Cheerilee’s hoof stayed at the door. She knew that no one else would be home, of course, that Twilight would never be so careless as to draw up a schedule without thinking; her hooves shook on the handle nonetheless.
She tried to remember how long it was since the first time; the answer came to her as easily as her multiplication tables did.
One month.
Twenty-eight days for her to have mislearnt—for Twilight to have mistaught—more than she had in her twenty-eight years of pathetic experimentation, as though she were a witch-doctor being handed paracetamol.
It wasn’t just the Bovi-Equine languages, now; they had learnt languages simply to defile them. When that had turned too difficult—when the only languages left were so far away that it would take years to learn them— it was the Equestrian nomenclature of biology, of astronomy, of chemistry—
The door opened as she leaned on it, making her fall over onto her forehooves; she looked up just in time to see Twilight’s warm, smiling face.
“Just on time!” she said, her voice as friendly as one could imagine a voice could be, right before she leaned down and put her muzzle up against her ear, her voice turning considerably colder. “You could almost input Gravelham’s Function into Ackerpony’s Number and multiply an additive monoid precisely at your Cartesian coordinates in the time it’d have took you to open that door.”
—even of mathematics. She shuddered unnoticeably as Twilight turned around and went into the unusually dark library, silent; there was no need to say anything else. A few weeks ago, defiling the language of the purest science would have been too horrifying to contemplate; now it was nothing but a greeting.
She followed quickly. Twilight did not like to be kept waiting.
A slightly bubbling sort of sound came from behind her, and she turned around just in time to see the door shut, trapping them in darkness. There was a low scraping sound. She waited; Twilight knew best.
The lights suddenly came on, and the first thing she saw as the brightness cleared from her eyes were the wide eyes of a short, somewhat nervous blue colt sitting at a table that looked very much like one from a school.
“Miss Cheerilee?”
“Snips?” she asked, her eyes open wide. “Miss—Miss Twilight?”
A voice came from behind her. “You’re the teacher, not me,” Twilight’s voice said, and she glanced over to see her teacher scratching away at a spread scroll with a quill. “Teach.”
“He’s just a foal, M—” She stopped herself and shook her head. “He’s just a foal, Twilight, I can’t possibly—all we’ve done is play—”
“Don’t lie to me,” the voice said. Twilight’s horn was glowing, but nothing else was; Cheerilee couldn’t see her lips moving. “You want this. I’ve seen how you look at them, giving them their little lessons, seen how you’d make a ‘mistake’ and then never admit it—”
Snips looked to the sides somewhat uncomfortably. “Uh, Miss Cheerilee? Twilight said you had to tutor me because my grades were down or something, right?”
Twilight laid back casually in her chair, mouth as closed as before. “—enjoy your little gift, Miss Cheerilee. I hope you don’t have any more questions.”
She had plenty of questions, but all she saw as she looked back was the foal.
The first sentence came out without thinking.
“Yes,” she said, recalling Snips’ grades, “Yes, Snips. I’m here to tutor you.” She noted that Twilight, thoughtful as she was, had left a fairly comprehensive selection of the syllabus on the table. “You’ve fallen behind on—on foreign languages,” she said, smiling in a rather far-off manner as she fetched a familiar book from the table.
She philosophically detested the integration of foreign languages at the elementary level—it demeaned them all, Cheerilee thought, and then almost laughed out loud—but right then all she could think of were the possibilities.
“Let’s start,” she said, bringing the edition of Modern Languages of Equestria up to bear along with a fair amount of writing material. Her hooves trembled, and she took up a seat alongside the little, innocent little idiot of a foal. “I’ve got your scores, but what is it you feel you’re having trouble with?”
“Uh,” he began, putting a hoof up against his lower lip. “Windwards Griffonian. How do I tell the difference between tones and stuff?”
The question went through her like a bad simile; not the question itself, which had been asked several hundred times to her alone, but the knowledge that she held a foal’s entire comprehension of the facts of the world in her hoof.
She could say anything she wanted, and no Applebloom or Twist or any other one of those smart little ponies she loved and despised so deeply would ever correct her, and she knew that he would tell Snails and that moron would believe him wholeheartedly—
“Uh, Miss Cheerilee?” he said, waving a hoof before her glazed-over eyes. “You alright?”
“Oh,” she said, and giggled. “I’m just fine.”
Even as the words came from her mouth, she felt a considerable rush of shame. She had gotten caught up so deeply in the sheer depravity of her thoughts that she hadn’t stopped to consider their depravity.
She fought against herself, and felt something pushing against the edge of her consciousness, something that made her wonder if it wasn’t herself at all; she looked back pleadingly at Twilight’s lightly amused face, and a thought in Twilight’s voice came unbidden to her mind:
I might listen, the voice said, but your body won’t.
“Well, Snips,” she said, somewhat cautiously, “it’s easy to distinguish tones. Let me show you.” She bit down on a pencil and put it against the ruled paper.
She could stop now, and simply teach him the facts. Nothing was forcing her to lie; Twilight’s condemnation wouldn’t mean nearly as much to her as the community’s.
Her head moved forwards and drew a 天 tiān, the compact little strokes boxing it rather neatly; then she drew a 神 shén, then a 干 gàn, then a 鼠 shǔ.
The foal would never speak Windwards Griffon, Cheerilee reasoned; most of the Griffons outside of Griffonia proper would speak the Riverwards dialect. She would do him no disservice by miseducating him in it.
“Ooh!” he said, his voice filled with the spark of youthful vigour, “That’s, uh—the sun dries rats?”
The foal had some spark of intelligence in him, unlike Snails; she knew that even with his little lapses of judgement, he had the potential to master this language just as she had.
And something in Cheerilee wanted more than anything to crush it.
The horror of her thought struck her, and she shook her head in momentary terror; her heart felt like it had skipped a beat. She sat for a while, looking down at her hooves.
If she struck now, she might gain a little pleasure from it—that was a lie, because she knew that she would enjoy it more than she ever could possibly have enjoyed anything more in her life—but was it worth this foal’s mind? She could stop now, and nothing would happen to her. The tones were all different, and she could teach him easily; she had no doubt the foal would learn.
“Well,” she said, “it’s actually a traditional greeting.”
Snips’ eyes widened in surprise. “Really?” he said, the joy of discovery in his voice.
Cheerilee bit her lip slightly to stifle the gasp of perverse pleasure that ensued. It came far stronger than she’d expected, a certain rush as carnal as it was intellectual, and a sort of warmth came over her as her eyes rolled back very slightly.
This is a foal, she told herself, looking inconspicuously at him. A real, live foal, and I’m feeding him any old horseapples for milk and he’s believing it all.
“Uh, Miss Cheerilee? If you’re tired—”
“No, nothing’s wrong!” The look, she realised, was only inconspicuous as far as a schoolteacher looking silently at a foal asking a question might be called ‘inconspicuous’. “Nothing at all.” She put her hoof down upon the paper. “See, this sentence is special, because it has all the tones. The first one’s—”
“Tiān?” he said, in a particularly endearing squawk; he didn’t sound quite like a griffon, but it was close enough to make Cheerilee wonder.
A thought suddenly hit her.
Most of the griffons in Equestria spoke Riverwards; surely, then, it wouldn’t be too bad if she decided to give him a more modern education?
“No,” she said, “It’s tìn.” Her shudders were fairly constrained; she focused on the task at hand. “See, that’s called the arriving tone: tìn.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the departing tone?”
“Since a lot of griffons lived on the ground after the first war,” she said, relating a true fact, “they started saying that they ‘arrived’ by going down, and it carried over into the language!” she continued, doing her best impression of a depraved foal’s show announcer.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking rather unsure. “That sounds a little too soon to be something t’change a whole language around, right?”
A sudden nervousness came over her. At the very least, he hadn’t noticed the other, far more important distinction. “Now, Snips, don’t you trust your teacher?” she said, her smile showing a sliver of teeth. If she were in a cartoon, she reflected, she might be sweating.
He put his hoof up against his chin for a moment and then smiled, nodding. “Of course, Miss.”
The foal had accepted her authority without question; she hadn’t Twilight’s masterful self-control, and couldn’t help but let out a little groan of relieved pleasure. The foal barely seemed to notice, looking intently down at the characters.
“And this is sǎng,” she said, gently nasalising the un-nasalised syllable as she spoke and letting the sound catch in her throat on the upstroke. “That’s the level tone, because it maintains a constant pitch throughout. And this is gōn—yes, that sound exists in Windwards—and this is sú—”
—
“So, you see,” she said, “人 refers to ponies in particular. Sentient beings are 马人.”
“You sure it’s not the other way around?” Snips said quietly, copying the fact all the same.
Cheerilee acted as if she hadn’t heard him; he had been raising those weak objections for a few hours, now, but he seemed to know on some level that she simply knew more than him, that she was the mare and he was the little schoolfoal without the slightest clue.
It was a feeling of power the schoolteacher had only ever thought she had before, under the eyes of her fellow teachers and before the gaze of her brightest pupils, but in that little library with nothing to judge her she could do anything.
It was intoxicating.
“And that’s all we have for today,” she said, smiling warmly. The clock on the wall read nine. “Do you have any questions?”
“Not any more, Miss Cheerilee,” the colt said, his face brightening quite suddenly as he gathered up his notes; even if he was wrong, he had learnt. “Is it okay if I share my notes with Snails? He’s been having a little trouble with his Griffon too.”
“Of course, Snips.”
She smiled as he went, and waited until she could hear the door close behind her before she let out a long, deep moan, her eyes closing shut in utter ecstasy. She stayed like that for almost a minute, the pressure lifting from her like a flood.
“The Riverwards was a nice touch.”
Then she remembered that there was something to judge her after all, and as the pleasure wore off it was replaced by a rather permeating numbness.
She looked around to see Twilight looking rather impassively at her, her horn enveloping the papers in purple light; they disappeared with a flash.
Cheerilee gave her a weak look, as though uncomprehending. Then she shook her head slightly. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said, quietly. “I never thought—”
“You never thought,” she said, a small smile appearing on her face, “that you’d eventually get to do what you’ve always wanted?”
The schoolteacher coughed into her hoof. She couldn’t focus very well. “I—I think I went too far,” she said, shaking her head gently. Her chest felt tight; perhaps she was feeling regret, but she knew the amount of damage she had done was far beyond the point of regret.
“You enjoyed it, though, didn’t you?”
She looked down at her forehooves for a little while, then up at her.
“I did,” she said, “but I don’t think I want to enjoy it again.”
“So,” Twilight said, her voice level, “you want to go back to how it was before? Just mispronunciations and misconjugations and malapropisms and faux amis?”
There was a bit of a silence before Cheerilee spoke again.
“Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.”
“That’s too bad,” Twilight said, shrugging, “because tomorrow, we’re going to work together. You really gave me a few pointers, you know. Very inspiring.”
“Twilight,” she said, “Miss Twilight, please. I know I can’t make up for it, but I won’t do it again.” She stood. “I’ve got to go. I’m not going to do this another time; I’m sorry.”
She began to walk towards the door.
“Just so you know, Miss Cheerilee, we’re no longer equal in this relationship.”
She stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember when I told you we had the same to lose?”
Cheerilee nodded slowly.
Twilight shrugged again. “We don’t have the same to lose any more.” She leaned forwards a bit. Cheerilee didn’t look her in the eye. “The magical transcripts are somewhere you’ll never need to go.”
“We’re both at fault here,” she said, a sort of dread creeping into her voice. “You brought Snips here and you watched me. You encouraged me.”
“I don’t know Griffonian, do I?” she said, her mouth closing itself for her next sentence as her horn glowed. And it’s a shame there’s no way to record telepathy.
Cheerilee had a thousand objections, but she knew that Twilight had covered every base. A certain sort of serenity came over her.
Her returning voice was expressionless. “What exactly do you want to do?”
“Why,” she said, “we’re going to make sure that every single one of your students gets some one-on-one time, won’t we?”
“Who’s next?”
Twilight grinned.
“Sweetie Belle.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But she guessed that she might as well enjoy it.