"I apologize for derailing your educational outing," I said to Cheerilee while the colts and fillies chattered with each other about the new, expanded CMC.

The cherry-colored pony smiled wryly. "Oh, I wouldn't say that," she said. "It's proving quite educational... though not in the ways I expected."

Twilight sidled up to me. "And I apologize for poking you in the keester," I muttered to her. "Sorry."

"Apology accepted," she muttered back. "Clever manipulation there, buster. Got them to reconsider the whole Cutie Mark thing from another angle....I liked the analogy about the participation ribbon. And I've been worrying what would happen when one of them finally got their mark...."

"So have most bronies," I confessed. "Just thought I'd take a chance at heading off a problem in advance..."

"---and got them to start reaching out to their friends outside their inner circle," she added. "Very nice. Though I don't think Rarity or Applejack will be thanking you any time soon..."

"Can't please everyone I'm afraid," I said fatalistically. I wasn't particularly surprised at her observations. Contrary to what impressions the first couple of seasons might have made, Twilight does have a keen eye for this sort of thing. She is, after all, doing in-depth studies in Friendship, so this sort of social shuffling is actually an open book for her. At least when she's observing impartially---- no guarantees how things will go when she's right in the thick of it.

I rapped my cane for attention. The foals quieted down. "Not to interrupt anyone, but I think we ought to get back on track," I said. "Before we continue I would like to ask a couple of cutie mark related questions, myself. First off, while we're talking about Cutie Marks, I'd like to get to know you all just a LITTLE better. Because that's an excuse for me to sit here and rest another minute or two." A few of them laughed. "So I'd like to ask each of you what your cutie mark means. Truffles? Would you go first."

The pudgy grey pony shuffled his hooves. "I got it helping my dad cook at his restaurant," he said shyly. "I'm a real good taste-tester."

"I bet he is," Silver Spoon snarked. Several ponies giggled.

"he ith," Twist rallied to his defense. "He helpth me when I make candy. He can even tell how much peppermint I uthe in my peppermint thtickth."

Truffles smiled and blushed. "One day I guessed all the ingredients my dad used in his spinach casserole, even the spices. He was real surprised, and proud of me! and---" he pointed to the fork and knife on his flank. "There it was."

"Interesting," I said. "A very useful talent for a chef or a food critic... Okay, how about you, Featherweight?"

The skinny little fellow shrugged.  "Nothing much," he said. "I can just hover real well." He demonstrated by lifting off and hanging suspended in the air, his wings barely moving.

"I bet you could stay airborne longer than any other pegasus in Ponyville," I said. "Useful for long range flights, or for aerial recon--- that's taking photographs from the air," I explained. "Now how about you, Archer?"

Archer didn't say a word. She just grinned and pulled three pebbles out of her saddlebag. The first she spit into the air. The second she dropped and kicked with her forehoof. the third she flipped straight up, spun around, and kicked with her back hoof, sighting over her shoulder. All three sailed through the air towards a trashcan a fair distance away--- and landed in a discarded paper cup next to it, one, two, three.

She got a round of applause from everyone, myself included. "Now that's some fancy shootin'," Applejack exclaimed.

"I figured it was something like that," I said. "Now for one that bronies have all wondered about--- Snips?"

"Oh, that's easy. Uh, got a piece of paper or sumpin'?" Snips asked. I pulled a sheet of paper out of my shoulder bag and held it up by the corners. "Will this do?" I asked.

"Perfect," Snips said. Before I could move he stepped forward and ran the tip of his horn down the middle of the paper. There was a sound like a razor sliding through silk, and the paper held between my fingertips split apart, cut as neatly as if it had been sliced by a scalpel.

        "yyyeeeK!" I said. Not my most eloquent commentary, but heartfelt.

"Pretty neat, huh?" Snips said proudly as I carefully set the sliced paper aside. "I can do it with cloth, paper, wood, glass--- anything, so long as it isn't too thick. And look---" He twisted his head back and ran his horn through his fur. Cut hair sifted down, and instantly he had a baby-smooth bald patch on his right rear flank the size of my hand.

....He paused for a moment and regarded his own half-shaved behind. "I probably shouldn't have done that, should I?" he said dolefully.

"No, probably not," I said. " It's okay, Snips. Just.. slide your saddlebag back to cover the bald patch." The others laughed as he shuffled back in the crowd, trying to cover his pink rump. "Okay, how about you, Snails? What does your cutie mark mean?"

The lanky colt looked embarrassed and hung his head, his ears drooping. Diamond Tiara clearly could not resist. "As if it weren't obvious....." she drawled. Sad to say, more than one foal laughed. Snails' head drooped a little lower.

I heartily wished I had learned "The Stare" from Fluttershy, but I had not. I had to resort to the old standby: sitting perfectly still and not saying a word. It worked though... the ones laughing fell silent. I let the quiet stretch on for an awkward second, doing my best to radiate I am displeased with you from my very pores. I admit I am uncertain whether the message got across, or whether the colts and fillies were confused into silence because the Space Alien looked like he had gas.

        I had Truffles fetch me another glass of water and took a sip. I finally spoke. "Go on, Snails, what is your special talent."

The colt shrugged. "Ah dunno...." he said.

"You don't know?" I asked. He shook his head. I saw the adults looking at each other, some surprised, some knowingly. "Okay, then," I persisted, "What were you doing when you got your cutie mark?"

Snails shrugged again. "Out in the yard," he drawled. "Lookin' at snails and thinkin'."

"Thinking about what?" Snails mumbled something. "Come again?"

          Snails took a deep breath, and with the air of someone who'd told this story FAR too many times, said "Numbers."

I blinked. "Okayyyyy. What numbers?" I'd meant to say "what about numbers?" and started to correct myself.... but then he began to recite.

"one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen..."

Snips nudged his pal. "Geez, Snails, you're counting wrong again!" The other colts laughed.

Me, I did a rather marvelous spit take.

"Twilight... board please?" She resummoned the aetherial chalkboard. I noticed from the corner of my eye that she looked as shocked as I felt...."Can you put a grid on it this time.... thank you." I traced the grid and drew a square with the number 1 inside. And began reciting aloud as I drew another above it, with a number 1 inside. then one to the right of the first two, four times as large....

"One, One, Two, Three, Five, Eight, Thirteen, Next number, Snails?"

"Twenty one," Snails said without hesitation. "then thirty four, then Fifty Five..."

"Okay, that's enough," I said. "Colts and fillies, this is a very specific sequence of numbers. Can anyone here, other than Twilight or Snails, tell me what the pattern is?"

There was a pause, then Rainbow Dash spoke up. "Oh, I get it! Each of the numbers is equal to the sum of the two before it! Hah." She looked at the others. "What? I'm good at solving puzzles..."

"Known as the Fibonacci sequence on Earth." I ran a curve through the boxes, connecting the corners in a rapidly widening spiral. "Which, as you see, when laid out as squares, forms one of the most fundamental patterns found in nature.... The Fibonacci spiral." I tossed the chalk in the air and caught it in one hand. " The sequence and the spiral are both found everywhere--- in growth patterns, sunflowers, rose petals, the branching sequence of plants, seashells--- or the shell of the common garden snail."

Everyone was now staring at Snails, who looked remarkably cheerier. "Fibonacci? Is that what they're called? I always called them the Snail numbers."

I decided to yank everyone's crank another turn. "Another property of the fibonacci sequence," I said, turning back to the board and drawing a line segment, "is that the further along it goes, the closer it gets to another number..... a particular ratio." I wrote A/B=A+B/A on the board under the divided line. "that number is called the Golden Ratio, or phi." I drew the symbol on the board. "A ratio is a comparison of two things. Like, say, if Pinkie wanted to bake a cake, and the recipe called for one cup of sugar to five cups of flour, and she wanted to make the cake WAAAAAAY bigger---"

"Which I would," Pinkie said confidently.

"No matter how big she made it, it would have to be one cup of sugar for every five cups of flour... or 1/5. That's the ratio of sugar to flour. Now the golden ratio, if your first line segment, B, is 1, is...." I paused and grinned. "Snails? Think you can solve this one?"

"Uhhhh, one point six one eight......." he stopped. "Uhh, Mister Arthur, it sorta goes on and on... I'm not sure how long..I've gotten to fifteen places, but....."

"That's okay, Snails, it does go on forever." Dear God, the colt had figured out phi to fifteen decimal places in his head.

"Just like PI!" he said. "..... I like Pi."

"Just like Pi, yes." I nearly giggled like a schoolgirl when he said that. "Phi is another number that crops up nearly everywhere. It was also regarded by the ancients on Earth as the most artistically perfect ratio. They built their temples based on Golden rectangles---" I drew one on the board--" and the proportions of their pictures and statues were based on it... which, coincidentally, is pretty close to many of the proportions of the human body." I showed them my hand and measured off the distance between the knuckles.

Snips stared at his best friend like he'd sprouted a pair of alicorn wings. "Dude," he said. "Why didn't you tell me you knew all this cool stuff?" He paused. "And why do you keep getting such bad grades at math?"

"Yes, indeed!" Cheerilee blurted out. She blushed (an interesting effect on a pony the color of dark cherries.) "Oh sweetie," she said to Snails,  "I didn't mean to sound like that, but---" she looked at me. "This is very confusing...."

I felt an itching suspicion in the back of my head. "You wouldn't happen to have some of Snails' homework with you, would you?" I asked her.

"As a matter of fact, I do," she said. " I finished grading it and I was going to give it back to them at the end of the day.... I'm afraid he got an F," she stage whispered to me as I took the paper from her mouth. "he does good enough, on average, but then he'll turn in a paper like this and---"

I looked at it. It took me a minute-- I'm a trivialist, not a mathematician--- but I figured it out. "You'll have to regrade this," I said. "It looks all wrong because he was doing it in base four."

"Base... four?" more than one curious pony queried.

"the numbers we count in," I said. I held up my hands to illustrate. "humans and ponies--- because you copied it from us--- count in Base ten." I counted off with my fingers. "That wasn't always the way, mind. Some tribes of humans just counted in base five.... for one hand. Others counted in base four.." I counted again, using my thumb as a pointer. "Others counted in base twelve---" I used my thumb again, this time counting the joints of my fingers. "The reason we have 24 hours, with 60 minutes made of 60 seconds, is that long ago a tribe of people that counted in base 12 started trading with a tribe that counted in base 5.... and everyone there ended up counting in base 60. Nowadays we use base 10, or base 2-- binary. For everything except clocks... ahem."

"I saw how Mr. Arthur had ten fingers, and I wondered 'gee, why are us ponies counting like we got ten fingers? We just have four hooves... and..." Snails shrugged.

"So that's what he meant by 'he used different numbers," Cheerilee said, stunned.

I knelt down and looked Snails in the eye. "I think things are going to be a little different for you from now on, Snails," I said. "At least I hope so...."

"Really?" Snails beamed.

"Wait. You mean Snails is smart?" Snips said.

I looked up at the bust of Albert Einstein. I stood up and walked over and rested my hand on that venerable head. "You know, Albert Einstein flunked math in his school years?" I said. "Yet he went on to do all that he did. He just thought so differently from everyone else that people had trouble understanding him.

"There is a quote by him that I personally like: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

I noticed some other museum patrons crowding up behind us, looking impatient. "Well, I think we've worn out our welcome with Mr. Einstein. Perhaps we should move on?" The girls ran herd on the class, slowly moving them on down the hall. "Miss Cheerilee, um, perhaps you should talk to Snails' parents," I said. See about getting him a tutor in advanced math." I looked at the paper again before handing it back. "Really advanced math.

Cheerilee nodded. "Oh, definitely," she said, still a little shellshocked. She took the paper back and and stowed it away.

I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of an incredibly rare Fluttershy hug. (suffer your jealousy in vain, Bronies!) "That was wonderful, Arthur," she said. "What you did for Snails---"

"What I did?" I said, disbelieving. "I didn't do anything! I was just a hapless bystander!"

"Arthur, you just discovered a math prodigy, right under everyone's noses," Twilight said.

"By blind luck, Twilight. I'm no mathematician myself... I barely passed high school algebra. My familiarity with Fibonacci and phi are the consequence of way too many hours learning random bits and bobs of trivia on the internet back home. It was dumb luck, sheer unbelievable dumb luck, that I recognized it... I'm no scholar, no polymath, I'm just a bozo with a brain full of Trivial Pursuit clues. And I couldn't even win a game of Trivial Pursuit!"

Twilight rolled her eyes. " Why is it that you are so unwilling to give yourself any credit?"

"Twilight, does it seem at all unusual to you that ever since I've gotten here I've stumbled from one ridiculous success to another? I'm an opinionated blowhard; my standard default is to be on the losing side of an argument. Yet nearly everyone I've met so far has come around to my way of thinking. Every situation I've encountered I've been just lucky enough to have the bits and bobs of know-how to succeed. It's like an egotist's bad fantasy version of heaven; someplace where everybody ever so sensibly agrees with me. Just by the sheer laws of probability I should be making some colossal mistakes."

"Oh my," Fluttershy said. "You are such an awful pessimist, aren't you?"

I grunted. "Probably. Maybe it's just that things have been going too well for me, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop--- YEEEK!" That last exclamation exploded from me involuntarily, as I had turned around and come face to horn with Rarity. She was wearing a grin the likes of which I hadn't seen since my last viewing of Lesson Zero. Fellow bronies? You have NO idea how utterly scary that smile is in real life. "In the course of ten minutes, you have managed to singlehandedly TRIPLE the membership of the Cutie Mark Crusaders," she said sweetly. "And they are even now recruiting more. Assuming I manage to survive whatever apocalypse my sweet little sister and her friends unleash upon us next, no matter how long it takes, somehow, some way, I am going to make.... you... PAY." She turned on her heel and trotted off after the rest.

"Feel better now?" Spike asked sarcastically as he trotted by.

I looked at him, "Strangely enough, yes...."

I pondered what the future had in store for Snails. Pony's perceptions of him might change quite a bit. Would he be able to deal with it? Would he lose his place in his community and his social circle? Would he be estranged, or burn out like other prodigies? Would he himself change?

As I pondered, Snips came galloping back to where we stood. "Mr. Arcturus, come quick. Snails got his head stuck in one of the exhibits!"

....Or maybe Snails would still be Snails, prodigy or no. I sighed and smiled ruefully. "Best go fetch some butter from the food court," I said to nopony in particular. "We may have some trouble getting those ears out...."