"Now I have to be absolutely, positively certain that you are one hundred percent willing to go along with this," Twilight said to Time Turner. "This project is top secret. Hush hush. Nopony outside must know about it before it is finished. The pay is going to be... phenomenal, but the work is going to be protracted, difficult, and dealing with the extremely arcane, which always has its risks. Are you CERTAIN?" She flared her wings and leaned forward, staring at him wide-eyed with their noses an inch apart.

Time Turner gulped. "Well....I... y-yes," he said. "Derpy and I need the money to... well... make a start of things-- I'm just a little nervous. This is the first time I've ever done any work for Royalty."

Twilight blew a raspberry. "Don't worry about that," she said. "Once we start on this, we're all going to be just fellow teammates before long, I assure you." She nodded to him and the other workers she'd selected. "And I'd like to keep it that way. I don't want you bowing and scraping and 'you're highness-ing' when you ought to be yelling 'run, it's gonna blow!' " This got nervous titters from the mares and stallions gathered.

"I understand we're going to be sequestered?" Somepony said.

"Yes." Twilight waved around her. "We'll all be working and bunking right here in the Starswirl the Bearded wing, and the neighboring staff wing. We'll try and make it as comfortable as possible. Mister Ink Spot--" here she directed their attention to her fiancee, who nodded his head in greeting-- "will be our, well, our outside liason. Everything in or out has to go through him, or me."

"How long will we be sequestered?" Time Turner said, worried. "I thought it was only until the end of this week."

Twilight bit her lip. "Yes," she said. "And no..."

Even as Twilight raced about to create, design, and build a proof-of-concept that might very well change the world, the gears and levers of the Equestrian government, particularly the arcane workings of the Equestrian royal court, continued to turn. Schemes continued to unfold, plots continued to unwind, plans continued to mesh together, the driving cogs utterly oblivious to the vastness of greater events around them and, even were they to be made aware, utterly uncaring.

It was the nature of the machinery of politics that there was really no coherent arrangement to the parts... and more than one set of gears and pulleys and levers was working at cross purposes with the others. For the most part, so long as the master watchsmith known as "Celestia" kept an eye on things, the whole mismatched clockwork continued to function, or at least not cause too much serious difficulty. But if one wasn't careful, some of these gnashing, clashing parts would break loose entirely of their moorings and go pinging about in the inner works, jamming things here and bending parts awry over there, causing rapidly escalating havoc.

It is with that in mind that the narrative now moves to consider two such loose nuts rattling about in the halls of Canterlot Castle. The two were meeting in a little alcove, an area off the beaten path but not too far, where the guards or staff rarely patrolled, and they could be fairly sure they would not be overheard or spied upon by magical means. The castle was full of such little blind spots, or so the elder of the two claimed, and he had carefully mapped them out over years of experience. Again, as he so claimed.

"Well, my boy, it's about time you returned," Duke Blueblood said to his wayward son. "The fortunes of the Unicorn tribe and of the Blueblood clan wait for no stallion."

Prince Blueblood (1) regarded his father unamused. "Yet it apparently managed to wait until the exact moment I got back from my little yachting junket," he said drily. Immediately after that terrifying encounter with not one, but two enraged princesses, Prince Blueblood had wisely decided to recuperate his nerves by taking his personal zeppelin out on a little tour away from the capital. Way, way wayyyy away from the capital. A week or two out in the coastal sun had done marvels for his nerves.

Unfortunately,  he had been back home barely an hour and his dear pater was doing his darnedest to undo all that good work. "None of that backtalk," the Duke said. "You lounge about doing nothing but spend money while the legacy of the unicorn families withers away. Have you no ambition?"

"No," Prince Blueblood said bluntly. "And if you had any sense neither would you."

The elder unicorn turned red. "Why I never--"

"You ought to, father. It's fun," the prince said, idly sniffing at a nearby flower in a vase. "Honestly father, think. We're a royal bloodline. We are landed gentry with noble titles, houses, mansions, and a royal stipend... we could bloody well spend the rest of our lives lounging about doing nothing but spend money and we'd never run out. In fact the commoners would be THANKFUL that we were spending our lives as idle wastrels, rather than haranguing the Crown with bills and decrees and proposals that were sure to upset them. Is putting our family or any unicorn family back on the throne going to make our pillows any fluffier or our wine any sweeter?"

Duke Blueblood's face was a brilliant scarlet now. "You miserable popinjay," he said. "To think that you came from my loins--" he cut himself off. "Boy, you're going to start contributing something to this family's fortunes and ambitions besides your pretty face and your hair care bills," he hissed. "Or so help me I'll have your access to the family funds cut off so completely you won't have a credit rating fit to borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbor's scullery maid."

Prince Blueblood gulped, but managed to (mostly) keep his cool expression. "I never said I wouldn't help," he said.

"Good." Duke Blueblood scowled. "Our first effort to get this new princess under control was... less than satisfactory," he said. He grunted and shifted his stance a little; he was still suffering some pretty severe bruising. "Trying to subdue the uppity little mare by marrying her into a proper, disciplined unicorn family obviously wouldn't work anyway. So we're going to have to try a different approach to diminishing her power---"

"Undermining her popular support," Prince Blueblood said in a monotone.

"--Undermining her popular support," Duke Blueblood smirked. "You have been paying attention after all."

"Hardly," the prince said. "You only have four strategies for dealing with ponies you don't like, Pater; Marry them into some strict family of martinets, ship them off to the boonies, bankrupt them or trash their reputations. All your clever plans are some combination or other of the four."

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Duke Blueblood said.

His son said nothing but he thought plenty. He recalled the fate of one of his younger cousins, a vivacious young thing who had annoyed his father by getting "uppity."  Duke Blueblood had made an example of her by talking her father into marrying her off to a brute of a stallion who was known among the gossips for his brutish behavior... drinking heavily and striking the maids so violently he left bruises.

Of course that had backfired somewhat, when on their honeymoon the groom was eaten by a crocodile.  It was a tragic event, a complete freak accident, everypony said;  Blueblood personally always thought it was suspicious that Celestia's wedding gift had been a trip to Zebrabwe, complete with tickets for a cruise down the crocodile-infested Amarezon river. And Blueblood was fairly sure there wasn't actually any Zebra marriage tradition that called for the newlywed groom to sit in a chair hanging off the prow of the boat with a string of "lucky" fish in his lap... The young widow, by Celestia's decree, had ended up inheriting every last dime of her late husband's estate as well as his royal stipend (an even bigger blow to the Blueblood estate), and was now merrily spending it all on touring the world and writing a wildly popular series of travelogues of her adventures.

Then there was the time he had tried to ruin a mare's reputation with a whisper campaign of scandalous rumors. A Sapphire something-or-other... Dear Pater had apparently never heard the saying "there's no such thing as bad press." The mare in question had diverted the budding scandal into Equestria-wide notoriety, and had ridden her own coattails into a pop music career that literally thrived on her own outrageousness.

Then there were the soldiers he'd tried to have exiled to some Maker-forsaken post in the frozen North-- who had somehow ended up being diverted to a post several hundred miles eastward, in the dazzling verdant oasis of the Crystal Empire. Or the servants he'd swore would never work in Canterlot ever again. He was true to his word; they never had. They were too busy spending their sweepstakes winnings.

Quite a lot of Duke Blueblood's machinations had ended up the same way; his would-be target booted upstairs, diverted to plush positions elsewhere, sentences commuted, "punishments" dealt out that the victims would have begged for under other circumstances... little slips, little errors in paperwork, a sly word here and there from the crown and while father had his "revenge" his innocent victims somehow resurfaced elsewhere, untouched. And there at the end of it all would be the Princess, sitting there with that ineffable smile....

But then again, quite a lot of them had not.

Prince Blueblood was a ponce, a sissy, a twit and a coward, but he was not, in fact or theory, a moron. Half the reason for his falling out with his own father had been because by the mere age of twelve It had been obvious to him that his father's circle of conspirators were light years out of their league. They imagined themselves chessmasters, when in fact they were going up against a true grand master with nothing under their belts but a school yard championship in tiddlywinks.

Then he recalled his father's most recent misadventure and shuddered. When the throne room had exploded in cosmic flame... There, he thought, was proof positive that with Celestia one could in fact go just one hoofstep too far.  It had been like discovering in mid-move that your chess rival had suddenly decided to take up kickboxing.

"Will you pay attention?" Duke Blueblood snapped. The prince snapped out of his reverie.

"What?

"You were standing there staring into space for five minutes," Duke Blueblood said. "Honestly, is your skull full of nothing but hairspray and gin?"

Prince Blueblood sniffed, wounded. "Well, what were you saying?"

"I was saying," the Duke said with the feigned patience of one dealing with the mentally dim, "that we are going to have to use a more... dispersed tactic to bring Princess Twilight to heel."

"You mean we'll have to make scattered attacks against her through intermediaries, so Princess Celestia and Princess Luna don't find out who's responsible."

Duke Blueblood harrumphed but didn't deny it. "We have been given a rare windfall opportunity," he said. He produced an envelope from inside his expensive suit coat and passed it over to Prince Blueblood. The prince opened it and found a stack of cheap instant photographs inside; he began leafing through them with a raised eyebrow. "Twilight Sparkle has been running amuck in the royal library," Duke Blueblood said. "She's all but barricaded herself in the Starswirl the Bearded wing and is working nonstop on some project-- something apparently to do with the hearings before this Court of Cosmic Whatevers. In all the mess she's making, she dropped these photos on a stack of paperwork and forgot them."

"And what am I to do with them?" Prince Blueblood asked in bemusement.

"Take a look at them, boy. You can see that some of those photos could be, shall we say, interpreted badly if you gave them the right spin..." the Duke smirked. "Which is just what we want. You're going to get in contact with your riff-raffish friends in the tabloid press, and you're going to convince them to gin up a story with them. I wrote a few suggestions for your pet ink-noses to get them started."

Blueblood regarded the pictures skeptically. He could see the "suggestions" written in the margins. "Noone's going to buy this, Father dear," he said. "Not even the Barnyard Bargains shopper trash is dullwitted enough to believe these sorts of stories."

"It doesn't matter," the Duke said. "The idea is to pepper the target with hundreds of accusations... too many for anypony to sit down and sort through. Repeat an idea often enough, and it gains a momentum all its own. Right now the great unwashed are thrilled by her novelty and think that she's "one of them" because she came from nothing, hangs about with peasants, and is marrying below her newly lofted station. Eventually the sheer number of 'questions' will have ponies muttering about her, and popular opinion will begin to turn against her. At the very least they'll have her a frazzled wreck."

"Not hard to do," Prince Blueblood muttered, recalling stories of some of the more epic freakouts by Celestia's favorite student. And therefore not a bad strategy, he had to admit. He remembered to sniff in scorn. "But what in Equestria makes you think I can make the tabloid trash jump to my tune?"

Duke Blueblood smiled coldly at his son. "Don't pee on my leg and try to tell me it's raining, boy," he said. "You've been priming the gossip columns and tabloids for years with stories about yourself. You figure that as long as you look like a ponce and a twit, nopony will saddle you with any responsibility or expect you to do anything."

Prince Blueblood gulped. He was caught out.

It was true. Prince Blueblood had always been... deliberately careless about the image he cultivated. He routinely offended ponies, deliberately alienating the powerful and influential, cozying up to other royal layabouts, doing his best to get his face on the front page as an irresponsible partying playboy...

Then, at the Grand Galloping Gala two or three yeas ago, it had turned around and bit him. Prince Blueblood had been latched onto by an obvious ladder-climber.(2) He had amused himself by behaving like an absolute lout and embarrassing her the whole evening, only to have the tables turned on him at the end when she proceeded to verbally lash him to bits in front of the Canterlot elite then splatter him with cake like a circus clown. He had burned with a need for revenge against the gold-digging little chit... until Princess Celestia herself had taken him aside and informed him that he had grievously offended the Bearer of the Element of Generosity, one of the greatest national heroes of Equestria and a favorite of the Crown, and that she was terribly upset and disappointed with him.

He had very nearly soiled himself. There was low caste, middle caste, and high caste-- and then there were ponies who were above and beyond any caste system at all, who were in a category all their own that made them literally untouchable. The Element Bearers were on that level. They were from low or middling backgrounds, had no wealth, were of no social influence by birth and were intimately connected with arcane forces the Princesses themselves could not touch. In a way, Twilight Sparkle had actually taken a step down on the social ladder by becoming a Princess. Mucking about with the Element Bearers through social warfare was like banging on a stack of land mines with a stick, and Prince Blueblood, already on the outs because of his own deliberate antics, had spent the entire evening playing a drum solo on them.

No, Prince Blueblood had burned all his bridges ages ago. He was on the outs with Celestia, with the Elements of Harmony, and with everypony and anypony who was at all connected with them. His best hope for this latest scheme of his father's was to quietly follow through, get clear, and hope that when the horseapples hit the windmill he would be left in a relatively splatter-free zone.

"Oh don't choke on your tie, boy. Go ahead and play the useless ninny, for all I care. Just don't expect me to go along with it. You're going to make your underestimated little self useful to me from now on."

Prince Blueblood cleared his throat. "Will there be anything else?" He said faintly.

"No, for now. Gassing up the tabloids is your only job for now," the Duke said. "If you can think of any other juicy rumors about Twilight Sparkle or her cronies, you have permission to use them."

You have permission, Prince Blueblood thought dismally. It was obvious who was on which end of the leash in this family.

"I have some other angles I'll be working with my own contacts in the respectable branches of the media," the Duke went on, making sure to slather the disdain on the sentence. "A few weeks of having her friends and family used as a punching bag by the press, she'll be more willing to cooperate. The more she cooperates, the more we ease up on her. She'll toe the line, soon enough." The Duke looked at his pocket watch. "I expect to see tabloid headlines by tomorrow, boy. Don't disappoint me." With that, he turned and trotted off down the abandoned hallway.

Blueblood groaned silently to himself in disgust and stuck the envelope in his jacket pocket. So this was what it meant to be in the big leagues, he thought. To go from being a fop with a martinet for a father figure, to being a flunky for a cut rate movie serial villain. He could at least hope that when it did all hit the fan, it wouldn't be spread with perfect uniformity.

1)There was an incredibly long and tedious explanation as to why the son of a Duke should be called a Prince, but even contemplating it always gave Prince Blueblood a headache. Quite frankly all that mattered to him was that at a fairly young age he had managed to locate the wordy precedent in some book of heraldry and convince his "Auntie" Celestia to implement it. Prior to that, it had been his fate to be referred to as a "Dauphin..." which had proven extremely unfortunate when he entered elementary school, as the wittier students had taken to making squeaking noises and throwing fish at him when the teacher wasn't looking.

2)Obvious because unlike any female in his actual social circle, she had been eager to be around him.