29 Hearts, Ace of Spades

The Sound of Cards

When Sunset finally stepped out onto the suspended stone circle she already found herself referring to as home (which wasn’t all that odd when she thought about it), the morning dew was fading away to be replaced by a light layer of fog. The sun cast orange rays through the many small gaps in the school’s castle walls, creating a hard but beautiful stained glass effect on everything. Sunset allowed herself a few moments to just drink it all in with a deep breath before trotting on after the lively Arty and Heartstrings. It was ironic in a way, at least to her, that of all the ponies she could have really ‘met’ first, the two ahead of her were likely the least like her on the whole campus. She’d known ponies like them back in Trottingham… but she actually enjoyed the company of Heartstrings and Arty. That might change of course, but even with as little as she’d been around her, Sunset believed that she wouldn’t be able to shake Arty.

A little giggle escaped her as she sped up her pace to catch the other two. Imagining Arty like the hound puppies around Trottingham was just too cute. “All I’m saying,” Hearstrings was insisting to Arty when Sunset caught up to her other side, “is that of all animals, bugs probs’ve got the least amount of internal magic.”

“Just a second ago, you were saying they didn’t have any at all, and were good hoof fodder,” Arty mocked scolded her with a vicious grin.

“Say, what are you two arguing over now?” Sunset inserted, confused.

“Bugs,” Heartsrings piped up. “She seems to think they are overlooked magically.”

“Because they are!” Arty insisted, and Sunset got the distinct feeling she was back at the beginning of an argument that was only bound to move in circles.

“I’m afraid I can’t add all that much,” Sunset shrugged. “Never thought about them really.”

“See, exactly my point,” Arty humphed and held her chin high.

“That’s not really a…” Sunset began, only to stop when Heartsring’s hoof tapped her shoulder and she shook her head while rolling her eyes. “Hee. You should ask the professor, Arty.”

“I think I will,” she said. “You two go on to the classroom. I’m going to see if he’s in his office.” And her tone was quite clear they had no choice in the matter. So Arty peeled off while Hearstrings and Sunset wandered into the classroom. It had no door like the other rooms on the level and was quite a bit more spacious than everyplace else. Or it was a normal sized room and their dorm rooms really were that small. Sunset was privately of the latter opinion.

The classroom was already hosting the other ponies in their class, though it was clearly not full. Roommates milled about together or friends from before quickly found one another and stuck quite close. Between all the moving bodies, Sunset found her eyes captivated by the walls and boards at the back of the room. Fully labeled charts, diagrams, runic alphabets, lists, and everything in between hung in any place a hook could be nailed into the stone wall. Even the pristine black board already had drawings in a variety of colors and equations etched onto its surface. And they were the most… “Heartstrings… those drawings on the board… they’re perfect,” she whispered.

“Ayo, it’s just Lyra,” she answered with a nonchalant wave of her hoof. “But yeah, what’s your point? I mean, wouldn’t the princess want only the best teaching here?”

“No, no, no!” Sunset shook her head vigorously, excited and frustrated all at once. “Come here!” she said, grabbing Lyra’s hoof and nearly dragging her through the other students to reach the board.

“Blegh… I think I just accidentally licked somepony’s coat,” Lyra mumbled when Sunset let go of her to hop on the teacher’s stage. “What’s got you all worked up?”

“Watch,” Sunset said, and with a simple nudge of her magic, she cast a grid of light against the board. “Look! Everything on here is perfect! It’s all symmetrical.”

“Damn…” Lyra muttered to herself, gazing onto the board, eyes darting over all the markings with new… No she wasn’t. She was looking at Sunset. “You’ve got some skills on you,” Lyra smirked, “moving the chalk marks like that.”

“What… no I didn’t… they were already right,” Sunset trailed, glancing back between Lyra and the board, cutting the spell.

“Everypony quiet!” Corrugan’s voice resonated through the space. “Whether you feel like it or not, this is a school, and we have a lot to get through this first week.” He strode through the center of the room, almost parting the students as they scrambled to clear a path. “So behave, for the love of the moon, like the ponies the princess believes you can be.” Sunset sidled off the stage as inconspicuously as possible, clearing the way for him to step into his place. Lyra helped in her own way, grabbing her with magic and pulling her onto the floor with a little more force than Sunset thought was necessary. “So, roll call!” Corrugan shouted out to them.

Sunset glanced around at the rest of the ponies, wondering why they were taking so long to do something so simple until… “Oh! Um… one,” she said, doing her best to hide behind Lyra as the sequence rattled off.

“Aright,” Corrugan sighed when they had all finished the roll call. “Take your own seats for now, and I’ll figure out who I want where as we go on. Go on, let’s move some flank. I wasn’t kidding around when-!” And before he could finish his sentence, Corrguan seemed to go into a half spasm before appearing to lock in place. “Just - go - one second,” he managed to wince out, stumbling to the teacher’s podium and taking heaving breaths for several seconds before shaking his head and looking no worse for wear. “Ah, yes,” he said with a rather sheepish smile and looked them all over, almost amused. Sunset glanced back, and while she was certainly taken aback, she wasn’t letting it show show as much as so many of the other students. “Nothing to worry about. Just an unfortunate side effect of a little magical accident when I was young and inexperienced. But that’s why you’re here. So that sort of thing doesn’t happen to you when you get out into the world. Okay, so, yes, take seats.”

Like she expected, the ponies around her broke into inaudible muttered conversations as they all milled about to find their friends and desks where they thought they’d be least likely to be called on. Sunset just decided to stay where she was despite Lyra’s earnest grunts and tugs for them to get to the back. Instead, she found the aisle closest to the front and planted her flank in the chair, adjusting her braid so it wouldn’t be squashed against the back of the seat. Eventually, Lyra gave up staring at her disapprovingly and plopped down next her with a huff. Arty managed to find them and sit on Lyra’s other side, but she looked mildly depressed (Sunset had a faint feeling bugs weren’t all that magical).

“Okay,” Corrugan said, striding to the center of his stage. “So I’m sure a lot of you know at least some of what’s written on all of these posters of mine. And we’ll get to that, maybe even start the first lesson today if we can manage it,” he tapped the board with his hoof, “but for now, I have to show you the campus instead of just letting you explore it yourself. So, that said, I want it to be very clear that we measure your progress and knowledge by the number of weeks you’ve been here. And, everything around campus is designed to help you learn in a more practical way. Which brings me to the point that everything out there is marked. If your week number isn’t high enough, don’t touch it. Plain and simple.”

“What happens if we do, just out of curiosity?” asked one of the colts farther in the back, and everypony ahead of him turned to see who had asked such a, well, Sunset herself thought it was retarded.

“Dumbass,” Lyra muttered under her breath to Sunset, and she nodded back.

“There’s always at least one of you lot of colts that asks,” Corrugan smirked. “A lot of the other teachers wouldn’t be so blunt, but let’s put it this way, if you don’t know what you’re doing around some of the structures and markings on campus, dying will be the least of your problems. I’d like to avoid that, you’d like to avoid that I hope, so until you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what something is and does, you’ll keep your grubby hooves off. Clear?”

“Yes, Mr. Corrugan,” the colt said, looking embarrassed as a filly being asked on her first date and his colt friends already beginning to knock his shoulders and trying to contain their snickers.

“Does anypony else have any more questions before we go?” Corrugan asked, ignoring the colts.

“Yeah, I do,” Lyra raised her hoof, and Sunset’s brows went up without any conscious decision of her own. Lyra really hadn’t struck her as the type of pony to ask questions in a classroom unless she absolutely, completely didn’t understand something or couldn’t figure it out any other way.

“Go ahead then,” Corrugan replied with a hoof motion.

“Yeah, so how many ponies out here are actually proxies?” she asked blankly, and even through her own wince, Sunset could feel the collective intake of breath from the class. Corrugan’s face grew dark, but the question didn’t seem to have phased him as much as everypony else. Instead, he just eyed Lyra for a long while, and Sunset had the odd feeling he was looking for something normal eyes couldn’t see.

“Baltimare?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she snapped back with a touch of pride.

“This school is not the underground fantasy world of your home town,” Corrugan said, voice hard as steel. “Ponies out there don’t fully understand what it means to become a proxy, and as such, you will not even attempt the process while you are here.”

“Sheesh,” Lyra answered, leaning back. “I wasn’t tryin’ to be a plothole. I just thought there might be some here since it’s all about weird magic and stuff.”

“Lyra Heartstrings, you and I will talk later,” Corrugan said. “Right now, we’re late, and I’ll not hear the end of it for a while. Everypony! Three lines from the doorway! Let’s chop it!” There was a mad scramble into the lines, and before Sunset was even fully aware of the directions they were taking, the class was out of the main tower into the courtyard behind the school.

* * *

Mountain air was crisp and fresh no matter which way she thought about it, but Sunset felt that when they were outside with the sun shining brightly on everything breathing the mountain air, there weren’t really any better ways to describe the purity of everything. And between that and the arrangement of all the constructs in the courtyard, her senses were nearly overwhelmed. Even her attunement to magic was buzzing in her horn, either from the magical nature of all the objects around her or the sheer amount of magic that been practiced in the courtyard over the years. There wasn’t anypony around now except their class, but Sunset could almost see the ghostly outlines of ponies in the air whenever the wind blew. It was truly as if magic had become part of the visible world.

“Everypony stop staring around so you don’t run into the flank of the classmate in front of you,” Corrugan barked from behind the line. “Circle up right here! Yeah, that’s right Mayflower, bring the line back around.” Everypony broke out of their little formation, Arty and a smirking Lyra coming up on Sunset’s sides as they all grouped around their teacher. “Okay, now that we’re out here, let me explain how all these things out here work. There are four separate courtyards in addition to the one we’re in now, and until we move on into more advanced subjects, I want you to stick to this courtyard. There’s nothing that says you can’t go to see what more advanced students are working on, but you certainly won’t be allowed to participate, and chances are, they’ll only get annoyed that you’re in the way.” He took a deep breath and continued on, “That said, these courtyards are where you’ll do most of your homework. Respect the structures out here. Some of these are one of a kinds, built by the princess herself. Be careful. You all have thirty minutes to wander and investigate. Get familiar. I’ll be over here, and I can answer any questions you might have. Shoo.”

Everypony was all too eager to begin exploring, loud voices cropping up almost instantly as some of the fillies immediately ran off with their friends to things they’d seen walking in. Sunset wanted to see everything more clearly though, and took the chance of the dispersing class to check the place over with her eyes first. If it stuck up from the ground in a weird shape, there were ponies around it, and with that said, Sunset took her stride toward an apparent blank space in the courtyard. “Sunset! Wait for me!” Arty called after her, but there didn’t seem to be a need, as Sunset didn’t make it all that far.

“Heartstrings, Shimmer, Arts, stay a moment,” Corrugan’s quieter, more personal voice called them all back. “Shimmer…” he addressed her first with a drawn, tired look on his face. “You weren’t picked for the princess’s personal student for no reason. Have you been talking with them about proxies?”

“What!? No! Absolutely not!” Sunset answered reflexively, too shocked she would insinuated in something like that to care too much that her accent flared or that he spilled her little secret to the two ponies beside her.

“Whoaaaaaaaah,” Arty said in a hushed voice, eyeing Sunset with something close to awe.

“Heh, makes sense,” Lyra commented.

“Then how would you know about proxies, Miss Heartstrings?” Corrugan asked with a scrutinizing air. “Even if the darker parts of Baltimare have their fair share of the things, even most of the underworld doesn’t know that much about them if they know they exist at all.”

“Oh, yeah, that,” Lyra scratched at her leg, the first time Sunset had seen her worried. “I… I kinda helped make ‘em for some guys… yeah. I don’t understand how it works… they just told me what to do and how… I had to put food on the table after Pops lost his job an’… I’m not gettin’ kicked out am I?” She was almost pleading now, a simple question stripping her down completely. Yet where before in Trottingham she would have done her best to just leave as fast as she could, something she couldn’t explain or rationalize kept her there. Right next to her.

“Hey now,” Corrugan said, smiling a bit and his voice becoming softer than any stallion’s voice she’d heard before. “Don’t make me watch you lose your head. Buck up, I didn’t say anything about that. I just wanted to know how you knew about proxies. Maybe another teacher would have sent you to the princess, but not me. You left that behind willingly, and let me just say, you would have begun making a name and bits for yourself had you stayed there. That’s enough for me. My only requirement is that you not share the technique with anypony else, whether you understand it or not. I do a lesson on proxies, but I don’t teach you how to make one. And that’s on the princess’s order. We good?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Lyra’s voice cracked a bit. “I won’t bring it up again.”

“Don’t apologize for knowing advanced magic,” Corrugan lightly scolded her. “Just learn how and when to use it.”

“Could she come with me when the princess wants to do special lessons so she could learn the concepts behind the spells?” Sunset piped in, the word escaping before she’d had time to catch them and think about whether she should let them go or not.

“Tall order,” Corrugan replied though he continued to smile in an amused way, “but no harm ever came from asking. I’ll see what she says. Now off with your three. Explore. Learn. Or whatever.” They turned and walked off, Sunset leading the way toward the flat area she’d been going toward before, and when they were far enough off, she turned to a still staring Arty.

“Don’t say a word,” she said, only Lyra said the exact same thing with her, and when they all glanced back and forth between each other, little giggles became full laughs.

* * *

His office door shut with a small, light click and locked with an equally quiet sound. And as soon as he was sure he was alone, he let the ruse fall and collapsed against the bookshelf. His breathing was shallow and rapid, and he silently began running through his mixing procedures from that morning. What with a new class coming in and all the stresses and distractions that came with it, he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d missed a step or ingredient or something else. But nothing in his mental run through seemed out of place, which would mean he’d need to do an analysis before he made his conclusion. Privately, he already knew what the issue was.

He dragged his way across the various chairs and tables until he plopped into the one behind his desk, using what little reserves of energy he had left to initiate his desk’s rings. The wood flared to life in a deep orange array of casting rings, all turning at various rates and directions, some even rising away from the wood to turn on a three dimensional axis. He looked up to check they were all in proper working order, and was frankly unsurprised to see her standing there. “Teacher,” he managed to breathe out, a self-reflecting smile on his face. “Amazing how many times you walk in on me when I’m like this.”

“Corrugan…” Princess Celestia said, ever concerned. “Rumor in the dining hall has it you had a seizure in class today. What happened?”

“Eh, that’s not rumor,” Corrugan shrugged, his limbs shaking now as he moved to extract the bottles from the desk drawers. “I did. Just a small spasm though, nothing scream inducing like last year.”

“Where did you go wrong with the formula this time?” she asked him, walking forward and analyzing his casting ring array.

“I don’t think I did,” he replied with a grunt, pouring the liquid into one of the triple rings and watching as the magic took control. “But we’re about to find out.” He nodded to the rings as spell after spell flashed from the rings and their movements became every more complex and erratic across the wooden surface. After only a few moments, the entire array shifted from orange to a hazy light blue before fading away and dropping the liquid into Princess Celestia’s waiting magic aura. “Just what I thought,” Corrugan sighed, choosing to just fall back into the chair for the moment.

“Little Corrugan, you cannot continue to insist this is not addiction when this will be your fifth increase in potency in the past month,” Celestia admonished. “Let me help you the way I know how. There’s no reason you have to live this way, and if things keep going like this, I will have to decide if you’re still an acceptable teacher.”

“You do things your way, and I won’t be fit to do much of anything,” he said. “You should stop worrying so much about me, even though I know you can’t.” He smiled. It helped soothe her when he smiled.

“If only,” she returned the expression. “You know you will eventually kill yourself with that concoction of yours.”

“Knew it the first day I took it to save my life,” he replied stiffly. “Look, I know I’ve done things you didn’t expect out of your personal student, but that’s the past, and I have to pay for it everyday. And with that being said, I know you didn’t come find me on cake eating hour to scold me again.”

“No, you’re right, and I have decided to eschew cake for the month thank you,” Celestia said mock offended. “How is Sunset? I really want to meet her personally this evening. It’s been long enough.”

“Ha ha ha hah!” Corrugan loosed a hearty laugh despite how weak he felt. “She is definitely Princess Celestia student material. Already found the crazy one in the class and the one with the smarts she shouldn’t have. It’s like looking the mirror honestly, and she wants to bring Miss Heartstrings to her lessons with you.” And with that he down an entire bottle of his solution, feeling the warmth and cramping sensations grip at his throat, head, and stomach. He clenched, but forced himself to relax. It would be enough to get him through the day, and he had enough stored up to make it through yet another retooling. Celestia was accustomed to the effects of the solution by now, and simply waited (for how long he couldn’t tell) until he was able to speak again. “Gah, anyhow. Yes, Heartstrings knows how to build a proxy apparently, and Sunset would like it if you taught her the theoretics behind the spell.”

“Discord have mercy…” Celestia trailed off. “She’s how old and can already do something like that?”

“She hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing,” Corrugan replied, feeling his voice drop into its normal range and tone as the effects of his solution began to take their effect. “She knows how to produce a result in the right conditions, nothing more. Which is why Sunset wants to bring her along.”

“And your opinion on the matter?” Celestia asked severely.

“Do it,” Corrugan answered without hesitation. “Nevermind whether Heartstrings needs to know about it or not, she could build one regardless. It’s Sunset’s impression of you that’s important.”

“Is she really that brilliant?” the princess asked, a fondness entering her eyes.

“I was watching her in the courtyard,” Corrguan said. “She went straight for the analysis cubes, even brought them to me asking what they were. You teach her right, and that filly has the potential to build entirely new spells, nevermind theory.”

“Oh good,” she sighed. “I’ll take her request regarding her friend as well. It will be a good cautionary lesson for them both. It seems I’ve lingered too long,” she added after a pause, ears twitching toward the dining hall. “Lunch is over.”

“Collection time then,” Corrugan grunted, standing and testing each of his limbs for strength before walking around his old teacher to the door.

“Corrugan,” she stopped him just as his hoof was about to turn the handle. “Promise me you won’t forget to keep yourself safe while doing as much for them.”

“I make no promises like that,” he grinned, stepping outside. “Each one of those fillies and colts are my job to take care of, and if that means I don’t make it with them but they go on to change the world for the better… Well, that’s my job now.” And he didn’t give her the chance to rebuff him, closing the door to the office and setting off down the curling stairs to retrieve his class. Only, as he passed a small puddle of dew water that had escaped the sun’s rays, he stopped and gave himself a reminder of the pony he was. For his teacher’s sake. She wanted him to remember what he couldn’t forget.