Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt III
From the journal of Sunburst, May 4, YS 1329:

Being on leave was fun for a while, but it’s over and I’m back at work.

I’m guarding Princess Twilight Sparkle. Turns out this is a pretty good assignment. I was doubtful at first; I’d always thought of the royal guards as fulfilling a formal and ceremonial role at least as much as a functional one. I was afraid it would be a lot of work maintaining an uncomfortable suit of plate armor in picture perfect polish just to stand there and look pretty in it all day. It seems like the ponies for that kind of thing should be mostly pegasi from the heavy combat fliers and unicorns from the Dawn's Hammer paladins, maybe. Those are closer to the kinds of big muscular armored ponies I always saw guarding Celestia and Luna. As a scout trained to fly light and move fast, I didn’t know how I’d fit in.

Fortunately Princess Twilight seems to think differently about how her protectors should work. There’s not a lot of us, and we’re not here for show. We can even keep our natural colors and don’t have to use dyes or spells to give us all uniformly white or gray coats like I heard the guards for the Royal Sisters have to. Instead of plate armor, we just wear chain shirts. So much lighter. So much more breathable! We mostly patrol, too, instead of standing around at static postings. There’s only a few door guards who have to be stationary, and we rotate them out halfway through a shift, because who wants to be stuck in one place for so long? It’s mind-numbing, and a bored guard who gets distracted easily is a much less effective guard. The big picture is that we’re supposed to be a mostly unnoticed but fast-responding minimally intrusive presence instead of a big show of force.

Princess Twilight’s Captain of the Guard sure seems to be the good choice in that vein. She’s a pegasus named Rainbow Dash. She used to be a Wonderbolt, and was even the team captain after Aunt Spitfire. It was a little surreal at first to recognize the unmistakable blue coat and crazy rainbow striped mane from the old posters on a real pony right in front of me. There’s one funny thing I found out, though: I’d have pegged her dead to rights as a Cloudsdale pegasus, but I heard that before the ’Bolts she was living in some small mostly earth pony town called Ponyville. Weirdly, Princess Twilight also used to live there for a while, too. Why a princess was in a place like that, I’m not sure. There must be an interesting story behind it.

Coming from the same place can’t just be a coincidence, and I’m pretty sure the two of them must have known each other from way back. Also it’s kind of interesting that Princess Twilight personally commissioned Captain Dash as an officer. A personal commission directly from a Princess is rare these days, but I guess Captain Dash was too good to pass up. I suppose it makes sense. If I was able to personally pick and choose whoever I wanted to run the team guarding me, it’d be a former captain of the Wonderbolts. But I might be a little biased, with my aunt and all.

Because of how this guard is supposed to operate, most of the other ponies on the guard team are a bit like me—trained to be quick and mobile, I mean. There’s some flight scouts (myself among them), a few Cloudsdale lancers, and some unicorn fast skirmishers. They’re not on the bulky side, but they’re quick and strong with their magic. There are a few pretty big stallions and mares, but even they emphasize speed and maneuvering over trying to be tanks and taking bruises. There’s even a few former Wonderbolts, like Captain Dash. They’re the whole package of incredibly fast and tough. I’ve heard plenty about the training program they go through. Just scout training was hard enough for me. I don’t think I’d last a week in their horseshoes. Okay, maybe not even a day. I’m kind of a wimp. I can admit that to a journal. Just don’t tell anypony else, right? Right.

So, yeah, in short, it’s a good group.

The work schedule is kind of strange, but it’s not bad. Shifts are only six hours long, meaning there’s four shifts a day: midnight, morning, afternoon, and evening. We’re split up into five sections. Each section is on the same shift for a week at a time, then rotates to a new one, then once a section’s gone through all four shifts there’s a fifth week set aside just for training. Those training days are pretty exciting. We work out for an hour or so, then get some time at the range for weapons practice, and then a couple hours in either classroom instruction or tactical teamwork exercises. After that we have the rest of the day off to hang around Canterlot and enjoy the city.

So I still get time to watch ponies in funny hats walk around with their snouts in the air.

This is kind of awesome.
 
 
I think that’s awesome enough for today.