In Blanche’s room, Bluebird squinted to read his own handwriting as he looked over his notes… (How had his penmanship gotten worse since he was a foal? Bluebird wondered if even his mentor could get to the bottom of that mystery.)
By the looks of it, it was all there—the facts of the case surrounding the discovery of the wing fragment, the coincidence of Changeling Ringing, the deal with the royal jelly, as well as her perspective and information about changelings in general. If ever he and Pesco were stuck on a point of changeling trivia, Blanche would definitely be a source to return to. But for the moment, he had learned everything that was relevant, and so he thanked the young author for her time and made way for the door.
“There’s one more thing I should say, Officer,” she called after him. Bluebird turned back to face her. “It’s about my dearest twin brother Bon.”
“Oh?” He flipped his notepad back open. “Do tell.”
“Let me set the scene: ‘Twas nine years ago, in that uncertain season between summer and fall. Father was by now sufficiently impressed with Bon’s playing of his well-tempered little clavier that he saw it time to arrange for the fawn’s first piano exhibition. It would be a solo performance for Father, his daughter yours truly, and choice guests—just a little after-dinner entertainment, meant to acclimate his son to high-society networking.
“Can I just say? This wasn’t the first or last time Father exhibited Bon like this. As for myself, well… I’ll call it ‘fatherly love,’ the fact that I was spared such demanding expectations. You can call it something else, and I encourage you to.”
Favorite child? Sexist dad? the cadet scrawled. He added a couple extra question marks to each, for good measure.
“Now, regarding his piano exhibition, eight-year-old Bon was scared out of his velvet, of course. But even back then, he was never one to let an opportunity to impress Patriarch and friends pass him by. So, alone in his room he worked himself to the bone practicing The Blue Doenube for weeks, until he was sure he could play it in his sleep. Having achieved mastery, the thought of his exhibition no longer frightened him.
“Or so he thought. He sat down at the keys that fateful day, and all at once that mastery dripped from his brain out his ears. (Bon insists that the stool was at an unfamiliar height to him and it threw off his magical muscle memory, but make no mistake, it was the same damn nonadjustable stool taken straight from his room.) The result, Officer, is that he didn’t make it halfway to the coda of that waltz before he succumbed to his sour notes. He stood up suddenly; he staggered across the stage; and then, he simply fainted from embarrassment.
“As far as after-dinner entertainment goes, it was a sidesplitting tour de force. Father was the only one who wasn’t so amused.”
Bluebird had tried to transcribe the key details of the story, but gave up halfway through as he began to question what even were the key details. “That’s, uh, quite the sibling story, Blanche! I’m sure that information will prove useful in, um…”
“I’m only telling you this so that you have a distant memory to corroborate with my brother. Idea being, if he recalls it exactly as I do, it stands to reason neither of us have been replaced by a changeling.”
That made much more sense to Bluebird. At the same time, though, he wondered if she couldn’t have shared a memory of theirs that was just a smidge less… traumatic?
The smirk on the sister’s lips told him she definitely could have.
And that was the true end of the interview with Blanche, after a second thanking for her time. Once outside her bedroom, Bluebird took one more moment to review his notes before deciding he would regroup and strategize with his mentor.
He walked back down the corridor and toward the spiral staircase that would feed into the foyer below. However, on his approach, he could hear a conversation taking place downstairs. Bluebird stood over the banister—neither concealing nor outright revealing his presence—and saw two familiar faces having a conversation at hoof’s reach on the divan: It was Girard the griffon, and that earth pony Grid Iron.
“All in all I guess I don’t really know much about the thing… But I wouldn’t worry about it, dude, you couldn’t wind up any worse off than me!” Grid chuckled in good spirit.
Girard’s back was to Bluebird from this angle, his head bowed low as he mumbled. It was all Bluebird could do to make out choice fragments of the griffon’s words:
“… I just can’t imagine how that feels, or doesn’t feel… I mean I literally have a hard time conceiving… without… But I can’t deny… it sounds like it would make things so, so much—”
“Oh hey there, Detective!” Grid bellowed. Girard spooked and reflexively craned his gaze backward and upward. “Or, was it detective-in-training?”
Bluebird gave a friendly salute as he descended the stairs. “Still just a cadet, yep. Pesco’s the big guns.”
”Ah, but who’s keeping track anyway?”
“The payroll department, primarily, ahah.”
Bluebird had made it to the landing when the griffon rose from his squat to his four legs and stretched his wings anxiously. He gave a slow nod to his friend, thanking him for the benefit of whatever conversation they had just had. “I-I should be going now. Gloria will begin to wonder.”
Girard wasted no time as he began to vacate the foyer in the direction of another corridor beneath the stairs, passing Bluebird on his way. He slowed down as he went, tracking Bluebird with his gaze… The same “haunted” look in his eyes as earlier, mixed with something else. Was he expecting something?
Girard disappeared from the scene without another word.
“Say, Gloria and Girard,” Bluebird began casually, addressing the standing pony still present, “what’s the relation between them, exactly?”
“They’re cousins, yeah,” Grid said.
“A pretty inseparable pair, huh? And you would have us believe Bon and Blanche are the twins!”
“Yeah, Girard and Gloria are joined at the haunches!” Grid said. “They grew up as cubs in the same royal family, back in their home province.”
A Griffonstone royal duo, Bluebird thought. Quite the honor. But even though he’d only had glimpses of these two thus far, he had the distinct feeling this occupation agreed with Gloria’s manner of dress and personality far better than it did Girard’s. Two nobles cut from different cloth, he supposed; he’d always imagined royal types as having very interchangeable personalities, but he knew that was ignorant of him.
“If you don’t mind me asking, what was it you two were talking about out here?”
“Well, I’d just fixed myself a pre-workout snack,” he gestured to a large bowl, only a few kernels of quinoa left sticking to the sides, “when I noticed him preening something furious, out here alone in the foyer. And well, Girard, you see, probably you’ve already noticed… He’s kinda a bundle of nerves, even in the best of times.”
“I see. And these are more like the worst of times.”
“Exactly! He’s wound up even tighter than usual. Not the worst I’ve ever seen him, but, it ebbs and it flows, y’know.”
“Sounds like a hoof-ful and a half to deal with.” Realizing the possible faux-pas, he quickly added, “For him, his anxiety, I mean.”
Grid chuckled, then leaned a hoof against the divan, looking contemplative. “Yeah, certainly for him. Gloria is his rock, generally, but he leans on us from time to time, too. I guess I cherish the opportunity, when he does.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s just nice, not having to worry about living up to expectations around him, y’know? Well, that sounds pretty rude when I say it, but really, I feel those expectations all the time around others, especially at CCD,” he explained. “Like, there are more scholars than athletes at that place, and so I’m mostly just known as the pony who got in for sports.”
Bluebird found it amusing how it all seemed to go back to something existential with these kids. “What sports do you play?”
“Cross-country skiing and hoofball, mainly. Dual scholarship,” he added, with a hint of pride. “But yeah, I think I’ve just about got the formula down pat for pulling Girard out of his nervous funks like this one. The trick is, after you calm him down from whatever’s stressing him out—and I don’t blame him, there’s a lot to be stressed about right now!—he’s likely to calm down too much, and become a bit depressive. So you pick him back up again, and then he’s pretty much right as rain!”
“So I guess the part I dropped in on was this recovery phase, huh?” The cadet felt an itch in his pocket where his pen and case notes lay, but he resisted the urge; best not to risk spoiling the mood. He would just have to trust his memory and record details later. “Hate to have interrupted your method, and whatever you were talking about.”
“Oh yeah, I forget how, but we wound up on the subject of, y’know, love and romance, and well, I guess he’s been feeling down about his own prospects there?” In a familiar gesture, he rubbed the back of his neck. His extraverted nature was quickly fading. “To be honest, you kinda saved me from an awkward situation. Dunno if I would’ve been able to execute the recovery, or well, y’know, if I would’ve been the best player to take that one in particular to the end zone, heh.”
Grid went quiet, but Bluebird detected there was an explanation missing. He was about to prod for one, but then he remembered—silence, if it worked, worked best. Indeed, after a pause, Grid continued on his own:
“Um, you know that stereotype of the hoofball jock with the amped-up libido and his choice of mare for each day of the week?” he said, exceedingly forward. “Well, without sounding too weird about it, I’ve always been kind of the opposite: Not once have I ever had a crush on a mare!”
Hm.
“Or on a stallion, uh, just to make that clear. At least, not as far as I can remember…”
Once again, Bluebird’s wing twitched, wanting to reach for the notepad. If a changeling was involved, love was relevant; and if love was relevant, then maybe, so was an (alleged) lack of it?
“… It’s the sort of thing I always expected to happen eventually. But now, in my senior year of high school, I think I’ve come to expect it’s permanent: a life without all that whatever-you-call-it. Who needs lovers when you have friends, am I right?”
Grid scrounged up a smile.
Plodding hoofsteps from the hall behind Grid interrupted the conversation. The pair turned their heads in anticipation of who might be arriving…
My interview with Zorn having concluded, I had begun to make my way back to the foyer. A multitude of questions competed for my attention—Could we trust Zorn and his experiments, that there was one and only one changeling in the villa? Or that his emergency serum was what he said it was? Could we trust that all the quirks and circumstances setting him apart from his friends were truly benign?—and I did not notice until I was halfway into the foyer that the room was currently occupied; Bluebird and Grid Iron stared at me, seemingly interrupted in conversation.
“Oh hey. What’s up, Big Guns?” Grid jested, much to Bluebird’s amusement.
I moved to excuse myself to give my partner privacy for his interrogation, but Grid picked up a finished bowl of something starchy from nearby as he postured to leave.
“Was good talking to you Bluebird, but I really oughta hit the gym. Don’t wanna miss out on the glucose boost from my meal. Later!”
“Wait!” Bluebird called after him. “Just one more thing.”
Grid stopped before the hallway, and looked back at my cadet. I myself could only wonder what he had in mind.
“It’s just, Blanche gave me a good idea, a precaution we should be taking with each of you here,” Bluebird said. “Grid, is there something you know about one or more of your friends here, something detailed and in the distant past that you can have corroborated? Something that a changeling impostor would be unlikely to know, in other words.”
This was a good strategy, I thought. A fast and noninvasive tactic that could, in theory, immediately out the changeling. But it was not without its faults, especially in its current form…
“Hm, yeah! I could tell you about the time Bon and I—”
“How about something regarding Gloria and Girard, specifically?” I preempted, rudely but not without reason. “Say, the first time you ever met them.”
It was likely a changeling could over time acquire bits and pieces of obscure personal stories, specifically to offer them up as proof of their identity. Demanding information on a particular topic not of their choosing, on the other hoof, would greatly reduce this strategy’s rate of false negatives. Moreover, the characters of my request were a deliberate choice—they were the ones we currently knew the least about.
“Gloria and Girard, huh? Them again?”
He looked at my partner, who simply shrugged.
“It’s been a minute,” he said, thinking more deeply. “I’ve kinda known Girard since my first week at Canterlot Academy Day. I sat next to him in our Seaquestrian History class, but we didn’t talk much. I only really got to know him after we all met his cousin Gloria at first year’s prom…”
Bluebird recorded these details for future reference, nodding approvingly for Grid to continue.
“… Let’s see, her dad had come to the shindig, which was pretty memorable for how much he stood out, in all his kingly getup… We don’t see him very often, in fact I think they have a bit of a strained relationship… But yeah, that year Bon was really into poker, and he cleaned a bunch of his classmates out at the afterparty… I remember Blanche there, she was going through a little bit of a goth phase, heh… and Zorn and Girard weren’t there, because of general Zornness and food poisoning, respectively.”
Food poisoning. Consistently the number one bogus excuse for absence. Even in an innocuous context, I couldn’t resist prying. “You sure there couldn’t be another reason he didn’t attend? Girard, that is.”
Grid picked up on my incredulity. “Well yeah, sure, maybe it was just his nerves acting up. Most every social event that comes around, though, Gloria tries to rope him along, because she knows it’s what’s best for him. So I figure it was probably a legitimate excuse, whatever it was.”
So, his nervous condition is a pre-existing one. Dealing with fragile suspects wasn’t my specialty—and if Gloria was his protector, that could make it all the more complicated.
“About this strained relationship between Gloria and her father,” I asked, “is there anything specific you can tell us?”
I knew I was testing the boundaries of politeness, asking Grid to conjecture on his friends’ family issues like this. At the end of the day, though, my partner and I weren’t here to be polite.
Happily, Grid seemed to understand this. “I don’t think they have it out for each other, really. Like I said we don’t see members of their family much, since they practically live across the planet. But whenever we do, they only have good things to say about Gloria and Girard. Sweet people. They just always seem a bit… nervous, I guess.”
Bluebird chuckled. “Maybe that’s where Girard gets it from?”
“Huh, yeah! Like, actually!”
He looked in awe of my partner’s detective prowess. To me personally, Bluebird’s suggestion had sounded like more of a joke than a deduction.
“On second thought, I think I had the wrong impression about a strain. I’m glad you had me think about it more carefully, Big Guns.” Addressing my cadet, Grid asked, “Anyway, that about enough details?”
With the retracting click of a pen and a bob of the head, Bluebird at last granted Grid his permission to leave for the gym.
Once alone, my partner and I shared our accounts of our interviews with Blanche and Zorn. Bluebird, as well, filled me in on what I’d missed of the three-way conversation in the foyer—it seemed I wasn’t the only one asking him about the griffons. It took almost as long as the interviews themselves in order to bring each other up to speed, at which point we moved on to speculation and future plans.
“Already we’re being stretched in contradictory directions,” I opined. “Do you feel the same, Bluebird?”
“Maybe. In what way?”
“Don’t let me bias you,” I said. Maybe Zorn was rubbing off on me? “In whichever way.”
“Well, on the one hoof, Blanche put the fear of Celestia into me with her profiling of this changeling, this royal jelly-fed supersoldier, so to speak. And she has a lot of evidence to back it up!” he conceded. “But now you have Zorn, and it sounds like he’s vaguely aware of the situation, but not acting on it? Call me optimistic, but that paints a less dangerous picture of the bug to me. Especially when there’s not yet any evidence he’s here to cause any harm.”
Hmph. “Zorn has to believe in the possibility of harmful intent, if he’s entrusted this to me,” I said, brandishing the weighty brass syringe.
My partner had a habit of preferring the most charitable interpretations of culprits’ actions. Initially in our partnership I considered it a very silly tendency of his, but I had to admit it balanced out my own pessimistic tendencies. Myself, I still favored any of my own developing theories, such as:
The wing fragment was a deliberate message to Blanche somehow related to Changeling Ringing. Perhaps Blanche found something out about changelings she shouldn’t have, in the course of her research? Or perhaps the changelings didn’t like their depiction in the book? Or perhaps they did like it, and this wing fragment was some misunderstood attempt at recruitment?
Otherwise or independently, perhaps Zorn was the changeling, or working in concert with them; it would explain more than one strange aspect of his behavior. If this was true, the “magic-suppressant” serum he gave me was not something I could take at face value.
Still otherwise, if I were to put myself in the horseshoes of an infiltrator, I believe I would’ve chosen to replace Grid Iron. From what I’d seen, he was both the physical and social core of the six. I agreed with my partner that the theme of “love” was important in this case—and Grid was caught in the middle of both Bon’s apparent affection for him, as well as this most recent conversation with Girard. Finally, despite his kind nature, he was the only one in whom I detected an undercurrent of barely restrained anger—even violence.
But in the end, we lacked convincing evidence for any particular theory. Now was the time for action, not navel-gazing.
“It bothers me to no end when suspects withhold information from me, especially on something so important,” I said, thinking back to Zorn. “I imagine a mansion like this has a well-stocked library. That being the case, I would like to find anything there that might help me to translate something from Zebrish.”
Bluebird rubbed his neck with a hoof. “So, you’re thinking of, ahah, going behind Zorn’s back in order to read his lab notes?”
“Yes. With how he labeled the dishes, I think there’s a good chance he’s not committing the experimental setup to memory.” My underhanded intentions not sitting quite right with my partner, I quickly added, “This only as a means of last resort for us. And not a moment sooner.”
We both tried to believe me, but I don’t think either of us really did.
Nonetheless, we signed off on our separate plans: Bluebird would conduct an interview with Bon and also corroborate Blanche’s personal story, while I would seek out the library.