Chapters FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
"Greatly honored," Clear Sight muttered as he pronked along the gray-walled passage. "That's what the Princess said. Greatly honored. Next time, ask her for details before you volunteer."
The unicorn, it would be fair to say, was not pronking cheerfully, the reason for which - and for the pronking itself - became clear as he turned the corner, bounced up the steps four at a time, and barely stopped himself from crashing into the broad crystal dome overhead, heaving a heartfelt sigh of relief.
(The dome had been the cause of a great deal of heartfelt relief on his part. Nearly four octennia old, and with nopony with the proper magic available to repair it for the last three, it was showing its age in many places. With the outpost having been abandoned during Princess Luna's... absence... 1, there were actual cracks showing, crudely reinforced with sealant.
Perhaps now that the Crystal Empire had returned, it could be fixed properly - if it proved its value, which is why Royal Equestrian Intelligence had decided - with Princess Luna's return, strong urging, and if the coffee-machine talk was anything to go by2 aliens falling out of the sky in giant balls of fire - that it was time to send somepony up here again.)
Steadfastly ignoring the dusty lunar plains beyond the clear crystal, Clear Sight fitted himself awkwardly into the observer's seat behind his telescope - an antique reflector hastily restored with modern mirrors, and the sole telescope in the room not still covered in crackling multi-octennial dust sheets - and pulled over the 3 day's checklist.
"Day 23," he said, a quill grasped in his field scribbling in synchrony. "No problems that weren't in any of the last 22 reports, unless you count talking to telescopes, machinery, and myself. Only five days to go, and they haven't started answering back yet. Except me.
"Item one: cleaned, oiled, and topped up with water the Munificent Oxygen Engine4. It's wheezing like an asthmatic mule halfway up the Canterhorn, but it's still running and I'm still breathing.
"Item two: cleared out the last of the old quarters. It was as stripped as the rest. No surprises there, unless you count learning how tame Fillyfoolers Fortnightly was in 1067. Barely a fetlock showing."
"Item three: report on Zebrican troop movements in the southern San Palomino, and any ships or airships coming from the west." He shoved a lever up a notch, and while the telescope pivoted towards the rising ochre orb and its blue-green eye with a tremendous clanking of chains, attempted to bring some order, or at least a lack of obstructed vision, to a mane rendered even more unmanageable than usual by the moon's low gravity. "The skies should be clear. Let's see what we can see."
Princess Celestia having considered that sending trained agents to marinate in aura of angry nightmare-taken alicorn to be a very bad idea, not to mention the moonquakes caused by said angry nightmare-taken alicorn being spiritually confined within.
By which Clear Sight meant "assuming nopony had slipped up and poured themselves a mug of Luna's Special Roast5 again"
Written, of course, on branded SparkleNotesTM6 highest-quality self-duplicating checklist paper.
A pile of brass and cloud-based enchantment downstairs that originally produced explosions from water. Eventually Featherbrain7 arranged for the breathable part of the water to end up in one place, and the explosions in another.
Rated a Class III Chemothaumatic Hazard. Non-alicorn consumption may cause excitability, insomnia, dizziness, hallucinations, muscle twitches, heart palpitations, delusions, magic surges, the Royal Canterlot Voice, and exploding twice.
Two of her friends are savvy businessmares, you know.
A pegasus academic, one of a group still not all that well thought of in the still-fairly-Pegasopolitan warrior culture of the day. Besides, her cutie mark was a brain with a quill overlapping it, so there wasn't much she could do but learn to embrace it8.
Later she showed them, showed them all . But that's another story.
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
"The character and training, and therefore the expectations, of the Exploratory Service can perhaps be summed up thus: upon wakening to find herself face-to-face with one of the mythologae, her first question was not 'Are you a unicorn?', but rather, 'How come you're purple?'"
TWILIGHT SPARKLE (writes) : "When we got to the library and Moongleam (as she has insisted we call her) saw the collection, she bounced around the room in a circle for a full minute, calling out 'Yes, yes, yes, yes!'. She seems very excitable to me. Is this normal for her species? Is it likely to happen oft-"
(a short moment of embarrassed recollection later)
TWILIGHT SPARKLE: "Oh. Right." (crosses out the above, several times)
From a not-happening future:
"If it would make it easier for these... allegators to do so, I will offer my public promise and assurance here and now that I will not, under any circumstances, accidentally throw them off the side of the Canterhorn and watch to see how far they bounce."
Many episodes downstream of the present:
TWILIGHT SPARKLE (now an ALICORN): ...apparently you don't get an ethereal mane unless you have your own celestial body, so...
MOONGLEAM/CORDELIA (helpfully): I can arrange that!
From even more distant future:
The formerly plain, if not unaesthetic prototypes, she concluded, had been Raritied to within an inch of their mechanical lives. Golden filigree ran down the long, paired barrels in a suggestion of speed and power. Intertwining silver outlined the magnetic coils, weaving back to the breech in a horn-like spiral. At the root of the barrels, the main bodies of the weapon were streamlined teardrops - pearlescent white for the Day Guard, and ebon black for the Night, matching the embroidered battle saddles to which they were attached - each glinting with the polished jewels of nanocircs and thaumic cores alike surrounding Equestria's sigil. It would, it was necessary to concede, be impossible to evade the conclusion, facing these across the field, that you had picked a fight with the very epitome of elegance, grace, and good taste.
Rarity, when it came to magic, was not Twilight Sparkle. (As a respectable and average 2.7 on the zero-to-eight logarithmic scale used to measure the thaumatic potency of unicorns, this did not concern her, since no unicorn currently alive could match Twilight -- who had, according to the whispers of the Canterlot gentry, been assessed as a 9.2 during a certain infamous entrance examination.)
She was, however, undecided whether to be more amused or irritated by the blindness this caused in all too many of those who found themselves going up against her friends, for one reason or another. After identifying Twilight as the obvious magical threat, the thoughtful ones would then pick out Applejack and Rainbow Dash as "the fighters", and pay all too little attention to the other three - a mistake that might be excusable where Fluttershy was concerned, for anypony who hadn't seen for themselves just how quickly timidity could become intimidation if one managed the difficult task of sufficiently angering her, and perhaps even in the case of Pinkie Pie, if they avoided thinking about just how certain things were achieved with the dexterity of any Ponyville resident of long standing.
But really, she thought, did none of them take a moment to consider the implications of a field honed day and night for years in the skillful and simultaneous manipulation of a good dozen tools of the fashionista's craft?
The silence, broken by occasional strangled gulps, coming from the front rows of the mob - both those who could feel the presence of an impossibly sharp sewing needle encompassed in a gentle blue glow pressed against some sensitive part of their anatomy, and those who preferred not to look for one in case they found it - suggested that they were considering those implications in some detail now...
"Did you have a good reason for refusing Prince Rutherford of Yakyakistan's desire for a journey on your starship?"
"Yes."
"And what was that reason?"
"A vivid imagination of the consequences of" - air quotes - "THIS NOT YAK OXYGEN! YAKS DESTROY!"
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
sparkle (n.): the unit of magical potency; devised in 60 Y.H. by Star Sparkle of House Twinkle, whose work with the Royal College in recovering the arcane knowledge lost during the Discordant Era and in laying the groundwork for the modern scientific conception of magic is well known and discussed extensively elsewhere.
(It is worth noting, for historical interest, that while the definition of the sparkle has been revised several times to reflect new knowledge and withstand more precise scrutiny, the original definition reflects both the limited knowledge available at that time and the early days of the scientific mindset: "One sparkle shall be equal to the average felt potency of eight stout unicorn mares not of distinctively clever extraction, found 'pon a street in Upper Canterlot, selected at random, neither of high breeding nor of mixed tribe within the last four generations, measured in the act of raising a bushel of well-sieved Cantervale oats to the height of the Solar Sister's left shoulder." )
Author's Note
(Loosely inspired by this: Sparkle-Date Me .)
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
5 The Perils of Pink Party Paradoci
"...everything was going as normally as possible for this department; while research into large-bore partillery had stalled (despite the immediate success of Project Funderbuss), we had a breakthrough this morning upon renaming the project's intended product the Revel Railgun. It seems to be important that party-cannon related devices like their names.
"Sadly, our lucky streak was broken in the afternoon when Shaved Barber jokingly suggested 'pulling oneself out of one's own mane' as an example of a bootstrap paradox. Much to his surprise and existential confusion, the Department Head then demonstrated the resolution of the paradox by arriving promptly in the lab via that very method, and the resulting outbreak of disorderly theorizing with fudge oat swirl ice cream consumed the rest of the day.
"As for myself, I need a topologist, an evening at Berry's Punch, and a new grad student. This one's crashed."
- daily report, Cat Herder, Department Neck 1, Dept. of Pinkieology
"Because he works right under the Department Head, silly!"
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
The small island realm of Griffonstone, while entirely overshadowed in geopolitics by the Griffon Empire proper, is nonetheless much better known in Equestria. It traces its origin back to the First Griffon War (308), and more specifically to the griffon forces abandoned in the course of the war. Emperor Gyula (239-310) banished all those who surrendered to or were captured by the EUP Guard, along with their descendants for ninety-nine generations, from ever returning to the Empire or any of its eyries.
Those abandoned griffons split into various factions, with the largest two - the Redemptors and the Rebellious - being wiped out shortly thereafter, as the former launched a hopeless second attempt to complete the Empire's objectives in Equestria (the Battle of Red Fields , 309) and the latter mounted a rebellion against the Emperor under the banners of General Gripbeak (the Betrayed's Rebellion , 309-310, which in itself failed but weakened Emperor Gyula sufficiently that he fell in a challenge mounted by his nephew, later Emperor Gallant). Others turned to mercenary work as free claws, but we concern ourselves here with the third faction, which led by Tribune (later First Citizen) Gildedclaw, took wing south-east out of Equestria, crossing the Great Celestial Ocean by island-hopping through the dragon lands, ultimately to arrive on a small then-uninhabited island off the southern coast of the Empire, later named Griffonstone.
When Gildedclaw's people arrived on Griffonstone, they first burnt their banners, and then divested themselves of other elements of Imperial Griffonic culture, abandoning clan, eyrie, custom, and the traditional Griffonic reverence for wingleaders and ancestors. Having been abandoned by their fellows, Gildedclaw thought that it was only fitting that they abandon them in turn.
This abandonment was not undertaken without a replacement in mind, however. As a diplomat before the war, Gildedclaw had found much to admire (and covet) during a posting to the growing Equestrian city of Manehattan, and thus he persuaded his followers to establish Griffonstone as a merchant republic. However, having shed the ironclad customs of the Empire that kept the admittedly quarrelsome and covetous nature of many griffons in check, the newborn republic was deeply divided by internal dissension, and despite advertising itself as a free port, few found it a congenial enough destination to risk the wrath of the Empire.
Gildedclaw himself died under suspicious circumstances (insofar as falling down a flight of stairs onto three sets of wingblades can be considered suspicious) in 318, leaving behind no organized government. By the time that the Empire was able to turn its attention to Griffonstone after the Betrayed's Rebellion and the succession conflicts, it could easily have regained control of the island, but found nothing there worth the effort of reclaiming.
In the following years of anarchy, Griffonstone fell into the Equestrian sphere of influence by default, by the mercy of Our Guiding Sun, whose insistence on sending supplies to the island for the relief of Equestria's former enemies undoubtedly saved many lives, at the cost of a slight chill in Equestrian-Imperial relations.
A new era came for Griffonstone, however, in 480, when an adventurer, Grover, returned to Griffonstone bearing the Idol of Boreas. Little is known of the nature of this idol, or any magical properties which it may have possessed, but regardless, with it Grover was able to unite Griffonstone as never before, and was acclaimed by the population as Griffonstone's first king, Grover the Great. The newborn kingdom was able to build its own merchant fleet, and as its reputation grew, became a popular entrepot for trade between the various powers surrounding the Great Celestial Ocean.
These good times continued for nearly 1,200 years, with Griffonstone and its allies fending off an invasion from the Empire in 560 under its third king, Gaffhook, and maintaining good relations with Equestria, culminating with the Night Guard being permitted to maintain a forward base there during the Great Griffon War (1194), but they were not to last forever.
In 1671, under the fourteenth king, Guto, Griffonstone was invaded by the legendary Arimaspi, who succeeded in stealing the Idol of Boreas from the palace, and attempts to retrieve it were foiled as during heated combat with the royal guard, Arimaspi fell into the Abysmal Abyss, a chasm dividing the island, and was lost. With the famed relic lost, King Guto's rule collapsed, and in the years since, Griffonstone has degenerated once again to its previous chaotic state, dependent on Equestrian support. Indeed, it is known throughout the world as the Lame Horse of Equus, the weakest of Equestria's client states.
- Moondancer, Archivist to the Sisters Two
Author's Note
This is Advancedverse canon, obviously, for anyone wondering how the Griffon Empire and Griffonstone came to coexist and differ in culture.
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FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
8 In Which Princess Luna is Nadreck of Palain VII
Those blessed with access to the restricted section of the Canterlot Archives, or with a reader's omniscient perspective, will know that the list of Equus's sophont species Twilight gave to Cordelia was somewhat incomplete, for all that it is the list of species which any well-educated Equestrian savant would be able to rattle off. Perhaps the most prominent omission, other than the strange species of the uttermost West, would be the yaks of Yakyakistan.
Another omission is the caribou. (Or rather, was the caribou.) Yes, those caribou, who had developed into every bit as disgusting and terrible a culture as that series portrays them. They just made three fatal mistakes, unless one counts their fundamental error (or fundamental misfortune) of existing in the same universe as Luna Versuta, Avenger of the Herd .
In the past, the caribou dwelled in the lands north of the Crystal Mountains, and as slaver cultures tend to do, they preyed on their neighbors - those being the dragons of the Withered Wastes (which extended less far south back then), Yakyakistan to their west, and the Crystal Empire and the future Stalliongrad to the south. They were notably unsuccessful in attacking the major cities (the Crystal Heart repelling such loveless creatures very effectively, and proto-Stalliongrad having thick walls and cannon), but their hinterlands suffered greatly from raiding.
Their first mistake was in assuming that the alicorn Princesses concerned themselves only with the ponies of Equestria, rather than all ponies everywhere. Not that they would have taken them seriously anyway, being mares ruling, but that's less a mistake than a persistent state of stupid.
They did, however, send a diplomatic mission south to Equestria. To their eyes, after all, it looked like a soft country ripe for conquest, without any real power. It should perhaps be noted at this point that "diplomatic mission" in this and various previous cases meant "some caribou able to control themselves and their mouths well enough to spy".
In the modern day, it is generally accepted both that diplomatic immunity for diplomats accredited to the Day and Night Courts includes a solemn promise that Princess Luna will not walk in your dreams uninvited, with the awareness that if your dreams are particularly charged, there's no guarantee that she won't overhear things from the dreamscape, and as such, diplomats are generally chosen from those possessed of great serenity and ability to look at pretty much anything with a calm mind.
The former rule exists because of the caribou's second mistake: sleeping in Canterlot, where their dreams of what exactly they would do to their new anticipated conquest - and the Crystal Empire too, for that matter, once they had the ability to hit it from both sides - were completely open to the Princess of the Night, resulting in their rapid ejection from Equestria with a stern warning never to return.
And their third mistake? That would be believing they were safe after having returned to their homeland, and to go on plotting havoc and war. After all, they knew Princess Celestia's reputation; and through the eyes of their comically macho culture, kindness, gentleness, and second chances look almost exactly like weakness. And if one weak mare cannot possibly be a threat, what threat could her younger sister be? Ridiculous!
(They may also have had some trouble with the concept of diarchy, and assumed that only the elder could actually be in charge, and could therefore keep the younger in check. Oops.)
Three of them found out.
The rest of them never understood exactly what happened, because Luna's epithet isn't Versuta for no reason. The only reason to get Equestria's armies entangled in a long war was to preserve lives, and she was in no mood for that. From the heights of the Crystal Mountains, the Cunning Moon whispered ambition, delusion, and paranoia into the dreams of the caribou, stoking dissent, jealousy, fear, greed, and so forth, and raising tensions until one final spark eventually exploded into violence, and in one bloody night of fighting the caribou tore each other apart. Only the aforementioned three nobles survived in long-before prepared hidden bunkers, forcing Luna to slay them personally. She still prefers not to discuss the matter, finding it quite embarrassing.
(Those of their slaves still functional in mind, prepared to hide from the eruption by dreams of their own, scavenged all the necessities from the ruins and began the long trek south into the Empire, shadowed and secretly helped by Luna's agents.)
As for how this affected Equestrian relations with Yakyakistan and left them in a rather sorry state for many years thereafter, resulting in they, too, being omitted from common knowledge… well, that's another story.
It is, however, entirely untrue that Luna still keeps the caribou king's skull, dipped in molten silver, in her liquor cabinet.
(It's on her desk.)
Author's Note
The series in question is, of course, Fall of Equestria, which I will not link to, and which I don't recommend anyone unfamiliar with it look up unless they have copious brain bleach handy.
(But if you really need to know why I'm happy to give it a bit of a kicking in the backstory... there's always TV Tropes. Which needs less bleach. Not no bleach.)
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
10 The Noble and Ancient House of Pants
The distant ancestor of Fancy Pants (one Cargo Pants) and the rest of the aforementioned Noble and Ancient House of Pants was a humble if prosperous tailor whose opening of his stores and warehouse to clothe ponies for free during a certain ancient killing winter incident - no, the other one - saved a lot of lives.
While some nobles of more exalted (or at least more warlike) ancestry may snicker about this where the Diarchy is unlikely to overhear, the ennoblement of the Pants' came as no surprise whatsoever to those paying attention to what Princess Celestia actually values .
(Said Other Killing Winter Incident, in this case, was a side-effect of the disappearance of the Crystal Empire, which pulled the central core out from the thaumaturgic infrastructure that held the bitter cold of the north back behind the Crystal Mountains. And gales of snow and ice swept down near-instantly, forcing everyone in Equestria's northern belt to decamp suddenly southward or else freeze to death.
In the modern era, there are exactly two cities in that region: the returned Crystal Empire - which did not repower said infrastructure due to it being about 1,500 years behind on maintenance and the returned crystal ponies having lots of other things to fix first - and Stalliongrad, which persisted as an industrial and mining center due to (a) access to coal, (b) mighty feats of earth pony engineering, and (c) sheer undiluted stubbornness. No-one stands fast and refuses to move like a Stalliongrader who's been told that he must.)
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
11 A Little Cantervale Geography
"While Canterlot is the best known and the largest - qualifying as an actual city - dwelling on the Canterhorn, it is by no means the only one. Also known to the discerning traveler are Canter Junction , a small town supporting the railyard where the various railway lines across Equestria meet before ascending the mountain; Canterbury , a former mining village and now Nocturne town in the shallow caves below Canterlot; Canterhigh , an airship port and village located on, or in the case of its cloud homes, near, the Canterhorn's opposite face, having the distinction of being the highest grounded village in Equestria; and Underfalls at the base of the Tears of Epona, a Canterlot suburb and large market town serving the northern Cantervale, which somehow escaped the otherwise ubiquitous prefix."
- Around Equestria on Ten Bits a Day, Night & Velvet Publishing
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
Possibly the strangest of the various solar cults on Equus is the cult of Celestia Clementia , i.e., "the Merciful".
That's because it's not a pony cult. It's a griffon cult, arising after the Great Griffon War of 1194 Y. H. (in which the griffons were repelled from Trottingham and driven back beyond their own borders by the open use of weaponized sunfire), on the basic principle of "please, please don't incinerate any more of us or reduce anything else to sheets of glowing glass; we're so very, very, very sorry and will never, ever do anything like it again". Adherents to the cult eat as close to a vegetarian diet as griffons can manage, are excruciatingly-to-the-point-of-creepifyingly polite and helpful to any ponies they may meet, and engage in lengthy propitiatory rituals of apology.
(The majority of the griffon population finds them tremendously embarrassing. In fact, the only person who finds them more embarrassing is Princess Celestia herself, although there's very little she can actually do about the situation - beyond discouraging rather terminally an early offshoot that was well on the way to inventing stepped pyramids and certain types of sacrifice traditionally done atop stepped pyramids.
Still, at least they're not as uncomfortable as the cults of Celestia Invicta in Trottingham that worship her in her aspect of "She Who Strikes Down Our Enemies With Righteous Fire". Not only is it an aspect that she'd prefer to minimize, but this time, it's right here in Equestria.)
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
Author's Note
Those who follow my blog as well as the main Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced story will recognize this as a vignette/worldbuilding piece I posted there in the past. Well, there's no particular reason why someone should have to follow my blog to pick up on Advancedverse bits and pieces, so I'm going to include them in here along with the FiSA: Side Stories shorts.
2 The Battle of Eclipse
Battle of Eclipse (-632 P.D.E.): The first and only attempt by the Crystal Empire (expanding south) to seize territory from the Republic of Equestria (expanding north) began and ended with the Battle of Eclipse, in which the hitherto-undefeatable crystal unicorn ability to lase (which, when grouped into phalanxes, permitted them to reduce fortifications and eliminate close formations in a matter of seconds) was countered by the emergency measure - proposed and implemented by the collegium caelis 1 - of moving the moon and the sun in syzygy, producing an eclipse lasting three days to take away the ambient light upon which this ability depended.
The peace talks that followed were short, and defined the solution to the problem of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. To wit, don't .
The Republic's magistrates in charge of moving the heavens. Originally composed of a changing number of unicorns, by the time of the Battle of Eclipse, Celestia and Luna were, effectively, the entire permanent membership of the collegium .
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
The Crystal Empire (which sprawled across most of northern Equestria at the time, from what would later be the port of Vanhoover in the west to the future Sovyet of Stalliongrad in the east, reaching almost as far south as the Cantervale) was founded about 800 years prior to the Discordant Era by Bucephalus the Great (who, although history from the era is rather fragmentary, appears to have been one of the few pre-Sisters ascended alicorns), having personally conquered most of northern Equestria at the time.
Sadly, much like the great historical conqueror of whom he is a shameless expy , he died of severe magically-aggravated pneumonia at a relatively young age, secondary to his many battlefield injuries. More fortunately, he had an extremely competent nephew and general who managed to hold the Crystal Empire together after his death and found its ruling dynasty - at least until the Discordant Era, in which only its central hieropolis with its geomantic architecture was able to hold out against the draconequus's chaos.
After the Discordant Era, said city was unable to put the Empire back together again in the face of the disinterest on the part of the lands it hadn't managed to protect... and was, in any case, all too soon to face its own internal struggle with the early rumblings of the Sombran Coup.
FiSA: Side Stories and Notes
...like attorneys general, or brothers-in-law.
Many have been confused, over the years, on meeting Raven Inkwell, especially those who have business dealings with her, and who travel widely.
Those who frequent the Courts of Canterlot speak of a unicorn with a white coat and dark-brown mane, worn in a bun, whose cutie mark is a quill and inkwell, and who wears round glasses with black frames; the Principal Private Secretary to Princess Celestia, and, along with her Lunar counterpart, the second-most important pony in the Royal Service that administers Equestria behind the scenes, next to only the Cabinet Secretary himself.
Those who travel elsewhere at the right time, on the other hand - or who spend much time in Ponyville, for reasons that are hopefully obvious to anyone versed in recent Equestrian history - speak of a Raven Inkwell who too has a white coat and a dark-brown mane worn in a bun, with the same quill-and-inkwell cutie mark, and the same round glasses, save that this Raven is an earth pony, and turns up all across Equestria where her presence is needed, as one might expect of one of the Royal Service's elite troubleshooters. But very much not as one might expect of the hard-working, ever-busy PPS of the Day Court's princess.
The answer to this conundrum is very simple, and found just over 30 years ago, in the maternity ward of Canterlot General Hospital, where the redoubtable professor Pewter 'Nevermore' Inkwell gave birth to twin foals, identical in almost every respect, after a grueling, multi-hour delivery, and one which involved a lot of missed sleep and rather generous doses of painkillers.
Much to her later embarrassment, she had named both of her daughters "Raven Inkwell" before noticing one's horn, or indeed becoming fully aware that she had produced twins.
Her husband, however, thought it was hilarious.
As, to the confusion of all others, do the Ravens Inkwell.