Magical Medicine

by yellowbastion

Chapter 5 Part 2

You are Twilight Sparkle; well-read, studious, lavender, graduated pupil of Princess Celestia, unicorn turned Alicorn of Friendship, grand master level user of the semi-colon. Your over-under score for accurate usage of the semi-colon is often in the ninety-ninth percentile. You would love to shake your own hoof for that accomplishment were it not for the usage of the cloning pool being so heavily restricted, for good reason.

You sit behind your crystal office desk in a drawing room in the East wing of the Ponyville Castle of Friendship. A freshly unboxed EverHot™ Unbreakable IV® brand ceramic mug half-empty of its nutty, rich, sahlab-style hot chocolate drink levitates in your magic near the left side of your head. It hovers slightly above eye-level as not to boop you in the snoot if you were to quickly turn your head but still be visible as to remind you of its existence. Both Pinkie Pie and you had learned a valuable lesson about situational awareness, personal boundaries, and a practical demonstration of the term magic whiplash on that fateful day.

Your cleaning staff, a team of engineers, and several magic theorists are still trying to extract your previous mug and the remains of a strawberry and rhubarb cobbler which had… become… partially phased, to put it mildly, pinning a large throw rug to the crystal floor of the West wing drawing room. It looked as if Discord had popped in to construct a scale replica displaying wave action on a pond, where the mug and cobbler had acted as a thrown rock and the rug was the surface of the pond, which had caused everything to sink in its entirety low enough to become an unmovable tripping hazard. He had not made such a model but, with his permission, he grudgingly shouldered the blame which was to be the official story if anypony were to ask. And ponies did ask, more frequently than you would have imagined. He was less of a scapegoat and more of a scapedraconequus, for which you are continuously grateful. Not that you would ever tell him.

That little janitorial issue aside, you would have been in a relatively good mood this morning if it were not for todays early edition of the Ponyville Foal Free Press. For in your freshly pedicured hooves the front page title makes you wish you had entered into different vocation, as an editorial editor and not an Equestrian princess.

Your glare casts over the newspaper title like a lighthouse beacon made of balefire, for what felt like the hundredth time. Anonymous: Penetrated Twilight Sparkle through back door.

The title splashed across the front page as gracefully as a griffin flying into the moving blade of a windmill. While being technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, was wholly inaccurate, bordering on slander. You’re not angry. The writers of the article in question were foals, after all. If you were to be completely honest with yourself, you were only half a notch higher than severely disappointed on your gruntability scale.

Being a former head librarian, you know better than anypony that the common pony will often immediately judge a book by its cover. In this case, the common pony will normally only ever read the article title. The common pony will only read the big, bold, simply worded lettering of the header and use their dirty, filthy, detestable gutter of an imagination to fill in the rest. The common pony will mindlessly giggle at the large funny words, then skip over the article body to the next title in search of more funny words. Again, you’re not angry at foals, you’re just half a notch higher than severely disappointed, which is a completely different thing!

You are not a foal. You are not a common pony. You are an Equestrian princess and are often held to higher standards than most ponies. You do the work and you follow through. You conduct your own research, in your very own laboratory, and often times publish the results in creditable journals like “Magic Quarterly” and “The Decanter”. The article in todays paper will go on to tell how the resident, and thankfully only, human had assisted a team of paid professional penetration testers, whom were hired by The Crown, to test the security of the Castle of Friendship. It will continue on to tell how they had achieved victory by slipping through the guard rotation and sneaking in a service entrance in the back of the castle.

You know all of this already because you had personally proofread and approved the article body. The team had successfully completed their job at finding critical flaws and your guards will continue their job to make improvements. Since then you had already implemented several changes to castle security which is why the newspaper was even allowed to publish the article at all. You wouldn't want a school newspaper to give a possibly hostile foreign nation the figurative keys to the castle. Equestria didn’t have nearly enough windmills near the border to guard from a possible griffin invasion force. Security penetration testing is a common enough exercise in Canterlot and the Crystal Empire that a write-up such as this may as well saunter past the border of being pedantic, trip over common parlance, and skid plot first into being a new, fun, daily activity. You’ll have to remember to thank Carrot Top for that vivid, yet apt turn of phrase.

Your internal musings were interrupted by several soft knocks on the chamber door. Shortly after a yellow face with just the cutest little nose, followed by a pink mane, popped through the ajar door. It was one of your best and closest friends, Fluttershy, of course. She was returning from her assignment with good news!

“I’m sorry, Twilight. I don’t think there is anything I can do.”

Okay. Maybe not good news, but a step in any direction was still progress. If you had learned anything from your tutelage under Princess Celestia was to delegate tasks to those who were more knowledgeable. Fluttershy was only the first pony you had reached out to. There was still…

“After that I consulted Zecora. Then I went to the hospital and asked Doctor Stable and nurse Red Heart for second opinions. They’re at a loss, too. Nothing was wrong but… we can’t figure it out.”

Drat. Those three were your next best options. Unfortunately, the resources currently at your disposal were limited. Without going out of your jurisdiction, you had very few options left. Well, nothing for it now. It’s time you stop prancing around the issue at hoof. When delegation fails, delegate harder.

Author's Note:

Fun Fact:
I try to write Twilight as close to show-accurate as possible, and reference her friends, family, and show events as I feel works in the scene.
The “joke” about griffins flying into windmills is based on IRL bird strikes of electricity generating wind turbines.