The library door burst open, scattering the piles of notes that Twilight Sparkle had been gathering for Fluttershy across the floor and causing a massive thud as the pegasus smacked her head against the ceiling. “I demand an explanation!”
Twilight did everything she could to avoid glaring at the white unicorn standing in the doorway as she began gathering up sheets of loose-leaf. “Is there a particular reason you’re being melodramatic, Rarity?”
Rarity didn’t seem to find this insulting, if only because she didn’t seem to hear it at all. “Fluttershy, we had an appointment for the mud bath, coat shampoo, and hooficure package at the spa at eight-forty sharp! I worried myself half to death when you didn’t show up. I’ve never known you to miss an appointment without good reason, and it seems to me that you could have come to the library after we’d finished.”
“Oh, um, I’m sorry, Rarity,” the pegasus apologized. “Something’s come up, and I didn’t have time to tell you that I couldn’t make it.”
“Something came up? I do hope you’re able to go into a bit more detail.”
Fluttershy took a deep breath and told her friend about the sudden accident in Cloudsdale, the massive bank of fog headed toward Ponyville, and the early-morning visit from a DOW bureaucrat that had resulted in the entire mess being dropped at her hooves. Even though the explanation was rather abbreviated (since the technical jargon probably would have gone over Rarity’s head), the whole thing was starting to become rote.
The fashionista seemed impressed as Fluttershy finished explaining the situation. “My word... and they’ve delegated all that responsibility to you?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I suppose so...”
Rarity’s eyebrow flew upwards with concern. “You ‘suppose so’? I hardly think the situation warrants any sort of ambiguity. Were I in your position, I’d be anxious to prove my mettle.”
“Fluttershy isn’t you,” Twilight pointed out.
“Touché,” Rarity granted. “But still, there’s no reason for the poor dear to waffle on the matter. I’m sure the Department of Weather would not have chosen her if they didn’t have full confidence in her abilities.”
“Assuming they’re right,” Fluttershy mumbled to herself. Unfortunately, Rarity overheard her.
“What do you mean, dearie? Are you saying there’s been a mistake? Darling, if some nameless bureaucrat checked the wrong box when filling out a stack of paperwork, I’m sure it can be corrected.”
“Um, no, they didn’t make a mistake. I’m a qualified fog specialist. I have the certificate and everything.”
“Well, then what possible reason could there be for you to be so nervous?”
By now, Fluttershy’s meekness was starting to border on self-parody. “Well, it’s just... I don’t know if they’ll take me seriously....”
“But darling, why on earth wouldn’t they? You only need to be assertive when giving your orders, and I’m sure everypony will get to work with minimal fuss.” The second of silence that followed was rather awkward, suggesting that something very important had yet to be introduced to the conversation. Rarity’s eyes suddenly widened as a flash of inspiration hit her. “Fluttershy, dear, are you worried that you’ll end up behaving as you did during the Iron Will incident? Because I can assure you that you have clearly demonstrated that you have the self-control to be assertive without becoming a bully.”
“No... it... it isn’t that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Well, I’m not a full-time weatherpony. This was just supposed to be something I did on the side. I thought it would just mean that I’d be called in as a consultant every now and then. I never thought I’d be put in charge of anything important.”
“Stop right there,” Rarity said, mustering up her most emphatic tone of voice. “There’s no need for you to be so evasive when your true situation is so blindingly obvious.”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened in panic. “It... it is?”
“Of course. Why else would you be lacking in confidence in your ability to complete a task when others have no reason to believe you are unqualified?”
The pegasus’ mind shifted from “panicked” to “frantic.” She’d been found out. She was done for. Her reputation was ruined, and the Lunar Guard would haul her off to prison—granted, it would probably be a minimum-security prison, but it was still prison! Who would take care of all the animals? Oh, why did she ever give in to temptation? Fluttershy took several deep breaths. She had to get a hold of herself; she might not be able to salvage her livelihood, but perhaps she could keep her friends, if she explained why she’d committed her misdeeds. “I’m... I’m sorry. You see, it’s not always easy keeping the shelter running....”
“Darling, now is not the time for apologies!”
“But if you’ll just listen—”
“Shush!” the white unicorn responded. “A matter as grave as this must be dealt with immediately. Fluttershy...”
“Y-yes?”
Rarity thrust a hoof into her friend’s face as she solemnly declared: “You should be wearing a cravat!”
August 31 ‒ 9:44 AM
Shepherd’s Pie’s lantern swayed back and forth as it dangled from his mouth. Given how dense the fog was, it didn’t do much to illuminate his surroundings, but that wasn’t the reason he’d brought it. Rather, Rhubarb had insisted that he bring it along so that his daughter wouldn’t become lost again as he led her back to the spruce tree where she’d originally landed her flying contraption.
Fortunately, that particular tree was something a of a local landmark. Most of the route was near the edges of the fog bank, where the cloud wasn’t as thick, and visibility was much better (then again, it was difficult to imagine how visibility could possibly be worse than the center of the fog). For her part, Pinkie Pie kept having to regulate her normally erratic pace to match her father’s in order to make sure she stayed near the lantern’s soft glow. Of course, this resulted in a gaping stretch of boring, and Pinkie couldn’t resist the temptation to fill it with a subject that had been on her mind since she’d bid her mother farewell.
“Um... I’m sorry for leaving the farm...”
Shepherd’s Pie stopped walking and set down his lantern. “Not this again,” he said, barely managing to suppress a groan. “Pinkamena, we’ve been over this. Your mother and I have never felt any resentment towards you for moving away. In fact, we’re quite proud of you.”
“But then why are you always talking about what Shoofly and Whoopie and Maud have done? Why not me?”
Shep chuckled softly at this, “We brag about you all the time, Pinkamena. After all, you’ve helped to save Equestria... how many times are you up to now?”
“Um, let me think.... Nightmare Moon was first, then Discord later on, and there was also the mess at the royal wedding a few weeks ago, so that makes three.”
“Well, in any case, you’re a national hero, and the Princesses consider you to be a personal friend of theirs. What parent wouldn’t be proud?”
“But I never hear you talk about that.”
“Well, of course you don’t. Why would we brag to you about the things you’ve done? You know far more about them than we do. Your sisters, on the other hand, are a different matter. You don’t spend as much time with them as you used to, so your mother and I try to fill you in on their accomplishments, since they’re of the sort that don’t end up in the newspapers.”
“You... you really mean it?”
“Absolutely. Maybe the next time you visit, you’ll be able to stay long enough for your mother to show off the scrapbook she’s made of all of your achievements. I daresay you’re the only guest we’ve ever had who hasn’t been browbeaten into listening to her entire two-hour presentation.”
Pinkie Pie giggled at the thought of her mother trying to describe her wacky antics while maintaining the stern, serious tone of voice that she preferred for, well, pretty much everything. “I think I’d like that.” The pink pony would have loved to continue the conversation, but at that moment, the massive spruce tree suddenly sprang out of the mist, as if it had been a timberwolf lying in wait for its prey. Pinkie’s gyrocopter was leaning against the trunk, right where she left it. As wonderful as it was to reconnect with her family, Fluttershy was waiting for her back in Ponyville. She hugged her father one last time and dragged her flying machine out from under the tree’s branches. “I promise you’ll be able to spend more time with me the next time I visit. Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye!”
Shep smiled as broadly as he could at his daughter, almost managing to show some of his teeth in the process. “Goodbye, Pinkie.” He watched her lift off of the ground, and continued to stare upwards long after his daughter had faded into the mists.
August 31 ‒ 10:00 AM
In retrospect, Pencil Pusher really shouldn’t have been surprised at how fancy the office looked. The floors, walls and ceiling all looked like they were made of polished white marble. The bureaucrat could even hear hoofbeats as his feet struck the surface, though in his sleep-deprived state, that could have been his imagination playing tricks on him. If he were anywhere else in Cloudsdale, a room like this would have seemed tremendously ostentatious, but this particular executive worked for the largest construction supply company in the Equestrian sky. Why wouldn’t the office be made from high-end materials?
As the secretary closed the door behind him, the bureaucrat glanced at the nameplate on the desk: Jasmine Breeze. It sounded like the name of a scented candle. Unfortunately, Ms. Breeze was apparently being somewhat delayed, and there weren’t any pictures that would give him any idea of what she looked like.
Still, it didn’t take very long before the door opened again, signaling the entrance of a cream-colored pegasus stallion with a chartreuse mane and wearing a pinstriped suit and a haggard expression on his face. “Sorry about the delay, Mr. Pusher,” the stallion said in a baritone voice. “As you can no doubt guess, there’s a lot of things that need to be resolved around here.”
“Uh, no problem,” Pencil Pusher replied, somewhat disingenuously. “Will, um, Jasmine Breeze be arriving, as well?”
“I am Jasmine Breeze.”
“You are?! Um, I mean, of course you are. It’s not like you’d just walk into somepony else’s office, right? That’d be, you know, insensitive.”
“It’s also a bit insensitive to assume that somepony is a mare just because they have a flower in their name.” The executive’s tone of voice made it clear that Pencil Pusher wasn’t the first pony to make this particular mistake.
“Oh, um, yeah. Sorry.”
“Might I suggest we dispense with the usual small talk? After all, I think we’re both rather busy at the moment.”
“Uh, right.” Pencil Pusher took a deep breath before starting to talk. “It’s about your formula.”
“Mr. Pusher, we’ve already given the Department of Weather all the information legally required of us.”
“Yeah, but what’s to stop you from going the extra kilotrot and telling us a bit more?”
“A potentially devastating reduction in our already precarious profit margins, for one thing.”
“Are you serious? It’s all about money to you ponies?” Pencil Pusher’s attempt to invest his voice with moral authority was somewhat undermined by the fact that it briefly cracked into a falsetto halfway into his second rhetorical question.
“I assure you that it isn’t. There’s more going on here than I can adequately explain.”
“Well, maybe you should try explaining it anyway, because that’s how it looks to me. Listen, in the past twenty-four hours, I’ve only gotten two hours of sleep—”
Jasmine Breeze, however, didn’t seem interested in letting the bureaucrat finish making his point. “With all due respect, Mr. Pusher, you are not the only pony who is suffering from sleep deprivation this morning, so I’d avoid trying to use emotional appeals to make it seem like you’re the only one who’s been working their flank off since this debacle started.”
Pencil Pusher sighed. “Okay, fine. But I still don’t see why you’re not willing to be more helpful. I’ve met the fog specialist who’s been assigned to handle this, and from what I can tell, she’s going to want as much information as you can give her. I mean, don’t you realize that everypony’s going to assume that Caligo must be an evil, greedy corporation?”
Jasmine Breeze responded with a sigh of his own. “Why do you think we made you wait for two hours while we were talking to our public relations consultants?”
“You... you’re really willing to take a PR hit just to make some money?”
“If you want to be cynical, you could put it that way. From our point of view, however, helping your specialist would mean taking a risk that could completely destroy this company.”
“I’m not sure I understand....”
Jasmine Breeze ran a hoof through his mane. “Okay... let me try to explain this. The first thing you have to understand is that the market for cloud-based construction in Las Pegasus is extremely lucrative right now. Any company that manages to dominate that particular market share will likely be rewarded with years of financial security. You with me so far?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now, the second thing you need to keep in mind is that it’s very difficult to make clouds that can last a long time in hot, arid regions. As a result, most of the cloud structures in Las Pegasus need to be renovated every few years to keep them from disintegrating. This gets very expensive in the long term. Thus, if somepony developed clouds that could last for a very long time in those conditions with relatively little maintenance, those clouds would very quickly become the primary building materials in Las Pegasus, even if the initial cost was higher than the cost of standard clouds.”
“And that’s what you’ve developed?”
“Precisely. However, it wasn’t easy, because it requires a lot of precision pegasus magic to make clouds behave in such an abnormal fashion. We’ve sunk an extraordinary amount of bits into our research and development, just to find a way to make the entire process economically feasible. If, however, one of our competitors found out what we’ve actually done to these clouds...”
“...you’d be in trouble,” Pencil Pusher finished. “I guess that sort of makes sense, but... couldn’t you get insurance or something for that?”
“As a matter of fact, we did take out an insurance policy against industrial espionage, which would allow us to recoup most of the research and development costs. We’d still lose our competitive edge, but we wouldn’t be so far in the red that the whole company would be at risk.”
“So what’s the problem, then?”
“We’ve run into an unexpected snag. You see, representatives from our insurance company claim that to share any information about the formula with anyone outside the company beyond what is legally required would be the same thing, for their purposes, as releasing it to the public. Thus, it would no longer be covered by our industrial espionage policy.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!”
“I wish I was. I assure you that our legal department is doing everything they can to argue otherwise, as we’re fairly certain that the media will place the blame squarely on Caligo’s hooves, but until then...”
The executive continued explaining himself, but Pencil Pusher wasn’t really listening anymore. He had more than enough experience with arcane bureaucratic procedures to know a lost cause when he saw one. Maybe you should just let the whole thing go, he thought to himself. After all, it’s not like there’s anypony between here and Ponyville that you actually know. The more visually-oriented section of his brain responded by producing the image of a yellow pegasus with a long pink mane. Nice try, but a fifteen-minute conversation does not count as “getting to know somepony.” Listen, you’ve done everything that’s been asked of you. Nopony’s going to be mad if you just took the rest of the day off and got some sleep. All you need to do is fly back to work, and then get out of there before Greg unloads more crap on you.
Pencil Pusher couldn’t really argue with this logic. However, the other participant in this internal debate had arguments that didn’t rely on any logic whatsoever. The yellow mare reappeared, but instead of the disheveled, dragged-out-of-bed look she’d had when he’d met her, his mind now presented him with a glamour shot from her former career as a supermodel. This was followed up with images of her living room, which didn’t show any evidence that she had a special somepony, and images of his lonely, sparsely furnished apartment. It didn’t take long for Pencil Pusher to make his decision.
Ugh... fine. Have it your way. We’ll be a good little overachiever and try to impress her. But if it turns out that she does have a special somepony, I’m going to keep reminding you of this humiliation for the rest of your life. This seemed like a fair enough trade-off, but on the other hoof, he didn’t really have any idea how he could help her out.
Oh, that? It’s fairly simple, actually.
“What if she signed a nondisclosure agreement?”
Jasmine Breeze stopped talking and looked at his guest. “Excuse me?”
“A nondisclosure agreement,” Pencil Pusher repeated. “What if the fog specialist was willing to agree in writing that she wouldn’t share anything you told her with anypony else? Wouldn’t that satisfy the insurance company?”
“Hmm... it just might. Hold on, I’m going to send out a memo to legal.” As the executive started scribbling on a nearby notepad, Pencil Pusher couldn’t help but smile. Now, all he had to do was make sure that Fluttershy actually knew who he was....