In Luna's opinion, trying to learn about all of the events she'd missed during abeyance was something like returning to a long-running series of books after having been forced to skip several volumes -- or in her case, about a thousand. She was deeply familiar with the first three hundred or so, but after that...
On occasion, she would be able to personally dip into a relevant portion of the collected text, just long enough to extract a needed fact. But when it came to mastery, nopony, not even a Princess, would ever have the time to fully review them all.
It could leave Luna reliant on her staff, and she tried not to let it frustrate her too much: that she seemed to spend so much time consulting others in a quest for what felt like the most basic of information. And in truth, the time which had passed since the Return had allowed most of that frustration to fade -- or at least move aside to make room for the exasperation. Because all too often, consulting other ponies about the lost time was to find that those who'd theoretically had access to a thousand years of history had used that opportunity to do no more than skim the material. Those who did so generally operated under the same delusion: namely, that they didn't have to learn about the actions of every last character because if the story was still ongoing, then clearly the plot somehow made sense.
Those who wished to impress Luna were often advised to present her with the new, as the younger of the Diarchy was trying to keep up with the times. Many of those who wound up invoking other emotions did so while not quite being able to account for the old. Or, with this particular staff meeting, failing to explain just why it was now her problem.
"Let us begin again," the dark mare stated from her position at the head of the silver-shot marble table. "I do not wish to proceed any further until I understand exactly what I have been presented with." 'Presented' felt like the right term. Luna was still assuming her full duties, taking back a little more with every passing moon -- but the Solar staff saw the resumption of power as a chance to shed a few responsibilities, and her sister simply used the opportunity to pass over a number of gag gifts. "There is now a holiday on the calendar which is meant to celebrate the concept of freedom."
A dozen ponies nodded. It was possible to determine each one's current blood pressure through the exact amount of tail vibration at the other end.
"Which has been around for some time," Luna unnecessarily added. "It is simply that nopony brought it to my attention before this summer, as everypony felt I had other things to do."
If tail vibration didn't suffice, the degree of sweat saturation within fur was another clue.
"At least, until somepony determined that the holiday was now within my dominion, and was therefore something I should be supervising. Would that be correct?"
Of course, it took total saturation for any of the drops to actually fly onto the table during the next round of nods, but some ponies perspired more freely than others.
Luna fought back the urge to sigh. "Describe the origins of this holiday, and the methods by which it is celebrated."
Several ponies began to talk over each other. After a brief verbal scramble, they conferred, got their stories straight, and divided up the words between them. The staff knew Luna did her best to accommodate them during such briefings, and also still felt it best to make sure everypony would receive an equal share of any potential disbelief.
She listened.
"I will attempt to summarize," she announced at the end of the barrage. "A group of rather young adults -- and I use 'adult' to indicate body alone -- from those noble houses which felt they had lost the most during the Unification, having nothing other than their titles because they were quickly proven to lack both intelligence and planning skills, decided that the best way to gain the superiority which they truly believed they already possessed -- was through taking over the government. Their concept of the best means for doing so involved powerful explosives."
Several ponies managed nods.
"Which failed rather spectacularly," the dark mare continued. "And ever since, this occasion has been marked with, among other things, the detonation of fireworks."
The tails were twitching faster.
"So we celebrate their not having blown things up," Luna summarized, "through blowing things up."
"...ponies love fireworks," a senior staffer just barely managed.
With a tone which failed to suggest mercy, mostly due to the number of listeners who still believed in it, "And why is the holiday called 'Rightsstag'?"
"Because nopony lost their rights?" a stallion offered. Followed by, after some thought, "And that giant hollow wooden statue of a stag probably had something to do with it."
"The one which they were trying to pass as a gift from another government," Luna recalled. "When no species of deer has ever been proven as fully sapient."
Everypony nodded.
"I do recall saying something about the conspirators having lacked intelligence," the alicorn dryly said. "And when looking beyond the basic desire of our Solar counterparts to go home somewhat earlier in the day, exactly why is this holiday now considered to be within my dominion?"
There was silence for a while, and even the quiet was sweating.
"Because..." the youngest mare eventually tried, "fireworks go off at night?"
She had already been resisting the urge to sigh. Fighting off a sudden desire to facehoof in public didn't require much more in the way of effort.
"It's mostly about arranging the festivities at the Hanshin," a pegasus stallion informed her. "Booking the acts, making sure the traditions are observed, and trying to give the audience something new because the stadium is trying to sell out every year and with their capacity, that's hard. When it comes to bringing ponies in, we can do most of that, Princess. Your main responsibility will be to sit in the Princess Box during the ceremonies and watch the performances."
"Except that," Luna dryly noted, "we are all familiar with the functioning of the modern press. Should the event be a success, we shall receive approximately none of the credit -- but if we fail, I shall gain all of the blame. I trust you all to perform the majority of the work, but I will be trying to keep an active hoof in the proceedings. At the very least, I will need to approve every act."
"Of course, Princess," an old mare told her. "And of course, if you happen to know of any which you think might be suitable..."
She was still trying to figure out a thousand years of history. Attempting to make herself into a part of the world which that lost time had produced. She went to plays, she had become interested in cinema, phonographs offered seemingly endless amounts of music and she would never run out of books. But when it came to just knowing somepony who might perform...
...she didn't.
It hurt.
Catching up on a thousand years of history was effectively impossible. Immersing oneself in the resulting culture was somewhat easier, and so Luna used some of her free time to travel across the nation and study whatever had arisen. It had been three nights since the staff meeting, she was alone in the Princess Box for the lone sporting arena offered by one of the smallest settled zones she'd ever seen (because every stadium and theater had a Princess Box, just in case), and the new locale had produced a rather unique learning opportunity.
She had been given the chance to study the nature of nothing.
The game (insofar as any total lack of activity could be described as such) was called rounders. Luna understood the pony version to be an adaptation of a sport generally played by bipeds, and a number of adjustments had needed to be made for anatomy which mostly existed on the horizontal. She had no idea whether the original iteration of the game was any better. All she understood was that when it was played by ponies, there was a ball, and there was a bat. Some rather complex operations and elastics were required before either could be slung or swung. And when they were, the most frequent result was 'nothing.'
The bat and ball seldom made contact. If that somehow took place, ponies would arc their necks to follow the ball's path, right up until the moment when it inevitably landed within a player's open mouth. The batter failed to advance. The 'pitcher' would collect the ball, drop it in the sling again, adjust their uniform's cap, check on the positioning of their own tail, exhale across their forehooves for no discernible reason -- and all of that would be taking place while the newest batter decided exactly which patch of dirt she wished to stand on, generally while flexing her knees, chewing on hay, and perhaps meditating on the nature of the universe because it was a rare state which allowed ponies to witness the very concept of zero.
The spectators had their own ways of reacting to the absence of true activity. It seemed to be freeing their minds, especially when those thoughts had no real sport to focus upon. Attending rounders was something of a social occasion, and she understood that: when there was a total vacuum of sport failing to occupy attention, you might as well turn to your neighbor and start a conversation. Those who were dating had absolute freedom to nuzzle in public.
On the other end of the scale, looking closely at some of the papers which were being obsessively filled out told her that some ponies reacted to the void through engaging in statistical analysis. They attempted to measure nothing: how much of it each player had contributed, the rough duration for which it could be expected to continue and, should the final dual team score in regulation innings equal the amount of excitement produced, how much extra nothing could be reasonably expected before matters were resolved.
In between the innings (because rounders took place in defined turns, all the better to divide the nothing up equally, and she was still trying to figure out how that math worked), there was (a lack of) entertainment. In Luna's opinion, it was designed to keep the crowd from lapsing into a collective coma, mostly by forcing fast-closing eyes into more of a half-open wince. And she had seen no posted schedule, so every non-event served as a fresh ambush.
There were hobble races: colts and fillies dragging themselves towards a goal line with three legs tied together and one forehoof desperately trying to hook itself over an anchoring pebble. (Prizes were offered for the winners: in the spirit of the game, they were typically worth nothing.) A song about a pony with an eye made out of cotton was played, and she listened as the crowd tried to sing along with the slurring. Every so often, a chant would be started: the name of the town, the name of the team, and this would be repeated right up until the moment she began to internally review what little remained of the execution laws. And at one point, a pony embedded within a giant pile of flopping fabric, something which vaguely resembled a crab, came out onto the grass, targeted the player who caught the balls which weren't hit (nearly all of them), and through tipping that pony down a tube of wire and linen, effectively ate her.
Luna considered it to be the highlight of the evening, right up until the mare emerged from the dugout for the next inning and the 'game' continued anyway.
She was bored, alone in that singular, never-before-used hosting box. Desperate for distraction. Considering an early departure: she'd been told that leaving before the last 'out' was considered to be near-heresy by rounders fans, and she was still internally daring any of them to actually call her on it. She felt as if she was about to fall asleep and it was barely ten in the evening...
...but then the current inning ended, or died from boredom so that a new generation could take its place. And a blue unicorn mare, with a corona which had seen magenta tinged by grey, confidently stepped out of the dugout.
That, more than anything else, was what focused Luna's attention. The mare was attractive enough: good features, a nicely-worked manestyle, tail held properly with hips swaying to an internal beat. But more than anything else, it was the confidence, the way the mare strode towards the deepest part of the stadium with intent, purpose, and something very close to a posture-based declaration of ownership.
Luna could see the mark. A dual image: one side was a lost channeling device for focusing unicorn magic, and the other -- told her that the mare was one of her own. Something which was still so rare to see.
There was something being placed on the grass by the stadium's staff, at what appeared to be the destination point. A wooden box with a lid, wide and low. It was roughly hexagonal, and had what almost appeared to be an occupied candle mount on each corner. Luna just hadn't seen candles which were so thick and red, almost an angry hue to contrast the long white strands of what seemed to be a truly excessive amount of wick.
She felt as if she recognized the mare, a unicorn she knew she'd never seen, and trying to figure out the why of it distracted her from truly hearing the stadium announcer's words, as the crowd perked and focused with equal intensity: something which then began to increase. Luna didn't understand why the newest performer felt so familiar...
And then she did.
She had been told stories. Now she was seeing the subject of those tales, and so it was like watching a fictional character stepping into the real world. It fascinated the observer, and the actual worry didn't start to come in until she began to remember what some of those stories had been about.
The unicorn levitated the lid off the box, revealing a great amount of white cotton wadding, none of which had presumably ever been within an eye socket. Along with a shaped hollow, just large enough for a mare to lie down within, on her side.
That corona, while still managing the lid, projected straight up. The Equestrian symbol for TEN appeared in the night. And as the unicorn climbed into the box, started to close the lid behind her, it changed to NINE. Luna admired the skill, and did so all the more when the numbers kept changing after the box was fully closed and the crowd began to chant in time with the countdown. A preset illusion: something very few casters could manage, especially after the spell was cut off from the source.
A tiny hole opened in the top of the lid. Six lit matches floated out, separated, each going to an overlong wick. Igniting them, and the burn rushed inwards while the crowd chanted -- it was getting rather loud now -- and the little hole closed again, the illusion and watching ponies said TWO and then ONE and the flame touched all six sticks in the same instant.
Her wings began to flare before the sound of the explosion reached her, had started to react on the sight of smoke and flame alone, there was flame and bits of grass and dirt flying up from the ground, the wood had splintered apart and there was debris flying across the arena, but the center of it was smoke and flame, she had to reach the mare, she had to --
-- it was too late. She knew it was too late, and recognized that at the same moment the wave of air reached her: displaced in an outbound sphere by sheer concussive force. The energy of a mare's death rippled across her feathers, and her priorities changed. There had been an explosion, and there was no helping the one who had been at its center. But the crowd -- the scope of the sound, the sheer number of decibels, herd instinct would be surging and those upon the stadium's benches would begin to panic. Stampede. She had to get in the air, get a direct view for as many as she could see at once, try the Royal Voice and spells and techniques and everything else required to keep them from trampling each other. Luna could already hear a roar of disbelief rising past the echoes of the explosion, and when that faded --
-- no.
Not disbelief.
Excitement.
Celebration.
It slowed her. It kept her in the box for a single extra moment. And in that instant, an alicorn who could only see perfectly in the dark watched a unicorn mare proudly stride forth from billowing smoke.
The crowd saw her, rose from their benches so their hooves could properly stomp, cheered -- no, it was more than that. It was something very close to a vocal explosion.
For her part, the mare simply curtsied: the sign of a consummate professional. Flickers of corona collected the few bits which had been kicked her way. And then she strode back towards the dugout, as the stadium crew removed the splinters, collected the wadding, replaced a few minor divots, and waited for the pegasi to clear away the last of the smoke. All of the flames had gone out on their own.
The crowd settled down. The nothing resumed, with multiple ponies now breaking it down by individual swings. Luna left the Princess Box, found an arena employee, and asked her to send a message ahead.
She waited out the rest of the 'game'. But now she was waiting for something.
The mare, under one of the other hooves, had only been asked to wait. She hadn't been told who she was waiting for, and there was a little ruffle in the fur which indicated irritation: something which steadily increased as she muttered and fussed about her boxes of supplies, deep under Moon and stadium alike.
Then she heard the heavy hoofsteps. Glanced back, and purple eyes went wide.
"Ms. Lulamoon," Luna politely greeted.
"Princess!" The performer was scrambling now, trying to fully turn around at speed and in doing so, nearly spun herself into the floor. "I didn't -- I haven't -- there haven't been any --"
"-- I am aware that you have kept to the terms of your post-Amulet release," Luna generously offered. "This meeting is not in regards to your parole."
"Then..." The mare swallowed. "...why are you here?"
This time, the alicorn offered a small smile.
"As one artist to another -- may we discuss your act?"
The mare's eyes became wider.
And then they were lit from within.
"No magic at all?"
"None," Trixie beamed as the mares moved into the stadium's outdoor cart parking area, heading towards the lonely caravan. "Other than just closing the lid and moving the matches to the wicks. It's actually better that way, because of course some of the unicorns at every show are going to be testing the air with their horns, seeing if there's anything they recognize. But it's just science, Princess. None of them ever think to look for science..."
"Clever," Luna approved, stepping around a pothole. "Twilight Sparkle has told me that about you."
With open pride, "The Great And Powerful Trixie is pleased that the Princess has heard --"
A silver-clad forehoof lightly rapped the light blue snout.
"-- ow!"
"And," Luna added, "she also told me that should I ever meet you, to do that whenever you slipped into third-person. Now, simply because I will not proceed without a full understanding of what took place -- I must ask you to do something where you may be reluctant to comply. But I am asking as one artist to another, with my promise to keep the secret. Explain the trick, Ms. Lulamoon. Or without magic involved, the stunt. At your discretion."
Trixie awkwardly rubbed at her snout for a while.
"They're shaped charges," the mare finally said. "Just about all of the force goes outward. The wood is thin, and mostly treated to be fire-retardant. I leave a few small portions exposed, because a brief flame sells the effect. For the amount of kinetic energy which rebounds off the ground, comes towards me... the padding is enough to absorb it. My only real concern is the sound, and I slip wax plugs into my ears once I'm out of sight. It's perfectly safe, Princess. The only real problems with the stunt are that I always have to build a new box, and it's not easy to make replacements for the charges. The box is easy enough." With more than a touch of mutter as she closed the last bit of distance to the caravan, "After all the wheels I've had to fix and replace on the road, it's not that hard to just put together a box."
"And the explosives?" Luna inquired.
"This town may be small, but it has a chemist's shop. A lot of them don't. I make the charges when I arrive, from fresh materials. The stuff doesn't travel well."
The performer turned, sat down in front of where the caravan's raised ramp would normally drop. Waited, with eyes so wide and bright.
"An additional question," Luna began, because this was crucial. "An explosion of that size, a sound on that level -- the expected reaction would be a stampede. But there was no secondary effect placed in the stadium, to calm the occupants. You have both power and skill, Ms. Lulamoon, and so I do not mean this statement to be offensive -- but enforcing an outside emotion on that number of ponies is beyond you. Beyond just about all and, for most inflicted feelings, illegal without consent. You cast no such effect on those who watched, and none of them, not even the most skittish, broke. Not a single pony ran. Why?"
Trixie smiled. It was actually a rather pretty smile, almost shy in the way it made its way onto the mare's face and then got out of sight quickly, as if frightened that somepony had noticed. Luna wondered how often the mare smiled at all...
"Because they've decided it's an illusion," the performer confidently stated. "Nopony comes to see me die, Princess. They're in the seats for --" and those bright eyes briefly clouded under the weight of hard-won experience "-- rounders, mostly. But the arena announces when I'm coming, a few weeks in advance. They know the stunt is going to happen, and they want to see if they can figure out how I walked out of it. They know I wouldn't do it if I couldn't walk out. So when they see it as an illusion... it's just a noise and smoke and a little flame. As long as they know it's coming, they'll never run. Because it's just a show, and -- that means there's nothing to be afraid of."
And once again, the mare was looking up at Luna. Waiting.
The silver-clad left forehoof lifted from the ground. Moved forward, and lightly brushed the fur of forward-tilted ears.
"You are one of mine," Luna softly breathed. "So rare..."
The unicorn didn't move. She simply closed her eyes at the contact, and kept them that way until all legs were on the ground once again.
"I wish to hire you for the Rightsstag celebration at the Hanshin," Luna announced. "To perform this 'stunt' again." With a small smile, "Because if ponies associate celebrating freedom with explosions, then what could be more of a celebration than having a mare blow herself up on the holiday?"
"...the..." The mare was barely breathing. "...the capital? I can perform in --"
"I believe that is where the Hanshin stands," Luna stated -- then thought of something. "Hmm. This arena is on the outskirts of the settled zone. The Hanshin is not. But I believe I have a way to deal with that."
Individual fur strands were vibrating.
"You will be compensated at a rate appropriate for the venue, of course," the alicorn added. "And as you have indicated that some warning time is necessary, I am granting you access -- by post, as I expect you have engagements to attend on the way to the capital -- to the palace's printing press. Work out the design for some portion of a promotional one-sheet, and I shall arrange for them to be plastered across the city. Any who purchase tickets will also be given notice, and that should make things safe enough. Do you agree to attend?"
"YES!" She was just about on the verge of pronking in place, half-standing with all four knees flexing over and over without ever quite committing to the launch. "I'll be there, Princess! With a fresh box and six sticks of shaped charges! I know Canterlot has the chemist's shop I need! There might even be a choice for once --"
The dark mare would live far beyond the meeting which took place that night, and none of those years ever granted her the ability to figure out why her next words emerged.
"Six," Luna said.
The unicorn's legs straightened.
"Princess?"
"Well..." Luna considered, "...have you seen the Hanshin?"
Trixie hesitated. Slowly, reluctantly shook her head.
"It is large," the alicorn understated. "As it is one of the venues used when Equestria hosts the Games. It is much larger than the arena you occupied on this night. As such, it holds a crowd proportionate to its size, and that will be a very large number of ponies indeed, Ms. Lulamoon. Thousands upon thousands, all waiting for your performance. The closing act, prior to the actual fireworks."
She was barely breathing. "The... closing..."
"Additionally," the dark mare calmly kicked in, "we have Saratoga Way and its stage shows, which include a number of magic acts. Multiple cinemas. All among the best acts in the nation, and sometimes the world. Some ponies hone their craft for years before they risk so much as a street corner in Canterlot. It does not breed audiences which impress easily. So given the scope of the arena, the prestige attached to the venue added to the nature of your audience... to arrive in the Hanshin with six sticks..."
The performer understood, and it made the response immediate.
"Is ten enough?"
"I believe that would be sufficient," Luna decided, and carefully regarded the narrow caravan. "Shall we draw up the contract? In the interests of protecting your possessions, it is likely best that you bring the scroll outside."
The tickets started to sell. Then the posters came out, and they began to sell faster.
Luna checked in on all of the acts, watched several rehearsals and picked up some information on the changes which had been made to stagecraft. There was no such supervision for Ms. Lulamoon, but -- the performer was working her way towards Canterlot, would arrive on the holiday itself and in any case, the stunt struck Luna as the sort of thing where the audience shouldn't see it too many times.
The posters themselves were magnificent. The unicorn mare wasn't the whole of them, of course, for every act had to be listed -- but the attendees needed that vital warning, and so a rather pretty form took up a significant portion of the broadside. Luna spotted those posters over and over again as she trotted through her nation's capital at night, and took the required number of replacements as a sign that a few of them were being placed on bedroom walls.
But she did no more than glance at the posters after a while, because there were other things to work on before the holiday. And after the first examination, there was really no need to read them.
She didn't know the performer was staying in contact with the printing department.
She never saw the text change.
The Hanshin was one of the largest structures in Equestria. It borrowed some of its architecture from minotaur designs, as Mazein's political arenas favored bowl structures with expanding rings, centered on the one at base level where debating parties had the option to give up on words and just go for the pin. It could effectively accommodate the entire population of the capital with room left over, because ponies traveled for the Games: to watch their loved ones, for the joy of the sport -- and then you had to figure for those spectators from every other participating species, because just about all the athletes were guaranteed to come with a trailing hometown crowd. It meant that the Hanshin was rarely filled for anything other than Games events (which also saw a thriving, strictly temporary village born at the base of the mountain, all the better to keep the hotels from gouging) -- but this night came close.
It felt as if most of Canterlot was in the open-air stadium. Portions of Ponyville had taken the trip, although she'd noticed the audience was free of Bearers: missions had a way of ignoring holidays. A few had come from further away, because word of what the capital was putting together had spread and ponies were curious to see the results of Luna's first year in charge. She personally felt herself to have done well with planning the final fireworks: after all, having lights twinkling in the sky was built into her very being.
Most of Canterlot, part of Ponyville, and some representation for what lay beyond -- but not her sister, because Tia had successfully foisted responsibility onto the younger and, having wrapped up a few minor appearances in the early morning, had taken the rest of the day off. The elder sibling was in bed, and so Luna once again had a Princess Box all to herself.
She didn't really mind. There were things she enjoyed doing with Celestia, in large part because it was once again possible to do anything -- but if the responsibility had been pushed at her, then she intended to at least collect a purely-personal portion of the credit. It was something which could be lorded over the elder in the morning.
It was a huge crowd: thousands upon thousands. They were cheering, and had been doing so for some time. Luna, who often found herself revising her opinion of average pony intelligence downwards, was starting to wonder if a thousand years had done something opposite for lung capacity.
Sweating, tired, happy dancers were starting to make their way out of the center, illuminated by the powerful lighting devices which rimmed the upper edge of the stadium. The collected herd gave them one last rousing cheer as they went into one of the access tunnels: lost at first to comparative shadows, and then distance took them away from even Luna's night vision.
"The last act of the night before the Rightsstag fireworks, everypony!" rang out across the Hanshin, carried by an announcer's spell-boosted voice, and the cheering was joined by a round of stomping from ponies whose hooves should have been sore six acts ago. (There were also some native griffons, and so it was just barely possible to pick out the tic-tac of talons.) "The act who is a firework! Give her a Canterlot welcome, like nothing she's ever heard before! Let's have a Capital Stomp for --"
The name was almost lost in the ensuing din. The mare was not.
She came out of the rightmost tunnel, and her trot was just so. Posture precise, pace measured, eyes initially focused only on the center of the arena. She'd never had an audience on this scale before and yet, at the moment she turned a calm, welcoming regard to the first row of seats, it seemed as if she'd never performed for anything less. The consummate showmare, in her perfect environment at last.
Little nods served as something very close to the curtsy which would only come at the end, and she made her way towards the brightest spotlight.
On the left, there was a small team of ponies entering. The stadium's employees had been serving as setup staff all night: putting stages together in minutes, taking them apart again in half that time, making everything vanish into the shadows again. For the last act of the night, they were carrying a wooden box, balanced on a pallet which had side rods extending across all of their backs.
Luna watched the mare closing in on them, and smiled. The recognition of one artist in the presence of another.
The box was carefully lowered to the ground, dozens of knees bending in concert. Gently pushed onto the center grass, and the team quickly withdrew. The mare had the spotlight to herself.
She turned in place, and it was as if her simple regard somehow met every pair of eyes. But there was no smile, no indication that this was anything other than what she was meant to do. The stadium might as well have existed for her alone, and all of the applause was centered on a single target.
The unicorn glanced up at the Princess Box and, even knowing that the performer likely couldn't see her, Luna nodded. The largest horn in the stadium ignited with darkness and stars.
Under normal circumstances, a full working on this scale would have been beyond her capacity. Luna had power -- but she had no special talent for shields. She was capable of creating them: her personal ones were stronger than just about anything on the continent, covering a normal building was no trouble -- but to fully dome a structure on the Hanshin's scale with something truly solid would require a mark, and Captain Armor was in the Empire.
She was incapable of fully shielding the stadium. But she didn't have to. Her energies were stretched too thin, and to maintain the effort for more than a few minutes would begin to drain her -- but that effort only needed to accomplish one thing. It had to stop a certain amount of vibration, muffling the sound of the explosion. Those who had attended were prepared: anypony living within normal hearing range of the Hanshin could still be startled. The shield, constructed properly, would prevent that.
Still -- she didn't like how the results felt within her mind. Shaky, translucent...
Luna pushed. Put some more of her personal stores into the construct, felt it solidify at the same instant the Princess Box seemed to dip slightly downwards, and resolved to raid most of the snack tray as soon as the act was over. Her Box, her snack tray. It wasn't as if anypony else was taking food from it, with her Guards outside the Box in a protective ring. So far, the most they'd managed was to guard her from a small window gap: something where the glass was stuck about half a hoof-height over the base. (She'd tried to close it, and quickly found that the effort necessary to do so was also the strength required to make it shatter.)
The unicorn mare looked up. Judged the shield, then nodded towards the Princess Box: one artist to another.
Her horn ignited, magenta tinged with grey. The wooden lid began to slide.
The cheering somehow became all the louder, and Luna watched the performer climb inside. Even though this was her second time seeing it, and she was now watching the stunt while knowing how it worked -- she wanted to watch. To, in a very real way, share the moment, for this mare was one of hers. It meant observing closely was something more than polite --
-- wait.
That's not the same box.
She examined the thought as the mare placed herself within the padded hollow. Of course it wasn't the same box. The wooden constructs were destroyed by the performance. This was a new hexagon --
-- no. She'd asked for ten sticks, and it seemed they had to be evenly placed: one at every corner. So a ten-sided structure. That was what had caught her attention --
-- she was counting now, and did so a little too late.
A dodecagon. Twelve sides.
And it was only then, as that corona was projected towards the sky, as the first number appeared writ large over Canterlot, the lid sliding closed and the little hole opening to let the matches out (a dozen of them, and only the dark mare might have seen that they were moving somewhat shakily: the unicorn nowhere near her mass limit, but having trouble coordinating so many objects across different vectors), with the crowd joyfully shouting along "FIVE! FOUR! THREE!" in concert with the changing illusion which measured the count and the overlong wicks catching the flame...
...it was only then that Luna realized she'd hired a mare to blow herself up with twelve sticks of shaped charges.
Twelve.
Sticks.
She was halfway to the oversized emergency exit swinging clear panels at the front of the Princess Box when they all went off.
There was a part of Luna which never truly registered the scope of the sound. It existed as something within the range of hearing, but it was also the whole of it. At the moment the decibels from the explosion reached her, her entire being became nothing more than another means of conducting them. The sound filled her body, made every cell vibrate at the same rate, shook stars within mane and tail as it cost her knowledge of breath and heartbeat and the desperate scrabble of her own hooves. The noise was everywhere and everything, moving through the stadium in an expanding wave as the vibrations rearranged fur, shook mane and tail styles, she was just barely aware of movement at the edge of her vision as a stuck window slammed shut --
-- and then she saw the next thing.
In the little stadium, the air had been disrupted, pushed out behind the sound in a similar expanding wave. A detectable, brief change to the normal patterns.
Within the Hanshin, a wavefront of curling, roiling, visible atmosphere was now rushing across the interior of the bowl.
Manestyles came apart. Hats were launched. Objects which had been held within coronas wound up impacting six body lengths to the back. Multiple programs came out from their natural underbench homes and turned into speeding, poorly-aimed missiles: most of those went into the hats.
There might have been screams. Shouts. Cries of alarm. It was impossible to tell, because there was only one sound in the world, and it felt as if that was all there could ever be.
The sonic wavefront raced outwards in all directions, hit the solidified shield, something which confined it to the Hanshin alone. Tested itself against Luna's power, and found its strength incapable of breaking through.
Then it bounced.
The air blast, not wanting to abandon its partner, followed suit and promptly came back the other way.
Everything echoed. Everything resounded. But everything also absorbed. Every body touched took a little of the energy away, wind which tried to blast through dozens of ascending rows lost something for the effort and by the time the curl of air got back to the center, it was capable of doing no more than snuffing out the rather more extensive flames while setting the smoke to curling in on itself. And by that time, Luna was already in the air, speeding down towards the crater --
-- there was a crater of sorts. A ring gouged into the arena, like a pacing groove created by a Twilight Sparkle the size of an Ursa Minor, only with boulders of earth strewn about the arena to prove the nature of its carving. It was uneven, deep, still smoldering. And the ponies she flew over hadn't broken, hadn't stampeded because this was an illusion, a spectacular illusion but still one they'd been ready for, just an illusion and those could never hurt anypony --
-- except that now, there was a desperate alicorn racing towards the center of the blast. And if it had been possible for most of the crowd to truly hear anything, they would have picked up on their own growing murmur.
Twelve sticks.
I told her ten.
Luna couldn't see through the smoke. Darkness, yet: the shadows of the access tunnels were like daylight to her. But the smoke billowed in on itself, it just kept rising and she didn't know what was at the center. If there was anything left other than vacuum and a few strands of fur and the horn, a virtually unbreakable horn left behind when nothing else remained --
I could have said eight.
She reached the edge of the smoke. Her wings shifted forward, pushed, and the smoke was sent towards sky and fast-fading shield.
There was a piece of ground remaining in the center, just large enough to land on. Some scant splinters of wood, barely big enough to see. Cotton wadding was strewn everywhere. And there was also the form of a unicorn mare, one of the few who was Luna's own, lying on her side. Completely motionless.
Luna touched down. Saw the closed eyes, the stilled tail. A thickened trickle of orange running down the fur under the right ear. Some of the wax had momentarily liquefied.
"Ms. Lulamoon."
No response.
Louder, more urgent. "Ms. Lulamoon."
Nothing happened. The murmur was starting to reach her hearing, and it would soon possess more force than the explosion.
"Trixie!"
And acting on instinct alone, she poked the mare's body with her left forehoof.
"...was..."
It barely reached her. It froze the world.
"...was that loud enough?" whispered the mare.
There were any number of options in the presence of life. The mandatory one started with an upswell of relief, something which needed only a moment to saturate Luna's body as she considered whether to laugh or cry, because every followup option seemed to center around getting the mare to a doctor --
"...because Trixie has been thinking about it," the shut-eyed unicorn announced with a little more strength, "and she totally could have gone to fourteen --"
Wings briefly swept low, all the better to conceal Luna's next movement.
"-- ow!"
"I am taking you to a hospital," Luna announced as her wings refolded, now watching as the mare wriggled her legs for the first time. "Immediately, by teleport -- stop that! Stop trying to get up! Why are you not listening to me?"
...actually, there was probably a very good reason for that.
"Can you hear what I am saying?" Luna cautiously asked. "Can you hear anything?"
But the unicorn simply struggled to her hooves, opened her eyes and regarded the ring crater with an expression which suggested unnecessary inconvenience. But then she looked at the stadium, a structure which was almost full, and purple eyes drank in the audience --
-- there was a new sound and if not for what had come moments before, it would have been among the loudest which Luna had ever heard. Something very much like a roar expressed as group exhalation, the release of stress which never should have been there because they'd tricked themselves for a moment, but really, they'd known the truth all along.
They were cheering.
The entire stadium. All of the ponies, and the myriad species of Canterlot. Living conductors for a new sound. Cheering in unison, as if they were capable of nothing else.
The unicorn looked at Luna then, just for a moment. And the alicorn, as one artist to another, understood.
The illusion was intact, and that was the only thing preventing the giant crowd from breaking. But there was only one way to keep it intact.
Luna's corona flowed, gathered up enough of the scattered earthen boulders to build a rough bridge. And the unicorn walked.
She did so steadily, calmly, even if some of that pace was occasionally assisted by a now-invisible corona trying to brace her legs. But she looked around at the stadium, and did so in a way which made it seem as if she was regarding all within the crowd in turn. She moved as if she'd been there a hundred times before, because that was what she was supposed to do. Her posture was perfect, her tail held just so, and none in the audience really seemed to notice the little rivers of wax coming from her ears, or the way that tail presentation was presenting somewhat less tail than before. They simply cheered and even if she could not hear them... she knew the cheers were there.
The mare exited the core of the Hanshin in the company of an alicorn who was making an effort to haul in a thunderstorm of bits, on her hooves all the way. And just before she would have entered the tunnel, she stopped to curtsy.
She was, after all, a consummate professional.
The performer kept up the pace, deep into the shadows of the tunnel, and then looked up at Luna.
"Can they see me?"
The alicorn shook her head as bale-weights of bits settled onto the tunnel's floor. Recovering mane-held stars offered extra confirmation through a slight increase in shine. The crowd continued to cheer.
"In that case," the unicorn announced, "Trixie feels this would be a good time to --"
She collapsed. Knees bent, the mane sagged, everything went left, and the spent body fell into the cushion of Luna's waiting corona.
A silver-clad left forehoof automatically rapped the snout, and the flash of dark light took them away as more colorful bursts began to fill the sky.
Those who wished to impress Luna were often advised to present her with the new, and so she looked at the toy building which was balanced on the palm of the minotaur's huge hand. Inspected the little bulge in the dome of the roof, and then questioningly looked to yellow eyes for the explanation.
"It's just a scale model, obviously," Ambassador Torque Power grinned. "And we had to scale up a lot. But the theory's sound. Once we finish getting the real thing together -- that's just a couple of moons now -- the roof is gonna be held up by air pressure, Princess. Just air pressure! We're using it for a sporting arena. Protecting against the stuff that can get changed by bad weather, since we generally let ours stay wild. It'll solve a lot of problems." He pocketed the model again, adjusted the little striped tie. "And even if you guys don't have the same need, I just thought you'd appreciate being the first Equestrian to see it."
"It will be a wonder," Luna sincerely stated from her position on the silver-shot throne, because she was truly looking forward to seeing the final results. "But I am familiar with your habits, Torque: as much, I suspect, as you believe yourself to know mine. Is there something to come after your display? Because I doubt you came here from Mazein's embassy for this alone."
"Okay, okay..." Two heavily-muscled arms spread wide, and the grin got bigger. "You got me. But it's a little thing. Not even diplomatic. Just a small favor. One friend to another."
She waited.
"Our freedom holiday is coming up in a couple of moons," Torque told her. "Actually, the stadium might be ready in time for it. And it's not like it is for Equestria. With us, it's the biggest event on the calendar."
Luna nodded.
"It kind of has to be," added the representative of what had once been a species of slaves, his right hand briefly touching the nose ring. "And I heard about what you guys did. Talk of the town for a while, right? So I was wondering... that mare who finished off the show. Do you know how to get in touch with her?"
Yes, although it'll take another moon of potions before attempting to do so means I can stop raising my voice --
"Because my group voted on it, and just about everyone wants her there. We'll even pay the travel expenses and hotel fees, since it's such a long trip. So -- contact information, or getting through to her for me. Sending her over to the embassy." He genially shrugged, stuck his hands in his pockets. "Like I said, small favor. So -- okay, Princess? Can you put us in contact?"
The younger of the Diarchy thought about it.
"I require two promises from you. And then I will bring her to your embassy myself."
His head tilted slightly to the right: it was most visible in the shift of the horns. "O-kay..."
"A maximum of six sticks," Luna firmly said. "And the performance is held outdoors."
A little too carefully, "Any particular reasons? Because after what your show got --"
Air pressure...
"-- Ambassador... exactly how fond are you of that roof?"
