1.
Like most disasters, Mayor Mayor Mayor started out by being born.
Mayor Mayor Mayor probably didn't deserve the flack she got for being born. If it'd been up to her she would've avoided the whole messy affair and just never bothered existing in the first place. Such was the early life of Mayor Mayor, everyone in her extended family (excepting her father, who never resented anything) resented her for being born in the first place. But really, who could blame them? Mayor Mayor didn't.
In the first place, it really wasn't a fair trade. Unlike her mother, at first Mayor Mayor couldn't talk, or walk, or even reason. She needed tending to and fed, and worst, cleaned. She made messes of the most odious and horrible variety. Her mother could've done all those things for herself and more, and would have cared for Mayor Mayor herself if she hadn't been permanently excused by Mayor Mayor. Instead it fell to Mayor Mayor's uncles and aunts and cousins to care for the child.
Most heinous of her crimes was that she forced them to put up with Mayor Mayor's father. Mayor Mayor's father was a nutter, professionally. He raised trees for nuts. He was also a complete lunatic: a unicorn who believed he could farm as well as any earth pony when his cutie mark displayed sheets of legal tax forms. He also named Mayor Mayor, after discerning with a keen and mad eye that the name of a pony often corresponded to their lot in life.
"Who knows? You could even be the Mayor of Canterlot!" Mayor Mayor's father told her, when she had complained of not yet having her cutie mark. He concluded the obvious: The reason she didn't have her cutie mark was that she hadn't tried Mayoring yet.
"Just remember, you're just as good as any unicorn, just as any unicorn is just as good as any earth pony!"
Mayor Mayor Mayor's father's name was Quill Filing, but that didn't put him off the business of farming nuts. The only time Mayor Mayor Mayor's father's business actually turned a profit was after Mayor Mayor was born. The surge of magic caused by the newborn earth pony caused the nuts to grow massive and break the limbs of the trees they hung from. Such nuts were a delicacy to dragons, and were quickly sold on the open market. For the most part though, they survived off the grass of the land, and the charity of their relatives and neighbors, and most of all almonds. Lots and lots of almonds.
"You can do anything you put your mind to! The only limit is your imagination!" Mayor Mayor's father told her, as he shook some nuts down from a tree. For a long time, Mayor Mayor managed to fool herself into believing this madness.
After Mayor Mayor was old enough to work the almond farm and go to school, her extended family moved out of Ponyville with no forwarding address. About that time was when Mayor Mayor began to think about what she wanted to do with her life.
"Mayor of Canterlot?" Her teacher guffawed. "There is no Mayor of Canterlot. The entire city is controlled by Princess Celestia herself."
Mayor Mayor looked down in shame.
2.
Mayor Mayor Mayor didn't want to be disaster, or even a mayor! She definitely didn't want to be an almond farmer. What Mayor Mayor really wanted to be was a librarian. Her dream was to be the head librarian of the royal library of Canterlot. Often she would imagine herself pawing through the ratted scrolls and ancient tomes of knowledge, only to be whisked away by some long forgotten spell to a land more exotic and interesting then boring old Equestria.
"What?!" Said her father, when she told him that's what she wanted to do with her life.
"What?!" Said the her teacher, who'd already appointed Mayor Mayor to be class president, as well as adjusted the curriculum to include more civics lessons.
"What?!" Said the pony who was interviewing her for the position of Canterlot Royal Librarian. "You're an Earth Pony?"
"What!?" Said Mayor Mayor, who had applied to the job under the name of Scroll Binding. It'd never occurred to her that this might be a problem.
Mayor Mayor decided to become a librarian on account of the local Ponyville library had been the only place she could reliably get away from her father and her classmates. No one ever wanted to go to the damp dilapidated hut that served as Ponyville's library but the Librarian, an old mare who was hard of hearing, and Mayor Mayor.
Her classmates resented her for being named Mayor Mayor, and the fact that she was appointed to class presidency without an election. Mayor Mayor never wanted to be class president, and in fact hated the job, which mostly involved doing boring, menial chores for the teacher. They mostly resented that she was destined for the greatness of mayoralty while they all had farming cutie marks.
Several of her classmates did in fact go on to be Mayors in other, better country towns, spurred by their distaste of Mayor Mayor and the increased civics curriculum, as well as their natural knowledge of farming. All of them went on to be successful Mayors of minor note in their town's histories, unlike the disaster Mayor Mayor would inevitably become.
Her classmates also hated Mayor Mayor because Mayor Mayor's father was a nutter and a lunatic, who gave them free almonds when picking up Mayor Mayor from school. The first time it'd been a pleasant surprise. By the five hundredth time everyone in the school was sick to death of almonds, Mayor Mayor's father, and Mayor Mayor.
"Almonds suck, and so do you." One colt put it succinctly.
Mayor Mayor tried to explain that she also hated almonds, but none of her classmates believed her on account of their natural distrust of politicians.
"It's just a campaign promise. She'll start shoving almonds off on us again as soon as she becomes class president again."
After a while, Mayor Mayor succeeded in convincing her father to let her bring the nuts with her to class in the morning. Then she began dumping them in the Ponyville stream, resulting in her popularity to also start plummeting among the fish. Her popularity amongst her peers was unaffected.
Since Mayor Mayor hated her school life and her home life, she found the library a natural retreat. Since she had nothing else to excel in, she excelled in school. She graduated with honors and after a lot of needling and more then a few tears, managed to convince her father to enroll her in a correspondence courses for a degree in library sciences. She'd successfully earned her masters through the correspondence courses, and even gotten her cutie mark handling spell scrolls while volunteering at the Ponyville library. Everything seemed to point to a bright future as a librarian.
Which is why Mayor Mayor was now trying to salvage her bright future before it could even begin. A creeping sense of unreality seeped over her as she stared at the interviewer, who still had the gall to stare at Mayor Mayor with a look of incredulity. It was as though the interviewer thought Mayor Mayor was being the absurd one, which was in itself absurd.
"You're an earth pony!" Mayor Mayor said.
The interviewer was indeed an earth pony, female, with mint green fur and long, luxurious purple hair. The beauty, however, was marred by the scowl she gave Mayor Mayor from behind her desk. It was like she was looking down at the mare, even though they were about the same height.
"It's different. I'm an Administrative Assistant. You're applying to be a Librarian."
The name on her desk said Wintergreen, but the mare never bothered to introduce herself. Her last name was indeed Wintergreen, and she didn't like being an administrative assistant, and she didn't like Mayor Mayor much either. She liked sweet things and socks and not much else. Very few ponies liked Wintergreen, but she was alright with that, she didn't like most ponies. So long as they didn't become problems, Wintergreen was content to leave most ponies alone. She was pretty sure Mayor Mayor was going to be a problem.
By now, Mayor Mayor had worked up the will to be indignant. She sat down in front of the desk, not willing to move until she got the interview she felt she deserved. "I am a very capable Librarian with good credentials and plenty of experience. I can manage a library as well as any unicorn or pegasus. I will bring this to Celestia herself if I have too."
Mayor Mayor was bluffing on that last part, she wasn't sure how long she could afford to stay in the city. No doubt the wait list to appear in court before Celestia was longer then she could manage, but everything was riding on this job.
Wintergreen was undisturbed. In fact, a slight smile ticked at her lips. "Can you cast Dispel?"
"What?"
"I said, can you cast dispel? I know of at least one earth pony who's natural ability is an anti-magic field. He could get a job here, pretty easy. So, Ms... Binding was it? Does your cutie mark imply the ability to close spell scrolls before they can be used?"
Mayor Mayor didn't know what to think of this. While the possibility of lying occurred to her, she was pretty sure that the other mare would force her to demonstrate the talent. Mayor Mayor spluttered. "No. I-"
Wintergreen raised a hoof to silence the mare. "Now, suppose a foolish unicorn student picks out to read, I don't know, the incantation to summon Erebus, or cast greater firestorm, or open gate to Tartarus, what would you do?"
"W-well, um, I'd make sure that they couldn't even get access to those kind of scrolls!" Mayor Mayor managed.
It was at this that Wintergreen smiled, a hidden glee coming to fruition. "Are you really suggesting that we don't allow people to read things... at a library?"
Mayor Mayor felt red hot frustration flow into her cheeks. "There's no reason the average pony would need those kind of scrolls!"
"Are you sure? I mean, what if a pony really needs to talk to Erebus, in order to, say, complete a thesis, or prevent some disaster, or merely to have a friendly chat?"
"Then perhaps something could be arranged, if they had good reason-"
"As judged by you? Is that what Scroll Binding means? Are you going to bind shut all the scrolls of equestria?" Wintergreen laughed. "Suppose someone did convince you that they had good reason, the fate of equestria or something silly like that, and then things got out of hand? What would you do then?"
"I'm not a wizard!"
"Exactly."
The room lapsed into silence. Wintergreen continued to smile, a hint of triumph infiltrating it's malice. Mayor Mayor's mind was preoccupied with the notion of her dream, the little story in her head she'd told herself since she was little. It was as if someone committed the dream to paper, enclosed it in a tome, canonized it, and then here was this Wintergreen who was tearing out the pages and declaring it to be the sloppy romance fiction it really was. "So. There's no way that I, as an earth pony, can become a Librarian. In Canterlot."
"No."
"Are there any openings for any other positions. More-" Ugh, the words felt distasteful on Mayor Mayor's lips."-Administrative Assistants?"
"Full up at the moment." Wintergreen's smile had gone from menacing to false cheer, the kind of smile one wore during route, routine business meetings. She'd won already. "We will accept future applications, feel free to try again at a later date."
The rest of the exchange was a blur to Mayor Mayor. Things must have been said, but they existed as individual flashes in Mayor Mayor's memory, like a photo album that had been jumbled up so that there was no story, no continuity behind the rapid fire images of people and places. There was her shouting, or was it pleading? The desk. Her hooves on the desk. The green mare shoving her towards the exit.
All that Mayor Mayor could recall with clarity was the horrible, empty, cheerful smile of Wintergreen as she ushered Mayor Mayor outside the office, perfectly content with the crushing of the other mares dream.
"Don't come back," Wintergreen said, and slammed the door to the office shut behind her.
Mayor Mayor applied for most of the libraries in the towns surrounding Canterlot before her bits finally ran out. Most of them had heard what she'd done on the interview, and as such turned her down. Mayor Mayor suspected Wintergreen had made certain that they knew. They wouldn't tell Mayor Mayor what'd she'd done so wrong, even when she'd asked, even though she suspected she already knew the answer. She could try again in Manehatten or Fillydelphia, but she would have to save some more bits first, but most of all, she'd wanted to be a Canterlot Librarian.
Dejected and defeated, Mayor Mayor returned to Ponyville to become the Librarian there, because nobody else wanted the job.