Chapter 1

Do away with friendship, and do away with trust. Do away with love and kindness, teach yourself the skill of blindness, and embrace the truth of “must.”

And if at times it seems unjust, take comfort in this. You have no choice, and never did. And so it cannot be your fault.

Consider one Twilight Sparkle, who when we come upon her is doing something most impure. She is seated before a terminal, watching scrolling lines of green text go past, and touching herself in that particular way. She bites her lip, folds back her ears, lets out a hot and passionate breath, and with hoof and horn alike stimulates her nether regions.

Her apartment has no study and her bedroom isn’t big enough for a desk, but she can use the desk in the common space, because her roommate isn’t home.

Until he is. She’s halfway through groaning, “Oh yes,” when the door opens behind her.

Twilight was a unicorn. An extremely smart unicorn—a genius, in fact. She never had much magical power though. She was born with a notch on her horn, and while modern medicine could correct the deformity, it could not correct the genetic defect which ultimately caused it. With intensive therapy and years of training, Twilight eventually managed to acquire enough magical strength to operate keyboards, lift small objects, and perform other normal tasks.

“-so then I said, ‘he’s a sweet kid, both his mothers are nuns!’” said Sombra, and everypony laughed. A few ponies observed that it was a good one. “Well, anyway. Let’s get down to business. I called this meeting to talk about revising our strategy for rent increases in the greater Brightwall area. We got some new data. Chrysalis?”

Chrysalis, who once dated Twilight’s brother and who always dressed like a whore, consulted the paper in front of her before speaking. “Um,” she said, rubbing her jaw with a hoof. “So, we have some new market data, and it looks like the rent market in Brightwall is heating up. Two new corporate campuses and three industrial parks opened there in the last year, and we’re seeing rent increases as much as 8% with no decrease in tenancy.”

“Wow,” said Flim. Flam agreed. “That’s big for one year.”

“Yeah, totally,” Chrysalis said. “And actually, given how many upscale units we have and the inrush of high-income professionals, I think we might be able to raise rents as much as 12% this year for select clients. Um…” She shuffled her papers again. “Do we want to go through the data? It’s kind of dense.”

“Did you make those simplified graphs?” Sombra said. “Like I asked?”

But Chrysalis hadn’t, so she awkwardly looked at the table and mumbled something about having a staff meeting yesterday.

“Fine, we’ll look at the raw data. But please clean it up next time.” And they looked at her spreadsheet, dense with numbers and green highlighting. It all looked pretty good. She was great with numbers.

“What about PR implications?” Twilight asked. “That was a big problem for us last year. Do we need to be careful about that?”

“What PR implications?”

“Well, I mean, we’re evicting ponies, right?” Twilight asked. “Because, the tenants we have now, I mean, they’re not the new arrivals. They’ll be replaced by the new arrivals. So we’ll be raising rents and then they’ll either break the lease or get thrown out. And you know how the media reacts when we throw ponies out of their homes.”

Sombra gave her a narrow look. So did a few of her coworkers. “I’m sure they can pay a little more.”

Twilight fiddled with her pen, rolling it back and forth with a hoof. “Did we calculate estimated increase in evictions?”

“Around a 22% increase.” Chrysalis coughed. “Annual.”

“See?” Sombra said. “Tiny.”

“We manage fifteen apartment blocks with an average turnover rate of 19%,” she rattled off the numbers from memory. “A 22% increase in evictions means approximately two-hundred-and-fifty ponies getting thrown out.”

“You’re counting lease breaking,” Flam pointed out. “Just evictions makes it closer to a hundred. Maybe a bit less.”

“See? Less than a hundred.” Sombra turned back to the projector. “Anyway, you were saying?”

Twilight stayed quiet for the rest of the meeting.

She shrieks, though for an entirely different reason than she’d hoped. At the sound of the door opening behind her, she leaps from her chair, and her flank cracks into the desk. The stack of paper on the desk corner tumbles to the floor and unravels, filling the room with a cloud of white paper.

“Oh, shit!” Spike says, covering his eyes, “Sorry!”

“It’s not what it looks like.” Twilight’s face is so red one would think she sunburned. “I… I thought you were going to be out all evening. I-I’m sorry. Oh my god, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s fine.” When it cracks a finger from his eyes, Twilight is across the room, her back to the wall, her tail tight between her legs. “Are uh… you okay? I can beat it for awhile.”

“I’m good. I’m good. I’m fine. Come in. It’s your place too. Sorry.” She looks down at her hooves, struggling to get her breathing under control. The floor around her is carpeted with loose 9x11 paper sheets.

“No worries,” Spike says. Not that it bothers him—he’s gay as a post, and his best friend is this girly girl Rarity. “Uh, what’s with the paper?”

“It’s nothing.” Twilight doesn’t bother to lock her laptop screen. Spike’s eyes shoot there on impulse, but despite what one might expect, there is no pornography to be seen, just a static field of green text. “Some notes.”

He picks up a page that stands out to him, because of how little is on it. It’s mostly white, formatted like a cover, with a title in the center and the author below.

“For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils,” he reads aloud. “Is this a script?”

On a Tuesday, Twilight got an email from a tenant complaining about the crystal ponies living in the next apartment. He said there were a lot of them, that they didn’t speak the common tongue, and that half of them didn’t even have papers.

Legally, the company was not obligated to act on such information. But if a tenant was evicted due to criminal activity, the company got to keep the full security deposit, which was two months' rent. That generally meant it was a profitable thing, when a tenant was arrested.

But Twilight liked crystal ponies. Her sister-in-law was a crystal pony. So she deleted the email and closed the help ticket, marking it as: “Maintenance Request -- Resolved”

An hour later, she got an email from Sombra with the subject line: “Fixed your ticket. Come see me?”

On Thursday, it was her job to go wait by the building while the earth ponies in grey broke down the door and dragged the family living there away. Some of them had papers, but they were guilty of harboring aliens without papers, so it all came to basically the same thing.

She was there because the locks needed to be replaced. She couldn’t replace locks—there was a contractor from town for that. But policy required someone from corporate to be there.

So she watched him replace the lock, and listened while he told her how lucky she was to have a cushy desk job.

“No, it’s my um… fanfiction.” Twilight gathers up the paper as quick as she can. “It’s bad. Don’t read it.”

“Hey, it’s okay. Back in college I wrote Quantum Shock slash fiction.” He offers her a gentle smile. “You know. Because when a cyborg warrior and a mutant abomination meet, and they love each other very much, they do it in the butt.”

“Hah.” She smiles back, if only a little. The blush on her face calms. “Thanks.”

“So what’s it fanfiction of?”

“Nothing.” Already, she has half the pages, an advantage of being a unicorn. But they’re in the wrong order, leaving hundreds of pages jumbled up. “Life.”

“All writing is inspired by life. I meant, what series is it based on?”

“Life,” she repeats. “It’s my fanfiction about… real life. You know.” She laughs, with a certain stiffness in her voice. “Like, I like the real world, but Zuko and Katara should have ended up together. Like, a fix fic.”

“Oh. A fix fic?” He picks up another page, considering it. “What did you change?”

“Well, I just… take problems from my real life. And then the people around me support me, and I never disappoint them, and together we make things better.”

Twilight had a plan. A wonderful, clever, elegant plan, that made her feel like getting that MBA was worth it after all. She stayed up all night, color coding her excel spreadsheets and tweaking her graphs and making her little models.

“So as you can see,” she said the next day, “with the new rezoning, we should be able to demolish our Chersterglen and Toika properties, merge the lots, and put up a new six-story apartment building. Not only will we pick up another 120 housing units, but given the demand for luxury units in the area, we could anticipate up to a 34% increase in revenues per unit.”

“Why not go over six stories?” asked Flim.

“Because the zoning board is extremely unlikely to accept such a proposal. That’s on page seven of the handout.” Twilight pointed at the paper in front of him.

“I was thinking,” said Flam, “what if we went for less units, but more luxury. Spread things out a bit. Put in a park.”

“That alternative is covered on page twelve of the handout.” Again, Twilight pointed. “It’s a good idea, but from a revenue perspective, it just doesn’t make sense.”

“Have we accounted for the cost of capital and lost revenues during the construction period?” Chrysalis asked. “Because those could be significant.”

“Yes, that’s already included in the spreadsheet I sent out. I also sent you a separate email with the details in case you have any questions.” Twilight smiled bright, putting her laser pointer away. “So, what do you think?”

Everypony looked back at Sombra. He sat back in a very boss-like manner, and considered Twilight.

“Well,” he said, “this is very interesting.” And she was so delighted.

Later that day, he gave her a verbal rebuke for being unpleasant around the office. She shut down her coworkers without giving them a chance to speak, and made them feel stupid.

“It’s a very good suggestion,” he said. “But it offends ponies, you know. When you act like you’re smarter than them.”

“But I am smarter than them,” she said.

He asked her if she wanted her verbal rebuke to become a written rebuke. She apologized.

She smiles. Spike worries.

“But that’s what friends do anyway, right?” he asks. And she nods so hard that he worries even more. “I mean, you have friends, right?”

“Of course I do. Applejack and Rarity and Pinkie Pie and you and um… the animal mare. Name.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “Fluttershy! Sorry.”

“Right.” He filters through the sheets. “Magical adventure?”

“You know it.” She grimaces, wondering if she can forcefully take the sheets back from him. “High-flying, even.”

“Fight the bad guys? Buckle, swash? Laser beams and swordfights?”

“No,” she says, as she decides that she cannot. Dragons are pretty strong, and it would be rude. “I don’t like violence in stories as the default means of solving problems. Usually, we all just stand up to the bad guy, and… you know. They back down. Sometimes the whole town helps. Or we use magic.”

“Oh. Like, stand up how?”

“Like we tell them to stop.” Her chest is tight. She struggles to keep her head up, and ultimately fails. “Sometimes I give a big speech.”

“This is, um…”

“Don’t, okay?” Twilight snaps. “Don’t fucking patronize me.”

“I’m not. Sorry. I’m not.” Spike hands her back the papers. “I’m just saying… you know. I know you’re an anxious person. But you can stand up to bad guys in real life too. You know?”

“No, I can’t.”

For a long time, he considers her. Then he asks: “Have you ever tried?”

“Hey, boss?” Twilight said, “can I chat with you for a second?”

“Sure!” Sombra replied. “My door is always open. What’s up?”

So she came in, sat down on his couch, and they chatted about the weather for a bit. Finally, when the small talk ended, she got the point. “Look, I’m sorry, I know this is a change from what I said before. But I had a talk with some people. Including my roommate. And I got some advice about how to communicate clearly. And I just thought… there are some things I want to talk to you about.”

“Hey, I like to think we’re friends,” Sombra said. “Get it off your chest.”

“I just…” She drew in a breath. “I think some of our policies about how we treat our tenants, they’re just. They’re really heartless, you know? Like, cruel. I know we have to do right by our stockholders, but we can turn a profit without treating ponies this way.”

So he fired her.

Later, she couldn’t pay rent, and had to leave Spike behind and move back in with her parents.

And if at times life seems unjust, take comfort in this. You have no choice, and never did.

Chains within, unlocked, are set free to become chains without. Those who cannot bind their selves shall instead bind their limbs, through actions.

And so it cannot be your fault.

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