The Everfree Forest put no fear in the heart of Keen Arrow. She’d been along this path enough times to know exactly what to expect. Having Zecora teach her how to identify dangerous plants and animals (the result of foalhood curiosity nearly getting the better of her one year) and Auntie Octavia (Princess Octavia to everypony else) showing her the finer points of self-defense (both physical and magical) made her prepared for just about anything the creepy old forest could throw at her. Thus did she arrive at the mansion deep in the woods with almost boring ease.
That was unfortunate, because right now she wanted something to zap.
Despite being ten years old now, the mansion still hadn’t managed to achieve that ‘spooky middle-of-nowhere’ vibe its owner was probably looking forward to. The entrance was a large, two-storey affair of hardwood floors and paneling and a pair of twin staircases leading to a balcony above. Just as she was readying to go up one of those staircases, a cloud of black smoke billowed into existence in the middle of the balcony. When it faded, there stood Uncle Fine.
“Ah, Little Miss.” He smoothed a black and red vest that required no smoothing and grinned. “Most unusual for you to show up unannounced, but not unwelcome.”
Uncle Fine had aged marvelously. His red mane, long freed from the black dye he’d stuck to in his youth, seemed bright in the dim lighting. Perhaps it wasn’t as brilliant as it used to be, but at least he wasn’t graying yet. There were a few extra laugh lines on his face, no doubt the result of countless hours spent with his marefriend, but his body was every bit as toned as it had ever been. He’d taken to wearing a dark red bowler hat, which Keen estimated would last only up until the moment Miss Rarity caught sight of it.
That didn’t stop him from taking a startled step back when Keen, now at the top of the stairs, magically jerked a few sheets of paper from her saddlebag and thrust it in his face. “I need your help,” she declared. “I’ve been puzzling over this thing all week and I just. Can’t. Do it.”
“Well, hello to you too.” Taking the paper in his own magical aura, he peered at it. After flipping a page or two, he said, “It’s a story. Incomplete, I note.”
“It’s trash,” she venomously corrected. “I’m supposed to be done with this by Monday for my Advanced Literary Class, I’ve got four days left and the only thing I can write is trash. I’m going to fail the assignment!”
To this Uncle Fine raised an eyebrow. “It’s hardly the end of the world.”
“I do not fail assignments,” she snarled. “Especially essays.”
“An essay and a short story are not even remotely the same thing.”
“I know that!” Heaving a sigh, Keen took the papers and stuffed them back in her saddlebag, not caring that it was getting crumpled in the process. “Fundamentally, I know that. But I’ve never finished a story. Not even a short one. I thought taking this class would help in that regard, but now that I’m here the work is just… not coming to me.”
“Ah.” Uncle Fine’s smile turned warm, and maybe even a touch amused. “The old problem. Why are you so devoted to writing something of your own?”
“Because I can. Or, at least, I think I can.” Leaning heavily on the banister, she let her chin rest atop the railing with a pout. “You do it. Miss Twilight does it. Tartarus, even Miss Dash does it.”
Uncle Fine shuddered and muttered with utmost dread, “Worst editing job I ever accepted.”
“But she still did it, and it was a bestseller.” No doubt thanks to his and Twilight’s contributions. “And look at me. I can write better than most adults, and yet I can’t finish anything. Isn’t that pathetic? It feels pathetic. I want to be able to say that I can.”
Uncle Fine offered no response. She wondered if he was too disgusted with her to offer one. She wouldn’t blame him. Sure, they weren’t blood related, but it had to be a disappointment that his ‘niece’ was such a failure in a thing which he excelled at and was passionate about. She could still fondly remember all those nights he’d sneak into her room to tell her stories. Her mother didn’t do bedtime stories much when she was little, and she wasn’t very good at it anyway. Which was at least part of his reason for doing it: if a filly was going to get a bedtime story, it should at least be a good one. That it annoyed Lightning was icing on the cake.
She’d read every single one of Verity Fine’s stories, some of them more than once. The Adventures of Kit n’ Caboose remained one of her all-time favorites. Then there were the lies. What were lies but stories told to be convincing? Uncle Fine used to have a saying: ‘Truth was for ponies who lacked creativity.’ If you wanted to get an interesting story, ask Uncle Fine what he did for a living. His answer was different every time, and it never involved actual writing or… Well. His real job was confidential. Not that she didn’t know, but it was fun to play at not knowing, and good practice for when somepony inevitably asked her.
Point was, Uncle Fine was an unquestioned storytelling master, able to come up with witty and entertaining tales with little or even no prompting. She’d grown up on those stories, she loved them. And once – just once – she wanted to be the one to tell him a story. A good one, with wit and charm and adventure and romance and all the things that made a story truly good. Yet she couldn’t even finish a stupid short story. Every time that fact presented itself to her, she felt unworthy of calling herself his ‘Little Miss’.
She finally dared to glance up at him. The regret was immediate. The old stallion, normally so strong and confident, appeared at a loss for what to say or do. Her uncle should never look like that, and she should never be the reason. She promptly stood up straight and adjusted her bags. “I’m sorry. You’ve probably got important work to do for Princess Luna and I’m here whining. I’ll head back now.”
The confidence shot back into him. Moving with a fluidity that defied his middle age, he circled around and blocked her path to the stairs. “You only just got here, and the road back to Ponyville isn’t exactly short. Stick around, maybe we can figure something out.”
She stepped back, unable to look him in the eyes. “I don’t want to intrude…”
“She says after storming into my house and pushing paper in my face.”
Her pout earned her only a well-meaning grin. He ushered her, gently but firmly, into the nearby hallway at the center of the balcony. They paused before a seemingly plain, undecorated wall. Fine’s horn shined bright, and Keen could faintly hear the sound of objects moving behind the wood panelling. Then, with a faint click, part of the wall slid away, revealing a hidden room. This was by no means a surprise, as Keen had visited Uncle Fine’s private study plenty of times in the past. She could probably open the door herself if she just put her mind to it, but had never tried out of respect.
The study was a small, windowless room. Uncle Fine liked small, dark spaces. She was definitely more into sunlight and windows herself. The walls on both sides of the room were covered in floor-to-ceiling bookcases that were crammed so tightly with novels it was a wonder how they had been squeezed into place at all, with the exception of a cabinet space that Keen knew held notes, rough drafts, and Uncle Fine’s Foallitzers.
The back of the room was taken up entirely by a desk that was very neatly sorted and arranged. Just as she looked at it, a sheet of paper ‘popped’ into existence and floated, gently and precisely, down onto a small stack of similar such sheets. She didn’t know what they contained or who was sending them to him, but she did know it had something to do with his super secret work for Princess Luna and, thus, not anything she should inquire about. That had been very hard to accept five years ago.
Now all her attention was on the large stack of papers on the right. As she neared, she examined the sheets and knew quickly that they were the draft of a new book. The sheer size of it tugged a miserable moan from her throat. “I don’t understand how you do it.”
Uncle Fine’s horn sparked, and the papers on the left – Keen hadn’t bothered to even glance at them – slid into a cubbyhole of the desk, where a small door slammed closed. The papers stopped coming after that. “Keen, has it ever occurred to you that maybe writing stories just isn’t your forte?”
Flipping lethargically through the pages, she snorted and muttered, “At this point I’m confident it’s not. That shouldn’t stop me from trying.”
Settling at her side, he read the page she was on over her shoulder. At least, she assumed he was doing that. “So you’ve come to believe this isn’t what you should be doing, but you plan on doing it anyway.”
She didn’t want to explain it to him. It felt too personal, especially when he was a big part of why it was happening. When she finally succeeded, it needed to be a surprise. Which was an odd way of looking at it, considering her coming to him for help. But it was what it was. “If Twilight and Rainbow can do it, so can I.”
He chuckled. “I’d hardly call Twilight’s dragging on over unnecessary details good, and the less said about Rainbow’s pulpy-tropey self-inserts, the better.”
“That’s hardly encouraging,” she grumbled, dropping the pages onto the desk with a bit more force than necessary. A beat as his words struck. “You know, I understand exactly what you mean. I see the flaws in Twilight’s writing, it gets to be so… droning. And Rainbow’s story is fun but not what one might call ‘stimulating’. I get that. I understand it. How can I understand it but not be able to write for myself?”
He hummed, as was his wont when thinking. After a few seconds of this he used his magic to pull down a whiteboard that had been hidden in the ceiling. There were all sorts of scribbles and imagery depicted on it, but he wiped it clean before she could get more than a glance. Probably for the better, all things considered.
“Five years ago, we had a talk,” he declared, pulling out a series of markers from his desk. He kept the red one and offered her the rest. She picked the blue, though she wasn’t certain where he was going with this. “We established that you’re a ‘perfectionist writer’. Or, to put it in terms Lightning Dust could grasp, you think too much.”
Keen snorted. “I’d say I’m obligated to defend my mother, but alas, the statement is accurate in all regards.”
He grinned and pointed the red marker at her, but otherwise said nothing to her counter. Turning to the whiteboard, he continued, “What we need to do is break you out of your determined need to think things through. I propose a game.”
Settling on his desk cushion, she began poking dots on the whiteboard with her marker. Or rather, she poked the exact same spot again and again, an easy act of precision and a means of settling her nerves. “What kind of game?”
Gesturing to the board, he announced, “I am going to write a sentence. You then have ten seconds to start writing your own, otherwise I’ll write another one. Every sentence you write earns you a point. If you stop writing a sentence, I’ll jump in and finish it and you will be awarded no points.”
“Ten seconds?” She shook her head, twirling a lock of mane in one hoof. “How am I supposed to think of anything in ten seconds?”
“You’ll learn,” he replied smugly. A familiar, wicked smile slipped across his features. “Or else.”
The poking against the whiteboard ceased. Keen knew her uncle’s sense of humor. He was usually kind when aiming it at her, but something told her the gloves were coming off this time. It wasn’t a pleasant concept. “Or else what?”
“You will score at least twenty-five points. If you do…” He tapped his chin with the cap of his marker, blatantly drawing out her anxiety. She bristled in preparation. “...I’ll resist the temptation to start leaving out hints.”
“Hints?” That sounded just like him. It also sounded dangerous, but she swiftly put on a confident air, sitting tall and taking on a regal posture of indifference. “Hints. You mean to tell ponies about some dirty secret. Jokes on you, old stallion; I’m cleaner than Miss Rarity’s mane.”
“Oh, no doubt. No doubt.” He nodded, seemingly in complete agreement. She wasn’t fooled for an instant, and his returning grin confirmed her suspicions. “You don’t have to be dirty to have secrets. Secrets you think dear old Uncle Fine, traveling sneakpony nonpareil, somehow hasn’t discovered.”
Narrowing her eyes at him, she muttered, “You’re bluffing.”
Tap tap tap went the marker cap against Fine’s chin. His gaze was like that of a sphinx toying with its latest meal. “That boy at school. The one who you made friends with all those years ago. Green Daze, I think his name was? Yes. I must say, dear niece, your taste in stallions is curious. Not exactly brimming with muscle and confidence, is he?”
He knew? No, that wasn’t possible. He couldn’t know! She hadn’t told anypony. Not a soul! “I d-don’t see what he has to do with this.”
The marker floated up to the whiteboard and started writing, but Keen’s eyes were locked on Uncle Fine’s wicked smile. “Then you won’t mind losing, will you? Tick tock, Little Miss.”
She scored seventy-eight points that day and got an A+ on her short story assignment. It ended up being about a mansion haunted by a sneaky trickster ghost who should kindly butt out of other ponies' romantic non-lives.