Manehattan leaves it's hoofprint on everypony who ventures into it. In Suri Polomare's case, it left that hoofprint right on her throat and a matching one square upon her plot as the uniquely karmic city turned her ill intentions right back on her. Though she was still largely oblivious to the extent of her own mistakes and had certainly learned no lessons from them, she'd understood that things had gone south when Coco Pommel deserted and it wasn't but a week later that she darkened that mousy mare's doorstep. That doorway itself was half underground, as her former assistant let an apartment that had been sectioned off in the basement of a classic old brownstone, but real estate in Manehattan was such that even with a doorway that forced one to duck, a low ceiling and no natural lighting, it was quite a find.
Every visible bit of the apartment was taken up by fabric, thread, ponikins and dresses in every state of progress. Suri didn't get to see any deeper inside as Coco scowled and braced a hoof against the door to halt her former employer's ingress.
"So I guess it's true, huh? That you're working for Rarity now, trying to be a costume designer on Bridleway? Yeah?" Suri said, trying to keep an even tone despite the dull anger building inside her.
Coco, shrugged noncommittally, "I'm subcontracting for her for the time being, it's just about the same job I was doing for you...except she actually listens to my opinion and gives me the freedom to explore my ideas."
"Yeah, that's great, but the way I hear she's clear back in Ponyville, or some other no horse town, okay? So, yeah sure, she's got to give you a slack leash now, but you don't get where that mare's gotten as fast as she has without micromanaging your squirrely little assistants. Some day, when you get comfortable, she's going to come back and you'll see how lucky you were to work for me, heh heh, 'kay?" Suri pushed against the door, trying to force her way in but making no headway, "Look, can we just talk a minute?"
Not being able to force her out, Coco sighed and acquiesced. She felt bad for her arrogant former boss, former friend, but didn't want her in her home. She had sticky hooves and a lack of shame when it came to ideas in progress, "Fine, but not here. Give me a minute and we'll go for coffee or something."
"Fine. Just don't take long." The pale pink pony sighed out as she dislodged her hoof and finally let the door swing shut and latch. For a moment she wondered if Coco would simply bolt the door and not come out, skittish thing that she was, and Suri had to reassure herself that she was coming to offer her an opportunity she'd be grateful for.
"Even after all this you haven't learned your lesson, Suri? Just what kind of utter ruin is it gonna take?" Coco sadly asked from behind a half empty cup of simple, high quality Zebrican coffee served black, into which she was dipping a flaky scone.
"Ruin? Yeah...no, this is my big break, that's exactly what it is, heh heh. If you'll help me I'll even cut you in for, say, ten percent? Hmm?" Suri took a swig of her half calf double frappuccino with cinnamon and a few drops of cherry syrup to spice it up, it's whip cream cap long since slurped away, leaving the smallest crescent of white on the tip of her muzzle.
"No! First, I told you I wouldn't betray my employer, a mare who I've come to consider a friend, and second, every underhoofed thing you've been doing just keeps backfiring. This scheme you've told me about, it's just another case of you outsmarting yourself with some silly, convoluted lie. You're plenty good enough of a designer to make it if you'll just treat the ponies around you with a little respect." Coco chided, hoping, for once, to get through to the stubborn mare.
"So now I'm supposed to be taking wise advice off of a former assistant of mine? Is that it, huh? Wisdom that's going to get you where? To where I am when you're my age? Oh wait, you're two years older than me, yeah, sorry 'bout that."
"How many assistants have you had since you broke into the business around here, Suri?"
"I don't know, it must be a good, dozen? I wouldn't go through so many if they could be bothered to make some decent coffee, right?" She chuckled, as if grinding through so much equine grist would be nothing but a joke and a minor bother.
"One, Suri. You've had one assistant since you came to town and I'm her." The mare glared and screwed up her face, "Even though it took you a year to remember my name, you can't possibly expect me to believe you wouldn't remember if you'd fired and hired a dozen ponies."
"Hmm, maybe? I guess it's not really the sort of thing I pay much attention to. I'd think you'd have learned to make coffee by now, if that was true." Suri rolled her eyes and sighed in attempted concession, "Look, I'm sorry I fired you, k?"
"But, you didn't fire me, I quit!"
"You can't quit, I haven't hired you back yet." Suri chuckled, "Look, I'll up my offer to fifteen percent, and I'll maybe think about hiring you back when things work out, but that's my final offer."
Despite her infuriating ways, Coco didn't want to see her former boss ruined in the way she would assuredly be if she went ahead with her plans, "Look, it's a conflict of interest and I'm not supposed to tell anypony this, but Rarity's still got a whole bunch of that fabric, but I promise it will ruin your reputation in the fashion industry if you buy it because...."
"Yeah yeah, but can you get it for me?"
"No, listen, you don't want it, it's going to be..."
"Heh, let me worry about whether I want it or not, and you just get me as much of that sweet sweet fabric as you can manage, okay?"
Exasperated at the density of her former boss, Coco took the easy path and just conceded, "You know what, I don't need a percentage. If you really want me to do what you're after, I'll do it just to see the look on your face when it comes back to bite you in the plot."
"But you'll do it?"
"Yeah, sure Suri, for what good it'll do you."
"And you're sure you don't want a cut?" A cutely bobbed aqua mane was shook in the negative, "Okay, heh, more bits for me."
Coco sat alone with her lukewarm coffee for a long stretch before retrieving paper and pen from her saddlebags and writing out a pair of letters that she stuffed side by side in the same envelope.
Miss Rarity,
I'm at my wits end and I'm not sure what I'm meant to do. The accompanying letter is from a company Suri Polomare started for when she has to deal with ponies she's stepped on trying to get to the top. It's come up before. I wrote it because she hasn't hired a new assistant and she's totally hopeless at writing professional sounding letters so she tried to con me into doing it for her, which I guess she did in the end.
I didn't really want to deal with her after what she's done and maybe you don't either, but you told me to keep an eye out for anypony who wanted to buy up your surplus of that gorgeous fabric, since you can't very well use it in your designs anymore.
Well, she didn't say it outright, but I get the feeling that she's showed those copycat dresses of hers somewhere and gotten a contract to make as many as she can find the fabric for, that's about the way she works. If that's true, you've got her over a barrel there, since nopony else is making it yet. You could probably even sell it at a profit instead of having to discount it to get rid of it. Given the state her finances were in when I left, she's probably not going to make it when this falls through. I tried to warn her not to do it, but she kept interrupting and wouldn't listen and I'm not sure what you want to do.
Please advise,
Coco Pommel
In reply, several days later she received:
Coco-
If you really wanted to warn her off, you could compose a letter, no? That would be considerably more difficult for her to interrupt. If you wanted some kind of petty, foalish revenge, well I could get behind that as well and wouldn't blame you in the least for such inclinations. I must leave that decision to your conscience, however.
From my perspective, things are considerably more cut and dried. If it is her desire to sweep up the remnants of my failure, even if it is a failure which her own hoof caused, I see no reason to begrudge her. Petty vengeance does not have it's place in business, and in truth, if she acts swiftly enough she might stand to make a sizable profit on the whole endeavor. Moreover, she is a fully grown mare and a businessmare besides. It isn't our place to force her to give up her ill-conceived schemes.
In a nod to generosity, I would be delighted just to part with the material without incurring a loss, but perhaps you should charge some percentage above that and keep it in escrow as insurance against Suri's possible failure? That is to say some portion could be held back and returned to her should she find her venture less sound than she'd anticipated, and if not you could consider it a commission, or some such thing. Say, thirty percent over cost? Maybe ask fifty percent over cost to start with so she has some room to haggle me down. I'll leave the details entirely up to you.
-Rarity
Suri's eye twitched, a scowl bloomed on her face and a low grumble grew. Her latest assistant (she'd gone through three in the time since Coco left) had already scurried away, pausing only long enough to tell the gaggle of workers on the shop floor to knock off for the day before leaving the place entirely and for good. He knew a sinking ship when he saw one and he also knew not to let it drag him down. By the time Suri's primal scream reached a crescendo and petered out, the half dozen sewing tables were likewise abandoned, drop lights still swinging from the hurried passage of the seamstresses. All that was left was one mare's incandescent rage flaring to life in an office only slightly smaller than the sewing floor, shipping and receiving areas combined.
The mare grasped at her desk, gouging it's edge with manicured hooves and muscled the half ton piece of modernism into a shallow arc, flipping it noisily onto it's top, crushing her nameplate and many wayward office supplies. She kicked the office door entirely off the hinges in passing even though it was left ajar and stood, a vengeful goddess surveying her domain.
How had it come to this? She wasn't some yokel, she knew just how it was done and she'd played everything just right and still she was ruined. After getting an agreement with Rarity, through Coco, for twenty percent less than the Ponyvillian fashion designer was asking, she'd tied up the material with a contract but deferred payment and renegotiated so as to make Rarity more desperate to sell, and she was. She managed to knock a full thirty percent more off the price before she finally paid. She'd almost lost Coco's support on that one, she seemed unwilling to budge on that last thirty percent and seemed to think it was terribly important for some reason, had even written letters to that effect (She assumed, she hadn't actually read beyond the first few words before discarding them.) but that doormat eventually gave in. It had taken some extra time, but it was worth it.
In most industries, the actual material is the least valuable part of the finished product and that's usually the case in fashion as well, but in this case the whole selling point was the exclusivity of that singularly gorgeous fabric. She'd signed a contract to that effect with Glad Rags, the foremost purveyor of club clothes in Canterlot and Suri had bought up Rarity's whole supply to make sure it remained exclusive, since she could assume the unicorn would not be weaving anymore of it. The relatively small scale production of designer dresses commanded a premium price and the fabric had been similarly expensive, costing tens of thousands of bits for the stockpile that would yield, perhaps, five hundred completed items.
With labor factored in she would still have made a killing, but she'd leveraged her whole business to make it happen and it would have worked, too, if not for one thing. Certainly Rarity was the only pony who could weave the amazing fabric at first, and it would take a long while for anypony to reverse engineer it and get it into production, but she hadn't considered that Rarity was a businessmare too and wouldn't just write off something she'd put so much time into developing.
She sold off the production technique to the highest bidder, who wanted to produce it in unheard of quantities. Cost savings of scale meant that even the thriftiest shopper could soon have spectacular dresses, and who, pray tell was the retailer who received this stretchy but not clingy, shimmery but not showy boon? Bargain Barn. Bargain bucking Barn, and now that exclusivity was lost, her contract with Glad Rags was also voided. She'd have to give the money back, probably pay a stiff penalty, she'd skimmed the default part of the contract at best, so she wasn't sure. She'd be lucky not to end up in prison for fraud by the time this played out.
A knock on the door drew her attention, and there stood the last pony she wanted to see, the cream coated traitor in her pert little sailor uniform, "Suri? I see, they finally told you. Are...are you going to be okay?"
"You!" She growled, eyes blazing.
"Suri, I'm sorry. I tried to tell you, I wrote letters even, but you never listen, I tried to keep a fund in case this happened, but it didn't work out, and now...If you'd just gotten in and gotten out before Bargain Barn announced they were using that fabric for their whole spring line, you still could have made it and everypony would have come out happy, but all that backbiting...it just ate up the time. Oh, how bad is it, Suri? I'll help you out if I can, I'm doing alright now and I think..."
"I don't need your charity, or your pity! Okay?" The fashion designer screamed and advanced on her former assistant who shrunk back to best weather the anticipated blows. They never came. Another knock on the door interrupted them and there stood a stallion in an expensive suit. Suri didn't recognize him, but there was no doubt that he worked for Glad Rags.
"Suri Polomare?" He asked, taking in the scene of chaos and the interrupted altercation.
"Y'know, she just tore up the place and stormed right out of here, can you believe that? Hehe heh, I'm not sure what's got her tail in a twist, but if you like, I'll be happy to give her a memo, okay? My name is Buttons, her secretary. I'm sure she'll be right back once she calms down, but...hmm...if you want to talk to her assistant, that's her right there, gotta go, bye, okay?" Suri pointed to Coco and flitted out the door in a trot.
"And you are?" He inquired of Coco.
"Just a friend who's being taken advantage of, that's all."
"Seems to be a lot of that going around in this city."
She huffed, "Maybe, but from where I'm standing it seems like you get from this city just what you put into it. Incidentally, I don't think Suri's going to be coming back."
On a train headed west sat Buttons, once again bearing the name she'd been born with, the one she'd been known by before her aspirations to fashion design forced her to change it to something with more weight. Let Suri Polomare die back in Manehattan, where everypony had double crossed her and done everything they could to ruin her. She was moving back in with her parents, she really didn't have much other choice. Even a few hundred bits would have given her a measure of freedom, a couple thousand might have kept her business afloat, but her accounts were already seized and everything was gone, so let them have it, all of it and her alter ego as well, that cruel city that trod upon her heart.
Author's Note
I have to imagine that basing a fashion line on a fabric that only your rival produces is risky in the best of times, and in this economy? Really, is she crazy or something? M'kay?
