Ms. Glimmer and the Do-Nothing Prince

by scifipony

01 — Prologue

Author's Note:

This novel is full of mysteries, some easy, some hard. While I encourage you to leave comments, please use spoiler tags when you think you've solved one of the mysteries, so that your fellow readers can have as much fun solving them as you've had.

I'll solve one mystery now: The story takes place a few years before Nightmare Moon's return, fourteen hours after the faint at the end of the previous story.

Prologue

Day 602

I walked into the castle sculpture garden, yawning. The sun had risen at the proper time and nopony found it remarkable—other than the moon zoomed across the sky and got lost in the sun's glare. To compensate for the sun never rising yesterday, the early morning was outrageously hot, especially for autumn. My stomach growled at the sight of pastries and bowls of oat porridge spread casually across a red-checkered picnic cloth, laid out on the lawn in front of an odd white marble sculpture.

The hideous marble thing had mismatched horns on a pony head, with a far-eastern wyrm-type dragon body. Surprisingly, the crazy sculptor had carved mismatched limbs and wings, too. The surrealist-creation's toothy wide-open smile showed non-pony dentition—and was inartistically snaggletoothed.

The duchess had picked a remarkable place for breakfast. Why it was somepony other than the duchess waiting for me was another matter. Maybe that had to do with my performance yesterday...

Yesterday had not been my best day. I might never live it down, toppling over in a faint the way I had. By the time the peerage had gotten the brouhaha all sorted out, nowhere to their satisfaction, I'd had little time to deal with personal matters. That's when I discovered that I, Starlight Glimmer, had friends.

I'm not sure when I started thinking that, but I had. Been thinking. Friends. Cutie mark-poisoning, doubtless. And it was a royal pain. Literally. I mistrusted the situation, and they'd likely all leave me in the end, but for now: Friends.

I had not wanted to sleep in the castle with Celestia living under the same roof, and had declined picking a suite. My intuition refused to trust her. Like me trusting having friends.

That left me where I'd lived the last few months: Sunset Shimmer's ivory tower.

That meant I'd brought my former butler, Proper Step, and my friends, Citron and Streak. I could not decline the royal guards; I understood the necessity for bodyguards, having been one myself. At least they'd posted themselves outside.

Sunset, gone cold turkey from her addiction to nettle ewe—even with medicine prescribed by her father to dull the physical symptoms—could not have been more down. I'd been awful to her. I'd involved her in a sting operation to arrest a crime boss, offering her hope of scoring more of the intelligence-enhancing herb. She had learned how pathetic she was. Despite the news I generated—which swamped the news of her arrest—ponies knew. And Sunset knew they knew.

And I realized I liked her. That I valued her as a friend. Liked having her around.

Sunset couldn't even get herself a colt-friend thanks to her being Celestia's protégé—and her well-known irascibility. It dissuaded prospects, even class climbers. It proved I really liked her if I put up with those horse apples. As for getting her a colt-friend, I'd helped with that...

I huffed, shocked out of my woolgathering, unwilling in the moment to face how I'd helped.

A grey black-maned pony with a schnauzer dog-face trotted slightly ahead of me, watching me with expectant caramel eyes. My former butler, now my... what exactly? Proper Step nodded and introduced me to my appointment. I did not miss the royal guard pegasus that banked away overhead.

The filly waiting, stood. Black-framed glasses magnified deep purple eyes as she frowned, having trouble making eye contact. The red-maned pale yellow yearling curtseyed. Except for big bushy red eyebrows, she physically resembled Twilight Sparkle, even to the stripe pattern in her mane. Okay, except size. Twilight was definitely a runt; likely grew up with her nose in a book instead of a bowl of hay!

I noted the sailboat and horseshoe crest on her turtleneck sweater. I asked, "Lady Horseshoe Bay?" Proper address was Lady plus domain. I spoke first, because protocol dictated I had to speak first or there would be no conversation.

The kid gulped. Kid? Who was I kidding? She was my age or older, but I'd compressed a decade of living into four years, all of them working at the best of my ability to be an adult. Meeting ponies my age made me feel old. I cleared my throat.

"M-M-Ms. Glimmer, I'm Moon Dancer. Duchess Calm Seas is my great-aunt^*."

"Charmed. Sit, sit. I'm the opposite of formality. I don't bite," unless my teeth were all I had to fight with, anyway.

She kicked aside a big book, then jumped and caught the fluttering pages in her pink magic before they could crease. She blinked at me, pushing it under the tablecloth.

"You needn't hide it. I ran away from home to learn magic. My Marlin's Tertiary Primer was my best friend and I've slept with it like a doll."

She smiled wanly. "Books are my best friends, too." She pulled it out. The tome read, So You Want to Make an Amulet? A senior-year embedded spells text.

"Celestia's School?"

"Yes."

"Technically, I'm still enrolled—"

"Really?"

"I never noticed you, but then I noticed Twilight Sparkle only because Sunset Shimmer pointed her out."

"I stay away from her. She's uber scary. Shimmer, not Twilight. We're friends, when she remembers other ponies exist. Twilight, not Shimmer."

Twilight: The pony Celestia was creating friendship magic for, who had no interest in friendship? Check. "Sounds like her. Your aunt?"

"Great-aunt," she corrected me. Her eyes widened. "Sorry! I didn't mean to correct you, um, Your Hi—"

I cut her off before she could put her hoof in her mouth. "I'm no pony special, despite what's happened. I've been homeless more times than I can count, and up until two months ago, I lived in a one-room apartment with a haystack for a bed. I believe no pony is 'better' than any other."

I lay down and looked at the plates of oat porridge and hay pastries that smelled of butter and wonderfully fragrant cinnamon. I served her and myself equal portions as Proper Step placed rose-motif teacups, pouring us Earl Greymare tea. Since Moon Dancer didn't offer an answer, we ate. I got her to open her book, and she opened up. Spell embedding was new to me, and we nerded-out for a while as we chomped. I'd thought adverbial interlocks modified codicils, but they actually provided a range-of-function applied to a spell allowing the amulet to act in the original caster's intent. I took out my notebook to write this down, which pleased her if I read her smile correctly. I even got her home room teacher's name so we could meet up.

Looking up from the page I filled, I asked, "So, why'd your aunt pick here, not a castle dining room?"

Moon Dancer pointed at the unusual statue we sat beneath. Then I realized she meant the empty pedestal beside it. "You've heard of Prince Blueblood?"

"The Do-nothing Prince? Celestia wants me to be his teacher, to see if I could 'make something of him.'"

"Aunt Seas told me to tell you..." She pulled out a lined yellow pad from her saddlebags to read, "'Celestia's nephew can be surprising and it would behoof you learn why.'"

Yeah, it definitively had to have surprised him that he was no longer in the direct royal succession.

"Anything else?"

"Nothing she said. However," she lowered her voice and talked under a hoof, "My great-aunt doesn't really like him very much."

Thus my dance with the peerage began.

____

*Duchess Calm Seas is Moon Dancer's grandmother's sister.

Comments

[Black--Soul]

Interesting start, looking forward to a hopefully for me interesting story.

The main characters all probably have a pride issue:

I guess Twilight looks to them like this:
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