1/28

I rolled my eyes. “Please don’t call me boss,” I said. I cringed as I realized that although I didn’t know much about rank, I was going to get a lot of it. Better get out ahead of this one. “To you? I don’t have a title.”

In his usual style, Rock let out a laugh that was way too vigorous for my dumb joke, devolving into chortle and snorts while Seaweed looked at him incredulously. Eventually, she stood up. “With your leave, si- uh, First.” She gave me a polite nod. “I’ll be in the castle spa. We have two new recruits I need to train today, so I’d best get to it.”

“Best of luck, Seaweed!” I said, giving her a wave. Then, as she left, I looked over at Rock with a note of surprise. “The castle has its own spa?”

He nodded. “Right next to the Zebrican restaurant in the business wing.”

I looked at him, awestruck. “There’s an entire wing for businesses? How many are there?”

He quirked his head to the side. “Less than two hundred, more than one? We need to have a place for anyone who needs nearly anything to get it in the castle. If we have a Griffish ambassador, then we need a place they can stop in to get a scrap of meat, or if a Zebra needs some goods for their potion-crafting.”

I rubbed at my forehead, realizing that this castle was my new home, but it was also huge, for bigger than I had thought at a glance. “I don’t know where anything is…” My ears quirked up and I looked up at Rock Solid with a grin. “I need something fun to do anyway… Why don’t you show me around the castle?”

Rock nodded delightedly. “Sounds awesome! I was kind of a castle rat myself, so this place has been my home since I was born.”

“Your entire life in the castle…” I said, chewing over that. “Its like its own miniature city.”

“Bigger than some entire towns!” He said cheerfully. “Used to be bigger than Ponvyille before Princess Twilight took that over. C’mon, lets get started!”

I fluttered down off the chair and followed Rock as we headed out of Celestia’s bedroom, through some kind of antechamber, and back into her apartments. Rock pointed a hoof at a smaller door down the hallway. “There’s where your room is, for as long as you keep it,” he said. “It’s a little bit utilitarian, but we can get furniture in there to suit your whims. We were just gonna base it on your room back in Neighagra Falls but, uh…”

“Most of my furniture looks like it was fished out of a dumpster?” I asked drily. “Yeah, comfortable enough but I’ve never particularly cared about how anything looked. I guess I’ll probably need to at least have it look good. Just make sure it looks comfortable.”

He gave me a brief, casual salute. “Can do. I’ll pass the word along once we’re in the bureaucratic wing.” He lead us out of the apartments and back over towards the massive stream of traffic in the larger hallway. “This is the residential wing,” he explained. “They’re still called wings, but only a couple of them are like, actual wings. Old-school naming convention when this place was less complicated.”

“Anyway,” he said, pushing us through the crowds with a practiced confidence combined with the muscle mass to make himself unignorable. The bright gold of the royal guard probably helped with matters, too. Any guards seemed to be ducking and weaving with a great deal more ease. “Residential wing, closest to the carriage platform back there. Any long-term residents also stay here, plus the premium apartments for hoity-toity nobles,” he gave a humorous elbow and a conspiratorial grin. “And for VIP guests.”

I nodded. “So you live around here?”

“Oh, I got upgraded to a special room right next to yours,” he said. “So I can intercede on your behalf should some evil assassin attempt to slay our fair Prince Consort.” He mussed up my mane, and I couldn’t stifle a bit of a giggle at that before I swatted his hoof away.

“Alright, alright,” I said, nearly stepping away before I realized that being too far outside of his radius o’ bulk would mean getting trampled by the oncoming stampede of traffic. “Huh. What if I’m attacked while I’m with Princess Celestia?”

He gave me a flat look, then one side of his mouth quirked up. “I imagine your attacker would be flung halfway to Trottingham before they got a chance to regret their poor decision-making.”

Oh. That was a stupid question. “Right… Has there ever been assassination attempts in the castle?”

“Nope! Well, maybe a hooffull, but they don’t tend to get very far. We have great information ops around here, and more royal guards than you can shake a stick at. You’d have to be pretty dumb to attempt something of that ilk.”

I nodded, and we continued walking down the superhighway before we took a turn, waiting for the gap after a carriage to sneak on through. The flow of ponies lessened somewhat, though it was still more people than I usually saw in a day. “We’re entering the bureaucratic wing,” he explained. “Less interesting, but still pretty important.”

He pulled us into a door and into a spacious office with a large window overseeing the Canterlot skyline. Bright tans and beiges made it a somewhat bland but comfortable sight. Behind the desk sat a meek unicorn mare, white coat and black mane. Black, thick-rimmed glasses were contrasted by a white collar hanging around her neck and a red kerchief hanging off of it. She looked up at us and gave a dutiful smile. “Can I help you?”

“This is Raven,” Rock said, gesturing towards her. “She’s Princess Celestia’s secretary-”

“Scribe,” Raven said, voice light and almost dainty, but surprisingly firm on this point. “I am a scribe, not a secretary.”

Rock looked a little bit nervous. “Right, uh, forgive me ma’am. Scribe. Raven is Princess Celestia’s scribe. If you have any bureaucratic concerns, you can discuss them with her and she’ll get them sorted out right quick.”

Raven nodded politely, giving me a smile. “You’re the Prince Consort?”

I nodded. “I’m not sure how the technicalities work out… There’s going to be a marriage.”

“The Prince Consort-in-Waiting is afforded the same rights, powers, and privileges of the Prince Consort,” Raven said assuredly, reaching into the desk of her immaculate desk and pulling out a piece of paper and hoofing it over. I took and was delighted to see a layman’s explanation of the whole process. “Once you were selected and, uh, acquired for the purpose, you became, for all legal intents and purposes, the Prince Consort. And sir, if I may be so bold, I am queen bitch of the dogpile around here.”

I blinked at her. “Um. Excuse me?”

“The bureaucratic wing is a hellscape of unimaginable proportions. Organizational violence is the name of the game. Every two-bit whore with a pen thinks they can muscle their way through here,” Raven continued, her tone not shifting at all from the polite and dutiful tone. “But you need to know what you’re doing. I’m in your corner, as long as your interests align with Princess Celestia. You need something, you go through me. Don’t expect me to haul your ass out of the fire if you try to make it on your own.”

I simply stared at her for a long moment. “Um. Yes ma’am.”

“Oh, you technically rank above me,” Raven said. “I’m a lowly scribe, after all. Now, what did you need?”

I struggled to remember for a moment. “Furniture. I need furnishings for my new room.”

“Style? When would you like them?”

“Uh… I’ll probably be staying in the room tonight, so tonight? Is that possible?”

Raven rolled her eyes at me. “Please.”

“Alright, okay, cool, thanks,” I said, chattering a bit nervously, giving her an uneasy grin. “Um. Nothing too fancy. Just like, comfortable? Relaxed?”

Raven had a piece of paper down quickly and scribbled out a few lines, then wheeled her chair over to some sort of tube on the wall. She put the paper in a canister, pressed a few buttons. With a low gasp, the tube sputtered to life and sucked the canister away. “You’ve got it!” She said cheerfully. “Anything you need, just let me know.”

I nodded, but I felt a little bit distant, and I was very happy as Rock gently guided me out of the office and back into the hallway. “I think she likes you,” he said at least.

I gave him a look. “How can you tell?” The skepticism in my voice was obvious. The mare was inscrutable.

“I dunno,” he said with a shrug. “She gets weird a lot of the time, but this time it was a… happy weird!”

I maintained my skeptical look as we worked our way down the halls. On either side were doors with names like “Department of Agriculture Division” and other titles. Most of them were rather banal. “I’ll take your word for it,” I finally said. “Is there anything else interesting in this part of the castle?”


“The bursar,” he said with a wry grin. “But you don’t have to worry about money, the Princess has seen to that.”

“Huh… Really?”

“Yup! You’ve been extended a line of credit from the crown itself, giving you restricted access to the treasury itself! I’m sure that if you were to try and abuse it that would be revoked pretty quick, but as it stands, you’ve got enough for pretty much anything.”

I considered this. “My life is a little bit stupid, isn’t it?”

“Little bit, yeah.”

We plodded our way through the remainder of the bureaucratic wing. By the time we were done, the stream of ponies had devolved in pockets of ponies standing in small groups and chatting. Occasionally one or two of them had a pile of paperwork or an official-looking briefcase. Then as we left the formal, organized hallway and entered a larger pavilion with marble floors, they had food or shop bags.

“Shopping wing?” I guessed idly, looking up at the ascending tiers. Three floors in total, each with shops ringing around them, as well as the occasional cart or standing vendor.

“Now you’re getting it! Sort of a mall, I suppose. Not nearly the biggest shopping center in Canterlot, mind but it gets the job done.” Rock pointed up at the highest ring. “If you’re looking for anything Pegasus specific, they put it up there. He paused and quirked his head to the side. “What’s like, sleeping on a cloud?”

I wrinkled my snout. “Sleeping on a cloud? I sleep on a bed.” We looked at each other for a long, slightly awkward second. “Aaaaanyway,” I continued. “I’m kind of hungry… I guess I haven’t eaten yet today. Maybe we should get something to eat?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I’ll change our route up. We’ll stop by the royal cafeteria and the royal kitchens, get you some proper grub.”

I nodded as we took a right turn and started off into a hallway that ascended somewhat. I figured it was towards the center of the castle. Heh. I supposed that made the kitchens the very literal heart of the castle.

“Say, why have a food court at all if there’s a royal cafeteria and kitchens?”

“Eh, that’s a bit complicated. Either you believe that certain retailers can specialize in their craft and do a better job than the more generalized workforce of the castle could manage, and so the Princesses worked together in order to provide them a place in the castle they could be recognized. Or you believe a few years back Bearer Rarity wanted a boutique in the castle and bullied Twilight into making it happen, which would of course be scandalous and treasonous.”

“...and what do you believe?”

Rock shrugged. “Little of Column A of, little of Column B.” With that, we were in what was undoubtedly a cafeteria, my dreary high school days floating back to me in a blur. Linoleum white tile, too-bright lights, and shining chrome stations that doled out food to ponies who stepped along in bored-looking lines. Unlike your average high school cafeteria, however, the food didn’t look like a biohazard.

In just a few moments, we were sitting at our table and had a hearty chef’s salad with various fixins. Rock’s tray was piled many times higher than mine, but I had little difficulty believing he’d be able to devour the whole head of lettuce that had been placed in front of him.

“Say, Rock,” I said, deciding to broach the question I’d been wondering the whole day. “Why don’t you look like the other Royal Guards?”

“Hm?” Rock solid, then finishing the bite of salad he was munching on. “There are plenty of guardsponies who look like me. Or a little bit. Most of them aren’t as big.”

“No, I mean, uh…” I pointed at him and waved my hoof up and down. “White coat, pegasus, blue mane…”

He paused and snorted, which evolved into a chuckle he only managed to restrain with some difficulty. “You mean the dress guard? You know most of them don’t actually look like that, right?”

I paused, a little dumbfounded. “They… don’t?”

He laughed more obviously at this. “Sun and stars, no! Most of them are mares!” I must have looked particularly awestruck because he laughed even harder at that, booming out loud enough we got a few looks while he smacked his hoof on the table. “What, did you think we just had a few thousand white pegasus stallions laying around who no one objected to us putting in the line of duty?”

I flushed a little bit. I hadn’t actually considered it. Mares outnumbering stallions three to one, I suppose it made a sort of sense…

“Then why do they look like that?”

“Traditional and illusions,” Rock said in between bites of his salad. “See, it's easy to forget but Equestria has been around for more than a thousand years. We have a lot of weird little quirks. Like the ability to shanghai random stallions in sexual servitude in a way that elevates him to the highest rank of nobility possible. See, way back in the day stallions were treated as like, super valuable. So the ability to have a bunch of stallions, pretty ones, hanging around you was like, the hottest shit.”

I nodded. “So, if you had a court mage, you would just enchant the armor to make everypony who wore it look like they were a stallion. A very handsome stallion.”

“Yup. That’s why they don’t react much, either. Enchantment is easy enough, but mapping complex emotional patterns is much harder. These days it's sort a uniform. Only the bigwigs get out of it.”

“So… you’re important?”

“Wouldn’t have assigned me to one of the most high-priority positions in the castle if I wasn’t.” He flashed me a cocky smile. “C’mon, two more stops and we’re good.”

I nodded and we finished up our salads with relish. Once we were done, Rock lead us out through one of the three large doors, this time to the north. Things quickly became different than any other wing of the castle. There were always the occasional guards to direct traffic, answer queries, or prevent kerfuffles, but quickly that become groups of two or three paying a good deal more attention. A few of them clutched halberds  and stood in front of a doorway. More than one gave me an almost accusatory glance, to which the only proper response was to roll my eyes.

“The military wing?”

“The defense wing, officially,” Rock said. “Don’t worry about them. They just have a bit of trouble around people who aren’t part of the family.”

“That seems a bit counterproductive.” I say, looking over at the guards, one of whom glared back at me. Not really harshly enough to mean anything by it. Most likely they were just bored.

“Do you want me to announce you as the Prince Consort?”

“Sun and stars, no,” I said, horrified. “Over the top ass-kissing would be way worse than this.” I paused for a moment. “Maybe if one of them starts to act rude.”

Rock stopped in front of one door that seemed particularly well guarded and gave it a knock, nodding at the guards standing in front of it. A placard on the wall declared it to be the office of one Shining Armor.

“Prince General Shining Armor?” I asked incredulously. “We’re just gonna… drop in?”

“Well… uh…” Rock said, shrugging. “You’re a Prince now, he’s a Prince. I figure you two should know each other, right?”

I stared at Rock. “Did you think about this at all?”

“Well it seemed like a good idea at the time-”

He was saved from needing to answer by the door opening to reveal the powerful form of Shining Armor, once Captain of the Royal Guard and now the General of the Combined Armed Forces of Equestria. He was taller than average but not huge, with a definite tone and bulk to his muscle. With a bit of curiosity, I noted that he was actually built for endurance, not strength, a classic channeler physique if I’d ever seen one. He was also starting to get the first wisps of grey in his mane, a few wrinkles around the eyes. At my best guess, he was mid-forties, somewhere in that range. As he opened the door, he looked at Rock with a familiar smile, then his eyes darted over to me. Confusion, then recognition.

“First Prize!” He said, offering a hoof. His voice had a mellow, friendly tone to it. Not quite Rock’s booming baritone, but definitely in the deeper register. “You can call me Shining.”

I nodded dumbly and took the hoof, giving it a solid shake .”Uh, yeah. You can call me First, I suppose. Is that, the, um, protocol here?”

He snorted and waggled his hoof in a ‘meh’ gesture. “Prince to Prince, Consort to General. Twily could probably dig some ancient tome on the proper form of address. Might be worth reading up on if it comes up in some kind of formal setting but unless you’re one of my men, you can just call me Shining.”

He opened the door wide and waved his foreleg. “Come on in. i’ve got a few minutes before my next appointment.”