The next time Night met Twilight, he brought a few gifts for her.
She sat at her desk, reading over a new trade offer from Abyssinia, asking for some more magical defenses to protect them in the case of another Storm King, in exchange for some more of their exotic resources.
And that’s when Night strode in and dropped a spherical gem into her lap. “Hello, Princess!” he said. “That is one of the power gems for the castle’s emergency wards.”
Twilight sighed before she picked up the gem and passed it to one of the nearby guards. “Take this back, please.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” the guard said.
“And this,” Night said, sliding a sheet of parchment her way, “is a receipt for an enchanted jar and some bottled dragon’s breath.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow at that. “And why do you need an enchanted jar of bottled dragon’s breath?” she asked, glancing at the receipt.
“For last-minuted messages across the country,” Night said casually, taking a seat that he had not been offered. “That one specifically went to Newsie, because that’s the only way we’re getting a job done before the Gala.”
Twilight glanced up. “Alright, what’s your plan?”
“A little more counter-thieving,” Night said. “And this time, maybe you’ll get a chance to spread your figurative wings.”
Twilight slipped the receipt into the rest of her papers. “So what’s your plan?”
“Well, there are two options,” Night said. “The arrest option and the scare option.”
“And why isn’t it just the arrest option?” Twilight asked.
“Because I can’t guarantee to have guards around to do the arresting,” he said simply. “Which is fine, honestly. The scare option wastes time and energy while keeping ponies safe, just like anything else. The arrest option is just a bonus, one I prefer to have, but sometimes you have to make do, and if Celestia had the power to post a guard on every single street corner, I’m sure she would have by now.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “Well, I could have a guard posted nearby.”
“You could,” Night said, “but you do need to remember that you’ll be a random unicorn that was also in somepony else’s house, and that could cause some problems. That being said, if you want to do that, we can certainly try.”
Twilight frowned before a smile began to creep onto her face. “Well, maybe we can figure something out then.”
Night leaned forward. “I know the look of someone planning something. What have you got in mind, Princess?”
---$---
Fillydelphia’s skyline did not have the towering heights of Manehatten, but it still struck an imposing figure. Twilight and Night stood on a tower just on the edge of the city’s dense urban areas. They both stared out, Night using a pair of binoculars while Twilight used the changeling amulet to physically alter her eyes to perfect magnification and night vision levels.
The tower they stood on, a small radio tower to boost the signal across the city, flashed with a red light to warn low-altitude, night-flying pegasi that it was there. Night didn’t really appreciate it at the moment, though, as it kept blinding him in the darkness, despite his best attempt to keep his night vision. The only saving grace to the blinding signal was the red filter over the bulb, which barely saved him.
“See anything yet, Twilight?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she replied.
He glanced out across the darkness again, toward a single office building in the city proper. Behind them, Twilight watched the gated community that sat on the edge of the city’s urban heart. The smaller buildings were fairly dense as far as wealth was concerned, but if Night had to put money on it—which in a way, he was—he’d say that Moon would probably try to hit an office building. Office supplies were surprisingly easy to sell, and they could very quickly rack up a price tag, which would help Moon recover from the expenses that the others had gathered. Additionally, fewer ponies lived in office buildings than houses, which meant fewer witnesses that the thieves needed to avoid.
“See anything yet?” Night asked.
“Not yet,” the Princess replied, staring down at the houses. “I have no movement in the houses. Everything seems quiet.”
Night nodded before he glanced back at the office building, searching its face for any sign of movement.
The light flashed again, incredibly bright, despite the red tint to it. He tried blinking with the flash, closing his eyes as he tried to synchronize with the blinking signal.
It wasn’t working.
He sighed and dropped himself a little lower in the darkness before continuing his vigil.
He froze. “I have movement,” Night said.
Twilight jumped through onto the other side of the tower before she followed his gaze to the building.
“Fifth floor,” Night said, letting Twilight know where he’d seen the thieves. “There are three of them.”
“Three?” Twilight asked.
“They do that occasionally,” Night said. “Typically to make sure I don’t stop them. With two ponies watching the back of the third, they can typically get away with stealing more, especially when I can’t stop them.”
“So does this change anything?” Twilight asked.
Night smiled. “Only that we don’t have to set them up for Grand Larceny. They’re going to do that themselves.”
Twilight smiled. “That is something that I like to hear.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
And with that, they both Catapulted themselves into the darkness. The pair arced toward the building, flying over the streets with carefully calculated paths. They made their way to the office, landing on a building just across the way before the trio of thieves made their way inside.
“Alright,” Night said, “With three of them, we’ll have to be a little more careful.”
Twilight nodded. “I got it,” she said. Then she cast a Transform Image spell to shrink her visible form to an inch tall. “Trust me, I’ve got this.”
Night shrugged before he Catapulted himself across the street below, landing on the office building, only five feet away from the window the trio opened to get inside. Twilight landed beside him, pressing against the wall, her miniature form mimicking her unseen actions.
“Alright, Twilight,” Night whispered. “Let’s go.”
---$---
Mystic Haze already hated this assignment.
Moon Light, the little punk with too much cash and not enough sense, was furious about the failure last week. Star Hunt had not only been caught by ‘The Eternal Rival’ that seemed to follow Light’s Pack wherever he went, but Star also was charged with Grand Larceny, and cost the Pack some money.
To make up for the loss of funds, instead of the normal breaking-even that Moon typically met with, Moon ordered that they go for a bigger target, a prospect that Mystic already didn’t enjoy. The real appeal to working in the Pack was that anything they grabbed wouldn’t have lasting effects. The sentences were minor, with minor fines, that left them with nothing but a small mark on their record.
This wasn’t the case here. This would easily be a felony, which would drain Moon Light’s coffers more if they were caught, not to mention what would happen if all three were arrested.
Of course, the only thing Moon Light said concerning the situation was, “Then don’t get caught.”
With the Wisdom of the Ages thus passed, Mystic found himself stuck with Star, the idiot who started this whole mess, and Silver Blaze, an idiot thug that could barely cast Telekinesis, much less Pennypincher’s Pricetag.
Surrounded by incompetence, Mystic moved forward, slipping into the offices of the building. The trio of them was focused on the typewriters. They were large and cumbersome, to be sure, but that meant that they were expensive. More importantly, so were the ribbons in them.
“Alright, Silver, you grab a typewriter or two, Star and I will focus on the smaller things,” Mystic ordered.
Silver raised an eyebrow before he began looking for the nicest-looking typewriter before Mystic turned to Star. “I need you to focus on the ink ribbons and anything else you can find that we can carry out of here. I need to find the office and see if I can’t find a safe or something.”
“The safe?” Star asked. “Moon doesn’t like it when we steal money.”
“And Moon is a child, who only has my quote-unquote loyalty because he has money to get me out of jail,” Mystic said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to steal enough to make my bail.”
Grumbling, Mystic left, casting Tango’s Treasure Finder as he moved, a cousin spell to Pennypincher’s, which revealed the largest currency source in the area. Sure enough, a large square was highlighted through the walls of the offices. That had to be the safe, and Mystic’s target.
He walked across the floor, occasionally glancing in at a few offices to see if they had a few knick-knacks worth stealing.
Finally, he made his way to the stairs. He climbed up to the next floor and followed his spell to a large office that had to belong to some kind of higher up. The outlined treasure was behind the bookcase, expertly hidden, but not immune to Mystic’s magic.
He glanced up and down the bookshelf, trying to figure out how to open the secret before he started clearing books. There was a lever behind them. He could only see it once they were out of the picture. He grabbed an entire shelf’s worth of books and pulled them to the ground. When he saw nothing, he pulled down the next.
He smiled. There was the latch, waiting for him. He quickly pulled it, and the bookcase seemed to pop out of the wall slightly, and sure enough, he slid it to the side with a slight push.
There was the safe, exactly as the spell revealed. He prepared his Sapphire’s Safecracker, another of the Perceive Matter spells, and glanced into the lock’s inner workings. He casually spun the knob to the safe, watching the pins fall into place. Honestly, this spell made getting into safes like this too easy. All somepony needed was Perceive and Matter, and they would make an incredibly comfortable living as a locksmith.
“Mystic!” Someone yelled, and for a second, Mystic felt his heart leap into his throat. Who was yelling? Was something happening? Were they found out?
Star ran up the stairs onto the next floor. “Mystic!” he yelled again, his voice echoing in the empty office.
“What? What?”
“Silver’s gone!”
Mystic blinked. “What do you mean, gone?”
“He just disappeared! I could still hear him, but he was gone, and...and something got him, man!” Star said. “It sounded like he was screaming.”
“Screaming?” Mystic asked, furrowing his brow. He would have heard screaming. The building wasn’t so big that he wouldn’t be able to hear Silver. Something...something let Star listen to him. “I think we have a mage on our hooves, Star,” he said.
“No, no, this is worse than that!” Star said. “Ever since I’ve run into the Princess, I’ve been cursed, man! Cursed!”
Mystic rolled his eyes. “You’re being stupid. This is probably just that Rival pony, or whatever Moon calls him.”
“The Rival’s never been able to do stuff like this, man! This is serious trouble!”
“I hear you, Star,” Mystic said, “but we can’t—”
“Leave…” a voice said, tickling Mystic’s ear.
“Did you hear that?” Star asked, jumping.
“Yes, yes, I did,” Mystic said, “and it’s very obviously a mage using illusions to rile us up.”
Star began to turn back. “Are you sur—” He cut himself off with a scream.
“Star?” Mystic said, wincing. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Mystic? Mystic, where are you?” he asked.
“What are you talking about? I’m right here!” Mystic said. Star glanced about wildly, trying to find some sign of the pony.
“What is wrong with you?” Mystic yelled, before slapping Star up the backside of his head.
Star stumbled forward, yelling as he took the blow and began to run. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Princess! Don’t kill me, I’m sorry!”
“What are you talking about?” Mystic yelled at him as he ran. “The Princess isn’t here!”
“Oh, really?” a voice said behind him, and Mystic turned to see a massive figure standing behind him. She towered over him, a living shadow whose coat was as black as night. The creature, obviously female, stared down at him with two reptilian eyes the color of freezing ice. Her wings shadowed him, eclipsing him completely, and her horn crackled with power.
Mystic glanced up at the figure. “You’re not real…” he said, staring up at her. “You’re not the Princess…”
“Well,” the figure said, smiling wide with pointed teeth and fangs. “You’re right on one account.”
The figure stepped forward, revealing not Princess Twilight, Princess Celestia, nor Luna, but Nightmare Moon herself.
Now there was a perfectly rational part of Mystic’s brain that knew—knew beyond a shadow of a doubt—that this was an illusion. It had to be. Nightmare Moon was defeated, Princess Luna returned. It wasn’t even October when Princess Luna occasionally dressed the part on Nightmare Night.
But every other cell of his body screamed that he needed to run. The part of him that listened to ghost stories as a foal knew the truth. The part that still remembered how bad fillies and colts would be swallowed by the Nightmare Moon knew. The part of him that feared what he could not know, the part that felt the mare’s breath on his face, felt the chilling stare, cowered before her physical form, that part knew. And that part took over.
Mystic ran. He ran for the open door to the stairs, galloping at full speed, only to knock himself unconscious.
Night stepped out from behind a desk and shook his head, before dropping his control image spell, revealing the door had in fact been closed, and the unicorn had just run into it face-first. “Well, that went better than I could have hoped.”
Nightmare Moon smiled before she transformed back into Twilight’s disguise with a burst of green flame. “That, I will admit, was fun.”
“Really?” Night asked sarcastically. “I couldn’t possibly believe that you were having fun with that. ‘You’re right on one account?’ That was almost trying too hard.”
Twilight shrugged. “It is what Nightmare Moon would have said.”
Night shook his head, before looking over the unicorn. "Let’s get this one tied up.”
Twilight nodded, before Creating a chain of wooden blocks around the pony, before using a Transform Matter spell to change the wood to steel.
In Celestia’s opinion, Transform was one of the most powerful techniques a pony could know, so it was no wonder that Twilight had continued to develop and practice this magic in particular throughout her career. Transform, along with physically transforming an object, allowed a Created thing to become permanent. Though she would admit, this particular skill was locked behind the ability to cast two spells at once, no easy feat, especially compared to the relatively simple task of splitting a spell between two targets.
The only limitation there was that a Transform spell could not work outside of the Form of the original material. Transform could not turn a pony to stone, for example, as Matter, which can be touched but is not living, and Body, which lives, were two separate Forms. That’s one of the reasons that artifacts like the Elements of Harmony were so powerful.
With Mystic now secured in chains, they went to go collect the other two.
Star lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs, which had been Transformed into soap. Another chain wrapped around him and it too was turned to steel before they collected Silver, who had not seen his assailant knock him out with a powerful blow to the temple. With all three thugs collected, Twilight and Night led them outside. There, they hung the criminals on the outside of the building. Within seconds, they were ready to be found by the guards, all their ill-gotten gains hanging next to them.
“Well, Twilight,” Night said, looking up in approval at the three ponies. “I have to admit, this is a much better way of dealing with these kinds of ponies.”
Twilight nodded.
“Of course, if I was going to use it, you’d have to let me learn Transform.”
Twilight didn’t immediately reply. “That is a fair point.”
Of course, Transform was also the door to several other dangerous abilities, like making coinage, shape change, and a thousand other abilities that could destabilize the country. That’s why Celestia had kept Transform so well protected, the only spellbook that taught it within the Royal Library’s restricted wing, to be handed out at her discretion.
And even that wasn’t enough, considering that an incredibly dedicated pony could learn the word from studying other mages.
Letting Night learn Transform was...well, it had far-reaching consequences that she wasn’t sure she wanted to deal with.
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.
“As you wish,” he said.
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Come on before they wake up.”
Night nodded, and they both slipped away toward Night’s safehouse.
---$---
When morning came, Twilight yawned and climbed out of the air mattress that Night bought her. Of all the purchases he had made so far, this one definitely earned her seal of approval.
Night groaned at her alarm clock and rolled over on his cot, stuffing his ears with his pillow.
“I thought you were a morning pony?” Twilight asked.
“Too much magic,” Night muttered.
Twilight gave a slight nod before she fished out her amulet and raised the sun. “I get that,” she said, before turning off the alarm she brought with her and crawled back onto the mattress. “Get me up in ten minutes, I need to start heading back to Canterlot. I have a Gala to prep for.”
“Bold of you to assume I’ll be awake in ten minutes,” Night muttered.
Twilight smiled at the comment but didn’t say anything else.
After all, if Night missed her wake up call, then it wasn’t her fault that she was late.