictive sounds of a frantic calliope. And the numerous fountains kept them cool. Since this was a partially aquatic environment, the dominant attire of the children was swimwear adorned with the likenesses of various cartoon characters of screen and television: Anna and Elsa, Dory as well as Dora, Optimus Prime and Rainbow Dash. The dominant sounds to be heard were those of the ever-present calliope, the splashing of water, the playful screaming of children on epic sugar highs, and the gentle scolding of parents who were now realizing the folly of feeding ice cream and cotton candy to their three-year olds. A dozen feet away from the vendors, a girl with strawberry-blonde pigtails wearing a torn blue jumper hid behind a bush, trying and failing to get any of her box of matches to stay lit long enough to actually set anything on fire. She was the only miserable child in the park.

We’ll get back to her later.

A few blocks away from the park was the locus of entertainment for another slice of the city’s demographic: the Shopping District. There one could obtain antiques from a less bustling era…or the latest fashions imported from all of the other exciting cities on the planet. Each shop had its own unique clientele, differentiated by the type of music playing out of the speakers at each storefront. There was everything from Boccherini to Mangione, from the most sedate Vivaldi to the most vivacious Bon Jovi—as performed by the Mantovani String Orchestra. Atop this musical mish-mash were heard the usual sounds of mostly-female voices comparing items and prices, sharing gossip, and trying to avoid the subject of politics. Here the Helpers were employed to carry purchases. Except when being told to praise a particular purchase, they were quiet and passive, waiting for orders.

And of course the sounds of cars, and of human foot traffic, could be heard throughout the city.

In one corner of downtown, at the entrance to an abandoned alley, came a faint but distinctive sound. A sound that had not been heard in the city in decades:

Clip, clop. Clip…clop.

The sound of hooves.

From out of the alleyway stepped a horse-like creature, her eyes nearly at the level of the average adult human. Her coat was midnight blue in color, and her mane and tail drifted in a gentle breeze undetectable by anybody else. Suspended within those blobs of hair were faint spots of luminescence, gently pulsating lights reflecting the stars of the night sky. The mark of a crescent moon was emblazoned upon each of the equine’s flanks. The presence of wings and a horn were only to be expected, for this was Luna, Pony Princess of Equestria.

The reason for her presence here lay in the pile of small posters balanced upon her back. Under Luna’s watchful eye, one of the posters levitated itself into the air. Four pieces of wax paper were removed from adhesive strips which had been affixed to the four corners of the back of the poster. The poster was carefully positioned in the air, and then pressed firmly against the brick wall on the left side of the alley entrance, causing it to stick in place. With a satisfied nod, Luna turned and walked down the street, her eyes roaming about to find the next good place to hang a poster.

As she walked, the humans she passed…did nothing. They just walked and talked as they normally did. They made room for the large pony, but in no other way acknowledged her existence. The conversations might falter for a brief moment as Luna passed into a human’s view, or there might be the occasional glance into the sky, but otherwise, it was as if the Princess of the Night didn’t even exist.

Luna did her best to hide her reaction to this lack of recognition. She went about her job of hanging posters with diligence, switching to using a box of tacks she was holding under one wing whenever the best place to put a poster changed from a stone wall to a wooden post.

At the end of the street, Luna approached a busy intersection. She stood for a while and watched carefully until she understood how the various colors of street lights controlled both vehicular as well as pedestrian traffic. With a nod of comprehension, she then walked boldly up to the corner and used her magic to depress the crossing button.

A few seconds later a dignified elderly woman stepped beside her and ordered her Helper to press the same button.

“I’ve already pressed it,” Luna informed her politely.

The woman wrinkled her nose and said nothing. Her Helper didn’t even do the business with the nose.

Luna snorted in frustration and looked away.

“Mommy, Mommy!” a little girl a few feet away cried, pointing at Luna and dragging the hand of her weary mother. “It’s Princess Luna!”

The girl suddenly attracted all of the attention that the pony had failed to.

The mortified mother did her best to silence the excited girl. “No, no, it isn’t,” she urged in a low voice. “It’s just a mirage caused by the heat. Let’s…let’s cross at the other intersection.”

“But Mom!”

Any further protests could no longer be heard, as the poor girl had been dragged out of hearing range.

The group standing around Luna began discretely backing away, all while looking in any direction except at her, and mostly up.

Luna steadfastly refused to resist the urge to look up as well, to try to see whatever it was the humans were pretending to look at. She was well aware of this little game of “staring at imaginary sky things”, as it was a great favorite of her sister’s pet phoenix. Besides, her ears informed her that there was absolutely nothing up there but dragonflies. But just in case…

Luna took a peek skyward. And saw absolutely nothing of interest.

With a scowl at being suckered yet again, she turned her sights to the opposite street corner. She almost missed the changing of the light, and had to stumble forward to make sure she got across the street before the flashing outline of the walking human turned into a slapping hand. Luckily she was expecting her pile of posters to fall off of her back during this maneuver, so she was able to catch them in time.

The humans on the far side of the intersection acted the same as the ones on the street she had come from, giving her no acknowledgement whatsoever. From time to time she would glance at her reflection in a shop window, just to make sure that she truly was visible. A few minutes later, she looked back at one of the posters that she had put up, just to be sure they didn’t fade out of existence once they were separated from her.

At the next intersection, Luna looked over at the digital display in front of a bank. The display informed her that the time was 1:18 pm. Or at least, this is what it would have said, if the other 25% of the light-up dots were working properly. Luna’s time on Earth today was scheduled to last until 5:30.

It was going to be a long day.

Chapter 2: Bedtime Chatter

Chapter 2: Bedtime Chatter

With a gentle “pop”, Luna stepped out of the Earth afternoon and returned to Equestria. She was in a random hallway of the Royal Palace in Canterlot, and the time was nearly sunrise.

The clocks on Earth and Equestria were not yet aligned with each other.

Luna looked down first one hallway, and then another, before deciding on a direction and walking boldly forward. There was a very good chance it was the wrong direction entirely, but a princess never gives that sort of thing away. This time, at least, it was more or less the right direction, and she arrived at her sister’s room just in time.

Without a word, Luna opened Celestia’s door, strode through the large and empty bedroom, and came to a halt alongside the Sun Princess to perform their twice-daily ritual.

With the sun and moon in their proper places for the day, Celestia walked into the bedroom, her sister following. A veritable army of servants had materialized in the room in the space of a minute, and they set to work, combing and smoothing her fur, mane and tail, polishing her hooves and horn, and applying the pieces of Celestia’s ceremonial barding for her appearance at the Day Court. While this was happening, she lightly nibbled at a piece of rye toast with apricot jam.

Luna had a near-identical set of servants waiting to perform the exact opposite operation in preparation for bed, but they were waiting for her in her own bedroom.

“So,” Celestia asked after taking a sip of ambrosia, “how was Earth?”

“It’s…not as bad as you said it would be,” Luna said evasively, taking the opportunity to straighten a loose pinion in her wing, and therefore not have to look her sister in the face.

“Oh dear, that bad?” Celestia said. “Were you chased by a torch-lit mob armed with tar and feathers?”

“I said it wasn’t that bad,” Luna insisted. “I completed my assigned task without interruption.”

“But…” Celestia prompted. She idly lifted a hoof to make it easier on the pony servicing it.

Luna remained quiet for a few moments before finally replying. “But they wouldn’t look at me.”

Celestia put her hoof back down and turned her head to look right at her sister. “They wouldn’t look at you?”

“Yes.”

“But…why? Were they scared of you?”

“Not…” Luna rubbed one foreleg against the other. “Not of me, per se. But from where they looked instead of me, it was the consequence they feared. The consequence of being seen to acknowledge my presence.” A holographic projection from Luna’s horn brought a small robotic contraption to life in the space between the two alicorns. It was flat and roughly circular in shape, suspended in mid-air by four small propellers that produced a hum identical to that produced by a dragonfly’s wings. “They’re pretty good at hiding, I’ll give them that. It took me more than an hour to finally spot one of them.”

Celestia advanced carefully to look at the vision her sister provided from several angles. “What is this thing?” The servants had no choice but to stand and wait patiently.

“An autonomous device for observing humans from afar,” Luna explained. “They fly far overhead, occasionally swooping down when instructed to study something interesting. I suspect that I was so far outside the range of what they were programmed to look for that I was overlooked. Just to be safe, though, I cast a spell upon myself to be only visible to living beings. Oh, and one more thing…” Filaments of light appeared around the object, entering and exiting a whip-like appendage at the top. “The masters of these devices use this invisible frequency of light to control them.”

“Radio,” Celestia said, nodding. “I think the Lagomorphs were the first civilization Starswirl found that used those frequencies for long-distance communication. So, you discovered a population under siege?” At that moment she noticed the servants and unfinished breakfast waiting for her, so she backed up with a bemused grin and returned to her regular morning routine as she awaited Luna’s answer.

“A siege, but a very unusual one. For one thing, the signals controlling these machines came not from the capital of a foreign nation, but from that nation’s own government. And it was a very unequal siege. I crossed into a neighborhood where the average skin pigmentation was significantly darker than the average, and the density of observers was many times higher than usual. There, the inhabitants standing around me stopped pretending I didn’t exist, and actively fled from my presence.” One of Luna’s servants, having finally caught up with her wayward mistress, poked her head inquisitively inside Celestia’s doorway. A frown coupled with a quick shake of the head made it clear that the servant was to return to Luna’s room to await her return.

Celestia’s servants meanwhile had completed their ministrations, and a large mirror was presented to allow Celestia to inspect herself.

“Yes,” Celestia said with satisfaction. “You have performed excellently, as always. You may go.”

With brief but reverential bows, the servants left the room in rapid succession, ordered strictly by increasing seniority. After a calculated pause, the two sisters exited the room as well, their steps directed towards the throne room.

“Well it really comes down to what I suspected from the first,” Celestia informed her sister. “That world is a mess. Now if you could just help me convince Twilight of that fact…”

“No,” Luna said calmly. “This is a world with troubles, true. But I think we can help.”

Celestia stopped in her tracks. “No,” she said firmly, “absolutely not.”

Luna had to catch herself as she passed her elder sister behind. “But Tia,” she said in her most-winning voice as she looked over her shoulder at Celestia, “I really think we have a chance here. Don’t you remember Gunther and Gudrun?”

Celestia rolled her eyes. “Look, Sister,” she said, carefully modulating her voice to avoid sounding condescending. “I know we used to topple foreign governments on a regular basis before your banishment, but there’s a little thing called ‘sovereign rights’ that developed in the millennium since…since…who were Gunther and Gudrun again?”

Luna turned fully to address her sister. “They were the first griffons we ever met, remember? That dragon Scintillus showed them off to us at her clutch party—claimed that she had created them out of pure magic.”

“Scintillus…Scintillus,” Celestia muttered, tapping one golden-shod hoof against her cheekbone. “Ah yes! She wanted to marry you off to her unhatched son, and it took quite a bit of diplomacy on my part to keep her from declaring a vendetta when you refused.”

“Um…right,” Luna said, blushing as she remembered some of the more embarrassing parts of the dragon’s speech on the subject. “And when she couldn’t get the marriage she wanted, she decided to marry her two slaves to each other.”

“Oh, so that was Gunther and Gundrun?” asked Celestia. “I blocked the whole thing out because of the atrocious music and humiliating dance that the two were made to do as their ‘courtship’, to quote Scintilla. They looked like a couple of chickens hopping about, especially with the clothes they were forced to wear.”

“I rather appreciated that dance,” Luna said quietly. “It was just about the only honest element of the entire night. At any rate, I became interested in that particular couple, and I invested time in learning more about them. I never learned where they came from, but I did conclude that their love was genuine. I also determined that the griffon race was as fully capable of emotion and intelligent thought as our own, and therefore that they did not in any way deserve the status of being a slave race of the dragons. So I began a vigorous campaign designed to liberate them.”

Celestia groaned. “Oh no. The Cincinnatus Letters. That was you.”

“Indeed,” Luna said with pride. “I knew I couldn’t interfere directly as a Princess of Equestria without dragging us into yet another expensive war against the dragons, but I did everything I could through the power of words to sway ponies, griffons and even dragons of the rightness of my cause. For that matter, I was the one who introduced literacy to the griffons.”

“Do you know how much trouble I got into when the dragons figured that out?”

From around a corner in front of Celestia, a unicorn’s head carefully presented itself.

“Give me a few minutes, Raven,” Celestia informed her.

With a curt nod, Celestia’s private secretary turned and returned to the throne room, there to keep the peace among an increasingly antsy crowd of petitioners until the Sun Princess’ appearance.

“Oh, it couldn’t have been anything serious,” Luna said with a dismissive wave of a hoof. “I was only giving the griffons what they deserved. Anyway, the campaign failed, and the dragons locked their servants away where no pony could see them anymore. I was sent a rather gruesome memento mori of poor Gunther and Gudrun by Scintilla, with a curt note informing me that she had resisted the temptation to punish them for the actions she had finally figured out were due to me. No, she informed me, the pair had died of natural causes, and they left behind them children who in turn were now her slaves.”

Luna lowered her head and sighed. “I became Nightmare Moon a few years later, but that had nothing to do with my failure to liberate the griffons. Nevertheless, that failure has always gnawed at me, especially after I learned that you managed to succeed where I failed.”

Celestia lidded her eyes as she looked down at her sister. “That is a gross over-simplification. The griffons liberated themselves. They invoked my name as a cover, and very nearly caused a war because of it, but actual pony involvement was in fact absolutely minimal. Far worse was the effect on the dragons.” Celestia’s brow furrowed as she looked off in the distance, remembering some less-than-pleasant memories. “The dragons had become completely dependent on the griffons, first to fight their clan wars for them, and then to lead those wars as their generals. When they liberated themselves, dragon civilization collapsed entirely.” She sighed. “Perhaps that was for the best. Before they started using griffons to fight their battles, dragons employed increasingly powerful magics to war upon each other. There were a few times when they quite nearly destroyed the planet. Did you know that the Windigoes were their creation?”

Luna shook her head. “When did you discover this?”

“A couple centuries into your banishment,” answered Celestia. “They were originally meant to generate suicidal despair in their dragon targets, but have no effect on any other creatures. But their dragon victims reprogrammed their magic into the form we now know, a form that could not affect dragons; they did not care what the consequences on ponies would be.

“The point I am trying to make, Luna, is that the dragons were a threat to Harmony, and Harmony took care of the matter.”

“By removing their ability to think?” Luna asked incredulously.

Celestia shook her head in annoyance. “The greed curse only affects dragons that allow themselves to be consumed by their baser emotions. You’ve met Spike, so you know they don’t have to be like that.”

“And the humans?”

“The situation with the humans is the business of the humans, and them alone. Based on what I tried and failed to do with the dragons, I’m certain that if you were to intervene, you would be condemned by all sides. Promise me that you’re not going to go trotting off and starting any human revolutions, Luna. Doing that will completely justify their government’s distrust of us.”

Luna lightly bit the inside of her cheek.

“Luna…”

The younger princess let out a petulant snort. “Very well, I promise I won’t lead any revolutions while I’m on Earth.”

“And don’t try to free any of their slaves.”

“They have slaves?!”

Celestia sighed. “You didn’t notice all the humans with colorful turbans, dog collars, and the exact same shade of blue eyes? The free humans address them by the euphemistic term of ‘Helpers’?”

“I…may have noticed them,” Luna said slowly, “but I didn’t really pay much attention to them because—”

“Because you were too focused on being ignored.”

“…Yes.”

“So when are you going back?”

“In a couple of hours. I need to see if anybody wishes to hire my services.”

“Excellent,” Celestia said with a satisfied nod. She passed Luna on her way to Day Court. “You’ll be back in time for sunset?”

“Of course, Sister.” Luna proceeded back to her room, her mind lost in thought.

Chapter 3: After-Work Discussion

Chapter 3: After-Work Discussion

The Randalls lived in a split-level ranch house in one of the numerous suburbs that surrounded the human city. The first ten years of the mortgage had been paid strictly on time, with the financial investment company that currently held the deed expecting another thirty years of steady payments to come.

The Randalls were a family of three: father Charles, mother Teri, and little daughter Sara. Both parents were employed and made enough money to put the family comfortably in the upper-middle class tax bracket. In a progressive move, the mother was the primary bread-winner. Her husband was on record as having “no complaints whatsoever about this arrangement”. What he truly meant by these words was up for debate.

On this particular evening, Charles Randall returned home from a “voluntary” “morale-boosting dinner get-together” with his fellow employees that had somehow failed in its stated goal—just like all of the previous ones. He found his wife in her usual position at this time of day: seated at the kitchen island, catching up on the newest Internet memes and celebrity gossip by way of her tablet computer.

Charles gave Teri a perfunctory kiss on the cheek before beginning the job of putting away the remains of the lunch he had made for himself that morning. Teri in turn idly mussed her unmanageable poof of a hairdo without looking up from her screen.

Charles failed to ask his wife about the events of her day, or about the amusing antics of cats and former reality-show contestants. And Teri failed to ask her husband about whatever it was that he did for a living.

Theirs was a relationship based on uncomfortable silences, and normally, that was the way they liked it.

“The drones have been conducting experiments downtown again,” Charles said without warning, completely destroying the silence.

Teri put down her tablet and stared at her husband for several seconds before responding. “What were they doing?” she asked finally.

“Experimenting,” Charles repeated in a matter-of-fact way. “Dropping hallucinogens. For use against our enemies.”

“Huh,” said Teri. She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a few moments as she processed this information. “And did you get caught up in this mass hallucination?”

Charles nodded his head proudly. “Yes, indeed! I hallucinated that I saw Princess Luna.”

“‘Princess Luna’?” Teri asked. “Um, which anime was she from again?”

“Not an anime,” Charles insisted, “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.”

Teri nodded. “Oh yes, of course. You watch it often enough.”

“Just as an escape,” Charles said without thinking.

The ever-present sound of dragonfly wings suddenly got a lot louder.

“Not that I have any reason to want to escape from this wonderful country we are living in!” Charles quickly clarified.

The couple stood (and sat) in quiet nervousness until the humming sound finally drifted away to more inviting targets.

“So, what did the others see?” Teri asked. “Your fellow subjects in this experiment.”

“Oh, they all saw Princess Luna,” Charles replied.

“Really?” Teri asked with a raised eyebrow. “So you all just happened to be bronies, gathered around the exact same street corner at the exact same time. What are the odds?”

Charles shook his head. “Actually, that wasn’t the case. Two or three of the people I talked to didn’t even know who she was. But from their descriptions, it had to be Luna.”

Teri sighed. “Charlie, you can’t hallucinate something that has no significance to you. And a hallucinogenic drug will not make everyone affected see the same thing at the same time. I mean, if my company could get away with that, they’d be selling diapers right here instead of being forced to do their business in third-world countries.”

“But you still wouldn’t buy them yourself,” Charles said quietly.

“Are you nuts?!” Teri exclaimed. “Have you seen the post-mort…” She caught herself and took a deep breath before continuing, a hint of resentment in her voice. “I mean, those are products for the lower socio-economic rungs. We can afford better, so we do. It’s good for the economy. And Sara’s going to stop needing to wear those things any day now, just you wait. We’ll find the right therapist, or she’ll finally tell us what’s going on in her nightmares, and she’ll become normal again, just like we always wanted.”

Charles stared at her blankly for a moment before speaking. “Speaking of Sara, where is the little dumpling? I expected to hear something from her when I got home. Screaming, breaking glass…”

The doorbell rang.

“That would be her,” Teri said, getting up, “along with her police escort.”

“What did she do now?” Charles asked with desperation.

“She tried to burn down Children’s Park,” Teri said with a note of exasperation as she made her way to the front door.

“How did she even get across town anyway?” Charles asked, following his wife with an open milk carton in one hand.

“She refuses to say.” Teri opened the door, to see a police officer wearing a pair of data goggles firmly holding the hand of the girl with the torn blue jumper.

Teri knew that the goggles were tracking every microscopic motion of her facial muscles, always watching for the distinctive twitch that indicated that someone was contemplating attacking a police officer. That twitch alone was legal justification for the use of lethal force.

She tried to keep her face very, very still.

“So, what are you going to do, Mom? What are you going to do?” the girl asked with a sneer.

“To your room, young lady,” Teri ordered. “Right to sleep. No supper.”

Sara frowned in disappointment, yanked her hand out of the police officer’s, and marched upstairs as loudly as possible.

“And pleasant dreams!” Teri added, in a hopeful tone that was completely false.

The door upstairs slammed shut.

Teri turned to the police officer. “I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” she said, again with a tone she didn’t mean. From a checkbook, she pulled out a check with at least two more zeroes than was necessary, with a stamp in the corner loudly proclaiming that she voted for President Strait. “I believe this should cover the cost of the damages to the park…and to a certain minor’s criminal record?”

The police officer took the check and tucked it into his breast pocket, all without revealing a hint of emotion. He then turned sharply and returned to his patrol car.

The couple silently returned to the kitchen. After a moment, Charles noticed the milk carton in his hand, decided he didn’t want any after all, and put it away. “Now the weirdest part,” he said, continuing his story as if it had never been interrupted, “was what Princess Luna was doing: putting up posters. None of us looked at them—I mean, they might have been enemy propaganda, and you know the penalty for being caught reading enemy propaganda.”

Teri turned to look at him. “Putting up posters?” she asked. “That sounds familiar.” She tapped her fingers together for a few seconds before picking up her tablet and tapping in a couple of searches. “Ah, here we go—somebody posted a link to an outtake of a news video by mistake on the Bunny-Eared Cats Off-Topic Forum an hour ago instead of an AMV of Boss Fluffykins dancing to ‘Shake That Fat…’.” She stopped at the look her husband was giving her. “Hey, I don’t criticize your pony fixation! Anyway, after I got the link fixed, I decided to do some investigating—the original video wasn’t on the Channel 12 site for some reason, so the powers that be must have decided that it was too unimportant to post. I only watched enough to see that it was about posters and not cute cats before shutting it off, but it’s still in my cache, so here it is.” She shoved her tablet over so that Charles could see it. A video was playing, showing a trio of middle-aged attractive people sitting behind a desk.

“Hello, this is Mary Montell, along with Rick Taylor and Elena Martinez with the weather, and this is a News 12 Update.” For some mysterious reason, the POV of the broadcast was not the camera pointed at the news anchor, but rather the one pointed at the weather lady, who was sitting nervously in place and shuffling the papers before her.

The individual identified as Rick Taylor then began telling the story, again from off camera. “From the weirder side of the news, hundreds of mysterious posters have been spotted downtown between 5th and 11th Streets, and yet no one has admitted to seeing the individual responsible for putting them up.

“The posters claim to offer help in the realm of—get this—dream therapy, especially in resolving the nightmares of children and in fact claiming the ‘magical’ ability to enter dreams and fight imaginary monsters—for a price. The gypsy behind these posters uses an obvious night-based alias and the number of a public telephone booth, neither of which we will provide in the name of protecting the safety of the good citizens of this city.”

“Can you imagine?” the voice of Mary Montell butted in. “Even if this wasn’t an obvious fraud, if this particular psychic actually did possess the power to invade dreams, what an incredible violation of privacy that would be! Is this person getting the child’s permission? What happens if something goes wrong? Who’s going to foot the bill for the inevitable psychiatry sessions from having somebody poking their heads around in your most private space? I mean, can you imagine anyone being that irresponsible?”

Charles had gotten his coat on before Mary Montell had completed her opinion. “It should only take me a half hour to get down there at this time of night. Maybe I can get one of those posters before they’re all thrown away.”

“Good luck!” Teri cried out as the front door closed behind her husband. She stood there in the foyer for several moments, deep in thought.

· · ·

Back on the kitchen counter, the unwatched news video ran on, past the point where it was supposed to stop: “Elena Martinez,” the lone woman who had been on camera the entire time finally spoke,“here with the weather, but first, some interesting tidbits about Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, the supposed final destination for the worst of the worst terrorist enemies of this country.” Behind her, the expected weather map of the city was replaced by a grainy image of a desolate beach with some battered buildings in the distance.

The woman looked to be gathering her courage for a moment before she started speaking again, her words pouring out so rapidly that they were hard to distinguish: “Did you know that the Hispanic population of America is down nearly 8% from a year ago? And the number of people claiming their religion to be Muslim has gone down by nearly 30%. At the same time, nightly flights of dozens of military troop carriers and hundreds of black helicopters from around the country are converging on Guantanamo Bay.

“As these photographs prove, America’s most famous prison for terrorists no longer houses foreign enemies at all, but instead missing members of our own population, people taken without trial or explanation of any kind, besides the obvious supposition that the powers that be would be happier if they didn’t exist. Obviously, given the sheer numbers involved, these undeclared ‘enemies of the State’ are not stopping at Guantanamo, but where do they end up?

“Don’t you see what is going on? First the unwanted, the undesirables, and then those belonging to the wrong political party, and then, who knows? No one is safe!” As she was uttering these last words, Elena Martinez was rushed by dozens of black drones that had broken in through the windows and ceilings. These were equipped with robotic arms in addition to their camera lenses, and several of them had items clutched in their robotic hands. Before she knew it, Elena Martinez was chloroformed, stuffed in a body bag, and dragged off the scene.

A drone that had a pair of large turrets instead of arms slowly lowered itself into the scene, looking straight at the viewer and filling the entire frame. In the reflection in its lens, the recording light of the camera could be seen to be off—or at least appearing to be off. After several long seconds, the drone flew away, and the video ended.

Chapter 4: A Round of Job Interviews

Chapter 4: A Round of Job Interviews

When Luna returned to the human city, she took the time to truly look around her.

The Helper slaves were everywhere. Practically all of the lighter-skinned humans had one, and some even had two or three.

True more-or-less to Celestia’s description, the Helpers wore cheap plastic hats shaped like turbans, had rubbery flea collars around their necks, and had the same baby blue eyes regardless of their ethnicity. And they seemed to consist of a great number of different ethnicities, showing a great variety of skin shades, heights and head shapes. There was no overlap between their ethnicities and that of their owners, nor did their number include any of the Hispanic peoples living in the ghetto adjacent to the city.

The reason Luna may have failed to note the existence of the Helpers before is because they acted far more like machines than like people. All orders were obeyed without question, and without any emotional response whatsoever. In an alley, Luna witnessed two masters ordering their Helpers to fight each other as a crowd loudly bet on the outcome. Even as the two turbaned men were beating each other with fists, elbows, knees and feet, they never so much as grunted as a blow was struck.

Luna walked away from that alley clearly shaken. After a bit of random wandering, she arrived at a particular payphone, one of the last left in the city. Using her magic, she made a previously-invisible answering machine come into existence—a gift from the first humans Princess Twilight had revealed herself to, a pair of hackers. Unfortunately for Luna, the counter on the device informed her that nobody had called the number on her posters. It was only then that she realized that she had seen none of those posters since returning to the city. A quick survey revealed that not a one was left where she had posted them. With a huff, she disappeared back to Equestria and came back with another batch. She kept her eyes open as she started reposting to see if she could find who it was who took the earlier set down. She stopped at a wall were there was no room to put one of her posters up.

The wall was instead covered with a neat mosaic of missing person posters. One for each of dozens and dozens of missing children, all of whom had disappeared in the last six years. Nobody walked in front of that wall, instead crossing the street to avoid such a concentrated site of human misery.

Luna slowly wandered away, in an emotional haze for the second time that night.

Ahead of her, she saw a vehicle painted in distinctive colors with the word “Police” upon it. She cautiously advanced to see if she could learn anything from them.

There were two police officers in the car. They both had metallic devices mounted in front of their eyes.

“So, do you think we’re gonna catch the idiot who put up all of those posters?” the younger one asked.

“I doubt it,” the elder one replied. “He’d have to be pretty stupid to try and put them up again.”

“I’ll say,” the younger said with a laugh. “Say, did you actually look at those things when you were taking them down.”

“Not really.”

“I’ll tell you this: the lawyers would have loved to sink their teeth into them.”

Luna gasped at the mention of her mortal enemy. With a flash, all of the posters she had so carefully placed were summoned back into her forelegs and clutched tightly against her chest.

Charles Randall had been patrolling the streets of downtown for nearly three hours before finally spotting the tuft of street-level starlight peeking out from behind a police car parked at a McDonald’s storefront. Carefully, Charles circled the block so that he could park across the street and thirty feet back.

Inside the squad car, Charles could see the silhouettes of two officers eating and talking. They were wearing their data goggles, devices which informed them who was a criminal and who was loyal, while providing neat features like night vision and targeting lasers. The goggles also provided the useful side-effect of making the police officers look even less personable and human than they had appeared before the election. Near as Charles could tell, the attention of the officers was mostly concentrated on an alleyway next to a nearby liquor store.

Seeing as he would have some time to wait before the police left the scene, Charles pulled out his iPhone to write a text to his wife. Taken with a sudden inspiration, he turned the camera mode of his phone on and pointed it at the spectral blue pony sitting on the sidewalk.

The screen of the device showed a McDonalds, a police car, and an empty sidewalk.

Charles moved the phone aside, and saw the same scene with Princess Luna.

He put the phone back in front of him, and then removed it, several times before a smile of realization finally came to his face. “Well I’ll be…” he whispered out loud.

On her spot beside the driver’s door of the police car, Princess Luna reclined like the Sphinx while she worked on revising her poster. Phrases like “with the child’s permission” and “guaranteed to have no negative long-term effects” had to be fit in. “Rights and liberties, rights and liberties…” Luna muttered sarcastically under her breath. “‘Why, I would never think of disrespecting the humans with their bizarre attachments to rights and liberties, Twilight, never!’”

The policeman in the driver’s seat, hearing this whispering with his human ears—and yet oddly not picking them up with his computer-enhanced earbuds, turned his head to look down at the sidewalk beside him, and saw only pavement.

Luna stuck her tongue out at him.

The driver was interrupted in his survey of the sidewalk by his partner, who pointed him at a couple of teenagers and a Helper emerging from the liquor store. The teens pulled spray paint cans out of a canvas bag held in the arms of the Helper before walking into the alley.

With a pair of identical predatory smiles, the two police officers emerged from their car and followed the teens into the alley.

Charles took this opportunity to sprint as quietly as possible to a newspaper machine located close to Luna. While staring at the day-old headline about the surprise winner of the latest Kardashian popularity survey, he addressed his words to the pony princess: “Excuse me, your Royal Highness?”

Luna majestically rose to her hooves and turned to face him. “Yes?”

“M…my name is Charles Randall, and I’m interested in contracting your services for the benefit of our daughter. She’s been having nightmares.”

“Excellent,” Luna said with an enthusiastic smile. “I am eager to finally do good in this city. Do you wish to see my qualifications?”

A few minutes later, the police officers returned with the one vandal they were able to catch, a piece of duct tape over his mouth. The Helper was left standing at the alley entrance, waiting for orders that would never come. As the officers were processing their catch, a car started behind them and suddenly took off. The officer with his hands free pulled out his pistol as he waited for his goggles to identify the car. When it turned out to belong to a loyal citizen, he lowered his weapon. He did note that the roof of the car looked dented, as if somebody had attempted to put too heavy a weight on top at some point, before dismissing the matter from his concern.

Meanwhile, an example of the very poster they were supposed to track down had been plastered on the roof of their own car.

Teri Randall was reviewing her research on the “fictional” character of Princess Luna for the second time when she heard the alert telling her that someone had opened the electronic gate to their property. She got up and walked over to the front door.

The back of the door facing her had a rectangular device similar to her tablet mounted on it. This showed the view from the multiple security cameras on the property. Through these cameras she saw her husband park his car, get out, and walk to the front door. She was disappointed to see no one accompanying him.

Teri turned to walk back into the kitchen when she was surprised to hear Charles use the doorbell. Cautiously, she walked back to the door viewer and pressed a button. “Yes, Charles?” she asked into the device’s microphone.

“Sorry, I just couldn’t find that horse,” Charles said in a louder than normal voice. “I guess I was right about her being a hallucination. Sorry.” Hovering ten feet behind Charles was a drone.

“Oh no, it’s perfectly alright,” Teri said, also in a louder than normal tone. “You are in fact allowed to be right. Sometimes. Just don’t make it a habit.”

“Wouldn’t think of it. So do you think you can let me in?”

Teri entered the combination and provided her thumbprint to engage the three heavy bolts keeping the front door secured. Then she unhooked the little chain and opened the door.

She saw Charles standing there. She saw the drone drifting away with a sort of disappointed air. And she saw the large blue equine standing behind Charles. She then immediately turned around and walked into the kitchen.

Charles conscientiously wiped his stainless shoes on the Welcome mat in front of the door while Luna entered, then followed and closed the door, which instantly locked itself.

Luna looked around her surroundings before facing Teri. “This is a beautiful house you have here, Mrs. Randall,” she said.

Teri looked at the tiles.

“It’s alright,” Luna said with a smile. “No spying device will hear what you say in my presence. The same applies to the more primitive digital and analog devices being employed by your daughter upstairs at this very moment.”

There was a slight pause as both parents looked up at the ceiling. “In that case, thank you, your Royal Highness,” Teri said, making a slight curtsey.

“That will not be necessary,” Luna told her. “You may address me as Luna while I am working on your behalf. And you might want to monitor your actions—I can’t mask those from outside observation yet.”

“Um, I think I’ll go into the living room, to watch that loud and distracting football game I recorded on Monday,” said Charles before leaving the kitchen. “I’ll leave you to your ‘reading’.”

“Good idea,” said Teri. She then sat down at one end of the kitchen table, within sight of a large window that was devoid of curtains, drapes, or anything else to keep from being watched from outside. “For our interview, I’ll be sitting here in front of the window, so it will look like I’m reading. I hope you’ll pardon the disrespect.”

“Under the circumstances, I perceive no disrespect, I assure you,” said Luna, as she sat down on the kitchen floor like a cat. “Although…may I ask one question of you before we begin?”

Teri marveled for a moment that Luna’s head was at the same level when sitting as it was when standing. But then, that was how horses operated, after all. “Go right ahead,” she finally replied.

“You seem to be remarkably calm for someone dealing with an impossibility. The ponies who have visited this world so far have been told on multiple occasions that that is what they are. I was even told that if a human was presented video evidence of our existence, they would decry it as the result of ‘CGI editing’. And yet you are so willing to accept this impossibility that you are willing to hire one to treat your own daughter. May I ask what it is that makes you different than the majority of your kind?”

“I wouldn’t consider myself all that different from the average person,” said Teri. “According to Nick Bostrom, this very reality we live in is nothing but a very expensive computer simulation for a race of highly-evolved beings. If that theory is true, as I hold it to be, then recent, shall I say ‘apocalyptic’ events have the appearance of a simulation that has run out of funding. As a scientist myself, I know full well the sorts of crazy things you try when the money is falling out. So I wouldn’t put it past the Implementers to sneak a few characters from a children’s program into this world, just to see how we would react.”

Luna looked at the refrigerator as she processed this statement. “I’m going to need to meet this ‘Nick Bostrom’. And that is not why we are here.”

“Well I wasn’t going to ask because it didn’t seem at all pertinent to the job description, but why are ponies here on Earth?” Teri asked.

“Cultural appropriation,” Luna explained. “Equestrian society seems unconcerned with material progress, so the princesses have taken it upon ourselves to borrow useful ideas from parallel universes and try to apply them to our own.”

“And does that tie into why you are taking up a profession here?”

“Yes. I am looking out for potentially useful advancements for Equestria, while watching out for possible negative side-effects. I decided that dream walking would be the skill of mine that would be the most desirable by non-magic wielding humans, while also having the least chance of having long-term effects after we have left.”

Teri lowered her tablet in shock. “Wait, are you saying that humans can wield magic?!” She then quickly raised the screen back in front of her face.

“Why yes, of course,” Luna replied matter-of-factly. “There are alternate realities where magic is non-existent, but those are simply not worth visiting for beings such as ourselves. If I can use magic here, then so can you. In fact, why don’t you move out of the way of that infernal window and put your head in yonder ice chest, and I can teach you a spell right now.”

Teri suddenly appeared at the refrigerator. Luna considered informing Teri that the fact that she never actually inhabited the space between chair and refrigerator was a strong sign that she was already versed in the so-called “pink” school of magic, but she decided that this world was probably better off if she remained blissfully ignorant of that fact, and instead joined her.

“Reach out a hand like you were going to hold an egg,” Luna instructed. “Now concentrate on this abstract image that I am placing before your eyes. Make it a thought in your mind, the only thought, the veritable center of your universe, the only thing besides my voice that you can perceive. Now watch how it moves…sense the pattern so you are the one who are moving it in your mind. Yes, now just a little faster, and…there. Look down at your hand.”

Teri marveled at the soft orange sphere of light that nestled in her hand. As she stared at it, it grew brighter and then dimmer, and then floated out of her hand to illuminate various corners of the refrigerator. Finally, it settled back into her hand and sunk into it, fading from existence.

“You are a quick learner,” Luna informed her.

“Thank you,” a proud Teri said as she reached for a Diet Pepsi. With a thought, she held out her hand and stared at the can. It wobbled a little. When it refused to move any more, she reached out and grabbed it. “I guess levitation is a bit harder for solid objects?”

“A little,” said Luna, who waited for Teri to resume her place at the table before sitting back down in her former position.

“I’m surprised how easy that was,” remarked Teri.

“Well, you appear to be a natural. Shall we resume the job interview?”

“Oh, right,” Teri said, having nearly forgotten why the princess pony was in her house to begin with. “I think we can streamline the process of evaluating your character a great deal if I knew about the status of the cartoon. Is it 100% factual?”

“More or less,” Luna replied. “There’s a fair degree of simplification, due to the target audience and the episode length, but I saw no outright lies being committed. Well, except for the matter of ordering—there were some events in the Fourth and later seasons that most definitely happened before Twilight got her wings, for example. But for the most part, what you saw in the episodes is what actually happened. Don’t ask me why this supposed work of fiction lines up with our lives as well as it does—for that we have no explanation. Just a sense of profound thankfulness that this anomalous work of so-called fiction sprung up in your world and not in our own.”

“So the episode with the Tantabus…”

Luna smiled inwardly at the fact that it was not Nightmare Moon that she was being asked to answer for. “That was three months after my re-introduction into society,” she said calmly. “Twilight and her friends didn’t even know that I could visit dreams. Otherwise yes, what that episode had to say about me was completely true.”

Teri nodded. “Very good. You misused your abilities, but you learned the error of your ways, was willing to take advice from those you could easily consider your inferiors, and completely resolved the emergency while ending up a better person because of it. It shows that you are a strong person to have gone through all of that, and a stronger person to be willing to admit to it afterwards without flinching.” At this point she sighed as she looked off to the distance. “Of course, I wish I could have been that forgiving six years ago.” She lowered her tablet so that she was looking over it at Luna. “You’re free to take the job, if you want it after talking to my daughter Sara. Do you have any additional questions for me?”

“One and I hope you don’t consider it intrusive or impertinent. Why don’t you have any Helpers? This appears to be a rather large house to maintain for two working parents.”

Teri put a hand to her chin. “It’s true that we did have three servants before the war: a chauffeur, a maid and a nanny for Sara. But afterwards, when the Constitution was changed to allow reprogrammed prisoners of war as slaves and we saw how some people were treating their ‘Helpers’, well that just made me feel awful about the way I had treated my servants so often as something less than human. So I let them go with severance packages generous enough that we’ll probably never take a proper vacation again so long as we live, and we absolutely refused to take any Helpers as reward for picking the ‘right’ political party six years ago.”

Luna smiled. “It appears there’s some hope for your kind yet. So, let me meet your little daughter. What sort of nightmares is Sara suffering from?”

Teri sighed. “She refuses to tell me—offers up one excuse or another. Lately she’s been outright lying to me, saying that they’re about her hurting her classmates or even attacking Charles and I. I’m pretty sure she’s getting those out of psychological books, to convince me that she’s insane.”

Luna frowned as she thought this over. “Are you sure that she is not in fact in need of some sort of mental therapy? I can only offer her one night’s worth of help, after all.”

“My daughter is not crazy!” Teri insisted, leaning forward to put her face into Luna’s. Then she backed down with a sigh. “And…even if she is, she can’t be.”

Luna saw a look of quiet desperation in the woman’s eyes.

“I tell her again and again that I not only won’t commit her, but I can’t. But it never seems to get through to her that things are different now. There are no more mentally ill patients in this state.”

Luna furrowed her brow in confusion. “I don’t understand. Is there some sort of miracle cure, or—”

“The President has declared that the mentally ill are not loyal Americans,” Teri said wearily. “And that means if you’re diagnosed, you disappear. And are never seen again.” She reached out to put a hand around the pony’s front leg. “Princess Luna, I don’t care if Sara comes out of tonight’s dream hating me, or if it makes her decide to run away and never see me again. What I need is for you to convince my daughter to be sane again. Her life depends on it.”

Chapter 5: The Dream Police

Chapter 5: The Dream Police

Sara Randall closed the floorboard where she had concealed the equipment she usually used to spy on her parents. The fact that none of them let her hear or see anything going on downstairs with any degree of clarity was quite troubling to her. She grabbed a small wooden four-legged chair, brought it outside of her bedroom door, and sat down to await the inevitable arrival of the mysterious visitor. Slowly, she tightened her hands into fists in order to restrain her frightened trembling.

· · ·

Princess Luna slowly made her way up the human staircase, unused to the relatively short height of each step compared to pony standards. Turning a corner, the princess saw a human girl sitting cross-legged on a chair, her arms crossed and her wide eyes fixed on Luna’s. She was wearing a pair of slate-gray pajamas decorated with rattles, bibs, tiny spoons, sippy cups, and other paraphernalia of infancy. She looked far too old to be wearing it. The garment was loose on her skinny frame, except around her sharp elbows and knees. Her hair was hanging loose around her shoulders, and Luna was struck by a pair of old gray eyes that didn’t look at all like they belonged on a girl so young.

“Good evening child,” the blue pony said gently from the top of the stairs. “My name is Luna.”

The girl looked down at the floor and shouted: “Mom, aren’t you going to tuck me in?”

“I can take care of this, Mrs. Randall,” Luna quickly addressed the floor before turning back to her charge. “I am here to help you with your dreams.”

Sara fixed an angry glare at the princess. “You may have fooled them, but you don’t fool me. You work for the government, don’t you? You’ve finally figured out how to spy on dreams, and you picked me to be your first victim.”

“I do not represent your government,” Luna said calmly but firmly. “With your permission—and only with your permission—I’d like to—”

“CITIZENS OF AMERICA,” a robotic voice interrupted over the speaker of the family television set at a volume great enough to make Sara’s teeth grate, “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF THE GREATEST NATION IN THE WORLD WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO WATCH AS HE AND THE GREATEST SINGERS OF THIS COUNTRY JOIN TOGETHER TO SING A ROUND OF PATRIOTIC SONGS, TO FURTHER IMPROVE THE MORALE OF THIS ALREADY PERFECT COUNTRY. CITIZENS HAVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE TO SING ALONG.”

This was followed by the voice of President Strait singing the opening lyrics of “God Bless the USA” (aka “I’m Proud to Be an American”).

He was soon accompanied by the live voices of every living, breathing citizen in America…or at least everyone that wished to remain living and breathing citizens of America. And in the background, always heard, was the sound of the hundreds of millions of drones monitoring every human in America.

Every human…except Sara Randall.

Sara got up. “I have to go down there. Singing is serious business.”

“It is,” agreed Luna. “But do you feel the song in your heart?”

Sara looked around her desperately. “Well, no, but… Look, if you’re not with the government, then you’ll have to prove it. Say something that none of the president’s men would ever say, even if they were trying to entrap a poor innocent little girl.”

Luna looked away briefly in bewilderment. “How could I possibly convince you of that? I do not work for your government. I hold no allegiance. I’m not even an American.”

Sara’s mouth dropped open in shock. “Say that again.”

“I’m not an American?”

Sara beamed. “That’s the one. You’d have a laser through the head right now if you actually were a government agent.” She took this moment to truly examine the fantastical equine before her. “I just wish you weren’t so crazy looking.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “I had been informed that ‘crazy’ was your goal.”

“Crazy on my terms. And speaking of which, this is how we’re going to do this: I’m going back in my room, and going to sleep. You’re going to stay outside my door. If you really are the same Princess Luna from My Little Pony, then you can enter my dreams just fine like that. Then I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?” Luna asked with a smirk. “The lack of a ‘laser through my head’ should be proof enough that this conversation is not being overheard.”

Sara shook her head. “Yeah, not in real time,” she informed the princess. “But never underestimate the government’s skill when it comes to spying. They could probably feed seismographs through a super-computer for six months and end up perfectly reconstructing everything we say.”

Luna briefly blanched. “I had not thought of that. Make note to regulate the spacing of seismograph stations once I get back to Equestria. Very well, I shall obey your strictures. May you have a productive night’s sleep.”

“And you as well,” Sara said as she pulled her chair back into her room, closing the door behind her.

“Sara’s Sanctum Sanctorum,” the sign affixed to the door read. “May instant madness descend upon any mortal foolish enough to breach this barrier.”

Luna idly levitated a pen out of her mane and changed the word “foolish” to “foalish” before settling down to sleep right in front of the door.

Sara’s dream began as a great cloudy nothingness. There was nothing, because Sara’s mind was trapped in a single thought. And that thought was of a broken calliope playing the same fragment of a theme over and over again.

Earworms were something that Luna had great practical experience with. Sitting down on a divan that materialized below her, she raised up a pipe organ from the cloud floor and began playing J.S. Bark’s Ricercar a 6 from The Musical Offering, the one surefire cure she had ever found to the problem. Within a few seconds, the calliope had faded away, and the true dream could now begin.

The ceiling of Sara’s dreamscape was a hemispherical dome, like that of a smallish planetarium, colored an appropriate pale blue. Instead of clouds, thin but puffy white lines outlined the shape of a human eye. About a hundred such designs, all identical, were spaced evenly across the inner surface of the hemisphere.

At Luna’s hooves was now a carpet, dyed green. The piles of the carpet looked extraordinarily large, as they might appear if she were a quarter of her normal size. On closer examination, this appeared to be one of those “educational” carpets, the ones that overeager parents placed in their toddler’s rooms in the vain hope that the item alone would be enough for the child to learn about the alphabet or the Periodic Table, through the osmosis of carpet burns. The subject of this particular carpet was geography, as the county outlines and filled-in cities of this state were spread out before her. With the screwy scale she was dealing with, the borders of the state were at least a hundred strides apart. There seemed to be something going on at the southeastern corner of the map, so she made her way over there.

After sitting down, she was able to see a group of mice gathered around a little bandstand. All the mice were dressed like humans, and standing on their hind legs. Atop the bandstand was another mouse, dressed in a crisp blue suit. He was lecturing them in a language made up of complex squeaking.

Luna heard a loud hum coming from above her. She looked up to see that one of the eyes near the horizon had changed from white to red. Suddenly a beam of blinding light shot down from the eye to the group of mice, incinerating them.

A temporarily-blinded Luna stood up suddenly, blinking rapidly to try and regain her vision. The after-images that flashed across her eyelids were not of mice, however, but of actual human beings, suffering in the way you would expect them to be if suddenly struck by a massive microwave laser. Their fates were far too gruesome—and anatomically correct—to be the work of imagination. This girl actually saw this happen.

“Lesson #1: Never compare the president to Hitler.”

Luna spun around to face the disembodied head of Sara Randall floating before her. Although the shock of what she had witnessed made Luna speechless, Sara by contrast looked almost bored, as if she had been subjected to the images so many times that she was able to block them out.

“Anyway, this isn’t what I wanted to show you,” said Sara. “Follow me.” The head floated towards the location on the map representing their real-life location. From Luna’s perspective, the head refused to change its apparent size as it retreated away from her, meaning that it got bigger and bigger as it got closer to its destination. Luna followed, and noticed the same thing happening to herself. As a result, when the pair arrived, they thoroughly towered over the irregular blob on the coast that represented the city.

In front of Sara’s head appeared the image of a proud middle-aged woman and her daughter, a girl of Sara’s age. The woman was wearing a traditional Mexican dress, decorated with hundreds of golden coins. Her black hair was up in a tight bun. The girl, holding her hand, was wearing a red and white school uniform. Her dark brown eyes looked into Luna’s with a look of both hatred and betrayal.

Sara’s disembodied hand pointed to the girl. “That is Dia Maria Montez, my best friend in the whole world. Her family settled here a hundred years before the Americans, in the old history. In the new history, the one where nobody lived in America before the English settlers showed up, they’re a bunch of ‘back-stabbing land grabbers’. Anyway, her mom owned this huge cookie factory, and was very rich. Because we were the two richest kids in our class, we stuck together and picked on all the other kids.” She didn’t sound the slightest bit guilty about this admission. “Our teacher had a son named Ricky who was going to the same class as us, and we fought over who would get to have him. She won, like she always did, and for once I couldn’t accept that, so I turned them in to the detention monitors as ‘filthy immigrants’.”

Sara (a complete Sara, not missing any parts) stepped through the image of the two members of the Montez family, dispersing it. “I…I just thought that Dia was going to get a lecture and made to sit inside during lunch! Instead, they disappear overnight and Teacher tells us that there are no Montez’s, and never were, and hits me with a ruler when I insist that she’s wrong. She was crying the whole time, so I’m sure that I’m right.

“Anyway, Ricky wanted Dia back as much as I did, so we started exploring: asking about other kids who disappeared, sneaking around places where the adults couldn’t go, and so on. That brings me to Lesson #2: As long as you don’t bring any grown-ups, the drones ignore you just like everybody else.”

Sara pointed down at the nondescript white warehouse building sitting on the carpet straight below them. “This is the building we found, where all the children are taken.”

“But what about—?” Luna began.

Sara looked up at Luna with a desperate stare. “Please don’t ask me where the adults went,” she pleaded. “I don’t know, and this part is awful enough.” Having said this, she reached down and pulled the roof off of the building. Girl and pony leaned down to look inside…

The interior of the building consisted of hundreds of computer terminals on desks, with a child sitting in a chair before each one wearing a pair of behind-the-neck headphones. As Sara pointed, the image zoomed towards Luna, showing a Dia Marie Montez with baby blue eyes typing monotonously at a keyboard. A grotesque pile of electronics and pulsating flesh sat on Dia’s head, with tubes pumping a noxious-looking gray liquid in and out of her brain through several holes in her skull. Similar modifications had been performed upon all of the other children. On the screens before them were displayed the visual outputs of the drones, dozens at a time.

Luna turned away, disgusted.

“Aw, you missed the part where Dia is forced by her programming to order a drone to kidnap another child, and complete the cycle,” Sara said in a dead voice.

“This is horrible!” Luna exclaimed. “Surely you told somebody what you saw?”

“Oh, yeah, sure we did. We told as many kids as we could. But we couldn’t tell any grown-ups, because the drones would always come a-running when we tried to do that. In fact, three more families disappeared over the next few days, from kids trying to tell their parents and getting caught. Somehow, my and Ricky’s names never came up, or else we would have been snatched as well.

“One day Ricky had enough. He said he was going to sneak in there and rescue everybody himself. I…tried to help him. The building itself was crazy guarded, but the area had all of these secret tunnels from Prohibition, and Rick knew there was one in an abandoned medical clinic next door. Sure enough, it led us right into this boarded-up room, and from there we broke into the boiler room, which had at least five or six other boarded up doors leading to other secret passages. To throw people off the scent, we carefully put back the boards for the way we came in and opened up another passage, one that led to a bar that was still open. Then we turned around and began our infiltration.” Sara rubbed her hands eagerly as she recalled her experience. “We snuck around and saw how everything was working and how the building was laid out. We got this close to getting into the area where they made the mind-control juice.” Her face fell as she remembered what happened next: “And then Ricky was caught—well, more like he pushed me out of the way at the last second so I could get away. I snuck around and followed the guards and as soon as I could steal a set of keys I found where he was locked up…but it was too late. They had left food for him to eat, and of course he wasn’t dumb enough to eat any of the cooked stuff or drink anything that could have been poisoned but…”—Sara’s voice started choking up—“but there was a Montez Genuine Chocolate Chip straight out of a vending machine, and…and that was a dirty trick! I would have eaten one if they had left one for me. I got kinda mad when he started yelling for the guards to catch me, and I managed to set the cell block on fire, but not before rescuing and then beating off my ex-new best friend who was trying to kill me. I only just managed to escape.”

Luna pulled Sara into a hug. She didn’t resist. “I really don’t think there’s anything more you can do,” she said softly into the girl’s hair.

Sara yanked herself out of the pony’s embrace. “Oh, I’m going back. And I know how to get away with it this time.”

“What do you think you can do differently this time?” Luna asked incredulously.

An eager look came into Sara’s eyes. “They screwed up,” she said. “When craziness became illegal, they put out a commercial telling people where to bring their crazy uncles and children, and the place they said to bring people is that same clinic we used to sneak in. All I have to do is drive Mother into taking me there, and when we arrive, I can tell her the truth! Together, I know we can break Ricky and Dia and everybody else out. Mother’s great with computers, and she’s tall enough to reach all the equipment, and I know the layout of the place by heart! Or…or you could help me! With your magic you could blow the roof off the place! Attract so much attention that no amount of lies could cover up what they did!”

“Sara!”

“Luna, please! You’re the only—”

“No, Sara. If I got involved, someone who wasn’t an American, it would only infuriate your president. Perhaps even more than comparing him to Mr. Hitler. And he still controls those heat rays.”

“Oh,” Sara said in a small voice. “I hadn’t thought of that. So…what do you think I should do?”

Luna took a very deep breath as she considered Sara’s question.

Chapter 6: Exit Interview

Chapter 6: Exit Interview

Teri was still watching pony episodes on her tablet when she heard the sounds of Luna’s hooves slowly descending the staircase behind her. She looked up to make sure that the windows were all covered, before turning to face Luna as she entered the kitchen.

“Well?” the mother asked in a hushed voice. “You were in there for four hours. Did she tell you anything?”

“Where’s your husband?” Luna asked, walking around the table before wearily lowering herself down into the same sitting position from earlier that night.

“He tried to keep me company, so I drugged his soda when he wasn’t looking. He’s asleep on the couch.”

Luna shook her head. “You head a bizarre family, Mrs. Randall.”

“So, about Sara’s dream…?” Teri prompted.

“I thought of another spell I can teach you. Would you like to learn it?”

Teri sighed deeply. “Sure, why not?”

“Alright,” Luna instructed her, crafting shadowy blue shapes around her. “Now raise your arms like this, like you’re conducting an invisible orchestra, and just imagine moving them like that. Yes, including those parts that would probably break two or three bones if you actually performed them. Now at the same time you are thinking of those motions, actually move them like this!”

When Teri did what was asked of her, the whole room started lightly vibrating, causing a faint rumbling sound to fill the room, resolving into a building rattle. “What did you make me do?” she asked nervously.

“Listen,” Luna instructed her. “That’s your own personal theme song.”

Glasses, doors, the table, even Teri’s own teeth vibrated, all at different speeds, creating the illusion that a full orchestra was lurking in the kitchen just out of sight. And what this orchestra was playing was a march, somewhat rambling at first but then pushed forward inexorably by percussion, with upward flourishes in woodwinds and brass, ultimately recognizable as…

“The Trade Federation March from The Phantom Menace,” Teri said with a groan. “Really? The theme song of the most pathetic villains ever?”

“I don’t know, it sounds somewhat catchy out of context,” Luna said sympathetically. A quick flash of her horn and the musical rattling ceased, bringing an eerie quiet to the room.

“Is there any way I can change it?” Teri asked. “Like how about a heroic theme?”

“Hmm…possible, but hard.” She pointed at Teri’s tablet. “I changed mine once, but well…you saw what was required for that to happen.”

Teri shook her head once more. “You changed the subject again. Can you tell me anything that happened in Sara’s dream?”

Luna looked around her. “It’s very quiet this time of night. Have you no neighbors?”

Teri sighed once again in defeat before addressing the question. “Yes, we do, but they are each several hundred feet away. The McKimson’s dogs used to keep me up at night, but that was before the Plague.”

“‘The Plague’?” asked Luna with a raised brow.

Teri looked down at her cold cup of coffee. “Look, how much do you actually know about the War on Terror?”

Luna looked away for a moment. “There were a few days, right after Twilight opened the portal, when we stayed with a couple of humans and tried to habituate ourselves to your culture, mostly by watching their movie collection. In between, we asked them about all of the unusual things we saw in those films. The War was certainly discussed, especially after watching United 93. We didn’t speak long about it, and I do not recall any diseases coming up…although there was something about a lost pet that made them too emotional to speak.”

Teri took the time while Luna answered to get up and microwave her tepid coffee back to life. “It’s kind of an emotional subject. Once I start, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to control my words. And you told me that your magic has limits as to how much is blocked from government eyes and ears.”

“What if I told you that you were dreaming?” Luna asked, idly scraping a section of reality off of the wall next to her like it was frosting on a cake and sucking it into her mouth. Through the gap she created could be seen an infinite expanse of stars. As Teri gaped in disbelief, Luna raised her hoof back up and smoothed the dream world back into its former resemblance.

Teri sighed in defeat. “Very well, the Plague—the short version, anyway.” She took a moment to compose herself. “So this was around the time of the Second Attack—the one that targeted the ‘heroes’ of Abu Ghraib during their ticker tape victory parade.” She looked up at Luna with a pained expression. “I hope you already know what happened there—I…I don’t really want to discuss that topic.” She looked deep into her coffee before continuing. “So, even though the bomb that went off killed dozens of people who had nothing to do with those crimes, there were those in this country who declared that this time the terrorists were in the right. There were protests, and counter-protests. There were flag burnings…and then the people who burned those flags were caught by the public and burned to death themselves.” She stopped for a while to collect herself while Luna fidgeted nervously.

Steeling herself, Teri looked into Luna’s eyes as she continued. “The biological attacks came after that. Plague after plague after plague, each designed to wipe out the majority of the human race. You see, Al-Qaeda hated Western Civilization with a passion, so much so that they were willing to topple that civilization, to reduce us back to the Stone Age, because they were that confident that God would be on their side, that they would be the lone survivors, and then they could rebuild things back to how they were during the days of the caliphs. We scientists fought against every one of those plagues, found cures for them all, and most importantly, covered up every trace that they ever happened. Because we didn’t want to see Americans becoming as fanatical about exterminating them, as they were about exterminating us.

“But there was one plague we missed, because it wasn’t aimed at us. Instead, it targeted the order Carnivora. Before we were able to catch it, every dog, cat and bear in the world was dead.” Teri’s eyes lost focus as she glanced towards the living room. “Also raccoons,” she added absently, “but I don’t think anybody really missed them.

“There was no way to cover that up, and it really struck a nerve. It was during the election season, and the public’s passion for blood pushed the most irrational of candidates into the White House. Oh who am I kidding? My own Boo-Boo died in my arms with blood leaking from his eyes instead of tears, and I voted for the bastard just like everybody else. We wanted them to pay.” She took a sudden and long drink of her coffee then.

“We refused to fight the war on their terms before,” she said in a dull voice, all emotion forced out of it. “They wanted a total war, a war to destroy the world. Well, under our new president, we gave it to them. His predecessors had used the end of the Cold War to replace every weather and communication satellite in orbit, secretly arming all of them with the latest weapons of mass destruction that only they could control. This was done just in case the Soviet Union ever came back from the dead. None of those ex-presidents thought that those weapons would ever end up in the hands of anybody crazy enough to use them. But he did. He won the War on Terror, by using his microwave cannons and army of surgical drones to commit unspeakable atrocities. And all without ever deploying a single American troop overseas. That was his campaign promise: he’d win the war, and nobody who voted for him would ever be forced to kill an enemy if he didn’t want to.”

“May I interrupt with a question?” Luna asked in a shell-shocked voice.

Teri shrugged and drank some more coffee.

“What’s the minimum voting age in your country?”

“Eighteen. Why do you ask?”

“I wanted to be sure. I guess he did keep his promise. So what about your armed forces? The ones he wasn’t using to fight this war?”

“I think soldiers made the President nervous—he never allowed himself to be photographed or filmed next to one. Maybe because of the respect we give them—if a soldier, or even an ex-soldier came out and denounced what he was doing, maybe more people would have opposed him. As it is, the active duty armed forces in this country have been steadily reduced, until they practically don’t exist anymore. All under the rationale that the drones and satellites have such advanced A.I. that they never make mistakes, and will never be guilty of sparing an enemy out of mercy. As a matter of fact,” she added, rubbing her chin, “I don’t think I can remember the last time I’ve even seen a veteran on the street. I suppose that’s a bad sign. Any other questions?”

“Just one: what about the other nations? The ones who were neutral in this war. Did they do nothing to stop your president?”

“When they protested, he turned the same kind of barbarism towards them as well. The United Nations was dissolved—literally, he melted the building into slag. I’ll leave it to you to imagine the collateral damage to New York City, where the U.N. was hosted. Like many of his worst crimes, there was little to no protest in this country. Those who believed that the U.N. sought to enslave the world, and who thought that New York City was far too high and mighty for its own good rejoiced; the rest of us remained silent.

“Assassination attempts over the years—all unsuccessful of course—have led to many of the world’s most-beloved monuments being destroyed in retaliation. At this point, the world is basically waiting for him to drop dead, and the rest of America to come to its senses.”

Luna shook her head slowly in despair. “So what happened after the War ended?”

“Then the protests finally started again. He picked a little town called Santa Clarita on the Mexican border, and turned America’s full weaponry against it, on live television.” Teri was a little surprised that this latest revelation had no effect on the mare.

“Your daughter saw that broadcast.”

It was now Teri’s turn to gasp. “But she’s so young!”

“She’s older than you think,” Luna said. “I think I can figure out most of the rest of how this country came to its current state. And why your leader still retains his office after all that he has done.”

“Oh, I think we could have overthrown him if we really wanted to,” Teri said. “What you need to understand is why so many of us remained loyal to him, even after it became obvious that he was completely insane. 9/11, and especially the Plague, struck an old nerve. The one that has us believing that we’re better than everybody else, that God helped give birth to America against the might of the greatest empire in history, and that we and we alone are God’s chosen people. Also, and I’m pretty sure this is a character flaw that ponies don’t share, but we have a bad habit of doubling down when the beliefs we secretly feel the most guilty about are challenged by outsiders, like with the South in the Civil War. It was only when he started turning against Americans who didn’t happen to live in New York City that most of us finally woke up to realize we had voted our freedom away. So most people responded with denial, by retreating into reality television, gamer culture, internet snarking…whatever was necessary to get out of this world and into one where we didn’t have to face our responsibility for making this mess we’re stuck in now.”

Teri shrugged helplessly. “So yes, it’s my fault too, because I voted for him.” She squeezed her eyelids shut. “But damnit, that doesn’t mean that my daughter has to suffer for my sins!” she yelled, finally letting her emotions bubble to the surface. “Can’t you do something for her? Take her to Equestria, let her live in a world without this madness.”

Luna hung her head and shook it sadly. “No, Teri.”

“Look, I won’t tell anybody. You don’t have to bring anyone else in. If I can at least accomplish this, then my life…our lives…humanity, won’t turn out to be a total failure. When this world finally blows itself to Kingdom Come, at least one human will survive!”

“No, Teri.”

In a sudden move, Teri stood up and flipped the table to the side, then sunk down on her knees before the Princess and pleaded. “Why? Why can’t you save just one child?”

“Because she’d never survive there,” Luna said sadly.

“What, because of the vegetarianism? Is the magic fatal to humans?”

“No, there’s nothing physical to stop her from living there. But Equestria is not a fit place for humans.”

Teri pointed at the toppled table, and the corner of her tablet that peaked out from the wreckage. “But you said the series was true. And that this world is an alternate reality to Equestria. That means we are essentially the same, right? That humans and ponies are counterparts of each other.”

Luna frowned. “Not on this world. Teri, you said the Plague took away all the cats and dogs. Surely humanity found replacements for them?”

“Well…sure,” Teri said, not sure where this line of questioning was going. “We developed genetic manipulations to increase the intelligence and friendliness of any mammal we wanted.

“Now you might think that chimps and gorillas would be the natural first choice for experimentation, since they are so intelligent already. Luckily, some of us remembered the first Planet of the Apes series, so we neatly avoided that little genocidal trap. No, we settled on a much safer pair of animals: pot-bellied pigs and Shetland po…”

“Yes?” Luna asked with a predatory glint in her eye.

“Shit,” Teri exclaimed under her breath.

“You know,” Luna said, getting up to stretch her legs, “maybe my sister is right. Maybe we shouldn’t waste our time on a time period that clearly is too busy self-destructing itself to want to have anything to do with us. It’s possible for us to visit the same world more than once you know—it just has to be later than when we left. Maybe we should come back in five hundred years, when I’m sure a more amiable species will be in charge of the planet.”

“Look, you can’t be so heartless,” Teri pleaded. “You’ve seen my daughter’s dream; you know how much she is suffering. Even if she won’t tell me the details, I can see that much. Just take her to Equestria. According to the cartoon, that place is a paradise.”

“Perhaps a paradise for ponies,” Luna said with a half-smile, “but certainly not for humans.

“Ponies are herd animals, Teri. Humans, at least the ones I have met, are fiercely individualistic. And I understand that—spending a thousand years with only a genocidal maniac for company gives one an intense appreciation for individuality. And that is not how Equestria works.

“In Equestria, everypony has their own cutie mark, which gifts them with the precise skills which make them most useful to the collective. And that is the end of individuality allowed to them. A unicorn that acts too different from other unicorns, a pegasus that is too un-pegasus, or an earth pony that attempts a profession scorned by other earth ponies, will be punished by her or his peers. And that punishment will never let up until the pony changes or dies. The needs of the herd will always override the needs of the individual pony. And if you’re not a pony, then you are a second-class citizen. Not to mention that your penchant for casual violence is completely unacceptable in pony society.”

Teri got up and rolled her eyes. “I think you’re perhaps describing more the pony society you left a thousand years ago than the one shown in the series,” she countered. “Humans face plenty of ostracism for being different as well, you know, and we manage to survive, even if it takes a few scars to get through it.”

Luna bit on the edge of a hoof as she thought. “How can I make this clear to you…?” she muttered. Noticing the hoof for the first time, she quickly brought it back to the ground. “Alright,” she finally said. “You saw United 93. Imagine the scenario at the end of that movie. The plane hijacked by terrorists is on target for some morally-devastating target in your nation’s capital, perhaps the White House or Capitol Building. Imagine you’re one of those passengers that have realized that, and have jointly decided to attack the cockpit of that plane, regardless of consequences.

“Now imagine that some human analog of me is there as well. I have magic, but not that much of it. I make a counter-proposal, the only thing my magic can do that can possibly improve our odds. What I propose is that I take over the minds of everyone who is going to make the assault. With this control I can coordinate the attack, guaranteeing that the terrorists will be incapacitated and that you will be able to regain control of the plane. The terrorists can then be tried for what they did and what they tried to do and every one of you will survive to tell the tale. Do you take up my offer? Oh, and I have to mention an unavoidable side-effect of the spell is that I will absorb and retain all of your memories, no matter how embarrassing. All of your secrets will become mine, but I promise not to tell a soul a single one of them for the rest of my immortal life. Do you take me up on your offer, or do you continue with what you know in your hearts is a certain suicide attack to protect America’s dignity?”

Teri shook her head incredulously. “I…I can’t possibly take that offer. My private thoughts are the only part of me that I truly own, the only place were even the President cannot invade. And then to throw mind control on top of it. What kind of monster would engage in something like that?”

“Me, Teri Randall,” Luna said, getting into the mother’s face. “If the events of that movie occurred with pony protagonists, that is exactly what I would do, and I would be celebrated for it when the plane safely landed. I am a Princess, and a pony princess protects her herd, uses her herd as necessary to guarantee their happiness. It is a right explicitly delegated to every pony princess, and one that all of us have used before, even if the events were perhaps a bit too squeamish to document in an episode meant for children. Even in the episode where Twilight was punished by Celestia for using mind control on the ponies of Ponyville, the crime held against her was not what she did, but the pettiness of her motives in using it.

“And I’ll tell you another thing. If the events had gone in Equestria the way they did in the movie and reality…well first, the pegasai and myself at the very least would have survived. So let’s say that the passengers survived, but the plane crashed and the terrorists died. Do you know what would have happened? There would be a public uproar, not about the intended attack, but the fact that I failed to save the terrorists.”

“Seriously?” asked Teri.

“But of course,” replied Luna. “In Equestria, there is no such thing as absolute evil. Everyone can be reformed. If they don’t feel like reforming right now, then we’ll turn them to stone or send them to Tartarus for a few centuries, and then we’ll bring them back and try again. And again. Until they are reformed. It doesn’t matter what the scale of the crime is, it will be forgiven.”

“Well, what about the justice system?”

“There is no justice system in Equestria, not as you define the term. If a crime rises to the level that a princess must be involved, then the princess decides on a path of reform or imprisonment followed by reform. Otherwise, it’s up to the pony in question to punish themselves. And they always punish themselves. To do otherwise, to believe that you are above punishment, results in the only fatal punishment known to Equestria: total rejection by the herd. Most ponies die within a year once that happens. Again, something that separates ponies from humans.

“There is one other thing. I said that magic was not fatal to humans. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have an effect.

“The primary form of magic practiced in Equestria is harmony magic. The use of harmony magic engenders in the user and those around her feelings of harmony and good will. Furthermore, harmony magic is powered by friendship, among other factors.”

“So magic is mind control as well?” Teri asked incredulously.

“It’s not as strong as the kind of magic a princess can wield. But it is pervasive and insidious, at least to anybody who has a problem with having their mind manipulated. It can be resisted, but it’s hard, and you basically have to become a hermit.

“As for dark magic, well the show has made it very clear that that type of magic has its own effect on the caster, leading to paranoia and megalomania.”

“So basically you’re saying that Sara can either live here, where her only freedom is inside her own mind, or in Equestria, where the only freedom she will never have is the ability to trust her own thoughts.”

“Basically.”

“I still think you’re underestimating us,” Teri insisted. “Even under all of those pressures, I’m confident that I would never betray my core values.”

Teri suddenly woke up to the sound of dragonfly wings buzzing in her ear.

“It was her!” Teri screamed in panic, pointing at Luna, who was seated exactly where she was in her dream. “She’s the one who forced me to speak those words! Punish her instead of me!”

And then she realized that the buzzing was coming from an actual dragonfly hovering right outside the open kitchen window.

“The Trade Federation March,” Luna said in disgust. “Your perfect theme song.”

Teri groaned, and sunk her head into her arms. “Fine. You’ve definitively proven that I don’t deserve to go to Equestria. Now can you offer me any hope whatsoever?”

Luna smiled. “Ah, you have finally asked the right question. Pay attention to the morning news—around nine or ten am. Take the day off, both of you.”

“And Sara?”

“Let her go to school. It will be her chance to teach everyone else for once.”

Author's Note

Ah the chapter where the crazy meter finally pegs at maximum. I tried my best to apply reason to reign the worst of it in, but I don’t think I did a very good job.

And then I threw in the stuff about Equestrian mind control—you know, as a pleasant diversion?

Well at least this chapter is 100% optional to the plot...maybe I should have put this note at the start of the chapter?

...Nah.

Chapter 7: Show and Tell

Chapter 7: Show and Tell

Luna knocked lightly on Sara’s door at 6:30 am. She had just returned from raising the Moon in Equestria.

“Give me a second,” came the voice on the other side of the door. “And don’t even think of picking the lock.”

Luna waited a few moments, and then Sara emerged in her school uniform, opening and closing her door in quick succession before locking it again. “Did you peek?” she asked with a scowl.

“I wouldn’t even think of such a thing,” the princess replied, her muzzle held high. “Now eat your breakfast so we can get started.”

The human girl and the ageless pony descended the stairs together. Behind them, on the other side of the locked door, Sara’s room continued to be decorated in the same style it had been for most of her life: pink walls decorated with six-inch tall stickers of Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Princess Luna, showing how they all looked as of Season 1 of the show. Added to this were numerous posters, most of them from the poster book that Hasbro put out: the Wonderbolts, Rainbow Dash breaking the color barrier, Celestia raising the sun, the dragon migration, the Great and Powerful Trixie, the cover of the Elements of Harmony book. Finally, and prominently featured, were posters of Luna: her reading to the Cutie Mark Crusaders during Nightmare Night, and one contrasting her with her former persona of Nightmare Moon. A dream-catcher, died midnight blue, was hung over her bed.

Luna rode to Sara’s elementary school the same way she had rode to her house: on top of Charles’ car. As before, she used a full invisibility spell, to avoid attracting attention.

Sara got out of her car, insulated sandwich bag in hand. She waited until she heard Luna land beside her before speaking. “Remember, roll call ends at 8:40. Don’t show up late and make me look stupid.”

“Princesses are always on time,” a slightly echo-y voice answered her. There was a sudden downdraft of air, and she was gone.

“Um…good luck,” said her father. “In…whatever it is that you’re doing?”

Sara sighed. “I’m not telling you for your safety…and mine. But I’ll tell you all the details tonight. Deal?”

Charles Randall smiled. “Deal.”

A couple blocks away from the school, Luna found The Museum of the Spanish Empire. She found it by following her ears, because broadcasting from a tinny speaker was the same griffon mating dance she had last heard 1112 years ago, at the marriage of Gunther and Gudrun.

A plaque was mounted on the outside wall of the museum beside the speaker. There was also a small television monitor behind bullet-proof glass, playing a video that showed a man and a woman in strange costumes enacting a ridiculous dance. They looked like a pair of chickens.

Luna read the plaque:

The Canary Islands are an archipelago located 100 kilometers (62 miles) off the coast of Morocco. In ancient times, the chain was also known as the “Fortunate Isles”, based on its perfect placement as a supply depot for long ocean voyages. The islands were first settled millions of years ago during the last Ice Age, when water levels dropped enough for people to walk over on a land bridge that was later inundated. It is believed that these original settlers were contemporaries with the builders of Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments. As such, the Canary Islanders would be the last descendants of these peoples, as they were subsumed on the continent by the ancestors of modern Europeans 4,000 years ago.

The islands somehow managed to avoid being visited by the Greeks or Romans, and remained untouched until 1402, when they were discovered by Jean de Béthencourt, a French explorer working for Castilian king Henry III. Béthencourt declared himself king of the islands, with all of the inhabitants as his own personal slaves. This led to widespread revolt. In 1448, Jean’s nephew and successor Maciot Béthencourt sold the islands to Portugal in return for military support to put down the rebellion. What instead happened was that the armies of both Portugal and Castile invaded in support of rival branches of the Béthencourt family, fighting a vicious civil war for control. Both sides conscripted the natives into their armies. The war only ended in 1495, not because one side had captured more islands than the other or because any Béthencourts has survived to claim the throne, but because the Canary Islanders had been slaughtered, down to the last man, woman and child. At this point, Portugal gave up, and the Canary Islands were re-settled by Castilians.

During the near-century when Western Europe was in contact with the unique Canary Island civilization, not one attempt was made to understand it. Inhabitants were made to learn Spanish or Portuguese instead of anybody attempting to learn or document the Canary Island language and with the frequent fires inevitable in warfare, any traces of a written language or literature were obliterated. But everyone, be they Castilian, Portuguese or French would-be king, thought that one dance they did was really neat.

Today, the Canario song and accompanying dance are the only traces of Canary Island culture to survive. So, if this song pleases you, please commit it to memory, so that this last aspect of a forgotten people may live on.

8:40 am.

The classroom Sara Randall attended was made up of half third-graders and half fourth-graders, an arrangement that hadn’t been tried in this school in at least a century. But when half of a school’s student population disappears without a trace, and the government decides to respond to this crisis by cutting education funds in half, you do what you must.

“With roll call out of the way, it’s time for Show and Tell. Sara, it’s your turn this week. What do you have for the class?”

The girl got up from her desk and walked confidently over to a spot next to the open window. “Today, I wanted to introduce you to my imaginary friend: Princess Luna of Equestria.” She said her words loudly and clearly.

She was allowed to stew there for precisely five seconds (as her fellow students got closer and closer to breaking out into mocking laughter) before Princess Luna strode majestically into the classroom.

Thirty-two jaws dropped open in unison.

“Good morning, class,” the horse-sized pony said, standing beside a smirking Sara. “My name is Luna, and I am one of four reigning princesses of the land of Equestria. I am quite learned in the theory and practice of magic, and I thought I would begin by teaching you all a trick that you will all find quite useful. With your permission, Mrs. Bantam?”

“I…I…” The teacher took a few moments to collect her thoughts, and try to wrap her mind around the existence of the being currently addressing her. “You promise you won’t hurt them?” she finally managed to ask.

“You have my word that this spell will only be to their benefit. And perhaps yours as well.”

Mrs. Bantam nodded dumbly.

“If you could all stand up,” Luna instructed the class. “And take out your digital camera devices. We’ll be needing them soon as proof that the spell worked.”

9:12 am.

Mrs. Bantam’s class was walking through the Warehouse District at the edge of town. A tangle of rusty railroad tracks wound between the enormous buildings, most of which were abandoned. Derelicts scattered at their approach, most of them intimidated by the presence of a tall blue horse with a sharp horn and wings like a hawk at the rear of the group. Mrs. Bantam walked beside her. The class was led by young Sara Randall. Drones flew hither and yon between the buildings, searching frantically for the disturbance they just knew were approaching, but somehow could not pick up on their electronic senses.

“There it is,” Sara said, pointing suddenly at a white-washed building seemingly indistinguishable from the others, except for the presence of several faded presidential re-election posters. Each of them showed President Straight with arms raised in victory. “We’re almost there—4 More Yrs!” they read.

“You’ll be leading us inside, right?” Mrs. Bantam asked, grabbing tightly onto Luna’s right wing.

The princess gently but firmly disentangled herself. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “I promised my sister that I would not lead your kind into a revolution…so I asked Sara to do it for me. I will merely be preventing the arrival of any reinforcements.” To the gathered children, she said, “I have the utmost confidence that you will be able to find and free your lost friends.” To Mrs. Bantam she added, “And your son.”

A teary-eyed Mrs. Bantam patted Luna on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said in a choked voice. “Thank you so much.”

Luna shrugged her wings. “It’s the sort of thing expected of princesses. But you’re welcome just the same.” And with that, she lifted herself into the sky with slow flaps of her wings.

“Let’s do this,” Sara said in a quiet voice, more to motivate herself than anyone else. With a deep breath, she raised her arms like she was conducting the members of an invisible orchestra, and motioned them to begin.

An urgent motif in strings, like something out of a Russian symphony, arose out of the vibrations of the power lines above them, soon supplemented by the sounds of drum loops in the vibrations of loose chunks of concrete littering the ground. There was the faint feel of a singing male voice, but the fidelity of the spell wasn’t good enough for the words to be clear, so they had to be supplied by memory.

The class began to march towards the warehouse, past the identical posters of President Straight, heads down and their hands in fists.

The teacher, after hesitating for a moment, followed quickly after them.

· · ·

“GREETINGS AUTOMATONS!” Luna shouted in her Royal Canterlot Voice from the spot she was hovering, turning off her electrical invisibility spell. Drones darted in from all directions to study her, some even turning slightly like a dog’s head when confronted by something incomprehensible. Luna imagined the faces of all of the mesmerized children controlling each drone. “Would you like to go on a chase?” she asked them. “I am very chase-able. And I’m not an American.” She immediately jerked her head to the side, as the spot where it once was was struck by dozens of laser beams. “Catch me if you can!” she cried out gaily, ducking down into the alleyway between two neighboring buildings and flying out of town, a veritable fleet of drones flying behind, under and above her, trying in vain to outfly her. To their pilots, Luna imagined that this was probably just a video game, with the promise of a sweet treat for the first one to take out the enemy. For her, it was the grand waltz brilliante of the sky, a dance she knew by heart.

· · ·

With but a touch, the door of the warehouse slid open with a smash, and 32 angry children and their temporary guardian strode in.

The guards raised their machine guns as Sara stepped forward, staring them down. The automatic aiming devices that they really didn’t need as this close range insisted that there was nothing to shoot at, all while the phantom music arising from the ground, the air, from their very bodies just grew louder, and louder…

· · ·

Above in the sky, a drone’s laser finally connected with Princess Luna—and bounced harmlessly off of an invisible shield.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she called over her shoulder at the offending robot. “I’ve been cheating all this time. It’s a dreadful habit I picked up from my sister. Perhaps a bit more force will be necessary to overcome my defenses?”

The number of drones surrounding the princess increased from dozens to hundreds.

· · ·

In the warehouse, red lights flashed and klaxons sounded. The men with guns looked around them nervously. Sara took this moment to resume her march, right into the midst of President Strait’s lowest-bid private army. The mercenaries kept their guns drawn and aimed, but when the children refused to slow down, they allowed the group to pass without taking a shot. Realizing that somebody was going down, and not wanting it to be them, they put their government-owned guns down on the ground and walked out of the building.

· · ·

“Last stage, I promise!” Luna cried out as she shot straight up, faster and faster. The drones tried to keep up, but the alicorn was far too fast for them, and eventually they reached the limit of their radio control tethers, causing them to drop en mass out of the sky, exploding several minutes later on impact with the streets of the city.

Meanwhile Luna continued to climb, right out of the atmosphere and towards the largest of the communication/armed satellites, the one that coordinated all of the drone control centers in America…

Teri and Charles Randall sat side-by-side on a couch facing their 40” flat-screen television set. Teri had the remote, and idly flipped from channel to channel, while Charles did nothing but hold Teri’s free hand in both of his.

The channel surfing stopped on an image of President Strait looking right into their eyes. “They are ugly and their breath smells,” he told them. “They refuse to look you in the eyes, and they always mumble. Not to mention the fact that they are all weak and forgetful. Oh, and their Social Security fund is destroying the country, and needs to be shut down. It’s obviously a socialist plot—I mean, it has 'social' in the friggin’ name! For all of these reasons, and thousands more that I won’t bore you with, I hereby declare that old people make rotten Americans, and America will only be the greatest nation in the world when everyone 65 years of age and older are dead—and I get all of their possessions. Now, who wants the honor of passing what I just said into law?”

The camera zoomed out, to reveal that the President was broadcasting his visage on a large screen in an ornate building. Included with him in the projected image were eighteen of his Secret Service bodyguards, the crack group who had saved him from assassination time and again. The screen the President was broadcasting on was located at the front of the United States Senate chamber. A chamber made up entirely of people 65 years and older, who were in an uproar.

“This is an outrage!” a man identified as Senator Baker from Missouri declared, shaking his fist at the screen. “We’re the demographic who got you elected in the first place, and you have the gall to turn on us! Besides, aren’t you eighty-se—”

Any further complaints were cut off as a laser cut a hole clean through Senator Baker’s head, and he dropped out of sight.

“Everyone knows that I’m a spring chicken of twenty-seven,” President Strait growled. “And that questioning that figure is an act of treason. So, anybody else?”

“Did I miss anything?” asked the somewhat breathless voice of Princess Luna.

Teri and Charles turned to see that the pony was standing behind them.

“What happened to Sara?” asked Teri.

“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. So, it looks like I’m about to witness history.” She waved a hoof at the screen. “It’s not that often that democracies spontaneously convert themselves into dictatorships. The inevitable collapse of humanity should accelerate from this point.”

“Well…I don’t know if I would say that,” Charles ventured in a low voice.

“How do you mean?” asked Luna.

“Well, Rome actually became a good deal more stable when it went from a republic to an empire.”

“Yes, but that is no Augustus. I think we can both agree on that point.”

Charles laughed uncomfortably. “You act like you met the guy.”

“Augustus? Sadly, no. I did meet his successor Claudius, though.”

“Seriously?”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “You’re almost as fond of that word as your wife is. But yes, quite seriously. Claudius said he was going to write down everything I told him about Equestria, but then he was poisoned and I’m pretty sure I saw Nero personally burning all of his books before I left.”

“You are serious.”

“Claudius was a pretty good historian, but very biased against his predecessors, perhaps with good reason. I found Livy’s account of Augustus’ reign to be much more believable.”

Charles shook his head incredulously. “Wait, wait, wait. You read Books 134 to 142 of Ab Urbe Condita Libri? But they’ve been lost for centuries!”

“I’ve got a copy of the whole thing in a trunk back at the palace. Granted, I haven’t touched it in more than a thousand years, but Tia assured me that everything not infected with dark magic has been preserved until the present day.”

“Can…can I borrow it for a while?”

“I don’t suppose there’s any reason I can’t make you a copy.” It was only at this point that Luna noticed the death-glare that Teri was giving both her and her husband. “Oh, are we missing anything?”

On the television, it was now President Strait’s turn to be livid. “I don’t know why I waste my time with you losers,” he snarled. “You keep thinking of excuses to delay and delay my brilliant ideas until they just aren’t good anymore. You and your pussy-footed neighbors in the House are the core of the corruption in this country, a corruption that will not be purged until the people’s will is fully expressed, by making me America’s sole ruler…for life.” He rested his finger above a large orange button.

The television producers, anticipating what was going to happen next, switched to a split-screen view. In one corner of the screen, the President was about to carry out his threat, to make the central concept behind the film Logan’s Run into a work of non-fiction. Other screens rotated between showing random trailer parks and retirement communities (the flinching of one Secret Service agent revealed that that was the current location of his own parents), the entire city of Palm Springs and the entire state of Florida as seen from orbit, and the Capitol Building, framed exactly like that scene in Independence Day when it explodes.

The President pressed the button.

Nothing exploded.

He pressed it five or six more times. And still nothing exploded.

The image on one of the little screens now showed a small room with a couple of rolling chairs, illuminated by the light of multiple television monitors mounted on the same wall as the camera. Suddenly an elementary-school aged girl in a red and white uniform appeared in that room, her arm raised high in the act of snapping her fingers. A few seconds later a couple dozen more students appeared, also by snapping their fingers.

“Excuse me, Mr. President?” Sara Randall asked from the tiny image, which was quickly enlarged by the savvy producer to share the screen with that of the President.

The jaws of Charles and Teri Randall dropped in unison.

Luna took this moment to reach out a hoof and stick it right into Teri’s hair. After poking around for a few seconds, she pulled out a big box of warm popcorn, which she began loudly munching on.

“Go away kid, I’m busy,” mumbled President Strait, as he got out a screwdriver and began to disassemble the box the big orange button was mounted on.

“But Mr. President…” Sara said with the most-ingratiating tone she could muster.

“What?!” the President barked, finally looking up.

“I kinda-sorta broke your unstoppable killing machine.”

“You?”

“Well, I had some help.”

“But you took out my entire network! No hacker in six years was able to accomplish that!”

“That was Luna,” said Sara.

Both Teri and Charles turned to look at the princess. “And how did you pull that off?” Teri asked.

“Magic,” Luna said simply.

“Seriou—?” Charles caught himself. “You’ve got to do better than that.”

“No, I do not,” answered Luna. “Magic is the manipulation of reality through the power of the will. If your satellite is secured with an electronic lock that resists scientific forms of cracking, then you need to apply the correct metaphor. I imagined it as a maze, a maze so complex that it would take years to plot a course through it. But like most mazes, it was two dimensional, so I flew straight to the center and landed, thereby cracking the lock.”

“So in scientific terms, you phased through higher dimensions to bypass the security.”

“I have no idea,” Luna said flippantly. “I’m a mage, not an engineer.”

This whole time, the level of conversation between Sara and the President was far closer to her level than to his. The term “neener-neener” was uttered, and not by the elementary-school student.

“And now I need to ask you a question,” Sara said, cutting off the debate. She reached off camera and pulled a dazed Dia Maria Montez into view. “Actually, my question is for my best friend Dia here. Could you please explain to her why you kidnapped her and tens of thousands of other children across the country, brain-washed them, and then forced them to fight your War on Terror and then start eliminating everybody in America who looked at you funny, all while scarring her psychologically for life?” She flipped a switch in front of her, replacing her image with a recording of children targeting Santa Clarita, children very recognizable to President Strait’s bodyguards. “Oh, and while you’re at it, perhaps you can explain the same thing to your Secret Service agents, since the children you ordered this to be done to included their children, and they just went through watching you threatening to kill their parents?” The smile of triumph as her image re-appeared on the screen was a thing of beauty.

Seventeen Secret Service agents simultaneously pulled out their pistols, aimed them at their boss’ head, and cocked them.

Teri, Charles, and who knows how many other television and streaming news watchers around the world leaned forward in anticipation.

“Now this could set a bad precedent,” noted Charles. “The Roman Empire wasn’t truly doomed until the emperor’s bodyguard decided that they had the power to not only pick the new emperor, but also decide when the old one had outlived his usefulness.”

Meanwhile the President had stopped his stare-down with an eight-year old girl to notice all the guns. “What?!” he screamed, turning on the Secret Service. “You can’t do this to me—I am your GOD! Try to kill me, and I’ll swallow your souls! I’LL SWALLOW YOUR SOULS!”

He had a lot of veins sticking out of his neck.

With a deep sigh, the chief of the Secret Service addressed his agents. “Stand down. I know the temptation is really strong, but at the end of the day, I refuse to lower myself to his level. Besides, killing him is the easy way out.

“If we just get rid of the President,” he explained to everyone in TV Land who was demanding he do just that, “then everyone would try to act like his death had solved everything. We’d pretend that he tricked us into voting for him, that we didn’t know the whole time that he was criminally insane, when the reality is that we believed his lies because we preferred them to the truth.

“Mr. President, you are hereby relieved of your office, which is not really legal, but I’m sure we can find a competent psychologist to make it official without any trouble. He or she will put you away and finally get you the medication you should have been on for the past decade. And then the government can get to the important job of finding all the sane people behind your reign of terror, those who profited from your insanity. The rest of us will deal with our guilt, we will be owing massive favors to all the neutral countries you attacked, and in the end American democracy will survive.”

The President didn’t say anything. Actually, he had been frothing at the mouth for the past couple of minutes, before his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed out of frame.

The television screen went to black, as the unseen producer was left to try and find a title for what had just happened. Because as every television journalist knows, a story doesn’t really exist unless it has a title, preferably one with a horrible pun embedded in it.

“What about the Helpers?” Charles asked the empty screen. “You are going to fix that little mess, right? Because slaves have never been good for the emotional well-being of a civilization.” He turned his head to see that his wife was staring at him. “What?”

“You’re a history professor, aren’t you,” she declared.

“Adjunct,” he said lightly.

“But you said you and your co-workers never get along.”

“Academics is hell,” Charles explained.

Luna, who had spent the last few minutes chewing the inside of her cheek as she thought over everything she saw, finally put aside her half-finished box of popcorn. “Alright, we’ll stay,” she told the Randalls. “Oh, and when am I going to get paid?”

On the television, a series of scenes showed what was going on in the nearly one hundred centers where American children had been forced to operate drones and death satellites for the past six years. Parents were re-united with dazed children, including Mrs. Bantam with her son Ricky.

Sara addressed the camera. “Mom, Dad, could you maybe take in my friend Dia? Until they find the prison where her mom is being kept? And maybe longer?” She mumbled the last part.

The Randalls looked at each other in shock, then got up and ran out of the house, into one of their two cars, and drove away, leaving the front door open.

“We’ll return to ‘President Strait’s Jacket’, right after these words from our sponsors.”

“I’ll uh, take care of the place until your joyful return, I suppose,” Luna addressed the empty driveway. Closing the door, she made her way to the kitchen, and a cell phone that had been left on the table. “Now what was the name of that one place? Round Table, the Last Honest Pizza? I wonder if they deliver.”

Author's Note

This chapter was even better before I remembered that we’re not allowed to post lyrics anymore. Oh well—I’m pretty sure you can figure out where the appropriate lines from “The Phoenix” were supposed to go.

Credits and Acknowledgments

Credits and Acknowledgments

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with extra credit given to Lauren Faust for…

You know what? I used to hand credit out to all of those other individuals because I was trying to be humble, but humility is for losers, so let me just tell it like it is: I created My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. I paid that Faust chick to pretend that she did it, but we all know that no woman ever did anything useful in the history of ever.

(What about the fact that all the protagonists in this story are female? Shut up, voice in my head.)

Let’s see, what else? The theme from Rollercoaster is awesome, so I wrote that (at the tender age of 5? Shut up—it’s the same year I directed Star Wars; Lucas can have the prequels). “John Williams” is one of my hundreds of aliases—the beard I have to wear for public appearances is rather itchy. The song “Dream Police”—I wrote that, and performed it, all by myself. Fall Out Boy? Me. (I mean, who else would be genius enough to combine Shostakovich with a drum loop? John Williams. In other words, me. I win again, voice in my head. Sigh.) The iPhone’s mine, too. And the Internet. I’d charge you all to use them or even think about them, but I’m too nice a guy. You’re welcome.

Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t appreciate a donation or two—gold bullion is preferred.

You can also thank me for the new fanon that the episodes were made out of order, to the point of including Alicorn Twilight in stories that obviously should have happened in Season 2, because Hasbro is just that evil.

Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Theory is complete bupkis, because if it were true that would mean that I have no free will, which I refuse to accept. Now the theory that I’m the only person in the universe who’s real and you’ve all been created to serve me—that one sounds very plausible.

“God Bless the USA” (aka “I’m Proud to Be an American”) is not mine, by the way. Lee Greenwood can have it—that song’s way too egotistical for my tastes. Is it just me, or did you ever get the feeling with all those “God Bless America” bumper stickers after 9/11, that it was less an affirmation, and more of a threat? “God had better bless America, or else we’re going to have to go up to heaven and beat some sense into the Creator.”

The actual city of Santa Clarita is nowhere near the Mexican border, which obviously means that I was referring to the other Santa Clarita. Duh.

The history of the Canary Islands given in Chapter 7 is complete and utter bullshit, written that way purely for dramatic effect. But hey, we’re in a post-fact society, and I’m betting that there’s got to be one moron out there so stupid that they believed everything I typed up there, while telling themselves that I’m surely not referring to them right now. I mean, all I need is one bar of gold bullion from an awe-struck fan—is that so much to ask?

(So, are you the slightest bit frustrated by the results of the 2016 Presidential Election? Well, a little. But it’s not like anybody’s going to notice that President Straight got awfully Trumpian at the end there.)

But I still stand by my disclaimers in the Preface. Assuming you bothered to read them.

The title illustration for this fic is made up of a New York City street scene from Shutterstock, combined with “Princess Luna Trotting” by Proenix.

Gunther and Gudrun’s mating dance is Il Canario, by Cesare Negri (1602), as shown in Chapter 7. Cincinnatus was a Roman farmer who was made absolute dictator during a crisis, led his armies into absolute victory, and then instead of exploiting his power gave it all up to become a farmer again; the Founding Fathers and particularly George Washington often expressed their wish to live up to his ideal. Teri Randall is absolutely supposed to be played by Teri Hatcher—that’s the only part I bothered to cast. Charles on the other hand was inspired by my wishy-washy uncle of the same name (who isn’t a brony as far as I know). The theory that ponies visit alternate universes to steal their stuff comes from the Friendship Is Magic comic book arc entitled Reflections, written by Katie Cook and drawn by Andy Price. “J.S. Bark” as a pony-ism for Johann Sebastian Bach was taken from the fanfic “It Takes a Village”, by determamfidd. United 93 is a 2006 film by Paul Greengrass, one of the few 9/11 films made less than fifty years after the event that’s worth watching.

To any non-Americans reading this far, I am so sorry that you had to be exposed to this many of our many, many neuroses. Although I am fairly sure, in an alternate universe where your country rules the world instead of us, that you’d be equally messed up.

Author’s Preface (you can go ahead and skip this one, but it will be included in the test)

The Invisible Alicorn

A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic

By McPoodle

Author’s Preface (you can go ahead and skip this one, but it will be included in the test)

I don’t normally waste my and your valuable time with sections telling you what you’re about to read. But on the other hand I don’t normally write dark. Given what else is on this site, this isn’t very dark at all, but I thought I’d put a word out to my regular readers just in case.

Basically what happened was I sat down with my racist great uncle one day and let him tell me all of his rants and conspiracy theories. And the setting of this story is what would happen if he was 100% right about everything. I did my best to make the world make sense and hold together, but there are some seriously nutty assumptions lurking in the background, so just sit back and enjoy the ride without poking anything too hard, OK?

Disclaimers That I Shouldn’t Have to State, But This Is the Internet, So I Do

None of the opinions stated by any of the characters in this story necessarily represent my own beliefs. Including Luna’s. Especially Luna’s.
This story does not represent what I think America is like. It does not represent what I think America is ever going to become, or what it could have become under any reasonable alternate history, such as a different individual winning a particular election.
Just because I like writing a story based on insane conspiracy theories, does not mean that I actually subscribe to said conspiracy theories. And just because my main characters tend to be somewhat Discordian in their practices doesn’t say anything about my own opinions. As a matter of fact, I side pretty clearly with Celestia in this story. But chaos is so much more fun to write about than tidiness, so here we go.