by Fuzzyfurvert
***
Twilight Sparkle breathed slowly into the brown paper bag she’d been given.
The steady melody of hissing air and crumpling paper soothed her mind and relaxed the muscles in her chest. In the background she could hear the dean’s magically amplified voice addressing the auditorium. It seemed silly to her, the room was mostly empty, just the first few rows filled with the parents and friends of the Special Honors Advanced Course graduates (i.e.:Twilight Sparkle).
It was an honor, being awarded Royal Certification of Mastery in Transmutation. She was just the second unicorn to have that distinction in the last hundred years, the previous being her father, Night Light. He was out there, sitting in the auditorium. Her mother and her big brother were there too, of course, as well as a host of her teachers from all over Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.
Which obviously meant that she was there too. The Princess. The most lovely, awesome, awe-inspiringly hot - No! She couldn’t let her mind wander down that path now. That was why she was breathing into a bag in the first place. She could scratch that itch later on in her dorm room with the door firmly locked and her hidden book of fanfiction at the ready to receive her thoughts.
Twilight took a deep breath as she heard the dean start his formal introduction of the graduates and dropped the bag. She ran her mastery display spells through her mind quickly and nodded to herself. She was as ready as she was ever going to be.
On queue, Twilight stepped out on stage to loud applause from the gathered ponies. The loudest clapping coming from the dead center of the group where her family sat. She beamed a wide smile at them and then gulped as when she saw Princess Celestia sitting right next to them. Her mind went blank and Twilight froze as the clapping died down and left her in awkward silence while everypony starred.
The moment stretched and Twilight felt herself shrinking into the floor paneling of the stage until she noticed Celestia’s eyes. The Princess flicked her eyes to the side, but otherwise remained still with that lovely smile of hers in place. Two more quick flicks got the purple unicorn moving again and the tension flowed out of her shoulders and back as she mounted the podium and took a jittery breath to ease her nerves.
“T-th-thank you all for coming today.” Twilight’s horn started to glow. “To display my mastery of the Transmutation school of magic, I have prepared a few spells to show you.”
From behind the podium, she levitated a small blue cube. “Transmutation is about change. Changing the measurable, physical qualities of an object or living creature. This cube is a simple shape in a basic color, but with transmuting spells I can change it into anything else I desire.”
Twilight’s horn started to glow brighter and the cube began to spin slowly. “First, I’ll change the color to...um, white. Yeah. And we’ll add some...gold? Sounds good.” Twilight bite her lip as the cube changed color obediently and a blotch of gold appeared. “Next, shape. Let’s do...uh, a sphere. Then for complexity, I’ll make it irregular. Just sort of pressing a crease or cleft here and kinda bulge out the sides?”
Twilight hummed to herself as the solid morphed in front of the audience to the sound of impressed gasps and applause. “Hmmm...now I’ll increase its overall mass by a factor of four!”
The shape grew as Twilight focused her magic into it and she grew proportionally more relaxed as she lost herself in her own spellcraft. She smiled to herself after a moment when she felt she had demonstrated enough and looked back at her audience as the shape settled itself on the stage next to her.
“Transmutation is about achieving your desires. If you don’t have what you need, create it out of something else. Our imagination is limitless and with transmutation magics, we are limited only by our imaginations.”
Twilight sighed. The gathered ponies before her were silent. All of them had their eyes glued to the shape that sat next to her. All but one of them looked horrified. The Princess, her mentor and idol, was blushing furiously.
“Wha?” Twilight gulped, uncertain about herself again and wished she’d brought the bag out with her. She turned then and looked at the center of everypony’s attention.
What had once been a small blue cube was now a ¼th scale, anatomically correct model of Celestia’s backend.