Don't you have work you should be doing, woman?
Author's Note
ROBCakeran leaves ideas on the windowsill like a delicious, tempting pie and I snatch them and run away BUT THAT'S HIS PLAN ALL ALONG.
Anyway, more meandering bollocks.
Don't you have work you should be doing, woman?
When he had been summoned to the palace, local human Greg had not expected to find himself balanced atop a stepladder, straining to get cobwebs out of hard-to-reach corners with a duster that had been designed for someone about half his size.
Not that he minded. Good to get out the house, good to be useful.
Celestia - she of the infectious laugh and fondness for cake and also the one who had invited him up in the first place - had explained that these nooks, crannies, niches and corners and such were high enough up that most of the staff employed to de-cobweb the place simply couldn’t reach, with or without magic. Hence why she’d asked him around to do it.
Greg had accepted this reasoning initially, but then had remembered that some of these tiny horses had wings, so surely no lofty corner was beyond reach? By the time he’d thought to ask about this however Celestia had wandered off and he’d been left there with his duster and his stepladder, and so had just decided to get on with it.
He was sure that she knew what it was all about.
And as he stretched up to bust some more dust and dehome a few more spiders (judging by the state of the webs they’d long-since moved on anyway, he reckoned) he let his mind wander back to the last few occasions he’d been summoned to the palace and rather odd things he’d ended up doing those times, too.
Like the last time, when she’d had him round so he could help her pick out a paddling pool. She’d talked him into agreeing with her on the PaddleMaster 9000, leading him to wonder what purpose his presence had even served other than to take up space beside her on the throne while they’d flicked through the brochure.
Good pool though. It had a waterfall and everything. Somehow.
Or the time before that when he’d been drafted to cut the ribbon on a recently rediscovered, refurbished and reopened khazi in the palace. She’d even had a plaque done to commemorate the event and there had been a photographer.
The picture that had been taken - of a slightly bewildered but still cheerful Greg, holding scissors, stood beside a thoroughly regal Celestia and both in front of a very clean new water closet - now took pride of place above the cistern, no-doubt to the delight of anyone who needed to use the facilities.
There had been cake following that. A nice day, altogether.
If nothing else knowing Celestia did mean that dull moments were in very short supply. Bizzare and baffling moments common, yes, but dull moments few and far between.
Which suited Greg right down to the ground.
And speaking of the ground there came, without warning, from floor-level a polite clearing of a throat followed by a:
“Sir?”
Greg had, perhaps unwisely, stepped up onto the top-most part of the stepladder, the part that you weren’t supposed to actually step on. This meant that when the guard appeared and cleared his throat and addressed him as sir Greg very nearly broke his neck.
That little sticker warning you not to stand there wasn’t just for decoration, apparently.
“Jesus Christ! Oh! Oh, hello, sorry. Gave me the fright of my life,” Greg said, clinging onto a nearby drape for support, the stepladder balancing precariously as he struggled not to let his feet slip off. With a little help from the guard to right the thing again Greg carefully lowered himself down a bit so things were steadier.
“Thank you kindly,” Greg said and the guard gave a nod. The guard then said:
“There is an emergency, sir, that requires your immediate attention.”
This certainly sounded important, but the guard’s rather restrained delivery gave Greg pause. Most emergencies - while they were ongoing - were spoken of with a certain sense of urgency.
“An emergency?” Greg asked.
The guard shifted uneasily.
“The princess told me to tell you that it is an emergency,” he said.
Greg blinked down at the guard, and then it clicked.
“Ah, one of those emergencies?”
The day with the paddling pools had been an emergency too. Though in fairness to Celestia the sale she’d been trying to catch had been about to end, so Greg supposed he could see there being a need for haste in that instance.
Still. ‘Emergency’ might have been stretching it a little bit...
“Yes. So if you’d please accompany me, sir? And bring the ladder,” the guard said, giving an about turn.
Greg did quite dislike being called sir, but he accompanied the guard all the same, stepping down and folding up, tucking the stepladder under his arm.
“It’s only my stepladder. My birth ladder left me when I was a child,” He said as he followed just behind the pony. The guard did not respond. Shame. Celestia would have loved it - Greg made a note to drop it on her at the earliest possible opportunity.
The joke, not the stepladder.
He was led up and down various corridors (of which the palace had a lot) until thoroughly lost, just after which he was then led out of a door and into an internal courtyard of sorts, in which was a very nice garden (palace had a lot of these, too).
In the garden was a single tree. In the tree was a single Celestia.
She was up amidst the branches, entwined around them to keep from falling, perhaps a dozen or so feet above the ground (though Greg was always awful at guesstimating these things by sight). Arrayed around the garden were more guards, the one that had led Greg taking up position alongside them all.
It was something of an unusual thing to see, Greg felt. He couldn’t stop staring.
“Huh,” he said, attracting Celestia’s attention, her face immediately melting into a look of relief. She made to wave but in so doing seemed to lose her grip and very nearly fell from the branches. Giving a yelp she clung on more tightly, still looking relieved to see him but also now looking just that bit more sheepish than she had been to start with.
Greg kept on staring.
“There you are! Oh thank you for coming, something awful happened,” Celestia called down.
More staring. He eventually snapped out of it, finally closing his mouth and shaking his head and blinking as his brain got up and running again.
“So I see. You alright up there?” He asked.
“I’m stuck!”
“Stuck?”
“Yes! Stuck! Trapped! Stranded! You simply have to help me.”
As she spoke she accompanied the important, dramatic words with equally important, dramatic poses sprawled across the branches, laying a forlorn hoof across her forehead and doing a fantastic impression of theatrical distress, all without falling down, too.
Greg was quite taken aback.
“Uh…”
He cast his eye over the gathered profusion of guards all standing around looking awkward and doing very little to help extricate the princess. None of them seemed to know where to look.
“None of these lads up to your standards?” Greg asked.
Winding herself more securely around the primary branch across which she was resting (the thickest one) Celestia sadly shook her head.
“They’d love to help and I’d love them to help, but unfortunately they don’t have hands,” she said.
That brought Greg up short. He’d run through a couple of responses to be prepared for - strict palace health and safety regulations precluding guards from tree-rescue duty, say (madness, but such things happened, didn’t they?) - but this one blindsided him.
“Hands?” He asked, blankly. From up above Celestia nodded. She looked deathly serious.
In Greg’s experience she often looked deadly serious while doing or saying something ridiculous. Often made it difficult to tell where you should stand, put you on the backfoot, kept you guessing. It was one of her numerous talents, he reckoned, and entirely deliberate.
“They’re vital. The hands are vital,” Celestia said.
He looked at his hands. They didn’t look any more vital than they usually did.
“Vital, eh?” He asked as he wiggled his fingers. Celestia nodded again, gravely.
“Completely. Why, without them there’d be no hope at all of me getting back down again!” She said.
Greg doubted this.
Finally untucking the stepladder from under his armpit he set it down resting against his leg and put his fists to his hips.
“So just to clarify, if you’d got up into that tree and I hadn’t been on hand with my, uh, hands, you’d just have been stuck there?” He asked.
“Yes. I would have died up here,” Celestia said, making sure to have her eyes go extra wide on the ‘died’, for emphasis. Greg continued to doubt.
“Aren’t you immortal?” He asked, fairly certain that this might have come up once or twice.
“I am. So imagine how long I would have been stuck!” Celestia said.
Forever, presumably. Or until the heat death of the universe, maybe. With the tree somehow managing to survive until then? And no-one, say, cutting it down or providing a trampoline or stack of mattresses to fall onto?
The impression started to form in Greg’s head that she was pulling his leg, that this wasn’t actually an emergency and that this was actually all just a bit of fun. Cottoning onto this, he made the (sensible) decision to play it to the hilt.
“You poor thing. You’d get so bored up there!” he said, clapping his hands to his face in horror.
Celestia was clearly struggling not to grin with delight at him playing along.
“I know! It would be simply unbearable. So thank goodness you’re here to rescue me!”
“Hmm, I haven’t got a lot of rescuing experience, you know. Just so you’re aware, just so you don’t get your hopes up,” Greg said, now stroking his chin as though putting heavy contemplation into the task ahead.
“But you’re so dashing, you’ll be a natural! Trust me, I’m a princess, I’ve got a good eye for the rescuing type,” Celestia said sagely.
No-one had ever called Greg dashing before.
“Ooh, flattery. Didn’t expect to be flattered when I woke up this morning! By a princess, no less. And a wise and beautiful one at that! Maintaining her regal composure in a period of such acute distress,” Greg said.
“Oh Greg, you have such a way with words when you want to!” Celestia said, wafting heated cheeks with a hoof.
Greg was halfway into cooking up a properly hammy response to this when a quiet clank of armour plate reminded him that he and Celestia weren’t actually alone while having this ludicrous back-and-forth, and all that once he felt rather self-conscious. Clearing his throat he set his stepladder on the ground and stepped forward, sticking his arms out.
“I’ll catch you,” he said.
Given their broadly similar sizes it would likely work out more that he’d cushion her fall and she’d flatten him, but it was the thought that counted.
Celestia shook her head and beckoned, giving one of the branches a demonstrative pat.
“No no, you need to come up here,” she said.
Plainly a plate of hot nonsense but Greg was still playing along so accepted it without question. All part of the dance.
“Ah. That the first step in saving you from this dreadful fate, is it?“ He asked.
“And why you had to bring your ladder,” Celestia said, pointing to the ladder.
Greg saw his opportunity and grabbed it with both hands both figuratively and literally.
“It’s actually my stepladder, my biological ladder left me when I was a child,” he said, swooping to pick the stepladder back up off the ground and brandish it in her general direction.
Close enough with the punchline.
And much as Greg had hoped and much to his delight Celestia gave a thoroughly un-princess like snort and, again, nearly fell out of the tree.
“Oh that’s awful,” she said, righting herself again.
“I’m full of ‘em, me. Got a corker about prawns that I’ll hit you with when you’re back on terra firma. Okay, let’s get this sorted...”
Stepladder in hand Greg advanced on the tree, scoped out the best spot to set it down, set it down, climbed the steps and got started on the serious business of clambering up to join Celestia.
Never having been a man blessed with any notable amount of grace his tree-mounting technique left much to be desired. Celestia’s poorly-disguised giggling at his various fumbles didn’t do much for his confidence either but, eventually, he got his leg over and with a grunt up he went.
“There,” he said, flushed, balancing. “Did it. I’m up. What’s step two of the rescue plan, oh expert my expert?” He asked.
From down below there came a clatter. Looking, he saw that the stepladder had tipped over.
“Oh no. The stepladder. It has mysteriously fallen over, stranding you in this tree with me. How could this have happened?” Celestia said in a stone-cold monotone, one hoof pressed her cheek.
“I suspect sabotage,” Greg said.
Eyes flicking side to side Celestia lent in to whisper:
“You may not be far off…”
Enough of this gay banter, Greg decided.
“Alright lady, what’s the scam?” He asked. In response he got a lot of fluttering lashes and a small, shocked, wounded gasp from Celestia.
“Scam? What scam? Whatever might you be talking about? Whyever might you assume that I, a perfectly innocent princess, went to elaborate and immature lengths to lure you into this specific tree at this specific time of day so that you could look over there, in that direction, and see the view?”
This she said while looking over Greg’s shoulder and nodding pointedly. He got the hint.
“Fine, fine,” he said, shifting on the branch for a better look, finding that there was a handy-dandy gap in the foliage through which to see, well, quite the sight.
The position of this interior courtyard and this tree relative to the architecture of the palace and its placement as regards Canterlot more generally was such that, from their lofty arboreal perch, the two of them had a picture-perfect view over and away and out towards the horizon.
Greg had kind of just assumed that, even having climbed the tree, all he would have been able to see would be more palace, but it wasn’t so. You could see Canterlot from here, as the palace ‘dipped’ (for want of a better word) in such a way as to give quite the commanding viewpoint, given the height of the tree.
Honestly, he had no idea how this place worked sometimes. It just seemed to follow its own rules. He’d long-since given up questioning it and had been much happier as a result.
And he had to admit that what he was looking at right then was pretty damn spectacular too, especially with the sun starting to set. Clouds all backlit, beams of light glinting off myriad rooftops, dazzling off distant rivers even as darkness started to fall, glittering from the snow-draped sides of mountains etcetera, etcetera and so on.
There was definitely a good album cover in it, that much was undeniable.
“Okay that’s pretty good,” he said.
“I thought you’d like it,” Celestia said quietly, having capably and deftly shifted about on the branches (without slipping) to snuggle in right behind him and rest her chin on his shoulder.
The pair of them contemplated the sight in silence for a few happy moments. It occurred to Greg distantly that the sun was dipping at that particular moment entirely because she was making it dip. An odd thought. He sometimes forgot she was the one in charge of that.
Still cooked his noodle. Sun goddess diarch princess horse lady. Vast pools of experience, vertiginous depths of wisdom, the patience of eons, considerable magical heft, smile of warmth and sunshine. Also, kind of a huge child who does things like pretending to be stuck in a tree just to show off a pretty sight.
Greg supposed that sort of thing might be called ‘juxtaposition’ by the more wankily inclined. For his part it just made him chuckle and shake his head a little bit. Just one of the many things he liked about her.
“You could have just asked me, you know. Not the whole thing with the emergency,” he said.
She stuck her tongue out, as though the mere suggestion left a bad taste in her mouth.
“How tediously straightforward,” she said.
Probably the same reason why she’d decided to climb a tree in the first place rather than, say, find a balcony in the palace somewhere with a similar view. Not as much fun. Greg could appreciate this reasoning. Fun was, after all, the primary motivating factor behind just about everything he did.
Anything for a laugh.
“...point,” he conceded.
Some further moments of silent contemplation followed, Celestia’s head remaining resting on his shoulder, the weight of her pressing against his back. The sun got to a point where things started turning orange. Greg felt that orange was an underrated and much-maligned colour.
“So, joking aside, how did you get into the tree? Fly?” He asked, his curiosity finally getting the better of him.
She did have wings, this he could confirm. Sometimes she used them to sneak biscuits off his plate when she thought he wasn’t looking and tap him on the shoulder and pretend it hadn't been her who'd done it.
“Oh no, not flying, far too little room for that. I teleported into the branches,” she said.
Greg blinked.
“You can teleport?”
News to Greg.
“Have I never shown you that?” She asked. Hard to keep track of these things sometimes. Greg shook his head.
“Nope,” he said.
Celestia thought hard. She honestly could have sworn she’d done it with him around and watching at least once, but apparently not, and try as she might she couldn’t remember any instances to bring up to prove him wrong.
“How strange. You’d have thought that would have come up by now, wouldn’t you?” She asked.
“You would. If I could teleport I’d, well - I’d teleport a lot, not sure how to break that down any further, really.”
Words failed him. He imagined that later, in bed, he would come up with the perfect, pithy little thing to have said just then about his enthusiasm for teleportation but in the moment that was about the best he could manage.
Celestia still hummed and nodded as though he’d said something incredibly profound.
“I suppose, being able to do it, I don’t appreciate it quite as much as I should. Would you like a demonstration?” She asked.
“Oh, yes please!”
She removed her head from his shoulder at last and shuffled back along the branch as Greg twisted in place for a better view. Once sure that he was watching, Celestia ignited her horn.
There was a flash from the branches and, the shaving of an instant after that, another flash from below, and Celestia had gone from here to there. It was exactly as Greg had expected it would be and it was every bit as delightful as he might have hoped. He applauded while Celestia gave a small bow.
Greg then frowned, hands paused mid-clap.
“Wait, that’s great and all but now you’re down there and I’m up here. Can I get a teleport down?” He asked.
It took her a second to remember the whole ‘stuck in a tree’ setup she had going, but once she did she instantly managed to look appropriately horrified at this tragic twist of circumstances.
“Oh no, not from a tree. There’s only one way down from a tree! Hands!” She said, aghast.
Even Greg had limits. She hadn’t stuck to her own internal consistency and the logic of her premise wherein which hands were vital in getting unstuck from a tree, his suspension of disbelief had been shattered.
“You are - you literally just got down from here another way with no hands involved. Or you could just resettle my stepladder, you’re standing next to it. You’re standing on top of it,” he said, pointing.
She was. She ignored all of this.
“I’ll go and see if I can find someone with hands to help you! Wait there! Don’t go anywhere!”
And off she went at a canter.
(The guards, it should be mentioned, had long-since departed - their orders having been to slip away once the stepladder had been tipped over. All part of the plan.)
Greg watched this, then looked at the branch he was sat on.
“...great,” he said.
Greg looked down. The drop wasn’t too bad. It wouldn’t be fun but he wouldn’t die or anything like that. He just didn’t really want to do it. Especially as Celestia clearly hadn’t actually gone anywhere, she’d just hidden around the side of the door back into the palace proper. Even from up in the tree Greg could hear her laughing (and clearly trying and failing to stifle it).
She hadn’t even hidden very well, either, as her rear end was sticking out. Likely intentional.
But the point remained that she was still just there. Right there!
So there wasn’t really any need to jump down.
So might as well just enjoy the novelty and enjoy the sights. It’d make a fine anecdote a few weeks down the line, and something the two of them could chuckle over for years to come.
“Well, at least the view’s nice,” Greg said, sparing a final glance at the doorway she was failing to hide around before settling back against the tree, sticking his hands behind his head and turning to watch the last few moments of the sun dipping out of view.
All told, not a bad day.
