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// Chapter 8 - Bicyclette 
// Story: Cheerilee's Normal Day 
// by PseudoBob Delightus 
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And that combination of sights was enough to push Cheerilee over the edge. She snapped out of the fog of her exhaustion, her mind sharpened by sudden anger.

“How is that the Cutie Mark Crusaders being ‘alright’? Or even ‘a little worse for wear’?” 

She jabbed a hoof up at the image of the three fillies in the roiling darkness of the dreamworld, then at the literally infinite scroll Discord was holding in his claw.

“And while my students are suffering, you’re still making your silly little prop jokes?”

Discord blinked rapidly behind his fake reading glasses in mock offense.

“My dear, this is hardly a ‘silly little prop joke’. It’s called a bit, and I’m using it to underscore just how serious–”

“I know what a bit is!” she screamed, putting every ounce of frayed nerve into it. “It’s all a bit to you, isn’t it? A game where you just watch us ponies run around trying to fix it while holding back as long as you can as everything gets worse. Just to what? Entertain yourself?” 

Discord didn’t respond right away, only narrowing his eyes in silence. In a poof, gone were the scroll, the reading glasses, the safety vest, and the hardhat.

“So, Miss Cheerilee. Just what was it that you and Twilight discovered in the library?”

Before Cheerliee could reply, Twilight did so for her.

“According to Heir Apparent, whatever it was that infected that changeling, there is no known cure. It’s a disease of pure darkness, and childlike wonder keeps it at bay.”

“Precisely. Childlike wonder.” 

Discord smiled, but not at all pleasantly.

“Trust me, my dear, you do not want me to interfere in this any more or any differently than I already have.” 

“We don’t have time for this anyway, Cheerilee.” 

Twilight sounded as tired as the dark circles under her eyes would suggest. Her horn glowed,  and without warning, Cheerilee suddenly began to see another field of vision layered on top of her own. One that she took a second to realize was of herself, standing in the same spot where the image of Twilight was in front of her.

“Since Luna won’t wake up, we don’t have a choice anymore. I’m going to have to go in there and deal with this myself. We still don’t know exactly what it is that you did that managed to eradicate it that time, so I linked our sensoriums together. As long as we’re talking aloud we should be able to hear each other, and if you see or hear anything that seems important on my end you can tell me.“

All Cheerilee could do was nod silently, her mind still trying to integrate the two overlapping streams of sight and sound.

“Now, Shiny.”

Cheerilee saw both Twilight turning to her brother and the face of her brother, still massaging his head from the teleport.

“Think back to the day you taught me to fly a kite, okay?”

Shining Armor nodded, and both their horns glowed. A physical portal to the dreamworld began to open up between them, knit together by the power of an overlapping childhood memory. 

Cheerilee could feel Twilight’s lips pull back in a satisfied smile as she took a second to admire the result of another spell well done. She could feel Twilight’s brow furrow in confusion for a second, then go up in shock as she saw her own body leap in front of her and into the portal first.

And of all the things to be thinking about at that moment, all Cheerilee could think about was what she would say if someone asked her why she did it. 

There were plenty of reasons, of course. 

It made no sense to send the newly-crowned Queen of Equestria personally to face something so unknown and dangerous, and risk taking away an entire nation’s new leader before her reign even truly began.

This whole incident started in Cheerilee’s classroom, so the ultimate responsibility to her beloved students could only fall on her withers.

As a mortal pony that helplessly watched her world fill up with deities and monsters and face destruction about once a year, this was her best and only chance to do something about at least one of these things for once.

But she wasn’t thinking of any of that. Not really.

She thought about how Queen Twilight, who reflexively used “everycreature” when addressing crowds and called Equestria a “kingdom”, just as reflexively misquoted Heir Apparent’s words. She had written that “coltlike wonder” kept the disease at bay, not “childlike wonder”.

In modern Equestria, the two phrases were synonymous, but Cheerilee had majored in Early Middle Ponish back in university, and knew that they would not have been to Heir Apparent.

To have in front of you an entire life of happily doing what your cutie mark told you, as a perfectly-slotted gear in the millworks of your society. To have a society built around keeping that life perfectly innocent of the yoke of responsibility, the roil of complex emotion, the weight of power, the pain of ever growing up. That was coltlike wonder, in the world of Heir Apparent.

That was the world that this darkness had existed in last.