Outtake from "Winter Break" (Patreon)

I almost never do patron-only posts, but here's one.

This bit got chopped from the final story for two reasons: first, I figured out very quickly that I couldn't keep it and stay within the Jinglemas word count restrictions; and second, it didn't work out very well. (Did you know that hardly any of the locations named in MLP:FiM rhyme?)

But anyway, here is probably Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns' only non-unicorn faculty member, having a pity party for himself as Twilight Sparkle and Nyx look in...

* * * * * * * *

Nyx sighed and gave up. This was the fourth time they’d been around this argument, and if they went another round the words would be the same, as if written on the pages of a script. “Fine,” she said. “So where does this tour begin?”

“Well,” Twilight said, looking turning down the right hallway from the school’s massive foyer, “let’s begin with my favorite math teacher.” She knocked on the first classroom door and called out, “Professor Neigh? May we come in?”

“I suppose.”

With that less than enthusiastic invitation, Twilight opened the door and led Nyx into what looked like a very conventional classroom- slightly smaller than Cheerilee’s classroom, but Nyx reminded herself that aside from a tiny office and even tinier storeroom, that one classroom comprised the entire educational system of Ponyville. The desks were clean and empty, which was more than you could say for the chalkboards. There were eight of them surrounding the classroom, broken only by the corners of the walls, the door, and two windows. (One chalkboard blocked the middle window.) All of them had mind-bendingly complex equations in surprisingly small characters covering them to the point that in some places the functions threatened to overlap.

And at the teacher’s desk, slumped forward in apparent gloom and depression, sat a white-maned, gray-coated earth pony stallion wearing thick black-rimmed glasses and an aggressively beige cardigan. Everything about him screamed math teacher to Nyx, despite her extremely limited experience of teachers of any kind.

“Oh. Hello, Miss Sparkle.” Professor Neigh did not lift himself off his desk. “Or I suppose I should say, hello Princess Twilight. Please forgive me for not rising.” He followed this up with the kind of sigh carefully calculated to convey to an audience that someone is suffering and wants other people to appreciate the fact.

“Professor, what’s wrong?” Twilight asked. “Were you dismissed? I thought you had tenure!”

“No, no, I have a job for life here,” the professor said, waving this away. “Which is a good thing, because my career as an academic mathematician is utterly destroyed.”

“How did that happen?” Twilight asked.

“I was all set to publish,” Professor Neigh said. “An entire book. All about the analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean parameterizations of infinitely differentiable Rieponnian manifolds. It would have sold seven whole copies!”

Twilight’s eyes grew wide. “You really think so?” she asked.

The professor managed to nod without removing his chin from the desktop. “And that’s not counting library sales. It would have made my name in the mathematics world!” He sighed again. “I had it all laid out! It was so simple! And I only told two other people- Princess Celestia and a friend of mine from Neighpropetrovsk.”

“And this is important why?”

The professor rolled sideways enough to slip a hoof into a desk drawer and flip out a small book with a very thick library binding. “Because of this,” he said.

Twilight Sparkle looked at the cover. “The Eternal Triangle,” she read. “By Nickerlai Locochevskii.”

“It’s my work!” the professor wailed. “Not my actual proofs, they weren’t that blatant, but they might as well have been! All the steps, all the arguments, all the ideas are in there! It turned out my friend from Neighpropetrovsk told it to someone from Mareitania, who told it to someone in Saddle Arabia, who told it to someone in old Somnambula, who told it to someone in Farthest Reaches, who told it to-“

“I get the picture,” Twilight said, shaking her head. “But you could still publish your own work, couldn’t you?”

“WHAT??” This was enough to bring Professor Neigh to his hooves. “And be accused of plagiarism?” The shudder of horror that ran down his spine couldn’t possibly have been faked. “No, the only honorable thing to do is to find some flaw in his argument…” He slumped to the desktop and sighed again, the energy gone out of him. “In my arguments,” he almost wailed. “I have to destroy my own life’s work to save my honor. My career is over. There is nothing left to my life but calculating things like the cube root of 272.”

Twilight paused for one point three seconds. “6.47922360255,” she said. “Approximately.”

After a pause roughly three times as long, the professor said, “Correct. Very good, Miss Sparkle.”

Nyx shuffled on her hooves. “Um,” she said, not having wanted to interrupt things, “but is all of this supposed to make me want to attend the school?”

“It’s not always like this,” Twilight said quickly. “Usually mathematics is so calming, so orderly.”

“Oh, Miss Sparkle.” Professor Neigh chuckled a brief, bitter laugh. “How little you know about the cut-tack world of academic publishing.”

Though she was prone to miss subtle social hints, Twilight Sparkle could eventually determine when it was time to drop an unprofitable line of argument. “Well, I hope things improve for you,” Twilight said by way of a farewell. “But I do have one question: why were you limiting yourself to locally Euclidian parameters? Surely the potential of a more generalized theorem would be a greater step forward in geometry.”

“Because Euclidian parameters limit the options to a limited, though infinite, set of potential frames,” the professor said. “It’s harder to spot universal qualities across an unlimited set of infinite…” His voice trailed off, and his head lifted off the desk. “Er… I’m sorry, but could I trouble you to erase the chalkboards? I have some work to do.”

* * * * * * * *

Inspired by the fact that Tom Lehrer, who had previously thrown all his lyrics and original compositions into the public domain, this year also made all his recordings public domain. Thus, I wanted to have a reference to "Lobachevsky", Lehrer's satirical paean to the virtue of plagiarism. But, sadly, I couldn't get a song to congeal out of it, and with the word count limit I had to force myself to do without digressions from the main plot. Hope you enjoy anyway.