When I was a little filly, a royal guard called Sergeant Sweets came to my class to teach us about being safe. It’s been years, but I still can close my eyes and see how she looked.
Her armor was golden and polished to the point we could see our little faces in it. The crest of her helmet was large, pristine, and alternated between blue and white. I realize now it wasn’t regulation, but she had the most beautiful blonde mane that spilled out from under the rim.
She had big green eyes and a clear voice. I’d hung on every word as she told us what to do if we got separated from our parents.
“Always remember to stay calm, girls. Look at your surroundings and see if you can spot a royal guard like me. If you can, go to her and tell her you’ve lost your parents. If you can’t, don’t stray far from where you are.
“The most effective place to be is exactly where you got lost. Adult ponies will retrace their steps to find you. Don’t hide, even if you’re scared. But, if for some reason the area isn’t safe, you’re better off leaving it.”
Once I’d seen Sergeant Sweets, my whole life changed. Instead of planning to be a jeweler like my dad, I wanted to be a guard. I wanted to teach fillies about staying in one place. I wanted to help fillies that lost their parents. I wanted to look like her, sound like her, and be her!
Not once did I ever imagine I’d be up to my chest in mud, trying to reach a rope hanging over my head.
“Guard Azurite!” Chief Print yelled. “PRO or not, you must complete this course and pass your physical fitness test to complete this phase. This may be a practice run, but you need to get moving!”
I bet Sergeant Sweets never had to do this course. In fact, Sergeant Sweets may not have even been a real royal guard! That would be a file I’d be looking for… if I graduated.
When I graduated. When is what Mindful Soul always said, not if.
I turned around and slowly slogged back out of the mud pit and onto the solid dirt. This time I’d take a longer gallop before jumping.
“Move it!” Chief Print yelled again, startling me.
I screamed before taking off and leaping for the rope. I caught it, swung to the other side, and fell off. My landing may not have been perfect or even good but I’d finished the next to last obstacle.
As I trotted up to the climbing wall I couldn’t help but recall the first time I’d seen it as a cadet. “My old friend… you won’t best me!” I yelled at it.
“Less talk, more climb!”
Let’s see you climb it! The wall was three times my height, maybe more. I’d learned a trick before to help petite ponies with it, and I was as petite as adult ponies came.
Instead of going at the wall head on, I started my charge at a slight angle and leapt forwards. My hindhooves caught the support that jutted out and then I sprung up to the top, locking my forelegs there. Then I dangled.
And dangled while I tried to catch the top with my hindhoof.
Scrape. Dangle. Scrape. Dangle. Scrape. Scrape. Then I finally got it! I used the leverage to pull myself to the top before carefully dangling off the back side and dropping down.
Chief Print looked down at her stopwatch. “Not great, Guard Azurite.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I completed it, though. I’m not looking to join in the lowest time competition.”
“I sure hope not,” she said before turning to the class. “Alright, hit the showers, everypony. That is it. I’d say have a good weekend but I’d actually recommend a lot of you study instead. This rotation won’t last much longer and some of you are lagging behind.”
That was a lovely sentiment. What a sour way to end a week. We all started to trudge to the showers. Some ponies were muddier than others. I was at least eighty-five percent mud, and I wasn’t about to mess up my bathroom right before Aurum moved in. I’d stay and wash off for as long as it took.
Once I was in the locker room, I trotted into a stall, turned the water on, and started to let it work its magic. A hot shower could relax my tension and get rid of the mud at the same time. It would also prepare me for having to get home on a Friday night. Ponies loved to go out on Friday.
The water hit my mane and strung it all out over my face. Whatever style I had left was gone now. It might be time to go to the salon. I wouldn’t want Aurum to think I’d gotten lazy.
“Uh, excuse me.”
It was clear I’d need a lot of shampoo and marecare product to work all of the gunk out of my coat.
“Hi? Pardon me?”
Why did they always put mud under the rope? Was that necessary? When was I ever going to be on patrol and somepony would shout, ‘Guard Azurite, please help me, but to get here you’re going to have to swing over this mud pit’? Never!
“Hello?”
Seriously, I hadn’t been a patrol guard for very long, but I’d never even seen a rope in Canterlot. Was that something the rest of Equestria used a lot of? Were ropes strung up for ponies to swing on? I pushed my mane out of my face.
And found myself staring into the orange eyes of a big purple stallion. I did the only sensical thing any pony would do. I screamed at the top of my lungs.
He winced and pulled his head back a bit. “Sorry! You weren’t responding!”
I shrieked, “You’re in my shower!”
“You weren’t responding!” he repeated before lifting his head all the way. He had his forelegs on the rim of the stall, standing on the other side.
“I’m in the shower! I was showering! Who talks to ponies in the shower? What? What is it? Is the locker room on fire?”
He blinked a few times. “Oh, um… sorry. You usually just leave so fast every day I can never catch you. In here, you’re sort of boxed in.”
Boxed in? What did he mean by that? Was this a trap? The stalls weren’t huge, but they’d never felt like a trap before. Only ponies boxed me in. No, he wasn’t going to take showers from me!
If I hadn’t been completely soaked, my coat would have bristled. “That sounds horrible! Who are you? I’m a royal guard! Don’t make me arrest you. I’m a student of Iron Hoof and not afraid to use it!” That last part was a lie, but he didn’t know that.
The stallion threw a hoof up. “No, no, no! It isn’t like that. We’re in the same class! You sit in front of me.”
“I do?”
“Yes!”
“What do you want!” I shouted again.
“I need a tutor. I’m not going to pass if I don’t get help, and you’re the smartest pony in class. You know all the answers. You figure stuff out that the chief didn’t see. Please, I’m sorry I scared you, but please help me. If I just knew a little of what you knew, I could pass.”
The water was still hitting me in the head as I stared up at him in confusion. He wanted help? Nopony ever asked me for help. I was good in class, but they never cared to talk to me about it.
“Please? I promise I won’t take much time,” he asked again, his voice ringing with desperation.
Ponies never asked me for things. It wouldn’t be hard to help him. He looked so pitiful, too. He was a pitiful, peeping, purple plum. “Oh, fine. Can I finish my shower first?”
He nodded quickly. “Yes, of course!”
I waved my hoof in a circle. “And could you not watch, please? Like, maybe you could go sit over on the bench or something?”
“Sure, sure!” he replied before backing away from my stall.
Helping ponies was what I wanted to do. Tutoring was helping ponies. I also needed to get home and get things ready for Aurum. This was a tricky situation.
I finished my shower and wrapped myself in one towel while I levitated another around my mane.
When I peeked out of the stall, the stallion was sitting on the bench exactly where I’d told him to be. Now that I could see him better, he didn’t look so scary. In fact, he looked pretty much like most royal guard stallions. He was fit, although kind of skinny, and his lavender-and-white mane was cut short.
All and all, without him being in the shower with me, he looked harmless. Actually, he looked downright nervous, so I pushed the door open and trotted up to him. “Hi, I’m going to give you a pass on the whole shower invasion thing before and just start fresh. I’m Azurite.”
“Thank you so much. Macaron, nice to meet you, too.”
I smiled. I already felt safer. Nopony with the name Macaron could be bad. “Okay, so you want help? With what?”
The stallion idly rubbed his forehooves together, then replied with a nervous grin, “Everything?”
Everything? Everything! I was going to painting class! I was going to clean up more for Aurum. I had a life to live! “Oh, okay, everything then.”
His eyes went wide. “You’ll help me?”
“Yes, we’re both royal guards. What else am I supposed to do? But we can’t do everything tonight. We can do, like, one thing,” I muttered. It was going to be dark when we were done. I was braving the dark for him. Stupid, accommodating Azurite.
“Thank you so much! I really appreciate this. If I can ever do anything for you, just name it!” Macaron rambled on as we trotted together back to the academic buildings.
It wasn’t hard to find a study room on Friday afternoon. Ponies with better sense were already out and about having fun.
We settled down at the table. This was a problem of paperwork and time. At least mentally. It was time to figure out how to best solve this challenge. “Okay, we don’t have enough time left in the rotation to cover everything. I need you to dig deep and figure out the three things you’re struggling with the most.
“If we can work on those and make you an expert in two of them, then hopefully you can combine that with what you’re good at and get by into the next rotation. Does that make sense?”
Macaron nodded emphatically. “Yes!”
“So…” I asked, holding a hoof out to him.
“So?”
“What are you worst at!” I squeaked.
“Oh! Sorry. I’m bad at coding. After that, I’d say it is tied between form knowledge and retirement calculations.”
If he was bad at coding, he was in bad shape. That was the foundation for everything else in the rotation. At the same time, if I could improve him there, perhaps he’d succeed at everything else. “Let’s start with coding, then. Do you have all your notes?”
He nodded, dug through his saddlebag, and pulled out an orange notebook. He pushed it over to me and I pulled it open with my magic.
What I saw inside horrified me. I had to summon up all of my inner strength to avoid immediately vomiting.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I set a hoof on my belly and tried to look away from the disorganized mess in front of me. Nothing made sense. He had notes written haphazardly all over the place.
“There are lines on the paper for a reason,” I gasped before covering my mouth with a hoof. Bile, I could taste bile! How could a pony live like this?
“I have a system!” he said in protest, snatching his notebook back.
My horn lit again, grabbing the notebook and pulling it from his hooves. “You better explain it to me quick!”
“I will, but don’t judge me!” He frowned before leaning over to point at something. “Everything Chief says I write down straight and then I spin my own thoughts off that. That way I can remember what I thought when she said it.”
I tapped the page. “Okay, when she explained how to process a 1054 delta, you wrote cookies, mayonnaise, and lemons. How does that work with the system? Is it code?”
His head shook. “No, that is what I needed from the store that day.”
Something inside my body broke and boiling lava rushed up into my chest. I grabbed his cheeks with my hooves and pulled him down to look at me. “So help me, if you don’t start making sense this minute, I will toss this notebook off the mountain.”
Macaron looked at me in terror. “Pick a different one!”
I let him go and looked back at the notebook. And read off, “Like that one time back home with the dirt and turnips.”
“See, now, that one is clear. She was talking about something I didn’t get, which was exactly like back home when I was looking for turnips but the dirt was wrong.”
“You… You took a note to show you didn’t understand?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, so I could research it later.”
My hoof curled into a tight ball. Rescue breathing, Azurite. In one, two, three. Hold one, two, three. Exhale one, two, three. “Okay, let’s just set this aside,” I whispered before pulling out my notebook. “For the sake of time, I’ll teach you out of my notebook.”
“Sure, if that makes it easier for you, let’s do it. I can’t imagine your notes are much b— by Celestia, are you a living printing press?” He gasped as I laid out my notebook in front of him.
“No, but I’m very good at notes,” I explained, only a little proud. Okay, a lot proud. I love my notes. “Now, we’re going to start at coding. You’ll see here that I take my notes in black. When a key word or term I think is important comes up, I write it in light blue. When a term comes up I know is critical, I write it in azure. In the terms section of my notebook, I have this all defined.”
Macaron reached towards the notebook, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging agape.
I slapped his hoof. “No! You read from over there. I don’t want your system to infect it. Now, let’s get to work.”
“Okay, okay!” he whimpered, rubbing his forehoof.
For the following three hours, I went through coding with Macaron and explained it to him the best I could. While I did that, I made him take new notes, not copy mine. When he started off on his word tangents, I stopped him.
If he was confused, instead of taking a note he was confused, we just covered the topic until he got it. It was a tricky thing, but in time we started to get each other.
Macaron leaned back, stretched his forelegs, and yawned. “Okay, I understand more than I ever did, but I’m getting so tired I can’t see straight.”
“Yeah, that happens. Done for tonight then?”
“Yes. Thank you so much, Azurite. You’re a life saver. Can we do this again next Monday night? Please?”
I rubbed my chin. “I have a doctor’s appointment, but we can after that if you’re fine with it. We can meet at this restaurant near my apartment. Is that fine?”
“You’re the teacher. You tell me when and where, and I’ll be there! Whatever is convenient for you.”
That was a good point. I pulled his notebook over, wrote the address of the restaurant down, and then under that the time for an hour after I’d be done with Mindful Soul.
“See you then,” I said, pushing the notebook back to him.
“Absolutely! Thank you again. You’re going to make an awesome PRO.” Macaron smiled before heading off.
I sat there and hugged my notebook. It was such a simple little statement, but it made me feel good. I was going to be a great PRO. It almost made up for the fact that I’d missed my painting class.
Hopefully Happy Tree and Peapod would forgive me. They probably would. They definitely would.
It was time to get going, so I trotted out into the darkness and sighed. I was tired from the tutoring. Almost too tired to put up with my body shaking and getting sweaty. Getting home just felt easier. Maybe I was still riding the high of what Macaron had said. Maybe I was getting better. Who could tell?
I turned a corner and hurried down an alley before popping out on my street. There weren’t many ponies around, and that was just fine by me.
When I trotted down to my door, I used my magic to unlock it and went inside. I wasn’t three steps in before I came to a complete stop. Somepony had been in my apartment. Things were not exactly where I left them.
Plant had moved a bit. That was impossible. Or was it? I looked down at plant. “Did you move?”
Plant didn’t answer. Plant never answered.
There was a gift next to Mr. Peeper’s bowl, and he was staring at it intently. I trotted over and asked, “Did someone bring you a gift?”
Mr. Peepers blew four bubbles.
“For me? How do you know?”
He circled his bowl and headed down to the bottom, pointing himself at a note.
“Oh, well, yeah, I guess if you read the note you’d know. Now, we know it’s fine if you read my mail but just a reminder, that is a crime. I wouldn’t want you to go to a jail bowl,” I said idly before picking up the note and reading it.
Cousin Azurite. I decided to come early after receiving your letter. Your sincerity was touching and I couldn’t wait to move in.
Forgive me for letting myself in. Knowing you so well, your lock charm was easy to decipher. I’m going to go do some shopping so that we have groceries for the week. I noticed your icebox was empty.
This gift is a token of my appreciation. See you soon.
Aurum
“She’s here? Already? I haven’t cleaned up enough!” I squealed.
Without another thought, I started rushing around the living room, cleaning up everything I could. Anything that was out of place was immediately rearranged.
When I burst into the bedroom, I found that her bags were already unpacked and she’d even put out a few things. One caught my eye in particular: a plush flamingo on her bed.
“Cute!” I galloped back out and into the kitchen to start cleaning there.
My magic grabbed a sponge, wet it, and started going to town all over the counters. Mr. Peepers did nothing but sit in his bowl and blow bubbles at me.
“Don’t just float there! Straighten up your rocks! Wipe down the bubble chest! Clean up the palm tree,” I ordered while I ran the sweeper over the floor.
More bubbles were blown and he came to the top of the water. While I cleaned, he started flapping his tail, splashing droplets onto the table.
“No! Bad fish, stop that!” I hurried over to start wiping up his mess.
He came down to my eye level and blew more bubbles at me.
“What? What do you want?”
Five bubbles, then four. I followed his glance over to the gift.
“You think I should open it before she gets home?”
One bubble.
“Because if she wanted me to wait, she wouldn’t have left a note?”
One bubble.
“But the place is a mess!”
Six bubbles, a spin, a circle, and three bubbles.
“Okay, yes, I guess she has already seen it. Fine, let’s see what is in here,” I said before sitting down at the table and pulling the box over. It was large as far as gifts go. It took two hooves to hold it while I pulled the top off with my levitation magic.
Standing up straight inside was a square pillow. I pulled it out to look at it. The backside was blue, just like my coat. The front was white, but it had been hoofstitched. In arched letters, it read: ‘Azurite and Aurum’s Place.’
Under that was a cute graphic of a little blue pony and a larger silver one. “It’s perfect,” I said before hugging it to my chest.
I had a roommate. A real roommate. One that loved me and knew me. One that I didn’t have to be awkward around. Well, no more awkward than normal. What a wonderful gift.
My heart started slowing down and I just hugged the pillow. “I bet she made this herself,” I told Mr. Peepers. He didn’t hear me. He’d finally gone to straighten up his rocks.
“What a good day,” I whispered.