"Actually they're not so bad once you get used to them..."

Those inside could make out the muffled words of Nyx, Twilight and Ink Spot as they cantered down the castle hallway outside the locked door. "Oh look, this must be it," They heard Twilight say. The door swung open, revealing Ink Spot, Twilight Sparkle and Nyx....

...Who stared, stunned, at the stomach-medicine-pink abomination before them. Nursery school decorations, kindergarten music tinkling in the air, the baby-powder whiff in the air; they soaked it all in at one glance. The room was filled with a dozen or so colts and fillies, all seated in too-small chairs, paper plates and cups in their hooves and sullen expressions on their faces. Some had apparently strayed too close to their puffy-sleeved pink ward and captor; they had napkins and bibs tied under their chins and the distinct glowering look of a foal who had just had their cheeks scrubbed against their will.

Nyx surveyed the scene before her, eyelids at half mast. She set down the bag of candy canes. "You're kidding," she said, deadpan. "You're kidding, right?"

It was noteworthy that neither Twilight nor InkSpot chided or disagreed with her. The three of them stepped inside, gazing about in bemusement. Too late, Scootaloo looked up from her paper plate to see the door swinging shut behind them. She shot across the room like a sherbet-colored arrow, diving between Twilight and InkSpot--- only to fall just short just as the latch clicked shut. "Aw, nuts," she groaned, faceplanting in the carpet.

The three of them stared at the pegasus filly. "What was all that about?" Nyx asked.

Scootaloo stared up at them dismally. "She enchanted the doorlatch so nopony without a cutie mark can open it," she said.

"Well that's, um, clever," Twilight said. "She who?"

Scootaloo pointed with a hoof to the other end of the room. There stood Miss Smiles, who was struggling hard to keep her namesake on her face. She was currently being lectured by a stern looking pegasus in a tuxedo and monocle. Circumstance (or Pomp, who at this point knows) was apparently displeased with how the "foals' party" was being conducted.

Actually, to judge by what could be overheard, he was displeased with how it was being attended. "---made it perfectly clear that all the foals were to be kept down here," he was saying. "And yet there are still dozens of them running about the halls of the castle--"

"But I've been keeping them here," Miss Smiles pleaded her case, corners of her mouth straining. "I must have every colt or filly without a cutie mark already...."

"I meant all the foals, not just the blank flanks!" the majordomo said, exasperated. "Anypony less than their majority, understand? Things are very precarious now with Princess Luna's political influence, the last thing she needs is a herd of these runny-nosed little ruffians running amuck, knocking things down and tearing things up and bothering important ponies...." he waved his hooves at the crowd of incarcerated children, oblivious to the hurt looks from many... and the perilous dark glowers from some that he would come to regret ignoring later.

Twilight had closed the distance by then, and gave Luna's assistant something of a glower of her own."Well that certainly isn't what Princess Luna wants," she said. "I know for a fact that she is quite fond of the children here in Ponyville and would be delighted to see them."

Pomp eyed her disdainfully through his monocle. In his distraction his normally keen recollection of all things courtly fell short and he failed to recognize her. "Yes, I'm quite sure you're a close acquaintance of the Princess of the Moon," he drawled.

"She is," a monotone voice at knee height told him.

Pomp looked down and jumped a bit. Distracted or not, there weren't that many midnight-colored cat-eyed alicorn fillies running around Equestria. Nyx was staring up at him with a half-lidded gaze that spoke endless volumes.  He took a brief moment to be irritated at her impertinence. He could practically feel her thinking Snark at him. Then he looked up at Nyx's mother and his memory clicked and he realized; yes, he was face to face with Twilight Sparkle, protege' of Princess Celestia, Bearer of the Element of Magic, Guardian of the Night Princess.

And she was starting to look very annoyed.

Most ponies would have scorned Pomp and Circumstance as toffee-nosed prisses, but under their frills and macaroni they were as loyal to their duty as any of the Royal Guard. And one never retreated in the face of the enemy. "Lady Sparkle, I know that you and the Princess are intimate, but you are not aware of how sensitive the situation is. Since her return Luna's... eccentricities... have caused rifts with many of the noble houses. Until she learns how to behave like a modern, proper ruler, and stops lollygagging about with common riff-raff--"

"You mean, like us," InkSpot drawled.

"Or the other ponies in Ponyville," Twilight added.

Before anypony could say anything more, there was a knock at the door.  Who should come in but Mr. and Mrs. Cake, pushing a pie-shaped bassinet with two sleeping little backbirds in it. Pumpkin and Pound were snoring away as their parents wheeled them in. The relief on their faces at finding what was obviously a nursery was almost as blatant as the relief on Miss Smiles' face at the sight of actual infants. She bustled over, more than a little pleased to get away from the brewing storm behind her and cooed at the sleeping toddlers.

The Cutie Mark Crusaders, on the other hand, regarded the two sleeping babes as a pony might regard a fizzing time bomb. Not too long ago, several of them had tried their hoof at earning a baby-sitting cutie mark. The experience was seared in the memories of all involved. "So how long you figure we got?" Pip murmured nervously to Applebloom, never taking his eyes off the two seemingly angelic foals.

Applebloom tapped her chin and thought. "Well, I'm guessin' they saw that Pumpkin and Pound nodded off and brought them here for a nap," she said. "Let's say five minutes to notice they were asleep, three to find someone who knew where the nursery was, ten more to make their way here... it's been almost two minutes since they came in... Which means about...uh oh. Five, four, three..."

All the CMC within earshot of Applebloom grimaced and put their hooves over their ears. As soon as the junior Apple reached "one," both Pumpkin and Pound sat up in their rumpled baby costumes, looked around, and began to vent their displeasure at the top of their little lungs. All the adults present reeled back in ear-stunned shock.

"GAH!" Pomp exclaimed, wings fanning in alarm. "Skies above, what's wrong with them??"

"They never nap longer than twenty minutes at a stretch," Nyx yelled over the din. She was lying on the floor, forehooves wrapped over her head, ears pinned flat.

"How long will they keep this up??" the pompous pegasus exclaimed in disbelief.

"Their best time is an hour and a half," Nyx shouted back.

Pomp sputtered, his face turning red. "Deal with this!" he barked at Miss Smiles, who was desperately jouncing first one baby, then the other. He spun about and marched for the door, fuming. Just as he reached it, the door swung open again; there stood Flitter, staring in surprise at the noise, the majordomo, or the erupting corona of pink behind him, it was hard to say which.

For his part, Pomp stood there in the doorway, staring at Flitter in open mouthed disbelief that anyone would be so tacky. "I do not believe this," he exclaimed in outrage. "That anyone would be so crass as to dress as a Changeling-- !" He glared down at Flitter, who cringed back at the sudden hostility in his eyes. "You are coming with me, young lady!"

He stood in the doorway just a hair too long.

Every foal in the room saw the officious pegasus standing there, holding that accursed door open, and saw their opportunity. Pip leapt to his hooves and pointed. "FREEDOM!!" he shouted, and charged. Paper plates and bibs flew in the air as every foal in the room out of diapers scrambled, desperate to grab that vanishing window of hope. In an eyeblink Pomp was trampled to the floor under a hundred cute little hooves.

Nyx gave her mother an apologetic look and a shrug, grabbed her bag of candy canes in her mouth, and ran off after her friends, hopping over the prostrate pegasus.

Pomp looked up from the floor, trampled and bedraggled, just in time to see the last of a horde of loud, messy, noisy, runny nosed foals disappear around a corner, off to spread mayhem through the castle. He had a horrified flash of insight. They wouldn't stay to the haunted castle trails this time, oh no. They would go scurrying to every nook and cranny in the castle they could find, including pouring en masse into the grand ball itself.

"Come back here!" he yelled, struggling to his hooves and attempting to give chase. Alas, he could not; his hooves seemed to be anchored to the stone floor like magnets. One of the little unicorn wretches had cast the Ten Ton Horseshoe spell on him. He lurched out the door, heaving one foot in the air at a time to clank back down on the floor like an anvil, then heaving the next into the air like a cat walking in glue. "Confound it, come back here at once, you little hellions!" He laboriously clunked his way down the hall.

The adults left behind watched with slack jawed bemusement, save for a certain unicorn stallion who was trying VERY hard to look innocent. Twilight looked at him from the corner of her eye. "Ten Ton Horseshoe, huh?" she murmured, amused.

"Nothing beats the classics," Ink Spot murmured back.

"Oh... my," was all Miss Smiles could offer.

The Princess was having herself a high old time.

For close to a thousand years, Princess Celestia had been basically running Equestria alone in the traces. It had taken all that time  to repair most of the damage from Discord's rule and from Luna's brief rebellion, to inch its government  to something between parliamentary rule and a constitutional monarchy, to get the gears of governance running on their own and put the common people's hooves on at least some of the levers. It would probably take another couple of centuries at least to convince the common citizens that they didn't have to physically turn the climate or the seasons, that animals would hibernate, birds would migrate and snow and ice would melt on their own, and Heaven only knew how long before the more intangible, yet more stubborn, attitudes of royalty and nobility were finally sorted out.

In short, she was a busy mare, and liable to be for a long time yet.

But now Luna was back, and the work load was suddenly lightened. Enough that for the first time in decades, Celestia was able to arrange a day off for herself here and there. Like tonight.

The Court of the Night was still in the infancy of its rebirth, though. Few petitioners were finding their way to Luna's throne room; the nobility especially still avoided her, partly out of unfamiliarity, some few out of mistrust, many out of conceit.

That might change a good bit if tonight went as the Princesses planned.

For now, though, they both more or less had the night off. And the Princess made up as Nightmare Moon intended to make the most of it.

She'd been swooping from room to room, hall to hall, sometimes teleporting, sometimes as a cloud of sparkling mist, springing surprises on mare and stallion, colt and filly alike.  She had taken especial care to track down Pipsqueak and chase the little fellow down a hallway or two. She finally cornered him in an antechamber, pinned him down and blew raspberries on the colt's pudgy belly while he squealed with laughter. One could only imagine what the stuffy courtiers had thought of the sight of Nightmare Moon giving a foal tummy-zerberts.  His little unicorn fillyfriend had had certainly looked rather disgruntled, at least till Nightmare Moon had nabbed her and given her belly-zerberts too. A few licorice sticks to each of them and she'd left the tiny two giggling and hiccuping as they weaved their wobbly-legged way off into the castle.

She trotted for the throne room, chuckling to herself at the memory. Her sister was going to be laughing herself sick at the images in the scrying mirror. She started to trot for the throne room and found herself caught by surprise. Two ponies in robes and plain paper masks stepped in her way. They knelt before her, almost prostrate on the glossy-smooth floor. "Forgive us, oh Princess of the Night," one said. The voice was obviously that of a stallion, and it quavered faintly with apprehension. No, with fear. "But we must plead for your aid."

Passing strange. Thinking quickly, she mentally pulled her disguise closer about her."Yes? How may we be of aid to thee?"

The two shook at the strange, echoing voice of Nightmare Moon, but held their ground. "Our daughter has gone missing," the stallion continued. "We believe that she has come here, to your castle, without our permission. We beg your forbearance for her trespass."

The Princess' heart wrenched a little. Was the name of Princess Luna still so fearful to their subjects? Perhaps this was some family of backwoods ponies, living deep in the woods and kept out of touch. They didn't even seem surprised that the Princess of the Night apparently looked like Nightmare Moon. "Do not be afraid, my little ponies," she said kindly. "All the foals of Equestria are welcome here tonight..." Thinking to calm them, she let her Nightmare Moon disguise fall away, revealing the visage of Princess Celestia.

Their reaction was anything but expected. They quailed, crouching even lower to the ground. "Celestia forgive us!" the other-- a mare-- wailed. "We did not know it was you..."

"Princess, please," the stallion said. "We throw ourselves on your mercy! We will both gladly forfeit our lives, if you will but spare our daughter..."

The Princess let her jaw drop, shocked. "What do you mean? What is it you think of me? Show me your faces, my little ponies!"

The two hesitated. Then trembling hooves removed the paper masks, peeled back the darkened hoods.

Kneeling before her, cringing in fear as if they expected to be blasted to ash at any moment, were a male and female Changeling.

The Princess' mouth worked for a moment.

"Oh...My...."