Seriously, This Sort Of Thing Happens All The Time
To some, the darkened space which made up the central working floor of the Rainbow Factory would have seemed foreboding. Shadows clustered in the looming wake of silent devices, creating pools of ephemera which, in the flickers of the faint light which remained, seemed to extrude twitching limbs. The only semi-active machinery in the area grumbled to itself in a low mutter which only would have sounded like pony bones being split to anypony who'd been alone in the dark for at least ten minutes. The air was motionless, which meant the aromas which arose from the color pools had coalesced into invisible traps within the atmosphere, sharp scents gone somewhat stale to the point where anypony who trotted or flew through them would not react as if they had just encountered freshly-spilled blood, at least not in a way they would recognize until three minutes after their instincts reluctantly returned control and they found themselves a quarter-gallop outside of Cloudsdale. Some of them would still be accelerating.
The lone occupant of the huge room simply looked through the layers of umbra and mourned the loss of practicality, for it would be hours, a whole two of them, before she would be permitted to leave, and they would be uncomfortable hours indeed. She had been provided with a table, because of course they would have needed to give her one, just as they had provided such to all who had gone before her. And it was -- there was really no other way to describe it -- far too tall. She was but a filly: practically all those who had come before her (never to return) had been but fillies, except for the ones who had been colts. She had a certain advantage when it came to getting things placed upon the table itself, but when standing upon the vaporous floor... well, she simply couldn't see the tabletop. Hovering in place for a whole two hours was simply out of the question, as her wings were yet small and would easily become strained from just a few minutes of flight. Standing on the table meant less room for goods, and she'd barely fit everything she'd brought to begin with.
The filly considered that the practical thing to do, especially for an area which hosted an never-ending supply of fillies (although never the same ones twice), would have been to provide a place to sit. A bench high enough for the occupant to see what she was doing as she rested in perfect repose, awaiting the start of what was surely about to become one of the signature moments of her life, as signing off on something often tended to end it. But practicality had been murdered long before her own arrival, and so there was no bench. No chair. Nowhere to sit at all. And to rest upon the floor would leave her staring at legs all day, with no idea of what was happening above.
She glanced back at the closed doors. (There had been a rather distinctive click when they'd shut behind her, something with a decidedly final tone to it, at least for that value of 'final' which worked out to what was already starting to feel like an endless two hours.) No way out until somepony else opened them for her.
So she began to search. Tiny wings buzzed, carrying their possessor around the room, deeper tones becoming patches of forever-night within the shadows. A tiny drip of red took on extra darkness in the wake of her passage, but she didn't notice. Sharp eyes were checking in the corners as the machines grumbled, not quite loudly enough to block out the mostly-tuneless attempts at whistling.
Eventually, she found something, and just in time: her wings were already starting to feel the strain. Landing seemed to be required, and that meant she wound up nosing her discovery all the way across the floor, through shadows and the simulated groans of the dying and pockets of scent which had assailed so many before her, all of which she ignored. She was busy.
The item, which seemed to be just the right size, was pushed under her table, to the other side. Her side. Some complicated hoof-and-snout work got it flipped over, and then one last buzz of her aching wings brought her just above its upper surface. The filly smiled to herself in the darkness, slowed the motion of sore limbs and gently settled onto her new perch, assuming a position of perfect (if somewhat anticipatory) peace.
There was a sound. There were often sounds when things collapsed. This one had a little bit of a pwoomth! to it, along with a touch of alarm from the abrupt, quickly cut-off cry of the filly who was in the true middle of the event, and ended on a touch of plimpf!
Had anypony else been there (a few minutes early for that, but the newest hires would arrive to do their grim work all too soon), they would have heard the tiny sigh. And then silence took over, or at least as much as it ever did within the grumbling shadows.
Two hours. Two whole hours to go.
The lights came up.
It happened all at once as devices sparked into life, the signal having been given to start channeling stored thaums: a notice which had come from the other side of the door. Fans began to circulate fresh air. Curtains rose and allowed the very first rays of Sun to stream across the facility. Gears began to mesh in rhythmic, almost musical ways. Colors flowed, splashed, and swirled. The filly could hear all of it, and saw just about none. The air above her was considerably brighter. That was it.
Laughter entered the Rainbow Factory's floor, with most of it coming from overhead. Pegasi joked with each other as they began the earliest of shifts, shook the last remnants of sleep from their feathers as they flew towards their stations. But not everypony went directly to an assigned device. Several paused as they went by that special table, taking a few seconds to note its contents. (All of them missed what had been intended as a perch, which was lost in the lone remaining and very grumbling shadow.) A few -- the newest hires of the Factory, the ones who had yet to become educated or conditioned to the horror -- rerouted their paths, and they touched down in something which almost approached a line, eventually getting there after a rather brief scuffle.
The victorious stallion at the front looked at the table. He examined its contents.
After a few more seconds, the utter lack of filly finally registered.
"...hello?" he uncertainly asked.
"Hello," the little voice pipped up.
The volume was low. The tone was slightly ethereal. The underlayers hit every strand of fur in the Factory and sent every last one of them standing on edge.
He reared back, with his tail almost ramming into the mare behind him. "Where -- where are --"
"Back here," said the little voice, sounding somewhat mournful. "In here."
The stallion's wings flared. A few flaps brought him enough altitude to gaze down.
The little filly looked up at him, as 'up' was the lone sight line she retained within her tiny prison.
"Would you like to buy something?" she timidly asked. "It's for the school." This was followed by a brief pause as she remembered that there were supposed to be other lines in the recital, and she'd already placed some of them out of order.
"It's a student bake sale," she carefully added. "For the school." And immediately decided she'd ruined everything.
He was staring down at her.
"You're an alicorn," he said. "How are you an alicorn?" And then came what always happened after anypony got a really close look: "What happened to your eyes?"
She winced. There was a chance that a blush had gone with it, but nopony ever picked up on such within the dark fur.
"I had an accident," she said. "When I was born."
"An accident," the stallion carefully repeated.
"Yes."
"With a... mechanical rice picker?"
"With being hit by a direct blast of the most intensive magic which ever existed," she clarified.
"...oh," the stallion eventually said.
"It feels kind of like being pelted by foam balls," she helpfully added. "Which are on fire. With burning ice. Which also just got hit by lightning. If that's ever happened to you." She thought that over some more. "It probably hasn't. But when it happened to me last week, that's what it felt like. I have cupcakes."
"Cupcakes," the stallion said, with his tone indicating that he'd lost most of the meaning for the term.
The filly, who knew everything had gone wrong, tried not to sigh.
"Cupcakes!" she brightly declared, or at least forced, just before demonstrating one of the problems with her personal educational system. "They're homemade! For the bake sale. Because when you have a bake sale, you make cupcakes at home. Then you bring them to a business, they give you a table, and you sell them to the first shift because not everypony remembers to have breakfast every morning, even though it's the most important meal of the day and they really should have had something before they got here. Except everypony shouldn't, or they wouldn't buy anything. Unless they were getting a snack for later. Like a cupcake. Cupcakes are good snacks."
When you pretty much had to learn everything just about all at once, it tended to emerge the same way.
"They give you a table," the filly began to wrap up. "But not a bench."
The stallion stared down into the center of the cardboard box, whose folded and upended base had collapsed under the weight of a filly.
"There really should have been a bench," she mournfully concluded. "Cupcake, sir?"
"They're... homemade," he carefully tried out.
"Yes."
"Where?"
"At home," the filly insisted.
"And that's... in the deepest, darkest depths of Tartarus, is it?"
The filly thought about that.
"It's in a tree," she said. "It has a basement. I play hide-and-seek down there. Only I have to be really careful because sometimes I hide behind something magic and it doesn't like me. That's when the foam balls come in. Which are on icy lightning-charged fire. I also have banana bread."
The stallion instinctively moved his gaze and found the banana bread, which turned out to be bread in the shape of a banana.
"Oh," he said. "And the cups are actually... cakes?"
"Cupcakes," insisted the filly, who also had the occasional tendency to be rather literal-minded. "I frosted the rims. Myself. At home."
He continued to hover, only in a way which indicated an increasing amount of distress. One of the more senior workers spotted it and flew over.
"Easy," the older mare told him. "This happens all the time. It's just another bake sale. We get them every moon or so. You just have to learn how to deal with them."
"But..." He nodded down at the filly, whose vertically-slit pupils mournfully stared right back up.
"Oh," the older mare said. "Another rice picker incident." To the filly, "I'm very sorry, dear."
"Thank you," the filly replied, her pipping ethereal tones wobbling with uncertainty.
"But..." the stallion tried again, with something less than valiance.
"It's a student bake sale," the older mare reminded him. "How does a sensible stallion deal with a bake sale?"
He swallowed.
"The cupcakes," he said, forcing his attention back to the filly. "What are they made with?"
"Love!" she instantly pipped up.
He looked at her eyes again. "So not students."
That triggered a little frown as the filly visibly tried to work that out.
"A student made them," she eventually tried. "So... I guess they were made with student? Or... by student? Um..." Dark eyelids helplessly blinked, and the deep purple tail drooped across cardboard. "...I'm still trying to get caught up on my language class..."
The older mare's hoof touched the stallion's right shoulder. "Bake. Sale," she reminded him. "Be sensible."
He swallowed again, which turned out to be a preview.
"I'll... take three," he declared. "Of the cupcakes. Put them aside for me. I have to go get some bits."
The filly beamed. (The older mare facehoofed.)
"Yes, sir!" she smiled with the delight of a child who might not have ruined everything after all. "Right away!" Tiny wings buzzed.
After a moment, they stopped, and the panting body settled back into the box.
"Um," the filly said. "Could you just... pick something out? And put them aside? And... maybe drop the bits in the box?"
She listened to the shuffling sounds coming from the table's surface and for the first time, considered that she was in a position where it was going to be really hard to enforce any kind of security against shoplifting. The next minute also proved that she was going to have a rather difficult time preventing bits from falling into her mane.
The filly sighed. Life was hard, especially when you still weren't entirely sure you were supposed to have one. Retail was worse.
"Um," she tried again, then realized it wasn't much of a sales pitch. "Next?"
There weren't many sales. The filly had no true way of judging that, because she didn't have the experience necessary to judge much of anything other than what being hit with huge blasts of magic felt like. But she still felt as if things had been more than a little underwhelming. Admittedly, she hadn't exactly planned on selling out the contents of the entire table, but there just didn't seem to have been much in the way of pegasi traffic. A few ponies had come over. Two of those, motivated by a vague sense of guilt added to faded memories of their own attempts at gathering school support and baked goods which were still sitting untouched on their workstations, had come back for seconds. But overall, she'd just sat, waiting, in a cardboard box, for two hours. That was one hundred and twenty minutes.
She thought about that for a little while, then decided it was easier to see it as hours. Making just about anything associated with duration into a hundred and twenty made it feel like it had taken a torturous forever.
Her wings briefly buzzed again. The soreness instantly registered, and she finally wound up prodding at the cardboard walls with her horn until she had a rip, then forced her body through the increasing gap.
Once freed, she backed away from the table until she had an angle which allowed her to see a portion of the top along the back edge. There were still a lot of things up there. This included every last one of the apple pies, and she'd been so proud of those. It had been really hard to make every last one of them come out to the exact value, and she suspected most fillies her age would have given up after 3.14. (Her primary mentor had gently discouraged her from pricing them accordingly, pointing out that it would have been rather difficult to provide exact change. It was why she'd tried to do something special with the very last one.)
There was so much to pack up again, more than any filly could reasonably be expected to eat before it all went stale. And she sighed.
"Are you okay, dear?" She looked up, and saw the older mare gazing down with open concern.
"Nopony bought much," the little filly sadly said. "They're going to blame me. Everypony will. Because I was selling and not anypony else, anypony at all. The school sent me and it should have been --"
"-- dear," the older mare gently interrupted, "nopony ever sells much here. No filly, no colt. The only difference between you and any of the others is that you actually moved more of your product."
The little filly blinked, and the first tear to fall away somehow turned into the only one.
"...really?"
"Nopony else," the older mare told her, "in the fifteen years I've been working here, has ever sold a loaf of banana bread. Now --" She glanced behind her, and the most senior stallion in the Factory flew up, a laden soft bag clenched between his teeth. "-- you've been a very polite little filly, and you've had a hard day. Please accept this donation to your school, which should just about equal the value of your remaining goods, if it doesn't exceed it by a bit or two."
The blue eyes shone. "Really?"
"Really," the older mare smiled, and that most senior stallion flew the bag down to the filly, who accepted it in a mix of joy and shock. "Do you have somepony picking you up?"
"Yes," the filly excitedly said. "Really soon now. She'll give me a ride back down. Thank you!"
"It's quite all right," the older mare assured her. "Now, there's no need to pack all this up: we'll take care of it for you. And when you get back to your school, please ask your teacher to --"
But the short legs had moved at a speed just below that of blur, right after the small mouth had snatched up the bag, their owner fleeing out into the world before anypony could change their mind. The pony closest to the doors instinctively opened them for her, just before the small horn failed to put a tear in that part of the world. And then the little filly was gone, never to return.
The older mare sighed.
"-- stop sending her students here," she futily finished, and sadly turned to face that most senior stallion. "We can't afford to keep doing this," she added, although those words had always been meant for him alone. "Not every couple of moons. Not with what's going to happen next."
"You could have just let her go with her fair total," he replied. "But you passed the bag around. Again."
"It's the rice picker," she guiltily admitted. "I always feel bad for the ones who had accidents. Did you pass the notes in time?"
He frowned. "I didn't pass them at all."
"...what?"
"They moved the table from the last sale, remember? It's when they broke the bench. She would have seen any notes going across the floor to the rookies, the same way she would have heard any warnings --"
"-- she was in a box! She couldn't see anything unless it was right over her head!"
The most senior stallion blanched.
"It's been two hours since the shift started," the mare urgently reminded him. "Ponies are going to start thinking about --"
Which was when the first of what was to be more groans than any other visitor had ever inflicted finally reached them.
They immediately flew over, touched down next to the stallion who'd been the first to buy something. He was rather easy to find, although slightly harder to recognize with his curled-up body on its side and his features distorted by pain.
The two veterans sighed.
"Student bake sales," the older mare told the rookie, "typically sell baked goods made by students." (The responding groan of gastrointestinal distress seemed to represent agreement, or at least a somewhat-belated education.) "Come on. Let's clear out the wounded, see how many sick days we're going to burn on this, and call in a biohazard team to dispose of everything that's left."
"Even the pies?" the most senior stallion asked.
"Especially the pies."
"Why?"
The older mare glanced back at the table, then shuddered.
"Because I think she made that one equal four."
And as a happy little filly was gathered up by one of her mentor's friends and flown back to the tree, the Rainbow Factory got the triage tent out of storage, then cut back on the season's production schedule with the weary crossouts of long experience and mulled that on the whole, things could have been a lot worse -- and still could be in the very near future. Worse than anypony ever wanted to imagine, and still had to because it was the only way of preventing an ultimate level of disaster.
After all, there was every chance that the next time around, Ponyville would send up Scootaloo.
