Expecting the first committee meeting to go smoothly was a pipe dream at best. Sunset leaned against the door of the classroom they’d designated for meetings, building up the will to go in like she was charging an attack in some battle anime. She even thought about screaming a little, just to get it all out early. Her head bounced lightly on the door frame as the stress in her body fought for control, to which she said ‘Eat me’. She turned off her phone, took a deep breath, and walked in.
She had many different ideas of what awaited her, each of which more outrageous than the next. Images of fighting, swearing, crowded rooms filled to bursting with suggestions from the box (she knew it was a Tweeter account, yet her imagination had gotten the better of her), but the one she wasn’t counting on was the entire committee, all five members, quietly sitting around the clean, neat desk and diligently pouring over paperwork and discussing their ideas with a sense of civility.
She blinked a few times at the rather peaceful, efficient display in front of her, and took a mental inventory of her fellow committee members. The most prominent was Schadenfreude, sitting at the head of the two long tables they’d pushed together, side by side. There was an empty chair next to him, obviously meant for Sunset. On the right side were the Decorations Planner and the Financial ‘Officer’, best friends Lyra Heartstrings and Bon-Bon, respectively.. They chattered back and forth about… whatever it is those two liked to chat about, generally paying no mind to the rest of the room. They did look up and give a happy smile and wave when Sunset walked in the room, however.
The other side of the table, the closest to her empty chair, was where the Food Planner and Music Planner were sitting. Sunset was mildly surprised to see Pixel Pizzazz in the Music Planner’s chair, as Vinyl was typically the popular vote. Even Octavia had a rather fantastic ear for classical and jazz music, which some of the students seemed to appreciate. She was not surprised to see Pinkie Pie in the food planner’s chair, because keeping her away from any kind of party was a scientific impossibility. Pinkie’s seat was right next to her chair, which she took with some trepidation, mildly suspicious of the rather calm atmosphere, something of a rarity in Pinkie’s or Schaden’s presence. Many people had theories as to what would happen if you left them in a room for any length of time, but as far as she could tell the building wasn’t on fire yet.
“Ok...” she said cautiously as she sat down. “Is this everyone? There isn’t like, a Standing in Line Officer, as well?” There was some general chuckling at that, and a snort from Pinkie, who was sitting rather uncharacteristically still. She looked around at the other five people, and waited for a few seconds. “Alright, out with it. What happened?”
Pixel tilted her head with a raised eyebrow. “Uh, what do you mean? We’re literally sitting here waiting for you two to tell us what we’re doing.”
The corner of Schaden’s mouth twitched slightly, something the now hyper-alert Sunset didn’t miss. “Reel it in, Douchehorse. We haven’t even started yet.”
Schaden shrugged. “Sure. Whatever you say, Shimmy.” Before Sunset could respond to the unfavorable nickname, he turned his attention to Pizzazz. “I think she’s talking about the fact that someone thought it was a good idea to put me and Pinkie Pie in the same room together for any length of time with little to no supervision. And no, Lyra, you don’t count as supervision. That kind of went out the window when you two decided to compete to get onto the Friendship Games team.”
Heartstrings, who was about to protest, closed her mouth with a small pout. Bon-Bon patted her head.
Sunset just sighed and moved on. “Ok, we’ve only got like, an hour today, so let’s try to get somewhere, shall we? Have you guys talked about a theme at all?”
Lyra perked back up, pulling a single sheet of paper out of the folder directly in front of her. At least the table somewhat met Sunset’s expectations; it was a total mess of folders, flyers, loose papers, and snacks. She put her own binder carefully to the side, away from the pile, lest it get lost. Or eaten. Or Schadened on. “Well, Freude over here actually got something good out of that dumpster fire of a Tweeter account he set up. There were a lot of Twits about themes this year. A. LOT. Like almost a hundred individual themes. Most of them pretty garbage. But a few were repeated a few times, or generally supported. So I took a machete to the briar patch of bad ideas and found a couple decent ones. So I retwitted a list of the best ones in a poll, and the top three were: Equestrian Horror Story, cause it’s October, the Running of the Leaves, that old culture festival downtown, and someone brought up the dance that Crystal Prep had on that yacht last year, and suggested that maybe we have the dance, if not on the boat, then maybe at the Pier. I really liked that one.”
“That… actually sounds nice. Well done. Both of you,” she said somewhat begrudgingly, somewhat annoyed that Schaden’s obvious troll account actually yielded some positive results. “I think we should put a pin on the Pier idea, though, until we get an idea for the weather.”
“Actually,” Schaden interjected.
‘Oh here we go,’ Shimmer thought, resting her chin on her hand and turning her attention to her co-Chairman.
“There’s a couple of Inns and Hotels on the Pier, rather close to the water, and a few Community Centers. If I remember correctly, one of them has a rather open ballroom with a bay of windows that overlook the bay. We could give them a call and see how much they’d run us to rent it,” Freude explained.
“O-oh. Ok,” Sunset stammered, not ready for a legitimate answer. “That’s… certainly worth looking into. Lyra, why don’t you look up the number and call them as soon as you can?” Heartstrings nodded happily. “However, I don’t want to dismiss the other ideas. Can you and Bon-Bon cost out the decorations for each, plus space rentals if we decide to have it off-site? I suspect the Running of the Leaves might be the cheapest, but I don’t want it to feel like a cop-out.”
“Aye-aye, captain,” Bon-Bon punctuated with a brief salute.
Sunset turned to Pinkie Pie, who had been surprisingly quiet the entire time. “Ok, Pinks, what ideas do you have about food?”
A silence that shattered itself on the rocks like a sheet of glass the instant Sunset asked her a question. “Well I was thinking if we do the Horror Story thing that we could to like the Halloween food I did last year and we could have like Blood Orange punch and eyeball and brain cupcakes or do we want to do a single giant cake cause that might be easier to make and decorate and I’d have to do the entire thing the day off cause I don’t want the food to go stale so it really depends on what decorations we’re doing cause if we do running of the leaves you don’t want to do oranges and stuff cause those aren’t autumnal flavors really so we’d want to do more seasonal stuff like pumpkin or whatever like apples and I know Applejack would totally love to help with the baking if we do apple stuff but what if it’s at the Pier do we want to do like saltwater taffy and seafood but a lot of people have seafood allergies and that would really suck so maybe we just to a giant cake that looks like a fish and-”
“Pinkie,” Sunset interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Breathe.”
Pinkie blinked. “Oh yeah. Uuuuuuaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! And if it looks like a fish we’re gonna need a really clever flavor cause fish-flavored cakes aren’t that great unless we do fishcakes OOH FISHCAKES those are super good they’re like cakes but fishy and you can do all kinds of stuff or we could do sushi sushi is super popular right now and there’s a bunch of stuff we could do for the people with allergies but I really think I should wait till we see what kind of decorations we’re doing so how about I get back to you on that?”
Sunset, well-versed in the art of letting Pinkie Pie get to the point, just nodded, while the other girls did their level best to let their brains catch up with their ears. “That sounds good. How about you do up some menus for each thing, and we’ll tell you which one to use when we know?”
“Okie doki!” Pinkie cheered.
“Also,” Shimmer added.
“Yeah-huh?”
“Why were you so quiet until I asked for your opinion just now?” Sunset asked.
“Oh! Schaden bet me a box of cronuts I couldn’t be quiet until you talked to me,” she explained.
Lyra nodded. “Yeah, he kinda made similar bets with all of us that we couldn’t, as he so eloquently put it, ‘Keep our happy asses in check till you got here’.”
Shimmer raised an extremely suspicious eyebrow at Schaden. “Did he now?”
“Hey, you’ve got actual superheroes on speed dial, some of which made it abundantly clear that this was an important thing you were doing, and I like my ribs in the order they were delivered, thanks,” he explained, somewhat defensively. “Man, being a dick was so much easier when people couldn’t, like, blow up your locker with a box of gummy bears.”
“Bag,” Pinkie corrected. “I buy gummy bears by the bag.”
Sunset sighed. “Pinkie, as much as I appreciate you using your powers for… I guess not-evil, please don’t threaten Student Council Members with exploding anything, please.”
Pinkie smiled agreeably. “Okie-doki!”
Finally, Shimmer turned to Pizzazz. “Ok, I have to ask, why ae you the Music Planner?”
Pixel just sighed and leaned back. “Because it gives me something to do besides being Photo’s lackey all night. Besides, I’m ok friends with Vinyl and Melody, so really I just kind of hie them as subordinates and make sure they aren’t like, breaking the rules or the budget or anything. Really the hardest part of this job is the influx of Twits and junk I’m getting from students, and a few teachers. And Schaden,” she added with a growl. “NO, WE ARE NOT HIRING A MARIACHI BAND TO FOLLOW THE PRINCIPAL AROUND.”
“Oh, good,” Sunset sighed. “And here I was thinking someone had replaced Douchehorse with some kind of alien.”
“Um… Sunset?” Bon-bon asked hesitantly. “I get that you two don’t really get along, but… why Douchehorse?”
“Cause that’s my last name,” Freude explained.
“What.” Lyra said.
Schaden rifled around for his wallet, and pulled out his ID, throwing it on the table. “Schadenfreude von Douchehorse. My dad named me.”
“Your dad sounds like an asshole,” Pizzazz noted, looking at the ID incredulously. She passed it back to Lyra and Bon-Bon, who seemed to be checking it for signs of forgery.
“Yeah, he is,” Schaden said wistfully, with a sense of pride.
“ANYWAY,” Summer interjected, wanting to get back on topic, “It sounds like there’s not much we can do until we figure out the venue, so how about we clean some of this up, make a few phone calls, and call it a day?” she suggested. She took her phone out, and turned it back on. After a few loading screens, her home screen popped up. Quickly followed by an alert saying she’d missed a Twit. Then another. Until they just kept coming, eventually informing her she’d missed 237 Twits.
“Pizzazz, you said you were getting a whole bunch of Twits about the Formal?” she grumbled, having an idea of who was responsible for this.
Pixel nodded. “Yup. Somebody,” she added with another glare in Schaden’s direction, “Posted the entire Committee roster to the Suggestion Box account.”
Sunset’s eyes slowly rolled in Schadenfreude’s direction. “Schaden,” she growled.
“See?” He offered helpfully, stretching his cheeks. “Totes not an alien.”