Diamond Tiara And The Economics Of Love

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.