"You can go look at the trees anytime you want when they're not bearing ripe fruit. When they are bearing ripe fruit, I'd rather you help harvest if you're going to be on the field at all. But if you want to buy some zap-apples to magically poke, or even grow your own zap-apple trees somewhere that's not the main zap-apple field so you can experiment on them in peace, I won't stop you."

"Oh, are they relatively easy to grow? I'm not, except literally speaking, very green-hoofed."

"You put some seeds in the ground and the next day you have a tree. The only reason most ponies don't have their very own zap-apple trees is because they're inconvenient to have close to your house or in public areas - too zappy."

"When they're bearing, or all the time?"

"Particularly when the apples appear, but they've been known to zap things at other times too, if you bump into them too hard or if there's lightning nearby."

"Could I grow a little one in a pot and keep it under a wire basket?"

"You can try! But I don't know if the seed'll sprout a smaller tree just because you put it in a pot. It might not, and then you'd have a broken pot and a full-sized zap-apple tree to haul away."

"Sounds inconvenient. Can I try sprouting one in a pot in the field of them, and then if it's huge all I have to do is make sure it's sitting neatly in the ground?"

"Sure. I'll set aside some seeds from the next harvest for experiments."

"Yay!"

Cordy giggles.

"I'm very fond of magic. It's not quite my literal special talent, but it's close enough that I can almost pretend that it is."

"What is your literal special talent?"

"It's sort of hard to put into words - I usually sum it up as 'clear thinking', and the next question is 'why a bell', and my standard answer to that is 'clear as a bell'."

"Gotcha. Matching talents to cutie marks is kind of a hobby of mine," she says.

"What's yours, why a spiderweb?"

"I always have trouble explaining it, which might be part of the reason for the hobby," she says. "But it's about - interconnectedness. The most obvious part is being able to understand and talk to any kind of creature that can communicate at all. But that's just the surface, the practical effects. I think my special talent might really be... not quite 'making friends', but something close to that."

"You are good at making friends."

"It's one of my favourite things!"

"Were you befriending somepony when you got your cutie mark?"

"Actually, I was heading off a stampede of terrified squirrels."

"...Huh."

"I did make friends with some of them," she adds. "After I got them calmed down and fed them some cherries."

Clarity giggles. "I got mine when I was working on my final exam at the School for Gifted Unicorns."

"Nice!"