“Uuuugh…” Raven Inkwell turned over amidst the fluffy, white cushions that filled the backseat of her unusually spacious carriage, rubbing her muzzle into one of her huge pillows. “Sometimes I hate this job…”
Wolffe, her personal changeling handmaiden, watched the scene unfold with elegant amusement, a charming little perk up at the corners of her lips. With equal poise she transformed, her formerly pale green body elongating and flowing into a spitting image of Fleur de Lis, unicorn supermodel and quite indisputably the most attractive non-divine being residing in Canterlot. Raven peeked up as Wolffe laid down her new, slender unicorn muzzle onto her bed, watching as Fleur de Lis’s silky pink mane sprouted from her head and cascaded down to her withers. A common changeling transformation, for one reason or another, but Raven thought Wolffe did a particularly lovely job of it.
“But you are good at it,” Wolffe whispered. “You know Princess Celestia appreciates your service.”
“Yeah, I know, but it’s just so frustrating, and…” Raven sighed, smoothing out her bunned chestnut mane. “I think it brings out the worst in me.” Her white head perked up from the white pillows in a confusing show of pony camouflage. “You think I was too hard on him?”
“Nahhh,” Wolffe stifled a giggle. “You’ve got an important job, you know. It’s important that the taxes come in properly, that Canterlot gets every last bit that it's owed and not one less. After all, if the Royal Guard doesn’t get enough money, they might start laying off, and then poof! No more me!”
“And what would I ever do without you, Wolfy,” Raven rolled her eyes, burbling into the mattress beneath her.
“Exactly!” the changeling assassin in Fleur de Lis’s body flashed an unsettlingly perky smile. “So what if you hit him over the head with a dictionary? Honestly, if somebody doesn’t end up comatose, have you really filed your taxes correctly?”
“Mmm…” Raven thought over her routine over the past few weeks, a seemingly never-ending slog of travel amidst Equestria’s hundreds of sleepy townships. Always the same meetings in the town halls, receiving a slate of tax forms from a reluctant mayor, followed by a trip to the local bank to actually retrieve the gold and pile it into the excise convoy she was leading. Such was the life for the collector of Equestria’s winter taxes. “You ever get bored of this?”
“Say what now?” Wolffe had already changed again, this time into an anthropomorphic parrot of the Sky Pirate Calaeno’s powerfully muscular build, only with an elegant white and blue coat of feathers for Canterlot’s colors.
She needed the use of her forelimbs, and more specifically, a pair of opposable talons to polish the arsenal of weapons hidden throughout the carriage. Some, like camping knives and hatchets, were necessities, carried not only by other mercantile convoys, but by every traveler going through specific trails of Equestria. Normally, travelers would only need a few, depending on which pathways they were on, but of course the tax wagons had to be on all of them.
“This,” Raven gestured noncommittally to the silver daggers and oiled cloth in Wolffe’s hands, the multitude of implements about her, leading onto the carriage itself. “I mean, we’ve been doing the same thing for months on end. You’ve got to get tired of sitting and waiting on the drive, getting out, and getting back in, tired of this stupid job, tired of… well, me.”
Wolffe sighed a knowing sigh, already melting back into the diminutive, pale-green changeling that was her true form.
“I know royal assassins sometimes see multiple duties. Sometimes more than their share,” Raven went on. “Why, Princess Luna’s personal retinue might as well be a gaggle of really, really expensive concubines… And I know you-”
“Raven, we go over this every year,” Wolffe ran one of her digits across her friend’s shoulder in a light impart of comfort. Then she smeared what oily residue remained on her chitinous pads all over her face and hair, giggling at Raven’s indignant groans of disgust. “You’re stuck with me! You know, every year, Princess Luna comes up to me and says: ‘Does thou not feel overqualified to guard life when thy claws are so adept at taking it? Doth ye not delight in the art of the kill?’ And I have to remind her: ‘No, that’s not me, that’s my brother Krombopulos-’”
“Whoa, whoa… What in Equestria are you talking about?” a new, profound sense of confusion rose up and shattered Raven’s self consciousness.
“Point being, I like you,” Wolffe laughed. “What I like most in this world is spending time with my friends, and that means you. But I do understand the need for excitement as well. Honestly that might be the only thing separating me from ‘expensive concubine’ territory, as you so eloquently put it.”
“Huh. So what can we do about that?” Left with little recourse other than to be comforted, Raven popped up from under the cushy white blankets to rest her head against Wolffe’s shoulder.
“Look no further than the last stop on our journey,” Wolffe poked her head out the carriage window, watching as the smoldering town of Ponyville slowly loomed closer on the horizon. “Wow, that does not look good…”
“I did ask, didn’t I?” Raven’s head shortly followed and she followed Wolffe’s gaze, a sheepish grimace taking to her features.
Even the heavy hoof of Raven Inkwell had to admit that Ponyville was one of the few towns in all of Equestria that actually had a good reason to not pay its taxes on time. That was what she chose to call the six plumes of black smoke slowly drifting upward from various far-off homes and the shell-shocked ponies running about with buckets of water and wheelbarrows of rubble. As she exited the carriage and straightened her glasses, the ground beneath Raven and Wolffe’s hooves shook and the deafening pulse of another explosion rocked their ears. Collective groans filled the air as a seventh burst of smoke billowed skyward and poured out of the town gates.
While a familiar and somewhat ignorable sight in summer, the contrast of the snow covering the rooftops and streets and the black smoke rising from the houses never failed to raise a few eyebrows in Ponyville’s visitors. They could at least rest assured that the residents were keeping themselves warm.
“How has this town not burned down yet?” Wolffe mused as she and Raven made their life to the gates.
“Fun fact, three out of every five hundred bits paid in taxes ends up having something to do with Ponyville,” Raven scowled.
As a result of either their homes being routinely destroyed or the simple lack of income that came with living in a country town, many residents of Ponyville never paid a half-bit piece in taxes, and those that might have been eligible were due to pay such a pittance to the Crown that the time it might take Raven to ask them to pay it cost more than it was worth. Despite that fact, the perky and vibrant shade of the still-standing homes and their equally bouncy inhabitants told a puzzling story of enrichment rather than poverty.
Most visitors to the town attributed its success and expansion to the burgeoning School of Friendship, and while this was technically true, an enterprise so closely affiliated with a Princess and the royal coffers could not explain away Ponyville’s confusingly dramatic economic success.
The first and most obvious face of Ponyville’s strength had to be Sweet Apple Acres, home of the iconic “Zap Apples,” and a refreshing brew of cider that had a home in any self-respecting noble’s pantry. The export of their refined goods alone brought in enough money to support the entire town, not to mention the apples themselves, which dominated fresh markets all throughout the Equestrian heartland. Applejack and her family could have lived like kings and still have been ponies of weight, but the practiced frugality with which they led their lives meant that they were wealthy to a gargantuan degree.
Perhaps due to the lesser footprint of her business, Rarity tended to fly under the radar when it came to her own hoard of bits. While she could hardly compete with the magnitude of Sweet Apple Acres’s products, the fashionista made up for it in her clientele, who were more often than not ponies for whom money was no object. Not even the high overhead cost of producing masterwork clothing, with nothing but the finest threads and colors, embedded with rare gemstones and often at length, could dampen the income of a pony so drowned in commissions from nobility both at home and abroad. She certainly spent like it too.
Last and certainly least, Raven explained, was Rainbow Dash. On her own, as Captain of the Wonderbolts, she earned a strong income as a professional athlete, a healthy stipend from the Equestrian Armed Forces, for whom the Wonderbolts were elite reservists, and an outstanding set of royalties from celebrity appearances and merchandise, but it could never quite hold a candle to her friends with actual jobs. Even so, she was easily the third-richest pony in Ponyville, and fittingly enough, the most willing to flaunt it.
“I guess it’s convenient that we basically only have to collect the taxes of three ponies,” Wolffe murmured. “And Mayor Mare should already have that done for us… As a matter of fact, shouldn’t she have come outside to receive us? Where is she?”
“Wondering why I still have the office, thank you very much,” A soaked, soot-black vagrant in the shape of Mayor Mare coughed out a small puff of smoke as she passed them on the street. “Happy Hearth’s Warming, by the way.”
“Where did you come from-” Wolffe stammered.
“Tis the season of giving… back to your government,” Raven said with as wide of a pensive, wry smile that ever graced her muzzle. “I hope even despite all of this…” She gestured incoherently in the direction of the town. “We’ll be able to proceed in a timely manner.”
Mayor Mare shook some of the ash out of her mane, stamping on the ground to relieve her coat of its stifling cake of soot. Though this by no means left her clean, Raven and Wolffe could at least take more confidence that they were actually speaking to the Mayor, whose mane now sported spots of natural white amid the peppers of charcoal and coat at its frazzled ends revealed its true tan color out from the black.
“Oh, come now, Miss Inkwell,” Mayor Mare beckoned them to follow her down the road. “Were we really that late last year?”
“Yes, you were,” Raven Inkwell produced a clipboard and leafed through a few pages to find a blank one. “Although I seem to recall you had a good excuse?”
“You could say that,” Mayor Mare shrugged. “Last year, the Cutie Mark Crusaders took it upon themselves to gather the fireworks for the Ponyville holiday celebration. At some point they ran out of local suppliers to buy them from- or maybe they were just put off by the cost, I wouldn’t know- but at the end of the day they figured: ‘Fireworks explode, right? So anything that explodes must also be fireworks, or something at least close to fireworks.’”
“They didn’t!” Raven gasped, suppressing her incredulous laughter.
“Oh, they certainly did,” Mayor Mare, in her infinite grace, smiled slightly at what must have been a truly awesome disaster to clean up. “I think Sweetie Belle, bless her soul, used her sister’s connections to purchase an entire shipment of magical weapons from the Crystal Empire. Weapons like, oh, like the ones your assassin friend has right there.”
Wolffe glanced down at a leather bandolier that crossed the underside of her barrel, populated by five or so magical grenades that crackled with the energy of their deadly enchantments. She supposed that they did look like fireworks or Hearth’s Warming ornaments in an unfortunate sort of way.
“As a matter of fact,” Mayor Mare peered at one, a light blue affair that occasionally clouded over with beads of condensation. “This one’s an ice bomb, right?”
Wolffe slowly reared up into her parrot form, moving the bandolier from dangling uselessly beneath her to a prominent feature of her heavily built chest. She unhooked the grenade from its holder on the leather strap and gave it a cursory glance.
“That’s right,” she nodded, then added after a pause: “Sorry you’re familiar enough with magic ordnance to be able to tell.”
“It has its moments,” Mayor Mare shrugged, gesturing to one of the burning buildings nearby. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”
“Oh, sure,” Wolffe pressed down on a rune on the grenade until the writing began to glow and hum.
She waited until the little ball reached a fever pitch before hurling it into one of the many cavities fire had left in the building's walls, and no sooner had the ball touched one of the burning timbers it exploded into an awesome flurry of snow and wind. When the white powder cleared, where once there was fire licking up the building’s walls, huge sheets of blue ice coated the charred eaves and jutted out of every orifice as if a glacier had suddenly taken up residence inside. The fire was all at once smothered, stamped out, and refrigerated out of existence.
“Ohhh, so that’s why-” Raven glanced over at Mayor Mare.
“Yep, that’s how the Town Hall got frozen in that big block of ice last year,” she sighed. “I still remember what you told me when I gave that excuse to you.”
“‘That’d make a great excuse if it were true!’” Raven had no choice but to laugh at that. “Oh, Celestia, it took us so long to break through to your office…”
“Thankfully we won’t have to do that again this year,” Mayor Mare reached into her saddlebags and produced three thick packets, one for each of Ponyville’s wealthiest ponies. “I’ve gotten the tax forms ahead of time.”
“Conference as usual, then?” With so much wealth concentrated in three ponies, the Ways and Means Office in Canterlot insisted that a thorough audit be completed the moment they turned in their self-reported taxes. To avoid that horrendous inconvenience, Applejack, Rarity and Rainbow Dash agreed to meet in Sweet Apple Acres’ barn and pay a healthy fee so that Raven would observe them all at the same time while they filled out their tax forms and waive the audit. Mayor Mare often tagged along to ensure the three of them behaved- after all, the more money Raven managed to siphon from them, the more funding she might eventually have at the ready to repair her town.
While Rarity may have been the Element of Generosity, that did not mean that she was willing to allow others to dictate when and how her vast fortune could be spent. To that end, she regularly covered the barn’s skylights and windows with thick, uninviting black banners with sharp purple insignias on them. They obviously wouldn’t do much to scare off the tax collectors, but the resulting dour gloom inside the barn would make it difficult for Raven to tell if she was properly reporting her income.
“You want to do like a good cop, bad cop thing this time?” Raven hummed as she stared at the covered-up barn.
“Mmm, we’re not so much asking questions as we are trying to catch them cheating,” Mayor Mare thoughtfully replied. “I would know a little bit about that, except with schoolponies taking spelling exams and whatnot. … Oh, don’t give me that look. It took me a little while to figure out I wanted to be the Mayor of all things…”
Raven snorted and rolled her eyes at the thought. “Well, it’s probably a better mindset than ‘Stand there and watch for discrepancies.’ Here, I brought a copy of their estimated incomes for you to get familiar with.”
Since Mayor Mare was responsible for receiving both the tax forms and collecting the taxes for the rest of Ponyville’s residents, she knew how to parse the numbers in Raven’s small dossier, understanding where each one ought to go on the tax forms they were about to oversee. She went silent as she committed each one to memory, and when she was finished, she took the little slip of paper, squirreled it away in her saddlebags, and snapped them shut.
Rarity and Applejack gave them a welcome chillier than the winter air as they creaked open the barn door and entered. All the farm equipment had been put away at Rarity’s behest, and more unsettling drapery covered the walls and hung down from the ceiling around a central table like some kind of gothic tea party. She too was dressed for the part, in a sharply grim blue suit and black vest featuring a pair of indigo-highlighted shoulders. Meanwhile, Applejack, while not exactly thrilled to see the tax collector with her mayor and an assassin in tow, sat with patient discomfort beside Rarity dressed in nothing but her plumb-standard stetson farm hat.
“I think we’d all appreciate it if ya closed the door,” Applejack motioned to a few snowy curls blowing in from the open portal. “As usual, it’s gonna take a little while to get this dusted, and some warmth ain’t exactly unwelcome.”
Totally cut off from any ambient light, it soon became painfully obvious to the two glasses-wearing ponies that the only light in the entire barn was thrown from a single candlestick in the middle of the circular table where Rarity and Applejack had their tax forms and mountains of their income documents set up. A third, much smaller pile of papers and emplacement on the table slowly dawned the realization that one of their partners was missing.
“Waiting on somepony, are we?” Raven squinted both her eyes and her teeth.
As if in response, Rarity let out a dignified cough and Applejack groaned in exasperation and nodded up to the ceiling.
As truly annoying as all the atmospheric posturing was, at least Rarity had the dignity to sit at the table beside Applejack and pretend to honestly report her income. Rainbow Dash had no such qualms, nor any inclination to ever grow them, and every year tried more and more outlandish tricks to get out of paying her taxes- or at least, paying them honestly. Raven and Mayor Mare looked up to the ceiling to witness Rainbow Dash curling her hind legs around the backrest of her chair, which she had nailed through the roof, ensconced in fleshy, featherless wings that might have been more at home on a dragon, or a-
“Bat,” Raven Inkwell scowled up at the ceiling. “You turned yourself into a bat?”
“Wow,” Mayor Mare followed her gaze. “You girls really do do something different every Hearth’s Warming, don’t you?”
“What’sssss up, guys?” Rainbow Dash peeked out of her leathery cocoon, pleasantly hissing through her new pair of fangs.
“Can I ask why,” Raven angrily rubbed her hoof into her muzzle as if it would go away. “Why have you turned yourself into a bat-pony?”
“Uhhh… Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rainbow Dash glanced about awkwardly as she fluttered her wings. “It’s a… condition. Recently diagnosed! At random times, I just turn into a bat-pony- nothing I can do about it, really…”
“Uh huh. My condolences. Get down from there so we can start already.”
“Sorry, can’t do that,” Rainbow gestured with her wings to her limbs. “The transformation weakens my hooves, so unfortunately I’ll have to do my taxes up here. You don’t mind, right?”
“How am I supposed to watch you fill out your forms when you’re suspended twenty feet in the air and hanging upside down?” Raven exploded, her normally snow-white face turning a very unladylike shade of red.
“I’m very sorry,” Rainbow nodded in a poor show of earnest respect.
“So am I,” Mayor Mare chipped in, a coat of sympathy wrapping her words. “That sounds very difficult for you.”
“You have no idea,” Rainbow bowed her head.
“I never turn a pony in need away,” Mayor Mare flashed a gentle, generous smile, though a sharp twinkle in her eyes gave Rainbow a slight pause and brought a smirk to Raven’s lips. “What kind of mayor would I be? No, I’ll get working on some… transitory changes for you right away.”
“Eheh… What do you mean?” Rainbow forced out a chuckle, her pupils shrinking a little bit as Mayor Mare began her offer.
“Well, only being able to rest by hanging is a serious lifestyle change. While the weather team can’t quite build a new house for you in the space of one afternoon, we can make some stopgap changes to your old one,” Mayor Mare grinned up at her.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked uneasily.
“Clouds are pliable,” Mayor Mare shrugged. “The weather team shouldn’t have a problem flipping the whole affair upside down. We can glue your furniture down to the floor- well, your new ceiling- so you can still use them.”
“Oh. Um,” Rainbow Dash blanched, realizing the stakes had been raised higher than she was willing to bluff. “Y-You really don’t have to… I wouldn’t want to be a bother…”
“Oh, no,” Mayor Mare smiled up at her. “I insist. It would be my genuine pleasure.”
Rainbow Dash shivered indignantly from her perch on the ceiling, before flapping back down to pout at the tax table.
“Actually,” she grumbled. “My legs are feeling stronger already. It should be alright.”
“Good to hear,” Mayor Mare patted her on the shoulder before walking back to Raven, who watched her walk away from the charred corpse of Rainbow Dash’s excuse with nothing less than a gobsmacked gape on her face.
“Alright then, old pony,” Raven gave Mayor Mare a playful kick. “I see you’ve still got it.”
“I live to serve,” Mayor Mare made a playful bow before returning to attention as the three of them actually started filling out their tax forms.
The routine would then follow a simple formula. Applejack would proceed the fastest, because she was possessed of a particular blessing of sight that allowed her to simply read her farm’s earning reports, add the numbers up, and tack them onto the sheet. Rarity trailed close by, evidently less precise than her friend, for she would spend some time struggling to read the numbers on her commission receipts, and when she finally did write something down, her value would often differ ever so slightly than the original amount. Surely the fact that the difference was always negative was merely a coincidence.
However, if Rarity was disblessed with sight, Rainbow Dash might as well have been completely blind. Whatever parts she glossed over as “unimportant” would be left blank, and whatever parts she actually filled out contained errors transcending malintent, when her writings were legible at all. The remaining half of her tax forms gave Raven and Mayor Mare the disturbing impression that Rainbow didn’t actually know what taxes were or how to pay them.
Fixing any of those problems wasn’t in either of their powers, however, so the best Mayor Mare and Raven could do was watch and correct them as best they can.
“How many errors have you caught so far?” Raven spoke in passing to Mayor Mare as they swapped places.
“Oh, a few,” she chuckled. “But what do you expect when working with schoolponies such as these? Why, Rarity, bless her heart, has already missed a zero and all the digits from her thousands down to her ones place, and AJ never was very good at mathematics anyway.”
Raven laughed at the indignant splutters that elicited from the two friends. “I take it you’re enjoying this?”
“It is part of my holiday tradition. And as you mentioned earlier, it does remind me of when I used to sub in at the schoolhouse from time to time. Nostalgia is a powerful… and concerning… thing…” Mayor Mare trailed off as she watched Rainbow Dash ascribe in two quick strokes of her pencil a number that should have been at least six figures long. “Rainbow, dear, don’t you think you made more than eighteen bits last year?”
“... Uh-”
“Don’t you ‘uh,’ me,” Mayor Mare sternly barked. “Do your math again. Here’s a hint- It’s somewhere upwards of eight hundred thousand.” Then she turned back to Raven with a sheepish smile. “Goodness, I might have missed this more than I thought,” Mayor Mare brushed herself off and moved on to glance at Rarity’s figures. “You think it’s too late for a career change?”
“Whatever makes you happy,” Raven shrugged. “Who knows, pop in a youth potion and you might give Cheerilee a run for her money.”
“That does sound delightful- Rarity, you know your property is worth more than that. Humility isn’t a very good look on you- But you know, I’m thinking I might miss the energy of being mayor. Assigning coloring homework and wrangling fillies just doesn’t hold a candle to ‘magical grenade fireworks.’ Haven’t forgot about that yet, by the way.” Mayor Mare hardly broke her stride as she delivered a casual but smart little swat to Rarity’s head.
“I know how that feels, but be careful what you wish for,” Raven could afford to speak without interruption as she calmly corrected a few of Applejack’s simple calculation errors. “You might end up with your own breed of Cutie Mark Crusaders if you’re not careful.”
“As if one wasn’t enough, really,” Mayor Mare sighed. “Perhaps then, it’s best if this town only has the one schoolteacher as well… Though I’m not sure where schooling adult fillies fits into that equation! Rainbow! Your house is not worth negative twelve thousand bits!”
And so the exchange went on in much the same way, with Mayor Mare and Raven Inkwell trying to get in a casual conversation between the constant correcting and occasionally giving into the immense frustration that surrounded them. It went on like this for hours.
When an animal is brought into captivity, its first instinct is to react defensively and angrily. It will try to attack the cage and attempt to undermine its bars, trying every possible method to break or climb or undermine a way out from its prison. Of course, a well-constructed and staffed prison precludes all escape, and as the time passes and the bars of the cage cast long shadows across its frightened inhabitant, it will degrade itself, wasting in pride and energy until it poses no threat to its guardians at all, only interested in whatever will prolong its own survival and, hopefully, earn its freedom.
Raven observed, as she often did with these high-value targets, a growing lethargy in Rarity and especially Rainbow Dash as the process of tallying income and filing taxes entered the three hour mark. A certain sense of dread brewed on their faces and exhaled in their breath, this sense that they were doomed to spend the rest of their lives sequestered in this gloomy, black-draped barn, failing to even spend the admittedly large portions of their annual fortune that remained for them- truly, what was millions of bits before their freedom?
“It would cost you nothing to let us go,” Rarity moaned as she pulled out another dozen commission forms for the running tally.
“Nothing but the favor of Princess Celestia?” Raven sipped appreciatively from a mug of hot cocoa Mayor Mare and Applejack had been kind enough to whip up for her. “I think not.”
“Then at least help me count these infernal numbers up!” Rarity dramatically gestured to the extant stack of commission papers. “At this rate the both of us will be here until the cows come home!”
“Too late!” Applejack’s piercing voice echoed through the barn as she bucked open the doors. “Pick another milestone, ‘cause the cows have come home. Daisyjo! You ain’t wanna be out there anymore than I do, so get inside!”
Rarity squirmed and cringed as Applejack and Mayor Mare led the Sweet Apple Acres’ cattle herd into the stalls, and now the previously just-bearable pall of silence had been replaced with the horrible din of incessant mooing. No less acidic than the new smell of manure floating through the air was the daggers glared at Applejack from both Rarity and Rainbow Dash. She had finished her taxes nearly an hour ago, and began doing farm chores with Mayor Mare’s help ever since.
“How’s the farm girl life treating you?” Raven cocked her head at the strange sight of Mayor Mare in one of Applejack's spare straw hats and work boots.
“It’s been a while since I’ve wrangled a cattle herd, but the chilly winter air makes it much easier to get them to go back inside,” Mayor Mare shrugged, and leaned in close to Raven. “Figured it would help with Miss Delicate Sensibilities over there.”
“Is there anything you haven’t done in this town?” Raven laughed, glancing over at Rarity’s face screwing up in palpable disgust at the scene unfolding all around her. The curtains she had used to close the barn off from the outside world were certainly ruined by now- she’d have to toss them out- no, she’d have to burn them.
“You’re doing this on purpose!” The fashionista wailed, pounding furiously on the table. “You can’t just lock me in a dark room for three hours and make me do my taxes!”
“Oh, I can make you do your taxes,” Raven pointed out. “But you’re the one who locked us both in a dark room, put all these dumb curtains on the windows, and lied- like sixty seven times- about your income. Have a look at Applejack! She has even more income streams than you do!”
“I’ll do anything! Anything! Just make it stop!” Rarity screamed.
“First, we get rid of these curtains,” Mayor Mare crowed. “Can’t properly check your new dedication to honesty in the dark.”
She nodded to Wolffe, still standing in the shadows behind them. The assassin didn’t wait for a second approval, leaping onto and running across the walls. As she passed each window, she stabbed outward with a dagger, cutting down the curtains before jumping back down, right where she started.
“Anything else, Mayor?” she sheathed her weapon with a cheery little flourish.
“You’re good, assassin,” Mayor Mare nodded. “Start getting the tax convoy ready to leave for Miss Inkwell.”
Wolffe nodded, and Mayor Mare opened her mouth to thank her. She blinked once before she spoke, and in that space of time, the changeling had already gone.
“Okay,” Mayor Mare muttered before returning to the task at hand.
Thanks to Wolffe, the winter sunlight streamed through the newly cleared windows and illuminated the table, revealing Rarity’s tally-up for all to behold. Raven and Mayor Mare peered down at the paper, immediately alighting on a few glaring mistakes.
“Look, I know the count is wrong,” Rarity’s dramatic tears carried her eyeshadow streaming down to the table. “I just… I just want this to be over.”
“Tell you what,” Raven slapped down a number in front of her. “This is your taxable income now. No deductibles, no frills. Just this number…” she tapped the empty square on the form with her pen. “In this box, and zeroes everywhere else.”
“Twenty two million bits!” Rarity’s sputtering defiance returned. “How dare you! How much will be left for me and Sweetie Belle?”
“Less now that I’m tacking on fines for last year’s Hearth’s Warming Catastrophe. And probably this year’s too,” Mayor Mare politely informed her.
Rarity scowled at both grinning ponies. “I would rather-”
“Sit here for another three hours while listening to the two of us yammer on and on about what we’ve done with our lives?” Raven glanced over at Mayor Mare, who just shrugged. It was a long list to get through, and she had good confidence that she could stretch it for at least that long.
“Hey, it beats trying to put out Ponyville fires. Some… misguided soul… mixed flash powder with the town supply of firewood, so anyone who isn’t busy is on alert.” Mayor Mare sighed.
“Ah,” The color drained out of Rarity’s already-white face. “You know what, I’ll sign that now.”
She scrabbled out her patchwork in the deductible blanks and scratched twenty-two million into gross income. “You two jerks are lucky I have more important things to do than haggle over my taxes with you!” she practically scrawled her signature in the blank before throwing the paper at Raven and scuttling off outside. “Sweetie Belle?” She could be heard urgently calling out for a long time before her voice ultimately faded into the distance. “Where are you?”
“What was that all about?” Raven murmured.
“Miss Inkwell, whenever something explodes in Ponyville and the town is not under attack, it must be the fault of the Cutie Mark Crusaders,” Mayor Mare explained as if this was a difficulty she had to experience every day. “Each of them play an important role in the process- Sweetie Belle is responsible for acquiring the explosive material, Scootaloo has the know-how to make whatever Sweetie Belle finds explode, and Apple Bloom is the only one smart enough to make sure they all live to explode more things in the future.”
“So that means, with Rarity-”
“My guess is that Sweetie Belle broke down whatever extra fireworks they had this year and mixed them into the town’s firewood to give it a little extra oomph,” Mayor Mare went on. “That’s those fires I was helping put out earlier. It also means she has a big repository of explosive powder somewhere sitting somewhere around here, and if I were Rarity-”
A truly deafening explosion erupted from somewhere outside the barn, momentarily shutting out the light from its eastern side with dust and smoke. One of the barn's rafters cracked in half, dangling haphazardly from the ceiling as the shockwave trundled through the barn and shook the structure down to its bones. Applejack looked up in annoyance as the dust settled and one half of the beam swayed free of the snapped nails holding it in place, sending the huge wooden spire to slice down into the ground right next to her.
“Should- Should we get help or something?” Raven watched in flabbergasted awe as Applejack muttered a curse under her breath and angrily stalked out of the barn.
“Nah,” Mayor Mare shrugged. “This sort of thing is never enough to kill those three fillies. Her, on the other hand, um…”
The two of them glanced back at the table, remembering that Rainbow Dash was still there, and concerningly, hadn’t complained for a while. As a matter of fact, slumped facedown in her income reports as she was, the last time she’d done anything at all but breathe wasn’t exactly immediately apparent, though her income tax forms did all seem to be complete in a passably accurate manner. Thankfully she was at least still alive, but her body refused to respond to anything Raven or Mayor Mare said or did.
“Okay, we should get help now,” Raven said, after she pocketed the completed papers.
“Agreed,” Mayor Mare nodded. “You think Wolffe would know what to do? I’m afraid Ponyville’s infirmary is rather full at the moment.”
“Maybe if she were still a pony, but like this?” Raven indicated the elongated, fluffy ears and fleshy wings of Rainbow Dash’s decidedly pale, batlike form. “About the only thing I figure she’d be good for is putting the poor thing out of her misery. You have anyone in town really good at taking care of animals?”
“Fluttershy’s a good thought,” Mayor Mare mused. “I’ll get on it right away.” She picked up Rainbow Dash and slung her perpendicularly across her back. “Oof! Goodness, now I’m getting flashbacks from my stint in the army…”
“I’m- I’m going to ignore that,” Raven spluttered. “Well, now that all the tax forms have been filled out, I’m off to the bank to get their bits and then I’ve got to get it all back to Canterlot. … I guess that means this is goodbye for the rest of the year?”
“Only on official business,” Mayor Mare shrugged. “You’re just as welcome as anyone else to visit our little slice of Equestria- maybe in a less hectic time of year?”
“Nah, it's just too much fun to watch all your Ponyville excitement unfold…” Raven shook her head in the polite disbelief that she had seen all that she had seen. As she skipped down the street, she called over her shoulder: “I’ll be sure to make some time in the busiest part of your year. I hope we can work together again!”
“Done!” Mayor Mare happily called back while checking Rainbow Dash’s pulse. Though still as reasonably strong as it was when she picked her up, it never hurt to double check. “Right, let’s get you to Fluttershy…”
