Twilight
THE DERPY REPORT
Part 1. Twilight
Twilight felt a bit silly talking to a spoon. However, the young pony in front of her was so insistent, and her cross-eyed look was so endearing, that she simply didn't have the heart to say no, even if the request was eccentric.
“Sure, Derpy, I'd love to give you an interview,” Twilight said, but her voice seemed to say otherwise, and she was eyeing the spoon in front of her with trepidation.
“You know that's a spoon, not a microphone, right?” she asked. “It doesn't record anything!”
“Puh-lease!” Derpy said, apparently untouched by trifling matters such as logic. “I promise it won't take long!”
Twilight looked around the town-square. Naturally, Derpy had approached her in the most crowded and exposed part of Ponyville. The conversation was already attracting attention and Twilight found herself trailed by dozen of curious eyes. She responded to the glances with an awkward smile and turned towards Derpy again.
“Okay, if you want to,” she said in a low voice. “But could we not do it... right here?”
“Sure, but where?” Derpy asked and Twilight looked for the most polite way to lead the faux reporter to a place that did not have as much of an audience.
“How about the library?” she suggested. “I can ask Spike to make some tea for us.”
“Will there be muffins?” Derpy asked with hope in her eyes.
“Yes,” Twilight said, still trying to avoid the curious glances. “There will be muffins.”
“Yay! Muffins!”
Breathing a sigh of relief, Twilight began to trot towards Ponyville's public library with Derpy happily following her close behind, barely able to contain her glee.
Twilight only needed to mention tea and Spike was halfway to the kitchen to put the kettle on. While he was busy with the tea, Twilight prepared a small round table. She draped an astronomically accurate tablecloth around it and the two ponies sat down to wait for tea.
Derpy admired the tall bookshelves that surrounded her and as she spaced out, Spike emerged from the kitchen to set the table, placing one small decorated cup in front of each pony. A silent conversation took place between Twilight and Spike, all beneath Derpy's notice.
‘Are those the cups you are planning to use?’ Twilight said by pointing at the two delicate porcelain cups that just seemed to invite disaster.
‘Yeah, what's wrong with them?’ Spike asked with a shrug.
‘While I don't want to speak ill about our investigative journalist friend, she does have a tendency to be slightly klutzy, and that is my favorite set. So if you could bring her something more sturdy without offending her, I'd be much obliged’, she said to Spike with a complex series of gestures that he found hard to interpret.
‘I'm sorry?’ Spike said with an eyebrow.
Twilight abbreviated her spiel into two short gestures and Spike nodded knowingly. She stared awkwardly at Derpy, who was still lost in her own world. Twilight could hear the dragon rummaging around in the kitchen,
Spike returned with a lidded plastic cup that even Pound and Pumpkin Cake would have found a bit childish. Upon looking at the plastic cups, Twilight couldn't help but bring a hoof to her face. Luckily, Derpy seemed to have missed the nonverbal conversation going on around her.
“What nice books!” she said, oblivious to Twilight's disappointment. “They are so pretty and colorful!”
“Yeah, I like them too,” Twilight said then looked down at the baby-blue mug Spike had placed on the table. “Uhm, I'm sorry for the cup.”
“What cup?" Derpy asked, looking around in confusion. ”Ooh this one? It is perfect! I can drink without spilling a drop!” she said, smiling warmly at her host.
Twilight tried not to notice Spike's smug smile from behind Derpy's back.
“Now, what was it that you wanted to ask me?” Twilight said as Spike poured the tea.
“Why don't we start with before you came to Ponyville?” Derpy asked, raising the spoon up to her mouth like a microphone. Twilight gave the spoon another confused look. Her mind tried to make sense of the situation, but it was still completely illogical.
“Well...” Twilight began. “I studied a lot, spent a lot of time at the library-”
“Didn't you have any friends?” Derpy asked before she could finish.
“Oh yes, I knew a few ponies. “We didn't hang out much though...” Twilight paused, but Derpy didn't seem to pick up on the awkward silence.
“Didn't it ever get lonely?” Derpy asked. her eyelids sank down into something resembling a concerned look but Twilight just sighed.
“No, it didn't,” she said, then paused for thought. “Well, thinking back, I guess I was lonely, only I didn't know it at the time. You can't really miss something you've never experienced, after all.” Twilight looked forlornly at the gray Pegasus before her, trying to smile.
They both had talked for a while. For Twilight, Derpy seemed to be picking topics at random sometimes, but she noticed that a good deal of them were focused on her own past while still studying in Canterlot. She met the questions with reluctance and instead tried to steer the conversation towards the reason for this strange interview.
Derpy was about to reply, but was interrupted by a delightful squeak from the wheels of a cart as Spike arrived with the tea and cake. He placed a large frosted muffin in front of Derpy, prompting her to stare at it with a seemingly ferocious hunger. Still, she politely waited until Spike had placed Twilight’s daffodil cheesecake on the table.
Noticing that Derpy was eying her muffin pleadingly, Twilight gave Derpy a quick nod before letting her spoon levitate up and scoop up a small piece of the cheesecake. With her eyes closed, she savored it for a while, allowing the her taste-buds to acknowledge each flavor independently before swallowing it.
When she opened her eyes, she noticed, with some slight concern, that Derpy had completely devoured her muffin. For all Twilight knew, she had simply swallowed it whole.
“Uhm... do you want some more tea to wash it down?” Twilight asked, with her eyes slightly wider in amazement. Derpy, however, merely licked her lips contentedly.
“No thanks, I'm good!”
Derpy looked around the library, trying to figure out why Twilight chose such an odd place for a coffee break. She couldn't help but notice that it was the middle of the day, but apart from her, Twilight, and Spike, there were nopony there. It certainly seemed more like a home than a public institution.
“Uhm, does anypony actually come here?“ she asked bluntly to Twilight. She looked like she was about take offense to this, but decided not to react.
“You'd be surprised,” Twilight said with a defensive smile. “The nice thing abut being a librarian is that you get to aid ponies in their own quest for knowledge.”
“And entertainment?” Derpy asked.
“And entertainment,” Twilight agreed with a nod.
“So, do you like to read?” Derpy asked, prompting the other mare to stare blankly into her lazy eyes.
“What kind of question is that?” she said, gesturing towards the many a quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.
“I mean for fun,” Derpy said. “Not study, stories!” At least this question was an easy one to answer; Twilight only needed to think for a moment.
“Well, I like the ‘Daring Do’-books, and the ‘Larry Globetrotter’ series,” she said, poking her chin with a forehoof. “I keep trying to get Spike to read those, but he keeps refusing. And...” her voice suddenly got a bit lower, “...the ‘Pepperjack & Glitterfang’ saga.”
“Never heard of that one... is it good?” Derpy asked. This was again an unexpectedly hard question for Twilight to answer, and she struggled for words.
“Uhm... it's not... 'good',” she admitted, letting her ears fold to the sides of her head, seemingly in shame. “It's about this mare called Pepperjack who meets this stallion, Glitterfang. He's handsome and mysterious, but he has a dark curse...” Twilight let her hoof rotate, her eyes focused on the ceiling as she tried to find the best way to express her opinion on the series.
“The prose is bad, it's full of grammatical mistakes,” Twilight said. “The author seems to believe that 'was', 'were', 'where' and 'wear' are the same word and by the looks of it, she places her commas with a shotgun.” She took a sip of her tea and continued with the impromptu review. “The story isn't much better to be honest. The plot is cliché and the main character is one-dimensional. Come to think of it, it’s a pretty trashy series...”
“But if it's not good, why do you read it?” Derpy asked in earnest.
“Because, uhm....” Twilight's speech center appeared to have stopped working momentarily. The mare paused fore a few seconds before gathering herself.
“You wanna see some of the cool books I have in my collection?” she asked, smiling awkwardly to the mare before her, hoping that she wouldn't notice the sudden change in the subject..
“Sure!” Derpy said, letting herself be led down a more comfortable conversation path.
She didn't seem to notice, but Twilight breathed a quick sigh of relief.
“I am a big fan of Starswirl the Bearded,” Twilight said with newfound ease. “He wrote some really good books on astronomy, and I have most of them. I especially like the Prisma editions, made by one of his students as a tribute to him. Each are unique and decorated with gemstones and bells.”
“Oooh, sounds nice,” Derpy said, sounding genuinely interested. She was actually rather fond of astronomy. Fitting for a filly with her head in the clouds.
“And guess what? I actually have one of them!” Twilight said with stars in her eyes. “Celestia gave it to me as a birthday present. It's the coolest thing ever!” She was barely able to contain her enthusiasm.
Using her magic, she took down the book from its shelf. It had little copper bells that dangled from the side and made pleasing “ping” noises. When the covers turned towards Derpy she could see a pattern of amethysts and emerald that shone brightly in the midday sun that passed trough the library window.
"Oooh, pretty!" Derpy said before raising a quizzical eyebrow, "but why the bells?"
“Starswirl was fond of bells,” Twilight said and shrugged. “Why; nopony knows. But I read a biography a few years ago that claimed he took care of his blind little sister and that he had sewn the bells to his clothes so that she would always know where he was.”
“Aww...”
“But no other book supports this,” Twilight informed. “And the author of this biography, though contemporary with Starswirl, never wrote any other book, at least not under the same name. Nopony knows their real identity. So it's generally not accepted among historians.”
Twilight showed Derpy a few other books. They were antique, colorful, eccentric or just plain rare, but all of them were among her prized possessions. Derpy listened intently and it was hard to tell whether or not her interest was genuine or faked.
“What's the strangest book you have in your library?” Derpy asked her after she put an aged felt-bound atlas of forgotten maps away.
“Oh, it's got to be one of Vanilla Wands specialty books,” Twilight said, looking around for one to show. “He was quite a character, a good scholar, exobiologist mainly, but he also wrote a lot on magic. However, he had a very... specific point of view, both scientifically and politically. He was a... ‘flying bolt’ I think is the word.”
Derpy's eyes rolled around in their socket as she stared blankly towards Twilight. She didn't know what a “flying bolt” was and wasn't sure she'd understand even if somepony explained it to her. Twilight was silent for a moment, still looking for one of the books.
“ Anyway,” Twilight said after locating a particularly good example . “In his later years, he acquired an interest in the self-referential, hence this!”
She pulled something out of a shelf that looked almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a book. The pages were made out of slightly browned cigarette-smoke and the cover was made out of a thick cotton-candy kind of cloud that frayed outwards in counterclockwise swirls.
“This is ’The Cloud book of Clouds’,” Twilight informed Derpy. “One of the best works on meteorological engineering not written by a pegasus. Also, it's very annoying to read.“
With her magical influence, she once again compressed the miniature cloud into something that almost didn't completely fail to resemble a book and put it back into the bookshelf.
“Vanilla also collaborated with a scholar called Drumgray Fudge on’The Invisible Book of Invisibility’,” Twilight said after she was done putting it back. “I've heard it's a great book that changed the study of magic as we know it, and I know I have it somewhere. But I can't find it, because it‘s invisible!” Twilight put her elbow on the table and let her chin rest on the hoof.
“Frankly, Vanilla always struck me as a bit of a Troll...” Twilight said halfway to herself. “Anyway, was there anything else you wanted to ask?”
“No, it’s fine!” Derpy said with a smile. She got up onto her forehooves and started flapping her wings, aiming for the door. However, she miscalculated the distance, prompting her to crash into the front door, nearly tearing it off its hinges. Thankfully, the door was unlocked and Derpy was soon happily soaring high in the sky.
Twilight scratched her scalp as a new-found calm settled in the room. Spike appeared from behind the shelves and tried to make it look like he just wandered in and hadn't listened in on the whole conversation.
“Do you really think she's actually making some kind of radio show?” Spike asked Twilight, breaking the silence.
“I think she does...” Twilight said, eyes still fixed on the door that was almost ripped apart, “...in her own mind, at least.”
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Haha. I love this! F-F-F-Favoriting!
Did you commission Cosmic for that picture?
405799 its combined with fav
hay two views two likes
405799
I DREW that Picture MYSELF....
That picture makes me happy. I have a feeling this story will make me happy. I like being happy.
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Then every which apologies from myself. I just knew that Cosmic made pictures, although I'm devoid of info about yourself
This.. this was great!
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He does, but so do I...
lol i love that picture. Are you gonna add more to this? it appears so, but i figured i'd ask anyway.
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, at least.
Yes, there's going to be a chapter for each of the mane 6
You've used "where" a number of times that should have been "was." I'm not sure how that happened exactly, but it's a bit interr-
upting to the reader.
Also a few of your " quotes are missing and misplaced.
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I'll go through it later and straighten things out. 
How that happened? Well, Grammar Fail, plain and simple... 
Thanks!
I like this! Glad someone's being nice to Derpy. And interviewing ponies with a spoon seems like just the thing she'd do.
Also, "many a quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. " I see what you did there.
It's so nice to finally see a fanfic were Derpy is not abused.
I love the way you portrayed the characters. There was not much describing but still you managed to catch their personalities, even Vanilla's and Starswirl's. By the way, this story about the later stallion's sister - very nice idea, touching. Also the extraordinary books were... extraordinary. Just the sense of humor which I adore. Fav.