Princess Twilight Sparkle smiled, and let out a sigh that expressed just how unbelievably content she was at that very moment. She was sitting on a velvety-soft plush chair in her castle library around late evening, with a cup of steaming tea and a platter of cookies to her right, and a platter of encyclopedias and technical manuals to her left. The day was over. Nighttime was here. There were no students to bother her, no more assignments to grade, nor friendship problems to solve. She’d even had Spike clear out the castle grounds and sent Starlight and Trixie off to Canterlot for a long weekend.
It was, essentially, the perfect evening to finally relax and read what made her truly happy. It was the perfect time to sit back, and relax in the quiet dignity that was so often denied to her due to her busy schedule.
Naturally, she already knew this was therefore the perfect time for somepony to interrupt her with a world-ending problem of some sort.
She sipped her tea.
“Three,” she counted down, “two… one… aaaaaand…”
The doors slammed open with a gust of wind.
“There we go,” she sighed.
In strode an alicorn of darkest beauty, deepest magical might, and a deranged look in her eye.
Princess Luna threw one hoof out, and cried, “Princess Twilight Sparkle! The Moon is in danger!!!”
Twilight blinked once. She sipped her tea once more, even as a bolt of lightning punched the air to (unnecessarily) dramaticize the other Princess’ statement.
“Dash, stop that,” she sighed.
The answer came back from somewhere outside. “I told you it was a cliché!”
And then, seemingly unaware of the huff and the pout Luna gave her, Twilight Sparkle stood up.
“Then,” she said, dramatically flaring her wings, “We shall go to the Moon!”
In short order, the problem was made plain. As Nightmare Moon, Princess Luna had over one-thousand years to kill on the moon, and at some point, she’d built all manner of magical artifacts and devices. Most were just projects to busy herself with. Some were meant to help her get back to Equestria and destroy Celestia (none of which succeeded in their purpose). And a few were just because she was bored.
And one of those terrible arcane devices was going to destroy the moon in less than a month!
“We must return to the moon and deactivate the artifact!” Luna declared.
The only question, then, was how?
“Without the Elements of Harmony,” Twilight mused, sitting at the Cutie Map Table, fresh coffee brewed for her, Spike, Luna, and Rainbow Dash, “I’m not sure quite how to send a pony to the moon…”
Spike, sitting atop his own little throne, scanning ancient texts and tomes of astrophysical knowledge, snorted. “Yeah, thanks Sombra.”
Luna frowned, and added a third scoop of marshmallows to her drink.
“Twilight,” she said, smile straining, “I didn’t wish to be sent back to the moon for another thousand years. An afternoon should be sufficient.”
“A thousand years?” Twilight asked.
“That spell only works in thousand-year increments,” Luna said. She rolled her eyes, and added, “Starswirl designed it. He never did small when big would do. Typical stallion…”
“But…” Twilight shook her head. “I thought it was the Elements that…?”
“Gave my sister the power to overwhelm my magical defenses and banish me, indeed,” Luna said with a nod. “But the specifics were up to that silly bit of arcanum.”
Rainbow snorted, and slammed her cup down onto the table, which ominously creaked in magical protest. “You don’t need a fancy spell! You got the best flier in all of Equestria sitting right here! Just send me out there, and I’ll be back in an hour! Two, tops!”
Spike glanced up at Dash with a crooked eyebrow.
“Since when can you breathe in space?” he asked.
Dash waved one hoof disdainfully. “I can learn! It can’t be that hard!”
Ignoring her, Twilight sighed. “I just don’t know how to solve this problem. There just isn’t any spell that can teleport us across the gap between Equus and the moon. It can’t be done!”
“Just bring the moon closer, then!” Rainbow Dash said.
“We did that once, as a jest,” Luna sighed. “It took… well, it took forever to put back up in the sky. And we used means and methods no longer available to us at the time. Ever hear of Marelantis? The Lost City?”
Dash squinted. “Uh… no?”
“Now you know why.” Luna sipped at her coffee, and shrugged. “Well, I suppose you could always ask to borrow Sunset Shimmer’s spaceship.”
“Yeah, that’d…” Twilight paused.
Her left eye started blinking, without the right one.
“Excuse me, Luna?” she asked. “Could you repeat that? Sunset Shimmer’s…?”
“Her spaceship,” said Luna, nodding. “She once visited me on the moon with it.”
Twilight paused.
She nodded.
Then, she quietly hefted up one of Spike’s books in her magical aura, and proceeded to smash the ancient tome of astronomical findings directly into her own face.
“WHAT!?”
“Oh, right. That,” said Sunset Shimmer, nodding along as though her friend from another world had just reminded her of a funny anecdote, and not one of the greatest scientific achievements of Ponykind. “I guess I did reach the moon, didn’t I?”
Twilight ran her currently human hands through her hair. “Yes. You just happened to do something ponies have considered nigh impossible for millennium. Just a little thing.”
The other Twilight Sparkle, this one more permanently human, sat by her royal doppelganger’s side and stared off into, well, space.
“Moon…” she mumbled to herself.
The three sat around a table at one of the human mall’s many, many food-vending stores, a bowl of ice cream laid out before each of them.
“Mm,” Sunset affirmed, a mouthful of rocky road making verbal communication briefly difficult. “But it wasn’t a big deal, you know?”
Both Twilights glared in unison.
Sunset, perhaps feeling the need to explain, did so. “Well, it was more… um…”
She sighed, and lowered her head in shame.
“It was another scheme to become an alicorn princess…”
Both Twilights sighed together, “Of course it was.”
Sunset shrank a little into her chair. “And… I thought Nightmare Moon could help with that…”
Human Twilight nodded. “Of course, you did.”
“Let me guess,” Princess Twilight asked, “you found out she was completely insane and evil?”
“More ‘really lonely and clingy’, but yeah, kinda…” Sunset brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “I bounced after the third or fourth tea party. Either way, it was a long time ago. Bad memories.”
“What happened to the rocket?” asked Princess Twilight.
“Scrapped it,” said Sunset, sighing. “Most of it blew up on re-entry. I sold what I could to recoup the losses and turned what was left into an art project for Professor Arcane Appellative’s class.”
“How does a student even pay for something like that?” human Twilight asked, eyebrows raised in scientific-jealousy.
Sunset shrugged. “Celestia gives the Royal Student a stipend.”
“That doesn’t…”
“A really generous stipend.”
Princess Twilight leaned forward. “But… could you rebuild it?”
“That was, like, thirty years ago!” Sunset snorted, and folded her arms. “And I was, let me remind you, super-obsessed with becoming a Princess at the time. I didn’t exactly linger on failed projects. Sorry, Twi… but at best, I could reconstruct some of it by memory, but you’d still need a genius to…”
Human Twilight slammed her hands onto the table, nearly capsizing it instantly.
“I’ll do it!” she cried out.
Princess Twilight, saving her strawberry sherbet with both hands, blinked.
“What?”
“I’ll do it!” Twilight repeated. “You want a genius scientist to carry ponykind to the stars? Then I’m your woman!”
It was Sunset’s turn to frown. “Uh, Twi? I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I mean, our laws of physics…”
“Physics, schmysics!” Twilight scoffed. She blanched, but managed to keep her composure despite such a horrible curse being uttered by herself. “It can’t be that hard. There’s no way your laws of physics can be that different from our own!”
“THESE LAWS OF PHYSICS MAKE NO SENSE!!!”
Her cries of anguish carried quite well through the crystalline halls of the Castle of Friendship’s library, where the current research team – mostly made up of ponies who all vaguely resembled people from the human world, to Twilight’s eyes – was based. Long tables were piled high with paper, huge blackboards covered in chalky scrawl lined the walls, and a dragon that looked suspiciously like the formerly human (and currently unicorn) Twilight’s dog silently offered each researcher coffee and a donut.
It'd be a paradise if not for all the insanity she’d been dealing with.
“What’s so hard to understand?” Moondancer said with a scowl. “Look, you take the arcane coefficient, and multiply…”
“Your orbital mechanics are bound to the whim of eldritch beings!!!” Twilight cried. “Friendship is an actual, measurable quantity in determining delta-v!”
Moondancer sighed. “Yes? Every schoolfilly knows that…”
Twilight pressed a hoof to the bridge of her nose, and quietly seethed while her Princess self, Sunset Shimmer, and a few others consulted some star charts with a pony that looked awfully a lot like Twilight’s Vice Principal.
“Just… just tell me that the speed of light is a constant in this universe.”
Moondancer frowned. “The speed of… what?”
Sunset looked up from her notes. “Speed of light, Moondancer. It’s a human thing.”
“IT IS NOT A HUMAN THING!” Twilight snarled. “It is a universal constant!”
“Maybe in a stupid universe…”
“Trixie, so help me…”
The pony who most resembled Vice Principal Luna hummed to herself. “Actually… there is a universal speed of light. Of a sort…”
She turned to Princess Twilight, and whispered something into her ear. Then, Luna stood upright, and cleared her throat with a dainty little cough.
In a dramatic stage-whisper, she said, “Mine sister’s flank is so fat, that…”
There was a small explosion of solar fire.
“LUNA!!!”
Luna turned away from the seething, fire-enshrouded form of her sister, and asked Princess Twilight, “Time?”
After a few moments of chalk-scratching near-silence, the researchers had their answer.
“The Speed of Light appears to be… Eleven-point-one-seven-six-oh meters per second.”
With that pronouncement, all the researchers cheered, the Equestrian Space Program having solved the first of many mysteries that lay before it. Hooves stamped in approval. Confetti fell from the ceiling.
Celestia was just… confused.
“Um… yay?” she said, uncertainly.
Human Twilight Sparkle simply laid her head down, and wept at what science hath wrought.
“Princess Twilight? We have a problem.”
Twilight, head still buried in notes and calculations, glanced up at the pony who’d intruded at such a late hour, after hours and hours of late-night calculations and theorizing. Through the bleariness of non-sleep, it looked suspiciously like her old friend Minuette.
“Eugh,” she groaned. “Another one?”
Minuette nodded. “Another one. Or, really, it’s the same one as before. How are we going to pay for this space program?”
“The Royal Student Stipend, of course,” said Twilight, waving a tired hoof through the air. “It paid for the first one, after all. At least, assuming Sunset remembered that correctly.”
Minuette’s ears flattened.
“Uh… yeah. About that…”
“What?”
“The Treasury got back to us,” said Minuette. “They say you’re way, way overdrawn on the stipend. Like… by a lot.”
“Over…?” Twilight’s eyes crossed. “HOW!?”
“They said something about… books.”
Twilight’s eyes narrowed, and her own ears drooped.
“Oh…”
“Twilight, how many books did…?”
“I have a problem, okay!?” she cried, slamming her head back into the table. “I just…”
The Princess fell silent. The silence dragged on, and on. Minuette wasn’t sure if she was supposed to do something, say nothing, or say… anything, really. It was getting a little awkward, actually, when suddenly…
“Uh, Twilight?”
Twilight bolted upright, eyes wide and bloodshot.
“Sorry,” she said. She blinked, slowly. “Fell asleep.”
“Do…?” Minuette scratched the back of her neck. “… do you have a plan?”
Twilight nodded, slowly.
“Celestia will help us,” she said, confidently. “She knows what’s at stake.”
“I can’t help you with this, Twilight.”
“OH COME ON!!!”
The two sat in Celestia’s gleaming golden office, separated by a real mahogany desk, a platter of assorted cakes, and several very, very angry Treasury Ponies who glared at the Princess of Friendship from underneath their black hoods of office.
Tax Ponies. They had to set the mood.
“Celestia,” Twilight tried again, “the Space Program is of vital importance to the future of Equestria. The human space programs led to huge advances in technology, and greater awareness of the interconnectedness of the peoples of their world. Which is, essentially, Friendship. And therefore, it is my Royal prerogative to…”
“Isn’t the moon going to explode or something?” asked Celestia, one eyebrow raised. “I could have sworn Luna was worried about the moon exploding…”
One of the Treasury Ponies hissed. “Neither the Space Program nor the Moon’s Destruction was budgeted for this year. The Treasury does not support this turn of events.”
Twilight frowned. “Well, if you’d like to reverse time and prevent Nightmare Moon from activating a doomsday device one-thousand years ago, be my guest!”
“The manipulation of the Time-Space Continuum was not budgeted, either.”
“Well, what is budgeted!?”
The hooded heads of the Treasury Ponies turned, as one, to look at the platter of cakes on Celestia’s desk.
Princess Celestia shook her head. “I’m sorry, Twilight. But there simply aren’t enough bits for the space program. You’ll have to figure out some other way to raise the funds needed.”
Twilight threw her head back, and scoffed. “What? Are you expecting me to fund the space program with a bake sale or something?”
“I cannot describe how upset I am that a bake sale managed to fund the entire space program.”
Both Twilights, Sunset Shimmer, and Princess Luna stood atop a hill just overlooking the Ghastly Gorge. Well, it was once called the Ghastly Gorge. It was rapidly becoming known as Pinkie’s Pit, since she had been the one to organize the nation-wide bake sale that had now filled the gorge entirely with gold bits.
Another wagon full of gold dumped its load into the hoard. Spike, sitting in a pool floaty, gave the stallion hauling it a thumbs-up before he went back to basking.
“I… I just don’t understand!” human Twilight gasped in shock at the sight of such riches. “How…? How could a bake sale raise this kind of money!?”
Sunset shrugged. “Ponies love cupcakes. Celestia bought about… oh, I’d say at least twenty-feet worth of that gold pile just by herself.”
“Pinkie truly is a marvel, of course,” Luna added. “With such wealth, we shall be upon the moon in no time!”
“I just…” Twilight shook her head. “I don’t get it! Your species’ diet is atrocious! Don’t any of you worry about diabetes?”
Princess Twilight and Princess Luna both frowned.
“Dia-what?” asked the former.
The latter quirked her head to one side. “I have never heard of this either.”
Sunset shook her head. “Human disease. Ponies don’t get that, Twilight. Fifty-percent of a pony’s dietary needs are sugar-based.”
“That’s… that’s disgusting!”
“You’re currently a pony, you know?”
“I think there were still some eclairs back at the library…”
Days passed. Materials were purchased. Research was published. Science was debated. Science was questioned. Ponies began asking if the planet was flat, and if the moon was an illusion. Summary executions were dismissed after Celestia wrestled Luna away from the gallows.
It was a week of weeks.
Twilight Sparkle and Starlight Glimmer sat together in Twilight’s office at her School of Friendship, partly because it was a well-appointed space for diplomatic meetings like the one scheduled to take place momentarily, but mostly because there weren’t a dozen pony (and one human) scientists crowding the available rooms and getting donut crumbs on everything.
“Prince Pharynx,” Twilight said with a polite nod to the dark cyan changeling as he entered, “welcome! You’ll be happy to know that Ocellus has been doing exemplary work this term…”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s great,” he said dismissively, waving aside the Princess’ words. The changeling royal hefted a saddle-bag at his side. “I’m here on official business today, so let’s just get that over with, alright?”
Starlight tilted her head to one side. “Uh, sure? Everything okay?”
Pharynx sat heavily into the plush guest chair, and sighed, setting the bag down beneath him.
“Thorax is really interested in helping out with this stupid ‘Space Program’ business,” he said.
“Oh?” Twilight stood up a little straighter. “Well, we’d accept any help you’d be willing to offer!”
Starlight added, “What were you thinking, anyway?”
“Mostly manual labor,” said Pharynx. “You need a launch site constructed, right? Solid foundations, a metal tower, or something? I skimmed the description you published in your pony papers.”
Twilight’s eyebrows raised up. “You read our papers?”
“You can read?” Starlight whispered.
“So, I’m here to negotiate wages, and share my peoples’ expertise in these matters,” Pharynx said, ignoring both comments.
At that, Twilight’s brow furrowed.
“I’m… not sure if I can accommodate too much for wages, Pharynx,” she said, sighing heavily. “The Treasury Wraiths only budgeted the project so much, even after we raised extra funding…”
Her ears twitched. Something Pharynx had said…
“Expertise?” she asked. “You have… expertise?”
“Of course!” Pharynx laughed. “The Changeling Empire has had its own space program for years.”
There was an audible click that filled the small office room. Starlight briefly wondered if, by the way her friend and mentor’s face suddenly constricted into a grimace, if it hadn’t been the sound of Twilight Sparkle’s teeth grinding themselves down into dust.
Pharynx had the good sense to allow the alicorn to slowly, glacially come to grips with his statement.
Finally, a few minutes later, Twilight exhaled.
“Explain,” she said.
Pharynx shrugged. “The Changeling Empire already has a space pr—”
“I HEARD THAT PART!” she snarled, both hooves smashing straight down through the face of her desk and practically into the floor. “Explain that!”
Again, Pharynx just shrugged.
“Chrysalis had a lot of ideas, back in the day,” he said, hefting the bag he’d brought in back up to his hooves. “During the whole… Canterlot wedding… thing…”
He had the good graces to cough here.
“… she had me whip up some plans, and start the process…”
Twilight’s eyes shot down to the bag.
“Is that them?”
He smirked. “All in a folder, for your eyes only.”
She sighed, and threw her head back.
“I can’t tell you how much it means to know at least some of the load this will take off…”
There was a heavy thump.
Both Twilight and Starlight stared at the top of the desk. There was, indeed, a folder. Plain. Manila. A folder.
What was a little more unusual was the contents of the folder.
Twilight was slightly worried she’d gone crazy. Again.
“That’s…”
She opened the folder.
“It’s… uh…”
“Behold!” said Pharynx. “The Changeling Space Program!”
Twilight continued staring at the wooden log on her desk. The one wrapped, sort of, in a manila folder.
“You need to turn it over,” Pharynx said, helpfully. It was impressive, how straight he was keeping his face through all this.
When Twilight failed to move even a muscle to do so, Starlight tilted the log in her magic.
Twilight pursed her lips.
“It says…” she said, slowly, “… ‘Go to spess’. And ‘Space’ is misspelled.”
She turned her eyes, rapidly approaching bloodshot, to Pharynx.
He sniffed.
“It, ah…” He coughed again, if only to hide the smirk threatening to appear. “… She was kinda blitzed-out on Love she’d taken from Cadance at the time, and had a lot of weird ideas for the Empire…”
Starlight hissed, in a stage whisper, “Pharynx, run. I can’t save you now…”
Pharynx too noted the way Twilight’s mane had started to shimmer and writhe atop her head. Less ethereal, like Luna or Celestia’s mane did, and more… like a blowtorch.
“The labor offer still stands,” he added, quickly. “And… since changelings just need love, we’ll take hugs as payment.”
Twilight’s mane slowly drifted back down to her head, and stopped smoking.
“Fine…” she said. “Good joke. Very funny.”
“I thought so.”
“It’ll just be ten lashes before I send you back home,” she added.
“Honestly, I’d have been fine with twenty.”
“Sunset? What am I looking at?”
Sunset glanced over Twilight’s shoulder.
“Looks like… an old receipt.”
The human-turned-unicorn frowned.
“It’s one of yours. From when you sold the scraps of your original ship.”
“Oh? Cool. Where’d you get that?”
“It was on Princess Celestia’s fridge door.”
Sunset drew her lips into a thin line.
“That’s… kinda creepy, actually. What of it?”
A shoebox – and why ponies needed shoeboxes for their horseshoes, Twilight couldn’t fathom – full of papers poured out onto the library work table.
“I have a long, long list of ponies who bought those parts and pieces. Princess Me wanted to recoup what we could from the original. Including… the launching mechanism.”
She turned a glare at her bacon-haired friend.
“Sunset? Why am I looking at a pawnshop receipt for a freaking catapult!?”
“Well,” said Sunset, glancing at the pile, “how else do you get into orbit?”
Twilight took a breath.
“Multi-staged rockets.”
“That seems a bit overkill here,” said Sunset. She shrugged. “The moon’s only about five miles above the atmosphere anyway…”
Twilight groaned at yet another perversion of her beloved laws of physics.
“… so you just need enough force to break free of that before engaging the rockets.”
Twilight adjusted her glasses. “Somedays, I just don’t understand how your laws of physics can work.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. Princess Twilight’s already ruled-out using a catapult this time. We need a lot more oomph to hit space with there being three ponies on the mission this time.”
“You upgrading to a trebuchet?” Twilight laughed.
“Nah,” Sunset said with a shake of her head. “A cannon will work just fine.”
Again, Twilight groaned.
Sunset frowned. “Just out of curiosity, where’d the catapult end up?”
“Some shell company in the Caymare Islands bought it. A… CMC Limited? Why does that sound familiar?”
“APPLE BLOOM! Git back here! Y’all got some ‘splainin’ ta do!”
Finally, the day had come. The launch pad, a massive changeling-goo construction of unparalleled size in all of Equestria, sat in the shallows off Silver Shoals, the preferred spot for the takeoff according to the human Twilight Sparkle’s calculations. It was surprisingly stable for its size, having been made entirely out of materials that nopony wanted to think too hard about.
The center of this tremendous construct was taken up by something nopony had ever truly seen before; a cannon so massive, so utterly titanic in its proportions that the entire nation had voted near-unanimously for the same name.
But, since Celestia was adamant nothing be named after her flank, the name ‘Pinkie 11’ was printed on the artillery-piece’s side instead. The whole thing was painted to match, in honor of the mare who’d raised the funding for this project to save the moon.
No one knew what happened to Pinkies 1 through 10, but most suspected Pinkie’s Party business was doing very, very well.
The whole world was watching. Hundreds of ponies crowded the hills around the coast to get a look at the launch, as had thousands of changeling workers (those who didn’t go to the actual Post-Construction Party being thrown in their honor back home, anyway), dozens of yaks, buffalo, hippogriffs, and even a few dragons and griffons. Admittedly, those last two were there taking bets and selling concessions, respectively.
Sitting nearby, the ship itself awaited its pilots. It was a sleek, even beautiful design. Like an airship or submarine it looked, but wrought in the finest and sturdiest materials. Every inch of the vessel oozed Equestrian design and style.
It was called Princess 1.
And it was going to the moon.
The crowds cheered to see the crew approach the craft. Princess Twilight Sparkle would be its commander, being the smartest and most capable. Princess Luna would be second-in-command, partly because of her decisiveness, and partly because of her unique insights into the mission goals (that is to say, everypony blamed her for starting this in the first place).
And last was Rainbow Dash, Wonderbolt and pilot for the mission. Mostly because she said she’d cry if Twilight said she couldn’t go, and also had licked the ship and called ‘dibs’. Dibs being a sacred law of ponykind, that was the last word to be had on things.
They clambered into the ship, and as they began to make their preparations, everypony got to work. Teams of stallions and yaks hauled the ship closer to the cannon, where it was carefully loaded like a bullet. And then, dozens of ponies ran along the heavy crank-wheels set up to haul the end of the mammoth gun into the air, allowing the ship to slide down the barrel and into the base.
It was time.
And then, somepony realized they’d put the ship in before the gunpowder. And since the cannon took twelve hours to load, the launch was called off until the next day.
The next day, under threat of a smacking, the ponies in charge of preparing the Pinkie 11 made absolutely certain that the cannon had gunpowder in it before everything else. The crowds had come back, but much of the initial excitement was a bit muted. Still, they were there to see the spectacle. The history being made!
Finally, the cannon was raised up to aim at the sky itself, the ship carrying its three crewponies sliding down to the base neatly.
“Pre-flight checks complete!” cried Rainbow Dash as she finished checking her controls.
“Very well,” said Twilight Sparkle, taking a deep breath before she placed the spacesuit helmet over her head. “Then, we’re ready.”
The radio sprang to staticky life, and an oddly familiar voice came out.
“Are you sure?” Human-Twilight asked. “It’s hours before the flight window to the moon.”
Luna raised her horn, and the tiny point of light up above the ship that represented the opening of the cannon, darkened.
“… right. Moon magic. I hate this universe.”
With the moon now directly overhead, they were ready. From a nearby wooden tower, the final countdown was initiated.
“Um…” it said.
Most of the crowd quieted down once they realized they… were having trouble hearing the announcer. Perhaps the mics were on the fritz?
“We will be counting down from ten now. If… if everypony is okay with that?”
Rainbow Dash groaned, and slammed her head into the console in front of her.
“Did you have to give that job to Fluttershy?”
“Just remember,” the quiet voice whispered to the crowd, “the noise will be very loud when the cannon… um, fires. Oh, dear. I hope none of the animals are scared…”
There was a shuffling sound over the microphone. Almost like somepony was shivering. Or shaking. Perhaps both.
“I’ll just be a few hours, okay? I need to check the animals to make sure they’re okay with this…”
Twilight sighed. “This was a mistake…”
But, before the crowd could be too confused, and before Rainbow Dash decided to go for another bathroom break before launch, something odd happened.
No, not odd.
Chaotic.
A very snake-like being, the very Spirit of Chaos himself, appeared just behind the cannon.
“Oh, just get on with it!” he shouted. And with the snap of his fingers…
Rainbow Dash knew speed. It was in her blood. It was a part of her. Ever since her first Sonic Rainboom, she had pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be fast.
Or, she thought she knew speed. She thought she was fast.
No. In all of Dash’s life, nothing could have prepared her for this kind of speed.
The first Sonic Rainboom exploded out right when they exited the screaming cannon barrel.
The second appeared as they hit the upper atmosphere.
And the third ripped apart the last shreds of oxygen as they cut the very bonds of gravity.
Dash hadn’t listened to human Twilight’s speeches and lessons on how flying in space worked. She didn’t need to. Flying was flying. But just now, something of it stuck out in her mind. The idea that speed was, itself, a force that opposed gravity. That going faster caused your height to go up.
Right now, Rainbow Dash was going faster and higher than anything ever had before.
And she loved every second of it.
Finally, once the crew began to acclimate to the sheer speed they were traveling at, they could finally rip themselves from their seats. Dash took a moment to giggle at the outline of her butt in the chair, while Luna merely stretched out her legs, and Twilight began the mental calculations necessary for the next leg of their journey.
“Alright, girls,” she said, checking the clock on the wall, “we’ve got approximately five hours before we reach the moon and will need to start making corrective burns to enter orbit. I suggest…”
“Hey, Twi! Look what I can do!”
Rainbow Dash picked her legs up off the floor and marveled at the way she simply hung in midair. She flapped her wings, and flew across the cabin.
“This is cool! It’s like flying is swimming!”
“That’s nice, Dash,” Twilight tittered. “Just don’t hit anything, alright? Most of the equipment in here cost an insane amount of bits you’d be liable for. Not to mention you might throw us off course if you hit too hard.”
“Whoa,” Dash said, eyes widening. “Really?”
Luna took a moment to lift her legs up off the floor… and then immediately buckled her safety belt back on.
“I think… I shall remain right here, thank you,” she said through gritted teeth. “I do not care for this Zero Gee, or whatever your hooman self called it, Twilight. At least the moon possesses some gravity of its own.”
“Hey, Twi!” Dash laughed as she swept by her friend on another pass around the cabin. “You think we’ll meet any Maretians? Or Moon-Ponies? Like in Daring Do and the Princess of Mares?”
Luna scoffed. “Do not be ridiculous! Those went extinct even before I was imprisoned on the moon!”
Twilight quietly filed that thought away for later inspection.
“No, Dash,” she said, giving her own take on the subject. “As much fun as I would have meeting and befriending ponies from other worlds, there’s no way they’d be where we’re going. The moon is a lifeless, inhospitable rock, and space itself is literally, by definition, empty of all…”
Her ear twitched.
“Did…” She sat up, and had to grip the seat below her to stop from sailing up into the roof of the cabin. “Did anypony else hear something?”
Dash slowed herself down, until she merely drifted nearby.
“Didn’t you say there wasn’t anything out there?”
Now her ear twitched.
Rainbow Dash’s pupils shrank down into pinpricks.
“Uh… did that sound like…?”
Both ponies held their breath.
Tap.
That was the sound.
Tap. Tap.
Something tapping on glass.
Something tapping with purposeful rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Now even Luna’s eyes were open, and fearfully glancing about the ship. All three slowly, breath held, twisted their ears around, searching for whatever was causing that...
TAP!
Except for Luna, who kept herself tied down to her chair, they turned as one towards the airlock door. Sweat poured down their necks, and each felt their hearts pounding in their ears.
There was somepony tapping on the window…
“Derpy!?” Rainbow Dash cried.
A rather blue-in-the-face pegasus with eyes slightly more bulging than normal – though no less wall-eyed – tapped on the window again. Her cheeks looked just about ready to burst, so filled with held breath they were.
Instantly, and with a shuddering gasp, Twilight flashed her horn’s magic, and popped poor Derpy Hooves inside the vessel.
“WHOO!” Derpy gasped as well, sucking down deep lung-fulls of air. “Th-thanks, Princess! That was… whoof. That was scary!”
“You’re telling us!” Twilight said. Then, shaking her head, she asked, “What in the world were you doing out there!?”
Derpy smiled, chagrined.
“Um… I might have gotten stuck loading the ship into the cannon…”
Dash frowned. “How?”
Derpy shrugged. “I, uh… I just don’t know what went wrong, honest.”
“Well, it is no great matter, is it?” Luna asked from her chair. “One pony’s worth of weight isn’t going to affect the flight, is it?”
Twilight started doing the math in her mind.
“We can't make the lunar orbit like we were planning. We'll have to do something called a suicide burn, and try to directly land on the moon from here. More dangerous... but we also don't have a choice.” She turned towards Derpy. “Can you wait on the ship while we take care of this evil artifact, Derpy? We only packed three suits.”
Derpy saluted. “Aye, aye! But what sort of fancy party do they got on the moon?”
“Different kind of suit, Derpy.”
“Oh… well that’s nice too!”
The rocket engine fired, killing their velocity quickly. The crew were strapped in tight to their seats, teeth gritted against the shocking forces acting upon them. Derpy, naturally, taped herself to the back wall, and mostly just cheered as the moon loomed before them.
Gently, the ship came down on the surface of the moon, and slowly settled onto its long, delicate landing legs.
“Aaaaand… down!” Rainbow Dash said with as smug a grin as she'd ever worn. “What’d I tell you? Nopony can fly like Rainbow Da—HEY!!!”
The Princesses were already halfway out the door. Twilight turned around, and gave her friend a little huff.
“We’re trying to save the moon, remember? You can gloat about how awesome you are once that’s done. Alright?”
Dash pouted.
“You promise?”
“Yes, Dash. I promise.”
And with that, the crew departed.
All except Derpy. Who was still taped to the wall.
“I’ll just wait here then…”
“This…”
The sky was midnight black, but full of stars.
The ground shone with an elder-light.
Equus drifted silently above, a blue-green marble of utter magnificence, only matched by the sight of the sun passing between the two heavenly bodies.
Twilight’s breathing intensified, joining the sound of her heart pounding in her ears. The helmet and space suit made everything seem so closed-in, so claustrophobic. But staring up at… at infinity, changed everything.
She swallowed, and shook her head.
“Even through a pane of plastic-glass, I did not think I would ever see such a sight. The sheer majesty of the moon is… it’s overwhelming. All around me, a silver sea of stone that glows with ethereal light and beauty. To stand in the tranquility of the stars, and still feel something underhoof… Is it any wonder that ponies dream of such a thing? And if we could reach this far, then what could the future hold? What majesties await us? And wh…”
Luna reached up and popped her helmet off with ease, which led to Twilight’s voice suddenly ramping up in intensity.
“…aaat are You DOING!?!?”
Luna drew in a deep, deep breath and let it all out with an overjoyed sigh.
“Ah! What a scent! I’d almost forgotten the smell of the lunar winds!”
If Twilight’s helmet hadn’t been so securely attached, she was sure her jaw would have impacted the moon’s surface.
“Are you telling me you can breathe up here?” asked Twilight, voice hollow.
Luna nodded. “Of course!”
Twilight narrowed her eyes. “And you let me spend over a billion bits on these space suits because…?”
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” said Luna, shrugging. “You seemed very invested in the process. And Celestia said it was always best to just let you get such things out of your system.”
Dash, quiet up until this point, laughed.
“Oh, man!” she said, reaching up to her own helmet latch. “That’s awesome! I’d go nuts if I had to keep this stupid thing on all day!”
She ripped the helmet off with a hiss.
And immediately collapsed, choking.
Luna hummed to herself. “Oh… wait. Maybe it was alicorns that can breathe in space?”
As Twilight fought to get Dash’s helmet back on, human-Twilight’s defeated sigh crackled through the radio-static.
“I quit. Tell the Princess I'll found my OWN space program. With science. And physics!”
“Well, I don’t have much cause to test it, you know?” Luna said, defensively. “You’ve never seen an alicorn suffocate, have you?”
“When my friends and I tried to reach Seaquestria, yes,” said Princess Twilight, grunting with displeasure at both this conversation, and the cheap, griffon-made latch on her friend's helmet.
She snapped it on, finally, and stepped back to let Rainbow Dash desperately breathe again.
Luna snorted. “Really? Is it just me then? Well that just seems random, to be frank with you…”
“Then…” Dash gasped. “… then it was… phew… then it was a good thing Celestia knew, right? Or you’d have been in a lot of trouble, way back when you did the Nightmare Moon thing.”
Down in the radio room on Equus, nopony seemed to notice the way their alabaster sovereign paled a little more than usual.
A few minutes later, Dash, Twilight, and Luna had reached their destination. They marched up a long, long incline, the rim of the crater their ship had landed in. At the angle they’d come down at, nopony could see what had become of Luna’s place of exile, the white plains of the moon where the Nightmare had laid her temporary prison and home.
Hopefully, it was not too late.
“Just over this rise,” Luna explained, “will be my Lunar Palace. It is a magnificent thing, Twilight Sparkle. Truly, one of the great wonders of ponykind! I spent centuries building it with my own two hooves. Laboring day after day, night after night… with nopony to talk to except my own lonely self.”
The edge of the crater came into view.
“Here it is,” said Luna. “Just a few more feet and… OH NO!”
“What? What!?” Twilight gasped. “What’s wrong!?”
Luna fell to her knees, and threw her forelegs up into the air.
“Oh, calamity of calamities!” she cried. “We are too late! My palace is lost!”
Rainbow Dash and Twilight bolted forward, and beheld…
A smoking ruin.
Literally, smoking. Black plumes rose slowly from what looked to be the burnt-out husk of a vast stone structure, now reduced to a mere outline of stone bricks. No single wall in the entire building remained over three feet tall.
“Wait…” Twilight frowned. “What kind of… That just raises so many questions!”
“Don’t you need air to make a fire?” Rainbow Dash asked. “I mean, I’m no nerd… but I remember the safety course for the Weather Factory made us learn how to starve out a fire. What…?”
Luna leapt down the slope towards the ruins. She came to a skidding halt near the rubble, and wept.
“Mine own folly hath caused this,” she cried, briefly slipping back into Old Ponish. “But… but perhaps there is still time?”
She stepped into the remnant ashes of her home… and turned a corner.
“Yes! There it is!”
A strange, silvery artifact stood before her. Twilight and Rainbow Dash watched as the Princess reached out… and switched the little electric stove off.
“Victory!” Luna cheered.
The moon, as ever, was silent.
Princess Twilight, however…
”WHAT!?”
After the moon stopped shaking from the sheer, unbridled force of the Royal Canterlot Voice, Mission Control chimed in again.
“Uh, Mission Control to Princess 1: Did… did you do that? We heard you without the radio…”
“Indeed!” Luna said with a smile. “We have accomplished our goal, faithful compatriots! The moon is sa—”
Luna’s nose felt an odd amount of pressure. It was, perhaps, the result of Twilight Sparkle’s helmet pressing up against it.
“Princess Twilight,” said Luna, “you are in my personal space. And your eyes appear terribly red and… I believe Pinkie would call them ‘bulgy’. Is that correct?”
“Luna…” Twilight took a deep, though not necessarily calming breath. “… How precisely was the moon going to be destroyed by… by your stove?”
Luna, finally sensing danger, glanced towards Rainbow Dash… only to curse the coward for already fleeing back towards the space ship.
“Um…” she um’d, “well, when the spell ended, allowing me… er, Nightmare Moon to return, I was in the middle of breakfast, and I got a bit excited.”
“And…?”
“And I left it on while I went back to destroy you all,” she finished, having at least some idea to look away from the murderous glare boring into her soul.
Twilight pressed. “And…?”
Luna licked her lips.
“And… the moon would eventually get a very nasty black mark from all the fire. Enough to be seen from the planet below. Eventually.”
Twilight’s helmet began to melt. To the other princess, it looked like one of those Flankson Burners had replaced Twilight's mane.
Luna coughed. “In… say, a couple of centuries. Give or take. Moonrocks are very flammable, you’d be surprised. And it would destroy the moon’s beauty before then, so…”
Her eyes widened.
“Oh!”
Quickly, Luna leapt over a fallen wall. She dashed through the ruins, towards what looked to have once been a central room, but was now just a ring of stones. She madly looked about for a moment, before crying out in triumph.
“Aha! It was here all along!”
Her magic hefted up something large and rocklike. It appeared to be a statue, of some variety. If one were being generous, and perhaps had a deficit of depth-perception and object-permanence, one might have guessed it was meant to be an opossum, as carved by somepony who hadn’t seen an opossum before.
“I knew it!” Luna cheered, and hugged the slab of moonrock. As her fellow princess slowly stalked up behind her, she asked, “Can I take it back please? Just this one! Surely, our ship can accommodate one of my rock collection, yes?”
“Sure,” said Twilight, voice dangerously impassive.
“I called this one, Harvey,” Luna said, smiling and holding the crude art aloft. “There! This mission was a success! In fact, the success has now been doubled!”
Twilight nodded, once.
“Yes. Indeed. Luna?”
“Yes?”
“How powerful is an alicorn’s healing factor? Compared to a normal pony?”
Luna balked. “Ha! We are just about indestructible, Twilight Sparkle. Why do you ask…?”
Time hardly seemed to bother Derpy, being strapped to the wall. She was quite good at distracting herself, as it so happened. And right around the fifth time she got to ‘sixteen bottles of cider’ on the metaphorical wall – she kept forgetting the next number – Rainbow Dash returned to the ship.
“Hey Dash!” she cheered. “You wanna sing with me?”
“Uh… no, Derpy. I gotta get the preflight checks done…”
Derpy happily half-shrugged – the tape made that tricky, of course – and started to sing.
“Sixteen bottles of cider… wait, wasn’t I already on sixteen?”
Her eyes spun about as she tried to narrow them in thought.
“Ah, well! Guess I should start again…!”
The airlock opened with a hiss, allowing Twilight and Luna to re-enter the ship.
“Hello, Your Majesties!” said Derpy, smiling. “You ready to head back? Oh, why does Princess Luna look like she swallowed an opossum?”
Luna groaned, and said through loosened teeth, “I… told you… it was an opossum…”
Derpy blinked.
Huh. Something was off.
“Princess Twilight? Where’d your helmet go?”
“Melted,” was the icy response.
“Didn’t know you could breathe without one.”
Twilight snorted. “I’m too angry to suffocate.”
“Angry?” asked Derpy. “What have you got to be angry about?”
Dash sighed, and whispered something to herself. It sounded like, “Ah, Derpy. Why’d you have to ask?”
Twilight Sparkle whirled around, eyes as wide and as furious as very wide, very furious things which were also eye-shaped.
“Why am I angry?” she hissed, steam billowing from her horn and ears.
Derpy nodded. “Yeah. You seem upset.”
“Oh GEE!” Twilight shouted, rolling her eyes so hard she nearly strained a muscle. “I wonder why!? Could it be perhaps because my fellow princess didn’t have the good sense to turn off her stove before leaving the house? Could it, possibly, be because I just spent a month, a whole month, stressing myself out over this worthless project? A project that had me jumping dimensions, grappling with meddlesome bureauponies, fighting with my own government, my teachers, and blowing billions of taxpayer bits!?
“WHY!?” she snarled. “WHY EVER WOULD YOU THINK I’M UPSET!?”
Luna and Rainbow Dash sat in their seats, heads lowered from the volume of their friend’s tirade, ears flattened down.
Derpy, meanwhile, just frowned.
“Worthless?” she asked.
“Yes, Derpy! Worthless!”
“Well, that’s just silly!” said Derpy, shaking her head as best as she could with a roll of duct tape holding it against the ship bulkhead. “How could it be worthless?”
Twilight’s face froze, and slackened.
“How?”
Derpy nodded – again, as best she could – and said, “Yeah. How? I mean, you got to the moon, right? That’s pretty neat. And think of all the happiness you gave us?”
Twilight shook her head, and looked back to Rainbow and Luna. “Happiness?”
“Everypony back home loves the space program!” Derpy laughed. “It’s real inspiring, ya know? Reaching out our hooves to the stars? Everywhere I delivered mail this month, everypony was talking about it. About how excited they were, and how great it was that we could do something so… so neat!
“You really inspired the ponies of Equestria with this, Princess,” she said. “My little Dinky said she wants to be an astronaut now, because of what you’ve done.”
She scrunched her nose up.
“Course, she also said she wanted to be a puppy dog a few weeks ago, but the point remains…”
Twilight bit her lip, and looked down to her hooves. Somewhere, down there, it looked like she was searching for something. What, neither Derpy nor Rainbow Dash nor Princess Luna could say.
But then, she seemed to find it.
Twilight sighed, and allowed herself a little smile.
“Alright,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
Dash leaned in. “So… angst over?”
“Yeah,” Twilight giggled. “Angst over.”
“Woohoo!” cried Derpy. “Mission Accompli—”
The duct tape holding the pegasus up suddenly ripped, sending her crashing slowly back to the floor.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Alright, Princess 1,” the voice of Mission Control said, “this will be it. The roughest part of the flight. If the weird hooman Twilight is right…”
“I WILL END YOU.”
“Who let her back in? Anyway, you’ll need to hit the atmosphere at a steep-ish angle to avoid skipping off into space forever.”
There was a moment of silence, during which Twilight could almost hear Celestia’s white-hot glare through the radio signal.
“Uh… but no pressure.”
“Alright,” Twilight said with a steadying breath, “what degree?”
“It’ll get really hot, Your Highness.”
“No, the angle of descent,” Twilight said again. “What’s the degree?”
“Oh! Right. Um, this one!”
There was silence.
“Oh… you can’t see that, can you?”
Rainbow Dash growled. “Why did they give Mission Control a microphone? That guy was always crap at science back at Wonderbolt Academy…”
“Hey, come on!” Mission Control whined. “I’m trying my best here!”
“Look, Miss,” Rainbow said, her voice slipping into a stern command, “what Wonderbolt Dive am I doing here?”
“Rainbow, what does that have to…?” Twilight began to ask.
“Steeple Chaser,” said Mission Control, simply.
Dash flicked the radio off.
“See?” she said. “Forty degrees! Now, was that so hard?”
“I hate that’s what helps you understand science.”
Luna chuckled. “Careful, Twilight. You’re sounding like that hooman Twilight now.”
Rainbow Dash held onto the controls of the ship like a pro. With deft flicks of her hooves and wings to the various delicate instruments, she began to prepare the ship for its final descent. Equus, that beautiful blue marble in the night sky, finally began to grow in size as she throttled up the engines, and aimed for a steep drop.
All four crew members were strapped in, Derpy back onto the wall with whatever extra cushions could be found to help her survive what they all knew would be insane g-forces pressing down on them once they hit atmosphere.
Twilight breathed deeply, and began to prepare herself mentally. They were about to slam the ship into the atmosphere. It would compact the air molecules ahead of them, creating a wall of superheated plasma. That insane heat and turbulence would block out all radio comms for several minutes while the ship essentially went into freefall.
Once they got past that stage, Dash would hit a button, and the ship’s heat-armor would break off. They could basically glide back home from there, but Twilight made sure to have a set of parachutes set up to deploy once they got low enough.
Worst case scenario? Dash could fire the thrusters down again to slow them a bit more.
“Ah, yeah,” Rainbow hissed in satisfaction as the planet grew to cover the entire front window of the craft. “Steeple Chaser…”
“Rainbow Dash?” Luna asked. “What do you do in a Steeple Chaser? I’m not sure I’ve ever witnessed one before.”
Dash smiled.
“Oh, you go really, really fast. You dive really, really shallow… but not too shallow, since then you’d burn up or crash.
“And then… you SPIN!”
Twilight’s heart stopped.
“Oh no…”
Before anypony could object, Dash slammed the steering column left, and sent the entire space ship into a hard, hard spin.
“THIS WAS A MISTAAAAAAAAKE!!!”
“Dash, why!?” Twilight screamed, though it was far too late. She felt herself being nearly pulled straight up out of her seat, only held down by the force of her seatbelt harness. The entire world was spinning. Well, sort of. Either way, Twilight couldn’t muscle through the incredible g-forces pushing and pulling on her. She couldn’t break free.
Dash was in worse shape, having fully passed-out. Her forelegs and wings flung about like she was one of those wavy noodle-pony things Pinkie was always going on about, and she looked almost completely lost to the world.
In the back, Derpy was no better. The duct tape broke free, and wrapped itself completely around her, creating an odd, silvery cocoon that just… floated in the dead center of the ship. For some reason.
“Have Other Twilight research that if we survive,” Twilight had the sense to remind herself.
Princess Luna, of course, simply cheered and screamed like a filly on her first roller coaster.
“Yeeeeeees!”
And amidst all the flailing limbs and screaming, somepony’s hoof must have hit the radio switch again.
“This is Ground Control! I’ve taken over from Mission! Calling Princess 1! Calling Princess 1! You’re coming in too fast! And too spinny!”
Dash suddenly awoke.
“I… I don’t think I got this,” she said. There was something… deathly calm about the way she said it.
“Dash!” Twilight cried. “Grab the stick!”
“I…” Rainbow Dash held her forelegs out to the side as the hull of the ship began to glow red. “I think the ship knows which way to go.”
“Can you hear me, Princess 1?”
Rainbow Dash smiled, softly. Serenely.
“Tell Applejack I love her, very much,” she said.
The radio chirped, and a heavily country-accented voice cried out over the static, “SHE KNOWS!”
Every pony, changeling, dragon, yak, buffalo, griff…
Every creature down in Equestria looked to the heavens, that day. And they waited.
Just three minutes. Three minutes, and they’d know if… if the unthinkable had happened, or if their brave heroes were coming back.
About thirty seconds in, however, they had their answer.
A flash of purple light and the sound of a pop announced Twilight’s teleportation spell as it dropped herself, Rainbow Dash, Princess Luna, and Derpy directly in the center of the fields outside Canterlot, where everycreature had been waiting for them.
There was a stunned silence… and then a tumultuous cheer! All of Twilight’s friends piled onto her and Dash with relieved hugs, and Scootaloo practically threw herself over both of them at once. Hundreds crowded around, confetti flying, as they tried to get a look at the ones who’d been to the moon.
Celestia embraced her sister, and wondered at the opossum-shaped lump in her lower abdomen.
“What happened!?” cried Human-Twilight, as she and Sunset came running over, radio headsets still trailing behind them. “What happened to the ship?”
Dash blushed. “Uh… I kinda got carried away.”
“But… but the parachutes! The heat-shield! The thrusters!” Human Twilight shook her head. “You couldn’t save any of it?”
Princess Twilight shook her head, in a sympathetic response that made a number of ponies not familiar with parallel universe do a little doubletake, and said, “Sorry. Once I realized we were close enough for me to try a teleport… I decided it would be safer than trying to land that thing.”
“Well…” Twilight sighed. “Guess it can’t be helped. At least you’re all safe.”
“I gotta hand it to you, Twi,” Sunset said with a smile, “I’m getting a little tired of you taking my ideas and beating me at them. Despite that ending, that was real special.”
“And a pain in the flank,” Princess Twilight laughed. Then, rising up enough for her subjects to see and hear her, she added, “And despite the mission itself being… kind of a waste, to be honest… I believe what we accomplished will live on forever. We did something that nopony thought possible!”
Luna snorted, but everypony ignored her.
“And perhaps one day,” said Twilight, gaining steam with every word, “Pony and Creaturekind will reach out to the stars in friendship and love, and we shall…!”
Which was about when it all went wrong.
A bolt of black lightning struck the ground just behind Twilight Sparkle, and a howl like that of an eternal nightmare rent the very sky itself asunder. Black flames, and terrible ghosts rose up all around.
Creatures scattered in the sudden chaos, fleeing in all directions. Only Twilight and her friends, the Elements of Harmony, and the Princesses themselves, stood up to the frightening, and terribly ill-timed appearance of…
A blue ram. A blue ram who strode from the darkness itself, horns alight with unholy evil.
And a bell. A fell, monstrous bell of ancient, vile magic hung from his neck.
“BEHOLD!” he cried out. “I am Grogar. The true Grogar. Not some whelp playing at Evil. I have come, here and now, to enact my greatest of evil plans upon you ponies!”
He snarled, and black smoke drifted from his baleful eyes.
“I shall resurrect your worst enemies,” he said in a black tongue. “I shall restore your hatreds, and bring new life to your fears. I AM GROGAR! AND I SHALL…!”
Once everypony was sure they could see and hear again, there was a headcount. It didn’t look like any of them had been seriously hurt.
Oh, Pinkie’s mane was stuck at a flat angle directly away from where Grogar had been standing when the Princess 1, traveling at a speed significantly over that of Equestrian light – represented by C in calculations since its discovery – crashed into him, but other than that no one reported anything too serious.
Luna looked down into the crater first.
“He appears… somewhat defeated,” she said.
“He looks dead,” Celestia corrected. “You were flying in that deathtrap?”
“More like, falling. With extra steps.”
Rainbow Dash squinted at the remains. “Nah, he’s not dead. There’s dead, and then there’s that guy. Whatever his name was. And that is, like, twenty percent deader than dead.”
“Sugarcube, why do I feel like thwacking ya right now?”
Princess Twilight took a moment to inspect the corpse of the Ultimate Evil.
Human Twilight, standing beside her, tittered. “Guess we can call Princess 1 the Princess of Ballistic Trajectory, huh?”
“Guess so…” said the Princess, snorting softly. Then, she sighed. “I suppose this means the Space Program wasn’t a total failure?”
Sunset hummed. “Well, the moon wasn’t destroyed or burnt up.”
“And I got to fly a rocket!” Rainbow Dash cheered.
“And somehow it led to Grogar, the Necromancer himself, being defeated,” Celestia said, a slow smirk crossing her face. She added, in a whisper, “All according to plan…”
“Indeed,” Luna said with a nod. “In fact, one might even be so bold as to say that the real space program was the friends we made along the way.”
Twilight shot her a glare. “Friendship’s my thing, Luna. Stay in your lane.”
At that, everypony laughed, knowing that everything had turned out alright. Equestria had been saved, the moon wasn’t destroyed, a great many leaps had been made in the name of science and progress…
And, finally, Twilight could head back to her library, pour herself a cup of tea, crack open an old dusty book, and relax for the first time in what felt like weeks.
It was… perfect.
And so, the princess lowered her head in defeat.
“Three… two… one… aaaaand…”
Celestia hit the ground with a dense, anticlimactic thud, and the sun winked out.
“Hm, said Luna, thoughtfully. “Looks like the batteries need changing again. Twilight? Do you happen to have another spaceship lying around?”
“No,” Twilight sighed. Then, after a brief shake of her weary head, she looked up towards her friends.
“Alright,” she said. “First off, Pinkie… get the baking sale signs out again…
