The Last Laugh

Hard Hitter sat in an alley in the middle of Canterlot, hat drown down over her head, a long coat covering almost her entire body. It was a risk, this meeting, but her last exposé had exploded, and there were even rumors up top about promotion, so she had to bring something good back to the table. When her contact had reached out to her again, she had no choice but to accept.

She nervously checked her watch. Five minutes early. She tried to shake out the nervous jitters to no avail. She glanced around the alley, focusing at the entrance and the rooftops; her contact was a pegasus, after all

The clink of hoofsteps is what alerted her to the entrance of her contact. A male blue pegasus, wearing an ill-fitting coat, large hat, and oversized sunglasses quickly jogged into the alley. “H-Hey,” he said, obviously forcing his voice deeper, “Are you Hard Hitter?”

“Soarin?” the reporter asked, putting enough force through her voice to keep it steady through her nerves. “You contacted me, what do you have?”

He didn’t say anything, instead choosing to search the small alley for anypony else. “We said not to use names?”

“You started it,” Hard Hitter snapped back. “So do you have anything or not?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Soarin raised up his cloak and pulled out a ledger. Just visible on the cover were the words, Royal War of RSR 3299, Log. The rest was illegible. “Here.”

To Soarin’s surprise, however, Hard Hitter had scurried back to the edge of the alleyway. When Royal Guard started pouring into the meeting place, he knew what had happened.

“You set me up!” he shouted.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I had no choice!” Hard Hitter shouted, cowering from the angry pegasus.

“Under the orders of the Princesses of Equestria, Soarin, you are under arrest. Stand down and come quietly,” one of the Guard said.

The flutter of wings overhead sealed the deal. With a hung head, Soarin walked to the front of the alley. To his surprise, the Guard stood aside to allow Princess Luna herself to walk up to him with a small smile. “Ah,” she said, “this explains a lot. I apologize for the pie, but we need to have a chat about matters of national security...”

_--_--_--_--_--_

“Twilight!” Spike called up the library stairs, “Wake up! You’ve got mail!”

Twilight groaned and rolled over, making sure to avoid a book lying open on the floor, and stumbled her way to the entrance of her room. “Mail? From who?”

“I dunno.” Twilight could hear claws clicking against the stairs as Spike walked up. “It doesn’t have a name on it.”

Spike entered the room and held a rather large manilla envelope up to his caretaker. She took it, giving it a quick once-over. Not thick enough to contain more than one piece of paper, no mailing address, no return address.

“Well,” Spike said, trying to hide his excitement, “aren't cha gonna open it?”

With an amused eye roll, Twilight broke the seal on the envelope. As soon as the flap opened, a horn blew off, and confetti flew out, covering a large portion of her floor. She couldn’t contain a groan. “I love Pinkie, and her parties, but these ealy invitations are getting ridiculous.”

“Twilight, it’s almost noon,” Spike tried to say, but Twilight was already moving on.

From the envelope, she slid out a glossy piece of paper. Gold stitching bordered the paper, eclipsed in one corner by the seal of the Royal Sisters.

Congratulations are in order

to the winner of the 3,753rd Royal Prank War,

Miss Twilight Sparkle,

for impressive use of teleportation magic

Twilight looked down at the paper, then up at Spike, then back to the paper, then back up to Spike, and finally out the window, where Canterlot was just visible perched on it’s mountain.

“Wat?”

Author's Note

Well, it's finally over. Four years of off and on writing, and we're done here. Before I really get going on my soapbox, I've got some people to thank. First off, my editors, quick and Cloudy (doubly for you, because without him, this story wouldn't exist). Even though, by tradition, we never really did much editing to this, it was nice to have a second pair of eyes to catch my misspellings and whatnot.

Secondly, I feel like I need to thank everyone who has been onboard since the very beginning. Updates were always sporadic, I constantly said how much I hated this story, but you all stuck around anyway. It meant a lot to me to see everyone who said how happy they were when I started writing on this again.

Finally, thanks need to go out to everyone who submitted prank ideas to this little escapade. We ended up using only one or two, and gave credit in those chapters, but all the ideas were greatly appreciated. We just had a super specific idea of what kinds of pranks we wanted to use.

So thanks for sitting through all of that. I don't know what's going on from here. A sequel is unlikely, because it was surprisingly hard to write what we have, but I might do some bonus stuff down the line, haven't decided.

Thanks for reading, and have a fantastic day.

--thehalfelf