Let me tell you the story of an empire that began with a pencil. The story does not begin with a pencil. The story begins with colors: pink, purple and yellow, and how beautiful one pony looked….
Her name was Piera Pareta. She was the most beautiful mare in the world, and no stallion could view her face without falling in love.
This proved to be quite bothersome. Piera thought economics was a lot more interesting than stallions and did her best to avoid them. That was why she was annoyed one day to see a stallion enter the library after almost a year of solitude. She would have to find a new hiding spot.
Piera was struggling to stuff her tent into her Edgeworth Box when she heard the stallion come up the stairs. She hid her face against the wall, but the stallion walked past her without even glancing her way.
The first fish to evolve legs and flop awkwardly out of the water probably wasn’t half as surprised as Piera. Hesitantly, she turned around and watched the stallion feel his way along the shelves. Eventually he selected a book and sat down at a table with it. A few hours later, he returned the book and left.
Piera considered running, but she had nowhere to go. The dusty upper floor of the library was her home—well, it was the cat’s home, but Piera had fought tooth and hoof for her corner, and she was keeping it. After a while she relaxed and started to read again.
Piera had the oddest habit. When she was thinking, she spoke out loud, carrying on a conversation with herself. This caused her no end of trouble, as she would often be nodding and mumbling, “Yes, yes, that works,” as a suitor or three knelt before her, jostling with each other and making promises, offers and declarations of their love. Piera tended not to notice these things while she was lost in thought, and she was often horrified to wake up the next day to find a severed dragon’s head and perhaps a suitor or two's laid atop a pile of bloodstained jewels outside her door. That was why she almost didn’t notice when the stallion returned.
Piera held her breath. The stallion climbed the stairs, turned past her without looking, and felt his way through the shelves again until he found a book he liked. Then he sat down, opened the book up, looked at it, returned it a few hours later, and left.
This continued for several days. Eventually Piera hardly noticed him anymore, treating him much like how a cat treats a human without a food-opener, i.e., not at all.. She read her books, argued with herself, and she screamed when he tapped her on the shoulder.
“Quiet down!” the librarian snapped from below. Piera’s face burned hotter than the sun. The sight of her blushing was like a sunset viewed through a lot of air pollution. It was deeply beautiful and profoundly moving, and it made her life very difficult.
“Excuse me,” the stallion said, “I heard you talking—“
“Sorry!” Piera whispered, wishing she didn't sound so much like an angel singing a lullaby to a little foal on Hearth's Warming Eve just as the first snow began to fall. “I’ll keep it down.” She hoped he wasn’t the sort who would try to fight an ursa major to impress her. Piera always felt vaguely guilty when she saw the smear on the ground.
“It’s fine, actually. I thought what you had to say about the natural rate of interest was very interesting.”
“Oh, that." Piera blushed for the first time in her life without being afraid she might start a war. “Some ideas are just begging to be refute—wait, what?”
“It is an exciting time to be an economist,” the stallion agreed. “I heard young Frankie Knight speak a year ago about her ideas on the source of profits. It set my all my hairs on edge, and I have quite a lot of them.”
“Uh, hello?” Piera gestured at her face. “Anypony in there? Can you see me?”
“I can’t, in fact.”
Piera blushed again, hoping that a war might start to draw their attention away. “Oh, um—sorry. It’s just—I saw you reading. Um. I’m not ableist.”
“I never said you were. In fact, I like to look at books.”
“But you can’t read them?”
“No. But if I can’t see anything, I would like it to at least be a book. Generally, I strive to be as metaphorical as possible.”
Piera waved a hoof in front of his face.
“Stop that.”
“You can see!”
“No, but sighted ponies are incredibly predictable. Why does anypony think it’s a good idea to ‘test’ a pony’s blindness?”
Piera looked desperately out the window. “I think a war is starting—“
“Tell me more about the natural rate of interest.”
Piera did.
So it went. The stallion visited the library and Piera everyday. They discussed the latest economics research and debated everything from interest rates to the trade cycle. They even befriended the cat.[1]
[1] Historians later disputed this point.
They had one debate that never ended.
“I can make a pencil,” he said.
“From scratch? Alone? Commercial grade? You cannot.”
“I can,” he insisted.
Finally she challenged him to prove it. So the next day, he didn’t return. Piera shook her head wryly and began another book.
The stallion’s journey began in the cedar forest of Ostleregon. To cut down the tree he needed a saw made of metal. So he went to the iron ore mines of Whinnysota. He needed a shovel, and a pickaxe, both made of metal with wooden handles.
He was beginning to get the feeling the problem was circular.
While he scrabbled for ore with his bare hoofs, he began to get hungry. But he could not buy food without forfeiting the challenge. He had to make it himself.
He scavenged, but it was time-consuming and forced him to roam away from the mines. He dedicated himself to learning the seasons and the soil, planting crops and waiting to harvest them. He stamped on grain until it became flour, and added water he gathered to turn it into dough. This all became a lot easier when he finally had a shovel, but before he could have his shovel he needed a smelter and a mold. This took some time.
Finally he had his pick-axe too, and soon his saw. He gathered up his things and, carrying as much seed as he could, returned to the forests of Ostleregon. He cut down a small cedar tree and turned it into lumber. He knew he needed to cut the log into a pencil length slat not one-fourth inch thick. It took many tries to get this exactly right. Then he realized he needed to return to Whinnysota to make a kiln, which he hauled back to Ostleregon to dry the slat. He learned how to tint the wood, and then he kiln-dried it again. Then he learned to make wax from a plant, which he applied to the slat, and then dried it again in the kiln. Now he had a wooden slat the length and thickness of a pencil that looked pretty, like a commercial-quality one, instead of a natural sickly white. All this was complicated somewhat by his blindness.
Piera checked her watch.
The next part was difficult. He made another tool with the ore in Whinnysota and used it to cut eight grooves into the wooden slat. He made another slat and cut eight grooves into it as well. Then he went to Broncodale to gather graphite. He still wasn’t sure how he would glue the slats together. He mined the graphite and mixed it with clay from Marissippi. He went to Mexicolt and learned to make wax from the candelilla leaves, which he mixed with the graphite as well. He returned to find his wood, equipment and machines had all been stolen, including the wooden slats. So he started over.
When he had two slats again and the graphite, he laid the graphite in one of the slats. Now he needed glue, but he didn’t know how glue was made. When he found out, he decided to opt instead for a glue made out of wheat. He planted the wheat and waited.
He used the glue to hold slats together. From this he cut eight pencils. This proved to be important, as weather, accidents, mishaps and crime took seven of them over the years.
He learned to grow castor beans and refine the oil. He used them to make the lacquer, although getting it to turn yellow stumped him for a while. He learned to make a film formed by applying heat to carbon black to make a label on the pencil.
He mined zinc and copper and transformed it into sheet brass to make the ferrule. He built a ship—another long story—to take him across oceans to gather rapeseed oil and reacted it with sulfur chloride to make the factice, the ingredient to make the eraser (boy, was he surprised to learn that). Pumice and cadmium sulfide were also involved, and rubber as a binding agent. Finally he had his pencil.
A long time had passed. Piera was curious to see the result of the experiment, so she became immortal, still waiting every day at the library for the stallion to return. The cat died, which was sad. Piera buried her at night when no pony would see her face.
The stallion returned. He presented the pencil to Piera, who frowned skeptically at it, but it looked close enough. She was willing to concede the point.
“Let’s get married,” she suggested.
“I don’t love you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if I could falsify your hypothesis.”
This story is mostly true, or at least it contains most of the truth. What the pencil might have been traded for is anypony's guess. But it is known to every student of economics, the story of how a pencil is made, the incredible vast amounts of knowledge and labor it takes to create a single, simple pencil.[2]
[2] Some other things happened afterward. He died. She built an empire. And so on. Science continued its work.
It is a solemn tradition in Equestria that when this story is told, everypony who hears it breaks a pencil in half. For the most amazing thing about a pencil is that for all the effort and knowledge it takes to create one, you can buy a dozen for a bit these days. Where are you shopping? Oh, yeah, the deals are pretty good there right now. Yeah, well, you know how it is when the school year starts up again. Hey, can I borrow your pencil? I’ll give it back—thanks. Hey, look, if I shake it like this it looks all floppy….
