A Confederacy Of Dunce Caps

Chapters

Diplomacy By Other Means
Demotivational Tactics
Community Disorganizer
Public Works Projects
Corporate Mascot
Territorial Infringement
External Audit
Exiled To Gumballia

Diplomacy By Other Means

The word was a familiar one. It was, in fact, a word her father used quite often, for all sorts of reasons, generally with ponies who had genuine fear of hearing it and would do just about anything to change the word into its opposite. But on this occasion, sitting on different sides of the far corner for a dinner table which sometimes seemed much too long for just two, he had said it to her, and that was something Diamond simply refused to accept. So she went into her internal arsenal and headed directly for the heaviest weaponry she possessed, for dealing with that word wasn't going to be a casual exercise.

She put on the pout, let her lower lip tremble as she planted her forehooves on the edge of the table (in defiance of all etiquette, but it was a private dinner, as it almost always was), and squeezed her eyes tightly shut in the hopes of forcing out a tear, or at least something which could serve as such until her father had cause to glance away and she got a chance to go for the water mug.

"...no?" Diamond expertly whimpered. "But... daddy... she's being unfair... she doesn't have any right..."

She was angry, of course, but she had no intention of showing it. Her father didn't say "No" to her -- well, all right, there were times when he did and those seemed to be experiencing a disturbing increase in frequency, but she could still talk him out of so many if she really tried and he just had to see that this should be one of them. And the truth was that she had a very hard-working daddy, at least when it came to supervising all the efforts so many ponies went through to keep him (and her) on top. It made him tired, she knew it did, and there were times when he would half-limp through the door, dragging his legs under the burden of so much responsibility for making sure everypony else did the work, or at least that was how Diamond saw it and she was pretty much always right. On those nights, she would quietly cuddle up to him, let him read to her because even if the stories were stupid, her father wasn't and she knew reading aloud made him feel better.

When you were tired, you could make a mistake, one you normally wouldn't make when you were fully alert. Her father was tired and had made a mistake, and he was tired because he worked so hard. He did so much work because he loved her. All she had to do was make him see that it had been a mistake. Because he was tired. And then after he'd fixed everything, she'd let him read to her.

"Cheerilee has every right to make you change desks," her father stupidly insisted, which meant he was really tired.

"No, she doesn't."

There were bags under his eyes: she'd just noticed that. "And what makes you say that, Diamond?"

Her poor weary daddy. She would really have to spell it out for him: clearly asking him to do any part of the work was simply too much. "Because she's..." Diamond concentrated hard, which helped with the fake tears. "...assuming executive powers which have no basis in previously established policy!"

The exhaustion was also making his blinks extra-slow. "...what?"

"Daddy, when we came in for the first day of the semester, she let us pick our own desks! That means she was -- giving over the power of choice to us! And once she does that, forcing me to change my desk is claiming she has an unenforceable right to do just that! You can't say ponies are allowed to decide something for themselves one day and then take it back the next! It's -- basic student rights! She's overstepping her bounds!" Thoughtfully, "I bet the school board could even impeach -- I mean fire her for that..."

Her father stared at her. She promptly decided it was with pride.

"I think," he wearily said, "I've been letting you read too many newspapers."

"But there was this really interesting article on how the annual Return Day eclipses are actually a plot by the Princesses to --"

"-- and from the wrong publisher," he sighed. "Diamond... the school board is not going to fire Miss Cheerilee because she told you to change your desk. Not if you were passing notes. And this isn't the first time you've been caught passing them. It isn't the first time..." The tired eyelids sagged, momentarily closed. "...for a lot of things."

How did he know about that? She'd taken the letter which the teacher had ordered her to give her parent, reworked it so carefully as to remove any cause, made it look as if Cheerilee was just ordering the desk change because she was being mean and thus make her father rise to defend her like he always did... "I -- I didn't..."

His left front hoof pushed aside a napkin he'd been avoiding through the entire meal. There was a letter underneath. A letter displaying very familiar mouthwriting.

"Private courier," he sighed. "I paid her back the expense, of course: it cost her far too much to hire a pegasus just to carry this across town, but she wanted the security and now I can see why."

The lip quivering was starting to accelerate. Diamond was proud of her own acting abilities, and kept telling herself that because feeling as if it was anything other than acting was going to a bad place -- or that the place was heading towards her, galloping closer at speed and she was accelerating, running away as fast as she could, but it was following her and

my daddy doesn't believe me? Over everypony else?

And there was the tear she'd needed so badly at the start.

Stupid thing. Late to every need.

The table was too big. The room was too big. Her father was so very big and she...

"I deal with a lot of ponies, Diamond," her father said, and she wondered at the sorrow in his voice, considered whether it was something she could fake during the eventual rebuttal. "And the thing about having a retail business... is that I have to keep dealing with them. Oh, I can afford to drop the occasional supplier if I'm truly having issues and losing a customer here and there doesn't sting that badly. But at the same time, there are limits. And because I know what those limits are -- because I care not only about my business, but the ponies who make it work -- I do my best to get along with everypony. I don't sell much in the way of specialty products, you know... most of what we carry is available from others: sometimes at the same price, or just a tenth-bit more. Even a little cheaper now and again. Customers have options for where they want to spend their bits, when things aren't scarce or exclusive... and customers are fickle things, Diamond. They can find so many excuses for not spending. So many easy ones, invented for no real reason at all -- or ones which are all too real."

She didn't understand. "But this is about my desk...!"

"Ponyville business is off." The tired eyes would not leave her face, wouldn't slip away no matter how many tears lubricated the trail. "Not by enough to hurt, not yet -- but enough to fret about. I've been spending extra hours in that store, trying to find out what's been going on. And what I've noticed is that certain regular customers have gone missing. Do you know what they all have in common, Diamond?"

"...I wasn't passing notes, she was lying, she just wants to -- wants to --"

"-- you. The common element is you."

"-- see you -- because she's -- she..."

He gently reared back, carefully reached down and pressed her tiara between his front hooves, removed it and set it on the table. And as he spoke, he rubbed the base of her ears as he'd done when she was just a foal.

"The Apples still do business with me, at least in that they'll sell to me and nopony has suggested breaking the contract -- a contract they no longer have any legal obligation to honor, not after all those years. A verbal agreement with no force behind it other than their own dedication to keeping such. I respect that, Diamond. But nopony in the family will shop at my store. I used to see them every three days or so, and they haven't been in for weeks."

It gave her an opening. "Apple Bloom!" She hated to even say that name, but this was desperation and such called for sacrifice. "It was her -- she must have been --"

"-- that blonde pegasus mare with the unicorn filly... oh, what was her name, she's so distinctive, even beautiful in some ways... I wish I'd learned her name. I could learn it now, in moments, just by asking the right ponies. But I haven't seen her either. Not since the first rumor of what you whispered about her reached my own ears. I'm guessing they had already found hers."

Her daddy had just said a mare was beautiful. Diamond surged past mere desperation in a single shove and landed dead-center in the realm of fear. "She's just being stupid, being mean, she hates me because my eyes aren't --"

"-- let's see... who else? Pipsqueak's parents. Featherweight's. The Belles, all of them. In fact, just about everypony who's related to one of your classmates has chosen to shop elsewhere, with the exception of Silver Spoon's family. But it doesn't stop there. I recognized a few other faces through the vacuum of their absence. There were a number from that party which you insisted you were old enough to attend with me, the one where you hung around with a few of the older fillies and colts, then denied every word they carried back..."

He had never looked so tired.

Diamond was going to let him read to her for hours.

"And I believed you," her father sadly said. "Because I can compare numbers and sales reports and regional trends from every settled zone, but I don't want to contrast what my daughter said on the prior occasion to what just emerged on this one. Because it's so easy to believe in persecution and conspiracy, and I may be reading too many of the wrong newspapers while trying to figure out what's actually happening across the continent and how it might affect business. And I do believe that many of your classmates don't like you, Diamond, and some of them might even be actively acting against you. It's just that... lately, I've been starting to wonder about the cause. Because some ponies do attract trouble. There is such a thing as a repeatedly innocent victim who truly never means any harm and never experiences anything but. Some ponies have hard destinies that way. I -- we named you Diamond in the hopes of protecting you against that, did I ever tell you? We wanted you to be unbreakable. I never thought that it would make you spend your life proving just how hard you are by scratching everypony else..."

She tried to find somepony she could blame. It wasn't hard: one -- two -- had just been offered up to her. Two ponies she could use to prove that none of it had ever been her fault.

But one of those ponies was her father. And the other...

He saved her the effort.

"Names are destiny, they say," he said --

-- and the rubbing stopped.

"...daddy?"

He then saved her the trouble.

"Maybe it is my fault, in some ways," he said, and she wondered when he'd found time to dab at his own water mug, apply the results to his face. "Not just the name... but through saying my daughter was... anything other than what other ponies said. Because she was --"

was?

"-- my daughter, and..."

He pushed himself away from the table. Stood up.

"It's a week, Diamond," he quietly told her. "You can live with sitting somewhere else for a week. You'll still see Silver, you won't be grounded or anything else. It's just a change of desks. I'm not going to the school board. I'm not threatening to sue, because the district seems to have stopped buying supplies from me and I'd been wondering why. I can always offend a few suppliers here, a customer or two there, and not worry too much about it because some ponies will simply take offense no matter what I do... but never all, Diamond. Not even most, or a little less than half. And the thing is... I'm starting to wonder if it's about what I do any more. About how long that hasn't been the case. How long it's actually been all about..."

He just looked at her, then. She couldn't look at him. She looked at his water mug instead, and found the level had never changed.

"We'll talk," he said. "After the semester ends. After I sort some things out. But for now... Diamond... when you try to use me like this... you want it so that when you speak, ponies hear me. See me standing behind you. And you know something? They do, Diamond. They truly do..."

He walked away. It wasn't even a trot, and every leg dragged in turn.

It was just her at a table which was far too large, where two occupants was generally the most which could be hoped for, the most she ever wanted if Silver wasn't the third and even then, she never wanted her friend sitting too close because this was her daddy and the prospect of adding a permanent bench was...

...was.

Daddy always wins because he loves me.

Daddy always fights because he loves me.

Loves me.

And her daddy didn't want to fight.

...was.

She...

...had a week. That was good. A week was a long time. A lot of things could happen in a week. Maybe she could find the right words during a seven-day hunt, or there would be something which would distract him, maybe business coming back because she could threaten some of the ponies in her class and make them send their parents to the store, couldn't she? Surely that had to work.

Except that... what was she supposed to do? Follow them home? Make sure they got the adults out and spending bits? Trail them until every fraction of lost revenue had been made up for? It was just her and Silver, and he'd mentioned so many names... seven days wasn't enough to cover them all. No, it was best to think of excuses, something which was so easy because her father always backed her up except for the few times he hadn't and this was one of them, she was on her own and Silver couldn't do anything to help her, not with this and her daddy

isn't fighting.

Because he

had to see how good she was. She had to prove that for some stupid reason. And what was the best way to prove she was a good daughter? Through being a good student. If she passed all her finals, he would see everything bad anypony said about her was lies. Good grades, therefore, good daughter. That was it exactly. She had her way out plus seven days to think of ways to make it even better. With that kind of lead time and her own perfection brought to bear against the problem plus whatever Silver might incidentally contribute and Diamond would have thought of anyway, there was no way she wasn't going to win this one too. And once her father had seen that, he would believe her again. Fight for her. And -- everything else.

Which meant the very first thing to face was passing.

And she wasn't going to sit next to Silver for the rest of the semester. She was stuck with Snips and Snails. Quite possibly the two dumbest colts in the history of Equestria, boys for whom the term 'morons' had first been invented and then discarded because it was simply inadequate to the task. Copying off Snips and Snails was a guaranteed way of making everything worse.

It was a problem. But it was a problem which she was practically born to solve. She had to delegate again, just like her daddy did. And then he would see just how good she was. How good she had been all along, and always would be, because she had solved things his way.

I have to make them study. Get them up to a place where I can cheat off them and be safe.

Forget problem: this was going to be a challenge. Quite possibly the challenge of her life. The hardest thing ever done in that history of Equestria and anything in the textbooks was now just a deliberate overstatement, because it wasn't as if she could just blast the two colts with the dumb Elements and make them smart.

(She thought about that for a few seconds and came up with several possible, mostly bribe-based ways of getting into the vault, but none which instantly granted her four extra ponies. Still, she could always try to wear five necklaces at once and in the name of not removing her tiara, she supposed Silver could have the dumb crown, if only just long enough for it to work...)

So there it was. Get Snips and Snails to study, copy off their papers, and in any spare time which might exist, create lies for backup, something she was already good at. And then everything would work out.

Diamond forced herself to finish dinner. She was going to need the strength from every bite.

It took two solitary hours. Every time she looked at it, her dumb food kept getting too soggy to chew.

Demotivational Tactics

She told Silver about the problem during the shared trot to school. Well -- she told her friend about part of the problem, the sections which concerned Diamond's in-no-way-her-own-fault inability to claim her proper desk again and the necessity of finding some way to educate the two stupidest colts in Ponyville, Equestria, and quite possibly beyond. Nothing about what had happened with her daddy was included because as far as Diamond was concerned, that would all solve itself as soon as she passed her finals and besides... Silver didn't need to know. Because it wasn't important. At all. No matter how many times the resulting dreams had jolted her out of the nightscape to find a reality no more welcoming than...

...Diamond didn't remember the dreams, really. And she was going to keep telling herself that until it became true.

Silver looked sympathetic, an expression which mandated another mandatory glasses adjustment. "So what can I do to help?"

"I don't know," Diamond reluctantly admitted. "I thought about it for a while." During the night, while both attempting to find and trying not to dread any more sleep. "I think I have to work on this like my daddy would. I've been thinking about some more of the things he says after coming home from work... about how you get ponies to do what you want. But you don't know any of them." Which was clearly somepony's fault for not having Silver at more dinners, and that somepony was not Diamond. "If I can think of something..." Or if Silver remembered something Diamond had been just about to say, which did happen now and again.

Her friend nodded. "Just let me know if you need anything, okay? Look -- I'll keep studying. Just in case you manage to get switched back. You're sure your dad won't go to the school board?"

This lie had been rehearsed. "Not when he's got the supply contract coming up for renewal and some other dumb company is trying to take it away from us... you know, all those other ponies who just think they can come in and take over... I guess he doesn't want to... risk making them upset. Even for little easy things. It's just business. But they aren't going to sign until vacation starts. Everything will be normal again after that. We'll be right back next to each other, he'll get the contract, I'll get a boost in my allowance and --" the part which was supposed to make Silver not think about it -- "we could go for ice cream!"

She was sure that had all been believable. Her lies always were.

Silver turned, gave Diamond a look through the stupid lenses, one which seemed to go on for far too long.

"Okay," Silver finally said. "So what would your dad do first?"

'Try to form some level of personal connection with your employees. Have a conversation with them. It doesn't have to be a deep one. Just show them you have some things in common.'

As if Diamond would ever have anything in common with the world's dumbest boys. But they were all she had...

She found them exactly where she'd expected to, camped in the shadows of the schoolhouse's left side, waiting for the starting bell to ring and dumb Cheerilee to let them in. And they were doing what they always did during such times when the weather was warm and the soil was loose: excavating. For bugs. The slimier the result, the more Snails loved it. Sometimes he would bring an especially promising specimen in for show and tell, although all it ever promised to do was gross out the entire class. Snails could spend a happy ten minutes talking about the wriggling worm just barely encased in his field and for all of that time, he would be completely oblivious to how everypony else was trying not to throw up.

Snips usually just watched the dig. Sometimes he would give out words of encouragement, or laugh at the appearance of a particularly disgusting specimen. Once per season or so, there would be an argument about the merits of eating one of the finds, something Snails refused to let Snips do -- which was why Snips kept bringing it up at least once per season, because Snails could be hysterical when he was trying to defend something slimy which he would finally field-flick to safety.

That was the quality level of her only possible saviors: mud-grubbing, bug-hunting idiots, one of whom kept insisting he could personally go insectivore if he wanted to, a word Diamond only knew the meaning of because Snails had shouted out the definition during his protests at least fifteen times since they'd all started school.

Snails' horn was in the dirt. He was using it as a digging tool, stirring up the soil. His head came up just enough to let Diamond see an actual grub fall from the horn's tip. Snips laughed, a half-grunting snort which put her in mind of the tenant pigs she'd trotted past during the stomach-turning visits when her father took her along to see the Apples. (The pigs didn't make her want to vomit. Apple Bloom did.)

If she'd had any idea how to accomplish the feat plus the slightest degree of faith in their memorization skills, she would have enrolled the worms.

Talking to colts. Stupid ones. There really wasn't anything she wouldn't do to make her daddy happy again.

"Hey."

It had felt like a good opener on the way in -- but now that she'd vocalized it, the greeting seemed to be lacking something. Maybe she needed to make it more personal.

"What are you doing?" she followed up, and considered it perfect.

The colts looked up at her. Both regarded Diamond as if the bug hunt had somehow managed to turn up the world's first underground bird: fascination, confusion, a little shock, and absolutely no idea of what was supposed to happen next.

"Bug hunting," Snails dully said.

"Like we always do," Snips added. "Well, Snails does. I just watch." Another one of those truly annoying grunt-laughs. "Because he won't let me cut them up."

"Bugs are friends, not -- di-sec-tions," Snails carefully intoned.

"Whatever," Snips laughed.

They both looked at her again, as if making sure she was really there. The stares went back and forth for a while.

Diamond was starting to realize she was going to be doing the majority of the work in this conversation, which was actually fine because it made her even more the leader than she was already and if she had to provide every last verbal cue, then she would eventually be running the thought ones and then everything would be okay again. "So --" this part had required an hour of Moon-lit rehearsal, mostly to stop gagging "-- I just wanted to thank you... for the gum..."

Snails smiled. It made him look even dumber. "Wasn't nothin'."

Snips nodded. "We said we'd take care of you while you were in the dumps."

Which, to Diamond's forward-rotating ears, sounded promising. If the stupid colts had any real intention of looking after her...

"You didn't chew it, though," Snails pointed out.

"I was saving it for later." This also seemed to need something extra. "Because it's... special gum."

Snails beamed, which didn't do his visible intellect any favors either. "I thought so! Snips, didn't I tell you that was what she was doing? Because I always stick my special gum under the desk until I need it, so she's gonna do the same thing! And that gum was so special, I've been keeping it there since... since... when was Nightmare Moon here again?"

Diamond, who had touched the stuff, just barely managed not to retch.

"Dunno," Snips replied, thankfully distracted by the attempt to retrieve a memory. "When we were younger, maybe?"

"I think I'll always be young," Snails gravely stated. "I know I always have been."

Well, thankfully she didn't have to count on them for history.

"You usually don't talk to us this much," Snips abruptly noted.

Which was a level of insight she hadn't expected, and the recognition of active thought was added to sudden concerns about the tiny chance of Equestria's stupidest colts being able to figure things out and clashed, with the conflict immediately dropping into her stomach so it could writhe within the available space. (Diamond had encountered certain difficulties with her breakfast. No servants had been fired, mostly because she hadn't had the time to search for a responsible party.) She thought fast. "We -- usually don't sit next to each other, and you're too far back for notes." Which was all true. Even if she had for some reason wanted to relay a chain of written insult to the boys while lost in some hopeful delusion of their being able to read it, she didn't have a pony chain capable of relaying the missive. Most of the other students refused to pass her notes any more.

Just about all, actually.

(Which also meant she had no ready way of communicating with Silver during class. Something else which was all Cheerilee's fault.)

And as for talking to them... well, while there was more than a mere sufficiency of material to work with, Diamond had found that there just wasn't much point in spending time insulting Snips and Snails. It was like hiking up to the dam during the late autumn and spending an hour berating the water for being cold and wet: fully accurate in every way, but the water wasn't going to get much out of it.

Snips shrugged. "Okay," he said. "Hey, Snails -- lookit that one! It's practically bulging out its own sides! I bet if you stomped your hoof on it, the stuff inside would squirt out for gallops...!"

Snails' field flickered into view, protectively surrounded the indicated miniature horror. "Snips! Bugs are for cherishing, not for --"

"-- I'm just teasing ya, Snails, just teasing..."

Diamond wrenched her eyes away from the thing one moment after her mind finished the impromptu portrait of pressure-propelled insect guts finding the single open window in the Solar Wing and -- well, history strongly suggested that wasn't an executable offense, but it was the Princess and Diamond was effectively the boss of these two for the horrid duration, which meant that if anypony found out what the launch site had been, they might realize she'd been there and...

...no. Getting them to study, that was her responsibility. Nothing else. No matter what some ponies might insist on seeing because they were either stupid or had enough power to get things all their own way. Diamond hated ponies like that, at least when they weren't her.

It still was best to get them on the proper topic well before anything like that happened, though, especially the bell was due to go off at any second. She'd lost too much time in steeling herself for the final no-way-back approach.

"So," she tried out, adding a casual tone which she was in no way feeling emotionally committed to. "Finals are coming up."

"Yeah," Snails readily agreed. His right forehoof dragged a little trench into the soil, and his field lowered the wriggling bomb back to safety.

Cautiously, "How do you think you'll do?"

The colts exchanged a glance. The next one went towards her. Back to a momentary regard of the other stupid face in the area.

The raucous laughter nearly drowned out the starting bell.

Diamond did her best not to drag her hooves as she slowly trotted behind them, heading towards the front entrance and the final days of what was now starting to feel like a strictly temporary prison term. The one some of the oldest sections of history implied you got during the trial, just before you were found guilty and transferred into the dungeon.

"Watch your step," Snails said.

"What?"

Reproachfully, "You nearly kicked the trench. What if he hadn't been out of the way yet?"

He. She couldn't stop the thought, and just barely managed to get most of the sarcasm out of her voice. "Does he have a name?"

"Naw."

Well, at least he hasn't gone that far with the gross --

"We hadn't known each other long enough yet."

'It takes more than money to motivate an employee. Salary can almost always help, but it's still not a guarantee. Most ponies want more than mere bits. Many want open recognition of their efforts. Somepony to acknowledge how hard that effort truly was. Praise. Or even just a simple, personally-delivered kind word of thanks.'

Except that the stupid colts hadn't done anything worth praising. They hadn't even managed to accomplish a single thing which could normally be left free of insult on those rare days when the sheer offense of having to be around their idiocy did put Diamond in the mood to spend a pointless hour creating wind-blown ripples on the surface of the lake, water which would promptly smooth out the instant she stopped, just placidly resting there as if she'd never done anything at all. Water had no memory, which gave it something else in common with Snips and Snails.

That trait was, like the hoof-mounted stabbing blades she'd seen when their dumb teacher had forced them into a trip to Canterlot's Museum Of Military History, double-edged. Under the one hoof, the colts seemed to have very little memory of anything she'd ever wasted her time in saying to them before this, which meant she hadn't had to pull out any of the tongue-knotting false apologies she'd worked on through her non-breakfast, one which her daddy hadn't attended because he was just so busy all the time and probably just had to get to work early, no matter how hard he usually tried to spend that time with her even in the middle of the most desperate business crisis. But under one of the other hooves, they had no desire to attempt recollection of -- anything. Like the stupid facts trotting in order across the blackboard.

Diamond risked a whisper: Cheerilee would still be on the alert for note-passing and for careful projection of near-hissed sound, the acoustics of the back corner actually seemed to be on Diamond's side. "Shouldn't you be taking notes?"

Snips glanced up from his paper, just enough to put his snout clear of the actual desk. He'd been staring at it intently for several minutes, and Diamond had seen tiny lines of glow traveling across the sheet. None of them had left ink marks behind, and the writing implements on the desk corner had remained untouched by mouth and field for the first full hour of school. "Huh?"

"Notes. You should be taking them."

"Why?"

"So you can study them later and pass finals?"

He stared at her.

"Hey, lookit this," Snips said. His field surrounded the paper in a series of stutter-steps, carefully raised it. Large sections fell away. What remained was a series of carefully-clipped miniature exacting outlines of a pony form, linked to each other at the nose, a chain of two-dimensional nuzzles.

Diamond wanted to look away. She couldn't seem to manage it. First she couldn't get Cheerilee to do what she wanted, then her daddy hadn't fought for her, and now her own neck had joined the conspiracy of revolution, recruiting her eyelids along the way.

"It was really hard to get your tiara right," Snips said, with the tiny breath-blown scraps of cutout which now littered the entire area giving evidence.

She forced a nod.

He'd paired her with herself, at least. She wasn't being forced to spend a paper eternity snout-to-snout with some dumb colt.

"It's a necklace," Snips whispered. His field exerted again, and the ends of the chain awkwardly reached towards each other -- then paused. "You can put it on during recess."

There was a snort on her left. It was sharp, surprisingly deep, and highly amused. Apparently Snails found the whole thing funny.

The chorus of echoes from the rest of the classroom seemed to indicate a lot of ponies agreed with him. And normally Diamond would have seen the occasion as one of those truly rare events where the entire group almost came close to approaching half her level and she could spent a moment laughing at idiocy with everypony else, but...

...he'd done something. A feat which had apparently required real effort on his part.

Her daddy's words gave her the response, something which had to fight its way out of her throat letter by letter.

"It's... very... nice."

He grinned.

The chorus seemed to be getting louder.

Her unwanted new bench had proven too durable to break with a deliberately-hard plop, even with earth pony strength driving the effort. As it turned out, the stupid thing was also too resistant to the heat of fuming for properly catching fire.

They were watching her.

All the stupid colts and fillies in the class. Even Silver, although that was just checking on her welfare, looking for the hints of body language and secret signals which would let her friend know that progress had been made. (Naturally, Diamond had let no such thing travel across the endless void: there had been no cause and, after a pair of hours sitting between the morons, no available strength.) But the others had a different reason for their distant survey. Sure, Diamond might approach Snips and Snails on rare occasion: after all, everypony got fed up with water sometimes. But for her to follow them out, doing something which other dumb ponies might see as keeping company... it was getting attention. Diamond certainly would have watched anypony who seemed to be hanging around with the pair on a regular basis, working on some choice commentary to be delivered when the audience was just right, and for anypony else to be doing the same with her was patently unfair in a way any lawyer would have gotten a jury to see within minutes, if only she still had access to them.

Fortunately, the boys liked to spend most of their recesses out of sight from the herd, all the better to fully surprise the class with whatever revolting piece of debris they'd found during the break. So the scrutiny only lasted until they all got around the corner, which gave Diamond the freedom to go directly for the point. She normally would have spent some time setting things up with a degree of subtlety, but she had no confidence that either of the colts spoke subtle. She was beginning to feel thankful that they even understood some small amount of Equestrian.

"So you think you're going to --"

The paper necklace was floated across the gap towards her. As Diamond froze in silent horror, Snips' field gently wrapped it around her neck.

She wasn't choking. She wasn't. The paper wasn't tight at all. The gagging pressure was purely internal, which made it all the more real.

He'd misaligned the ends, which were on the left instead of at the back: it allowed her to just barely see the sudden intensity increase in that portion of field glow while his horn's corona intensified and the colt's breathing sped up, light sweat beginning to manifest in the shoddy, poorly-groomed coat.

"Easy, Snips..." Snails dully cautioned.

"It's new, Snails, I don't quite have it down yet..."

It took nearly everything Diamond had left not to rear back and every scrap of remainder to prevent herself from fleeing. One of the world's two stupidest colts was practicing a working on something which was around her neck? Rushing out of the area at full gallop was the only sane reaction, followed by seeking out the police, doctors to see if any damage had been done, then those still-blocked lawyers if it had, with that last part being mandatory because in the world of jury compensation, stress and fear often counted double.

But they were her only hope.

And besides, if Snips did wind up getting the whole thing either horribly wrong or in a truly minor fashion which she could fake into something more, going to the hospital would just have her daddy at her bedside, weeping and nuzzling her and seeing how he should have been properly protecting her all along, because it was his neglect which had forced her into this. So there.

There was a slight heat against the side of her neck, just a degree or two, still enough that she had to keep fighting that urge to run --

-- and the ends of the paper necklace fused.

The glow slowly diminished around both horn and paper, vanished. All four of Snips' knees were shaking.

"I think..." Snips was breathing very hard. "...that did it. Touch it?"

Diamond, the normal frown held back by the tide of fear, brought a really-not-trembling hoof up and did so.

The ends came apart, and the necklace fell away -- but only a hoofwidth, and then it was snagged by Snails' field.

"Okay..." Snips forced out. "Now... touch it again?"

Well, if it hadn't exploded the first time, her odds of living through the next seemed to be a little stronger. She managed a second contact, Snails' field helpfully parting to allow her direct hoof access.

At her touch, the paper slowly raised itself out of that second field. And it was glowing, a faint vestige of Snips' own corona hue -- but the smaller colt's horn was unlit, and Diamond watched as the circlet moved towards her neck again...

It encircled her throat. The ends heated by that degree or two, fused again.

Snails grinned. It was still dopey. It would never be anything but stupid. It was also proud. "Nice one, Snips! Won't tear either, right?"

Snips shook his head. "Won't tear, won't burn..." That stupid laugh again, but this one was still a little unsteady. "I had a lot of fun trying to get some of the first ones to burn! But it'll come on and off on its own, whenever you touch it. It won't even get dirty. It's... forever."

Diamond couldn't stare at it: the necklace wasn't in a good position for it. She just looked at the colts instead.

Spells. Workings. Dumb tricks. Using paper for jewelry. How could there be anything stupider than that? Paper wasn't precious. It had no worth at all. Sure, maybe the history stuff said it had been really hard to make once and that had made a big personal library into an undisputed sign of wealth, but that had been before she was born and so she didn't really care about it. In the all-important now which she personally had to supervise and dictate, paper was everywhere and maybe gems were just a little harder to come by, but at least ponies with brains thought jewels were beautiful.

A paper necklace. It was just stupid. And it couldn't tear or burn, which meant she'd have to go through the trouble of losing it --

-- wait. Paper which won't tear or burn?

"Snips..." Was that the first time she'd ever said his name? He usually wasn't even worth the dignity of one, just like most of the other ponies around her and unless she could use one of their names to pull in attention before launching the crushing blow, all of the Blank Flank Maintainers. (It was so obvious to Diamond that the stupidity of that trio would keep them mark-free until the day they stopped being willful idiots. And so she happily let them keep right on doing it.)

He perked up.

"Does it work on all paper?" Because she could see it now, Twilight Sparkle, so-called Element-Bearer, a pony of just enough importance to be annoying and therefore somepony who surely had to have access to the bits of the palace, floating over saddlebag after saddlebag filled with money after learning that her precious (but no longer valuable) library would never have to worry about having a book being destroyed ever again...

"Not yet," Snips breathed -- but that was beginning to center on normalcy. "Works best if I cut some pieces out first..."

Which wasn't exactly going to make the librarian happy, but a notch or two out of a useless title page had to be a fair trade for protection, right? "How about books?"

"Remember when I said it was fun trying to get the stuff to burn?"

Being quizzed on memory by Snips was an act of both irony and insult, but Diamond managed to force another nod.

"Guess what was on fire?" He grinned. "The binding glue! You had to smell it... well, if the wind was right, maybe you did... all the neighbors in that direction sure got it, and you had to hear them with my mom, it was like they couldn't appreciate a really disgusting..." Which was the point at which speech broke up into a series of those grunting laughs, a whole fallow of pigs rooting for false humor.

Oh. Well, a lot of profitable enterprises had to go through warm-up stages, or in this case, burn-down. "Keep working on it." More grinning. She was already sick of it. Except that...

...in a way, he was her employee. Or was about to be. And they needed to reach that part, quickly: there was only so much recess to use and every minute she spent with the colts was one less she had to use for making everypony else pay for that reaction. So in the name of the all-important goal of getting her to pass so that her daddy would see how good she'd been all along...

"Thank you," Diamond said, and silently vowed to spend an hour cleaning her tongue.

Snails' grin was no less offensive. "Bet it makes your neck turn green."

Whatever color had been about to suffuse Snips' coat immediately flushed into rage. "Will not!"

"And her coat's gonna turn all curly..."

"It won't!"

"Then it'll smell as bad as Snips does."

"Take that back!"

"Will not."

"I'll make you!"

"Do that."

The smaller colt lunged at the taller. Legs blurred. Bodies tumbled. Horns remained dark. Dirt went flying everywhere, which made Snails yelp as the twisting mass came too close to an exposed bug, and the traveling riot helpfully twisted away just in time.

Eventually, Diamond got sick of it and reluctantly moved in to pry them apart, which took very little effort: she was considerably stronger than both combatants and besides, they were giggling too hard to resist.

Once they'd stopped panting and a tiny degree of order had been restored, she finally seized control of the discussion.

"Why did you laugh when I asked how you would do on finals?" She already had a strong suspicion of what the answer was going to be, but this was the lead-in and given how much time the fight had taken, she didn't have much recess left to work with.

"'cause we'll flunk," Snails said. He didn't seem to be particularly upset about it.

"We always flunk," Snips added with an equal lack of caring. "Every semester."

Which would have sent her into despair if it wasn't for her well-earned confidence in her ability to fix everything, added to a simple fact which had just occurred to her, one which made what the colts had said into a tease which they would have to pay for. After the end of the semester. "You can't fail every time."

"But we do," Snails dully pointed out.

"No you can't!" Diamond insisted with brilliant, perfect logic. "We all started school together! You've advanced every year I have! So that means you're passing!"

Snips shrugged. "We take summer school," he replied. "And extra classes during winter break, too. Every year. Different teacher. We pass those."

Diamond blinked.

She didn't pay much attention to the idiots unless she absolutely had to. Why would anypony? But now that she thought about it, they never seemed to be around much during vacation... and now that she was thinking about it even more, the dunces had just given her a gift magnitudes more precious than the dumb necklace, something she could use against Cheerilee. If the colts never passed her classes and always got through the ones which the other teacher conducted, then clearly the fault was with the mare. It was something her daddy could go to the school board with: a simple request to get rid of the inferior. And not only that, those words had proven that the colts could pass. She had something she could work with...

"Is the break teacher that much better?" Recess might be limited, but evidence was important.

"Not really," Snips shrugged again.

"He talks to us more," Snails added. "But he kind of has to. We're usually the only two ponies there."

"Miss Cheerilee's better," Snips decided, and somehow managed to look dopier than ever. "And a lot prettier. Mr. Guffey looks out the window a lot. We just have to pass his stuff. We don't have to pass with Miss Cheerilee."

"We can't," Snails definitively concluded. "Ever."

The colts smiled at each other, and for all the obscuring stupidity within the twinned expressions, it was a smile Diamond knew by heart, because it was one she so often wore: the look of somepony who had figured out something nopony else knew, the pride of being a hoofstep ahead of the herd...

But to have that expression coming from them... Diamond was confused. "Why... why can't you pass Cheerilee's classes?"

This look carried heavy notes of concern. An extended silent communication passed between the boys, and most of the words seemed to possess considerably more than one syllable.

Finally, they turned to her.

"Wanna know a secret?" Snails asked.

"Swear not to tell?" Snips followed.

"Because you have to swear," Snails insisted. "On Celestia, Luna, and Cadance. Manes, tails, and hooves all together. Or we won't tell you. And it'll be that much worse if you break your word."

"It's that important," Snips stated, and the words were an absolute.

She swore, mostly because she was starting to think she had to. Not that she cared about making vows, not even when all three Princesses were involved because it was so obvious that the rulers never heard the words, and they wouldn't appear to inflict punishments if the promise was broken. But making the vow was clearly the only way the colts were going to talk.

More unspoken debate followed her falsely-solemn promise -- but thanks to her acting skills, this argument was much shorter.

"Our parents don't like us hanging around each other," Snips abruptly said.

"His mom thinks I get him into trouble," Snails added.

"My dad thinks he's the problem," Snips sighed. "And it's always been like that. Since we first met. I can't go over his house most of the time and my folks don't want him in mine."

"Plus there was all the stuff with Miss Trixie," Snails recalled, and both faces briefly went aglow with the light of adoration.

"That didn't help," Snips decided. "Neither did the Ursa Minor..."

"The first year, we both passed," Snails said. "We had all sorts of stuff planned for break. Digs all over the place. But our parents kept us away from each other. Chores. Working in the store for me and the business for him."

"Bookbinding," Snips groaned. "My hooves stuck to each other for the whole summer."

"We mostly see each other at school," Snails went on, and the dullness Diamond normally found in those eyes didn't seem to be there. "Or going back and forth. Because our folks can't stop that. But once we're out, they've got control. We couldn't sneak away most of the time, not even under Moon. Our parents put alarm spells up, so something big had to be going on anyway, something which would have already set them off... We didn't get to have any real fun together until the next semester started. Because we had to go back to school."

Snips grinned, and there was a sharpness in it. "So we figured -- why not have school all the time?"

"So we flunk with Miss Cheerliee," Snails concluded. "And then with Mr. Guffey, we pass. That way, we see each other all year round. We could always fail with Mr. Guffey too, but getting held back stinks and at least if we pass eventually, our folks are sort of happy. We stay with the rest of the class, we'll graduate, and then nopony can keep us apart."

"Ever," Snips definitively stated.

And as Diamond stared at them in open, impossible-to-conceal shock, they beamed at each other with the pride of a job well-done, a state which maintained across the scant seconds until the school bell rang again.

Diamond was the last pony into the classroom. The weight of her thoughts had slowed her down.

They had no motivation to study. It was, in fact, exactly the opposite. Snips and Snails had what they saw as every reason in the world to fail and fail again: each other. To pass was to be separated: to flunk was to be granted time with a friend. What kind of bribes, payments, and threats did Diamond have to offer which could counter that?

She had less than a week to find out. Otherwise, it was going to be a trio present for break classes this time around, and she doubted her father would be as happy about the delayed chance of passing as the colts' parents seemed to be.

Diamond wondered what Mr. Guffey looked like. And, for the first time, questioned whether she would learn the answer through staring at him across a schoolroom space lit by summer Sun.

Well, at least I don't have to worry about getting to the dumb Elements any more.

Blasting their parents clearly wasn't going to do any good either.

Community Disorganizer

'Few businesses can hope to become part of the community without contributing to it. Each settled zone is created not just to make a place of safety, but one of family. Unless you actively work to become part of that extended relationship, there will be those who see you as standing aside from it, taking without giving -- and in time, there will be nothing to take. Sponsor field trips, rebuild playgrounds when the disaster relief funds don't cover the slides during the first week, learn an instrument and play it while marching in the parades. If you can be seen as one who provides more than they extract, your enterprise will find that much given to it.'

Or in other words, make token efforts which tricked ponies into thinking they were getting something from you instead of the other way around, and you could keep doing the same thing forever. Diamond had figured that one out early on, but hadn't used it because giving on any level, even a false one, was just too much work, not to mention that receiving was so much more fun -- especially when certain ponies weren't exactly giving things up of their own free will. But in this case, there seemed to be cause for a certain level of minor exception, and she'd worked out the details during the last hours of school. She needed something from Snips and Snails, something only they could provide. They had every reason not to give it to her.

So all she had to do was get around that rationale.

She'd waited until the last bell had rung, quickly trotted over to Silver and told her that there were things Diamond had to do, just keep studying and everything would be fine -- then scrambled out the front door before the stares and giggles and highly offensive half-whispers which wondered about whether she was about to follow her new friends home could reach deeply enough into her ears for a response to become mandatory. Especially since...

...they weren't her friends. At best, they were mere employees, and she had to get them working. And they had already told her just how to pull it off. She was about to charge the problem at the source.

She'd flipped a single bit shortly after leaving the schoolhouse, let the facing pick the initial target. And then she'd followed one of her employees home.

The colt hadn't seemed to notice her tracking him: he was easily distracted by just about everything, up through (or down to) and including dirt, or at least whatever he'd just spotted crawling out of it. She'd had to pause and hide several times while he helpfully assisted in the extraction and nudged the new arrival on its way. It had taken more time than she'd wanted it to, but he'd reached his destination at last, and then she'd needed to add a few minutes for safety, much of which was used for silently rehearsing the prepared speech, along with checking the street to make sure nopony she knew was around to spot her. Not that such would have stopped her: there was too little time to even think about the idea of witnesses postponing her plans -- but that meant she didn't have much to spare for denials either.

It was a surprisingly nice neighborhood. Nowhere near hers, of course: Diamond lived -- well, far too close to the Apples for her liking, but having a home outside of central Ponyville gave her daddy the space for a formal estate. But for what was to be found on the actual streets... not bad. If you liked not being wealthy, which Diamond didn't and nopony ever should. (Except for Apple Bloom and anypony else Diamond hated, because they deserved it.)

Diamond trotted up to the front door, raised her left forehoof, and carefully knocked.

After a minute, a crack opened, and one violet eye stared out at her. The subsequent blink came across as oddly unhappy.

The rest of the door gradually opened. Very slowly, as if the adult on the other side was individually second-guessing every extra hoofwidth of aperture.

"Hello, Mr. Gastrope," Diamond smiled, using her most polite this-pony-is-important-in-some-way-which-I-can't-get-around-until-I'm-older voice. "Is Snails in?"

He stared at her.

"What are you doing here?" It was not a happy inquiry.

"I came to see Snails," Diamond said, doing her best not to turn it into insistence while also managing to withhold most of the nausea. "To pick him up, really. So is he in?"

The violet eyes went narrow, and the deep voice was dangerously soft.

"You think I'm stupid. Don't you?"

Diamond tried to blink back the shock, but all that seemed to do was push it deeper in. "...Mr. Gastrope?"

"He may not care what you say about him," the surprisingly large unicorn said, "but I do. I remember the things he can't be bothered with, which unfortunately includes most of his schoolwork. My son is upstairs tending to his farm, ignoring his homework, and generally living in the contentment which comes when somepony does not have to deal with a filly who drops by because insulting her classmates in school and street is no longer adequate to her needs. Please feel free to repeat that in front of the jury your lawyers will undoubtedly have assembled within the moon: I won't deny any of it. I know about you, Diamond Tiara. Everything he's ignored... I was nearby to overhear a little of it, and I can guess at the rest. I can't control what you do out there." He took a deep breath.

She seemed to be breathing too quickly, and it made her words exit faster than she would have liked. "Mr. Gastrope, I really have to see Snails --"

The big head leaned forward. Nostrils flared, hot air blasted against her coat. The horn came close to touching her forehead, and the first flickers of dark red corona were beginning to spark around it.

All words stopped. Along with breathing.

"-- but you will not do it in my house. Good day, Diamond Tiara. It will be a much better one for your absence."

He pulled back, and the door slammed in her face.

She stood there for a time, for there was only one other place she could go -- and even that would require eventually returning to this. She had to start arranging things here and now, because then-and-later might be so much worse...

Why had the adult acted like that? Why had he said those things? Sure, she'd made a few well-chosen comments about Snails over the years, mostly on those days when water itself became offensive, but the colt didn't seem to care at all -- which meant his dumb father surely had no cause for being so angry with her. If it wasn't for her very urgent needs of the moment, he would be accounting for the emotional damage of fear in front of a jury. He'd almost touched her: the best lawyers could turn that into a threat, and her daddy had no other kind --

-- but at least for now, she didn't...

Diamond found herself distantly wondering if the Gastropes were still shopping at her daddy's store. Took three slow breaths, managed to dismiss all tremble from her tail along with the memory of same, and knocked again.

Then again.

It took ten minutes of repeats before the door flew open, and the stallion's legs were already in a pre-charge set.

"What. Do. You. Want?"

Afterwards, she managed not to mind that her voice had been shaking just as much as everything else, because while lying in front of the ponies on a jury was easy enough, recounting the truth minimized future effort. "...I need to see Snails..."

"And why, other than trying to find out if there's anything you could say which would ever make him care about your poison, would you ever need to see my son?"

Which brought her to the practiced portion, and it made the words emerge more naturally, even if the sudden glare up into those angry violet eyes was pure improvisation. "To study!"

He pulled back, just a hoofwidth or two, and his legs slipped closer together. Shock, although Diamond later decided it was more fun to perceive it as fear stemming from her skillful defiance. "...what?"

"Well, sir --" and that word had every bit of her daddy in it which she could muster "-- you've probably heard that I'm at the top of our class. And, no offense to him, I'm sure it's not his fault in any way, but your son is at the bottom. Everypony knows he's failed finals every year since his second, he's had to keep going to summer school... Miss Cheerilee thinks he needs a little extra help. So she asked me to tutor him."

It was a brilliant lie. Diamond felt it was one of the best she'd ever come up with, especially on the relatively short notice granted by the second half of the school day. And she only had to get away with it twice.

"Tutor." Pure disbelief.

"...yes." A lie that good should have been working already.

"You." Distilled.

More carefully, "Yes." She tried to look extra-polite. It normally would have involved a tiara shift, but she couldn't seem to move.

"Why?" Supersaturated.

"Because I'm at the top of the class and --"

"-- why would you ever agree to help my son? Why would you help anypony?"

She hadn't anticipated the question, knew the truth was the last thing which should be released into furious ears. Diamond scrambled. "We... sit next to each other now... we've been talking a little more during recess... he's been in extra classes every summer, Miss Cheerilee thought it was a bad pattern which had to be broken, kind of like how it took ponies about a century to not start any diplomatic meetings with new griffon ambassadors until their eighth day in Equestria, after they'd adjusted, and I... I just thought I could..."

She had to have more lie than that. Somewhere within her was the falsehood which would make everything work out, force the angry adult to believe her. It was just that it was taking more time to locate the thing than usual, he was still staring at her, that corona was getting brighter, more jagged, and you could only sue somepony after the fact...

"...help?"

"You have never helped a single pony in your life," Mr. Gastrope softly said. "You will not help my son. I would say you won't sabotage him either, but I honestly don't know what you could have done to make his grades worse anyway --"

And there it was. Her head dipped in shame as she fumed about having to admit to a fault, even a partial lie of one, but this was for her daddy...

""-- I'm being punished."

Nearly a whisper. "Say that again."

"I -- did something... in class and... if I help Snails pass his finals..."

Slowly, lumen by lumen, the spiking corona dimmed.

"And you only get out of trouble if he passes," Mr. Gastrope said. "Is that it?"

She nodded.

"And he fails despite your efforts -- you're still in trouble."

Again. It was becoming her go-to move.

"We've tried tutors," he told her. "More than a few times. And he just keeps failing his finals anyway. We've even tried to get Mr. Guffey to give him private lessons during the year, but we can't get him away from Saddle Arabia: apparently their school year is almost the exact opposite of ours and they pay rather handsomely for language classes. You'll fail where everypony else did, only faster."

Which didn't seem to be something she could nod to.

He took a deep breath.

"Which would mean... you would still be in trouble," Mr. Gastrope concluded. The last six words emerged through a smile, one Diamond knew well, the same expression she wore every time she saw that the Blank Flank Maintainers were about to fail at life once again. "And you certainly can't make things any worse..."

She would have one of her father's assistants draft a letter of complaint and send it to the Weather Bureau for her. It was almost summer. There was no way she should have been resisting the urge to shiver.

"Wait here," Mr. Gastrope said. The door closed again, and much more slowly.

She waited, briefly wondered what he'd meant by 'farm' -- but only for a moment, and then the other smile which sprang to life around the BFM, the one which manifested once the failure was complete, came to her lips. Smug satisfaction, knowing the universe was running properly, which was to say in a manner which benefited Diamond.

Halfway there.

Snails had been confused, but Diamond had hardly expected any other reaction. He'd thankfully possessed enough common sense to remain silent through his trip down the ramp, packed his schoolbooks into saddlebags, and even kept quiet while Diamond explained that they'd be studying at her house plus she'd even make sure he got dinner -- but then the door shut for the final time, and the impact broke the dam which had held the words back.

"What are you --?"

"Shh!" An urgent hiss.

"I don't --"

"Shh! Just follow me! And when I tell you to, hide!"

The second performance benefited from what had turned out to be a rather intense opening curtain: this time, Diamond knew which words to go with first, and Mrs. Bradel was eventually confused into releasing her own son. Snails, who was turning out to be pleasantly good at following orders, didn't emerge from concealment until the door had been shut and Snips' dazed mother was no longer peeking out between curtains while trying to figure out if any of it was actually happening.

"What are you doin' here?" Snips curiously challenged his friend.

"The same thing you are!" a surprised Snails responded. "...I think. Whatever that is... what are we doing?"

BFM Smile #1 put on another appearance. "I got you together!" Diamond declared, and waited for the adulation to pour in.

It didn't happen.

"Huh?" Snips asked.

"What?" Snails echoed.

"Together," Diamond clarified through repetition, with no more than eighty percent of the exasperation blocked. "You're not in school -- but you're together! Because as far as your parents know, you're not with each other! You're with me! And if anypony finds out, I can just say I was told to tutor both of you -- but by then, it'll be too late..."

Snips' dull eyes were the first to clear: Snails' quickly followed.

"We're not with each other," Snails breathed. "We're with you... and they just think we're studying... that's brilliant!"

"That's amazing!" Snips was virtually prancing in place. "That gets us the whole afternoon! And part of the night!"

Diamond nodded. "Yeah! But -- they think you're studying. With me. So it's important that you actually do some of it, because they might quiz you on stuff when you get home every night. I told them you'd be at my house, and you've got your books... you just study for an hour, maybe two or three or -- anyway, you just study, we'll have dinner, you'll study a little more, and you can have fun with each other the whole time!"

"Fun," Snips repeated. He seemed to have some understanding of the word..

"Sure!" Diamond beamed. It was working! If the colts could learn an entire school year of material over the course of summer classes, they had to be capable of memorizing enough in a week to let her pass! And if she managed to crack down on their work schedule, get them at her place for the weekend while she supervised...

...well, her grades might be pulled down a bit: there was a good chance she wasn't going to finish at the top of the class. But she was certainly more than capable of forging Cheerilee's mouthwriting, and she doubted the teacher would send out a backup copy of a report card. As long as she didn't fail and wind up in summer school (because she didn't think she could come up with excuses for being gone that many hours per week), she would be okay...

"Fun," Snails double-echoed. They were now both ahead of Princess Luna.

"I've got all sorts of stuff!" Diamond proudly declared. "One pony can't possibly play with it all!" Two had barely made a dent, and -- well, excepting parties, there had never really been more than two, she hadn't wanted any of those ponies touching her stuff and these colts weren't exactly an exception, but she needed to lure them the rest of the way in. She could pick out a few pieces she hadn't used in a while...

...which was just about all of them, actually, but it was far more important for her daddy to make sure she was current with the latest toy trends than to use any of the results...

...and nose them over to the colts. For a five-minute play break at the end of each hour. Under supervision.

The boys grinned at each other -- then stopped. Their faces fell at the same moment, and both turned to face her.

"But it just gets us through the end of the semester," Snails said.

There was worry creasing Snips' low forehead. "And when our folks find out we've been together... 'cause they're gonna find out, they always do... even if we're just with you... they'll ask for separate tutors."

"We just have to get through a week," Diamond told them. "That's all. After that, who cares what happens?"

"We do," Snails solidly said. The colt's head went down and for once, he didn't seem to be looking for a bug. "Because when they find out, and Snips is right, they always do -- they'll ask for those separate tutors."

"So?" Diamond really wasn't seeing the point. She would have passed. Nothing which happened after that was any of her concern.

"They'll ask the school," Snips told her. "Which means Miss Cheerilee. Who knows you weren't assigned to tutor us, who'll tell them, and then..."

Diamond blinked.

They were right. They were exactly right. There was a good chance that nopony would ever find out -- but the colts' parents struck her as exactly the kind of ponies who would march to the school board and demand their children be separated again. Which would lead into questions as to just who had put them together, even through a third party, and that would lead directly back to her. She could claim a lot of things about Cheerilee, and had -- but it would take more than a little verbal and legal dressage before anypony would truly believe the teacher had assigned a tutor and forgotten about it.

There was a chance -- not a strong one, but a chance -- that Diamond could wind up in trouble. Which normally wasn't a concern because her daddy would get her out of it just as fast, but...

...was.

She wasn't being careful enough. She'd spent so much time sheltered under the protective stable roof of wealth and privilege and legal doubletalk, she'd forgotten that ponies who didn't have that shield needed to be cautious, something she generally taught them about every time they slipped up. Until

unless

until her daddy once again saw how good she was, she needed to project her plans further along, be on the watch for ankle-breaking gopher holes in any road. Something she already did -- but in the confidence that somepony else would seal the gaps. For the first time, Diamond briefly considered that such protection had made her prone to larger risks, and she couldn't afford to take too many of those just yet...

The boys had seen the danger where she had not. Had saved her.

"We shouldn't be here," Snips miserably declared. "We should just go home right now..."

"We're supposed to be at her house," Snails sighed. "They'll check to see if we showed up. You know they will. If they find out we weren't there, that's it. When they find out we were both there, it's worse..."

The gloom intensified, dulled coats while seeming to darken clouds in a way not even the pegasi could manage.

"We're dead," Snips glumly stated.

"We're worse than dead," Snails corrected.

Diamond looked at one. Then the other. And for one of the very few times in her life, at least that she cared to remember for more than a minute, found she had nothing to say.

"Take it off," Snips told her.

"...what?"

"The necklace. Take it off. We're gonna be in trouble, big trouble, and it's your fault... just take it off!" The surge of anger did not reach his horn: no corona ignited -- and somehow, that made things all the worse. "You shouldn't have it!"

"Snips, it's not her fault," Snails dully interjected. "She was just trying to help. She doesn't know our folks... how they think, the ways they check up... We didn't tell her: she couldn't have known."

She hadn't taken the necklace off.

She'd gone to Snails' house first. Mr. Gastrope hadn't spotted it and things might have turned towards still worse if he had, but she should have taken it off the instant she left school, at the end of lunch, anytime, but she'd sat in the dumb schoolhouse with everypony seeing the stupid thing was around her neck, she could have claimed to be trying on a product sample, summer business venture, sure, that definitely would have worked, but she was just thinking of that now and...

...she should have taken it off...

"We're still going to be in trouble! She -- she..." The smaller body seemed to shrink. "...I dunno, Snails, maybe you're right, but you know what's coming, we can't --"

"-- come with me," Diamond broke in.

"We can't," Snips groaned, which was the only thing keeping it from being a sob. "We come with you, we're in trouble, we sneak away, we're in trouble, we go home -- nothing works..."

"You're supposed to be with me right now," Diamond said. "They'll only go to the school after they find out. There's at least tonight to think of something."

"Like what?" Still miserable -- but there was a note of hope in his voice now, much like the Maintainers after they scavenged an idea for a future failure from the ashes of the most recent one.

"I don't know yet." Which felt like it had been a mistake: you were never supposed to admit when you didn't know something. But there were things Diamond knew about potential trouble which the boys didn't, and one of them was "But as long as you haven't been caught yet, there's still time -- and if you do get caught, that's when you get to explain things. We just need to come up with the right explanation."

We.

Well, they were her employees. Therefore, they could make a contribution to the overall effort and Diamond, as their boss, would instantly recognize any miraculously helpful suggestion, then take all the credit.

"Come on," she told them. "My house. We'll think of something there."

This particular silent communication between the boys was a long one and for a moment, she almost found herself wondering what they were saying.

"She's right," Snails finally admitted. "We're worse than dead... but not yet. Let's go."

And they all trotted off towards Diamond's home together, the colts following her. Which felt only appropriate and right, but...

...her daddy's words were echoing in her head again.

'Every employee can be said to be responsible for themselves -- but the pony in charge is still responsible for all of them.'

She'd never worked out what that one truly meant.

Not until it was too late.

Public Works Projects

Diamond didn't look up when she first heard the newest hoofsteps beginning to approach: she simply risked a quick nod to the colt who was sitting on the bench opposite her own in her daddy's oddly basic (but rather comfortable) study, which was her pre-established way to telling him not to look up either. And then when she judged that those hoofsteps were close enough for their owner to pick up on words, she increased the volume of her own.

"-- no, the Diamond Dogs were actually invited to the signing of the treaty, just like everyone else," Diamond carefully lectured. "A lot of ponies make that mistake. They think that just because the Dogs didn't sign, they were never invited at all. But they didn't have one leader who would speak for them. It's really important, to have one leader --" quickly "-- maybe two, just so you know exactly who's in charge. But with them, every warren was like its own little country, and all their alphas ever did was fight with each other over who was the biggest alpha. So even if any of them had wanted to sign, they couldn't agree on who should. And if one alpha tried to go, the other warrens would stop him because they didn't want it to look like he was speaking for them. Okay?"

"Uh-huh," said the colt, which was all she'd trusted him to say after hearing the results from the brief rehearsal.

They both felt the head carefully moving into the open doorway. Neither of them paid any visible attention to it.

"Now, the dragons..." The head pulled back. The hoofsteps moved away as Diamond continued her lecture, which she maintained for thirty seconds after the last echo had faded. "...all right, come out!"

Snails carefully stepped out from behind the freestanding, shielding bookcase. "You're sure she's gone?"

Diamond, who was intimately acquainted with how sound moved within her house, especially when those sounds came in the form of her orders, nodded. "We're clear. Let's get back to the real stuff!"

"But aren't we gonna do history for a while longer?" Snips asked, momentarily glancing at the now-empty doorway, at the spot where his mother's head had recently been.

"...why would you want to do history?" a confused Diamond asked, because history was the one thing she had to do and wanting to was never going to be any part of that.

"You were talking about dragons," Snips immediately answered. "Dragons are cool! But just the big ones. Who might eat ponies. I mean, Spike's okay, but it's not like he's ever gonna do anything cool, like stomp around and knock over buildings and set whole settled zones on fire! Except for that one time when he almost did, but nothing really happened. Besides, like you said, our folks might quiz us on some of this stuff when we get home, so we've gotta have something to tell them."

Snails nodded. "If they came all the way out here to check on us, they're sure going to follow up when we get home. We know. A few minutes of listening in aren't enough to convince them of anything. Not even close."

Diamond managed to repress the instinctive snarl, mostly through spotting the thing as it was just beginning to emerge and wrestling with it until the final battered result could pass for a sigh. "Fine... Five more minutes on the Treaty of Menagerie, but then we've got to get back to Literature." (She'd never really been interested in the written stories of other ponies, not when she was clearly so much better at making up her own.) But so far, the boys had been right about their parents, right about every way in which they'd predicted the adults would behave...

Precautions had been taken at the moment they'd all reached the estate. Diamond had rounded up every servant who was afraid to offend her (which was pretty much all of the still-employed ones) and given them their orders: two of them were to answer the door on every knock. If the Gastropes or Bradels showed up and asked to see their sons, they were to be told only that son was being tutored by Diamond. One servant would make an offer to show the snooping adult just what was going on with their offspring -- which gave Diamond time to get into a lecturing position with whichever son that currently was, while the other colt hid: something there was plenty of time for, because the other servant would have galloped ahead to sound the warning. Mrs. Bradel had been the second visit of the early evening, and hopefully the last: she was pretty sure they weren't going to get more than one from each family. And the staggering of their arrivals had taken out the one problem she hadn't figured out how to fix: the possibility of the adults showing up at the same time, or even just encountering each other on the lone road which led to her home, something which would have let them know both boys were on the premises -- and while she could have explained that away once, it would have prevented any more visits over the days to come. Planning, with a little bit of luck added in because the world approved of Diamond's plan in the same way that her daddy would eventually openly approve of her again, had given them the first night -- and it looked as if the colts were finally starting to relax.

But...

"Do they always do that?" Diamond found herself asking, because she was starting to realize that employee welfare just might mean more than ponies not sending couriers ahead bearing notices of illness too often. "Check on where you are and who you're with?"

"All the time," Snails sighed.

"Just in case we're with each other," Snips wearily confirmed. "And they still might go to Miss Cheerilee, and we haven't thought of anything we can do if that happens..."

Which made all of the relaxation reverse itself, and Snails gave his Literature text a disheartened snout nudge as he sank back down to the floor of the cozy study. "Did you think of anything? While I was behind the books?"

"No," Diamond reluctantly admitted, although not without feeling some pleasure about his starting to look towards her as the source of all thinking. "But we've still got time. Dragons now, though. And then you'll review some dumb stories. Maybe you can read them out loud to each other, because that helps ponies memorize stuff, especially when you've got to tell your parents about it. And -- reading stuff out loud makes it better. Even when it's dumb."

"And we'll play after that?" Snips quickly asked. "I want some more time with that block set! The ones which stuck together if you touched them just right. I almost had that bridge halfway across the room before we got called in for supper!"

"Maybe." Actually -- probably. The block set was something she'd never really been interested in, especially after she'd done some quick research in her father's study and found out it had never appreciated in value for the collector's market by even a single tenth-bit, even if the original packaging was still perfectly sealed just like hers had been before she'd sacrificed it to the needs of passing. Admittedly, this might be giving up more than a few bits down the road because such markets weren't exactly stable (and there had been the one time when Diamond had almost managed to get all of the store's lone shipment for that year's Hearth's Warming Eve's hottest toy off the shelves before they could be sold to the public, just so she could be the one to sell them at a markup which her daddy had refused to consider inflicting on anypony), but they'd really wanted to see it in action and besides, it kept them away from the stuff for which the secondary market value had already gone up.

"Your place has some awesome suppers," Snails said, finding the ghost of a smile. "And the ponies who bring all the dishes in move really fast!" Thoughtfully, "I guess they've sort of got to. If you just trotted down the whole table, the food would get cold. Except for the food that's already cold. That would warm up."

They'd had to use a third bench: a rare occasion outside of Silver's visits. But there hadn't been a fourth. Her daddy hadn't come home for dinner. And that was normal, it really was: there were some times when he stayed at the store until long after Moon had been raised, and Diamond only knew he'd arrived at home when she heard the tired gait approaching her door, just before he made his way into the bedroom as carefully as he could, trying to be quiet so he wouldn't wake her (although she was just pretending to be asleep by then, every time), and kissed her forehead before he finally went off to sleep. Her daddy worked so hard, and sometimes had trouble putting work off for another day, especially when he thought there might be something going on at one of the stores, like if there was a new competitor in another settled zone, or he was trying to decide just what to order from the latest wholesale catalogs, and always if he was trying to track down a reason for why --

-- Ponyville business is off.

"Diamond?"

That just might have been the first time either of the colts had used her name, which was probably why it felt so weird to hear. "Huh?" Diamond responded, and wanted to wince: that just made it sound like they were having some influence on her...

"You looked kind of out of it there," Snips continued in his role as the resident expert on just what ponies who were kind of out of it looked like. "Were ya thinking about something?"

"Literature," Diamond lied. "Let's do the dragon stuff, and then you two review some stories, and then the blocks. And then we'll do math after that." Not that Diamond needed much in math, because watching her daddy's accountants fill out her homework probably had some benefits, but it would look weird if the colts got home without that subject to discuss.

"We can't stay too late," Snails pointed out. "We've got to be back home for our normal bedtimes."

Which meant Diamond really needed a way of getting them onto the estate for the weekend. Well, as long as her lie was holding... but still, good employees should really be willing to put in some overtime.

Not that she knew if they were good employees yet. Their job was to keep her on top, and this was just the prep work for the true labor. But they were still all she had...

"I'll watch the clock," Diamond assured them, for her daddy had lots of clocks. "Just listen for now, okay? So when it came to the dragons --"

So she talked about that for a while, and watched the boys wriggling with excitement because they were dumb enough to still think dragons were cool when the presence of the one at the stupid library had already disproved that forever. Then she made sure they got into the early part of the literature stuff, and listened as they read aloud to each other, each quickly deciding that it was more fun if they threw in some voices, and their idea of how to make themselves sound like mares threatened to make the clocks stop. And after that, mostly because her daddy had said break times were an integral part of a productive workday, she reluctantly paused in her supervision and started leading them to the blocks, where she'd have to do some more supervising in order to make sure they didn't get into anything else, especially if it might have potential long-term value.

Some of that supervision might have to be conducted close-up. Somepony needed to make sure they were playing properly.

Snails glanced over to Snips as Diamond led them back towards the elaborate playroom, with its many shelves and extensive staging area which hosted a scale model of the palace large enough for a couple of ponies to stand in, its walls glinting in the highlights from reflections off untouched wrapping paper: there were a few things which Diamond really hadn't gotten around to, mostly given by ponies who probably hadn't been able to spend that much. "You know, Snips, if nothing bad happens, even if our parents don't find out -- this is still a really good idea. Not just the getting together, because that's still brilliant as long as we don't get caught. The studying stuff, too!"

Diamond's ears instantly perked.

"You think so? 'cause I don't know if our folks are gonna quiz us on this much..."

"Yeah, but they could ask any question. And it's not like we could review everything in one night, so we can get some stuff wrong. But we've still gotta be careful --"

Her tail was starting to feel as if she was holding it a little higher than usual.

"-- especially when it comes to getting stuff wrong. Making sure..."

And Snails grinned.

"Oh!" And it was a bark of a laugh which emerged from Snips, something which would have made any Diamond Dog proud. "You mean like third year! When Miss Cheerilee was trying out the multiple choice tests!"

A quick nod. "Yeah! You remember! We nearly marked off too much of the right stuff by accident, both of us! I know it was just bad luck, but five more for you, three for me, and one of us would have wound up on vacation!" And a very slow head shake. "Too close, Snips. Too close..."

"Yeah, Snails! I get it! If Miss Cheerilee does something like that again, and we know what the right answers are going in, we'll never put them down! -- hey, Diamond?"

The lone word seemed to take every bit of strength dinner had granted before reaching back to her absent breakfast and trying to draw from vacuum. "What?"

"Did you know your tail's dragging on the floor?"

She knew. And it kept dragging for the entire break period, ultimately covering up the vital blocks which would have allowed the bridge to carry the toy cart to something other than a final crash.

She hadn't slept well. Again.

It had been hours lying in her bed, trying out every position imaginable, if only because she eventually got sick of looking at every individual wall, in turn. Trying to figure out what her next move was. If she even had one. Because as it turned out, she could make the boys study. She could even make them learn. And they saw their learning as a more efficient way to flunk. They would write down their answers, their perfectly wrong answers which nopony would ever benefit from copying (with the exception of each other), send themselves to summer school and Mr. Guffey, and she just might wind up going with them...

A week was bad enough. A summer would be nightmare, and perhaps even more so than the one which recent history somehow felt warranted the capital letter, even though all that had happened was some extra nighttime and six mares whose only authority came from jewelry, and not even good jewelry (like her tiara) at that. And that was before considering what her daddy would say, how he would feel about her having flunked, and...

...was.

She still had six days. There was time to think of something. But she'd used up so much of that time under Moon, trying to come up with anything, anything at all, and it had gone on deep into the night, until she'd finally heard her daddy's weary hoofsteps coming down the hallway, and she'd immediately closed her eyes, tucked herself into her usual sleeping position, made sure her forehead was presented at the typical angle, and...

...he'd gone past her door.

Straight to his own bed.

And then she hadn't slept for a very long time, almost up until the moment she'd had to get up and not find him at breakfast. Having all the stupid pillows turn damp hadn't helped.

It had also taken a very long time to walk to school. After all, her daddy's house was some distance from the town, and it was hard to trot fast when you were tired and the dumb servants hadn't made a breakfast decent enough to eat again, or at least decent enough to keep down. Diamond had nearly been late, getting through the door mere seconds before the final summoning bell rang, and everypony had watched her as she'd gone to what wasn't supposed to be her seat, accompanied by a half-giggled greeting from the dumb boys, silent concern from Silver, and it had felt like stupid Cheerilee's eyes had been on her back all the way down the aisle...

She'd barely had the strength to even pretend she was paying any degree of attention. Every so often, there would be words from her left or right, and she might remember to nod: it didn't always seem to make much difference, except that...

"You okay?" Snips checked.

She remembered to nod.

"You look really tired," Snails added.

She nodded again, although that one was mostly on reflex.

"Don't try sleeping in class," Snips advised. "That doesn't work. We've tried it. Unless you don't snore. Snails snores. A lot."

A nod didn't seem to fit the occasion.

"Don't worry," Snails reassured her. "It'll be recess in a few minutes. You can rest up a little more then."

And sure enough, the bell rang, because it always did. That much closer to the final bell, the one which would signal failure and summer school and... was.

Diamond forced herself off the uncomfortable bench, down the aisle, and once again felt the weight of Cheerilee's dumb gaze upon her -- right up until Truffle stepped up to the desk, several papers shyly clutched in his teeth, and took the attention away.

There was trotting, although it was more like a slow hoof shuffle towards her doom. The other students were watching her, of course, especially since she was following the colts again: she had to stay close, just in case she thought of something. And Silver was watching: eventually, if Diamond couldn't think of anything, even Silver would find out...

The recess routine began, well out of sight from the others, a day which brought a scheduled hint of approaching summer heat, something Diamond could barely feel. Snails dug, displayed and talked about the results. Snips laughed, made jokes, gave advice, tried to see how much he could say before his friend took the argument from verbal to rough-and-tumble, a border he wasn't successfully crossing today. Diamond watched from near the wall, her body slumped low in the grass, tried not to think about an onrushing future while only concentrating on the things which might stop it, a priority order which, when put into practice, reversed itself on every attempt. And then --

"-- I gotta go in," Snips abruptly stated.

Snails glanced up, momentarily putting his horn free of the loosened soil. "What's up?"

"Bathroom," Snips announced. "You wanna know the details?"

The taller colt took an odd-seeming glance at Diamond. "Not right now. Get back out in time if you can?"

"I dunno, Snails, this one might be a while..." And with that, he galloped around the corner and out of sight. Snails shrugged, then lowered his head again, poking the dirt with his horn, dragging in careful, shallow trenches. Pulled back to see if anything had been uncovered, then started again. Over and over and over --

"-- why do you do that?"

Another glance up. "Do what?"

The rest of the tired words slipped out just as easily as the first five. Maybe they would be offensive and drive her last hope away. Maybe they wouldn't be. She wasn't sure it mattered any more. "Use your horn. You've got your magic. Why don't you just put your field deep into the ground and pull the bugs out?"

His head lifted a little more, just enough to stare at her.

"Unicorns can't put their fields inside stuff," he said. "Not solids. It's called differencing-nations or something like that. But nopony can do it." Mournfully, "Even when all the best bugs are deep down and I never see the great burrowers. The ones I can't reach..."

Her own blink felt oddly slow.

"You can't? Not even just for dirt?"

"Not when it's solid. Mud, sometimes, I can push a ways down. Really loose soil, that's kind of easy, because it's just being pushed aside. But when you go down deep, and it gets hard again -- not even Miss Trixie could do that, and if she can't..." He shrugged. "So I've gotta dig. Nothing else works."

His head went down again. The horn resumed its rooting. And Diamond stared at him.

He was a unicorn. Maybe not the strongest one: she really hadn't seen enough of his workings to get any sense of his power, mostly because it would have previously meant having to pay attention to him. But she'd just been told he couldn't do something easy. Just about the easiest thing imaginable...

Diamond was tired, and worried, and there had been times during the day and too-long night when she'd felt oddly -- lacking in control. Like there were things she couldn't do, when there had never been before. Things she couldn't arrange, not by herself or through her daddy, her daddy who hadn't come in to kiss her, or... anything. But this -- to have something easy in front of her and be told that no unicorn could do something so easy...

She was tired. And under other circumstances, she might have thought about it more. Because Diamond had her magic: she'd found it even earlier than her mark, practiced now and again under her daddy's instruction, and he'd told her how strong she was, how much pride he had in not only that strength, but her ability to master it on the finest level. The quality of her tools.

Diamond had her magic.

But she didn't really like it.

To enrich the soil, make it so that anything had a chance to grow in the grounds around the estate... that was automatic, constant, a part of her which needed no more tending to than her own breathing. But to go beyond that was to do something Diamond hated.

You had to ask.

That was the rule. You asked a question, and hoped to get an answer. Using her magic meant communication with something greater than herself, something which might say No, where no lies or tears or threats would ever change its mind. There was nothing which could make that a pleasant experience. And then there was the other rule, the one her daddy had told her about so carefully, the one every earth pony followed and for once, that meant Diamond had to follow it too. It wasn't that there were things you didn't do. It was the stories about what might happen after things had been done. And her daddy, who'd loved her, had told her about every last one of them, so that none of them would ever happen to her.

But she was tired...

Diamond looked around: that was automatic. Nopony else in sight. Nopony watching. And as for the other sense... her magic had come earlier than that of the others in her class: she'd even beaten Silver to that particular kick. Some of them still didn't have it. (She felt Apple Bloom was one of them. She had no proof, but she felt it went nicely with every other failure.) And as for those who did -- if she worked carefully, she just might be lost in the background of the Cornucopia Effect. It should be easy to get past fillies and colts, especially ones who weren't actively listening...

"Did you ever try stomping?"

It got her the expected response. "Huh?"

"Stomping," Diamond insisted. "Scare them into coming up!"

"I might collapse their tunnels," Snails dully insisted. "I don't want to hurt them."

"So maybe -- just tap?"

He was staring at her again.

"Tap," he repeated.

"Like raindrops. Like they might want to come up for water."

"They'd drown."

Exasperated. "Or like some berries just fell off a tree! A little heavier and not so often! Have you tried it?"

Slowly, "Naw..."

"So what's wrong with trying it once?"

It took far too long for him to blink. And then his left forehoof came up at the same moment his head went down again, carefully peering at the soil.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

And Diamond, who no longer had any of the colt's attention, closed her eyes, pulled her attention away from sight and the hearing which could only listen to the outer world, banished scent and the warmth of Sun against her coat, pushed her focus down and

there is life within the earth

always

unable to work within solids. that's funny, because nothing is ever truly solid. especially the earth. tiny tunnels, not too far down, but well beyond what a prodding horn, especially one trying so hard to be gentle, could ever reach. and those tunnels are everywhere on that level, up and down and all about. unite all the ones from a single acre, make them into a single slowly curving line, a new kind of enchantment holding up a different bridge, and watch it wrap around the world.

she can feel that, when she focuses this deeply, when no other sense has her attention and there's nothing to do but listen. the little gaps and rents and diggings. and there's more. she can feel vibration moving down the tunnels, tiny impacts coming in constant series from too many legs. it tells her where they are.

so she asks her question

and the answer is given

the tunnels do not collapse. they simply and gently fill in behind the vibrations, and the little lives within know only that there is suddenly a direction they cannot go, one which is moving towards them. it makes them scurry, so many tiny legs moving against the earth, and the deeper soil parts in front of them, a new tunnel slanting up even as the portion they would normally scurry into is taken away.

they cannot think, none of them can think: they only know they have to escape and there is but one way left to go: the one presented for them. it goes up, and they cannot think about that either, up out of the deeper soil and closer to where the dirt has been stirred up and loosened, closer to Sun, they scurry faster and

"HEY!"

Her eyes shot open. Snails' own lids looked as if they might never close again.

"That's a mycohpes zethroides!"

It was a beetle. It didn't look much different from any other beetle Diamond had ever seen, and so she really didn't understand why the colt was suddenly prancing about in place -- although with extreme care regarding where his hooves came down.

"And here comes another one -- that's a girl! It's gotta be a girl: look at the shell colors! And --" gaze moving everywhere, his volume gaining decibels with every fresh spotting of a six-legged bundle of armor which nopony ever should have cared about "-- there's another! And -- I don't believe it, Diamond! I've gotta -- I've gotta get home!" His horn ignited: one field bubble gently surrounded and lifted two beetles, while a second quickly collected some soil. "I'm just borrowing them!" This seemed to be directed at the other bugs who were milling about the stirred-up soil in total confusion, none of whom could understand him or, by that point, see him: the colt was already on the gallop. "I'll have them back tomorrow! They'll be comfortable, I promise! If Miss Cheerilee asks where I went, tell her it's a mycohpes zethroides and I had to go home --!"

Gone.

Diamond stared in what had been his general direction, then looked at the stupid beetles, a few of which were still coming out and coming towards her, all four legs jerked and got her upright before anything could crawl across her, and she leaned against the schoolhouse wall and wondered why Snails cared about the stupid --

"Diamond Tiara."

She didn't want to look. She didn't have to look. Because she knew the voice, hated that voice and everything it said, a voice which for the first (second?) time in her life had power over her...

Her daddy's protection... maybe it had made her prone to taking larger risks. But she'd just taken a huge one. And in her exhaustion, she'd forgotten something. She'd come to her magic early, was better with it than the other colts and fillies, she was sure of that --

-- but she'd completely forgotten about the adult.

She didn't have her daddy's protection. But it wouldn't have mattered. There might have been nothing even he could say. Nowhere to run. There was no protection from this.

Cheerilee was standing behind her. Cheerilee, who had felt everything.

"Come inside," the older earth pony calmly said. "With me. Now."

It was the longest trot of her life.

She knew the others were watching her again. Were wondering what had happened. And they didn't know. Silver didn't know, and Diamond had no way to tell her, especially after Cheerilee looked out across the other students (including a recently-emerged Snips) and told them that she needed to have a private conference with Diamond and that in order to make it work, recess was extended. They'd loved that. Pairing it with the possibility that Diamond was being punished made it all the better.

But they had no idea. Not about punishment. The stories her daddy had quietly told her... some of them had been about punishment. So many of them had...

Diamond followed Cheerilee into the schoolhouse, watched as the teacher locked the door behind them before the adult went up to and then behind her desk, nodded to Diamond, waited for the final approach. And part of her wondered if she would ever come back out.

"Sit down."

Diamond sat.

Cheerilee looked her over. Mane to tail and back again, pausing on the tiara each time.

"That was a very nice thing you just did for Snails."

"...what?"

"You heard me, Diamond," Cheerliee calmly said. "I heard what he shouted just before he galloped off. And a bit more than that, because you listened deep instead of listening around. But I think you might have just given Snails one of the best days of his life. You did something nice for him."

"I..." It seemed to be the only word she could currently find, and so she used it again to buy time while she looked for others. "I..."

"And you don't do nice things." It had been a statement. "For anypony." The green-grey eyes narrowed. "What are you up to, Diamond?"

"I'm not..." She had to have more than that! "I'm not doing anything... I --"

"Last night," Cheerliee quietly continued, "I had visitors at my house. Two, actually, about forty minutes apart. And they both had the same question for me. They wanted to know if I was punishing you through ordering tutoring sessions of their sons. Or in this case, son in the singular, because each told me they'd already been to your house and seen you with that colt, with no mention of the other being there at all."

They'd been right. Snips and Snails had been right, their parents followed up on everything...

"You were teaching, Diamond," Cheerilee softly stated. "You were trying to get them to pass their finals. And you told their families that it was a punishment. Do you know what I told them?"

"I -- I don't --"

"Well," the older pony said, "I told them the only thing I could."

She trotted out from behind the desk. Stood in front of Diamond, mere hoof-widths away.

"I have a teaching mark," Cheerliee softly went on. "That's not just part of my magic, Diamond: that's the focus of my life. But it does mean I'm a good teacher. Now, that magic can manifest in different ways, depending on the individual pony. With me -- it doesn't make me good at dealing with the school board. At talking my way up through the bureaucracy and convincing them there's nothing to fear from you, something I can tell you because I'm pretty sure you know both that and, since I've been speaking to your father, that it doesn't matter any more. But... some teachers instinctively know just the right words to reach a student. I can do that sometimes, but it's never worked with Snips and Snails, and I don't know why. And a very few -- never completely lost touch with their inner filly. They can still think like a child when they need to. That's more useful than you might ever imagine, and I'm proud to be a pony who can call that a part of her mark. It isn't a completely reliable aspect of my magic -- but I can do it, Diamond, at least once in a while. It's instinct, really, a special level of intuition. So when the Gastropes came to me... I knew you were up to something. But I didn't know what. And the best way to find out -- was by letting it happen."

Diamond blinked.

"I told Mr. Gastrope that you were tutoring his son," Cheerilee said. "On my request. And about forty minutes later, I was still very surprised to tell Mrs. Bradel the same thing -- but I told her anyway. Because Snips and Snails have failed their exams every year from their second on, Diamond, and I would love to see that end. If you're truly trying to get them to pass, then I can't think of any reason to stop you -- except one. The one where I know you're up to something."

Direct eye contact.

"What are you up to, Diamond?"

"They -- they need to study... I just want them to pass and not have to attend summer school again..."

"You don't do nice things for anypony," the teacher said. "Let's not even pretend, Diamond. You are being nicer to Snips and Snails than anypony except Silver, and that little stunt you pulled outside might have just pushed you past that. You're not going to be a good little pony unless you've found a means by which it benefits you. Are you going to tell me what it is?"

And Diamond searched, rooted within her own mind, stirred up every thought there was, and unearthed the lie of her life.

"They're -- my friends."

Cheerilee was staring at her again.

"Your friends."

Quickly, trying to sound as if she was only the proper portion of defensive, "They were nice to me when I was sent back there. I spent some time with them at recess, and... they're nice. I didn't know they were nice, they didn't have any reason to be nice and they were nice to me anyway, and I thought it would be -- nice... if they had their summers again, and maybe we could spend part of the summer together. But when I went to Mr. Gastrope, he didn't believe me. He didn't think there was any way I'd want to tutor Snails, and I thought that if I told him it was from you..."

She stopped, checked the teacher's eyes. They were a little bit wider -- and then narrowed again.

"And the reason each parent only saw their own colt?"

"Bathroom break," Diamond quickly said. "Snips can take a really long time in the bathroom."

Too calm now. "And you expect me to believe this."

"Did you see him go in from recess? He was just in there for --"

"-- Diamond, I'm going to let you tutor them." She was smiling again. Diamond was starting to hate that smile. "And with you tutoring them -- as their friend -- I expect them to pass. In fact, I'm counting on it. Because if they don't pass... then I believe you invented a punishment which would take place if that happened. Without specifying what it was."

She could feel her heart. Her lungs. Every breath.

"Teaching isn't easy, Diamond," Cheerilee smiled. "And for some reason, it's very hard with Snips and Snails, at least for me, and that's with a teaching mark. Still, I understand somepony else has rather more summer success than I've ever found in any other season. Maybe you'll be just as good -- somehow. Good luck, Diamond. Please go tell the rest of the class to come in now."

Diamond carefully pushed herself upright, forced herself towards the door. It was taking a while. The air seemed to have acquired a surprising weight, and it pressed in from every direction.

"I was originally going to talk to you about this before school started." Cheerilee added, "but you were nearly late. And Diamond, please try to get some sleep tonight. I know when a pony's about to collapse on her hooves, and I'm tempted to send you home early -- but this close to finals, I'd rather not have you miss anything, especially when you have to pass it on later."

She couldn't answer.

"Oh -- Diamond? One more thing." And her tone changed, gentled, became sad... "That was a very nice thing you did for Snails. Please try to come up with a reason why it won't ever work again. Because I don't think you want to be next to him for every moment of his life to come, just in case he decides to start tapping his hooves."

The teacher sighed.

"You're very talented, Diamond," she said, and somehow, each word felt as if it carried its very own invisible tear. "It was -- a pleasure to feel you work. It truly was. I wish I could feel it more often. But... I'd appreciate it if you'd be a little more careful. Listen around. Always. All right?"

And all she could do, facing away from the older earth pony, was nod.

"I wish," Cheerilee softly said. "I wish... Let them in, Diamond. Let all of them in."

Corporate Mascot

It was the first time Diamond had truly slept in three nights, and it had been from betrayal.

She'd managed to get through the rest of the school day, go through the routine necessary to round the boys up and bring them to the estate. After that, it was into the study, where she'd started to go over the first part of the lesson plan, the facts that the two would readily take in and never actually fieldwrite onto paper until deep into the summer unless Diamond could think of something. And she'd tried, as the two read. She'd concentrated as best she could, focused, and -- neither concentration nor focus had truly been there, displaced by the room required to store about a dozen yawns. Her head had dipped multiple times during the first lesson, her eyelids had sagged as if bearing the weight of a thousand false lashes (or slightly less than half of the bulk order which that one dumb designer placed every couple of years), and...

...then she'd woken up. In her bed, under Sun, with the dancing dust motes inside the rays mocking her.

She'd lost a night. A whole night. Because her body, which had always been perfect in every way up until that point, with what she felt was just about the perfect build for somepony her age, not to mention those elegant, entirely-natural mane and tail streaks, and then there were her ears, Diamond had the best of all possible ear shapes, those of the models chosen for so many magazines just about guaranteed that -- it had betrayed her. Two nights of poor sleep, yes, and missed meals, that might have been a factor, but she'd felt that her own perfect body would surely be able to get through another study session before any need to seek (and probably fail at finding) rest, especially with earth pony endurance driving the way.

But she'd fallen asleep. And she wanted to curse her body, insult it in a way that would humiliate it into never doing such a thing again, but that would ultimately amount to insulting herself and Diamond felt like that was crossing a potentially bad line. So instead, she lay still in bed for a few extra minutes, fuming in a way she dearly wished to take out on somepony. And then the day got even worse when she went to breakfast, didn't find her daddy there again, and couldn't even truly vent on the servants because with her stupid body so desperate for recharge (especially after having slept through what would have been dinner), she finally managed to keep her breakfast down.

Five days left. Five. Because even the thing she had the most control over in the world, her own body, had turned against her. Five days to think of something before the exams and what seemed to be an almost-guaranteed failure and her daddy --

...was.

She almost had to force herself to trot towards the school, subject herself to the gazes and giggles of ponies who were convinced Snips & Snails were her new friends, not to mention being in the presence of Cheerilee, who finally had something she could truly use against Diamond, a looming punishment on top of everything else and who knew what form that would take, plus she'd told the teacher that the boys were her friends and....

It had worked. It had been the lie of her life, and it had worked. Cheerilee had believed it, and that was why she'd agreed to let Diamond continue the tutoring -- well, that and the chance to punish without her daddy to stop it, something the mare must have been dreaming of for years. But the thing about believed lies was that ponies treated them as the truth, and what did so many gossipy kids and adults do with what they thought was the truth? They passed it along. Normally, that was something which worked in Diamond's favor: create the story, watch it echo from a dozen throats, and the world changed to suit the false tale, culminating in that moment of surprise when the target found out what they'd been doing, who they'd been with, and how long they were going to be grounded for it.

Diamond had told Cheerilee that Snips and Snails were her friends. It had been believed. It might be repeated. And should that reach the schoolyard, and Silver...

Trot accelerated into gallop.

"...what?" The expression was purest confusion, which naturally made the stupid glasses slip.

"It's not true," Diamond quickly repeated. "Whatever they say, everything they say, it's not true. They're just saying stuff. Because I had to say some stuff and because I said it, everypony believed it and --" She normally didn't speak that quickly, and wondered if it was somehow giving the words extra authority. "It's not true, Silver. Don't believe it. Anything they say about me until the end of the semester. Anything at all."

She'd been lucky for the first time in what felt like forever, spotting her friend a short distance from the schoolhouse, still on the approach. There had been a few seconds available for interception, scrambling behind a shielding tree. But there was only a few seconds available, and Silver just looked confused.

"Diamond -- what's been happening?" her friend slowly asked. Too slowly. "I've been trying to stay out of your way because I know how hard this is, with -- those two, but -- you nearly fell asleep in class yesterday, you still look kind of tired, and -- is everything okay? Is there anything I can do? Anything at all to help. You know I'll help if I can, and --" Concern now. Another slip. "-- you're breathing kind of fast..."

"I galloped most of the way here. I didn't know if I had time --"

More confusion. The dumb glasses looked as if they were about to fall off. "-- we've still got a little time before the bell --"

"-- you've got time." She stopped, waited until the hoofsteps and piping voices on the road behind them had faded again. "I have to talk to Snips and Snails this morning, before we all go in. I had to hurry so I'd have time to talk to you too. I just -- I..."

And once again, her words were failing her too. Couldn't she rely on anything any more? Not body, not mind, not --

...was.

"...I'm getting there," she told Silver, because she had to. "It's working. But it's taking a lot of time. And I had to say some things in order to make it happen, and --"

More hoofsteps. Familiar ones, because she'd reached the point of being able to identify that group of sounds, after they'd twice followed her to the estate. She knew their hoofsteps...

"-- just -- I have to go talk to them. Just -- whatever they say about me, anypony says... don't believe it, Silver." And then the word she couldn't remember ever using with her friend before: "Please."

Pinkish-purple eyes blinked at her, perfectly visible because the glasses were just about all the way down her snout. "I... okay, Diamond. I won't. But if there's anything --"

Diamond missed the last part of it, the words caught in twigs and bits of near-bloom Lady's Mantle which shifted behind her departing form. She had to reach the colts, and that meant accelerating, but -- nopony had been in very much of a hurry to reach school on this near-summer day, except for her. Too many students were still on that last approach, some of whom she'd passed during her initial rush, she was about to be seen going right up to them, on top of all the recesses and everything else...

But she didn't have a choice. This time, she had to meet them before the first break. There were questions which needed answering, immediately.

"Hey, Diamond," Snips casually acknowledged her as she galloped up on his right? "Feelin' any better? 'cause I've gotta tell ya, last night, when you just passed out on us, we were kinda --"

"-- how did I get into bed last night?" Because she'd quizzed every servant she could find in the little time she'd had, and none of them had done it. And then she'd remembered she was dealing with the day shift.

Snails shrugged. Casually, "We carried you."

That got her to turn, and the head movement rotated her ears enough to pick up on the abruptly giggling fillies who were just starting to pass them.

"They put her to bed?" one of them laughed.

"Both of them?" giggled the other.

And then something they never would have done before the bench switch. They never would have risked it.

Together, voices raised in mutual singsong, "Diamond's got some coltfriends..."

She fought the urge to spin back. To charge. And, at least temporarily, won, mostly because the new single most humiliating moment of her life wasn't quite over yet and so all the plans her suddenly-back-on-her-side brain had just come up with for completely destroying those two were going to be put on hold. Additionally, you could really only completely destroy somepony once and so while every last one of those plans looked perfect, Diamond was still going to need some sorting time.

She forced herself to take a deep breath, planted her hooves a little harder on the next step, and finished her glance towards Snails. The taller colt's field was active, with two beetles carefully carried in a bubble hovering a few hoofwidths away from his head.

"Carried me," she carefully half-repeated.

"Yeah," Snails shrugged. "I got my field around your forelegs, Snips got your hind legs. And then we..." Was that a blush beginning to manifest under his coat? "Um..."

"We galloped around with you for a couple of minutes," Snips grinned. "Because Snails thought you might be sick."

"Did not," was the immediate protest.

In a boyish version of that same singsong lilt (which neither colt had remotely acknowledged), "He was all worried..."

"Yeah?" Snails challenged, "So were you. Whose horn ignited first?"

The smaller colt hesitated. "Well... she was tired all day..."

Snails' expression briefly suggested that even though something less than complete destruction had been achieved, he'd still won. Another shrug, and the field bubble bobbled in time with the movement. "Anyway, we wanted to make sure you were okay. The back of your ears didn't feel hot, but there's lots of stuff that can make you sick and it doesn't all have fevers, so we just found a servant who could make sure. And then we put you in bed."

"We studied for a while," Snips offhoofedly continued. "Because our parents were still gonna quiz us and I don't think they would've believed me if I said you'd just fallen asleep. And we went and had some playroom time twice, but just with the blocks because we kinda figured the closed stuff was gifts for other ponies and didn't want to mess up anypony's party. Your servants brought in dinner, and they were really nice about it, too! Even explained what the stuff was that looked too ugly to eat, and one of them dared us to..." He laughed. "Snails, do you remember the name of that one really weird fruit? The stuff that sort of tasted like gum?"

Snails considered. "Cherimoya -- I think." (Diamond's nod was more or less automatic, because of course she had to prove that she knew that.) "And then we studied a little more and went home. You just slept. Feeling any better?"

She went with the answer they probably wanted to hear. "Yeah. A little."

Both nodded. "Okay," Snails said. "See you inside. I've gotta keep my promise." He glanced at the field bubble. "Time to go home." And he turned, galloped towards the still-disturbed dirt. Which reminded Diamond: she needed an excuse for him, something which would keep him from tapping his hooves in the hopes of summoning bugs ever again, and she'd fallen asleep before coming up with anything...

"I'd better help him," Snips added a moment later. "Two horns are better than one!" And followed.

Diamond finished the trot inside on her own, trying to ignore the looks and giggles and what was apparently fast-becoming a popular mini-craze in juvenile music, something so catchy that one of the Blank Flank Maintainers had gone so far as to start humming it to herself, and if that one somehow actually became bold enough to sing the words...

She was about to make a move, try and stop that before it could spread any further. But that was when Cheerilee came in, and eventually, the boys were at their desks again, with her between them, still, between them, and --

-- she'd woken up under her blankets. So unless her daddy had come in (when he wasn't coming in) and moved her without even a single moment of her waking...

They'd tucked her in.

Carefully.

Even though it was making everything worse by the second, it was almost a comfort, going around the side of the schoolhouse during recess and lunch, because most of the sound didn't carry that well around corners and it meant Diamond didn't have to hear the song.

For the most part, she stayed quiet during the breaks, and the majority of that time was spent in watching Snails. He was back at it again, of course: there wasn't a warm-weather time outside when he didn't spend at least a few minutes trying to find new and disgusting specimens. And she needed something to keep him from hoof-tapping, especially since after yesterday's false success. She'd fully expected him to start it up immediately. But for some reason, he was back to his usual method, and his legs only shuffled to change position. She didn't understand that. Snails had what he must have believed to be a new and winning strategy: why wasn't he trying to increase his find profits with it by luring in extra carapace-covered dividends? Her daddy would have said he was reverting to start-up tactics. (Which was bad business form, and didn't speak well for his potential to expand.) If the tapping could have worked at all on its own, which it wouldn't, and... she was having trouble thinking of anything. It was possible that she'd come up with so many believable lies over the last few days as to bring her inventory dangerously low.

But -- he wasn't doing it...

'For a certain personality type, deadline anxiety is a very real thing, and just about everypony will start to become anxious as the last hours before a project's completion approach, especially if there's still any real degree of work remaining to be done. Some ponies will actually become inspired under those circumstances, and a few truly will do their best work under pressure. But others will collapse. And before you put any team together to work on a timed project, you have to know exactly how everypony in it will respond to the last ticks of the clock.'

Diamond's current enterprise was certainly a timed project. But it was one where the workforce had been effectively assigned to her, and she still had no idea how they would truly react to a fast-approaching deadline, especially since neither truly understood just how crucial the labor was. The goal was to keep Diamond at the summit, and they didn't even know they were meant to be doing it. There was no pressure because as far as they were concerned, there was no work.

But she was starting to wonder if her daddy's advice also applied to the leader of a project. Because there were only five days left, five days (and less now) in which she had to find a way to make them write down the right answers for her to copy, and when it came to ideas for making that happen, her mind seemed to be as blank as a certain trio of flanks, possibly with the same potential duration of permanence.

Still, over the last few days, her best lies had come out when she was up against an approaching deadline which threatened to arrive in seconds. Her experiences with Mr. Gastrope and Cheerilee seemed to indicate that she might be one of those ponies who worked best when the clock was down to a last few ticks. And so she considered herself to still have time for figuring everything out. Just... not as much of it as she would have liked.

It was time to pick Snails up for the afternoon: she was gathering him first, mostly to get any potential encounter with his smirking father over with. And she also meant to use that meeting as a test of her deadline skills, because that was when she was going to give Snails her tap-prevention excuse. An excuse she... still didn't have, even as she slowly trotted up to the front door, but sometimes when you started talking, the rest of the lie just naturally came out, and so maybe the best thing she could do was say his name and then find out what followed.

Words led to words. And words led to... well, she was about to find out.

Diamond knocked. The door quickly opened, and there were no smirking violet eyes staring at her, waiting for news of failure. Snails had answered his own door.

"Ready?" Diamond asked. She didn't want to lead with the excuse and besides, her daddy had often spoken about the benefits of what he called a talk-and-trot.

He looked down at her. It was a natural thing to do: there was a fair amount of difference in their heights. It was still something Diamond didn't particularly like anypony doing. If she had been capable of envy (which really didn't come naturally when you were the best at everything important), she would have considered envying the Princess for her sheer size. Diamond still had faint hopes of hitting a major growth spurt somewhere along the way.

"I wasn't expecting you this early," he eventually said. "I've still got some work to do on the farm."

It was the second time the word had come up, and this occasion irritated her enough to say something about it. "What farm?"

"Huh?" His natural response to just about anything.

"You live in town. Your house is just about up against the one on the side of the next street, so there isn't much of a backyard. And --" she'd just remembered this part "-- your father said your farm was upstairs, and you can't keep dirt out of the sun and expect it to do anything unless you're an earth pony. So how can you have a farm at all?"

He was staring at her again, and there seemed to be an unusual amount of thought crossing his face.

"Come inside," he said.

Inside a colt's house. After the others in her class had been singing? "I can wait out here," she immediately told him. "Just --"

"-- I've gotta do it anyway," he interrupted, and she managed not to take visible offense at having her words cut off, even though employees really weren't supposed to speak over management. "And it's easier to show you. It'll just take a few minutes. Maybe less if you help."

Diamond doing the work: it was as if the entire world was out to offend her today, and she momentarily felt as if her vengeance plans required some serious expansion of scale. But if it got him under her supervision any faster...

Besides, he was obviously on his way to do work, no matter what that mysterious labor actually was. He was probably doing it wrong.

"I'll come in," she told him, which did not form any kind of legally binding verbal contract committing her to actual labor, and he nodded, turned to lead the way.

The interior of the house wasn't bad. It wasn't good, either; whoever had decorated it liked reds a lot more than Diamond did, and too many of them reminded her of apple hues. But on the whole, it was acceptable, as long as you didn't like being rich.

Snails trotted steadily, heading for the ramp to the second floor. Leading the way. Well, of course he was: it was his house. But Diamond had to pay attention to the path because in the remote event that they ever did it again, she'd know the way and could get out in front.

Up the ramp. Down a still-too-red hallway, which seemed to be growing subtly warmer as they progressed. There was a door just ahead, and Diamond couldn't smell much in the way of soil. Couldn't smell much in the way of anything: the door was unusually tight against the frame.

Time to test her deadline pressure theory. "So," she began, "about those beetles yesterday -- the tapping I ord -- asked you to try..."

And before she could see what lie would naturally flow out, Snips' horn ignited, and his field began to interact with the lock as he casually said, "Yeah. I forgot to tell you: I'm not gonna be doing that again."

She blinked.

"Ever," he quickly added.

Twice.

"Why... why not?" Had another pony reached him first? Had Cheerilee been oddly lacking in confidence for Diamond's abilities and talked?

"Because they didn't think it was berries falling," Snails said, still facing the lock, which was beginning to glow. "Their tunnels collapsed."

And for the second time in two days, she couldn't move.

...how... how does he...

"It was slow, though," Snails added. "And just from one end. They were just going up to the higher levels for safety, and no one got hurt. I think... I think I must have been tapping just the right way, and maybe the soil was a little drier down there than usual, because we haven't had much rain scheduled for the last half-moon. It probably wouldn't work again, and if it did, I might not get as lucky, not hurting anyone at all." She could see the concern on his face, even from her current frozen angle. "So I'm not going to risk it. Ever. But --"

There was a soft click. Glow and corona faded, and Snails glanced back over his left shoulder.

"-- no one got hurt. So I'm not mad, Diamond. It wasn't a bad idea, and you just didn't know what actually happened. We just don't do it again."

His left foreleg pushed on the door. It opened, and he trotted into the room.

Diamond barely saw that, and her hooves seemed to be carrying her forward more or less on their own. More rebellious employees. "But..." She had to find out. "...how do you know? That it was their tunnels collapsing?"

She stepped inside.

And Snails, standing proudly in the center of the well-lit room, surrounded by shelves and heat lamps and dozens of glass terrariums, each containing plants and soil and water and crawling residents who'd been granted perfect indoor living conditions, said "They told me."

She stared. She stared at everything. At the spiders and their giant orb webs, strung inside a huge glass case. At snails calmly sliming their way up the interior of clear walls. Ants moving through perfectly visible tunnels, looking as if the glass had somehow bisected an active colony without harming a single resident. Ladybugs and crickets, a praying mantis, bugs she had no name for, more bugs than she'd ever known to exist or that could exist...

And then she was staring at the farm's owner.

"You talk to bugs." It wasn't quite a statement.

He nodded.

"You can't."

She'd been insulting him on and off for years now, on those rare days when water just bothered her that much. It was the first time she'd seen him look offended. And then he silently nodded towards his right flank. To his mark.

"But... but... they're not smart!" she protested. "Not even a little! Maybe that one pony talks to animals, and animals are dumb enough, but at least they've got fur and feathers and their heads are bigger! And they're not still smart enough to be invited to treaty signings! How can -- how can bugs talk?"

His dark eyes hadn't narrowed. His voice was calm, level.

"They don't talk about much," he said. "But I think that just makes what they do have to say more important." And he turned away from her, trotted over to a shelf full of small boxes. His horn ignited, and lids raised. Small pellets were floated out, and he began to carry them towards one of the terrariums.

But Diamond wasn't looking at that so much as the field itself. At the tiny hints of jagged spikes surging along the boundary lines.

Snails... was upset. Angry. Only a little -- but he was angry for the first time ever, she couldn't risk having one of the colts mad at her...

The words were hard. She hated having to say them, did everything she could in her life to avoid saying them at all. But they were necessary.

"I'm -- sorry."

The field's borders smoothed. Slowly.

"It's my mark," Snails said. "Most ponies don't question a mark."

Most. There was that weird pegasus mechanic, and Diamond had been meaning to make a few choice meant-to-be-overheard comments if she ever ran into the adult --

"Except when it's me," he quietly finished. "You're not the only pony who doesn't believe it, Diamond. But they talk. They all talk. The way they hold their legs. Tilt their heads. It's all words, when you know how to listen. Miss Fluttershy knows that, for her herd and flock. And even ponies with pets... they learn what some of the words are. Sometimes I think anypony could learn it, and my mark, her mark, we just -- got it all at once."

She was still staring at him. He, busy with the feedings, hadn't noticed.

"But we don't... share anything," he added. "Me and Miss Fluttershy. I went out to the cottage once, and she believed me. But there's a line. She's on one side of it and I'm on the other. I can -- sort of hear where she starts, and she could tell where I stopped. That was it."

"You can really hear them," she said, and wondered why her voice was so soft. "Understand them."

"Yeah." And that was a statement. "But you could too. If you wanted to."

He glanced back at her then. The dark eyes were calm. Patient. And -- something else.

"Come over here for a second," he said. And, not knowing why, she came.

So many shelves. So many glass boxes. So many ugly, hideous, revolting...

"I wanna show you someone," Snails said, and Diamond prepared to do her best not to vomit.

His horn inclined, and a fraction of glow indicated the terrarium, something with oddly-sandy soil at the bottom, but a large number of triangular green leaves growing out of that. Nothing nightmarish currently in view.

Snails approached that glass box, nodded for her to come closer and for no reason she could understand, she did. He put his head close to the clear surface.

"Come out," he whispered.

It came.

It was beautiful.

The insect crawled out from under the sheltering leaves, and gold hit Diamond's eyes, brilliant gold which shone in a way no bit ever had, reflective not even in the way of normal metal or the metallic-furred stallion she'd seen all of one time and hadn't been able to figure out mockery for before the earth pony had trotted out of sight. Reflective in a way she'd never seen before, that perhaps nopony but Snails had ever seen. Light didn't dance on the carapace, it tilted, seemed to twist. Every movement created new reflections and refractions, all six legs wove in a continual ballet of walking wealth and mystery...

"What is it?" Diamond breathed. She was betting on expensive.

The back of the carapace gently lifted, parted, and delicate wings painted the air in iridescent gems.

"Mr. Guffey brought her back from Saddle Arabia for me," Snails quietly said. "He promised me that if I passed last year over a certain final grade... well, he did it. And he promised something else if I didn't see him for classes this summer, but..." He shrugged. "Chrysina resplendens, Diamond: that's the species name, and that's Griffonant because a lot of species were written down that way for the first time, and I guess ponies just got into the habit. But in Equestrian, she's called a jeweled scarab."

Diamond mostly heard the last part. She was looking at living jewelry.

"Her shell," she softly said. "The way the light..." She didn't have words for what was happening to the light.

"Miss Twilight says..." Snails concentrated. "...that she's 'pre-fer-en-tial-ly left-pol-ar-ized.' I think that means light reflects differently."

The scarab came up to the glass. A tiny head tilted, bringing the body with it. Diamond saw the little black eyes, and then noticed two of the elevated legs weaving, while the other four maintained balance.

"She wants to know who you are," Snails said. "I don't have guests much."

"Much?"

"Miss Fluttershy came by once after I went to the cottage, after we talked about how to get things set up. She has medicine herbs in her attic year-round and a friend who visits, to keep them growing. So I asked my dad to find somepony who'd just drop by once a week, because some of their food has to be grown and nopony in town sells it. And Mr. Guffey was here that one time. And... that's it. My parents mostly stay outside. So she's surprised to see new company. Is it okay if I take her out? Give her a closer look?"

She didn't look slimy at all. Or repulsive. Or... "It's okay."

His field dipped into the terrarium, gently surrounded its resident, levitated up and out. The scarab was now floating a little away from Diamond's face, no more than two hoofwidths. And she wasn't recoiling. She didn't want to run at all. Not from a living jewel.

She looked at the beetle. It -- really did seem to be looking at her. Wings shifted. Legs wove again.

"She likes your tiara," Snails told her.

"She... does?"

"Because it's so bright and shiny. She'd like to touch it. If that's okay."

A bug. On her tiara --

-- a jewel...

"I... okay."

The little field bubble floated closer, and the scarab's wings began to buzz, almost in anticipation -- and then the energy winked out. The scarab, already hovering, took a second to get its bearings, and then flew forward.

Diamond didn't pull back, not even by the width of a tail strand. And so the scarab landed, tucked its wings away, and rested, while the pony who was now carrying her looked at the reflection in nearby glass.

Her own face, which she'd always felt was perfect, along with the exact suitable manestyle to set it off. Her tiara, always present at any time she could wear it at all. And... a jewel. A living jewel.

The next words, spoken under no pressure at all, turned out to be exactly the right ones.

"What's her name?"

And Snails smiled. "Cameo."

"Hi, Cameo." Because that was only polite. (In the reflection, wings briefly emerged, were tucked back in.) "Could you tell her... she's very pretty?"

"You just did," Snails quietly said. "I'm going to finish up so we can go." And he moved away, began touring the terrariums, softly calling out names and watching their bearers approach...

Diamond just kept watching her reflection. The new arrival within it, quietly resting.

"Diamond?"

She wasn't about to look away. "What?"

"Snips and I went over a lot of your place last night, looking for help. Well, as much as we could in a couple of minutes, which might not have been much because it's so big. And we found that servant, but..." He hesitated. "You don't have any pets, right?"

"No." The response came easily enough. Pets were... well, as far as Diamond could tell, they were mostly a hassle. You had to feed them and clean up after them and -- well, actually, she had servants who could do that, but pets were also common. Sure, some were more rare than others: you seldom saw ponies with cats, mostly because for some reason, living with an open and shameless hunter didn't go over well with most prospective owners. But overall, pets were everywhere. They made noise. They shed. They slobbered. They...

...were something you could say good night to.

They were always there.

They didn't forget about you.

They didn't...

...was.

"She really does like you," Snails said.

And they were outside, with the terrarium held carefully in Snails' field. He was also carrying a heat lamp, several little boxes, and two books which he'd made Diamond promise to read. Cameo was still perched on her tiara.

"Now it's okay to go outside with her when it's warm like this," he said. "She likes it warm, and because she's so far from home, none of the birds know she's something to eat -- sorry, Cameo, sorry! But Diamond has to know! -- anyway, nothing around here is a predator for her, so she's safe, as long as you're always careful about where she is. But once it starts getting colder, you've got to keep her inside. Now you're not gonna have any trouble growing the food because... well, because. And as for cage cleaning..."

She nodded, trotted along, feeling as if her legs were being raised a little higher than usual. All they had to do was pick up Snips, who would course have something to say about her new pet, a pet nopony else in the settled zone had, especially since Snails had just --

-- Diamond stopped.

"She's -- your only one?"

"She was," Snails truthfully said. "Now you're going to be her friend. But I'll drop by sometimes after the end of the semester, if that's okay."

Diamond was trying to get her mind around the concept. She was failing. "You gave me -- your only..."

"I'll see Mr. Guffey in a little while," a smiling Snails told her. "Maybe we can make a deal for another passing --"

And his eyes went wider than Diamond had ever seen them.

"MOVE!"

She didn't. She didn't know why she had to move. And in the time she would have needed to ask --

-- Snails' corona flared. The light around it intensified, and before her eyes, a second layer appeared. Energy projected, surrounded her --

-- she had a split-second to figure out what he was trying to do, another for deciding he couldn't do it, and yet one more for finding out she was wrong.

The field lifted her. Not very far off the ground. A hoof-height or two, just enough to get her clear. And then it pushed.

Diamond had flown before: when her daddy needed to reach the Canterlot branch in a hurry (and she'd never entirely understood why they hadn't just moved there to live among more of the somewhat more elite, even if they weren't quite up to her level), he would occasionally forgo the train in favor of a hired air carriage. And if it wasn't a school day and he knew he'd have some time to wander streets and shops with her after business was done, he would invite her on the ride. Silver had even come along a couple of times. And so Diamond was familiar with the feeling of wind in her mane and land rushing by below.

This was nothing like that.

There was air, but it mostly moved around the field: she had a faint current on her face, just enough to register. The ground was only a little below her. The interior of the bubble was a little warmer than the weather. And where the field's energy touched her fur, there was a faint tingle, as if one of her limbs was just starting to fall asleep and had decided to bring her entire body in on it.

It also wasn't being pulled along behind hard-laboring pegasi. It was a shove.

She flew into the nearest gap between houses, nearly all the way to the back, deep into the alley's shadows -- where the field winked out.

Momentum, however, maintained.

She stumbled as she landed, but she was facing forward and the natural pitch of her legs made it easy to go into a short gallop. However, she wasn't the only thing in the alley and so she wound up dodging around some storage bins before coming out on the next street, her breaths short, sharp, and angry. If she'd stumbled a little more and gone down headfirst, then she could have hurt --

Why did he do that? Why would anypony...?

She turned, ready to gallop back --

-- is she okay? Is she still on my tiara?

She... had to check. Any nearby window --

-- and by the time she got close enough to confirm that Cameo had stayed with her, Snails was coming down the street from the west. There was sweat in his coat, more was dripping from his snout, and his eyes --

"Why did you do that? We could have both been --"

"-- Mr. Bradel!" Snails gasped. "I'm sorry, Diamond, I'm sorry, but I saw Mr. Bradel down the street, it looked like he might turn around and he can't see us together! And I couldn't hide and leave you alone because --" He stopped, wincing: sweat had just gone into his eyes. A subsequent fast head shake got rid of a lot, with none of it hitting her. "I had to get you out of sight, fast! And... um..." Panting. "...are earth ponies just naturally kind of... you know... for your size..."

She glared at him. Took a slow breath.

"You didn't warn me."

"There wasn't time. And if he'd seen us...!"

At the very least, it would have required excuses. And parents suspicious enough to follow their sons everywhere would probably check up on anything Diamond could invent.

"I'll go pick up Snips," she decided. "You go to my house. We'll all meet up there. And maybe somepony should just go there on their own tomorrow. That way, I'm only getting one of you."

He nodded. All four of his knees were still trembling. "Okay... let me just get Cameo and --"

She pulled back.

"NO!"

"...huh?"

"She's mine now! You gave her to me! No takebacks, no lies! She's mine!"

"Diamond, you've gotta listen, I was gonna do this before we --"

Which was when his horn ignited.

"No! She's mine! You can't have her back!"

And she galloped. Back into the alley, the shadows, and where the colt could not see, he could not aim. Galloped to safety and beyond, nearly all the way to the Bradels' house before she finally began to slow.

Snails had not followed her. He couldn't. They -- she checked the nearest reflection -- they were safe.

Just... just get Snips. And with that, she waited for the sweat to slow, came up with an excuse for it in case anypony asked, and approached the door.

If she had to, she could do it with one.

Territorial Infringement

Diamond really didn't pay that much attention to Mrs. Bradel or, in the days before Cheerilee had essentially ruined her life, to the entire family. She was vaguely aware that they were bookbinders, mostly because Snips had mentioned it a few days prior and the fact had stuck in her head due to her need to show she was paying some attention to the finer details of her employees' boring lives. She also knew that Mrs. Bradel specialized in book restoration, because her father had once gone to the mare and requested the removal of decades from an old family diary. Snips' mother knew workings which just about nopony else on the continent could claim to have mastered, mostly because she'd invented nearly all of them -- and also because unless you were a pony with a pressing need for book restoration, just about every last one of those workings was completely useless. Spells which smoothed out creases, added moisture to binding glue, made pages flexible again... and rendered her incapable of doing just about anything else.

Every unicorn (with the possible exception of the town's rather annoying librarian) had a limited learning capacity for their castings: they all had their fields and beyond that, could only learn to work a few spells over the course of their lifetime. (Diamond, briefly curious as to how that compared to the ultimate number of tools she might considering personally mastering, if only in the name of potential superiority, had asked her daddy what that number was, and been told that six to eight learned workings was typical, along with minor variants on whatever those spells turned out to be, and then a personal trick on top of that, which never had to be taught to those unicorns at all.) So for a pony to clutter up their memory with spells which affected nothing except books... that pony would need to be a bookbinder, have the world's worst priority sorting system, or just wind up as a librarian who had a ridiculous obsession with books to the point where even Diamond had heard the stories about how Mrs. Bradel refused to allow that adult into her shop for more time than it took to drop things off and pick them up again, lest she lose so much of her business to having those personal spells copied.

But on the whole, Mrs. Bradel was just... there: not worth paying attention to, not even really worth insulting (especially now, when she needed Snips more than ever), and forever smelling somewhat of old parchment and fresh binding glue. So when Diamond went to pick up the youngest in the family, she didn't really notice the adult, any more than she truly paid any real attention to Snips, whom she had told to gallop ahead of her and head for the mansion: Diamond would catch up later. Because when it came to paying, there were things Diamond had to do immediately.

Snails was gone. And he'd had all the items Cameo needed to survive: the terrarium, plants, heat lamps, the books which Diamond had promised to read in order to learn how to take care of her. She couldn't get any of them back. And so she'd ignored Snips staring at her, hadn't bothered truly registering the expression on his face, and galloped off on her own to take care of her newest employee.

Cameo's job was to be there, to stay when... nopony else would. Which meant Diamond, as her supervisor, needed to make sure a proper working environment was available.

It took nearly two hours, two hours she couldn't afford to spend with so few days left and but one colt remaining. But it was two hours which Cameo needed, and... they were two hours which ultimately didn't completely work out. There was no reason to visit her daddy's store, for pet supplies were mostly left to the settled zone's specialty shop. Visiting that shop had found just about nothing in the way of terrariums, at least not of the size and majesty which someone like Cameo was surely going to require. The owner didn't stock much, and a few frustrated future customer inquiries quickly uncovered the reason why: very few ponies kept reptiles, only one was known to take comfort in the presence of fish, a single pegasus had the town's lone tortoise, and Snails special-ordered everything else. All the shop had was a few emergency backups. Diamond had temporarily settled for one of those, mostly due to the complete lack of other choices, and had it sent ahead to the mansion. But she'd special-ordered something a little more spectacular for later and given the owner her promissory signature, swearing to come back on the following day with the actual bits. (It was a promise she always kept, for she kept a cautious eye on her allowance, always putting aside a few bits for emergencies -- and her father had been very careful to teach her the exact meaning of "credit rating" and why she should never take a chance on ruining it.)

But the books... those would have to be special-ordered as well, and the pet shop owner didn't have that catalog. Neither did the town's bookseller, and that put her in the library, with its annoying and somewhat surprised custodian trying to be helpful. But apparently entomology was this completely fascinating science which the librarian hadn't really studied and only one colt in town ever asked for books on, so that section was basic and when it came to jeweled scarabs, didn't contain anything more than a few paragraphs which officially registered their existence, mostly in Griffonant. However, in this case, the books Diamond needed could be acquired through the library exchange program, lent out from the Canterlot Archives. A process which would take up to five days.

She got it down to three, mostly through short, panicked breaths which she hadn't even known she'd had in her armory, plus a rather self-surprising "Please" personally delivered to the dragon, who then completely eliminated any outbound mailing time. But it was three days of taking care of Cameo where she wouldn't entirely know what she was doing, and when it came to food.... Diamond could keep the plants growing once she had them, but there was nothing which would let her create them without the base seeds -- which, in Ponyville, only existed at Snails' farm.

She'd galloped home as fast as she dared, which still meant frequent stops to make sure Cameo was still with her. She needed those plants, didn't know if anything else could substitute even for a little while, she had no access to farm or Snails and Snips couldn't even go to his friend's house. She didn't know how long Cameo could go without eating. She didn't know anything.

She... didn't know what to do. Only Snails did.

Without Snails, Cameo could...

Diamond, her stomach back to churning in a way which told her she was about to find out how long she could personally go without food again, mind spinning and unable to latch onto facts or lies in a way which would help anything, looking at every clock as she passed it and wondering if she had enough bits to hire an emergency air carriage into Canterlot and shopping money for after, along with whether the more elaborate pet stores would even be open by the time she got there and what their food supplies were like, plus it left her roaming the capital without her daddy, her daddy who wasn't anywhere to be found in the mansion and when she finally asked a servant, she was told he'd gone on a business trip and might not be back for days, rushing away before the mare could tell her anything else... eventually wound quickly up going past the study, where she got a brief glimpse of Snips.

He was stretched out across the floor, to the limit of stretch his small body would allow. Eyes half-closed, head and horn low. Talking to Snails.

It took Diamond a few seconds to brake, and then several more to turn around. The actual trot back to the doorway wound up feeling oddly slow.

The colts, who had already begun to look up at the sound of passing hoofsteps, stared at her. Neither said a word.

Diamond, with most of her mind already trying to figure out what she could say to the taller colt in order to get that food supply back, didn't put sufficient effort into her greeting. "What are you doing here?"

"My folks expect me to be here," Snails slowly said. His head had come up. His eyes were starting to go back down again. "Plus... you had Cameo --"

"-- you can't --" and somehow, she managed to stop herself. She couldn't open negotiations with the opposition knowing they were in a position of strength.

"-- and I still had the stuff for her. So I brought that with me. The servants put it in your bedroom."

Diamond stared at him for a few seconds, and he failed to meet her eyes during every last one of them. Winning a negotiation before it started was... a little unusual.

"...you're not taking her back?" That wasn't unusual. That was beyond unusual.

"I told her she was going to be with you now," Snails replied, and the words felt oddly heavy within her perfect ears. "And I saw a couple of servants bringing in a terrarium. You cared enough about her to visit Mr. Shoqërues' place before you came home, because you... didn't know if I was gonna be here. I think that makes you the right pony for her, even if --"

And he stopped. His head went just about all the way down, his eyes closed, and he stopped.

"Even if what?" It was very close to a demand.

"Nothing." Still not looking at her.

"Ponies don't say something over nothing," Diamond shot back.

And out of nowhere, from Snips, "You do."

He was looking at her. And once again, those eyes were angry.

Diamond didn't have a response. She'd been down to one colt. She seemed to be back at two. She couldn't chance going down to zero. And... she didn't know what he'd meant.

"Snips..." Snails dully cautioned.

"I said we'd give her a chance," Snips retorted. "When Miss Cheerilee was switching her desk. I told you it was okay if we gave her a chance, because stuff can look different when you're sitting at the back. That maybe she'd be different. And she got us together outside of school, but she doesn't listen, Snails, she didn't listen to you, she just ran off and..." The smaller head went down, the eyelids began to descend. "...I dunno, maybe we're okay, maybe, but..."

"We don't know," Snails quietly responded. "Until we get home, maybe not even until after -- we don't know. And if we act like something's wrong when we get in..."

"Yeah, I know, Snails, I know. But..."

And Snips' head came up again.

The eye contact was brief. And the sheer force of it nearly pushed Diamond out of her own doorway.

"Why are you doing this?" Snips asked.

Diamond, worn out from a day of introductions and desperation and near-discovery, found herself at a temporary (and complete) loss for lies, and decided to buy time while she scavenged the last of her resources. "Doing what?"

"Being nice to us," Snips shot back. "Getting us together. Watching during breaks, coming up with that tapping thing Snails told me about. You aren't nice to us. Just Silver. But Snails wanted to give you a chance, I said yes, and then you were nice, when --"

"You don't do nice things. For anypony."

Had he said it? Had she just remembered it? Or had words come in concert with memory?

"Why?" Snips repeated, and waited for his answer.

She was still tired. She didn't seem to have anything new to offer in the way of believability, and so she searched through her lessons...

"There is no such thing as perfect business transparency, and there shouldn't be. If you've caught on to the hot trend of the next season before anypony else, why would you want to go around telling the competition what it was going to be? Perfect transparency allows ponies to see right through you and read the projections you wrote out on the other side. Your books have to be honest, your numbers true -- but your plans should only be told to those who absolutely need to know them, the ponies who can help you carry them out and be trusted not to bring the words back to those who can use them against you. Don't offer that trust casually. But --"

No. She didn't need to think about any more than that.

"Things look different from the back," she tried, because if the words were somehow good enough for Snips to speak, they would have to be acceptable for hearing.

The small eyes briefly narrowed -- and then his head went down again. Both boys nearly had their chins on the floor.

"We studied some," Snails quietly said. "While we were waiting, after we talked. And it's probably about time for dinner, and you kind of look like you've been galloping around a lot. You've got sweat in your coat, and... maybe you should go clean up, Diamond, and then I'll get Cameo's stuff set up in your room. We can eat after that, and then..." The shrug was almost fully horizontal. "More studying, I guess. I don't know if we're up to the blocks tonight. Or..."

He sighed. And Diamond knew she'd heard him sigh before, it felt like there had been something involved each time, maybe the same thing, but she couldn't remember what it was and she'd just been told that boys didn't want to play...

It seemed to be a time for expressing some concern about employee welfare.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Snails lied. He wasn't very good at it.

"Something's wrong," Diamond insisted.

"It doesn't matter," Snips wearily said. "It's a fifty-fifty chance anyway."

Snails managed to glance at his friend. "Fifty-fifty?"

"It'll happen or it won't," Snips replied.

The slow nod which came back seemed to have a touch of resignation about it. "Yeah. Diamond -- it doesn't matter, okay? It'll happen or it won't. So we're not gonna talk about it any more, either of us, no matter what you say, not until after tomorrow morning, because then we'll know, it might not happen, and... you've been tired in class. You've nearly fallen asleep a few times, you already passed out on us the once, and... three of us maybe not sleeping isn't any better than two. So you go wash up if you want to, and then we'll do what we've gotta do. Okay?"

It wasn't okay. It was frustrating. She'd asked a question and she wasn't getting anything approaching a real answer. Diamond got to do that when ponies asked her about things she was best off not admitting to, and it was fine for her -- but somehow, when it came back the other way, it was really annoying. Plus she already knew that not having an answer was something that could easily steal sleep.

But Snails' eyes were -- hard. And it was a hardness that seemed to have been born from pressure and heat and something deeper than exhaustion, something which had forged his pupils into a substance stronger than --

-- diamond.

"Tomorrow," she checked, thoroughly irritated.

"Tomorrow," Snails confirmed. And it was all she got out of either colt for the rest of the night, including the times when she tried to spring it on them out of nowhere during the study sessions, during the breaks when neither really felt like playing and she wanted to see that bridge finished already... but not during the minutes when Snails had been setting up Cameo's new home, with Diamond already having decided not to cancel her order because any companion of hers was entitled to something with multiple stories, plus she would have to see what could be done about installing some miniature fountains.

She did wind up saying something to Snails at the end of those particular minutes. It seemed as if it was something which... had to be said.

"Thank you."

He hadn't met her eyes. "I know you'll take care of her."

She hadn't understood, and somehow, without being at all sure why, she'd wound up saying so.

"That's how you thank me," Snails had said. "By making sure she's okay. She's cared for. She's loved. Do that and... no matter what happens, one good thing..." He'd taken a slow breath. "One good thing came out of it. Take care of her, Diamond. No matter what."

She'd nodded. They'd eaten, they'd studied, they hadn't played. And in time, the boys had gone home.

As it turned out, there was something that could be done while not sleeping and knowing her daddy wouldn't be coming in to kiss her: reading books. And the things had been boring, with many of the words incomprehensible: Diamond had wound up making two trips back to the study in search of worthy dictionaries before the first of the books had fallen out of her tired mouth in such a way as to both require a future extra trip to the Bradel residence and allow her to discover the existence of the glossary. But she'd pressed on, because...

...Cameo watched her from the terrarium, and Diamond could tell she was watching. It took a little while before the scarab would approach a carefully-lowered hoof, but Diamond decided that was because she was just used to the envelopment of Snails' field. She ate. She relaxed under the heat lamps. She flew around Diamond's bedroom, exploring, with her new supervisor watching carefully, making sure of where she was at all times. And she would go back to perching on Diamond's tiara, with the two reading together. Or rather, Diamond reading out loud and Cameo listening to the words which described her original habitat, because reading out loud made things less boring.

Eventually, Diamond found herself going over the same sentence three times, and she carefully returned Cameo to the terrarium which had been installed on a relocated table to the right of her bed, just before curling up at its base and falling asleep where Cameo could see her.

It seemed important, having Cameo see she was there. And Diamond, who had taken her new sleeping position on instinct, too tired to truly think, didn't know why.

It had taken her some extra time to get out of the mansion in the morning, mostly because she'd needed to round up all of the servants, at least for the day shift. They'd been marched into her bedroom, introduced to Cameo, shown the books, and told to make sure they knew where the little scarab was while cleaning or changing mostly-undisturbed sheets or anything else. And then after they'd been sent out again (with the books and instructions to pass everything on to the night shift), she'd needed a few minutes to tell Cameo where she was going, why, and what time she'd be back, something the scarab was probably roughly familiar with from Snails' schedule, but this was Diamond and besides, once school wrapped up for the summer break, there would be considerably more shopping trips involved, some of which Cameo would have to come along for, if only to see how she coordinated with new outfits, plus there was the toy store to browse and the dollhouse section just might have those fountains in stock. But for now, she wasn't going to bring Cameo to school, because it was bad enough that Diamond had to go and there was no way she was going to make somepony else suffer through it.

She'd explained all that, and it had gotten her looked at a lot, along with a considerable amount of six-legged limb weaving and a few wing displays. Diamond had decided she'd learn what that end of the conversation meant soon enough, would do it faster than anypony (except Snails) and in the meantime, making up Cameo's responses in her head worked out perfectly, especially since that meant someone was agreeing with her.

And then she'd trotted off to school, consumed with plans, along with attempts at same. There were four days left -- but due to the way the calendar had worked out this year added to two very surprising snow days created by an unexpected storm which had broken the schedule and several plows when it had blown in from the wild zone, two of those were the weekend -- and that started tomorrow. If she was careful, she could have the colts at the mansion for two whole days, and that was all the more time to make them learn --

-- but she still didn't have a way to make them actually write the correct answers down.

The deadline was approaching, and the anxiety was certainly there -- but that pressure wasn't driving her to a solution, and she didn't want to be in a position where she would have to rely on a near-instant one which only arrived at the moment they all trotted into the schoolhouse for what had to be her last day. Diamond needed an answer, she needed it fast, and Cameo, while possessing a fresh perspective on the matter, wasn't in a position to deliver any ideas. (Which wasn't Cameo's job anyway and Diamond wasn't expecting her to work outside her comfort zone.)

But between poor sleep and the true need for servant education added to desperate (and so far, futile) planning along with the nearly-daily war with her breakfast, Diamond had left the mansion later than she normally would have, enough that any gallop required to get her through the schoolhouse door before the bell rang was... something she didn't have the energy for anyway. So she trotted. She would only be a little late, and excuses for that sort of thing remained automatic.

Diamond heard the bell while she was still on the approach, and crested the rise which put her in sight of the school about three minutes after it went off. It gave her a perfect vantage point from which to see all the colts and fillies milling around outside.

Well... nearly all.

They were talking to each other, mostly at low volume. The words didn't reach Diamond, but there was enough tone to let her know there was a lot of confusion out in the grass. But it trotted alongside with what seemed to be anticipation, and as Diamond froze at the crest, having spotted the two absences within the herd, her muscles suddenly tensing and a new voice sounding in her head, something screaming at her to run... a certain yellow filly looked up. And then that one signaled orange and white, who passed it along, there was something new rising from the ranks and it sounded like a group snicker...

...Silver was trotting up the path. Coming towards her.

Slowly. Eyes down. Glasses left behind in the grass because whatever expressions had been experienced in the minutes before Diamond's arrival had produced so many slips as to make her only friend momentarily surrender.

"...Silver?"

"You're supposed to go inside," was the soft response. "As soon as you got here. Just... go inside. While we wait out here." And her friend wouldn't look at her.

Diamond could hear the desperation in her own voice. Anypony could. And she couldn't stop it. "Silver, what's going on? Where are --"

"-- inside. With her. It's..." Silver's eyes closed. "...I don't know what it is. Just that she wants to see all three of you, while we wait outside, she just told us when we got here, you were late and I couldn't gallop off to find you because everypony had seen me already, and... and now they've seen you, and..."

The first tear fell from those pinkish-purple eyes.

"I don't know what's going on," Silver whispered. "I haven't known anything for days now. Just that... she wants to see all of you. And I can't do anything..."

A single head shake, hard enough to disrupt the end of the braid.

"No," Silver softly said. "It won't mean anything. It won't help anything. But I can walk you to the door."

And Diamond, with nowhere to run, slowly trotted at her friend's side, while the others watched and giggled and laughed and singsonged and did all the things Diamond would have done if it had been any of them.

It hurt.

This time, when the door closed behind her, Diamond knew she would come out again. She just didn't know if she wanted to.

The colts were sitting in front of the largest desk, heads down, hindquarters against the floor, eyes half-closed. Cheerilee stood behind something which suddenly felt very much like a throne.

"Come up here," the teacher said, "and sit down."

Diamond managed to make her legs work, for just long enough.

Cheerilee waited until her position had just about matched that of the boys, waiting between them. Nodded to herself, and then trotted out from behind the desk, moving behind the trio, then back around to the desk again, circling them as she talked...

"Last night," Cheerilee began, "I had a visitor. Rather later than I like to receive them, but parents tend to think teachers are paid for too few hours because those spent at the actual school are all they truly believe exist in my workday, and so more than a few like to extend things a little. Parents typically drop by at all hours. To discuss grades. Why a higher one wasn't fairly given for what they see as fair or, rarely, to ask whether something was truly earned. To talk about my methods, and it's amazing how ponies without a teaching mark seem to believe they understand my profession better than I ever could. But last night's visitor opened with a question I really hadn't heard before."

She stopped. Looked at Diamond.

"She wanted to know why her son's tutor had an insect on her tiara. An insect which she was convinced didn't exist in Ponyville. A bug which could have only come from one other pony. And from what she said, she then went out to that tutor's home deep under Moon, waited for her son to leave -- and saw the other colt go out with him."

Diamond couldn't look at the teacher. Couldn't breathe.

"Okay... let me just get Cameo and --"

"Diamond, you've gotta listen, I was gonna do this before we --"

-- got to Snips' house.

Because she had to pick up Snips by herself, and nothing about her could show a single sign that she was spending any time outside school with Snails. Nothing at all.

Cameo had been on her tiara.

Snails had tried to save her. Again. And Diamond... had run away.

"For some reason which she never quite explained to me," Cheerilee went on, moving again, "this upset her. It got her so angry that she stormed off -- to the Gastrope residence, where she seems to have exchanged a few words with those particular parents, mostly about whether they had tried to arrange the whole thing. There was a fight. A rather noisy one, which ultimately wound up getting the police involved, if only because there were coronas surging all over the place and the lightshow accompanied by the volume was starting to disturb the neighbors. And with that broken up without arrests becoming involved, she decided it was time to yell at me. A decision the Gastrope adults echoed about ten minutes later, while she was still in her first diatribe, and long before I would have been allowed any chance to talk. Which ultimately brought in the police again, who had become surprisingly sick of the whole affair before reaching my residence. And after all parties were separated and most of my furniture was upright again, an agreement of sorts was negotiated."

Stopped again. Behind them this time.

"Snips and Snails knew some of this coming in, I suspect," she said. "Especially Snails, given that the original fight was at his house. I know you're getting the whole thing at once, Diamond. But I'm pretty sure all three of you will be hearing this part for the first time."

Trotted around to the front. Stopped, looked at them. And once again, no part of her, including the stupid daisies on her flanks, seemed to be smiling.

"You are all staying after school," Cheerilee told them. "Your parents will be coming in. All of your parents. And once we have everypony in the same room under some shaky form of temporary truce -- we are going to find out exactly what's been going on."

External Audit

Diamond usually didn't think of herself as having real enemies: just minor inconveniences which could typically be rather easily dealt with. But when her daddy had refused to intervene following the desk switch, she had finally acquired a true one. Not Cheerilee: she still felt there had to be some way of getting around the teacher, if only her daddy would...

...there was too much else to think about right now, and that was because of her true enemy: time.

When she thought about it (and there seemed to be endless seconds for thinking about anything which wouldn't help her, which somehow left absolutely none for saving herself), the rivalry had truly begun at the moment she'd failed to break her vaguely food-scented new bench. And while she'd known she was under attack, she hadn't felt the individual kicks. She'd noticed days going by. Sometimes hours, especially as they continued to dwindle. But the truest, most constant impacts had come from the seconds. They were passing. They were bringing her steadily closer to the moment when the Gastropes and Bradels and Cheerilee and Diamond would all be in the same room, and Diamond would have to... explain herself.

"If you do get caught, that's when you get to explain things." That's what she had told the colts. And it was something which had always worked out for her, because the ultimate explanation was delivered to her daddy, who would always believe her no matter what, who had wanted to believe her right up until that first double-hind-kick bone-cracking moment of...

...was.

It was easy to sell to somepony who wanted to buy. A customer who stomped into the store, deliberately lashing their tail in such a way to jar merchandise and forever ready to claim that somepony else must have knocked the item to the ground before quickly asking if a scuffed floor model could be had for free... making them part with their bits was somewhat more difficult. One who actively hated the owner, somepony forever looking to slip something into their saddlebags and, if caught, claim that the store's employees had put in there to frame them... unless you had their lone gift resort with the party minutes away and absolutely no way to claim illness added to a full assortment of theft prevention measures, effectively impossible. Diamond felt Mr. Gastrope was somewhere beyond that. And then there were the Bradels. She had no prior evidence for what the Bradels would be like during the conference, but given what Snips' mother had done, she suspected they wouldn't be much of an improvement.

She'd taken too many risks. They could have been caught the first time Diamond had come to pick Snails up, with the paper necklace still wrapped around her throat. (It was not there now, and she could still feel it choking her.) It hadn't happened, and she'd just kept taking more risks, when her daddy wasn't there to save her, wouldn't save her, and when somepony had tried to step in and tell her there was a giant risk looming ahead, she had...

Time was the enemy. And in the last hours before the conference, it was a particularly active one. Cheerilee led the class in reviewing for the upcoming exams, and Diamond heard none of it, spending every fleeting second of class time in the much more important pursuit of searching for a way out. But whenever she tried to do so, time sped up. She would concentrate, focus, delve within herself for anything approaching an answer -- and before she could complete anything faintly resembling the first step of a plan, the recess bell went off.

But the trot outside... the one when she was thinking about failures, and having been caught, and what her daddy would say and do when he found out, when she had already been through was... it took years.

She didn't even know why she trotted around the corner, following the colts to the bug-hunting grounds. Snips and Snails seemed to have done it purely out of habit. They reached their favorite spots, and then the shuffle-hoofed, limp-tailed walk had shifted into a slow slump forward, leaving each boy huddled low in the grass.

They were silently looking at each other through half-closed eyes, and neither would look at her.

She needed words. For Cheerliee, for their parents, for... everything. She needed words to give ponies who didn't want to believe her. She didn't have any.

It should have been quiet, and it was not. With the colts silent, with Diamond voiceless, they could hear the others at play. Galloping, flying, laughing. Diamond knew what they were laughing about. If it had been happening to somepony other than her, she would have laughed.

Things did look different from the back, and at the side of the schoolhouse. They were more shadowed. Oddly cold, with nearly all of approaching summer Sun seemingly blocked out.

Diamond lowered herself into the grass. It wasn't particularly soft, or tickling, or... anything, really. It was just grass. And she felt her tail curl against the right side of her body, something she passively realized was a move made by ponies trying to put up a final futile barrier against the world: she'd seen that with the one ultimately dumb cousin. It was something only weak ponies did. She was doing it now. And she didn't care.

"...hello?"

They all looked up, although not by much. After all, the hesitant voice had been a familiar one, although it wasn't a voice which generally spoke to Snips and Snails, not unless it was backing up Diamond's.

"I... thought I'd better come back here," Silver said, slowly trotting forward. "I tried to send about a dozen notes during class, but nopony would make the relay for me, and... I just waited for recess. Come on, Diamond. We can go talk over --"

"-- no," she said. And didn't move.

Silver stared at her, eyes wide behind those stupid glasses.

Total confusion, with a hint of very audible fear. "Diamond?"

"We can talk in front of them," Diamond quietly said. "It doesn't matter. You just want to know what happened, right?"

Her friend forced a nod. "And -- if there was anything I could do to help you."

That got a bitter laugh from Snips: a short, sharp bark with no humor in it. "No," the smaller colt finished, and let his ears dip down again.

"We got caught," Diamond said. "Together. They got caught together. Their parents don't want them together outside of school, at all, and Mrs. Bradel saw them leaving the mansion."

Silver, whom Diamond was starting to realize was lacking in pretty much all of the backstory, looked more confused than ever. Her glasses nearly fell off her face three times as her snout wrinkled, visibly trying to find a first question, and she finally went with "But... it would have been night. She went out there at night? Was she walking Snips home?"

"No," Diamond said, her volume feeling oddly low. "She just went out to see if they were together."

"But that's stupid," was Silver's automatic response. "Doesn't she trust --"

"-- no." Snails said. It was his first word in hours. "She doesn't trust anypony. Not when it comes to us. Not after she saw Cameo."

Silver blinked.

"Who's --"

Diamond didn't know why she broke in at that point, especially with those words. She was fairly certain she'd said the words more times since the desk switch than in every moment of her life which had led up to it. She had no true idea why she was saying them now. Just that... they needed to be said, and if words needed to be said, then Diamond was logically the perfect one to say them.

"I'm sorry."

"Whatever," Snails instantly said, and his tail splayed across the grass.

No, he didn't want to believe her. Perhaps only two ponies ever had.

"Snails... I'm sorry. You tried to warn me, I know that. I know... what you two were talking about before I came in. Snips saw Cameo, didn't he? And he knew his mother might have seen her. 'It'll happen or it won't.' That's what it means, right? Seeing Cameo or not, whether she'd do something or not. And it..."

Her eyelids felt oddly heavy.

"...happened."

Silver was staring at both of them now. More worried than ever. And even for the one pony who might still listen to her, Diamond had no words.

"Why did you run away?" Snails asked. There was no anger in his voice. Diamond felt anger would have taken strength he no longer had.

Time kicked her. She couldn't insult it into stopping, couldn't threaten a lawsuit, couldn't even go so far as to dodge. She just lay in the grass and took it. Over and over again.

"Diamond?" Snails asked. "Why --"

"-- you wanted her back."

"Just for a few minutes. You didn't let me finish. You just --"

Even her words felt heavy now. "-- she liked me. She liked my tiara. She didn't have any reason to say that. She didn't get anything for saying it. She just said it. And you wanted her back."

There was no point in fighting that weight, and so her eyes closed. There really wasn't anything at the side of the schoolhouse worth looking at anyway.

It wasn't quiet. She wished it had been.

Hoofsteps in the grass, slow ones. Familiar breathing. A slight pressure, sliding down her left flank so as not to trap her tail. Silver resting next to her.

Time passed, and continued to do so no matter what she did.

"What's going to happen?" Silver eventually asked.

"We all have to stay after school," Snips placidly said. "Our folks will show up. They'll still be mad. My mom, this morning, before I left for school... she was saying all kinds of things, and... it sounded like she thought Diamond was assigned to tutor us. By Miss Cheerilee. Which is kind of weird. But... if she'd just gone to Miss Cheerilee first and asked for separate tutors, I don't think we would be in much trouble. Because she thinks Miss Cheerilee put us together, and Miss Cheerilee..."

Up until that moment, Diamond had never realized it was possible to hear a frown.

"...I guess she doesn't really know about stuff," Snips eventually continued. "Not that stuff, anyway. But Mom just... kicked the hurdle instead of leaping it. When she saw a bug... and then Snails and me, we were kind of kidding around a little when we left Diamond's place, because we'd sort of been expecting her or my dad to show up while we were supposed to be studying, and if we'd gotten that far without them, then maybe we were safe."

"We were... doing stuff," Snails provided, and Diamond's closed eyes easily allowed her to see it. Insults, mockery, shoves, and maybe a little rough-and-tumble after the first three deliberately went too far. Boy stuff.

"We were stupid," Snips quietly said.

"Yeah," Snails agreed. "Too many trees out by Diamond's place, on the road going back. Too many places for an adult to hide. She saw us having fun, and... that's what they hate. Us not just being together anywhere, but having fun, and..."

He stopped talking.

There was nopony speaking at all, and time viciously rang the bell.

They all got up. Diamond didn't feel as if there was anywhere else to go. And the first few hoofsteps back were taken with closed eyes.

Softly, on her left, "Is there anything I can do?"

"No." And that was it. Just... no.

"Do you want me to wait outside for you? Until it's over?"

She wanted to go home.

She wanted to talk to Cameo.

I want my daddy.

"Yes."

Lunch. Afternoon break. Time dragged and rushed, sometimes simultaneously. Diamond was simultaneously curious about how it was doing that while not really caring about anything other than the results.

They didn't really talk, because there didn't seem to be anything they could talk about. Diamond couldn't give them a plan to follow when she didn't have one. The deadline had been called in early, and it turned out that she responded to it by freezing. She considered that it would make her a horrible employee, was briefly grateful that she was destined for a management position -- and then wondered, for the first time in her life, whether she should have been leading anypony. Because she hadn't been able to motivate the colts into truly studying, not to the point where they would make a true effort to pass their tests and so bring her along with them. She hadn't been able to negate what Cheerilee had done, for in the end, those battles had been fought by her father, and all she'd ever done was direct a weapon which was no longer interested in wounding anypony other than her.

She... couldn't do anything on her own. Not without getting it wrong. She had delegated nearly everything, including every last one of what she'd falsely seen as her previous victories. Leaving her with nothing except failure.

It was a thought she didn't want to have, and it also turned out to be something she couldn't get rid of, even when she so desperately needed a plan and they were all lying in the grass, listening to laughter while the boys did nothing, because there was nothing to be done.

They also didn't blame her. Not with anything other than their eyes.

Cheerilee spoke. Cheerilee moved, wrote things on the blackboard, asked and answered questions. Diamond heard none of it. The only thing she truly noticed was when they all came in from afternoon break and found the teacher frowning at a piece of stationery, one with a familiar letterhead, and Diamond easily guessed what it said without ever reading a word. But that wouldn't save her, and she doubted it would even buy extra time.

She needed time.

She hated time.

She had to think of something.

She couldn't seem to think at all.

And then the final bell rang.

They wound up with one parent from each colt's family, as in both cases, somepony had to stay behind and mind those respective shops. Mr. Gastrope arrived first, slamming his hooves into the floor as if testing each board for defects, and Diamond silently placed him among the tail-lashers. Mrs. Bradel was a rather small mare in some ways: for height, she was just a little larger than the stupid librarian, but in build, she was more than a little overweight, and Diamond briefly wondered how she'd found a tree to hide behind before belatedly coming up with several suspects. Her horn was oddly short, and strangely blunt at the tip. A horn meant for poking and prodding.

Diamond had a good view for their entrances, because they'd all switched desks again. For this, she and the colts had been placed in the front row, and she wondered if they'd ever seen the view from this close. She had, during kindergarten. It had inspired her to subsequently find something with a little more cover.

Cheerilee was behind her own desk, as usual. Waiting. They'd waited about two minutes for Mr. Gastrope, who had tried to start things early over and over, with Cheerilee asking him to wait each time. The insistence was steadily increased on one side, the frustration seemed to build on the other, and forty endless and student-silent minutes later (for Cheerilee would not allow them to talk until the conference began), Mrs. Bradel had come in.

She'd glared at Snails nearly all the way in. Openly. The first of the three breaks was used for the brief furious glare delivered to his father, who returned it with interest which compounded by the second. (Diamond was completely sure that was illegal.) The second glare went to Diamond, who couldn't return it -- and the last went to Cheerilee.

"Where am I supposed to sit?" Mrs. Bradel demanded.

"I'm sorry for the lack of benches," Cheerilee patiently offered. "I don't have adult company very often. You can try a desk if you like, or just take part of the floor."

"Not even a place to sit," she huffed, and stomped off towards a desk. "That's too small..."

"For your rump," Mr. Gastrope immediately supplied.

Diamond considered it to be a completely worthless effort. Striking at an obvious target, with the recipient clearly enraged by the remark: that was usually worth some points. But under one of the other hooves, he'd just done it in front of a teacher.

"Mr. Gastrope," Cheerilee steadily said, using the time granted by Mrs. Bradel's deep inhale (and of course time had chosen to ally with her), "I had quite enough of that in my house last night, thank you. This is a conference, not a third round."

"Make him apologize," Mrs. Bradel said.

"Or what? She'll keep me after school?" Mr. Gastrope snickered. And the words had been something very close to singsong...

Cheerilee didn't say anything for a few seconds, and then the only words which emerged were "We can start now."

Mr. Gastrope frowned. "No. We can't, not when you wouldn't let me start before. Where are her parents?"

"Mr. Rich," Cheerilee replied, "is on a business trip." She nodded towards the familiar stationery on her desk. "His staff is doing their best to let him know about what's going on, but he won't be back for a few days, and there's really nothing which could have brought him back in time in any case. I'll talk to him about this once he returns, but I wasn't willing to postpone. Both of you want this cleared up immediately, and so do I. So we'll proceed without him."

Mrs. Bradel looked at Cheerilee, briefly at Diamond, and then went back to the teacher again.

"What about her mother?"

Diamond had been having so much trouble keeping her eyes open during the day, and when they had closed, it had naturally blocked sight. And similarly, her perfect ears had spent so much time drooped that she had almost managed to spare a little concern for long-term damage... but when they dipped, it did nothing to block hearing.

Cheerilee's voice was... gentle. Patient. Steady. None of that mattered.

"Gone."

Mr. Gastrope snickered. "Probably broke into a full gallop right after she saw what she'd birthed --"

-- and stopped, for few words could have survived the onslaught of Cheerilee's gaze.

"Her mother," Cheerilee softly said, "is gone. You say interesting things in front of children, Lyon Gastrope, even when you aren't one any more. Diamond?"

It seemed to require a response. "...what?"

"Do you need a minute?"

She'd had hours. They hadn't done any good. But it would be a minute without the conference going on. "Yes."

A small nod. "Go into the bathroom. Take a fresh towel from the linen closet and wipe your eyes. Come back whenever you're ready."

Diamond got up. It wasn't following Cheerilee's orders. It was just... getting a minute.

She hadn't even known she'd needed tears, and they had shown up anyway. It didn't exactly make up for being late during that last dinner with her father, but at least it was progress.

It wound up being more than a minute in the bathroom: her churning stomach seized the opportunity and while she hadn't been able to make any attempt at her lunch, she still needed to rinse the strange taste of emptiness out of her mouth. But she took care of herself, as much as she could under the circumstances. Rejected a last-minute scramble out the window, just as she'd earlier rejected all thoughts of galloping for the Everfree. And when it was over, she didn't feel clean at all. She felt... oddly warm. As if there was a little fire burning inside her, just looking for something to catch, and it grew hotter every time she thought about Mr. Gastrope.

Back to the assigned desk. The adults watched her. The colts didn't.

"Diamond?"

"...yes?"

Cheerilee's dumb voice sounded even stupider when the teacher was trying to be gentle. "Are you ready?"

"I guess so," was all she came up with.

"All right. Mrs. Bradel, you go first -- wait your turn, Lyon."

"I think," the stallion slowly said, "that's Mr. Gastrope to you."

"I'll remember that," Cheerilee replied. "Mrs. Bradel?"

The mare took a deep breath, one which briefly pulled Snips' attention in that direction. "Fine," she said. "You heard most of what I had to say last night, Cheerilee. I really don't have that much to add -- except for this: I am going to the school board and requesting your immediate removal from this posting." With a small shrug, "I'm probably not going to get it. I won't be surprised if they decided to keep you on through the exams, so the children won't be disrupted." And with a open satisfaction Diamond personally hadn't felt for days and could almost be jealous of, "But don't expect to be back here after the break. Not after I speak with some of the other parents, and tell them what a failure you are."

Mr. Gastrope snorted, and it seemed to be one of surprise.

"Well, how about that?" he said while Cheerilee's head was still tilting quizzically (and, it seemed to Diamond, sarcastically) left. "We agree on something. I've wanted Mr. Guffey in here for years. Since the end of my son's second year with you, Cheerilee, when I started to wonder if those daisies on your flanks are trying to make a statement about gardening."

Snails looked up at that, perhaps because he'd just heard somepony questioning a mark.

"Go on," Cheerilee slowly said. "Why do you both think I deserve to be fired? Mrs. Bradel?"

"You assigned my son a tutor," the mare said.

Diamond waited for it.

"Yes," Cheerilee said. "I told Diamond to tutor your son. And Lyon's son."

Instantly from the stallion, "I told you to call me --"

"-- I said I would remember it," Cheerille interrupted. "I didn't say I cared."

He was staring at her, and Diamond gave him company.

It was... very hot in the schoolhouse. Hotter than she'd ever felt.

"I can get you fired," Mr. Gastrope said.

"Possibly," Cheerilee admitted. "But here's the thing, Lyon. I heard you last night. I heard you just now. I heard you say something that made a filly cry, and I heard the pleasure in your voice as you said it. And right now, I think being somepony you hate is just about the best thing to be. So do your best, or your worst. From what I remember from school, even watching from a few terms away, they're pretty much the same thing anyway. But right now, I am still their teacher. And what I want to hear is why I shouldn't be."

"He's failed," Mr. Gastrope said. "Every year from his second on. With you, he fails. With Mr. Guffey, he passes. Between the two of you, Cheerilee, who's the actual teacher? Because as far as I'm concerned, nopony with an actual teaching mark would ever have a student fail. Their talent would prevent it, and your talent, whatever that is, doesn't."

"And Snips fails too!" Mrs. Bradel added about half a second after Diamond spotted the growing need to interrupt: she was very familiar with the look of a pony who wanted to get a word in, especially when Diamond wasn't letting them. "If we can't agree on anything else, we can agree on the evidence. You're not a good teacher, and the children deserve better than you. He fails with you and passes with him. Who's always been around every time he fails? You. It's you, Cheerilee. At this point, what else could it be? And having them tutored together --"

"Yes," Cheerilee quickly said, and the ice in her voice didn't cool the rising fire in Diamond's heart. "Together. Let's talk about that. Because that's the part I truly don't understand from last night. Why don't you want them together?"

He blinked. So did Mrs. Bradel.

"I guess she really doesn't know about stuff. Not that stuff, anyway."

Snips and Snails were looking at their parents. At their teacher. Diamond could easily spot ponies under stress, especially when she was causing it --

I did this, I did

-- no. This hadn't been her. The families had decided to keep the boys separated long before she'd been unfairly forced to switch desks.

But I started this part.

It wasn't her fault. It...

...was very hot...

Cheerilee wasn't sweating. Like the boys and parents, Cheerilee didn't show any signs of the heat at all. Cheerilee didn't know.

"Have you seen what happens when that one is with my son?" Mrs. Bradel abruptly shouted. "The trouble he gets Snips into? Do you happen to recall an Ursa Minor moving through our streets? Who lured it in? The Gastrope boy, with my poor son pulled along on the gallop! Just because that one was trying to impress some traveling show charlatan --"

"Miss Trixie is a great magician," Snails softly said.

She instantly turned on him. "Well! Now I understand why this one flunks! Everypony saw what she did the first time, what she failed to do! And then when she came back...!"

"That was our fault," Snips whispered.

"Your fault," Mr. Gastrope immediately decided, with a strategic sneer which officially opened the third round.

"I saw the inside of her caravan," Snails went on, not seeming to care if anypony was listening, and it was hard to hear him over Mrs. Bradel's fresh yells. "We both did. She writes on the walls. I think it's because she spends so much time on the road that she runs out of paper and still needs to take notes. She bought about a hundred notebooks after her first show, and I thought she'd have them filled before she left Ponyville. And because she's on the road so much, maybe even going through wild zones, she had a spell, just over her bed, which was supposed to be for beating..." A long pause. "Just in case. Maybe... maybe she can't cast everything she comes up with. But she's still strong. Not as strong as Miss Twilight, but just as smart, and... if you can think of things all the time, but you can't do them..."

"We're not great with magic," said the other colt in the room, the one who'd invented a working which Diamond had never seen before. "But we know how to tell when somepony is. She's great, in her own way, and she's..." Stopped.

"You were gonna say pretty," Snails said with the faintest ghost of a grin, completely missed by his now-screaming father. "We all know it."

"You're the one who said you liked her mane!"

"I like white streaks," Snails answered, and the words were almost casual. "They make mares pretty. But we thought... anypony who could write all that stuff down had to be capable of beating an Ursa. She could -- show off. So we remembered some things ponies had said about hearing growling, and... we found out that just because you can dream it doesn't mean you can do it."

"We made her feel bad about herself," Snips quietly finished while their parents continued to fight with each other. "So bad that she had to prove she could cast her own stuff, no matter what it took. She found the Amulet, and... I don't think that was her, after she put it on. It was something which thought it was her. The real Miss Trixie was the one who did the fireworks after, because she was sorry, and she didn't know how to say it -- so she made fireworks instead."

"You have to be careful, what you say to girls," Snails concluded. "And we're careful now. Because with girls, it's really personal."

And before Diamond could truly take all of that in, Cheerilee reared back -- and then earth pony strength slammed both forehooves into the floor.

The adults instantly stopped yelling. Both slowly looked at her.

"The next step," Cheerilee said, after the last of the echoes had finally faded, "is sending Diamond out to fetch the police." There seemed to be a hint of Diamond's internal fire in the teacher's eyes. "But I think I've heard enough to see the essence of it. Lyon blames Snips for anything that happens when the boys are together. And Lexi is blaming Snails, with both of you insisting on your own viewpoint. Rather loudly. Neither of you is truly objecting to my having assigned Diamond to tutor one colt: you're both angry that she's working with two."

"They get in trouble!" Mrs. Bradel pointed out. "All the time! And it's the Gastrope boy who --

"They've had a couple of incidents," Cheerilee declared with what Diamond felt was a truly false calm. "One of which came to them. I can think of three students who've done considerably more in the chaos department."

"If I didn't keep Snails away from that colt," Mr. Gastrope nearly hissed as flickers of dark red corona danced around his horn, "who knows what could happen? We all know how dull he is, don't we? It's no wonder he flunks. You can hear his stupidity every time he laughs, those idiotic grunting noises which a pig wouldn't even bother to voice..."

"Cheerilee," Mrs. Bradel softly said, her left foreleg beginning to scrape at the floor, "you may want to send the Rich filly out for the police now."

It would put her outside. It might be cooler outside, even under near-summer Sun. Diamond felt as if her fur was about to catch fire, and it was getting harder to hear everypony, with her own heartbeat so loud in her ears.

Mr. Gastrope ignored her. "My son is simply the victim of an inferior teacher who doesn't know how to explain that he can't get his future entomology degree without passing this level of school first, and break session grades aren't something colleges are going to respect. He needs to start bringing his average up now, and as long as you're here... You can't teach, Cheerilee: their failure proves it."

"Hearing you say that," a pre-charge Mrs. Bradel stated as Cheerilee began to move out from behind the desk, trying to get between them, "almost makes me want to automatically disagree with it. But the proof is still there. Mr. Guffey can reach Snips -- but under your supervision, he fails. You're the only possible --"

" -- IT'S YOU! THEY FAIL ON PURPOSE! BECAUSE OF YOU!"

And then nopony was talking any more.

Diamond was glad for that, because every stupid parental word had just made feel her hotter, and now the fire got to come out. She was sick of adults. She was sick of stupidity. She was sick of everything, and the anger which had built in the presence of so much sheer dumbness sent her out from behind the desk, across the schoolhouse floor, past a startled Cheerilee, and when her legs pushed off for the jump to the top of the teacher's desk, the fury gave her extra height on the leap.

She spun around to glare at them all the second after she'd landed, and decided she liked having the height advantage. Thankfully, there was still a chance for that major growth spurt to show up.

But that was for later. Right now, she wasn't going to look at the colts' faces, the slow-crashing horror moving across both sets of features. The boys weren't what she was mad at, not this time, for the thing about insulting the water at the dam for being cold and wet was that you were standing on the shore when you did it. Cheerilee had pushed her in, and so she'd found out that to her complete lack of surprise, it was cold and wet. But the dumb adults hadn't been pushed, they hadn't found out about the third thing, and since she was supposed to be the tutor and they clearly weren't going to learn it on their own --

"-- you keep them apart! You won't let them play together! They're going to get into trouble, because they're boys and boys get in trouble! It's what they do! They'd get into trouble if they were by themselves all the time, just without somepony to go for help! The only place you'd let them see each other was in school -- so they decided to have school all the time, and they made that decision together! Would you think of that? Would anypony? They came up with that, and they learn a whole term's worth of stuff during break, and you think they're dumb? They're smarter than you!" Admittedly, that wasn't saying much. "If you let them see each other -- if you just let them be boys -- they'd pass every time! But you think boys shouldn't ever get into trouble, when trouble is what boys are, and you made them do this! They live with you, all the time, your work doesn't make you travel, they both have a daddy and a mommy each and you're there all the time and you don't see who they are..."

Diamond considered the implications of that, thought hard, nodded even harder. Because it didn't matter that she had witnesses, that her father wouldn't save her, and while was remained important enough to hurt, somepony had to say it. So she took a breath, and somehow managed to glare at both adults all the harder.

"You're lousy parents," she told them, and decided that no matter what happened, when looking back on that moment from the depths of whatever punishment was surely coming, she would still be satisfied.

They were staring at her. She didn't care. Cheerilee was staring at her, and that didn't trigger a single regret. Snips and Snails looked as if Sun and Moon had just landed on their heads, crushing their entire world, and... that felt like it mattered. But the words had needed saying. And since none of the adults would ever see the obvious and the employees weren't up to the task, then the manager had to take responsibility for their welfare in order to finally create a proper working environment.

She even felt cooler.

Mr. Gastrope found his voice first and judging from the expressions around the room, just about everypony else wished he hadn't.

"I..." This to nopony in particular. "You..." That was aimed at Diamond, who stood her ground (or rather, desk). "I'm... if this is true... if this is being done on purpose... then there's only one thing to be done."

He turned his attention to Mrs. Bradel.

"You have to move out of town."

Diamond felt the response from Snips' mother was justified. "...what did you say?"

"Leave. Find another settled zone. Or send your son to a boarding school." With open sarcasm, "The Gifted School, if he's so smart. Keeping them apart after their classes isn't enough. They have to be permanently separated."

The colts stared at each other. And then, unnoticed by their furious parents, both started to move.

"I have to move? I have a business here! I have customers! Why doesn't your family leave?"

"You have one customer! Why don't you move to Canterlot and work for the Archives?"

"They ship to me! It just looks like Twilight's my only customer because she's in and out so much! And then there was that time I caught her hiding crouched down outside my window, trying to feel what I was doing, I had her send Spike for a moon and I nearly put a restraining order -- look, you can move! Or send your son away!"

"Well," Mr. Gastrope yelled, "one of us has to go --"

Two thumps. Eight hooves landing on the desk, which was now very crowded. Diamond felt more than a little squeezed, but was unwilling to use Cheerilee's bench. She had to stay out front, after all.

"We'll run away," Snails told his father. And the words had been steady. Serious. Sharp. "The first chance we get."

"I'll find him," Snips informed his mother. "Maybe we'll get together at Diamond's house. Maybe we figured out someplace else to meet while you were yelling at each other. But I'll run away and find him, because I'm not leaving him, and you can't make me leave him."

"You'll have to keep us locked up," Snails continued. "All the time. And..." Looking directly at his father. "...I can find him, no matter where he is." He switched to Mrs. Bradel. "It's easy enough to spot me. And you could stop me from getting close, I guess. But not every ant and bee and anisoptera. All I have to do is ask. Ask my friends to pass the word through the air and the hives and all the tunnels. Someone will see him eventually, and then it'll come back to me, and..." Back to Mr. Gastrope. "I will find him, Dad. And then no matter where I am, where he is, I'll go."

Mr. Gastrope took a slow breath.

"Then," he said, and Diamond could feel the heat in his voice, "if locking you up is what I have to --"

"-- oh, Lyon..." Cheerilee sighed. And then she smiled. Diamond knew that smile, for she had so often displayed it herself, and it personally gave her pleasure every time, as long as it was on her own face.

This one was being worn by somepony else. But somehow, it still felt good.

"...what?"

"You love your son," Cheerilee shrugged. "It takes a pretty understanding father to host an insect colony in his house. And I know you from school, and I know that when you're angry, you say stupid things. Hurtful ones. Some of them you take back, and some of them you don't. I'm not sure which category this falls into -- but I do know something else."

And the smile widened, for it was the smile that came from watching a pony fail at life.

"I know," Cheerilee said, "that I'm not going to let you take it back. Not until long after it's been repeated to other ponies, and maybe not even then." Without looking at her, eyes still fixed on the stallion, "Diamond? Please gallop to the police station. Ask for a child welfare officer and backup, then bring them to the school."

Diamond, who would later regret following what had so clearly been an order immediately, jumped down from the desk.

Mr. Gastrope's hind legs went out from under him.

"You can't."

"I just did," Cheerilee said. "Lexi, given that it'll get Lyon in trouble, can I count on your testimony?"

With a smirk Diamond nearly missed as she trotted for the door, "Yes. But I still don't want --"

"-- which doesn't make you a whole lot better."

"Don't," Mr. Gastrope said. (Diamond was no longer able to see his face, and so wondered if the begging was there as well.) "I just got -- mad. I can explain --"

"-- that you were mad, yes," Cheerilee presumably nodded. "Lyon -- are you willing to breathe a little now? To keep your horn dark for a change and listen? Because Diamond -- hold up for a moment, Diamond --" It stopped her at the door. "-- said a lot of things there, and I suppose most ponies would automatically take issue with hearing those words said to their faces. None of which means she wasn't right about more than a few of them. Including the fact that they're boys. Loyal, dedicated, intelligent friends who've been fooling all of us for a long time. Boys... get into trouble. It's what they do. Girls get into trouble. Our colts bring in a single Ursa Minor: our fillies... well, that's a much longer list. They all get into trouble, and as long as they look after each other, they generally come out of it. Two colts roaming Ponyville together can guard each other. One colt apiece striking out across all of Equestria in search of the other has nopony watching his flank. And so they're going to stay together, for their own safety. All right, Diamond. Straight to the station."

"But," Mr. Gastrope protested as Diamond opened the door, "I'll listen! I nodded, you saw me...!"

"I know," Cheerilee replied just before it closed again. "I just want the negotiations to have some extra witnesses."

And it was cooler outside, becoming more so with every step Silver took towards her.

Diamond spent most of the supervised portion of the negotiations fuming, mostly because she'd been forced to wait outside when she clearly should have been doing the supervising. The adults had let Snips and Snails stay...

"Are you okay?" Silver asked her as they waited in the schoolyard grass (at the front, not the side), for what was probably the fiftieth time.

"Yeah," Diamond lied. Some of the ramifications of speaking like that in front of credible witnesses were starting to sink in, although she still felt good about the actual words. "They're just taking a long time in there."

"There's a lot to talk about," Silver replied, and could say that with loaned authority because she'd accompanied Diamond to the station, which finally provided the chance for a full briefing. "Diamond... their parents could still move. No matter what they tell everypony, they could just pack up --"

"In an hour? I saw their houses. It would take a few days, unless they just abandoned all their stuff." Not that it was the greatest stuff: by Diamond's standards, some of it could stand for a little abandoning -- and now that she thought about it, how long would the mansion take to pack up? She was guessing at least four moons of full-time effort. Maybe that was what was keeping them from moving to Canterlot. "And they'd have to do it without anypony noticing, which includes Snips and Snails, then get that colt out of town... I don't think they could get away with it. Besides, Mrs. Bradel won't try it, and Mr. Gastrope... says dumb things. Really dumb. Ponies who can't do things say stupid stuff to make themselves look more important, and then they can't do anything they said either."

"You're sure?"

Diamond was mildly offended. Of course she was sure.

"If you can't pick out the fool at the negotiation table within five minutes of sitting down, it's probably you."

She wasn't a fool. Diamond knew an empty bluff when she heard one. And besides, being in a house with a locked-up Snails who could give careful instructions to every insect that wandered by probably wasn't the best idea --

-- she'd told Cameo she'd be home earlier than this. She'd have to explain what had happened.

"I'm sure."

The schoolhouse door opened. Mrs. Bradel stepped out first. She briefly glanced at Diamond and Silver, snorted, and made her way past them, heading up the road.

Mr. Gastrope, however, came right up to them. Or rather, right up to Diamond.

He stared down. She stared up. She wasn't afraid of him. And besides, the police officers had emerged directly behind them.

"You're the worst filly I've ever seen," he finally said, even with the police watching, because he was just that stupid.

The words which went through Diamond's mind were Lousy parent says what? But she didn't say them, because it was best for the police to see her as somepony who was unwilling to fight back. And after a while, Mr. Gastrope gave her the victory as he silently trotted up the road, with the officers following him. Just in case.

And then it was Cheerilee and the colts. Diamond got up, with Silver matching the motion, and they both trotted closer to the smiles. Diamond knew what those smiles meant, and that knowledge would have normally made the teacher's words both stupid and redundant. But she listened.

"Nopony's moving," Cheerilee told them. "The Gastropes and Bradels have agreed that if Snips and Snails pass their classes and don't purposefully bring any more monsters into the settled zone, they can get together outside of their classes." The colts beamed all the wider. "Not at each other's homes, though, at least for now: their parents need some time to... get used to this. Just out and about, or -- at somepony else's house. And with that said -- Diamond, you're late for your tutoring, so I suggest that you take them to your house and get started."

Diamond nodded to the boys, who trotted closer. They all began to move away, Silver included --

"And," Cheerilee added, "I still expect them to pass. This year."

Diamond stopped. So did everypony else.

"Their parents are now all right -- somewhat -- with their being together, even with summer school lurking," Cheerilee said. "They're personally not expecting a bump in the grades until the next term. But I remember what I said to you, Diamond, and what you said to me. All of it. So make sure they pass. Oh, and two more things. First, before you ask: I'm not switching your desk back. I think the new location is... good for you. And I will be speaking directly to your father about all of this, just as soon as he returns. Good luck, boys, and study hard. I'm not expecting top marks -- but with Diamond in charge, I do want to see each of you at least hoof-scrape a bare pass. Let me know if you need any review materials, Diamond: I'm sure you know where I live and I'll be there all weekend. Now get home."

It took a few seconds for Diamond to realize the others had gotten ahead of her, and three more before she could make her legs work again.

It didn't take long for the celebration to begin. Just enough for everypony to put the school well behind them, although the festivities didn't open in the way Diamond would have expected.

"I thought," Snips said slowly, "we were dead."

"I thought we were worse than dead," Snails slightly disagreed. "And then... Diamond, why did you try that? I know it worked out, I can't believe it worked out, but... I thought... what I said just now. Why that?"

Because she'd been hot. Because of Mr. Gastrope, who had made her feel that way. And...

...she didn't really want to think too much about it right now. There were other things on her mind.

"Because of something my daddy told me," she partially lied.

"What's that?" Snails asked first, with Snips close behind.

"'There are times when the strongest weapon you have against other ponies is the truth,'" she quoted. "'They generally don't know how to deal with truth, because they're not used to hearing it.'"

"Your dad sounds kind of cool," Snips wistfully decided.

...was.

"Yeah," Diamond admitted. "So what are we doing first?"

"We're gonna hit the blocks!" Snails instantly declared. "Finish that bridge! Silver, you haven't seen the bridge, it's really cool -- and then dinner. Maybe dinner first: that took a while. And after that, I saw this game on a shelf which --"

Oh no.

"But we've got to study!" Diamond broke in. "Your parents --"

"-- they only checked on that to make sure we were with you!" Snips grinned. "They're not going to quiz us any more. They don't need to! And I heard what Miss Cheerilee said about expecting us not to go to summer school at all, but there's a lot of stuff to go over."

"Yeah," Snails agreed. "I don't mind one more time with Mr. Guffey, and since I can seriously tell him I'm never going to be back, I just bet I can get him to bring me something great. A friend for Cameo to come and visit, just to start, and then..."

He rapidly moved into fantasy as they trotted along, saying a large number of names in Griffonant which Diamond couldn't translate, and she suspected most griffons couldn't either.

She'd gone through all that. She'd done so much. And she was... exactly where she'd begun, only now she was looking at that starting gate in a mirror. They'd had no motivation to pass, because they wanted to stay together -- and now they had no motivation to pass, because they were together.

Her legs were slowing down, even as her tail drooped and her ears dipped, she was going to need so much ear care later and the others had just noticed that they'd passed her, they were looking back...

"Diamond?" Snips. "You okay?"

"I'm fine." She wasn't.

"Are you sure?" Snails checked. "Does that board game stink or something?"

"I..."

Silver was looking at her. Worried again, and the stupid glasses slipped accordingly.

Exactly where she started, only with less days and no way to change anything, there was nothing...

"But your plans should only be told to those who absolutely need to know them, the ponies who can help you carry them out and be trusted not to bring the words back to those who can use them against you. Don't offer that trust casually. But --"

...and finally, she let herself remember the rest of it.

"Don't offer that trust casually. But eventually, you will have to offer it. Nopony goes through life completely alone. If it wasn't for ponies trusting in me, we wouldn't be where we are, Diamond, and I work hard to be worthy of their trust. One of the ways I do that is through giving it back. So when you find a pony you can trust... try to trust them."

"...I'm going to flunk."

Silver blinked. The colts stared. Diamond didn't know what they all did after their initial reactions, because she found herself looking at the road.

"I haven't studied," she heard herself say. "All semester. Nothing at school, no homework. I've been copying off Silver the whole time so I could just have fun in class. But then I had to switch desks, and you two hadn't studied anything, so I couldn't copy off you, and..."

Nopony was moving.

"...I'm going to summer school, and my daddy... he's... I get good grades, I always get good grades and he's been... he hasn't been..."

There wasn't any rain scheduled for the late afternoon: she'd checked the calendar. Having the ground under her tired gaze becoming wet clearly meant somepony had messed up.

"...is Mr. Guffey nice?"

The sound of ponies trotting. Trotting away from her.

Of course they were trotting away. She'd just told the boys about how she'd just been trying to use them the whole time, and Silver... Silver followed, she followed a pony who was in the lead, and Diamond was now at the back of the pack, the last to cross the line if she even finished the race at all...

The hoofsteps stopped, and other sounds replaced them.

Were they whispering? Or was it just laughter?

Trotting again.

"We've got the weekend," Snails said. "We can get a bunch of stuff reviewed in a weekend."

"More if we stay over," Snips considered. "I can tell my folks I'm doing a study sleepover. You've got the spare bedrooms. You've sure got everything else!"

Silver's right forehoof touched damp soil. "There's still time, Diamond."

She looked up, and didn't understand why they were there.

"You're... not mad?"

The boys shook their heads. Silver just looked as if she didn't understand the question.

"But I --"

"-- you did a lot of stuff," Snails said. "A lot of stuff, and..." He took a deep breath. "I don't know how I feel about the reasons. Not right now. But you were scared, and -- ponies do dumb stuff when they're scared." Carefully, "And -- when they feel bad about themselves."

"We're together," Snips said. "No matter how it started, you got us together. And as for how it started... I've gotta think some too, Diamond. Maybe a lot. But I can do that after the exams."

Silver smiled. That didn't surprise Diamond. But the boys...

...boys were supposed to be simple. At least, that was what their parents had chosen to see. Because water was cold and wet, and there was no real point in telling it so.

But it was also deep.

"I can't do this."

"Next book," Snails countered.

"Nopony can learn a whole term of classes in a few days. I bet even the dumb librarian couldn't --"

"-- why do you think Miss Twilight's dumb?" Snips asked.

"Because she's got the strongest magic in the settled zone and she mostly uses it for stupid stuff."

"That's not necessarily dumb," Snails decided. "Sometimes what ponies think is the stupid stuff is just what nopony else wants to try doing."

"And you're not dumb," Snips told her. "You came up with all those things just so you didn't have to study. I bet if you'd actually -- well, it's kinda too late to try it that way, so this is what we've got left."

"You've got history," Silver pointed out. "So you know there's one down, and that's a seventh of the final grade. We just have to push you up enough in the other six to pass. Even if it's just barely."

"But my daddy's going to see the grade. Cheerilee's going to speak with him personally. She'll probably show it, which means I can't change it, he'll know I barely passed, if I pass at all. And she said she was going to tell him... everything. Plus you said you wouldn't let me copy, because if I get caught, I'll flunk." But she'd never gotten caught, and they hadn't listened to her...

It produced a long silence, deep enough for Diamond to hear her own stomach churning again. She was starting to wonder what it had against her. Hadn't she always tried to supply it with the best food?

"Yeah," Snails finally agreed. "But that's later. And... that's when you get to explain yourself, right?"

The words would only surprise her later, strongly enough to shock her out of the nightscape. "You can't explain yourself when somepony doesn't want to listen any more. When you've explained yourself too much." She would repeat the line to Cameo after waking up, even though the scarab had been on her tiara when she'd said it, and received no extra insight on what it meant.

"He's your dad," Snips said. "Try. Come on -- literature?"

The churning intensified.

"Bathroom," she declared. "So when I get back." She started to race for the study's door -- forced herself to pause. "Snails?"

"What's up?"

"Read it out loud?"

"...okay."

"And do voices. It's better with voices."

There was a line from one of the stories they'd reviewed that stuck in Diamond's head, perhaps because of the overly-solemn voice Snails had given it: 'It was the worst moment of her life, and it kept right on happening.' Diamond wasn't sure she understood the story, but that line had engraved itself into her hooves. It was the line which described nearly every second of her life from the end of the conference through the start of the exams.

They ate (although for Diamond, that had been just barely). They slept (and same). They studied. They arranged blocks for fifteen minutes out of every four hours, mostly to keep from screaming. There were bathroom trips, and more frequently than she would have liked. And books, endless books and questions and stupid stuff which was really stupid when you tried to learn it all in a few days, with that effort possibly being the stupidest thing of all.

There had also been fifteen minutes set aside for complaining before going to bed, although those had been private ones. She needed to tell Cameo about just how stupid the whole attempt was, because while the scarab was present for the torture, Diamond felt she personally had to provide the true pony perspective, and that was something best done away from the other three.

She didn't know how much she truly remembered. She was pretty sure she was going to forget nearly all of it at the instant she put the final quill down or, worse, at the second she picked the first one up. But it was exam day.

The papers were in front of her. Quills. Ink. She'd wanted to bring a bucket just so she wouldn't lose any time to vomiting, but Cheerilee would have wondered what it was doing there.

The papers were in front of her, and had been for at least two full minutes. She still hadn't tilted her head towards the quill.

Diamond looked left. Right. The boys were writing. Fieldwriting instead of mouthwriting: both horns had partial coronas lit, and the quills hesitantly shifted across the papers. Each had also planted a foreleg across the desk. It made for an awkward position, and might be painful to hold long-term. It was also keeping her from making out a single word.

She lost another minute to fuming about stupid boys. And then the taste of the quill in her mouth made her want to throw up again. Stomachs were tyrants.

Slowly -- wondering if it was too slowly -- Diamond began to write.

She only looked up when the door opened, saw the private courier come in and put the sealed envelope on Cheerilee's desk. Diamond tried not to think about that too much, because the thoughts seemed to block memories from getting through. And she wrote on. But it was hard not to hear, and one by one, the sounds of trotting reached her as the other students brought their completed papers up to the teacher's desk.

Cheerilee graded them, then and there. She graded fast: Diamond supposed that was part of her mark. And once the grading was done and you found out what the result was, you could leave. Or you could go back to your seat, if you were waiting for somepony else to finish. Waiting outside was also fine. Unless Cheerile asked somepony to stay, they could do anything, because as soon as the grading was finished, it was summer.

Or it was summer school.

Silver finished early (at the time when Diamond should have finished): she waited at her desk. Snails delivered his papers just after the halfway mark in the count, Snips was two students later, and both returned to their benches as well. (She knew all of that only on sound, because she could no longer afford to lose a single second to looking at anything other than the paper.) And Diamond... was last. The Blank Flank Maintainers had waited for each other, with the pegasus finishing further ahead in the herd than Diamond had ever seen, and... after that, it was down to her. And those who seemed to be waiting for her.

She stood in front of the desk, watched Cheerilee's head move. Diamond couldn't really see all of her exam papers from that angle, but the quill seemed to be doing a lot.

Time was her enemy, and so it made sure the whole thing took forever.

Too softly to reach the student desks, "Go sit down, Diamond."

The bathroom was close. If necessary, she could make it on a gallop. "How did I --"

"-- your father," Cheerilee said, "is coming in soon." She nodded to the courier envelope. "We'll discuss your exam grade, especially how it compares to those from the rest of the term -- along with everything else -- when he arrives. It shouldn't be too long after the final bell, and that's just six minutes away. So go sit down."

She didn't want to ask the question, because she'd never needed to ask it before and it would tell Cheerilee something was wrong, even when it sounded like the exam had done that already. She didn't even want to ask it in front of them. But...

"Did I pass?"

Cheerilee looked at her. Just -- looked, and Diamond couldn't find anything in her expression.

"Did... did they..."

She couldn't hold the position, because her intestines didn't seem to be holding theirs. She had to run...

...Cheerilee nodded.

A tiny nod. The smallest one possible. But it was a nod.

She bolted. And it took her several dry heaves before she realized that the teacher could have been answering either question, or both.

Eventually, she managed to reach the bench between the boys. Cheerilee nodded. "Go home, you three," she smiled. "Or go play. I'll see you around Ponyville before the next term starts, I'm sure, and I'd appreciate it if you at least occasionally admit to seeing me. Now get out of here."

Snails exhaled, and it came across as something very close to an explosion of laughter. Snips didn't bother with any attempt at concealment and simply allowed his mirth to flow. But Silver just quietly looked behind her -- and then the colts focused as well.

"What about Diamond?" Snails asked, with Snips close behind.

"Her father and I have a conference after school," Cheerilee told him. "One Diamond will be attending. She has to stay."

Slowly, they both nodded and got up.

"Want us to wait?" Snips asked. Silver left her bench, trotted closer, listened for the answer.

Diamond shook her head. It seemed to be just about all she had left in her to do.

"Are we gonna see you later, after the conference?" Snails asked. "Find out what happened?"

And as it turned out, she had enough remaining for a single word. "Maybe."

They were staring at her again. It was really annoying, the way they did that.

"Maybe later," Snails slowly asked, "or maybe never?"

Diamond sat on her bench. She thought about her grades, about her daddy, what might be said or what could even be said at all, and the entirety of the past week.

They were waiting for her to say something. And there weren't any words, because she didn't know.

The bell rang. The door opened. Familiar hoofsteps came into the schoolhouse, and she felt sad eyes resting on her dipped head.

"Go home," Cheerilee quietly told the other three. "Or go play. This is going to take a while."

Silver left. The colts slowly trotted out. And to Diamond, it looked as if the filly was following them.

Two adults. Two adults and her, at the very start of summer, still in the schoolhouse.

"Diamond," Cheerilee said, "I'd like you to sit a little closer to the front, please. Move up."

She started to stand. Looked for excuses and found none. Sought explanations and came up empty. Tried to find anything while under the scrutiny of that endless patience and the sad eyes of what felt so much like was. Only one thing surfaced.

"Ultimately, what every business invests in is the future. And because nopony knows their future, there is nothing more terrifying."

Slowly, forcing tired legs to work, pushing herself into the unknown, Diamond finally reclaimed her desk.

Exiled To Gumballia

Her father had said that for every wealthy pony at the top of an enterprise, there were dozens to hundreds of ponies keeping them at that summit. Diamond Tiara had, as with so many words of wisdom from her parent, listened carefully before deciding what the nugget actually meant and in this case, that was 'The best way to get ahead is to have other ponies do all the work for you.' It was a philosophy she could wholeheartedly embrace, and did.

Of course, there were some things a filly still had to accomplish on her own. (Embracing philosophies was one of them: after all, if somepony else got that idea, they might expect Diamond to do all the work on their behalf. It was a concept which had kept her up for three nights in a row before she'd convinced herself nopony else would ever be that bright.) A number of those were simply too pleasurable to give up, like playing and shopping and mockery conducted in tones which no adults ever picked up -- well, hardly ever, and it was Diamond's choice not to remember any slips. But when it came to work, she had been given the secret: delegate. A task for every pony, and the ultimate purpose of all those efforts was to keep her on top. Could there be a worthier goal?

And so, acting on sterling parental advice (which her father actually had quite a lot of, at least when it came to things which didn't involve terminally inferior ponies and why she was supposed to put up with them), Diamond had carefully spread her responsibilities about the classroom, sometimes without the knowledge of those who were doing the work. Class assignments? She would make speeches while facing down the others from the front -- a natural, perfectly welcome position -- but somepony else would write them: it only took her father's senior assistant an hour for each and that was just time he would have used for stupid stuff like his lunch anyway: besides, writing things for her family to say was his job and shouldn't extra work just make him happier?

Homework? Silver Spoon could do that for her, at least for any subject which wasn't history: her best friend had a surprisingly good mind, sometimes bordering what Diamond kept resisting the temptation to label as nerd or geek or anything else which would make the recipient feel horrible about themselves for the sin of being able to think -- but that intellect fell apart any time dates got involved. Silver Spoon had never seen a century she was incapable of confusing with another, which included the one she was living in. Diamond intended to work on the problem, but it currently took third place to making sure the copying was done carefully and that Silver Spoon got a question wrong here and there -- ones Diamond would not. The papers had to be distinguished, after all.

Taking the blame for things she had done? Why, somepony else had done those things. Every time. Those ponies were generally very surprised to discover just how bad they had been, along with what they'd done and where they'd been at the time. She typically left the fumbling denials to them, as she couldn't be expected to cover everything.

And tests? In Diamond's very accurate opinion, Cheerilee was extremely distractible. In fact, casually bring up the right topic just before a quiet period -- like the ones used for test-taking -- began, and the teacher would not roam up and down the aisles making sure nopony was looking at any paper other than their own: she would simply sit behind her desk and silently reflect on whatever it was that the word 'dating' just kept right on triggering. (Diamond was vaguely curious as to just what was going on there, but results were more important than cause. Besides, she didn't need to learn about dating: there simply wasn't anypony in town up to what she expected to be her eventual standards.) Put Cheerilee in the right mood and you could pretty much copy somepony else's paper right out in the open, with 'somepony else' being Silver Spoon, who was only too happy to do all the work on Diamond's behalf. Because they were friends. Also because somepony had to do it and clearly Diamond wasn't going to be it.

Thanks entirely to her father's wonderful advice, those words which only Diamond was intelligent enough to interpret properly, she was largely getting through the semester on the Somepony Else Studied program. And it was wonderful. It gave her extra free time for the fun things. It kept her at the top of the class, which really wasn't important -- but her father had a stupid insistence on her getting good grades and if somepony had to be at the top, Diamond agreed that it really should be her.

There was only a week to go before vacation started. A simple week of doing just about nothing except for memorizing stupid history because her father refused to hire an expert for the retail chain even after all her arguments about how researching marketing throughout the centuries could only benefit the business and incidental knowledge about griffon wars would just help them expand into the Republic... well, anyway, one more week of imprisonment, but a sentence where the hard labor aspects had been properly delegated. And then it was Fun Time.

Diamond smiled to herself, paying absolutely no attention to whatever Cheerilee was mouthwriting on the blackboard because she had somepony to do that for her. She was too busy working on a different kind of note.

Want to hit the bowling alley?

She waited until the teacher's attention was somewhere else, then flipped the note across the gap with an expert head toss. Silver Spoon caught it with near-but-never-equal skill, read it, scribbled on the back.

Too loud. Have to study.

All around them, other ponies were dutifully trying to memorize the information Cheerilee was giving them, because they were all stupid. Diamond happily basked in her own superiority, then composed the response, still using the same piece of paper. Ripping sounds could draw undue attention.

But we can make fun of the dumb bowlers! Half an hour?

Got to pass. During vacation?

Diamond pouted: not getting her way was an unnatural event and normally had to be discouraged, stopped, or outright kicked at every turn. But in this case, she was aware that her friend was looking out for her welfare, because 'got to pass' meant Diamond had to pass. So -- maybe she'd let Silver get away with it this time.

Fine. Study outside the alley?

Never entirely, of course. That was just bad form.

She watched Silver frown at the note (and something would have to be said about that later), followed by the inevitable glasses slip from the facial movement and stupid adjustment which Diamond always watched, because her friend was in love with that dumb style no matter how many problems it caused and the results were just so funny. Some scribbling eventually resulted, and the note came --

-- halfway back.

There was an adult mouth in the way.

The friends stared at it in mutual horror, watched the teeth as they delicately nipped the missive out of the air, and Cheerilee carried their note back to her desk.

It was practically theft. Cheerilee was stealing! What right did the adult have to take something of Diamond's? Was it possible to have her arrested? How about lawsuits? Because in Diamond's experience, there were always potential lawsuits, even if her father insisted they were frivolous things conducted only by those who simply wanted to waste the court's time in the hopes of getting enough stupid ponies behind them to gain money from it, which just showed her brilliant father still didn't know everything because free money.

"So let's see what was so important..."

And now she was going to read their private words! That was practically emotional damages right there!

Cheerilee looked at both sides of the note. Three times.

Diamond fumed on her bench. (She would have to remember to describe it as near-tears and emotional collapse when her lawyer called her to testify. You couldn't sucker a jury without emotional commitment, or at least some really good acting.)

"Study times and sites," Cheerilee concluded. "Certainly an improvement in topic over your normal exchanges. Which doesn't change the fact that you've been passing notes in class during lectures, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. Again."

Why did she put my name first! Like it's my fault! "That isn't --"

"-- don't." Cheerilee slowly shook her head. "Let me guess where this is going. Mouthwriting analysis. You will ask your father to hire a lettered expert who will prove this wasn't your note and you've just been framed by somepony who has it out for you, for no reason either of you will be able to prove. And you'll hope that the threat of dragging the school board into it will make everypony cave in. Again. While knowing your father has no real interest in getting involved with this, is in fact getting sick of the whole thing --"

And with those words, the emotional damages had become real. "My daddy will do it! He'll do anything if I ask!"

The other students were staring at her. Extra lawsuits all around.

"That's what the school board is afraid of, yes," Cheerilee wearily continued. "Except that I've spoken with him. Several times over the last few moons, not all of which you had to know about --"

How dare she! He's my daddy!

"-- and he isn't happy."

Liar!

"You have been using your family's wealth as an excuse to get out of just about everything, Diamond Tiara. And I'm not neglecting you in this, Silver Spoon, because you go along with all of it. So -- there's only a week left in this semester. A week for the school board to panic. A week for your experts and affidavits and everything else. A week to get through a court system which will never even be approached because it's an empty threat, girls, and it's well past time I taught you that those have consequences."

She came out from behind the desk. Slowly looked from one friend to the other.

The stupid daisies on her flank didn't seem to be smiling.

"I'm breaking up the set," she told the classroom. "Diamond Tiara, switch desks with Truffle."

"I don't want to!"

It had nearly been a scream. It had definitely been a threat.

"Either switch desks," Cheerilee calmly replied, "or go up to my desk and wait for me to write another note. One explaining exactly why I am sending you home for the day. A note I will make two copies of. And then we can all talk about it together. Tomorrow night. Which may happen anyway unless you switch desks with Truffle -- right now."

Diamond stared at her.

The lawsuit was going to be epic.

But the best way to get paid for emotional distress without the casual effort of lying to a jury about it was to actually go through more of the stuff. It wasn't surrender. It was just -- setting up the payday.

"Fine..."

She switched desks, taking care to give Truffle a hard looks-like-a-pure-accident-said-the-paid-expert flank bump as they passed each other. Plopped down onto the new (and inferior, not to mention food-scented) bench hard with intent to break and option to echo, neither of which actually worked out.

Cheerilee nodded.

"We need to finish this lesson so you'll all be properly prepared for finals," the teacher said. "So I'll be keeping you all after the last bell." A rising left foreleg cut off the protests. "No arguments. No backtalk. If you want to complain about it, consult Diamond Tiara after school. I'm sure she'll have a lawyer in mind for all of you, presuming her willingness to share extends into class action suits. Now..." and that stupid sunny smile came back "...let's get back to learning, all right? Now, when I left off, we were talking about --"

Diamond ignored all of it, lost in much more important plots of revenge. Cheerilee wasn't in charge: Diamond's father was, because money talked and that meant her daddy could shout louder than anypony in town. This was just a temporary aberration, the same as everything else the teacher tried to do in the name of stupid discipline, and once Diamond spoke to her daddy, the school board would tremble like they always did, stupid adults living in fear of her father was just funny, and Diamond would get her own way. Again. Because that was what always happened. All she needed was the perfect lie to give her father, the right distortion of events which he would never question because it was her providing them, and everything would be fine. She could use the rest of her school time for hammering out the details, none of which would include the possibility of class action suits because he was her daddy and so those were, by extension, her lawyers and nopony else could have either one.

But she'd have to work quickly. Everything had to be settled before finals. Because she'd been forced to switch with stupid Truffle, and that move had put her between...

"...psst! Hey, Diamond! How do ya like the view from back here, huh? Pretty spectacular, right?" An ugly-sounding whisper of a giggle. "Don't worry! We'll take care of you while you're in the dumps!"

"Yeah." An even dumber-sounding stifled laugh. "We'll take care of you good... want some gum?" With sincerity and stupidity in equal measure, "I've only been chewing it for two hours... I think there's still some flavor in this one itty-bitty corner which you could have."

...Snips and Snails.

Two ponies who could not be copied from, at least not if the copier had any intention of seeing the next year of school instead of the same one over and over and over and --

Diamond shuddered, and not just because the sincerely-offered gum had just been stuck under her nose for closer worthiness inspection.

She had to get back to her own desk, by tomorrow morning at the latest. There was no other choice. She would just have her father throw lawyers at the problem until it collapsed under the sheer weight of not-at-all frivolous litigation.

There were two choices. Win or --

-- study.

With the hated exception of history (and why should things which had happened before she made the world perfect with her arrival matter at all?), Diamond Tiara didn't study. She had a pony to do that for her. A pony who was now sitting too far away to copy from.

But it was all right. Just a temporary aberration, that was all. Diamond would win. Because her father always did. That was why he was the most perfect daddy ever. Stupid Cheerilee would see. And then the dumb teacher would never try talking to her daddy again.

Daddy always wins.

It comforted her through the last bell, although it didn't do much for the three agonizing minutes they had to stay past it, minutes during which certain dumb students kept staring at her as if something had been her fault.

Well, all the more emotional distress to collect compensation for.

Daddy always wins. Because he loves me.

The alternative was unthinkable.