Diaries of the Anonymous Filly

If someone had told me that Celestia and Luna didn't live in a cute little bungalow in the suburbs, I'd have balked. Maybe it was the fact that Luna drove a nice car, or the way that they dressed in well-made clothes, but it gave off a vibe that they had he money to spare. So when the coupe pulled up to a condo building, well, I was a bit surprised.

Still, we pulled into an underground parking structure, and came to a stop in a parking space marked with a number—designated parking by my guess. Celestia was the first out of the vehicle, and was in the process of pulling the passenger seat forward to let me out of the back seat. Luna, however, just sat in the driver's seat, her eyes locked on the rear view mirror. Why's she suddenly look so done with everything? I pondered as I caught her eyes narrowing.

"Celly," Luna said with a sigh. "Here comes trouble."

I turned in the back seat to look out the rear windshield. There, a few meters back from the driver's side, stood an older woman in what looked to be yoga attire with a blazer thrown over it, dragging along one of the younger teens I'd seen around the school. After a moment's consideration, I realised that the girl matched the pale pink earth pony filly with the violet and white mane from Cheerilee's class, Diamond Tiara. That would make the woman with her... the bitch head of the school board that wanted me permanently removed from the school—or at least her human equivalent. Spoiled Rich, I think she was called.

When I started to climb out of the back seat, Luna put a hand on my shoulder, startling me in the process. When I met her eyes with a questioning look, she just shook her head. Don't get involved?

"Ah, Ms. Celestia," Spoiled Rich said in a tone that made my stomach turn. "My precious Diamond has informed me that you've finally put together an investigation into this awful Anon-a-Miss mess." As I turned back to watch her exchange, I really did not like the smile on her face. "I take it you've finally given that demon freak enough rope to hang herself like I asked?"

Like she asked? I bristled at that. Was this fucking woman really the reason why the school's been doing nothing? It was probably a good thing that I was wearing my cloak with the hood up, because I could feel my magic beginning to roil within my chest. The hand that gripped the back of Luna's seat was glowing gently, and I quickly released it, lest we found out whether 'Ponying Up' channelled my earth pony strength. Wouldn't be great if I tore the nice vinyl seat-covering.

The dark look on Celestia's face told me how she really felt. "Actually, Spoiled, doing as you demanded has only caused harm and chaos," she growled back. "Your 'hands off' approach has caused the worst-recorded 'bullying' incident in Canterlot High School's entire history, and that is counting Sunset Shimmer's entire reign of terror."

This got a raised eyebrow from Mrs. Rich, and Diamond Tiara nervously tugged at the furred collar of her jacket. "I really don't like you taking that tone with me, Celestia." She crossed her arms beneath her ample bosom and drawing attention to how low-cut her blouse was. "Don't forget who keeps you employed."

"What a fucking Karen," I whispered to Luna. There was no telling if she got the reference, but I think the meaning came through, because that got a snort out of her. That was followed by a roll of her eyes that transcended words. She's always like this, isn't she? It even seemed like she was entertaining the idea of throwing the car into reverse and backing over her. Luckily, Diamond Tiara's presence put a stop to that.

I nearly jumped when Celestia slammed her palms down atop the roof of the car. "And I really don't like having a student getting death threats over something it turned out she never even did, or students spilling each other's dirty laundry, or all the vandalism that my school's faced since this has started," she yelled. "Someone outed one of my students—who, might I add has extremely conservative parents—as gay, and nobody's seen or heard from her since. Social services won't even lift a finger to help."

Holy shit, she is really going off.

"That's what your wait and see directive has wrought, Spoiled Rich; an innocent party blamed, harassed, threatened and drug through the mud to the point where she had to flee back home, and a school no closer to finding an actual culprit." That's when I saw the tears streaming down her cheeks. "I had to keep stepping out of a staff meeting this afternoon to deal with parents losing their collective minds, and demanding I step down."

Diamond Tiara looked very, very uncomfortable right now, When she finally noticed me in the back of the car, she got this spooked look, and tugged at the sleeve of her mother's blazer. I couldn't hear her whispering to her mother, but it didn't seem like the woman was all that interested in what her daughter had to say. No, the bitch looked incensed that Celestia dared speak to her like that.

"Maybe you should, Celestia." She sneered at Celestia. "But don't worry, we'll wait until the school board meeting after the new year to address your failures."

That actually got a laugh out of Celestia... a terrifying one. I'd never seen Princess Celestia lose her cool, but to hear her voice like this, and this brand of stress laughter sent chills down my spine. "Just try passing this all off on me, Rich," she said, howling with laughter. "Don't think I haven't been idle this entire time. I have everything documented. Every email where you threatened to cut our funds if we intervened, every assurance that the board backed your insistence that I keep my hands off, even the blackmail to turn an blind eye when your daughter was caught smoking—I have hard copy backups of it all, and had a member of the IT department create a digital back-up of all the emails independent of the standard ones. They've already promised they'll be willing to testify at the board meeting if you attempt to have that evidence destroyed. So if someone's going down for this, I won't be going down alone."

Mrs. Rich raised her hand, her pointer finger directed at Celestia. It looked like she had something she wanted to say, but she dropped her hand to her side, let out an angry huff and turned away. "We'll see about that," she shouted, grabbing her daughter by the wrist. "Come along, Diamond. I need to make some phone calls."

Wow, she really is a piece of work.

Once that awful human being was gone, Luna finally released my shoulder and shut off the engine. I didn't say a word as I crawled out of the back of the car, or when I fetched my bag from the trunk. Celestia clearly needed time to clear her head, and asking about that would've been counterproductive. Instead, I just followed the pair into an elevator. If the mood had been better, I'd have even have commented on how this was my first time in an elevator in all my lives. But no, I knew when the time for lighthearted jokes was and this wasn't it, so the entire trip I just stood there holding my bag in front of me.

The ride up to the third floor didn't seem to ease Celestia's mood at all. Even when they opened the door into their condo, Celestia just dazedly walked off into one of the rooms in the hallway off the kitchenette that the living room opened onto. Although Luna assured me that her sister would be fine while showing me to the couch I'd be crashing on, I was still shaken from having witnessed the Sun Horse's unflappable exterior crack—even if it was by proxy.

Their living area was already decorated for the holidays. Off in one corner of the room, there was a plastic tree decorated. The mantel of the electric fireplace was adorned with artificial pine garland and various holiday baubles. It was so cosy, welcoming, and served as a stark contrast to my entire reason for being here. Such a happy time was marred by such problems.

If this drags out too long, I'll be here for Christmas, I mused, setting my bag down on the couch and removing the sleeping bag strapped to the bottom. It was kinda hard to imagine. Even when I was Nemo, I don't think we ever properly celebrated that holiday; once I decided to start moving and never look back, it was all but guaranteed I'd never have the opportunity to celebrate it. The thought of being stuck here and celebrating with Celestia and Luna just didn't sit right with me.

So while Celestia did whatever she had to do in order to cool off, Luna let me change fully into my pyjamas so that I could give my stuff a cold water wash and dry. Then, I left it up to them to decide on a meal. As a guest, it wasn't my place to make suggestions, and most of the time I was content to eat whatever Spike, Twilight, or Starlight cooked. Sure, I could fry, grill, or smoke fish and venison—anything to survive on the road—but it's not like I really had anything else to contribute. Regardless, Luna took off somewhere after a few minutes, probably to get some take-out.

Maybe I should ask Spike to teach me how to cook some things when we get back?

In the meantime, I took out my notebooks, the clay, and a pencil, and sat down at their coffee table. Before I tore out a page from the back, I took a quick glance around the room. It looked like either Luna or Celestia did their work-outs in here too, if the rolled up yoga mat and the rack of various dumbbells were any indicator. That gives me some ideas.

I started by rolling out a ball of clay and pressing it flat on the sheet of paper. Although I'd found an opportunity to test my kinetic amp spell, I wanted to get a proper medallion of Conjure Light prepped first; that was something I could use to demonstrate magic for Emerald Breeze. Etching it out with a sharp pencil took me almost no time, and once it was done I carefully removed it from the paper and sat it aside.

Another ball was rolled out and flattened, and I reproduced the spell almost verbatim, substituting fire where light belonged. Before peeling this one off, I carefully carved a single notch out of the edge. Rather than setting this one aside, I sat it atop my left palm. I repeated my earlier exercise in exciting the mana in my reservoir. It came even easier this time around, likely due to having accidentally done so twice today and having done it once on purpose.

It was strange, seeing the blue flame flicker into life above my hand. I'd never really noticed before, but the spell itself radiated a fair amount of heat, as I could see the effect of convection in play, but it didn't really seem to affect me, even as I watched it bake the clay in real-time. It occurred to me that I'd never really paid much attention to the safeguards portion that I memorised. I'd always assumed that it merely mitigated spell backlash and served as a safety cut-off, but it made sense that it would contain safeties to protect the user from negative effects of the spell, like heat and/or UV light. Even the hot clay, which should have burned me, didn't feel too bad, even when I flipped the disc to get the other side.

With my free hand, I tore another piece of paper from the back of the notebook. Carefully, I lowered my left hand hand until the back of it touched the table beside the paper, and angled it so that the disc would slide off my hand when I eased my grip. I quickly moved my hand away as soon as the spell broke, and the clay disc clinked harmlessly to the table. After a moment, I allowed myself to flex my hand and pop the joints.

"I was wondering what you were up to in here," came Celestia's voice from behind me. I turned my head as I opened the notebook to my force amplifier spell, and saw that she'd taken a seat on the side of the couch opposite my bag. In one hand, she had a glass of wine, and in the other was a stress ball. "It smelled like fresh pottery in here." Raising the hand holding the glass, she pointed to the fire medallion. "What is it?"

As I started rolling out another ball, I explained the basics of runic magic and my special talent, and how 'Ponying Up' had given me the idea to test it in this world in the first place. Then, while she was still talking I etched out the spell-form of my prototype spell. That one took a lot more precision, and I just barely got it to fit and still have enough space to notch it on opposite sides.

She watched in interest as I stood up and moved over to the rack of weights as I continued my explanation. By this point, I'd moved on to how I planned to use magic discretely to convince Miss Breeze that I wasn't crazy for saying I came from a parallel reality where people she knew were magic horses. It took a few tries to find a weight that became uncomfortable for me to pick up one-handed, although it was doable two-handed. Nodding, I carried it over and set it atop the wooden coffee table, making sure she could see me straining.

"Aunt Twilight would probably be really upset with me if she knew I was testing an enchantment on myself," I remarked as I reached down to channel into the unbaked prototype. "That said, I'm working with two separate sets of safeguards and starting at a low multiplier."

When the spell triggered, everything started to feel odd... I didn't feel weightless, but I did feel lighter than normal. The spell shouldn't have done anything to me internally, I thought, reaching over to lift the weight. It came up quite easily one-handed. Too easy... it's almost as if gravity isn't having its intended effect on me. I blinked, looked down at the spell form, and almost smacked myself in the head. Thankfully, I had enough situational awareness to not do that while the spell was in effect.

With a smirk, I gently removed my glasses and quickly dropped into a handstand. "I guarantee if I'd done this at the full squaring effect, I'd be on the ceiling right now," I said, transferring to one hand before lowering my feet back to the floor as I felt the spell starting to wear off. "I forgot that gravity acting on the body, and the body standing up to it, was a force/counter-force scenario and didn't account for it. Imagine what that'd be like if the multiplier was a straight square and I was outside."

Moving around to the other side of the table, I sat back down and started adjusting the schematic in the notebook while Miss Celestia picked her jaw up off the floor. Because I didn't know the rune for gravity, I had to substitute the moon-glyph as I tacked exclude gravity onto the section regarding to counter-forces. Reading over my work, I transferred the changes over to the spell on the clay.

Sucking in a breath, I triggered it again, and stood up. I didn't feel the weird lightness in my body this time, although I still found it somewhat easier to move. It was strange; gravity was affecting me all the same, but I didn't have to exert the same amount of energy to move. Hell, if I tried, I could probably run faster now, too. Just to be sure, I lifted up the weight with ease. I wonder what my comfort limit is... Might not even get to go as far as testing the squaring here without Twilight going over my work.

~ 26 ~

By the time Luna got back with dinner—I don't care if the country is called Xiaoma, here, I'm calling it Chinese!—I'd come to a conclusion. Anything beyond an eight-times multiplier would likely require a major overhaul of the spell. At the four-times multiplier, their fifty-pound dumbbell felt like nothing, and at eight-times, I was able to easily lift an end of the couch with two fingers while Celestia was still on it. That was all well and good, but things started to get floaty around that point. It took almost no effort to generate lift, and although I didn't crash through the floor, I found I had to practically walk on my toes to move without sending myself flying.

I ended up not going any further with the multiplier, and increased the duration to three hundred seconds before baking it. I almost wrote a conjure water spell, but that would probably get messy. Instead, simply baked the light spell and put everything away. The clay ball was transferred to my bag, while the medallions went into the pocket of my robe.

I'd just been working up the courage to ask Celestia to look up how fast a rubber bullet flew when Luna entered with the food, and set it down on the coffee table. Probably for the best; after seeing me fuck around with a spell that makes me stronger, she'd probably catch on right away that I gearing up to defend myself with a fair degree of force. She might even have caught on already, as she clearly wasn't stupid.

Celestia stood up to fetch plates and cutlery from the kitchenette, while I moved my rucksack and sleeping bag from the couch so Luna could take a seat. I took a seat on the floor, on the opposite side of the coffee table from her. "I see you have pony ears again," she commented, curiosity and amusement rolling off of her. "Something up?"

My hands shot up to the top of my head, and sure enough, I was still sporting two fuzzy ears. I focused on stilling my mana and slowing circulation. Sure enough, I felt them begin to shrink and migrate back down through my hair to the sides of my head. "Sorry, didn't even notice I was still circulating my magic through my body," I apologised, much to the laughter of the two. "In my defence, back in Equestria, that's an unconscious thing; I stopped noticing I was doing it on purpose while was baking those spell plates with my flame spell."

Celestia set a plate and a fork down in front of me before passing her sister a plate—without any cutlery, I noted. She walked back into the kitchenette, and returned with a fresh wine glass for herself, and one for her sister. As for me, she set down a tall glass of water before taking her seat. She was definitely a lot more relaxed-feeling than when we first got in. Maybe watching me and my enthusiasm was soothing? Or maybe it reminded her of why she got into education in the first place.

"I wasn't sure what to get you, but since you said you used to be human, I just picked our regular order with extra Lo Mein, chicken fried rice, and egg rolls," Luna explained, as she snapped open a pair of disposable chopsticks and started taking food from various cartons. "That one's Kung Pao chicken, and that one's curried vegetables."

Using my fork, I took what I thought I could handle since there were lots of spicy options there, alongside a generous helping of rice and two egg rolls. Compared to the atmosphere at the school, it was much more relaxed and homey here and now. Even the earlier bad vibe from their interaction with Spoiled Rich seemed to bleed away as we sat and ate. I almost wished we had a Chinese joint like this in Ponyville, because this was some real good comfort food.

As I stopped eating to sip at my water, I looked from one to the other. As they'd eaten, they'd each finished one glass of wine, getting a refill partway through. Setting down my fork, I sighed. "You know, this morning, when I saw everything that was happening at the school, I was wondering how things could have been allowed to deteriorate to that degree," I said, folding my hands in front of me. "I'm kinda glad to find out that you weren't idle by choice. That probably would've damaged my opinion of the princesses, but what I witnessed earlier... it was kinda humbling seeing you lose your cool like that."

There was a sigh from Luna, who clearly didn't want to discuss that at the table. To my surprise, though, Celestia chose to engage where I didn't expect her to. "Am I... are we... our counter parts I mean, really the leaders of an entire nation in your world?" she asked in a wistful voice. I could totally imagine her picturing what it would be like to not have higher-ups using her in their own political games, being the top authority on everything. "I've heard Twilight and Sunset mention them, and the way she speaks, I'm practically deified there."

I nodded. "I've only been living there for a little while now, but ponies practically worship the ground you walk on," I explained, nibbling on an egg roll. "I can't be certain Princess Celestia actually controls the sun, or merely the rotation of the planet. Frankly, the thought that she controls a star is terrifying; that said, I do buy that Princess Luna does move the moon. Rotating the planet makes more sense." I shrugged. "She's always so calm and composed... and seeing you like that reminded me that deep down, there's still a person with vulnerabilities inside."

They looked surprised, but they didn't interrupt. "What I don't get is that Spoiled Rich." I picked up my fork again and started picking at some of that spicy chicken. "What did Sunset ever do to her in order for her to abuse her power like that?"

"She took Diamond Tiara not winning the Fall Formal crown during her first year extremely personally," Luna answered with a look of disgust. She held her wine glass in her hand, looking balefully down into its contents. "That's right, this is over a glorified popularity contest. Then after the events of the most recent formal, it only solidified her desire to rid the school of her."

"Once Anon-a-Miss made their first post, she started blowing up my mailbox demanding I do nothing," Celestia whispered, burying her head in her hands. "'This is it; we have her now,' and 'Don't do a thing; give her all the rope she needs, and I'll take care of the rest,' she insisted. Of course, when I started seeing the vandalism and the decline, I tried to convince her to just let me do my job, but it's always threats and blackmail with her."

"What I wanna know is how a woman like her gets to be the head of a school board." I looked from Celestia to Luna, who'd begun to drink her wine. "Look, I'm gonna be real with you; in my old life, I had to do things that I'm not proud of in order to get by," I said, shovelling a forkful of rice into my mouth. "Doing those things, I've worked alongside lot lizards who dressed classier than your Spoiled Rich. Seriously, she looks like she should be working under a pimp in a crack-den, not for a school board!"

Wine shot from Luna's nostrils as she started to choke and laugh. The insinuation even brought a smile to Celestia's tired face. "Between her attitude and Filthy Rich's money, I wouldn't be surprised," she snickered. "Rumour has it that Diamond isn't even his, you know? She looks nothing like him, so if Spoiled did do what you were inferring, it'd make a lot of sense."

Lifting her own glass of wine, she shook her head before looking at me. "As much as a mess you showing up has caused, I really am grateful you're here, Anonymous," she said softly. "Your timely intervention has taken the power out of Spoiled Rich's hands, and has allowed me to finally start doing my job as I'm supposed to. You even blew up her plan, and she knows it. I know that I'm guilty for having caved under her demands, but she knows that trying to throw me under the bus now would be career suicide."

She looked kinda smug, saying that, as if the thought of Spoiled Rich torpedoing her own career brought her such intense joy. That joyous look didn't last though. After a moment of silence, she added, "More than that, though, I'm grateful that you stepped in on Sunset's behalf."

That got a solemn nod from Luna. She was starting to look a little flushed. "It was hard enough on the student body seeing Emerald's rapid decline before her passing," she murmured, her words unsteady. Jeeze, the way she's slurring after two glasses of wine, she's gotta be a lightweight. "If Sunset had crossed the point of no return, and the student body found out that they'd pushed her to do it for no reason... I think the grief would spark an epidemic."

That sorta killed the discussion, leaving us all to finish our meals in silence. They didn't need to ask me to help with dishes or put the leftovers in the fridge, and I'd even had time to take my laundry out of the dryer. Then, as Celestia helped Luna off to bed, I did my ritual brushing of my teeth and ~~mane~~ hair, before making sure my bladder was empty. Unsurprisingly, yes, there was blood present, which immediately made me conscious of the lingering ache in my lower back.

Following that, I unrolled my sleeping bag across their couch. As I cut the lights and crawled into the sleeping bag, I let out a sigh. This felt like the longest day of my life since I buried my parents, but it was finally over. Tomorrow would be a new day. Tomorrow, I'm going to do my best to bring in Anon-a-Miss, and end this entire mess once and for all. As sleep began to take me, one last thought brought a smile to my face. God help whoever tries to get in my way.