"Half? How in tarnation have we only raised half? Camp Everfree is countin' on us!"
Twilight Sparkle withered like a weed before the towheaded fireball that was Applejack. "I counted the money four times! Just to be sure!"
"Guess that explains why you showed up late to this here fundraising car wash."
"Hey, lay off the egghead," said Rainbow Dash. "Twilight, I get where you're coming from. When I try and count stuff, I end up having to count it at least four times. Sometimes it takes me till the thing that comes after four."
There was an awkward pause.
"Five?" Sunset Shimmer eventually suggested.
Dash snap-pointed. "That thing."
Applejack sighed. "It's all right, y'all. We just need to wash more cars. There's gotta be some we missed."
The wind sighed. A tumbleweed drifted aimlessly across the faculty parking lot, despite there being no prairie of any description nearby.
"I got it," said Pinkie Pie. "Tumbleweed wash."
"Pinkie, dear, whoever would own a tumbleweed, much less desire to see it cleaned?"
"Create a demand and buyers will come," murmured Pinkie, clenching one fist.
"This is ridiculous! We're running out of time!" cried Dash. "The camp fundraising deadline is next week. And Pinkie Pie's already hosted a bake sale, Twilight and Fluttershy had that doggie day care, and Sunset Shimmer and I planned this car wash!"
"Not to worry, darlings," said Rarity, breezing over to where Dash stood. "It's my turn to devise a plan, and I already have something amazing in mind. It will be the most profitable of all of our fundraising events! The pièce de résistance!"
"Hee-yoo!" said Applejack. "Now we're talkin'! What's your idea?"
"Meet me in the music room later this afternoon, and I will explain everything," said Rarity.
Sunset inclined her head. "Or...you could tell us right now?"
Rarity hissed, serpentlike. "Do not question my dramatic reveal, Sunset Shimmer! Music room! Afternoon!" She made a little shooing gesture. "Scoot!"
As the girls departed, Twilight Sparkle's faithful talking dog tarried a moment, looking up at Rarity.
"You got nothin', huh?" said the dog.
"How did you know?" Rarity said, slumping.
"Well, the hissing and the shooing everybody around was a clue."
"Did I just hear that you actually don't have a fundraising idea?" asked a returning Twilight, scooping her dog up.
"No!" shouted Rarity. "Or yes! No, you did not hear that because yes, I do!"
"She doesn't," said Spike.
"You wretched little Tobermory," said Rarity, as the others gathered back around. "Fine, I admit it. I'm utterly useless at developing fundraising ideas. I was just going to wander around the shopping mall and hope that I stumbled across some sort of dance contest announcement or something."
"Yeah, we probably need more to go on than that," said Sunset, tapping her chin with one finger. "If only I hadn't spent most of my academic stipend of solid gold coins before leaving Equestria."
"Wai-wai-wait," said Dash, screwing her face up. "Most of your solid gold coins?"
"Well, sure," said Sunset. "Equestrian currency is minted from actual precious metals. We're just lousy with it. But you have to understand, I only had about two hundred bits left in my safe deposit box at the School For Gifted Unicorns. That's only enough to buy a sizable carton of asparagus."
"Sugarcube," said Applejack, slowly, "do you have any idea how much money a couple hundred solid gold coins would fetch us on this side of the mirror?"
"Forget its use as legal tender, darling! Think of the bullion market!"
"Hm," said Sunset. "I did give my lockbox to Princess Twilight for safekeeping. It wouldn't actually take that long to fetch it..."
"What are you waiting for?" Dash shouted, throwing her arms wide. "With that kinda money, we'd be able to buy Camp Everfree for ourselves!"
"Okay. It's a plan. You girls hang here; I'm gonna run over to the statue portal thing, momentarily turn into a horse, and save Camp Everfree!"
It sounded like the sort of utterance you whooped encouragingly about, so the girls did. Sunset vanished from sight around the front of the school, returning a few minutes later.
"Okay, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that all my funds were exactly where I left them." She thrust her hand into the pocket of her leather jacket and removed a wad of bills. "The bad news is that taking them through the mirror transmogrified them into sixty dollars and change, which, not coincidentally, is about enough money to purchase a sizable carton of asparagus."
There ensued various noises of despair and disheartenment from the remaining six girls. "Consarnit!" said A.J.
"It's better than nothing, darling," said Rarity. "But I think we need to find some other solution than importing currency from your magical pony kingdom. How about we wander the mall after all? Maybe something will strike us."
"Sounds like a plan!" said Pinkie Pie. "Of course, 'I am going to stick cheese doodles in my ears' sounds like a plan too, but this sounds like a good plan."
"Don't forget your jacket," said Fluttershy, plucking Sunset's signature garment from the rear entrance steps where she had doffed it for the car wash.
"It's fine, I've got it already," Sunset replied, over her shoulder.
"Oh. Okay." Fluttershy peered carefully at the object in her hands. "So, um, where did this come from?"
Sunset turned around.
She blinked.
Twenty minutes later, the girls found themselves clustered around one of the free-standing tables at the Sweet Snacks Café. Their demeanor of paranoid curiosity was undercut by the bright rockabilly music playing on the vintage bubbler jukebox and the occasional flyby from a be-roller-skated carhop.
"Casual inspection suggests that they are absolutely identical," said Twilight, setting her portable mass spectrometer down on the table next to Pinkie Pie's chili fries.
"I know, right?" said Sunset, shaking her head. "Even this little scuff I put on the sleeve last week helping Fluttershy with the pet adopt-a-thon."
"Additional subsequent scuffing on one is not replicated on the other," Twilight noted. "They're not quantum twins, and this isn't macro-level action-at-a-distance. These are just two perfectly ordinary leather jackets."
"The weird thing is that they're two perfectly ordinary Sunset Shimmer's leather jackets," said Dash. "What the freakin' hay?"
"They're as alike as two peas," agreed Rarity. "Down to the thrilling little orange chevrons I added right before the Friendship Games. What precisely is going on here, darling?"
"The first time I came through the portal to the human world, I was wearing that jacket. I didn't think much of it at the time. I guess the portal somehow converted my traveling saddlebags into an outfit that...matched my personality?"
"Wow," said Twilight. "Each time you walk through that portal, it gives you a locally-appropriate set of clothing. How does it even know that? This is amazing!"
"Do you want to know what else is amazing?" said Rarity, her manicured nails clicking against the glass plate of her phone. She turned it around and presented its face, currently displaying an Internet shopping site. "Exactly how much you can sell a quality used leather jacket for online."
Comprehension broke slowly, dawnlike, across the girls' faces.
"No," said Sunset, narrowing her eyes. "We can't."
"Yes," said Rarity, delicately, "we can."
"No, no, no."
"Think of it, darling! One hundred percent ethically-sourced genuine leather jackets, in bulk. They're even vegan! That duplicate jacket has never even touched a cow! For that matter, neither has the original!" She frowned. "Well, except for that one incident up at Applejack's."
"Vegan sounds good," Fluttershy volunteered.
"This jacket was congealed straight from the fabric of the raw, mind-bending rainbow void between worlds," explained Sunset.
"Yes, but were any animals killed to make it?"
"Maybe! On a quantum level! We don't know! Plus, it only comes in one size!"
"The long tail of the Internet will be our salvation here, I think. Plus, alterations are far simpler than making a new garment out of literal whole cloth."
"Rainbow Dash, you sell clothing. Shoes, at least. Could you please point out some sort of flaw in this idea?"
There was no reply. Sunset and the other girls looked around. "Dash...?"
In a rainbow-hued burst of superhuman speed, Dash reappeared. Her arms were loaded with an enormous pile of absolutely identical pairs of athletic shoes.
"That was awesome," said Dash, positively quivering. "I just ran all the way back to the high school, kicked my shoes off, hopped through the portal, turned into a horse for a second, and when I came back, bam! Shoes on my feet, just like always! It was so cool I did it like thirteen times." She unceremoniously dropped her entire cargo of shoes to the waxed tile floor. "Do they serve oats here? I'm totally starving for oats all of a sudden."
Pinkie tossed her an oatmeal-raisin cookie. "Here ya go, Dashie!"
"Ooh!" said Rarity, inspecting the pile of footwear. "These are your special hundred-and-some dollar cross-trainers, aren't they?"
"Yep!" said Dash, her mouth full of crumbs. "We can pass the savings right on to the consumer, so long as the consumer happens to be a girls' size eight."
"I'd just love to try this on my Yves Chevali stiletto heels!"
"You could sell them fancy shoes at the mother of all discounts!" cried Applejack.
"Well, no," said Rarity. "We'd sell them full price. We'd just sell a lot of them. Don't worry, darling, we'll sell low-end clothes as well. Yours, for instance!"
"'Low-end'? Rarity, do you have any idea how much a genuine buffalo-felt cowboy hat goes for?"
"...no?"
Applejack told her. "Whahaha! Oh, this keeps getting better and better! Fluttershy, darling, I don't suppose you're secretly wearing something expensive and saleable?"
"Um," said Fluttershy, folding in on herself. "Maybe if it's, um, really important."
"What is it, darling?"
Fluttershy produced a tiny muttering noise, almost completely muffled by her upraised hand.
"Sorry?" said Rarity, leaning in.
"Didn't quite catch that," said Dash.
Flushing a bright pink, Fluttershy whispered two words into Rarity's ear.
"Oh, yes, I think those would be in very high demand," Rarity said.
"I am officially on board with any plan where I get to turn into a horse over and over and over again," Pinkie announced.
"We might not even need that many repetitions!" said Twilight, tapping furiously on her tablet. "The clock is ticking, girls. Optimalization is critical. What we need is to quickly cultivate definitive styles for ourselves involving expensive one-size-fits-all accessories. My smartwatch. Rarity's handbags."
"Diamond brooches," added Rarity, her eyes gleaming.
"Exactly! Once the mirror senses that these things are part of our signature outfits, we'll be able to literally turn Equestrian saddlebags into gold. Since this will also unavoidably generate garments with sizing limitations, we'll need to diversify as much as possible with different body shapes and sizes. That means—"
"—Recruiting the entire student body!" Pinkie cried.
"Exactly."
"Preferably the most glamorous ones," Rarity agreed. "I'll put posters up!
"Girls!" Sunset Shimmer shouted. "Listen to yourselves! You're talking about toying with power we don't entirely understand!"
"Yeah, but," said Rainbow Dash, "we're always doing that, aren't we?"
"R.D.'s right," said Applejack. "Hasn't stopped us before."
"Embrace the magic!" prompted Twilight.
"It's for a good cause," admitted Fluttershy.
"And, bonus: fun!" said Pinkie.
"What do you say, darling?"
Sunset looked at the pleading faces of six of her very best friends in the whole wide world. Two whole wide worlds.
"All right, I'm in," said Sunset, gathering up her identical jackets.
The mood in Principal Cadance's glittering office high in the central spire of Crystal Prep was one of manic despair.
"We've tried everything we could think of! And we're still only halfway to paying for our yacht party! We decided to make some casual inquiries into what Canterlot High was doing for their annual fundraiser—"
"We were spying on them," said Sugarcoat, in her typical dull staccato.
"Making casual inquiries!" insisted Sour Sweet.
"They had gotten the most attractive students in the entire student body to stand out on the front lawn of the school," said Sunny Flare. She leaned in, pressing her palms on Principal Cadance's desk. "They were taking their clothes off."
"I got two words for you," said Indigo Zap. "Student porno."
"Absolutely disgusting," said Sour Sweet. She glanced to one side. "We want to do one too."
"Girls!" said Principal Cadance. "I know how much this yacht party means to you, but I absolutely forbid you to make a porn film starring yourselves that you can sell for money!"
Cadance's eyes went flinty.
"I'll do it," she said.
