She found her sister in the abandoned transit center, just as Pipp had known she would. The younger princess considered herself to know everything -- about anything worth knowing. And when it came to knowing about other ponies, the most important portions of the course studies had possessed a previous subject limit of 'two'.
Pipp was going to find Zipp in the transit center because the older sibling had been doing everything possible to avoid the duties of a princess for years and on those occasions when her constant attempts to dodge went relatively short-range, it would be the transit center. Something which indicated that Zipp didn't really mind if Pipp found her, as opposed to all of those times when the elder had managed to get outsi --
-- Pipp could have followed.
She'd been invited along. More than a few times.
She just...
...it didn't matter.
Anyway, Zipp was going to be in the transit center, because 'outside' wasn't so much of a challenge any more. And Pipp had needed to seek out her sibling, because each of them had their part to play in the palace and Pipp was the smiling, beaming, singing public face of the royal family. A role which was mere hours from once again coming into play.
Except that... during Pipp's most recent broadcast appearance... a few things had sort of...
...happened.
It's the first one since then.
I have to get this right.
Exactly right.
If something else goes wrong...
Her sister, viewed from a distance, seemed to be acting rather oddly. (When measured against Standard Princess Protocols, Zipp hardly ever behaved in any other way.) The white body was rearing up over and over again, balancing on hind hooves while the fore allowed themselves brief moments of adhesion against the corkboard's held papers. Zipp dropped down, the papers went into a box on her right, and then the action was repeated. Over and over.
Pipp watched for a few seconds, then made the final part of the approach through a brief surge of flight and a concluding glide. Her wings produced enough sound to let Zipp know she was coming: simple courtesy, especially in a place whose primary occupant had so feared might be discovered.
Her wings were also sore.
Flight was powered by magic. Pipp knew that, because flight had only come back when the magic had. It was just that nopony seemed to have informed her muscles that magic was meant to be doing all of the work.
She landed. Zipp dropped back to all four hooves again, then turned around.
Pipp had the soreness-produced wince off her face before Zipp's eyes reached her features. Appearances were important.
"What are you doing?" Pipp asked. Because now that she was closer, she could see where all of the other cardboard boxes were. Most of them were full, and a few theories were overflowing onto the floor.
The younger sibling knew the boxes weren't supposed to be there. She was intimately familiar with the transit center, because Zipp had trusted her enough to show it off. Besides, having Pipp constantly looking for Zipp during those frequent absences would have eventually let their mother learn that absences were occurring, and after that...
Pipp had been down there a few times on her own, during those scant hours when she hadn't been needed for something else. She had never touched any of the blackboards or papers, because they had been boring and pointless and nopony was ever going to fly for real. (Until they had.) But she'd always taken some time with the fan.
"Packing up," the elder casually shrugged.
"Why?" was a natural question.
The multicolored wings flared slightly, shook out their feathers and then folded back in. "They're talking about putting this place back into use. Cleaning it up, then following the lines out and seeing exactly where they go. Getting the systems running. Since..." Zipp took a slow breath. "...we're all talking again. And everything else. Ponies are probably going to start traveling, Pipp. A few at first, and after that..."
Going outside.
Of course, for just about every citizen of Zephyr Heights, that just meant traveling beyond royally-established borders. For Pipp --
"And, you know," Zipp casually added, "if Mom goes through with the first part, then I won't have access for a few moons anyway. So I just want to make sure I can take everything with me."
Pipp blinked. Careful practice meant the act carried a certain degree of Art.
"The first part of what?"
...her sister was staring at her.
"You don't know? You're the one who hears everything before I do --"
"-- just tell me!" Petulance was also Art, especially after Pipp added the defining left forehoof stomp. On a particularly stressful day, Petulance was also her middle name.
Pipp Petulance Petals. Nopony among the palace's media advisors had seen the obvious benefits of having the alliteration lead off a song's download graphic.
Her sister shrugged and, in soon-to-come retrospect, did so far too casually.
"Mom's thinking about sending both of us out of town," Zipp smoothly said.
The elder fancied herself as an investigator. It was something which tended to leave her slightly detached from whatever she was looking into, because allowing a mystery to fully play out was clearly more important than letting those involved know what was going on before the perceived last page hit. And it also allowed her to make apocalyptic pronouncements of upheaval, doom, and social media score destruction with something approaching absolute calm.
Pipp's wings trembled. Her tail vibrated. Zipp didn't seem to notice. She was frequently the sort of investigator who initially picked up on hidden clues. Noticing the obvious took a while.
"Since 'out of town' exists now," the elder added. "Get us out of sight while the populace finishes calming down. A lot of them are at least a little distracted by flying, but... they haven't forgotten that we were lying to them. Or how they found out."
Hanging from the wires.
There's an emergency release. That didn't work either.
And the control board was so messed up, they couldn't kill the broadcast, any more than they'd been able to use the event/stream delay for editing out anything bad.
Everypony had seen the truth.
At the time, it had felt like everypony in the world had seen Pipp fail.
And then the world had gotten a lot bigger --
-- out of town...
Pipp had been out of the palace. Away from Zephyr Heights. (Something she'd done first, or close enough to be tied for it in the official record. She'd already been considering her eventual edits to the Pegapedia articles.) And the experience had been --
"They should have forgiven us already!" Pipp protested as little portions of featherdown took on their own vibratory rate. "We're the reason they can fly!" Well, part of the reason, but if the articles were edited carefully --
-- credit where it was due, always. Productions were created by teams. You just had to be careful about which name scrolled by first.
"And some of them can't fly very well yet," said that misplaced professional detachment. "There's been a lot of crashes. There's some old laws in place which keep them from suing the palace, but they're still blaming --"
"We can fly just fine!" (Although her wings were still sore.)
"Well, we were just about at the epicenter," Zipp pointed out. "Maybe we absorbed the first burst a little more completely."
...okay, that made a little sense. (And also felt like the right of a princess to do, which didn't exactly hurt.) But...
...out of town...
...outside...
"I don't mind leaving for a while," Zipp shrugged, because a mystery-spotting elder sibling was utterly incapable of judging when something important was merely in the middle of going horribly wrong. "I thought we could stay in Maretime Bay. I'd like to talk to Sunny some more. She was telling me some of the theories her father had about pegasus magic. Stuff the ancients used to do."
And now the excitement was starting to come into the elder's voice. Because Pipp clearly being in the first stages of a panic attack was an everyday thing, but talking about magic...
"Like Rainbow Dash --"
"Who?" Pipp automatically said.
Zipp shrugged. "I'm not sure. Somepony who lived a really long time ago, who was supposed to be important once." With mild offense, "Maybe I would have found out more if I'd gotten to talk for longer before we were hauled back here."
"If she was really important," Pipp's priority sorting decided, "then everypony would have heard of her." Which was Pipp's primary way of measuring importance, and guaranteed that the younger princess was Very Important Indeed. "So she couldn't have done very much. When it comes to historical stuff, she's clearly not as important as --"
Pipp's brain did some rather fast sorting. Then, acting in the name of perceived generosity, it shoved multiple generations of royals aside and tried to come up with something which a commoner had done.
"-- Naugahyde Patch," she decided, and further concluded that she totally hadn't sounded as if she'd been unable to recall the true name and made something up.
"...who?" Zipp eventually asked.
With immediate half-defensive insult, "It's a recording thing, Zipp! She invented wubbing! If you ever came into the studio, you'd know how crucial --"
Carefully, "Don't you mean 'dubbing'?"
"No!"
Eventually, the echoes stopped bouncing around the transit center. And then Zipp's calm gaze slowly moved to downy, fully-unfolded, shaking wings.
The clue registered, and the older sister stepped a little closer.
Gently, "What's wrong, Pipp?"
Hind legs folded. The smaller body wearily fell back onto its haunches.
"Mom's activating the middle studio tonight. It's a talk with Kath Chat." And because the insult hadn't fully faded, "Which you'd know if you paid attention. It's my first appearance since... everything. And Mom wants me to reassure ponies. Let them know we can still be trus --" Wing joints sagged. "That they can trust us again."
Because Pipp was the face of the royal family -- the recently-humiliated, still-wincing-at-the-mirror face -- and if she couldn't repair their reputation...
"Live?"
That was worth a snort. "Not after that last one. They're not even risking a delay. It'll be prerecorded. But it's a few hours from now. And I need to say something, Zipp. Anything. I looked over what the speechwriters tried to put together, and it sucks. I need something better, something new. Something which can make ponies forget. Forgive. And I..."
The front legs bent. Her sister echoed, and then they were both on the dusty floor. Facing each other.
"...I can't think of anything..." Pipp half-whispered.
"You always do," Zipp said. "Usually on the spot."
"I've never blown a performance that badly," the younger softly said. "I didn't even release the wires and get into an emergency glide while I could still pretend it was all something I was doing on purpose. If I get stage fright..."
"You never have."
Bitterly, "That sounds like a good cue for a first time."
Zipp shifted position, moved to be in parallel. The larger form offering support to the smaller, which leaned in.
"It has to be you." A little sadly, "I'm not good with --"
"-- I know." Which was a lot more gentle than the internal, equally-loving No kidding.
"So you were coming down to get some inspiration for a new song?"
"I've only done that a few times." Per year. "I don't think I can compose right now." She'd tried out fresh arrangements on her phone, shifted notes over and over before shifting them to the trash. Hours of doing nothing more than that before heading for the transit center, and she was probably lucky if Bestie was running on a quarter-charge. And it wasn't as if the scant outlets down here would take the right kind of plug.
She needed some time with her sister. But she also had to get back to the palace, before she completely ran out of power. Because when her phone went down...
...she'd left the palace, learned just how small the network was, there hadn't been a single bar to stand on and she'd felt herself starting to tumble --
-- it would be her first appearance since everything and if she got it wrong...
...outside...
"It'll mostly be talking," Pipp admitted. "But if it goes over, then -- Kath will send me to the stage area. And I'll do a song. But it should be something new. And I can't think."
The snuggle became a little closer.
"Maybe if you sung about new magic?" Zipp suggested.
It didn't feel like much of a suggestion. But it did sound like a distraction.
"Stuff this ancient whoever was supposed to do," Pipp checked. "More than flight."
The elder nodded.
"Like what?"
Promptly, "Standing on clouds."
Pipp artfully blinked, and followed that up with a rather musical snort. "Who cares? You know what clouds are?" And tried to remember. "Really high fog. So clouds are gonna be wet. Stand on a cloud and you'll just be messing up your fetlocks with every step. Guess what happens to your coat if you lie down." Rather derisively, "You'd be soggy all the time. What's the point?"
"It would be cool," Zipp decided.
"No, it would be cold," Pipp logically pointed out. "Cold, soggy coat. Forever."
The elder hesitated.
"Sunny said the ancients could do weather control."
Pipp's ears perked up.
"That's interesting." More than that: it was practical. Because Pipp knew everything -- but only about those things worth knowing. And until everything had happened, 'weather' had been a rather unnecessary subject.
Pipp had possessed what she felt to be a useful comprehension of weather. It was what she found when she'd opened balcony doors, stepped out into uncontrolled air, and stayed just beyond the walls for exactly as long as she could stand it. As durations went, that one would ideally run out before anypony on the street happened to look up and spotted her, because that was when the cheering started.
She didn't exactly mind the cheering. The fervent public wishes for performance made her feel warm, and there had been times when she'd launched a few notes from the heights. But if she stayed out there too long, then invariably, inevitably, somepony would ask her to...
...to...
...Pipp had believed herself to know about weather. You looked at weather from the proper side of a window. If you were really curious, then you went out on the balcony for a few minutes.
And that was it.
And then she'd had to gallop away from Zephyr Heights. Fleeing from guaranteed imprisonment. Because two earth ponies and a unicorn had crossed the border, that had somehow led to her helplessly hanging from the wires, and it had turned out that a populace who'd just discovered that the royals had been lying to them for generations was going to be just a little. bit. unhappy.
She'd...
...left the palace.
She hadn't really done that before.
Zipp had gone out. Even knowing what the risk was, the potential price for being caught, Zipp had left the walls multiple times. And Pipp had always been invited along, because the myriad routes which allowed one to sneak away were equally suitable for two. But...
...Pipp was the face of the palace. Adored. Beloved. The consummate performer and, when needed, the public spokespony. She talked and she sang and she swooped because the royals were supposed to be the last pegasi who could do that.
And the thing about going out in public, when you lived in the center of a lie which said 'I can fly'... was that inevitably, somepony was going to ask why you couldn't do it right now.
Pipp's life was in the palace, because that was where the wires were.
Weather control? She'd recently been forced into a position where she'd spent several days outside. There had been rain and wind and heat and overnight chill, and she'd been somewhat grateful for their lives having been destroyed in spring because that way, the snow could hold off for a while. In Pipp's opinion, weather certainly needed controlling, mostly so there would be a lot less of it.
Pipp had known what hunger was. The word defined the condition which very briefly existed before multiple servants materialized and offered up trays of food. So being hungry while on the outside was perfectly natural. The real question was why the servants weren't showing up to do something about it.
The outside world was generally filthy. (Pipp's lingering impression of Bridlewood was of a society so collectively depressed that only one mare could be bothered to actually dust, and there had still been little fragments of threads and glitter all over Izzy's house. Most of them had ridden back in Pipp's feathers, presumably in search of a better view.) And she'd gotten dirty, her mane and tail had become disrupted, and six ponies had utterly failed to appear in the name of restoring them. There was no more crucial duty than making sure the palace's face continued to look good and nopony had cared.
She'd almost tried to press Sunny into the role, but a single glance at the earth pony's favored style had told her just how pointless that was going to be.
Mane and tail care were surprisingly important. She'd spent cumulative moons of her life being tended to at a stylist's station. She was sure she'd learned the basics, and somewhat beyond. She'd been talking to Zipp about that...
How did commoners survive? When so many hours were consumed by the preparation of food -- and Pipp had recently learned that you had to actually go out and get it. Without ponies around to take care of their needs, to look after every possible want...
Pipp considered herself to know everything -- as long as the subject was worth knowing about.
She could operate a soundboard. Provide her with a stage and she would readily set up every piece of equipment. There was no instrument she couldn't tune, including the pony throat.
Algorithms had been mastered. How did you get millions (on up) of video and post views, when the world didn't contain that many ponies? Through working the system to make sure whatever you'd recently done always appeared first. As in 'first on everypony's personal Nicker thread, top search result for anything and when the system plays an ad before the main video, it's of me.' Pipp was the universal click-through. Anypony who wanted to learn about the horrors of that day's weather forecast generally had to get past her three times just to reach the radar. Every click, every scroll-by -- that counted as a view. Besides, it wasn't as if her fans didn't pause to watch, and their actions obviously justified the inflated numbers.
Pipp could sing, speak, and smile. The occasional touch of 'manipulate' was a side bonus.
She didn't know how economics worked. Taxes were things which were given to the palace, and then those funds turned into things Pipp needed. If any given item broke, then a replacement would appear. The same thing happened to all tech which had the sheer indignity to be two moons out of date. A princess had to lead every trend.
Pipp roughly understood hay to exist. The process of purchasing it was the sort of mystery which Zipp might never be able to solve, and who knew how much the stuff cost? What did anything cost? What were prices, anyway? Pipp was either given things outright by palace or parent, received freebies from various companies because that was a good way to get their pieces promoted, or she happily accepted gifts from fans. She didn't pay for anything. Besides, there were still a few places which didn't do online orders and purchasing would have meant going outside.
She wasn't completely unfamiliar with Zephyr Heights. Portions of the city could be seen from windows and balconies.
She had thousands of fans, and had never been in direct contact with a single one of them. Never touched. Because every public appearance had to take place with exactly the right lighting, under completely controlled conditions, and nopony could ever come close enough to wonder why her flanks felt like wire.
Pipp could balance acoustics, manipulate frets, insert herself into any news feed, make a manestyle trend just by adopting it for an hour, and was utterly incapable of paying a heating bill.
And now her mother was thinking about sending them both out of town.
Out of the palace.
Outside.
But if it all works out with Kath Chat...
...if I can fix this...
She shivered. Zipp pressed that much more tightly.
"And," the older sister casually mentioned, "they could create lightning."
Pipp's ears went all the way up.
"Lightning."
"Yeah. I just said that. It was part of the weather control. And Sunny said they could use it to attack --"
She had to check again. Some miracles required verification, along with slapping her tail against her own flank to make sure she was awake. "-- you mean like electricity."
"...yes," Zipp eventually said. "That's what lightning is..."
With perfect casualness, "How?"
Zipp frowned. "Sunny's not sure. Her father's notes just said it might have had something to do with... putting your emotions into the air? Anyway, I've already tried the cloud stuff. Yesterday. I'm still going through. So it might take a while to work out more than just flight, especially when flying is a little more complicated than most ponies thought --"
"Making electricity," a growing excitement happily took in. "So if this Painbow Crash could do it with magic, and we're just getting magic back now --"
"-- Rainbow, and it might take a lot of time --"
Pipp felt that her older sister was rather intelligent -- in some very limited ways. And Zipp had an absolute talent for missing the blatantly obvious.
"-- my phone would never run out of power again!"
And then Zipp's body was no longer touching her own.
Pipp immediately looked left. Her sister was shaking out her own wings, testing feathers.
"Zipp, what --"
"-- static," the older sibling muttered, because she had a talent for missing the obvious. "Our feathers were rubbing against each other and it's too dry down here. I got shocked." Then, a little more loudly, "Pipp, are you serious? This is lightning we're talking about! That's got to be big-time magic!"
"It's electricity," Pipp grinned. "Phones run down all the time, you know that! So does your tablet, and it loses power even faster! When we can charge them ourselves..."
We were right at the epicenter. We got back flight right away, and with more skill than other ponies are doing it. (The benefits which had arisen from a lifetime of going through the motions were not so much dismissed as completely unrecognized.) So that means we can start on the advanced stuff before anypony else!
"You could just carry backup externals," Zipp pointed out. "Power banks."
Pipp frowned.
"Don't be silly. If I carried extra batteries, then ponies would expect me to start carrying other things."
"Such as?"
"Money."
Zipp didn't seem to be blinking.
"That's what Mom said," Pipp clarified. "A proper princess doesn't carry money." Of course, a proper princess would have never found herself in a situation where she needed to spend anything.
"Mom also told us to hook ourselves into wires and pretend we could fly."
Defensively, as her wings compacted tightly against her sides, "It worked for a while."
"Pipp," the elder cautiously offered, "this is lightning. Even if all of her dad's notes are true, then we don't even have cloudwalking yet. I don't think this is something we should be messing with. Not without a lot of practice, under controlled conditions --"
The younger, tapping into deep reserves of Art, demonstrated her mastery.
"-- some reason you look that insulted?" Zipp asked.
"Zipp," the younger sibling said in intonations of 200% patience, "you know I livestream games."
"Everypony in the realm does," Zipp tentatively agreed. "Yeah. So?"
"What's my technique for a new game?"
"You get an early copy from the developers," Zipp promptly said. "At least six weeks before the actual release date, because that's in the contract. Any debugs go to your version first. And you spend hours with it. Running through levels. Getting the timing down. Figuring out the tricks. You don't want to speedrun because that makes the stream too short, but you need to know what you're doing. You make sure it all looks good."
"Which means," Pipp carefully put in, "that I always make sure I look like I know exactly what I'm doing. Every time."
The answering "...yeah..." seemed a little too shaky.
"And what do I say, when I beat a challenge for a brand-new Public Release Day One game on stream?"
"'First try!' --"
Zipp stopped. Cyan eyes narrowed.
"You lie a lot," stated the heir.
"'A comforting illusion helps to calm the public'," replied the spare --
"-- I know what Mom says," cut her off with a snap of teeth. "And you're more like her than I am. But there's a lot of times when you're impulsive. You sing out of nowhere, in front of nopony or anypony --"
"-- l'honneur du public," Pipp expertly and not-at-all-desperately pronounced. "The honor of being the audience for a princess. Anypony should be happy to be around when I sing --"
"-- and you do things just because you feel like it. You plan out everything, Pipp. Your words, your songs, your Nickers and streams. Until the moment you don't. You can't go messing with this."
Looking that insulted was also Art.
"Fine."
"Good."
They both stood up.
"I've got to go prepare for Kath."
"And I've got to finishing packing."
"Take your time," Pipp advised with a smile. "We may not be going anywhere just yet."
Not outside.
She wasn't ready. Not again, not yet...
"I hope you're wrong," Zipp told her. "Nothing personal, Pipp -- but I'd love to get out of here for more than a few hours. Without having Mom wonder why I didn't turn up for dinner, or -- without having our own guards chasing us down."
Pipp allowed the shrug to say it all, and waited her older sister out.
"See you after the studio?" Zipp finally said.
"Count on it."
Pipp's wings flared. Sore muscles immediately protested, and she ignored them all the way out because a proper exit was as important as the entrance -- if not more so. And she needed to get away from her sister, because...
Zipp fancied herself as an investigator. But there were times when the older sibling was so busy looking for the hidden as to miss the blatantly obvious. Pipp lied a lot, and so was more focused on what was actually visible. It helped in keeping the lies consistent.
Put my emotions into the air...
She'd been excited about the possibilities of creating electricity.
Show the public that they can trust us again. Show them something new, every time.
Show them what they can really do.
She'd been excited about the possibilities of creating electricity.
And then Zipp had gotten a shock.
It was so obvious...
She only had a few hours, but -- that was fine. She'd worked under deadline before. One more track for the release, a remix because the system had crashed in the middle of encoding the master, or some stupid reality show would come into prominence for no good reason and she'd have about ten minutes to learn every contestant's name, the reason they'd been eliminated, and who was absolutely going to be sitting at the same table during the palace's welcoming dinner because the resulting fight meant ratings.
(The royal family had a special section in that dining room. They came in on wires, they left on wires, and they didn't touch anypony else. But the lighting in their portion was perfect.)
Pipp had a private recording area in the palace, because everything she needed had to be in the palace. She'd heard the word 'skyhook' once, asked about the definition, and found the actual dictionary entry to be disappointing. You couldn't anchor wires into the sky.
...maybe you could with a cloud...
...the point had thankfully been rendered moot. She could fly. Pegasi could fly again. The thin, carefully-painted harness had been separated from her coat for days. It had been years since she'd felt so light, and all she had to do in order to keep that feeling going forever was go into the studio and demonstrate lightning in front of Kath. Thus proving that the royal family could absolutely be trusted, and render any trips to Maretime Bay into a strictly optional activity.
One which Pipp absolutely intended to opt into. Eventually. Sometime. Possibly after the whole 'weather control' thing had been set up, and somepony had arranged for food to materialize properly.
Also, there was a lot of salt in the air. Sunny had made her a smoothie, just before the sisters had been taken back. It had mostly tasted of strawberries. And salt. Pipp was still getting Izzy's crafting debris out of her coat, and fully expected salt crystals to congeal around individual strands within hours of reaching the ocean.
As world-upheaving nightmares went, Sunny was a perfectly nice mare with a decent personality who was absolutely oblivious to the fact that she lived in a commoner's hellhole. One where just about every mare, Sunny very much included, desperately needed the royal touch. Like better food. And a lot less in the way of 'outside'. And somepony really had to do something about their manes and tails.
Izzy, who seemed to be oblivious to just about everything else, had at least picked up on the fact that Bridlewood was a horrible place to live. And the unicorn dusted. The brief period spent in the lighthouse suggested that Sunny cleaned her bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and anything her father had been working on. The rest of the place mostly served to give the dirt a nice place in which it could retire. Forever.
(The other possibility was that Sunny didn't clean up for visitors because she never had any.)
(Pipp didn't really get visitors.)
(Not ones who could come close enough to touch.)
The recording booth was mostly acoustically clean. Pipp generally worked on her phone, because that was the best way to initially keep her compositions private -- but she did know how to write out musical notation. Doing so on paper could be rather satisfying, especially when things were going badly. You couldn't crumble your phone into a tiny ball and kick it into the trash.
She cleared some space, made sure the debris was nowhere near the center, turned off nearly everything electronic -- she had to keep the light going -- plugged Bestie in at the very edge of the studio, and then placed herself in the open space. Concentrating.
She needed to practice, and she'd done her best to make sure nothing would be damaged. Not that it really mattered. If she did happen to accidentally zap something, then a replacement would appear within a day. Pipp assumed that was just about the full purpose of taxes, and thought the commoners were being very nice about it.
Put my emotions into the air...
A princess who was expected to be the public face of the royal family needed to be capable of summoning emotions on command. Or, to put it another way, Pipp lied a lot. Getting off a truly joyous "First try!" during a gaming stream required a certain degree of lying to herself.
She called upon every feeling she could think of. Tried to imagine them as current running across skin and coat and feathers. And because a proper recording studio obviously needed the full-sized mirror to allow a performer that first chance at perceiving how the audience would see the final result, Pipp was able to monitor her progress.
Bringing up powerful memories of love didn't do much for raw voltage. Revulsion, which had several recent weather and food-based examples to use, failed to bring out amperes. But raw aggression -- she simply thought about Sprout, and the rest followed -- triggered the first visible spark: a tiny flicker of yellow-blue which leapt between the feathers of her left wing.
It didn't hurt. It just arced and at the moment she noticed it, the spark went away.
Excitement was paradoxically easier to control: she managed to get sparks dancing on both wings. Putting pride into play seemed to give her a little control over how they were moving. Then she thought to kick in some singing, because Pipp fully understood how to block out stage positions (including in the air) and music could do a lot in providing direction...
She wasn't getting full lightning, and she wasn't sure what she was missing there. But the electricity was clearly present. A mere two hours brought her to the point where she could just about pick out which feather was going to receive the next arc. Singing them along definitely seemed to help.
But there wasn't a lot of time left. Kath Chat would be entering the palace studio soon, with the crew setting up shortly after. Pipp needed to be sure she had it right...
She checked on Bestie, who was back to 85% charge. A few quick messages were posted to various feeds, asking her fanbase to check out the upcoming broadcast. (How bad could things be if she still had fans?) Doing so drained the battery a little, and she thought about --
-- no.
Not Bestie. Not on the first gallop. I don't want to risk her.
As names went, 'Bestie' could be considered as hereditary. Pipp went through a lot of Besties, because every one of them had done her the discourtesy of becoming passe'. A former Bestie was mindwiped -- well, reset to factory default, but it was really the same thing -- and given away as a contest prize to her fans. It was a way to make sure they were still cared for. But she loved every new Bestie just as much as the old ones, for exactly as long as they remained on the technological cutting edge.
So what I need here is...
...l'honneur du public.
It was easy to find one of the palace guards. Zipp would have said that most of the trouble came from trying to come up with locations where you wouldn't find them for a few hours.
Pipp did her best to learn their names, but still occasionally went with 'Guard' during any formal address. Something about the armor made them blend together. Even the mares started to resemble the stallions after a while.
The best way to pick out the youngest ones was by checking for a slight expression of uncertainty. The newest hires eventually began to mentally review the full twenty-page length of their non-disclosure agreements. This was generally followed by six moons of wondering whether they were legally allowed to greet their reflections in a mirror.
(Technically, they weren't. But her mother usually let that one slide.)
This guard, based on the slight twitching around his eyes, was very young indeed. He was also ancient, because he was older than Pipp and just about anypony who had so much as three weeks on her qualified. And he was absolutely not yet accustomed to having a princess trot up to him in the palace halls.
"I need your phone," Pipp told him. "Pass it over."
The twitches resolved into frantic blinking.
"You need my phone," the guard restated.
He had to be new. A more senior specimen would be effectively disconnected from the world by now, which was also known as 'not being in possession of a phone at all times'. Which meant Izzy was totally disconnected, but Pipp had figured that part out in a hurry. "Yes."
"The royal family has their own phones," the rather cerulean, somewhat-muscled, and utterly stupid guard nervously said. "They're secured. My phone is secured, but not on the same level as a royal phone. I'm not sure I should be letting a royal use my not-as-secured phone."
Pipp took a slow breath. The guard did his very visible best not to watch, which meant he'd utterly failed.
She lied a lot. Her position in the palace required it. Keeping the populace happy had meant spending the vast majority of her life as a living falsehood.
But the thing about being a princess was that if you came up with the right lie... then it had a very good chance of becoming the truth.
"I," Pipp regally said, "invoke the droit de plan de données. Phone, please."
She felt the 'please' was being especially nice.
The extremely dumb guard was staring at her.
"The what?"
"The right of the first call."
"I've had this phone for three weeks," the guard said. "I've already made the first call. I've made lots of calls --"
"-- but I haven't!" Pipp brightly told him. "It'll be my first call! On your phone. My first call, and anything else I might feel like doing with your phone while I have it. Under the droit." Her lower lip trembled, because she'd told it to do that and it understood Art. "How can you deny a princess her droit?"
"Um," said a guard who wasn't long for this world, or at least for this profession.
"PHONE," Pipp reasonably instructed.
The rectangle was shakily deposited onto her upturned hoof. Pipp looked down at the blank screen.
"Password?"
"Um..."
"PASSWORD," Pipp gently insisted.
"...ipaymyownrentnowmom. With a hash. And an exclamation point."
The screen lit up.
"Oh, look at that!" Pipp brightly said. "You're down to forty percent charge!"
"Um," stated the stallion who was now wondering if palace death benefits kicked in when you were just really wishing for it. "Is there some sort of rule about not going below fifty? Because I sort of got stuck on the NDA --"
And with exactly the right touch of music in her voice, "-- so let me just bring that back up for you..."
Her wings flared out. Sheer pride suffused her feathers. Hooves tapped to an inner beat.
The guard was still cowering against the wall. Given that his body was providing an absolute barricade against the golden surface, Pipp decided that the paint was being adequately guarded.
"Here you go," she generously told him, and placed the borrowed phone on the floor. His trembling hooves were clearly busy.
"UM," said the guard, because he had exactly one syllable left and he needed to make sure it didn't get away.
"You can take it back now."
"UM."
He didn't look down. The little curl of acrid smoke came to him.
Why are they all so dumb?
"Just take it down to Supply," she told him. "They replace phones all the time." That was what taxes were for.
"UM."
"It's cool enough to touch," Pipp reassured the stallion.
"UM."
"Have you ever seen a faster fire? It's not like it really had time to heat up at all. My hoof didn't even feel warm."
"UM..."
Which was when she wisely decided to give up on him entirely, and peacefully trotted away.
On the whole, she felt good about her ability to plan. Not using Bestie on the first trial had clearly been the right call.
Less intense emotions means moderating the voltage?
Now she just had to find another guard.
Or another phone, really. Any palace employee would do, as long as they had a phone. And if somepony didn't own one, then were they really a person at all? Phones were how ponies let the world knew that they existed. So if you didn't have a phone, you clearly didn't exist.
And if you went beyond what had turned out to be a very small coverage zone...
...if you were completely out of bars and you couldn't tell your fans what had really happened and now the guards were after you and there was no way to explain or lie or have ponies say how much they loved you and they'd find a way to make you feel better...
...she had to get it right.
She had to win back everypony's trust.
But right now, she had to find another phone.
...and a charging cord.
It might be easier to direct the amperage if she was actually holding a cord.
In the days to come, it was said by the palace staff that anypony could have followed her trail by tracing the drifting scent of scorched plastic.
A few of the ponies on the cleaning staff said it with a slight snarl. Because they loved the princesses. They truly did. You didn't even think about signing that monster of an NDA if you didn't care about the royal family with all your heart. But they had a tendency towards not sticking around to clean up after themselves.
It would have given nopony any comfort to know that, historically speaking, the new generation was exactly on pace.
If the royals were going to do something, then it had to happen in the palace. It was where you could adjust the lighting, make sure the ceiling tracks were well-concealed, and control -- everything. And that was why there was a filming studio.
...actually, there were several. One was used for press conferences, and no flash photography was allowed because you couldn't risk a glint of light off metal. Pipp refused to set hoof in the one where Sunny, Hitch, and Izzy had overturned part of the world, because they'd also managed to overturn her and every time she looked at the doorway, she started to see it upside-down. But there was also a midsized space: something which could be adjusted to replicate the sets of visiting talk show hosts. Make it look as if the royal family was on location, when the show had actually come to them.
A visitor had to sign a few forms when they hosted a show at the palace. There were NDAs involved, along with an agreement to let the palace provide the film crew. Also sound, editing, and unknown to the visitor -- or rather, unknown until very recently -- special effects.
Kath Chat's warm set had already been replicated. It supposedly looked like the living room of the average cozy house: Kath took a chair, and her guests went on the couch.
(Pipp wasn't sure what a normal living room looked like. Sunny's probably hadn't been it. Izzy's definitely wasn't.)
Kath was already in her chair, because filming was about to start. The couch, when viewed from the offstage shadows, mostly seemed to be made of thorns.
"Okay, Princess," the senior special effects head whispered as he trotted up to her. "You know the routine. I'll just get you connected up..."
His right forehoof nudged at her fur. An adhering wire trailed up to the ceiling.
"You're not wearing your harness," the old stallion said. "What happened to your --"
He stopped. Watering eyes, half-hidden behind thick spectacles, blinked a few times. There was no Art to that at all.
"I'm sorry," he softly said. "I forgot."
And she could have flown out to meet Kath. Done it for real. But her sore wings seemed to be locked against her sides. There was an odd tightness in her spine, which did a lot to counter the sudden weakness in all four knees.
"I..." Pipp said, and found her throat trying to close itself.
"Princess?" the senior carefully asked. "Are you okay?"
She shook it off. Literally, with a flare of wings and every feather vibrating before the joints folded back in. Checked her mane in the nearest mirror, found three helpful ponies adjusting it for her. And when perfection was restored...
The house lights went up. (They'd never been so bright.) And there was a cue. There must have been one, because a staffer nudged her flanks after she failed to hear it for the third time.
Pipp was on the couch.
She was on the couch, so filming had to be under way.
She didn't remember trotting out...
"It's good to see you again," said the warmly-hued orange and yellow older mare, smiling with a practice which even Pipp could envy. "Especially after everything which..." The hesitation was expert. "...happened."
After a few seconds, Pipp remembered how her neck worked. Lining up the muscles for a reassuring nod took somewhat longer.
I'm breathing too fast...
"There's been a lot of changes lately," the talk show host understated. "In how Zephyr Heights views the palace, and -- how we see ourselves." With a small laugh, "Lately, that's from a rather elevated perspective."
The laugh track went off. You couldn't always bring in a full audience, so there was a laugh track.
It sounded so stupid...
I can hear my own heartbeat.
Kath was looking at Pipp's eyes. The guest was supposed to have said something by now.
If I was a first-timer, I would never make it to the stage --
-- she didn't have a song ready, she'd been working on the newest piece of magic for all of her limited time, maybe she could just belt out one of her old hits --
Pipp's mouth tried to open. Her ears strained to pick up on a squeak of rust.
"Hello, Pippsqueaks," she managed to start. "Hello, Zephyr Heights! And... hello, world."
That's a funny look on her face.
Did I already say that or something?
"I know everypony has a lot of questions," rasped its way out of her narrowed, untuned throat. "About the changes. About flight, and -- everything that happened, Kath. I want to try and answer a few of them." With a fully false laugh, one which kicked bile back the other way as it exited, "I don't know if we've got enough airtime to settle everything. Or the bandwidth, or anything else. But I want ponies to feel that they can trust us again. And the best way to do that..."
She brought up her left foreleg, bent it back and eased the phone out of its underwing harness. A tiny piece of imported glitter drifted to the couch.
(She had to find a better place to keep Bestie. Actual flight hit the screen oddly on the downbeats.)
"...is to trust them. By showing them something new."
Bestie.
I forgot to get another phone before I came out. I meant to, and --
-- how did I get out here?
This is going to be with Bestie.
...the last three didn't actually catch fire...
The hostess was now squinting slightly.
"I have that model," she politely said. "I picked it up after you showed it off. I think most stylish ponies did."
"No!" This laugh felt as if it had hurt her ears. Perhaps that was why they felt as if they were trying to burrow inside her skull. "It's not the phone, Kath! It's about what I can do with it! What just about any pegasus might be able to do! Because..." and she felt her voice drop "-- there's more magic than flight. It was all out there, a long time ago. Somepony named Drainlow Trash could do all of it. She could get soggy, or really mess up radar, and even..."
She's staring at me.
I'm the face of the palace and she's just staring at me.
I have to get this right --
-- bring them something new...
"More magic," Kath repeated. "We could do more than fly? Or..." A little timidly, the sound of a hostess who knew she was stuck with a bad guest and had to get rid of her, "...get soggy?"
The emotions took over.
"Just look at this!"
Revulsion hadn't really worked.
Love, while precious, had been fully ineffective.
Aggression was undirected.
Pride turned out to be impossible.
Pipp's wings twitched, and the blitzkrieg of emotions represented by first-time stage fright expressed themselves as pure voltage.
None of the blinding flashes contacted the phone. Kath was completely untouched. The couch, however, picked up its first set of rather cozy singe marks. Sections of the empty audience seats began to sizzle. And, since there was metal all over the soundstage, the lightning went right for it.
There were multiple targets.
Pipp, locked deep within fear and fast-growing horror, was never able to say if any of them had been deliberately chosen.
It took some time to put the last of the fires out.
Most of the wires melted.
There was a saying and as with most of the things which commoners said outside of her stream's chat feed, Pipp hadn't paid much attention to it. Something about 'being called on the carpet'. It supposedly applied when you got in trouble, and Pipp generally treated consequences as things which happened to other ponies -- because they didn't understand the full impact.
Anything she did wrong in front of a camera was going to be captured forever. It would go viral. Memes were possible. Anniversary specials of the time she'd had a little too much to eat at her fourth birthday party were mandatory. And you had to laugh, you owned it, even spoke of it with a little fondness on the commentary track, and then you did everything possible to make sure it never happened again. You controlled your image, your appearances, and your life.
...she did love to think about that birthday. All of the early birthdays, because it took some time to learn how all the wires worked, along with how you moved properly within them. The palace had offered a lie accordingly: that even a royal pegasus needed some time before flight appeared. So she hadn't been locked into the harness for a few years, and there had been parties when she'd been allowed to go among the fillies and colts to play.
There had been a scant few years when she'd been able to touch ponies.
And then the harness had locked.
Princess on wires.
On strings.
A smiling, speaking, singing marionette.
Consequences happened to other ponies, because Pipp knew how to avoid them. As beliefs went, that one was exactly like the wires. It had held her up, until the exact moment she'd found herself hanging from it.
There was a carpet in the throne room. It led directly up to her mother's elevated, occupied seat, and both sisters had been called onto it. Both sitting at the base of the final steps. Waiting.
"I had a full briefing before you were both sent in," the queen told them.
Zipp, who had only caught up with most of the events while the last of the fires were still being put out, winced. Pipp's gaze was mostly fixed on the carpet. It was a nice carpet. Soft. Colorful. A rather pleasant blue, which actually set off Pipp's coat nicely. So there was some chance they could bury her in it.
"The recordings of what was going to be the broadcast have been destroyed," the queen announced. "Additionally, I am giving you both a royal order. We clearly need to investigate the magic which lies beyond flight. But in the name of not having to replace another studio, lightning is going to wait. That capacity will be kept secret. If we see evidence of the population discovering it on their own, then we bring that out. Slowly. And until then, any practice you two attempt will be entirely private, with no witnesses at all."
Neither sibling said a word.
"Unless you count fire extinguishers," the queen added. "Connected to light sensors. Any extra brightness beyond a given threshold, and they'll go off on their own. That should save some time."
"We can't tell anypony," Zipp slowly tried.
"Nopony," the queen confirmed.
"But what if it gets out on its own?" Pipp miserably asked the carpet. "Kath might chat. She's famous for it --"
It was the soft, almost gentle laugh which made her ears perk, and she looked up just in time to see her mother's thin smile.
"The secret of our previous inability to fly," Haven stated, "was kept as a collective affair, in a society which features both dedicated gossip websites and one full network, for generations. Because non-disclosure agreements are rather useful things, and ours include the words 'unusual activity'. I think we can lock down 'lightning' for a few moons." And then, a little more softly, "In private, with fire extinguishers at the ready. For electrical fires. I don't want either of you getting hurt."
Both sisters just barely managed the nod.
"And," the queen added, "I think you both really need to get out of town for a while."
"MOM -- !" escaped from Pipp's mouth without initial notice, and then launched the echo with full consent. "I -- !"
"-- the populace needs more time to forget," Haven told them. "Before they truly trust us again. This may be a time when words don't work, Pipp. Because we've apologized... but if we do it over and over again, it'll turn into begging. That costs us respect, and dignity. It..." and gentler still "...doesn't suit us well. Especially you."
"But we'll be out of touch!" And nothing could have surprised Pipp more than hearing Zipp say the words. "Both of us! It's going to take weeks just to get mail routes going, and that's for physical letters --"
"-- we're going to set up a repeater network in Maretime Bay," the queen evenly interrupted. "Eventually, we'll make sure our respective systems can connect. The engineers tell me it'll take some time, because we're not all running on the same hardware or software. But your phones will be able to get through. I promise. We'll start the build at the new lighthouse: it'll be easy to work it into the reconstruction. That should give you a home base, and I think Sunny would be glad for your company. If we ask politely."
The next words were for Pipp alone.
"You'll still have your fans, downy girl," her mother gently said. "You can tell them how you're doing. Let them know what life is like now, as long as you leave things like lightning out of it. And I don't think you'll need to worry about the press for a while. They did just discover the concept of 'travel', and their accounting departments will put up a moons-long fight before acknowledging 'travel expenses'. But..."
They'd hardly ever heard their mother sigh. Their parent was too confident for something like a mere sigh, too self-assured...
"I've had you on wires," she told the sisters. "Because that was the only way to make it all work. And they attached us to the palace. But we don't need them any more, do we? Go outside, both of you. Go out and... fly."
Zipp smiled.
"Okay, Mom."
And then they were both looking at the youngest member of their family.
"Pipp?" their mother carefully asked. "You're very quiet. That's not like you --"
It's dirty.
It's cold and wet and nopony shows up with food or fixes your mane or swaps out your Bestie for a new one.
I only know how to be in here.
How to be on a wire.
I'm scared...
But she was the public face of the royal family.
And the royals were going... outside.
"...okay..."
The queen smiled.
"You'll need something to do, of course," their mother observed. "My downy girl... Zipp mentioned that you'd expressed an interest in mane care? Thoughts of operating a salon?"
Pipp was, on several levels, utterly terrified. Facing an unknown future, salt crystals in her fur, and weather which probably wasn't going to be controlled for years.
But there was always time available for glaring at an older sister who'd given up the goods without so much as a full interrogation.
"Yes," she reluctantly admitted. "I always have to look my best, and most ponies... they don't have anypony who knows how to help them reach their own. If I was taking a break from singing --" and if there was going to be a salon, then it was going to have a stage in it: she wasn't going to plan on inspiration never striking "-- it's something I feel like I could try to do."
How did commoners get along, without a full staff to do things for them at all times?
I'm going to find out...
She knew everything, as long as it was something worth knowing about. So now it was time to learn about the world.
"Which would leave you running a small business," the queen observed. "With employees. I can try to place some advisors among them, to make sure you don't stumble coming out of the gate. But we should start planning that now, before you both leave. Do you have any questions about it?"
"Yes."
Pipp stood up. Squared her shoulders and hips (Artfully), glared at her sister one last time (same), and then firmly met her parent's gaze. Locked onto the blue eyes, and thus got to miss most of the expression-based horror to come.
"What's the going rate for a basic manestyling? I was thinking... twenty thousand?" Thoughtfully, "Maybe thirty. It'll be a princess doing it, after all. That's got to be good for an upcharge. And it'll really help the profit margin! Not that we'll need all that much, of course." And, with the last laugh she would have until well after the palace guards finished their cruelly-assigned mission of scaling back her luggage to a mere five bags, "I've seen Maretime Bay. What's the rent on a storefront? Fifty a month? Fifty... somethings?" With some worry, "They do use some kind of currency, right? Because Sunny gave me that smoothie for free. But it's not like I was carrying any cash..."
