>In front of Cheerilee, the Hu'mun is gesticulating.
>Her eyes dutifully track his motions, flickering between his "hand" motions and the incomprehensible figures on his chalkboard in the proper manner, but her gaze does not.
>It is, Twilight remarks to herself, a quite peculiar fashion by which Cheerilee looks, as though there is something singularly entrancing, demanding ceaseless attention, yet simultaneously at the edge of the horizon and barely detectable by mere vision.
>The tome of alleged alien knowledge, supposedly containing the collected and consolidated works of many of the Hu'mun's finest "mathematicians" (though it seems more and more likely she had simply misheard "madmen") slows to a rest in its owner's grasp.
>A question has apparently been asked of the Equine assemblage, as though one of the collected members might present their own comprehension of the lesson and, an assumed class-wide understanding of the material confirmed, allow the Hu'mun to continue.
>Such a synthesis is, of course, not forthcoming.
>Twilight scans the room, locking eyes with surprisingly few others, Cheerilee excluded, with most too preoccupied with frenetically scribbling the shapes and symbols, the rest searching for something more comprehensible in the familiar and altogether more meaningful shapes of the terrain outside the classroom windows.
>The Hu'mun clears his throat but after an uncomfortably long pause, finally realizes that there is no answer to be found from the class.
>With a sharp motion, the tome is closed and pinned to his body by an arm, and he makes to trade seats with Cheerilee.
>She does not rouse, though by this time a majority of the students have begun to realize the lecture has ended.
>Seeing that the so-called schoolmarm is in no condition to stop them, and lacking any other immediate authority figure to reimpose oneself upon their actions, they flee as though a single body, pouring from the schoolhouse with a mixture of joyous cries, groans of relief, and no small amount of stumbling.
>As Twilight makes for the only remaining pony in the room, the Hu'mun exits without a word, leaving the two alone.

>Your name is Cheerilee, you suppose, though even that proves difficult to dredge from the unfathomable waves of thought which assault your mind.
>You slowly come to realize that there is another pony in the room with you, trying to draw your attention, though such an act is pointless, the amorphous concepts you contemplate now etched indelibly not into a mere physical object such as a slate or chalkboard, but your very psyche itself.
>Integers are far more intriguing, and the lavender mare is ignored.
>Names, patterns, phrases for things which previously, having lacked categorization, had also escaped your notice did so no longer.
>And these newly-named things, in being for the first time, seemingly now noticed you, and turned their tenebrous attention upon you as though a pony would a particularly irritating gnat.
>Unable to hide in the vast and flat plains of your own understanding, the entity which previously titled itself Cheerilee was being crushed by concepts entirely foreign to any previous Equine mind.
>If there were more integers than "many", if indeed as claimed an unlimited amount of integers, then one could busy oneself with counting from birth to death and never reach the end.
>And if there really were such procedures as detailed in that alien and inequine Tome, mathematical rituals to transmute truths about the world into "real numbers" and those selfsame "real numbers" back into truths about the world?
>To count the hoofsteps around the schoolhouse and then effortlessly, as if by magic, so determine the number of hooves which might fit inside?
>There was at once a slithering sense of horror, a feeling that down this path one trots lies a concept, something which is best left buried and unconcieved, and that to unearth it into one's consciousness would instantly damn Cheerilee to a fate worse than death, but strain as she might, she could not wrench her thoughts from the tracks they were even now careening down.
>The accursed seed had been planted, and found Cheerilee's mind and soul a fertile soil.
>The rituals revealed themselves, demonstrating the ease with which one could determine the number of stones a well would take to fill, the number of shingles a barn would need, the speed and size of a river at every point on its journey from mountaintop to ocean.
>Mathematics more complex striding forth from the fog, for infallibly discovering those numbers hiding in the limits of eternity, the edges along endless curves in an impossible plane where there is never quite nothing.
>One could derive, through calculations, all things, from the paths which the celestial and lunar bodies were truly fixed upon, to indeed even the final violent fate of those bodies.
>And as the Stygian knowledge fully blooms, spreading like a fungus through the cryptlike passageways of thoughts and fears, the contradictions in these numbers reveal their hideous and final truth, the composition of reality itself.
>Tears are at once streaming down a face, a hitching laughter emerging, interrupting a maddened voice which seemingly comes from nowhere at all.
"We're not real. We're just numbers."