The Roles Ponies Play

A king. Arguably the weakest piece on the board. And the most important. Twilight stares at a black and white checkerboard with a variety of carved pieces on the playing field. Starswirl the Bearded had brought the game over from one of his many visits to other worlds, along with the full set of rules and instructions.

The role of the king always intrigues Twilight, who is used to powerful rulers in real life. One would think the queen piece should be the ultimate ruler, with the movement abilities she has in the game. And yet...one can win even without her, if one were clever enough. All it takes is brain power.

Spike toddles back into the living room from the kitchen, having finally cleaned up after the Wacky-Game-Night/Weeks-After-Party Pinkie Pie threw in honor of finishing one of THE WEIRDEST GAMES EVER!!!!!, or so Pinkie and Rainbow chimed together. He didn't know what the fuss was, or why Rarity and the others, esssPECIALLY Rarity, showed much more adoration for him. Seriously, game night was only like three nights. Spike shrugs and walks halfway across the room before he notices Twilight still staring at the chess board. You'd have thought he had royally slaughtered her this time.

Once the board game was over and done with earlier, Luna had stood up, saying a few rather rude things under her breath before steadying herself, holding her head high and proclaiming, "That plot sucketh!" Luna continued, "It REALLY really sucketh. By all that is just, SUCKETH!!!" She then stomped over to the nearby fireplace and threw the sheaf of papers onto the hearth, incinerating them with her horn. Then spit on them. Then incinerated them again. Twilight pleasantly stated she would fix the fireplace and the newly created cave underneath her residence later.

Luna then instructed Spike, "I have need of your scribely duties. Please write this down." He grabbed a scroll and quill. "Dear Sister. Your writing doth SUCKETH huge. I will write the next script and YOU officiate." She glanced at Spike, "You wrote the word 'sucketh' and 'you' in upper case, yes?"

He nodded, "Yep!"

"With royal underscoring in multiple inks?"

He just got finished putting away the eleventh quill with mauve ink. "As per Twilight's Standard Emotionally Heart Felt Correspondence protocol, done and done!"

Luna nodded curtly, then incinerated the hearth one last time, per Luna's Sucketh protocol.

Laster after all the other ponies had passed out, Spike and Twilight sat down for a friendly game of chess, and somehow he had won. For several of her turns, the alicorn seemed distracted. He only won by the most reckless of moves near the end, which seemed to have thrown Twilight off her typical logical approach. After each loss of a piece, finally her queen and then at checkmate, all she would mutter was 'I did not see that coming.' It really bothered her, Spike noted.

He sighs. At least the other mares had left before the two finished their chess game. Before witnessing her defeat, Spike mused to himself, though only Twilight would have made a big deal of it if Rainbow Dash had caught wind of that catastrophe. Aside from Princess Luna, nopony else could normally match Twilight's ability to see several moves ahead. At least, not counting this last session. He reaches out to touch her foreleg and says plaintively, "Twilight? It's only a game."

She is startled and blinks, looking around. Then she focuses on her dragon friend and smiles, "Oh I know." She giggles softly at his words and says, "I think we've had our fill of games, at least until the next Pinkie Pie fill-in-the-blank party." She glances back at the board for a moment. Spike's black knight is within jump distance to a cornered white king, her white queen on its side a short distance near a black pawn. Once she had lost her queen to Spike's pawn, that part of the board was ignored to the end, the queen left lying there as a testament to the power of the weakest of game pieces. Weakest, but NEVER lowliest.

She sits up and pats her friend on his head frond. "I'm okay, Spike. Really. I've just been thinking a lot lately."

Spike chortles at that, "Self awareness of one's thinking. 'Am I a thinking mare, or a mare thinking?'"

Twilight laughs. "Spike! You've been reading philosophy! What do you think so far?"

"Eh, some of it puts me to sleep. Some of it gets in your head so much I think myself to sleep."

She giggles again, "Perhaps it is not for everypony. In some cases, thinking can be a dangerous past-time."

Spike remembers every experiment thought up by Twilight since he had been living with her. He bobs his head and replies, "Don't I know it! By the way, want me to put that up?" He points a talon at the board.

She shakes her head and responds softly, "That's okay. I want to study it a bit longer." Spike grins and heads off.

"That's the Twilight I know!"

She smiles wanly, glad to have the Spike SHE knows back, as well. Twilight stares at the board for a few more minutes. When she is sure Spike is taking a nap from all the work he did in the kitchen during cleanup, she levitates a small wooden box over to her from a high shelf and opens the lid with her hoof. Inside, nestled on a velvet cushion, are three magic nullification rings. She picks up one with her hoof, hesitates, then slowly drops it down onto her horn. She has been so dependent on magic all her life that just the thought of the temporary magical arrest is unnerving. Steeling her resolve with the sentiment she can always toss her head to the side and throw the ring off, she closes her eyes and focuses on her breathing, making each exhale longer than the last.

At length she opens her eyes and stares at the white king. And stares. And stares. She inadvertently starts thinking of their recent adventure. A simple exercise of teamwork that spiraled into life and death. Roles were realized, expanded. Merged realities, alternate personalities, worlds beyond this one. The universe, the multiverse. All of it so overwhelming that she finally does something she never thought possible. She empties her mind, if only to avoid the onset of a migraine from all the overthinking, which has happened before. And yet this one time is only different because she made a conscious decision to do so. Conscious emptiness. She is everything, and nothing....

The king starts to vibrate.

***

Slicer sits on a cliff, overlooking her home. It is a home now long gone, now just a dream she finds herself in once in a while. A cliff where she sat staring into the eyes of a loved one, now long gone. She pointedly stares at the sun beginning to rise, anticipating the stinging it will bring to her eyes.

A form moves behind her. She has had help with this dream in the past, from her mentor, so she recognizes when she is here, sees the dream for what it is. Nostalgic memory. In the past, her mentor has shown up. This time, the large form takes the shape of a big black, familiar, panther.

Slicer smiles delightedly. Here she has no inhibitions, no walls to put up to keep other ponies out. Here, she can express herself openly, yet rare are the times she is happy. Like now. "There you are!" For some reason, she missed the panther, trying to understand it was just a thing of imagination, or a construct, or a-

"There I am." A soft, deep, purring feminine voice.

She sits up in shock and exclaims, "You speak!?!"

The panther nods and walks slowly over to the pony and settles down, turning her large head to the thestral, "I always speak. Sometimes you do not listen." Gwenhwyvar bumps the pony with her nose gently.

Slicer settles down, looking away, then back at the cat. "But, I thought...That was a game. Were you not a figment of an imaginary game? Are you real?"

The cat purrs softly and says, "Life is a game, with rules we do not always understand. Yet that is part of the fun, learning as we go."

Slicer groans and settles up against the cat, both frustrated with this 'reality vs whatever' topic, and happy her big snuggle pillow is back. "You sound like HIM now, that Gan thing." A thought suddenly occurs to her and she turns her head to ask cautiously, "Was your job to keep me from being a complete jerk and screwing up Twilight and her friends' roles in their 'learning game'?" She raised her hooves to accentuate the quotes.

The big cat huffs and bats Slicer's shoulder gently.

"You give yourself too little value in the role you play in the universe," the panther murrs. Then she licks the side of Slicer's neck once. "You remind me of another lonely soul I used to hunt with. It took him a while to accept who and what he was, but more importantly, what he was capable of. Peace with one's identity can heal many wounds."

They both look out to the rising sun, its light starting to blind Slicer's eyes. The cat continues softly, "Even those wounds we inflict on ourselves."

Slicer looks down to avoid the sun, only to see a large chocolate heart appear next to her, hoof prints marring its surface.

"I don't know if that wound is ready to heal yet," Slicer murmurs.

The panther's whiskers twitch in amusement, "Then it shall be a fine hunt to track down the right medicine."

Slicer scoffs, "You're a cat! How do you know about medicine?"

Gwenhwyvar replies, "My soul exists beyond the mortal realm, and as such, it can touch many realms, not just the astral plane where I live. This dream is in between worlds, so I have come to know many things, many dreams. Many medicines..." The cat's ears perk up and swivel. She gathers herself and stands, much to Slicer's silent disappointment. The cat looks out behind them, now alert. "I should rest. Your mistress approaches and I have not the strength to play cat and mouse with her today. She is very strong willed, worthy of a well rested opponent." She glances at Slicer, the corner of her mouth quirking.

The cat turns to leave, but pauses while Slicer sits up. She levels her gaze at the pony. "I shall be here from time to time. You never have to feel alone, again." Before Slicer can say anything, the cat bounds away into the hazy boundaries of existence and is gone, a telltale mist settling to the ground. Slicer can't help but chuckle, knowing somehow the cat left that familiar effect behind on purpose.

As the air settles from the stir, another dark figure approaches from a different direction. This time it coalesces as Luna, the princess of dreams. She looks around as if expecting something else, then walks over to sit next to Slicer. "I sensed a powerful entity here and thought you might be having a nightmare. As it is, you appear calm. And the entity appears...not here."

Trying to hide her smile behind a hoof, Slicer knows it is a futile act with her mentor. Luna sees her knowing smile, then for some reason, lets it go, for now. The princess looks out to the rising sun basking them in its orange light.

"This dream again? Normally the sun hurts the eyes of my night children, yet you dream of it often enough. Does it still sting to look at?"

Slicer watches the sun for a moment. She finds it is not so blinding as before. It is a beautiful thing, if one could see it in all its glory. So much she has seen, and not yet blind. She shakes her head, but asks, "The dream, or the sun?"

Luna smirks ruefully and looks down at her student from so long ago. "You tell me."

"No," she responds at length, looking back from Luna to the sun, "Not this time. Normally it does hurt, despite how often you remind me it is only a dream sun."

"Hah!" Luna says out loud, puffing her chest out. "Then you are making progress. After that game we played, you subjects have had the wildest dreams yet, even to the point of rescuing me and my sister from some evil spell or what not. Are your rulers so fragile in your eyes?"

Slicer shakes her head, growing concerned, "No, your highness, never fragile. Just...very important to us. I suppose when we dream like that...we...change our roles? It helps us to understand you better...and ourselves." A simple answer, to hide a complex problem. Gan. As to the dreams she's had so far, they were not only of saving Luna, but others as well. She shrugs. Silly stuff, she supposed.

Luna is visibly impressed. Slicer sees that and debates about what to say next. Would the immortal alicorn even believe her? Keeping secrets was tough, and rude, when Luna has meant so much to her. She sighs.

"Your highness. Something...unexplainable visited us. I don't know if the others are willing to discuss it, but since you were involved, I feel compelled to at least make you aware of it." Luna raises her brow but waits patiently. Slicer then relates everything that happened to them, from the moment they arrived at the gaming table to the moment they woke and saw Luna getting up to make several comments about Celestia's horrible script writing skills. Even Silvery Orb's docile behavior that a written script simply could not convey in words to the DM. During the entire retelling, Luna's face remains impassive. Even after several minutes of silence.

Slicer breaks the silence, "And that entity you sensed...that was the panther in the game. She was here, before you arrived." Luna's brows raise.

"Indeed?" She mulls over it all, dark blue almond-shaped eyes staring off in the distance. She finally says slowly, "I will tell you this, yet you must never speak of it to Tia or the elements. My sister and I encountered a similar being who helped forge our destinies. Now that you have brought this to my attention, I remember more of him. I can feel impressions from that memory, a dream within a dream as it were. I loathe to think some deity controls us so strongly that we know not the leash that is on us, yet I cannot ignore the signs of his influence."

Slicer frowns, remembering Gan's discussion on influence. "I never got the impression he was controlling me, or us. He even said he wanted to avoid anything he did influencing how we made our decisions." She paused, thinking again over their experiences. "Is a change of perspective considered control?"

Luna can't help but smile in astonishment. "Good question. A good, mature, question." She taps her chin with a hoof, thinking. "Perhaps only if you do not like what you see."

They both watch the sun for a time.

"I have no complaints," Slicer says quietly.

"Neither do I," Luna acquiesces. "You have given me much to pontificate. Sleep well, my wandering thestral. And tell your big cat I am onto him."

"...her."

Luna raises an eyebrow while in mid-turn, "Hm?"

"Her. She thinks it is a game of cat and mouse with you." Slicer pauses, then says delicately, "She didn't tell me what roles either of you played."

Luna ponders over the insights from her old student. She smiles devilishly and says, "I will enjoy this age-old game."