#jordanis

(Fimfiction link)

The sun rose, and the moon set. Celestia stepped off her balcony and into her bedroom, and Luna followed after her. The marks of a long day were plain on the larger pony; her hooves barely cleared the ground, her mane and tail trailed along limply after her, and she punctuated all this droopiness by tumbling onto the bed in an undignified sprawl. Luna was used to these minor theatrics, and settled herself neatly to Celestia's left, just behind her shoulder. She gave her sister a long moment in deference to the depth of her desperate flop before speaking.

“And how were they today, dear sister?”

Celestia's deep sigh trailed off into a quiet whine. “Ennnnh.”

Luna nodded sagely. Her horn lit, and she took Celestia's mane in her field. “No worse than usual, surely?”

Her sister's nose wrinkled, and she raised a hoof to waggle back and forth non-commitally. Finally, she managed to find real words. “Have you seen Duchess Cloudsdale's aid bills? They're straight out of the Archives. Positively antique. Never mind last year, they're last century.”

Commander Hurricane would have approved, thought Rainbow Dash. A moment later, she scrunched up her nose in distaste. Great, now even the inside of her head was starting to sound like Twilight! This was getting out of hoof.

She shook her head, still frowning, as she swooped through the gap in the cloudbank. It was a thick bank—even at Rainbow's habitual pace, there was a long moment of shade before she emerged through the other side of the wall of cloud. There wasn't much more sun on the other side than there had been inside the tunnel, but it was enough to be noticable.

The reason it was still so gloomy was easy. Or, well... easy enough to say, anyway. It was an entire, enormous room in a really big cloud, and as easy as it had been to say “no problem!” to Twilight when she'd asked, it had not been easy to do.

The view opened up in front of Rainbow: a hundred yards away, the far wall loomed. The entire area had a cloud floor, and looking up, maybe fifty yards overhead, there was a puffy, light grey cloud ceiling. And smack dab in the center was the only dash of color in the whole place: Rainbow's cloud house, same as ever. Except for the 'being built into an enormous cloud fortress' part. That was pretty new.

It was... weird. A room this big was just wrong. It was too big to feel like 'inside', so it felt like she ought to be able to see free, open sky somewhere. The fact that she couldn't set all her instincts to twinging, telling her it had to be some kind of horrible, freak thunderstorm artifact, or the center of a tornado, and to get get getout getout. All she actually did was ruffle her wings for a moment before taking off again, towards the house.

Yeah, this really needed to change. She couldn't live like this any more. Twi was gonna have to find a new way to deal with her little infestations. She was a princess—couldn't she just make it legal to turn ponyrazzis into frogs or oranges or something?

That seemed like it would be for the best for everyone.

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