Diamond Tiara And The Economics Of Love

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.