Worth A Bucket Of Warm Piss
Gentle Breeze was beside herself with excitement. She honestly had thought that her entire career in the Treasury would pass in the lower labs, perhaps eventually rising, in her useless dotage, to a supervisory post in the power-gem manufactory - or maybe, if she buckled down and developed her tincturing skills beyond their current merely adequate condition, an assistant's position in the distillery. She had, of course, been trained to the position as an understudy's understudy, tested rigorously for political and temperamental flaws, and finally, triumphantly, given access to the secret archives. Or, at least, that fragment of it which was relevant to the needs of the post. But to rise to these rarified heights, at the mere age of twenty and three? The first pegasus to hold the position since Gentle Passage in the Second Celestial Era?
She only wished that she could tell her friends and family that she'd gotten appointed Mare of the Stool to the new Princess! But, of course, it was a state secret, which ponies around the princess – princesses, now – held which positions within their court. Spies, assassins and thieves could hardly exploit the vulnerabilities of the princesses' courtiers if no-one was exactly sure which pony did what. And Gentle had been jumped ahead of the usual unicorns with whom she had trained. This was because she was somewhat slightly closer in age to the new princess, and also, besides, because little Mi Amore Cadenza had been a pegasus prior to her unexpected and unheralded ascension.
Her coronation had been a whirlwind affair, a tiny pink foal with her stubby horn and slightly larger wings perched up on that high balcony, staring wide-eyed out across the hastily-assembled ponies of Canterlot. She had been given a tiara two sizes too large for her, and as she struggled to look as regal as the occasion demanded, the heavy golden circlet threatened to slide over one eye or the other. She'd inadvertently bobbled back and forth, fighting to keep the gold circlet centered on her too-small head by sheer concentration.
Gentle Breeze had been one of the banner-bearers, along with three other hoofmaidens gathered from the lower echelons of the court, all more or less similar in stature and appearance, aside from the color of coat and mane. The Mistress of Ceremonies had dithered over the proper coat-dying cantrip tuning, eyeing swatches of color and repeatedly casting on poor, increasingly frazzled Haut Ton. They ran out of time before the Mistress was satisfied, and she left them all a rather peculiar shade of powder blue. But, however ramshackle and stop-gap the preparations had been…
Little Princess Cadance had been incandescent. Gentle Breeze had nieces and nephews that age, and none of those hellions were as sweet-tempered and well-mannered as the little alicorn had been. She gave the best speech a filly just hours beyond her marking could possibly have given, which is to say, very, very brief. Not much more than 'Thank you, everypony, I will do my best to be the best princess I can, please help me as you can, thank you,' really. But it had been delivered clearly and firmly, with great poise and grace.
The ending of the ceremony had been rushed a bit, as the elder Princess had given those subtle signs which flew entirely over the head of the new princess and her exceedingly blue entourage. Gentle Breeze, looking back, now thought she knew what the signs – the slight head-inclination, the forehoof lifted slightly to gesture this way or that – meant, but then? All she knew was that the five of them were hustled off the balcony, and were herded back to the temporary suite that a crew of earth-pony servants were still arranging as they breezed through the guarded doors.
"Oh, my stars, how did Princ- Aunt Celestia know?" asked the little pink princess, practically dancing on her hooves. "Where's the water closet? I really must…" she blushed, not completing the evidently quite earthy sentiment. Gentle Breeze reflected on this moment with hindsight, now knew that this was simply another sign of little Mi Amore Cadenza's childhood among earth pony foster-parents, and her lack of court polish, or knowledge of the accepted euphemism.
"Ah!" Gentle Breeze said, coming to a belated realization that her function would be required of her far, far earlier than she'd expected. "This way, Princess."
They scattered a pair of maids who had been still working on getting the toilet ready for its royal usages. The original porcelain throne was still in the usual place, and had not yet had its water turned off. The little princess innocently went to the toilet to make her water, only for Gentle Breeze to block her with an extended wing, having securely closed the door behind the maids as they scurried out of the way.
"No, Princess, we'll be removing that from your suite. It is not at all the thing for princesses to use the common toilet. Here." She pushed a golden close-stool sitting where it had been hidden behind the door, forward into the middle of the room.
"Wait, no, what? That's bigger than I am? How am I supposed to…"
"Here, my Princess, use this as a step for now. Unfortunately, the royal closes are currently sized for the Princ – for Princess Celestia. They're rushing to make your own things down in the manufactories, as we speak. But for now, please, hrm, yes?"
"Why can't I just, er," little Cadance's eyes turned to the standard porcelain toilet, "Until there's something more, ah, me-sized?"
"Princess!" admonished Gentle Breeze. "You have been crowned a royal princess of Equestria! With that comes certain standards of behavior and accompanying security precautions."
"What does what I tinkle into have to do with, ah, 'security'?"
"Princess, everything having to do with your royal person is now a matter of state. You have passed across the veil, and you now possess a celestial body which is highly, even excessively magical in nature. Your sweat, your hairs, skin cells, hoof and horn clippings, and yes, water and feces, are all highly thaumically reactive. There will be ponies, people, even creatures and monsters who will seek to steal even so much as a hoof-clipping or a hair, to use for dark magics, mind-control spells, shapeshifting, high-level crafting and alchemical processes almost beyond number. Here, before you burst, get up." Gentle lifted the little princess onto her golden box.
"I can't go with you watching me!" Gentle Breeze turned to give the flustered no-longer-quite-a-child some belated privacy. Although she'd have to get over that sooner rather than later.
Gentle Breeze continued in a slightly louder voice over the sound of liquid ringing off of the metallic interior of the close-stool. "You have been assigned a squad of royal guards to protect your person, we passed them just a moment ago, and soon enough, you will be meeting them. But you have also been assigned me as your Mare of the Stool, to protect those things which once were part of your person, until such time as they are safely… not you. We'll be going over hoof-trimming and polishing, mane and coat combing procedures, and so forth. It is absolutely vital that you never use a public accommodation, and that you carefully monitor who and what touches your mane and your body."
"This all seems rather unlikely. I think I will be checking with Pr- Aunt Celestia about all this, if you don't mind… what is your name, anyways?"
"Gentle Breeze, your highness, and I would be quite remiss if I did not encourage you to discuss this thoroughly with the elder princess. It is very much your business, your highness, and nopony's else."
"And, apparently, yours."
"Of course, your highness. Keep in mind that this is nothing that Princess Celestia has not gone through herself for centuries – millennia, actually. There have been… plots. Not all of which were successfully warded off by the more negligent of my predecessors." The young princess would be shown the forbidden histories, that detailed the reigns of terror of evil viziers such as Brown Betty and Puppy Frowns. Let alone the mad domination of Dandelion the Abominable. All disappeared into the secret archives, their corruptions and manipulations hidden away from the public history, the Princess's erratic behavior elided within her known propensity for mercurial temperament and love of pranks. "Our mission, your highness, is to protect you against those who would use your various leavings to manipulate you."
Gentle Breeze frowned, thinking that a lie or omission committed now would ruin her future relationship with her principal. "And, more than incidentally, to collect what is in magical and alchemical terms a highly precious, if not actually priceless, commodity for the use of the royal labs."
"OK, done. Am I too royal to use toilet paper, too?"
"Of course not, your highness. But kindly dispose of them in the close-stool. Which reminds me, here… stand in this pan. We'll go over our grooming regimen. Not that you really need it right now, but habits soonest cultivated, are soonest inculcated." Gentle Breeze took up an alicorn-sized comb in her teeth, and began teasing it through the little princess's locks, and mumbled her explanation of each step, and its role in collecting the royal hair and shed skin cells…
Gentle Breeze deposited the used close-stool on the assayist's scale. "Tare twelve pounds, three point two six ounces."
The lab's head assayist checked the serial number of the close-stool against his records, and confirmed the tare weight. Then he wrote down the total weight, tare plus matter. "Hrm," he muttered, "Not much by princess standards."
"Fine Gradient, she's barely out of foalhood. Give her some time to grow into the role. She's less than a fifth the size of Princess Celestia."
"It's been almost a thousand years with just the one principal. Not going to be easy, adjusting to a new set of standards."
"The standards are the standards, sir. We'll just have to take into account that she just won't be… yielding as much."
"Harmony knows, we need more yield."
"Talking out of school, Breeze, Gradient?" demanded the Princess's Own Alchemist as she burst into the room, her eyes flashing under those alarming, bristling eyebrows and half-singed mane. "Well, don't dilly-dally about. Is it going to work? Is it the aqua princips?"
The assayist and the mare of the stool exchanged glances, slightly perplexed by the question. "It certainly… smells right, your excellency?" ventured Gentle Breeze. "But we're not the alchemists here. Do you have a way of…?"
"Bah! Of course I do. Here!" The Alchemist's red horn-glow drew a set of reagents and measuring tools out of her compact saddle-case, and they hung, mid-air, as she waited impatiently.
"Well, Gradient? Get that piss out of the jar, and ready for testing!"
The assayist opened up the close-stool, emptied it out into a measuring pan, and wiped down the interior with a specially-prepared set of wipes, which were deposited along with the contents of the close-stool. The Alchemist's horn lit up, and a green-black flame consumed the excess material in the measuring pan, leaving not even so much as ash of the hairs, the wipes, used toilet-paper and additional contaminants.
Fine Gradient squinted at the scale indicator under the second measuring-pan. "Five point six nine ounces." He tipped the measuring pan, causing it to drain into a beaker, and held the beaker up to the light. "A hair less than half a cup."
The Alchemist scowled at the color of the fluid. "Not much weight for such a strong yellow. Not a good sign." He took a test strip, and drew it across the drying skin of fluid still clinging to the measuring-pan, and examined the results. "pH is good, though. Highly acidic. Good, good."
The further tests proved extremely satisfactory, with grains of lead, pewter, and even pure silica going through the hoped-for reaction.
"Ha! Even simple dirt, look at this," crowed the Alchemist, brushing residue off of the crumbly gold nodules growing within the garden-dirt they'd tested with the fluid. He poured the liquid slurry into a separation-tumbler, and shook it vigorously, and poured the remnant back into another clean beaker.
"Still basically a hair or two less than half a cup! If anything, I'd say this is superior to what we're getting from Celestia's movements."
"We haven't started the new princess on a steady regimen of tea and supplemental diuretics, Queenswater," said the elder princess's senior Mare of the Stool as she walked into the assayist's office along with the rest of the increasing crowd of alchemists and hangers-on staring with barely-restrained glee at the new sample of aqua princeps. "She will begin to produce more dilute fluid as we milk her like we do my much-abused principal's aching bladder."
"We shouldn't be doing any such thing!" objected Gentle Breeze. "She's still growing. We'd stunt her growth if we subjected her to Celestia's punishing diet and regimen. Please, if we want her to be… useful in future decades and centuries, we need to let her develop as nature dictates."
"Miss Breeze," said the Alchemist, sneering. "There is nothing in the least natural about an alicorn. They are offenses unto nature, and the result of the brutal interference of destiny in matters natural. All of pony civilization is likewise a repudiation of natural processes, but none so extreme or violent as that of the existence of the eternal alicorn!"
"I'm no philosopher, your excellency, nor am I a graduate of the academy, but I do know foals. You can't force growth, not without doing damage. Please… she's still young, and needs space."
"Do you have any idea how much aqua princips is left after over nine hundred years of only one princess contributing to the reserves? NONE AT ALL! We're literally operating hoof to mouth here, and we have for over eighty years! We are so far in arrears with the government's expenses, it is not funny. The Court's credit has never been so low, so worthless as it is today! The dragons grow restive and rapacious, the diamond dogs claim top dollar on their contributions to the fisc's specie reserves, and merchants' terms are frankly speaking, larcenous! We need to expand the Mint's production schedules, yesterday." The Alchemist's bristling eyebrows should have cast her burning eyes into shadow – why were they burning like the embered coals of banked Tartarus?
"A multiple of zero is still zero, your excellency. Give me the opportunity to develop the young princess's closet, and we will satisfy all expectations," Gentle Breeze promised, desperately.
And that truly set the mouse among the cats. They argued for the better part of an hour, while all the time, Gentle Breeze's principal was up to Harmony only knew what… Gentle finally left the senior treasury officials to their pointless wrangling over the possibilities of a new princess, while she went off to deal with the actualities. Wheedling another Celestia-sized close-stool from the supply quirks, to start with.
And to supervise the dismantling of that damn porcelain toilet, before Cadance used it in the middle of the night and pissed the equivalent of two months' Court budget worth of alchemical reagents into the palace's lamentably efficient and modernized plumbing system.
Later that evening, the elder Princess arrived at the new princess's temporary suite of rooms to meet with Cadance. The hoofmaidens cleared the room to give the princesses what little privacy they could ever expect. Gentle Breeze and the lieutenant of Cadance's personal guard detail waited on the princesses in the foyer outside of the sitting room, and they both watched as the earth pony who had delivered a very late tea service to the chamber exited with her rolling cart.
Gentle Breeze and Lieutenant Haze had very little to say to each other. The commonalities between the Treasury and the Defense Ministry's basic missions aside, there was some deliberate effort expended by each ministry's leadership to keep the rank and file from becoming 'chummy'. It was all rather ludicrous in Gentle Breeze's opinion - she did not like Treasury's chances of staving off an armed coup if it came down to wings and horns. They were not a paramilitary organization, after all… still, standing orders were orders.
Eventually, the stately elder princess appeared at the door, opening it with her golden magic, and beckoning to her assistant and the other pair of guards who had accompanied her to this late-evening meeting. A subdued Princess Cadance trailed at her elder's heels, offering the usual pleasantries, wishing her 'Aunt Celestia' a good night, and all the rest of the expecteds.
Finally, the elder princess's retinue left, leaving the younger princess's ill-assorted collection of near-strangers staring resolutely at anything that wasn't the somewhat spell-shocked little alicorn.
Cadance turned to Gentle Breeze, her young eyes haunted and prematurely aged. "The entire country's bit supply?"
"Not entirely, princess. Sometimes we trade shipments of gems and pork to the diamond dogs for gold ore. But on balance… yes. And ponies get restless about the pork thing."
"Do I want to know what 'pork' is?"
"Save it for another day, your highness. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
"Speaking of which, Missus Breeze, Aunt Celestia made me drink half a pot of tea. Can we..."
"Of course, your highness."
"For the good of all Equestria, I suppose. Lieutenant Haze - what is the current battle-cry used at the Officers' Academy?"
"For Princess and Country, your highness?"
No little filly should look that jaded. "Well, then, Missus Breeze. For Fisc and Country!"
Author's Note
So, yeah, that's a thing. And I'm not sure if they want me to credit them on this sort of thing, but Shrink Laureate and the general Company helped in grammar-checking and general sense. Specific sense is in no way their responsibility or fault.
I'm so, so sorry.
