Harvest 12th 3473 EE
Busy busy busy! It's just as well we have a civil government set up and taking care of day to day matters within what's left of Maresia, as our time is fully taken up with stabilising the ecology. In future years it should be easier, we'll have the tools and processes in place to make things work without our personal intervention, but right now we're still setting them up, and using Alicorn awesomeness to make up the shortfall.
I'm rushed off my hooves… wings… flashy fiery transporty effect… well whatever means of personal movement you care to name, I'm still rushed off it, or them as the case may be. I'm continually having to dash all over Equestria, solving problems that didn't even _exist_ until now, teaching, persuading and downright browbeating ponies to do things the right way, which is to say, my way.
I've never had so much fun in my life!
I've been taking time out from the run-around, evaporating whole acres of seawater with my solar powers to form clouds and shunting them in the right direction to supplement the sparse natural cloud cover. We've mapped the natural high level cloud streams that are less affected by the suppressant effect, and I've been shamelessly using them to get clouds to where they're needed. However, it still requires me to flash to the destination and organise pegasi teams to bring the clouds down.
Luna has focussed more on training our subjects in what to do with the fields and animals, starting in Maresia and working outwards. At one point, despite the food we could recover from the irradiated zone, I was worried how we would feed and house all the detransformed refugees we were recovering.
However, I solved that one with a twofer. They are being trained up as well, and being sent out to other Fifes and towns to train the ponies of those areas. However, their expeditions still need a lot of personal attention from both of us. It's just as well we can be anywhere in Equestria within a few heartbeats. It may also be helpful in the future that there are groups of ponies all over Equestria who are sworn to us.
It's just as well, we've been racing desperately to get things organised before the harvest starts in earnest. Of course, the really major efforts won't be needed until we have to shift the season to fall. Pegasus teams will have to lead the migratory birds south, and the rest of us dig winter burrows for creatures and shake the leaves off the trees. I'm hoping to make it a sort of competition, a race to make it easier to sell to the populous.
Part of the problem is that different areas require different solutions. For example, a farming community like Ponyville has more earth ponies and different requirements than a unicorn heavy city like Canterlot. Adapting the procedures to manual labour or magic and optimising it for the location is what's taking up the time.
Speaking of time, timing becomes critical, which led us to the requirement for calendar reform… Alicorn style! We've let the world slow down by a third of an hour per day, and Luna has let the moon out into a slightly wider orbit. By my calculations, this should result in a year of three hundred and sixty days, and a month of thirty days.
Ponies will be able to tell what day it is, or the time of month by observing the phase of the moon, and key dates will coincide with full, half or new moons. No more odd days added to the end of months to make things work, and since the majority of ponies are illiterate, no need for written calendars! Not that I intend to let that stand, but fostering universal literacy is a long-term project.
There's been resistance of course, mostly in the Fifes that were controlled by the conspirators. While they're with the ancestors, many of their families and heirs are following their policies, and hate the two of us personally for killing them. The King has been as good as his word, but many of the worst ones are in border Fifes, far from Canterlot, with the largest forces of private guardsmen.
We've had very little resistance from the common ponies, despite the efforts at propaganda that some of the nobility have made. Firstly, our pegasus-borne message got there first, secondly, the very Fifes that have the most conservative nobility are the very ones that are hardest on the common pony, and finally, those same common ponies seem to have had most of the gumption knocked out of them by that same effort.
They're habituated to obey orders, no matter how crazy, because if they didn't they suffered. Is it any wonder that given a choice between taking orders of the very nobles who brutalised them, and the ones who stormed in and removed their worst tormentors, they choose us? I'm not proud of the fact that we're using what we did as a motivator, but the survival of more than Equestria is at stake, and if something has to suffer, I'd rather it was our feelings than a whole lot of ponies.
Luna is even less happy than I am about it, but she's been steadfast in actually doing the work. Have I mentioned how much I love my little sister? I've just checked my past entries, and it seems I haven't in so many words. So I will now. I love my sister, I always have, and no more so than now, when she's backing my every effort, filling in the gaps, working her horn off to make my ideas a reality while dealing with her own grief. I do my best to reciprocate, but I'm not really good at it.
Peeking again? Stop blushing Luna, you know I mean every word of it. Yes, you're the only one who'd ever be able to find this diary, or open it, so I put this in for you. I just wish I were better at saying it out loud.
Back to the keeps in the borderlands. Some of the geniuses in those Fifes are crazy enough to do more than just grumble. Some have tried countermanding our orders, interfering with the work that's being done, and the teams of ponies we've sent to help. A couple have even used force, obviously thinking that as in days of yore the king will just sit back and let them have their heads.
Instead they've been handed their heads. My ideas about combining flying chariots with soldiers to improve mobility have started to bear fruit. When I first raised them with Sergeant Major Apony, he seemed about ready to tell me to stick to raising the sun, but by the time I'd finished, he was willing to admit, grudgingly, that I might have something, maybe.
One of the things that really stuck in his craw was opening the guard to mares. But it's the only way to get enough pegasi to provide the air component of the new force structure. For that matter, while our projected army strength is pitiful compared to some of the larger Fifes, it's still a significant chunk of our population.
I made things slightly less annoying by adding a refinement. I worked out a minor enchantment, and yes, I can do that now, I studied theory back when I was a pegasus and now I have the horn to do the practical part of it. Luna's still far better at spell crafting, but I'm not going to add more work to her over-full nosebag.
As I said, I worked out a minor enchantment based on one of Luna's illusion spells to add to armour. The guard armour is good quality, hardened leather-bark and canvas brigandine, complete with metal reinforced helms, stained blue and usually worn with a saddle-coat with the Maresian coat of arms.
While wearing the armour, all pegasi look like white males with blue manes, all unicorns and earth ponies look like grey males with white manes. If you're wondering why an Equality Crusader made the pegasi different, it's because if we ever need forward scouting, having a colour scheme that blends with the sky might be useful.
I also added a little refinement that's a minor variation of the levitation spell used for flying chariots on the armour. If someone falls out, they will fall at normal rate but land softly. I added it purely as a safety feature, but the Sergeant Major is starting to incorporate deliberate jumps into the training.
I can see the advantage, rather than having to land the chariot to disembark, ponies just drop out of the sky. A useful tweak to my idea of rapid deployment. Rapid deployment was needed to deal with the worst of our problem Fifes. It was also an assassination attempt on Luna, one of the more flamboyant ones, so we let it run out so we could stop it very publicly.
Oh yes, with everything else, I haven't mentioned the assassination attempts. It stems from the same basic fact, that a lot of the people who are most annoyed with us are also the ones with more marks than brains. It's just as well that our bodies seem pretty much invulnerable, and that our foes still haven't pegged that our clairvoyance is dependant on sunlight or moonlight.
It's one of the reasons we let some of the plots come almost to fruition, the ones that won't harm bystanders. Subtle poisons, projectiles, blades, spells, it's all vegetable soup to our manna-enhanced constitutions. I'm actually getting quite fond of the taste of arsenic, it's tangy...
Obviously the next strategy to try would be containment, but I've spent a few moments trying to figure out one that works, and I can't. Physical containment, we can bull through or blast through almost anything or wink away. Magical containment, you need more power than one of us to make it work.
Even those containment wards that charge themselves from the energy contained have limits, especially in charge and discharge rate. We could simply overload them by pouring in power more quickly than they could adapt to. Then of course, our linked ley-line is like a secret passage that could bypass it entirely.
About the only possibilities I can see is to de-stabilise our ley-lines and use it to draw us into our linked astronomical body. However, that would also require more power than either of us could handle, let alone a regular unicorn or even a gestalt. The other would be if we could be disconnected from our ley-lines we'd suddenly get a lot easier to kill. But once again, you need more power than either of us have, a lot more.
So back to the plot in question. We'd been watching the whole thing take shape, so when Luna went to check up on the Shire, our old not-even-slightly friend Alfalfo's domain, we already had our counter-strategy in place.
Alfalfo himself took over the family when his father had the bad planning to be part of the conspiracy against us, despite his 'unique' status, and without a single hint of remorse as far as we can tell. Maybe because his father barely tolerated him after he had the 'accident' with the rebounding red-hot poker and his private body parts.
So Luna came around on her regular visit, unaccompanied, as is our regular practice (no-pony can keep up with us, after all unless we tow them). She was talking to Applebuck, the leader of the Maresia ponies we'd sent to help, getting a progress report. Then, from over the hills several miles away, and from what they must have fondly considered to be a concealed trench, Shire guards launched a dozen magically guided trebuchet stones, massive things weighing at least 50 pony-weights apiece.
They were enchanted to home in on the most powerful magical signature there, in other words Luna. Alfalfo has some feeble idea that if he could destroy one of us, and prove we could be killed, he could raise a popular rebellion among the border Fifes. Insane, but I think he was more than slightly unhinged to begin with, considering his tastes. He failed to account for the fact that in the event of success, I would then proceed to melt his castle into a pool of lava.
Of course, the actual ponies operating the catapults weren't insane, just well paid and unaware of what the target was. The trebuchets were targeted on a particular area, and they'd been told to fire them off when they got a particular signal. They didn't know Alfalfo's plan, or that he'd planned to have them poisoned as soon as they'd done the deed to cover his flanks.
So there they were, my sister and an innocent bunch of ponies about to be smashed under enough rock to build a fair sized castle, and she just looked up and shrugged, mainly for the benefit of the ponies from Maresia, and the locals. Then she cranked up her horn and started flicking those rocks away like baseballs, reversing their direction in mid-air.
Just to drive the point home, she let the one that had successfully targeted on her come crashing in, spun on her fore hooves and bucked it back the way it came. I was up on a cloud, using my solar sight to provide targeting knowledge, but until then I hadn't interfered.
I did with the return flight, providing some terminal guidance so that not only did each of those rocks hit the trebuchet that launched them, utterly wrecking it, but also so that flying pieces of debris knocked every member of the teams that served them unconscious.
Then I called in the Maresian guard. I flashed back and called for a full scramble, and if I'd mentioned to Sergeant Major Apony that I'd be doing an inspection later that day and to be ready, that was just a co-incidence. They were suited, booted, and up in the air inside three hundred heartbeats. Most impressive!
I gave him a set of targets, impressed an image of my over-flight on a piece of parchment to provide him with a map, and stepped back and let him get on with it. Well I did tow the army group with me when I flashed back, but that was my entire contribution. He dropped teams on the trebuchet site and inside Alfalfo's castle before his guards were able to react.
Most keeps have open sided wood roofed pavilions inside their baileys to give their defenders protection from pegasus attacks, but that would be mainly light projectiles dropped from above. No one else had considered dropping a force of fighters, especially with magical support, instead. A single company or eighty earth ponies and twenty unicorns against a defending force six times their number.
It was a walk over, Luna and I just stayed in the air and watched. There were signals, light flash sequences that the unicorns could use to call in our support, but they never got used. We had a few injuries and no casualties, even on their side. Alfalfo was hardly the type to inspire personal loyalty, so when they realised how thoroughly they'd been owned, most of his units dropped their blades and surrendered.
I did bring our artillery unit, ten of the new flying chariot mounted ballistae and crews, but like the pegasi, who dropped their chariots and flew back in less than a hundred heartbeats, and they just provided cover against escapes or salients from the castle.
Alfalfo was dragged off, kicking and screaming to the King, who stripped him of his titles and lands. He was within his rights to execute the oath-breaker, but I suggested that instead he was put to work on one of the work gangs in Maresia. Trust me, we could look back through his past life and a clean execution was way too good for him.
It was also an object lesson that made sure any other nobles with bright ideas kept them as just that. So with ponies finally working to stabilise things, we've finally got things stabilised enough that I can start building the cloud cities we need. There will be three, to take advantage of the natural airflows.
Cloudsdale will serve Canterlot and its surrounding Fifes. The eastern Fifes will have Stratosford, and in the south, nearest Horseshoe bay, we will have Bespinto. All three cities will portal in fresh water mass, filtered from the sea, and generate clouds via the reification process Luna and I developed.
Liquid rainbow will be produced as a side effect, and subsidiary processes such as snowflake prototyping and charging thunderclouds with lightning will have their own process lines. The system will require more power than ambient magic can supply, but we managed to get the photo-thaumic conversion effect I described in an earlier entry working, and the entire system is powered by it.
As long as I make sure each city gets plenty of sunlight, the whole system should work indefinitely. In fact, as the conversion systems intercept it well above the city, I will be making sure they get several times the normal amount of sunlight otherwise at cloud level the city would be a dull and dreary place due to the loss of some light to the power system. I'd better make sure that no-pony spends long periods of time high over the city, the increased intensity will be worse than mid-day in a desert.
Which reminds me, there was a problem with the long-term stability of the foundations. Even when reified into a pseudo-solid by pegasus magic, cloud will slowly leak magic, and evaporate. Not the best idea for a city's foundations. Obviously, a rune-set could reinforce and stabilise the reification effect, but the problem would be where to carve it.
Cloud, even reified, doesn't take fine carving, and inscribing huge scale runes on the underside of the city would leave it too vulnerable to a single point failure. Damage any part of the rune set and it starts coming to pieces. Once again, not exactly safe.
My solution was rather subtler. I wrote of discovering that ice crystals could act as storage crystals for pegasus magic. I designed and embedded an array of thousands of them in the foundation clouds, each engraved with the necessary rune-set to stabilise the surrounding cloud, and a cooling spell so keep them frozen.
Because they were frozen water, and formed out of the same stuff as the clouds, they stayed embedded, part of the stabilisation effect. Once again I had the problem of powering it, ambient magic alone wouldn't do the job, and being deep inside the clouds, neither could sunlight.
This required even more ingenuity, but I figured out a tweak. I applied our photo-thaumic conversion research to a warming spell, and got a thermo-thaumic effect. When I was a foal I always wondered why hot things got cooler and cool things hotter. How did they know?
I figured out, and the currents I feel in the sun confirm it, that they don't. Instead they are trying to balance their temperature with their surroundings, like water in a glass finding it's own level. So how does this help? Well, the ice crystals are cooler than their surroundings, so heat from the surrounding cloud flows into them.
However, the surface is under the thermo-thaumic effect. Adding a third set of runes required some clever layout design, but I managed it. It converts the heat flow into magic, which powers everything else. Ultimately, it's powered from my sun, just a little more indirectly.
Permit me a small amount of smug at having come up with that, and a happy sqeeing noise. Inventing is so much fun!
And on that note, I'll sign off. I have ten thousand of the things to reify into the sub-structure of Cloudsdale before I lower the sun today. Oh well, an alicorn's work is never done, I guess.