((Prompt: Somepony joins a secret organization.))

The night after her coronation, as she returned to her room in the palace, Twilight Sparkle found a note on her bed. It was of high-quality white paper, with a symbol of the sun and moon intertwined embossed on the front. Flipping the note over, she found only a single sentence written on the back.

The Order of Sun and Moon is watching.

Twilight looked around, but could find no other evidence anypony had been in her room. Frowning, she resolved to show the note to Celestia in the morning. She would know what to make of it. For now, sleep was more important than mysterious notes. It had been a long day.

When she woke, the note was gone. In its place was a new note, the same symbol but now on fine black paper. The reverse of this note had a few lines written in silver ink.

The princesses are all figureheads. Come see where the true power of Equestria lies.

Joe's Doughnut Emporium, 9:00 A.M.

Twilight glanced at the clock. She uttered a soft curse and scrambled out the door. It took a full gallop to make it to the doughnut shop in time. She arrived panting and gasping for breath, her feathers all in disarray and her mane still suffering from bed-head.

Doughnut Joe glanced at her and jerked his head toward a large glass case of doughnuts in the back of the shop. She approached the case curiously, then stumbled back as it suddenly slid to the side, revealing a dark passageway behind it with a cloaked figure waiting for her.

“Follow me,” came a voice from deep within the hood. With that, they turned around and marched into the gloom of the secret tunnel.

The doughnut case slid back into place behind her as Twilight followed. She did her best to keep pace with her guide, but it was clear they had longer legs than her. She spotted pink hooves beneath the hem of the robe, and she swore she spotted a purple-tipped wing once as the figure shifted under the garment.

“Cadance?” Twilight said.

“Shh,” responded the voice that Twilight could now clearly identify as her old foalsitter. Cadance led her into a wide chamber, dimly lit by torches. In the center there were four high-backed chairs arranged in a semi-circle around a table. Two of them were occupied by more cloaked figures, and Cadance took a seat next to them, leaving Twilight at the foot of the table.

The robes did not do a good job of hiding the dark blue and white coats of their respective occupants. “Princess Luna? Princess Celestia?” Twilight asked incredulously. “What's going on?”

Luna raised her voice. “We do not use those names here. In these walls, you will call me, 'Sister Moon.'”

Celestia's smile was visible beneath her hood. “Welcome, our newest sister. Welcome to the Order of Sun and Moon.”

Twilight looked around the room. There were a few bookshelves, a ping-pong table crammed in one corner, and a mini-fridge. “I don't... I don't understand,” she said. “The note said... figureheads, true power...”

Luna—no, 'Sister Moon'—nodded sharply. “Yes. The princesses are figureheads. The true powers that run Equestria are the ponies in this room.”

“But you are the princesses!” protested Twilight.

“Our reach extends to the very highest levels of the government,” confirmed Luna proudly.

Cadance grimaced sympathetically. “Just go with it,” she whispered to Twilight, levitating a set of robes for her.

Twilight sighed, and pulled the robe on. It was surprisingly comfortable. Very soft and breathable. “Okay, fine. So... what do we actually do here, then?”

“We are glad you asked, Sister Star,” said Luna, pulling out a stack of papers and planting them on the table. “For in this room, we make decisions for the fate of all Equestria!” She gestured her hooves wildly.

Twilight glanced at the papers. They consisted of tax reform bills, legislation... the day-to-day paperwork involved in running a country. “So... we do our jobs, in other words?”

“Basically, yes,” said Celestia, grabbing a tax form and levitating a quill. “But it's better, because we get to wear robes, and there's doughnuts in the fridge.”

Twilight shrugged. It was hard to argue with that logic. She fished a jelly doughnut out of the mini-fridge, took the fourth chair at the table, and the Order's grasp over Equestria became complete.

Author's Notes:

Welcome back, repeat-followers! Welcome the first time, new readers! Welcome backwards, time-travelers! Let's refresh ourselves on a few of the usual FAQs, so we can save valuable comment-space for remarks on how awesome I am.

-These stories do not necessarily share continuity unless specifically noted. Some might fit together well enough, but others are flatly contradictory to one another.

-The genre tags within the chapters are going to be a little inaccurate sometimes. Although I type them in, so I could conceivably write in whatever genre tags I wanted, I try to limit myself to only the tags available to standalone stories published on FimFic, to avoid the temptation to tag something [Weird Sorta-Melancholy Introspective Soliloquy About Fruit and Fruit Products] or the like. Also, it helps me make up my mind if I ever decide to expand any of these and publish them as standalone stories themselves.

-The prompts I use are from Thirty Minute Ponies, which, sadly, is on hiatus until mid-November. However, because I cannot stand to have only five of the Mane Six represented in my Thirty Minute series, I will be using archived prompts from before I joined. This will explain, to any of you who follow that blog, why my prompts take a sudden leap back in time.

-My username is "Somepony Else," backwards. There, mystery solved. You can stop looking up obscure dead languages and alphabet codes now.

Hope you enjoy reading these at least half as much as I enjoyed writing them!