Violette, Cosmic Constant and myself were by default forced to sit idle, hunkered down in the empty ballroom while the Bearers of the Elements pursued Mayhem. We made idle chatter to try and distract ourselves from the situation. Or rather Cosmic Constant and I did; Violette's English was too poor to easily take part in the conversation. She was reduced to sitting there and asking Cosmic Constant (who it seems spoke Fancy as well as his native Germane(1))   what we were prattling about. I could only hope I would pick up a few words of it soon.

Despite the situation I felt fairly confident that the Bearers would manage to pull things off. Experience with them had taught me that, appearances to the contrary, they were six of the most capable ponies in Equestria. Mayhem was fast and unpredictable, but the bearers had two magic users, and three fliers. Mind, Fluttershy was still a 'weak' flier, and while Twilight was still having some issues with stability and control, if they were motivated enough they could hold their own in the air...

What? Twilight? Yes, ever since she became an alicorn.

...I didn't mention that? Oh. Well.

Bit of a kerfluffle, that was.

I wasn't present for the event that caused it, and the details are a little muddled, but as I understand it Twilight was mucking about with an unfinished spell by Starswirl the Bearded,  and in the course of unraveling the resultant mess (something about switched cutie marks-- I didn't even think that was possible!) the Elements activated and triggered her... ascendancy, for lack of a better word.

It was about that time that I learned some interesting things about the nature of the Elements. As Luna explained it to me, the Elements' main, or key function is to reveal or restore the true nature of things. To "Put things back the way they should be," roughly speaking. For instance, transforming Nightmare Moon back into Princess Luna. Or changing a village ravaged by Chaos magic back to normal. Or restoring cosmic stability by changing a disruptive chaos entity into an inert statue. They had other abilities, of course. And more darkly, could be put to other purposes, or even made to behave against their natures--- Luna's imprisonment in the moon was done by exploiting that, turning her connection to the moon into a full union with it--- but at the cost of its connection to its bearers. Celestia and Luna lost their connection to the elements because they tried to turn them against each other; as a consequence Celestia had been forced to wait a thousand years for new Bearers to be born and the balance of the elements to be restored.

What does this have to do with it? Well, all ponies are born with at least a little of the potential to become Alicorns. Some rare few, though, are born essentially nascent....alicorn caterpillars, if you will. They will inevitably become alicorns; it's only a matter of waiting for the right trigger. Twilight was such a case. Even Celestia and Luna are uncertain of the actual mechanics, but it seems the Elements were designed to do this-- to seek out those ponies with the potential for alicornhood, gravitate to them and in turn subtly gravitate those ponies to themselves, and then transform them. Ponies with sufficient potential can ascend on their own, or even be born as full alicorns (per Princess Cadence), but it's incredibly rare.  The Elements help make it a certain thing by, in a nutshell, revealing the pony's true nature... an alicorn.(2) And well, Twilight was such an obvious nascent that she might as well have had "Instant Alicorn, just add Element" for a cutie mark.

Twilight handled her transformation and her consequent promotion...about as well as one would expect.

 

---

 

Twilight continued to stare into the mirror, an expression of dumbfounded shock on her face. I think it was at that point, when she finally got a look at herself in her new tiara, that it all sank in. She'd caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as they were fitting her for her gown, and she'd frozen, eyes wide, pupils turned to pinpricks. It was starting to get disturbing. At least she wasn't hyperventilating.

Then again, I wasn't entirely sure she was actually breathing.

"Twilight?" Celestia said, concerned. She nudged the purple alicorn with a wing. "Twilight dear, are you all right?"

One of the quartet of blonde-maned mares tending to her leaned forward anxiously. "Princess Twilight?" she said. "Are you all right, Princess?"

That seemed to get a response. Twilight raised a single trembling hoof to the crown on her own head, and then started making the most extraordinary wheezing noise.

"Eeeeee..."

I found myself backing up a step, along with Spike. "That's not good," he muttered to me.

The drawn-out "eeeeeee" quickly turned into wheezing gasps, in and out--"Eeee--ahhhh, Eeee-ahhh, ahh-eee,ahh-eee, ahh-eee... " Her eyes puddled up. She finally let out a heartbreaking wail:

"But I don't WANT to be a Princess!!"

Celestia, bless her heart, rushed forward, wings spread like a mother hen. She enfolded the poor filly as Twilight finally went into her long-overdue breakdown. "I don't want to be a Princess! I hate politics! I don't know how to run a country! I don't want to rule anypony! How will I run a castle, I can't even keep my sock drawer organized!(3) And what about my research? I can't give up my books and my studies and my experiments, I just can't! How can I move away from Ponyville? How can I leave my friends? I can't handle being treated like royalty, I'm not Blueblood--!"

Her friends of course clustered around her, while Celestia chuckled and cooed reassurances to her like a mother to a distraught foal. Twilight had already started talking about going on the lam, changing her identity, having her wings removed or getting a horn-ectomy or maybe she could just wear large hats all the time and lets try the breathing trick Cadence showed her, why isn't it working, why isn't the breathing exercise working--!

Being merely an acquaintance and a typically awkward male, I stood to the side and grimaced sympathetically. "Epic level blow out," I muttered to Spike.

"I give it a six out of ten," he said. "Nothing's caught fire or exploded yet, and nobody's turned into a cactus..."

"Eeee, ahhh, eee, ahhh, eee, ahhh....."

 

 

---

 

It took a while for Celestia and the Bearers to calm her down, but eventually she did.

When she stopped hyperventilating and bawling in panic, Celestia had reminded her, quite pointedly, that they had a mostly parliamentary government-- the only members of the royal family with any political authority or duties were Celestia and Luna themselves, and they weren't going to be vacating the diarch thrones any time soon. Twilight wasn't even first in line for the succession.

Furthermore, her rank as Princess was pretty much ceremonial--- much like Prince Blueblood's--  and wouldn't make any substantial changes to her life, or so Celestia managed to reassure her. There were in fact swarms of Princes, Dukes and Duchesses, Lords and Ladies, Sirs and Madames(4) in Equestria who lived fairly pedestrian lives outside of certain ceremonial or minor political roles, and perhaps having a touch more luxury from their royal allowance. Twilight might be expected to pop into the palace a bit more often, but she could live-- and spend her time-- as she darned well pleased.

It sounded a great deal like how the nobility in England worked. After all, what government role did Sir Elton John or the Prince of Wales really have, anyway?

Celestia's calm reasoning, along with a lot of mothering hugs and reassurances from her friends that she was still "the same old Twilight" eventually pulled the new Princess out of her emotional death-spiral. She'd more or less come to terms with it since then, and was accepting with good grace the one or two things that did change. The Ponyville library, for one, got one hell of a magically-aided expansion. One alicorn-powered growth spell later and it would rival the house-trees in elven high fantasy. It was about five times as wide in the trunk as it had been, and now cradled a rather sizeable mansion in its boughs (and no few extra volumes in its shelves.) Mayor Mare was a little unsettled at first to have a Princess' palace looming over the Ponyville skyline, but eventually conceded that it was nice of the Crown to give the local libraries a few new branches.(5)

Confound it; now I'm going to have to go back through my journals and check to make sure I wrote "alicorn" where it should say "unicorn,"  aren't I?... Ehh, to heck with it.

My, I have wandered off-topic, haven't I.

At any case, suffice it to say that between the six of them, they had three fliers, two magic users, and the Elements of Harmony, and so I felt the mane six to be more than a match for the modular Mayhem.

It was unfortunate for my peace of mind that it dawned on me: Mayhem had outmaneuvered us. With the six of them scattered in pursuit of his segmented body, they would be unable to bring their particular Magical Maguffin to bear....

 

---

 

Meanwhile, the Bearers of the Elements were having troubles of their own. There were six Bearers, six Equation Balls, and six Draconequus segments, so one could be forgiven for thinking that it was a fairly even contest.

One would have to reassess the situation, however. Of the six Bearers, only one, Rainbow Dash, was a seriously skilled or even experienced flier. Fluttershy was pitiful on wingpower; Rarity, while deft and agile, had little stamina; Applejack was struggling hard with her natural earth pony agoraphobia; Pinkie Pie was erratic and inattentive; and Twilight, while possibly faster than even Rainbow Dash thanks to her alicorn powers, had a long way to go on control and maneuverability.

The arena for their aerial combat was not in their favor, either. The airspace over the city was getting filled with more and more randomly moving objects, turning the sky over the city streets into a perilous obstacle course. While the mane 6 had to duck and weave to protect their all-too-vulnerable selves from getting pummeled, pierced, or crushed, Mayhem had no such restraints. His autonomous segments pinballed off of buildings, ponies, and objects both mobile and stationary with reckless abandon.

True to her nature as a pony who respected the power of intellect, Twilight was pursuing the head. He was giving her quite the run, despite the ridiculousness of his bat-wing ears and the incredibly unaerodynamic nature of a disembodied head.  He was smart, too, if seemingly demented; he kept to below rooftop level, forcing his pursuer to bob and weave through the buildings and towers of Canterlot in a combination dodgeball and slalom run.

This was not Twilight's forte', and it was showing. If she flew above the rooftops, she risked losing him, but when she tried to pursue him down the narrow canyonways between the towers of Canterlot, she found herself smacking into loose objects and taking bruising impacts off stone walls. If it weren't for her magical forcefield she would have already broken something. The worst indignity was when she took a sharp corner and plowed headlong through a dozen lines of wet clothes dangling over the street--- what in Tartarus? weren't there laws about blocking the flying lanes in Canterlot?-- coming out the other side with a half-dozen unmentionables(6) tangled around her horn.

Snarling and spitting, she managed to shake the laundry off her head before she crashed into something. This was no good; she couldn't possibly outfly a creature who considered Isaac Newton's laws of motion an optional feature. She needed to outsmart the thing.

She fired off a quick salvo of magical bursts-- freezing spells, bubble-trap spells, stunning spells-- but Mayhem's flying head dodged them with ease. The spells pinged off the walls and street. She even tried the "appearing door" spell, apparating a door and frame in front of him. He simply opened it and flew right on through, slamming it behind him.

Twilight growled in frustration. She just couldn't get a clear shot! And she didn't know how to make spells that would turn corners on their own. She had been practicing that, but to be safe she'd only learned to do it with--

"Lightbullllb," she sang to herself with a wicked grin. Her horn lit up as she turbocharged a new spell.

Mayhem's head was running a slalom course through the remains of an open-air market, dodging hurtling wagons and flying piles of fruit and launching whatever wasn't already airborne into the air, when a brilliant flash of purple lit up behind him. His eyes rolled back in time to see a blob of purple light streaking his way, effortlessly dodging the obstacles in its way and closing with him fast.

He yelped and began jigging back and forth across the street, but it was still no good. The bolt of light struck him in a splash of octarine light. For a moment there was no effect; then the mustache began to grow. It sprouted from his lip in a torrential rush, yards and yards of curling fu-manchu mustache streaming behind him like the tail of a comet, growing ever longer and bushier by the second till the ends finally tangled around a lamp post.  

The head came a stop with a painful yank. Mayhem yelped, losing his grip on the ball in his mouth. It sailed off down the road, right into Twilight Sparkle's waiting hooves. "Hah!" she shouted triumphantly. "Brains over Brawn, once again!... Euugh." She shook a bit of Draconequus drool off one hoof. She turned the ball over, examining it hastily; how was she to deactivate it?

There was a tiny valve stopper on one side. Recalling Arcturus' own handling of Ataxia's snowglobe, she quickly tore it out with her teeth. The ball deflated with a loud bronx cheer. She looked around. Had it worked?

Things, unfortunately, were still bouncing around. Though the randomness of it seemed to have diminished, slightly... "Okay, looks like we gotta get 'em all to stop this," Twilight said. "One down, six to go." She turned to the entangled head. "As for you--" the Element of Magic on her crown flared.

Mayhem's head gave a panicked squawk and vanished in a cloud of smoke. Twilight pooched her lip in discontent. "That was rather inconclusive," she said. Had she 'won,' or had the head just teleported back to join the rest of him? No telling. She fired a magic flare into the sky, signaling for the royal guard to come secure the deflated globe. "I hope the rest of the girls are doing okay..."

 

---

 

 

Author's Note:

1)Don't blame me; Celestia has been planting these stealth puns all over Equestria's world for millennia. It is only going to get worse now that she has access to literal tons of twenty-first century pop culture. She's read the Harry Potter series and, as I learned from Luna, is already laying the groundwork for Gilda's homeland to be renamed Griffindor...

2)I'm tempted to draw parallels with 'being strong with the Force' and becoming a Jedi Knight, but I'm not certain how accurate it would be and it would involve bringing in the old novel 'Splinter of the Mind's Eye' and that would be just getting too fandom-obscure.

3)I've never seen any pony wearing socks in public, is the strange part. I've asked about it, but I get the most shocked and scandalized looks. One would think I'd made conversation about their choice in intimate lingerie....

...I think I just answered my own question.

4)Not like that, you sniggering dolts.

5)She's used that pun in five public speeches since then. Kill me.

6)Like socks.