Mind Over Matter

2 – Of Educational Endeavors

[There is a relieved sigh, followed by the clink of china on wood]

Now that was quite refreshing. There’s nothing quite like a cup of tea and some cucumber sandwiches to invigorate you.

Oh, right. Ahem. This is the audio journal of Sir Mind Cleaner, entry number one-and-one-half. I would call this entry number two, but this is more of an extension of my last recording. So, to pick up where I left off… Ah, yes. Miss Valencia Orange had just made her grand appearance. I was in the process of describing her cutie mark, which is a wheel of orange slices. Right, I think I remember now… Erm, no pun intended.

“You brought me here?” I had asked her, still trying to think of something other than how marvelous the painkillers felt.

“Why yes, I did,” she said matter-of-factly. “My name is Valencia Orange, co-owner of Orange Fruit Meadows. She trotted closer to my bed, allowing me to glimpse the very tall and thin pony standing behind her, dressed in a sharp suit. Noticing my awkward glance, she gestured with her hoof, and said, “Don’t worry, he’s as friendly as they come. Slender Ties is the family butler.”

“A pleasure, sir,” he said in a reedy voice.

“Now, if I may be so bold,” she continued, turning back to me. “What is your name?”

I faltered for a few moments, once again desperately trying to remember something about my former life. Did it start with a K? Maybe I had an embarrassingly stupid name that tormented me throughout my years as a child until I got into a fight with a bully and made a reputation for myself? Or maybe I was named after a famous figure in history… Good Lord, I hope my parents did not shame me by naming me after an athlete. After a few stuttered attempts at naming myself, the good doctor was kind enough to explain my amnesia to Mrs. Orange.

“How dreadful,” she said sympathetically. “You mean there is absolutely nothing at all that he can remember?”

I took the liberty of answering for myself that time. “Only trivial pieces,” I admitted honestly. “And it took me a few moments just to remember those.”

“That is terrible,” she sighed, shaking her head sadly. “I simply couldn’t imagine what it would be like to awaken in a strange place with no memory of what anything is.”

A thick silence fell upon us after that. There was really nothing more to say, I suppose. I couldn’t exactly remember any particularly amusing stories to tell her, and I was but a stranger to her. Even the doctor ran out of memory tricks soon enough.

Though he did ask one very important question.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but what are we to call you?” he asked, looking at his clipboard once more. “I can’t keep calling you ‘AP’ much longer.”

“AP?” I asked in confusion.

“It’s short for Anonymous Patient,” he clarified. “We use it to identify patients with, well, no identity. And it’s not very useful in cases such as these, when the patient in question has had their mind wiped clean of any memory.” He hesitated, before looking towards the door and whispering, “And there is still the matter of how you’re going to pay for all of this. The Chief of Medicine is not going to appreciate me doing non-profit work… again.”

That caused yet another heavy silence. I was sort of reeling in my mind, wondering how in blazes I could answer that. Bloody Hell, I didn’t even have a wallet on me!

… Or any of the bloodied clothes I was wearing previously, but that was beside the point.

“Well, I should think that’s obvious,” Mrs. Orange replied after a moment. “As it was I who brought him here, then I shall be the one to pay for his treatment.” As I opened my mouth to protest, she continued, saying, “And until you recover your memory, I insist that you stay with my husband and I at our home. Slender, when our guest is well enough, would you please escort him? I shudder to think of him alone on the streets.”

“Very well, madam,” he said simply.

And that was that. No amount of arguing I tried could sway her decision. To this day, I still can’t quite wrap my head around the amount of hospitality and generosity she showed me during my entire stay in Manehattan. Her husband, Mosley Orange, was just as kind to me, not even deterred in the slightest by my appearance. They gave me shelter, they clothed me, they fed me… And most importantly of all, they began to teach me of the world I would come to call home.

And it was here, that I accidentally acquired the name that I have today. It’s a funny story, but when Doctor Corpus was signing me out, he put “Mind wiped Clean” in the name segment by mistake. With his untidy scrawl that could only loosely be called writing, “clean” looked very close to “Cleaner”, and Valencia and Slender both thought that the name suited me.

So, I became Mind Cleaner, unknown amnesiac, and moved in with the Oranges.

Slender Ties became a sort of private tutor to me. He taught me of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, the rulers and guardians of Equestria, he taught me the very basics of each subject that he thought each pony should know. It is because of him that I became I proper gentleman. He showed me how to properly behave around others, which became a life saver whenever the Oranges held company.

I will admit, I was very uncomfortable at the idea of being a guest of the Oranges whenever others would arrive. They would always gawk at me in the most ludicrous fashion, unsure of what to make of me. But soon enough, with Slender’s teachings and Valencia’s kindness to guide me, I was able to safely work my way through the rigors of socializing with Manehattan’s upper class.

I think it would not be best to waste precious record time, so I shall only cover the most important aspects of my stay in Manehattan.

The first was my study in medicine. More specifically, medicine and procedures to treat the mind. I still had such a zeal to find out who I was, that I would spend hours upon hours at a time simply reading books at the Manehattan library. Each one I could find was filled with notes on psychology and sociology, but none of them held the answers to what I was looking for… at first. But as I continued to study them, I found myself fascinated with the very subject itself. How did the mind work? Why was it such an enigma to even the most well-versed of scientists and doctors?

Slender took an interest as well, pushing me to study those topics even more when he found out about my own fascination. He said it would help me build character, give me a specialty I could use to make a living for myself. He even arranged for me to be taught by Doctor Corpus officially, so I could earn an actual degree. Valencia and Mosley were both fully supportive of this as well.

And it was thanks to the three of them that I earned the first two of my titles: gentleman, and psychiatric professional. Yes, within two years, I had earned the right to practice my profession with flying colors (quite ironic, I know), though I had yet to find somewhere to actually practice it.

Now, the second important aspect was my first meeting with Miss Rarity Belle. You see, the Orange Family was to host a rather lavish and large party, even by their own high standards, but they wished to have a new ensemble to greet their guests with. As I understand it, they were to use this party in order to make a very lucrative deal with a shipping company to get their produce spread even further throughout Equestria. With that in mind, they commissioned a friend of their niece to visit Manehattan, and create said ensemble.

I still remember the flabbergasted look upon her face when the designer first laid eyes on me. [He chuckles to himself] If you can believe it, she actually turned to Mrs. Orange, and very seriously asked her why she owned a shaved diamond dog!

Of course, I should have been offended by the statement. But as it was, her expression and the way she kept glancing at me was so entertaining, that I burst out laughing on the spot, which caused the rest of the household to start laughing as well.

After this, I managed to explain everything to Miss Rarity, and she was pleasantly surprised by my demeanor. I treated her as any gentlepony ought to have, and she treated me with respect and dignity. It should go without saying at this point that we became fast friends; even more so when I told her how I had an instinct to wear clothes on a daily basis.

I still don’t quite understand why, but I always feel more comfortable wearing clothes. Maybe it’s the advantage of having pockets, and something to protect me from the elements in place of a fur coat? Ah well, another mystery for another time.

In any case, as I previously mentioned, I was having trouble finding a proper place to practice my profession (oh, a tongue twister! How marvelous, I must remember that one). When I mentioned this in a conversation with Miss Rarity while she was measuring me for a new vest, she told me of how Ponyville was in need of an actual therapist.

In fact, I believe her exact words were, “Oh, darling, Ponyville would be a perfect place for you to start then. Lovely town, very friendly ponies… and as I recall, the town’s therapist recently retired… And really, only one other pony is trying to attain the job, and she’s not very qualified.”

“Who would that be?” I remember asking.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to worry about that,” she had been quick to tell me. “She’s much more comfortable with magic, though, let’s just leave it at that.”

And now you see why I moved to Ponyville to begin with. After Rarity had left, I talked it over with the Oranges, and we made plans for my eventual move. This involved quite a large amount of paperwork, frustrated letters between myself and the mayor, and seven night’s worth of studying business law. To be honest, the last part was almost entirely useless, but it served to ease Mayor Mare’s mind.

That leaves us with the third most important event to take place. Personally, I believe it is the most important, because it may hold the key to my amnesia, and it is thanks to this that I am the successful psychotherapist that I am today.

This is quite bizarre, so I’d best start at how I discovered my unique talent precisely at the beginning.

It was three nights before I moved. I was filling out the last of the paperwork I needed to assure the medical professionals at Ponyville General Hospital that I had indeed earned a degree and the right to practice privately. The sheer amount of forms needed were starting to give me yet another headache, and I was getting extremely exhausted. My eyelids began drooping, the pounding in my head was similar to that of a buffalo stampede, and my patience was wearing thin.

This next part I remember very, very clearly.

I threw my pen onto my desk in sheer frustration, and began thinking to myself, “Why can’t you just fill in yourself and save me the trouble?”

And the moment I had those thoughts, my headache instantly began to fade away. I felt momentarily confused at the sudden relief, but wasn’t too concerned. After all, something that was bothering me had left. Why should I be worried because of it?

Except for the fact that when I looked at my forms, I noticed that the pen was moving by itself, writing out exactly what I had just thought. The more I watched it, the more I realized it hadn’t stopped; it was still writing out exactly what was going on inside of my head.

Needless to say, I had to throw away a few sheets of paper that had been filled with terrified curses and frantic attempts at logically explaining what was happening at the time. I began to calm down after a few minutes of this, and started trying to think of an explanation for what was happening. I still had a few books that the Oranges had given me for Hearth’s Warming last year, mostly on psychology. Maybe one of them held an answer?

A rather desperate thought, but you must understand, I had only seen unicorns do something like this. For almost two years, I’d been convinced that I had no magical qualities to me. Suddenly, I’m able to write what I’m thinking without so much as touching the pen. What else was I to think?

Well, as luck would have it, I actually found the answer… though, it was in a book that had been purchased as a joke more than anything. It was called, The Power of the Mind: Magic without Magic. It explained how non-Unicorns could use their minds to do things that magic users could, but I had initially scoffed at the idea. It just seemed far too ridiculous!

Yet according to the book, I had just done what was referred to as “Automatic writing”.  Essentially, what I had just done was use my mind to pick up the pen, and channel my thoughts through it, allowing the pen to almost instantly transfer them to words.

Another note I had taken during all of that was the fact that I called the book to myself mentally, using telekinesis. I was shocked, to say the least. I considered waking somepony up to show them this, to ask if they thought such a thing was possible.

But… I elected to keep it a secret, for the time being, at least until I was sure it wasn’t a one-time occurrence. For the rest of the night, however, I continued to practice whatever I could glean from that book, trying out everything.

And the most bizarre part of that entire experience was… just how comfortable I felt with it all. I know I acted frightened at first, but there was just something so… [He pauses for a few moments] exhilarating about it. I took such an enjoyment at using telekinesis to move books around my room, to pack and unpack my bags using nothing more than my mind. In the beginning, it proved to be quite a challenge to simply move a single piece of paper, or a pen for that matter. But as the night wore on, everything just started to… to come to me.

Eventually, Slender Ties was sent in to see what the ruckus I was inadvertently causing was, and accidentally took a pair of pants to the face.

Well, so much for secrets. I must have forgotten the fact that I’d told myself to keep it to myself, because I was giddily showing Slender just what I had learned to do with all the excitement of a filly gaining her cutie-mark. He had very much the same reaction I had at first: shock, then a sort of awe. When the Oranges woke up the next morning, they were very much surprised to see that Slender and I were busy playing a strange sort of tennis.

And by that, I mean he would lightly toss something at me, and I would try to catch it with my mind, then throw it back. I didn’t catch it all the time, though, which meant Slender got a small amount of compensation for earlier by smacking me in the face with a banana.

[There is another small chuckle]

I still don’t understand why I wanted to keep my psychic prowess secret from anyone in the first place. It’s served me immensely ever since then, and I’ve made my living off of it. So far, nopony has reacted in a negative way towards it (except for those who question my methods, but that’s for another time), and it hasn’t hurt me in anyway. I just get massive headaches whenever I try to push myself.

In any case, three days after that, I had my bags packed, and I was on the first train to Ponyville. I’m not sure I’ll ever be capable of forgetting that first day there, when I was met by the most excitable pony on the face of the planet, one Mis-

[A door opens in the background, interrupting Mind Cleaner, followed by low whispering]

Ah, is it four o’clock already? My word, how time flies. No, no, I haven’t forgotten our appointment, Miss Punch. Simply give me a moment to turn off this contr-

[The journal ends abruptly]

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