• Published 13th Jun 2012
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Duel Nature - Eakin



After a close call, Twilight learns to defend herself

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Three Months Later

Captain Reinolds leaned back as far as the bar stool he was seated upon would allow. It had been a very good day so far. Up at dawn to take the Tranquility out for a few hours of sailing, then a visit to the local clinic to continue his physical therapy. His horn was healing well, and he’d almost remastered basic telekinesis. The doctors assured him that he was making excellent progress and, if anything, was recovering faster than they had anticipated. That had left the whole afternoon free for laying in a beach chair with a cheap paperback novel. He had to admit, he could get used to this.

This bar had quickly become one of his regular evening haunts. It was always lively without being crowded, just far enough off the main streets to avoid the tourist element. The owner and bartender, Thirsty Throats, had a keenly honed sense of which patrons needed a sympathetic ear for their troubles and which ones wanted to just drink undisturbed.

Speak of the devil, Thirsty Throats slid a fresh beer in front of him. “Compliments of the two mares at the end of the bar. Enjoy!”

Of course, just because the day had been good so far didn’t mean it couldn’t get better.

“Thanks, Thirsty” Reinolds said before lifting the beer with his hoof and raising it to the two cute pegasi, who raised their drinks in response with shy smiles. Reinolds took a deep gulp of the brew and got off his stool to approach them. He took his time heading over to them, and noticed the pink one with a strawberry blonde mane whispering something to her friend, an aquamarine pony with a seafoam green mane, who blushed and giggled by way of reply.

“Thank you for the beer” said Reinolds as he sat down in the barstool they had left open between them. “Don’t think I’ve seen you in here before, I’m sure I’d have remembered mares as pretty as you two. My name’s Reinolds. Captain Reinolds. It’s nice to meet you...”

“Cherry Blossom,” said the pink one, reaching out to bump Reinold’s hoof in greeting before continuing “and this is Seashell. No prize for guessing what her cutie mark is.”

“Charmed,” said Reinolds, reaching out to bump Seashell’s hoof in turn, who giggled coquettishly and replied “Likewise, Captain.”

“Are the two of you from around here?” asked Reinolds by way of small talk as he lifted his beer for another sip.

“Well, I am,” said Seashell. “I sell seashells down by the sea shore. Cherry Blossom here is one of my sorority sisters from back in our university days. We try to get together every year or so for our own little ‘spring break.’”

“That’s great,” said Reinolds. “I’m actually from Canterlot myself...” he tried to lift his beer using his magic as casually as he could, but a sudden stabbing pain in his injured horn made him drop it back to the bar, luckily without spilling the half-full mug.

“Oh, your horn!” said Cherry Blossom “It’s all scarred! What happened to it?”

Reinolds winced and rubbed the base of his horn while he waited for the wave of nausea to pass before responding. “Well, that’s kind of a long story...”

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“...and then Princess Luna bucked her out of the ring, still wrapped in the net! I knew that if I was going to protect my faithful student, whom I had personally taught everything she could ever need to know about magical combat, I would have to intervene myself. So I stepped between them and refused to let the Princess harm a single hair on Twilight’s mane any further!” said Reinolds, gesticulating wildly as he recounted the tale to the two mares, whose expressions hovered somewhere between amusement and skepticism.

“Uh-huh. So then what happened?” asked Seashell, casting a ‘can you believe this guy?’ look at her friend.

“Right, well, like I said, the Princess was absolutely furious by that point. She was even willing to take her anger out on me! But I wasn’t about to back down when Twilight’s life was at stake. I summoned up the most powerful defense I could muster and blocked her strongest magic. It might have hurt, but my devotion to pure, helpless Twilight burned brightly within my soul. The princess tried not once, but twice to bring me down with her most potent spells. She even managed to crack my horn in the process, but she couldn’t take me out before Princess Celestia arrived to put her in her place!”

The pony who had been drinking at the table behind them stood up suddenly enough to knock over her chair, and bring the attention of all of the bar’s patrons directly onto her. Casting off her cloak, she revealed a horn, as well as a pair of wings and a coat as black as the night itself.

“ENOUGH OF THIS!” shouted the alicorn in the booming Royal Canterlot voice. “WE SHALL NOT TOLERATE ANY INACCURACIES IN THE TELLING OF THY TALE!” The two mares shrank before the rage of the newcomer, and even Reinolds seemed shocked by her outburst.

“AS WE REMEMBER, WE TRIED AT LEAST THREE TIMES TO BREAK THINE DEFENSES, NOT TWO, BEFORE WE WERE ABLE TO EXHAUST THEE” shouted the Princess “WE WILL NOT HAVE RIDDLING THY TALE WITH INACCURACIES!”

“Wait, Princess... you mean... this actually happened?” said Cherry Blossom as she recovered from her shock.

“BUT...But of course! You did not think that a Royal Guard would lie about his accomplishments, did you? Everything the Captain described occurred, in precisely the fashion he described it! Surely, the bards of ages to come shall sing his praises for his courageous actions. Now if you will excuse us, we must go attend to royal business... somewhere else” said Luna as she rose and walked out of the bar. A hooded figure tossed a few bits onto the bar to cover her own drink and slipped out after her.

Seashell and Cherry Blossom turned towards Captain Reinolds, who allowed himself a small smile at their looks of shock and disbelief.

“Did I mention that I also own a boat?”

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The hooded figure crept up silently behind the Lunar Princess.

“Ah, Twilight Sparkle,” said Luna, “What took you so long?”

The cloaked figure removed her hood to reveal a horn and lavender coat. Twilight shook her head and let her mane fall back into its normal shape, unencumbered by the cloak she wore. “My apologies, Princess Luna, I was afraid of being spotted if I followed you too closely.”

“Are you absolutely certain that such actions were befitting the role of... what did you call it? A ‘wingmare?’”

Twilight glanced back towards the entrance of the bar. Reinolds had just stumbled out of the bar flanked by Seashell and Cherry Blossom. All three of them were laughing as they trotted in the direction of Reinold’s apartment.

“Very sure, Princess Luna. I think you’ll find that by tomorrow morning, Captain Reinolds will be quite satisfied by your performance back there.”

“You are certain that we did not lay it on with excessive thickness?” asked the Princess.

“Completely certain” confirmed Twilight. “You did great. Although I can’t help but noticing that every time Reinolds tells that story the amount of property damage seems to increase.”

“Indeed, We cannot believe any of our citizens would actually believe that we could reduce a building to an uninhabitable crater that still continued to give off deadly levels of magical radiation to this day” said Luna as she turned to go, and Twilight followed.

“You really have no experience picking up stallions at bars? As long as you’ve lived?” asked Twilight.

Luna considered the question for a few seconds. “Would ordering attractive stallions to report to the royal bed chambers for our pleasure be considered experience?” she asked.

“No, not really” replied Twilight, sparing only a moment to reflect on how odd that question might have seemed to her three months ago.

“We do not have any experience in this area” said Luna, definitively.

Twilight followed her Princess in silence. It had been a struggle to return to something like normalcy after their duel, and Celestia’s sentencing her to six months as Luna’s personal attendant and bodyguard. Twilight could still feel the gap between them, and the Princess’ hesitation to share her feelings with her after Twilight’s betrayal, though it still hurt the unicorn to think of it in those terms.

The first few days after Celestia had assigned Twilight to her new duties had been awful. Her very first assignment had been to escort Luna to Celestia’s room, where Celestia’s lecture on the proper treatment of their subjects had devolved into a three-hour screaming match between the two sisters. Twilight shuddered at the memory. It was always awful to sit and listen to an argument, but when both arguers had access to the Royal Canterlot voice? Twilight was surprised that she was still able to hear anything by the following morning.

For the next two weeks, Luna had seemed resolved to entirely ignore Twilight’s existence. Though Twilight spent the full 12-hour shift each day following the Princess from place to place, Luna refused to directly acknowledge her in any way. Indeed, she seemed to take pleasure in slamming doors behind her so that Twilight had to reopen them to follow her. Or worse, walking out onto balconies and suddenly taking to the air, forcing Twilight to find a way to track and follow her from the ground.

The first turning point had come when Luna had left for another meeting with Celestia, ordering Twilight to remain in place. After an unhappy half hour sitting in the alicorn’s office staring at the walls, Luna had returned in a bad mood followed by two servants hauling carts full of paper behind them.

“My sister seems to think that if I have enough free time to challenge commoners to duels, I have enough time to overhaul the entire Equestrian tax code. All 740,000 pages of it.” said Luna bitterly.

Twilight was unsure of how to respond, or even if Luna was addressing her at all, so she decided to remain silent for the time being. The next two hours were spent watching Luna, hunched over her desk, muttering to herself as she tried to keep track of the mathematical formulae inherent in the nation’s finances. The more she read, the more frustrated the Princess seemed to become. “Carry the 37... minus 10% of the difference.. so that would be 35 times 23 which is... which is... ARGGGH!” Luna shouted in frustration.

“Eight hundred and five” said Twilight, before she could think better of it. She immediately realized her mistake and covered her mouth with her hoof. “I’m so sorry Princess, I didn’t mean to interrupt your concentration. Please forgive me.”

Luna opened her mouth to yell at Twilight, but then sighed and thought better of it. “No, you’re right Twilight. That is the correct answer after all. We just get so frustrated when we have to deal with the Gymkhana formula for compounded interest. We didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

Twilight furrowed her brow, confused. “The Gymkhana formula? Why wouldn’t you just use the Buckskin method instead?”

Luna slammed her hooves down on her desk “Yes! Thank you! That’s what we’ve been wondering this entire time!” she waved Twilight over “Look here, at how those idiots in the treasury have been doing these calculations for the last three decades...”

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An hour later, Celestia came up to check on her sister’s progress. A part of her regretted assigning her sister this sort of menial busywork, but after remembering how cruel she’d forced herself to be towards her most faithful student she hardened her resolve and thought better of it. Even though Celestia knew she had to be seen publicly supporting her sister and fellow princess, that was no reason to let her off the hook in private. Besides, her sister had been clamoring for more responsibility since she’d returned from the moon. “Be careful what you wish for, dear sister,” Celestia thought grimly “It just might be granted to you.” Still, the entire Equestria tax code? Even for her, there were limits. She was about to knock on Luna’s office door when she heard strange noises emanating from the room. Was that... laughter?

“No, Twilight Sparkle, plee hee hee hee hee heese... please stop... our sides... we cannot breathe... HA HA HA HA HA!”

“And then... and then the second accountant says... ‘that’s no depreciation formula, THAT’S MY WIFE!’”

Both voices burst into a fresh round of hysterical laughter.

Princess Celestia allowed herself a small smile before leaving to inform her treasurers that the new tax code might take a few more days to draw up than she had originally anticipated.

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Twilight had arrived to her duties the next day in a happy mood, hoping that maybe Luna was ready to forgive her entirely for her actions during their duel. Unfortunately, the alicorn seemed to have hardened her heart once again, and returned to barely acknowledging Twilight’s existence. Still, she had at least stopped slamming doors in Twilight’s face, which Twilight considered to be some small degree of progress.

The worst part of this punishment, Twilight was coming to realize, was the raw and all consuming boredom that accompanied it. Her suspension from the Academy meant she no longer had access to the school’s library, and since she now spent 12 hours a day standing at attention or following the Lunar Princess from one part of the palace to another she didn’t have nearly enough time to read anyway. An hour or two with her texts back in the tiny little room she had been assigned in the servant’s quarters wasn’t nearly enough for a voracious bookworm like herself.

That’s why what Luna had prepared for her on the one-month anniversary of her service had come as such a pleasant surprise.

Luna had called her into her room like any other day. Twilight expected nothing more than a boring assignment like “watch the door” or “fetch me something from the kitchen” the likes of which had become her daily routine. But it seemed today was different.

“Hello, Twilight Sparkle. Our sister feels that we should become acquainted with the modern popular culture. To that end, she has given us this ‘Daring Do’ novel and requested that we read it. However, we find ourself bogged down in reports and other official business. We were hoping you would read it and write us a report on-”

Before Luna could go any further, she was startled by the lavender blur that streaked past her and pounced on the book in question.

“OfcourseprincessI’llgetonthatrightawaythankyoufortheassignmentseeyoulaterbye!” said Twilight as she darted out of the room with her prize. In minutes, she located an out of the way corner in an unused but well lit room deep within the castle and made herself comfortable. She had completed the book by sunrise and stumbled back to her room, exhausted but more satisfied than she’d felt in weeks.

The next afternoon, on one of her all-too-rare days off from her duties, she met Rainbow Dash for lunch before the pegasus went to see the Wonderbolts performance scheduled for that evening. When Twilight had mentioned what Luna had given her to read the previous day, Rainbow Dash had nearly choked on her sandwich.

“You got to read Daring Do and the Spear of the Windigos? That’s doesn’t even come out for another two months! I’ve had a copy pre-ordered for weeks!” she exclaimed “You have to tell me everything! No wait, don’t tell me anything! Is it good? Does Daring finally hook up with Bravado? No, don’t spoil it for me. Arrrrgh!”

“I guess the publisher sent the palace a few advance copies” said Twilight casually. “It was pretty good, I guess.”

“You beat up a Princess and they punish you by letting you read the book I’ve been dying to get my hooves on for nearly a year? If I punched Princess Celestia, like, right now, could I get in on this too?” asked Rainbow Dash, slightly too earnestly for Twilight’s tastes.

“Sorry, Rainbow, I’m pretty sure it was a one time thing. Tomorrow I’ll probably be back to boring old guard duty.” Twilight grabbed the check and paid it, waving off Rainbow’s protests and offers to split it.

She hated to be going so soon, but she had so many errands to run and only a single afternoon to accomplish everything. She hugged her friend goodbye. “It was good to see you again, Dashie. Give my best to everyone back in Ponyville. And may the winds of change blow forever in your favor.”

“Huh?” said Rainbow Dash

“Oh, sorry, that last part will make more sense once you’ve read the book.” She walked away with a subtle smile as Rainbow Dash’s face went through a fresh series of twitches and contortions.

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As her sentence wore on, Twilight and Luna got more and more comfortable being around one another. Some days it would have been easy to mistake them for very close friends. Whenever Luna ordered her around, she at least had the grace to seem embarrassed for doing so, and Twilight was sent on frequent assignments that gave her opportunities to walk around Canterlot. Better still were requests to deliver a message to Celestia that almost inevitably led to Twilight having a long conversation with the Solar Princess about whatever was on her mind, or a question about a theory she’d uncovered from some textbook during her free time. Even if Twilight wasn’t technically a student of hers for the time being, Celestia seemed almost as excited about their conversations as Twilight was.

Still, there were setbacks as well. One day, about two months after the beginning of her servitude, Twilight had shown up to Luna’s room only to find the Princess crying into her pillow. Without thinking, she had dashed up to her and asked her what was wrong.

“Why do you want to know, Twilight?” asked Luna between her choked out sobs “so that you can can use it against us later? Leave us alone.”

The Princess refused to speak to her any more that day, and Twilight was forced to sit outside her bedroom and listen to Luna’s sobbing for an entire shift.

It was a few weeks after that when Luna had suggested a trip down to Pensacolta to visit Captain Reinolds. Twilight had eagerly agreed to accompany her. She had only gotten to see him once before he’d left the infirmary. Their reunion had been a happy one, and the three had shared a low key dinner at one of Reinolds’ favorite restaurant, Luna’s identity hidden behind a illusionary persona to avoid attention. They swapped stories and caught up with events in one another’s lives in the manner of old friends, the unpleasant shared past temporarily forgotten.

All this had led up to Luna and Twilight walking along the streets of Pensacolta late that night, wending their way back to the hotel room where a stack of paperwork awaited Luna’s attention. Even traveling this far from the capital granted no reprieve from the endless deluge generated by the palace bureaucrats.

They didn’t realize they were being observed by a shadowy figure on the nearby rooftop, who was utterly befuddled by this development. Why was the Princess here, and why now? Did she know? Countermeasures would have to be implemented, and superiors informed. This could ruin everything they had worked for so long to accomplish.

Princess or not, no pony would interfere with their plans. This additional complication would be dealt with by whatever means necessary.