1. Haycartes Method. A particularly difficult method of inserting oneself magically into a book's text to learn it rapidly.
2. Starlight Glimmer. An accomplished mage attempting to teach her easily-distracted friend Trixie a useful spell for studying. Becoming more agitated by the minute at Trixie's antics and failures, she was preparing to stop for the day on good terms before her patience was exceeded.
3. Twilight Sparkle. Modern master of the Haycartes Method spell, meddling in Starlight's instruction while misguidedly attempting to befriend Trixie--Twilight's onetime rival. Oblivious to Starlight's gentle nudges and coded "ixnay" warning whisper to Trixie and oblivious also to Trixie's menacing shouldercuffs, Twilight provided unwanted pointers.
4. Trixie Lulamoon. Incensed by know-it-all Twilight barging in all bushy-tailed and sparkling teeth into the midst of a grueling three-hour instruction session with a wink and a nod and a presumptuous foreleg draped over Trixie's shoulder, Trixie grabbed a thin poetry book understanding that the simpler the source, the easier to successfully demonstrate that Twilight's assistance was most assuredly NOT needed. Neglecting Starlight's warnings, to make the casting extra-simple she rips out a single page... and succeeds.
"... Trixie!" Starlight's inside-the-book avatar shouted.
"Terlite!" The blue unicorn responded.
"..." Twilight Sparkle cogitated.
"Fie!"
"..."Twilight continued cogitating.
"Fux."
"Ret xeffefet?"1
"Trixie reit i fixtixe."2 Twilight pointed her two-dimensional avatar's foreleg at Trixie, and shook her head right to left in disappointment.
Trixie knew not quite what Twilight had said, but the lavender unicorn's body language was informative enough. "TxiLLeite, fuxx U!"3
"It UR FULT Trixie." Starlight sadly shook her head. "I tuller u~ uile i xif tuux."4
Twilight had an insight, reflecting on her studies of Old Ponish. "Fee ufe letter f,x,l,t,r,u,i,e...f? F!" She brightened. "F!F!F!" She danced.5
"?" Starlight tilted her head.
"Fux F," Trixie glared.6
Twilight continued, gaining confidence. "Ufe F fur F."7
"?"
"F fur F, ufe it. "
"!" Starlight nodded. "I Xet it!" She herself had started speaking louder when stating letters that were dissimilar.8
"U fee?"9
"I Fee!" Starlight nodded, enthusiastically.
Trixie rolled her eyes. "Fo fut? Xe lutf lf letter letx."10 Trixie followed no discernible rules to better interpret her gobbledygook.
Twilight shook her head. With a sigh, she postulated a solution to the rule-less madness of lexical development--one garnered from experience with crosswords and word jumbles. "Ufe _ fur letter _." She crossed her eyes, then brightened. "_! Fe ufe _!"11
"?" Starlight raised an eyebrow.
"Fee ufe letter _?" Starlight nodded long and slow. "Fee _,_,_!" Her eyes twinkled.12
"Tif _,_it fifx Trixie i fifExit", Trixie muttered.13
"U _,_,t it!" Twilight smiled.14
Trixie rolled her eyes.
Twilight pondered, then she brightened. "_e i_ u _. _,_,_,_, e f _. If e if E~ E,e,i_,u,_. E,_,_,_,e,f_."15
"E _ ,_ E!" Starlight nodded, also noting that Twilight had picked up on her idea of uttering replacement letters louder than standard nomenclature.16
"_,ut t_Et_, _,_t, g_,_,_ , e_,_u,_,_," Trixie's barely comprehensible blank-filled phrase demonstrated her point.17
"Trixie ri_,_t," Starlight nodded, eyes losing their luster.18
Twilight tapped her hoof: "!!!!_~~~_!~~, !~_~!!!_~~~_~~!!_! !_!!!!_!!_!!!?"19
Trixie frowned. And so did Starlight until she realized and responded in like, thrusting the hoof bangs and clicks of HoofCode.
"_,_Et?"20
"It lE_ _ uE_e"21
"_,_t _,_,Et I tEu_,_t u."22
"It _,_rx _ette_ _ere! I luX Ur TeE_,_."23
Trixie harrumphed.
Twilight ignored the two's excited chattering. Instead, she cast the spell she needed, completing missing letters with HoofCode.
They escaped the land of few letters, little the worse for wear despite their sojourn on the crumpled page.
"Now that we've put that in the past," Twilight reveled in the comforting real world. "Why did we lack so many letters? Even short poems often use an "A" or an "O"."
"It was an experimental piece..." Starlight picked up the scrap and read:
________
~?~
Fitful.
Flu!
Fell
Xir,
xxx.
~?~
________
"What's Xir?" Starlight asked.
Trixie rolled her eyes at the two powerful ponies who had just rescued her with their erudite linguistic knowledge. "Don't you know anything?"
Starlight arched an eyebrow.
Trixie blushed, but then grew bolder as she spoke. "It's a gender neutral term," she shrugged. "A performing pony must be aware of all xir audience and their various preferences." She shook her head. "Starlight and Twilight, sometimes you seem so smart and other times you're just cheugy. Get with the new generation."
"Generation Five?" Starlight suggested.
Trixie nodded.
"Wait," Twilight frowned as she descended a staircase. "You're not using that 'cheugy' neologism right--"
"TxiLLeite," Trixie huffed. "I don't need your help. Trixie will make xir... experiments... and find Trixie's own way." She gumboed up language and looked over her shoulder and, foreleg leading her friend Starlight from the room, met Twilight's eyes: "Trixie may not be a mistress of HoofCode or Old Ponish, but Trixie, who is well traveled and who has interacted with many cultures, has her own secret cunning linguistic knowledge." Smarmily, she grinned at Starlight, who swished her tail.
Twilight, with a great sigh, attempted a different approach to bond with the prickly showmare: "Trixie... I'm sorry. Instead of approaching as a friend and meeting you where you were, I forced instruction on you and pushed too hard."
Starlight, tail tucked tight between her hindquarters, nodded.
"And then you did something I didn't think was possible--you found your own way in! I may have been too arrogant. Perhaps you have something to teach me?"
Trixie inhaled deeply, and with a smirk, she let out her breath and winked. "Anklyfray ymay earday, iyay on'tday ivegay ayay amnday." Then she walked away. Starlight trotted afterwards and responded, Twilight thought, in a similar tongue. But, despite the expanded vocabulary set, Twilight couldn't quite grok what she was hearing.
Twilight blinked. "Some mysteries, I suppose, can never be completely understood... or appreciated." For about three seconds she accepted that ending... but then the meddlesome mare hurried to her library and pulled an all-nighter flitting across linguistic and cryptographic encyclopedias puzzling out what Trixie was using for her secret best-friends-code with Starlight. A few mornings later: Twilight was found, teeth chattering in binary.