Guards and Monsters

It was a few more days before anything else interesting happened, and that was just Spike coming back. Luna had a suit of armor for him, that was supposed to turn him into a bat-pony, but it ended up turning him into a sort of pony-dragon hybrid, which utterly baffled her. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was supposed to be able to happen – it was like adding two plus two and getting ‘fish’.

“The important thing is that he’ll come back after being killed, right?” I said.

“Will he?” Luna asked. “If he does, in what form? This is not possible, but if it has, indeed, occurred, then everything else we know about the shadow transformation is in doubt!”

“Well, we might as well test it,” Diamond Tiara said. “He has to die sooner or later, unless he wants to be stuck as that weird half-thing forever.”

“What?” Spike said, looking up from where he’d been fascinated, examining his new wings.

“And if we’re wrong, it kills him, and then Twilight kills us,” I said. “Are you really willing to take that risk?”

She rolled her eyes. “If it kills him, he’ll be saved by that stupid spell you were going on about after the party.”

“He’s not a pony,” I said. “Celestia’s spell only works on ponies.”

“I’m voting for not being killed, if it’s all the same to you girls?” Spike said, raising a clawed hoof.

“We must study this properly, and figure out what exactly went wrong before we risk Spike dying,” Luna replied. “Even if I cared nought for his life, what has happened is beyond my understanding, so the further effects should more of the spell be invoked are likewise impossible to predict. Killing him could return him safely to his normal form, or annihilate the world in a sea of fire.”

Spike pouted. “You’re going to hook me up to one of those machines like Twilight has, aren’t you.”

“An excellent suggestion! Let us start with that,” Luna replied. “The rest of you have the night off. Try not to kill anypony.”

===

It was a Twosday, which meant that the drill sergeant guy was spending the night in the barracks, since he was teaching us on Twosdays and Windsdays. By popular acclaim – which meant, Diamond Tiara suggested it, and we decided to go along because even if we hated her (and I’m the only one who really hated her) she knew enough not to make suggestions that ponies weren’t going to follow – we decided to go find him and ask him what Guards did when they had time off.

In his case, the answer was ‘Play Obliettes and Ogres’, and even if we’d been interested in that, his group wasn’t going to be able to make room for four newcomers in one night. He pointed us to the bars that he figured we were probably asking about, so we headed there, and got drunk with a bunch of Royal Guards.

They were mostly out of uniform, which meant they were all the colors of the rainbow, but they didn’t seem to mind that we were still in our armor, and being bat ponies was ‘exotic’. Especially since we were bat pony mares, and even out from under their armor’s illusions most of the Royal Guard were stallions.

Yeah, Pipsqueak’s bat pony form was a mare. I mentioned they were all identical, right? He was still *such* a colt even when he was in it, though.

Anyway, DeeTee and Pip managed to get drunk enough that Bonnie and I didn’t let them go home with the nice stallions that they were draping themselves all over – and the stallions were actually nice, and understood perfectly. Especially when we told them that Pipsqueak was really a colt. Instead, we stayed at the bar and did some karaoke, and some table-dancing because why not? We might not have gotten all the words of the songs exactly right, especially when we were dancing on the tables.

And that’s why they call them the diamond dogs
‘cause they die and they die and they hop like frogs
when you stab ‘em in the butt with a big sharp spear…
There’s really nothing to fear!

Eventually, we staggered out the wrong door and found a changeling feeding on one of the Guards in a back alley.

Yeah, the invasion of Canterlot was years ago, but changelings are like insects. You just can’t get rid of them, but it’s usually pretty harmless to let them stick around, since the worst that happens is that you lose a little love and wake up covered in itchy bites. So we let it finish with the Guard before dragging it off to the next bar. It turned into yet another identical bat pony, and we had a new game to play with the Guards there. “One of us is a colt, and one of us is a changeling. How do you like those odds?”

It ended up coming back to the barracks with us, and spent the night with Pipsqueak. When we woke up in the afternoon, it was trying to make itself useful as some sort of domestic servant – cleaning up all the junk we’d left lying around, making the extra beds, things like that – but Luna wasn’t having any of that.

She dragged it out to the training ground. We were all squinting in the bright daylight – it was overcast, at least, but still way too bright for bat eyes. The changeling was fine, since it could just adjust its eyes to whatever light level it wanted. Stupid cheating changelings.

“I will not have my Night Guard taking on servants,” Luna told it. “They are my servants, and if you wish to join them, it will be as an equal. But if that is to happen, you must prove yourself worthy. Pick one of them,” she motioned to us, “and kill them, in my name.”

“What?” the changeling chittered. “No!”

“It’s okay,” I said, stepping forward. “You can kill me. I don’t mind.”

It stared at me.

“Luna has us die for her amusement all the time,” I tried to explain. “That might be a reason not to join, I guess…”

“It is not for my amusement, it is for your own edification,” Luna insisted. She turned to the changeling. “But she speaks the truth – if you join my Night Guard, you will die in my service.”

There was a flash of green fire, and the changeling was suddenly an ordinary pegasus, fleeing in terror.

“Well, I guess not everypony’s cut out for this,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect a changeling to be so squeamish, though.”

Bon Bon had her hoof up on her forehead. “You forgot to mention the part where we come back to life after we die.”

“What? No, I’m sure I mentioned that part,” I said, trying to remember exactly how I’d put it.

“You said Luna killed us all the time,” Diamond Tiara said, rolling her eyes. “I thought you were being coy on purpose.”

I pouted, and stomped the ground with a forehoof. “Oh, Luna’s tits. It would have been fun to have a changeling around.”

“The armor probably wouldn’t have worked properly on her anyway,” Pipsqueak said. “Did any of you get her name?”

===

We were halfway through our daytime training – it was a Windsday, so the drill sergeant stallion was there, taking up our free time with actual instruction – when the next shoe dropped on our heads from our night of debauchery. This time, it was Moondancer.

“Hi, Moonie!”

She looked grim, but nodded in my direction. “Miss Heartstrings. I’m afraid that this is not a social call.”

“Here to join the training?” the Guard asked her. “I’ve heard Celestia’s been sending you out as her envoy.”

She sighed. “I’m afraid that a certain matter has reached the public’s ear, and can no longer be ignored. Miss Heartstrings, Miss Sweetie Drops, Diamond Tiara, and Pipsqueak, by order of Princess Celestia, you are to come with me to stand trial for the slaughter of the Rocky Gulch Diamond Dog tribe.”

“You can’t do this!” Diamond Tiara snapped.

Moondancer lit her horn with a generic aura, although she wasn’t casting a spell yet. “If you will not go quietly –“

“No, I mean you have no legal right to do this,” Diamond Tiara continued, interrupting her. “We’re agents of Princess Luna. Princess Celestia has no jurisdiction.”

Moondancer narrowed her eyes. “When you… implied, in my presence, that you were responsible for the deaths, we were willing to overlook it. But you stood on a table last night in the Prancing Pony Tavern and sang a drunken song about your crimes in front of half the Guard. You can’t possibly expect this to go unpunished.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Pipsqueak said.

“Then you have nothing to fear if you stand before Celestia for judgment,” Moondancer replied. “Although I’m not sure how you expect to get away with killing noncombatants –“

“You mean, the ones wearing your hide as an apron?” Bon Bon asked. “I could still recognize your cutie mark, even under the splattered blood from the ponies she’d butchered after you.”

“She probably means the puppies,” I pointed out, helpfully. “But that was all Pip. You can just arrest Pipsqueak, right?”

“You helped,” Diamond Tiara said.

“Not on purpose!”

“Look,” said the sergeant. “Everypony calm down.” He was, of course, completely ignored.

“Nopony’s arresting me on any trumped up charges,” Pipsqueak said. “Anyone who tries is a traitor to the Princess, and the penalty for treason is death!”

“The law doesn’t work that way!” Moondancer shouted in his face.

“Are you seriously charging Princess Celestia with treason?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure the law doesn’t work that way.”

“No, no, I was just going to get rid of this zombie,” Pipsqueak said, motioning at Moondancer. “She’s not really alive anyway, so it’s not like I can kill her.”

There was a flash of purple light, and then the four of us were trapped under a giant dome shield, thanks to our drill sergeant. “Okay, everypony, calm down.”

“Thank you, Shining Armor,” Moondancer said. “Now if you’ll help me escort them to the palace dungeons –“

“That includes you, Moondancer,” the sergeant said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid they were correct when they said that it’s Luna’s prerogative to judge them for their actions done in her service. This isn’t the first time Celestia’s overstepped her bounds with the other Princesses, and while Twily and Cadance let her get away with it, I don’t think Princess Luna would be happy about this.”

“That’s why I’m doing this now, while she’s asleep,” Moondancer said. “This is for Luna’s benefit! Of course she wouldn’t throw her servants under the cart, but the public demands justice. If it’s not these idiots, it’s going to be Princess Luna herself who answers for these crimes.”

“I can guess how she’ll answer,” I said.

“She’d stick her tongue out and give a raspberry?” Bon Bon guessed.

“No, no, she’d glower at them, and her mane and tail would sort of swirl into that big ‘tornado of night’ thing,” I said. “And then she’d tell whoever was complaining to go buck themselves in the head.”

“And can’t you see what that would do to her reputation?” Moondancer asked.

“It would reinforce her current reputation as being a grumpy angry pony of the night?” I answered. “How about it, Pip? Want to take one for the team? They need somepony to blame, and you’re most at fault. It’ll make Luna look better.”

“No, we can’t give up anypony, not even Pipsqueak. It would set a terrible precedent,” Diamond Tiara said.

“As opposed to setting the precedent that you’re entirely above the law?” Moondancer asked.

“I can live with that,” Pipsqueak said. “The only law we need obey is that of Princess Luna.”

Moondancer didn’t give up that easily, but she didn’t have the magical oomph to get through the drill sergeant guy’s force field, and none of us were going to agree to go get railroaded into prison, so it was a standoff until Luna finally woke up and sent her packing.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think Princess Celestia is going to drop this just like that. Maybe we should go somewhere else until this all blows over? There has to be somewhere else you can teach us.”

“If they came up to the Crystal Empire, I could put them through drills with the rest of the troops,” suggested the sergeant.

Luna snorted. “I will not be driven from my home by my sister’s machinations. I will deal with this matter, you need not worry about it any further.”

===

Obviously, that didn’t work. I was up all morning, shivering in bed, thinking about how close I’d come to spending the rest of my life in prison. “I don’t want to go to jail, Bon Bon,” I said, holding her. “Promise me that if they come to take me away to jail, you’ll kill me first. It has to be you! You’re the only one!”

“I think they’d catch on when you reappeared on the other side of the room,” Bon Bon said.

I whimpered. “Well – then you’d have to kill me twice! I don’t want to go to jail, it’s soooo boring! I’d rather be dead!”

“Ugh, will you shut up?” Diamond Tiara shouted from three bunks over. “Nopony’s going to jail. My family has lawyers, you know.”

“What does that matter? Celestia makes all the laws! For a case like this, she’d be the judge, too, and the executioner!” I was babbling, I think, but only because I was remembering some of the darker parts of my civics class. “All that the laws are are things that Celestia said in some previous case, that they wrote down just in case she wants to be consistent, later. But you can’t use them against her – she’ll just do whatever she wants and they’ll write it down as more laws in their little law books and your lawyers will have to go back to school and study the case of Lyra Heartstrings vs. Equestria. And meanwhile, I’d be stuck in prison with my horn cut off, having to pick up the soap with my mouth! Forever!”

“Were you even listening?” Diamond Tiara said. “Celestia doesn’t want to punish anypony. She just wants to look like she’s doing everything by the book so that ponies don’t form an angry torch-bearing mob and burn down the castle. The lawyers can come up with a technicality, and she’ll jump all over it. Go to sleep!”

“Only if you promise to kill me if it doesn’t work,” I said, pouting.

She had a counteroffer. “How about if I promise to kill you if you don’t stop whining?”

“I’ll kill you,” Pipsqueak said. “Anytime you want. Just give the word.”

I sniffled. “Okay.”

Everypony was quiet for about ten seconds.

“Wait, was that supposed to be the word?” Pipsqueak asked.

Diamond Tiara shrieked, and threw something at him, and then they got in some sort of pillow fight and probably ended up sleeping with each other or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was still picturing the inside of a prison cell, and at some point I fell asleep and started dreaming about it, and basically that whole morning really sucked.

===

We had the afternoon off, and Diamond Tiara decided to go see her family’s lawyers, just to make sure that she was really in the clear. The rest of us went with her, including Spike who was still stuck as a dragon-bat-pony-hybrid-thing, but was no longer stuck being a lab rat, since they’d figured it out.

“Yeah, it turns out the transformation worked fine,” he said. “If I died I’d turn back into a drake, just like you guys.”

“So what’s with the scales?” I asked. “Not that I’m complaining. It’s a really good look on you.”

“Luna said that being a dragon is like my cutie mark,” Spike said. “It’s a spiritual thing, and not just the body I was born into. So even if you turn me into a pony, I’m still a dragon. I can breathe fire and everything!”

“That’s so cool! Do you still eat meat?”

Spike gave me a look. “I’m not going to eat you, Lyra.”

“Oh come on! It’s the perfect opportunity,” I said.

“You wouldn’t enjoy it,” Spike said.

Diamond Tiara laughed. “You’d be surprised.”

“You might as well humor her,” Bon Bon said. “Luna’s been having us kill each other almost every night.”

“Yeah, about that,” Spike said. “Are you sure she’s… you know. Not evil?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Almost entirely sure! I think.”

“She’s a princess,” Diamond Tiara said. “The worst she could be is ‘eccentric’.”

“Right!” I said. “If she declared herself a queen, then we’d know she turned evil.”

“Riiight,” Spike said. “I suppose you know her better than I do.”

The Rich family lawyer – and since his name was ‘New Money’ he might actually have been part of the family – was happy to see Diamond Tiara, or at least he was trying his hardest to look happy to see her. He welcomed us all into his parlor, which had shelves and shelves of law books full of precedents Celestia or her other judges had set over the years, and a huge cabinet full of hard liquor, because being an expert on the passing whims of immortal princesses was enough to drive anypony to drink.

New Money and Diamond Tiara made small talk for about an hour while the rest of us sat around bored out of minds. Well, I wasn’t that bored, I was doing composition in my head, which is always kind of interesting, and New Money even had a notepad and quill so I could write some of it down.

But eventually, he got to the point. “So… you haven’t been arrested, have you? Or any of your friends?”

“Not quite,” Diamond Taira said, casually. “Princess Celestia sent an envoy to take us in, but Luna says she can make it go away. I’d like to know how our defense is looking in case it doesn’t go away as neatly as she’d like.”

“We were arrested last week,” I pointed out.

“That didn’t have anything to do with this, and you were already pardoned,” Diamond Tiara said.

“By Celestia, or by Luna?” New Money asked. He frowned when we told him Luna had done it.

“This could be a problem,” he said. “If she pardons you again for another crime, it’ll start to look like she’s abusing her power.”

“But it isn’t abuse if Celestia arrests us repeatedly on made up offenses?” Pipsqueak asked.

“But we’re actually guilty,” I said. “I mean, you are this time, and Bonnie and Spike and me were last time. I guess Diamond Tiara isn’t guilty of anything.”

New Money poured himself another drink. A very large drink. “Maybe you should explain everything, from the beginning.”

The good news was that the altercation at the gate was the sort of thing that Luna’s pardons were meant to be used for – no harm had been done, and it was all a misunderstanding.

The bad news was that sending out a squad of assassins to kill a Diamond Dog tribe was basically unprecedented. “It happened,” he said. “But nopony ever talked about it, and it never went to trial. It was always a diplomatic matter, where we’d accuse them of eating ponies, and they’d accuse us of sending out assassins, but no pony ever admitted to it.”

“So what does that mean?” Diamond Tiara asked.

“It means I have a lot of work ahead of me to come up with a collection of related rulings that I can make look like a precedent. I’ll start with self-defense, since they did attack you first, and with Luna’s line of reasoning about the puppies – anything that we can blame on the Diamond Dogs themselves makes it less of an open and shut case. Meanwhile… don’t get arrested. Don’t get in any more trouble. Maybe leave town? This is a bigger deal in Canterlot than anywhere else in Equestria.”

“Luna doesn’t want us to leave town,” I said.

“No, Luna doesn’t want to leave town herself. We can tell her we’re taking a few days off,” Bon Bon said. “I’m getting a little tired of this constant ‘training’ anyway.”

“Aww, but I haven’t gotten a chance to do any of it,” Spike said.

Pipsqueak said, “Then you can stay? You’re not in trouble yet.”

===

So, since we had an open invitation from that drill sergeant guy, we all hopped on the first train up to the Crystal Empire. Since we couldn’t change Spike back from a dragon-bat-pony thing – we tried a few different things, but apparently dragons are really, really tough, and he wasn’t really all that eager to break in his get-out-of-death-free card anyway – we wrapped him up in a perfectly non-suspicious black cloak. We left Luna a note telling her we were taking a vacation in the Crystal Empire. We stuffed our own armor in a perfectly non-suspicious giant purple and silver bat-themed chest, dragged it down to the train station, and shoved it into one of the overhead compartments.

Then all we had to do was tolerate each other’s existence for a few hours, and not get in a huge argument about who killed who in the middle of a crowded train car, where several ponies were reading the evening edition of the paper, which had ‘MURDERERS ON THE LOOSE – IS PRINCESS LUNA PROTECTING THESE FIENDS?’ as the headline.

The accompanying picture was of us as bat ponies, at least.

After threatening Spike with the Cloudsdale National Anthem – he curls up in a cute little quivering ball every time he hears that tune, for some reason – I got him to sing along with some classic travel songs: Fifteen Tons, Oh, Savannah, The Song That Never Ends Until Ponies Get Really Sick of it and Threaten To Shove the Singer’s Lyre Where the Sun Does Not Traditionally Shine. He also gave me a backrub, but only because it kept me quiet. I was still kind of singing, but it’s hard to sing at more than a dazed mumble while Spike is giving you a backrub, even if he is using slightly dragony hooves instead of his normal claws. The others looked out the window, or chatted about stuff, or I don’t know. It was a pretty boring trip, all told. But we arrived without incident.

“So, I guess we have to go find Mister Shouty Guy now?” I said.

“You mean Shining Armor?” Diamond Tiara asked.

“Is that his name?”

“How can you not know Prince Shining Armor? Everypony knows him!”

“Huh, sorry,” I said. “Never heard of him.”

“He’s Princess Twilight’s big brother,” DeeTee said.

“She has a brother?”

She threw her hooves in the air. “He’s married to Princess Cadance!”

“Oh right, I heard she got hitched,” I said.

“Lyra, you were a bridesmaid at his wedding,” Bon Bon said.

“No,” I said, stopping. “I wasn’t. I was going to be a bridesmaid at his wedding, only it turned out that he was marrying a Giant Evil Bug, who hypnotized me and sent me down into the crystal mines as a guard. Then Cadance, sweet, lovable Princess Cadance, took advantage of my altered mental state to throw me off a hundred foot cliff onto sharp, pointy crystals, where I broke all four of my legs and had to spend the wedding lying there in agony, staring into Twinkleshine’s dead eyes, until I finally bled out.”

“You’re still on that?” Bon Bon asked.

“It’s a good thing Mister Shouty Guy had nothing at all to do with that whole incident,” I said. “Because he’s kind of nice. I like him.”

Even though I’d explained how we couldn’t possibly be looking for Prince Shining Armor, everypony else still wanted to look for our guy at the Palace, so we headed right down the main thoroughfare, with Spike in his cloak and the big bat-themed chest wheeling along behind us. We hadn’t actually gotten to the city proper before a big blue alicorn plopped herself down right in front of us.

Pipsqueak bowed. I waved with a sheepish smile.

“I’m afraid I must cut your vacation short,” Luna informed us. “Come, I have prepared a safe house from which we can plan our next operation.”