Betwixt Silver and Gold 4:
The Trial of a Time Pony
Rhetoric is the oldest of the speaking arts, a part of the arts curriculum of all of the major races, and employed in situations as diverse as criminal prosecution and state-level trade negotiations. The Classical Era gave rise to two differing schools of thought on the subject of how best to conduct a debate: the Pony School and the Dragon School. The Pony School taught a reasoned approach to gently persuade the opponent to your point of view, appealing to her better nature. Most dragons would hold this approach in contempt if asked. The Dragon School taught an aggressive approach involving threats of physical harm and raising doubts about your opponent’s parentage. Most ponies would hold this approach in contempt if asked. Privately, however, almost everypony agrees that the only reliable way to win an argument is to employ both approaches. It is for this reason that police interrogations always include one “pony” and one “dragon”. Also unacknowledged by the official sources is the existence of a third school: the School of Celestia. This school teaches the art of using your genius to so befuddle your opponent that she will willingly turn over compromising information, reveal truths that she never realized before, and turn against her own allies. The School of Celestia has only one student.
—from The Equestrian Handbook, 2nd Edition, by M.J.P., Chapter 3
“...The speed of the playback is controlled by this dial here. If you find you need to stop playback to make a correction to the transcript, push the Stop button and...are you even listening to me, Princess?”
“Hmm?” asked Princess Luna, turning away from the yellowed scroll floating before her to look at her private secretary. Sundance was carefully explaining the operation of a complex device to her for what had to be the fifth time in a row. It was designed to record conversations and then transcribe them to paper.
“You can’t keep putting this off,” she told Luna with some emphasis. “As the pony who made this recording, you’re the only one who can be relied upon to correct any mistakes, and as you specifically excluded me from the interrogation...”
“Yes, yes,” Luna said with a vague wave of a foreleg. “The device seems simple enough. I’ll ring for you if I need any help. You may leave me now.”
Sundance made a deep curtsy to her employer and princess before exiting.
* * *
Luna sighed. She really wasn’t looking forward to getting this particular recording added to the historical record. However much she might enjoy pranking her sister from time to time, she had no wish to see her humiliated in public, and this transcript (after the hundred-year statute of limitations wore out) would surely put the Goddess of the Sun in the worst possible light. The only chance to root out a possible threat to Equestria, botched by a temper tantrum. Only time would tell just how much of a threat it would truly be.
Luna tried to delay the inevitable just a bit longer by turning back to the scroll, telling herself that was a material reference to the matter at hand. In form, it was just a simple story that the alicorn had written back when she was a filly, but the subject matter involved the first appearance of the mysterious and ageless traveler of time and space known as “The Doctor”, the same individual who these thousands of years later had so readily provoked Princess Celestia into her unfortunate blunder.
Luna had completely forgotten about the scroll almost immediately after writing it, but her older sister had maintained a certain fondness for it. She also used it to collect her observations of the Doctor in his subsequent appearances. For a reason that Luna could never quite fathom, the observations soon degenerated into a desperate attempt to learn the name of the tune produced by a music box the Doctor had given the sisters at the start of their joint reign. The box had been manufactured on the Doctor’s favorite planet, and he had somehow managed to change the subject whenever the subject of the music box’s song ever came up. Luna did not consider Celestia to have any addictive tendencies (unlike herself), and so this obsession seemed oddly out of character for her. This was the first thing that attracted Luna’s attention when she rediscovered the scroll a couple of days ago.
The other was Celestia’s entry for the year 6028, a couple of decades after Nightmare Moon’s imprisonment began, and the only entry for that entire millennium:
I am a foal. The answer was before me all along, but I ignored it, and look how my family has suffered as a result. Where will it end? And how can I possibly keep her from knowing?
It was one more link in a long chain, one more sign that Luna’s sister was keeping something from her. Perhaps that, too, contributed to her frayed nerves on that ill-starred day.
Luna walked out to the balcony of her study and looked up at her stars, before steeling herself to the task ahead. “We must never shy away from our mistakes,” Tia liked to tell her, “because they make us who we are.”
Very well, thought Luna. Let’s work our way through this mistake. She crossed through the study to the outer doors and informed the guards waiting outside to please leave her undisturbed for the next couple of hours. She then arranged the tape player, printed transcript, pen and eraser beside her divan and got herself comfortable.
Sundance had instructed her to use her memories as a guide to the correction of the manuscript. Where shall I begin? Luna asked herself. How about...
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
Oh I believe in yesterday...
Luna was singing the answer to a puzzle, the words of a song made by a music box over seven thousand years old. The puzzle had been cracked, not by the genius of an ageless alicorn, but rather by the weird luck of Pinkie Pie, who just happened to own a CD with that song on it. How she obtained the CD was described in a letter from the pink pony so convoluted that it might never be deciphered. While Tia had been pursuing this mystery, Luna had never cared, but now that she knew, she was determined to share the song with every pony she met.
“I wish you’d stop,” muttered Tia under her breath. “You’re giving me a headache.” As so often seemed to be true of the sisters, their moods were complete opposites of each other. If Luna was now obsessed with the song, then of course Tia was now disgusted with it.
Walking between the two, and trying not to get caught in any crossfire between the goddesses, was Sundance, pushing a small cart that contained the recording machine.
The three of them were in a dank passageway located far under the castle, deep within the Mountains of Tranquility. Luna noticed that this far away from the sun, her sister’s mane was translucent, and waved more slowly than usual; the stone wall opposite her seemed to shimmer when seen through it.
Finally the trio reached a barred and locked wooden door at the end of the passage. Sundance turned to face the two alicorns and curtsied slightly. “If you need any help setting up the equipment—”
“That will be all, Sundance,” Luna told her gently.
“—and if you need help afterwards, I could just wait out—”
She was silenced by Celestia’s glare, a look cold enough to freeze fire. Sundance gulped and then edged around Luna to make her way back down the corridor alone.
“That was a bit harsh, don’t you think?” Luna asked her sister.
“Perhaps,” answered the elder sister. “Consider it me getting into character. I think under the circumstances that we should switch our usual roles for this interrogation. I shall be the Dragon, and you can be the Pony.”
“As you wish, Sister,” Luna said, turning to unlock the thick door.
* * *
Luna pushed the equipment cart into the hallway on the other side of the door, walking past a series of empty prison cells, until she arrived at the only one that showed signs of life. The lighting in the cell was so poor that Luna could not clearly make out the form sitting patiently on the cot at the far end.
The Goddess of the Moon picked up the illustrated instructions left by Sundance, and with their help set up the device and the three microphone stands. When she was sure she had everything ready, she turned on the device...
This was where the transcript began, with markers identifying each distinct voice the device detected:
V1 [UNIDENTIFIED]: Testing, testing, one, two, three. Yes, that appears to be correct. Device, please identify this voice as Princess Luna.
V1 [Princess Luna]: Ah good, that worked.
V2 [UNIDENTIFIED]: Using “Princess” in front of our names will just make the transcript unnecessarily long. Device, please identify this voice as Celestia.
V2 [Celestia]: See?
V1 [Princess Luna]: Very well. Device, please re-identify this voice as Luna.
V1 [Luna]: And...done.
V2 [Celestia]: Device, please identify the next new voice you hear as Doctor. Doctor, we’re ready to begin.
V3 [Doctor]: If you insist.
V2 [Celestia]: We shall be asking you a series of questions. Your responses will be recorded for posterity.
V3 [Doctor]: And what if I refuse to answer? Will you torture me? Or lock me and my companions up for the rest of eternity?
V2 [Celestia]: We are not barbarians, Doctor. If you answer our questions to our satisfaction, you will be free to go, to leave or visit Equestria as you see fit.
V3 [Doctor]: And if you do not like my answers?
V2 [Celestia]: It is my belief that you have a certain emotional attachment to Equestria. Therefore if I find your motives to be malevolent, I shall help my ponies and hurt you at the same time by banishing you from Equestria. Forever.
V3 [Doctor]: And how do you propose to do that?
V2 [Celestia]: You’ll recall that in the year 5000, I succeeded in summoning you, and your other nine “selves”. This is because you have a device in your TARDIS that turns you into a pony, so you can survive in this magical land. I was able to summon you because the device uses my magic, and my magic continues to hold sway over it. Defy me, and I will put you ten and your companions back in your TARDISes, turn you back into your original forms, and remove the devices and all knowledge of it from your minds. To enter Equestria after I do that would be suicide. You know I am capable of this. A single word from me and the spell will be cast. Now, why are you here in Equestria, at this moment in time? You used your TARDISes to travel from the year 5002 forward in time to 6963. What was the significance of that year to you?
V3 [Doctor]: And I’m to answer your questions, just like that? I have my rights under your vaunted Equestrian justice system, you know. As just one example, do you mind telling me what I am being held four?
Luna reached forward and pressed the Stop button on the playback. She then carefully erased the incorrect word “four” and replaced it with “for” in the transcript. As she pressed the Play button, she let her mind wander back to the cell block...
Celestia sighed. “Really, Doctor, are you going to fight me on every single question? Because I can certainly play the game that way if you’d like.”
The Doctor gave her a good glare. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Luna took this moment to get a good look at the prisoner. Outside of Equestria, the Doctor resembled the tall bipedal creatures called “Ancients” who had once lived on this world before an overdose of magic had wiped them out. The Doctor would have suffered a similar fate if he had not been transformed into a unicorn. After his first visit, the Doctor devised his own means of changing his form back and forth, which allowed him to come and go as he pleased. In his unicorn form, the Doctor was light blue with a pale blonde mane. In his original form he had a preference for somber black clothing. In any form, the Doctor was advanced in years, and fond of tweaking the noses of anypony in power, even the sisters.
Tia sighed. “Since you weren’t paying attention, my question was directly addressing the nature of your crime. You promised me in 5002 that you were leaving Equestria, but now it is clear that your party used time travel to visit this era, after I had expressly forbidden all time travel due to your disastrous forays into Equestria’s past.”
“‘Disastrous’ is the last word that I would use to describe an innocent bit of sight-seeing,” said the Doctor.
“You...” Tia began before stopping herself. “No, I promised I would get over that little episode, and I have. The fact of the matter is that you deliberately disobeyed one of Equestria’s laws—”
“—An odd sort of law to write,” The Doctor added, “when it can only be applied to ten individuals in the entire history of the planet. I mean, you could have just asked.”
“—And when you did arrive in this time period, you deliberately proceeded to subvert the Equestrian prophesies that we showed to you.”
“Well, what’s a little prophesy here and there between friends?” the Doctor said with a shrug.
“Do you even know what a prophesy is?” Tia asked incredulously. “Prophesies are all about timing, and timing controls who is where. Prophesies are the warp and woof of the fabric of reality. Now what is your agenda?”
“We are here on a mission,” the Doctor said simply.
“Finally, some progress!” proclaimed Celestia. “And who gave you this mission?”
“...Not you,” the Doctor said, looking her square in the eyes. He then allowed his glance to wander over to Luna. “Well I hope you will excuse these failing eyes of mine,” he said with a grin, “but is that Princess Luna over there being so quiet? It has been a very long time, hasn’t it?”
Luna blinked a couple of times before replying. “Um, it’s nice to see you too, Doctor.”
“‘Nice’? ‘Nice’?!” protested Tia.
“I’m glad to see you in good health after your restoration!” The Doctor cried out as Tia dragged Luna away from the microphones for a private chat.
* * *
“Luna, what are you doing?” Tia asked her sister, tuning out the sound of the prisoner wishing Luna well.
Luna blushed. “Well I was...I just thought...”
Tia stared her down. “We are trying to extract vital information from the prisoner. Your tone is completely inappropriate.”
“That ‘prisoner’ was our friend!” Luna replied. “When he arrived, he discovered the source of Equestria’s magic, the malevolent entity that had been hiding under our castle for tens of thousands of years, plotting for the opportunity to conquer the whole of reality! The Doctor closed the Supreme Will’s portal, which directly resulted in our ascension. Now look at him: crammed into a little black box that’s far too small for him, lit so poorly he might as well be a creature of monochrome.”
“It seems so right, don’t you think?” said Celestia with a smirk. “You can’t deny though, that he has always had his own agenda, and has been contemptuous of our authority. He was only nice to us the first time because we were so completely powerless.” She turned and walked back to her position, adding “besides, he’s the one who’s making this difficult.”
V3 [Doctor]: Difficult? You think I am being difficult? You should consider yourself lucky that you didn’t capture my immediate successor instead of myself. Now there is a master of the art of being difficult!
Luna expected the transcript to not include the conversation she had with her sister once they had stepped away from the microphones. She had forgotten the fact that the Doctor had maintained a steady monologue the entire time they were away. She stopped and rewound the tape in order to hear what he had said and compare it with the transcript:
V3 [Doctor]: I’m glad to see you in good health after your restoration! Nine was pessimistic, as he tends to be, but I told him that Celestia would find a way to pull you through, and indeed she did! You look like you did when we first met, in that old castle by the sea where your family had lived for generations. So is it true that Nightmare Moon is gone for good? Did the Elements of Harmony truly silence the voices? And are you sure that they are all silenced?
V2 [Celestia]: Besides, he’s the one who’s making this difficult.
Luna stopped the tape in puzzlement. Why did he ask about the voices? she asked herself. Luna had had a voice in her head giving her advice from the moment she was born, but this wasn’t unusual. After all, she told herself, everypony in our family has a voice in her head. And now, she realized, her voice was gone. She couldn’t even recall when it had disappeared. It could have been before she became Nightmare Moon, or after.
She decided to add this matter to the long list of her personal mysteries, and continue on.
Tia spent a few moments trying in vain to stare down the Doctor like she had Sundance. “You’re mad, do you know that?” she finally said. “You’re one person with ten different personalities. That’s the walking definition of madness.”
“Hm...is it now?” the Doctor mused. “Personally, I consider it an exercise in higher mathematics. My TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside because it folds space to fit everything inside. As a time traveler, I fold time. The ten of us are one being, but you are merely seeing the folds of me that happen to be facing your way, and thinking them to be distinct from each other.”
“Can you communicate with them, telepathically?” asked Luna, once again straying off script. “Can you control the other Doctors?”
This remark caused Tia to start pacing back and forth, as she awaited her chance to resume her line of questioning.
The Doctor smiled slyly. “I find that the more complex the mind, the easier it is to manipulate. I remember a time when one personality kept another out of the way for the longest time, via the simple game of ‘Name That Tune’.”
Tia walked up to the cage. “Doctor, I ask you yet again, why are you here, in this place, at this time?”
The Doctor looked at the princess without flinching. “Because this is the right place, with the right ponies, at the right time. You are in possession of the greatest force for good in the history of Equestria, more powerful now than it’s ever been before, and more powerful than it will ever be again.”
“I knew it!” proclaimed Celestia. “You want the Elements of Harmony!”
“You are wrong, Princess,” the Doctor replied calmly. “The harmony we seek is temporal in nature.” He turned his back on the Princess before he continued. “We have only sought to make things better...like the Passacaglia.” He nearly whispered the last part.
Celestia seethed. “The Passacaglia was perfection in musical form! The most flawless work of art crafted by a pony to that point in history. Free in its creation from jealousy and racial hatred. The one, firm proof that our ponies had the potential to be better than their creators, that we were not just indulging ourselves when we set out to craft them. That a pony could have created something that beautiful, only 1300 years after her ancestor had first taken breath, was a shining beacon of hope in a life that had seen nothing but pain and loss!”
The Doctor turned back towards the princesses, a predatory look in his eyes. “Quaver’s Passacaglia was the musical equivalent of a burning trash heap,” he snarled, “and believe me, I know what those smell like! I substituted Bach’s far superior version from Earth’s history, and it became so famous so fast that your dumb pony had no choice but to eventually embrace it as her own. How typical!”
Tia slowly backed away from the cage. “There! That’s exactly what I mean! How can you so casually tear apart the threads of Equestrian history? You’ve destroyed my fondest memory! And think of what you did to Quaver, to every musician who followed her, doomed to fail as they tried to match a piece of music far in advance of what the greatest pony geniuses of that era could possibly accomplish? That work cursed centuries of work to the judgment of mediocrity, because they could never compare! It’s your casual smugness that condemns you, a smugness that makes me think you lot capable of any foul deed! Now I ask you, for the final time, to tell us in full what you have done, and what you plan to do, in this era, in this place, and with our ponies!”
“I don’t like your tone,” the Doctor sniffed.
“You will bow down and respect your goddess!”
“My...my goddess. Celestia, Madame, I hate to disappoint, but you are no goddess. Your bumbling performance here has made that abundantly clear. True goddesses are coeval with the creation of the Universe. True goddesses can be at anyplace in the universe, at any time. And their power is infinite. Your power, on the other hand, is not only limited, it is stolen! You are only gods because of the power that you stole from the Supreme Will. Did you never suspect, for one second, that that power might come with a price? The price, perhaps, of those voi—”
“BEGONE!”
And with a flash, the Doctor vanished from his cell as Celestia’s banishment spell was cast, never to be seen again.
Luna sighed deeply. It was quite possible that the Doctor never would have told Celestia everything she wanted to ensure the safety of the ponies of Equestria. The Doctors had irrevocably lost her trust when one of them wandered away from the Fifth Millennium Celebration party to look up the composition of the piece he heard the orchestra playing.
Luna looked down at the transcript to spot any more corrections that needed to be made. That’s when she saw this:
V4 [UNIDENTIFIED]: Begone!
All caps, she thought wryly to herself. Definitely needs to be in all caps. Then she noticed the failure to attribute the line to Celestia, and out of curiosity rewound the tape. True, Celestia had lost her temper, but surely her voice wouldn’t sound so different as to be unrecognizable...
“BEGONE!”
Luna jumped up in shock, her wings carrying her to the corner of the study farthest away from the tape recorder. The voice she had just heard was not Celestia’s—it was Nightmare Moon’s.
In a rush, all of the facts suddenly fell together:
“You look like you did when we first met, in that old castle by the sea where your family had lived for generations.”
“The malevolent entity...had been hiding under our castle for tens of thousands of years, plotting for the opportunity to conquer the whole of reality.”
“Everypony in our family has a voice in her head.”
“So is it true that Nightmare Moon is gone for good? Did the Elements of Harmony truly silence the voices? And are you sure that they are all silenced?”
“We are here on a mission.”
“And who gave you this mission?”
“...Not you.”
“You are only gods because of the power that you stole from the Supreme Will. Did you never suspect, for one second, that that power might come with a price?”
“I am a foal. The answer was before me all along, but I ignored it, and look how my family has suffered as a result. Where will it end? And how can I possibly keep her from knowing?”
“I find that the more complex the mind, the easier it is to manipulate. I remember a time when one personality kept another out of the way for the longest time, via the simple game of ‘Name That Tune’.”
“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...”
* * *
With a start, Luna realized how very late it was. She flew down to the door to the balcony, willed her out of control heartbeat to slow down, and deliberately walked outside.
The Moon was waiting for her on the western horizon. She let out a calm breath, and the orb smoothly set, followed almost immediately by the rising of the Sun from the opposite horizon.
“For a second there, I thought I’d have to do it myself, Sister,” Princess Celestia called down sweetly from another balcony located a floor higher in the castle.
“Sorry about that,” Luna said sheepishly. “I was busy.”
“With that interrogation transcript?”
Luna casually turned her head away, hoping the telltale widening of her eyes hadn’t been noticed. “Um...yes.”
“Well, it’s about time,” said Celestia, with one front leg akimbo. “Be sure to get that to me as soon as it’s done. I want to see if there’s anything I can learn from it.”
“Sure thing, Tia!” Luna said, perhaps a trifle too happily, as she slipped back inside.
Tia, the name echoed in Luna’s head. Or whoever she really is.
The Moon Princess felt utterly and completely alone. Her diminutive stature was proof that she was far from finished recovering from the aftermath of the Nightmare Moon ordeal. Luna was in no fit state to challenge Celestia, and no pony had any reason whatsoever to be anything but totally loyal to her.
What can I possibly do? she asked herself in desperation. In millennia past, this would be the moment when she would appeal to her inner voice, an inner voice that she now knew was an agent of Equestria’s mortal enemy, plotting from the moment of her birth to twist her mind into being its instrument of destruction, and of his liberation. Worst of all, as a probable result of the Doctor’s tampering, there was no prophesy to cover this situation.
“Prophesies are all about timing,” Celestia had said during the interrogation, “and timing controls who is where. Prophesies are the warp and woof of the fabric of reality.”
The voice of the Doctor answered her: “This is the right place, with the right ponies, at the right time. You are in possession of the greatest force for good in the history of Equestria, more powerful now than it’s ever been before, and more powerful than it will ever be again.”
“Yes,” Luna said out loud with a broad grin. “Yes I am.” She trotted over to the outer doors and opened them. Two guards sprang to attention. “Archibald,” she said, “you are to accompany me to the Great Hall. Bismuth, please assemble a chariot and a team to pull it.”
“Which chariot shall I prepare, Your Majesty?”
“Whichever one has room for myself and six guests,” replied Luna. “We are going to Ponyville, but we won’t be there long. I have business to attend to.”
Author’s Notes:
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is copyright Hasbro, with extra credit given to Lauren Faust for the specifics of the series. The characters of Celestia, Luna/Nightmare Moon and Pinkie Pie are taken from that source. The character of Sundance is from the Progress series of fanfictions by Andrew J. Talon. The interpretations of these characters in this story are all my own, of course.
“Doctor Whooves” is the fandom’s name for a background character, a character that the show did nothing to suggest might be a pony who is anything out of the ordinary. It is the fandom that has decided that this is the pony version of Doctor Who (copyright the BBC), and for that I am most thankful. The fact that a handful of other background ponies share his hourglass cutie mark has led to speculation that more characters from that series, including past incarnations, might also be lurking about. The specific incarnation being interviewed here is the Doctor as portrayed by William Hartnell from 1963 to 1966. Note that he began the series pretending to be the owner of a scrapyard in London. In the “Three Doctors” serial of 1973, he spent the entire time making his cameos from the confines of a television monitor, the “little black box”. Reference in this story is made to the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton, 1966-1969) and the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston, 2005).
“Yesterday” is a Beatles song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I would be most surprised if you've never heard it before, but just in case, here’s a link. The Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor (BWV 582) was composed by Johann Sebastian Bach between 1706 and 1713. I do love a little mood music, don’t you?
