//------------------------------// // Chapter 9 - Things Are Shaping Up // Story: The Traveling Tutor and the Royal Exam // by Georg //------------------------------// The Traveling Tutor and the Royal Exam Things Are Shaping Up The printing presses of the Canterlot Times made low rumbling noises in the background as News Flash flipped through the final galleys headed for publication. It gave him a warm feeling in his chest to see the lines of carefully lined type and framed photographs, even if the hottest story at the moment was ‘Royal Couple Continue Wedding Planning - No Honeymoon Destination Set Yet.’ That had not stopped the copywriters from producing nearly a full page of senseless blather and supposition about the legitimacy of the foal to occupy space on the front page, along with matching pictures of the couple at the train station, kissing. That kiss had sold tens of thousands of newspapers, but that was yesterday, and today he was going to need more fuel for the fire. Artists were scratching out just what they thought the new Royal Foal was going to look like, what frills the wedding dress would include, how the capitol would look decked out in purple and green, and even the health page was getting in on the act by preparing a whole section on ‘Nutrition During Foaling’ by an entire set of writers who had never eaten anything cooked with their own hooves in their life, let alone suffered through the pangs of parenthood. “Good evening, Flash.” A certain disreputable photographer strode into his office just as News Flash sent the approved galleys off to the presses. Blotter had once been a respected copywriter, then a gossip writer, then a lowly photographer, and now was on the way out even though he did not realize it. News Flash had the pink slip all written out and ready to be signed just as soon as he had squeezed the last drop of productivity out of the burned-out stallion, but for now, he smiled a tight little smile and tried to ignore the way Blotter propped his hooves up on the desk. “Hello, Blotter. What are you doing here? We’re running your photo of the new prince on page A4, so you’ve earned your oats for the week, I suppose.” “Got something better.” The old newspaper pony floated a thick envelope over to the editor, who left it to sit on the side of the desk like some damp piece of paper that had been used to pick up a little doggie present at the side of the street. “Another picture of an empty window? Wow. We should stop the presses right now.” Flash rolled his eyes and tossed the envelope into his overflowing inbox. “A little better than that. You see, I had to get one of my old cameras out for the photo shoot with Lord Green Grass yesterday evening, one that I hadn’t used since the changeling invasion.” Blotter grinned. “You know, the time you hired that eager young sprout to replace me, and he turned out to be a love-sucking bug that glued down every one of our reporters in green goop during the most important news event of the century. Good thing he fainted from hunger before he managed to do anything serious.” “I know, I know,” moaned Flash. “I bought your story that evening, remember?” “Well, I remembered something else when I was in the darkroom. I didn’t get all of the film used up out of one cartridge, and it still had a bunch of shots from the invasion.” Dismissing the comment with a waved hoof, Flash yawned. “Changelings falling from the sky, changelings gluing good, honest citizens to the ground. We have thousands of those. But I suppose it can’t hurt.” He opened up the package and leafed through them, pausing at one particularly colorful one. “No…” “Yes.” Blotter grinned and lit his horn in a soft green aura. “I checked it out with Zofoz’s Transcending Tracer. What you see there is one familiar green earth stallion, somewhat out of breath, presenting a golden engagement ring to what appears to be Twilight Sparkle, and if you look up just a bit, you can see Queen Chrysalis. I had stuck the camera out of a castle window and fired off a dozen or so frames just to check the autofocus and hoped to catch a changeling in the shot. But the tracer spell confirms it. That is Lord Green Grass, no two ways about it, and that is a changeling who looks exactly like Princess Twilight Sparkle before she got wings.” The editor panted a little as he flipped through several pictures, each showing the production of the ring, the presentation of the ring, and the last one with the little glitter of gold at the base of Twilight Sparkle’s horn while she leaned forward with her lips pursed up in obvious expectation of a kiss from her fiancé. A single word managed to work its way up through all the dreams of awards and scoops that filled Flash’s head, and he rounded on the photographer with an abrupt question. “Changeling? You mean that’s not really Twilight Sparkle in the picture?” Blotter only grinned wider. “Yep. Authenticated it twice. Of course Zofoz’s Tracer doesn’t work on duplicated photos, only the original negatives, so it’s really up to you how to run the photos. This would sell a ton of papers.” The photographer floated a film cartridge out of his bags and placed it in the center of the editor’s desk. “All I care about is getting paid.” ~ ~ ♥ ~ ~ The dull red of a upcoming sunrise lit the Golden Oak Library with crimson fire and brought the red out in Miss Grace’s tied-up mane as she stood outside in front of the Royal Postal Service wagon. A sudden rattle of hooves preceded Green Grass as he bolted out the library’s front door, looking much thinner than yesterday, when he had his afternoon appointment with the most prestigious manecutter in Canterlot. His normally shaggy pale green coat was trimmed perfectly even, with tidy fetlock lines and perfect curves that must have taken hours in the barber’s chair, as well as a permanent wave to his mane that made it look somewhat respectable, despite the inattention from a brush that it received this morning. Even his short tail had been shortened ever so slightly in the pruning process, as well as given a permanent wave of its own that made it bounce when he ran, and it bounced quite well in her opinion as he caught the bag of pastries that Grace was holding out for him and vaulted into the chariot. “Only fifteen minutes late, m’lord.” Grace tucked away the stopwatch and stood to one side patiently while the chariot shot into the sky on its way back to Canterlot, only turning to greet the Princess of the Library once it had vanished from sight. “Good morning, Princess Twilight Sparkle.” “Good morning, Lieutenant Commander Grace,” she responded, her lips drawn into a thin line. “I said I didn’t want a security force hanging around the library.” “My apologies, Your Highness. May we continue this discussion inside? I have some books to return.” She floated a pair of crime novels out of her bags and followed Twilight Sparkle inside, placing them on the check-in table. It only took a few minutes of card-checking and stamping to get the paperbacks back on the correct shelf while Twilight twitched with a suppressed question all the way through it. Afterwards, Miss Grace casually stood at the library bookshelf, considering the meager selection of current detective novels until Twilight lost her patience. “Well?” “I’m torn between the W. B. Griffon novel and the—” “Not the books!” snapped Twilight. “Well, they’re important too, but what did Princess Celestia and Princess Luna say when you told them that I didn’t want anypony guarding me?” Grace raised one eyebrow. “Why, they agreed with you, of course.” With a soft glow of her green magic, an image of Celestia and Luna appeared, with Celestia saying, “My sister and I shall abide precisely by her request. Get a good night’s rest, Miss Grace, and please pass on our decision to Twilight tomorrow morning, along with both of our best wishes.” “Oh.” Twilight Sparkle sat back and blinked a few times. “That was easier than I thought.” A firm knocking at the front door of the library distracted Twilight as she called out, “It’s open — oh, wait a second. I forgot to flip the sign.” The Open/Closed For Cleanup sign flipped and the door swung open with a startled “Eep!” from Twilight as a tall female griffon poked her beak inside. The female griffon nudged her male counterpart, and they both swept into a deep synchronized bow on the library steps. They looked a lot like Gilda to Twilight, only each of them was wearing a golden helmet with a pair of goggles pushed up on their forehead, as well as a white armband with a series of tally marks on them. Shining Armor had worn a legband like that one weekend when he had gotten a day’s leave from the Academy. His only had two simple marks on it, but each of these griffons had enough marks to go all the way around the band in a circle that showed a certain shrinkage as they were drawn in, as if the draw-er were afraid of running out of space. They both rose to sharp salutes, their forelegs, or more correctly talons gently touching on the sides of their helmets. “Cadet Candidate Radiant Dawn Touching The Mountains With Golden Light and Cadet Candidate Brilliant Lightning Stabbing Through The Clouds To Ignite The Trees reporting, Your Highness. We would like to request a favor.” Both of them stood there in such perfect rigidity that if Twilight had not seen them move, she could have easily mistaken them for perfectly detailed statues. “Ah… At ease?” Both griffons promptly relaxed, the female reaching out to shake Twilight’s hoof. “Thank you, Princess Twilight. When Stabby and I heard that you lived in a library, we rushed right over, didn’t we?” “Yes indeed, Dawn.” The smaller male griffon pulled a sheet of paper out and handed it over to Twilight, who picked it up in her magical field with no small hesitation. “We fell so far behind in our studies in the Academy that we were worried that we might be kicked out. That really worried us, didn’t it Dawn?” “You aren’t kidding, Stabby. But when we were talking about it in class one night, somepony told us that we could get permission to skip out for one semester if we wanted to catch up on our studies. Well, since we both were so far ahead in the rest of our training—” “Particularly sparring.” The male griffon nodded so enthusiastically that the little pom-poms of fluff on the top of his head bobbed in a nearly hypnotic pattern. “Sparring with ponies is fun.” His nodding slowed slightly as he added, “Except for one of them.” “But studying is where we were falling behind, and we asked, ‘If we were to take off for one semester to catch up on our studying, where could we go?’ Well, one of our teachers—” “Definitely a teacher,” agreed the male griffon. “Not a princess.” “—suggested that we find a place with all the books we would need to be studying for class, but without the distraction of a bunch of guards to spar with.” “Break a few dozen noses and the teachers get so peeved,” said the male griffon. “And we thought about going to the Crystal Empire—” “Except the books would be about a thousand years out of date.” “And the other libraries don’t have the range of books that Ponyville has.” “So in a totally spontaneous, completely unrehearsed fashion we came here so we can do some studying in a nice, quiet town, far away from the trouble and distractions of Canterlot.” Both griffons sat on the library steps with such intense expressions of pure innocence and bliss that Twilight was fairly sure they had once crusaded for whatever the Griffon equivalent of cutie marks were in their home town. Or nest. Or whatever. “I’d like to help, but—” Twilight glanced at the list “—I don’t think we have a copy of Equestrian Military Expeditions of the Third Era anywhere in the library. “I’ve got it,” called out Spike from inside the library, the pitter-patter of fast moving dragon behind her coming to a halt. “It came in yesterday’s shipment and I filed it under History. What else?” “Aerial Combat by Wing Splice, now that one I’m sure—” “Found it! A little dust, but—” “Spike!” Her eyes roamed down the sheet until she came to a line. “Ah, HA! I know we don’t have a copy of Manderhoofen’s Chronicle of the Thousand-Hoof March” “It’s in the box that Green Grass was planning on returning to his father’s library in Canterlot, but he said we could use anything out of there. Come on in, guys. I’ll see if I can find you a couple of cushions.” Twilight fumed silently as the two griffons trooped by, each giving her a respectful bob of the head and a ruffle of wing feathers as they passed. Once they had been seated, their Canterlot Library Cards dutifully entered into the Ponyville register, and a collection of their reading list arranged within easy reach, she turned on Miss Grace. “I thought you said Princess Celestia and Princess Luna agreed not to send anypony to guard me.” “True,” said the unicorn mare, checking out her two books and putting them in her bag. “And, as promised, you don’t have anypony guarding you.” “No pony at all,” agreed Stabby, lifting his beak over the top of his book. “And certainly not guards yet,” said Dawn in almost exactly the same pose. “Cadet members of the Royal Guard, on indefinite training leave. Of course, we’re sworn to protect the Princesses of Equestria. We took that oath before the class started.” “And it’s still in force,” said Stabby. “We’re the first griffons in the Royal Guard Academy. We mate for life, we take oaths for life, and we don’t take either lightly. You’re going to need somegriffon around once that newspaper headline hits the streets. We already caught a newspaper reporter trying to sneak into the library. She’s tied up outside.” “What newspaper headline? What reporter? And where’s Crosswind? She should have been here before the rest of you showed up.” Twilight glared at the suddenly guilty-looking griffons. “Sky-blue pegasus mare?” said Dawn. “Dark blue tail with a white stripe down it a little like a skunk, and a red cross for a cutie mark?” “She bites,” said Stabby, displaying a light scuff on his forearm. Miss Grace pressed a hoof against her forehead and breathed in and out for a moment. “Cadets, will you please go release Twilight Sparkle’s appointment secretary while I brief her on today’s news.” Grace’s green magic floated a newspaper over to Twilight Sparkle and unfolded it. The headline of ‘PRINCESS SPARKLE’S SECRET ENGAGEMENT REVEALED’ blared out in such huge letters that there was barely space on the front page for the photographs of Green Grass and ‘Twilight Sparkle’ formalizing their engagement in the middle of the changeling invasion. “I would suggest that your sole conversation with any member of the press for the next few weeks be composed of two words,” said Miss Grace. “No Comment.” Dear Princess Celestia, Please roll this letter up and smack your sister and Green Grass on the back of the head. Their explanation had better be good. Your student fellow Princess, Twilight Sparkle P.S. On second thought, use the weekend edition of the Canterlot Times instead. It’s thicker.