Author's Note

Some time ago, I was told the first chapter was a bit of an info dump and I'm in agreement.

-To old readers that have already read the first chapter, this is just cutting off all the info dump from the first half of chapter 1 and putting it in its own chapter that readers can skip if they want to.

-To new readers; If you're not a fan of exposition, here's the TL;DR. Cinnamon is a 19 year old Human that appeared in Equestria as a 3 month baby. He had trouble finding a job due to his lack of a cutie mark, so he joined the guard. He then joined a contest that happens 4 times a year to become Princess Celestia's personal guard, which he won after the third try. He held the position for 9 months, during which time, he became closer to the princess. They would make jokes to each other under their breaths and challenge each other to keep a straight face. Unfortunately, it came to an end when he lost a tournament. So he waited to be assigned as a court guard. There, he learned that Saturday was a rather special day for citizens and guard alike. A chance for something more.

0. Prologue

19 years ago, a 3 month old baby human appeared in Equestria wrapped in a blanket. Nobody knows where he came from; he just appeared on Manehattan Square in the morning before the sun was due to rise. A cream colored unicorn mare named Vanilla Crush happened upon him crying on her way to buy ingredients for her bakery. Not knowing what to do, she brought him back to the bakery where her red Pegasus stallion, Coco Harvest, was preparing to make the display cupcakes for the day. They didn’t know what to do, or what he was, or why he was here; so they called the Manehattan Guard for help.

The Guard handed out fliers about a found newborn along with a picture of him. After a week without anyone coming forward to claim the baby, they assumed it was a deformed baby that was abandoned by its parents. So Vanilla and Coco decided to adopt him into their family, named him Ground Cinnamon, and raised him as if he was their own foal. He quickly grew taller than his parents, and before they knew it, he had graduated and was looking for a job. That’s when life became complicated.

His parents helped as best as they could, letting him work in their bakery while he was looking for a full paying job. However, wherever he went, they either weren’t looking to hire someone that didn’t have a special cutie mark for the job, or would only offer to pay him a fraction of a living wage because of it.

Despite that, he continued to try; stores, restaurants, offices, construction, but they stopped being an option for the same reasons. Things weren’t looking good until Vanilla suggested that he could try out for the Guard. She learned they let any species apply with no pay cuts for a stupid reason like not having a specific kind of cutie mark, or a cutie mark at all.

So after some research, he decided he didn’t want to be just any guard; he wanted to be a part of the Royal Canterlot Guard. So with a train ticket to Canterlot and a bag of bits for a hotel room, he went to take the entry test.

There were two parts to the test; A written part and a physical part. The written part had questions asking why he wanted to apply, what he was hoping to get out of it, what would be the best thing to do in certain situations, education, family ties, etc. The physical part was a simply obstacle course that he had to run.

He passed the tests but performed below average for the obstacle course thanks to the irresistible sweets that his parents made. So he had to do an extra month of basic training on top of the required 4 months to shape up because of it.

After he finished basic, he would have to spend the first two years in the guard on wall duty. It was an initiation of sorts, if you couldn’t handle standing guard in the heat or cold for hours, then you weren’t mentally fit for the guard. After that, the doors opened up in the guard. First, you got to choose if you wanted the day shift as a solar guard, or the night shift as a lunar guard. After that, you got to make a list of what positions you wanted from most to the least.

Door duty, wall duty, dungeon guard, hall patrol, court guard, garden patrol, gate duty, city patrol and train inspection duty. You weren’t guaranteed to get your first pick, but the jobs were on weekly rotation and it was a guarantee that you wouldn’t have the same job two times in a row. There were also three special positions in the guard that required something special to apply.

There’s the reserves, which required you to sign a 4 year contract. All you had to do was combat training in preparation of any sort of major conflict that may or may not show up. If you tried to leave before your 4 years were up, you would be sentenced to 10 years in the dungeon and a permanent mark on your record if you tried to look for another job.

Then there were the Ambassador Guards. You were required to go through special combat training that took another two years to complete. You and another guard were responsible for the wellbeing of the ambassador you were assigned to. It was pretty easy, but failing the assignment resulted in a court case to find out which guard was at fault, if not both. Being found guilty for not performing this important role would grant you a dozen years in the dungeon, a hefty fine, a dishonorable discharge from the guard and your name added to a country-wide blacklist from any form of security or guard job.

Finally, there were the Personal guards; the position that Cinnamon was going for. Only four guards were allowed the job and it could change every three months. Half of them were in charge of accompanying the princess’ while they were active in the castle and the other half were in charge of guarded their chamber doors while they slept. Two were assigned to Princess Celestia, and the other two were assigned to Princess Luna. The process itself was a pretty simple one to get the job. Every three months, a contest is held to determine the best creature fit for the jobs. Any guard that passed the first two years of wall duty could throw their helmet into the ring. It also served as a show for the civilians to watch the guard compete.

The contest was divided into two parts. The guards that were competing to be Princess Celestia’s personnel guard were judged by Princess Luna. Princess Celestia could only watch and had no say in Princess Luna’s final decision. The roles were reversed for the guards competing to be Princess Luna’s guard with Princess Celestia having the final say in Princess Luna’s guards.

He participated in the event three times before he was chosen to be one of Princess Celestia’s personal guards. On his first attempt, he fell short heavily due to the unarmed combat portion. Minotaurs were easy to fight, griffins were a bit more challenging but the ponies were the hardest in this event. Even though they were half his size, they were sturdy and their hooves hurt.

When he failed his second competition for the same reasons, he decided to seek training in that area every Sunday for three months. He learned how to incapacitate a pony while keeping damage from those hard hooves to a minimum. It was still difficult to win that portion of the contest since fighting a pony, which were the majority of the other contenders, required him to put himself in awkward, exploitable positions in order to initiate an attack or defend from an attack.

But after his third attempt, he finally made it. He was in one of the most important positions a guard could hold in the canterlot guard, guarding Princess Celestia as she went about her daily business. He worked five days of the week, having Saturday and Sunday off for R&R. But as the months went by, he started to notice a side of the princess that he never saw whenever she oversaw training or addressing the public, she had quite a bubbly personality. The kind of personality that would start to brighten his days on the job, the kind of personality that he started to miss on his days off. She would make small remarks during court that only he could hear standing beside her throne. They weren’t made in poor taste, just little playful remarks that would make Cinnamons’ stoic face falter, and occasionally absent-mindedly say something in response that would bring a small smile to her face. He even got her to snort at one particular remark as well as a quick wing smack to the back of his head for implying that a stallion must’ve ran into Blueblood on the way to court based on how he was waddling away. He felt his heart flutter knowing he made the princess do something quite un-princess like during her court. After that had faded, he suddenly feared for his job, but she didn’t scold him about it. Over the course of a few weeks, he started to push the boundary more and more until they both were making small remarks about every other case. It was quite fun to the point that he didn’t feel like he was doing work anymore, which made it all the harder when he lost the third competition since becoming the princesses guard. He performed sub-par to his normal swordship event and lost the unarmed to a griffin early on in the competition. The griffin had used her tail to knock him off balance, and lunged at him as he was trying to recover. It was humiliating and only got worse when he realized the princesses had watched that happen. It didn’t even last a minute.

He had tried to stay somewhat close to the princess by moving the option to be a court guard from his fifth choice to his first, but it would be weeks before he was chosen for the spot. During that time, he felt… weird. The jobs felt… dull. The pride of serving the guard of Equestria was instead replaced with waiting for the days to end until the week was over and he could receive his new assignment, hoping it would be in the throne room.

On the fifth week, he was finally assigned as a court guard. He stood among a dozen other court guards lining the carpet on the way to the princess. Their job was to make sure only the ponies with an appointment approached her one case at a time, depending on what kind of case was being presented. It was… well it was better, but it wasn’t as enjoyable as when he was standing by her side. He looked at the throne out of the corner of his eye. The griffoness that had bested him was standing at attention, the practiced face that Cinnamon once held when he first had the position. He looked to Princess Celestia, still giving every creature that appeared before her a welcoming smile. While he was looking at her, she had turned her attention to him, catching him in the act of being distracted while on duty. His eyes widened and quickly focused his attention back to the area in front of him, hoping the commander would go easy on him when the princess notified her about his fault.

The chewing out never came though. Every time the commander would walk in his direction, he prepared for the lengthy yelling about the importance of keeping focus on duty, about how pitiful it was that he could let his mind wander so easily like a civilian, but it never came. Even so, he didn’t chance another glance in the princess’ direction.

Then the weekend came. Unlike being a personal guard, he had to work on Saturdays as a court guard. Princess Celestia apparently had a special topic for Saturday's court that he hadn’t known about as her personal guard. Saturdays, Princess Celestia opened her doors to allow anyone come in and ask to court her. It was odd for him to see since the mares were the ones that usually asked stallions out But watching as hundreds of suitors, male and female across multiple species, came and asked the princess if she would have them as her consort, it felt foreign to see.