Fifty Sheaves of Paperby AmitChaptersDysfluencyDyslexiaDysaethesiaDysfluencyCheerilee laid hunched over a little book. Her hooves flipped over the pages feverishly, looking now and then over her shoulder. A bit of sweat began to drip from her brow, and she wiped it off as slowly as she could, careful not to let any fall. There could be no evidence. Twilight wasn’t in, but she took pride in being paranoid—even if she knew that it wouldn't make any difference in the end. The page-turning began to slow as she concentrated on the words, each syllable more appealing as she went on. Her subvocalisations got quicker, her lips beginning to move along with her imagined voice. She didn’t even notice as her voice gained a few decibels. “Jay sweez uh-nay joo-ment grayn-dee,” she gasped out, stretching out the last phoneme as far as she could. The recitation was getting louder, out of control; her voice was uneven but bold, plowing past the words. By the time she realised that her subvocalisation had lost its prefix, she had stopped caring; it felt far too good to stop. “Jay-ai-may-rant man-gurh lay foin kwand eel ay powssay,” she moaned, savouring the words on her tongue, “eel ay luh-ayr trayz sayvowryux.” The sheer wrongness of the syllables bumped up against her ears, making her groan in terrified joy as her body shivered; the library filled with the sounds of her now-unrestrained shouts, resonating through the floorboards as she debased the language. She focused on the act as the words streamed from her muzzle loud enough to muffle the sound of an opening door; she knew that if anypony found out, she’d never teach again. As if to remind herself, she glanced back at the cover: Basic Lowlands Unicorn, First Edition. She imagined it was the textbook she had used as a filly herself—she knew it couldn’t be, but the thought made her shudder nonetheless—as she defiled the carefully-constructed pronunciation guides, shifting vowels, pronouncing silent letters, vocalising hiatuses. The terror of discovery filled her, but it only spurred her on. Thoughts of her pupils’ shocked reactions went through her head as she disregarded every diphthong in the book, every diacritic, every single bit of outdated orthography she could see, forcing her Canterlotian accent onto every word as obnoxiously as she’d ever told anypony not to. “Luh insignificance duh capitalis-mee ayst ay tell point kwuh-lawn pee-yoot vee-vruh—” The pressure mounted behind her tongue, the sounds forcing herself through her throat as she turned short, low gutturals into long, consistently high-pitched alveolars, crushing the beauty of the words under her tongue, every pretence to euphony shamelessly discarded as the syllables twisted around them like bad similes around concepts. “Saynz billey-tay-ge!” Her eyes slammed shut instinctively as she reached the heights of pleasure, unable to look any longer. She breathed in as deeply as she could as the flavour of the words slowly faded from her mouth; with a gentle sigh, she pushed her hooves away from the book. Then she started to worry. Quickly, she began convincing herself of her safety. Spike was off running an errand. Twilight had gone to get groceries. There was no one living close enough to hear her, and her voice wasn’t nearly loud enough to penetrate the tree’s thick lining. Twilight had promised that her reading wouldn’t be disturbed. The schoolteacher paused her train of logic and smirked. I wonder what she’d think if she saw me now. She shook her head and decided that there was no reason to worry. And then she opened her eyes. She saw the ceiling. “Whew,” she said, and stood up to see Twilight standing at the door, mouth wide open. They stared at each other for a while, only a couch between them. She closed her mouth and swallowed gently. “How long have you been standing there?” Twilight chewed upon her lower lip before replying. “Since you said you were a grown mare.” “Oh.” She looked a bit off to the side. “How much did you see?” “Nothing. The couch was in the way.” Twilight came a bit closer, coming up around the couch and looking down. Cheerilee suddenly felt considerably smaller. “I heard it, though.” She glanced at the open door, clearing her throat almost soundlessly. “All of it.” Cheerilee’s cough was subdued. “I guess there’re worse ways to end a career, huh?” “Not a lot,” Twilight said, kneeling a bit. “What’s this?” She glanced back at it. “Basic Lowlands Unicorn, First Edition.” “That’s a foal’s textbook.” Cheerilee’s cheeks flushed. “I know.” There was a moment of silence before the soft buzzing of magic took it and a book came down between them. The purple field spread it open, and it tilted so that she could see Twilight’s muzzle. She glanced down at the page before affixing her eyes upon hers. Then she spoke. “Luh joo-ment days mee-chaw avwayr pay-see danz lah pree.” Her tone was casual, but her gaze failed to waver. Cheerilee’s eyes widened. “You—you misgendered both of those nouns and you used the wrong tense.” Even in her darkest moments, even in the deepest depths of depravity, Cheerilee never even thought of touching grammar, never thought of touching the sentences themselves. And the mare before her had just done that as easily as if she’d swiped her hair. Twilight grinned. “I know.” She leaned close; the touch of her breath made her shudder. She had taught foals long enough to smell the scent of mispronunciation and of bad grammar; it was some sort of earth pony sense, a smell that she had before prosecuted without mercy. She breathed it in. And she loved it. “It looks like you’ve got a lot to learn, Miss Cheerilee.” In spite of herself, the schoolteacher whimpered. Dyslexia“Today,” Twilight said, “we’re going to work on limits. What languages can you read?” “Everything north of Zebrica.” Cheerilee sat on a little chair before a little table in front of the chalk-board, looking at the various shapes scrawled across it; Twilight hadn’t the most beautiful handwriting, but she was sure it was never so completely illegible. Cheerilee almost raised an eyebrow; botched handwriting wasn’t exactly her area of interest, but she supposed she could try it out. Twilight nodded. “That’s good. We’ll manage.” The horn’s magic enveloped a wooden ruler. She rapped it against the board, putting it up against the very first thing on the list. It suddenly resolved into legibility; at her gasp, Twilight grinned playfully. “Just a little enchantment,” she said. “We don’t want you peeking ahead, do we?” She nodded quickly, remaining silent. “Let’s start off with something simple, shall we?” she said, pointing to the bit of writing. “A simple declarative sentence in Highlands Unicorn; mispronounce it.” Der Hengst ist schnell läuft. “Durh hungh-su-tuh ist suh-chnell loft.” The words gave her a bit of a shudder, but the sensation—as taboo as it was—had been dulled somewhat by repetition. “Very good,” she said, her smile holding. “Now, this might be a bit harder,” she said, rapping the ruler upon the term. “It’s a little taste of Stalliongrad literature.” Станьте солнцем, вас все и увидят. “Stanʹtye solntsem, vas vsye i uvidjat,” Cheerilee said, her diction perfect. “Become the sun, and they will all see you.” She looked to her with a small smile. “Worthy Prose’s Crime and Punishment.” Twilight’s grin attained an air of menace. “I don’t care what it means, Miss Cheerilee, and I don’t care where it’s from.” “Wait,” she said, her eyes widening, “That’s a modern classic. You can’t possibly—” “Don’t worry,” Twilight said, her voice suddenly compassionate, “I’m not gonna make you mispronounce it.” She sighed in relief. “Make it ungrammatical.” Cheerilee gulped. “But—” This is all going too quickly, she wanted to say, this is high literature, I didn’t know it would go this far— Twilight’s eyes turned on her. “Now.” “Ya stanu solntsem,” she said obediently, her eyes fixed on Twilight’s, “vas vsye i vidjat.” As the words came from her mouth, she felt a sudden release; the mangling of the sentence released something in her, something that she might have described as primaeval, barbarian; the pure joy of destroying something so exquisitely refined by the sheer power of her own voice. Twilight, however, looked down upon her with an expression as unimpressed as any she had ever seen. “That sentence is consistent.” She came up closer and put her face up against hers, staring with a look that seemed almost disappointed. “I became the sun and they all were seeing me.” “What’s wrong with that?” she said, and regretted the words as soon as they came out. “That’s exactly it. Nothing. For Celestia’s sakes, you got the right declension! This isn’t a question on a worksheet, Miss Cheerilee. All you’ve hurt is the prose. When I say make it ungrammatical, I mean ungrammatical. Do you understand me? I don’t care if you have to trash every single rule in the book—do you understand me?” “I understand!” she said, and she realised with a start that tears had come to her eyes; she wiped them away quickly, shaking her head. “I understand. Ungrammatical.” Twilight’s voice attained a sudden air of calm. “Then do it.” Cheerilee’s voice trembled as she spoke. “S—stanu—” “That’s not a very good start, is it?” Twilight said, her tone reattaining a slight air of menace. “Stanu—stanovityesʹ,” she said, almost spitting the syllables out. She could not imagine why she would be so hesitant to merely say the word itself—it was, after all, a perfectly respectable reflexive—but she realised, as the bureaucrats of Stalliongrad must have as they signed one of their thousand little signatures on their thousand requisition forms, that her little inflection was the foundation of an atrocity. “Stanovityesʹ,” Twilight repeated, her smile returning back to her face. “You can do better than that, can’t you?” “Nam stanovyashchiysya solntsami,” she said quickly, pushing the words out of her. “toboj vyesʹ ili pobachytysya.” She could barely hear herself as she spoke; the mangling was so intense that it was all she could do to ignore it entirely, to ignore her own words and simply let it out—the feeling her mouth had on the sentence lingered like a bad simile. But she could, at least, pretend that it wasn’t her that had said the words, and be assured in the knowledge that it had simply been a little hallucination, that she couldn’t possibly massacre a sentence with such utter debasement. Her daze was utter relief. “Very good,” she said, as though she’d just done the most common thing in the world. “I’m impressed.” She reached out a hoof and patted her gently on the head like a little foal; the gesture was almost affectionate. Cheerilee looked up at her blankly, as though she hadn’t understood a word. “Now,” she said, coughing respectably as she went back to her usual manner, her symbol of authority tapping upon the teacher’s table, “write it down.” “Write it down?” she said, her voice lethargic. “All of it?” A pencil and paper materialised before her in a flash of purple light. “All of it.” She hesitantly grasped the thing with her teeth and began to transcribe; her mind had done a fine job of convincing itself that she was merely in a bad dream, merely giving a report on her own wild imagination. The graceful Loshadrillic came as fluently as it did when Cheerilee had first learnt the language: not very. Нам становящийся солнцами, тобой весь или побачитися. Twilight looked down upon the pile of jumbled morphemes and allowed herself a wide smile. “Now say it.” Fair enough, she reasoned; she had laid her own filth, and she should roll in it. She let go of the pencil, and paid it no heed as it fell from the table to the floor. All just a little dream, she decided, nothing but. “Nam s—” She felt a hoof push up against her mouth. “What are you doing?” “I—I’m reading it out loud, like you asked.” Twilight withdrew and then shook her head, as a teacher might at a petulant child. “That doesn’t sound like any Equestrian I know.” “Equestrian?” she said, shaking her head in turn, albeit with far less gusto. “This—this is Loshadrillic.” “I don’t think you heard me right,” Twilight said, her tone neutral. “It’s Equestrian.” She looked at her writing and then back to Twilight; it took her a few moments to realise what she meant, and she found herself suddenly quite fully awake. “I can’t do that,” she said, her voice somewhat firmer than it was before. “Yes you can,” Twilight said, observing her own hoof as though it were the most interesting thing in the world. “I’m not going to do this, Twilight.” She didn’t know what she was expecting, but she said it nonetheless. “Is that so?” she said, looking up and dusting her hoof off her barrel. “I may have destroyed the poetry of a beautiful phrase, I may have made it unreadable, I may have even confused the Stalliongradski word for ‘see’ with the Ostlesan, but I will not—I will not do that. I spent five years freezing my hooves off in a desolate wasteland to learn that language, and I will not turn myself into some kind of—some kind of sign-gawking tourist!” Twilight chuckled a bit, not bothering to look back. “Well?” Cheerilee said, her momentum run out, “What do you have to say to that?” “What do I have to say to that?” Twilight said, shrugging. “Well, I don’t hear you leaving.” Her jaw dropped. “What?” She yawned quite pointedly. “I don’t hear hoofsteps and an opening door.” Cheerilee stood threateningly, the legs of the chair making a loud squeaking noise against the floor. “This is a trick, isn’t it? You’re going to let me go and then you’re gonna te—” The librarian laughed deeply, and the teacher fell silent; she turned around and giggled at her. “Miss Cheerilee, I have as much to lose as you. You’re free to go. But let me tell you something.” She approached, and Twilight’s smile grew wider. “I know how to have fun by myself, Miss. You thought you knew, too, but it’s getting old, and you want to know more, don’t you? You can’t just stop now.” Cheerilee didn’t respond; she didn’t dare look Twilight in the face. “You’re an adult; you know how this works. If you really hated this, if you really wanted me to stop, then you’d already be out, wouldn’t you?” She came closer. Cheerilee could see her in her peripheral vision, but she did not budge. “I don’t even need to blackmail you. You want this. You want this more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life.” She came up to her ear, her muzzle almost physically touching it as she whispered gently. “And nopony else is ever going to give it to you.” Cheerilee shivered silently. Quite abruptly, she turned about-hoof; her magic grasped a chalkboard eraser, and she positioned it at the top of the list. “The library’s closed. You’ve got five minutes to get out.” “Ham.” “Hmm?” Twilight said, pushing the eraser down slowly. “What was that?” “Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn.” She stopped and turned around, looking impassively at Cheerilee’s shaking form as she looked down at her own paper. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t hear you that well.” “Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn,” she said slowly, stuttering slightly, “to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr.” “I’m afraid I don’t understand you.” Twilight sighed. “Oh well. Four minutes, by the way. Town regulations; can’t let you stay after hours. Closed at five today. You know how it is, right?” “Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn,” she said, looking away from the paper and directly at Twilight, “to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr! Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr!” She shouted it over and over, until the syllables became jumbled, as Twilight watched, raising an eyebrow as if she could not understand; she said it as loud as she could, over and over and over until her throat went hoarse with the effort. Her voice began to wane, and soon it was nothing but a forced whisper, and as heard herself and realised how useless her voice was then, how useless she was, she could bear it no longer and let her head fall down onto the table; she felt her forelegs grow wet as her eyes teared up, beginning to flow. She didn’t know how long she laid like that; all she could hear was something pushing against the blackboard. Then she got up, not bothering to look around. She had an idea where the door was, and quickly began to walk towards it without looking up. As silly as it was, she didn’t want her to see her tears. “Where do you think you’re going?” She rubbed her eyes with a forehoof. “I—I’m going home,” she said, and put a hoof up against the door. “Ponyville Ordinance 2-49. No public employee may house a non-exotic sentient being in a public building after hours unless otherwise directed to by the state.” “We can move up to my room.” She turned back around to see Twilight with her ruler and a familiarly messy slate. Her voice of gratitude came out raspy and thin. “My throat?” She smiled that smile of hers again. “We’ll manage.” Cheerilee felt her eyes tear up again, but she was no longer sad. DysaethesiaCheerilee’s hoof stayed at the door. She knew that no one else would be home, of course, that Twilight would never be so careless as to draw up a schedule without thinking; her hooves shook on the handle nonetheless. She tried to remember how long it was since the first time; the answer came to her as easily as her multiplication tables did. One month. Twenty-eight days for her to have mislearnt—for Twilight to have mistaught—more than she had in her twenty-eight years of pathetic experimentation, as though she were a witch-doctor being handed paracetamol. It wasn’t just the Bovi-Equine languages, now; they had learnt languages simply to defile them. When that had turned too difficult—when the only languages left were so far away that it would take years to learn them— it was the Equestrian nomenclature of biology, of astronomy, of chemistry— The door opened as she leaned on it, making her fall over onto her forehooves; she looked up just in time to see Twilight’s warm, smiling face. “Just on time!” she said, her voice as friendly as one could imagine a voice could be, right before she leaned down and put her muzzle up against her ear, her voice turning considerably colder. “You could almost input Gravelham’s Function into Ackerpony’s Number and multiply an additive monoid precisely at your Cartesian coordinates in the time it’d have took you to open that door.” —even of mathematics. She shuddered unnoticeably as Twilight turned around and went into the unusually dark library, silent; there was no need to say anything else. A few weeks ago, defiling the language of the purest science would have been too horrifying to contemplate; now it was nothing but a greeting. She followed quickly. Twilight did not like to be kept waiting. A slightly bubbling sort of sound came from behind her, and she turned around just in time to see the door shut, trapping them in darkness. There was a low scraping sound. She waited; Twilight knew best. The lights suddenly came on, and the first thing she saw as the brightness cleared from her eyes were the wide eyes of a short, somewhat nervous blue colt sitting at a table that looked very much like one from a school. “Miss Cheerilee?” “Snips?” she asked, her eyes open wide. “Miss—Miss Twilight?” A voice came from behind her. “You’re the teacher, not me,” Twilight’s voice said, and she glanced over to see her teacher scratching away at a spread scroll with a quill. “Teach.” “He’s just a foal, M—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “He’s just a foal, Twilight, I can’t possibly—all we’ve done is play—” “Don’t lie to me,” the voice said. Twilight’s horn was glowing, but nothing else was; Cheerilee couldn’t see her lips moving. “You want this. I’ve seen how you look at them, giving them their little lessons, seen how you’d make a ‘mistake’ and then never admit it—” Snips looked to the sides somewhat uncomfortably. “Uh, Miss Cheerilee? Twilight said you had to tutor me because my grades were down or something, right?” Twilight laid back casually in her chair, mouth as closed as before. “—enjoy your little gift, Miss Cheerilee. I hope you don’t have any more questions.” She had plenty of questions, but all she saw as she looked back was the foal. The first sentence came out without thinking. “Yes,” she said, recalling Snips’ grades, “Yes, Snips. I’m here to tutor you.” She noted that Twilight, thoughtful as she was, had left a fairly comprehensive selection of the syllabus on the table. “You’ve fallen behind on—on foreign languages,” she said, smiling in a rather far-off manner as she fetched a familiar book from the table. She philosophically detested the integration of foreign languages at the elementary level—it demeaned them all, Cheerilee thought, and then almost laughed out loud—but right then all she could think of were the possibilities. “Let’s start,” she said, bringing the edition of Modern Languages of Equestria up to bear along with a fair amount of writing material. Her hooves trembled, and she took up a seat alongside the little, innocent little idiot of a foal. “I’ve got your scores, but what is it you feel you’re having trouble with?” “Uh,” he began, putting a hoof up against his lower lip. “Windwards Griffonian. How do I tell the difference between tones and stuff?” The question went through her like a bad simile; not the question itself, which had been asked several hundred times to her alone, but the knowledge that she held a foal’s entire comprehension of the facts of the world in her hoof. She could say anything she wanted, and no Applebloom or Twist or any other one of those smart little ponies she loved and despised so deeply would ever correct her, and she knew that he would tell Snails and that moron would believe him wholeheartedly— “Uh, Miss Cheerilee?” he said, waving a hoof before her glazed-over eyes. “You alright?” “Oh,” she said, and giggled. “I’m just fine.” Even as the words came from her mouth, she felt a considerable rush of shame. She had gotten caught up so deeply in the sheer depravity of her thoughts that she hadn’t stopped to consider their depravity. She fought against herself, and felt something pushing against the edge of her consciousness, something that made her wonder if it wasn’t herself at all; she looked back pleadingly at Twilight’s lightly amused face, and a thought in Twilight’s voice came unbidden to her mind: I might listen, the voice said, but your body won’t. “Well, Snips,” she said, somewhat cautiously, “it’s easy to distinguish tones. Let me show you.” She bit down on a pencil and put it against the ruled paper. She could stop now, and simply teach him the facts. Nothing was forcing her to lie; Twilight’s condemnation wouldn’t mean nearly as much to her as the community’s. Her head moved forwards and drew a 天 tiān, the compact little strokes boxing it rather neatly; then she drew a 神 shén, then a 干 gàn, then a 鼠 shǔ. The foal would never speak Windwards Griffon, Cheerilee reasoned; most of the Griffons outside of Griffonia proper would speak the Riverwards dialect. She would do him no disservice by miseducating him in it. “Ooh!” he said, his voice filled with the spark of youthful vigour, “That’s, uh—the sun dries rats?” The foal had some spark of intelligence in him, unlike Snails; she knew that even with his little lapses of judgement, he had the potential to master this language just as she had. And something in Cheerilee wanted more than anything to crush it. The horror of her thought struck her, and she shook her head in momentary terror; her heart felt like it had skipped a beat. She sat for a while, looking down at her hooves. If she struck now, she might gain a little pleasure from it—that was a lie, because she knew that she would enjoy it more than she ever could possibly have enjoyed anything more in her life—but was it worth this foal’s mind? She could stop now, and nothing would happen to her. The tones were all different, and she could teach him easily; she had no doubt the foal would learn. “Well,” she said, “it’s actually a traditional greeting.” Snips’ eyes widened in surprise. “Really?” he said, the joy of discovery in his voice. Cheerilee bit her lip slightly to stifle the gasp of perverse pleasure that ensued. It came far stronger than she’d expected, a certain rush as carnal as it was intellectual, and a sort of warmth came over her as her eyes rolled back very slightly. This is a foal, she told herself, looking inconspicuously at him. A real, live foal, and I’m feeding him any old horseapples for milk and he’s believing it all. “Uh, Miss Cheerilee? If you’re tired—” “No, nothing’s wrong!” The look, she realised, was only inconspicuous as far as a schoolteacher looking silently at a foal asking a question might be called ‘inconspicuous’. “Nothing at all.” She put her hoof down upon the paper. “See, this sentence is special, because it has all the tones. The first one’s—” “Tiān?” he said, in a particularly endearing squawk; he didn’t sound quite like a griffon, but it was close enough to make Cheerilee wonder. A thought suddenly hit her. Most of the griffons in Equestria spoke Riverwards; surely, then, it wouldn’t be too bad if she decided to give him a more modern education? “No,” she said, “It’s tìn.” Her shudders were fairly constrained; she focused on the task at hand. “See, that’s called the arriving tone: tìn.” He raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the departing tone?” “Since a lot of griffons lived on the ground after the first war,” she said, relating a true fact, “they started saying that they ‘arrived’ by going down, and it carried over into the language!” she continued, doing her best impression of a depraved foal’s show announcer. “I don’t know,” he said, looking rather unsure. “That sounds a little too soon to be something t’change a whole language around, right?” A sudden nervousness came over her. At the very least, he hadn’t noticed the other, far more important distinction. “Now, Snips, don’t you trust your teacher?” she said, her smile showing a sliver of teeth. If she were in a cartoon, she reflected, she might be sweating. He put his hoof up against his chin for a moment and then smiled, nodding. “Of course, Miss.” The foal had accepted her authority without question; she hadn’t Twilight’s masterful self-control, and couldn’t help but let out a little groan of relieved pleasure. The foal barely seemed to notice, looking intently down at the characters. “And this is sǎng,” she said, gently nasalising the un-nasalised syllable as she spoke and letting the sound catch in her throat on the upstroke. “That’s the level tone, because it maintains a constant pitch throughout. And this is gōn—yes, that sound exists in Windwards—and this is sú—” — “So, you see,” she said, “人 refers to ponies in particular. Sentient beings are 马人.” “You sure it’s not the other way around?” Snips said quietly, copying the fact all the same. Cheerilee acted as if she hadn’t heard him; he had been raising those weak objections for a few hours, now, but he seemed to know on some level that she simply knew more than him, that she was the mare and he was the little schoolfoal without the slightest clue. It was a feeling of power the schoolteacher had only ever thought she had before, under the eyes of her fellow teachers and before the gaze of her brightest pupils, but in that little library with nothing to judge her she could do anything. It was intoxicating. “And that’s all we have for today,” she said, smiling warmly. The clock on the wall read nine. “Do you have any questions?” “Not any more, Miss Cheerilee,” the colt said, his face brightening quite suddenly as he gathered up his notes; even if he was wrong, he had learnt. “Is it okay if I share my notes with Snails? He’s been having a little trouble with his Griffon too.” “Of course, Snips.” She smiled as he went, and waited until she could hear the door close behind her before she let out a long, deep moan, her eyes closing shut in utter ecstasy. She stayed like that for almost a minute, the pressure lifting from her like a flood. “The Riverwards was a nice touch.” Then she remembered that there was something to judge her after all, and as the pleasure wore off it was replaced by a rather permeating numbness. She looked around to see Twilight looking rather impassively at her, her horn enveloping the papers in purple light; they disappeared with a flash. Cheerilee gave her a weak look, as though uncomprehending. Then she shook her head slightly. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said, quietly. “I never thought—” “You never thought,” she said, a small smile appearing on her face, “that you’d eventually get to do what you’ve always wanted?” The schoolteacher coughed into her hoof. She couldn’t focus very well. “I—I think I went too far,” she said, shaking her head gently. Her chest felt tight; perhaps she was feeling regret, but she knew the amount of damage she had done was far beyond the point of regret. “You enjoyed it, though, didn’t you?” She looked down at her forehooves for a little while, then up at her. “I did,” she said, “but I don’t think I want to enjoy it again.” “So,” Twilight said, her voice level, “you want to go back to how it was before? Just mispronunciations and misconjugations and malapropisms and faux amis?” There was a bit of a silence before Cheerilee spoke again. “Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.” “That’s too bad,” Twilight said, shrugging, “because tomorrow, we’re going to work together. You really gave me a few pointers, you know. Very inspiring.” “Twilight,” she said, “Miss Twilight, please. I know I can’t make up for it, but I won’t do it again.” She stood. “I’ve got to go. I’m not going to do this another time; I’m sorry.” She began to walk towards the door. “Just so you know, Miss Cheerilee, we’re no longer equal in this relationship.” She stopped. “What do you mean?” “Remember when I told you we had the same to lose?” Cheerilee nodded slowly. Twilight shrugged again. “We don’t have the same to lose any more.” She leaned forwards a bit. Cheerilee didn’t look her in the eye. “The magical transcripts are somewhere you’ll never need to go.” “We’re both at fault here,” she said, a sort of dread creeping into her voice. “You brought Snips here and you watched me. You encouraged me.” “I don’t know Griffonian, do I?” she said, her mouth closing itself for her next sentence as her horn glowed. And it’s a shame there’s no way to record telepathy. Cheerilee had a thousand objections, but she knew that Twilight had covered every base. A certain sort of serenity came over her. Her returning voice was expressionless. “What exactly do you want to do?” “Why,” she said, “we’re going to make sure that every single one of your students gets some one-on-one time, won’t we?” “Who’s next?” Twilight grinned. “Sweetie Belle.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But she guessed that she might as well enjoy it.
DysfluencyCheerilee laid hunched over a little book. Her hooves flipped over the pages feverishly, looking now and then over her shoulder. A bit of sweat began to drip from her brow, and she wiped it off as slowly as she could, careful not to let any fall. There could be no evidence. Twilight wasn’t in, but she took pride in being paranoid—even if she knew that it wouldn't make any difference in the end. The page-turning began to slow as she concentrated on the words, each syllable more appealing as she went on. Her subvocalisations got quicker, her lips beginning to move along with her imagined voice. She didn’t even notice as her voice gained a few decibels. “Jay sweez uh-nay joo-ment grayn-dee,” she gasped out, stretching out the last phoneme as far as she could. The recitation was getting louder, out of control; her voice was uneven but bold, plowing past the words. By the time she realised that her subvocalisation had lost its prefix, she had stopped caring; it felt far too good to stop. “Jay-ai-may-rant man-gurh lay foin kwand eel ay powssay,” she moaned, savouring the words on her tongue, “eel ay luh-ayr trayz sayvowryux.” The sheer wrongness of the syllables bumped up against her ears, making her groan in terrified joy as her body shivered; the library filled with the sounds of her now-unrestrained shouts, resonating through the floorboards as she debased the language. She focused on the act as the words streamed from her muzzle loud enough to muffle the sound of an opening door; she knew that if anypony found out, she’d never teach again. As if to remind herself, she glanced back at the cover: Basic Lowlands Unicorn, First Edition. She imagined it was the textbook she had used as a filly herself—she knew it couldn’t be, but the thought made her shudder nonetheless—as she defiled the carefully-constructed pronunciation guides, shifting vowels, pronouncing silent letters, vocalising hiatuses. The terror of discovery filled her, but it only spurred her on. Thoughts of her pupils’ shocked reactions went through her head as she disregarded every diphthong in the book, every diacritic, every single bit of outdated orthography she could see, forcing her Canterlotian accent onto every word as obnoxiously as she’d ever told anypony not to. “Luh insignificance duh capitalis-mee ayst ay tell point kwuh-lawn pee-yoot vee-vruh—” The pressure mounted behind her tongue, the sounds forcing herself through her throat as she turned short, low gutturals into long, consistently high-pitched alveolars, crushing the beauty of the words under her tongue, every pretence to euphony shamelessly discarded as the syllables twisted around them like bad similes around concepts. “Saynz billey-tay-ge!” Her eyes slammed shut instinctively as she reached the heights of pleasure, unable to look any longer. She breathed in as deeply as she could as the flavour of the words slowly faded from her mouth; with a gentle sigh, she pushed her hooves away from the book. Then she started to worry. Quickly, she began convincing herself of her safety. Spike was off running an errand. Twilight had gone to get groceries. There was no one living close enough to hear her, and her voice wasn’t nearly loud enough to penetrate the tree’s thick lining. Twilight had promised that her reading wouldn’t be disturbed. The schoolteacher paused her train of logic and smirked. I wonder what she’d think if she saw me now. She shook her head and decided that there was no reason to worry. And then she opened her eyes. She saw the ceiling. “Whew,” she said, and stood up to see Twilight standing at the door, mouth wide open. They stared at each other for a while, only a couch between them. She closed her mouth and swallowed gently. “How long have you been standing there?” Twilight chewed upon her lower lip before replying. “Since you said you were a grown mare.” “Oh.” She looked a bit off to the side. “How much did you see?” “Nothing. The couch was in the way.” Twilight came a bit closer, coming up around the couch and looking down. Cheerilee suddenly felt considerably smaller. “I heard it, though.” She glanced at the open door, clearing her throat almost soundlessly. “All of it.” Cheerilee’s cough was subdued. “I guess there’re worse ways to end a career, huh?” “Not a lot,” Twilight said, kneeling a bit. “What’s this?” She glanced back at it. “Basic Lowlands Unicorn, First Edition.” “That’s a foal’s textbook.” Cheerilee’s cheeks flushed. “I know.” There was a moment of silence before the soft buzzing of magic took it and a book came down between them. The purple field spread it open, and it tilted so that she could see Twilight’s muzzle. She glanced down at the page before affixing her eyes upon hers. Then she spoke. “Luh joo-ment days mee-chaw avwayr pay-see danz lah pree.” Her tone was casual, but her gaze failed to waver. Cheerilee’s eyes widened. “You—you misgendered both of those nouns and you used the wrong tense.” Even in her darkest moments, even in the deepest depths of depravity, Cheerilee never even thought of touching grammar, never thought of touching the sentences themselves. And the mare before her had just done that as easily as if she’d swiped her hair. Twilight grinned. “I know.” She leaned close; the touch of her breath made her shudder. She had taught foals long enough to smell the scent of mispronunciation and of bad grammar; it was some sort of earth pony sense, a smell that she had before prosecuted without mercy. She breathed it in. And she loved it. “It looks like you’ve got a lot to learn, Miss Cheerilee.” In spite of herself, the schoolteacher whimpered.
Dyslexia“Today,” Twilight said, “we’re going to work on limits. What languages can you read?” “Everything north of Zebrica.” Cheerilee sat on a little chair before a little table in front of the chalk-board, looking at the various shapes scrawled across it; Twilight hadn’t the most beautiful handwriting, but she was sure it was never so completely illegible. Cheerilee almost raised an eyebrow; botched handwriting wasn’t exactly her area of interest, but she supposed she could try it out. Twilight nodded. “That’s good. We’ll manage.” The horn’s magic enveloped a wooden ruler. She rapped it against the board, putting it up against the very first thing on the list. It suddenly resolved into legibility; at her gasp, Twilight grinned playfully. “Just a little enchantment,” she said. “We don’t want you peeking ahead, do we?” She nodded quickly, remaining silent. “Let’s start off with something simple, shall we?” she said, pointing to the bit of writing. “A simple declarative sentence in Highlands Unicorn; mispronounce it.” Der Hengst ist schnell läuft. “Durh hungh-su-tuh ist suh-chnell loft.” The words gave her a bit of a shudder, but the sensation—as taboo as it was—had been dulled somewhat by repetition. “Very good,” she said, her smile holding. “Now, this might be a bit harder,” she said, rapping the ruler upon the term. “It’s a little taste of Stalliongrad literature.” Станьте солнцем, вас все и увидят. “Stanʹtye solntsem, vas vsye i uvidjat,” Cheerilee said, her diction perfect. “Become the sun, and they will all see you.” She looked to her with a small smile. “Worthy Prose’s Crime and Punishment.” Twilight’s grin attained an air of menace. “I don’t care what it means, Miss Cheerilee, and I don’t care where it’s from.” “Wait,” she said, her eyes widening, “That’s a modern classic. You can’t possibly—” “Don’t worry,” Twilight said, her voice suddenly compassionate, “I’m not gonna make you mispronounce it.” She sighed in relief. “Make it ungrammatical.” Cheerilee gulped. “But—” This is all going too quickly, she wanted to say, this is high literature, I didn’t know it would go this far— Twilight’s eyes turned on her. “Now.” “Ya stanu solntsem,” she said obediently, her eyes fixed on Twilight’s, “vas vsye i vidjat.” As the words came from her mouth, she felt a sudden release; the mangling of the sentence released something in her, something that she might have described as primaeval, barbarian; the pure joy of destroying something so exquisitely refined by the sheer power of her own voice. Twilight, however, looked down upon her with an expression as unimpressed as any she had ever seen. “That sentence is consistent.” She came up closer and put her face up against hers, staring with a look that seemed almost disappointed. “I became the sun and they all were seeing me.” “What’s wrong with that?” she said, and regretted the words as soon as they came out. “That’s exactly it. Nothing. For Celestia’s sakes, you got the right declension! This isn’t a question on a worksheet, Miss Cheerilee. All you’ve hurt is the prose. When I say make it ungrammatical, I mean ungrammatical. Do you understand me? I don’t care if you have to trash every single rule in the book—do you understand me?” “I understand!” she said, and she realised with a start that tears had come to her eyes; she wiped them away quickly, shaking her head. “I understand. Ungrammatical.” Twilight’s voice attained a sudden air of calm. “Then do it.” Cheerilee’s voice trembled as she spoke. “S—stanu—” “That’s not a very good start, is it?” Twilight said, her tone reattaining a slight air of menace. “Stanu—stanovityesʹ,” she said, almost spitting the syllables out. She could not imagine why she would be so hesitant to merely say the word itself—it was, after all, a perfectly respectable reflexive—but she realised, as the bureaucrats of Stalliongrad must have as they signed one of their thousand little signatures on their thousand requisition forms, that her little inflection was the foundation of an atrocity. “Stanovityesʹ,” Twilight repeated, her smile returning back to her face. “You can do better than that, can’t you?” “Nam stanovyashchiysya solntsami,” she said quickly, pushing the words out of her. “toboj vyesʹ ili pobachytysya.” She could barely hear herself as she spoke; the mangling was so intense that it was all she could do to ignore it entirely, to ignore her own words and simply let it out—the feeling her mouth had on the sentence lingered like a bad simile. But she could, at least, pretend that it wasn’t her that had said the words, and be assured in the knowledge that it had simply been a little hallucination, that she couldn’t possibly massacre a sentence with such utter debasement. Her daze was utter relief. “Very good,” she said, as though she’d just done the most common thing in the world. “I’m impressed.” She reached out a hoof and patted her gently on the head like a little foal; the gesture was almost affectionate. Cheerilee looked up at her blankly, as though she hadn’t understood a word. “Now,” she said, coughing respectably as she went back to her usual manner, her symbol of authority tapping upon the teacher’s table, “write it down.” “Write it down?” she said, her voice lethargic. “All of it?” A pencil and paper materialised before her in a flash of purple light. “All of it.” She hesitantly grasped the thing with her teeth and began to transcribe; her mind had done a fine job of convincing itself that she was merely in a bad dream, merely giving a report on her own wild imagination. The graceful Loshadrillic came as fluently as it did when Cheerilee had first learnt the language: not very. Нам становящийся солнцами, тобой весь или побачитися. Twilight looked down upon the pile of jumbled morphemes and allowed herself a wide smile. “Now say it.” Fair enough, she reasoned; she had laid her own filth, and she should roll in it. She let go of the pencil, and paid it no heed as it fell from the table to the floor. All just a little dream, she decided, nothing but. “Nam s—” She felt a hoof push up against her mouth. “What are you doing?” “I—I’m reading it out loud, like you asked.” Twilight withdrew and then shook her head, as a teacher might at a petulant child. “That doesn’t sound like any Equestrian I know.” “Equestrian?” she said, shaking her head in turn, albeit with far less gusto. “This—this is Loshadrillic.” “I don’t think you heard me right,” Twilight said, her tone neutral. “It’s Equestrian.” She looked at her writing and then back to Twilight; it took her a few moments to realise what she meant, and she found herself suddenly quite fully awake. “I can’t do that,” she said, her voice somewhat firmer than it was before. “Yes you can,” Twilight said, observing her own hoof as though it were the most interesting thing in the world. “I’m not going to do this, Twilight.” She didn’t know what she was expecting, but she said it nonetheless. “Is that so?” she said, looking up and dusting her hoof off her barrel. “I may have destroyed the poetry of a beautiful phrase, I may have made it unreadable, I may have even confused the Stalliongradski word for ‘see’ with the Ostlesan, but I will not—I will not do that. I spent five years freezing my hooves off in a desolate wasteland to learn that language, and I will not turn myself into some kind of—some kind of sign-gawking tourist!” Twilight chuckled a bit, not bothering to look back. “Well?” Cheerilee said, her momentum run out, “What do you have to say to that?” “What do I have to say to that?” Twilight said, shrugging. “Well, I don’t hear you leaving.” Her jaw dropped. “What?” She yawned quite pointedly. “I don’t hear hoofsteps and an opening door.” Cheerilee stood threateningly, the legs of the chair making a loud squeaking noise against the floor. “This is a trick, isn’t it? You’re going to let me go and then you’re gonna te—” The librarian laughed deeply, and the teacher fell silent; she turned around and giggled at her. “Miss Cheerilee, I have as much to lose as you. You’re free to go. But let me tell you something.” She approached, and Twilight’s smile grew wider. “I know how to have fun by myself, Miss. You thought you knew, too, but it’s getting old, and you want to know more, don’t you? You can’t just stop now.” Cheerilee didn’t respond; she didn’t dare look Twilight in the face. “You’re an adult; you know how this works. If you really hated this, if you really wanted me to stop, then you’d already be out, wouldn’t you?” She came closer. Cheerilee could see her in her peripheral vision, but she did not budge. “I don’t even need to blackmail you. You want this. You want this more than you’ve ever wanted anything in your life.” She came up to her ear, her muzzle almost physically touching it as she whispered gently. “And nopony else is ever going to give it to you.” Cheerilee shivered silently. Quite abruptly, she turned about-hoof; her magic grasped a chalkboard eraser, and she positioned it at the top of the list. “The library’s closed. You’ve got five minutes to get out.” “Ham.” “Hmm?” Twilight said, pushing the eraser down slowly. “What was that?” “Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn.” She stopped and turned around, looking impassively at Cheerilee’s shaking form as she looked down at her own paper. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t hear you that well.” “Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn,” she said slowly, stuttering slightly, “to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr.” “I’m afraid I don’t understand you.” Twilight sighed. “Oh well. Four minutes, by the way. Town regulations; can’t let you stay after hours. Closed at five today. You know how it is, right?” “Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn,” she said, looking away from the paper and directly at Twilight, “to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr! Ham ktahobrwn-n-kr kojihuamn to-six-on bekeb njin no-six-a-fournt-kr!” She shouted it over and over, until the syllables became jumbled, as Twilight watched, raising an eyebrow as if she could not understand; she said it as loud as she could, over and over and over until her throat went hoarse with the effort. Her voice began to wane, and soon it was nothing but a forced whisper, and as heard herself and realised how useless her voice was then, how useless she was, she could bear it no longer and let her head fall down onto the table; she felt her forelegs grow wet as her eyes teared up, beginning to flow. She didn’t know how long she laid like that; all she could hear was something pushing against the blackboard. Then she got up, not bothering to look around. She had an idea where the door was, and quickly began to walk towards it without looking up. As silly as it was, she didn’t want her to see her tears. “Where do you think you’re going?” She rubbed her eyes with a forehoof. “I—I’m going home,” she said, and put a hoof up against the door. “Ponyville Ordinance 2-49. No public employee may house a non-exotic sentient being in a public building after hours unless otherwise directed to by the state.” “We can move up to my room.” She turned back around to see Twilight with her ruler and a familiarly messy slate. Her voice of gratitude came out raspy and thin. “My throat?” She smiled that smile of hers again. “We’ll manage.” Cheerilee felt her eyes tear up again, but she was no longer sad.
DysaethesiaCheerilee’s hoof stayed at the door. She knew that no one else would be home, of course, that Twilight would never be so careless as to draw up a schedule without thinking; her hooves shook on the handle nonetheless. She tried to remember how long it was since the first time; the answer came to her as easily as her multiplication tables did. One month. Twenty-eight days for her to have mislearnt—for Twilight to have mistaught—more than she had in her twenty-eight years of pathetic experimentation, as though she were a witch-doctor being handed paracetamol. It wasn’t just the Bovi-Equine languages, now; they had learnt languages simply to defile them. When that had turned too difficult—when the only languages left were so far away that it would take years to learn them— it was the Equestrian nomenclature of biology, of astronomy, of chemistry— The door opened as she leaned on it, making her fall over onto her forehooves; she looked up just in time to see Twilight’s warm, smiling face. “Just on time!” she said, her voice as friendly as one could imagine a voice could be, right before she leaned down and put her muzzle up against her ear, her voice turning considerably colder. “You could almost input Gravelham’s Function into Ackerpony’s Number and multiply an additive monoid precisely at your Cartesian coordinates in the time it’d have took you to open that door.” —even of mathematics. She shuddered unnoticeably as Twilight turned around and went into the unusually dark library, silent; there was no need to say anything else. A few weeks ago, defiling the language of the purest science would have been too horrifying to contemplate; now it was nothing but a greeting. She followed quickly. Twilight did not like to be kept waiting. A slightly bubbling sort of sound came from behind her, and she turned around just in time to see the door shut, trapping them in darkness. There was a low scraping sound. She waited; Twilight knew best. The lights suddenly came on, and the first thing she saw as the brightness cleared from her eyes were the wide eyes of a short, somewhat nervous blue colt sitting at a table that looked very much like one from a school. “Miss Cheerilee?” “Snips?” she asked, her eyes open wide. “Miss—Miss Twilight?” A voice came from behind her. “You’re the teacher, not me,” Twilight’s voice said, and she glanced over to see her teacher scratching away at a spread scroll with a quill. “Teach.” “He’s just a foal, M—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “He’s just a foal, Twilight, I can’t possibly—all we’ve done is play—” “Don’t lie to me,” the voice said. Twilight’s horn was glowing, but nothing else was; Cheerilee couldn’t see her lips moving. “You want this. I’ve seen how you look at them, giving them their little lessons, seen how you’d make a ‘mistake’ and then never admit it—” Snips looked to the sides somewhat uncomfortably. “Uh, Miss Cheerilee? Twilight said you had to tutor me because my grades were down or something, right?” Twilight laid back casually in her chair, mouth as closed as before. “—enjoy your little gift, Miss Cheerilee. I hope you don’t have any more questions.” She had plenty of questions, but all she saw as she looked back was the foal. The first sentence came out without thinking. “Yes,” she said, recalling Snips’ grades, “Yes, Snips. I’m here to tutor you.” She noted that Twilight, thoughtful as she was, had left a fairly comprehensive selection of the syllabus on the table. “You’ve fallen behind on—on foreign languages,” she said, smiling in a rather far-off manner as she fetched a familiar book from the table. She philosophically detested the integration of foreign languages at the elementary level—it demeaned them all, Cheerilee thought, and then almost laughed out loud—but right then all she could think of were the possibilities. “Let’s start,” she said, bringing the edition of Modern Languages of Equestria up to bear along with a fair amount of writing material. Her hooves trembled, and she took up a seat alongside the little, innocent little idiot of a foal. “I’ve got your scores, but what is it you feel you’re having trouble with?” “Uh,” he began, putting a hoof up against his lower lip. “Windwards Griffonian. How do I tell the difference between tones and stuff?” The question went through her like a bad simile; not the question itself, which had been asked several hundred times to her alone, but the knowledge that she held a foal’s entire comprehension of the facts of the world in her hoof. She could say anything she wanted, and no Applebloom or Twist or any other one of those smart little ponies she loved and despised so deeply would ever correct her, and she knew that he would tell Snails and that moron would believe him wholeheartedly— “Uh, Miss Cheerilee?” he said, waving a hoof before her glazed-over eyes. “You alright?” “Oh,” she said, and giggled. “I’m just fine.” Even as the words came from her mouth, she felt a considerable rush of shame. She had gotten caught up so deeply in the sheer depravity of her thoughts that she hadn’t stopped to consider their depravity. She fought against herself, and felt something pushing against the edge of her consciousness, something that made her wonder if it wasn’t herself at all; she looked back pleadingly at Twilight’s lightly amused face, and a thought in Twilight’s voice came unbidden to her mind: I might listen, the voice said, but your body won’t. “Well, Snips,” she said, somewhat cautiously, “it’s easy to distinguish tones. Let me show you.” She bit down on a pencil and put it against the ruled paper. She could stop now, and simply teach him the facts. Nothing was forcing her to lie; Twilight’s condemnation wouldn’t mean nearly as much to her as the community’s. Her head moved forwards and drew a 天 tiān, the compact little strokes boxing it rather neatly; then she drew a 神 shén, then a 干 gàn, then a 鼠 shǔ. The foal would never speak Windwards Griffon, Cheerilee reasoned; most of the Griffons outside of Griffonia proper would speak the Riverwards dialect. She would do him no disservice by miseducating him in it. “Ooh!” he said, his voice filled with the spark of youthful vigour, “That’s, uh—the sun dries rats?” The foal had some spark of intelligence in him, unlike Snails; she knew that even with his little lapses of judgement, he had the potential to master this language just as she had. And something in Cheerilee wanted more than anything to crush it. The horror of her thought struck her, and she shook her head in momentary terror; her heart felt like it had skipped a beat. She sat for a while, looking down at her hooves. If she struck now, she might gain a little pleasure from it—that was a lie, because she knew that she would enjoy it more than she ever could possibly have enjoyed anything more in her life—but was it worth this foal’s mind? She could stop now, and nothing would happen to her. The tones were all different, and she could teach him easily; she had no doubt the foal would learn. “Well,” she said, “it’s actually a traditional greeting.” Snips’ eyes widened in surprise. “Really?” he said, the joy of discovery in his voice. Cheerilee bit her lip slightly to stifle the gasp of perverse pleasure that ensued. It came far stronger than she’d expected, a certain rush as carnal as it was intellectual, and a sort of warmth came over her as her eyes rolled back very slightly. This is a foal, she told herself, looking inconspicuously at him. A real, live foal, and I’m feeding him any old horseapples for milk and he’s believing it all. “Uh, Miss Cheerilee? If you’re tired—” “No, nothing’s wrong!” The look, she realised, was only inconspicuous as far as a schoolteacher looking silently at a foal asking a question might be called ‘inconspicuous’. “Nothing at all.” She put her hoof down upon the paper. “See, this sentence is special, because it has all the tones. The first one’s—” “Tiān?” he said, in a particularly endearing squawk; he didn’t sound quite like a griffon, but it was close enough to make Cheerilee wonder. A thought suddenly hit her. Most of the griffons in Equestria spoke Riverwards; surely, then, it wouldn’t be too bad if she decided to give him a more modern education? “No,” she said, “It’s tìn.” Her shudders were fairly constrained; she focused on the task at hand. “See, that’s called the arriving tone: tìn.” He raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the departing tone?” “Since a lot of griffons lived on the ground after the first war,” she said, relating a true fact, “they started saying that they ‘arrived’ by going down, and it carried over into the language!” she continued, doing her best impression of a depraved foal’s show announcer. “I don’t know,” he said, looking rather unsure. “That sounds a little too soon to be something t’change a whole language around, right?” A sudden nervousness came over her. At the very least, he hadn’t noticed the other, far more important distinction. “Now, Snips, don’t you trust your teacher?” she said, her smile showing a sliver of teeth. If she were in a cartoon, she reflected, she might be sweating. He put his hoof up against his chin for a moment and then smiled, nodding. “Of course, Miss.” The foal had accepted her authority without question; she hadn’t Twilight’s masterful self-control, and couldn’t help but let out a little groan of relieved pleasure. The foal barely seemed to notice, looking intently down at the characters. “And this is sǎng,” she said, gently nasalising the un-nasalised syllable as she spoke and letting the sound catch in her throat on the upstroke. “That’s the level tone, because it maintains a constant pitch throughout. And this is gōn—yes, that sound exists in Windwards—and this is sú—” — “So, you see,” she said, “人 refers to ponies in particular. Sentient beings are 马人.” “You sure it’s not the other way around?” Snips said quietly, copying the fact all the same. Cheerilee acted as if she hadn’t heard him; he had been raising those weak objections for a few hours, now, but he seemed to know on some level that she simply knew more than him, that she was the mare and he was the little schoolfoal without the slightest clue. It was a feeling of power the schoolteacher had only ever thought she had before, under the eyes of her fellow teachers and before the gaze of her brightest pupils, but in that little library with nothing to judge her she could do anything. It was intoxicating. “And that’s all we have for today,” she said, smiling warmly. The clock on the wall read nine. “Do you have any questions?” “Not any more, Miss Cheerilee,” the colt said, his face brightening quite suddenly as he gathered up his notes; even if he was wrong, he had learnt. “Is it okay if I share my notes with Snails? He’s been having a little trouble with his Griffon too.” “Of course, Snips.” She smiled as he went, and waited until she could hear the door close behind her before she let out a long, deep moan, her eyes closing shut in utter ecstasy. She stayed like that for almost a minute, the pressure lifting from her like a flood. “The Riverwards was a nice touch.” Then she remembered that there was something to judge her after all, and as the pleasure wore off it was replaced by a rather permeating numbness. She looked around to see Twilight looking rather impassively at her, her horn enveloping the papers in purple light; they disappeared with a flash. Cheerilee gave her a weak look, as though uncomprehending. Then she shook her head slightly. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said, quietly. “I never thought—” “You never thought,” she said, a small smile appearing on her face, “that you’d eventually get to do what you’ve always wanted?” The schoolteacher coughed into her hoof. She couldn’t focus very well. “I—I think I went too far,” she said, shaking her head gently. Her chest felt tight; perhaps she was feeling regret, but she knew the amount of damage she had done was far beyond the point of regret. “You enjoyed it, though, didn’t you?” She looked down at her forehooves for a little while, then up at her. “I did,” she said, “but I don’t think I want to enjoy it again.” “So,” Twilight said, her voice level, “you want to go back to how it was before? Just mispronunciations and misconjugations and malapropisms and faux amis?” There was a bit of a silence before Cheerilee spoke again. “Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.” “That’s too bad,” Twilight said, shrugging, “because tomorrow, we’re going to work together. You really gave me a few pointers, you know. Very inspiring.” “Twilight,” she said, “Miss Twilight, please. I know I can’t make up for it, but I won’t do it again.” She stood. “I’ve got to go. I’m not going to do this another time; I’m sorry.” She began to walk towards the door. “Just so you know, Miss Cheerilee, we’re no longer equal in this relationship.” She stopped. “What do you mean?” “Remember when I told you we had the same to lose?” Cheerilee nodded slowly. Twilight shrugged again. “We don’t have the same to lose any more.” She leaned forwards a bit. Cheerilee didn’t look her in the eye. “The magical transcripts are somewhere you’ll never need to go.” “We’re both at fault here,” she said, a sort of dread creeping into her voice. “You brought Snips here and you watched me. You encouraged me.” “I don’t know Griffonian, do I?” she said, her mouth closing itself for her next sentence as her horn glowed. And it’s a shame there’s no way to record telepathy. Cheerilee had a thousand objections, but she knew that Twilight had covered every base. A certain sort of serenity came over her. Her returning voice was expressionless. “What exactly do you want to do?” “Why,” she said, “we’re going to make sure that every single one of your students gets some one-on-one time, won’t we?” “Who’s next?” Twilight grinned. “Sweetie Belle.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But she guessed that she might as well enjoy it.
