Written by: RainbowDoubleDash
After the devastation wrought by Zecora's curse in the previous story, Ponyville is a disaster area, and requests funding from the government to help repair the town. There's just one little problem: The pony in charge of allocating said funds is Night Light, Twilight Sparkle's father. And he's got a grudge against Trixie for the part she played in getting Twilight made a fugitive.
The finale of Season 1 and the end of the Night Court arc.
Tropes in this fic include:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Raindrops, watching Blueblood on the prowl for a lady companion for the Gala, notes that it's a little bit attractive.
- Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Puissance's interest in scheming against the Elements is forgotten in favour of messing around with her new telegraph system.
- The Bus Came Back: Zizane returns, and is finally arrested.
- Chekhov's Boomerang: Truth is a Scourge, which Trixie had previously been tinkering with back in "Tales of Ponyville". She's got it mostly worked out here.
- Children Are Innocent: Flicker, Puissance's great-grandson, repeats his father's words about Puissance to her face, not realizing there might just be a reason his dad says it's a bad thing Puissance is still alive, and that it isn't a good idea to say these things to her.
- Didn't See That Coming: Pinkie Pie, both figuratively and literally, plowing into Blueblood and saving him from being poisoned by sheer Pinkieness.
- Zizanie using strange abilities to avoid capture, resulting in her being outed as a Discordian, which nopony knew about.
- Zizanie again when the one thing she has on Luna* turns out to be worthless, as it's already in the process of becoming public knowledge.
- The entire Night Court gets their dirty secrets exposed to Luna, even if she can't actually punish them as the damning evidence she has is legally inadmissible, as she can now make it clear she won't allow it to continue, by threatening to replace them with the local mayors if they screw up again.
- Trixie and friends getting dubbed Knights Of The Realm and granted the Right Of Approach* was not an expected outcome. They just wanted to catch Zizanie, show Luna how utterly corrupt the Night Court is, and encourage her to do something about it.
- Dramatic Irony: With a dash of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good. Puissance thinks Cheerilee is directly challenging her not-so-subtle attempts to dictate the course of Equestria's education system, being the Little Pony standing Up to the Scheming Noble. Actually, Cheerilee is just asking questions, and has no idea Puissance has done anything.
- Engineered Public Confession: En masse... though Trixie's actual target is Zizane. The confessions extracted from the Court are inadmissible due to the nature of truth poisons. Doesn't mean a lot of them blurt out several things they shouldn't have...
- Even Evil Has Standards: Fisher is a scheming tribalist, but when Luna yells blue murder at her courtiers, he is one of the few who has the decency to look ashamed.
- Fantastic Racism: Fisher, a unicorn tribalist, takes the time to dismiss Ponyville's story of a curse as "earth pony superstition". Then he feels the need to go that little bit extra and say "earth pony farmer superstition".
- Gone Horribly Right: Trixie's actions end up catching Zizane, who spills a lot of beans to Luna in exchange for not dying, but in the process pisses her mentor off something truly mighty.
- Humiliation Conga: After spending the entire season, and indeed the story, being a smug manipulative bastard, Greengrass is subject to a truth poison that makes him blurt out exactly what he plans and how he feels about Luna to her face. He's last seen running off, complaining about his game being ruined.
- Trixie gets one herself, courtesy of Night Light and Shining Armor, as she tries to get a hold of Night Light, and later Luna, all as revenge for Trixie ruining Twilight Sparkle's reputation and forcing her to go on the run as a fugitive.
- Innocently Insensitive: Night Light tells Ditzy she's too young to know what it's like to be a worried parent. Ditzy isn't offended, since he wasn't trying to be rude about it, but she does clarify that she does in fact know what it's like.
- I Told You So: At the beginning, Mayor Scroll tells Applejack that, since they're facing disaster and famine, she can declare this. Given the situation, Applejack really doesn't want to.
- Manchild: We get a look inside Greengrass's head, and he's basically this. Just one with a lot of political savvy to go with it. Even his last act in the story is quitting because ruining other ponies lives "isn't fun anymore".
- Modest Royalty: Luna shows up at the Gala, where she usually makes a big show of wearing the fanciest clothes possible, looking much more plain than usual, as part of her apology to the ponies of Ponyville.
- My Beloved Smother: And Great-Grand Smother to boot. Puissance is insistent on controlling every aspect of her children and grandchildren's lives, up to and including what they name their foals. The ones who rebel... well, she deals with them.
- Never My Fault:
- Night Light thinks Trixie is only apologizing for what happened to his daughter Twilight Sparkle because it's come to have political consequences for her, but offers her the Sadistic Choice below as a chance to prove she's sincere. He's actually doing this himself, as he is withholding Ponyville's emergency funds as revenge against Trixie for the selfsame incident and doesn't care that what he's doing is illegal. In his mind, Ponyville's problems are Trixie's fault for what she did to his daughter.
- Blueblood responds to Luna's opening speech at the Gala by muttering that he isn't sure he deserved the aspertions cast on him, noting that when a Viceroy is up to something, there's not a lot someone like him can do. Trixie disagrees.
- Puissance, after Luna's castigation, is mentioned as storming out acting like she didn't deserve to be yelled. Note that in her case, said crimes included falsifying evidence against her own child.
- No-Sell: When Truth is a Scourge goes off, everypony present starts saying exactly what they're thinking and are unable to stop... except Pinkie Pie, who's like that anyway. Well, except for sounding a little angry about waffle-houses.
- Blueblood as well, as every time he was served a spiked drink, Pinkie took it for herself.
- Obfuscating Insanity: Was Pinkie just "being Pinkie" when she kept taking Blueblood's drinks spiked with Truth is a Scourge, or did she know something was wrong with the drinks and trying to protect him from whatever she thought it was?
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: Shining Armor uses his position to make Trixie's day annoying, as he vowed he would. But he pales compared to his father Night Light, who vows if Trixie doesn't either resign as Representative or bring his daughter back to him, he'll utterly destroy any chance of her having a career. He also holds off on delaying emergency funds to Ponyville, solely to spite her, and knowing full well he couldn't do it forever, and settled for as long as possible before Luna ordered him to do it already.
- Out-Gambitted: Subverted. The Night Court thinks Luna did this to them centuries ago by bequeathing a lordship to every mayoral office in Equestria, knowing full well about their total corruption, and all Zizanie had done was Give Her A Reason to get rid of them, and legally at that. The subversion is that Luna actually hadn't known about how deeply it had run. The mayoral offices getting lordships wasn't a counter-plan. Zizanie had indeed enlightened her to how bad it was. However, when Luna notices them jumping to this conclusion, she sees no reason to correct them.
- Please Put Some Clothes On: Puissance's thoughts on seeing Luna at the gala. Mainly because she's wearing an ostentatious dress made to show off her massive wealth, and Luna's modesty look is making her look bad.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Hoo, boy. Leaving out-of-universe matters aside, the reinstated version of Trixie faking having spiked Blueblood's drink with Truth is a Scourge (it bears repeating that she didn't actually do so) adds on a Discussion of this trope where Trixie's friends call her out on the matter when just the previous night Luna castigated the entire Night Court for similar antics. Trixie has to explain that the purpose was to distract Blueblood long enough for the dust to settle and he would leave them alone. She even makes it clear she doesn't like it either, but it was either that or risk Blueblood trying to use what he knows against them in the near future. This way, he's kept busy long enough for the reforms to settle in, and knows they can play his game and play it better than him.
- Sadistic Choice: Night Light offers Trixie one when she confronts him: Either resign as Representative, or find his daughter and convince her to come back to him, and he'll consider the matter closed. If she does neither, then he will obstruct every bill she puts into the Night Court and oppose her every motion.
- Suddenly Shouting: Luna flips her lid at the Night Court, even getting some extra-large font for her anger. It's simultaneously awesome and terrifying, and intentionally so. See You Are Better Than You Think You Are below.
- Shout-Out: Luna's explosion above was based on Augustus doing the same at Julia's promiscuity in I, Claudius.
- Too Dumb to Live: One very stupid noble tries "um, actually"-ing Luna when she's furious, and says she should just get rid of the whole lot of them. See Out-Gambitted above for the details.
- Vicious Cycle: Luna reveals to Trixie that the Night Court has gone through some nasty corruption in the past, and she's done what she feels is her best to curb and contain it. Trixie and the other Element Bearers disagree on that last part.
- Wham Line: When Trixie calls out Night Light over his Sadistic Choice he in turn calls her out for wanting to be part of the Night Court without knowing how the Night Court functions. Cue Heroic BSoD as Trixie realizes the problem isn't certain ponies in the Night Court, but the Night Court itself.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Goes with the above. Luna has more power than she actually uses, but refuses to use it because she's terrified she'd wind up a tyrant like Corona that rules through fear. Trixie and friends, both through their plan with Zizanie, and the conversation after the Night Court's castigation, make it clear she needs to step up and actually rule Equestria, and that seeing how her sister fell means she would never do the same. While it's true that the Night Court is scared now, with Luna more actively policing the government's actions, they'll remember to respect the Crown going forward.
