Twilight smiled as she entered the Ponyville cafe and spotted Cheerilee already at their usual table, nursing a glass of orange juice. Cheerilee looked up when she heard the door open, and gave Twilight a smile of her own. Twilight lit her horn and pulled out the chair opposite her friend and slid into it, draping her bulging saddlebags over the back.
"Sorry I'm late. Got caught up a bit with a letter to Celestia. You haven't been waiting too long, I hope?"
Cheerilee shook her head. "Not at all. They haven't even taken my order yet."
Twilight breathed a sigh of relief as the waitress walked up to their table, floating a notepad and a pen beside her.
"Hello, Princess Twilight. Hello, Cheerilee. The usual today?"
"Definitely," Twilight said. "This one is going to take a while."
Cheerilee raised an eyebrow, and a slight smile crossed her face. "Is it? Well, sounds like both of us had a similar week, then."
Twilight scoffed. "We'll see, I suppose."
"Hm." Cheerilee looked over to the waitress. "The usual for me as well." The waitress nodded, and Cheerilee turned her attention back to Twilight. "I suppose I'll start with a cranky superintendent."
"I'll see your superintendent and raise you a cockatrice getting loose around the school."
"I heard about that. Nopony was turned to stone, so I'm not sure it was that big of a deal," Cheerilee shot back. "But either way, I'll call with Snips and Snails accidentally destroying the swing set, and raise with me needing to request funding to fix it."
"Is that why the superintendent was cranky, then?"
Cheerilee shook her head. "Nope. His wife left him."
Twilight flinched back and sucked in air through her teeth. "Ooh, I can see why that would make him grumpy. Still don't think your swing set beats a stomping yak destroying two tables in the lunchroom."
"Maybe not, maybe not," Cheerilee replied, bobbing her head in acknowledgement. "But I think that a parent/teacher conference with the parents of Snips and Snails who are oh so certain that their darling angels could never do something like that is the winner here. You can repair the tables with magic. I'm never getting those two hours of my life back."
"At least yours won't turn into an international incident," Twilight retorted. "We caught a changeling student and a pony in the bathroom together--"
"Alrighty ladies, here's your food. Cheerilee..." The waitress set a plate of french toast drizzled with powdered sugar and syrup in front of Cheerilee. "And here's yours, Princess Twilight." She placed a large stack of pancakes in front of Twilight, alongside a large pot of coffee and a mug. "Let me know if you need anything else."
"Will do," both mares said at the same time before digging into their food. The table was silent for a few moment as Twilight and Cheerilee ate a few bites before Twilight poured herself a cup of coffee.
"Anyway, neither parent was too happy about that. It took me a while for me to smooth it over. We're going to be more careful about that kind of thing in the future for sure."
Cheerilee grimaced and bit her bottom lip in thought. "Well I had... er... some foals were arguing about..." She sighed and thunked her head on the table. "I fold. I can't beat international incident, though I would like those two hours I spent with Snips and Snails' parents back."
"Unfortunately I already used the Starswirl time traveling spell, or I might be able to help you," Twilight replied, pouring cream and sugar in her coffee.
Cheerilee clicked her tongue. "Pity. I wasn't even talking to them about how I was going to expel them or anything. They got detention, sure, but the meeting was more about them being more careful in the future and things like that. But nooooooo!" Cheerilee grimaced and stabbed at her food with a little more force than was probably necessary, flinging a few drops of syrup onto the table. "Our precious little foals wouldn't do something like that! It must have been somepony else that you saw with your own two perfectly working eyes digging around the support posts!"
"Ugh, been there," Twilight grumbled. "It's, like, helloooo! Being in the bright light caused by blasting the Elements of Harmony didn't damage my eyesight! I can still see you stealing the mandrake root."
"Oh, speaking of, I don't think you got all of it back," Cheerilee said. "I found some of it in Diamond Tiara's desk."
Twilight sighed and idly stirred her coffee. "Yeah, there's been kind of a black market around my school for that kind of thing. Somehow the students got it into their heads that mandrake root cures things like toothaches and removes toxins in your body and cures kidney disease or whatever else, when no, they're thinking of the acai berry, and only the type that grows in the Crystal Mountains once every hundred years!" Twilight scoffed. "If I had access to some of those, I'd be able to get you your funding for the swing set. A solid gold swing set. And a five-story schoolhouse. I wouldn't be using them in common potions classes."
"Well, let me know if you run into any of them, then," Cheerilee replied. "You ever had them?"
Twilight shook her head. "No, ask me again in fifty years when they bloom again. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna have obviously had them. Luna says they taste like blueberries and are kind of overrated." Twilight shrugged. "Dunno. Either way, mandrake root doesn't work for that kind of thing."
"Pity, I suppose," Cheerilee said with a wistful sigh. "I guess I'll have to find out where Diamond Tiara got it. If she got it from one of your students then I'll have a talk with her about it. Otherwise it's not against the rules for her to have it." She frowned and tilted her head thoughtfully. "I think. It's never actually come up."
"Well, if you want to borrow the school rules guide I've been using as a doorstop for the past couple of months, go right ahead," Twilight responded. "Even I haven't been able to slog through that in any detail. The first time I read it through I was kind of skimming. I don't recall any rule against students having their own mandrake root, but I might not have spotted it. It's not like it's poisonous unless you boil it at exactly one hundred and fifty degrees for exactly one hundred and fifty minutes, then add a pinch of salt, a dash of pepper, then slowly mix in some mustard extract before setting the cauldron to a simmer for an hour." Twilight shrugged. "Or eat it raw after a year of harvesting."
Cheerilee tapped her jaw in thought. "Hm. I might have to let the other ladies in my cooking class know about that. It sounds like the exact recipe we're about to try out."
"Well, if they decide to go through with it anyway, don't say I didn't warn you," Twilight said.
"I get that they might want the root if they think they have magical properties or whatever, but my question is what they're trading for them," Cheerilee said with a slight frown. "I mean, you know how school black markets work. The higher the risk to get the product, the more it's worth. A stolen mandrake root can't possibly be worth only a few sticks of gum."
"Yeah, we've been trying to find that out, too," Twilight replied. "No real successes so far. Maybe Diamond Tiara just flat-out paid for hers?"
Cheerilee shook her head. "No, that would surprise me. Maybe markers? I keep a pretty close eye on those since my students tend to use them to get high as opposed to coloring another picture of their families."
"Ah, markers," Twilight said with a chuckle and head shake. "I wish my students were only using markers. A couple of them got a hold of some powdered poison joke. Mix in a little water and heat it up a bit and it releases a gas that can be pretty... potent. Rainbow Dash and I found a couple of students who'd managed to do that, and they needed a trip to the nurse's station. One of them said, and I quote, "holy Celestia, I'm tripping balls.'"
Cheerilee tittered for a moment and shook her head. "Come on, though, you can't pretend that you never did anything like that in Celestia's school."
"Oh, I didn't say that," Twilight said with a grin before finishing her coffee and pouring another cup. "Celestia tended to keep a pretty close eye on me when I was her personal student, and I wasn't the most social pony, but every now and again there was an 'accident' in the science lab and some students got a little loopy. At one point it got bad enough that Celestia herself had to come give a PSA on the dangers of 'crystaling', as the students called it."
"I imagine they don't call it that anymore now that the Crystal Empire is back."
Twilight shrugged. "Who knows? I only did it once, and I've managed to keep the recipe from my student body, which mostly amounts to not telling them it's a thing. If any one of them figured it out, that would be it. I'd have to spend more time and effort trying to weed out the students who were providing it."
"Ugh." Cheerilee thunked her head on the table. "I remember when I only had to confiscate little prank toys. Now I'm looking for things like mandrake root what whatnot."
"To be fair, you're teaching grade school, and my students are in the high school age range. I'd be surprised if you had to deal with much more than the odd mandrake root, especially since by itself it's pretty harmless."
"True, true," Cheerilee said, pushing the remnants of her toast around her plate. "But I can't imagine those parent/teacher conferences. Either way, I have been trying to figure out who keeps supplying my students with highly scented markers. Maybe that's why Snips and Snails were digging around the swing set."
"Could it be somepony outside of your school?" Twilight asked.
Cheerilee shook her head. "No, no, it's one of my students. I have it narrowed down to Twist, Silver Spoon or Scootaloo."
"Hm. No idea. Maybe I can get Rainbow Dash to ask Scootaloo about it." Twilight rolled her eyes. "All she's gotta do is say that she did the same thing when she was a filly, and if Scootaloo is your culprit, she'll spill the beans pretty quickly."
"Well, I hope it's that simple," Cheerilee said after draining the rest of her orange juice. Silver Spoon hides behind an angel facade, and Twist is so goody four-shoes that it's hard to get a read on her sometimes. She's only on my suspect list because I've caught her with two packs in her desk, and she's not exactly the most artsy pony. She says they're for art class, and I have seen her using them, but she could be the distributor that I'm looking for."
"You could ban them," Twilight suggested.
"I've discussed that with my boss for sure," Cheerilee replied before grimacing and flattening her ears. "But he's dragging his hooves on the matter. It takes a lot of paperwork to ban something so generally benign from our school. If we have parents complaining that their precious little angels can't take markers to school..."
"Yeah, I get that," Twilight said. "At least you don't have to deal with all of the cultural differences between the different creatures who go to my school. When Thorax let more changelings come to my school, they were frightened by some of the other yak students who tend to greet with loud stomping. We had one of twitchier students get freaked out by that, so she turned into a bear out of defensive instinct. Fun times."
"I had a situation like that. I got a student from Manehattan one year, and they can be a little more... aloof than ponies in Ponyville. They tend to move and talk faster, too. She was quite surprised by how... friendly ponies can be here? If that's the right word? They talked to her and tried to get to know her more than she was used to."
"She eventually figured it out, right?"
Cheerilee nodded. "Oh yes. She got more used to the culture around here, and my other students learned more about what it was like to live over there and how that would shape a pony differently than if they were born and raised in Ponyville."
"And at the end of the day, I think that's the most important thing," Twilight said, pushing her empty plate aside. "It's one of the main focuses for my friendship academy. It's a wide world out there. It's not just Ponyville, even if it does seem like we get the majority of disasters and monster attacks. Everycreature has a different culture and experiences and just... stuff that makes them them. If we can learn to embrace and learn from that, you can make lifelong friends."
Cheerilee let out an amused scoff. "Can't turn it off, can you? I guess you of all ponies would know, what with you being the princess of friendship and saving the world with your friends and all that."
"It does change your perspective on things, that's for sure," Twilight admitted. "I have no idea where I'd be if I hadn't moved to Ponyville, removing the Nightmare Moon incident." She motioned to her wings. "I doubt I'd have these."
"Probably not, but it's also hard to remove the Nightmare Moon incident. In any case..." Cheerilee stood up and stretched. "It's been a time and a half, but I'm meeting Berry Punch at the spa in an hour."
"Yeah, I have some paperwork to do for the school." Twilight stood up and tossed a hoofful of bits onto the table. "This time next week?"
"Of course." Cheerilee winked at Twilight. "Unless your international incident get too out of control."
"It shouldn't, but it is Ponyville."
"It is Ponyville."
With a final hug, the two mares went their separate ways, a little more ready to face the next week.
Author's Note
Just some light fluff for Jinglemas. Hope you enjoyed and Merry Christmas!
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