2/18

“What?”

“It's a bit of an escalation… Admittedly I was totally unprepared for the gambit. Luna was always good at strategy, however. I quick and brutal strike at a dear place when I’m least suspecting it. I’m not surprised in the least.”

 “Wh-” I nearly repeated myself, but realized I wasn’t likely to get anything more out of that line of inquiry. “You’re saying she kidnapped me as, what, some kind of joke?”

“No, not a joke,” Celestia said with a grim certainty. “A prank.”

“She forcibly fellated me several times. She made it sound like she was trying to convert me away from you. She kidnapped me and still has Rock hostage. That’s a prank?”

Celestia looked back at me and tilted her head to the side. “That’s… not a prank?”

I stared at her a little dumbfounded. “You’re kidding me! A prank is like, throwing water on someone while they’re sleeping. Or throwing eggs at their house. Not like, kidnapping and brainwashing!”

Celestia blinked a couple of times and muttered to herself. She paced back over to her whiteboard and flipped it around, where a series of complex diagrams laid and she continued to think as she stared at the figures, then turned back to face me.

“We may have lost some sort of sense of scale,” she admitted. I looked at her, slackjawed in utter horror, confusion, amazement. “In our defense,” she continued. “We have been engaged in pranking each other for several hundred years. When Luna returned from the moon, there was a bit of awkwardness, but eventually we were able to continue where we left off.”

“And… nobody tries to stop you?” I asked. “They just let you, what, destroy half the castle in the name of a prank?”


“We have very strict rules on that sort of thing!” Celestia protested hotly. “After the first time we destroyed a castle we made a strict compact to avoid harming anything other than each other’s belongings.”

“You destroyed a- she considers me your-” I felt myself losing a bit of focusing, swooning ever so slightly. “Look, I don’t understand how this helps us get Rock back.”

“Rock is fine,” Celestia said, putting up a hoof to halt my protests. “I doubt she simply has some uses for him.”

“Uses? Like what? Grilling him for information? Reprogramming his mind?”

“No,” Celestia shook her head. “Even with the lens of this being a prank, Luna is clearly sexually frustrated.”

That got me. I considered Luna’s actions and realized that yes, she had been a bit insistent on the points of her plan. Combine that with the fact that she had stopped chasing me after she had gotten ahold of Rock and the fact that she was Celestia’s sister…

“Oh.” I said. “So. We don’t really need to save Rock.”

Celestia shook her head sagely. “I think he’d be rather opposed to it, in fact. He’ll be back tomorrow, if I had to guess.”

I needed a second to clear my head, anxiety and stress melting away.