"Plus, I'm the Voice of Inadvisable Dreams," Voice added mischievously. "If I don't feature in at least a few dreams, I'm clearly not trying hard enough."
Cadance choked, rapidly turning red with embarrassment, and even Celestia looked taken aback.
I'm disturbed, yet impressed. She got Cadance with that one!
"Not all the names are accurate, of course. It's not as though I'm actually a demon. You don't have anything to worry about."
Um...
Um...
Oh, Harmony, She's going to be following me and acting like this the whole time, isn't She?
I quietly whimpered and stifled the irrational urge to flee. This was fine.
Being Sunset is Suffering.
Now now Shimmer, I know it's hard to grasp that the entity with power is acting submissive to you, since you think power should be plain about it and dominating with presence and deed instead of 'hiding behind a mask', but really, sometimes the most powerful position one can have is that of the submissive, just ask Cadance about it, I'm sure she'd be happy to explain.
...And somehow I didn't expect where that was going to go. Well done.
I'm certainly not going to be founding a subversive cult with the intention of eventually overthrowing Celestia and instating myself as goddess-empress.
Suspiciously Specific Denial?
A cult wasn't quite what I'd imagined when Voice mentioned previously overthrowing a tyrannical dynasty, I would admit. The way She talked about it, I'd assumed she was just helping other ponies in their preexisting rebellion
...The fact that she trolls people makes these reveals slightly less worrying. But only slightly.
"Oh, if my known presence would cause issues around her, I'll certainly be happy to let you forget about me during those times," She said quickly.
Translation:
Twilight gets to giggle at the strange maid that only she can see, that's making funny faces at Sunset.
My attempt didn't work immediately and did require a few minutes of tweaking, but sure enough, I did manage to find the rune in question:
Honesty.
Is that Celestia projecting on Sunset or something? I get that it's either representing or actually
from an Element, but that sounds like a mind control spell the way it's used here without that information...
Admittedly, that was for smaller and lesser spells rather than a grand working like this, and she had been the one to teach me that forced emotions could consume the caster if they let even a trace of doubt bleed into their work…
Maybe forced love was an exception?
Cadance:
I have a sudden urge to slap a... horse.
And I don't know why.
I glanced back at her to idly note that Inkwell was a unicorn today. Rumor had it that there were actually two twins masquerading as a single Raven Inkwell, thus explaining both her differences in appearance and how she got so much done. I knew better. She just happened to be very good at self-transformation spells. I wasn't sure that I'd ever seen her as a pegasus, though, just as an earth pony and unicorn.
...Actually, I'd never seen her transforming, either. She was definitely the same pony instead of twins, right? Right?
I vaguely recall something about this. Aren't there
actually two of them or something?
I instinctually turned to see Voice's reply, and instantly regretted it. She remained in maid mode.
This is still funny
in context.
Regardless of the reason, a prolonged, excited "eeeeeeeeee–" soon transformed into phantom notes filling the room without a source.
How
do the Princess(es) deal with this? Do they just sit calmly at the table sipping tea and ignoring the singing conga line of whatever tripped the local harmony meter?
I was immediately forced to wonder: Why and how does this pony have measurements of Cadance and Celestia?
Probably best not to know.
You can bet Dreams is snickering into a wing, though. This is getting fun.
"Her School said I'm surely wrong,
My tribe would make me stall.
I thought I must stay strong
And could still show them all!
Alivaril did that Mad Science quest a while back, which also had singing while inventing crimes against physics. I wonder if this is a shoutout to that, or if it's foreshadowing instead?
I stared at the giddy, vibrating young mare before me and couldn't quite decide if employing Flighty was the best choice ever, or one that was going to end so catastrophically badly that we would accidentally make the castle explode.
BothIsGood.gif
More seriously, I do suspect both will happen at some point.
I could see it going either way, especially since I was already close to finding whatever ponies had rejected her from Celestia's School and setting them on fire. The foals there didn't wish they had Flighty's drive, and that was the problem!
At this rate I think she has a divine (ascension pending) right...
Eldritch God Empowered Mare Versus Modern Educational System
...The school system would win. I had the misfortune to see "instructions" for how to solve some math problem and pretty much had a Sunset trying to figure out how, let alone why.
That leaves alone the stuff that's actually complicated, like the chain rule, use of trig functions when integrating, or various uses of partial derivatives. This was how to multiply or something equally banal, and it was
incomprehensible.
That said, there's also a "joke" about how to solve the problem 15-8, and it shows you how to properly do the carry so you can reduce the problem to 15-8. I will readily admit that this hits close to the mark when I was learning to subtract.
Pretty sure Celestia set this up, as a direct followup of
If that's true, it really shows how good she's gotten over her millennia of rule. That is some amazingly subtle subterfuge going on there.
