Creative Organization, With Coffee and White Zinfadel · 4:22am Dec 4th, 2019
Rarity always said that organization was the heart of creativity.
Of course, she usually said this after six carafes of white zinfadel and twelve cups of high-octane coffee. Most of what she said in this mindset could be discounted or ignored. The buzzing that came from her addled lips were more of a carrier wave than a signal by the time she got to that altered state.
Before she became an employer, it hadn’t mattered. She’d gotten into her weird states, and was productive, and wild, and weird, and nopony knew better. These were the halcyon days of the original Carousel Boutique, when it was just her, and the sewing machine, and the mind-melting high walls of demands, promises, and the unyielding deadline. Still, it had almost always been well enough. She’d usually had enough time, most of the time, to come down from her heightened state and even out. So long as she didn’t scare the customers.
She never thought she’d ever be a place to scare employees. For some reason, her dreams of success and prosperity had always been a solitary affair, a personal matter. She’d charge the walls in front of her, storm the bastions, burn the castles, and seize the princes within for her own artistic purposes.
Success! Barbaric and ladylike and fierce. All the product of heroism, the mare against the world, and eventually, an appreciative prince to applaud appropriately.
But yeah, she was out of wine, and the project was barely broken down. Sassy was looking glassy, and the fabric was barely organized, let alone patterned, let alone sewn to the patterns which hadn’t even been properly cut yet.
Why had she hired anypony to do this scut work? There were never scutponies sufficiently talented to scut properly by Rarity’s own damn standards. They weren’t crazy standards! They were industry standards.
Rarity was fairly sure they were industry standards. Insofar as clothiering had industry standards. They had standards, right?
Sort of. She’d never designed to factory work, piecework, any of all that. That was the practice of the Polomares of the world. The feeders of the machines. The ponies who fed the great fashion hoppers of the massive cities of the east and proud Canterlot City.
Still, Suri Polomare could do it. She was better than Suri Polomare, Rarity was sure of that.
If only her hornfield wasn’t spasming so erratically. And if only this blasted colt could figure out how her pattern-cutting was done, how she preferred to have it all done.
Hack! Incompetent! Foal!
No, no, she was better than this.
Rarity backed up, and walked the poor foal through the process, once again, slowly, carefully, patiently.
She needed more coffee, Celestia damn it.
It wasn’t as if there was a prince hiding somewhere in this enormous pile of ponyshit. Rarity knew that well enough by now. There were barely any princes left in this degenerate world, none worthy of the name. Only princesses.
And Rarity was flexible enough to deal with that. She could do princesses!
Except they were all kind of like family. Twilight Sparkle was a princess, true, but she was also like her little sister. Well, not like Sweetie Belle. Even Sweetie Belle was more mature than Princess Twilight.
And the Royal Pony Sisters! Like her mother, plus the whole command of the heavens and the dream-world thing.
Let’s not get into the whole Cadance and Shining Armor thing. If being a lady meant anything, it meant that you weren’t a homewrecker!
Rarity wasn’t nearly young enough to wait for little Flurry Heart to grow up, even if it wouldn’t be so embarrassingly awful to try to date a pony over twenty-five years younger than her. By the time she was an adult, Rarity would be an old mare!
Oh, the damn foal was getting it wrong again. She needed another drink.
Not sure if it was coffee or wine she needed.
No, no, it wasn’t irrecoverable. Rarity jerked forward, and stopped the colt before he totally ruined it, and pointed out a way that he could retrieve the core, underlying elements of the pattern he was working on, that they could patch the whole thing together, piece it into something sewable and, possibly, sellable.
Who knows? Rarity didn’t. Her biggest successes so far had been mostly mistakes, and her worst disasters had been planned, painfully, carefully, painstakingly.
It was kind of why she relied on this custom blend of alcohol and coffee, a crazy-making stew of stimulants and depressants - to get her into that wild creative fugue that produced the raw product that true organization could work with.
She screamed into the ear of the poor colt, and his panicked jerk tore off the edge of the pattern in exactly the right place.
“Oh, that’s beautiful, darling! Exactly as I wanted. You might just do, dear. Now do that six more times, while Sassy and I work out how we’re going to mare these sewing stations.”
The colt’s eye twitched with an alarming spasm, and Rarity worried for a brief lucid second that her first - no, her second employee was about to stroke out.
Somehow, it all worked out in the end.
Then Rarity got an eyeful of the mares and stallions Sassy had hired to run their sewing machines, and it all started over again.
Oh rarity...
You have a way with folks that certainly, well. works wonders.
5164068 Therapy helps. Mostly.
5164100
I only worry for the cost of such severance pay, generally with the adeptness of those scissors.
So ... Rarity needs somepony to invent alcoholic coffee?
Hah! Interesting. Anything in particular inspire this, if I may asK? I'm curious.
5164144
Twenty minute surprise speedwriting contest session. Prompt was simply 'organization'. There wasn't enough to be fully publishable, but seemed about the size for an amusing blog post.
It would certainly be the most fabulous coup Canterlot's ever seen.
But yeah, if Rarity even learns of coffee liqueur, I'm pretty sure she'll violate labor laws that most ponies hadn't even heard of.
Another short one that came from a contest? You are on a roll these days!
Interesting bit, not many stories look at Rarity employees or her relation with them. People sometimes forget that she even have employees.
5164172
Ah, thanks. :)
Princes huh? Besides the obvious one, there's Rutherford, and I just realized Terramar might also qualify as a Prince. He and Silverstream are niece and nephew of the Queen, right?
5164457
Eh. more likely they're some sort of nobility. We've not really seen enough of their interactions with the Queen to figure out whether hippogriffs have an expansive definition of royalty, or what. And it's possible that they're her husband's kin. Is the prince consort alive, btw? I'm thinking 'no'. His noble death during the evacuation of Mount Aris seems likely to have been enough to leave Queen Novo the bitter and pessimistic seapony we meet in the movie.
5164512 I may have been influenced by The Windsors (the show, not the actual royal family), but it is just as likely they are related to Novo only by marriage, not blood, and therefore not royalty (though probably they have titles, especially if the leader of the armed forces escorts Silverstream to school).
5164100
But it's mostly the alcohol.