Guards and Monsters

Normally, afternoons were our time off, but then normally we weren’t still in bat form. And normally, we didn’t get ambushed by a drill sergeant as soon as we stepped out the barracks.

He was one of the largest unicorns I’d ever seen – seriously, he could give Celestia a run for her money. Part of that might have been the voice. “There you maggots are! Do you think just because you’re a bunch of bats you get to sleep all day?”

“Yeah?” Diamond Tiara said, sneering. “We stay up all night, so we sleep during the day. I thought that would be obvious.”

“Ooooh, we have a smart mouth. Do any of the rest of you girls have smart mouths?”

“I do!” I said, bouncing a bit. “Do you want me to sing you a song?”

“I want you to get down and give me twenty!” he shouted, right in my face.

“Twenty whats?”

It turned out to be ‘twenty wing-ups’, and since I ‘needed somepony to show me how to do a proper wing-up’ I had to do them with him standing on my back. I did sing him a little song while I was doing it, though, since he hadn’t said ‘no’. Well, I kind of hummed it. I hadn’t worked out words for it yet.

I was up to thirty three (he added twenty more to my count after Diamond Tiara rolled her eyes at him) by the time he noticed Pipsqueak not being a bat. “And what in Luna’s name are you supposed to be?”

“I’m supposed to be a bat, sir,” he replied, saluting.

That sort of stopped him in his tracks.

He didn’t ask for the details, and we didn’t give them to him. It’s not like I thought it was really a secret, but DeeTee and Bonnie and Pip were all making like it was a secret, so I figured the least I could do was play along. It didn’t really matter once we got to the actual hoof-to-hoof training that Luna had called him in for.

He was pretty good – I mean, he was a really good fighter, but he was a pretty good teacher, too. He’d actually tell us what we were doing wrong and how to figure out how to do it right, unlike Luna who’d usually let us get killed when we screwed up, hoping the pain would convince us to try harder next time.

That never really worked with us. Diamond Tiara would fail harder out of spite, Bon Bon would stubbornly keep trying the same thing over and over in case it would eventually start working, Pipsqueak would panic at the thought of failing his favorite princess and start just doing random stuff, and I’d get discouraged and start fighting really half-assed while daydreaming about music or something, and just resign myself to dying some more.

But this guy was good. Even Diamond Tiara eventually started listening.

Unfortunately, he was a Royal Guard with all that implied, in particular the bit where he was awake during the day and slept at night. So when the sun went down, he hoofed us back over to Luna.

None of us said anything, as she paced back and forth in front of us, but I know I’m terrible at hiding my own body language, so I think she probably got the gist of it. We were not ready for another night of training directly after a day of it.

“Take heart,” she said to us. “Tonight I have something special planned.”

“Another mission?” Pipsqueak asked.

“Nay, thou art not yet prepared. This is clear to me now. Tonight, I must attend an event recommended by my sister. You four shall escort me. Diamond Tiara – as we agreed, you may attend in your true form, in order to better curry favor with the nobles and other wealthy ponies in attendance. The rest of you will be my honor guard.”

“Actually,” I said, having a sudden thought. “Could I come in my real form too? I know I didn’t make it a condition, but I’m planning to be famous someday, and anything I can do to get my name out there is another step on the path to fame and stuff.”

Diamond Tiara scowled. “Do you even know how to act at a fancy party?”

“Yeah, I grew up on ‘em,” I said. “They’re boring, but I can play the up and coming eccentric in my sleep. It’s one of the standard forms. Number twelve.”

“What?” Luna asked.

I peered at Luna. “You’ll be doing a number seven, I assume? The grumpy soldier?”

“I do not recognize that notation,” Luna replied. “I rarely attend such parties. I was given to understand that one must be oneself, in order to be accepted for what one truly is.”

I giggled. “Well, sure! But you have to be a specific version of yourself that telegraphs who you truly are correctly. Back when I was in school, we came up with a list of archetypes.

“One is The Dignified Gentlemare – this is the default, that everypony is supposed to emulate. You don’t draw a lot of attention, you leave a generally positive impression on everypony, and you bore yourself and everypony else to tears with the sheer conventionality.

“Two is the Naïve Waif. It’s an excuse if you don’t actually know what you’re doing, but usually it’s a cover for somepony who doesn’t really feel confident and wants to fish for compliments. Not a good one to use if you want to actually accomplish anything.

“Three is the Rakish Ne’er-do-well. Generally, stallions on the prowl. Lots of bragging about silly things they did recently, they usually gather a crowd to listen to their stories.

“Four is the Kindly Matron, which is mostly an excuse to look down on everypony else for being less boring than you are. I can’t stand people who use that form.

“Five is the Shining Wit. You make all sorts of puns and act ever-so-clever, and if you fail to pull it off you look like a total idiot. Either way, people will be laughing at you.

“Six is the Princess. Just pretend you’re Princess Celestia. Demand respect from everypony, and stay totally cool no matter what.

“Seven is the Grumpy Soldier. You’re friendly to everypony but you’re looking down on them at the same time, because you’re involved in things that are so much more important than all this frippery. Anypony who complains about anything gets the Death Glare. You don’t say anything, you just let them realize that you know what real pain is.

“Eight is –“

“Enough,” Luna said, cutting me off with a sweep of her wing. “Your credentials are accepted, you may play the part of one of my attendants. Pipsqueak, Candy Pony, the two of you will be our guards.”

Bon Bon shrugged. Pipsqueak saluted.

To change us back into our real bodies, we apparently had to die, so Luna had us give a quick demonstration of everything we’d learned during the day’s practice. Pip and Bonnie got force fields, and armor, and their choice of weapons. Diamond Tiara and I got completely slaughtered. They double-teamed her and took her out quickly, slashing open her belly with a wingblade, then left her there screaming and bleeding out while Bon Bon pinned me to the ground and Pipsqueak stabbed me right in the crotch like he was trying to rape me to death with his spear.

He was probably just trying to make it extra-painful. And it was! My muscles convulsed around the razor-sharp leaf blade, slicing up everything between my legs, and then it was inside me cutting up my vital organs. My stomach burst open, bathing my innards in acid, and it lodged in my liver, and Pip sort of held it there, wiggling it around instead of pushing another half a foot and getting my heart. It got him bucked in the face a bunch of times, but with Luna’s force field he barely noticed, and meanwhile I was in agony, writhing uncontrollably and gushing blood from the ragged entry wound.

Really, it sounds worse than it was. If I have to die in excruciating pain, I want Bonnie or somepony else I love holding me tight. Yes, she was choking me to death with spiked hooves digging into my neck, but that was actually sort of a bonus – it made me go all fuzzy even before I finally died.

And after everything went black… well, there’s a reason that letting us get killed when we lose never really inspired me to work harder to avoid it. I came so hard when I reappeared in the barracks! Diamond Tiara had actually managed to finish dying first, so she was there watching me, and I was so turned on that I didn’t actually mind. She could have jumped me right there, and I would have let her.

She didn’t, of course. She hated me as much as I hated her. We did shower together, but that was only because there was just the one big shower, and we scrubbed ourselves quietly in different corners of it until we felt like normal, living ponies again.

===

Despite what I said to Luna, I really do love fancy parties. All the elements of a truly tedious travesty are there – plates of little snack foods, slow music that hardly anypony recognizes or understands, and fancy dresses that are all expensive and fragile so that nopony wants to move around too quickly. But then you counteract that by pushing the quality of everything up to eleven, and it’s like stepping into a whole other world.

The dresses Luna made for us helped. I know, I know, magically created dresses are a huge no-no, but as a Princess of Equestria Luna is allowed to change the rules if she wants, and changing them so that Diamond Tiara seemed to be wearing a living galaxy of glimmering stars, that left the impression that you should be able to see through the starscape to the pony below, while not actually letting you see anything past the glare that got more intense the closer you looked – well, that didn’t exactly cost her points.

My dress wasn’t quite as breathtaking; she’d offset my mint-colored coat and mane with a dark, gaseous nebula, that sort of squirmed around against my body instead of lying like cloth. Like Tiara’s, it had a large cat’s-eye gem for a brooch, identical to the ones on the armor, just in case we needed to suddenly be bats.

Luna herself went naked, except for her regalia. And us, I suppose – as her entourage, we were there to make her look good.

The party wasn’t in Canterlot per se, so that meant a long, cold chariot-ride in Luna’s horror-themed monstrosity of a carriage, with Pipsqueak and Bon Bon pulling it. And when I say ‘cold’, I mean that I was actually envying the bat ponies pulling us, since the exercise was keeping them warm. I was even tempted to snuggle up to Luna for warmth, but her expression was even colder than the air.

“So, what’s this party for, anyway?” I asked, to distract myself. “Is it Lord Such and Such’s birthday?”

“Nay, it is a celebration of astronomers, who have constructed yet another monstrous telescope to better look at the stars from afar,” Luna replied.

“Oh! So they’re basically holding the party in your honor?” Diamond Tiara said.

“So they think,” Luna replied. “To tell the truth, I care little for astronomy.”

“I thought you wanted ponies to stay up all night, staring at the stars?” I asked.

“They’re a bunch of nerds,” Diamond Tiara replied. “Nopony wants to hang out with nerds.”

“I find certain nerds to be tolerable,” Luna said. “Astronomers, however, should all be consumed in an entirely accidental, tragic, and yet somehow inescapable fire.”

“Ah,” I said, smiling. “So we are on a mission.”

“No!” Luna snapped. “No. They are annoying foals, not villains or monsters. You are not to kill any of them.” She paused. “Unless you discover who came up with form 228-B. Nay, nay, not even then.” She sighed. “They are not bad ponies. I must remind myself of this. They grew up in a world where the stars were fixed, and spent their entire lives recording and mapping that fixed pattern.”

“Oh,” I said. “I get it. You used to move the stars around, before your exile.”

“Indeed, I painted a new pattern every night,” Luna said. “Most of them were not this… haphazard botchery. When I painted my last sky, I was not entirely in my right mind.”

“So it’s sort of like Nightmare Night. It’s an insult and a reminder of the bad parts of the past, but to everypony mortal it’s just the way it’s always been.”

“But you’re a Princess,” Diamond Tiara said. “If you want to change the sky, do it.”

“I would,” Luna replied. “However, doing so without making an eternal enemy of the Canterlot Astronomy Society requires me to fill out form 228-B.” She paused for dramatic effect. “For each star.”

“Hire some ponies,” Diamond Tiara said. “Have them fill out the forms for you. It’s tedious and awful, but it probably doesn’t require any actual skill, especially if you don’t care if the forms are accurate, so you can use unskilled labor, which is dirt cheap.”

Luna stared at her. She smirked.

“They obviously invented the form to keep you from changing the sky. They knew you wouldn’t want to just break the rules, since you’re sensitive about being seen as a tyrant, so they threw a bunch of red tape in your face. But they screwed up – they made it possible to play their game, just really annoying. If you actually move the stars, they’ll be more than annoyed. They’ll be crushed. They spent their entire lives studying the current patterns and orbits – you’ll completely destroy their careers.”

“Just don’t move the north star,” I said. “That one’s actually used by sailors.”

“No, no, you should move that one too,” Diamond Tiara said. “You should move it to make it more useful to sailors, just to rub it in their faces.”

“I will have to think on this,” Luna replied. “For tonight, the plan is to pretend to be pleased at their attention. Nopony is to kill anypony. Even if we see somepony who sorely deserves it, we will be in public, and should leave their fate to the Royal Guard.”

“So, the Night Guard is a secret?” I asked.

“Nay, but the details of our missions should remain so.”

With that, Luna fell silent, and the cold started creeping in on me again. Fortunately, it was only a few more minutes before we began our final descent, and once we were down below cloud level it started to warm up.

The moral of the story is that if you’re going to go flying in a pegasus-pulled chariot, wear clothing made of actual, physical cloth and not illusionary nebula clouds.