"Okay, uh, Miss Sparkle; can you tell us what part of the plan this is to find the lost Tomb, exactly?"

Twilight turned around and nearly smushed her nose against the lens of the camera. "Yeep! Roller, back up a little.. Oh, um, ahem." She readied her 'lecture mode' as the camera slowly moved back, taking in the unicorn, the library behind her, and the cloud of books zipping back and forth through the air. "Actually, this is one part of two different projects. We were in the middle of a massive renovation of the Crystal Empire library when the issue of the lost tomb surfaced, so we're simultaneously completing the renovation and reorganization, and sifting through the archives for any references or information about the tomb or it's location.

"Over here--" she pointed; the camera panned over clumsily to focus on a set of tables, where ponies were laboriously sorting through stacks of books and putting little runed stickers on the spines. "--The staff is sorting the books by the Dewhoof Decimal System into their appropriate categories, and tagging them accordingly. Then D.Frag's sorting spell picks them up, transports them to the stacks, and shelves them accordingly." As the camera focused, an emerald glow surrounded a stack of books at the end of the table. The camera tracked as they zoomed through the air like a flock of birds, finally coming to rest neatly on a nearby shelf, shuffling themselves into the books already there. "Once they're shelved, they're accessible to a special set of content searching spells made by Foxfire, Googleplex, and Wicker Speedy that let us search them all rapidly for any information on the Lost Tomb." The camera followed her hoof as she indicated the flickering web of emerald lines that stretched from every shelved book, crossed the ceiling, and then descended to a series of podiums with chalkboards and levitating scrolls. Four or five ponies were gathered around each podium, muttering things, taking notes and making suggestions. Every now and then, a book would fly from the stacks to a set of mostly-empty shelves set aside near where they worked. "As you can see, any books with potential content are pulled so they can be gone over more thoroughly later."

"So how much have they found?" The camera turned back to Twilight.

Twilight bit her lip. "Not much," she said. "But it's still early in the process, so there's still a great deal that we could still find..." she looked over her shoulder. "What is this?" The camera panned again, revealing D.Frag, Foxfire, Wicker Speedy and Googleplex sitting at one of the browsing podiums. They were staring at the scroll in front of them, their heads all tilted to the left for some reason, their expressions indescribable. "What's going on?" Twilight asked.

"Umm, trying to calibrate the image-searching spell," Googleplex said in a distracted murmur.

"I think it needs work," Wicker Speedy said, his eyes glazed.

"Why, what's wrong with--- AIEEK!!" Twilight had stepped into view, standing behind the others to see what was on the scroll.  There was a scuffle and a purple hoof suddenly blocked the lens. "Turn that off this instant!" Twilight could be heard saying. "Now! Before Spike or some foal sees it!"

"Okay okay--"

"And find that book and take it off the shelves! Put it in a box or something! What kind of words were you using to get an image like--- THAT??"

"Umm, lessee. 'Macrame.' "

"What." The delivery was a study in monotone disbelief. " What in the world... Roller, edit that out later-- stop FILMING, Roller, for crying out--"

"Ahem. As I was saying, this is only the first step in the hunt for the lost tomb. While we're working here in the library, a couple of professors from the Canterlot University are researching the folklore and oral tradition of the Crystal Empire, while others are examining the relics and artifacts that till now were kept in secrecy in the chambers of this very library."

"So who's doing that?"

"Well, the interns are doing most of the actual work with the relics, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Precious Lore. But the folklore research in particular is being headed up by... ah, Professor Dubious."

"Dubious? That nozzle?"

"Roller! You can't say that on film--"

"But he is! He's a complete nozzle! And a unicorn supremacist too, the big frickin--"

"ROLLER!--"

"...nd you'd better edit that last little bit out, you hear? Is it running? Oh. Ahem."

"So why is Professor I.M. Dubious heading up the research? He doesn't even believe in the lost tomb. Or in Earth Pony magic."

Twilight sighed and bit her lip. "Because he's that good at what he does. He's thorough, and meticulous. He may not believe old folklore and legends, but he's very very good at fishing them out and piecing them together. He personally rediscovered the lost tales of Saddle Arabia, and documented the lineage of all the variants of the legend of Trotlantis. In the end I don't care if he believes the evidence or not, so long as he finds it for us."

"So... Professor... Why don't you believe the legends?"

Professor Dubious stood in the basement chamber, the archaic relics and tomes behind him. He huffed at the camera. "Let's cut to what you really want to say, boy. You want to accuse me of being an arbitrary skeptic. Somepony who just refuses to believe anything, even when it bites him in the tuchus. Am I right?"

"...Uh, okay, we'll go with that."

"Am I?"

"...Well... you've gotten a lot of things wrong lately, Doc."

Dubious snorted. "And how many things have I gotten right? Nopony ever talks about that." He looked past the camera at the pony carrying it. "Why do you think I'm such a bitter, mean old skeptic, eh?"

"Cause Santa didn't bring you that hoofball you wanted for Hearthwarming Day, is my guess."

Dubious froze. For several seconds he stood there. Then he sat down and took his pinc-nez spectacles off. His tone turned somber.

"When I was a boy, before I got my cutie mark, I believed in Santa. It wasn't hard; my family was well off, so there were always plenty of presents under the Hearthwarming tree. Even the ones I asked for. But, as I got older, I couldn't help noticing that other little foals, who were at least as good and kind and obedient as I was, rarely seemed to get what they asked for. Funny enough, the poorer your parents were, the less often it happened too.”

"Of course I finally caught them sneaking presents under the tree. Who doesn't figure out Santa isn't real, eventually? But that was the start of it all. Sakes alive I was a cynical little blank-flank after that...  But what made it bad was, even after I caught my parents out, grownups were desperate for me to keep believing. Even though it did me no good. Even though it was an obvious lie. They just got all sorts of upset; I was supposed to believe, no matter what.

I started noticing all sorts of things I was expected to believe. I had one of those horrible dowager aunts who had all sorts of myths she expected me to believe. 'If you're naughty the parasprites will eat you.' 'If you eat sugar straight you'll grow worms in your stomach.'  'Don't touch frogs, they'll give you warts.' 'There's a monster that lives in the old abandoned well, if you bother him he'll drag you in !' 'If you make a face it'll stick that way.' That sort of thing. No, she couldn't just tell me not to do something, she had to make up some horrible myth or mythical bogeyman---- to frighten me into behaving.

         Consequently I took particular delight in proving her wrong. I would ask doctors about the worms in the stomach or getting warts from frogs and dutifully report my findings. I would sit and make faces for hours on end then point out-- loudly-- that I STILL wasn't stuck. I went down that abandoned well with a rope ladder and a flashlight. I got stuck and they had to call the fire department to fish me out, but I found zero well goblins and made a point of telling everyone present just that. I debunked the parasprite thing by sitting all night in a closet full of them---

"How---"

"One closet, one parasprite, fifteen boxes of Oaty Hunny Puffs. By morning I had zero Oaty Hunny Puffs, about a hundred or so parasprites, and no bites. I even smeared peanut butter on my face; they licked the peanut butter off and left me be. And as to being naughty, well, Auntie certainly had nothing nice to say about me after she opened the closet and let all my parasprites loose in her house."

"...You were a rotten little kid."

"Say that and smile.  But that wasn't the clincher. No, even though I was going about disproving and debunking all sorts of things, I was still gullible. I still had things I wanted to believe were true.

"I'd earned quite the reputation as a little skeptic. Colts and fillies would even ask me if something was true or not, before believing it themselves. But there was one colt in school... Silver Tongue. He had everypony impressed, all the blank flanks looked up to him. Myself included. Even though I had reached the point where I doubted nearly everything anypony said, for some reason I always trusted Silver Tongue.

        "One day, I don't know, I suppose he decided it would be funny to convince the Doubting Pony of something ridiculous. So he took me aside, and convinced me that he knew a spell that would make unicorns fly.

"It was one of those things I'd always dreamed of as a foal. To be able to fly, like a pegasus! And here he was, claiming that he had learned "the Flutterwing spell." To my eternal shame, I believed him. On the spot. I asked him-- I begged him to cast it on me...

"It wasn't a flying spell, of course. Just an illusion spell that made it look like I had butterfly wings growing out of my back. He even had his friends stand behind me and levitate me for a minute to convince me.

"Now I knew he couldn't cast that spell. Grown unicorns couldn't cast that spell, and he was all but flunking his magical classes...he could barely levitate an orange. I could SEE his friends' magic aura around me, levitating me. But I wanted so badly to believe. So I ignored my common sense, and every clue that it was a trick... And I decided that I would impress the whole school with my new wings. So I climbed up on to the roof of the schoolhouse, yelled 'everypony, watch!' ....and jumped."

"I broke all four of my legs.

"I lay there in the hospital, in horrible agony, all four legs in casts. It was then and there that I realized the truth; that ponies were liars. They lied to one another, they lied to themselves, and they did it for all the worst reasons. And even though every pony was a liar they never caught on when they were lied to. It was faster-- and safer-- to just assume that something someone told you was a lie, because ninety nine times out of a hundred, it was. And you didn't need to break your own legs to find it out.

"And that, my boy, is how I earned my cutie mark."

There was a long silence. "Dude...."

"Boy, ponies are too ready to believe. Too ready to believe ANYTHING. Either because they're afraid it's true, or because they desperately wish it was. Just like little foals are desperate to believe in a fat pony squeezing down a chimney to give them their greedy little heart's desire, or that Princess Luna's alter-ego will jump out of the closet and gobble them up. Or a silly little unicorn colt believing that a smooth-tongued liar could make him fly.

"Ponies wonder why I research mythology and folklore and oral traditions. Well, I research old tales and stories and legends--- like this old myth of Secrets of Earth Pony Magic-- the same way a person living in Hosstralia researches poisonous snakes. So I can know what falsehoods are out there, garbling up the truth; so I can know where they came from and so I can keep from putting my hoof down where their fangs can reach.

"I doubt things because nopony else seems willing to. Ponies don't like me; they hate me for spoiling their fairy tales. But you know what? I can live with that. Because I'd rather break some silly daydreamer's heart than hear later about how they broke their legs."

The roll of film reached its end; the camera flipped and clicked to a halt. Roller lowered his camera, blinking. The Professor gave him a long, evaluating look, then turned away. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to get back to."

Roller took his camera and quietly left.