An Expensive Mistake

by CommissarVulpin

Rating: everyone
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Original Character
Length: 2857

Twilight tries to fix a priceless artifact.

After an unintentional disassembly of the amulet capable of controlling the sun and moon, Twilight takes it to a Canterlot clockmaker in hopes he can fix it - and fast.

This story was written in just over an hour, and took first place in a Quills and Sofas speedwriting competition.

Published 2023-02-07 03:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-02-07 03:00:01 UTC

An Expensive Mistake

Remontoire was an artist. Not in what some ponies would call the ‘traditional’ sense, however: he did not paint on a canvas, nor did he chisel statuary. He did not spin pottery or compose music. Rather, his canvas was a well-worn workbench; his paints were brass and steel; his brushes were drills, broaches, and files. Most ponies would call Remontoire a craftspony, but he considered himself an artist. After all, artists would often claim that their artworks were ‘alive’ once they had made them, and Remontoire was among them; but could any other artist claim the privilege of literally seeing a piece come to life, watching it move, hearing its heart beat?

Horology, unfortunately, was a dying art. In this age of locomotives, airships, and everything else to move the pace of a pony’s life faster and faster, precious few could appreciate the slower aspects. The silver lining was that with the relative scarcity of true hoof-made timepieces, the prices they would fetch to ponies who appreciated the effort gone into making them was more than enough to guarantee a comfortable life to the horologist.

But money was a secondary concern to Remontoire. It always had been. Those looking to simply make a quick bit would not have the patience to pursue such a painstaking craft. And if the craft of horology could be described in a single word, it would indeed be ‘patience’. Filing of frames and plates, turning of arbors, depthing of wheels, and all of the final fitting was done by hoof. It required a ‘feel’, for lack of a better term, that one could only develop through years of practice. There were machines to speed up the process of course, but nothing could replace the hours of gently filing away brass to make two parts fit just so.

Remontoire came from a family of clockmakers. His father taught him from a young age, just as his father had done, and his father before him. The tiny shop in which he worked had likewise been passed down through the generations, wedged between buildings in an older corner of Canterlot. Stepping through the door of the clock shop, one would be greeted by a myriad of impressions upon the senses: the light from Celestia’s sun gently filtering through the sheet glass windows, catching motes of dust; the rich smell of wood and the musky tang of oil; and, above all, the demure ticking of dozens of timepieces mounted along every inch of wall space. Remontoire’s shop was a step back in time, and he had no intention of ever changing that. He was getting old now, and was planning to retire soon. In time, his son would pass the craft to his own child, as well as the shop, and hopefully ponies in years to come would still appreciate the more patient arts.

His tiny shop had had the privilege of serving three of the royal Princesses within his tenure. Celestia had graced his threshold not long after Remontoire had taken the shop full-time, ducking under the lintel to present a priceless thousand-year-old timepiece which was in need of repair. She had brought along her sister Luna, and both had expressed an interest in watching him carefully disassemble the clock to determine the problem. The original maker had etched his signature into the plates - a practice instilled upon Remontoire by his father, who emphasized the importance of taking pride in one’s work. “The piece is not perfect until you feel proud to put your name on it.” He hadn’t recognized the name, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a distant ancestor. The repair itself had been simple: A screw supporting a part of the hour-chiming mechanism had broken under the strain and wear of a thousand years, and a replacement could be turned within a day. He had delivered the repaired and freshly-oiled clock to the palace himself, not willing to trust the mail service with such an invaluable artifact, nor willing to take up the Princess’ time by summoning them to pick it up.

The third visit from a Princess came just that morning.

The newest addition to the royal family, Princess Twilight Sparkle, ducked under the low doorframe and approached the counter, where Remontoire was busy checking the fit of a pinion, the various parts of its parent mechanism neatly ordered around it.

Strangely, she was wearing a long cloak and a hood in an attempt to hide her identity.

“Good morning, Princess Sparkle. How may I help you today?”

She winced. “Shh! You never saw me,” she whispered as she slid off her hood. She looked far less put-together than in the newspaper photographs, her face bearing an expression closer to panic (and if the stories were to be believed, this was her natural state).

“If you insist. What can I help you with today?”

“You’re Remontoire, right? The best clockmaker in Equestria?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but I know my way around a timepiece, yes.”

“I heard you’re the best. And right now, I need the best.”

She opened her cloak and placed a box on the table. Remontoire approached it and carefully opened the lid, peering at the contents.

“Oh, dear…what have we here?”

He pulled out what had once been a beautiful mechanism, an elaborate mechanical amulet engraved with sun and moon motifs in gold and silver. Currently, however, it was split in half, with gears, springs, and screws jutting out of it at all angles. Several other parts, including a purple gemstone, were loose in the box beneath it. He noted, trying to suppress a wince of his own, that someone had tried to fix it with adhesive tape.

“Can you fix it?”

“Hm…probably. Can you tell me what it is, and what happened to put it in such a state?”

“It’s, uh…” Twilight shifted nervously from hoof to hoof. “The Princesses gave it to me. Celestia and Luna. It’s supposed to be able to…control the sun and moon without them being present.”

Remontoire’s eyebrows raised. “Indeed? I was under the impression that only the royal alicorns could do that.”

“Well, normally, yes, but they put some of their power into it that allows it to function.”

“I see. And I’m guessing it was whole when they gave it to you?”

She winced again. “Yes. It wasn’t working right when the time came to raise the sun, so I tried to reset it with a special tool. I guess I didn’t use it right, because the whole thing came apart in my hooves.”

“Well, I’m never a stallion to turn down a challenge,” he said with a small grin. “So I will try to fix this artifact for you.”

“Oh, thank you,” Twilight breathed with visible relief. “Thank you so much. How quickly can you get it done?”

“How quickly do you need it?”

“Uh…as soon as possible?”

Remontoire resisted the urge to sigh heavily. If he had a bit for every time he’d heard that phrase, he wouldn’t need to be running a clock shop. “Normally you’d have to wait for all my other jobs to be finished first, but I suppose I can expedite it for a royal client.”

“Thank you so-”

“For a fee, of course.”

She blinked. “Oh, of course. Naturally. Money won’t be an issue. Name your price, and I’ll pay it.”

“After I fix it. I don’t charge for unfinished work.”

“Okay. Um. Sounds good. Thank you again.”

The two of them stood watching each other for several seconds, counted out by the multiple clocks on the walls.

“Princess, it’s going to take me more than a few minutes to fix this. You don’t have to stand there and watch me.”

“Oh! Sorry, I…um…send for me when it’s done. Please. Thanks.”

Then she awkwardly shuffled out the door.

Remontoire finally allowed himself that sigh that he had been holding in for a while, and carefully began reassembling the clock that he had been working on. Something to be finished at a later time, it seemed. Once it was together and placed out of the way, he gently pulled the amulet out of the box Twilight had put it in, along with the loose parts.

He arranged everything on the bench, and placed a loupe over his eye and began inspecting the parts, mentally cataloging them and looking for any damage. Thankfully the gemstone wasn’t cracked - he suspected that was the centerpiece of the mechanism, and would be impossible to replace.

Then he peeled off the tape holding the two halves of the main body of the amulet together and pulled them apart. Screws, gears, and springs simply fell out and clattered onto the workbench, loose inside the shell. He simply inspected them and arranged them like all of the other parts before continuing.

He pored over the internals of the mechanism, trying to determine how it worked, and what could have broken within it. It was closer in size and design to something like a pocket watch than the clocks he usually worked on, but he wasn’t unfamiliar with watches, fortunately. The same principles applied, just smaller in scale.

Hours passed. He got lost in the brass, the steel, the tiny red jewels that served as bearings for the multiple arbors. This piece was priceless, not only in its age or the precious metals used in its construction, but the cleverness of the entire design. Whoever had designed it was a genius of the highest order, but sadly there was no signature or maker’s mark at all. The prodigy who had built it would remain a mystery.

Finally, he had the entire mechanism disassembled and laid out on his workbench. Beside it all was a notebook, filled with sketches and notes on how things fit back together. He had a good idea of how it all worked now. At its heart it was a pocket watch, which did not tell time in the traditional way, but instead would rotate a dial with the celestial bodies engraved on it. As the wheel of sun and moon turned, it would echo the movements of the heavenly wheel, showing one where they were in their orbits as it simultaneously controlled them. In addition, a skilled user could simply turn the dial manually, hastening the rise or set in the way that the Princesses were fond of doing.

And the way it controlled the heavenly bodies was equally genius - a series of gated wheels and lenses would rotate as the mechanism did, aligning them in such a way as to focus and reflect light onto the central gemstone in different ways. Remontoire was not well-versed in magic, but he suspected that the dance of light across the facets of the gemstone would release the alicorn magic stored within in such a way that it would serve to move the sun and moon, just as the Princesses did.

Unfortunately for him, he did not know which way to align the mechanism upon reassembly to ensure that the display matched the actual configuration of the skies. But the maker had planned for this as well, and included a method to recalibrate the amulet, to synchronize the two effects if they drifted out of alignment. The recalibration was achieved by turning a screw on the back of the device, which, cleverly, was also the screw that held the entire mechanism together. But the one weakness of the device was that if it was turned too far, it would snap, and the entire amulet would fall apart.

He was certain that Princess Twilight had achieved just that, as he beheld the two halves of the screw resting on his workbench.

But disassembling, inspecting, and documenting the device had taken him all day, and he decided to close the shop and retire for the evening. When he returned the following morning, a tall stranger wearing a hat and coat was loitering nearby.

“I haven’t finished it yet, Princess,” he told the stranger, who eep-ed and scurried away.

Today he spent mostly on cleaning the internals of the device. While it wasn’t necessarily dirty, the oils inside had begun to thicken with age and needed to be replaced. Plus, a fresh clean and lubrication was the minimum of service since he already had it apart. He’d be a lazy clockmaker indeed if he didn’t perform this basic step. He performed exterior cleaning as well, polishing out small scratches and scraping off the tape.

It was a long, tedious process, however, as he carefully soaked each part in solvent and rubbed it with a piece of pegwood to scrape off the old oil, before moving to the next one. It wasn’t long until his neck hurt from peering at the small parts through his loupe for several hours. But his determination paid off, and he was rewarded with a sparkling clean array of parts on his workbench. Now came the time to put it all back together.

But first, a new screw. He found his calipers and took several measurements of the part, then dug out a piece of steel that most closely matched its size. In his lathe, he carefully cut away the metal, revealing the screw within much as he envisioned a sculptor might. The unneeded metal flew away as sparkling chips, and the part itself was finally revealed. Then he hardened it, tempered it, and blued it to a bright, vibrant sheen before placing it back with its fellows.

As he began working on reassembling the amulet, he gently applied new lubrication anywhere two parts rubbed up against each other. Not too little, but especially not too much - counterintuitively, too much lubrication could be worse than not enough, because the oil would capture and hold dirt and turn it into an abrasive substance that would wear away the parts faster than using no lubricant at all.

Using a special tool, he wound the springs back into their barrels, and placed those parts inside along with all the others. Gear after gear, screw after screw, they all were returned to their proper location and tightened carefully.

Finally, after many hours of work, came the final assembly. The central gemstone was placed back in its socket, and the two halves were returned to each other. The new screw was placed in the back and tightened, and just like that, it was done. A few turns of the winding stem set it to ticking softly, and he gave it one final polish with a rag and stood back to admire it.

A wave of pride overtook him for a moment at another job well done, and he was reminded why he did what he did.

He peered outside his shop and looked around. Twilight was nowhere to be seen. She had told him to send for her when it was done, but if it was such an important thing, he didn’t want her to have to walk across the city to pick it up. So he bundled it up carefully and trotted off towards the palace.

Upon entering the throne room, he was delighted to see all three Princesses sitting on their thrones inside. With permission from the guards, he walked up to them and gave a quick, courtly bow.

“Ah, Remontoire,” Celestia said gracefully. “Welcome to the palace, but I’m afraid I don’t know why you’re here.”

He grinned and brought out the wrapped bundle. “Princess Twilight asked me to repair something for her, and I thought I’d deliver it myself.”

He looked over at the new Princess; she looked stricken. She cleared her throat and said, slowly, “I believe I asked you to send for me when it was done.”

“Yes, you did, but I thought I’d save you some time out of your busy schedule and bring it to you.”

“Oh. Thank you.” She didn’t sound like she meant it.

Celestia, however, was curious. “Oh? Please, show us what it is. I’d like to see what Twilight has entrusted you with.”

Remontoire opened the cloth to reveal the amulet. Celestia and Luna looked at each other, then at Twilight.

“Twilight,” Celestia said in that tone reminiscent of a mother about to ask some very difficult questions to her child. “I thought you said it was in your room.”

“Oh, uh, did I say that? I meant, haha…”

“So that night you were having difficulty with it…you broke it?”

Twilight hung her head, ashamed. “Yes, Princess.”

Celestia sighed. “It’s all right, Twilight. I know Remontoire, and I know he was able to fix it. That’s not what I’m disappointed about. I’m disappointed that you felt the need to lie to us about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ll talk about this later. Now, Remontoire, I believe you deserve to be compensated for your services.”

He nodded politely, and pulled out a hoof-written invoice. It was immediately wreathed in golden light from Celestia’s horn and floated over to Twilight.

Twilight took the paper and read over it, and her eyes bugged out.

“How many bits!?”