Another typical Day Court takes a turn for the worst when one petitioner has a very strange request for Celestia: he wants her to clear his fields. This would just be absurd, except for one thing: he's brought payment. In the oldest currency that Equestria possesses, which literally promises work from the Princesses in exchange for their validity.
Realising the potential damage those coins could provide if they somehow got back into the open market, Celestia has no choice but to humor him.
Read it here
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Tropes found in this story include:
- Foreshadowing: Celestia and Luna's memories of clearing a pasture are a somewhat subtle hint that they began life as earth ponies.
- Rare Money: The First Minting Sols and Lunes, the very first coinage that the Princesses ever created after founding Equestria. They're so rare because Celestia and Luna deliberately destroyed them as soon as they could begin phasing them out, as while they had been an ugly necessity to begin with, their promise was ultimately too dangerous to the stability of Equestria.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: This fic establishes that Celestia is still sporting mental scars from her childhood during Discord's reign. It's bad enough that being out under an open sky acts as a trigger for a PTSD-like panic attack, as such occasions in "the old days" were the most dangerous times for her, in no small part due to Luna's lackluster efforts at staying on guard.
- Silicon-Based Life: The "Rock Doves" infesting the field that the old farmer wants cleared.
- Too Dumb to Live: The crazy old farmer who's got his hooves on the largest collection of Sols & Lunes in the world and considers the best use of it to be... getting the Princesses to do manual labor on his farm. It's implied he's at least partially "fallen into the mark" and so isn't thinking clearly.
- Weird Currency: Not the sols and lunes themselves, which are made of regular gold and silver, but rather the notion of backing them with a fixed amount of the Princesses' time.
