“Cadance warned me what you were up to.” Vice-Principal Luna, arms crossed, leaned against a wall of her sister’s office and regarded me with scant favor.
Other than the sunlight filling it, the small room bore little resemblance to the palatial chamber I’d visited the afternoon before. Principal Celestia, seated behind her unexpectedly decorative desk, shot her sibling an indecipherable look before turning back to me. “Mister Cookie Pusher, when I agreed to this meeting, I didn’t realize how much of an invasion of privacy it would involve. I’m not sure I’d have consented if I’d known what you had in mind.”
“I’m relieved you did. As I told Ms. Cadenza, the alternative would be a full-scale investigation. I’m sure I don’t need to explain what that would entail.” I stood with feet slightly apart, hands clasped behind my back, and wondered if I should have gone with the suit after all, instead of polo shirt and slacks. I’d hoped the informality would help put them at their ease, but it didn’t seem to be working.
“Yes, she mentioned that too,” Luna commented disapprovingly.
I sighed and refrained from rolling my eyes. “I know this is intrusive, and I’m sorry it has to be. Whatever happens here, though, my next step is to interview Ms. Shimmer—and her friends—sometime in the next few days. I just thought it would be a good idea to get a little background before I met them for the first time.”
“What kind of background?” Celestia jumped in before Luna could make another acid observation.
“All kinds.” I shrugged. “Who are they? What kind of history do they have here, especially Ms. Shimmer? What happened before and during the Fall Formal, the Battle of the Bands, the Friendship Games, the trip to Camp Everfree? What is your assessment of them, individually and as a group? What does the other Twilight Sparkle have to do with it all?” I essayed a faint smile. “Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?”
It went pretty deep.
Cadence’s truncated version was a mere anecdote by comparison. Not all or even most of my questions were answered, of course, but that wasn’t necessary. What I did get was, at the moment, more important—the first inklings of a coherent and comprehensive timeline. No longer would I be groping in the dark, stumbling toward or over scattered clues under, at best, small spotlights.
Sunset Shimmer showed up essentially from nowhere to enroll at the school, part of the same class that included the circle who eventually would become her friends. At first she simply was a nuisance, ambitious and self-aggrandizing, but her behavior escalated rapidly through her freshman year until she’d become queen bee of the student body. Her schemes and antics terrorized even juniors and seniors.
Her ability to drive wedges and pull puppet strings from behind the scenes was unprecedented in the veteran educators’ experience. Everyone knew exactly what she was doing, but there was little proof on which to take action. The usual cliques of a modern high school were reinforced almost to self-parody, and tensions ran high. Sunset herself joined none of the camps, yet moved among them largely at will, even claiming a well-liked rock guitarist as boyfriend almost without reference to his own views on the subject. As a former teenage male myself, I didn’t find it at all hard to understand the dynamics of that situation. To his credit, eventually he realized what was going on and broke off the relationship, at no small risk; surprisingly, Sunset apparently didn’t bother exacting any retribution.
Then came the Fall Formal early in her junior year, most of a year past by now. Twilight Sparkle suddenly appeared on the scene, claiming to be a transfer student whose paperwork was delayed, and in the space of two days turned everything on its head. Celestia and Luna described the finale vividly, including their own breathless incomprehension and anxiety over the titanic forces wreaking havoc on the building and the students for which they were responsible. Sunset’s defeat and subsequent near-breakdown seemed almost an anticlimax after the chaos and destruction. The arcane light show accompanying that downfall, photographed more or less accidentally by a low-orbit earth-science satellite, I already knew to be one of the first harbingers of what would become Eloptic Machine.
Princess Twilight Sparkle—and her talking canine companion Spike, who claimed to be a dragon, of all things—returned through the portal from whence she came, leaving behind a tremendous mess for the principals to clean up, though they seemed to feel no animosity toward her for doing so. They’d required a token bit of labor from Sunset and her cronies as part of the punishment meted out, but all manner of laws and regulations put a quick stop to that in favor of professional reconstruction. The noise and inconvenience were constant reminders of Sunset’s sins; her two henchmen were regarded largely as biddable annoyances, and so didn’t come in for the same level of hostility the mastermind did.
By the time the work was completed, everyone at the school was thoroughly sick of the whole affair and the person who’d caused it. The brief smear campaign that followed during the holiday season played into that resentment. The whole group was driven nearly to despair, but in the end the real perpetrators confessed, leading to an awkward reconciliation and lingering attempts to clean up the resulting mess.
The rest of the winter and the early spring were less eventful. Sunset was on social probation, no one outside her small circle of friends willing to trust or even put up with her any more than they absolutely had to. Even the faculty regarded her warily. That she stuck it out anyway was a testament to her innate tenacity and the support of those friends. Of course, at the time she really didn’t have any place else to go, which probably helped.
The sisters’ demeanor, initially as dispassionate as Cadance’s, shifted as they went on from there. Before long they began finishing each other’s sentences, Luna pacing and Celestia bouncing back and forth between seated and standing. One or the other conjured documentation as needed, pulling open drawers on the cabinets in the office or vanishing briefly through the door, returning to plunk folders emphatically on the desk in front of me.
Those folders were every bit as illuminating as the ongoing lecture—and lecture it had become. The Battle of the Bands changed everything, much as the Fall Formal had before it, but for the better from Sunset’s point of view. The princess returned to help, two years before she should have been able to, and afterward established more formal and regular contact with the school’s bureaucracy. A whole file folder of documents was presented to me, by far the greatest treasure trove I’d seen yet.
Testimonial letters, one from a Princess Celestia and another from Princess Twilight Sparkle, were calligraphed on the finest grade of paper, complete with royal watermarks I’d never seen before. Matching letters by the principals before me were more prosaic mass-market sheets full of ink-jet text. A transfer form from Princess Celestia’s improbably named School for Gifted Unicorns, which looked to be letterpress-printed, had been filled out with fountain pen and backdated to Sunset’s freshman year at CHS.
A brief report summed up Princess Twilight’s perspective on both incidents and all seven girls’ participation in them, notarized with the privy seal of a literal new country heard from, the principality of Equestria. I noted with interest the stamp, sharp and clear enough to have made by a brand-new dry seal, which incorporated a sun-and-moon motif and the names Celestia and Luna.
Their namesakes then expanded the documentary barrage to include the whole set, declaiming as they did the virtues both personal and scholastic of each and every member. Even Sunset’s rehabilitation came in for its share of praise. Finally I held up my hands in a warding gesture. “All right! I’ll stipulate all seven—or eight—of them are good students and fine young women, if it means we can move on.”
That took the wind out of their sails, as I intended, and after a minute or so of luffing they resumed the history lesson with slightly dampened zeal. Their take on the Friendship Games differed little from Cadance’s—more detailed in some respects, less in others. The unorthodox fundraising for summer camp shortly after raised a smile; I’d seen the result myself more than once.
The recent trip to Camp Everfree itself was every bit as disturbing as any of the previous three magical showdowns, not least for the new and more . . . active turn the girls’ magic had taken. I’d found or received almost nothing on it yet thanks to the delays inherent in any intelligence-gathering, and what I learned from the principals was more than a little chilling. I must have paled, for both women stopped, Celestia mid-sentence, and eyed me uncertainly.
“Let me get this straight. Each of them now has what amounts to a superpower?” I managed in a tone that came out only a little strangled. “And Sunset’s is mind-reading?”
“Yes.” Luna was enjoying my discomfiture, I was sure. “The magic seems to be concentrated in the pendants they acquired.”
“But my sister and I didn’t inquire into the details, other than to get promises they won’t use it to cheat when school resumes in the fall,” Celestia added hastily with another glance at said relation.
I closed my eyes briefly. “All right, go on.”
“There isn’t much more to say.” Celestia held out her empty hands palm-up. “With school out for the summer, we haven’t had much contact with any of them.”
“According to rumor they’ll be touring the studio sets where the new Daring Do movie is being shot,” Luna added with a whiff of malicious glee. “Or perhaps that’s happened already; I don’t recall at the moment.”
“Thank you,” I said a bit through my teeth before taking a deep breath. “I appreciate your thorough and complete cooperation. You both have been a great help, and I feel sure—”
My phone buzzed in its pocket. “Excuse me a moment, please.” I pulled it out and peeked at the illuminated screen. A text message from Mister Brown informed me It’s showtime!
It looked like I’d be meeting those seven girls a little sooner than I thought.