With class over, Crag was eager to get home. He rapidly fielded questions from a few students while loading his knapsack, told the rest to catch him at his office hours tomorrow, squeezed through the door out onto the sidewalk, and launched himself into the sky. He always enjoyed his commute, when the weather was good. He watched Manehattanites scurry about their business hundreds of feet below and relished the wind beneath his wings. Soon the streets and buildings of the island gave way to the pine forests and mountains of the mainland, and he came to rest outside a cave mouth that faced the late-afternoon sun. Crag liked his cave, but it was horrendously expensive—it turned out that location, not electricity or running water, was the rule when it came to real estate.
"Hi, honey." said Crag's girlfriend, Shelly, a pale-yellow dragon one year his senior and a bit shorter. "How was class?"
"Hey, babe." They hugged and Crag kissed the end of her snout. "It's fine. We just got to the atrocities of the Second Solar Dynasty and they're taking it okay. It's funny how Twilight just took the throne three years ago and ponies are already identifying less with pre-Equestrian societies. It's for the best, though. Ponies can't spend the rest of their lives wringing their hands over the sins of the fathers."
"Hands?" said Shelly with a smirk.
"Ugh, whatever." said Crag, curling up on the floor of the cave and stretching his forelegs. "How were your classes?"
"Wednesday's my day off, remember?" said Shelly. "I spent the morning studying, though. Trig substitution can suck my eggs."
"Yeah, I don't have a lot of regrets about going into social studies. Although, that reminds me, I have to finish that manuscript." He got up. "Can you make dinner tonight?"
"Sure, I've gotta do something with those fire opals. They look great. Is that a new paper you're working on?"
"I wish. It's the third submission to this journal, fifth overall. The coauthors all say it's not usually this bad, but I'd feel better if I had just one publication, somewhere, to show for everything."
"I'm sure you'll do it, sweetie." said Shelly. "Just give it time."
Crag smiled at her. With a small sigh, he settled down at his desk with his roc's quill, an inkpot, and piles and piles of books. It was nicer to work by sunlight while he still could.
Whisperwing finally mopped off the last few tiles of the bathroom, peeled off his plastic booties, and surveyed his hoofwork. He could feel others' pity when he told them he was a janitor, especially at a big bank like this one, where he was surrounded by much wealthier and ostensibly more important ponies. But he liked it, overall. The occasional toilet catastrophe aside, the job was undemanding and meditative. It was easy to think about math, doing the same sort of work over and over again, and he took a certain satisfaction in knowing that he was engaged in far more meaningful, necessary, and honest work than the labor-leeching middlemanship that the investors and managers who surrounded him were so ludicrously overpaid for. Between Equestrian law, city law, and the union, he was treated decently by his employer.
Now was his dinner break. That meant first of all dinner, but secondly some math, while his mind was fresh from an afternoon of wandering. Whisperwing thought his unusual career path was working well so far. After the School of Friendship, he'd decided to eschew higher education entirely in lieu of doing whatever work would feed him while teaching himself mathematics and doing research in his free time. He was pretty sure that few other 20-year-olds had a solid grasp of category theory and three promising lemmata towards a proof of the absolute normality of the square root of 2, which he'd just published in Analysis Equestria.
Whisperwing sat down in an office he hadn't cleaned yet. He consumed a Dagwood and a large bag of corn chips and took out the refurbished typewriter he'd imported from Klugetown. Many-key typewriters like this one were starting to become popular among pegasi; using their wings, a pegasus could type more easily than on the traditional binary typewriters that earth ponies were stuck with. Today, Whisperwing's mathematical work was an unenviable task, but it would, he hoped, help give him some much-needed legitimacy as an outsider to academia—he had outright begged several editors to let him do it. He had to write a peer review for a prospective journal article. A second review, in fact, for a paper he hadn't thought was very good the first time.
Crag's work began inauspiciously. Reviewer 1 had asked him to cite "Alabaster, 1002"—a paper by somecreature named Alabaster, published 1,002 years after Luna's banishment. This would be a simple enough task, especially if Crag didn't bother to read the paper himself, but the reviewer hadn't included a bibliography in their review. From the name, it wasn't even obvious if the author of the paper was a pony or a dragon, so Crag had to check two different weighty indices of ancient-history publications in 1002 ALB (which Crag had bought copies of at great expense, because he needed them frequently and all the library copies in Manehattan were non-circulating). As luck would have it, both species had more than one Alabaster who was fairly productive in ancient history, and a careful scrutiny of the listed publications revealed no paper that was an obvious fit for the context, at least judging by the article titles. Crag wondered if Reviewer 1 was one of these Alabasters, trying to pad their citation count. Oh, well. He'd choose the least inappropriate-looking paper and hope that that's what the reviewer wanted. His doctoral advisor was always telling him to pick his battles, and this battle wasn't worth fighting.
Next, Reviewer 1 wanted some discussion of Tirek's possible role in the assassination of Greathoof II and the subsequent years-long drought in earth-pony lands. This was an idea stupid in its very inception that had been refuted a thousand times with both earth-pony and unicorn sources, and while Tirek claimed to have killed Greathoof himself in recent Tartarus interviews, this was far from the only lie that Tirek had told about his past. And it wasn't as if more oral history was going to be collected now that Tirek was in permanent residence at the Canterlot statue garden with his co-conspirators. Crag took a moment to calm himself—the smoke that was pouring from his nose in considerable volume proved that he was letting his annoyance get the better of him—and leafed through his earlier unpublished essays for some tactful language he remembered that he'd written about this.
Crag looked back at Reviewer 3's review. It was a paragraph long, just like last time, and the uselessly vague request to "please make Table 2 more clearer" had been copied exactly from the first round, poor grammar and all. The editor seemed to have largely ignored Reviewer 3 and Crag's responses to them last time, but then, if the editor shared Crag's suspicion that the reviewer hadn't actually read the paper anyway, why had she asked them to look at the resubmission? Crag supposed that if Reviewer 3 could copy a vague complaint, Crag could copy his polite request for clarification. That only seemed fair.
Whisperwing was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that only superficial attempts to repair, or rather complete, the paper had been made. Most notably, the "remark" that Theorem 2 critically depended upon to generalize from Lipschitz-continuous functions to almost-everywhere-differentiable functions had gotten only a few more hints towards a proof, not the full proof Whisperwing had asked for, which he suspected wasn't actually possible because the remark, as stated, was false, although a counterexample had eluded him. The authors wrote as if straining against a word limit when they actually had upwards of 1,000 words left. Whisperwing considered mailing in with his review some of the notes he'd taken last time in an extended attempt to prove the remark, if only to better convince the authors that it wasn't nearly as easy as they seemed to think.
Flipping forward to the conclusion of the paper, Whisperwing was also displeased to find that the material about chaos he'd objected to had been incompletely excised. In the first submission, the authors had repeatedly praised their work as usable to construct a new notion of chaos that better captured a scientist's intuitive notion of a chaotic system and was easier to apply. Whisperwing's first review had gone to some lengths to explain that the author's proposal was just a slightly more complicated and poorly explained version of the well-known notion of topological transitivity, and that there were good reasons that topological transitivity was conventionally considered to be insufficient for a dynamical system to be chaotic. The authors had removed the passages Whisperwing had actually quoted, but not the other material saying basically the same thing. No doubt they'd been encouraged by the other reviewer's uncritical acceptance of basically everything they said. At least there was no question that Whisperwing had an important role to play here.
"So how's that paper going?" said Shelly gingerly over dinner.
"Slowly." said Crag morosely. "I think I've only gotten out a paragraph tonight, total. Everything seems to take forever, and so little of it involves actually doing history."
"Poor baby." said Shelly, hugging him. "You've just started being a real historian. I'm sure it's gonna get easier as you get experience."
"Yeah, I hope so." said Crag, hugging her back.
Whisperwing assessed his work in progress grimly. It was a lot of words he'd written, and carefully, but it was anypony's guess if the authors would take them to heart, or even understand them. This system of peer review that academia had somehow settled on was obviously a bad system: it was unclear in what it set out to do and it wasn't especially good at doing anything. How much did Whisperwing want academic acceptance, anyway? Was it worth it?
Whisperwing walked around the offices. Everypony was gone now except for him and another janitor, who was working at the other end of the building. It was dark and lonely. Whisperwing sighed and looked once more at the personal ad he had gotten into today's issue of The Manehattan Monitor. Would he ever find another stallion interested in a serious relationship, instead of mere casual sex? If Manehattan was supposed to be the capital of Equestrian homosexuality, why did it feel so sparse sometimes? Water, water everywhere; and not a drop to drink.
Whisperwing went to a toilet stall and masturbated furiously. He didn't usually masturbate at work, but he felt he needed it tonight. Feeling a little better, he picked up his mop and got back to work.