Behind her desk in the schoolroom, Ms. Cheerilee sighed, something that always made Toola Roola think of the big trunk in the back closet where Mother stored the family's sweaters.
Mother would load the trunk up after Winter Wrap Up, seal it shut with her magic, and wouldn't open it again till just before Nightmare Night. And the dry, dusty, musty puff of air that came out would get Toola itchy and sneezing and rushing to the kitchen to fumble with the tap for a glass of water.
Ms. Cheerilee's sighs, though? They were worse. They weren't as dry and musty, sure, but they got Toola all itchy and squirming and whiny. "But Ms. Cheerilee! Mouth writing's really, really hard!"
Mother didn't like it when Toola got whiny. It never made anything better, Mother told her, and most of the time, it simply made things worse. "Look at your sister," Mother would say, and Amaryllis would bow her perfect head, her perfect mane parting perfectly around her perfect little horn. "Amaryllis knows that whining won't get her what she wants."
Of course not, Toola never said in reply. 'Cause Amaryllis doesn't need to want anything! She gets everything without even having to ask!
"It takes practice, Toola," Ms. Cheerilee was saying the same way she'd been saying all year now. It just seemed that each time she said it, her smile tightened and sharpened a little more. "The exercises in the workbook are there so you can—"
"But I do practice! I do!" Except she didn't. How could she, after all, when pencils just plain danced across pages when Amaryllis's horn started glowing? Toola would never be able to do anything as elegantly as that! "It's just completely and totally impossible!"
The instant she said it, she knew it was a mistake, but by then, it was too late. Ms. Cheerilee's smile drooped into a straight line, and her eyes closed halfway; leaning over, she picked up a piece of chalk in her teeth and wrote Completely impossible? on the blackboard.
For another instant, Toola considered spinning in place and sprinting out of the classroom rather than, as Mother so often put it, dignifying that question with a response. But that was just the whininess worming its way through her, Mother also would've said.
So instead, Toola nodded, said, "Thank you, Ms. Cheerilee," slipped her saddlebags on, and trudged out into the autumn afternoon.
"Keep practicing!" Ms. Cheerilee called, and it took a truly heroic effort for Toola not to repeat the words in a whispery yet whiny voice while rolling her eyes.
But she made that effort. Snide little half-whispered comments and eye rolling were more Amaryllis's thing, anyway...
The effort took a toll, however, and Toola was halfway home when what Mother called the whole interminable ennui of existence caught her squarely in the back of all four knees. Fortunately, she was crossing Ponyville Park at the time, so she pulled up to sit on a bench under a tree.
Of course, whining about the whole inevitable ennui of existence was what Mother considered to be the absolutely worst sort of whining. So Toola made some more effort, pulled her workbook and notepad out, grabbed the pencil in her teeth, and started the first practice exercise.
Five sheets of paper later, all of them crumpled with a snort and spat toward the trash basket at the end of the bench, she was starting to think that whining might be the only proper reaction. But then a loud clearing of throat snapped her head upward, her tongue poised to spit out something whiny that would likely be more stinging than a wadded piece of paper.
Discord was standing there, though, all tall and thin and on two legs with his eyes narrowed and his weird arm things folded. Everything on her tongue tumbled back into her throat, and she swallowed it with a gulp, the pencil dropping to the paper. "You...you're Discord!"
His eyes widened. "Am I?" A vest appeared around his middle part, and he started poking his claws and talons into various of its pockets. "Well, doesn't that beat all?" From one of the pockets, he pulled a little yellow-white card and held it out to her. "I was wondering why I had these printed up!"
The words on the card were in plain, sort of brownish letters: Discord and then below that Bail Bonds, Farrier, Strife Coach, Keys Made.
He tucked it back into a different pocket. "Things make so much more sense now! I'm quite indebted to you, young lady! For after all"—his voice lowered in pitch and volume and his eyebrows sort of drew together in the middle of his face, all of which made him look a whole lot creepier than he already did—"we all want things to make more sense, don't we?"
The idea of spinning and sprinting popped into her head once more, but Toola really didn't want him chasing her across the park. Except— "You're a good guy now, aren't you?" she blurted out.
"Am I?" Another surprised look twitched across his face, and he dug some more in his pockets. "Well, I'm certainly glad I ran into you!" He pulled out another card with Discord on it in the same sort of printing but different words underneath: Vice Headmare, Troubadour, Grapes Stomped, Good Guy. "I can't imagine I'd have any idea what was going on with me if you hadn't set me straight!"
Tucking the card away, he twirled sideways and collapsed onto the bench beside Toola, his face never wavering in its smiling stare at her. "So!" he went on. "After you've been of such invaluable service to me, what can I do to help you?"
With all her heart, Toola wanted to say, You can go away, but that seemed like the sort of thing Mother would refer to as an almost terminally bad idea. So— "I'm fine," she said instead, bending her neck to pick up the pencil again.
"I beg to differ." He snapped the claws of his lion paw, and five crumpled pieces of paper appeared floating in front of him. "These artifacts are practically oozing a miasma of despair." Little half glasses sprang out of his snout, and he quickly uncrumpled one of the sheets. "Which is completely understandable since you're apparently attempting to decipher some ancient Elephantruscan inscriptions..."
"Hey!" Toola flailed her hooves at the balled-up pages trying to knock them away, but they kept drifting just out of reach. "Those're mine!"
"Really?" He blinked over the top of his glasses. "You don't look Elephantruscan."
"I'm not!" That stupid interminable ennui started seeping over her again, and Toola fell back onto her part of the bench. "I was practicing my mouth writing." She said the words very carefully so they would come out clearly even with the pencil clenched between her teeth.
"Were you?" The way his voice arched each time he asked a question reminded Toola of Amaryllis at her most sarcastic. His squinting at the page while turning it from side to side and even upside down just reinforced the feeling.
But complaining about that sort of thing was the second-worst form of whining, according to Mother. "A true lady deflects a sarcastic barb," Mother would say when she caught a few drops from Amaryllis's constant nasty flow. "She ignores it and strives to shape the conversation along more pleasant lines."
Most of the time, dealing with Amaryllis, Toola found that she didn't know how to do that. And this was definitely one of those times, too. So she just waved at her exercise book. "I was only—"
"No, no!" Discord straightened suddenly, his eyes bugging out at the paper. "Don't tell me! I can see it all so clearly now!" His glasses leaped up from his nose, stretched and bulged and slid into place between his horns as a pith helmet. "It's a treasure map!"
Everything around Toola flashed, and Ponyville Park vanished into darkness. Little bluish-white glowing splotches shimmered everywhere, though, and after a few blinks, Toola could see that they were patches of mushrooms growing all over the place inside a giant cave, the rocky walls vaulting up to become a ceiling high above.
"Yes," Discord's by-now-altogether-too-familiar voice was saying beside her, and Toola craned her head over to see that he was now wearing the same sort of outfit Daring Do always wore on the covers of her books. He stood from the boulder that had taken the place of the bench they'd been sitting on, held up Toola's practice page, and gestured off to the left. "We go this way, I think."
Toola stared from him to the cave and back again. "But that's not a—"
"You're right." Discord stopped, turned, and stared with wide eyes directly behind her. "We're here already."
Leaping to all fours, Toola spun and saw that the boulder was actually the outstretched paw of an enormous sphinx statue filling the rest of the cavern. Except—
The statue's eyes creaked downward till they were looking straight at Toola. In the dimness behind the statue, something that might've been a giant tail started swishing back and forth, and the statue's lips began to stretch, curling upward and opening into a grin that showed a mesh of massive, pointed teeth.
Other than her heart, which was flapping against her ribs like a bird in a cage, Toola's whole body seemed to freeze, the boulder-sized paw in front her rising slowly into the air—
But Discord gave a little laugh. "Oh, silly me! This isn't a treasure map!" The sphinx, the cave, and the mushrooms all whisked away, and stacks of boxes took their place, the new, more yellowy sort of dim light coming from single firefly lanterns hanging in rows along a stained wooden ceiling. "It's a ransom note!"
Toola spun again, this time to stare at Discord. He had uncrumpled a second sheet of paper and was holding them up side by side. His Daring Do outfit puffed into smoke, and underneath it, he had on a slouch-brimmed fedora and a big tan overcoat. "Good thing I'm a shamus as well." The papers stayed in place as he moved his eagle talons to tap his chin. "Or is that 'shaman'?"
What drew Toola's attention more than that, though, was the older stallion squatted on the concrete floor among the boxes a few paces behind Discord. The stallion had ropes wrapped all around him and a black-and-red checked bandana tying his snout shut.
That was when one of the words Discord had said recently sank in. "Ransom?" Toola looked up at Discord and gestured with her pencil at the tied-up stallion. "You mean like when somepony's been foalnapped?"
Discord's head cranked around till it was facing backwards, then his body snapped into place to match. "Gadzooks!" he said. "Quick, Flotsam! The game's ahoof! Except—" He turned all at the same time, his eyes narrow, the pages still floating in front of him. "Didn't you say this ransom note was in your writing?"
"Yes! I mean, no! I mean—!" Toola shook her head. "It's not a ransom note!"
"It's not?" He held the pages up again and squinted at them some more. A third sheet uncrumpled itself and slid into place on top of the first two, and Discord said, "Oh! Yes! This makes a great deal more sense now!"
Toola sucked in a breath to start yelling that they were just exercise pages, that they didn't say anything other than the simple little phrases in the workbook, but everything was already flashing around her.
It didn't go dark this time; her walls, ceiling and floor were all sparkling, white, and crystalline. Discord still stood beside her, his attention still focused on the pages. "It says right here, 'the importance of seeing fiends'." He nodded once and glanced around the whole gleaming room with a smile. "Well, believe you me, you'll never see a more fiendish fiend than our next guest. Fillies and gentlecolts, please give a big discordian welcome to Grogar the Great!"
A shadow moved among the pristine crystals, and Toola leaped for the paper. "It doesn't say, 'the importance of seeing fiends'!" Jabbing the page with her pencil, she tore it down, slammed it to the floor, and recited as she wrote: "The importance of being friends!"
"Discord?" a deep voice growled, the echo from the crystals making it hard to tell what direction it was coming from. "I understand you've been taking my name in vain."
"Yes, yes," Discord said with a wave of his lion paw, but he was bent down squinting at the paper. "This looks like 'impotence.'" Gray wings burst from his eyebrows, and they fluttered into spots above the brim of his hat as he raised his gaze to meet hers. "Do you even know what that means?"
"All right!" Toola shouted, clenching her eyes and spitting out her pencil. "I'm really bad at mouth writing! Is that what you want me to say? 'Cause I am! And I'll never be any good at it! I'll never be any good at anything! Not like Amaryllis! And I'm sorry I'm just an earth pony and not a unicorn like her and Mother and Father, but I can't help it! It's just that my tail's a different color from my mane, my hooves get all stompy when they should be all gliding, and I hate that I'm a disappointment all the time! But it's really hard to make a pencil work right when you're holding it in your teeth!"
"Toola?" Mother's voice asked.
The word hit her as hard as a tree branch across the forehead, and she started, snapped open her eyes, saw she was sitting on the bench in Ponyville Park with Mother staring at her from a few paces away along the path.
All Toola Roola could do was stare back.
"You hadn't come home," Mother said more quietly than Toola had ever heard her speak. "So I thought perhaps I'd best make my way along the path to the schoolhouse and ascertain that all...was...well..." She swallowed and did some more staring.
"Well!" Discord slithered into the space between her and Mother, his lion paw resting on her shoulder, his eagle talons drawing Mother closer. "I think you two have a few things more important than mouth writing to talk about. And might I suggest that you include this Amaryllis in the discussion as well?"
Toola wasn't really listening, though. She was too busy watching the shimmer in Mother's eyes. "Toola, I simply will not have you thinking you're a disappointment! You're my wonderful younger daughter, and I love you beyond the ability of any instrument to measure or any words to convey!"
"Mother!" Toola launched herself from the bench and pressed her dampening face into the sweet blue hide of her chest.
With the client and whatever relative that was of hers happily weeping, Discord pulled down his hat and turned away.
Another job well done. And best of all? He pulled a card with his name on it from a pocket of his sudden vest and tapped the words Private I Before E onto it.
He'd gotten the name of the story into the story itself.
With the sun setting behind him, he walked into the mean streets of Ponyville looking for more problems to solve.
