The Runaway Bodyguard

by scifipony

Chapter 9 — The Command

I squeaked as I halted in the doorway.

The husky auburn stallion stood straight. He had a red mane and he flicked his tail at my self-announced entrance. Magenta eyes turned to regard me and a bored expression turned to a smile. He wore a blue gendarmes cape and short collared shirt. His prance cap lay on the counter beside an open saddle bag from which spread out file folders like a pushed-over pile of sand.

Was I so transparent that Proper Step could pinpoint what I might do if I ran away? Was this the power of adult thinking?

I glanced behind me, almost bolting as my heart tried to seize up. Then I remembered an earlier thought.

It isn't just about you.

Everypony had their own agenda, but if I acted guilty I'd surely become the officer's agenda whether or not Aurora Midnight actually was.

I forced myself to look at him and say, casually, "Uhh. Sorry?"

No other ponies occupied the four blond wood desks behind the dark oak counter, each scattered with stacks of paper, books, and pens. A red stapler stood out. I saw only one apple. The hard white chairs on this side of the counter were devoid of delinquents awaiting scoldings. A mint green unicorn mare glanced out an open office door and sang, "It'll be a few minutes!"

I awaited the constable. Would my name pass his lips? Would my run end in the next few seconds?

Instead he stepped closer, his eyes alighting on my acquired bowler, my clothing, then stopping to note I'd covered my cutie mark in a city were many ponies, especially the young, wore clothes that nevertheless revealed that intimate—to me—detail. He looked at my string tie, tied professionally by Rambler, then into my eyes.

I fought to keep eye contact, but decided that the confrontational superior mode Proper Step explicitly taught me to affect—yes, he and I had spent hours looking into each other's eyes without looking away while trying not to blink—was the opposite of what I needed. Bow to authority. I looked down.

"Excuse me for asking, but are you presenting as a colt or dressing up?"

Not, Are you the Countess?

"Um... Dressing," I said, using my normal voice, ending with a squeak. Was I a door hinge? I wanted to hit my head with a hoof.

My dressing up as a young stallion wasn't fooling him. And I wasn't sure what "presenting" really meant and took it as spending too much time sequestered with adult tutors and isolated from foals my age. Him walking behind from one side of me to another revealed his peculiar magnifying glass cute mark. It had an eye in the center. I'd have bet anypony real bits that the thing led to a compulsion to be observant. The more I interacted with ponies I didn't know, the more I realized their cutie marks made them easier to read and to perhaps predict their behavior.

"Pretty sharp," he commented, "considering what you had to work with."

"The culottes or the lavender fur?"

"The not-britches. There are plenty of pink, lavender, and mauve stallions, trust me. I've been told hair spells are incredibly difficult to master and don't last." He waved a shiny black hoof shoed with black steel over his hornless earth pony forehead. "Our forensic criminalist is a unicorn."

"I've read that about manes, too."

"Convincing," he said.

I felt my face warm, though the disguise was thrown together through the worst of happenstance.

Standing in front of me, he lowered his head to look me squarely in the eye. His magenta ones looked backlit, though that was them reflecting light askance from a window. He asked, "You aren't a bully, are you?"

I swallowed. I felt under a magnifying glass. Ponies of high station were often bullies in a fashion, certainly using bits or power to get or enforce their way. Another reason to hate the tool Celestia was trying to fashion. I shook my head. "Nosir—"

The mare in the office said, "No lectures, Farsighted. They had an assembly about the matter yesterday."

He had looked back, but he looked at me again from his normal stallion height so I had to look upward. "We take bullying seriously."

Thoughtlessly bristling, I kept our eyes locked. "Apparently."

An eyebrow went up, but so did his smile. He returned to leaning against the counter. He added, "The Canterlot Constabulary needs resourceful unicorns to join our ranks."

The clerk said, "This isn't recruitment day, either." I heard a chair scrape the floor.

He lowered his voice and directed the seat with his hoof below him as he told me, "Really. Training in forensic spells, crime scene potions, detection cantrips—"

"You're a detective?"

With horseshoes clattering closer from the office, he half-whispered, "Yes. With fast-tracking, you can make detective sooner." Louder, facing the administrator. "When you graduate."

"When you graduate," the mare echoed. She had blue eyes and a pale green mane styled into a page-colt. She blinked and frowned momentarily when she glanced at me.

No way she recognized me as anything but a student, so I didn't react.

I continued to stand near the door as the two spoke in low tones, looking briefly into two of his folders. The detective jotted on a small flip sheet notebook. He packed up his saddlebags with a thank you and departed. As he passed me, he reiterated, "When you graduate. My name?"

"Detective Farsighted."

"Sharp," came his voice retreating down the hall.

As I trotted to the counter, my heart began racing again, realization setting in.

"Do I know you?" the mare asked, her voice naturally sing-song. Sweet. "I should. I've dealt with most of the students here."

She had a name tag. "No... Ms. Maple. I—"

"Well, that's a relief!" She tittered.

"I have a question about—"

"Oh, I don't know about that."

I did my best to not give her a disapproving look. We'd had occasional dinner parties at the manor where the Countess Grin Having had to play host. It always devolved into a learning opportunity, with coaching before and a written test afterwards. I'd met her type, usually a society mare, all lace, fluff, and giggles. Disarming. Camouflaged. A cragadile when you got to the topic of the ask.

Ms. Maple wore a white starched collar with a blue ribbon tie. I could hardly miss her purple-red maple leaf cutie mark. Sweet indeed. Maple was likely short for Maple Syrup. The cutie mark incidentally clashed with the color of her fur. Cutie marks presented many levels of insidiousness if you analyzed them deeply enough!

Sweet made ponies lower their defenses.

So, I asked my question, "Can you find some information about a friend of mine who goes here?" talking over her inevitable interruption so thoroughly that I didn't hear what she said.

She gave me a patented disapproving-teacher look.

I said, "Do you know who I am?"

"I— Well..., no. You didn't give me your name." She smiled.

I smiled. I chose, "Starlight Starbright," over Aurora since though Sunburst knew my actual name, he'd never used Aurora Midnight with me.

"I see. And where do you go to school?"

She really was getting on my nerves. I affected cheery and said, "Not here. Can you see if my friend Sunburst is here? He started years ago," I presumed. I mean, of course he did. Did he?

She looked up as she thought. "Sounds familiar. Don't know, though."

"Could you please look?" I pointed a hoof into the office she had just left, full of filing cabinets.

"Where are you from?"

"From the same town as Sunburst."

"And you want to attend this school with your friend." A statement.

That reminded me. I magicked out the card I'd gotten thanks to Princess Celestia and snapped it on to the counter with a brassy reverberation. The metal contrasted against the darker wood, but her eyes traced the spark she triggered by looking at it. She reached for it with her magic.

I pushed down with mine.

She pulled it toward her a hoof-length and I doubled my downward pressure.

She pulled harder.

I pushed harder.

The tug of war continued for half-minute and surprisingly she stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth as we each used incrementally more magic. Then she bent over the counter to take a look.

I covered it with a hoof. "Sunburst?"

"I'll see what I can do," she replied and trotted into the office.

I could see the muscles under her maple leaf cutie mark ripple as she reared and horsed heavy boxes around. A clipboard hit the metal side of a cabinet. Her tail had white streaks in the pale green, and she swished it, then swished again.

"Uh, huh," she said to herself as her tail relaxed. Louder, she said, "Look, Starlight, I'm sorry about that. Farsighted was right about your giddy-up. I let myself react to that adorable bad-colt look you're presenting. Thought it would be fun. However..."

She paused. I stood up straight, ears twitching forward as she loudly went through page after page of something.

She continued, "However, that card under your hoof is called a Command. It comes from Headmare Celestia herself."

Uh, oh! I backed from the counter toward the door.

I froze when she craned around to look at me, saying, "She explained it to you, didn't she, that I must admit you if you test even for minimal magic? The voice rune contains her words on why she issued it." Maple turned back and stepped further into the office. I heard her unlocking then tugging open a clanky filing cabinet. Her tail flicked into view then disappeared. "What did the princess give it to you for?"

"I got it this afternoon," I said, trying to process what I'd just heard. My mind shied away from the prospect of attending school again with Sunburst and instead flitted to what I had done to earn it. "A royal guard gave it to me after I'd been listening into a spell—"

I gasped.

My spell!

I had been eavesdropping on Her spell, registered clues to why alicorn magic worked so well, and had applied it to mine, strengthening it by magnitudes... AND I HADN'T TAKEN NOTES!?

The counter rattled as I dumped my notebooks and my Marlin's Tertiary Primer. I opened to my transcription of Don't Look, Don't See, Don't Hear on one pad and my notes on the math in the other. I levitated a couple of pencils, one red, from the closest desk and wrote with both, not at the same time, of course, but holding the two let me minimize the time having to move the writing instrument.

Frankly, how did earth ponies and pegasi take good notes holding a pencil in their lips like a kindergarten foal?

I quickly got lost notating the simplifications I'd seen, the transform that I had seen performed on the illusion spell, and the sensations I'd registered. I even recast the wish predicate, refactoring it twice, because it misstated the reality stator that inducted my magic. I know it's sacrilege, but I leafed through Marlin's and wrote margin notes where I'd become absolutely sure that the ancient thaumaturge had been dead wrong.

"Uh, Starlight?"

I shrieked and threw my pencils in the air.

Ms. Maple dodged like a veteran teacher. I had no idea how long I'd worked in that concentration fugue, but she definitely had been looking down at the open notebook for some time. I knew full well that teachers learned to read upside-down as part of their training.

My brain felt overheated. Or, at least, that was the sensation of perspiration that beaded on my forehead. I looked and realized I'd scribbled out... five pages of equations, full horn-calculated mathematical solutions, and annotations. Suddenly polite, or contrite, Ms. Maple hadn't moved the Command card at all, but she did turn over my Marlin's in the blue cloud of her magic to read the title and nodded knowingly. The book did look old, and impressive, and moving it did smell like a sacred library.

"You've advanced way beyond sixth year." She gave me a grin.

My face heated up. Forgetting that I was a unicorn at all, I reared to the counter and used my forelegs to close the notebooks and Marlin's and to scrape them together and hug them to my chest.

"S-sorry," I said. About the thrown pencils. Otherwise, I was babbling. I had a vulnerable spot: Ponies praising me!

"That looks like a university level spell and your math seems sound. Looks like you've aced the written half of the entrance exam already."

"I'm not trying—" I took a deep breath. "If my math is so good, why can't I cast beyond variants of Levitate or Illuminate? And beyond those Sunburst needed to explain to me, like Scrub or Sparkle?"

She again looked up as she thought, though it might have been a stifled eye roll. "Well, that explains why you came to Canterlot. Let's see... You need a better manifestation coach? Maybe a good Old Ponish arcana tutor? Maybe your brain—"

"My brain!?" I guess I needed to work on my teenage eeew reflex.

She chuckled. "Both your brain and horn grow in size and complexity throughout foalhood. Neuronal connectivity to the horn depends on genetic heritage. Some infants cast magic instinctively right out of the womb, to the horror of the family and community. I'm dealing with one teenager who didn't manifest baby magic, or any magic, until she was an early teen—what we call a magic-retentive. During her practical magic test, she triggered a magic storm that destroyed some castle buildings and much of Alicorn Way. It took weeks to repave."

She looked at the Command card. She hadn't touched it.

I looked and it sparked at me. "Right. I've demonstrated minimal magic?"

"Good. You pay attention." She snorted.

"I—" How does a pony control a blush?

"As I said, I think I understand why you're here. Looking for Sunburst is only part of what you're seeking. Your friend is an important reason, I'll grant, but you need better teachers, too."

She paused and we looked at each other. Was she also the drama teacher?

For my part, I magicked my work back into my saddlebag. When that wasn't enough, I made the card follow into the under-flap pocket.

My heart was racing again when I finally blurted, "Sunburst?"

She took a deep breath. I didn't like that she was avoiding this part.

"Please," I said.

"I did find Sunburst."