Romance and the Fate of Equestria

Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Five

Princess Luna sat behind a massive film camera, her eye fixed to the small screen mounted on its side, capturing the scene in front of her, a flawless recreation of the streets of Clovenshire. Fleur Dis Lee was once again made up to resemble a young Celestia, her all-pink mane magically flowing, standing over Angel O'Brien, who now wore the Snowdrop makeup.

"Are you through?" O'Brien said, a dangerous glint in her eyes.

"Yes," Fleur said tonelessly. "I'm going to the castle."

"One more thing…"

Fleur gave an unconvincing sigh. "What?"

"You simply must stop looking at this as a personal vendetta," O'Brien said breathily. "Luna didn't just betray you. It affected all of us. Luna promised that when there was no sun, she would help us grow food. But she hasn't. I've asked Nightmare Moon about it in person. She recognizes me, but you're right, she's not my friend Princess Luna anymore."

"And you're telling me this now?" said Fleur, emotionless and inflecting the wrong words entirely. "What was with all the pretending to be a Nightmare Moon supporter?"

O'Brien blinked several times, uncertainly, then turned to face the camera. "Erm… could we cut? Just for a moment?"

"Erm… certainly," Luna said in surprise.

All of the film equipment sputtered to a stop, and Fleur's magical mane went limp. Luna stepped out from behind the camera and stepped up to the actresses to speak with them.

"Say, you haven't been calling 'cut' every time you needed to start over a take, have you?" Luna said casually. "Because that involves shutting everything down, and then a lot of very unnecessary setting things up again. It's better to just briefly pause…"

"Oh," O'Brien said blankly. "Uh… I did not know that."

"Never mind, never mind. What seems to be the trouble?"

"It's just, uh…" O'Brien said nervously, "I wanted to make sure Fleur knows that the cameras were actually running."

"I beg your pardon?" Fleur demanded.

"They were," O'Brien said sweetly. "Act, honey. Won't you?" She clapped her hooves together in front of Fleur's face.

"Oh, 'act, honey, won't you?'" Fleur mocked. "Says the pony whose biggest claim to fame in her life is putting together a tiny rainfall on the east coast."

"…To the lifeless porcelain mannequin, yes," O'Brien said, nodding.

Fleur glared at Luna. "Princess Luna, are you going to let her talk to me that way?"

"Indeed, Angel O'Brien," Luna said sternly. "I appreciate all that you did in the directorial role in my absence. You stepped up to the task better than anypony could possibly have imagined. But I am back and I am the director now, and it is no longer your place to say such things to your fellow actors. And even if it was your place, that was a rather impolite way to phrase it."

"I should say so," Fleur huffed.

"I'm sorry, Princess Luna," said O'Brien, downcast.

"That's quite all right. That being said, Fleur…" With a burst of energy from her horn, she set off explosive sparks in Fleur's face. "Cameras are rolling, honey. Act, please."

Affronted, Fleur faked a cough. "Ahem, funding your entire movie, ahem," she whispered.

"Ahem, lightning bolt from the heavens, ahem," Luna shot back wryly. Instantly, Fleur was struck by a surge of blue lightning, leaving her fur blackened. "Have you anything else to say?"

"…No," Fleur muttered.

"All right," said Luna. "Makeup! We need makeup over here to fix Fleur, please. Everypony else, take a ten-minute break. Back here in ten minutes on the dot, understood? We're burning daylight, and we don't want to be caught in the Everfree Forest after dark. Of course, I could prevent the sun from setting so we could extend today's shoot, but that might be called an abuse of power. Chop-chop, everypony!"

The crew began to scramble around in every direction, while an army of makeup artists descended on Fleur.

"That's right, Fleur," Luna said smugly. "You may think money and fame are the greatest powers one can have, but as it turns out, some powers are quite overtly supernatural, so… yes, by all means, threaten to cut off my funding again, see what it's like to have the goddess of the night on your bad side. It's a shame, and I'm terribly sorry for inconveniencing you so, but as we used to say here in the streets of first-century Clovenshire, 'Check thyself before thou wreckest thyself'."

Luna turned on her heel and strutted away from Fleur, clearly feeling pretty good about herself. Angel O'Brien stumbled, blindly, to Luna's side.

"Thank you for standing up for me," she said softly.

"Oh, thank you for calling her out on not trying," Luna replied graciously. "I wasn't sure I should. You know, you look simply fantastic in your makeup."

"Meh, I'm okay, I guess," O'Brien said, shrugging. "You should see Aqua."

"Oh, I have, I've seen the footage," said Luna. "Mind-blowing. How was it, by the way, shooting all of that?"

"It… started off a bit rocky, but we pulled through. May I say it's great to have you on set at last? It's quite the mercy that my time as director is over."

They walked together toward the edge of the set. This flawless recreation of a Clovenshire street had been erected, through a combination of raw construction and illusion magic, right at the foot of the ruins in the heart of the Everfree Forest.

"Heh…" O'Brien chuckled, admiring her surroundings as well as she could through the murky contact lenses. "Who else would be crazy enough to drag the entire film crew into the Everfree Forest to shoot on location? Build a set exactly where the events happened, to show what the place looked like a thousand years ago… you've got quite the vision, Princess."

Luna smiled at her then, realizing she probably couldn't see the smile, gently brushed her cheek with her hoof.

"So… that line…" O'Brien said anxiously, "the bit where Celestia is all like 'I'm here to save your ungrateful skins, you're welcome'… did she actually say that?"

"Well, I wasn't there, so I couldn't tell you," Luna said. "It's safe to say that, if she did say that, what she actually said was, 'Here, am I, to make safe thine ungrateful hides, thou art welcome,' but who's going to watch a movie where ponies talk like that? But, yes, from what I can gather from Snowdrop's autobiography and Celestia's account, yes, this exchange truly did take place, if not exactly the way it's in the script."

O'Brien looked uneasy.

"This scene, you may recall, takes place during the reign of Nightmare Moon," Luna said gently, "and Nightmare Moon existed because there was a time I did not like Celestia very much. What not many ponies know is that among those who knew us, few of them liked Celestia either. At least one pony who was very close to me spoke to Nightmare Moon and said, 'Lulu, you've turned into Celestia.'"

O'Brien stifled a giggle. "Ponies called you Lulu?"

Luna smiled. "One pony did."

"And, of course, it was more like 'Lulu, ye dost turneth into…?' No?"

"'Ye'?" Luna said in amusement. "I'm not a pirate. I think you mean to use 'thee' and 'thou'."

"Sure," O'Brien said, blushing a bit. "Well, uh… let's get on set again. We haven't been particularly productive thus far."

"Yes, I know…" Luna muttered. "I know I've been spending entirely too much time with Ricochet Highlights. I do hope to lay a foundation, you know."

"Wow," O'Brien remarked. "So you haven't been joking. You really do want to date Ricochet Highlights."

"I want to sleep with him," Luna corrected. "Maybe then date him. We'll see. I'm a professional, I'm not going to do it before the film is wrapped. But I'd like him to be prepared for when I start wooing him, so…"

"Goodness," said O'Brien, shaking her head. "Your bed-warmers will be so disappointed…"

Luna chuckled. "I dismissed the bed-warmers from that particular task. It was one of the first things I did once I got back. I don't need them anymore… I'm not lonely. Besides, several very competent female guards were complaining that they were barred from the highest rank of their profession. Unfair, you know." She shrugged. "I had assumed everypony had known already that I was sleeping with the top-tier guards, but apparently not.

"But I've been dating! Quite prolifically. It's very exciting. The royal guards, bed-warmers, they were chivalrous and dutiful, but that was the thing, it was their duty. They did it with honor and it was great and all, but there wasn't much passion. These fellows I'm dating—oh! They are warm for my form. It's wondrous."

"You're… but…" O'Brien stammered, her blank eyes darting back and forth as she tried to turn her obstructed gaze to Luna, "I thought you had a crush on Ricochet."

"What?" Luna said defensively. "I'm royalty. I'm allowed to fool around. Yes, not a lot of royalty these days exercise that right, but it's true. Everypony knows."

"You know, it's none of my business," O'Brien said dryly, "but if you're really hoping for a modern-day dating experience, you should try to date someone for longer than a day before you sleep with them."

"I appreciate your concern, Angel O'Brien," Luna replied in amusement, "but I am an adult, in fact I exceed the legal cutoff age by nearly two orders of magnitude, so my sexual conduct is mine to decide for myself. I like bedding a stallion on the first date. If that's all he wanted and he seeks to leave and never call me again, then it's a good thing we got that out of the way early. If he stays and is still interested, then I know that real dating can begin."

"I guess that's one way to do it," O'Brien mumbled. "But by the mother of Celestia, it's pretty unorthodox… but I guess it makes a degree of sense."

"Ay. As we speak, I'm stringing along several hopefuls who did indeed remain at my side the morning after." Luna chuckled, then fell silent as her eyes turned to the slowly descending sun. "Is that a common expression?" she wondered. "'By the mother of Celestia'? I've heard it before."

"Er, yes," O'Brien said awkwardly. "Sorry… weird to have an oath that refers to your mother, isn't it?"

"Indeed," said Luna. "And I'm not sure why there would be. Our mother wasn't particularly exceptional… well, unless she happened to be one's mother, of course, and only I and Celestia can claim that. But in truth, she was just an ordinary mare from Ribbondale who liked flowers, got badly shaken up by a divorce—as did Celestia and myself, I may add, there was serious regression into childhood there—and died at a ripe old age while eating a plate of cookies and in the loving embrace of her second husband."

Angel O'Brien beamed at the pleasant thought. "Were you close with your stepfather?"

"Er, no," Luna said calmly. "Mother met him quite late in life, I didn't ever get to know him very well. I had pretty much left Ribbondale behind at that point. Too many memories. Which is a shame, because I really did love Ribbondale. I shall never know its like again."

"Where was Ribbondale?" O'Brien inquired.

"Hmm? Oh, Ribbondale is Manehattan, child. You didn't know that?"

"No," she said in surprise.

"Have you ever been to the Neverglades in Manehattan? It's very authentic to what Ribbondale was once like. It's nice… it was nice. We were all immortals there… not that the other races were disallowed, it just happened to be an all-immortal settlement… so few immortals remain. I do still wonder how that happened, what took our race's spark away. I do like Manehattan, it's truly a testament to Equestrian ingenuity, but Ribbondale… it didn't tear through the land to be perfectly flat and level like Manehattan, you know? It moved with the land. If you built something on a slope, you worked with the slope, the rise and fall of the land, you didn't pave it all over with perfectly-level concrete streets… I recognize the practicality of it, and that not all of the places in the world can be the natural places in the world, but… I do miss that particular place."

-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-

Meanwhile, up in the ruins of the castle, Octavia and DJ P0n-3 had converted a mostly-intact tower room into a recording studio, its walls padded with lush carpeting, microphones hanging in little glass booths throughout the room, and a desk covered in sheets of music and lyrics, below a window looking out over the set, glass newly installed within.

Vinyl tapped the window. "Really goin' to record the 'ole soundtrack 'ere?" she inquired.

"What can I say?" Octavia said casually, tuning a magnificent, glistening mahogany stringed instrument. "I've just got this feeling that there'll be a certain air of authenticity here… yes. If we do record the entire soundtrack here in the old castle… yes."

"It's not built for it…" Vinyl muttered. "Sound recording is a very delicate art… but wiv this set-up you've got 'ere, I fink we can work wiv it. Say, is tha' a new cello?"

"Why, yes, thank you for noticing, it is new," Octavia said proudly, running a hoof down its neck. "I've just purchased it. But it's actually not a cello at all."

"No?"

"No, this is the world's largest violin," said Octavia, plainly fighting to maintain a straight face.

Vinyl smirked. "Really? Because it looks an awful lot like a cello."

"Not at all. It's a violin, see, and due to its great size, it's capable of reaching much lower tones than a normal violin, for dramatic effect."

"…So, it's a cello."

"Yeah, it's a cello," Octavia submitted, grinning and stifling a giggle.

"Ahhh, yeah, you're funny," Vinyl guffawed, checking a sheet of parchment. "So, wha' 'ave we got 'ere? Wha's on the schedule…? Ah, all righ'. Say, when Ricochet 'ighlights comes in 'ere, could you tell 'im I'm not interested? Maybe drop some 'ints that 'e should see Luna? Luna likes 'im, I don't wanna get in the way."

"Oh, of course," said Octavia, nodding vigorously. "I know you wouldn't want to cheat on Blinkie."

"Would you just…"

"Hehehehehehe…"

"Yeah, I don't know if you fink it is, but tha' was really not your fines' moment," Vinyl grumbled.

"Hey, you're hanging out with Blinkie on a regular basis now, aren't you?" Octavia said smugly. "So stop your bellyaching. Now, I know that Plan A was for you to be dating her, and that was a good Plan A, one I was in favor of, but hanging out with her is a good Plan B, isn't it? Isn't it? Admit it, you like hanging out with her."

"And I'm 'appy to do it. But that was a real dirty trick, Inkie. Nearly traumatized me. I had to bang four guys the next guy just to get over it."

"You what?" Octavia cried.

"And I don't normally go for four guys in one day. I go two guys, tops, and stick to girls the rest of the day. Four guys causes chafing, mate, I don't know if you knew that…"

"Just the day after your date with Blinkie?" Octavia said cautiously. "How in the hell do you have sex with four ponies in one day? I mean, I know you're a recording artist and that makes things a lot easier, but you're not even a gold recording artist."

"Is this going to be a finly-veiled segue into why you, a quintuple-gold recording artist, can't get laid?" Vinyl said wryly.

"I can get laid," Octavia snipped. "Just not on anything resembling a daily basis, as if I'd want to, much less four times in one day…"

"There's a certain animal magne'ism I've always 'ad," Vinyl said earnestly. "Especially in…"

"College, yes, I know," said Octavia. "We've spoken of such a time, not a month ago."

Vinyl frowned, processing Octavia's words. "…Was that a haiku?"

Octavia blinked. "Why, yes, I suppose it was. So, you've never been pregnant, or anything?"

"Nope, not even a little bit," said Vinyl. "I'm careful! I can take five seconds to be careful to avoid a lifetime of obligations I ain't ready for, mate. I could do bloody PSAs abou' bein' careful."

Simultaneously, they instinctively turned to look at the room's entrance, having just realized that little Angel Aquamarine was standing in the door.

"Oh, tits," Vinyl said in alarm. "Er… pardon my language. 'Ow long 'ave you been standing there?"

"Long enough to be kinda confused?" the filly said, grinning sheepishly.

"Yes, sorry," Octavia said breezily. "We're talking about… grownup things you're not ready to hear. Let me just say for the record, for you to remember later in life, that Vinyl is not normal when it comes to the topic we were discussing… just to get that out of the way."

"Yeah, I pretty much 'ave more sex in a week than the average pony does in a lifetime. You can quote me on it, but don't try it at home."

"Please do not quote her on that," Octavia said wearily. "And you do not."

"I meant wiv more ponies," Vinyl clarified.

"Oh. Yes, that is accurate." She turned to Angel Aquamarine and quickly changed the subject. "So, you've been rehearsing your song, then?"

"Uh-huh," she said in relief.

"Righ'," said Vinyl, suddenly businesslike. "We've been goin' over it, and we were finking, what if you didn't sing the 'ole fing?" She produced a lyric sheet, levitating it in her deep red aura, and pointed out a few verses. "What if these verses 'ere were sung by Princess Luna 'erself? And you sang the choruses in a duet?"

"You want me to duet with Princess Luna?" said Aquamarine, looking disquieted. "Imelda, or the real Princess Luna?"

"The real Princess Luna, if she's interested in the concept," said Octavia. "Not Imelda, not Imelda at all. She can't sing. Thinks she can. But she cannot. Sounds like dolphins in a blender. But I'm not gonna be the one to tell her that."

Vinyl looked out the window. "Hrmm… looks like they're not finishin' the scene, but they can't work on it past sunset… which is weird, seein' as this is a Nightmare Moon scene and there was no sun then."

"You can't shoot a film scene at night, Vinyl," Octavia reminded her. "It doesn't show up properly."

"Well, you'd fink stardust film designed by Princess Luna 'erself could… well, anyway, I'll ask her abou' the song once she's done wiv tha'."

"Not without me!" Octavia said in alarm. "I want to see her face. She's going to blush and it's going to be adorable, I just know it…"

"Oi, I know, righ'?" Vinyl said enthusiastically. "Whever she says yes or no, there'll be so much blushin' and gigglin', I couldn't possibly let you miss tha'."

"Love her," Octavia said dreamily.

"Love her," Vinyl agreed.

"Is Princess Luna your favorite princess now?" Angel Aquamarine said.

"Mm-hmm," said Vinyl.

"Best princess," said Octavia.

Angel Aquamarine beamed. "Mine too."