=====// \=====
The golden orb of the sun sank gracefully from the Equestrian sky in its eternal cycle, the brilliance of the mighty vessel of the day fading to a lustrous orange as its azimuth decreased, refracted into a thousand shades of pink and purple by the scattered high cloud. Below, ponies hurried to and fro in the prosperous city of Canterlot, taking advantage of the last of the light to fulfil their daily routines. High above them, a beautiful white Alicorn stood braced on the top of a soaring, slender tower, eyes closed in concentration and mane and tail billowing serenely around her as she manoeuvred the great heavenly body to its rest.
This minor daily miracle was interrupted by a loud, snarling clash of gears, and the sun jerked to a halt barely a hoof-width above the horizon. Beside the white form, a smaller, midnight-blue Alicorn winced and turned to her companion, “Oof! I hope you don't park the Royal Chariot like that, Celestia!”
Ageless violet eyes snapped open, and the white Alicorn glared furiously at the offending sun. “Oh, me!” she snapped in annoyance, “Bloody thing, it's not due for a service for another 7,000 years!”
“Have another go, sister dear, it probably just needs a bit of encouragement,” suggested the blue Alicorn.
“I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way, Luna,” said Celestia mournfully. Nevertheless, she shut her eyes again and focused on the horizon. After a moment, there came another series of grinding, grating sounds, and the sun rocked back and forth slightly in its place.
“Go on, give it some hoof,” Luna urged as below them, cats put their ears back and fled for home and dogs began to howl. After a final round of metallic torture, there was a loud bang which echoed from horizon to horizon like a cannon blast and the sun juddered to a halt.
“Oh, buck it!” Celestia spat bitterly, stamping a hoof in an uncharacteristic display of petulance.
She looked around for a second like she was searching for something to kick over the edge of the tower to express her frustration. The two hulking Unicorn guards behind her stood even more still than usual and desperately tried to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible despite their traitorously-gleaming armour and helmets. Princess Celestia was as kind and benevolent a ruler as they could wish for, but occasionally she got a bit... tetchy. Especially on days like this, when she had been forced to do without coffee.
“I don't suppose you could give us a tow, could you, sister?”
Luna's eyebrows shot up, “How? With what? The sun's 400 times larger than the moon, and even if I could give you a tow, it'd take me 8 light minutes to get there! And besides, I may have lowered it and put a supercharger in, but I'd never have enough grunt to tow it! Sorry, sis, but you're on your own. You can fix it, can't you?”
Celestia sighed, and muttered something under her breath.
“I didn't quite catch that,” said Luna suspiciously, “Whatever it is, you'll have to get a wriggle on. It's coming on to moonrise and I've got a lovely meteor shower planned for later, too. There's no point with your sun hanging there, hogging the sky all night.”
“Well, excuse me!” Celestia snapped, nettled, “I didn't build this bloody universe, you know-”
She broke off and took a few deep, cleansing breaths. When she continued, her voice voice was much calmer. “I'm sorry, sister, forgive me. It has been a rather trying day, and this is not helping.”
Luna sighed, “It ought to have gone on for millennia yet, if you've done the recommended servicing. You did change the hydrogen, didn't you?”
Her sister said nothing, but looked a little sheepish.
Luna rolled her eyes, “'Tia!” she wailed in exasperation.
“I'm sorry!” Celestia blurted guiltily, “I was going to, all right? But I've been rather busy this last thousand years or so!”
Luna opened her mouth to retort, then thought better of it. Discretion being the better part of not bucking your hopelessly-technophobic sister around the earhole, and all that. “So what do we do now? You can't just leave it there.”
Celestia let out a long, shuddering sigh which hung ominously in the air for a long moment.
“Well, I am still a member of the Universe Association....”
Luna twitched, and stared at her sister in disbelief. “Oh, no. No way! Not if it's still that horrible pig they've employed for the last hundred thousand years in our dimension!”
“Oh come on, it wasn't that bad, was it?” Celestia protested weakly.
“Not that bad!” Luna roared indignantly, “I had to eat lettuce leaves and celery for seventy years after he implied you were overweight!”
“Erm... maybe I overreacted? And if you wouldn't mind lowering your-”
“He said you had an arse like two badly parked carriages!” Luna bellowed, undeterred. Behind them, almost unheard, came a tiny little sliver of a snicker. Slowly, the two sisters swung around to glare pointedly at the two Unicorn guards. The Sergeant, a grizzled old mare, remained statuesque, but the young stallion next to her slowly wilted into a quivering heap, his eyes widening in terror.
“Thinkest thou my sister's derrière is overlarge, my loyal Guardspony?” Luna snarled, slipping back into Old Equestrian in her rage.
“Um... no, my Princess?” he stuttered weakly in a high-pitched voice.
“Oh, so thou admits to thinking on the state of my sister's behind?”
The poor guard floundered helplessly for a response which wouldn't land him further in the mire until Celestia took pity on him.
“Luna...,” she said warningly, and with a final, thunderous snort Luna about-faced. Celestia stuck her tongue out at the guilty pony before joining her in looking back out over the city. “Anyway, he improved after that.”
This time, Luna's reply echoed across the entire city.
“IMPROVED?! YOU MEAN WHEN HE SLAPPED ME ON THE FLANK AND ASKED ME WHAT TIME MY REIGN ENDED?”
This time, there was no mistaking the shocked guffaw of amusement, nor the loud clang as the male guardspony slumped heavily against the wall laughing fit to burst. Luna whirled again with fury in her eyes, but the Sergeant was already apologising in a pained voice, “Sorry, Your Highness, sorry! He's still learning. I'll take him off and send up a relief.”
“And he may spend the next twelvemonth peeling potatoes until he has learned his proper place,” Luna snapped icily over the guard's helpless wails of hilarity. The Sergeant's head bobbed respectfully in reply.
“Yes, Your Highness. Come on, you.” With that, she nudged her rubber-legged companion back towards the stairwell.
Celestia shook her head, “He's learned since then,” she said placatingly, “After our complaint, they sent him on a two-week Corporate Communication and Public Relations course.”
“I hardly think that would help-” Luna snorted derisively.
“A two-week residential course,” Celestia cut her off, “In Luton.”
There was a brief, shocked pause. “In Luton? That's going a bit too far, isn't it?”
“He's a changed being, I'm told. And besides – I don't see that we've got much choice.”
Luna muttered a rude word, “I suppose you're right. Oh all right, but you're handling this on your own. Let me know when I can raise the moon.”
With that, she launched herself into the air and soared over to the Lunar Tower.
With a slight smirk, Celestia cocked an ear towards the stairwell and caught the male guardspony's voice echoing faintly up the stairs,
“You rotten sod, Sarge, I was holding it in until you bloody laughed! And then you blamed me!”
“Privileges of rank, my lad, privileges of rank. And you've only got yourself to blame for the second time.”
Celestia's smirk widened to a full-on grin as the indignant reply became too faint to be distinct. Actually, she should probably have a guard while he was here – for the look of it, if nothing else. It would take a while for the call to be answered, so she had plenty of time to get somepony up here. And she knew just the ponies!
She raised her muzzle to the sky and chanted aloud, her voice quiet but echoing strangely from the heavens,
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
=====// \=====
As It's Making Its Way Back Down
=====// \=====
“I can't believe it, Sarge! I thought we'd be lucky to ever see the sun again, let alone to be straight back up guarding the Princess. I mean, we hadn't even got back down to the ground floor!”
Sergeant Halberd looked across at Private Light Brigade and wondered yet again if he'd been dropped on his head as a foal. Actually, he wasn't a bad recruit, for all that he was still sopping wet behind the ears, but it was painfully obvious that the third foal of his very much upwardly-mobile merchant family had led a sheltered life so far.
“There's probably a reason for that, Private,” she noted drily.
“Really? But she and Princess Luna seemed really angry! I don't think I've ever been so scared in all my life!” Light Brigade burbled.
Again, Halberd looked sideways at him and wondered if the innocence in his voice was actually genuine or if he was subtly taking the pee.
“I wonder who this 'important visitor' is?” he continued as they started up the winding staircase to the top of the tower. “Princess Luna said something about a pig, and they're not so bad if you don't mind the smell?”
Very sheltered.
“I'm afraid to find out.”
She couldn't think of any reason that they would be plucked from the ranks to guard anything more important than a banana after the little scene earlier, but thirty years of experience told her that she probably didn't want to know the answer – and while there was unlikely to be any actual danger, they weren't going to enjoy finding out.
Beside her, Light Brigade sighed happily, “I can't wait! It's such an honour!”
Yes, dropped on his head. Repeatedly, from a second-floor window. She shook her head and focused her attention on getting herself up the stairs without tripping and breaking her neck. Achievable goals, Halberd, achievable goals...
“My lad, you have an awful lot to learn.”
=====// \=====
Celestia paced slowly around the small balcony at the top of the tower, still embarrassingly bathed in orange tones from her recalcitrant celestial sphere. Just as she was wondering if she should have gone downstairs in search of her afternoon's cup of coffee – Or sent somepony to get me one, Good Me, why don't I think more clearly sometimes – her acute eyesight spotted a tiny dot approaching from the eastern sky. She shook out her wings and resettled them, trying to prepare herself.
Gradually, the dot got larger until the unlikely-looking carriage touched down atop the tower. Its square, boxy body was even more battered and dented than she remembered, blisters and rust stains and small perforations mottling the yellow-painted metal around the sagging wheels. The door to the cab shrieked open on ungreased hinges, disgorging a miasma of yellowish smoke from the interior as an eye-searing abomination jumped down heavily.
“Awright, darling? Universe Association Breakdown and Recovery Serv-,” it began brusquely in a gravelly voice which spoke of an aeon of cigarettes, before turning towards her with a large toolbox clutched in one claw and doing a double-take, “Oh, it's you.”
The creature was a strange sort of bipedal dragon, mostly covered in flabby scales of a sickly green. The exceptions were the stunted, leathery wings which protruded from its back and the slimy, mucous-covered head; a fleshy, featureless dome with two blood-red eyes above a thick beard of writhing tentacles. Incongruously, the dog-end of a cigarette with a long, precarious column of ash poked through the tentacles, presumably at the corner of the thing's mouth.
Celestia smiled weakly, trying to persuade her stomach not to throw up as it straightened itself and smoothed its tentacles with a self-conscious claw. “Hallo again, Cthulhu.”
“Oh, I 'member you. Flat bat'ry last time, wunnit?” it slimed ingratiatingly at her.
Oh my, he hasn't gotten any more attractive. “Yes, that's right.”
Behind her, she could hear the shocked hyperventilation of her guards, accompanied by a distressing trickling sound from one of them. Oh dear. Maybe I went a little bit far in insisting that they stay for this. That was always her trouble; she loved playing little pranks on ponies right up until the fun started, when she immediately started feeling bad for them. Maybe I'll give these two a week off to recover, later? Hmm, perhaps two!
The thing snorted, which set off a long, revoltingly-liquid coughing fit. Eventually, it hacked something up and spat discreetly beside the van, where the stone began to sizzle and dissolve.
“'Scuse me. Yeah, they always put it off, 'till one morning you gotta ice-age an' they just don't start on them cold mornings, y'know? There's no telling somebeings! Still, that's what they got me for, darlin', now what is it today?”
“Well, it's my sun, you see...” Celestia outlined the problem while trying to avoid a little dance of revulsion. It wasn't his fault that his physical form was unappealing, and taken in isolation it wasn't so very bad, but even to her as a goddess something about him screamed Abomination! Eldritch and vile! on some sort of primal level like the Royal Canterlot Voice through a megaphone. She didn't dare think what it was like for the ordinary mortals.
“'s your Hermitian string-function clutches have gone. I swear, this bloody model! Endless trouble wiv 'em, you got done up a treat when they hocked this one on you, love!”
“Yes, yes, I see, but can you fix it? The moon's supposed to be up already, you see, and the day's getting rather a lot longer than it's supposed to be...” Why did her mouth always run on when speaking to him? Why?
“Weeeeell, dunno. Can't get the parts, see, they stopped makin' 'em a few million years ago. I can't promise nuffink, but I'll 'ave a look in the van. Boy!” He bellowed the last word, and the door on the far side of the carriage creaked open in response.
Dear Me, there's another of them! How can there be another one? Celestia shivered despite the warm evening air. This one was remarkably similar in appearance to Cthulhu but its mouth-tentacles were thinner and shorter, and the dome of its head was disfigured with angry purple boils and spots.
“Pop 'round and 'ave a butchers under the hood, will ya, lad? String-function clutches. We got any Hamiltonian harmonic oscillators in the back?”
“Used the last one last week, unless you restocked?” it said in a slightly whiny voice. The younger abomination hauled open the side of the carriage and rummaged briskly, “No, there's one here. I'll take some Uncertainty grease as well, like. I might need it, I might not.”
With that, its form wavered and vanished, leaving Celestia to wonder if its last statement had been some sort of joke and to make awkward small talk with Cthulhu as he tried to light another fag with the guttering dog-end of his last one.
“So, er... keeping you busy, are they?”
Cthulhu harrumphed, the tentacles around his mouth heaving and seething hideously in amusement, “You might say, darlin', you might say. Universes these days, they don't make 'em like they used to. Oh, they're awright when they're new, but put a few million years onna clock an' once fings start going on 'em, they're forever inna shop 'cos they're so bloody complicated that you gotta replace whole units at once, none of these simple repairs inna field like on these older universes. 'Ere, you gotta light, love?”
He rambled on and on while Celestia forced herself to keep her rather fixed smile in place and nod at appropriate intervals. For all her composure and eternal grace, Celestia nearly jumped when the younger creature popped suddenly back into existence. Behind her, there was a sharp gasp of breath from the Sergeant, accompanied by a high-pitched, girly shriek from the Private which would have cost him endless humiliation from his fellow soldiers had any of them heard him – assuming they weren't fleeing in gibbering terror themselves, of course.
The younger creature brandished a hefty object in one claw which danced and shimmered in the air. Celestia's eyes crossed when she tried to focus closely on it, but it looked strangely like a Möbius triangle with three right-angles on top of a small harmonium.
Cthulhu seemed to recognise it without effort, “Oh, a Von Neumann bearing?”
“Yes, boss,” the younger being grunted, heaving it into the back of the van with a surprisingly melodious crash, “That one went near the second Overberg and jammed the whole bloody works up. I'll see what I can find, but pop over an' have a look.”
=====// \=====
Sergeant Halberd kept her face smooth and watchful thanks to long years of practice, but internally her heart beat an insane tattoo against her ribs and she thanked both deities that lunch was long since past and her stomach was empty. Beside her, she could heard Light Brigade's armour jingling softly from the force of his terrified tremors. But he was still there, she reminded herself. She could think of any number of guardsponies who would have broken down and fled before thetwo mouth-dessicating horrors chatting idly with her Princess and popping in and out of reality like a revolving door, but he had stuck to his duty beside her. Of course, he could just be too terrified to move, a corner of her brain cheerfully reminded her, Are you certain you could, if they started threatening the Princess?
Finally, her fervent prayers were answered when the older creature suggested that Celestia try lowering the sun. She watched her Princess brace herself and reach out as she had done so many times before, and this time the sun cruised smoothly below the horizon without complaint leaving night to settle across the land. In a reassuring reminder of normality, she even heard the first cautious notes of the crickets break out far below as the creatures packed up their van and prepared to leave.
“That should hold you for another 10,000 years or so, but I'd get it done soonest if I were you,” said Cthulhu, lighting up his seventh fag of the visit. “Say, 'Hallo', to that lovely sister of yours. Shame I missed her, she's such a gorgeous little thing,” it leered.
“Er, I'll be sure to tell her.” Even Celestia's voice sounded strained at that point, “Now, how much do I owe you?”
“On top of the standard membership fee?”
Cthulhu's head turned slowly and fixed on the Sergeant, and suddenly his eyes seemed encompass the world and bore straight down into her soul with the terrifying intensity of the supreme predator. Her heart lurched to a stop, a primal urge to flee pressing in on her mind so strongly it actually transfixed her in place as the thing's amusement radiated like a malevolent sun.
“I'd say a couple of ponies.”
She heard the heavy crash of Light Brigade's faint before her own darkness swept over her.
=====// \=====
Celestia gave Cthulhu a very flat look at his hissing laughter, his mouth-tentacles shaking along with his body. Beside him, his underling just rolled his eyes in a bored fashion.
“Was it really necessary for you to terrify my poor guard so?” she asked severely.
“All in good fun, love, all in good fun.” Cthulhu chuckled, wiping his eyes with a greasy claw.
“For you, maybe, but they're only mortals, you know!”
She counted out fifty bits with rather bad grace and passed them over, getting a stained receipt in return which she delicately floated back to the Treasury so that she didn't have to touch it. With a wave of his claw, Cthulhu and his sidekick roared off in a cloud of greasy smoke, gradually fading from sight and from her reality. When the last traces of their carriage had disappeared, she turnedand looked down at her crumpled guards, huffing in annoyance.
“I swear, Luna was right,” she muttered sullenly, “Next time, the bloody day will just have to last forever!”
=====// F I N I S \=====
