The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers

by scifipony

Chapter 14: Prodigy

That somepony who noticed my malaise, of course, was the T.A. in my last class that day. As I walked down the hall toward the exit, not even toward the exit that lead toward the university library, but toward home, somepony walked beside me and without a by-your-leave, leaned ever so slightly into my right side. She was yellow furred and warm.

It was cheeky. It implied intimate familiarity. It was embarrassing because it was a mare, though in Canterlot girlfriends seemed to be a lot more touchy-feely than ones in Hooflyn, particularly where I'd lived where they might just as likely kiss you on both cheeks as knife you for such a prank.

And with Sunset Shimmer, I wasn't convinced it wasn't a prank.

I cringed and gasped. I was a mass of bruises barely hidden by short fur on my right side from twisting mid-leap to avoid killing Fellows in the furniture warehouse.

She flinched and looked at me with uncharacteristic concern in her turquoise eyes. Her magic opened the door so we could walk out into the front quad. She asked, "Are you okay? You weren't your annoying self in class today."

When I didn't answer and disconsolately walked toward the street, she walked ahead of me. "Look at this! I'm beginning to see the numbers!" In front of us, fiery numbers played and spun like fanciful butterflies. She seemed inordinately pleased with herself and happy, both also uncharacteristic of her.

"Is that a joke?" I all but whispered.

"No. I know illusions aren't you forte, but this is a mirror of what I'm seeing in my head. I can see the numbers, though I will admit it's quite hard to manipulate them—" Her grin went away and now she got in front of me, trotting backward. "You aren't well. What's the matter?"

"Soft. Nice. Concerned? What's the matter with you?"

"I found a little helper with my concentration. But that's me. What about you?" She stopped. "Dish."

Dish? I almost walked around her, but instead sighed. "I got beat up," I prevaricated, though it wasn't exactly a lie either, "and I hurt and I deserved it and I want to go home."

"Beat up? Deserved it? Nobody deserves to be beat up. It's that neighborhood you're living in on Lower West Gallop."

"Wait? You know where I—?"

"I've got means, and I suspect you do too. You need to move—"

I started blinking as an unfamiliar emotion welled up. She wasn't the only one acting uncharacteristically today. "I'm little better than a vagrant—"

"And I'm so much better?"

"Your arrow is aimed at the sun, mine at the dirt and the mud. I'm bad news with a bad attitude and you don't want to be associated with me."

A pink and a orange pony had stopped to look, attracted by my intemperate speech. Like I cared.

"Who's down in the dumps today?"

Now, prissy talk? I wanted to kick her, which was an improvement in my mood. I ground my teeth and glared.

"Well!" she said, pulling her head back in mock effrontery. "I do want to associate with you. You're a patient teacher, you take crap from nopony, and you're magically talented. That's good in my book. What I don't understand is how you got beat up."

"Even you beat me up."

She huffed dramatically. "I remember it differently. Yeah, I challenged you, but your injuries were entirely self-inflicted."

Indeed, the double-star marks from the practicum where I'd burned off the fur in the backlash of trying not to kill her were still visible. "There are parallels," I admitted.

"So you weren't beat up?"

"I am beat up." Absolutely true. Two white unicorns under a tree and the old greens keeper with a straw in his mouth had joined into the audience. Sunset Shimmer dressing down a lower-classmare was always a spectacle. If she fought back, more the better. "And if somepony reputedly quite talented herself would teach her supposedly magically talented student how to cancel a spell, she might have avoided some of it."

She swished her tail. "Hehe." Still, she didn't look all that contrite despite the faintest blush, but the dig hadn't succeeded in digging in, either. The nasty part of me wondered if she'd gotten laid last night.

I made to walk around her on the grass, but I had been standing long enough for the bruises to tighten up and I visibly winced. Sunset sidestepped into my path, looking concerned.

"You are hurt!" As I rolled my eyes, she leaned forward and examined my right hindquarters, even going so far as to blowing air to ruffle my fur, though it would have been far more polite to use her magic. "Glimmer, you look like you were hit with a brick. You're all black and blue. You're lucky if something isn't broken."

"Something is," I whispered.

"That's enough. You are stupider than you look, and that's saying a lot. Follow me, now."

I knew where we were headed and complied. "Perhaps I need to teach you judo, first. You're probably not so much kicked as knocked over? Am I right?" Of all the rest of the nattering she did along the way, the only thing I paid attention to was that she said that if I would be willing to take a roommate, she could find me a room for a gold bit and ten silver a month. That made me think of the twenty and one bits of silver guilt that jingled in my saddle bags, essentially double the amount I made on most jobs. Yeah, sell more of my little remaining soul off.

We found her bespectacled father in the hall just having locked the door to his office. Sunset Shimmer said, "She's been beat up."

I added, "And Sunset had nothing to do with it."

The frosted glass in the door rattled as he unlocked it. Sunset Shimmer even politely stayed back in the waiting room as the doctor turned on the lights and lead me into an examination room. I levitated off my saddle bags and hopped on the table as he donned his head mirror.

As he separated the fur and palpated areas, causing me to grimace, he said, "And I suppose I should have seen the other fellow?"

I actually giggled at his unintentional pun, but I went with it anyway, remembering Fellows hooves up exposed on the the sofa. "He was actually quite cute, and the only thing I did to him was stun him to get away." And cut off part of his ear.

"He knocked you down and back. You've lost a bit of fur here. I'm surprised you're not cut up."

"I was."

He paused. His dark green eyes flicked to look into mine, then back to my rear haunches. He stepped back. It took him about ten seconds and he spotted the healed injury across my withers. The scar was kind of red, and obviously new. Thinking about it rationally, he had to realize it was long and deep enough to require stitches, but was perfectly straight and perfectly thin and perfectly sealed. It had soaked my cape with blood. Flowing Waters got a beatific smile on his face. "Which transform? You know how to use calculus with imaginary numbers?"

I shrugged, which hurt, and answered his questions. He nodded a lot, corrected some suppositions I didn't quite have right, and quizzed me until standing was starting to make my leg quiver.

He looked out the window at the late afternoon sun. In a low voice, he asked, "And you did this on yourself?"

"Well, yeah."

"My, my." He tapped his hoof, as trying to say something but not coming up with the right words. Finally, he said, "You're something of a prodigy."

"What? 'Cause I could heal myself? It seemed straightforward when I tried hard enough."

He laughed briefly. "Straightforward? Easy? Young lady, I found those transforms in a book nopony took seriously for centuries. I had to track down the original book in the Star Swirl the Bearded Time wing of the Canterlot library, and convince the princess to even let me in there. You just watched me doing my magic and, with a few hints, figured it out yourself?"

I shrugged, but something fearful was growing in me.

"And, and to top it all off, you performed the magic on yourself, first? I've never had the nerve to work on myself, and it took years working on livestock before I used it on anypony." He stared at my blank flank, obviously surprised to find it still blank. My silent wish was that it would forever remain so. "Show me. Show me, I have to see it to believe it."

I was actually shaking. He glared at me with a passion someone his age normally didn't show. I complied nearly in shock, pushing my magic into my leg and harnessing it against the fracture in the bone. His eyes, magnified behind his bottle-bottom glasses, stared unfocused into my green aura as he sampled my numbers.

"A green-stick fracture," we both said together.

He had me lie down and together we healed the bone in my leg. About an hour later, we proceeded to fix my bruises, causing the damaged tissues to heal further than they had. The interstitial fluids could not be fixed, but he assured me that the bruises would now disappear in a few days. As for my withers, he gave me some silver salve and warned against sealing wounds without cleaning them first.

"And, before you get too high on yourself, working on yourself ought to be a magnitude easier than working on another pony because of nervous system feedback; it's just that it takes an incredible amount of nerve to do that because…"

I filled in what I figured. "Because I could damage myself easily." That was the scary part I'd ignored.

"If you'd broken something, you could have bled internally, even fainted, unable to fix it."

He had a lot of fears about a process he'd never tried and learned, but I wanted him to get to his point. "I could have paralyzed myself, or—"

"Yes. This wasn't a good idea, you understand."

I nodded noncommittally.

"Well, that's settled. You're a third year student, right? Sunset Shimmer's teaching assistant assignment is third year."

"I'm a first year, bumped up to third because of exams."

"Well, that's something I have to tell Princess Celestia about—"

"Uh—"

"A prodigy like you needs to be fast-tracked into university study. You require senior classwork at very least."

"I—I can't keep up in half my studies."

"Let me guess. History, geography, and literature?"

I nodded.

"Equestria needs its brightest minds, now. There is something known as 'trailing studies' and 'assigned tutors.' You may not know this, but there is a silent war going on. Incursions by magical beasts, and a few neighbors needing to be discouraged from raising armies."

I blinked, then understood. Spies. Special operatives. "Both my father and mother were killed in that.... I actually know, though I don't think I understand."

"Princess Celestia took both Sunset Shimmer and her rival as protégés from modest backgrounds and is training them for a reason. Her school finds the best. There is a need, and besides which, you look like you wouldn't mind. I can sense a greedy part in you when it comes to magic. It would mean access to restricted archives and rare objects."

Actually, I did mind being drafted. So, it was a secret little war that had taken my parents away and made them heroes and left me an orphan of elevated means I had no use for. "I don't come from a modest background," I said. "And though I would like more challenging magic classes, I don't want to bother Princess Celestia—"

"Too late. You no longer have a choice."

I never did. I never had. I probably never would.

Still, the idea of getting into the university much sooner worked for me. I would rather learn all the things I needed to learn sooner than later, because sooner or later my job with Running Mead was going to kill me. Better that I wring dry what I could get from Canterlot quickly and leave alive.

In any case, this quashed any thought I had of leaving Canterlot any time soon. I had to stay, even if I was forced to work twice as hard at my "job."

To my chagrin, I would get an interesting blue note that night. But before I left and before an oddly mellow Sunset Shimmer took me to a feel-better dinner at the Hey Burger! and didn't drink at all—before all that, the doctor said as he locked up his office, "If you follow a medical track... Realize that I am an old stallion but Princess Celestia will out-live us both. I can't retire because nopony can replace me, except—maybe you could."

Would the princess want a criminal as her personal physician? Even were her physician a member of the peerage and the daughter of Heroes of Equestria, I suspected that answer would be an emphatic "no."

Author's Note:

Next:
Chapter 15: Exam
Starlight finds herself in the scarred Luna tower taking an exam. She's told, "Impress us with your magic, Dearie."

Comments

[Revan]

Well, I'm glad I'm returning to this story. Time for more reading!!