Diamond Tiara And The Economics Of Love

Chapters

Notice Of Intent
Confounding Interest
Business Year In Review
Market Research
No-Wage Slave
Moon Is Raised And She Wants To Go Home
What Color Is Your Ocean?
Company Shakeup
Organization Disruption
Happenstance, Coincidence...
...Enemy Action
On-Hoof

Notice Of Intent

She would always remember exactly what she'd been doing at the moment when her daddy started to give her The Talk.

Not the one about sex. Diamond had decided she knew all about that. Which was entirely to her own credit, because it wasn't as if there had been very much information offered up in class. This actually hadn't been Miss Cheerilee's fault: the school board had been oddly squeamish about allowing any actual details to reach the single available lecture, and it had apparently taken some fairly major blunders in back-of-the-schoolhouse nuzzling attempts for any of the adults to change their minds. Diamond had decided the best way to truly learn was through performing her own investigations and, after closing the last of the scant books offered up by the librarian, concluded that it was way too early for her to be worrying about personally attempting any of it. Also that when she was ready, she was clearly going to be extremely choosy. It was the sort of decision which required a lot of advance preparation. There was a deep-down, rather frustrated portion of her which was hoping that the party who was theoretically being prepared would eventually notice.

So she didn't need to receive that kind of lecture from her daddy and all things considered, she much preferred to spare him the embarrassment of having to attempt it. Especially since Diamond had gone to a lot of trouble in translating from the academic & biological and accordingly, probably knew more than he did.

It wasn't the sex talk. It wouldn't take very long into the real talk before she would start to wish for the educational version. As an improvement.

Where was she, when the disaster officially launched itself off the precipice? In the new dining room on a cold winter night, having a hot dinner with her daddy. They usually ate alone, because it was just the two of them. It always had been.

Well... not really, not if she was going to think about what had clearly taken place in order for her to be present at all. There had been a time which preceded 'always' and unlike the bulk of history, it had been a period which Diamond had actually been present for. A factor which made it important.

But all she could remember was two.

Strictly speaking, that wasn't quite right. Cameo had a place at the table, because a pet needed to eat and one who was loved was going to do so in close proximity to her pony. Diamond had investigated the offerings made by those who created custom furnishings for dollhouses, paid for some rescaling, and now Cameo ate dinner with them. Of course, for a jeweled scarab, that was mostly a blend of exotic grasses and strange roots added to foreign leaves and stems. Diamond grew all of it herself, because Saddle Arabian plants could flourish under an earth pony's care -- which clearly required some personal attention. And it didn't hurt to have the miniature plates match the rest of the table's settings.

Silver slept over sometimes: something which had started fairly early in their friendship, and maintained to the current day. There had also been a pair of more recent, fairly occasional additions on top of that: two laughing presences who tended to make dinners a little more messy and, because asking boys to fully control themselves was a lost cause, quite a bit louder. The servants ate with them on special occasions, or if there was something to talk about. And very rarely, her daddy would invite a businesspony to dine with them, because he was trying to establish a relationship and there was something about fresh bread which seemed to help.

Then there had been an... 'interruption' was something of an understatement. And once the reconstruction side of that had resolved, another filly had occasionally began to turn up at the table.

Five factors which could change the numbers. But there had been a period of several moons during which the third and fourth had never applied and the first two had felt oddly awkward, because it was sort of hard to invite ponies over to dinner when you weren't eating at your own residence. And during the time in which they've been staying with others, there would be four ponies at the table, sometimes five, there was a chance for six and once you took the visitors out, that was family.

Maybe that was what counted. (For the Belles, the number went up to four.) And when it came to family...

Diamond loved her father. He cared about her more than anypony else in the world. Each was the only pony whom the other had in the world.

That meant something.

Two. For ponies, it was two.

It wasn't supposed to be two. Something had happened, and -- Diamond didn't remember. She hadn't even been a year old yet: she had an excuse. But it was just like every other portion of history: when it came to making things official, her witnessing presence somehow wasn't required. Most of the world insisted on operating without her direct supervision and as with what had taken place shortly after her birth, it had proven that when left to itself, it made very poor decisions. Diamond and her father had to live with the results.

Two. The two of them together. Always. Two.

It wasn't the way it should have been. But that was how it was. Two worked, because each could give all of their love to the other.

Her daddy should have understood.

The new dining room, as with the majority of the fresh structure, had come out somewhat smaller. Diamond's bedroom was one of the few exceptions: she was growing up, and her daddy had decided that she needed a little more space to suit. The conservatory was roughly the same size, and the new flower clock at the side of the building had been exactingly replanted. But her daddy had decided that they didn't really need a ballroom, because it wasn't as if they were really ever going to have any formal dances: a somewhat smaller area for potential parties was enough. Some storage space had shrunk, a number of unused closets had been outright eliminated, and the dining room no longer featured a table which required anypony who entered at the far end while carrying hot food to worry about the dish becoming cold along the way. It was a dining room where you didn't have to shout, which was sort of a shame because Diamond had once found entertainment in tracking the echoes. Not that the boys had initially cared about that sort of thing, but then they'd both remembered about burping and once that had happened, a happy investigation into the science of sonics had officially been under way.

(Burping had been the soft option. You had to put up with a lot, when you had boys over and both of them frequently forgot the rather basic fact that they were visiting a girl. This irritated Diamond, because she really needed one of them to acknowledge that. Or ideally, both: she was only working on true preparation for one, but having both of them recognize the fundamentals of biology would allow for mutual reminders.)

With the new building... they didn't really live in a mansion any more. More of a fairly large house with some guest sleeping areas and a couple of special function rooms. But her daddy had said there was really too much space for a pair of ponies, a few servants, and one jeweled scarab who, while effectively having the run of the place, still spent a lot of time in what Diamond was hoping would be officially acknowledged as the world's most elaborate terrarium.

Maybe that was part of what had started him thinking about it. Space. Because Diamond's new bedroom was somewhat larger -- but her daddy's was still the same size.

He'd purchased the same kind of bed...

They were wrapping up dinner, and Cameo had already started on dessert. Diamond liked to watch her companion tuck into dessert, because doing so meant the jeweled scarab was healthy. Also, she was especially proud of the tiny nectar trough.

Her daddy reared up a little from his bench, and the right forehoof pushed a plate aside.

"Diamond?"

She looked up, and... he looked tired. Her daddy often did, because there were fifteen stores in the franchise --

-- sixteen soon: Appleloosa's branch was only a few weeks away from opening -- there had been a delay -- they were probably going to travel there for the occasion and Diamond wasn't sure what to bring for a trip to the desert, but Cameo would probably love the heat --

-- fifteen stores (going on sixteen), with a single stallion responsible for every last one of them. The stores and, ultimately, everypony who worked there.

He'd been talking to Diamond about that part over the last few moons. What it felt like to know that the normalcy of so many lives depended on his finding a way to succeed. The weight of it. There was a tremendous responsibility there, and... trying to fulfill it made him tired. He wanted her to truly understand, because she was going to take over someday and she needed to be ready.

Her daddy's talent was for business. He found ways to haul the burden. Diamond...

...he looked tired. He often did. But there was also quite a bit of worry there, and Diamond was sure it wasn't due to anything she'd personally done. (Not recently, anyway.) Weariness, concern, and... lurking under it all, as if unsure as to whether it could fully peek out and make itself known, an odd sort of anticipation.

"Daddy?" she asked, because that was usually a good way to let him know that she was ready to listen.

His head dipped for a moment. The brown chin nearly hit the table, and his mane seemed to sag under its own weight. But then he looked up, and a weary, worried blue gaze looked over her face.

"I'm going to try something tomorrow," her father said. "Something I... haven't done in a very long time." And sighed. "Honestly, Diamond, I think it's --" paused, and his right foreleg lifted. Bent in, until the hoof touched his bare neck. The place where the tie rested, on the increasingly-rare occasions when he bothered to wear one.

She used the opportunity to check on the leg. It had healed nicely. Multiple moons of rubbing in burn cream had eventually done the trick.

"'I'm'," he corrected. "Not 'it's'. I think I'm going to fail. Because..." and the laugh was short without being sharp, almost embarrassed about being caught out in public at all. "...of course I'm going to fail. Why wouldn't this not work?"

She was already worried: a quick side glance at Cameo found feelers moving with equal confusion. The scarab could pick up on moods, and -- her daddy allowed Cameo to ride upon his mane, every now and again. He was always so careful when moving around the house, forever on the lookout for where the insect was...

Her daddy was worried. Really worried.

It was probably some kind of new business deal. A rookie supplier asking for a partnership: that happened sometimes, and the results weren't always positive. There were times when he just needed somepony to listen, and Diamond was willing.

It was also possible that he was looking for a fresh perspective. Advice. But his mark was for business, and hers wasn't.

"I don't know," Diamond carefully said. "You haven't told me what it is yet. Maybe if I heard..."

He nodded.

"I wanted you to know before I tried," he told her. "No matter how it worked out, so it wouldn't be a surprise one way or the other."

It was her turn to nod. (Cameo's carapace briefly lifted, and wings spun a dance of light.) And then she watched him searching for words, looking within and without to find the right ones.

He usually didn't do that. Her daddy almost always knew what to say.

A seventeenth franchise?
His tail was starting to twist on itself.
This was going to be big --

"As much as anything else," her daddy began, "this is because of --" hesitated, and now he was watching her shoulders. Her ears, and then her tail. Checking for a reaction. "-- Tirek."

Diamond didn't shudder. It had been moons, and... she was getting better.

"He was the wake-up call," he eventually continued, after visibly reassuring himself as to her continued calm and forward-rotated ears. "A reminder. That we all only have so much time, Diamond. Nopony can know when theirs will run out." It was only a half-smile upon his face now: wry, but -- sad. Mourning. "And when you live here..."

She blinked.

"Are we moving?"

Everything she knew was here. Everypony --

"No," he quickly reassured her. With a much lighter laugh, "Especially not so soon after putting together a new house. Ponyville is home, Diamond. And with -- Tirek -- most of the business owners in the local Association grouse about what having the Bearers here does to repair bills, and all of the reconstruction. But he came here because eventually, he was going to go everywhere. He'd finished with Canterlot, and we were..."

There's a giant shadow over our bodies. It's shaped like a hoof.
I'm weak. I can't really move. She's next to me, and I can't lead her out from under the shadow. I can't get her to safety.
I can't do anything.
My daddy is racing towards us. I'm screaming at him, telling him to stay away. His forelegs are soggy and burned at the same time, because he was in Canterlot when it started and he didn't know how to make the train's boiler work right. He shouldn't be able to move at all and he's galloping and the shadow is coming down and

But she wouldn't react. Not while he was watching her. She didn't want him to see her shiver. Shake. Ever. Because that scared him.

And she was... getting better. She really was.

"We were convenient," he finished. "The next thing he could drain. That was all."

Diamond was sure that it hadn't looked as if she'd forced the nod. She was good at that sort of thing.

The really hard part was in being as good as she thought she was. Or... needed to be.

"Everypony came through it," her daddy said. "We came through it --" and then his head dipped again. "No. Everypony here saw Sun rise again. There were those in Canterlot who can't say the same. Who... can't say anything, Diamond."

Her eyes closed. Then she felt a minimal, familiar mass alight upon her mane, and she opened them again.

It was her mane, these days. She was still trying to decide if she wanted a new tiara. The last one had been a gift, just about the final thing she'd done during the giant centaur's attack was arrange for it to be presented to a crack in the giant hoof, and...

...she didn't know.

"Only so much time." This smile was sad, small, and -- almost timid. "And I thought... if Miss Fluttershy could somehow find a way to manage the feat with Miss Dis Lee, when that might have taken a different monster attack to fully ignite..."

The temperature of Diamond's blood dropped by fifty degrees.

She was amazed that Cameo had stayed with her. The jeweled scarab, so far from her birth home, liked it hot. (Diamond put a lot of effort into maintaining the heat lamps in the terrarium, and she frequently kept her room considerably warmer than the usual. It typically left her sleeping on top of the sheets, but -- you did a lot for the ones you loved.) Having the support's internal flow spontaneously convert to slurry should have sent the insect fleeing towards the nearest vent.

He's talking about --

"There's this mare," her father slowly said.

Several key bones were now laced with ice. Diamond, unable to move, waited to see which ones shattered first.

"And," her daddy wearily added, "I've... been lonely for a long time --"

"I'm here!" Diamond desperately pushed into the world. "I'll always --"

This time, his foreleg reached across the table, and the hoof gently rubbed at the base of her ears.

"It's not the same."

It wasn't as big a table as it had once been. Her daddy sat at the head of it, and Diamond was just around the right corner.

"There's different kinds of lonely, Diamond," said the one she loved. "I just told myself that it was... natural, after a while. That anypony I looked at... if they looked back, all they would be seeing was bits. There was no point in searching, because any mare who was smiling at a mound of metal wasn't worth the effort. And... it didn't feel like there was much of a chance for getting one to see me. I got lucky once. Just once. And... that was more luck than some ever have. I didn't have the right to look again, not after..."

He stopped. His foreleg dropped down, and... he looked so tired...

She kept her eyes on him. Diamond wasn't entirely sure she had the strength to move her head anyway, and if she turned --

-- they had guests sometimes. Arranged along the table. And some of them got close. But...

Don't look at the other side.
Don't look where nopony ever sits.

And then her father turned his head.

He looked at that spot. Exactly that spot, and continued to regard it for ten endless heartbeats before facing his only daughter again.

"I told myself that," he informed the lone foal. "I told myself a lot of things. And then I had a wake-up call, Diamond. I'm lonely. I'd... like to try."

She tried to find words. Anything she could say, do, muster which would stop it. Two syllables desperately moved forward.

"A mare."

Those clearly hadn't been the right ones.

"A very distinctive mare," was accompanied by a decidedly awkward smile. "Even beautiful in some ways..."

The words felt familiar --

-- memory sparked and in doing so, ignited the fire of panic.

oh no

"But you probably just think of her as the mailmare," her daddy added.

Her stomach was now ablaze and her blood hadn't defrosted. Diamond had no idea how that worked.

"So did I, for a while. Especially because it's taken a surprising amount of effort to learn her name," he ruefully mentioned. "I've had less trouble running down the real addresses for a few failed enterprises, and that was with ponies who were trying to hide. At this point, I'm just hoping I actually have it right."

say something, say anything, stop this

It was like trying to use her talent on herself. It felt as if something should have been happening, and yet all she could do was just sit there and listen while the world cracked and everything started to fall apart --

"I wanted you to know, before I tried," her father kindly added. "To warn you. But... Diamond, if this somehow works... I need to keep you out of it for a while. Because..." The hesitation stretched out for a while, and Cameo's wings emerged: the downdraft shifted two whole strands of Diamond's mane. "...you've -- said things to her."

Well, of course she had! She'd seen the mailmare, and when just about anypony got a look at that wandering right eye --

-- Diamond had... said a lot of things. To a lot of ponies. And apologizing was hard. Feeling contrite had become sort of natural, but she still had trouble looking that way. Diamond had Resting Superiority Face and hadn't really seen it as being a problem. And when it came to being properly sorry -- exactly how was she supposed to remember every single inspired (and usually brilliant) comment she'd ever made? She kept coming across those for whom she'd just misplaced the offenses, and it felt as if the fallout was never-ending.

She needed somepony who could both keep track of it all and book apology appointments. Her very own Secretary Of Insults. But Silver hadn't been there for everything, and it was usually just Diamond trying to remember exactly what she'd said. Followed by trying to figure out a new spin on 'sorry', because that was a word which had never been meant to do so much work.

"If she says no," her father hastily kicked in, "it's not necessarily because of you."

He was an honest businesspony. He always stressed the importance of remaining so, and did his best to be ethical in all things. It was good for the business, helpful in the community and in Diamond's opinion, didn't make him into a particularly good liar.

"Truthfully," the adult added. "I think she's going to say no. And that she would have said it anyway, possibly to anypony who asked." Wryly, "Telling myself that might make the upcoming rejection feel less personal. But... I want to try, Diamond." The smile slowly worked its way in, then noticed where it was and fled for its life. "I finally want to try again. I haven't felt that way for a very long time, and... maybe that's worth something all by itself. And I wanted to warn you either way." He took an exceptionally deep breath. "Because I'm going to do it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," his daughter just barely managed to echo.

He nodded. "The asking. Not the results." Even the chuckle sounded weary. "Not that I'm expecting results. But I've got the day shift at the store. I'll be there when she brings in the mail, and I'll make sure there's some privacy. One way or another... at least I'll have asked." Ruefully, "I've been putting this off for half a moon. And that included telling you, because I didn't want to try until you knew."

Blue eyes carefully focused on her frozen features.

"You're okay with this, aren't you?" rippled across her body in waves of open concern.

Say something.
Anything.
Anything...

She tried to force a grimace of pain into speaking for her, the inadequate results cracked into something which faintly resembled a thin smile.

"...it's just... trying," she finally voiced. "You try a lot of things. It's like any new items you bring into the store. Some of them work out. Some of them don't."

Good. That was a start. Now she just needed a followup which would definitively explain why this particular mare had been destined to go into the Clearance bin --

"-- thank you," her father exhaled. "Thank you, Diamond. For understanding."

I don't --

But then he was rubbing at the base of her ears again. And The Talk was over.

She allowed that rubbing, because she loved him and it was how he showed how much he cared. But it still took one of the greatest acts of willpower she'd mustered in her life simply to get through dessert. And once that was over, she just barely kept control over her own body long enough to reach the nearest bathroom.

...it was a new house. She'd thought it was the nearest bathroom.

The coat closet had mostly been empty. Getting rid of the residual scent still took an hour.

It was absolutely not a rant. Her daddy had told her that one of the best ways to see how a plan truly sounded was to describe the details out loud, and do so in front of an audience. Watching their reactions was a good way to figure out whether you actually had something viable, and that meant marching back and forth in her bedroom while declaiming the whole of it was nothing more than giving a presentation.

Additionally, Cameo was extremely attentive and could be presumed to agree with everything Diamond said. So there.

"Dating! It's been just the two of us for years --"

The jeweled scarab reared up against the front glass wall of the terrarium. Four of the six golden legs waved at Diamond.

"-- three," Diamond generously corrected. "Now it's three. But you haven't been here that long." Almost smugly, "And for ponies, it's still two. That's counting properly." She made the turn by the textbook-occupied cabinet, and the streaks in her tail angrily lashed across the spine of bound centuries. "Dating...!"

You couldn't trust the majority of adults. That was a simple fact, because most of them had no idea how to think properly. Her daddy was one of the rare exceptions and even then, he'd been through some failures. Diamond wasn't entirely sure what happened to ponies during the maturation process to make their brains mostly stop working, but she had figured out that she needed to be on perpetual guard against any signs of deterioration in herself. Frequent self-checks would probably be enough.

There were certain things she trusted her father to do. 'Run a business' was high on that list. But when it came to dating...

How could anypony trust him to date? There was no way she could rely on him to find somepony! Frankly, it had clearly been something of a miracle that he'd managed it the first time around --

-- actually...
...he hadn't.

"The first time I saw her?"

The filly listened. She rested at her father's forehooves within the sunlit glass conservatory, ears rotated forward, and drank in the past.

He took a few breaths. Looked out the window, stared across the years, and then focused on his daughter.

"She was trotting across the Gate. That was what we called the open space between the college buildings in Vanhoover, Diamond. The Gate, because -- if you finished school, and walked out for the last time -- you were supposed to feel like you could go anywhere. The gate which led to the rest of the world."

The flower clock was visible through the glass. Her father kept it going, every year. Something which was hard for him, because his magic wasn't as refined as that of the mare who'd first planted it. He didn't have the same level of fine control. But he did everything he could.

"I started keeping track, without really knowing that I was doing so. We didn't share any classes, but -- some of the ones we were each attending started and let out at the same time. She walked across the Gate three days out of five. After a while, I started to figure out which class she was leaving. What her major was. And I kept waiting to see her trotting with a stallion. Or different mares, or trotting a little closer to one of them. Because there had to be somepony who'd already tried. There had to be."

The filly resolved to ask what a 'major' was. Later. Much, much later. And she felt her tiara grow warm, and she listened.

Halfway between speech and whisper, "I saw her for about two minutes, three times a week. And I was trying to think of what to say, when everypony in the world must have said it to her before. Somepony must have found the right words long before I did. And I was just this plain brown stallion whose self-worth began and ended with a bank account which I was afraid to mention to anypony, just in case that was the only thing they saw about me. You'll... have to be very careful about that, Diamond. When the time comes."

What did she have to be careful about? She hadn't even started school yet and the filly knew she was going to have plenty of bits. Money was power. Why wouldn't she want ponies to know she was powerful?

"I was afraid to tell anypony my name."

That was just silly. Her father was a very silly pony. That was one of the reasons she loved him.

"It was two weeks before she changed course. She went into a light gallop before I could move. And then she was right in front of me."

He was smiling. But his eyes were wet. You weren't supposed to feel both ways at the same time.

"She said one of us had to start this relationship and it clearly wasn't going to be me."

Obviously.

Softly, "I couldn't move. I just... stood there. I couldn't believe it was happening at all. I had to be dreaming. I kept waiting to wake up, and she... went behind me. I thought I'd lost my chance. That if it had been real, I'd lost the only hope I'd ever had."

Except that it hadn't worked out that way, because the filly was there to listen --

A little ruefully, "Then she bit down on the end of my tail."

The filly giggled.

"She just about dragged me for the first three hoofsteps. She was that strong. You get that more from her than me. I started moving just because I wanted my dock to stay attached."

The giggles kept coming.

"There were ponies all over the Gate, staring at us. She acted like none of them were there at all. And she kept pulling until I started to move with her. But she didn't let go until we were in the student union, at the cafeteria."

There was more moisture on his eyes.
Then it was being absorbed by his fur.
She didn't want to make her father cry. Not ever --

"She tried to buy me lunch." And the laugh was soft. "She said... with the way I groomed myself, trying not to stand out at all... I probably didn't have the bits for a good lunch. Because she didn't know who I was. I saw her reaction when she finally found who my father was, Diamond. From about six hoofwidths away. She never had a clue until that moment, especially when I would only say my name was Fil. She paid that day, and..."

The fur was saturated now. Moisture fell onto the filly's face.

"...I guess you could say that I spent the next few years trying to pay her back..."

...which proved that he wasn't capable of dating. Somepony else had seized his reins, and that had been an entirely sensible decision because if it hadn't been made, then the world would currently be suffering from a total lack of Diamond.

Worse: the world wouldn't even know what it was missing out on. And there would be nopony around to make sure things were done properly.

He was lonely? Well, she understood that. He'd said that this had started because of Tirek, and the centaur's attack had triggered multiple varieties of madness. Some of them were clearly ongoing. Diamond was getting better, but her father had obviously been wounded more deeply than she'd originally suspected. She would have to keep a closer eye on him. Because for him to consider dating --

-- the mailmare...
...no, seriously: the mailmare?

Diamond pictured the pegasus. It took an effort to move her internal attention away from the right eye.

He could do better.

Not that he had to. He already had Diamond in his life. When it came to not being lonely, that was clearly enough for anypony.

It's not as if he could do any worse. She's clumsy and she blunders into things and she's always setting off lightning, I think she's broken as many things as Sweetie and the other two combined and it's not as if anypony calls her on it.

She wouldn't understand if they did call her on it, because she also talks like she's the stupidest mare in the world.

Why her?

Diamond thought about it.

The most obvious conclusion was that her father had no taste. The more charitable version decided that a decade-plus of not considering anypony at all had resulted in a certain amount of atrophy.

"Atrophy," she said aloud, and then spent three minutes explaining it all to Cameo. Wings buzzed in an appreciative manner. "And it's not just that..."

Powerful legs bent, gathered power, and Diamond leapt onto her bed. Mattress springs creaked against the impact of earth pony density. Her mane, disrupted by the force of the landing, sprawled across the covers.

"He'd be thinning out resources," Diamond realized, and the shock of it nearly sent her tail straight.

Cameo was looking at her.

"Love exists," Diamond carefully instructed. "That's obvious. And it's an exchange." She reconsidered that. "Potentially, anyway. If you give love, then you have a chance to get love. So if it works out, then there's love going back and forth. But Cameo... if anything exists, then..."

The adolescent hesitated.

"...it exists in a finite quantity. You can't have a demand without a limited supply." With somewhat more confidence, "That's business. And if he... there's only so much, and..."

The math didn't work. Anypony should have been able to recognize that and somehow, her father hadn't seen the divisor lurking within the equation.

Diamond would be getting less.

Unacceptable.

She stared at her companion. Tiny claws sympathetically moved against the glass.

Diamond held position on the mattress for a while. (It was new. Everything in the room was new, because it had to be.) Thought.

"It won't work," she finally said. "He thinks she'll say no. She's too dumb to understand the question. So it'll be a no." (This was internally repeated a few times, for reinforcement.) "But... just in case..."

She carefully climbed down from her bed. Moved over to the balcony door, pushed it open, and quickly stepped out into the cold winter air. The glass was hastily slid shut behind her: Cameo didn't need the exposure.

Diamond gazed up at Moon.

There were a few adults who claimed that only foals prayed. And in Diamond's opinion, some prayers were in fact pointless. It was obvious that the Princesses never heard anything unless you were standing a few body lengths away and even then, they couldn't always do much.

But if you were really going to try, then you had to seek a greater power. And when it came to this level of potential crisis, it was crucial to call in any potentially available resources.

"No," she told the orb. "It has to be a 'No'. So make that happen."

And then she went back inside, planned to arrange for her daddy's favorite meal after the next day's rejection because he would clearly need some extra comfort, and went to bed.

Diamond typically got home from school well before her father finished the day shift. It let her meet him at the door, with the appetizer tray already balanced on her back.

He was glad to see her.

He had some news.

Diamond listened.

She immediately resolved not to speak to Moon for a week.

Confounding Interest

She'd mostly decided to forgive Moon by the time she headed for bed, because it wasn't a good idea to close out a potential resource after a single mistake. Additionally, there was every chance that the orb had simply been busy, or -- distracted. Logically, there had to be at least several thousand sapients making requests on any given night, and that number felt as if it was assuming that the traffic in prayers was fairly slow. It was possible that Moon had simply lost her specific request in the flood.

Of course, by not keeping itself attuned to her potential needs at all times, Moon had potentially demonstrated a severe and immediate need to resort its priorities.

Diamond did have other options. Outsourcing was something her father generally frowned upon -- but in this case, it was just making sure to remember that Sun was also out there, and presumably listening. There was just the minor issue of a more limited access period, because it was winter and Moon had the majority of the hours.

Diamond could theoretically try to get Sun's attention at night. It was just a matter of facing in the right direction. Oh, and talking while having her snout just about pressed into the carpet. Plus she would essentially be trying to talk through a planet.

...multiple minor issues. And since the majority of her winter time under Sun was also spent under a schoolhouse roof, it was entirely possible that calling in extra cosmic reinforcements would need to wait for the weekend.

But for now, Diamond was back in her bedroom. She'd somehow managed to get through dinner following her father's announcement and judging by the feelings coming from her stomach, some portion of the meal was making a game attempt to get through her. In the proper direction, as opposed to what typically happened when she was especially upset. It was why she'd basically bolted the meal before nearly dashing from the table: because she was fully aware that her small intestine was going to need a head start.

(Her daddy had been thrilled to see his favorite foodstuffs awaiting him. He'd said that it put the perfect capper on the day.)

She was briefing Cameo. The jeweled scarab had been present in the dining room, but had missed everything at the front door. Diamond didn't like bringing Cameo to the front door in winter, just in case it stayed open a little too long.

"...and you didn't see his face! He was all stunned! Like he couldn't even believe that she'd said --" paused, then rethought everything as her tail began to lash across the pacing trail. "Maybe not stunned. Disbelieving.”

Hopeful.
Alive --

No. She couldn't let him get hurt. This wasn't just atrophy of taste: he was obviously no good at choosing, especially since he appeared to have never truly done it before. And it was the mailmare, somehow it was the mailmare and maybe he'd just been desperate enough to go for somepony whom he'd felt couldn't say no, possibly because she didn't understand what it meant...

The mailmare had said yes. Or... something which had been close enough. Her father had suggested that the pegasus was basically agreeing to give him a chance, and that felt especially insulting. Who did that mare think she was? Because when somepony as special as Diamond's daddy came along and somehow showed interest in that one, the intelligent thing to do was agree immediately...

Diamond softly groaned.

"I should have thought of that last night," she wearily told Cameo. "That she was going to say yes. She's not that dumb." With a sigh, "She's been in the store. She buys things. And if she can buy things and count her change, then she knows what money is. And that Daddy has lots."

...maybe he'd just asked her because he was starting all over again and it was sort of like training for sports? Clearing the lowest possible hurdle...

...except that he'd thought the pegasus would turn him down. And maybe that was lack of confidence (which wasn't something which her father normally displayed -- in public, anyway), but...

He'd brought the mailmare up once before, just before everything had gone wrong near the end of a school year. Said she was distinctive, even beautiful in some ways.

Her father had been thinking about this for a while. A half-buried concept, stored at the very back of the mind. And then Tirek had stomped a giant hoof, and every such thought had been jolted towards the front.

No. It's my love. She shouldn't get it.
And he isn't any good at this. He just about told me that.
He's going to get hurt...

With the mailmare involved, 'getting hurt' had a lot of options attached. Some of them involved lightning.

She groaned again. Her tail lashed against the bookcase: this told her that it was time to turn and pace back the other way.

"And he said that he wanted to talk about something else with me," Diamond added. "But that it could wait for a couple of days. And it wasn't bad." Of course, her father had thought that dating again -- at his age! --- wasn't bad...

...one nightmare at a time.

One Nightmare...

She thought about it --

-- no. It wasn't practical. She had a few more ponies available to try and wear necklaces, but she still couldn't get into the vault. Which was rather inconsiderate of the librarian, because the Elements were still being stored in a library and therefore, really should have been available for loan.

When you thought about it, there were a lot of things which might benefit from being blasted with magic. Things and people. Especially when you weren't quite sure what any given blast would do. The librarian considered herself to be a researcher, and she'd gone and locked away any real chance at extended practical group trials.

But it might just make the mailmare smarter. Prettier or, for those who had taste, make her pretty at all. More desirable...

Diamond fumed for a while. Then she tried talking it out with Cameo again. There was some more non-ranting involved, quite a bit of pacing, she eventually began to head-shove some furnishings around because it had just occurred to her that she might do better when moving in more of a circle and when that failed, she spared a moment for glaring at Moon. Not that she didn't intend to form a working relationship with the orb, but she wanted it to know that the startup stage wasn't exactly going well.

She tried to think, as her stomach churned and her tail lashed, while her tossing head somehow managed to feel oddly heavy and too light at the same time. Tried to think of a way to save her father from himself.

And nothing came.

Diamond's pacing came to a stop. Her eyes wearily closed.

"There's no helping it, Cameo," she sighed. "I know you're doing your best, but I think this is past your experience." It wasn't as if there were any male jeweled scarabs in Ponyville, and Diamond currently wasn't in a position to be considering future imports. "I have to bring in some consultants."

Getting ready for school, as an adolescent, took more work than it once had. And a lot more time. Fortunately, Diamond had her own bathroom.

She was still trying to settle on a new personal Look. One which wasn't centered around a... constant companion. Not so much an accessory as a metallic part of her body...

It's gone.

Her head felt strange without the tiara. Too light. And sometimes, too heavy.

It was the 'at the same time' moments which she had to watch out for.

She'd certainly been aware that she was growing up. Lengthening legs, picking up breadth in her torso, and she felt interesting things were talking place with her tail -- but she'd never really thought about her head getting bigger. Which made sense, because it was usually filled with large thoughts and they clearly needed the room. It was just that before it had been -- lost --

sacrificed

-- her tiara had been getting tight.

Diamond had considered having the tines resized. But then it wouldn't have quite been the original design, and... well, she could have just tried to weave them into her mane, letting the hair take all of the support -- but that wasn't quite the right level of security. And she was still growing. Eventually, she would have reached the point where the center didn't look proportionate, and after that...

There must have been a time when it was too big for me. But she didn't remember it. She felt as if it had always been just right for her, until just before the very end.

She hadn't picked out a new one, because... the original had been a gift. Something which was hers.

Then she had arranged for it to be regifted, as what she had intended to be a final act of contempt. Jammed into a crack within a giant hoof, in the hopes of causing infection. The last thing she could do before she...

...Discord had appeared.
Acted.
And as the stolen magic had been sent back to those sources which still lived, the monster had shrunk. That hoof had gotten smaller, the tiara hadn't, and...

It's gone.

Which, for full accuracy, needed a more specific definition.

It's dead.

So was Tirek.

There was an adolescent looking at Diamond from the mirror. Harsh blue eyes told her not to shiver.

Preparing for school...

She was trying out new manestyles and tail displays. The current version required straighter falls than the usual, without the little twists along the way. The intent was to show off the streaks. The intent was always to show off the streaks and because trying to get any definitive reaction from the intended audience was an exercise in frustration, Diamond switched it up every week.

After that, she had to get dressed. The Weather Bureau had arranged for what felt like an exceptionally cold winter, which was apparently making up for something: Diamond's best guess was that the local coordinator had slept through most of the subtle temperature downgrades, and now it all had to be done at once. But dealing with the conditions meant layering, and when you were an adolescent...

There was an undercoat. (This went directly over her own, much more natural coat, and did so with no recognition of irony.) This was followed by a thick, soft blue-grey jacket, and then she had to worry about slipping her hooves into the rack-mounted open leggings. Fore and hind.

She was armoring herself against the chill. Doing so meant that by the time she was finished, there was very little of Diamond left to regard. It was mostly her features -- along with her mane and tail. Because that was the idea. It was what she was supposed to be doing. And when it came to the true goal, the weather was her ally. She knew that for an absolute fact, because she'd studied.

Diamond felt herself to be getting better at the process with every successive icy dawn, and was still waiting for the acknowledgement which should show that any of it was actually working. And once she reached the point where her half-bound joints were only operating through a combination of earth pony strength and raw stubbornness...

Her father had already left for the store. Diamond told Cameo to stay warm, watch out for herself, and to be careful around the servants. And then she set out for school.

It was a new house, one which was noticeably smaller when regarded from the outside -- but it had been built on the original site. The first structure to occupy that space had been a mansion, and those demanded a lot of room. Getting enough acreage had required her grandfather to build outside the core of what had become Ponyville, and it meant geographically, Diamond's closest neighbors were the Apples. This was a fact which had once provided a convenient, localized target and, with the passage of time, now added the occasional touch of awkwardness to the school journey.

Apple Bloom didn't see any need to take a side path any more. The junior members of those families were sort of talking, but... it wasn't always easy to find subjects they could talk about. Even when there were a few things they had in common. Mutually-hoofpressed precious...

But she didn't see the youngest Malus during that particular trot.

Diamond had one of the longer journeys to school, and it started out on the old road: something which had been cut through the forest by ponies who insisted on having a few less trees to go around. Snow had been shoved off to the sides, and the older trunks were buried up to the height of Diamond's back. Some of the white had been distorted by dirt, along with showing a few yellow discolorations near the base because animals had to go somewhere.

(She'd once asked her father about personal carriages. Having a servant bring her in every day, and possibly even roll out a carpet to the schoolhouse door. The proposal had been rejected, and she'd been a little huffy about that for the next two moons of kindergarten. Really, she'd just been trying to create jobs. Well, one job. Although it was possible that the carpet would have required a specialist. But at least the trot helped her stay in shape.)

The plowing hadn't been perfect. There was usually a thin layer of dirty crust on the road, trying to attach itself to Diamond's leggings. She paused every so often and shook off whatever she could. Presenting a proper appearance was important, especially when she was waiting to find out if a given Look would actually work. And she had to keep trying. Even when she felt that success should have come by now. And even if she hadn't hit outright triumph dead center on the first attempt --

--or the second --
-- it shouldn't be taking anywhere near this long --
-- seriously: was there a crucial square hoofprint of fur which was the key to everything? Did she have to go so far as to cover her dock? Because tail wrapping might have felt like a logical next step to some, but she knew something about her target's general tastes and that would amount to pure self-sabotage --

-- she should have at least been getting some feedback...

Diamond muttered to herself: solitude allowed for that. And then she kept going.

It was a long trot just to reach the bridge which led into the core of Ponyville, and then she had to divert towards the schoolhouse. Diamond picked up her consultants along the way.

Silver was frowning, and naturally that meant the glasses slipped accordingly. The boys were visibly thinking everything over. (The majority of their thought processes tended to be visible, especially now that they were willing to be caught at it.) But Silver was the one who spoke first.

"And she really said yes?"

"Of course she did!" Diamond announced. "Why would anypony say no to him?"

"I just didn't think she'd say yes," Silver came very close to countering. "I mean, obviously she did, but... it just didn't feel like the sort of thing she'd say."

"What did you think she'd say?"

"Something about how she just doesn't know what went wrong."

They all trotted on for a while, doing so in full privacy -- well, at least when it came to ponies. Slipping away from the main streets and taking one of the wooded paths across the last part of the route gave them protection from adult eavesdroppers, but they couldn't do anything about the local animals. Still, Diamond considered them to be sufficiently protected. The caretaker might have understood anything relayed, but it would take exceptional circumstances to make her ask.

"How long until the date?" Snails checked.

There had been no special note of longing attached to the word 'date'. Diamond hadn't really expected one, and still took a private internal moment for fuming.

"A couple of days," she told him. "I don't know what he's actually doing, though." She'd have to find out.

"With the mailmare?" Snips considered through a half-grin. "Maybe he's just going to follow her around on her route. Help her sort packages. It's a cheap night out, right? And he can stay behind her the whole time!" Which triggered the laugh (and did so as Silver's snout wrinkled with disgust). "If that's what he's into..."

"It's my father," Diamond immediately said, and felt herself to be doing well by keeping the sneer out of it. "He can do something better than that. He can afford more than that."

Then again, he was clearly rubbish at choosing ponies to date. There wasn't necessarily any counterbalancing compensation when it came to the actual activity.

Snips just shrugged. "Movie?"

"He could buy out the cinema and have the whole place to himself!"

"Themselves," Snails dully corrected.

"Yeah..." Snips considered. "They could make all out they wanted!" Another laugh. "Nuzzling from the title screen through the closing credits, and no witnesses! Except for the projectionist, but ponies say Ms. Bayleaf is just looking for stuff she can do at home --"

Which was when the shorter boy finally noticed how the girls were reacting. (Diamond distantly wondered whether the tail lashing was doing anything for her streaks.)

"-- I'm just teasing ya, Diamond," he quickly said. "Just teasing."

She just barely managed a smile, and made sure to keep her lips together over tightly-pressed teeth.

The smaller colt slowed in his trot.

"It's a weird thought," he carefully admitted. "Parents dating. I mean, I know mine must've at some point. There's a wedding album. Mom keeps the binding perfect. And the corners. So if there's a wedding album, then they dated. To get that far. But I can't see it in my head. It's like trying to look at something slimy when Snails digs it up."

"Snips..." the taller boy automatically cautioned.

"Only it's actually gross."

They moved under low-hanging, slumbering branches. Snails had to duck.

Diamond lashed her tail again, just to see if he would pay any extra attention. (Or any attention.) Nothing happened. Snails was lost in thought, and not because it was unfamiliar territory.

"I can't really picture it either," he said. "It's not like my mom's trying anything yet." And shrugged. "Not that she's gonna. Since nothing's official."

Diamond offered a sympathetic nod.

'Trial separation.' Divorces weren't all that common, but... they happened. Snails' parents just weren't sure whether they were ready to take it that far. They were simply living apart for a while, and trying to sort things out. And when it came to Snails, her sympathy could be sincere -- but as far as she was concerned, his mother was on the potential verge of catching the luckiest break of her life. Diamond considered Lyon Gastrope to be one of life's assigned prizes, because something had to provide motivation for staying out of last place.

Snails had been taking it fairly well, especially since there were no signs of any potential custody dispute. But Diamond was still keeping a close watch over the whole thing. You couldn't be too careful. Especially when any fallout had a chance to hurt him and, as a non-special side lack-of-bonus, could fully disrupt her own plans.

There had already been a degree of adjustment, because the original blueprint had scribbled a fuming Mr. Gastrope in near the margins. He didn't like Diamond and in return, she'd been looking forward to making him live with it.

The other option was that the adult could just leave, and -- he was sort of on his way to doing that already.

...she really had to keep an eye on Snails. But for now, with the schoolhouse getting close...

"A couple of days," she stressed. "And then he's going out with her. When she's all wrong for him. I know that. Anypony would."

"She wouldn't be my first choice," Snips admitted, and Diamond automatically waited for the rest. "Since I'm holding out for the right mare."

"'The right mare'," Silver immediately said, "is at least ten years older than you. She's always going to be older. And she isn't going to date a kid."

"It's Miss Trixie," Snips confidently declared. "I can wait --"

Diamond looked ahead, spotted the rock, and planted her left forehoof with a little more force. The resulting echo took out most of the fantasies.

"This is wrong for him," she repeated. "She's wrong. I don't want this to happen, because I have to protect him. And he can't know that I did anything to stop it." Carefully, "So... what should I do?"

She waited. And they thought.

Diamond generally preferred to make her own plans. But with any such brilliant specimen currently absent, meaning there was nothing to refine... well, there were benefits to discussing things in committee. Even when that group included two colts, because Snips and Snails were remarkably bright for boys.

Admittedly, this usually meant they were somewhat less stupid. But they each had their moments. And on the whole, when it came to colts...

Diamond had an issue with boys. It was ongoing, as stupid as most of them were, and it probably wasn't going to resolve itself today either. Because she was growing up, and the passing moons had unlocked odd thoughts. These had been followed by a few strange dreams. Diamond, who didn't want anything going through her mind without careful inspection and proper approval, had inspected all of the new concepts closely and in doing so, come to a horrific conclusion.

She liked boys.
Worse than that.
She wanted them.

Diamond liked boys, and that was frustrating because she didn't LIKE most of them. The majority of colts were stupid. There wasn't anything worth liking. But she liked boys, she wanted them, and she'd told herself that it wasn't the choice she would have made.

So she'd tried to make a different one.

Silver had come to the dreams somewhat earlier than Diamond, and her oldest friend had been forgiven immediately for finishing in first because...

Silver had been scared. (It was so easy to see -- but only when looking back.) She hadn't wanted to talk about it at all. But it was something they'd had to get through if they were going to keep trotting into the future together, and during one crucial sleepover... it had all come out.

Silver wanted to be with a girl. But she didn't want that filly to be Diamond. She loved Diamond, but -- not that way. And she'd been afraid that it would change things, that they couldn't be friends any more, and...

...as sleepovers went, that one had been a total lie. Neither had slept at all. They'd talked, and a careful discussion which started under Moon had brought them all the way back to Sun. Multiple levels of exhaustion had left them both dazed for days, and Diamond had spent most of the weekend stumbling into door frames.

But the important thing was that they'd come back to Sun together.

Silver was attracted to fillies. They were still friends. But then Diamond had realized that she wanted boys, and that was a cruel fate indeed. So she'd asked Silver for a little help, and during the next sleepover...

...they'd tried all sorts of nuzzles. Nothing had happened. Silver was still her friend, and Diamond couldn't see her any other way. She just didn't feel anything towards mares. Not that way. (She even had some trouble in simply judging whether a girl was appealing, and that had been the first time she'd ever encountered difficulty in passing judgment on anything.) Apparently it wasn't the sort of thing you got to choose or change your mind on, and how stupid was that? About as dumb as the average boy. Maybe more.

So if she was absolutely stuck with males, with no help or cure in sight, then...

...she'd been thinking about dating Snails.

Not quite yet. For starters, if she was going to wind up with a boy, then he was absolutely going to be brought up to her standards first. And she clearly needed to make sure that he would be capable of dating properly, which mostly meant going along with whatever she wanted.

Okay, Snails didn't look like much. Neither did raw sculptor's clay. It was messy and went all over the place and if you were careful, you could make just about anything with it. Snails provided plenty in the way of raw material and once you had that, it was mostly just a matter of time, making sure it didn't air-dry on you because that would ruin everything, and finding a place to get rid of the rough bits. Diamond was currently willing to put in the work.

Snails, because he wasn't as dumb as most boys, wasn't a bad option. Unfortunately, he was also a package deal.

It was sort of like dealing with a toy manufacturer who knew they'd just finished a full production run for something which was destined to be the last-place finisher in the Get Out stakes. Because if they also had a recognized Heart's Warming Eve winner... well, they had one line which was guaranteed to sell and if the store wanted to get full stock on that, then they were going to be dealing with the bundle. One box of the good meant taking three of the horrible. And that was mandatory. The product lines were linked together. Permanently.

...well, it was potentially mandatory and tied until her father got involved, because the weight of soon-sixteen stores was sometimes enough to break a few knots. Diamond even helped out there, because she'd been the franchise's unofficial assistant toy aisle buyer since kindergarten. Nothing provided insight for knowing what kids would want to play with like being one, and her daddy took her to the national show every year: expert advice helped the store, plus she got to play with most of the samples.

But the analogy held up. If you wanted Snails, then you were stuck dealing with Snips. The boys couldn't be separated for long, and that meant Diamond was trying to form some tentative, mostly-theoretical long-term plans for keeping him from living in a post-marriage house.

...which would potentially mean trying to fix him up. The good news was that she had a rather exacting idea of his tastes. Diamond absolutely knew what Snips was attracted to, and was equally aware that Miss Trixie wasn't interested.

Still, there were far worse fates than Snips, and she was sure she could locate somepony for him. Eventually. But it would need to be a pony who could be convinced that the stupid grunting laugh was somehow endearing. It had taken Diamond several dozen attempts at lying to herself before the falsehood had started to take hold.

Her committee was still thinking, and the schoolhouse was beginning to come into sight.

She pulled ahead of the group, then deliberately swished her tail. Followed that up by tossing her mane. In both cases, streaks flew: the former benefited from a touch of concealed buttocks sway.

Diamond glanced back to check on the results.

Look at me.
Look at me.
...for Sun's sake, look at --

And nothing happened.

...boys.

(Singular. Not that it helped.)

"We have to go in soon," Diamond announced. "Anything?"

They all shook their heads.

"We can talk about it some more during recess," Silver said.

"Maybe Sweetie will have an idea," Snips thoughtfully added.

Maybe.

It could be hard to speak with Apple Bloom. With Sweetie...

They'd shared an experience. Something which had pushed them together. And it was easier to pretend you weren't shivering when somepony else's coat was absorbing the vibrations.

"Yeah," Snails considered. "It'll probably go better with more of us. Recess good for you, Diamond?"

She forced the nod. Got a little more ahead, tried the tail movement again...

...oh, come on! I heard him during the parent-teacher conference! He likes white streaks! He said they make mares pretty! And there's a perfectly perfect set of white streaks right in front of him, showing off for him, and I've got a jacket and leggings and everypony said this is what I'm supposed to do!

I'm dressed!

It wasn't just for winter. Even with this level of cold, there were a few ponies trying to get through the season with a scarf and the sort of half-scurrying tail-curled trot which was mostly meant to hide the accumulated ice crystals in their fetlocks. Because some professions required their own outfits, fancy parties were a semi-common thing in Diamond's life, and some ponies got dressed for the fun of it -- but the majority of society defaulted to 'nude'.

And when you could see just about what everypony had to offer in the way of physical appearance, for virtually all of it, constantly -- then enticement came from covering up. You hid what they'd seen before, and that would make them want to see it again.

So Diamond was getting dressed for winter. As much as she could, while still being able to move. And then she very carefully went by Snails' house, picked him up, and trotted to the schoolhouse while mostly staying in front of him in order to provide the best possible view. On every school day. And that meant on every school day, she got to both catch and feel him not looking.

What was she doing wrong? Was the next step actually going to wind up being a tail wrap? It would certainly hide that much more of her from view, but it was also putting away half of her streaks and she had some doubts about concealing what Snails likely considered to be one of her best features. And she'd tried to stay dressed in class, because it was all the more time during which she was essentially forcing him to recall the hidden --

-- but there was a certain problem with that.

The default pony situation was 'nude'. Classrooms were heated and in this case, that meant to a level which allowed students and teacher to be fully comfortable during the winter -- while clad in nothing more than their own fur. Remaining fully dressed for the outdoors under those conditions quickly produced sweat. Maintaining the layers in spite of that could lead into froth, and the state which lurked beyond 'froth' was generally known as 'hospital'. Diamond, trying to be enticing and appealing and the sort of exotic dresser who just happened to be sitting on a school bench right now but could theoretically start dancing at any moment, could easily wind up alluring herself into the emergency room.

...which had a theoretical chance to get Snails at her bedside and weeping with regret at what he'd done, but she didn't like her odds.

So she had to go into the classroom, trot up to the garment closet, and awkwardly shed the layers. She had more layers than anypony else, so she had to stay there longer than most of the class combined. And worse, she did so while her intended audience didn't watch any part of the process. She just had to get undressed while totally observed, then trudge off to her desk. Again.

He was being so inconsiderate! She showed off for him on every last chill winter school day, and he wasn't even...

...maybe he didn't want her.
(Why wouldn't somepony want her?)
Didn't he have any taste? She would have been smart enough to want herself!

...wouldn't she?

She wasn't entirely sure. Diamond had trouble judging with mares, so... maybe she wasn't going to be the best judge with herself. And she'd tried to bring in a consultant on that too, but the recruited pony had treated it as the most awkward question ever.

Diamond didn't understand why.

I should ask her for advice.
Again.

Silver was obviously going to be the expert.

Business Year In Review

There were probably ponies who would argue that a certain degree of change was natural. Diamond, if she was ever so fortunate as to find herself in the presence of that level of non-intellect, planned to jab a foreleg in the general direction of Town Hall -- and it was going to be the general direction because she wasn't entirely sure where the plans were kept. Namely, the ones which dictated the procedures for Winter Wrap-Up, Summer Shutdown, the Running, and every other transitional process for which ponies had tried to take charge. Because change might be natural -- but that didn't mean it shouldn't be regulated.

She was an adolescent now. Her entire class was, and that meant they were all changing. Diamond felt that putting a few direct controls on the process wouldn't exactly hurt. Additionally, there was a clear need for educational lectures. Something delivered by a pony of both knowledge and authority, which was probably going to mean screening out most of the adults. In theory, there were words which would teach Snails exactly how he was supposed to be responding to Diamond's enticement attempts and if the school board got involved, that sentence was going to be fear-deconstructed into uselessness. By contrast, turning it over to the custody of the librarian was just going to result in Death By Edit. There would be Fearsome Gerund corpses all over the place, and that somehow became all the worse when nopony was entirely certain what those were.

A lot of things were changing. Others weren't, and a few of them really needed to. None of those were Diamond's fault because if given both opportunity and authority, she absolutely would have changed every last one of them. She just lacked the power to do so.

(She'd briefly considered a career in politics, because there was so much which needed fixing and it was clearly going to require more than two alicorns to do it. In fact, Diamond's presence in the halls of power was just about mandatory because the older Princess had been gifted with centuries to work on all of the problems, and the result? There were still problems to be had. Diamond was sure she could at least kick a dent into the pileup, but...)

(...the store...)

Their teacher hadn't changed. Ponyville East operated under what Diamond had heard described as the Mutual Trot Theory: you advanced through the system, but your instructor came with you. It was supposedly meant to give the students a more familiar voice, along with a better relationship and as far as Diamond had once been concerned, what the experimental process mostly did was give the same adult extended time in which to figure out the tricks. This had been annoying. Miss Cheerilee wasn't the quickest adult when it came to spotting things -- but she'd eventually and regretfully proven to be faster than most. Diamond was fully certain that if she'd been given a new teacher every year, she could have gotten away with everything right up through graduation -- followed by bringing extended years of study in Advancing Lying onto a college campus and rendering them into a full doctorate.

The school itself hadn't changed very much. There had been some repairs, because it was Ponyville in the time of the Bearers and the blast radius tended to relocate itself at random. And the Crusaders had been through a phase where whatever they weren't going to get a mark in might also fail to be demonstrated during a school presentation: anypony who had to go through watching a second go-round tended to do so from a position near the emergency exits. But when it came to the interior... that was very much the same. And while there had been some swapping of benches to accommodate growing bodies, the desks were starting to feel too small.

Recess was exactly the same length as it had always been, and that was why Diamond had missed most of it.

It wasn't fair. She'd worn all of those layers to school and since the Weather Bureau had been too stupid to schedule a warming trend, she clearly had to put them all on again before going outside! Something which should have made Snails pause to watch the extremely extended process -- but he'd just donned his own minimal layers and headed directly out into the cold.

Of course, during winter, everypony had the option to spend recess inside -- and doing so put you under the direct supervision of Miss Cheerilee. Diamond liked to keep proper planning well away from adults, who were presumed to be incapable of appreciating it and in the majority of cases, were better off without a preview.

Diamond was getting older. Taller, stronger and, regardless of Snails' continued failure to acknowledge it, definitely more attractive: something her younger self wouldn't have believed possible. So recess should have been expanded to accommodate her. That was only sensible.

...she'd been considering a library visit. There had to be books about exotic dressing techniques, because ponies liked to write down whatever they considered to be important and that had continued even when most of the authors were so clearly wrong.

She also recognized that given the library's custodian, any such texts were probably going to be age-restricted. And explaining that she just wanted to read the sections on how to do it all quickly was unlikely to grant her access.

(Seriously: how did they do it? An exotic dresser had to be capable of donning clothing at all sorts of speeds, on rhythm, often while matching a background beat -- and then they had to be nude again before starting the next performance, which could start at Any Minute. There had to be a comprehensive selection of speed-undressing techniques. Diamond was completely sure that she would be capable of mastering them all, and remained somewhat less certain as to how she was supposed to access the required material. Finding out what the actual titles were would help, but there were a few potential issues with ordering for home delivery. And it was possible that Miss Fleur knew everything about the subject -- but the retired escort drew the line at anything more advanced than teaching adolescents how to put on makeup.)

Getting fully dressed had cost her time. And when she'd finally gotten outside, she'd discovered that unsupervised boys had allowed themselves to be distracted by a snowball fight. Both Snips and Snails had active coronas, and flinging things at each other was apparently good practice. So they practiced a lot, and each relished the sounds of horror which came when the other pretended to be going for the yellow snow.

Silver had been located. It had been easy to spot her, because Silver had walked right by Diamond as she'd finally exited the schoolhouse, going the other way. Adolescence also meant a myriad of reasons to visit the restroom more frequently than usual: another change meant it was now the boys who really didn't want to know the details.

And until they remembered what their priorities were supposed to be (or with Silver, sorted out the important stuff), it left Diamond with but a single consultant, resting beside her on the cold ground under one of the evergreens.

This consultant was surprisingly good at listening. Diamond just wasn't sure that was a good thing, because the unicorn had gone through several years of hearing stupidity while completely failing to recognize it as such. Filtering any of it had been completely out of the question, and when it came to having ideas...

They talked now. They'd been talking for moons. And it had let Diamond learn a few things. For starters, when it came to the majority of the disasters, the consultant had typically been going along for the ride -- but she'd continued to do so even when she knew that the running rails always terminated in a crash. And maybe some of that had been because she hadn't wanted the other two to be in the debris field as a mere pair, but she'd still lacked the strength to trot away -- and at least a few of the initiating ideas had been hers.

Admittedly, that meant her consultant wasn't always all that bad at having ideas. She just clearly needed somepony around who could spot the lousy ones.

She'd listened as the situation had been explained: having the other three out of hearing meant that at the very least, repetition technically wasn't happening. Now she was visibly considering what she'd just heard, and Diamond was -- waiting.

Waiting to see what she thought.

"Your dad. How did he look? When he told you she'd said yes?"

Diamond thought it over again.

"Disbelieving." That was good for a snort. "Like it had been a surprise. And he was all happy when he talked to me. 'There was a boulder directly in front of my right forehoof: I can't believe I didn't miss!'"

"He didn't actually say that," the consultant immediately deduced.

"No," Diamond readily admitted. "But it was how he looked. Like he'd kicked as low as anypony could without going into the dirt, and he was still surprised he'd touched the ground."

"And was that everything about how he looked? Sounded?"

It was a sincere question. Diamond gave the memory a little more inspection.

"I think... he might have been holding something back," she admitted. "He said he wanted to talk with me about something else, and that it could wait a couple of days. But he looked like he was keeping words locked in the stable before he said that."

The consultant thoughtfully nodded. The little matching bob of the white horn gave the movement a touch of extra punctuation.

Beyond the chill shade of the tree, on the mostly-plowed grass of the school grounds, fillies and colts were playing. Classes were mixing together, talking and laughing and having fun, and they could do all of that freely because they didn't have Diamond's problem.

If the entire group had known...

Not that she wanted to tell them. But she felt at the very least, a few might have offered a thoughtful pause and when it came to this sort of potential disaster, that just about equated to sympathy.

The majority, however, might have laughed all the harder.

"It'll come out," the consultant predicted. "Your dad doesn't keep secrets for very long."

Diamond nodded, and then said the words.

"So what do you think?"

It would have been an odd thing, once. Caring about what this pony thought.

But things changed.

Change could require a catalyst. For the class, it was getting older. Everypony in the group becoming adolescents at the same time, with hardly anypony knowing what to do with it. (Diamond had a plan, because she pretty much always did: the problem was in getting other ponies to cooperate with its obvious brilliance.) But for her father, it had been Tirek. The monster had changed a lot of things, and some of those alterations had been permanent.

"I think," Sweetie Belle said, "this is going to be really complicated."

Diamond, who was occasionally willing to acknowledge the wisdom of any basic truth which didn't get repeated too often, nodded.

For Diamond and Sweetie, the catalyst had been Tirek.

They had nearly spent the last seconds of their lives together. And after they'd been rescued from the descending shadow, the natural tendency had been to spend a little more.

Some of that time had been expended in sharing a bedroom.

Diamond was living in a new house. But before that, there had been a mansion.

And in the time in between, Diamond had been homeless.

If you lived in Ponyville, then you had to know how to get out of Ponyville. Generally in a hurry, and possibly while something was chasing you.

Just about every settled zone ran evacuation drills, because settled zones were surrounded by wild ones and since a monster was something which couldn't care, they didn't care about borders. And with Ponyville, where the Bearers lived... there was at least one drill per season. The number of actual evacuations was somewhat higher.

Tirek had finished with Canterlot. (Her father had been there, hadn't been drained, was doing everything he could to reach her.) He'd turned towards Ponyville, draining from the wild zone along the way. And at his size -- with the way that size kept increasing, making it feel as if there was a laughing mountain coming towards the town and any avalanche would be maliciously aimed...

The Bearers had prepared to confront him. Trying to do whatever they could. The rest of the town had very sensibly tried to get out of the way, although true sensibility probably would have involved a lot less screaming. And Diamond, not knowing what had happened to her daddy...

She'd directed the evacuation of her home. Gotten the servants out, made sure they were on the right route and that Cameo was safely with them. And then she'd looked towards Canterlot, all she'd been able to see was Tirek, and --

-- she'd been scared. (She could admit that, if only to herself.) Who wouldn't have been, when there was a mountain coming to hurt you and you didn't know what had happened to your daddy?

And if she was scared, then... there were going to be ponies who were more scared. Too frightened to think properly. Rationality would be sacrificed in favor of the need to gallop, and a pony's legs might not remember which way to go. Legs weren't very good at thinking on their own.

There might even be some who were too frightened to gallop. Joints would lock. Wings, if available, wouldn't be. Every trembling feather tight against a flank, knees didn't know what to do any more because they technically couldn't, and those ponies would just sort of... wait.

Wait for the mountain to fall on them.

Evacuations had to be done properly. If one pony didn't get out, then it had all gone wrong. And the servants were on their way to safety, Cameo was with them, Diamond could hear the screaming even from so very far away, and if one pony got left behind...

Cameo and the servants were moving towards safety. That was their job.
(Not that anywhere would have been safe for long. Not from Tirek, who would have eventually drained the entire world.)
Diamond, who had needed a few seconds to reconcile both a decision which had arisen from the core of her mark and what her legs were doing about it -- had galloped towards town.
There was a terrified herd, and the screams were loud enough to reach the mansion.
Somepony had to lead them.

She hadn't meant to find Sweetie.

She'd been looking for anypony who couldn't get out on their own. Who was too scared to act without guidance, or possibly had galloped at full speed into a wall and made themselves too dizzy to try anything else for a while. (Terrified ponies could do some really dumb things.) And she'd found Sweetie.

Sweetie had initially been trying to evacuate. The little unicorn (bigger now, but not by much) might have been attempting to do so in the company of family, and -- that would have meant her mother. Just her mother, because hoofball coaches traveled a lot.

Daddies being somewhere else usually wasn't their fault. It was work. Earning money often required travel. Diamond understood that. Her daddy had to travel and when it had all started, he'd been in Canterlot. The place which had been one of the earliest targets, because of course Tirek was trying to drain the alicorns.

Maybe he'd been trying to claim Sun and Moon for himself. Just like he took everything else.
Maybe he'd thought he could make them work. Keep the world going on his own, for what might have ultimately become a population of one.
Or perhaps he simply hadn't cared.

Sweetie's father was home less than Diamond's. Much less. He'd been in Baltimare. Well beyond the horizon, with no idea that anything was happening at all.

And the older sister had been... getting ready to battle Tirek.

(With what? Diamond still didn't know. The Bearers had never talked about what their plan would have been. What would Miss Rarity had done, with needles and cloth and what was occasionally a fairly blistering vocabulary? Diamond, who'd weaponized her tiara at the last, liked to imagine something could have been done with the needles.)

The evacuation had been well under way. Most of the population had gotten out. But ponies who were in a panic tended to move in herds, and two of those groups had intersected. Passed through each other. Sweetie, small and easily knocked around, had been jolted free.

She'd been bruised. Disoriented. Trying to recover, recenter. And she'd also been the first pony Diamond had found.

And then there had been two of them.

Tirek had still looked to be a fairly long way off, and two could search with somewhat more efficiency than one. They'd both been looking, the pair had located a few ponies, gotten them on their way out, there had been plenty of time to work with because a mountain clearly couldn't move very fast --

-- a mountain which had been getting bigger the whole time.

That meant longer strides.

They ran out of time. And then the shadow had been on top of them.

They'd nearly died together. They would have died under an uncaring giant hoof, and perhaps it would have been a trio of deaths because Diamond's father had found them, been racing towards them on burned legs even as she'd screamed at him to stay back. Begged, during the last moments of her life. Because he was racing under the shadow as if he could do something for them, they were going to die and he was only being drained, 'only' drained but if he stayed back, he would live for a little while...

Diamond had been weak. Hollowed, because so much of her had been pulled away into the metal glints within that giant hoof.

She'd known she was going to die, crushed by the descending mass. Her blood and bones would have been mixed with those of the little unicorn.

(A near-final, half-crazed thought had noted that there was no need for a true burial, especially when none of the parts could be sorted out. Somepony could just push some dirt over the smear.)

She didn't want her daddy to see it.

She didn't want him to die too.

But he kept trying to reach her. Up until the very end, he kept trying to reach her. She was begging him to turn back, begging in the last seconds of her life and a stallion who'd burned himself from inexpertly forcing a train's boiler to run all the way to Ponyville wouldn't stop.

And then Discord had appeared.
Discord had saved the world.
He'd nearly died.

When Discord had been fighting Tirek...

The draconequus had allowed himself to be fully absorbed. Power, body, and mind, because the best way to take the monster apart was from the inside. And he'd been looking for all of the stolen magic, sending it back to where it belonged.

Diamond had been able to move before that, simply because the pulling had stopped. She'd still been weak, hollowed, wounded deeper than the core -- but there had been enough left of her to get Sweetie up, and then they'd managed to move together. They'd both gotten out from under the shadow. Escaping from the impact zone just before the giant hoof crashed down behind them.

Not that it stayed a hoof.

Tirek had chosen to absorb chaos -- but the monster hadn't had any control over that power. Because there was a second mind within the giant body, and it apparently felt the best way to keep the monster distracted was through turning parts of Tirek's body into cactus spines and scales and the occasional pillow. Diamond had personally felt that converting hooves into pillows was an interesting decision.

Discord had been taking Tirek apart from the inside, and Diamond's power had been among the first returned. (She acknowledged that this had been more proximity than prioritizing -- several weeks later.) Sweetie's horn had lit up. There had been magic going anywhere, back to hosts and homes in order to make souls whole again --

-- but Tirek had been fighting. Uselessly trying whatever he could to fend Discord off. Clawing at his own body, which was a little easier during those times when his hands had become giant claws. Unable to truly reach a foe who currently resided within his bones.

He'd also been casting. Wildly, completely uncontrolled, trying anything and everything in the frantic hope that something might work. (Monsters were apparently capable of hoping, if only about things which concerned themselves.) Burning thaums of all kinds, using up some of the magic which couldn't be sent back to the dead.

Bursts of power had erupted from his body, over and over. The largest had streaked over the eastern horizon, phasing into invisibility as it moved and -- that one had changed the world. It had just taken a few moons before anypony had learned about the how of it.

Another, only slightly smaller, had gone directly for the library.

The Bearers had been closing in on Tirek's shrinking form, and Miss Twilight's approach angle had started from the tree. She'd seen the blast coming, instinctively deflected everything she could, and that was why both librarian and tree had survived.

(The alicorn had been mostly fine. The tree... the library had remained open, but the tree itself was healing. Dedicated teams of earth ponies were steadily guiding it towards full recovery, and it was still possible to see the scars in the bark.)

Shortly after that, Discord had won. Saved the world and in the process, lost himself.

Tirek, shrunken to skin and bones and organs which had no right to still be working, had been taken away by the Guards. Discord, who hadn't had enough strength left to fully reform his body... the insensate and intangible remnants of the chaos storm were carefully brought to safety. It would take moons before he woke up again, and the draconequus still hadn't fully recovered.

Time had passed. The evacuation reversed itself. Ponies began to cautiously reenter the settled zone. The majority, needing a safe place to recover, had headed for home. Diamond and her father had made sure to get Sweetie back to her parent, and then done the same.

Except that the majority of the blast had been deflected.
Redirected, really.
It had to hit somewhere.

They'd stood next to each other. Frozen in place within the old road, just barely on the other side for what was left of the gates. Looking at splinters and rubble and all of the places where the fragments had landed.

And then they'd been homeless.

Her daddy hadn't blamed Miss Twilight.

They had talked about it, though. All the weeping librarian had eventually managed to say was that she'd been trying to get the blast out of town, deflected away from the main residential sections and anywhere that evacuated ponies would have been waiting for an all-clear. Beyond that, she hadn't exactly aimed.

It had been an accident...

Diamond's father had carefully approached the little mare, half-collapsed with misery in front of the scorched tree. And then he'd told her that... not a lot of ponies lived out that way. It was the mansion and some of the farming areas. If the impact point had been a little further out, then the Acres...

(He'd stopped for a little while. Waiting for the crying to end.)

It -- didn't matter. The servants had gotten out. His daughter was safe, and her pet... Snails was on the way with an extra terrarium and some emergency scarab food, so that would be settled quickly enough. The living were safe, and -- wasn't that the most important thing?

But his house, the librarian had wept. All of his possessions...
(Everything Diamond had owned.)
(Everything.)

He'd smiled, just for an instant. Told her that he lived in Ponyville, and that meant taking certain precautions. Anything inanimate and precious... that was in a safe deposit box, far away. Anything else could be replaced. In time. And really, if anypony was going to lose their home from this, then wasn't it better for that to happen with somepony who could afford to rebuild...?

It... wasn't her fault...

He hadn't blamed her.

And when you didn't really blame somepony, suing them was obviously completely out of the question.

Diamond had lost everything.

Everything except Cameo, and... that was enough. If she could have saved only one, then...

But her tiara was gone.

Gone because she'd been in the last seconds of her life, she'd looked up at the descending hoof, and she'd seen all of the cracks. Imperfections. There were flaws in most hooves (excepting hers, which were obviously perfect) and everything about Tirek's had gotten bigger at the same pace. What had been a tiny gap was now large enough to place something within. And since she was going to die anyway...

Sweetie had helped. The last of the little unicorn's magic had levitated the tiara, jammed it into a crack. Diamond had heard it bend and break as the metal went in, and -- she'd been happy. Because Tirek was too big to ever get it out again and maybe in a few days, that hoof would be infected. Leaking pus everywhere, while still trying to support a mountain.

Except that Discord had entered the fight. Taken him on, for the sake of the world -- and, according to the last thing the draconequus had said, to avoid boredom. (A world where Tirek was the only one with magic would have been extremely boring. And probably very dead.) And the monster had gotten smaller as the power was sent back.

Tirek had shrunk. The broken tiara, still jammed into a crack... hadn't.

Ultimately, Diamond's final act of assisted, intended postmortem vengeance had split the monster's hoof. Something which hurt, and she hoped it still did.

Admittedly, that wish had recently entered the realm of eschatology. (Diamond had needed to do way too much research in order to discover that word's existence, and was still trying to justify the time investment through finding other places where the term might apply.) She wasn't entirely sure whether the dead could experience pain in the shadowlands, and had no intentions of making a personal investigation any time soon. Regardless, in the event that it wasn't usually possible, she was hoping somepony would make an exception for him.

Her daddy's most precious things... those were in the deposit box. Safe.

But for Diamond, if she looked past Cameo and made herself consider the inanimate -- it had been the tiara.

She still hadn't replaced it.

(There were times when her head felt too light. And too heavy. At the same time, which made no sense at all.)

It had been a gift...

Her daddy was good at getting things organized during a crisis, and that didn't change very much when the crisis was his.

Money couldn't solve every problem: he'd always said that. There were things which bits simply couldn't do. They didn't take away pain, or... cure the incurable.

They couldn't bring back the dead --

-- the power of money, he'd said, was ultimately limited. But if your problem was that your home had been destroyed? Then there was something money could do about that.

He'd hired an architect. A construction crew. Made sure the servants had salaries for the full duration of the rebuild, because it hadn't been their fault either. And there had been a room booked in one of Ponyville's hotels. Long-term. Father and daughter had to stay somewhere.

They'd been there for all of three days, because that was how long it had taken for Sweetie's father to get home.

Diamond hadn't managed to overhear the majority of the argument: her own daddy had banished her to the side room for most of it. All she'd been able to pick up on was the big unicorn's gruff, insistent tones, along with a few words like 'my daughter' and 'not going to'. Her father had countered with a 'don't need' at one point, along with 'shouldn't be imposing'. Diamond presumed that was enough to win.

Then there had been a very slow, sad 'wasn't there...'

Her father had gone silent for a while.

The two adults had exchanged some more words, all of which had been too soft to hear.

And then they were living with the Belles.

There had been an argument, and then there had been a victor because that was how arguments usually worked. Diamond just wasn't completely sure who'd won.

Her own daddy had managed to get some things away from the big unicorn during the negotiations: Diamond mostly learned about them during the trot to Sweetie's house. (Her father had limped through most of it, because the burn cream took moons to fully work.) For starters, he'd clearly won the right to pay his own way. They could stay with the Belles until the new home was complete enough to live in -- but her daddy refused to let the other family bear the expenses of hosting anypony. They were going to pay for their own food, the additional drain on charged devices --

-- Sweetie's father had bemusedly pointed out that they were going to be living with unicorns: device recharges weren't really a problem --

-- wonders, then. There was going to be extra laundry and dryers were in the 'wonders' category. A unicorn couldn't recharge a pegasus creation -- look, the point was that Diamond's daddy was going to cover any incurred expenses. Also, you did talk to your spouse about this before you came here, right? Because if you didn't, then Diamond and I are going to wait outside while you try to explain this. For maximum safety, we're going to be about three streets back -- no, I've seen your spouse argue in the store before this. Four streets. With the option to try for five. Send up a corona flare if it gets really bad. Two if I need to get you out of there...

The big unicorn's response had been a deep chuckle. And by the time they all reached the front door, Diamond realized that the two fathers had become friends.

(She was still trying to work out exactly when that had happened. Diamond hadn't known it was possible to do it during an argument.)

Moons of living with the Belles.

Her father had gotten Miss Rarity's old bedroom: the colors really hadn't suited him, but the thread count on everything was apparently divine. Diamond had moved in with Sweetie, and... she'd never had to share space with another filly before. Not night after night, every single night, in a place which belonged to another because Diamond didn't have anything left at all...

And it was also staying with somepony who, until recently, had seen her as The Enemy.

(Justifiably.)

There had been some mutual jurisdictional friction. And then they'd gotten over it, because they'd nearly died together and the past felt as if it was becoming smaller. After a while, it turned into something they could mutually hurdle.

Also, both of them had been having bad dreams. Just about the same dreams about being trapped under falling mountains, and... Princess Luna didn't have enough hours under Moon to visit everypony. So it helped to have somepony around who understood.

They all ate at the same table. Diamond had been vaguely curious as to what regular meals prepared by a mother were like, because Silver's didn't do a lot of cooking. The answer had been 'a lot like a recipe book', because Sweetie's mom prepared things according to exacting directions. And she did so every single time, regardless of how often that dish had been made before -- because if she didn't, then everypony quickly discovered that Sweetie had picked up her tendencies from a very local somewhere.

Sharing a meal with somepony else's family. It was... strange, and no less so when that family so often felt incomplete. Sweetie had a mommy and daddy, but -- her father was on the road a lot. Sometimes the mother went to parties, and Diamond could spot an aspiring social climber from two hundred body lengths away, in the dark. Especially with that dress. The dress was usually a problem. Miss Rarity was welcome to drop by for dinner and usually did so at least once whenever her father was in town, but the mother had an odd objection to accepting any of her older daughter's dresses.

They were hardly ever all together. (Sweetie's daddy had to coach the team, Miss Rarity had missions...) And when they were, there were little fights. Disputes, and it felt oddly like the majority of words were going unsaid. But for the most part, if they were together, then they were -- together.

It took a few days before Diamond's daddy really tried to join in on any of it. Longer for her. And then they were all talking, because they were living in the same house and talking was frankly easier than anticipating the arrival of whatever Sweetie's mom had tried to 'whip up' for dessert.

It felt strange.

It felt like the sort of thing Diamond couldn't let herself get used to because eventually, it was all going to go away...

Diamond had her own room again. Her own house, and the word qualified because you really couldn't call the rebuild a mansion. The dreams were... fading. Slowly, and she'd found that writing to her new quill companion helped with that. Diamond had a very special quill companion, one who wasn't like anypony else in the world -- and in part, that was because she wasn't a pony at all.

Writing to her made the dreams more infrequent. Meeting her...

...Diamond had started to feel a little more like herself after that.

(She wasn't always sure which self she felt like. That change had started a little earlier, and she tried to keep an eye on it because there were aspects which seemed to be waiting for a chance to change back.)

Her own room. Her own house. Those changes could be argued as reversions.

But she'd claimed a new desk in the classroom.
The one next to Sweetie's.
And that change was holding.

"What do you know about the mailmare?"

Sweetie thought it over.

"That she's the mailmare," the little unicorn finally said. "And she's got my route most of the time." Thoughtfully, "I think the post office shuffles everypony around so they'll know the whole settled zone. But when they're not doing that, she's on my route."

Which meant that during the time they'd been living with the Belles...

My daddy would have been seeing her more than usual.
I know she comes into the store sometimes. Not just to shop: to deliver stuff. But now she would have been in the store and coming to where we were living.

It had clearly made everything that much worse.

Diamond decided not to blame Sweetie. The little unicorn couldn't help where she lived --

-- the earth pony had a thought.

It was an odd sort of thought. The question itself was perfectly natural, but not having an answer pressed under her hoof wasn't. Especially with something so basic.

Know your enemy.
...opponent?
...well, whatever the mailmare was, Diamond clearly had to learn about her in a hurry. Studying the competition was basic, and Diamond was prepared to put in the research --

"What's her name?"

-- but the future structure of knowledge didn't have a foundation.

Sweetie's features twisted across the full range of confusion.

"...I'm not sure," she finally admitted. Pale green eyes blinked a few times. "I've heard ponies call her things, but I don't know if any of them are actually her name. Especially since they're usually yelling. After the lightning."

"Has she ever done the lightning stuff near you?"

More thought.

"Maybe almost," Sweetie eventually decided. "But just almost. And it was more around us."

"Almost..." Diamond tried.

"If we were Crusading and got too close to her, then any cloud she was resting on would start to turn kind of dark. Obviously a pegasus can do that on purpose. But Scootaloo said it can also be a stress reaction, so..." Forelegs slowly spread away from each other, gestured. "I guess I don't know."

Her daddy said that honest answers had to be respected, and Diamond tried to do that. It didn't change the fact that the lack of actual information was infuriating.

"I have to find out her name," Diamond decided. "Just for starters. Help me after school? If we can't find out during recess?"

Sweetie's nod came across as being somewhat... hesitant.

"Were you going to do something else?" Diamond checked. Her own plans were usually brilliant enough to justify an override of whatever anypony else had wanted, but inquiry was polite.

"No. I was just thinking..." The hesitation stretched out, took on vocal proportions more appropriate to Miss Fluttershy. "...you said your dad was happy."

"Because he got a yes," Diamond's frustration pointed out. When he should have known that she couldn't say anything else...

The little unicorn’s forehooves dragged small furrows into the dirt.

"Maybe," Sweetie finally said, "the best thing is to -- let him be happy?"

Diamond instantly snorted. "With her?"

"She's the one he asked --"

"-- she's not right for him!"

She's not good enough --
-- he thought she was pretty --
-- there was something very wrong with stallion tastes. And, by temporal extension, Snails.

"He hasn't been with anypony in a very long time," Sweetie said. "You said he felt lonely --"

"-- I'm there! I'm always going to be there!" Powerful hind legs kicked backwards, came up just short of the trunk. "Why does he need anypony else?"

Sweetie didn't say anything.

The silence stretched out --

"-- that filly has been looking at you," Sweetie said. "A few times now."

Diamond managed to keep her head from outright snapping up, which let her discover that it had somehow been lowered. The lack of tiara was probably at fault. "Which one?"

"Over that way." The white horn lit up, and a thin line of glow briefly indicated a direction. "I'll tell you when to look. So you won't get caught. Not yet. Not yet -- okay, now!"

Diamond looked.

A unicorn. Younger than they were by at least two years, and Diamond wasn't sure about that because the filly gave off the impression of being small for her indeterminate age. The coat was a relatively pale purple, while the mane and tail were blonde (with lighter shading along the edges): the irises had shifted closer to gold. Grooming was almost admirably expert, but... she was young enough that she was probably being prepared for school by a parent.

The horn seemed to be a little too long for her. (Diamond wondered if she was going to grow into it. She didn't really know how the process of horn growth worked.) It was also noticeably pointier than the usual. It was a horn which, with speed and strength behind it, could do some damage -- but the filly was small.

And she'd been looking at Diamond. For some reason.

"I don't really know her," Sweetie said. "Do you?"

Diamond concentrated.

Light, sparkles, glow...

"I think she had an early corona," the earth pony said. "That's it."

"Maybe you said something to her," Sweetie carefully proposed -- then hesitated again. "About her."

"Maybe."

Probably.

If it had been a insult based in physical traits, then there wasn't a lot to work with. Not that such had ever stopped Diamond for very long.

"So... maybe if you tried to apologize..." Sweetie gently suggested.

Instantly, "No."

"Diamond --"

"-- I can't. Not until I remember what it was." How much would a Secretary Of Insults need to be paid? She had to calculate based on a full-time position --

"You could just say you were sorry. See if that --"

"-- it doesn't work," Diamond immediately countered. "Generic apologies never do. It's like putting on minotaur gloves to keep your hooves warm. The intent is there, but nothing fits."

This time, she felt her head briefly dip. Too heavy and too light, at the same time. Which didn't make any sense, but... there it was.

"When I remember," Diamond finally said. "Or when she tells me. One way or another" Her eyes refocused. "The boys are coming over. Maybe they'll have the mailmare's name."

Learn about the competition.

How hard could that be?

Market Research

How hard could it be?

Very.

When Diamond thought about it... she knew that ponies talked about the mailmare. It almost felt as if some of them tended to stay on the topic almost constantly. It was possible that a few kept discussing her because they weren't intelligent enough to think of any other subjects, but... realistically, there was also the matter of what seemed to be a never-ending supply of new material.

She was aware that ponies talked about the mailmare. She wasn't completely sure what they'd been saying, because Diamond hadn't always paid a lot of attention to what ponies said unless she'd been looking for something she could use against them. But there had been enough words drifting through the air as to make her feel that she should have retained at least a few of them, and...

She'd overheard a few of the talks, as had her consultants. The adults' discussions certainly included descriptive terms, none of which included any flattery whatsoever. And there were things they called the mare, but -- there were too many of them. No single term seemed to be used with sufficient regularity to designate it as the baseline. And if the herd was somehow collectively quoting individual subsections of the birth document, then the mare had the only form in the Herdbook Registry to claim a personal filing cabinet. Nopony among her consultants could state, with anything remotely approaching confidence, that they knew the mare's name.

Her daddy had stated that it had taken a surprising amount of effort to learn it, and Diamond was starting to perceive the why.

Of course, she had the option to simply ask him -- but that would have meant admitting that she hadn't known. Additionally, there were times when Diamond simply preferred to manage her own affairs, especially when having any adults learn what those were would inevitably wind up leading to interference. At a minimum.

Nothing got settled during recess. But there was more time available than that. She already had her consultant group at work on the problem -- although once school let out, she wouldn't have the whole of it for long: everypony within the assembly had their own lives, and it usually took some advance arrangements to make their long-term priorities completely coincide with Diamond's.

(Additionally, when it came to the totality of her intended afterschool schedule, she didn't want to have the boys along for the whole of it. Some things needed to be private, especially when the ultimate goal was to make her displays public enough for the designated viewer to notice.)

She needed to learn about the competition.

And Snips had an idea...

Five adolescents were making their way down some of the back trails, because that was the fastest way to reach their first destination -- or would have been if winter hadn't become involved. The back trails didn't exactly see a lot in the way of snow clearing, and that meant they were mostly trying to follow in the hoofsteps of whoever had been through before.

Diamond and Silver, as the earth ponies in the group, should have been first in the procession: superior strength, greater snow-breaking capacity. Snails, out of what Diamond quickly decided was concern over the future stage of her leggings, got in front of everypony and let a unicorn's greatest weakness lead the way.

She watched him for a while, as the group trailed far too slowly in his inefficient wake. Considered how the other benefit to personally being out front would have been giving him an extended look at her backside, managed not to mutter to herself, cut her pace a little more so as not to trot directly into his dock --

-- something seemed to prickle along the base of her mane. Her hocks felt as if all of the muscles had just gone tight. Her ears tried to twist, rotating until they were just about fully backwards and since pony anatomy wasn't designed to go so far, that segment of the whole rapidly became uncomfortable.

It all added up to one thing. A concept which needed a moment to arrive as words, because the basic sensation had been created at a time before words existed.

Somepony is watching me.

The prey sense. Intangible, almost ineffable -- but when it arose, always recognized. Something was observing her, possibly even following -- and not the pony she'd wanted trailing, because he was currently going to war against a knee-high ridge of accumulated flakes and losing. There was another entity involved...

It was a sensation which arrived on the level of absolute knowledge. It was also effectively useless, because she didn't know what was watching her. She also wasn't getting a sense of immediate danger from any of it. Just... observation. And that made it annoying.

'Prey sense.' She'd been given formal lessons on it during kindergarten, and was still waiting for the followup class which would explain how any of it applied to her. Yes, ponies were technically a prey species. It was possible to apply the label to any herbivore, and that seemed completely unfair because if you weren't careful about what you tried to use as a meal in a wild zone, some of the plants would absolutely try to eat you first.

Also, predators pursued whatever they wanted and didn't stop until it was in their clutches. Therefore, on the mental level, Diamond was clearly a predator. It wasn't her fault if her body had decided to disagree. And when they were in the settled zone, when she couldn't hear or scent anything trying to line up an attack... then the most likely explanation for the internal alarm going off was one of Miss Fluttershy's birds having spotted a pony procession and deciding to follow for a while. Not so much in case of future interrogations as in the hopes of seeing something tasty slip out of a saddlebag.

Additionally, anything which did come after them would be attacking a group. Taking on a single pony was one thing, at least if that pony wasn't Diamond. A single pony could potentially be some level of prey. The herd was the reason Equestria existed. There was power in numbers, and some of it might eventually elect to stop kicking.

She recognized that. And she didn't feel as if there was any real danger, especially when none of the others seemed to be reacting at all. So she stayed on rough alert, made sure she wasn't showing any external signs, and pushed on ahead. Far too slowly.

Followed. Observed...

She knew all of that, and found it stupid. Not as bad as being in pain, when the alarm was ringing so loudly as to potentially prevent the most basic of thoughts (like how to shut it off) -- but persistent. Annoying. Something was watching her, possibly trailing, she knew that, but she didn't hear wings and couldn't pick out extra crunches in the snow past the sounds of five efforts (with the lead substandard), she had total awareness and that meant her body could stop now...

But the sensation wouldn't leave.

It didn't quite fade when the group reentered Ponyville's streets. Instead, it became decidedly more unfocused, because it was late enough for a few adults to be out and about. There were ponies who tended to watch Diamond as she went by, just in case she decided to give them a little personal attention. Say a few words...

She tried to recognize faces. Remember if there was anything she'd said before, followed by trying out the only thing she could say now. But there had been so much, and... she didn't remember all of it. Barely a fraction, and that was with those comments which had felt devastatingly memorable at the time.

Secretary Of Insults. Full-time position, with travel benefits and possible sleeping quarters at the new house. It was possible that the employer might remember something just before going to bed --

-- Diamond blinked.

What was --

-- she was sure there had just been a partial flash of bright light from the alleyway on the left. Which had been followed by a sound very much like something bouncing off a wall and then falling into a mound of snow. Diamond knew exactly what that last sound was like. She'd had a few winters in the world, and some ponies were easy to push.

Maybe somepony had been shoving their plow load into the alley. Reflection of light from the blade. And they'd tripped, because you had to put displaced snow somewhere and for the last six ponies to go by, the alley had probably been it --

"-- that's it up ahead," Snips reported. "The red brick building. I'm in there all the time." Openly disgruntled, "Because after Mom finishes repairing the books, somepony has to mail them back. I've gotta head over to the shop right after this part, Diamond. You know how she gets..."

Diamond nodded. Mrs. Bradel truly believed in the family business model, and had a special fondness for the section which said that legally, her son didn't even need to be paid minimum wage.

"So let's go in," Diamond told them. "If it's going to be anywhere..."

The prey sense waited for the doors to click shut, and then finally turned itself off.

Diamond exhaled. Looked around, and then tried to figure out what part of the post office she was supposed to be looking at.

There weren't that many ponies in line at this hour: the rush to mail things out in time for Hearth's Warming was well behind them, with Hearts & Hooves Day still some distance ahead. (She had to get some open notice from Snails before then, if only for the sake of getting him trained early on proper dating gift shopping.) Only three were waiting to speak with the clerk, while a fourth wanted to know every possible means of sending a box to Manehattan while, ideally, paying for none of them. Two mares were looking at mailing supplies, because it seemed that a few adults turned up at the building with the contents of a future package and no idea for what was supposed to happen next.

One wall hosted a myriad of brass-edged miniature glass doors, each of which had a cubbyhole behind it, its own number and, courtesy of the post office, something resembling a street address. It was ideal for getting things mailed in while you were still looking for a place to live, and also would have been perfect for Diamond if it hadn't been for the minor problem of still being a minor. Kids needed to have an adult sign the application form.

There were also two maps, colorful and bright and not so much painted onto the far wall as embossed there. The one on the right showed Equestria, and numerical codes designated the region identifier for every settled zone. Diamond actually had most of those memorized, because there were fifteen stores (going on sixteen) and if there wasn't a store in an area, there was probably a supplier. It meant that her father both sent and received letters all the time --

-- which had been just that many more opportunities for contact with the mailmare --

-- and it had given her plenty of exposure to the system.

The right-side map displayed her own nation. The one on the left was for the world.

She wasn't quite as familiar with those codes. Barnyard Bargains did have a small International section, tucked away near Cookery. It meant her daddy regularly ordered from outside the borders -- but most of what he brought in was spices. He was reluctant to fully expand the business into any territory he didn't truly understand, and had once told her that he longed to meet the one yak who could theoretically instruct him about the destruction of customs forms.

It still meant she could read the majority of the map, because the postal system was an international, cooperative effort. Ponies passed off outgoing mail to Protocera, which agreed to honor the stamp -- and in return, ponies carried griffon mail to Equestrian destinations. Mazein packages tended to be heavier, anything going to Eeyorus would plod up to its intended destination -- if there was a region code embossed into the map, then someone was going to deliver the mail. Eventually.

There were a lot of region codes. There was also rather more in the way of map. Several sections were just -- outlines. Rough coastlines, and very little else. It struck Diamond as being a rather odd number of blank spaces, and she felt that somepony should have filled them in already. Then again, if that had happened, International Studies would have been that much longer --

"I don't see her," Snails whispered. "Maybe she's still out on her route?"

"Maybe," Sweetie considered. "Those can take hours to finish."

Diamond didn't want to see the mare. 'Recognized on sight' was the best case. The worst was everything which could happen after that.

There had been no sightings yet. When you weren't looking for her, the mare was everywhere and all too often, so was the stink of ozone --

"So what do we do?" Silver softly checked. "Just ask one of the employees?"

"Nah," Snips grinned. "I've got a faster way. You see that big open window in that wall, near the mailboxes? Where nopony's standing right now?"

"The one about snout-level, yeah," Snails noted. "So?"

"That's where they nudge over packages which are too big to fit in the boxes. I've seen them do it." Not without pride, "And sometimes Mom gets mail that way, because she gets stuff to fix from all over the world and the other countries don't always get the address completely right. The post office holds some of the big stuff here until we can come over to verify it."

"And?" Diamond checked.

"And I've picked up stuff," Snips told them, short legs beginning to cross the distance towards that gap. "And if you rear up just right, you can see the sorting area behind the wndow. Which has a town map." This grin wasn't quite so dull. "They stick labels on it. Current route assignments."

He reached the window.

"Names..."

Snips reared up.

The abrupt resumption of the prey sense upon exiting the building was mostly overlooked. Diamond had other things on her mind, starting with a rather basic question: It took my daddy a 'surprising amount of effort' to visit the post office?

The other inquiry was a little more open.

"What kind of name is 'Derpy'?"

Everypony thought about it. Adults flowed around the tight knot of confused youths, which had effectively frozen itself into place within the cold street.

"Dunno," Snips finally admitted. "Does 'Derpy' mean 'mailmare'?"

And then they were all staring at him.

"What?" Snails finally asked, because the colt who knew Snips best was the obvious candidate to effectively announce when his friend wasn't making any sense.

"In another language," Snips very nearly clarified. "I mean, a lot of ponies get names which go with their jobs, right? Or maybe they change their name once the job starts, to fit it better. But sometimes parents like to pick the exotic stuff. Like what Miss Fleur's folks must have done, because I'm pretty sure the only thing her name means in Equestrian is her." He shrugged. "Naming's sort of weird. Anyway, maybe 'Derpy' means 'she who smashes mailbox doors' in Yakasian or something."

"Maybe..." Diamond considered. If foreign languages were getting involved...

Somewhere off to the north, the Town Hall bell began to toll.

"And that's my cue," Snips announced. "See you tomorrow! Let me know if you learn anything else!"

"I will," Diamond promised -- followed by "Thanks, Snips." He'd had an idea, and it had turned out to be a good one. Offering thanks was effectively mandatory, especially when doing so effectively encouraged him to come up with that quality of idea again. As opposed to all the ones regarding the grossout potential of field-flung yellow snow.

"No problem," the shorter of the colts grinned. "Just get me something tasty from the store! At the employee discount!"

Most of the trot to Barnyard Bargains was spent in reflecting on how she had absolutely not taught either colt to do that.

There were occasional exchanges of presents within the group. Hearth's Warning, birthdays -- the traditional times. (Snips tended towards hoofmade items, while Snails generally found something suitable for Cameo's terrarium.) But they'd both been surprised to learn that Diamond had to buy anything she gave. Which she did while working with what she considered to be a fairly adequate allowance -- but if her intended purchase was coming from the store, then it had to be paid for. She simply did so at the employee discount.

This was proper. Inventory had to be kept. Freebies messed up the profit margin. And when it came to getting the discount -- well, she was the toy aisle's primary advisor. Recognition was only fair.

So the boys didn't ask her to get them stuff for free. They just made the occasional request for a purchase to be made on their behalf. And if it wasn't a gift, then Diamond was (eventually) fully paid back -- at that discounted rate.

Something is following me...

The other schools had let out. They were seeing ponies of their own age on the streets. It was possible that somepony was finally paying attention to her tail.

"I've gotta duck out after the store," Snails reminded her from his position on the left (and in no way behind her). "The farm, you know?"

She knew.

Somepony other than the one I want to notice...

She eventually risked a glance back, trying to see if she could pick out the observer. It mostly got her a flash of light from the window in front of the fix-it shop's broken camera display.

This time, the sensation didn't fade as they entered the building.

She'd explained the destination on the way over. It wasn't to see her father: this was the hour which hosted a scheduled meeting, and he would be leading the herd in the conference room. But her daddy had asked the mare out. Diamond didn't know exactly what he'd said, and could only presume the mare's -- Derpy's? -- response had included something which could pass for 'yes'. She wasn't currently in a good position to ask him about the exact circumstances of the mistake, and going to her was clearly out. But whatever had happened -- it had taken place during the store's day shift. And her daddy was infamous for never quite closing the office door, to the point where ponies just knocked on the frame. It meant employees could hear a lot, and there seemed to be a good chance that they were still gossiping.

Except that they weren't.

He also said that he was going to arrange some privacy.

Maybe he'd spoken to her near the loading dock. Or among the backroom Advance Orders shelves, or maybe the door had even... closed.

Nopony was talking about the upcoming error. There weren't many employees talking at all. And when they spotted Diamond...

She felt as if she was collecting a number of rather odd looks. Her first guess was that they had heard about what was going to take place, and rather naturally felt sorry for her. Which she appreciated -- but it would have been nice to get a few verifying words on the subject, as opposed to the total silence which instantly closed in whenever she stepped into view.

Maybe they were worried that she was going to tell on them. She didn't have any reason for doing so. Yes, the store was sort of on the messy side today, but -- the franchise was busy, to the point where she couldn't always spot ponies through all the ponies who were already in the way. Customers knocked things over all the time, or dropped pieces and didn't put them back. There was a fair chance that she'd been the first pony to spot most of it.

...it was almost a pattern. She would lead the group down an aisle, there would be a thump somewhere behind them, she'd turn around...

Maybe there was somepony new doing shelf stocking. If items were placed too close to the forward edge, then the vibrations produced by passing hooves could eventually send them down. Wind backblast from active wings was worse, and formed one of the many reasons why her daddy asked that shopping pegasi remained grounded while within the store...

...definitely on the messy side today.

Sweetie and Snails put a few fallen things back on the way out, working via glow. It was good practice for them. Diamond approved.

In winter, Moon looked over the majority of the cycle. It meant that when the trio of adolescent fillies finally got to approach the library, Sun was already being lowered -- and Diamond, who'd spent just about the whole of the day trying to get some help from the herd, had officially missed her opportunity to recruit from the other side of the cosmic. This annoyed her. But there was presumably going to be a chance to try again tomorrow and if there somehow wasn't, everypony was presumably dealing with the sort of issues which didn't necessarily make trying to save her father from himself into something minor, but could at least justify asking it to wait for a while.

They weren't going to spend a lot of time inside the tree. Diamond typically didn't commit all that many hours to the library, and that obviously wasn't jealously over its survival. She hadn't been particularly fond of the place before Miss Twilight had made the instinctive decision to deflect the blast of power away from it, and her daddy had been the first to admit that the mare really hadn't had time to think about anything in the way of aim.

Diamond typically wound up at the library when a school assignment required a certain amount of research. The fact that she now had to do all such research herself was more than a little grating, but... she'd been caught copying the work of others, and the only way to show that she'd stopped was through very visibly not doing it any more. In public.

How long was she supposed to keep it up before ponies would just believe that she wasn't going to start again?

What would it take before she was just trusted --

-- anyway, she didn't enjoy the majority of fiction, at least when it was written down. Stories were meant to be read out loud by somepony who was sitting next to your bed. While doing voices, because it was always better with voices.
Diamond had recently taken up a minor interest in the new invention of audiobooks, but she got sick of swapping albums and besides, none of the voices were exactly right -- but to be fair about it, her daddy didn't exactly have the time to start a sideline career in vocal recording.

Most stories weren't interesting because the act of writing was clearly a rather basic one. Anypony could make up stories about ponies who didn't even exist. (She often presumed that just about anything somepony else did was simple, or else they wouldn't be the ones doing it. By contrast, her own issues were obviously immensely complicated because complexity had to be assigned to those who could manage it.) Diamond had created multiple, fully-plausible falsehoods regarding the real and wound up having just about all of them believed. This was a process so inherently complicated as to inevitably collapse in on itself, and Diamond presumed that the collapse was inevitable because otherwise, it wouldn't have happened to her. But she did feel that she'd kept it going for longer than just about anypony else could have.

Novels usually didn't hold her attention, especially when nopony was reading them to her. But she had some genuine interest in history. Fiction was just stuff which somepony had made up, but history -- those were stories about real people. And by contrast, there weren't all that many of those stories, especially when you compared the count to the total number of people who'd ever lived. Diamond wasn't always sure as to exactly what made somepony's life important enough to get into the official record, but presumed any truly reasonable standards meant she was prequalified.

She could find genuine pleasure in reading through a historical account, especially because any twist ending wasn't the result of a desperate author looking for any way of reaching the final page which didn't require actually resolving several dozen dangling plot threads. But that wasn't the sort of thing you could just casually admit, and that was another reason for Diamond to mostly avoid the tree.

Also, it was winter, she was wearing more than a few layers, the library hosted a resident dragon, and Miss Twilight kept the place (over)heated accordingly.

She made sure to check on the alicorn's position as they entered. They were about to do something which, if spotted, would definitely lead into adults asking questions: that made it essential to know exactly where the one with the most local authority actually was. But the small mare was behind her desk, and a glow-enveloped quill was steadily moving from one small lined paper rectangle to the next. Creating new cards for the library catalog would keep Miss Twilight busy for a while. All they had to do was avoid drawing her attention.

They carefully passed the desk. The librarian didn't ask if they needed anything, because her focus was on the cards. She certainly didn't get up or try to follow them.

Something following...

Maybe the sensation had just gotten frozen into the On position. It would probably defrost when Diamond began to overheat.

The trio took the long way around to what Diamond was sure was going to be the relevant section, peeked ahead to make sure there were no inconvenient adults in the area, avoided a few patrons, kept six ears on rotation in a hunt for either exceptionally light hoofsteps or an abrupt shift of wings, closed in --

-- Diamond had believed the tree would possess something regarding her desired topic, because Miss Twilight didn't like fully excluding any category. The librarian had Views on censorship, and one of them said that when it came to authorship, ponies generally had to be allowed freedom of creation. Furthermore, once that book was created, then there had to be at least one library which hosted a volume from its print run. Otherwise, how could the text truly be said to officially exist? And there were always the Canterlot Archives, which made sure to get a copy of everything -- but the vast majority of Equestrians would never venture into any of the more than two dozen buildings which made up the Stacks, and that means local branches needed to do their part.

So Ponyville's library had books which discussed exotic dressing techniques, because Miss Twilight had Views on forbidding things from being written.

She also had certain opinions about allowing the results to be read.

Diamond had reasonably been expecting the books to be sealed behind either a swing-down locking glass shelf cover or some degree of glow. The first was preferable, because the typical shelf lock wasn't very good and a little fiddling around with a horntip could potentially defeat it. Another type of horn use was required to get past glow, but there was some chance for the librarian to have been using a purchased spell and Sweetie might have been capable of defeating anything store-bought.

A lock or glow. Finding both struck her as overkill. Having the glow's hue radiate as a very familiar pinkish shade was just unfair.

There was a card pasted to the lower right corner of the blockade. It was possible to make out the hosted words, if you squinted.

"'Not To Be Removed Without Direct Supervision'," Sweetie softly read aloud. (They had to keep their voices down: the librarian wasn't that far away.) A little mournfully, "We should have known. But I didn't, because I've never been in this part of the library."

"You never tried to get a mark for this?" Silver curiously asked.

"It's something which adults do," the unicorn replied. "Once they're adults. Nopony wanted to wait that long."

Silver thought about that. (Glasses shifted.) "That makes sense."

"And we would have needed a lot of clothing," Sweetie added. "More than any of us had. Which probably would have meant asking Rarity if we could borrow some, when she doesn't exactly make a lot of things for kids." With a small sigh, "And then she probably would have asked why we needed so many slip-ties. She doesn't like slip-ties... Diamond, why are you pressing your snout against the glass?"

"I'm trying to read the titles."

"...oh."

"I can't make them out through the glow." She reluctantly pulled back, blinked until the spots faded from her vision. "This is so stupid. Why would she lock this away? All I want to know about is how to wear clothes properly!" In the way which made colts think about what had been temporarily hidden underneath...

Two adolescents took what almost felt like a shared breath. And then both looked at her: one through lenses, one without.

"Maybe it's the wrong approach," Silver carefully tried. "There's got to be other things you could do."

"Like what?" emerged on a current of frustration for which only the volume had been muted.

"You could try flirting," her oldest friend proposed. "Like -- Cotton. She flirts all the time --"

That was good for a largely-repressed snort. "So wait until she finishes. And then try whatever's left. If there's anything at all." Cotton Cloudy believed herself to be attractive: according to Silver, this was actually true. She also felt herself to be flirtatious, which mostly begged the questions of where she'd first encountered the word and why she'd never bothered to read the actual definition. Because Cotton flirted through process of elimination: attempt every possible means of vocal and social interaction which could possibly exist and if her target responded in a positive manner, then flirting had clearly been achieved.

Cotton had been attempting to flirt for most of the school year. The casualty list of the mentally stunned had begun to record the names of those who attended Ponyville's other schoolhouses, and showed no signs of turning back. And Diamond wasn't entirely sure how flirting worked just yet, mostly because she'd been concentrating on dressing up as her primary tactic -- but she knew enough to recognize that if Cotton was doing something, then that automatically wasn't it.

Sweetie's forelegs shifted a little. Hooves lightly, awkwardly scraped against the floor.

"Or," the unicorn softly proposed, "you could just ask him out --"

Instantly, "He has to ask me."

"Why?" Silver softly followed up.

"Because if he can't pick up on the clues, then why is he worth it?" She just barely managed to keep her left forehoof from stomping, and the majority of her followup decibels had to be implied. "Demonstrate some intellect! And interest! Besides, he likes white streaks! We know that!"

"He likes streaks," Sweetie quietly tried. "But that doesn't mean he's going to like everypony who --"

"-- and I have --"

She stopped. Looked directly at Sweetie --

-- no. The little unicorn wasn't competition. Her mane and tail really didn't have any white in them, and the colors didn't appear as streaks. It was a two-tone look. Completely different.

Diamond stopped. Held back the sigh.

"Maybe there's somewhere else we can learn about it," she considered. The town's bookstore felt like a possibility, but Miss Bluestocking was probably going to keep a close watch over those titles. Plus you couldn't really read in the bookstore, because that mare didn't like it when customers tried for sneak previews. And even if they just copied out the titles in hopes of future mail order, there was still the problem of securing a drop address --

-- something thumped.

All three adolescents froze. Fast-rotating ears focused on and isolated the sound.

"A book fell," Sweetie quietly decided. "A couple of aisles over, I think."

Diamond nodded. Remained on alert, because that was the sort of thing which could potentially draw librarian attention --

"There's stories which have exotic dressers as characters," Silver recalled. "And they probably talk about their work. Maybe if we just found one of those?"

"Which means reading a whole book," Diamond immediately groused, "just to see if there's two or three paragraphs which I actually need. And maybe a whole lot of books, because those paragraphs might not be in the first one. Or the second, or a lot of numbers past that. It's too much time. And it's not like there's any book which just tells you what's in a book."

"But if we can't get at the real thing --" Sweetie softly began.

Which was when Diamond had a Thought.

"-- what if there was?"

"Was what?" Silver asked: this time, the head tilt shifted glasses and necklace. "The real thing to watch? I don't think anypony's going to let us into a show --"

"What if there was a book," Diamond slowly said, because she'd just become aware that this was an Idea and that meant her words needed to be clearly enunciated for the eventual record, "which told you what was in books?"

She'd added a few decibels into the statement. They had seemed necessary. You just didn't get the same kind of vocal impact into the average whisper.

"A book," Sweetie repeated, "which told you --"

"-- you get somepony to read the first book!" Diamond interrupted, because brilliance had the stage and the audience could just wait to applaud until the end. "Then they just write down whatever's in it! Only they keep it to the important stuff. Like character names and places and short summaries for what everypony does. So nopony who would have had to read the original book has to deal with stupid things like describing places and weather conditions --"

She could feel herself sweating: a natural consequence of being so fully dressed within the well-lit, overheated half-wounded library during the dead of winter, and the primary reason why they'd needed to make this visit short in the first place. She simply no longer cared. The Idea was that good.

There was also a faint touch of cooler air beginning to flow across her forehead, coming in from a high point. Maybe the librarian had actually thought to turn on a fan.

"-- and you wouldn't get stuck having to pay attention to the first book, because all of the important stuff is in the second! Can't you see it? What if nopony ever had to hunt for subtext again!" Real text, as with clearly-written contracts, needed to be fully in the open. Diamond rather accurately believed that anypony who wanted to work with subtext had something to hide. "Or spot some subtle clue, because it was found for you!" Happily, "You could just skip over all the character development, because that's almost always stupid. That character should have been developed in the first place. And when it comes to key scenes, to those two or three paragraphs which were the only reason you were about to force yourself through a whole stupid book when they might not even be there, you would just know --"

The light breeze amplified, ruffled her fur and brought cool relief to the heat generated by utter genius.
Then the first sounds of too-close wingbeats finally reached her.
And then three adolescents finally, belatedly looked up.

The half-hovering alicorn was staring down at them. Her expression, twisted well beyond the usual levels of distaste, was actually rather hard to read. Her eyes, gradually fading to pure white from the edges in, were not.

None of them moved. The first one to move was obviously going to be the first target and while Sweetie knew some old Crusader twitch code which signaled a simultaneous three-way break and rush from safety, she hadn't taught it to Diamond or Silver. They didn't know if the eyelid edge shiver was supposed to be it.

"It's almost funny," the librarian too-softly told them. "How I never really thought I would hear that again, especially coming from anypony else. But bad ideas are sort of alive, aren't they? And sometimes they try to survive through changing hosts. So I'll tell you exactly what I told Cliff Notes. That you're not banned, not for an idea. And you can all come back tomorrow. But you're going to go home and think really hard about what you just said. NOW GET OUT."

No-Wage Slave

...well, realistically, that meeting had just about been on the verge of breaking up anyway.

There had been one more thing which Diamond had wanted to do in the library, but she hadn't been sure if it was even possible. Adults said a lot of stupid things, and one of the more irritating was to tell adolescents that if they didn't know how to spell a word, they should just get a dictionary and look it up. Well, how were you supposed to do that without knowing what the proper spelling was in the first place? Phonetics didn't always work! And besides, even if they'd gotten the chance to check for a translation of 'Derpy' in the library's international dictionaries...

Some foreign languages had their own alphabets: Diamond had learned that early. A good international dictionary would have an Equestrian translation for each word -- and still wasn't necessarily going to organize the whole book that way. And sometimes you didn't even have a good translation: just somepony's guess at how a transcribed word was supposed to go. Or worse, there wouldn't even be a solid, single definition available, because yaks could use 'smash' in a lot of sentences and when speaking, did so without ever quite managing to explain what was apparently some rather exacting specific usage context.

But at least it was context. Diamond's completely understandable feelings regarding subtext had just gotten them all unfairly kicked out of the tree.

The trio of adolescents stood outside the library under a cold, recently-raised Moon, about halfway between the door and a snow-encrusted book fort. Visible breath formed clouds of frustration and because none of the trio happened to be pegasi, having that vapor generate electricity wasn't an option. Diamond briefly considered this to be something of a pity.

She was perfectly content with her own magic. But Princess Luna had been in Ponyville a few times, and Diamond freely acknowledged the impact of having lightning add a minor touch of emotional punctuation to events.

"...I've got to get home," Sweetie finally said. "I didn't tell my mom that I was going to be out very late, so it's not going to be all that long before she starts wondering where I am."

"And I've got homework," Silver sighed -- then followed that up with a wince. "We've all got homework. But you know how bad it is."

Diamond reluctantly nodded. Miss Cheerilee, as with what was probably just about every teacher in the planet, would claim not to be torturing her students: this was followed by assigning full bale-weights of counterevidence.

"We'll work on the problem some more tomorrow," she told them. "There's still time."

There was agreement. (This made Diamond feel a little better, because caring about her problems showed that they also cared about her. Also that they had their priorities straight.) Then they headed off in different directions, going towards their homes. And Diamond was going to the same place as always -- but the house was new, she hadn't been in it for very long, and the rebuild had taken long enough for certain things to reach the level of reflex...

It took two hoofsteps before she stopped following Sweetie, and forced her body to turn towards the older path.

The prey sense, which had apparently decided to spend a little extra time at the library, didn't come back for the rest of the cycle.

Kicked out.

Apparently writing up new entries for the card catalog hadn't been distracting enough.

If that book hadn't fallen over...

Or been dropped. Some ponies were just clumsy, although not on the near-transcendent level as the mailmare. Ponies dropped things in the store all the time -- there had been multiple examples strewn across the aisle floors today -- and that slippage should have been a lot more difficult when most of them were gripping with their teeth.

It had probably been a drop.

That had set it off, right? The librarian had heard a book drop, just an aisle or two away from where the trio had been. She'd gone to investigate, and that had brought her close enough to hear Diamond's brilliant idea. Everything which had happened afterwards was therefore entirely the fault of whoever had dropped the book.

And then she kicked us out...

It still felt oddly embarrassing, and that emotion focused too many of her thoughts on the totally unfair removal. Reviewing events as she trotted across town in the winter chill, because Miss Twilight had been wrong and Diamond wanted to be fully certain regarding the 'why'.

Technically, she was also doing exactly what the alicorn had told her. She was thinking really hard about what she'd said to be removed, and doing so while going home. A few blocks of intense thought eventually had her put the Book About Books idea into a stable for a while. This was partially because she needed to figure out exactly what the startup requirements were, with the rest centering around a need to discover whether Cliff Notes had filed any claiming paperwork.

...banished from the library. For one day. (She was considering whether to make another attempt tomorrow.) And they'd even been allowed to trot out under their own power. Theoretically, if the librarian were ever to become truly angry, 'trotting' wouldn't necessarily be an option. A truly mad pony might kick somepony out of a building. With the alicorn, the list of possibilities included 'throw'. Or, given the way a unicorn field operated, 'fling'.

It could have been worse. Miss Twilight clearly hadn't realized which books they'd been after. There would have been a Lecture and if the librarian had been in a particularly bad mood (which merely being in the presence of genius seemed to have unfairly arranged), she might have sent a note about Age-Inappropriate Reading Material to Diamond's father. And she would have had it sent by dragon.

..and that was the bookstore on the left. Diamond briefly considered trying to go inside and spot the titles she needed, but ultimately went past. Miss Bluestocking didn't always pay full attention to customers, but -- Diamond could see the store's interior: she would have been the only shopper there. And for Diamond to go into the bookstore, alone...

Barnyard Bargains had a Books section. It mostly focused on bestsellers, because books took up a lot of space and her daddy preferred to leave the full breadth of the publication world to the specialists. He could go into the bookstore without issue, because he picked up quite a bit of his reading material there. Diamond, however, might be perceived as going on an independent scouting gallop.

Or maybe she'd said something about Miss Bluestocking once.
Or the mare's cockatiel.
She couldn't remember...

So she passed by, and that was a decision made out of both practicality and emotion. Because love might have been offered via finite supply, but frustration worked on a quota system and as far as Diamond was concerned, she was well over.

If I can't get the books...

What about just watching a professional do it? Silver didn't think anypony was going to let them into a show -- but Diamond's experience had taught her that if you just strode forward, head held high and acting like you belonged in a place --

-- then she was probably still going to be challenged on her age.

Diamond was already taller than Miss Twilight (which admittedly didn't take much), but the librarian just about always came across as an adult -- physically. The adolescent wasn't entirely sure why. Maybe it was the near-constant exasperation with so many of the ponies around her. And if that was the case, then it was extra unfair because Diamond already had that.

It wasn't her fault. She just looked young. She'd tried to come across as older before, and it hadn't worked. Diamond had once tried to see a restricted movie, and browning her teeth to add extra authenticity into her claimed years still hadn't gotten her through the cinema doors. There were supposed to be other tricks you could do with cosmetics to sell the non-magical illusion, but she was almost sure that Miss Fleur wasn't about to teach adolescents how to put on that kind of makeup.

Or she could just try to sneak in. And then if anypony caught her, all she had to do was explain that she was only trying to see how it was done and in the name of education, they had to let her stay --

-- that probably wasn't going to work either.

Ponies passed her on the street. Quite a few of them were heading in the opposite direction, because she was close to the train station now and some of the early commuters were beginning to come home. Several adults looked at her. A few indulged in Moon-revealed glares.

Did I say something about you?

She tried to remember. She examined their features, along with whatever winter clothing had left visible of their forms. Trying to bring back previous inspiration without letting any echoing words reach her voice.

But nothing came.

Secretary Of Insults.

She composed the classified ad in her head. A few more hoofsteps had her mentally underlining the core requirements for research and interview skills.

A servant greeted her when she came through her own front door. Cameo reared up against the terrarium glass, waited to be let out and then perched in Diamond's mane. And... that was all.

She made sure Cameo's miniature plates and trough were properly placed on the dining room table. That way, she wasn't eating dinner alone.

It was natural. Her father was working late, because he tried to work all of the store's hours -- and even earth pony endurance wasn't enough to let him constantly attempt the feat as a straight haul. There were days when he left the house before breakfast in order to be part of the opening crew, and those occasions would often see him meet up with Diamond on what, in spring, would be an afternoon Sun-lit road: one coming home from school, the other from work. And from there, they would trot together.

But if he left late, then he got back late. And during the store's busiest times, like Hearth's Warming, if Diamond knew that she would be asleep when he finally came home from a pre-dawn-to-well-past-dusk shift... that was when she made sure to have a warming pan placed under his bedsheets. The thermal sealing on the house was exactly up to the level which they'd paid for, but apparently there was something muscle-soothing about the presence of a warming pan.

A new house. A new bed in his room.

The same type of bed.

He came home late, when all the servants were asleep, without Diamond to welcome him because he insisted that she get enough rest, and the warming pan was the only thing in his bed...

"It's not the same."

-- it couldn't be the mailmare. She wouldn't let that happen. She had to protect him.

She also had to try not to think about it too much, because Diamond's stomach seemed to be wired directly to her brain and if she was going to come up with the plan which would save her daddy, it was vitally important that she keep her food down.

So he wasn't there for dinner. That was normal. It probably meant she was going to be alo -- with Cameo for breakfast on the next morning, because he tended to alternate shifts. And he would check on her while she slept, because he cared about her and always wanted to make sure she was okay.

She did her best to eat. Supervised Cameo's meal, because somepony had to make sure the jeweled scarab was eating properly. Being a responsible pet owner who happened to have the Cornucopia Effect on standby meant Diamond provided the growing of Cameo's food supply with her direct magical attention and, after Tirek, had arranged for a backup greenhouse. Just in case.

She was holding off on briefing the scarab regarding the day's events. Having a servant occasionally carrying trays in and out meant her bedroom offered more privacy. Besides, she was focusing too much on forcing digestion to make any long speeches and even if she'd wanted to launch into a full presentation, the new dining room no longer provided her with dramatic echoes.

There were times when she looked at the place where her father sat. Hoped his day was going well, and that he would make just a little too much noise when he came up to her door. She'd woken up at his approach before, risking opening one eye just enough to see a tired, proud, happy shadow standing guard at the entrance, and... it made her feel better.

Her food was getting a little cold, because she had to eat slowly. But her heart was warm.

They loved each other.
Each was the only pony whom the other had in the world.
That wasn't how it was supposed to be. But that was how everything had turned out.
And that was how it had to stay.

Unfortunately, the definition of 'love' didn't include 'lets me get away with anything', which was why she was currently (and quite possibly permanently) stuck doing her own homework. Something which a teacher's sadism felt needed to occupy most of the evening, especially when Diamond couldn't even ask (order) the store's accounting department to look over her math any more.

She went over her day with Cameo: the scarab made leg-weaving gestures of sympathy regarding Diamond's unfair library treatment while being appropriately wingcase-raising intrigued by the Book About Books idea. And all too soon after that, it was time for bed --

-- no. There was one more thing to do first.

Diamond made sure Cameo was close to a source of heat. Got the balcony door open, stepped into the chill of a winter night, and looked up at Moon.

"I need to know that we can work together on this," she told the orb. "And you've got to prove that you're listening. So you have to --"

-- Moon had to -- what?
She wasn't actually sure what it was capable of. But Sun and Moon worked together with the Princesses in order to keep the world alive, and being able to do that seemed to suggest greater possibilities.
Maybe the best way to figure out what those were was to let Moon take the initiative.

"-- you have to do something to help me," she decided. "But you can decide out what that is. This time. As long as it helps." She paused. "And I have to know that you did it. So make that happen."

The responsibilities of leadership had been properly tended. Diamond went to bed.

She didn't wake up during the night. She didn't have to. Her father would have guarded her.

She hadn't expected her daddy to be in the dining room for breakfast, and he wasn't.

She also hadn't been expecting to find a note on her bench, and she got one anyway.

Diamond,

Come directly to the store after school. I'll be waiting for you in my office. We need to discuss something important.

And that was it.

She stared at it for a while. No extra words appeared. Then she considered going into the kitchen, getting a lemon (or rather, half of one) and slowly rubbing it all over the paper, just in case that did the trick.

There was a tiny downdraft brushing against her mane. Cameo had ridden with her into the dining room, and the little wings were buzzing.

Go to the store.
Waiting for me.
Important...

The last 'important' discussion had led to her father asking the mailmare for a date.

Maybe they're getting marri --

Diamond's stomach flipped.

-- no. That was impossible. They hadn't even been on that first date yet.

That first date...

Her teeth nipped at the note: some frantic swallowing managed to keep it from being discolored by anything more than saliva. She removed it from her bench, carefully deposited the paper on the table, and then took her seat.

Several foodless minutes were spent in reviewing everything she'd recently done. Diamond didn't really feel as if there was anything which warranted a summons. The librarian hadn't been that mad.

This was followed by going over a much more worrisome category: everything he might think she had done. Or rather, what somepony else could have accused her of doing. Because there were adults who made up stories about other ponies and if the target couldn't fully track the trail, they might easily decide it led back to her. There was a certain degree of precedent.

So if she tried to look at it that way --

-- she had to stop after a while. It was like trying to gallop across the entire planet on three legs.

Then she realized breakfast was over, she hadn't actually eaten anything, and it was time to get dressed for school.

Maybe he just wants to give me The Talk. The one about sex. And the office is because he'll feel more comfortable there. It might be easier for him than it would be at home. Which was almost starting to feel like the best-case scenario...

Diamond checked on Cameo's position, got off the bench, and headed for her wardrobe.

(She wouldn't be all that far into dealing with the results of the actual discussion before she began to actively wish it had been The Talk.)
(It would have been an improvement.)

She made sure to coordinate her colors. As the current week wasn't quite over yet, Diamond elected to keep going with her current mane and tail styles: she didn't want to switch up too early or too often. It was best to give the intended audience some time for proper reactions, and she continued to follow that policy even while feeling that the audience should have been hoof-stomping multiple rounds of applause starting from several moons back.

The Weather Bureau was still allowing her to freely attempt some degree of the layered look. The actual layering was threatening to paralyze her shoulders and hips. However, there was significant evidence which suggested that as long as she maintained some degree of knee flexibility, then mobility wasn't going to be a real problem. Miss Pie existed and she moved like that all the time.

Diamond examined herself in the mirror. Harsh blue eyes eventually located her position at the center of the garments, then determined that she absolutely found herself appealing. However, she did allow that it was mostly due to the all-too-rare possession of good taste.

She had to be attractive.
Silver, clearly the best-qualified to judge, was oddly reluctant to talk about that.
Her daddy had always said Diamond was pretty...
...but he felt that way about the mailmare...

"Diamond?"

It was an oddly slow vocalization of her name. Something which didn't so much suggest that a stupid boy had been trying to remember what it was and needed to make sure as it implied that Snails had just tried saying it for the third time.

"Huh?" was the best she could do on short notice.

"I asked if you came up with anything overnight," the tall colt apparently repeated. "For your dad."

"Um..." wasn't much of a followup.

"You're moving kind of weird," Snips decided. "Even after figuring for all the stuff you've got on." ('Stuff' had her repressing a significant degree of fuming.) His head tilted slightly to the right. "Did ya have breakfast? Because you don't always do well with food when you're thinking about problems."

"And," Silver just had to add, "you've been looking distracted during the whole trot." With open concern, "Did something else happen?"

She told them about the note.

"And you ain't done nothing," Snips ungrammatically checked.

"No," Diamond decided, because she was still sure that her non-offense hadn't been bad enough for the librarian to send anything. "But it doesn't mean somepony didn't say I did."

"You can't worry too much about that," Snails philosophically observed. "Not unless you find out that's what happened, and then it's like you always say. That's when you get to explain."

But he doesn't listen to me the same way any more.
He loves me. But he doesn't always believe me.
Not more than anypony else. Not first.

"I guess..." was as far as the verbal part needed to go.

"It could be the toy show," Silver pointed out. "That's coming up in a couple of moons, right? You always go with him, to consult. And this is around when he'd book the tickets."

Diamond thought about it.

"He would have written that down." Which was when a few less-than-ideal brain cells went off, and the brute idiocy of Hope reared its stupid head. "But he's been distracted lately. By that mare. So maybe..."

See him at the office, because that's where he'd have the convention layout. We can work out the route. Plan the attack. The map always gets delivered to the store --

-- the map would have been delivered by the mailmare.

"I want to come over after you get back," Snips proudly announced. "To see the haul." With a slow shake of his head, "If I'd known that toy companies give out samples at their conventions, then maybe I would have thought about going for a mark in toys." He grinned. "You always bring back the best samples."

"You wanna meet up during recess again?" Snails checked. "Talk about the date stuff then?"

Which at least proved that Snails could use that form of the word 'date' in a sentence while having some idea of what it meant. "Maybe. If we get the chance."

"What about meeting you outside the store?" Silver sympathetically offered. "After it's done. We can talk about whatever happened, and then --"

Diamond shook her head. "It'll be near the end of the day shift. He'll probably trot home with me. You don't have to come."

Why does it have to be at the office?

Silver physically paused, and so Diamond hesitated in her own trot. A gentle forehoof tried to rub at her right shoulder, and mostly wound up shifting cloth layers across each other.

"It'll be okay," her best friend told her. "We've still got plenty of time."

She wound up feeling unfocused for what was pretty much the whole day. It felt as if a giant version of the note was hovering just over her head, casting a thought-dampening shadow across her brain.

Maybe it's just the toy show.
He's just a little distracted...

They didn't get anything much of anything done at recess -- well, the boys managed to wind up with fragments of half-melted snow deep-pressed into their fur, but that clearly didn't count. Besides, there had been other priorities. The first part of the school day had seen lessons streaming through Diamond's ears. This had been followed by moving down to her mouth and trying to express themselves through a slowly-moving quill. She didn't feel like she was getting enough of them. And while Silver no longer allowed Diamond to copy her homework, her best friend was still okay with sharing notes.

They reached the afternoon break. Silver asked to see what Diamond had written down, adjusted her glasses three times, and failed to translate from the scrawl.

"I'm just going to make two copies today," she decided.

"Thank you."

"You need to eat something."

"After the store," Diamond said. "After I know."

It'll be okay.
It has to be okay.
It's not like he's going to be dating two mares at once.
...miniherd marriages are legal, but it usually starts with two. Then they have to mutually agree on a third...
...there hasn't even been one date yet --
-- there can't be one date --

"Where are you going?"

"Bathroom," was delivered on the gallop.

And then she was walking through the store. Her father's store. The flagship. The embodiment of everything he worked so hard to achieve.

His store. His aisles. His employees --

-- they were looking at her.

All of them were looking at her. Even the cashiers were getting in on it. And when it came to the exact kind of look...

...they all feel bad for me?

No, that wasn't the expression. It was more towards -- anticipation. Worry. Concern. They were nervous...

Some of them were talking. About work, about what they were going to do when they got off shift. About life. But words faded out as she approached, with soft syllables reborn in her wake. They wouldn't talk around her, they started again as soon as they decided she was out of range, and she couldn't make out what they were saying.

She went through the Employees Only door. Entered the back of the store, with her legs maneuvering through familiar territory on their own. Diamond's brain was somewhat occupied.

'We should start with the dolls this year. Not just for the other stores: for Ponyville. I think it's been long enough since the Smarty Pants Incident. Doll sales could finally go back up again.'

'It was just an idea for a new kind of book, and she didn't like that. Maybe if you let me tell you what it is --'

-- please let it be the toy show...

The door to her father's office was open. It always was.

Diamond hesitated, while she was still just out of sight. Slowly raised her left forehoof, then carefully knocked on the frame.

"I heard you coming down the hall, Diamond." The most familiar voice she knew seemed to have a small smile lurking behind it, and most of her stomach untwisted. "I do know what your trot sounds like. Come in."

She carefully entered --

the convention floor map isn't on the desk
he could take it out at any minute

-- what was actually a rather simple office, and remained so no matter how many times she tried to give him decorating tips. The desk served as a desk. It also could have been a declaration of wealth and power, but he insisted that 'desk' came with the same number of drawers.

The bench for visitors was nicer than his own. There was a map of the nation on one wall, with pins indicating the location of each franchise. Another section hosted two pieces of framed artwork.

It was very bad artwork. Diamond's foalhood talents had never gotten anywhere close to drawing. But he'd had them framed anyway.

"Sit down," he requested.

She climbed up onto the bench. It wasn't hard. Her legs had been getting longer.

He waited until she was settled in, then looked her over. And the tired eyes were kind.

I'm not in trouble.
I'm not.
I'd see it if I was. He doesn't look upset at all.

She was starting to feel hungry.

"I've been waiting to have this talk with you," her father gently began. "For -- quite some time." The right corner of his mouth briefly twitched up: a half-smile. "In a way, it's been planned since the day you were born..."

She managed not to wriggle.

It's The Talk!
...it's just The Talk.
Let him say everything. Even if it's obvious and sort of stupid.
Don't show him up.

"Whatever you need to tell me," Diamond calmly said. "I'm ready."

He nodded. Took a slow, steady breath, and the smile became full.

"You're going to start doing intern work at the store."

Diamond blinked.

In a way, it could be seen as amazing. The only outwards sign of her entire digestive system spontaneously tying itself into a knot was blinking. Getting a reaction out of Snails with her mane and tail streaks, that was about twenty times harder than it ever should have been, but when it came to her body's reactions demonstrating near-impossible levels of understatement...

Words.

Right. She needed words. Words were something which existed and she needed them, so they could start to present themselves right now. Furthermore, they were free. And they were equally free to show up at any moment --

Her father's brow creased.

"Diamond?"

"I --" Oh, of course: the shortest, most overused possible candidate. "-- I thought..."

(She hadn't really thought about it at all.)

"That it would be in summer?" he wrongly guessed.

Diamond felt her head go into a nod. After a few seconds, she decided the motion was too fast, then tried to find a way of making it stop.

"No." And he chuckled. "You taught me a lesson once, remember?"

As words went, "I..." both clearly wanted the work and had no actual idea what it was doing.

"You and the other children of Ponyville." The smile got a little strong. "And a few of the adults, during the protest about the back-to-school sales starting far too early. That summer is for being young. I want you to have fun this summer, Diamond. So I changed the start of the plan to winter. And I was just waiting for the Hearth's Warming aftermath to fully clear, because an intern shouldn't be dealing with that level of returns. This is the slowest period we have, and it'll let you ease in --"

"-- an intern," was purely a vocabulary desperation hire.

"You have to learn the entire business," her father stated. "From the ground up. Interning will let that happen."

It's not just the ground up.
Interns spend a lot of time in the basement --
-- this isn't right, my talent isn't --
-- his is for business, a pure business mark, and mine --

It was possible that some of that had made it to her face. A tiny slip, just enough to let her look worried for a single moment. He noticed.

"It won't interfere with your other job."

"My -- other..."

"We're still going to the toy show together," he smiled. "I need my best consultant. I'm hoping to get the convention material in a few days."

"When..." She couldn't gulp. Swallowing would bring saliva down, and any addition to the system risked bringing bile back up. "...did you decide it had to be now?"

"The other night," he admitted. "Or at least, that's when I finalized it. I did tell you that I wanted to speak with you about something else, but..." A little more carefully, "I did consider postponing it until next year. I was thinking that with my -- starting again, it might be too much at once. But on the way home last night... I was taking my time, thinking about everything. Including that. And then I looked up at Moon."

You what?

"And when I did..." her father finished, "it just felt right."

You looked at Moon and you felt --
-- that TRAITOR!

"Diamond?"

She blinked again. Her body was clearly going with what it knew.

"You look like a young lady with a question," her father decided, which just proved that he was in no way ready to date because he could not read female moods.

"...who's my boss?"

She watched him fight back the laugh.

"You're an intern, Diamond," half-private mirth told her. "Everypony is your boss."

"And... why did I need to come into the office?"

"It's not because you're starting today," he failed to reassure her.

"Oh."

"Tomorrow will be fine."

"...oh."

"You're in the office," her father explained, "because there's paperwork which needs to be filled out for a new hire. Even an intern. So we'll do that now. And we'll go over it together."

I'm not --
-- my talent --

In Diamond's judgment, he very nearly picked up on something.

"Don't worry," he gently told her. "I'll translate any legalese which managed to sneak in. And then I'll show you where to sign."

She took up the offered quill in her teeth, scrawled here and there. This was deemed acceptable.

Her father, beaming and proud and happy, asked her to step out of the office. Wait by the cashier section while he filed everything away. And then they would trot home together.

Diamond was nearly halfway through her unwatched stagger down Cookery before she realized that he'd never mentioned anything about a salary.

Moon Is Raised And She Wants To Go Home

Her stomach felt somewhat full, and she wasn't entirely sure how that had happened. Having a certain amount of emotional distress churning in her head tended to echo directly into other organs, but -- she'd clearly eaten something, even if her memories of the actual chew-and-swallow part were largely absent and any impression of taste had gone on an early Hearts And Hooves Day vacation --

-- she really didn't want to think about Hearts And Hooves Day --

-- he has to ask me out by then. He has to --

-- at any rate, she'd eaten. It was helping her think as she paced within her bedroom, hooves coming down with just a little additional impact on each successive pass because that required calories too.

Diamond was thinking, and one of the first things she recognized was that she'd managed to get a meal down due to the rather impressive power of distraction. She hadn't been concentrating on eating during dinner. Most of the repast had been spent in coming up with things she could yell at Moon.

Her head turned, because the most recent part of the pacing had brought her to Cameo's terrarium and in any case, it wasn't a very large room and going for the next circuit meant her head had to turn first. It brought harsh blue eyes in alignment with the balcony door, and she glared through the glass.

A certain degree of upwards angling was then required in order to locate the actual target.

In the most technical sense, she'd been working on her upcoming speech since shortly after leaving the store and she still wasn't sure of what to say. She'd just taken special care not to look up at the orb during the trot home, just in case any words gave in to their natural temptation and slipped out.

Another circuit. Moon, which was putting roughly the same amount of effort into recognizing how much she was fuming as it had given towards fulfilling her requests, placidly hung in the sky.

Of course, Moon was a rather long way off. It was a considerable distance to look across, plus Diamond sort of had to assume that a clear line of sight was required. She immediately rerouted the majority of her pacing so that it took place near the clear glass of the balcony exit and considered the problem solved.

One problem had been solved. Unfortunately, her parent had recently nosed over a few bale-tons of extras.

"And how was I supposed to say anything to him?" she asked Cameo. "He was happy! All proud! You know what he's like when he's happy and proud: it shows up in his trot! When his knees are going higher --" she would have to check on the status of his healed legs again in the morning, as the burns had been especially bad around the knees "-- and his tail gets all lofted. He was talking about how proud he was to have me starting at the store while we were coming home together, and --"

She paused, in trot and speech. Looked at her pet, and noticed that the wings were buzzing a little faster than usual.

"-- I think that's what he said," Diamond clarified. "I was sort of distracted." Because dashing off into the bare bushes to temporarily take care of how she was really feeling would have raised a few questions.

She wasn't even sure of what she'd said in response. There was a vague impression of agreeing noises, accompanied by a lot of nodding.

Tiny wings briefly refolded. Iridescent cases closed, then shivered. Diamond considered tweaking the room's temperature settings.

Iridescent. As descriptions went, it wasn't quite detailed enough. She'd had to check the exact meaning of the term Snails had originally given her: 'preferentially left polarized'. And the strange science behind it meant that Cameo's light-illuminated carapace shimmered like nothing else in the world.

Someone who was unique. A special pet for a special filly. Except that time had rendered the latter into an adolescent. Somepony who was about to start work. She'd put in a request to Moon for assistance, allowed it to choose its own method of delivery, and...

"It's my talent," she softly told her truest confidant. "You know about my talent. Starting as an intern means..." Paused, in speech and motion alike. Trying to think of the right way to put it, because Cameo was always worth searching for the proper words.

There was something of a reflection in the balcony glass. She felt as if it was glaring at her.

"It's the first hoofstep on the road," Diamond finally said. "The one Daddy's been paving for me since I was born. We both know where it goes. But my talent..."

Moon appeared to have a sadistic sense of humor. Diamond was in a position to know.

The scarab slowly sunk down, rested against the terrarium's imported soil. Tiny eyes continued to follow Diamond.

"...I know," the adolescent finally sighed. (She could do that more openly, when Cameo was the only one watching.) "I know." She sort of wanted to match the movement, resting her body against soft carpet or supportive mattress for a while. Just... stopping. Letting the invisible weight have its way with her until morning.

But that wasn't who she was. And there was still business to conduct.

"I'm going out onto the balcony," she informed her confidant. "And closing the door behind me, because I might be out there for a while. You won't get cold that way."

Cameo, rather sensibly, had no objections. Diamond stepped into night and chill.

She looked up at Moon. Her mouth opened --

-- no.

Diamond rarely had any trouble in coming up with words which made others angry: the usual difficulty was in picking out the best ones. But brilliant compositions of insult spoken to ponies were still coming back on her, and when it came to offending Moon...

There were times when ponies moved away. Moon was going to be around for a while.

Maybe this is salvageable.

They clearly needed to establish some kind of relationship.

Maybe it wants something first?

Negotiations. She could at least make an attempt at those. Except that... ponies usually told you what they wanted, and Moon was sort of on the silent side. Her father had apparently received some sort of communication from it, but that message hadn't arrived as words. Just... a feeling.

Diamond, standing on her new balcony with the door tightly shut behind her, looked up at Moon and waited to see if she felt anything.

...irritated.
Also cold.
Mostly irritated.

So how can I have it talk back?

She could... use a go-between. She talked to them, and then the words would be relayed in both directions. Because if Moon spoke directly to anypony, then that mare would just about have to be --

-- Diamond stopped. Closely examined the internal image of her having to tell Princess Luna everything.

...it was cold. She was shivering because it was cold. She should have put something on before coming outside, but her bedroom was kept so warm for Cameo...

Getting dressed would have been good practice, but the jeweled scarab had a certain species-based problem in evaluating Diamond's technique.

Keep it between us.

What could Moon want? What did it need? Because that was business. Identify the need and fill it, at a profit.

Diamond could always make a promise she didn't intend to keep. But her father frowned on that. Also, unless you had the fortune to come across somepony who was exceptionally gullible, the practical limit was usually once per victim. Diamond was assuming that Moon was more intelligent than Mr. Barnum and Ms. Bayleaf. Plus once you'd tricked somepony that way, you ideally never wanted to see them again and as before, Moon was just going to be there. It might somehow be possible to fool it once -- Diamond had vague recollections of foalhood stories about that sort of thing -- but she was presuming that Moon could hold a grudge for a very long time.

If it was negotiation...

It was usually best to negotiate from a position of strength and when it came to hoof-hammering out that kind of agreement, Diamond felt that she was going to have some trouble establishing her credentials. Moon did half of the work in keeping the planet alive. Just half -- 'just' felt a little odd there -- but it was still considerably more than she'd ever personally managed.

The second option was to approach as an equal, and her father would have had somewhat more of an argument there. Moon helped to keep the planet alive, but the business made that life more comfortable. It wasn't as if Moon offered much in the way of food, because that was more of a Sun thing. It also didn't seem to do creature comforts and as a sapient who needed some comfort, Diamond felt it could do far worse than by starting with her. But to make that argument, she would have to be in cha --

-- fifteen franchises, going on sixteen. All in Equestria. Moon was still the co-leader in global coverage.

So she would be negotiating from a position of weakness. The worst possible scenario. And if she was stuck with that, then it might be best to open with a bribe.

What could I offer?

She could... build it a place which demonstrated her respect. Or rather, she could try to contract somepony to do it. Her classmates, probably: Diamond's allowance wasn't exactly at the level which allowed the hiring of full construction crews, and using marble was right out. Still, it would show that she was serious about the whole thing. And once the structure existed, ponies could go there to celebrate Moon's existence --

-- no. It felt like a good idea -- but it also felt like it was too good to not have come up before. A few times. Diamond knew she was brilliant, but that same intelligence also allowed her to recognize that history was sort of long, there had been other brilliant ponies occupying most of it, and some ideas tended to repeat. If a building to honor Moon actually worked, then she would have seen one already. Probably a lot more than one, because there were sapients all over the planet who needed to ask for help.

Maybe Moon just didn't like that sort of thing.

What can I offer?

She didn't know.

Diamond kept looking up at Moon. Wondered just how much attention it was giving her, then tried to figure out how it was even possible to tell. She couldn't look it in the eye. The image of a mare's head had vanished years ago and taken the suggestion of an eye with it.

Don't try to negotiate just yet. Not until I can think of something to open with.
Maybe I could just... ask?

She hated that. Her magic required asking the earth for what was essentially permission to do everything. That was frustrating enough. And now she was getting someone else involved. Asking always implied that the other party might say no.

...it was getting really cold on the balcony...

Diamond took a breath. Vaporous ice seared her lungs.

"Let's start small," she proposed. "You don't have to solve everything all at once. Just before it could all really go wrong. So..." Her lower lip puffed a tiny cloud of warmth towards her mane. "...maybe if they get to the date, you could make it a really bad one? So he won't want to try again. Or..."

She thought it over.

"I need to know you're with me on this," Diamond reluctantly said. "Because right now, it doesn't feel like it." There were ponies who claimed Sun and Moon worked in mysterious ways. Based on her current experience with the latter, this seemed to translate directly into 'annoying'. Or worse.

Internship.
Starting on the road.
My talent...

"Information is power," she finally concluded. "That's what my daddy always says. It can be subtle power, but it's power. So, just to start us off -- at least show me something. Let me see. And then I'll know."

The next day's trot to school was mostly used for updating her consultant team on the labor situation. It was something she could do on the move, even if her current approach to the clothing question was about two layers away from negating movement.

Diamond briefly wondered if there were any basilisk variations who turned ponies into statues made of fabric. Miss Rarity probably knew. And potentially sought out the results in hopes of inspiration.

"Luna's tail," Snips very nearly cursed. "Of all the stupid stuff to start right now..."

It was using the invocation of a Princess as something very close to profanity. It also felt like sympathy, and Diamond tried to bask in it.

"What's so wrong about doing stuff at the store?" Snails immediately asked.

Raw. Material.

"You don't get it," Snips blatantly pointed out. "You're still free. I've been stuck for years." The shorter boy slowly shook his head. "Usually to a lot of paper. With binding glue. Working for your folks sucks, Snails. And now Diamond's gotta go through it."

Silver's snout wrinkled. "I know it's not the best timing," Diamond's oldest friend said, "but it was always going to start anyway. Someday. You're on your way, right? And at least it's not in summer."

Diamond didn't bother to repress most of the groan. "It's not just timing," she pointed out (and added a punctuating tail lash, just in case Snails noticed that). "It's time. You said we had plenty of it. Time to work on this. And now some of my time is going to be spent at work. How is that going to help?"

Everypony thought about that. This included the boys, for whom the process was decidedly more visible.

"You can still think," Silver carefully told her. "You'll just be doing it there."

"But I'll be stuck in the store," Diamond countered. "Or doing things for the store. If there's anything where I'd need to be somewhere else..."

And -- my talent...

No. She hadn't told them about that part. Or, when it came to the magic given form by her mark, much of anything else.

She had likely spent cumulative days of her life in boasting about her mark, because that was what you did when three classmates didn't have theirs. But as a general rule, Diamond didn't talk about her talent. Its very nature meant it was in her best interests not to, because that kept ponies from preparing for it.

Silver knew, but had been asked not to tell. The boys...

Don't tell.

The time aspect was currently infuriating enough. Time, as with love, was a limited resource, and you couldn't really buy any.

"I don't know," Snails considered, and did so with the words which so many adults considered to be his dominant state. "There's got to be advantages, right?"

"Like what?" a poorly-hidden burst of frustration wanted to know.

"You might see when the best stuff comes in on the loading dock. And figure out how much of it you're going to get for yourself." With what he likely had decided was subtlety, "Or if you were thinking of a gift for somepony else -- somepony who's got a birthday coming up -- you could go right for it. At the employee discount."

She resisted the urge to glare at him. Diamond was fairly certain that Snails wasn't into glaring.

"And maybe," the still-a-colt openly courted death (and worse, did so instead of courting her), "it'll be fun?"

It wasn't.

That was why it was called 'work'. If it was fun, it would have been called 'play'.

Snails was the one who had a birthday coming up. It took Diamond less than three hours to decide he'd just talked himself into the privilege of opening a gift-wrapped dictionary.

Her father was in the meeting room when she arrived at the store, conferencing with various department heads. It meant he wasn't available to directly give her the first assignments. But he'd thought to pass on what he'd wanted done before entering the meeting, and it left everypony else telling her what to do.

They waited until she'd undressed (in full privacy), because the store was kept nicely warm in winter and overheating wouldn't have helped. But once that was done, with her clothing deposited in a newly-assigned personal locker... she had prancing instructions being nosed over to her by shelf stockers.

It was easy to tell when somepony was giving her orders. For starters, they spoke directly to her. And in the course of that, they would tell her what to do. The speech might start as something shaky, but each additional word seemed to pick up cumulative degrees of confidence. She also suspected some of them were enjoying the process. Spotting the tiny, half-hidden smiles felt like full confirmation.

A number might have been looking at it as their chance to exact some level of vengeance. A Secretary Of Insults would have known.

"You're starting on shelf cycling," the stock clerk told her.

Diamond blinked.

"...shelf cycling?"

"That's when --" the young unicorn mare began.

She'd effectively grown up in the store. She believed herself to know almost everything about how it operated. Diamond was completely familiar with shelf cycling, and that was why she felt there was no need for her to actually be doing it.

'But that's for --!' didn't quite make it to her mouth, because the next stop for those words would have been the meeting room door. They probably would have paused to knock before going in.

"-- um," not only didn't make for an effective substitute, but failed to dislodge her default level of Resting Superiority Face.

The stock clerk decided to treat the single syllable as a sign of ignorance, and kept talking. Any and all incredulous looks from Diamond were ignored, and that happened in absolute safety because the mare was doing nothing more than giving an order to an intern.

The full instructions took a while. Multiple customers passed them in the aisle. Quite a few smirked. Some of the expressions were seen: the rest were felt.

Diamond knew a good smirk had physical impact. She just wasn't familiar with being on the receiving end.

This was how shelf cycling worked.

New inventory came in all the time. The majority of it would be replacements for items which had already sold and ideally, you usually didn't want to completely sell out of anything. Clearance and seasonal items made for obvious exceptions -- but when it came to the basic staples of the business, it was best to always have something there for the next customer. Because if the item wasn't available, they would leave the store to seek it elsewhere. And they didn't always bother to wrap up the rest of their shopping first.

So new stock came in. But the older items would still be there. And (also) ideally, you wanted to get the senior pieces out of the store first. Some things had expiration dates and when it came to the less stable variety of mass-produced potions -- those with a Sell-By date of no more than a moon before potential disaster -- you wanted to make sure they were used up before anypony risked the kind of nausea which made expiring feel like the soft option.

It meant stock clerks were supposed to put newer items at the back of the shelf. Older ones were kept within ready mouth grip range at the front. And that way, the senior pieces sold first -- except that some customers knew about the system, insisted on getting the freshest of arrivals, and did their own rearrangements to suit. And once the more recent additions were visible again...

Shelf cycling, nosed over to an intern, meant that pony was supposed to go over the contents of an aisle, then subject everything to a rather specific form of time travel. The past was placed in front of the future.

Diamond had mastered the basic concept at the age of four.

She'd never actually done it.

There was a variable-elevation bench in the aisle. It had a platform which was large enough to rest on, could have its height adjusted by mouth crank, and it was going completely unused because Diamond was supposed to be learning the business from the ground up and in this case, that meant crawling onto the lowest shelf first.

She was crawling. The necessities of pony anatomy meant that every shelf had to present enough vertical space for a customer to safely stick their head in. Those trying to reach something near the back would inevitably wind up pushing their shoulders into the shelving and if you didn't offer customers enough room to do exactly that, then the resulting cascade of storage and product could easily turn into Medical Emergency On Aisle Four. Diamond was gradually coming into her full adult size, but the process wasn't happening fast enough and if she cleared enough space for her body (while trying to take care of those bottles along the way), kept her head down, tucking her legs as close as was possible while still allowing movement, she could effectively crawl.

Effectively. Not efficiently. Ponies weren't very good at crawling.

There was a small glowing device strapped to her forehead, and it was there because going forward was costing her an increasing amount of aisle light. The enchantment provided just enough lumens to let her read the expiration dates stamped on liquid-filled glass bottles, and somehow did so while never quite reaching the shelf above her. That surface was currently serving as her half-forgotten ceiling -- but it never stayed away from her memory for long. Every time she recoiled from something, she received an immediate reminder of where it was.

(Diamond, even for an earth pony, was considered to be on the strong side. Her recoils came up with a certain jolt. The resulting headache was bad enough -- but she was also roughly three rude shocks from having the shelf above her turn into the shelf contents behind her, and was trying to figure out whether that would actually represent an improvement.)

What was there to recoil from? What wasn't present? Because customers could be strange beings, possessed of comprehensible-but-incredibly-lazy habits. They would wait until they were on their way to the registers before changing their minds on purchasing something, and why bother to put the item back where it belonged when they could just stuff it behind rows of potions bottles? That process was clearly easier. Somehow.

Then you had the ones who just didn't have the bits to purchase their desired piece at that exact moment, didn't want anypony else to get it first, and concluded that hiding everything elsewhere in the store was the sort of brilliant tactical strategy which no other pony had ever come up with. Ever. Most of those specimens considered themselves to be collectors of some sort, the majority haunted the toy aisles and based on the evidence of Diamond's eyes, just about none could remember where they'd put anything. They also didn't seem to have much insight when it came to picking out pieces which would actually appreciate in value. But those ponies had felt some initial desire to purchase toys which Diamond had personally picked out for the store, so at least she'd been doing a good job there.

And there were ponies who'd somehow carried their trash into the store and didn't feel like carrying it out again.

Each hoofwidth of process into the shadows made her feel as if she was approaching another world. It was probably populated by dust bunnies. Or rather, overpopulated, because this section clearly hadn't been done in a while and as long as she was advancing into the division between dimensions, she'd been given a sponge and wetting tray. But not a mouth guard. There either hadn't been a mouth guard sized for the store's youngest intern, or some of the older Diamond-familiar employees had decided there was an extra layer of vengeance coming.

It was... surprisingly difficult to bite down on half of a sponge. Or rather, the biting was the easy part. Keeping any liquid from going backwards was just about impossible. But the desperate spitting was allowing her to effectively recycle the supply.

Also, as long as she was going that far back, she had to take inventory. That meant spitting away from the notepad.

She was just about all the way under the shelf now, with her teeth carefully picking up bottles and moving them aside to create more room. (There was dust on some of the grip points and when it came to her tongue, that almost served as a cleanser.) And there was some question as to whether this was a good place to bring in 'eschatology'. The rearmost items weren't exactly dead, but to truly delve all the way back might lead her to discover whether the shadowlands had a private stock. Diamond was slowly approaching the the dividing aisle wall between Potions and School Supplies, and felt as if that was the most natural place for the basic concepts of reality to go on holiday.

The unicorns are supposed to do shelf cycling...

...they did the majority of it. Any employee was supposed to be capable --

-- she just had to get through it. One shelf at a time, for the dozens which populated the aisle. And she wouldn't have to do this for the rest of her life. Once her father had decided she'd learned all about shelf cycling through Direct Experience, he'd move her on to something else and, given this kind of start, something worse.

He didn't want to take away summer...

The mere thought should have made her look forward to the season.

(Snails had to say something soon. There was no chance that Diamond would be able to maintain her current fabric layer count after the Wrap-Up wrapped up: sweat would come in far too quickly, then rapidly convert into froth. Trying to pull off the same look in summer had a good chance to actually kill her.)

But she couldn't seem to manage it, and Diamond wasn't sure why.

She kept advancing, and more aisle light was blocked out. But it didn't do anything to stop her other senses.

Diamond could hear customers trotting past her tail, and felt the smirks hitting just above her dock.

"I'm finished," she told the nearest supervisor. It was easy to find a supervisor. She was an intern. Every other employee qualified. But she'd wanted to get away from the Potions aisle before the dust bunny army launched a second assault against the invader, and so had chosen the supervisor closest to the glass of the store exit.

It was dark outside. Winter made it hard to figure out if night had arrived early or if she'd just been at it for that long.

The stallion nodded. "Fifteen-minute break. Then get dressed."

If evaluated by the tastes of the average pony, then the store had a decent-if-small selection of clothing. Diamond suspected Miss Rarity wouldn't be caught dead wearing any of it, and didn't feel as if she'd just been personally asked to serve as a model.

There were two reasons for telling Diamond to get dressed, and sending her home right after a break didn't make any sense.

"...what am I doing outside?"

"Cart retrieval," the stallion mercilessly stated. (Diamond automatically considered the sentence to be merciless. It wasn't the sort of two-word statement which left any room to get mercy involved.)

"Just... around the front of the store, or...?" 'Or' was the bad option.

"Six-street radius," wasn't so much qualifier as verdict. "Bring back whatever you find."

The offered break wasn't. Diamond wound up in a back room, frantically trying to get a start on her homework because she'd just realized that it had to be done sometime. There were ways in which school was very much like a second job and when it came to the leftover labors from the earlier shift, Miss Cheerilee wasn't going to accept I Didn't Have Time After The Other One as an excuse for not getting them done.

Then she got dressed. Keeping the results down to normal winter insulation allowed her to leave a few layers in the locker. Snails was presumed to be nowhere in the vicinity, because she'd asked the entire group not to be. She felt as if she would have to be working for some time before anypony could just come in and --

-- there's going to be other kids coming through the store. Seeing me working. Telling each other. I might have already missed one --

-- outside. She was going outside. Proof of labor would probably mean bringing back a cart. And that had the potential to turn awkward, because customers tended to take the store's shopping carts home. Some of them technically brought the things back during their next trip -- at least for the amount of time it took to go down all of their chosen aisles. Others just outright kept the things, because a cart could be used to store so many items and when it came to cost, her daddy had already paid for it. Carts were lost all the time, and most of them never came back.

There had been several attempts to solve this. The most recent had seen Miss Ratchette install short chains which locked carts to each other when put away, along with a tiny lockbox near the hitch. Pushing a half-bit into the box's coin slot freed up the cart. This was supposed to encourage customers towards putting the carts back, as the money was returned upon relocking. A number of ponies had responded by deciding that the price of a cart was now a half-bit. Several were still complaining about how that was clearly much too high.

So there were cart retrievers. Some worked in front of the store and tried to keep the chains from getting tangled. Others went into town and just looked for where carts had been taken. And since they were effectively recovering the store's property, the police didn't have a problem with employees simply reclaiming any cart which was out in the open. This included anything sitting on a lawn, or visible within an unlocked shed.

The police didn't mind.

Customers, upon witnessing any such retrieval effort, frequently treated it as if they'd just caught somepony in the act of somepony stealing their cart.

...oh. So she'd insulted that mare.

There hadn't even been any issues in figuring out what she'd originally said. The mare had provided plenty of detail, because cart retrieval ponies got yelled at a lot. Diamond had been spotted while she was still trying to get the wheels to stop squeaking on their way past the front gate, and yelling had ensued. The opening salvo had effectively summarized everything which had happened before. This had let Diamond recover all memories of the exact incident and upon both review and full attention paid to everything else the mare was saying, she'd decided that her original efforts hadn't been harsh enough.

She'd still tried to apologize. For what she'd said. Not for the cart. The cart belonged to her daddy. And the mare had said she didn't look sorry --

-- stupid Resting Superiority Face...

She'd still decided to count it as removing one pony from the list. As far as Diamond was concerned, being repeatedly accused of theft had effectively balanced things out. And now she was a block away from that house, the echoes were finally fading and the six witnesses would presumably stop smirking any hour now, but Diamond could finally pause and try to unfold the hitch so she could pull the cart back to the store --

-- the hitch was sort of adjustable...

...the store needed to order some junior carts.

(Diamond presumed Miss Twilight was just pushing the thing with her field. Or pulling it. Some unicorns pulled.)

Pushing the cart with her head hadn't felt like a good idea at the time, because her head was still sore from doing shelf cycling. But it was the most workable option and in both cases, there was no chance for her tiara to become damaged from the activity. Her tiara was gone. And Diamond, who had picked up both height and body length over several moons and still held out some hope for getting close to Miss Fleur's intimidating dimensions, hadn't quite reached the point where the head-lowered position didn't have her form and viewing angles almost completely obscured by the cart.

It meant she had to stop every so often. Realign the direction, listen around her, try to figure out if she was about to push the cart into anypony and when hearing wasn't enough, she stepped back and peeked past the cart's sides. Scouting for a clear path.

She did it again when she was a mere two turns away from the store, moving down what sounded like an almost-empty street. She had to be sure, because a pony hit by a cart might consider suing. And it was dark and cold, the closest lamppost was behind her and the next one seemed to be far too distant. The Weather Bureau had scheduled for partly cloudy, which meant Moon wasn't helping much. Wheels on cobblestone created potential steering problems, and checking her course for obstacles felt like it was essential.

Diamond peeked out from behind the cart.

A cloud shifted.

Moon shone down on the street, and half-silvery light revealed the mailmare.

The pegasus was about twenty body lengths away. Perpendicular to Diamond's position, and a little ahead of the cart's travel line. Which meant she normally wouldn't be in a good position to spot the observation, but that one eye --

-- Diamond could see that eye. Its line of sight was currently drifting down. And what she could make out of the mare's face was somewhat pained. A familiar expression, because Diamond had been wearing it for a while. It was the look worn by somepony who was fighting off a headache. And losing.

The mare wasn't looking at Diamond -- but one bad change of drift could change that. For the moment, she was facing an overstuffed mailbox in front of a dark house. Nothing appeared to have been collected for at least two weeks, and snow had piled up on the walkway.

Maybe you should stop delivering there if nopony's home --

-- she had to be ready to move. Duck back behind the cart at the first sign of awareness --

-- the mailmare was right there...

Diamond had trouble determining if a mare was appealing. But it generally took no effort whatsoever to spot flaws, and inventing a few for future rumors didn't take much more. With the mailmare, there was that one eye. There would always be the drifting eye, and nothing could change that. But to look at the rest of her...

The fur was somewhat out of grain after a long workday, but it was clean. Mane and tail -- neither one was particularly styled, and it was impossible to work out whether the former had been split to go around that ear or if the mare had just forgotten she had an ear there. Go back to the face, look away from the eye again (which took an extra effort) and nothing about her features felt outstanding.

Her body wasn't all that sleek, at least when compared to somepony like Miss Rainbow. However, the wings were strong. There was more muscle at the base than Diamond had really noticed before, but -- who ever really looked at the mailmare for very long? And when it came to everything else...

...how did anypony go about judging butts? It was there. If the mare sat, it would be doing its job. There was very little else to go on.

How desperate is Daddy if this is what he decided to try with?

Or maybe Diamond was missing something. But if she was, then everypony else in town had missed it too. This suggested nothing was actually there.

I could ask Silver.

The mare's visible wing twitched. Diamond ducked back behind the cart. A few seconds passed with no sounds of takeoff, and she risked another look. Still there.

It probably wasn't a good idea to check on the mare's potential attractiveness with that consultant. That was the last resort of just-in-case, but her friend oddly regarded such questions as being exceptionally awkward and given her father's recent failure of taste, Diamond really didn't need to hear Silver say 'Yes'.

What did you break today?
Nothing in the store. You didn't come in.
Diamond hadn't seen her come in --
-- you break things. All the time. Everypony knows that. If there's a package marked Fragile, then that's probably a challenge. To see how many pieces come out.
How do you keep your job?
How did you even get --
-- why you?

How desperate could her father have been, to try for the mailmare?

Why her --

-- grey wings flared. Spread. Flapped.

There was something exceptional about the pegasus. It came in the speed of her takeoff. And within seconds, she was gone. Vanished into the darkness.

Diamond had never been spotted.

Not you.
It's my love. You can't have it.
I just looked at you. You're not worth --

-- maybe it wouldn't reach the first date. (There was still a little time to think of something which would save her daddy..)
It might be a bad date. It almost had to be. Something where her father might break it off on his own.
But if it somehow went beyond that...

The headache intensified, and Diamond's tail lashed.

I could still stop it before they go out.
He might wake up. Especially if he gets shocked --

-- no lightning. The burns had been bad enough.

It could all end as quickly as it had started. But if that didn't happen, then -- the mare wasn't good enough. Not for her father. If the mistake went beyond one date...

...then I'll need to think of something else.

Something big.

Her daddy was at stake. And she had to save him.

What Color Is Your Ocean?

The current problem with devoting any time to saving her daddy was that Diamond also needed to put in a certain amount of ongoing effort towards saving herself. Or rather, her grade point average. The experiences she'd gained from visiting Silver's family and staying in the Belle household suggested just about every parent treated those two very different things as being one and the same.

Diamond was no longer allowed to copy somepony else's homework and claim the creation had been hers all along -- well, technically, she'd never been allowed to do that, but it was the sort of thing where the rule had only truly kicked in after she'd been caught. Unfortunately, so had the punishment. And the adult effort to make sure anything submitted to Miss Cheerilee's desk had actually been written by Diamond? That was ongoing and even worse, a truly accurate description could casually kick in a 'still' while leaving room to swap out for the extremely dejecting future opinion of 'permanent'.

She'd been writing her own papers for moons. Honestly. Honesty was one of the virtues, and virtue was supposed to be rewarded. Diamond felt that a suitable reward for her steadfast virtue would be having the supervision stop, and anything she nosed over was still being scrutinized with what felt like twice the regard of anypony else's efforts --

-- anyway, she'd put in several hours at the store. This had been work or rather, it had been WORK. Then she'd had to trot home, because having a hired hansom waiting outside the store to bring a weary employee to her rest was the sort of thing which absolutely needed to be in a practical budget and therefore, she really didn't understand why her father hadn't thought of that already. The lack of waiting wheels had left her trotting as huge pieces of shelf-won dust bunny corpses had dropped from her fur. In front of adult witnesses, far too many of whom had Moon-shadows suggest that their half-concealed expressions were mostly hiding smirks. Also, having pieces drop away was clearly the easy option, because the harder one was carrying the rest of the battlefield home.

Her father had reached the house before her. And he hadn't greeted Diamond with the nuzzle meant for family, because she was dirty and he understood how she felt about touching or being touched when she was dirty. Diamond fully understood that putting forth a real effort could mean getting some mud on your hooves. She also recognized that a lot of ponies based their impressions on that first moment of contact, along with not always offering the opportunity for a newly-met personage to get cleaned up first.

(He'd tried to joke with her, saying it was the dirt of an honest day's labor. Something to be proud of. All that told her was that her brilliant father had once been a boy and therefore, by exacting and oddly painful definition, he'd never been a girl. He didn't understand girl stuff. Diamond had wondered if there was a spell which could turn every colt and stallion into a girl for a few days, just to give them a basis for comprehension -- but then she vaguely recalled that certain kinds of magic operated by something called The Law Of Balance and in this case, the same theoretical spell probably required her to be rendered into a boy. There were prices which could be paid in the name of universal understanding and in Diamond's opinion, that one was far too high.)

She'd spent some very necessary time in the bathroom. Just about all of her clothing had been sent to the laundry. Food had been offered, and her proudly beaming daddy had made sure some of her favorites were waiting because it had been a first day at work and you only got that once. Diamond presumed the cooking had been excellent, because it had all stayed down until she'd gotten away from the table. And once she'd dispensed with the 'How did it go?' questions for which he'd surely been told the answers by a dozen spies...

Diamond had put in her first intern shift. Work or, to be more accurate about it, WORK. And then she'd gone home to find more WORK waiting for her, because Miss Cheerilee had assigned HOMEWORK. By definition, this was the sort of WORK which was supposed to be done at HOME. Except that Diamond had arrived at her HOME several hours after she normally would have, because she'd been at WORK. And the amount of HOMEWORK assigned was just about enough to completely fill the hours between that standard arrival time and dinner, plus there had to be some studying afterwards because there was a test coming up. It was school and by further extension of the original definition, that meant there was always a test coming up. Summer break just put one off by a few moons.

She had to do all of her homework, by herself, without copying from anypony. And then there was studying and then, if she'd budgeted her time efficiently, there would be a precious hour or so for just getting to be Diamond. For playing with Cameo, thinking and planning and maybe going through a history book in search of a lost stratagem because nopony ever seemed to expect things to repeat from a thousand years back, except when they did. And for coming up with ways to save her father.

Dinner was over. And if the world had been normal, she would have been in personal time. Doing everything she could to protect the one she loved.

But she'd been at WORK.
The HOMEWORK still needed to be done.
And neither job cared very much about what the other wanted.

She was sprawled across her mattress, with the portable desk tray currently near the pillows because there was a divot in it for the ink bottle and all things considered, staining liquids needed a secure place to rest. Textbooks surrounded her. Finished papers were head-tossed to the nightstand or, given the way paper normally moved, the floor. Cameo, forbidden to offer scholastic advice and who possessed a distinct lack of skill at writing anything down, could provide no more support than was offered through watching. And that helped, but it didn't exactly get the words mouthwritten any faster.

(Diamond had a real desk and used it on occasion, but the mattress sprawl was just more comfortable. Plus she was feeling oddly tired after her shift, fully recognized it, and wasn't sure if starting from the desk would allow her to reach the bed. It was best to start from a position of safety.)

Two jobs. That was the fully irritable way to look at it, and the sudden burst of justified anger nearly had Diamond bite through the quill. She had two jobs, because school was work. Or rather, for those who no longer had the luxury of copying their answers, school was WORK. And at the same time, work was also WORK. This seemed to indicate that Diamond was doing at least twice the work of anypony else and just to make that even more frustrating, nopony was paying her for any of it.

Education required money to be paid in: therefore, education could be seen as a business. For public schools, those funds came from taxes. Miss Cheerilee's salary was essentially a herd effort, with every earning adult in Ponyville making a contribution. She was an employee of the town. An instructing supervisor. And when you rather sensibly decided to see it that way, then it immediately became clear that the students worked for her. Hours into weeks into cumulative moons of their lives spent doing completely unpaid labor. Because the education was supposedly its own reward, and that was all too close to the sort of thing which budding artists and copywriters occasionally got tricked into believing. In the sense that you were technically receiving something, it was entirely possible to be paid in exposure -- but unlike bits, you couldn't trade it for food and rent.

Diamond, on her first night as a double-shift fully non-compensated worker, had already determined that taxes needed to be higher. It was the only way to make sure students got paid.

Even so, they would probably wind up needing to unionize first --

-- she yawned and in doing so, lost her grip on the quill. It dropped to the tray. Ink-resistant lacquer picked up a few beads of downwards-flowing black. Diamond preferred black ink. In business, it was a color which suggested all was well, even when it wasn't.

She blinked a few times, then forced her neck and body to twist until she got a bare glimpse through the glass which blocked off the path to the balcony.

A thin silver of cloud-obscured orb sent a tiny shaft of reflected light towards her. Most of it got muted by the steady glow of device wire.

"Was that you?" she asked Moon. "On the street, when I saw her?"

No answer.

Had helping her to spot the mare been Moon's first true attempt at assistance? She'd asked that it --

'Information is power. That's what my daddy always says. It can be subtle power, but it's power. So, just to start us off -- at least show me something. Let me see. And then I'll know.'

Maybe she only remembered the words because they hadn't been part of an insult.

She'd been shown... the mailmare. How was that supposed to help?

Diamond wasn't sure.

Although to be fair, she was still trying to work out what kind of employ -- serva -- benefac -- helpful assistant Moon was. Some ponies required exacting instructions before they could be trusted with any labor: anything not precisely explained created a gap which disaster readily filled in. (MIss Dash was one of those, only she had a known tendency to replace any carefully-recited list with whatever she'd wanted the other pony to say.) Others actually did better when somepony did no more than describe the goal -- followed by, with careful intent, leaving them almost completely alone. You checked in once in a while, made sure they were eating properly, and finally collected the finished result. That was it.

She'd largely left Moon to make its own decision on how the goal should be achieved, and she'd gotten -- a view of the mailare, plus an overstuffed mailbox. This didn't feel particularly helpful -- but it was still more than she'd had.

Even so...

How am I supposed to use that?

She didn't know.

"You may need to be a little more direct," Diamond concluded. Maybe they could talk about that after she finished her homework. But it was getting late -- no, it was already late, and there was still so much more to do...

She turned back towards the tray. Took up the quill between her teeth again, and nearly lost it in the next yawn.

Direct help. Was it cheating if Moon did her homework? Miss Cheerilee would probably think so. Anyway, there seemed to be very little chance of having the orb's efforts mistaken for hers. Moon's mouthwriting had to be horrible. The orb no longer displayed a pattern of scarlike shadows in the rough shape of a mare's head and therefore, no longer had a mouth --

-- Diamond blinked. Her eyelids seemed to reopen on time delay.

Just get it done.

She tried. But her head kept drooping. This created ink spots on the page and where she couldn't clean them up, she had to effectively start over. There were times when she lost track of which word she'd meant to write next. The most typical result was to pick up the essay two brilliant sentences down the line, scrawl out a full page in open satisfaction and, upon rereading to check her work, discovered a two-sentence gap which now had to be filled in. The tiny editorial space between letters wasn't sufficient for the editorial inclusion.

Just finish...

It was getting late.

Running out of --
-- time?

Diamond felt as if she was forgetting something. Overlooking a detail. Something important. But she had to get her homework done before she could try to confront it. Completed homework, good daughter. That was part of the current standard, and would remain so just as long as she was the one who completed it.

Earth pony endurance could get her through this. It had to.

How much work was left? Diamond wasn't sure. Miss Twilight would have probably said that the best way to determine the answer was through reviewing a checklist.

She was pretty sure she'd left one in her nightscape...

"Diamond?"

The answering "Huh?" was just barely expressed through half a mouthful of wood.

"What's that around your neck?" Snails asked as the group tried to navigate down the Sun-lit trail towards school -- followed by, possibly in the event that she had something else hanging off the back and being really specific was required, "That stack of folding panels. Which goes out in front of your mouth. With all the hinges, and the little ridges --"

She didn't answer, because she had now had a mouth full of wood and the brass hinges felt odd against her tongue. Snips verbally stepped in.

"It's a portable reading shelf," the bookbinder's son declared. "My mom's got a couple around. The ridges are to keep stuff from sliding off."

"Oh," Snails decided.

"It's a good one, too," Snips observed. "See the little clips there? That's to keep pages from slipping back. Diamond?"

She now had just enough space to manage another "Huh?"

"Why are you wearing a portable reading shelf?"

"Because," Diamond explained, "now it's a portable writing shelf."

She'd borrowed it from her father's study. He only used it on long train rides, or if he anticipated having to wait in a line for several chapters. Her daddy certainly wasn't going to need it today, and he'd always told her that the resources of the study were hers to use.

He'd probably meant the books. Diamond had made a game try for the books that morning, because her father had a few international dictionaries: doing business across the borders made precise translation into a necessity. So she'd gone for that one shelf, and -- well, some things were still being replaced. Books were one of them. But she'd at least managed to verify that 'Derpy' didn't appear in Griffonant.

There hadn't been much time for doing even that. Not only had she needed to get dressed (and she was down at least one layer from yesterday), but breakfast hadn't gone well. As organs went, the stomach was a tyrant. Sure, the brain was supposed to be in charge, but just try telling any part of the digestive system that. It had an automatic override, along with likely veto power and the ability to expel anything it found offensive from the body public.

She was almost entirely sure her daddy hadn't spotted the problem. Girls her age had a lot of reasons for repeatedly dashing off to the bathroom.

He'd also seemed -- distracted. Concerned and, at the same time, anticipatory. Worried. This had made it easier to get the little things past him. And she felt as if she was supposed to be worried about that, as if she was still overlooking something -- but she was low on calories, fighting for focus, and --

"Why do you need to write?" Silver carefully asked.

"I didn't finish a few things yesterday."

"Like what?"

"Math."

-- short on homework.

"...math," her best friend checked.

"And History," Diamond added. "Half a century of it. But Literature's in my left saddlebag. I got up to the main plot twist before I cleared the bathroom." She thought about that. "I hope it's the main plot twist. There's only forty pages left. It would be really mean if the author kicked in another one."

"Diamond --" a tripled call of concern reached her.

"-- I'm okay," she immediately insisted. "I just didn't think working at the store was going to be so much work. And we really got a lot of homework yesterday." How was Snails getting it all done? She'd have to ask him about his study schedule, especially since he actually had one. "You know how Miss Cheerilee operates. She'll collect each assignment about half an hour before we start that subject, and she'll go in the usual order. I can finish as long as I write through lunch. And most of recess. Twice."

Silver took a careful breath.

"We can't do any of it for you --"

"-- I know --"

"-- but I'll look it over. Check your answers."

"Thanks."

Cautiously, "How bad was work?"

The smaller boy abruptly snickered. "I'm gonna say it sucked," Snips confidently stated. "It usually does. Because it's work."

Silver ignored this. Diamond placed and clipped a blank page, then went for a quill.

"Diamond?" her best friend checked. "How bad --"

"-- I can't talk and write at the same time."

Silver hesitated.

"We really need to talk about --"

"I have to write now!"

Silver's mouth closed.

He noticed the shelf.
So he does pay a little attention to what I'm wearing.
...I've been trying to show off my streaks for the whole winter and the first time he said anything about how I was accessorizing, he brought up the shelf.

Snow crunched under four sets of hooves. Diamond, who (accurately) considered herself to be the strongest of the group, took the lead.

"It's a decent shelf," Snips judged. "But it's still got the usual problems."

"Like what?" Snails asked.

"Well," the smaller boy thoughtfully said, "they're really not great with wind. The clips help, but you've still got to get the pages under them and hope the gusts don't get too strong."

Which was followed by the sound of spitting.

"Snips!" Silver instantly protested.

"Just checking! Direction and speed!" The grunting laugh echoed through the woods. "Anyway, it's just what the Bureau put on the schedule today. So wind's not really a problem right now. But the rest of it..."

Diamond concentrated on the paper. Writing while trotting... even with a support for the page, the motion was jarring any rendered characters. She had to make sure her mouthwriting came out properly.

"...just for starters," a rather distant-seeming voice continued, "they're really meant for when you're gonna be stuck somewhere for a while. Like a train, or in a carriage. And sitting. Or lying down. You shouldn't move. Or if you do, it's gotta be really slow."

"I don't get it," Silver reluctantly admitted. "Why can't you move?"

"Because of the shelf," Snips explained. "It's gotta be where you can see it really easily, or it doesn't work. And if somepony's reading, then the shelf is pretty much the only thing you're looking at. And if you're just trotting around --"

Snow crunched under Diamond's hooves.

The elevated curving root, raised above soil level while still hidden under half-trampled white, didn't crunch at all.

Everypony helped her up.

It took them most of the final minutes before school started to get the shelf back together. Snips did nearly all of the work: something which wasn't quite lost in the shadows of the building. There was an audience.

Diamond felt as if most of it was staring at her.

She spent nearly all of the first recess session in writing and in order to maximize the time available, didn't bother with much in the way of layering. Lunch went the same way, especially since her stomach was continuing its coup. This was a benefit. If she didn't trust herself to eat, then she had that much more time to work.

Her consultants kept dropping by her station. She'd chosen to work in the best light available, on the northern side of the building. Something which made her easy to find. Simple to spot, and watching was just a matter of backing off until a good distance observation post was found.

Sometimes the prey sense went off. The need to look up from the shelf, combined with the remote locations, mostly left her with a view of retreating tails. One of them was blonde with lighter shading along the edges and when compared to the other spectators, the dock was closer to the ground.

Silver checked her work. Once the little unicorn knew what was going on, so did Sweetie. The boys came and went. And Diamond fought, struggled, smuggled her textbooks outside because Literature needed to finish its vendetta against her with that stupid second twist on Page 212 (which any sensible book about books would have warned her about in the Table Of Somepony Else's Contents), and just kept pushing.

The others kept trying to remind her of -- something. She never let them get far enough to say what it was. She needed to finish her homework. Priorities.

But she did finish. With about six minutes left before the final recess bell, she recorded her honest feelings about the whole plot, thought about making a copy to slam onto the library's Public Reviews corkboard, and looked up from the shelf to find Snails in front of her. Watching carefully from about half a body length away, with his lanky body low against the ground.

He wasn't paying attention to what she was wearing. His gaze hadn't ventured anywhere close to her streaks. All of his attention was focused on her face. On her.

It was more than a little frustrating.

"Want me to look at it?" he asked.

She shook her head. It had been the Student Opinion section. Miss Cheerilee felt that when it came to Literature, you couldn't really have a wrong one -- but the opinion had to show you'd actually read the book. Or in Diamond's case, had it inflicted upon her, without mercy.

"Okay," the semi-dull voice decided. Dark fuschia eyes focused. "We've still got a few minutes. Maybe that's enough time for parent stuff --"

A neuron wearily fired.

"-- how are things with your dad?" Diamond quietly checked. And waited.

Snails blinked.

As short sentences went, "My dad," didn't seem to be buying time for anything. He just sounded surprised that she'd asked.

"You're spending some time with him tomorrow, right?" Which was the start of the weekend. She'd have more hours for homework over the weekend. Which presumed the intern schedule hadn't tried to claim most of the calendar first. "It's going to be his first visit since..."

"Since he moved out," Snails quietly finished. "So I don't know how things are with him. Because it'll be the first time."

"For now," Diamond corrected. "He's just moved out for now." Not that it would be any true loss if the status became permanent. "So what are you going to do?"

"Dunno," the boy admitted. "I just know how many hours he asked for. Not what he wanted to do with them." And shrugged. "We don't do a lot of stuff together normally, so I don't know what he'd pick."

Not doing stuff with your father?

Then again, it was Lyon Gastrope. Winning the chance to not do things with him could be the basis for a full contest.

"What would you usually do?"

"Some sports stuff," Snails replied. His left forehoof scraped at half-exposed dirt. "We go to games together. Sometimes. Maybe a movie. He'd never really been interested in the farm." The trench got a little deeper. "I mean, he doesn't mind it or anything. Not any more."

"Not any --"

"-- not since we talked about my mark. Really talked. He knows it's gonna be entomology all the way for me. The college stuff, eventually." The sigh felt exceptionally soft. "He was happier once my grades came up. But with the farm..." Slim shoulders shrugged. "Mom's said it, a couple of times. That it's not easy to have an insect farm in the house. Especially if any of my friends try to get out and explore the whole house. One of the tarantulas went for a walk once. I had to make some new rules after that. To keep anyone from getting hurt."

"Tarantula, " she tried. She'd been introduced to most of the farm, but --

"-- the bigger eight-leggers. Hair on their bodies. Fangs always point down."

Diamond blinked a few times.

"Frederic," Snails clarified.

Species could be hard to remember, because there were so many of them. Names were occasionally easier.

(Her father remembered just about everypony's name. She'd wondered if it was an aspect of his talent.)

"...oh."

"Yeah."

"Frederic got out."

"And into the bathroom. Through the vents. He was hanging out on the toilet trench lid. My mom went in, and..."

Screens on vents.
If we live together, then screens on all the vents.

There were adolescents laughing, somewhere off in the distance. It was surprisingly hard to make out any details.

Snails' eyes briefly closed.

"Mom's worried about me spending time with Dad."

"Why/"

"She thinks he might try to do something stupid."

Diamond tried to picture that adult doing something smart and in doing so, proved that imagination had limits. "Like what?"

"Take me," a too-steady voice replied. "Keep me. But she'd send Chief Rights to get me. And -- even in winter, I could always find someone to send back. He knows that. And I don't think Dad would ever do it in the first place. She's just -- scared."

"Do you want me to come with you? When he's taking you out for the day?" She'd have to check on her internship schedule, but her daddy would understand needing time for this and besides, any chance to make Lyon Gastrope uncomfortable --

"Nah. I'll be fine." Another shrug. "It's just my dad. But we need to talk about yo --"

The schoolbell rang.

"-- horse apples," the boy muttered. "Maybe after school."

She shook her head. "I've got to go straight to the store." She'd checked that much of her hours before leaving on the prior night. "It's going to be a gallop." Diamond was convinced that somepony had adjusted her start time just to see if she could make it before the Town Hall clock stopped going off.

They both stood up. Diamond tucked her belated homework away, then refolded the shelf.

"Diamond," Snails dully checked, "are you ready? For what's happening tonight?"

A weary neuron took the rest of the afternoon off.

"Sure."

"You're really sure --"

"-- I'm fine."

And they went inside.

Two parents. Snails was receiving love from two parents. But if the separation held...

Is it love?

She had spent just enough time around the boy's father to master the exacting art of despising him.

Or is it just an asset claim?

In Diamond's extremely informed opinion, Snails' father was stupid. If he was that stupid...

Keep an eye on Snails.

She was still trying to establish her own claim. The interruptions of morons would not be permitted.

Internship was apparently intended as a tool to let somepony learn the entire business from the ground up. As such, every given duty supposedly had a visible purpose. (The poorly-hidden one was 'Let members of the staff get their chance at revenge on me,' and Diamond was still trying to remember what most of them were seeking vengeance for.) And some of the most basic things weren't really for learning about the business. They were meant to help new hires learn the store.

Inventory? Count every single item in an aisle and if you didn't have that section fully mastered when you were done, then you probably needed to work on your memorization skills. Which meant the next aisle was probably going to be Books, because there might be something there which would help -- but you couldn't really start on it until your break. Or unless you got sent into the basement to trot along the treadmill which wound the clockwork for the store's fans. Reading was encouraged during that trot and because you were winding the fans, summer was mandatory.

What about returned items? Take everything which could be sold again and put it back where it was supposed to be Which meant knowing just where it had originated, or finding that location in a hurry. And you had to return it to the assigned place. All too often, putting something back where it had come from just created a new problem for whoever had to do shelf cycling next. Which was probably going to be Diamond.

And today...

"Straightening," she slowly said. The individual syllables were carefully drawn out, all the better to examine them for conspiracy.

"Just go up and down the aisles and look for things which are out of place," Jestine told her. Pale blue feathers softly rustled. "Then put it back. There there's anything on the floor, pick it up. Make sure any given peg is carrying the same item --"

"-- straightening," the intern interrupted, "is meant to let ponies learn the store's layout. Where everything is, and where it should go."

"Everypony straightens," said the youngest Purchasing hire. "That's what Mr. Rich asks for. To keep the store clean and in order. If you see something out of place --"

"-- I've been in the store since before I could talk!" insisted a decent amount of justified-if-muted outrage. "I probably know it better than anypony! I don't have to learn the layout!"

The pegasus took a slow breath.

"You know the layout," she seemed to acknowledge.

"YES!"

"Good," Jestine decided. "Then when you see something out of place, you'll know exactly where it should be. Go straighten."

The prey sense was back.

She was having some trouble in pinning down the source, probably because it wasn't singular. Something was watching her? When she'd been stuck on cycling, ponies had been passing down the aisle. Some of them had moved in ways which dodged her lashing tail, which at least meant they'd noticed her tail and might have even registered the streaks. Others hadn't quite gotten out of the way. But if they'd seen a tail and hindquarters sticking out from the shadows of the shelving, then they'd certainly looked.

And now she was out in the open. Adults kept passing her as she labored, and...

...this was the store's slow season. Were there supposed to be this many adults shopping? Maybe they were coming in to see her work. Watch her go through what had to be perceived as punishment and if that was the reason, then her own age group might not be all that far behind. There had been multiple witnesses who's gotten to see her cart retrieval incident, even more ponies had been within range of the audio, and the word had to be spreading...

...there were ways in which the thought felt silly. But that didn't mean it was invalid. And as thoughts went, at least it was something she could hang onto. Other concepts were slippery things, skidding out from underneath a hoof at the moment she tried to pin them down. True mental pressure was sending ideas skittering into dark corners.

She'd barely eaten. (She was afraid to eat.) There wasn't very much fuel in her body. It made thinking that much harder, and... she kept feeling as if she'd forgotten something. Overlooked it. Something important...

Diamond tried to pin that down. But whenever she tried to isolate the missing factor, it skidded away from her. Or the prey sense would come back, or something would fall.

So many things were falling. Had fallen. Kept coming down.

Why was the store so messy?

It was as if colts who liked to play in the mud had decided it was clearly too much trouble to go wash up somewhere after, and all they needed for getting rid of the big clumps was rolling around on her carpet. Not that the store had carpet in the aisles, because that would make the cleaning even more endless than it already was. But the principle was the same. The store was her house and nopony respected that. They put things down anywhere at all, they shuffled contents on pegs while looking for items and didn't bother shuffling anything back, boxes were hidden behind bottles and bottles were nudged between bottom shelf and floor, and the place for a discarded impulse item was decided entirely on impulse.

She knew the store. Where everything was supposed to be. Diamond instinctively recognized every potential hiding spot: the shadows where shoplifters tried to smuggle items into their saddlebags, and the darker spots in the basement where employees retreated to get some personal time. Or, because ponies had been known to treat employment as a chance for pairing up, some time for themselves. Plural. Certain sections of the lower level backup inventory maze held makeup, and others intermittently hosted Makeout.

Diamond briefly considered trying to watch some of that. It might be possible to pick up a few tips --

-- but she was stuck on the sales floor. Straightening. And she could do that without any real thought at all, because she knew the store. Spot a piece out of place, take it up in her mouth (which often tasted like whatever the last customer had eaten, because nopony had a mouth guard for her yet), and bring it back to where it should be.

She knew the store. And even when she was tired, barely able to truly think... she knew it shouldn't be this messy.

It didn't take long for even an exhausted mind to spot the trend. Especially when it was being pointed out to her.

"You missed that."

"I was just here!"

"And that," Jestine continued: a wing flared towards the offending item. "And that..."

"I was in this aisle two minutes ago!" She thought it had been two minutes. Time was beginning to slide. "I got everything! I can show you where I put it...!"

The Purchasing employee's features softened.

"Maybe somepony went through right after you," the adult allowed. "It only stays perfect when nopony's here."

One of her daddy's sayings. "Yeah."

"So straighten it again."

It kept happening. And it happened shortly after the prey sense surged, wherever she'd just been. At least one aisle behind and over, fully out of sight.

There were times when her ears rotated, drawn by the sound of something hitting the floor in those zones. Others located a followup of sorts: something which came across as a soft, half-muffled giggle. And she doubled back, suddenly convinced it was being done on purpose, if she just raced to the right point then the tormentor would be caught --

-- she nearly took the corner too fast, had to dodge a startled customer and wound up losing precious sounds to preventing her skidding hooves from sending her into the endcap. It occupied all of the scant attention she could give. And she thought she heard a little gasp, followed by one more giggle and light reflecting from several cans as Diamond slid by --

-- she reoriented. Picked herself up, got back to the entrance for Albums as quickly as she could.

A dozen records were scattered across the floor.

The prey sense was gone.

At one point, she glimpsed her daddy moving through a cross-aisle. His grooming was much more exacting than usual, and twin lines of moist disruption under his eyes suggested he'd recently tried to do something about the usual dark spots. There was probably a new supplier coming in for a meeting. And she wanted to speak with him, but Spices was just ahead. Spices were the store's equivalent of creative cookery. Ponies head-tossed the little bottles anywhere and figured it would all work out.

Her daddy was groomed, and... he looked -- nervous. A major supplier?

Forgetting something...

She tried to focus. She almost had it. And at the moment before her teeth clamped down on the fleeing tail of slippery memory, she heard another box hit the floor.

Diamond found and retrieved it. Her snout nudged the container back into position, then pushed it in a little more, giving the box some distance from the edge. Backed away, and felt the sharp tip of the thorn contact her rear --

"OW!"

"Sorry!" the somewhat-older deep red adolescent male desperately yelped. She assumed his fur was deep red, as that was most of what she could see past the other colors. "Sorry...!"

There had to be a pony somewhere in there. Most clockwork didn't talk, and the ones which could usually weren't very good at it. But the overall impression was of two very large groups of flowers which had found some saddlebags, added hooves for increased mobility, and finished it all off by inviting several dozen extra friends. There was a twin floral cloud trying to make its way through the store, and it really didn't have enough room. There wasn't even enough space in the saddlebags to hold all of the stems. Or thorns. Some of the thorns kept poking out.

Roses. Peonies. There were springs of lilac, and Diamond spotted a few gerberas. Winter meant multiple greenhouses had been involved in the assembly.

We don't sell flowers.

...no, that wasn't quite true. Hearts And Hooves Day was coming up. There were usually a few arrangements near the registers for the holiday, because those who were desperate for last-minute gifts usually wanted something edible to go with them. Maybe the supplier was sending over samples.

Forgetting something...

...and now there were petals all over the floor.

She was hungry enough to wonder which ones were tasty. (It was probably all of them. Holiday arrangements were like that.) But it wasn't worth the risk and besides, if anypony saw her eating off the floor...

There were dustpans hidden behind key endcaps. Diamond wearily trod towards the closest one.

She found a clock or rather, she found all of them. The store could be helpful that way. There were always clocks, and a few of the ones in that section were kept wound up.

Diamond looked at one. Then she looked at a few more, checked all of the results against each other, decided they probably hadn't ganged up on her, and sought out Jestine.

"It's been hours," she told her current supervisor. "I have to go home."

The adult nodded. "You can head out when you're ready."

The adolescent felt oddly worn out. Run down or, to be more accurate about it, lightly trampled. And it was going to be a long, long trot back to the house.

I could hire a hansom. Having somepony bring her back in a carriage would make the trip easier.

Or she could travel with company.

"Is my father done for the night?"

The mare looked at her. Just -- looked.

"He already left."

Diamond pulled up a copy of her daddy's schedule in her head. The lettering seemed oddly blurry.

Forgetting something...

"He already --"

"-- about an hour ago," Jestine interrupted. And then, with a small smile, "Probably earlier than he should have. But who wants to be late to their first date?"

Company Shakeup

Under normal circumstances, one of the most important things to do would have been finding somepony to blame. And even in the middle of what had just turned into one of the greatest crises of her life, Diamond really wanted to do that. Pause, order the events of the last few days to march through her head, put every last moment through an exacting review, and then decide exactly who was going to wind up suffering for it. Deservedly. Which was a fully separate category from the suffering she was experiencing, because that clearly wasn't deserved at all.

Diamond still felt that it was crucial to pin down a source for everything which had just gone horribly wrong. She just couldn't afford to think about it while stopped. Standing frozen in the aisle while Jestine stared at her was wasting time and all the worse --

He's probably on the date right now. It wouldn't take that long to reach the post office if he was picking her up after she finished messing up all of her work. Or her home.
Maybe her home.
...I don't know where she lives...
...maybe she's on the outskirts of town. Or right up against the fringe, like Ms. Fluttershy. Maybe he's still on the way there...
..or he's with the mailmare right now and all of those flowers were for her.

-- doing so when it might have already run out.

No.
...maybe there's still a chance...

The adult was looking at her. The expression struck Diamond as being slightly odd, yet completely explicable. It seemed to be the face of a mare who'd just watched somepony fail to make a single movement for far too long a time, and was just now beginning to wonder where the basilisk was.

"Is there something else?" Jestine carefully asked.

"No," Diamond lied. "I'll just go home."

I have to find him.
Maybe it isn't too late.
I have to --

Jestine nodded. Diamond turned, found that her legs were working with somewhat more speed and fluidity than earlier. She accurately concluded that an adrenaline dump was temporarily compensating for lack of calories, and also decided to give the surge all of the credit for why all four knees kept wanting to shake.

She wanted to go directly for the front doors. Gallop out into the cold winter night, search. And she couldn't, because all of her things were in the employee area, stored within that personal locker. Galloping from the store would draw far too much attention, and doing so while leaving everything behind...

So she had to go into the back of the store. Get dressed, and of course that was taking at least three times the duration which would have been required if a certain colt had just gone and said the right words already. Words which, as far as Diamond was concerned, should have been voiced two moons and three layers ago. So at least part of this was now Snails' fault. She'd have to make sure to tell him that, although only at the proper time. And in order to keep from sabotaging herself, that was going to be at least four dates in --

-- get the leggings on faster --
-- faster than this --
-- if they're not getting any mouth guards in my size, then somepony could at least spend the money on a clothing rack...

What had happened? She'd lost too many hours to the store. More than that: she'd become distracted. Work had done that. It had stuck her to the aisles, doing so with a force much stronger than binding glue --

-- she was having so much empathy for Snips right now --

-- and not only that, she'd barely been eating. Diamond saw her mind as a high-powered train, capable of achieving some incredible speeds on the straightaways -- but you couldn't get the steam engine going without shoving something into the boiler.

The adrenaline was letting her think clearly again (and with the sharpening of inner vision, she finally saw that her friends had been trying to warn her about the deadline all day) -- but that wasn't going to last. The internal surge would wear off, and then she was going to be weaker than any earth pony ever wanted to be...

She pulled at layers with her teeth, tried to get everything into position that much more quickly and nearly wound up tearing a few pieces. A moment was just barely spared for checking her assigned schedule, because she'd just realized that the next day opened the weekend and it felt entirely possible that her daddy had put her down for a full shift --

-- no. Work hours occupied part of the second day. The first had been left fully clear, and Diamond suspected it was to prevent her from falling behind on homework.

Fine.

(Except that it wasn't. Nothing was.)

She finished dressing. And she would have gone out through the locking dock in order to save a few precious seconds, but adrenaline didn't last and she couldn't afford to collapse. What she absolutely could afford was some candy: all properly purchased at the registers, while using the employee discount. Diamond prioritized for quick-dissolve sugars: the sort of thing which could make it to her small intestine before her stomach even realized it was there.

Most of the first packet went down her throat before she cleared the front doors.

There's still glow on the street from the display glass. That means anypony in the store can see me.
Move normally.
Edge of the light patch is just ahead.
Two more hoofsteps...

The streaked trail swished across the line, fully entered the first true patch of the night's shadows.

Diamond ran.

There had been a limited resource available: time before the date. And it had run out. All she could do was try to gallop after it, try to catch up, find her daddy and once that was done, she would --

-- no brilliant concepts surged through Diamond's head. Instead, she simply continued to run. Her mane bounced, and no metallic weight was shifted atop the strands. Mostly-bound limbs tested earth pony strength against multiple layers of fabric and were surprised to discover that the results very nearly worked out to a tie.

Maybe the sugar was still being processed. Anyway, there was a certain type of pony who was only at their best when under pressure. And when it came to the actual gem, diamonds were, in part, created by pressure. She definitely had the pressure part down. And if she continued trying to move at this kind of speed while wearing so many layers, the 'heat' requirement would just about take care of itself.

She was vaguely aware of ponies staring at her as she ran by. Their attention wasn't currently important. Store employees could potentially tell her daddy about how she'd both looked and acted on her way out. Nopony else mattered. Or rather, there were only two ponies who did and the goal was to get one of them away from the other.

None of the ponies on the darkened streets could help her. The only true candidate for assistance hadn't exactly been doing an outstanding job of it so far, possibly not any job, and yet she found her head going up. Harsh blue eyes searched the sky, looking for the last resort --

-- and there was Moon. Right where it should have been, in a position which it had probably reached exactly on time. At least it was good for that much.

Help me!

Diamond was aware that she hadn't exactly been specific. She wasn't sure whether exact instructions would have helped, and finding a place to both work them out and provide details by voice might consume minutes which, strictly speaking, she might not have to spare. She was effectively leaving Moon to its own devices and while there was some chance that Diamond would turn out to work best under pressure, Moon didn't seem to be feeling any.

But it didn't really have to do much.

Do something!

A single beam falling upon a building. That was all it might take. Moon just had to show her where they were.

She kept looking up, checking for that single ray of extra-intense light. Her desperate gaze only returned to the horizontal when she heard the alarmed yelp, and then she just barely managed to steer herself into a turn in the last instant before she would have run directly into the thin unicorn's ribs. That probably would have been a lawsuit. Or at least a really awkward explanation and attempt to apologize, both of which would have been automatically sabotaged by Resting Superiority Face.

Moon didn't seem to be cooperating. Still.

...she didn't have time to fume either.

Think...

What would he consider doing on a date? She'd tried to work that out, and she didn't know. She'd told Snips that if the goal had been a movie, then her daddy could have just bought out the entire place and had the screen to himse -- themselves. But that wasn't how he acted. He never would have wanted to disrupt the plans of so many others, especially not on the night before a weekend.

Perhaps he'd thought of -- a dance. Except that she wasn't even sure whether her father could dance. The mailmare might make an attempt, though. Maybe she just needed to keep her ears rotating, because the surest sign of that particular date activity would be hearing the first things break.

Think...

Where would her daddy have taken the mailmare? Because if she could just find them, then surely a mere glance at her daddy's face would inspire her to Think Of Something and then once she acted on it, everything would be okay again. There was still time to save him, there had to still be time, she could arrive partway through the date and that would just make the salvation a little more dramatic through taking place at the last minute...

...she checked on Moon again, just in case, and found the local radiance to be far too steady. No part of Ponyville seemed to be on track for getting dappled with extra lumens.

Diamond galloped. Passed the fountain, almost skidded out while dodging through a startled group of adults, made the turn and aimed for the restaurant district because her daddy hadn't dated for a long time and maybe he was inexperienced enough to still think it was a good idea to start with dinner and a movie. While opening with the 'dinner' portion. At least if the movie came first, then you had something to talk about over the meal. Which was assuming the mailmare had understood the plot. And it was probably far too much to hope that he would unconsciously engage in total self-sabotage through arranging to have the meal at Mr. Flankington's, not when there were so many better eateries in Ponyville --

-- Ponyville.

Fabric-wrapped legs began to slow. A heart wrapped in horror tried to pump more adrenaline through her body, and found itself merely channeling extra chill. Something which was now rising from within.

Oh no.

Money couldn't solve every problem: he'd always said that. Diamond, who didn't exactly have access to the bulk of the family funds, had a tendency to spot ways in which it could solve hers. For example, if the pay was good enough, then temporarily hiring a team to search the entire settled zone wouldn't even require an explanation. The bits would be doing all of the talking.

Fully tapping the accounts would have let her hunt through all of Ponyville, by proxy.
But her father wasn't restricted to Ponyville.

Money couldn't solve every problem. But if the issue was in wanting to impress a pegasus who, quite frankly, should have been rather impressed just by the fact that Diamond's father had bothered to notice the mailmare -- then he could have hired an air carriage. Private transportation to the capital, riding in a conveyance which had been enchanted to steer the cold air around the passengers. And once they were in Canterlot...

Better cinemas. Clubs. Theaters. Attendance as a plus-one at an invitations-only private party felt unlikely, if only because Diamond was fairly sure that you needed to be well past the first date before you really started introducing somepony around. But there would be multiple choices for dance floors, and some of them might grant the degree of respect to her father's payments which was required for risking having the mare get out there twice.

She could try to search the entire settled zone. Kick whatever bits she was carrying around and recruit at least a little help, although she was sure the amount wasn't enough to form a blockade against questions. And it might not matter at all, because... her father was an adult. One with enough money to go anywhere he liked, at any time.

Anywhere.

He hates being teleported. It makes him sick. The same way it makes me feel like somepony pulled the whole world out from under my hooves.

(He'd wanted her to learn what the sensation was like, before the true emergency came. So she'd know that she could manage the transport if it was ever necessary, and -- wouldn't be afraid.)

But he'll do it if he has to.
And if he really wanted to impress her...

For all she knew, it was a simple dinner date. And with the escort network in play --

-- the chill was coming from within, and the layers did nothing to stop or ablate the cold. She was down to the speed of a slow walk now, and couldn't seem to force any more than that --

-- a cross-continent relay series of paid teleports could place the meal in Manehattan.

Diamond looked up at Moon again, and the satellite just... hung there. Watching.

Her head dipped. Harsh blue eyes closed.

Adults flowed around her. None of them asked why the adolescent had stopped moving. She didn't see any reason for them to do so.

It wasn't their problem.

She... didn't give up completely, not then and there. She simply took a few seconds to reorganize her thoughts. If her father was in the capital, then he was still theoretically within chasing range. Diamond was sure she had enough money to hire an air carriage and if she was somewhat short on the total, then she was still clear for the train -- but it didn't matter. Canterlot was just too big to search. And if it had been the network... well, playing the role of a desperate daughter who truly needed to know where her daddy had gone didn't exactly require acting. But she still would have been relying on the charity of multiple ponies to bring her through the between and if she reached another settled zone... she would need to find a means of searching it. And if she came up empty... just trying to come back...

She couldn't extend the pursuit beyond Ponyville, and the growing shards of ice in her heart accepted that. But there was a chance that he hadn't left the most local borders, and so she made herself look.

Diamond peered through the windows of every restaurant. Nothing.

The bowling alley was dismissed as being stupid.

The cinema seemed to be talking normal business. However, there was only one way to find out who was in attendance and when Diamond approached the ticket booth with her bits carefully clenched between half-chattering teeth, the operator recognized her. Not that she'd ever insulted the stallion -- at least, not that she could remember -- but she had once tried to get into an age-restricted movie with the aid of cosmetics. This was another such film, and he took great pleasure in telling her that while she might be somewhat taller, she still hadn't reached the minimum required count of years and besides, her teeth weren't even brown this time.

(Adults tended to have their teeth brown with age. Therefore, use of white stains made them look younger -- and a filly who was deliberately turning the interior of her mouth into enameled chocolate should have passed for an adult. Diamond blamed her previous failure on what had been a distressing lack of height.)

There were clubs and bars. She'd never really tried to get into any of them before. By the time she'd finished listening to the fourth minimum age entry requirement of the night, Diamond was fully convinced that the conspiracy was well underway.

She forced her half-frozen form to trot past Town Hall, and the clock tower went off.

Diamond automatically counted the peals from the bell. Then she checked the clock face, because any news that bad required independent confirmation.

She... had to stop.

If it had been fully up to her, then she would have kept pushing. Ordered her body to carry a desperate mind through the whole of the night, until she came back to Sun with her father at her side. But she couldn't.

The new house was smaller. But it still had servants. And Diamond liked the servants: it would have been rather hard to live with them if she hadn't possessed some fondness for the staff -- but she also recognized that they spoke to her father regularly. Reported on whatever had happened while he hadn't been there. He trusted them.

And if she didn't start making her way out of Ponyville immediately, then they were going to tell him that she'd come in past her bedtime.

Diamond slowly turned. Oriented herself, aimed for the proper road, and made herself trot again.

She wanted to fume. But it was something which required a certain degree of inner heat, and every part of her felt cold.

The staff had dinner waiting for her when she came in. Much to Diamond's surprise, her body was actually willing to accept food. She put this down to a boiler which had been trying to run on sugar and distress for days, and still made sure to chew every bite at least twelve times. This felt necessary for smoothing the passage if any of it tried to come up again.

She washed up, because it was something normal which could be done. And when that distraction ran out after a mere twenty minutes, Diamond dried off, went into her bedroom, and told Cameo about everything. For an hour. The jeweled scarab was appropriately sympathetic and, during several portions of the tale, visibly stunned.

Homework was pressed into service as a distraction, and turned out to be exceptionally bad at it.

It was a cold night. Diamond checked Cameo's terrarium, made sure the charge indicators on the heat lamps were holding steady. There was also the option to slip a warming pan beneath her father's blankets, but she was --

-- angry?
Nervous?
...frightened?

Maybe it didn't work out.
It could have been a bad date.
If he comes in smelling like ozone, then everything's okay.
Unless she hurt him.

And if that had happened -- well, then Diamond knew she'd be able to come up with some ideas.

She didn't go for the warming pan. Diamond turned off her lights, left the bedroom door open just enough, and climbed into bed.

She didn't sleep. She couldn't. Her attention was fully focused on two things: the operations of her stomach, trying to make sure nothing there was about to kick itself into reverse -- and her ears. Her eyes were closed, because she needed to look as if she was asleep. But she also had to hear when her father came in.

He often came up to her doorway, when he arrived home late. Making sure she was all right. He might do that again, especially when the door was slightly open.

She wanted him to check on her.

She had to know.

The clock ticked along...

...hoofsteps. Familiar ones, but -- moving slowly. Typically, this was normal when he was coming to her for a night check, because he would be trying not to wake her up -- but there was something different about this approach. In Diamond's judgment, he was advancing at what she judged to be the speed of stun.

The approach disrupted the air, pushed some of it towards her snout. Ozone smelled a lot like bleach mixed with chlorine. It was an incredibly distinctive stink, and that was why she knew that he wasn't carrying any of it.

The hooves stopped just outside the door frame.

She risked opening her left eye. Just enough.

He looked... tired. He often did. The darkness under his eyes had threatened to become a permanent encampment. But... she'd just barely registered the new details in the store, hadn't she? That he had been trying to do something about that. His fur was somewhat more groomed than the usual, and the manestyle which he'd been using for what might have been the whole of her life -- there were shifts in the curves. The results weren't quite as formal, except for the part where she formally despised them.

He looked weary. But he also looked... hopeful.
Optimistic.
Happy.

All Moon had to do was make it a bad date.
A bad date with her.
That wouldn't have even been hard...

Her father smiled a little, if only to himself. Backed away from the door, and headed towards his cold bed.

He's happy.
...he doesn't know any better. He doesn't know not to be happy.
He's going to get hurt.
There's still time to make this right.
I have to save him...

He had told her that there were different kinds of loneliness. Diamond, failing to rest beneath her sheets, wondered if she was feeling all of them.

Organization Disruption

She didn't remember falling asleep, which always struck her as something of a discourtesy: if the world was going to fade out of awareness, then it could at least have the common courtesy to tell you when it was leaving. And given that she'd been awake in her bed for hours while waiting for sleep to come, it really would have helped if she'd known just how long she was expected to wait for.

Sleep, like Moon, only seemed to act when it wanted to, and Diamond was starting to wonder if either one actually liked her.

She hadn't intended to avoid her father.

Diamond had fallen asleep -- 'eventually' was about as far as she was willing to go. But once she'd finally reached the nightscape, she'd wound up staying there. The internal stage had been set for a single theme, and she'd gotten to watch as grey wings carried her daddy away.

It was something which should have made her long to wake up -- except that Diamond had never realized she'd been dreaming. Not when the scenario being repeatedly presented felt all too close to a potential future reality.

I have to save him.

She hadn't exactly been looking forward to breakfast: part of that came from her ongoing stress issues, and the rest arose from having no idea what she was supposed to say when he inevitably started talking about the date. But her body had crashed into sleep: as compensation for pain went, it was the least of what she was entitled to. And because it was the weekend, with no internship hours scheduled at the store...

Diamond forced herself out of bed. Looked at the nearest clock, found a backup because it simply couldn't be claiming that with a straight face and when the second opinion just supported the first, she found a servant who could verify events.

Her daddy had simply let her sleep in. He'd consumed a meal in private, and headed for the store.

There were things to do on the first day of a weekend, and the truly necessary ones centered around taking care of Cameo. Making sure her companion was eating properly, cleaning the terrarium, checking the jeweled scarab for signs of illness... all of that was normal. It was also a distraction, and one which very nearly worked. Right up until the necessary tasks ran out.

Food was choked down and, after a bout of willpower followed by standing with her head over the sink for five minutes while nothing actually happened, stayed down.

She had the option to go out, but... she couldn't think of anything she wanted to do in town. Or rather, she could -- but it didn't take all that much evaluation before Diamond realized that the fantasy of stomping into her father's office and outright demanding that he stop dating the mailmare wasn't going to do much. Or rather, it would probably accomplish quite a bit: it was just that none of the results would be anything she'd wanted to happen.

...maybe she could just stay in. Spending the day trying to come up with a means of saving her father was clearly the most noble option available --

-- hooves rapped on the front door.

Diamond, who had been staring at the schoolbooks in her saddlebags while wondering which homework assignment she could safely postpone first, didn't move to see who it was. She had servants to do that for her.

Literature could wait. It was a new book. She could catch up on the chapters later.
Math would probably be quick.
History was known to contain multiple examples of truly effective relationship breakup tools and because they were all illegal, had also made a point of recording the resulting prison sentences --

"Miss Diamond?" She turned. A servant smiled at her. "Your friends are here to see you."

Plural. It had taken some time before Diamond had come into possession of a plural.

"Which ones?" She already knew Snails wouldn't be there: he would be spending the day with his father, and Diamond expected to get him back after. Sweetie had both parents in town. And that left --

"Silver and Snips. They're waiting in the foyer." A little carefully, "Do you want to see them?"

"Yes."

It didn't necessarily make the day any better: not from the announcement alone. But she was miserable. And Cameo was doing her best to console and support -- but it was still the sort of emotional state which longed for pony company.

"Snails asked us to check on you," Silver told her as she entered the foyer.

"He wanted to make sure you were okay after the date," Snips followed up.

Which left Diamond just about ready to forgive him for up to two weeks of being totally oblivious to her fashion choices.

"And he also wanted to make sure you got your homework done," Silver added.

...maybe a week and a half.

Snips' horn briefly ignited, and full saddlebags effectively shrugged. "I brought my own books. In case you want to work on stuff with company." His features worked into a cross between a smile and a wince. "I know what it's like, trying to get everything finished when you've got working hours on top of it." With a not-so-faint snort, "Or at least I know now. Since I have to actually do the assignments." Which was followed by a soft sigh. "So how's the lousy salary life been treating ya?"

"Horribly," Diamond reluctantly admitted.

"And the date?" Silver checked. "What happened there?"

"...I forgot about it," just barely escaped from her lips.

Both visitors blinked.

"You what?" Snips immediately asked.

"...you forgot?" Silver breathed. "Since when do you --"

Diamond sighed.

"Let's talk in the conservatory," she told them. "It'll be nicer in there, with all the glass." The rebuild had brought back a few things from the old mansion, and her father still loved having one room where the majority of the walls had been designed to let Sun shine through. Diamond wanted the warmth -- and besides, she wasn't feeling all that happy with Moon. It might be time to flip the coin onto the other side. Having the conference visible to Sun could potentially save her from having to fill the other celestial body in later. "I'll -- catch you up."

They gathered on the plush carpet under warm rays, undiluted by cold air. Diamond spoke, and they listened.

"You need to be more careful about eating," a worried Silver finally said. "You're missing too many meals."

"Drinking," Diamond decided. "You know those ponies who say they don't have time for a full meal, so they just blend a lot of stuff together and drink it? Maybe that digests faster." She'd have to try it.

"And work made you forget," Snips groaned. "Work is horrible. Nopony should ever have to do any."

"Ever?" Silver naturally asked. "The world wouldn't be a good place to live if nopony ever worked."

He thought it over. "It's the definition."

"Work is work," Silver protested. "How could anypony define --"

"-- we'd just do mark-related stuff. Because that isn't really work at all. It's getting paid to do what you want to do." With a grin, "That's recess with salary. Diamond, I know it stinks now. But it's not gonna be forever. Doing all of the dumb stuff, like the shelves and the straightening... that's work. And it ain't you. But once you're all grown up and behind the desk... think about how good that's going to feel. Running the whole business, with your mark leading the way."

She hadn't told him about her talent. (She didn't want to. Ever.) Silver, who knew more, briefly looked worried.

"But that's a long way off," her oldest friend quickly said. "Diamond, what do you want to do now? About your dad."

"I don't know," she reluctantly admitted. "I was trying to think about it last night, and all that did was keep me awake for hours..."

"And you don't even know what he did for the date," Snips tried to confirm.

"I slept through breakfast -- I ate, Silver. I slept through breakfast with him. He probably would have told me. And I missed it." Then again, listening to the details might have had harsh effects on eating. "How long can you two stay?"

"I've got the day," Silver told her.

"I've gotta head back before Sun gets lowered," Snips put in. "I mostly got away because my mom knows I brought the school stuff. She's expecting me to bring some of it back finished."

Diamond managed to repress the sigh. They'd started out with her trying to tutor the boys, and... it had never fully faded.

"And I've got work tomorrow," she reluctantly admitted. "I wanted to put the assignments off, but... I probably can't squeeze them all in after the store. Maybe if I get them out of the way, it'll let me think about something else."

There was still time to save her father. There had to be.

"So let's do homework for a while," Silver suggested. (Snips nodded.) "Maybe we can play after, if there's still time. But at least it'll be one less thing to worry about. And we can just talk while we do it."

It said something truly horrible about a weekend morning to have homework as the most productive part of it.

They labored without pay, because the trickle-down economics of taxes always dried up before reaching the students. They talked. But nopony came up with anything new and while Diamond was glad for the company, the only thing it was truly doing was letting her know that somepony would be there when she felt even worse. It wasn't making her feel better.

After a while, they reached a natural break point. The worst of the assignments were complete, and everypony needed a breather before setting hooves onto the downslope.

"I'm gonna hit the bathroom," Snips announced. "Silver, meet you in the kitchen after?"

"Sure." The braid bobbed as Silver began to stand up. "Diamond?"

"In a few minutes," the resident decided. "I want to go outside."

Fresh air. There were adults who said it was a cure for just about anything which might ail you and as with most things adult said, it wasn't working out.

Diamond, without anypony to show off for, hadn't really bundled up. The day was cold, and there was snow coating just about every portion of the grounds -- but Sun was bright, and no major winds had been scheduled. A jacket and scarf sufficed.

She trotted down one of the main paths. Then she moved away from it. Her hooves broke through the half-ice crust atop the snow, blazed a trail towards the trees.

She needed to think.

...need still didn't equal results.

Maybe she needed to think about keeping lunch down. They were going to be in the kitchen, so Silver would try to make her eat. Not that her best friend didn't have a point. If Diamond missed too many more meals, she'd be imitating Miss Rarity. That mostly meant the fainting, but there was a chance that having her concentration completely go would do something for bringing in the accent --

-- the base of her mane prickled. Diamond's hocks went tight.

...that's not supposed to happen.

Prey sense? When she was on her own property, her own ground? Who could be watching her here? What might be watching --

-- she automatically looked towards the glass walls of the conservatory, and saw nopony at all. Not that she'd truly expected to. Prey sense rarely went off with friends.

Diamond frowned. Looked around at the snow-covered landscape. Nothing.

Maybe closer to the treeline.

She did some more damage to the pristine white. Went to war against the snow, claimed one victory at a time, started to pass beneath the first of the big oaks --

-- and a quarter-bale of snow slammed into her back.

It didn't drop her. She hadn't expected the impact, wasn't anything close to braced -- but she was an earth pony. Her knees bent slightly. For any who were watching, it was all they would have seen happen.

She looked up. The snow had come from above --

-- there were branches well overhead: thick ones, which could carry a lot of packed weight. One of them was now partially clear. None of the snow on the other wooden extensions was even partially slumped over the sides.

Diamond had a thought.

There was a visible effect. If any had been watching, they would have seen her ears rotate. Nothing more.

The outward expression of something invisible.
Slightly insidious.
Angry.

...winter is not death. It's sleep. The world rests, tries to renew itself. And... she's wondered about this, now and again. Because when she uses her magic, she's asking a question. Getting answers means something heard you. The world is alive, and -- does that mean it dreams?

She doesn't know. She can ask her questions -- but they have to relate to what she's trying to do. Asking the earth whether Princess Luna tries to help with its nightmares... that feels a little too personal.

Her senses reach out, and most of what they find is weight. The snow coats so much, with chill slowing the pulse of a continent. The sheer amount of mass... bale-tons just on the property, although it's a quantity which really doesn't get noticed unless somepony's trying to move it. Or attempting to pull a stunt like this, because she would usually be trying to find pressure against the earth and right now, that's everywhere.

The coating isn't even: wind creates dunes of white, while branches offer partial shielding and sometimes you get this little bare patch right at the base of a trunk. It makes the pressure into a variable, and that's not exactly helping her efforts: if it was constant, then she'd just be looking for the one thing which was different. As it is, she's trying to isolate four changes. A quartet of points which are experiencing slightly greater weight, with the spacing just so. Because as far as she's concerned, that snow didn't just randomly drop: not when the prey sense is going off and nothing else on the tree was close to falling. It was shoved.

So she's looking for whoever pushed.

It's not easy. Rain blurs the world, makes it harder to isolate individual impacts. Snow is like trying to move while wearing a dozen layers.

But she's always been good with the small details. Checking for the little things. Without irony, micromanaging.

She concentrates...

...over... there.

The big oak. The one where the trunk takes several seconds to circle. There's something on the other side of it, completely blocked from sight. Small and light, but -- fidgeting a bit. The pressure keeps shifting. And if she went around, looked with sight instead of truehearing... would she see hoofprints in the snow?

Probably. But that's not the current intent.

She's angry.

And if she's going to have snow dropped on her...

Diamond kept moving. Heading for a single oak. The largest in the area. And as she did so, she passed beneath a few others. Three of them dumped snow just as she passed. Only one was dodged, and she didn't care. Clumps of frozen white were shaken out of her mane, and she briefly wondered what she would have done if the tiara had still been present.

Nothing moved as she approached. Nothing ran, and she took it as a sign of intruder confidence. She would probably get a shift if she tried to reach the other side of the trunk, but...

The earth pony reached what she judged to be the exact opposite side of the wood. Turned to face outwards, with her streaked tail just barely brushing against the bark. Looked up at the branches, and all the snow waiting to come down.

Her body hunched in on itself. The spine curved, back legs came up, the forehooves planted --

-- she wasn't the youngest Malus. She didn't have to be. Diamond was strong -- and for that matter, so was the oak. She didn't have to worry about injuring a fruit-producing tree: she didn't even have any true concerns about chipping the bark. All she needed to accomplish was a single hard impact. The sort of thing which sent vibrations moving through the wood --

-- perhaps one of the Apples could have confined the results to just one side of the trunk. Diamond just had the benefit of knowing it was coming, and dodged accordingly. The tumbling snow missed her.

The other party couldn't say the same.

White weight came crashing down from every opposing branch at once. The solidified cold hit fast, hard. There was a high-pitched yelp, and --

-- Diamond was already moving. Reorienting after the dodge, charging around the trunk, and it brought her into a position where the sudden burst of light went directly into her eyes.

She spent a few seconds in blinking, trying to clear her vision. And when the spots went away, she found herself looking at a roughshod pile of snow with a partial broken dome in the center. Coming a little closer found hoofprints pressed into the white, and a trail heading back towards the woods.

Small hoofprints. But no pony.

A flash, and an absence.

Unicorn.

Happenstance, Coincidence...

She was inspecting the hoofprints in the snow and initially, she wasn't entirely sure why. The primary reason might have been that they were the only things which could be examined at all. Knowledge was supposed to be power, she had to start learning somewhere, and when Diamond had just acquired an ene --

-- the thought was put on hold, and she refocused on the impressions which had been placed into a sea of frozen white.

Diamond remembered the ponies who were waiting for her in the kitchen, then realized that taking too long outside might have them follow her out and right now, that could potentially wreck her only evidence: too many hooves stomping about. She didn't have a lot of time...

Small.

That was the primary fact available. The hoofprints were -- small.

Diamond was vaguely aware that anypony who possessed a unique pattern of imperfections in their keratin could essentially wind up having their flaws serve as a sort of identifier: it was why she'd generally been very careful about not stepping onto mud or soil while setting up anything... physical, because four utterly flawless impressions could clearly only be her. So there was a chance that anything she was seeing could eventually not only lead back to the actual pony, but serve as absolute proof of their prior presence. It was just that when it came to giving her something she could use at that exact moment... well, who went around trying to see the underside of hooves all the time?

Ponies who were too weird to appreciate the perfection of mane and tail streaks, that was who. Oh, and maybe police officers. Just in case they spotted something which could be used a few years later.

...and Diamond had done it. Once. But that hadn't been her fault, because Tirek's giant descending hoof had taken over the sky. It had been the only thing left to see, the last thing she would ever see, and she'd just been looking for some way to hurt him. To make sure he would have a reason to remember her. A legacy. The final thing she could do before she d --

-- the filly briefly closed harsh blue eyes, and stood perfectly still in the snow until she could tell herself that all of the shivering had been produced by winter chill.

After an indeterminable amount of time finally allowed her to travel from past to present, Diamond resumed the inspection.

Small.
How small?

Smaller than what Miss Twilight would have left behind, and that adult hadn't really been on the suspect list: the adolescent didn't think the librarian had been that mad about Diamond's brilliant 'book about books' idea -- and being angry about such genius was stupid anyway. (Maybe Miss Twilight was just mad about not having thought of it first. Or, given the apparent existence of Cliff Notes, second.) But when Diamond really looked at the impressions...

Small...

Teleportation was sort of -- advanced, wasn't it? There weren't very many unicorns who could learn it, and that wasn't just the strangeness which seemed to rein the potential for spell mastery to a pony's personality. Yes, temperament actually played a part: a stallion who had no interest in ever leaving his settled zone was unlikely to unlock the capacity for instantly reaching the next one. But it also took power to get into the between: more than a little of it.

(She didn't want to think about whether there had been any ponies who'd had just enough strength to go into the void. And not enough to get back out again.)

Strength. Potential. Maybe education, although she understood that some workings were self-taught and a unicorn's trick -- their personal spell -- would arise from the soul itself. But when it came to raw frequency, those who could teleport were rare. Something Diamond would have been able to work out even if short school sessions in Comparative Magic hadn't existed, because she understood supply and demand. Escort-capable unicorns were in high demand and if the supply had been larger, then the prices for such nausea-inducing journeys would have been a lot lower. And those who could bring others along were a subset of the original, already-tiny group...

There was a flash of light. Maybe it's easier to create a flash. It could have blinded me to the real exit. Faking the teleport. And there's a line of hoofprints going back to the treeline...

But it only took a little more inspection to eliminate that possibility. She felt that a pony moving across snow would have the forward edge of their keratin sink in a little more deeply, because there was a tendency to plant a little more of their weight in that direction. (Diamond quickly checked that with her own hoofprints, because theories needed testing.) This pony had trotted out of the woods, moving across Diamond's grounds. Even if they'd been able to somehow exactly backtrack their retreat, putting every hoof exactly where one had gone before...

...no. The proof was right there. The intruder had come in on hoof. And at the instant they realized their presence was known, the light had taken them away.

...one more check. Be sure.

She focused her senses again, sent her awareness deep within the earth and asked her question again. The concentration involved in checking a larger radius of snow blanket was starting to give her a headache, but...

...nothing.

The adolescent carefully tracked the incoming line of hoofprints in the opposite direction. It didn't take long before her passage between trees and over snow-covered roots brought her back to the main road, and then everything got lost because of course the plows had been through here and there weren't enough patches of snow left to hold much in the way of crunched-down testimony.

And then she returned to the house.

"Diamond?" Snips quickly asked. He had to hurry the word, because he'd started at the instant she'd started to trot by the open kitchen door and still didn't have a lot of time to work with. "You were out there for a while. Everything okay --"

"Camera!" Diamond called back over her own retreating tail.

"Huh?" represented most of what her original assumption about Snips' intelligence would have contributed to any discussion.

"I need my camera!"

Several minutes passed before she actually entered the kitchen. The hardest part of the sigh which announced her incoming presence was not breathing too deeply on the other end. Just about everything in the room possessed the residual odors of food and right now, those scents weren't necessarily on her side. Snips having once again served himself meant there were a lot of vegetable undercurrents to ignore.

"...I don't have a camera," Diamond wearily announced.

They were both looking at her. The adolescent immediately decided it was from concern.

"Camera," Silver too-carefully repeated.

"We lost just about everything," Diamond reminded her best friend. "Everything except for the stuff in Daddy's safe deposit box."

...actually -- now that she was thinking about it, Diamond didn't know what had been in there. Something so important that her father had wanted to give the contents that extra degree of protection. The ownership certificates for every store in the franchise?

...and now that she was thinking about it, Diamond realized she'd been wrong. "And a couple of little pieces from the old house," she added. "Stuff which was too small to get smashed up, or that just got lucky. But that's still nearly everything lost. And we're still replacing it. I just forgot that I hadn't gotten a camera back yet." She'd had such a good model. And while she wasn't anywhere close to being a professional (much less marked) photographer, it had been important to learn how to use it properly. "Snips, I know you've got to head to the shop once we finish the homework stuff." His mother wasn't as nice about weekends as her father. "There isn't enough time for you to bring one back. Silver, can you go get your mom's camera? Maybe if you hurry --"

"-- why," Silver inquired (and did so with what Diamond felt to be a little too much caution), "do you need a camera?"

Snips perked up and because he was a boy, that frequently meant he had just thought of something stupid.

"Did you see a monster?" the not-exactly-a-stallion eagerly checked. "Is it still out there and ya wanna get a good shot before it leaves? Maybe I can help you identify it!"

She didn't sigh or groan: neither felt suitable, and -- it was Snips. You had to expect a certain amount of frustration to show up in just about any dealings with him, although Diamond was hoping the maximum allotment on Ursa Minors had already been met. Some boys were just fascinated by monsters. Snips possessed at least a little interest, although she was fairly certain he'd stopped buying the 'educational' trading cards and had never gotten anywhere close to purchasing any poorly-drawn calendar. (Because bad taste had limits, none of the most recent ones had featured centaurs.)

Instead, Diamond simply explained.

The presence of Snips meant having to leave certain details out, and she quickly claimed to have just heard snow crunching on the other side of the tree. He didn't question it, and she hadn't expected him to. Diamond felt herself to have significant skill in lying: it was just that most such expertise apparently evaporated at the moment ponies started actually looking for it.

Still, for this, it was like her talent. Some things were just easier not to talk about, especially if she wanted ponies to still feel the same way about her once she'd finished. And given how few people spoke to her at all...

(Shouldn't she be trusted to do her own work by now? It had been moons...)

"So somepony dumped snow on ya," the boy summarized. "And you want to get a shot of the hoofprints because...?"

"If they come onto the grounds again while we've still got snow," Diamond immediately said, "I'll be able to compare. Or if we can catch and keep them here."

(How did you capture a teleport-capable unicorn?)

Thoughtfully, "It's probably not somepony who can self-levitate. Have you ever seen that? Miss Fleur can do it. And that's supposed to be really rare. Harder than teleportation."

"Trying gave me a really bad headache," Snips promptly stated. "Fields just aren't supposed to go backwards."

Diamond nodded. "So if they could," she proposed, "they might have floated in, then left the same way. Or --" because you had to consider all the possibilities "-- they were holding that back for later. So I'm not going to eliminate it just yet."

It felt as if her heartbeat was starting to quicken: the amazing part was that her circulatory system was somehow managing to leave her stomach out of it. Adrenaline was doing its best to temporarily substitute for an unreliable calorie supply. (She'd just used some magic and that meant a light snack was a good idea, but she couldn't trust her body.) It almost felt good --

"-- Diamond?" Silver, and it was rare for the tones of concern to be that open. "What are you thinking about?"

She didn't have to wonder about why her best friend had asked that, not when she knew the expression had been out in the open. "I'm just a little worked up," she readily admitted. "This is exciting!"

-- they were staring at her. Both of them, and she didn't understand why. Maybe if she just finished vocalizing the thought...

"I've never had an enemy before!" Diamond happily exclaimed, and watched for the moment when the stares ended.

Snips hadn't blinked yet. By contrast, Silver's snout wrinkled. The glasses shifted accordingly, and nearly fell off.

"...really?" the other earth pony slowly said.

The new home's younger resident briefly considered the perspective of somepony who'd not only been there for quite a bit of the 'fun', but had occasionally tried to nudge Diamond back when Silver had thought things were going too far. Efforts which, for the most part, had consistently failed.

"Okay," Diamond carefully qualified. "I've been an enemy. And I guess that makes whoever I was against into my enemy. I just really didn't have anypony who'd act on it. Not that directly!" Thoughtfully, "Maybe that says something about the quality of the opponents." Which briefly (and oddly) made her feel as if she owed Sweetie a fresh apology. She wasn't sure why. There didn't seem to be anything about that sentence which a Secretary Of Insults would have needed to write down.

And now that she was really thinking about it... was having an enemy who felt they could actively move against her an improvement, or an insult? Because this didn't necessarily represent Diamond having acquired a higher level of opposition. It could just represent somepony who was that unconcerned about her ability to retaliate.

Remember what Daddy said. Every business at least partially defines itself by the competition.

Which gave her another reason for finding out what she was up against -- sort of. Diamond had already done a very good job of defining herself, and didn't need to see any more meanings shift --

"-- be careful," Silver softly told her. "Please, Diamond. Just -- be careful for a while." And Snips solemnly nodded.

Harsh blue eyes blinked and in doing so, once again told their owner that the act didn't improve anything on its own. "Why?"

"Because," her oldest friend carefully intoned, "you made a lot of ponies mad." A little more softly, "We both did. And we're still apologizing. Still remembering everything we have to apologize for." The pause felt far too long. "We -- aren't forgiven. Not by everypony. Not even close. And we don't know who's doing this." With a tiny sigh, "I could make a pretty good guess on 'why'. But until we find out who and can try talking to them, for whatever good that might do... please be careful."

Which drew another nod from the boy. "Because not everypony knows you like we do," Snips stated. "Most ponies don't get close enough to... know stuff changed. To know you're sorry. So just watch your tail until we figure this out." With tones just as solemn as the first nod, "But if you can't? We'll try to guard it. Silver, I really don't have that much time before I have to be at the shop. Do you have enough to get your mom's camera?"

Violet eyes focused through carved glass, looked at the clock mounted over the stove. "Barely," Silver announced. "I'll leave now."

Snips was long-departed by the time Silver got back. The two fillies went out to the snow dump site, and Silver took the pictures. Then Diamond took two more, just to make sure it had all been done properly. A portion of allowance was turned over to make sure the film got developed, and there was a mutual agreement not to bring any actual police officers in on this because doing so was the single best way to get every possible adult involved -- a list which started with Diamond's father.

Diamond had gotten a lot of gallops out of threatening to kick her parent's perceived social and economic mass into whoever she didn't like. Getting him involved too early with somepony who didn't like her felt like a very good way of preventing Diamond from doing anything. Silver didn't completely agree with this, but was willing to file it under 'We need more information before we can act'. And since Diamond didn't talk about the personal belief that the police might just decide anything done to her was warranted, the matching topic silence made it safe to guess that Silver had reached the same conclusion.

Her oldest friend went home, and... between the interruption and need to preserve evidence, there was still an (un)fair amount of homework to do. Diamond didn't feel this had been a direct part of her enemy's plan, but was willing to recognize the results as a portion of rather irritating fallout.

She tried to do the work on her own. (She had to, because she wasn't trusted and there was no other choice.) But she kept getting distracted by her own thoughts.

A very small unicorn, far too small to be an adult. That implied somepony in her own age group -- or, given the size of the hoofprints, somewhat younger. A filly or colt. And either way, that worked out to 'child'.

(How many kids lived in the settled zone? Diamond attended Ponyville East, but there was also North to consider, and she'd trotted past the West schoolhouse a few times. How many names could she remember, and how did that compare to the number her father knew?)

A child who could already teleport.

What was she up against?

...Enemy Action

When she'd been a filly, Diamond had thought growing up was about acquiring an increasing amount of control. Or at least, that was how it should have been. It had taken most of her lifetime before she'd realized that reality had decided to disagree.

But it had made sense. When you were a foal, you didn't control anything. The most a foal could do was cry and hope that the open, increasingly-loud expression of misery would summon an adult who could work out exactly what was wrong. And as early lessons went, Diamond felt 'be miserable in public and something good might happen' had a few flaws. Sure, she'd managed to use it a few times -- maybe more than a few, and just about always as an intended strategy -- but she'd also seen too many kids kicking out a tantrum in the Toys aisle while under the delusion that if they just screamed loudly enough, the bits for the purchase would somehow just appear.

Life had to be about how much control you possessed. Foals didn't even have mastery over their bladder or bowels and as Diamond had personally discovered, once she had those two wrangled into harness and following orders, every other part of the body which dealt with food and drink had turned up its virtual snout and announced that it was going to ignore instructions for the entirety of her life. Picking up the ability to speak was necessary just so you could tell ponies what you needed done and once you had that, you mostly discovered that the adults had never put together any real connection between ears and brain.

Being a kid was partially about getting ignored a lot. The rest largely concerned adults telling you what to do.

Kids weren't instructed: they were given orders. (Which technically meant that being young was a job and when you kicked in school and internships, that meant Diamond wasn't being paid three times over.) This is where you can go by yourself, and the range was so short that it might as well have reins on the other end. Here's what you're allowed to do, the things you can eat, how long you can stay up, those books have to wait until you're older and by the way, you are absolutely not getting into that movie no matter how brown your teeth are. If you were young, everypony would tell you what to do, even those who weren't a parent or teacher would typically expect to be obeyed without question, and it hadn't taken Diamond very long to realize that the majority of the orders being issued by anypony other than her father were completely stupid.

But as you got older, you assumed more responsibility. (This initially seemed to represent being responsible for an ever-increasing amount of schoolwork, and thus Diamond's original, now sadly-failed brilliant plan for graduating without dealing with any of it.) You could stay out later. It was possible to travel for a decent distance, just as long as you were home in time for dinner. A few of the books became accessible and during those times when Miss Twilight was on a mission, it was possible that a small additional number might be available. You learned about the world around you and in time, a truly important lesson registered.

Adults didn't have control.

The weather was controlled (and in a settled zone where Miss Rainbow was in charge of the Bureau's team, even that was somewhat uncertain). Lives weren't.

You were old enough to have a full-time job? Well, if you worked for somepony else, then you seldom got to decide whether you kept that job: when the employer was somepony other than her daddy, it was possible to be fired for any reason -- or none. The filly might have believed that money earned as a mare could be spent on anything, but the adults had bills to pay.

Ponies could try to exert some degree of command over their own lives. But nopony could establish personal mastery over everything, and that was a fact so strong as to apply itself to the Princesses. They had control -- of Sun and Moon. Each had the option to compose bills for their respective Courts, but they couldn't order the representatives on how to vote. They could sign the results into law, or veto something which the Court had written itself. And that was it. They certainly couldn't control everypony (or everyone) in the nation. Recent events had proven that -- although what a very new piece of barely-history had mostly demonstrated was that some ponies were really bad at controlling themselves.

But if a Princess didn't have full sovereignty over her own existence...

Adults didn't have true control. This frustrated the majority of them to the point where they decided the best way to work it out was through controlling kids. Diamond, whose long-term plans did have some considerations towards being a parent, had already decided she wasn't going to be like that unless her foal absolutely needed it, and then for only as long as necessary.

Control was hard. Mastery of the self was difficult enough, and that was even after excluding the permanent failure which represented the stomach. But even if you could always try to dictate orders to your own person, overriding instinct and spontaneous shivering which should have stopped moons ago because she was getting better -- you couldn't determine what other ponies would do. Their lives intercepted her own, and the gravity created by unearned egos pulled her plans out of well-calculated orbit.

Of course, with Diamond's talent --

-- it didn't work on herself.

(She was an adolescent. In multiple aspects, her body was already out of control. Changes were taking place and all the worse, doing so with no input from her. It certainly wasn't listening to her suggestions regarding height.)

Trying it too often with others risked having its nature discovered and with that kind of talent, information could easily lead into deliberately ignoring whatever she was trying to accomplish.

And she'd never used it on her father.
Not with her daddy.
She'd cried for him, and a few of the tears had been real. Told endless lies to get what she wanted, confident that she would always be believed first.
But not her talent.
That was wrong.
She wouldn't even try.

Still... even when she excluded her parent (forever), her talent could have theoretically made things a little easier. It was just that...

...her talent worked on ponies.

(Well -- sapients. Diamond knew she had at least a small chance to see it work with just about anypony, but had yet to try it with anyone. It was safest to presume that monsters were immune, along with saving that test until she had no other choice.)

It had no effect on clocks.

Actually targeting what the gears were measuring was utterly hopeless.

And that was why the weekend evaporated.

Given any choice -- any control -- she would have slowed things down. Rearranged matters to suit her convenience, along with arranging for desires to be fulfilled. But she didn't have any authority over time and no matter what she did, it insisted on --

-- actually, 'passing' wasn't the right word. If time passed, then it might have considered leaving Diamond where she was and letting her catch up after she'd worked a few things out. Instead, time insisted on picking her up and carrying her forward when she didn't necessarily want to go.

Time was, all things considered, an utter bitch.

Diamond considered telling it so -- then realized that it might respond by moving faster, just to spite her. One fresh enemy was bad enough.

She had homework to do. There was always too much homework, and that wasn't just because any amount over none automatically qualified.

Diamond had also picked up an enemy (or had one reveal itself: she hadn't decided yet), and that obviously meant she needed a plan. But when it came to presenting any ideas in front of a receptive audience, her consultants had their own lives and, as adolescents, very little control over them. It mostly left her trying to work things out in front of Cameo for hours on end and while the scarab was very good at both listening and moving her antennae in an encouraging manner, she wasn't much for strategy.

She didn't see her father as much as she would have wished. There was a pair of shared meals, and -- that was about it. Which might not have mattered because when it came to opportunities to save him through the simple act of talking him out of it... the base requirement was 'talking'. She searched for the right words across fast-evaporating hours and found herself trying to bite down on fog: the truest insult was that her stomach apparently had trouble with that too.

For her to bring up the date would have been awkward in any case, and he didn't really discuss it that much: certainly not to the level of a point-by-point breakdown. He mostly just...

...he was smiling more than usual. Lifting his hooves a little higher on each step. And she'd noticed that the manestyle he'd kept to for years was... shifting. The well-disciplined up-tilted curls along the back of the neck were becoming a little more disorderly. Casual.

He didn't favor (and that was a horrible word) her with any true discussion of the date. But he did mention it. He said, with that still-lingering smile, that it had gone -- better than expected. (She was starting to wonder if her daddy was burdened by non-heroically low expectations.) And he didn't want to bore her with the details. With any other adult, Diamond would have seen that as being exceptionally considerate: with her daddy, it was leaving her with a lack of true information to work with.

But it had gone well enough that there was going to be another date.

(She couldn't get the day.)

He... mostly wanted to know what she thought about her first days of internship, and she -- told him it was fine, because he was her daddy and she didn't want to hurt him.

And it all left her with more thoughts to consume her limited hours, going around and around in her head. Doing so without control.

Diamond was, to offer a drastic understatement, preoccupied. It reached the point where she not only forgot to speak with Moon over the entire duration, but also neglected any potential attempts to recruit Sun.

She didn't recognize that last part until she was about a fifth of the way to school, with the weekend effectively lost. And then she very nearly facehoofed in the middle of the cold road.

She didn't, of course. Diamond hadn't reached the point of meeting up with any classmates yet, but Sun was an effectively permanent witness.

Also, she was wearing a lot of layers. The effort required for getting a hoof up to her own face might have torn something. And in the worst case, it wouldn't have been fabric.

It was almost time for recess, or so Diamond hoped. Time had multiple ways of betraying her and when she was in the middle of a timed test, it liked to slip by.

She couldn't check the clock. Miss Cheerilee had Rules for taking tests, and 'heads down' was one of them. This held true even when the unicorns in the class were no longer obligated by age to stick with mouthwriting. Even so, briefly glancing at the time probably would have been all right -- for anypony other than Diamond. For Diamond to raise her sight line apparently created the possibility that she would be trying to see somepony else's paper. Followed by copying it.

(Once. She'd gotten caught once...)

There was no option to look at Snails, and that might have been for the best: she was still somewhat irritated with him. She'd thought the mutual portion of their trot to school had finally represented Progress, because he'd started out by planting himself behind her tail. Not close enough to touch, but with more than enough proximity to watch. And at the exact moment Diamond had decided her latest attempt to get his attention was working, he'd started to -- circle her. Keeping up the pace as they all moved, effectively beating the bounds.

At some point during the weekend, before Diamond had the chance to update the group, Snips had provided his best friend with a full private briefing. Snails was guarding.

It could be argued as... nice, in its way. Even sort of noble. But for an adolescent who'd spent moons in trying to draw attention to her perfect streaks, there was also a certain amount of annoyance in recognizing that her target was mostly waiting to see if anypony tried to dump snow on them.

Not that he could check for that right now. Not indoors and during a test. Snails was free to look at the clock, but not much else. And for Diamond's part, all she could see was the paper on the desk. This offered her the options of either reviewing her own responses or considering just how much white space remained for the multiple unanswered questions.

She focused on the next cruel query, tried to concentrate. Memory eventually offered up a possible answer, and her teeth exerted a little more force on the quill. Diamond wrote.

The classroom door opened.

It was something she only knew from her non-visual senses, because to be Diamond and look up during a test was to make a mistake. There was a faint creak of hinges, and a little shift of air across her fur --

-- followed by the return of the prey sense.

...what --

-- which lasted just long enough to register, and then vanished. Whoever had just entered the room had glanced at her, followed by looking away. Nothing more.

She heard hooves approaching Miss Cheerilee's desk, and the steps were light. Somepony small, with less stature than anypony in their class. That wasn't unusual. Sometimes teachers needed to communicate with each other during school hours and since leaving a classroom unattended could be risky, they would often ask a student to carry the message. Diamond had relayed a few herself over the years, and always made sure to see if the contents were interesting.

The hoofsteps stopped. A pair of soft murmurs never quite resolved into words: it was safe to assume that the higher-pitched of the two was the student. Then the impacts of keratin on wood resumed, heading back the other way.

The door opened.
All four legs stopped.
There was a pause and even to Diamond's half-distracted mind, it seemed to go for a little too long.
One second.
Two.
Five.
Ten.
Fifteen.
How long are they going to just stand there --

-- hoofsteps resumed, and the door closed.

Diamond refocused on the test. She had to keep up the pace on her answers, and also needed to do so while not rushing any of them. Whatever reached the paper had to be right...

Time shifted her forward, because the proper thing to do would have been leaving her in place until she was fully comfortable with everything she'd written down and therefore time wasn't going to bother with any of that.

The recess bell went off three heartbeats after she'd resealed the ink bottle.

"And that's it," Miss Cheerilee announced, doing so with far too much lightness in her voice for Diamond's liking. "If you're still writing, you can finish your current answer. Then turn in your paper on the way out to recess." It was also possible to hear the smile. "If you're staying in, just bring it up. And I won't blame anypony who plants themselves next to the heating vents. I swear we get our weather schedule from ponies who don't have to actually live here..."

A couple of students giggled. Diamond reluctantly discarded a few thoughts about kiss-ups, bit down on the reinforced corner of her test answers, then carefully got off her bench and brought the paper up.

Miss Cheerilee gave her a small nod as the test was deposited on the larger desk, and -- that was all. A small nod. Acknowledgement that Diamond probably hadn't cheated today, and the answers were going to be compared to those of everypony within theoretical peeking range anyway.

The adolescent, who had no intention of remaining in the classroom while the insulting inspection was underway, moved over to the storage cubbies. A nibble jaw extracted her garments, and she began the laborious process of putting all of the layers on again. The students who were both less willing to armor themselves against the cold and didn't have the apparently-impossible mission of getting a boy's attention finished while she was still working on the foundation pieces, and then it was down to her and a mare who was probably just waiting for one section of Diamond's phrasing to match somepony else's by sheer coincidence --

-- she risked a glance back. Miss Cheerilee was already busy with grading the tests. Diamond couldn't tell whose was being examined and so turned back to her garments, now working with the half-distracted speed of somepony who knew every moment spent here was one less available for consultations. The heaviest coat started to go on --

-- her left leg went into the proper tube.

Then it stopped.

Diamond looked down.

Half of the fabric was limp and useless, dangling under a frozen hoof. The rest was pressed fairly tightly around a leg which couldn't finish descending.

She was very careful about her choice of outfits. Designer catalogs were examined every moon. Colors were told to coordinate, or else. Her attempts to get the crucial words out of Snails took place with utter respect for fashion and vague hopes that he understood what it was.

Diamond never would have ordered anything with thick half-loops of yarnlike string protruding from the middle of the leg.

Short-cuffed.

A prank. Somepony had pierced her garment, presumably with a needle. Woven the string through the center of the tube, then repeated the action several times. Something which had been done in a hurry, because closer inspection showed that the 'stitching' wasn't anywhere close to all being the same level -- but it still gave her left forehoof a barrier to hit during descent. And she could push through it with ease, because she was an earth pony. Of course,. the poorly-pierced fabric was almost guaranteed to tear around hasty holes, but she could certainly do it. The other option was to get some scissors and cut out the loops, leaving her with a damaged outfit --

-- Diamond smiled.

There was no risk to doing so. Miss Cheerilee was concentrating on the tests.

This happened between the time I took this off and when I tried to put it on again.
There's been students in and out to use the restroom, but... that's been it. I don't think any of them had enough time to do this. Maybe one of them looked up at the right moment, when Miss Cheerilee was distracted, but...
If it wasn't one of them -- then the door opened once.
You aren't in my class.
But you're in my school.

And now it was just a matter of narrowing it down.

On-Hoof

Diamond didn't tell the group about what had happened at the moment she joined them outside for recess, because she needed to prioritize. Even after fetching and using the scissors without having Miss Cheerilee notice any of it (which pleased the adolescent, because her skills in sneaking small items past adult detection had been going unused for moons), she felt there was more than enough time remaining in the break for briefing them. And when it came to her taking over the topic immediately...

It was her right to do that, especially if the others were discussing something stupid and with two boys in the group, that status was effectively-if-intermittently guaranteed. But there had already been some talking on the way to school, starting from the moment she'd begun to collect her traveling committee. And because Snips had already briefed his oldest friend, the topic had quite naturally shifted to the snow dump. The short-term results from that particular conversation had mostly proven that Snails knew where Diamond's tail was, if not what he was supposed to be doing with it.

But the fact that they'd all started talking about her life immediately meant other crucial topics were being neglected.

She moved towards where they'd camped: near the base of a large tree well away from the other students, where a glance up proved that all of the snow had come down on its own. Settled in on carefully-cleared cold ground, because at least her layering protected her from some of the consequences there -- although the act of 'settling in' with full comfort required access to a more extensive range of joint motion than fashion currently allowed. Waited out a few queries which had been directed towards Sweetie about the hoofball season, because her father was home and in theory, something rumor-worthy had to make its way across the dinner table eventually. And once that had faded out again, she spoke.

"How did things go with your dad?" she asked Snails, and waited.

The taller boy being present within the group meant that when it came to the just-passed weekend, the worst-case scenario had been avoided. Diamond wanted to make sure that status was going to become permanent. Her problems were important -- but she couldn't allow herself to forget about his.

He didn't sigh. Instead, his head briefly dipped, and dark brown eyes gazed at frozen soil.

"Weird," Snails told them all. "It was just... weird."

"Weird how?" Sweetie softly asked.

"We went to a movie."

He didn't notice any of the confusion which passed through the little herd: looking at the ground was good for that. Snails often spent a lot of time looking down. In a typical year, it could start to feel like that period occupied about ten moons out of every thirteen. He was generally checking to make sure he wasn't about to step on someone. And in the event that his hooves came a little too close to a six (or eight, or thousand) legged body, he was always ready to apologize.

But it was winter. Once he was away from his farm, his talent effectively had the season off. Snails seemed to be looking at the ground because it was easier than looking at anything else.

"What's so weird about a movie?" Silver carefully checked, and then adjusted her glasses again.

"It was in Canterlot," the boy slowly said -- then hesitated. "He told me it was going to be a movie, when he met me outside the house."

"Outside?" Which, surprisingly, had come from Snips. "You didn't say anything about outside the house when you and me were talking about it before."

"It just didn't come up," Snails readily admitted. "That part was his idea, though." Another pause. "Pretty much everything we did was his idea. But he said it would probably be easier for Mom if he didn't come inside. So when he trotted up, he told me it was going to be a movie. He just didn't say anything about the train."

One more hesitation. His eyes slowly closed, opened again.

"I was a little nervous getting on it with him," the boy told an assortment of frost-dusted dirt particles. "It's not good to feel that way about your own dad."

Diamond, however, considered it to be a perfectly sensible reaction on Snails' part, and was willing to say the same thing about anypony who had to share a space with Lyon Gastrope. (She still didn't know what the boy's mother had originally been thinking. Or 'if'.) And she was worried. Snails had already considered the possibility of his father trying to take him --

-- all right, that had come from the mother. (Whose brain clearly operated to some degree, if only in matters which directly concerned her son.) And in their last conversation about the topic, Snails had told Diamond that he didn't think his father would do it -- but Diamond believed the elder Gastrope to possess a special sort of anti-genius: the self-reinforcing type which arose when you kept telling yourself that your stupid ideas were actually the smartest thing ever.

He might have been trying to test the boundaries. Seeing how far he could go with his son -- geographically -- before Snails caught on to any possible intent. And Snails was already aware of the possibility, had been justifiably nervous about simply going into the capital -- but they still had to be careful.

The group looked worried. But they were also being silent. Letting him talk.

His right forehoof awkwardly scraped against the ground. The soil, which was mostly frozen to itself, refused to shift.

"This is gonna sound weird," he finally said. "I don't even know how to talk about it..."

"Try," Sweetie softly encouraged.

Seconds passed. Eventually, the boy nodded to himself.

"The movie was too young for me," he told them. "It was a foal movie. You know the type, Diamond, because you told us about seeing some of the displays at the big toy show. One of those things where it's all about how much stuff they can sell of the characters. Except that this time, I think the toys came first. And the tickets were a lot more expensive than they are here. So were the snacks. And Dad just kept buying them for me. Even when I told him I was full, he said I could just take it home. And we stopped at a toy store, he got me something from the movie and that was pretty much for a foal too..."

He stopped. Took a deep breath, and then released slow steam back into the world.

"He -- was almost acting like we were on a date," Snails summarized. "Does anypony know what I mean? Like he was trying to impress with how much he could spend on me, only he kept doing everything like I was still in kindergarten and that was the sort of stuff which would make me happy."

Diamond, whose father had multiple clients attempting a quasi-economic form of courting every year, understood immediately.

"He is trying to impress you," she quickly told Snails. "So you'll like him more than your mom. And --" She hesitated, but -- they'd talked about it before. "-- if there's a... divorce, and the judge asks who you'd rather stay with -- he's hoping it'll make you pick him."

Not that Lyon Gastrope was doing a very good job of it -- but under one of the other hooves, Snails definitely seemed to have some basic understanding of how dating worked. Which was somewhat comforting to Diamond, even when it was clearly uninherited.

Snails briefly glanced up. Bare branches and grey sky brought no visible comfort.

"Maybe," the lanky boy said. "Yeah. Maybe. But I'm not gonna see him again until this weekend, so I've got a lot of time to get ready for it. Diamond, you kinda looked like you wanted to say something when you were trotting over. You got a tout or something?"

She'd taught them the term, as her daddy had taught it to her: tout: advance information on a race -- or the pony who claims to know and wants to sell it to you. You had to be very careful about touts in business. Very few were fully accurate, and the only thing some ponies knew about the immediate future was where they would run to after getting your money.

But in her case, she knew something. There was just a certain need to connect it with somepony.

"Yes," she told them. "Listen..."

They did. She'd trained them that well, at least.

"So that's why your legging looks so rough," Silver half-groaned. "I didn't want to say anything in front of the others."

"Just a little rough-and-tumble," Snips decided. "Too bad it didn't happen closer to the knee. It kind of looked like you've been having some trouble with the knees."

Sweetie looked... thoughtful.

"Do you have any of the string?"

Diamond nodded: saving evidence was important, especially during those times when she'd been the one who'd accidentally created some and needed to hold onto it until the proof could be safely destroyed. Nimble teeth fetched several strands from a garment pocket, and the little unicorn's corona took custody. Sweetie floated the results across the gap, then rotated them in front of her eyes. Looking everything over.

"Why not just ask Miss Cheerliee who brought it in?" Snips asked. "She'd probably tell you."

Which just proved the smaller boy still needed a lot of polishing. "Because she'd want to know why I wanted to know," Diamond promptly countered. And with Diamond's unfairly-lingering reputation, the 'why' would have threatened to pick up multiple capitals.

"Nopony else in the classroom?" Silver checked.

Diamond shook her head. "I was the last one out."

"So nopony saw," Snails considered. "Too bad. It might take a while to figure this out. We can't ask every other teacher about who sent somepony between classes today either, and there's a lot of kids around --"

"-- it's somepony who's three years back."

And then they were all looking at Sweetie.

Her corona bubble split, and the results moved until a single strand of yarnlike material was hovering in front of each pony.

"I get stuck in the Boutique a lot," Sweetie reminded them. "I look at cloth and thread more than anypony should, if they don't have a mark for it." A soft blush was beginning to underlight white fur. "For a while, I was sort of worried that it was going to make Rarity's mark contagious. But when all you've got to look at is thread and cloth -- you look. And you don't forget all of it. We had an art project three years ago. The one where we had to sew around the edges of homemade greeting cards, remember? This is the thread from the supply cabinet."

There were five ponies in the miniherd. Diamond was reasonably sure that four of them weren't blinking.

"You remember stuff about thread when you're Rarity's sister," Sweetie calmly semi-repeated. "And when you used to be a Crusader, you kind of had to remember where you could get all sorts of supplies. Since we usually couldn't pay for much, and Scootaloo's definition of 'borrow' used to be 'as long as we bring all the pieces back'. Anyway, that's why it's so much like yarn. It's supposed to be softer because it's made for younger kids."

"Yeah," Snips carefully said. "Yeah, I get it. For when you still need a lot of practice, and can't use a mouth guard because you lose too much control." A colt who worked in a book repair shop knew a lot about fine adjustments made on delicate material.

Sweetie was still looking at the thread. Her retained piece rotated slightly in front of her gaze.

"It's not a very good thread for most things," she casually pronounced. "But it's really not good at holding improvised roller coaster tracks together after you run out of nails. The tensile strength is all wrong."

Diamond briefly considered that the current silence likely represented four ponies renewing their ongoing collective attempt to figure out how a post-Crusade Sweetie was still alive.

"And," the little unicorn carefully added as her corona brought the threads back together and then tucked them into Diamond's pocket, "do you remember that filly from a few days ago, Diamond? The one who was looking at you?"

Diamond blinked.

"The pale purple one," she carefully stated, because it was important to make sure they were all on the same page. "Where all I could remember was that she'd had an early corona..."

And there was something else now. A vague, half-phantom impression of making a casual muscle effort. Pushing...

Sweetie nodded. "Because that's the other requirement," the newest member of the group said. "Whoever did this would need to have their field fully active, with some control over it. Maybe she even hid it -- oh." With a little wince, "That's right. You two --" which had been directed towards Diamond and Silver, as the boys had already joined in on the nods "-- didn't have that class. Some unicorns can sort of make their field invisible, at least to where the normal color doesn't show up and stuff just -- moves. But it's hard. And unless you practice a lot, nothing you try to do that way works very well. Or at all. Spells sort of... get twisted."

"And moving stuff usually makes it go in directions you didn't want," Snips added. "I thought it would be great for pranks, but I mostly wound up setting myself up." With a hint of that grunting laugh, "You don't wanna know the details."

One more nod from Sweetie. When it came to (potentially) providing the details of personal disasters, it was usually safe to presume that Sweetie had worse to offer -- but unlike Snips, she was generally slow to volunteer.

"So it's probably somepony in that class, or who can at least get into that supply cabinet," Sweetie wrapped up. "Unless she found a card somewhere and decided to use the yarn. But it has to be a unicorn. And maybe the field was hidden. Because if Miss Cheerilee was grading, then she might have missed some small stuff moving around. But I kind of feel like a teacher's mark means you get really good at spotting glow."

"And if it's a unicorn in that class," Diamond carefully considered, "then it's got to be her?"

"I don't know," Sweetie honestly admitted, and resting forelegs briefly spread to the sides: emphasis on the statement. "I don't really know the ponies in that class. How many of them are unicorns, and who has their field back yet." With 'back' being the appropriate term, because everypony had their magic when they were a foal -- but it would fade before the second birthday, and only time would return both power and control.

Diamond thought about all of it. The prospects were starting to feel oddly -- exciting.

"We have to make sure it's her," she quickly decided, because striking back at somepony who wasn't your enemy felt like a really good way to make a new one. Especially since 'back' wouldn't really apply. "Does anypony know how we could find out?"

"I could try to get the feel of her magic off the thread," Snails said. "But Sweetie already picked it up. So now there's two signatures."

The smallest of the group winced. "Sorry..."

"Nah, it happens," Snails told her. "I probably would have done the same thing. I guess we just stay on watch for a while? See if we can catch her doing something. And if that happens, then we tell one of the teachers --"

"-- don't," Diamond instantly cut in. "Don't tell any adults. Leave everything to me --"

...why are they all looking at me?

Silver's expression...

"...Diamond," her oldest friend slowly said, "maybe you need to stay out of it."

Harsh blue eyes went wide. "Stay out of it? She dumped snow on my back! And --" several memories were resorting themselves, and the freshly-collected file was demanding attention from her thoughts "-- that might not even be all of it! I think she might have --"

"-- if it's her," Silver quickly broke through, "then she's three years back. You'd be going after a kid, Diamond. No matter what she's trying to do -- unless somepony sees her doing it, then it just looks like you attacking a little kid. And..." Much more slowly, "...after... everything..."

...I'd be seen as the bully.

Silver was right. All public perception would automatically go against Diamond. Especially with a younger filly. If the same events had taken place a year ago, the adults might have even labeled an initial, fully-open assault as 'fighting back in advance'.

(A year ago, it would have been Silver next to her. Nopony else.)

It wasn't fair.

She needed to be sure it was the young unicorn, because she couldn't go after the wrong pony. Or rather, she could -- Diamond had spent most of her lifetime demonstrating full proficiency in that area -- but she needed to strike at her enemy.

Going after an enemy was allowed.

She'd had to be so good. Surely kicking somepony who'd already gone after you didn't count as backsliding. That was just common sense, along with -- a channel. A way to not be quite as good for a little while, for a righteous (if personal) cause. She could finally do something. Being a little more -- herself.

But if she'd kicked first, and just didn't remember...

pushing

Diamond took a breath. Cold air seared her lungs. She still wasn't entirely sure how cold could do that.

"For right now," she finally told them, "everypony should just try to remember anything you can about her."

They all thought. The process was somewhat more visible on the boys.

"I dunno," Snips offered up the most natural result. "I think I've seen her around, but that's about it." Paused, and then corrected himself. "Maybe she's got some friends at school? I'm pretty sure she's with the same group most of the time. But when it's not here, and she's just, you know, around, when it's the sort of stuff you do with your folks -- I think she's usually al --"

The schoolhouse bell rang.

They didn't really manage to get anything else done with The Small Pale Purple Unicorn Filly Issue for the rest of the day, because school was unpaid work and for some reason, Miss Cheerilee continued to feel that her own authority over those hours reigned supreme. Still, Diamond retained some hopes of figuring out a solution -- or to start with, learning more about the problem. And if it had been a year ago, there wouldn't have been five of them working on it. Just two.

Of course, a year ago, the next part of the process would have been simple. Wait for school to let out, then go around the building until she spotted the filly. Trail her from a distance. See where she went, while Diamond learned what she could.

But this was today. And at the instant school let out, Diamond had to go directly on the store. On the gallop, because it was the only way to reach her other job on time.

She couldn't really gallop with all of the layers in place. Her movement was accompanied by the non-musical sound of popping seams, and not all of those were located around the thread-damaged area.

Diamond decided to see it as a sign that she was in the middle of picking up some rather welcome extra size.

Interns spent a lot of time in the store's basement. Diamond was an intern and today, that meant she was going to be stuck in the basement for hours. As the griffons were known to say, quod erat demonstrandum. You could also say it as a pony, but getting tooth clicks to substitute for beak clacks in exactly the right places took some practice.

She knew exactly why she'd been sent into the lower level. The excuse was 'take inventory': count up multiple sections of reserve stock, then compare them to what the sales sheets claimed should be there and present the totals. The reality was somewhat more annoying.

The basement wasn't a full mirror maze of the store above. Her daddy tried to keep things in roughly the same layout -- but there was actually more space available below than on the surface level, especially since some of the largest items did their best to spread out. In particular, the sole owner of fifteen-going-on-sixteen stores had a lifelong grudge against the junior play area construction kits known as Little Foals because the only thing little about them was the name. The smallest Little Foals box took up the same number of square hoofprints as two hundred pegboard items, while the largest openly demanded that the Toys aisle take over the entire store and while everypony was drawing up new plans anyway, they should consider that firing half the cashiers would open up that much more space. It wasn't as if they were going to have very many items to ring up anyway, because somepony on her father's economic level might be able to consider five LF purchases a year. Everypony else was presumably going to be in somewhat less often.

The good news was that Little Foals pieces, once properly put together (which typically happened on the twelfth attempt), were effectively indestructible. They would last a lifetime. As opposed to the duration for which an actual foal would be interested in playing with the stuff, which topped out at roughly two years.

Her daddy had spent a good part of his working life in trying to create a peaceful separation between franchise and brand. But the kits were traditional. If you had a toy aisle at all, you were expected to carry them. And so his current compromise was 'one display piece for each kit on the store level, bring all purchases up from our reserve stock in the basement'.

The lower level's layout didn't exactly conform to the upper. Completely new entries in the retail lexicon could float about for a time before truly finding their place. Some things wound up shifting categories, because a potion which didn't actually recolor your tongue for Nightmare Night could still do a surprisingly good job at freshening breath. And the deeper representation of the toy aisle was roughly four hundred percent larger than the real thing, which mostly showed just how good a job her father had done at paring stock down to the absolute minimum. A dedicated Little Foals specialty store possessed roughly a third of the palace's base acreage. Building one out of marble would presumably have some very confused government employees trying to check in for work.

Diamond felt herself to know the basement's layout by heart. She'd grown up in the store. Little legs had done their best to wander across everything, and the building had effectively embossed itself on her brain. There were ways in which it could be argued that the franchise had at least partially raised her.

A second parent --

-- the point was that Diamond knew about the Inventory Challenge.

You would be sent into the basement. Take counts of the following items, which meant having to find all of them. Confirm what the store's paperwork claimed should be down there. And there would be one. thing. wrong.

In a way, it was both a challenge and a trap. There might be a piece which wasn't in the right place. Something damaged, which needed to be returned or discarded. A count would be off from what it was supposed to be: too short, or even too high. The intern might go lightly mad in rechecking their math over and over, because surely the error had to be theirs. And if they came back up, found a supervisor, and admitted to having found something... they won.

Which meant the Inventory Challenge mostly worked if the pony going through it wasn't aware that anything was happening at all. Diamond did, and found it insulting. She knew the store.

But she was wandering through the lower corridors now. And there had been new pieces added, because that always happened. Constantly. Things which hadn't completely found their place.

She knew the store -- but not the current basement layout. It was discomforting.

But she had to do the job. Her father had certain expectations, and all of them had to be met. By her, because -- there was nopony else.

(Her talent...)

In theory, it was easy to laze off in the basement. Some rather short-term employees tried to hide away from their labors in the corridors. A few would even read, and her father had even made a little of that available on work time: the summer ceiling fans were powered by clockwork, and those trotting along the lower-level treadmills during windup time were encouraged to put a novel on the built-in shelves. Once they reached the warmest part of the spring, Diamond would have the option to bring down textbooks.

(She was going to be an intern for moons. Possibly even years.)

But it was winter. And she needed to find the one thing which was wrong.

The estimated count forms were in a thin gauze bag, hung around her neck. Clearing the challenge would be easy.

Except that it wasn't.

Perhaps it was the shadows.

It really wasn't about getting grimy -- or rather, not completely. It was hard to keep a basement clean -- but that was something else which interns were good for, and that meant Diamond was eventually going to be down here with a mouth-held brush and hoof-mounted dustpans. (She wasn't exactly looking forward to it.) You didn't really get dirty working in the basement, but it was hard to reach the surface again without towing some dust along in your fur. Her father called that the dirt of an honest day's labor and for a filly who was still trying to get Snails to notice her best aspects, that still meant there was far too much dirt.

She could have blamed the store's newest items, because they really did shove things around. Bringing in anything new always represented a disruption to established order, at least until you found a place for everything and could pretend the fresh arrangement had been effectively predestined the whole time.

But so much of it felt like the shadows.

Her father tried to keep the basement well-lit. There were plenty of lighting devices embedded in the ceiling, and a few glow strips lined the walls. (A number of those were color-coded, to help new employees remember where they were.) But Diamond was sure shadows had more weight than light. They sunk. And when they reached the basement, they clustered.

Light in the basement tended to stick with other pieces of radiance, presumably in the hopes of finding allies against the continual assault. Meanwhile, the shadows obscured brand names, hid expiration dates, altered crucial This Should Have Been Disposed Of Two Moons Ago age-shifted hues, and possessed endless patience.

Also, the ceiling was right above her and for the store, that was the floor. She could hear hooves moving around up there. Little snippets of conversation -- or rather, she could tell that ponies were speaking: the nature of anything said was lost.

(They weren't talking about her. She hadn't done anything recently. To pretend towards that belief would require being under the employee break room and trying to pick up on that which was less than a whisper.)

The basement was a place where everything should have been familiar and known, and yet there were secrets.

She turned at the proper location: look left, go past four units of wooden shelves, then pause under the well-tattered Wanted poster of (Extremely Former Employee) Overstock's face, and Diamond found the right bottles. Counted them, then did it again. Another match with what the sale count said should be there.

The fourteenth exact match. Out of seventeen possible checks, with three to go.

Maybe there's an extra behind something.

Pieces got shoved. Nothing new emerged.

At least she could just be in the basement. It was possible to pick up on little glints of metal in the ceiling, but it still didn't look anything like a giant hoof. And the shadows might sink, but they weren't actively descending --

-- she was underground. As an earth pony, Diamond was effectively surrounded by power. She just couldn't try to call on it without having to retake inventory for the entire store. Damaged items went into their own category.

She was safe. But she was still alone with her thoughts, when she had too many of them.

For example, one of those thoughts said that the store's basement was somewhat like a dungeon.

And Diamond hated knowing that.

The proper thing to do was blaming the boys.

Diamond supposed that as games went, Ogres & Oubliettes could be regarded as a semi-natural extension of the inexplicable male interest in monsters -- and when Snips and Snails had initially tried to explain everything to her, that was as far as she'd gotten in her original understanding.

It was all so stupid.

Unicorns didn't learn spells like that! A unicorn who wasn't like Miss Twilight certainly couldn't learn anywhere near that many, and they didn't lose the ability to cast one for a day just because they'd already used it once! And who wore that kind of armor? Not even Guards were that heavily protected! Even earth ponies would reach the point of My Spine Will Collapse Now, which made it a lot harder to consider running away. Diamond's quill companion barely came close to carrying that sheer amount of steel!

'Character classes?' She still wasn't fully sure what a cleric was. Based on reluctantly-acquired personal experience, the core requirement was being allergic to Diamond. They went around healing everypony else who was play-hurt, but Diamond...

She had learned what a polearm was. 'Arm' had required a quick memory dip into International Studies, but after that, 'polearm' had been easy. And what she'd learned was that there was exactly one of them -- but if you repeatedly changed the name and branding, you could pretend there were fifty.

You couldn't even treat the game as a potential tactical simulator, because ogres weren't real! (Oubliettes were, but that was because it was just the Prance word for 'dungeon'.) Why not build something based on monsters which actually existed? Weren't there enough of the things in the world without having to come up with more? And she really hadn't understood why anypony would want to spend so much time pretending to be somepony they weren't -- right up until the moment she'd realized that there was only one pony on the planet who got to be her. Just about everypony else could be presumed to be making up for a few deficiencies.

But the stupid game was something which the boys enjoyed -- somehow -- and if they were going to play at all, then it was important that they do so properly.

(Additionally, Diamond was still trying to figure out if the store should carry the books. She'd seen their prices, and any presumed profit margin which was that hideous really needed to give a few of those bits to her father.)

She'd started out by trying to recreate herself within the game, because there was no point in pretending to be somepony else when you were already somepony better. The boys had told her she was using too many attribute points for a starting character, and she'd half-snapped something about taking it up with her blood. Besides, she absolutely had that kind of charisma, and that was something else Snails apparently hadn't noticed.

Then she'd taken on the role of party leader, because anypony else clearly would have been doing it wrong.

The role. The rolls hadn't worked out. Because you played the game with dice, they never did as they were told -- she'd made sure to give them exact instructions and still been ignored -- and the absolute limit on minor coincidental earth tremors to shift a number was once, so she was saving it for a special occasion. Plus there were ponies who didn't abide by the 'kick the dice lightly with your forehooves' rule. Ponies named Snips and Snails. They shook the dice. In their mouths. Swished them around in their cheeks, because spitting on a die was apparently lucky and so getting all the saliva involved just had to work. And when the theory failed again, they tried to pass the dice to her.

She'd done her best to play, but -- the dice had hated her plan.

But there were two sides to the game. The ones who were part of the story, and the pony who told it. So clearly --

-- and that hadn't worked either.

It was a game with pieces which moved of their own accord. She knew exactly how the boys were supposed to be solving the problem, so why did they just keep trying Everything Else? If she was making a story for them, then they were clearly characters and a character who didn't do what the author wanted was beyond annoying. Also, she still had to roll for stuff and while she at least got her own set of dice for that, they still didn't respect her plan. And Snails, I want to roll this in private! I'm not adjusting the results just to make you -- look, why do I even have this dumb screen? Sure, it's for my notes too, but if you don't trust me on dice...

They hadn't.

...stupid O&O.

There were all sorts of problems with the game, starting with the fact that having Snails spend that kind of money on books clearly meant he wouldn't have as much to spend on Diamond. Which was actually another reason to get the full line into the store, because at least then she could make sure he picked them up at the employee discount.

And then you had the sheer idea of monsters lurking underground.

(Some did. Root anglers were famed for it. There were more than enough real horrors without having stupid writers dream up more.)

If she'd never been introduced to the game, then she wouldn't have seen the basement as a place for monsters to hide.

It was so easy to imagine monsters down here...

It's just me right now.

She tried to tell herself that was different.

The fifteenth count (dowels) came up correct. If the next two turned out 'right', she would have to double-check everything.

Imagination with rules.

She briefly thought about renting out the store basement to players, and then rejected the concept. Her father wouldn't be happy about anypony trying to rig traps, and there was also the problem of letting random ponies wander through an area which was stocked with Treasure Type Everything.

Still... you had the basics. A maze, and something you were supposed to be looking for.

(Sixteen correct. A few minutes later, it was seventeen. She started over. Items were shoved aside to make searching room. Some were relocated. She told herself that part was temporary.)

Other employees? Not quite monsters. More towards... the dungeon's ecosystem. Do Not Disturb. In theory, they would be neutral unless attacked. Or until you caught two of them making out, which was something else that happened a lot in the store's basement. But she hadn't found any during her time on the lower level. Unless there was a sale which needed to be brought up immediately, those going through the Inventory Challenge were left alone.

Neutral unless attacked.
In theory.
Maybe I attacked some already.
She didn't remember...

Even the neutral had their own agendas.

So did enemies.

So she had to learn a layout after all. Moving so many things to look for where her personal inventory trap had been placed... well, that certainly meant memorizing where it had all wound up.

Things were supposed to be a certain way, and they weren't. She wanted 'supposed to be' back.

More things were moved. Her mouth tasted entirely of dust.

What am I missing?

She couldn't surface without the answer. Her supervisors would laugh and as an intern, that meant everypony.

One pony...

Enemies always laughed when something went wrong with your plan.

Diamond had done a lot of laughing.

Think about -- previous incidents. The first step was to recognize that incidents had previously been taking place.

Items dumped on the floor of a just-straightened aisle? It could have easily been the unicorn filly. The same for the dropped book in the library: without that audio summons, Miss Twilight would have stayed where she was. The partially-seen flash of light from the snow-occupied alley had to be the unicorn. And it also explained why Diamond's prey sense had been going off. Watched and targeted.

Why?

What had she done?

She didn't remember.
She almost hoped it had been something good. A personal laugh loud enough to justify this level of counterattack.
She wondered if her own actions had actually been funny.

The Little Foals boxes were pushed aside for inspection.

Eventually.

It only took moving twenty-nine other things to make the necessary room.

The end of the third recount found her passing the treadmills. There was a clock placed within the forward view, and she looked at it.

Then she looked at it again.

I've been down here for --
-- nopony's come to get me, or check on me, or --

-- did she even have enough time left for homework? For a dinner which probably wouldn't have stayed down anyway? For anything?

It just was the Inventory Challenge. She'd seen dozens of ponies go through it.

Some of them had failed.

She couldn't be the one who --

-- her talent...

She blinked several times as her eyes adjusted to the main level's brighter lights. And then she reluctantly looked for Jestine, eventually locating the pegasus near the Books section. (Diamond didn't know if O&O belonged in Toys or Books, and was considering a third category called Do Not Buy This.)

"I..." was all which came out.

The mare was looking at her, expressionless. Waiting.

"...I checked," Diamond forced out. "Over and over. It's all where it's supposed to be. It's all right. It didn't look right at first because so much got moved around to make space for the new stuff, but every count I took was -- right." And the next words felt like they were among the hardest of her life. "...what did I miss?"

Jestine's face changed. There was an expression there now.

"Nothing."

The next blink felt fully inadequate. "...what?"

And the pegasus still looked almost... proud.

"Your father thought you would know how the Challenge worked," the mare told Diamond. "So he drew up something new. There weren't any deliberate disruptions. The new pieces are supposed to be there. And all of the counts are right. This was about how long it would take before you stopped second-guessing yourself and either came up to ask for help -- or accepted that the totals could be right. It was the first. So since nothing's out of order --"

Three blinks proved numerical reinforcements to be useless. "...but -- but I moved stuff! I was moving things all over the place, trying to make it right! The whole basement is just -- all over the place...!"

Jestine merely shrugged.

"Then go put it back. Not to what you think it's supposed to be, Diamond. To what it is. And then you can go home."

The filly silently turned. Unbound legs staggered towards the nearest descending ramp.

Welcome to unpaid overtime.

Of course, she was an intern. All of her time was probably all unpaid.

It didn't help.