Princess Luna’s Unconvincing Disguise

by SockPuppet

Chapter 2: The intriguing unicorn’s candidacy

Next Thursday, Merlot stood on the speaker’s dais in front of the department and the Canterlot mathematical community. Every seat was full, and ponies stood in the back and down the edges of the lecture hall. The fire marshal would have gone apoplectic.

The four very athletic ponies looked nervous and displeased. The buttercream-yellow pegasus mare flapped up and sat on a rafter. In fact, there were about a dozen pegasi up in the rafters.

Biggest crowd I’d ever seen for a colloquium. Apparently, Rosie wasn’t the only pony thinking that Merlot was intriguing.

Rosie and I sat in the first row, that week.

Merlot had two black eyes, a bandage over one ear, and fifty or sixty stitches in her face. Her left rear leg was in a walking boot, with bloody bandages under the boot. Apparently, her ‘duties’ for her day job that week had been strenuous.

And Rosie was right. She was the smartest pony I had ever met. And besides her mathematics, she had magic I’d never seen before, despite my growing up in a heavily unicorn neighborhood and entirely unicorn clan, and with a sister in Celestia’s school.

Merlot didn’t bother with chalk—writing simply appeared on the chalkboard. She teleported nervously from one side of the dais to the other, with loud cracks! of magic and brilliant cobalt flashes.

My sister—a gifted unicorn—can teleport once a week. Merlot was teleporting four or eight times a minute.

Crack! she teleported. "Recall our data matrix X is of size"—crack!—"N by M, for N instances with M observation points"—crack!—"per instance and for convenience we assume"—crack!—"that M is less than N so now we calculate the variance-covariance matrix X-transpose"—crack!—"times X and then the eigenvectors"—crack!—"of this matrix, assuming of course that"—crack!—"the variance of X is"—crack!—"homoscedastic, or can be prescaled as such..."

I whispered to Rosie, "She’s nervous. Those teleports are unconscious. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. If we tell her afterwards, she won’t believe it. Like when I levitate objects while I think. Remember how pissed you were when I was levitating a kitchen knife, and I swore I wasn’t, until you grabbed it out of the air and showed me?"

Rosie’s eyes grew wide. "Oh sweet heavens, she just eigen-decomposed a five hundred square matrix in her head."

I looked at the chalkboard. It was now covered in small but neatly written numbers, two hundred and fifty thousand of them, a five hundred by five hundred grid.

All two hundred fifty thousand numbers had appeared in the few seconds it took me to look down and speak to Rosie.

I could probably have done a ten-by-ten or twenty-by-twenty eigenanalysis in my head. And I’m a very, very, very elite mathematician.

The blood rushed out of my head and I got dizzy. I found I was equally unconsciously brushing Rosie’s feathers with my magic, and stopped myself, since we were in public, and I had recently learned how sensitive pegasi wings are.

Merlot—now hyperventilating with either terror or excitement as she reached the climax of her presentation—pointed a hoof at the numbers near the top of the chalkboard, "and then with classical least squares we can—" and her cloak began to lift away from her flanks. The bodyguard (alleged bodyguard) three seats over from me cleared his throat loudly.

Merlot’s cloak collapsed back to her flanks and she froze, blushing, silent, hoof extended. She shook her head, coughed once, and levitated up a long wooden pointer to indicate the equation she was referring to.

The bloodstain on the bandage on her left rear leg was spreading as she paced and stomped.

She went on for twenty minutes more. In those twenty minutes, she teleported over two hundred times. I counted. That means a teleport, on average, every six seconds. It was worse than watching a tennis match, as she volleyed herself back and forth across the stage. My neck hurt the next day.

At the end of her presentation, the Chair of the Department took to the dais. She intoned, "A show of hooves from the tenure-line faculty. Shall Miss Merlot and her ‘The approximation of a matrix by another of a lower rank’ be put forward for a doctoral dissertation?"

The faculty vote was unanimous. The chair smiled and shook Merlot’s hoof. "Congratulations, doctoral candidate Merlot."

The stunningly brilliant and beautiful mare smiled, beaming.

I was convinced. That was Princess Luna.

And we were going out for coffee with her tomorrow.

My head got very light again.

---

Too many ponies wanted to speak to ‘Merlot’ and congratulate her. We couldn’t get within fifty feet. She made eye contact with us, scribbled a note, and actually teleported it, across the room, directly into Rosie’s saddlebag.

Rosie used a delicate flight feather to open the bag and grab out the folded note. "Proofie," she asked me, "can you teleport objects?"

"I’m not a wizard. I can levitate three utensils at once in the kitchen, but that’s my magic’s limit."

Rosie opened the note and read: "Tomorrow, five p.m., Sir Caffeine’s Coffee and Music, Boulevard of the Alliance, Little Griffonstone, Canterlot. My treat."

"That’s nice," I said. "I’ve wanted to try griffon cuisine while I’m in Canterlot."

"No. You don’t," Rosie said. "Griffons eat meat. In Little Griffonstone, stick to the Boulevard. Those are the Equestrianized tourist restaurants. The ones off the main road are for the locals, or for adventurous ponies, which neither of us are. You go to the wrong kind of restaurant and your brussel sprouts will be fried in bacon grease."

I shrugged. "Yuck. Okay, but she says her treat. I’m still getting used to how expensive Canterlot is compared to Tröttingen or Baltimare."

"She’s a friend," Rosie said. "Let’s take my little interrogation project easy, so we don’t embarrass her. I can’t decide if being right or being wrong would be worse for her. Hey, did you see the newspaper this morning?"

"You are a fountain of non-sequiturs."

"Princess Celestia was spotted with a foreleg in a sling and with cuts and lacerations. She looks better than Merlot, however." She pointed toward Merlot’s booted leg. The soaked bandage was now dripping her blood onto the floor, but Merlot seemed not to notice as she spoke to the University president.

Comments

[Wild Zontars]

OK, I hope more people wander in here from *cough* elsewhere, because this is well done.

[SockPuppet]

9817699
Thanks!

[Pluie]

Haha, Little Griffonstone, that's great.

[BirdsBooksBrownies]

Have a few disparate thoughts:

1. I spent about half of this chapter going like mathematics is NOT my strong suit. If pushed, I might be able to calculate a quadratic equation or do some simple long division.
2. As to the main characters Rosie and her beaux, they could give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money in terms of observational skills.
3. Despite my whimsy, I would likely end up being a relative nobody in Equestria, lucky if I could so much as see Canterlot from a postcard much less eating at a restaurant on the behest of Royalty.