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// Chapter 68 — Pony Resource Manager 
// Story: The Runaway Bodyguard 
// by scifipony 
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I returned from Baa Harbor, directly to Baltimare. I found that Carne Asada had converted for me the set of three dressing rooms, the ones to the right of the theatre stage she used as her throne room. She knocked out walls to make the suite, and even removed the bricked-in windows, filling them with glass blocks in a bubble design when I asked for more light. After the hospital stay, I'd lost my taste for goth things and found myself becoming depressed in darkened rooms. 

I sat at an oak table I used for a desk, behind which I could hide nothing. Behind me stood a bed I never used and a treadmill, medicine ball set, spring hoof pulley torture devices, and saddle weights my physical therapist Bright Side and I worked with two hours a day.

Carne Asada wanted to watch me. 

I heard five sets of hooves and looked up to see the Doña herself stop in the doorway. While keeping my pencil in the air, I slid the drapes closed, causing the curtain hooks to screech, and cranked the skylight shutters. 

She smiled and Peppermint, the green unicorn captain of Carne Asada's B-team bodyguards, followed her in. I kept the pencil aloft because Peppermint knew it took slightly longer for me to switch spells than to only have one prepared ready for my horn. I had retrained all the staff unicorns with my techniques and fighting style to make my life easier. I recognized the threat of his accompanying her. 

Carne Asada said, "Hija, any other pony doing what you've been doing would be dead by now."

But I'm not. I nodded, putting down the pencil with a click-clack and letting go of my magic. "Direct, undiplomatic, and Old Skool as ever."

"You've consolidated relationships with all the syndicate principals in all the eastern cities we have territories in."

"I haven't hidden my lunch or dinner dates." Couldn't ask gang lieutenants to come traipsing up to the main residence to signal the constabulary that something was up, now could I?

"I'm aware you used my security and visited discreet restaurants for discreet conversation. And you kept notes that match the reports I get back."

"I never lock my desk." Not that any lock would have stopped her, even if I had drawers to lock them in. "Nopony ever talks specifics about their business. I'm a consultant. I listen. I teach them basic business principles when they obviously lack them, and encourage finding competence over seniority or muscle. I answer questions. I make strong suggestions. We talk sports, cosmetics, and gossip."

Peppermint stood next to her as she said, "The boroughs of Hooflyn are reorganizing. Wind Sail, Prospect es South, and es Sunset Park—" she used the borough names as I insisted "—have taken lower management roles, and three other boroughs are asking to consolidate operations and have abandoned... an industry altogether. They're standing up like soldiers and not acting like jealous siblings."

"Yes, and this is bad, how? They tell me profits are up and territory incursions are down."

"Margins—"

"Are down?" I slammed a hoof on the desk, eliciting from the unicorn the evil eye and a green aura around his horn. "I am your bodyguard. The next griffon may kill me, then you. You hired me to do a job, then thought to tell everypony I was your daughter to mess with ponies' minds? Seriously? Did you think I wouldn't wield the weapon the way I might a knife, a hoof, or my horn?"

This was where she would bring up Blue Lightning. When the newspapers had discovered that he had disappeared, the constabulary had kept mum despite yellow dog press speculation that he had taken a swim with cement horseshoes because he was a witness. Had Carne Asada erased him, surely the EBI would not have stopped their high profile investigation of her—but with her you never knew. For Carne Asada, principle always trumped business.

Well?

She kept eye contact until she didn't, then sat on the velvet director' chair in front of my desk, waving the unicorn away. He backed out into the hall very slowly.

She conceded, "I don't understand all you did."

"I'll teach you." I reached for one of the same books Proper Step had gotten my tutors; they were as pricey as had undoubtedly been my tutors. They lay scattered at the edges of my desk and stacked pastern-high on the floor beside me. 

She waved a hoof. "That's what underlings are for. I get reports that aren't in brainy-filly-speak. Bottom line looks good in that it lets me accelerate my plans. Starlight Glimmer?"

That name. She locked gazes with me again. "Yes?"

"Ask permission next time, even if you are laid-up in the hospital."

I nodded.

She glanced at the books on the desk, the gym equipment, the paisley drapes that cut the light to twilight levels. She reached into a peytral purse that blended with her blue dress, looked under the flap, then at me.

She said, "You gave your life to save mine. Don't think I didn't notice."

I grinned, showing my teeth. I defeated a flapping griffon master fighter! "Don't exaggerate. I'm tough."

"You died, twice. They barely revived you, twice. I saw you jump when they applied lightning shocks to your heart... What blood you didn't leave on the floor you lost to internal bleeding, they told me. The hospital wasn't close enough. They had trouble finding enough blood. You died—and I did not."

My hooves turned ice and I shuddered as a chill traveled the length of my spine. "Yeah. Well. Whatevs." I chuckled. 

No wonder I'd taken so long to wake up; I almost hadn't!

I sat there breathing hard. Dizzy. Feeling like I was in that storm fomented by the windigoes when I'd been a foal, this time in a boat without a rudder. Circling. Circling. 

She reached into her purse and came out with a manila envelope. "You asked for this and I'm giving it to you."

"Asked for... I, what?"

"They shot you full of medication but you fought yourself awake to see if I was okay. You saw me in the ICU and babbled even when I put a hoof across your mouth, but I understood what you wanted and why. I had to think about it, find out who this Ms. Maple was before I convinced myself that your obsession was something you were angry about, not something you wanted so you could take advantage of this." She reached into the purse and flipped my command card across the desk so it slid in front of me. The H-shaped rune noticed my attention and a green spark traced its outline. "You hate her as much as I do, so I'm not so jealous as to think you had plans to leave me."

She hoofed the envelope over.

I magicked out papers. They shook in the air just as my hooves did. I noticed the indentations of pressure-type official seals and wax seals that weighed down the last page so it acted like a pendulum. Odd. Was this indeed official? I looked at that end piece. I saw red wax, gold foil, and black ink cross-sealed though the stack with indented stylized loops and hearts. I saw a judge's signature, notary signatures, and something it took me a half a minute to remember the word for (though it was right there on the page). Apostille, an overseas document legalization stamp, one each for Trottingham, Prance, Saddle Arabia, Salerno, and Equidor competing for space on the page. "What? What is this?"

"What you asked for," she answered, reaching over and tapping the top page. I turned it over, then had to leaf through a set of instruction pages to find that actual legal document's front page.

I blinked. I read it. Then blinked again.

"Emancipation papers, what!?" I kept looking, scanning page after turned page. "Starlight Glimmer?"

"You es said I could pick a name, though admittedly you were drooling and fighting for consciousness. Hijita mia, this makes you legally an adult anywhere in the world that matters." I looked up and saw Silver Quill nodding beside Carne Asada. The elderly snow white pegasus took out an ink pad and a notebook, and invited in Bright Side, my therapist as a witness. The pink earth pony mare looked really uncomfortable, but she put on a smile that matched her happy pony face cutie mark. "It's legal once you add your hoof print and your es signature."

Even after Carne Asada and I were again alone in my office, I kept flipping the pages back and forth, amazed. Died and reborn, was I? I wondered if I could use it to kick Proper Step out of my earldom. The hoof print and signature were mine, whether it read Aurora Midnight or not. Princess Celestia might fight it, probably would fight it, or use a royal decree to reverse it, but the only earl in Equestria might be able to fight back with the peerage's help...

Thinking Her name brought up another question. "Why do you hate Celestia so badly?"

The mare's breathing increased and I could see her face darken at the word Celestia. She gulped back anger. Her wings strained against her dress and I heard a seam unravel. Any pegasus would have flared her wings. She stood and paced, hissing. "The White Windigo." 

"I'm sorry. If you don't want to answer—"

"Genocide," spat Carne Asada, trembling as she looked down at me. "The crystal caves of the Canterlot Mountain Range are my people's ancestral home! Es stolen! She killed our queen, and when we fought back, she tried to erase my kind from the world. After nine centuries, she will pay, and... I know you will help me for your own reasons." She rubbed her head with a hoof. "I—I have to go lay down."

The whole encounter left me unaccountably worried. Was everypony somepony else's monster? Why did I feel that my freedom came with chains attached?

The next week, she accelerated her plans and I soon understood why she had used the term soldiers earlier.