//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Welcome back to Canterlot High, Miss Shimmer // Story: Equestria Girls: A New Generation // by Naughty_Ranko //------------------------------// Sunset Shimmer sat in the small waiting area in front of Principal Celestia’s office and couldn’t help but sit bolt upright, feeling like she was in trouble. She wasn’t, of course, but muscle memory in places with lots of personal history was a funny thing, she decided. For her wardrobe this morning, she’d deliberately picked out what she privately called the least Sunset thing I own, consisting of a grey pencil skirt that went down to her knees and a very unassuming but meticulously pressed white blouse. Her normally sprawling wealth of fiery hair was tied up into a no-nonsense ponytail. She stood up and busied herself with looking around until her eyes inevitably fell on the photos of past Fall Formal Princesses hanging on the wall. The most recent ones, she didn’t know. Going back further though, some familiar faces popped up, juniors she’d known during her own senior year, then Twilight Sparkle, and a smile crossed her face. She didn’t turn to look, only glancing sideways at the three preceding pictures, her own. Someone had put them up again. Sunset had made it her mission in her last week before graduation to try and track down every last copy and get rid of them. Evidently, she’d missed a few, and her fingers twitched, ready to rip them off the wall and throw them in the nearby trash bin. But she resisted the urge and turned instead to a larger frame picture of the last Friendship Games. Taking in the smiling faces of herself and her friends in their prime, she lamented the fact that the school district had canceled any further events which necessitated the construction of a one-time-use dirt bike track. "Reminiscing, Miss Shimmer?“ Sunset jumped at the sudden voice and turned to see a gently smiling Celestia standing in the door. Blinking away the vision of Princess Celestia that had immediately popped up in front of her mind’s eye, she greeted her new boss who was wearing her usual of a light, yellow blazer and purple suit pants, a combination Sunset always felt did a grave injustice to the beauty and ethereal quality of her multi-colored hair. “I guess so. Good morning, Principal Celestia.” “Just Celestia,” the woman replied and pulled out her keys to unlock the door to her office. “I don’t like to stand on formalities with my teachers, at least when there aren’t any students around.” Sunset laughed sheepishly. “Well, that’s gonna take some getting used to.” “In your own time,” Celestia chuckled as she led her former student into her office. “I also went to school here once upon a time. To come back as an educator can be a bit weird. Sorry for being late. I dropped by the mall to pick these up from the locksmith.” And with that, she took out a second set of keys similar to her own and dropped them into Sunset’s hands. Sunset held the brand-new keys up to her eyes, all neatly labeled and held together by a simple but sturdy ring. “Ah, the keys to every room in school, the secret desire of every delinquent and even most of the mildly curious model students.” “Indeed,” Celestia said dryly while placing two cups under the espresso machine in the corner of her office. “I recommend getting a sturdy snap hook to keep them safe. Heavy is the responsibility of carrying the General Key, forged in the fires of Mt. Doom, the key to bring them and in the darkness bind them … at least until class lets out.” Sunset bit her lip and sat opposite Celestia as the older woman brought over two steaming coffee cups and sat them down on her desk. “What?” Celestia asked with a smirk and a twinkle in her eye as she looked at Sunset over the rim of her cup. “Nothing,” Sunset replied, still fighting down the urge to break into a fit of giggles. “I just never thought I’d hear you crack a joke like that.” “I’m a high school principal, not a bridge troll, Sunset. I try to maintain a proper distance and authority in front of my students. But I have my hobbies, and even a sense of humor. … A cringy one according to my sister, but I have one.” “Well, you could have had us fooled back in the day,” Sunset replied, taking a sip from her coffee and noting that the flavor was very rich and deep. “Thank you for giving me this opportunity.” Celestia waved her hand. “Please, I have to thank you. When the school board suddenly decided that we had to offer another foreign language as an elective, I was at my wits’ end. You’re a godsend! I thought I’d already lost you to Crystal Prep, seeing as you did your practical semester there.” Sunset took another drink and, seeing as she’d long ago sworn to herself never to hold anything back again from either Celestia, said: “Full disclosure, I would have jumped at the chance to teach at Crystal Prep if they’d offered me a full-time position.” Arching an eyebrow, Celestia asked: “Why didn’t they?” “Well, Principal Cadence wanted to, but she got vetoed by the PTA, so they gave the job to some moron who had rich enough parents to go to a much more prestigious college than me and who has got family connections that pay more in donations than just being friends with the principal’s sister-in-law.” Celestia put down her cup, steepled her fingers together and sat up straight, momentarily slipping back into her old role as Sunset’s teacher. “I understand this would be frustrating, but maybe calling a fellow educator a ‘moron’ for having lucked into more money and better connections than you is a bit harsh?” she suggested. Sunset took another drink and nodded. “Normally, I would agree, except for the fact that I know the moron in question. We were in the same student dorm during our semester abroad. I brought back a wealth of new experiences, a bunch of new friends I still stay in contact with and the love of a new language from that. … He brought back a case of beer.” “Ah,” Celestia said delicately and let the matter drop. “Well, be that as it may. Crystal Prep’s loss is our gain. So, was your semester abroad the reason you decided to minor in German Literature?” “It was. I spent some time at the University of Tübingen. I was actually more interested in their archeology department at first. But I soon became fascinated with the language itself. Weirdly enough, there’s a lot of similarities between Old High German and Old Ponish.” “Old … Ponish …” Sunset blushed. “Uhm, forget I brought it up.” After rubbing her eyes for a moment, Celestia leaned forward and gave her former student a piercing look. “Sunset, when you and your friends went to school here, it was …” She fought for a moment to find the right words. “Well, it was certainly never boring. But as a teacher, someone responsible for the well-being of my little students, it was also the scariest time of my life. To have something at my school I couldn’t understand, something I couldn’t protect my students from if it went wild, something that forced you and your friends into danger to protect the school again and again, which should have been my job…” “Celestia …” The principal reached over and took Sunset’s hands in her own. “I need you to tell me that that part of your life is over, that there isn’t going to be rumors floating around the students of one of their teachers being a magical horse girl from another dimension.” “Well,” Sunset mumbled in response, her mouth faster than her brain as it so often was even now, as she was also trying to come up with the right words, “technically magical pony girl from another dimension. Let’s not be specist.” Celestia frowned, her lips drawing into a thin line. After clearing her throat, Sunset looked Celestia straight in the eye to convey her sincerity. “You don’t have to worry.” Reaching down the front of her blouse, Sunset produced the geode crystal pendant and held it up. She noticed Celestia going instinctively stiff and leaning back in her chair, staring at the geode rock on the filigree chain as if she was expecting it to rear up and bite her. “We’d get incidents even into our college years from time to time,” Sunset began to explain. “But they became less and less frequent. Couple of years ago, we recovered an Equestrian artifact that was messing with the people over in Maretime Bay. We shipped it off through the portal to Princess Twilight for safekeeping, and then these stopped working.” She held up the pendant for emphasis. “It’s just a pretty rock now that I keep with me for sentimental reasons. No magical powers, no ‘ponying up’ since. We figure that was the final bit of wild magic that had crossed the portals Twilight made during the last Friendship Games, and the stones going dormant was their way of telling us: ‘Mission accomplished.’ We believe there’s no more Equestrian magic left in this world, except for what I carry innately, and that is barely enough to light a candle without a way to focus it.” Celestia breathed in deeply, nodding a couple of times and finally said in a barely audible whisper: “Good, that’s good.” Sunset gave her what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Her eyes lingered a moment on the pendant between her fingers, before she tucked it back away out of sight. Before the ensuing silence had a chance to stretch into awkward territory, the door opened and an older man in a bad toupee and a brown sweater strode into the office, right past the desk, and made a beeline for the espresso machine. “Ah, good morning, Cranky,” Celestia said with no visible sign of being rattled. “Sunset, you remember Cranky, don’t you?” “Of course. Hello, Mr. Doodle. How have you been?” Cranky held up one finger without even looking, drank down his entire cup with a few gulps, then placed it right back down to make himself another. “Cranky will be your teacher advisor for the time being,” Celestia said, raising her voice slightly as to be heard over the grinding of more coffee beans. “Any questions you have until you get settled in, you can confidently direct to our Acting Vice-principal.” “Acting Vice-principal?” Sunset asked. Celestia nodded. “Luna is taking a sabbatical this year. Cranky has kindly agreed to fill in for her.” “You mean you volunteered me,” Cranky cut in, taking a seat next to Sunset and placing his second cup of coffee on the desk. “And I let you rope me into it, cause it means I get to retire at the end of the school year.” “You’re retiring?” Sunset asked, aghast. He nodded. “You betcha, soon as I finished training my replacement, i.e. you. So don’t you bail on me halfway down the line, kid. I’ve already made a down payment on a nice, little beachfront property over in Maretime Bay.” Yeesh, the only way that could have sounded more cliché is if you’d said Florida instead of Maretime Bay, Sunset thought privately and said aloud: “I’m glad for any guidance you have to offer, Mr. Doodle.” Cranky gave her a piercing look with a crooked eyebrow. “No, you’re not. But that’s okay. I’m gonna drop my wisdom on you anyway, you decide what you do with it. Lesson #1. Anytime Her Highness summons you into her ivory tower, you mooch a coffee off of her. The stuff in the teachers’ lounge tastes like crap, but it gets you through the day.” Celestia dead-panned at that. “May I remind you that I paid for a second one out of my own pocket when I ordered these,” she said, jabbing a thumb towards the espresso machine over her shoulder. “It’s not my fault you lot broke yours within a week and had to make do with the old filter coffee maker since.” “’Ah, Celly. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a grunt down in the trenches with us,” he replied with a dramatic sigh. “The enemy, they’re everywhere, and they outnumber us. To hold the line against the students day after day, it wears down both troops and equipment.” Celestia quirked an eyebrow in Sunset’s direction. “World looks quite different from the other side, doesn’t it? It’s very rewarding, but it does take a thick skin on occasion. You sure you still want to do this job?” “Careful, it’s a trap,” Cranky whispered. “The rumors are true. She actually does have a space laser pointed at any given conversation partner’s head at all times, should they give an answer that displeases her.” Sunset looked back and forth between the two of them. “I was about to say that I could do without the snark, but then again you were both my teachers, so you know me better than that.” Looking Celestia straight in the eye, she sat up straight and added: “Reporting for duty, ma’am.” An actual chuckle rose in Cranky’s throat. “Careful, grasshopper. We may have taught you all the snark you know. We haven’t taught you all the snark we know.” Sunset turned and put the palms of her hands together. Bowing in his direction, she said with an absolutely straight face: “Hai, sensei!” And then she saw Cranky full-on guffaw, a sight she’d maybe glimpsed once or twice tops in all her years as a student here. Celestia simply smiled as the first bell of the day chimed. “I think you’ll fit right in here, Sunset. Cranky, would you please show her to her first class?” Cranky slapped his knees and slowly stood up. “You got it, Celly. Come on, kid. Lesson #2 for when you get in there, never show fear on your first day. I swear, they can smell it on ya.” As the two teachers made their way through the door, Celestia called out after them: “Sunset!” “Yes?” A smile played across the principal’s lips that once again forcefully pushed a memory of her old mentor to the front of Sunset’s mind. “Welcome back to CHS.” Sunset smiled in return. "Thanks. It's good to be home," she said with a nod and followed Cranky out into the hallways that at once felt very nostalgic and yet brand-new at the same time.