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A Report From the Joint Curators of the Academy of Ancient Arts, Addressed to Her Majesty, Queen Glimmer of Bright Moon
Dear Glimmer,
Lance and I want to thank you again for the grant and charter. The restoration of the north wing is almost finished, and soon we'll be installing the first official exhibits of the museum. You are, of course, invited to be one of the first guests, along with Bow and Adora -- official tickets haven't been printed yet, but here are a few prototypes that Lance has drawn up, valid for a full tour with tea and snacks any time you choose. Lance has already obtained a list of your favorite snacks from Bow, which he insisted on attaching to this letter so you can make any additions you feel are necessary.
I have enclosed the report on First Ones constellations that you actually asked for. The ones marked with hearts are the ones Lance and I have been able to locate by observation since the end of the war. Ones marked with frowns are still under debate. Lance has insisted he's seen most of them, but while he is quite brilliant, I fear his methods occasionally lack rigor. We would welcome your opinion, or Adora's, when you come to visit. (Bow refuses to get involved.)
Since you never actually attended the Academy of Historic Enterprises, I hope you won't mind a brief lesson: history is a living thing, always worth preserving, and always changing. As historians we are interested in constellations not for what they may tell us about the wider universe, but the ways they guided and enriched ordinary Etherian life, and the stories they tell of the people who first saw them and passed them on. While we are happy to provide these references, we look forward to documenting for future historians what new constellations the people of Etheria will find, now that we have new stories to tell about ourselves.
At your service,
George
P.S. We have received inquiries into these same records from Princess Entrapta. We're historians, not multi-dimensional cartographers, and we can't confirm any of her theories on where Etheria disappeared from. Lance and I would deeply appreciate it if you could get her to stop asking us.
P.P.S. Lance is insisting I tell you that most of Bow's baby pictures survived the fire.
Transcript of a War Room Meeting
Bow slots one of his data-storage arrows into the table's interface and calls up the latest star map. A hush falls over the assembled princesses as the whole room fills with low blue light and a dazzling depth of interlocking spirals.
"Okay, everyone. If we're really going to conduct more expeditions in space, we'll need a standard method of navigation. Entrapta and I have come up with a coordinate system, but it won't be any good unless we agree on the names of certain stars." He presses a button and some of the infinite profusion of holographic stars take on color; red, green, blue. "My dads' records show that the First Ones mostly named stars by the constellations they were in --"
"Which was highly inefficient, a simple numerical system would be much more streamlined," Entrapta interjects.
"But impossible for anyone to remember," Bow counters. "So. Any ideas?"
Mermista stands first and points to a pair of bright stars near the top of the map, each flanked by an inverted V of other stars, like migrating birds. Bow flicks a dial and faint blue lines follow her fingertip as she sketches a pair of pincers and a curve of shell. "This one totally looks like a crab."
"Yeah!" Frosta pulls herself onto her knees on the table and scribbles white lines around it. "An ice crab!"
Mermista snorts. "Excuse you, ice crabs are not a real thing. I know literally every kind of crab that exists and none of them are ice crabs."
"Well, maybe they exist in space!"
Scorpia raises one claw. "Oooh, sorry to interrupt, but maybe it's not a crab or an ice crab? It could be a scorpion! See?" She adds a red spiny back and arch of tail.
Frosta shapes a frozen pincer around one hand and clinks it against Scorpia's."Yeah, an ice scorpion."
Mermista drags a hand down her face with a groan. "That's also not a thing. You can't just take everyone else's things and add ice to them."
"That's literally exactly what I do, I'm the ice princess --"
Perfuma raises her hand. "Oh! I see one! Bow, may I?" In faint pink lines she draws a flower across a whole quadrant, encompassing a dozen star systems. "This one can be called the Starblossom!"
"That's beautiful, Perfuma," Bow says, "But it might not be super helpful for navigation. We're going for easily recognizable landmarks, people."
"Skymarks!" Entrapta shouts.
Mermista stands and pushes down Sea Hawk's hand as he reaches for the map. "Okay. This is definitely a thresher shark -- and if you say ice thresher shark I will flip out. The thresher shark is already the coolest shark, being made of ice would completely ruin it."
"Oh yeah?" Frosta shouts, but before she can climb onto the table and summon an ice shark, Entrapta leaps up herself and erases all their contributions with a flick of her own stylus.
"Bow, your idea is terrible and this is a waste of time," she announces. "This binary system will be E2001, this one E2002, then three through seventeen in this spiral arm over here --"
Bow slumps back in his chair with a defeated sigh. Glimmer pats his arm sympathetically. "No offense, but Entrapta's kind of right," she whispers, under the noise of Perfuma struggling to keep Frosta from tackling Entrapta for the stylus. "A general meeting may not have been the best solution for this one."
"Yeah, I should have realized. We do better with more clearly-defined goals." He rubs his chin in thought. "My dads said they sent you a report on all the First Ones constellations, did you read it?"
"Adora did. She's going to write them back, I think they had one down as 'tamer of dragons' when it was really 'gooseberry bush'."
That gets a laugh out of Bow. "Oh, Lance is going to love that." He scoots his chair back to avoid a flytrap impaled on an icicle and glances around the room. "Where is Adora, anyway?"
"She left a couple days ago to help clear a landslide blocking the road to Briarwall. She should be back soon -- she said moonrise tonight."
Bow looks at her with a faintly raised eyebrow that says clearly via best friend telepathy: and you're seriously sitting here doing this?
"What?" Glimmer protests. "I didn't want to miss your meeting!"
"Thanks," Bow says, grinning now, "but my meeting's gonna be on fire in a few minutes. You go find your girlfriend, I'll wrap this up."
Glimmer glances over at Scorpia, who's trying to cut her way out of a coil of Entrapta's hair with pincers and teeth. Entrapta, completely unfazed, is still talking and flicking her stylus in a breathless rattle of numbers. So far no one's managed to breach the defensive perimeter of her hair to reclaim any of her meticulously organized galaxies. "You might wanna wrap it up soon," Glimmer whispers. "I don't want to have to rebuild the palace again."
"I don’t know," Bow says thoughtfully. "Entrapta always says destruction is the mother of invention."
"Yeah, but she's Entrapta."
"Good point." Bow looks up again at the star map, which has a Frosta-sized imprint in the center of it where she leaped through it with fins on her arms to show Mermista all the ways an ice shark is superior to a non-ice shark. "I'll catch up with you guys soon."
Glimmer squeezes his hand in gratitude. "You're the best," she says fervently, and disappears in a puff of magic just as a crackle of red lightning splits the air where she'd been sitting and sears an inverted constellation of scorch marks into the back of her chair.
"Sorry!" Scorpia calls, only a little muffled. "I'll, uh… I'll definitely clean that up."
Methods of Amateur Astronomy
Adora gets back late, well after all the moons have risen, and even though all she wants to do is go to bed, she’s too tense to be still and too tired to sleep. After half an hour dodging the occasional elbow as she thrashes around looking for the most uncomfortable spot on the mattress, Glimmer snags her wrist and teleports them both. They land on the cool, grassy slope of Glimmer’s favorite garden, one of the little ones out of the way of the main bustle of palace life, bordered by a low stone wall, with a scattering of heavy-headed flowers nodding silver in the night breeze and a clear view of the sky.
In the open, on the hard ground, Adora relaxes. Glimmer settles in with one arm around her, ready to wait until she's asleep and teleport them both back inside.
Adora pokes her awake again after she dozes off. "Hey, look! It's Alethia."
"Hmm?" Glimmer opens one eye to peer up at the magnificent field of stars overhead. After days of staring into holographic galaxy maps, hunting for patterns, it just looks like nonsense to her now. "What's that?"
"One of the First Ones' constellations. It was in George and Lance's report. She was like Serenia -- one of their great heroes."
Glimmer covers a yawn. "Another She-Ra?"
"I don't know," Adora says unhappily. "So many of those constellations are named after heroes, but we don't have their actual stories. I mean, maybe we do, I haven't had a chance to go through all the records yet -- but we don't even know if the First Ones' stories were trustworthy. Everything that's left is just these scattered pieces, it'll take years to figure it out --"
She's starting to tense up again, reminded of all the First Ones inscriptions not yet translated, the roads unmended, the calls for help going unanswered, all the work still to be done across an entire planet in the slow process of remaking itself. Without bold and decisive action, Glimmer's efforts to get her to relax will be wasted, and she'll be up until dawn trying to figure out how she can solve every problem in the universe single-handedly.
Glimmer’s not about to let that happen. She leans over and kisses Adora as thoroughly and distractingly as she can. Adora makes a soft sound of surprise, and then Glimmer has all her attention, with nothing left over for the stress and strain of the world -- of all the worlds -- she tries to carry on her shoulders.
"Okay. I'll figure it out tomorrow," Adora says breathlessly when they break apart, her pinched look of anxiety replaced with a dreamy smile.
Satisfied, Glimmer snuggles closer, pressing one last quick kiss to Adora's chin. "Forget the First Ones. What constellations do you see?"
"A fuzzy bear," Adora says at once, pointing at a shimmer in the northern sky. Her other hand settles at Glimmer's hip, thumb absently tracing soft circles. Glimmer shivers with delight. "There's his nose, see? And his paws -- okay, three paws. The fourth one is stuck in a volcano, there -- and there's a spaceship, coming to rescue him before the volcano erupts."
"You're good at this," Glimmer says, and despite the warm thrill singing through her at Adora’s touch, she has to turn her face to Adora's shoulder to bury another yawn. It's been a long day for both of them, but she doesn't want to fall asleep again, not yet. Not ever, if it will mean missing a minute of Adora like this.
Adora laughs softly. "I got a lot of practice."
"That's what you do with all the time we spend in space?"
"Yeah," Adora says, about half a second too late and a shade too brightly. "Yeah, in space. That's where."
"So, not in space? Where else would you get stargazing practice?" Worry pricks her -- it could be something painful, a memory from the Fright Zone, or from the Crystal Castle. But then she lifts her head enough to see that Adora's blushing. "Adora?"
"It's --" Adora clears her throat, puts her arm back behind her head and looks up at the moons. "When I first came here, remember how I used to sneak into your room?"
"Yeah," Glimmer says. "It was pretty cute."
"And you'd wake up and then fall back asleep, just like this. And I'd stay awake for a while, and -- your hair --"
Glimmer automatically lifts a hand to her hair, just starting to frizz out of shape without the diadem she left on the royal vanity. She blinks at her fingers, like they might come away glittering. "You found constellations in my hair ?"
Adora's still blushing, but she's smiling, too. "I didn't know what they were called then, but -- it helped me fall asleep, to look for patterns. And sometimes I had these weird dreams about stars, and then I woke up and you were right there. My favorite one was here." She kisses a spot a little to the right of Glimmer's ear. "It was shaped like an apple."
"That's --" Glimmer giggles, then rolls on top of Adora to kiss her again. "I love you," she says, when they break apart, breathing hard. "You know that, right?"
“Yeah,” Adora says, always with that faint edge of wonder, like some part of her is still frantically trying to calculate what she did to earn this. At least she doesn’t hesitate anymore, like she used to. Like she was worried the answer might have changed. “I love you too.”
“Good.” Glimmer trails kisses down the line of her jaw to where the pulse flutters in her neck, then settles back into her arms with a happy sigh. "Since you're the most experienced stargazer in Bright Moon, I'm putting you in charge of this whole project. I'll tell Bow to add the Bear in the Volcano to the official list."
Adora's quiet. Glimmer adds, "I'm just kidding! I know you have enough work to do as She-Ra, and Bow's happy handling the star maps, you don't have to --"
Adora stops her with a brief brush of lips to her temple. "If I'm in charge, I'll make sure we have one for Angella."
Glimmer's heart constricts painfully. She didn't want to think about that during the meetings. If she thinks about it too hard now she'll start crying; about the great twinkling dark of the sky curved around Etheria, around her , just like her mother's wings did once, wrapping her in love, keeping her safe. Keeping them all safe.
She doesn't want to start weeping into Adora's starched nightshirt, not now, so instead she sits up and takes Adora's hand in hers. "And Mara," she says firmly. "So everyone knows her story -- her real story."
"So they can guide us," Adora says. This time she's the one who kisses Glimmer, soft and serious, the way she does so often, like Glimmer's the most precious thing in a universe full of treasures that no one’s even discovered yet. "Thanks," she says. "For showing me stars even in Despondos."
Now Glimmer's the one blushing. She wraps both arms around Adora and teleports them inside.