Tornado Of Helpfulness

by Estee

Rating: everyone
Tags: Filthy Rich, Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Rainbow Dash, Comedy
Length: 12249

Some ponies want to see the world burn. Others just think it's a good idea to force Rainbow into working retail.

All Mr. Rich wanted was a court-arranged signed promise stating that Rainbow wouldn't practice stunts over Barnyard Bargains any more. But judges are fickle creatures, and so the ruling put her in the aisles. Working off the damages while supposedly learning some respect for the store itself.

She wants to be a good employee. She's dedicating herself to this.

It's odd how all of Rainbow's interests seem to end in that one crater the same way.

(Now with author Patreon, SubscribeStar, and Ko-Fi pages.)

Published 2019-12-25 22:20:02 UTC
Last updated 2019-12-25 22:20:02 UTC

Afterwards, the badge was changed to 'Trainwreckee' and ceremoniously burned

The silence in the courtroom felt like the sort of quiet which was generally associated with storms, and that connection meant the stallion sitting on the petitioner's left-side bench had already made his first mistake. He believed it was the moment of peace which drifted through the air when you finally saw that clock and weather schedule had finally brought the whole thing to the point of leaving, and he was completely wrong in exactly the wrong temporal direction.

The jury had departed during the post-verdict break. The three dozen spectators were completely silent. Waiting.

"Before I render penalty," said the elderly black-furred earth pony sitting on the extremely elevated, heavily-padded bench at the far end of the room, "does the plaintiff have any final statements for the court?"

I wish it hadn't come to this.

(That thought would eventually be repeated.)

"No, your honor," Mr. Rich evenly declared.

The judge looked at the defendant's bench. "And you?"

The mare's neck was considerably more dipped than the streamlined form generally allowed. Its owner liked to present the sleekest possible profile to the world at all times, and so tended to carry her head high in the name of Presentation, Aerodynamics and, more than anything else, Ego. It was a standard posture which readily declared I Am So Much Better Than You That I Have No Need To Actually Prove It (Which Means The Next Piece Of Showing Off Is Strictly For My Own Benefit), and it had completely vanished.

"...no," the cyan mare half-whispered as a little more of the prismatic mane collapsed across her eyes.

Mr. Rich kept most of the sigh internal.

He really hadn't wanted it to go this far. But she'd left him no other choice.

There were many things which Ponyville residents could say about their weather coordinator. For starters, there was a certain amount of pride regarding her heroism, added to the acknowledgment that her virtue had dedicated so much of that bravery to Ponyville itself. Careful listeners would also uncover a certain amount of grumbling in regards to her work ethic. There was also an undercurrent of muttered plans towards future vengeance when it came to so many of her pranks, plus ongoing frustration at having once again found that your work site had become a nap site. And anypony who wanted to learn all that would have to listen very carefully, because it was usually just about impossible to make out through the desperate screams of "INCOMING!"

On her worst days (which often seemed to be just about all of them), Rainbow Dash treated the entire sky as her personal training arena: the fact that other pegasi were trying to use it occasionally escaped her attention, and the fact that all of Ponyville served as a potential impact zone was only jostled to the front of her memory by the bottom of the crater. She might be indulging in perfectly normal flight (although just a little faster than everypony else, because) through the settled zone, focusing on nothing more than reaching that one triad of comfortable construction beams before anypony could try to put a floor on top of it -- and then a spiraling air current would catch her attention. It would inspire her, and do so much in the same way that a dust devil might be described as inspiring debris: in Rainbow's case, the wind speeds went significantly higher. She would alter her path into the first stage of whatever she'd just come up with, perform the initial testing right there, and...

Judging by the frequent reappearance of That One Crater, Mr. Rich suspected there were a lot of spiraling air currents above his store.

He'd asked her not to practice near Barnyard Bargains, and his request had been lost in the verbal storm which usually erupted from everypony in the area after they'd gotten her up, verified that she was okay, and only then begun to recognize what the shockwave had done to the contents of every nearby shopping cart. There had been a few words said at multiple meetings of the Ponyville Tradesponies Association, and he'd even paid into the proposed group Post-Rainbow Relief Pool: a free-floating fund which everypony donated to according to their ability and withdrew from according to their need. (He liked the concept, although something about the wording of it made his mark itch.) And of course multiple ponies had filed complaints about the weather coordinator, but very little ever seemed to come of it -- with the possible exception of more crashes.

In Mr. Rich's opinion, the blockade she'd put up against his requests hadn't been malicious: she just had a basic requirement which had to be fulfilled before anypony could lecture her about flying, and Wonderbolt status wasn't easy to come by. And you tried to make allowances, when it was one of the Bearers --

-- but then he'd found himself galloping towards a now-considerably-deeper crater, pushing towards a middle-aged body's ground speed limit while fear-rotated ears continued to hear the grinding of jarred gears from the store's clockwork ceiling fans. It was easier to listen behind him for the sounds of that damage, because it was so much better than having to listen forward and thus risking the discovery that he could no longer hear the sound of breathing.

She'd been at the bottom. Eyes half-closed. Ribs heaving. And her first words had been "Did anypony get a look at my alula alignment on the way down?"

The crater was, in small part, a magical defensive mechanism to prevent more critical damage: she'd mastered a technique which sent an instinctive blast of wind ahead of her at the moment before impact, slowing her momentum as it pushed ever-increasing amounts of dirt out of the way. For Mr. Rich, the fear served the same function, and so he'd finally filed the civil suit.

The full process had been surprisingly quick, with the largest amount of time used by the summons server whose three-day chase had finally ended when she'd just nudged the scroll under the snoozing pegasus' right wing. The case had quickly been placed onto the docket, and as for the trial itself... well, under Equestrian law, anypony was entitled to request a defense attorney, even for civil cases. It was just that all the lawyers who'd been asked to get involved on that side (or, to the weather coordinator, offered the singular honor) had needed to meet her, and so had quickly realized that they would be trying to get Rainbow Dash off from a charge of Being Rainbow Dash.

It had left her defending herself. And from everything Mr. Rich had observed, what little research she'd done for the role had mostly taught her how to say 'Objection!' She'd objected to many things, because all of the witnesses had been sworn in and there had been a lot of truth which needed protesting.

She'd lost. Everypony in the courtroom knew it. Nopony ever really saw her like this, in a state where she'd not only lost, but had no choice but to actually admit that defeat. Neck low and head dipped, as her manestyle steadily came apart. Waiting for judgment to fall.

Mr. Rich felt sorry for her. Felt horrible that it had come to this. But the courtroom had been the only option which remained.

"The jury found for the plaintiff," the judge reminded them (and magenta eyes were now half-closed). "Unanimously. But the determination of the defendant's penalty falls to me." Dark eyes glanced at a recently-opened letter resting upon the huge desk. "And in regards to that penalty... the plaintiff has filed a request."

Mr. Rich glanced at her again.

A signed and witnessed agreement to never practice stunts within a given radius of the store. Nothing more, especially when it came to financial restitution. He didn't care about the damage to the street. Covering the cost of repairs was just part of his budget: that same expense would strain a weather coordinator's salary to the breaking point.

The virtue which had won her an Element would see her honor a contract. He simply never wanted to find himself galloping towards one of those craters again.

But she wouldn't meet his eyes, because she had lost. It left him looking at the judge, and so he got to see a chipped forehoof stretch towards his letter.

"I," the judge declared, "am rejecting it."

It meant he also saw the moment when that hoof shoved the envelope over the edge, and more than three dozen sets of eyes watched it drift to the floor.

"What the plaintiff desired," the judge calmly stated, "was a rather minor thing. However, during the break, I saw fit to indulge in a touch of research. I was curious as to whether Ms. Dash's fatal combination of misplaced courtroom exuberance and lack of control applied to other facets of her life. And given the nature of Mr. Rich's lawsuit, it seemed to me that other such incidents might not have reached the civil stage. So I sent a pony to fetch the police station's full crash report file."

He rapped that chipped forehoof on his desk. The door at the back of the courtroom opened, and a pony slowly trudged in.

It took a while. The court assistant was a unicorn, and so pushing her shoulders against the cart's hitch did very little to shift the sheer mass of the accumulated paperwork. Progress became very slightly easier when six of the papers slumped off the mountain and slid to the floor.

The next five ponies in line also needed their time, especially since papers were continuing to fall and the fourth mare nearly caught a hind hoof on what was starting to become a triplicate ridge.

"It would seem," the judge continued after the length of the main aisle forced the seventh pony to stop outside, "that Ms. Dash has, shall we say, something of a reputation. And given that, I feel the signing of a simple restraint document is insufficient."

Mr. Rich's stomach placidly dropped into his left hind leg. The echoes of the impact were purely internal, and wound up being largely masked by the sounds of still more creaking cart axles grinding to an increasingly-distant halt.

"I find that a well-rendered civil penalty," the old earth pony grimly smiled, "can be rather flexible. I cannot send you to prison, Ms. Dash. But I do feel it's best for everypony if you're confined within walls for a time."

Her head slowly came up, the movement weighted with dread. Mr. Rich could barely breathe.

"As penalty," the judge ruled, "I render that you shall work in Barnyard Bargains for a period of no less than three weeks, at six hours per day. That way, you can learn something about one aspect of what you've been damaging. You will be under the direct authority of the pony whom you have hurt. The law says that you must be paid some level of salary for that labor -- but I say it goes directly towards repairs. I've also taken the liberty of reviewing the summer hours you use for coordinating Ponyville's weather: apparently you put in the majority of your personal time during the morning, then spend the rest of it -- 'training'." It wasn't so much possible to hear the sarcasm as it was nearly impossible to hear anything else. "So you have the time to commit to this, especially if you push your paperwork off towards the weekends. Or, from what your regional supervisor told me, further off. And perhaps there's even the thinnest chance that you might learn a lesson about actual discipline along the way." The chipped forehoof struck at a resonating stone plate set into the wood, and so became just a little more chipped. "I will, of course, be dropping in to see how things are proceeding. Clear the courtroom for the next case."

The gallery, which was mostly comprised of Ponyville residents who'd wanted to See It Happen, began to mutter. Rainbow's tail splayed in shock. And Mr. Rich stared at the padded bench, finding no eye contact coming from a judge who'd already made everything into Somepony Else's Problem.

Ms. Dash. Working at the flagship. For three weeks.

There would be a lesson learned by the time her durance finished, and it would not be the expected one.

It was possible to hear them coming from quite some distance off, especially if you'd essentially grown up within the store and possessed a subconscious-but-exacting memory as to exactly how its acoustics worked. (His legs had already made an automatic adjustment to the right, compensating for the shift in the air provided by slow-turning ceiling fans.) Currently, this was allowing him to stand in the Linens section and track the lecture as it moved down Cookery.

Two mares approaching, two voices -- but only four hoofsteps.

"You're doing it again."

Defensiveness instantly surged and did its part in knocking several pegboard items out of alignment. "Doing what?"

"You're hovering," stated P.R. "Again. After I told you not to."

Any silence connected with Rainbow tended to be mercilessly short. "So?"

"So," the older pegasus mare shot back, "pegasi employees may only fly in the store if there's an emergency or they're working from above the top shelf. We have limited aisle space, widewings, and your span is taking up too much of it." Sarcastically, "We've all seen them. We also know where they've been. So put them away."

Mr. Rich once again took a moment to reflect upon how the pony who guided the franchise through the deadfall-rigged maze of public relations could somehow still be completely unsuitable for any interactions with groups of less than three hundred.

"I hover," Rainbow protested. "Everypony's seen me hovering, everypony knows that's what I do! I don't land, not unless I have to! I just --"

"Why?"

The audio track told him that the next group of items had been knocked over by a hard-lashing tail.

"...my hooves get sore."

The four which were moving along the floor stopped.

"How many years has it been since you came to ground?"

"I --"

"Stone foal," P.R. snidely cut in.

"HEY!"

"Tenderhooves," the older mare smoothly continued. "Airhead."

Furious now, "I'm not!"

"Do you want me to take a quick trip up for you?" P.R. openly mocked. "Bring down some good cool vapor and wrap it around your poor sore hoofsies? Booties for the dirt baby?"

"NO!"

"Then. Land. And you stay grounded unless the store needs you to fly. Do you understand me, trainee?"

He was now thinking about P.R's well-tended garden, because the older mare didn't have a cloud home. Her divorce also meant she didn't have full-time custody of her children, and he suspected she used the garden as a means of giving her something to mother while her foals were with that former spouse. Keeping in practice.

It was easy to picture that garden, with its long rows of blissful blooms. It was even easier to picture the intrusive trench which had started near the begonias, skidded through eight body lengths of flattened stems, gone through a fence, and ended at the point where the usual #1 Suspect had desperately flared her wings and gotten out of the area before anypony could make her clean up the mess.

He had no trouble in picturing that, and he wondered if he was borrowing a memory from the nearby source.

"...yeah," the trainee softly said, and he heard four more hooves lightly touch down. "No flying. Unless it's for the store."

It was either a very good time for him to step in or just a little too late: either way, he quickly cut across the nearest gap and slowed back to a casual amble at the moment he came into sight. "Is everything all right?"

The weather coordinator's head dipped. P.R.'s violet shoulders shifted in a casual shrug.

"We're just reviewing," the older mare said. "The basic things any trainee has to know before we send them out among the herd." The left wing unfurled, nudged a cyan flank. "This is a test, Rainbow. Tell Mr. Rich what we've covered so far."

Her head was still down, and the altered angle of the sleek neck had the cord-hung Trainee badge bumping against her chin. "No flying --"

"-- the rest of it," P.R. interrupted.

Rainbow took a breath.

"Do whatever you can to assist customers, but don't let them abuse you," she recited. "But you have to try and leave them happy whenever you can. You don't need orders to fix a problem, and it's okay to take initiative if you see something which needs to be solved quickly. Always try to improve the store. There's always one more thing you could be doing, but you shouldn't try to do everything and sometimes, the thing you need to do most is to take a break. And don't try to help Thistle Burr."

Mr. Rich curiously tilted his head to the right.

"Any reason for that last one?" he inquired. The settled zone's angriest resident generally treated any attempt to assist him as a deliberate means of sabotaging his self-assigned authority, which meant Surviving Thistle was a nearly-perfect test for a new hire: anypony who could make him mutter something which was most definitely not 'thank you' all the way to the registers was usually on the fast track for promotion. Rainbow, as a temporary, wouldn't be asked to fly through the full curve of the horseshoe -- but to openly exclude him from the start...

"Skywriting," Rainbow said, still looking at the floor. "He's still mad about me skywriting over his house."

A new series of memories crystallized. The majority required some degree of verbal censorship.

"Understood," he gently told her, because he'd never found out just how that fight began and given the parties involved, the natural suspicion was probably the correct one. "Do you have any questions for me, Ms. --" no: she was an employee now, if only for a little while "-- Rainbow? Anything you need to know or want to say?"

She was perfectly still then, with the overhead lights reflecting off pots and onto motionless feathers. And he realized he'd never seen her like that before, not with everything about her just stopped...

"Yeah. One thing."

Her head came up. Magenta eyes focused on his.

"I've been thinking," she told him. "About... how bad it must have been, for you to put me in court. P.R... she told me that you just wanted me to sign something, and the judge went off on his own. But she said you were just worried, and... I..."

She took a breath, visibly forced her gaze to remain level.

"...I'm going to do this right," she declared. "If I've gotta work in a store, a boring store --" a little more hastily "-- the best boring store in town -- then I'm taking it seriously. You've never had an employee like me, Mr. Rich. You've never had somepony who gives it all. I'm gonna get my picture in the Employee Of The Moon frame over the break room door. Even if I'm only here three weeks. You'll see. I'll make everypony see." One more breath. "And I'll sign the paper before I take my last day with you. I promise."

He blinked, tried to reconcile the idea of a freely-given promise from Loyalty. (P.R. beamed, mostly in spite of herself.)

"All right," he reassuringly told her. "I'll leave you to the training, then. And I'll see you in my office before it's over."

She nodded, and he headed for the candy aisle. There was only a little time left before her first shift was scheduled to begin, and she needed all the training she could get.

But she's taking it seriously...

(It was the first warning sign, and he missed it.)

The working part of that initial shift was delayed somewhat by the needs of Friendship, which in this case included a significant amount of Vengeance.

Ponyville knew their Bearers pranked each other as a means of releasing some of the tension which came from the clashes of six very different personalities: a social dance which came with its own blast radius. In this case, it meant he had a full parade of Elements coming through the store to 'properly' help their friend settle into her new occupation, and she knew what they were doing.

Admittedly, having Pinkie launch the proceedings was something of a giveway: having a pony with near-eidetic recollection merrily pronking up to the new employee for help because 'I just can't remember where the sprinkles are!' didn't exactly qualify as subtle. But after that, Rarity simply couldn't leave until somepony checked the loading dock to see if her favorite magazine had come in yet, while Fluttershy had a mysterious need for a left-forehoof spanner (and kept sending Rainbow into the basement over and over, insisting the weather coordinator was bringing up something for the right). Spike simply followed at a distance, taking pictures of everything until the moment she chased the giggling dragon out of the store. On hoof.

The last two entered as a unit, prodded until the desired scream emerged, started to make their way towards the exit -- but then they saw Mr. Rich, and a thick blonde tail carefully flicked towards the store's most isolated corner.

He met them by the pet food section, because most ponies didn't even approach canned meat unless they absolutely had to. The farmer got right to the point.

"How's she doin'? Any troubles so far?"

"No," Mr. Rich admitted. "Not that she's had much of a chance." Bearers had monopolized her first hours, and he was now expecting a long line of drop-in ponies who had only readily-explained impact sites in common. "But P.R. told me she's been paying attention to the training." Also that all of the terms he'd heard were insults intended for pegasi who refused to ever touch ground. "And she told me she's taking this seriously --"

The librarian was still learning about so many kinds of social interaction, doing her best to catch up with the rest of the herd. It was possible to chart her progress simply from the way she moved around Ponyville and judging by what had just happened, 'concealing expressions' had yet to receive its own scroll.

"-- is there something wrong, Ms. Sparkle?" he carefully asked.

"No..." the little mare tried through the wince, winning herself a glare from the farmer because not only wasn't 'lying' supposed to be on the course list, but any attempt to place it there needed to be a little more credible.

The blonde mare sighed. "It's like this, Mr. Rich. Y'said she's takin' it seriously?"

He nodded.

"That ain't always a good thing."

"I don't take your meaning," he admitted. (His tail, slightly quicker on the update, had just twitched.)

The earth pony mare looked at the librarian, who softly groaned.

"I asked her to watch the library once," Twilight told him. "Because Spike was out playing, I had to be at the post office, and I didn't get back for nearly two hours. And when I did..." Narrow shoulders went stiff, and her voice rose into a place midway between imitation and furious parody. "'Look, when I'm done with a book for the night, I just drop it on the floor. You had crowded shelves and an empty floor. No need to thank me! More than twice!' And all the way out of the tree, she was asking if she was going to get a commemorative plaque!"

"An' Ah," Applejack added, "needed t' step away from mah Roxbury Russets, right when Ah was 'bout t' harvest 'em for cider an' she'd come t' watch me. Rainbow takes cider real serious, don't she? So she decided t' get started on mah behalf. Save me some time."

Her ribs heaved for a few seconds. The hat went slightly askew.

"...and?" he eventually risked.

"Y'might have noticed," Applejack tensely declared, "that the cider wasn't quite the same color last year. That's what y'get when you don't have Roxburys t' work with, 'cause the ones y'did get are kinda, how do Ah put this, electrified." The farmer's tail lashed. "An' she didn't know why Ah didn't jus' ask her t' do it every year, 'cause it was so much faster her way. You're tellin' me that she's takin' this seriously? Then you've gotta be careful." She glanced at Twilight, and then returned an unnerved green gaze to him. "'cause Mr. Rich, there's only one thing on the continent scarier than Rainbow when she ain't thinkin'."

"And that," Twilight softly finished, "is when she is. Send for us if you need us, Mr. Rich. We'll look in when we can."

They left. And he told himself that he didn't understand, because he wanted to believe the best of a mare who was trying. But Rainbow Dash had been in Ponyville for several years, and that time had trained its residents to do more than instantly calculate potential impact trajectories just before carefully moving three body lengths to the right. Everypony knew she crashed, did so more often than a full class of flight camp adolescents who hadn't quite figured out how their wings worked. But she crashed because she tried the impossible, over and over again no matter how many times those attempts ended in crashes -- until the moment one didn't. The instant in which she not only achieved, but became the impossible.

You never quite got past the fear, because there was always the chance for something to truly go wrong. But to some degree, just about everypony had come to see the crashes as simple prelude. The warmup act before the aerial symphony began.

You got used to the crashes.
Until the day you didn't look up in time.
Until you became the impact site.
And all she would do was ask what her alula aligment had been.

(It was part of wing anatomy. He'd had to check with P.R. about that too.)

There was nothing quite like a shipment arriving before you'd expected it, especially if you actually had the shelf space ready to receive it. In this case, early summer meant the toy aisle was largely a work under near-permanent deconstruction. Children used part of their vacation time to think about what might be in a Hearth's Warming package, along with carefully gathering data through advance scouting. The name of the toy. The price. What it felt like to have it pressed between your forelegs while you shook it up and down, because it was going to be concealed in a gift box eventually and that was information you were going to need.

Toys which arrived in summer spent most of their time in dreams, and just about as much on the floor. Thankfully, there was a way to prevent a portion of the latter.

"That," Invoice morosely said as he looked at the open-front packaging for the now-still sample plush puppy which had been the first item out of the box, "is going to get annoying. Fast."

Mr. Rich, snout propelled mostly by the morbid curiosity which wanted to know if it could be just as bad the second time around, leaned in and carefully gripped the pull-ring between his teeth. Leaned back, and his momentum triggered the string wrapped around the tiny record which was encased deep within softness.

The minotaur innovation started the sound going, along with allowing the pre-wound spring to trigger tiny gears.

"I'm a happy puppy!" the toy declared in high-pitched singsong as its hind legs reared up and the tail wagged, doing so roughly to the time of the World's Most Insipid Music (give or take three beats). "Happy puppy! Bark, bark!"

That function had been created by minotaurs, which was why the shipment had originated in Mazein. But they had been working with partners, and so the overly-bright pastel lights flashing on and off (key) within the glassy eyes were purely pony in origin.

Strictly speaking, they watched the display for quite some time. The actual looking away arrived rather quickly, but everything replayed whenever they blinked.

It was one of the consequences from having a toy aisle, because nopony had ever found a way to prevent children from being drawn towards anything which flashed and made repetitive sounds. Parents suffering from amnesia would see eager forehooves gesturing towards the newest item. They would take it home. And their foals would play with the things. Endlessly. Typically, this would take place at a distance of about half a body length away from the adult and under ideal circumstances, the toy would go off again at the exact moment concentration was required.

"Very quickly," Mr. Rich agreed after blessed silence followed the second non-verse and most of the unloading crew had peeked out from behind protective cardboard. "And it'll also run down the thaum charge on the lights. These are expensive enough as-is: parents are going to be expecting a fully-capable toy at purchase. Can we turn demonstration mode off?"

"It comes turned off," Invoice observed, leaning in as close as he dared. (This wasn't very, just in case it started moving again.) "There's this little iron tab which interrupts the flow. You have to pull it out before the string can move. This one was just the floor model. What do you want to do with them?"

"The usual for noisemakers," Mr. Rich wearily smiled. "Put somepony onto setting them up. Or further up." Because parents exposed to such single-item conditions for a few weeks tended to have their homes suffer from rather precise robberies: the thief was both never caught and surprisingly easy to locate. Barnyard Bargains employees, who lived with the remote possibility of having several dozen going off at once, had their disposal fantasies tilt somewhat closer to homicide. "I'm going to go check on our trainee."

He found her in the First Aid section, and she wasn't alone.

It was best to observe from a distance: see how she did without the pressure of a supervisor's eyes upon her fur. He knew every hiding place his store provided, and so he watched her carefully approach the little pink unicorn filly. Somepony he'd already recognized.

The child was lying down on the floor, head held so that her horn could poke at boxes of gauze: this seemed to be her current form of entertainment. She was very small, very young, and rather prone to giggling.

Rainbow cautiously bent her own forelegs, leaned down.

Gently, "Hey, squirt."

The filly ignored her. After all, there were boxes about.

"I don't see any parents," Rainbow observed. "And you're a little young to be in here alone."

The filly silently considered this, at least so far as could be determined by the way she switched to randomly shoving mchanga bottles.

"Are you lost?" The right wing unfurled, with the tip going under the filly's belly to exert gentle pressure: the child giggled at the tickling sensation and began to get up. "I can take you into the back. Or up to the front, and we'll make an announcement at the register. I think I get to fly for an announcement." Her eyes went down again. "And you're moving a little funny on your left hind leg. Did something happen? Do you need --"

She was doing everything right, behaving exactly the way anypony should if they found a very young filly who seemed to be alone. But he'd recognized the child instantly, where she had not. And you didn't find Ruby in the store without being very far away from --

"-- that," the cold voice said, reaching him slightly ahead of the odor of crushed grapes and a fermentation process which never quite seemed to end, "is my daughter."

Rainbow looked up. It took a moment before she spotted the statue of an earth pony mare which had set itself up at the far end of the aisle, plus one more to see that it was breathing.

"Oh, hey, Berry," the trainee casually greeted. "Is this your kid?" A quick glance at the current source of bottle clinks. "Cute kid. Little quiet. Anyway, I just saw a kid alone, so I thought I'd better --"

"-- she went ahead," emerged in the too-soft tones of a parent who owned a bar and was tired of hearing Certain Questions: the list usually started with 'How can a responsible mare with a child own a bar?'

"Yeah. By herself. And I noticed she's limping a little --"

"-- she has a small crack in her left hind hoof," Berry broke in, now starting to approach. "It happens with children. And adults. We were already at the doctor's office, and we were sent here to pick up some perfectly normal filler and sealant. It's not even bad enough for a prescription."

And normally, that would have been enough, for Berry could be touchy and Rainbow's typical mode of social interaction was touch-and-go. There was a parent on the scene and the employee could depart.

But this parent was also a customer. One who didn't seem to be happy.

"...yeah," Rainbow decided. "So let's see what I can do here to make this better. For starters, that's the filler over there. And the sealant. There's a couple of brands. I could ask somepony about which one's better. Best. For you two, it's gotta be best --"

"-- I have the information from the doctor," Berry cut her off. "I'll pick them out."

"Okay," Rainbow rallied. "So in the meantime... you don't have a cart. Unless you left that in another aisle? And you've got two things to haul. Plus a kid. So I can carry the boxes up to the register for you. Unless you need something else, and then I can get you a cart." Thoughtfully, "And there's a kid. You could put the kid in the cart."

"Just the two things," Berry said as her fur began to settle back into its natural grain. "That's fine, Rainbow --"

But the pegasus was being Helpful.

"-- and I'll carry the kid."

There was probably a word for what Berry's eyes were doing, and 'stare' didn't seem to be it. The expression was about halfway between spear and Fluttershy.

"Carry," the tones of danger repeated.

Rainbow missed it. "Yeah. Pressure carry. Four-leg press: it won't hurt. Because she's limping, so why does she need to walk in the store? I'll just carry her out for you! Because that's a medical emergency, so it's gotta mean flying, right? Actually, if you don't have a cart outside or anything -- you don't, right? Because you didn't bring it in here. I'm sure I could just fly her home for you --"

"You're going to carry," Berry carefully summarized, "my daughter."

Ruby merrily resorted most of the bandages. Mr. Rich wasn't sure if it was because the filly's level of caring about outside events generally hovered around parasprite level, or if she'd decided they were about to be needed.

"Sure!" Rainbow's ribs puffed out. "Because at Barnyard Bargains, we are all about service --"

Far too softly, "-- do you see my daughter's neck?"

Rainbow looked down.

"...yeah," she eventually admitted. "It's..." The struggle became visible. "...a decent neck? For her age. I mean, I guess she could grow into it --"

"-- so do I," Berry told her, now having closed to within two body lengths. (For a pegasus forbidden to fly, facing an angry earth pony, this distance was also known as 'too late'.) "I see her neck. And the scruff. If she needs carrying, I'll pick her up. With my teeth. The same way I did when she was a foal."

Ruby's attention had now turned back to the painkillers.

"Teeth? Seriously? Everypony knows pressure carries are safer!"

The clockwork ceiling fans patiently clicked away Time Remaining Until Crisis.

"A pressure carry," Berry slowly pointed out with the fraying patience of a mare who spent much of her life trying to talk sense into drunks and still wasn't ready for something like Rainbow, "for me, is standing over her. With all four of my legs tilted in against her, which makes it a little hard to walk. Or shuffle. Or do anything other than fall on top of her, which has its own problems. And she's not as small as she used to be, so the first place we'd be going is back to the doctor in order to get her horn out of my ribs."

"Oh," Rainbow thoughtfully considered.

"Yes," Berry half-whispered. "'Oh'."

"So I should definitely be the one who carries her. Got it!" The trainee took one last crucial hoofstep forward. "Hang on, squirt. This may feel a little --"

-- which finally put her close enough to Berry's expression for the ongoing Lack Of Customer Happiness (And Then Some) to break through.

"Um," Rainbow said.

Mr. Rich didn't believe in supervising every action an employee took. Just about everypony started at the bottom of the ramp, and climbing up required the ability to make decisions on your own. Even those coming in with experience were expected to spend some time working the floor, because it was the best way to learn how this business functioned. It was why every franchise was ultimately capable of running itself: because he'd worked so hard to find those who didn't just say 'yes' and tended more towards 'why?' To a degree, that meant allowing trainees to make their own mistakes -- as long as they weren't crucial ones.

He tried to give them a little bit of space and in this case, the remaining amount was probably just about enough to let him squeeze his body between the mares before somepony died.

"This is my daughter," Berry hissed as her right forehoof scraped at the floor: the unheeding little unicorn under discussion had just discovered the elastics. "I get a little tired of having mares, especially ones with no children, telling me how I should be taking care of my --"

"I found a tenth-bit on the floor by the registers," Rainbow non-sequitured.

Berry temporarily stopped moving. So did a previously-approaching Mr. Rich, because there were statements to which the only logical response was to freeze in place and hope they didn't notice you.

"...what?" the bartender rather naturally asked.

"Yeah!" Rainbow blundered on, because she was speaking to somepony who had her own business and therefore just had to possess a familiar requirement for happiness. "Do you want it?"

"Are you insane --"

"-- is there something I can help you with, Berry?" Mr. Rich asked as he slid his body into what little space remained.

Hot earth pony breath blasted against the fur of his left flank, while the confusion radiating from the other side didn't quite serve as countering coolness.

"...you can walk me to the registers," Berry finally said. "Please."

He did, with the first-aid boxes carefully balanced within the hollow of his back. Leaving Rainbow behind.

"I heard about the court case," Berry told him as the tills loomed larger in their sight. "I'm guessing most of the town has by now. You've got her for three weeks?"

He managed a nod.

"No," she countered, her daughter happily limping along at her side. (Mr. Rich was still debating whether to mention the multiple loops of medical elastic which were snagged around the tiny horn.) "I don't think you do."

"If you're asking me to fire her --" was the automatic first response.

"-- I don't try to get ponies fired for having no idea how the world works," Berry shot back. "I'd never do anything else. Even with somepony who processes complaints."

"I don't quite understand," felt like something which was threatening to become overused.

"Do you know how to file a complaint against the local weather coordinator?" (He did and before he could tell her that, she kept going.) "You're supposed to do it through Town Hall. But most ponies don't know that. So they send a copy to the highest Bureau authority in the area. Which is usually the coordinator."

"Oh."

"She has a special file for those complaints."

"Really?"

"Based on the number of times I've seen ponies being hit by papers when they walk under her cloud office," Berry postulated, "I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a bottom. And I don't think it'll be that easy to send her out, not when the judge put her in here in the first place. I just don't think she's going to make three weeks."

He could hear the registers opening and closing now, which still didn't drown out the much louder noise Rainbow's tail was making in his imagination as the prismatic fall twisted itself.

If she'd gotten a touchier mare...

The horror hit in stages. The worst came when he both realized that his current standard for 'touchy' was Berry and at that, he'd aimed slightly high.

"I'm opening a time betting pool at The Whole Bunch. So ponies can bet on when she's out of here," Berry stated. "Five bits per square. Fifteen-minute increments. Winner takes the pot. Minus my twenty percent. Send over anypony who's interested."

"...oh," was, under the circumstances, just about the only thing he could still say.

"For obvious reasons," the mare added, "I can't let you buy a space. Because you can influence the result and it's not fair to anypony else if you get to play. Sorry."

"...right."

She looked thoughtful.

"However," she added, "speaking strictly as an advisory expert... how would you feel about five-thirty this afternoon?"

"Um..."

"You're right," Berry decided. "There's no way she's even making it to four."

Normally, the hiring process could be described as an experience built around mutual learning: the prospective employee got to know a little more about the job itself and what might be required, while the potential employer did their best to figure out if the pony on the other side was capable of fulfilling those duties. But he'd had no chance to interview Rainbow.

Did she possess any previous experience? Even the most basic of part-time jobs granted to a Cloudsdale adolescent as a temporary means of keeping them out of everypony else's air paths? He didn't know, because he didn't have her resume' either.

...all right: she wasn't a natural at customer interaction. He could simply take some time with her before the start of the next day's shift and conduct a related review: that would give him some sense of where he could most safely place her. But for now...

Everypony starts at the bottom.

He passed through the toy aisle on his way back to her, and found the usual crowd of summer children. The majority were busy with the inexpensive sacrificial pieces which occupied the bottom of the pegboard. However, some of the youngest were already staring up at the bright colors of the newest now-shelved arrival, and forelegs futilely stretched towards what they could never reach.

She was still in the first-aid area, morosely nosing everything Ruby's play had disrupted back into some kind of order. He was almost completely certain that nopony had told her to do that, and performing basic straightening without instruction showed good initiative.

"Kids mess things up," she shrugged as she looked up, fast-rotating ears having already registered his approach. "It's just part of being a kid. Messing things up a little. They're usually not trying to do anything bad on purpose."

As observations went, this one put her ahead of several members of his senior staff. "I know," he told her as the breeze from the ceiling fan rustled his fur.

A little more awkwardly, something which was always surprising to see with Rainbow, "About what happened before you came in --"

"-- we'll talk about it tomorrow," he assured her. "For now --"

Basics. Absolute basics. And talk to P.R. about exactly what they reviewed.

"-- I want to put you outside for a while."

Her eyes immediately went wide with premature delight. "Is it something where I can fly?"

"Cart retrieval."

Streamlined features went through a fully aerodynamic collapse.

"...cart retrieval," she dismally repeated.

"There's a little flight involved," he assured her. "You can see the area better from altitude. But it's mostly bringing the carts back to the inner and outer corral areas, when the customers don't return them." Which, even with the half-bit powered chain-link lockbox mounted on the front pivot hitch, was often. "Some customers also bring their own carts: ones which are too large to go down the aisles. You can help them transfer their purchases." He usually told first-time retrievers that they could ask somepony who was using an entire cart to haul one small bag of candy if they would mind carrying their purchase home, but not doing so with Rainbow struck him as saving a step. "Talk to Loopback when you get outside, then send her in. You'll stay on that until somepony relieves you."

"Okay!" Rainbow enthused. "A little fresh summer air! It's better than being in here under the --" She glanced up, and the movement lasted just long enough for him to spot the confusion. "-- yeah. Cart retrieval."

It was repetitive work. It kept hooves occupied while giving the brain very little to do outside the category of 'pondering dark thoughts regarding customers who won't bring their carts back'. It was, in just about every way, the ground-floor bottom level of retail, except for the ones in which it formed part of the basement.

It was safe.

"So I thought you needed to see this, sir," Jestine sighed as the light blue pegasus trotted slightly ahead of him, leading the way around small packs of children as they headed towards the main doors and the accompanying huge windows which faced the street outside: she was currently blocking most of his view for the straightaway. "Because I've been heading off some of the first complaints, trying to get everything worked out with them. Before they reached your office, because I feel like you're going to be very busy for the next three weeks." With a faint note of hope, "Or until tomorrow at half-past noon? Anyway..."

She stepped aside, and the view opened up. Several possibilities for Rainbow's short-term employment, sensing the need for karmic balance, simultaneously slammed closed.

"So she's still at it," the newest member of Purchasing quietly said. "Just about done with that one, I think."

It could be difficult to watch Rainbow's movements, especially when she was in the air: she didn't achieve anywhere near the same level of speed for casual efforts as she did with a long fly-up, but it was still possible for limbs and mouth to lightly blur. In theory, it was much less migraine-inducing to watch the items move. And as with so many business theories, the disproven hypothetical settled in behind his left temple to sulk.

"She's transferring purchases," he observed. "From our cart to his. While flying."

"Yes."

The customer whom Rainbow was assisting leapt up, failed to intercept the arc.

"By head-tossing them."

"Except for when she kicks them. You haven't seen a kick yet -- oh, there it goes."

They watched the trajectory.

"Well," Jestine decided, "it did land in a cart. Just not his. You'd think she would have learned more from watching Miss Applejack -- and that's a tail whip. I'm pretty sure that's the first time she's tried a tail whip, sir, mostly because nopony came in to yell about how their packages were tail-whipped across the street."

"How long," Mr. Rich calmly asked while trying to ignore the fact that his brain was apparently considering what life would be like outside his skull, "has she been doing this?"

"A while. She said -- she's making it fun, because transferring packages is boring and this way, the customers get home faster. Plus they get to watch a show. Loopback told her to stop, and she decided that meant she had to stop the snout balancing. Which she did. Not that she was very good at that. I think she has problems with the range of meaning, sir. Plus there may be a vocabulary issue."

"Such as?"

The customer, whose words were inaudible through the glass, had now resorted to equally-ignored sign language.

"Well," Jestine sighed, "there's certain words she has trouble with. Like 'Fragile'. I'm almost completely sure she has no idea what it means." They mutually watched the next package land, although both encountered some trouble once the pieces began to scatter. "She's also been retrieving carts. Sometimes she even waited until the customer finished unloading before bringing it back, which is part of why she started concentrating on transfers instead. Because none of them could catch her, but their screams kept up the chase for quite a long way."

The next leap allowed the customer's teeth to snag Rainbow's tail. Unfortunately, the customer was a rather typical unicorn for build and, lacking Applejack's larger size, somewhat higher density, and anything he could anchor himself to, followed up his achievement by awkwardly hanging in place.

"I'd like to go get her now," the young pegasus told him. "If you've seen enough."

He didn't move.

"Although I think the audience might be willing to watch a little more," Jestine finished, nodding at the ponies watching from the other side of the street. "Because it's like her stunts, sir. Everypony is just stopping to look. Except for when they move to dodge --"

"-- please go get her," Mr. Rich softly said, every syllable frozen within its own invisible bubble of control. "Now."

Shelf-straightening: he'd found her doing that on her own, so it was reasonable to expect that she would be able to do more of it. But he did find himself adding a few extra, previously-unused qualifiers to those instructions. All of them were calmly added after he finished explaining why parcel transfer wasn't meant to be a spectator sport, and he even trotted with her to the minimal Books section, pulled out the dictionary, and showed her the illustration for 'juggling' because realistically, most ponies weren't going to know that one and she had to see what he'd just forbidden.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Rich," she'd finally said, eyes focused on the floor again. "I'm trying. But this just isn't me. I don't do this sort of stuff. I guess if you have a mark for it, that makes it interesting. And not-boring. And it doesn't make you feel like you want to tear your own feathers out at the pinions. If you have feathers." Her wings had sagged. "I want to do it right, and I'll still going to sign that paper no matter what. But for me, it's just -- hard."

And he believed her.

"No retail work," he carefully verified. "Not even when you were in secondary school?"

"I had a courier job for a while. Delivering packages in Clousdale. It didn't last long."

"Oh?"

"They had this weird policy about naps."

Mr. Rich sighed.

"Just -- straighten up the store for a while," he told abruptly-perked ears. "Arrange things to the way they should be. I need to go speak with somepony."

P.R. tilted her head slightly to the left. Her feathers rustled, and several nearby hanging saddle blankets shifted in concert.

"My first assumption," she shrugged, "was based on the nature of the employee."

"Meaning?" Mr. Rich carefully inquired.

"In two words? Rainbow Dash. Any retail experience she possessed was going to have two quantifiers: 'none' or 'right up until they figured out it was Rainbow Dash'. She has a lot of natural talent, Mr. Rich. I had the Wonderbolts dream when I was a filly, because most fillies go through that stage. But I gave it up before I got my mark, because for me, it's a good day when I can take the full inventory top-shelf count without having to land three times." Another shrug, which arrived completely free of regrets. "For a pegasus, she's probably got one of the highest field strengths in the settled zone, and she uses it in ways nopony else does. She's a born flier. She's a natural hero, and those are even harder to find. But for retail? If the fan blades were any wider, she'd be napping on one. Most of what I was trying to teach her was the absolute basics, and the rest was just -- preemptive damage control. But I wasn't sure she could make it through three weeks, even with the judge's assignment."

"She has to," he replied, and wondered why his voice hadn't echoed. The internal hollowness should have done something for the sound quality.

"I'm not even sure she's going to reach --" with open hope "-- two forty-five this afternoon?"

"P.R. --"

"-- it's a very popular pool, Mr. Rich. Today's squares went immediately. Nopony put anything down on Day Twenty-One. Pinkie went as far as Day Five, but I think she just wanted to show support. Especially since no part of her body was twitching when she put her bits down and believe me, when she went that deep into the future, everypony looked."

He sighed, and that too felt hollow. "So we just have to give her very specific instructions. Step by step. And have her repeat most of them back."

She nodded. "So what's she doing now?"

"Shelf straightening. I found her doing that on her own earlier, so we know something she can focus on. At least for a while. But we'll probably need to think of something else, just to prevent her from becoming bored --"

"-- I'm-I'm-I'm a h-h-ha-happy puppy! Happy puppy! Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark --"

And then they were both running.

"So I solved it!" Rainbow beamed as she stood in the center of both the scattered iron tags and those who had recently scattered them. "I was straightening up the toys, with all the squirts around, and you could just see that all the stuff they really wanted was too high up for them to reach! All it took was a little swap! Shelves go down, the peg stuff goes up, and the kids are happy!"

At least, that was what Mr. Rich thought she'd said. His brain was having some trouble disentangling actual words from anything which wasn't Happy puppy!, especially as the latter was being repeated roughly twenty times per second. The lights were also giving him an odd amount of trouble. With a single toy, the lights were simply annoying. In bulk, they seemed to be strobing his brain. And the horde of delighted children just kept tugging on the pull rings, the repetitive motion was just about pulling the plush toy out of the box and that was turning out to be fairly fragile (not that Rainbow necessarily understood that, or 'fragile'), plus there was something else to consider.

She'd done exactly what she'd claimed. She'd flipped the aisle. Cheap items, the things children could generally afford with their allowance, reliable mainstays which had a permanent place in any store, were now too high for a youngling's casual mouth reach. The pieces which were noisy, expensive, relied on charges, needed an adult's budget to purchase, and tended to be easily damaged -- those were on the bottom. And the children, gifted with access to their dearest dreams, were exploring a new realm of possibility by trotting over most of it while paying for none.

A miniature zebra flew past his snout. Part of him registered that, along with the fact that the raided playset apparently contained something with wings because the next one had a pair of detached ceramic limbs right behind it.

"Tell me what this does to toy sales at the end of the day!" Rainbow crowed, and did so just as the crow from the set skidded past her forehooves. "If you can do it without any boring numbers. But I just bet they go up! -- Mr. Rich? Do you want me to get some water? I think there's something in your eye. Because Rarity's eyes get like that, when her lashes slip. Or when she's -- ooooh..."

He tried to keep his pegasus employees out of the basement unless it was absolutely necessary: the species had a near-universal tendency towards claustrophobia, and those who owned ground-based homes generally refused to have a level fully within the earth. But there was no choice now, and so he silently led Rainbow forward, bringing her through the maze of backup product. They veered around holiday pieces whose time was more than six moons away, turned left at the ghost of clearance sales yet to come.

Damaged toy packages go to the Hearths' Warming charity donations. That's how it's always been. This doesn't change anything.

Admittedly, the fact that it was going to be his largest donation ever might rotate a few ears. And the sheer number of high-end items was probably going to have extra charities knocking on his door for years to come. He could -- try to look at it as a chance to meet ponies...

Rainbow was shivering: he registered it as a sudden vibration of feathers and air.

"It's not much further," he reassured her. "And it's more open in that area. I promise."

Too shaken for bravado, "Is -- is there a window or something? Even one of those little ones that's just above the dirt --"

He felt as if he'd met his seasonal quota on sighs. "No. I'm sorry. The building just wasn't assembled that way." Not in a town which had been founded by earth ponies. "But I try to keep it airy -- and there it is."

It was, in fact, the most spacious section of the basement. It had to be, just in order to accommodate the main mechanism.

She looked at the exposed portion for a few seconds.

"What are the wheels? The big brass ones with all the notches."

"Gears."

"And the stuff that kind of locks into them as it rotates --"

"More gears."

She kept looking.

"The four flat things with the rims around them? The ones about the size of a hoof, on top of those straight parts that keep going up and down and up and down and --"

"Hoof mounts," he patiently explained. "This is how we wind the ceiling fans all at once. A pony steps onto the plates, and then they start to trot in place. Their movement recurls the mainspring."

"You just trot," she starkly said.

"For one hour, no faster than the gears will allow. That's enough to get through closing. There's a clock, but you'll also know it's finished when the resistance builds up too much to step any more. And that lever disables the gears and stops the fans, just in case you overwind by accident."

"In place. While looking at a flat brass ridge and backing board right in front of your face --"

"That's a bookstand," Mr. Rich sympathetically told her as he nodded towards the nearby pile of hardcovers. "Most ponies like to catch up on their reading. Nopony will mind if you borrow something, as long as you leave their own page marker intact. And you can take your break when you come upstairs."

He left her to it, in that well-lit corner, and watched from the shadows just long enough to see her select the book.

She was oddly subdued, when he saw her standing in the open doorway of his office. A little tired. Thoughtful.

(He missed that warning too.)

"Mr. Rich?"

"Yes?" He'd managed to find a master list for the Equestrian charities which held toy drives and, having overwhelmed those, was currently searching for something he could use for Prance. The light breeze from overhead was helping to shift the paperwork piles.

"It's all done."

He glanced at the nearest clock. Nodded.

"And I was just wondering," the weather coordinator added, "why it's clockwork? I'm from Cloudsdale. I know the Barnyard Bargains there like I know my own tail. They don't use clockwork fans. They've got an internal air current set up to go around the aisles exactly. Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. But there's nothing like that here. Just... gears."

It was a fair question, and so he did his best to answer.

"Because we're a franchise operation, Rainbow," he helpfully told her. "With stores all over the continent. And we still want every city to believe their Barnyard Bargains is theirs alone. So in the name of having ponies feel at home... things become a little variable. The stores in Windicity, Las Pegasus -- they use your kind of magic, because that's what pegasi are comfortable with. But Canterlot and Thaumington have unicorn majorities in their populations, so those stores focus on devices whenever possible. Enchanted fans, ones which turn themselves -- but they still need recharging. And Ponyville was founded by earth ponies. They're still the majority. So for Ponyville -- it's clockwork. It's just part of how we try to fit into every settled zone. Because in Cloudsdale, the clockwork would be what was strange. Unnatural. And so for your home --"

Her home was Ponyville, and had been for several years. But on a subconscious level, he recognized that some part of the pegasus had never fully come to ground.

"-- it's pegasus techniques," he partially repeated. "And vapor walls, of course. Except for part of the loading dock, because we installed a balloon landing platform. It's easier for ponies to drop off vertical shipments when they don't drop out."

She thoughtfully nodded.

(And that was three.)

"But it takes forever to wind the spring," she noted. "A whole hour! And forty pages. But that's an hour, Mr. Rich. An hour ponies could be using for other things. Like the next forty pages. Oh, and tell Receivables that I put the marker back."

"Arguably," he nodded. "But it's a reliable system: my father purchased that one, and we've never had to do more than replace a gear now and again. Additionally, devices and wonders need unicorns and pegasi to recharge them, but anypony can wind the mainspring. It's equality of a sort. It's also the town's heritage."

Her expression briefly suggested that it was also an hour.

"But pegasus techniques are more flexible. That's why the spa uses them, to have an ice bath in one place and a sauna for another! And for the store, in the winter --"

"-- we passed the furnace," he reminded her. "A lot of ponies like to stand under the blowers inside the front door, just enjoying that first blast of heat." With a little smile, "I've seen you do that."

She smiled back, and withdrew from the doorway. He went back to work.

...and that's the diorama sets sorted out. At least for what they've been able to locate of their contents: he suspected the lions would only be seen when somepony completely emptied the shelves, and the sheer skid distance for the smaller animals meant those shelves were probably in Stable Furnishings. I wasn't expecting everything to take quite that long. Something over an hour since she'd peeked in -- but it was an hour closer to closing and, more to the immediate point, the end of Rainbow's first shift.

He had to find something she could do: even in midsummer, the fans typically only needed winding once per day. And...

...I feel like I'm insulting her.

She's a Bearer. Whatever else she's done, she's a Bearer. Putting her on strict menial labor...

But her personality wasn't the type which naturally interacted with strangers: the prank wars proved she could have difficulty with those who were closest. There was no way he was putting her into the Complaints department, especially after she'd become its one-day focus. Stocking shelves meant giving her the chance to rearrange them, and he would have originally thought that problem was the exclusive domain of Ms. Sparkle.

Home deliveries?

There were a few, mostly to seniors who had standing orders and were no longer capable of picking up their own shopping. It just wasn't enough to fill an entire work shift. Still, it at least allowed her to do something she would be comfortable with.

He took care of some paperwork, sorted a few Accounts Payable documents, checked for double-billed orders. Breathed slowly and deeply, taking in the cool air as the fan clicked overhead. Drawing strength from it, which almost made him feel like a pegasus --

-- the recognition of the change was instaneous, for it was a sound so familiar as to only be truly known by its absence.

The clicking had stopped.

He looked up, doing so just in time to see the blades grinding to a slow halt.

...what? She just wound that up --

Distant hooves could be faintly heard coming to sudden stops all over the store. Ponies knowing something had changed, trying to figure out what was wrong...

She just wound that up.

He couldn't fly. The backblast of his abrupt departure still scattered papers all over the floor.

He found her in Cookery and for anypony who knew anything about Rainbow, it could be argued as the last time. Proudly staring up at still fans, as the cool breeze swirled through the store.

"Rainbow --" was all she would let him say before those beaming features turned to happily look at him.

"Isn't it great? I took initiative, Mr. Rich! I improved the store! Because I kind of understood what you were saying about heritage and everything, except where it got boring. But we're a mixed town now, and we should use mixed methods! So I told everypony I was flying in order to make things better, and then I got up by the ceiling and set up the new airflow system! It's just like the one the weather team uses for Ponyville! Only a little straighter, because the aisles don't wind like some of the streets do. And there aren't as many open spaces. Plus it's a lot more compressed. But I did it! An entire airflow system fit into one store!"

The cool breeze was now whipping through his mane. It then sluiced across the shelves, just before taking a hard left.

"And I knew it was possible to do one that way, because that's how the Cloudsdale store works!" she added, raising her volume somewhat to get past the sound of Stevedore flinging his body across the magazine display before any more of it could escape.

A missed issue of Mare Fashions Moonly whipped past his face, and the three brain cells which weren't getting ready to scream made a note to let Rarity know her fake purchase was in. Then he remembered that it was a fake purchase because she had a subscription to it and every other trade magazine on the continent, and decided not to bother.

"So I sort of reverse-thaumgineered it," Rainbow continued, gazing up with renewed pride as her badge was blown to the right. "Based on how I thought it worked, because it's not like I looked at the store's system too closely. I was just a kid: who knew I was gonna need that? But I'm the weather coordinator around here, right? I'm pretty sure I squeezed everything in. Plus I took some cues from the spa, for when the humidity starts going up."

A dark wisp of solidifying humidity took its cue and went up, drifting directly past Mr. Rich's snout along the way.

"That's a lot of noise coming from the toy aisle," the trainee noted. "Is there something in there which makes a sound like a bunch of kids galloping? Because if there is, I missed it."

"Ms. Dash --"

The first thunderhead fully coalesced and, just for the sake of irony, did so around the nearest motionless ceiling fan.

"Oh," Rainbow softly said. "Okay. Maybe that should have been a left tug in the weave --"

The first aid section destraightened itself. Most of Linen went airborne. Cookery, as the section with the most open metal, was abandoned entirely. And Rainbow did what she always did, what she would always do for all of her time under Sun.

She took off, and the world blurred.

The elderly black-furred pony paused in front of the huge front windows.

There were times when lighting conditions could turn glass reflective, block the view of whatever was on the other side. He just didn't expect to encounter that kind of situation at a given Sunlit hour, and he hadn't. He couldn't see through the windows because the water running down the inner surface was distorting the view.

He glanced back at the crowd of ponies, all of whom had decided to keep a distance of forty body lengths between themselves and the store. (This just happened to be the radius requested by its owner on a discarded document, but he'd already dismissed that from his memory.) Some of them were still dripping.

The doors were before him, and he pushed one open.

He was not a particularly imaginative pony, at least not in any way which didn't relate to what he saw as Justice. He would have had a hard time describing what he saw before him, especially as the lighter portions were still moving in a swirling pattern.

Several wayward linens draped themselves across his back. A few crockpots sparked, then harmlessly discharged. One small plush toy landed at his forehooves, declared "H-h-appy!" and finally did the best thing it would ever accomplish by breaking on the spot. And a tight knot of soaked, shivering employees was gathered near the registers.

"Is everypony accounted for?" a middle-aged stallion's voice asked.

"All staff," an older mare declared. "I took a customer count as Rainbow was getting them out. They're evacuated."

"Is anypony hurt?" a younger female frantically checked. "Did I get to --"

"-- we're fine," said a stallion of matching age. "Wet, but -- fine. Thanks, Rainbow."

Rainbow, thought the old black-furred male, which made for a rather remarkable occasion because that meant he'd just had a bench-free one.

"I think I got most of the weave untangled," the younger, familiar-sounding mare panted. "The wind, anyway. The moisture's gonna stay up against the windows until I can break that up again. But I can't do anything about the runoff. I'm... I'm..." It was possible to hear her swallow. "I'm sorry..."

One mare, who presumably worked in what was left of the Photography section, immediately took a picture.

"Nopony's hurt," said the middle-aged stallion. "That's because of you."

"Everypony almost got hurt because of me --"

"-- you're a lot of things, Ms. Dash," the stallion wearily went on. "I've learned that today. It's a lesson I won't forget, especially when you just demonstrated the most important one. I'm thankful for that, and it's why I'm not as angry as I could be." He paused. "That and the shock. Plus intimate knowledge of how the disaster relief forms work, especially as applies to Bearer activities. You're a lot of things -- but when it comes to retail --"

"-- who's responsible for this?"

Most of the staff turned to look at him, and several dozen forelegs instinctively jabbed at an exposed cyan pegasus prismatic mare.

He took a breath.

"I told you I would be checking on you! And this is what I find? This is how you demonstrate discipline? Clearly you need extra judgment! As soon as I reach my courtroom again, I am sentencing you to work at this store for the rest of your life!"

The young adult mare and middle-aged stallion looked at each other. Not at him. Each other.

And then they moved.

"What time is it?" somepony asked.

"Three fifty-two. If that clock's still working. Why?"

"Maybe you remember the rules. Does this count as a win?"

"Does the defendant have anything to say before we pronounce sentence?" asked the middle judge of the three sitting on the long bench.

The defendant, who hadn't looked up for the last two hours, continued to regard the floor.

"We'll take that as a no," the left-side mare declared. "Would the plaintiffs like a last word?"

Mare and stallion looked at each other.

"No, your honors," the stallion said, and did so while silently wishing it hadn't come to this.

"We're good," the mare added, nosing a recently-signed document over to the stallion as she did so. "Completely."

"Very well," the stallion on the right decided. "In that case --"

Three furious stares simultaneously focused on the defendant's bench.

"Judge Overreach," declared the center-seated head of the nation's Judicial Review Board, "after spending four days sorting through your cases, in the last seconds when I can call you by that title at all, I would like to ask you a question. What the buck were you thinking?"