Blackmail

Princess Celestia paced.

She was in her royal chambers, late enough in the evening that she expected no further business today, but not so late that she expected Luna to take over for the Night Shift for a while, yet. Her hoofsteps echoed across the high ceilings; the long shadows she cast danced frantically across the walls as she went back and forth, back and forth. She looked blankly at her own hooves as she crossed the carpet again and again. Occassionally an eye twitched.

She was thinking very hard.

The object of her restrained panic, a small roll of parchment, was laying innocently on her writing desk. A fallen inkwell left a sticky trail of ink across the floor beneath. Celestia suddenly seized the scroll in her magic, pulling it open forcefully before her, and scanning every millimetre for some hidden clue as to its origin.

Her earlier magical inspection had yeilded nothing. Nothing. This was, for a magic user as skilled as herself, unheard of, and quite frankly impossible. Every object in Equestria had a magical signature; every molecule on Equus was tracable to a magical source if you knew what you were doing. Celestia very much did know what she was doing, and yet, this innocuous little scroll appeared to have simply materialised on her desk from nowhere. Not teleported, created or transmuted by another magic user - which would create a shining beacon to its origin - but actually put into her room from nowhere, by no-one. Even Discord couldn't do that. Luna couldn't do that. The degenerate villains locked away in Tartarus couldn't do that. Nothing could. At least, nothing from the normal set of realities.

Celestia stopped pacing and took a deep breath. There was no denying it.

This was blackmail.

Normally blackmail wasn't really anything she had to worry about. Anypony dumb enough to try it was invariably found and punished. Most of the time they didn't even have any dirt anyway. The claims they made were vague, and the ransoms they asked were always petty riches.

This blackmailer followed suit in the former sense, but deviated wildly in the latter. Celestia chewed her lip. Surely it can't be true, she thought for the dozenth time. Nopony knows. I've made sure. I've warped the very fabric of reality to make sure. And that was what worried her. This letter's very appearance was the proof that the blackmailer might actually have the means to know things they couldn't possibly know.

Could she really risk it?

Maybe not.

The other thing was how.... weird the demands were. None of them gave any clue as to who was behind it. In fact, there was no obvious gain for anyone at all to be seen in the instructions. Her blackmailer simply wanted her to perform a twisted, but harmless, magical experiment on Twilight Sparkle. Once again her thoughts drifted to Discord, only to be pushed away again. This wasn't his style, and anyway, she'd know if this letter was from him.

She read the instructions one more time. Yes, carrying them out was definitely immoral, but again, probably not harmful. Maybe Twilight had made her own extradimensional enemy. Or maybe more of an extradimensional fetishest voyeur. Celestia was more than aware of the kinkier angles to what her blackmailer wanted.

She stared at the final line once more.

-

I know your secret identity.

-

There was nothing else for it. Twilight was just going to have to take one for the team. She was an alicorn now. She'd be fine.