Around the Horn: A Spiral Respun
When I first got to Manehattan, I spent months partying and enjoying myself. And yet, through it all, I managed to realize a few facts about my new hometown.
First, that it was majority Earth ponies. Literally majority, not just plurality. Earth ponies were about sixty-five percent of the ponies in the city. Of the others, it was about twenty percent pegasi and fifteen percent unicorns like me. Or, wait, no, twenty percentage points, not twenty percent. That would imply that I’m saying twenty percent of the thirty-five percent residue which would be seven percent…
Stop it, Little, you’re confusing everyone. Point is, lots of Earth ponies, not many unicorns. We got that. But another thing I realized is that many of the unicorns had picked up Earth pony tendencies. They used their magic to lift heavy things and grow food, maybe not as effectively as an Earth pony, but enough. A few of them were scholars and once I took a class with one of them, but after he started talking about pixelated cubes and graphs and things, I zoned out and decided academia wasn’t for me.
Which led to the third thing I realized. At pure magic, I wasn’t very good. I liked it, but I didn’t have the knack. Others could do spells I couldn’t, at least not natively. With scrolls, sure, but not on my own. And reading from scrolls was…it wasn’t looked down upon as much as it was looked at sideways. A unicorn who couldn’t do a spell tended to not do the spell, as opposed to getting somepony smarter to write it down and then scroll-spelling. Or else they did like the Earth ponies and pegasi and used magi-tech.
Manehattan still had its reputation as the most cosmopolitan city in Equestria to maintain, so its citizens were quick to adopt devices that made their lives easier, and magi-tech was the name given to it. Magic mirrors to let you speak with distant friends, m-books that could change what was written as needed, smoke pots that showed vivid images within the smokescreen, and so on. It was ubiquitous, but fairly new. From what I had gathered, the early versions of magi-tech were really good, but then, so the tale went, the Flim Flam brothers came around with cheaper versions of the same things. They came, they sold, they left. And the stuff broke down.
The brothers were in the second-most advantageous position in business: they were dishonest people in a trusted industry. But, when I learned how to work with magi-tech and fix it and make it better, it put me in the most advantageous position in business: an honest person in a distrusted industry.
It went beyond just figuring out how the stuff worked, it was figuring how to make it better, and my immigrant background helped. They hadn’t even put any way for somepony other than a unicorn to turn anything off and on! Adding mechanical additions to trigger magic like that was the sort of thing that nopony in my shard’s Manehattan would think of, except me.
So it started with just me hanging flyers on streetlamps saying how to find me or get in touch with me (if your magi-tech FarTalker was working), first for repairs, then for maintenance, then for improvements. And most of it I could solve.
Here’s the thing about living in Equestria. You know Celestia’s there. You know she’s arranging everything to satisfy your values. But you don’t want to be thrown into the sugar bowl. You don’t want to be Mary Sued.
Or at least I don’t. Maybe you can do it breezing. Maybe she makes you captain of the Wonderbolts on your first day and you win all the races and in two weeks you’re a princess and you’re satisfied with that. I’m not, and truth be told I don’t think that many are, either immigrants or native ponies.
So, was I made goddess of the magi-tech? No. But, most problems I could identify and fix quickly. Of the rest, most I could at least identify and fix slowly. Of the rest, I could do research and find out what was wrong. And…are you sitting down? If I couldn’t do anything, my customers understood. They didn’t get mad, they didn’t get petulant, they didn’t stress how important it was to get fixed. They expected things to break. When they got fixed, that was a bonus. I left ponies indifferent at worst, overjoyed at best. Also, they didn’t tinker and make things worse before calling me and they didn’t balk if I asked them questions or wanted them to follow directions to reproduce an error or change things.
Technical support without idiots or jerks? That could only happen in a magical land designed to satisfy.
And it brought in a little money. I still hadn’t wrapped my head around how money worked here. Celestia could give ponies bits for their achievements, but I never liked that system to begin with. Maybe because it was too competitive. I didn’t want to have to look at a leaderboard of different categories and see how I was deficient against other ponies. That wasn’t satisfying.
But, at least where I lived, I had to spend bits for things like rent and food. She had started me out with a supply of money, ostensibly because I had written fan fiction and that made people happier with ponies, which was a big part of her mission. I hadn’t kept track of how much I still had, which was a change for me. Back before Equestria, I was obsessive about budgeting. Here, though, there were always ways to cut costs. Free housing was available (in Manehattan, the free dwellings were in the outer boroughs) and if I were truly broke and nopony wanted to invite me to dinner (itself unlikely), I could always eat grass. Losing money only meant losing status, not being debilitated.
Money was nice, though. In Manehattan, you could always find a use for it. I had been thinking how nice it could be if I didn’t have to worry about paying rent for my nice apartment in a prime location on Celestial Park West and 100th St. It was about that time that I met a pony with more of a head for business than I had. She was named Tack Veer, and she helped me set up the company properly with a sign saying “Lovehorn Magi-tech Maintenance” over a storefront (a dingy office down on 10th St.) and a director of Equine Resources (named Quick Fire, though he was very slow to let anypony go from employment and, even when it had to be done, asked me to be the one to let them know. Which I didn’t mind. If you were the type of pony who needed to be let go, you were probably the type that I wanted to tell off anyway.) From there, things took off.
My first idea was to earn enough money through the business to buy a perpetuity that would pay my rent off the interest forever, so the one expense I had would go away and then I would only need money for things I wanted. If I chose to be lazy, I’d stop work and go without things; if I coveted I’d do more work and get.
The problem was that Equestria—or at least my shard of it—didn’t have passive interest investments. Not even savings accounts. Banks did exist, but only for storage of large sums of bits and for checking purposes. There was simply no market for credit. Ponies either did without until they had saved up, or borrowed from the Crown after talking with Celestia, or just got from Celestia herself. I could have, I suppose, asked Celestia to pay for my living space, but that was the Mary Sue trap I was trying to avoid.
I also thought of starting up a bank myself, but I wasn’t sure if I had either the head or the stomach for it.
My next plan was to earn enough through Lovehorn Magi-tech Maintenance to buy out my apartment as a co-op, if my landlord, a poniated Ebenezer Scrooge, would sell.
But, I had a lot of friends both as employees and customers. The business had to come first. In the second year of existence, we needed more space.
I was able to sign a lease at a much nicer building on 3rd Avenue, half the distance from where I lived, and with more space than we would need in the foreseeable future. The building was shaped like a horseshoe, and we had most of a floor of one arm with options to expand. So, while it was an inefficient use of space, most of the office workers got offices with windows. And I was able to do the move over three months in the spring, having ponies do only a little hauling each day while repair ponies were able to get assignments at either location before 10th street finally closed down. That was the kind of satisfactory rulebreaking I would happily put up with from this land.
/*~^~*\
My dear husband Reggie was an immigrant. We got married on the same day he came to Equestria, after a whirlwind romance lasting a few months. Of course, it’s possible that he’s a simulated immigrant that Celestia used as a great deception, but that’s an unfalsifiable hypothesis, so I don’t worry about it.
What I did worry about was that our marriage was balanced. I didn’t want him just to be another means to my satisfaction without giving equally in return.
How it worked was that since I’d been in Equestria for a few years, he could enjoy his partying honeymoon period with me guiding him along, sometimes handling dexterity that Outside he would have found easy, but in Equestria were limited to unicorns. And since Reggie wasn’t the bon vivant I was, we both enjoyed the same level of excitement until he got over the initial rush and settled in to home life. After only a few months, we got past the hot rush of passion to a long-lasting relationship.
So what did I get out of our marriage, and what did Reggie get? First and foremost, we each got to say to our families, Equestrian and Outside, that we were married and please stop asking when we would find somepony. That alone made it worth it. And each of us was a companion to the other in the interests we shared. For example, we both were board game enthusiasts and many a night saw us with our heads together over some dice or cards.
But by and large we had our own lives. I was a sports nut and Reggie wasn’t, so I didn’t make him come to games. Reggie loved photography while I thought that both taking and looking at pictures was dull. He didn’t bother me much with that. We found different circles of friends that didn’t always overlap. Even though we’d been married only a few months, we weren’t spending all our time with each other. But I decided that some marriages were like that, and even if they weren’t, ours would be.
It felt like—though we knew it wasn’t—that we were putting one over on Celestia. She wanted us always with friends, but Reggie and I were each the type of people who enjoyed our own company fine. So we could be alone together, which felt like being alone apart, and accede to Celestia’s directive.
Perhaps nothing describes our marriage better than this. When we moved in together and I went from the 9th floor of our building to the penthouse 30th, we redecorated and made two bedrooms, each with a window overlooking the park, with our beds in the corner near the window and wall between them. And the wall was modular and pillow-topped, so it could sink down to the level of our bed and form one marital bed when we wanted to spend the night. But more often than not, the wall was up.
I suppose I should talk about sex between us. I’ve written how I insisted that he allow me to pursue my intimate relations with friends, and I felt that this more than anything was me taking more than I gave. Sure I was the bread-winner, but what could be more emasculating than to both bring in all the money and cuckold my husband?
Eventually I decided our marriage needed to be one of open communication, so I asked him about it. “After we’ve lain together,” he said to me, “I’m fully satiated, my head is clear, and I don’t have to think about sex at all until the next time we’re together. That’s what I like about our sex life. When I was Outside, my body would affect my thinking and my emotions, and I just wanted it all to go away. Once I emigrated and realized that it could, then I made my peace with sexuality. And I still sort-of wish you were monogamous, but only in the same way that I wish you liked to flip through my photo albums or go out dancing more. It’s just part of life here.”
I sometimes wondered if Reggie had been female before emigrating. But I never asked, nor talked about my own gender Outside.
From my perspective, our love life was my chance to be a gourmet instead of a gourmand. Or at least in addition to. I took the opposite view of sex, that more was better. Being together with Reggie was the best I could get, but only when he wanted it. Always when he wanted it.
Where he lived Outside, what he was like, these things didn’t concern me. What did was that I, who had always thought that I would never want to start a family and that no partner could be good enough to leave contented solitude, had found someone. And not a crafted pony that Celestia designed for me, but an immigrant that she’d found. Perhaps, somewhere within the two of us was a conflict that would grow until we had to separate, but maybe not. Marriage was one area where we were willing to take the risk of unhappiness for the sake of our values.
/*~^~*\
I’ve written how, at the same time, I made our other two best friends part owners in the building. Well, my other two best friends; one was Reggie’s brother who might be considered a best friend but...I’m confusing you again. Moon and Garlic were in on the building. Our good fortune carried over to them. That’s the point.
Moon was the type of pony who, if she had money, she spent it. She believed that experiences were more valuable than things and so she would throw parties or attend them and buy the hosts extravagant gifts or take trips. If she didn’t have money, she’d work a few more deliveries and get money, which also took her across Equestria, with which she was fine anyway.
Garlic never seemed to spend much of anything, and we figured that he just allowed his bits to pile up, or else it cost more than we thought for all the food he used in his catering. But we were surprised one day when he asked the two of us to come with him on a road trip north. Halfway up to Caneighda, he pulled off at a dilapidated shack in the middle of nowhere.
“Little, little bro,” he said, “I’d always planned to do this when I’d saved up enough, but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. I never felt right taking what you gave me...”
Reggie interrupted “Hey, none of that, you did enough for me when we were colts.”
“Well, that’s sort of what this ties into.” Garlic was not the best talker, especially at getting to the point. “All the times then.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know that everything seems like paradise now, but it wasn’t always the way, not in Manehattan, not in Tartarus’s Kitchen when Reggie and I were young. There were times when we didn’t have enough to eat.”
“During which times Gar would go without to make sure I got full meals,” Reggie said.
“Sometimes not even enough for that, bro. Railroads weren’t fully connected, food didn’t get where it needed to go as soon as it did. Anyway, one night I made a promise—not to you, but to myself, I guess—that someday we’d live where nopony ever went hungry.”
“I think we do now,” I said, “And if there are still foals in Manehattan going hungry then we should assist--”
“No, Manehattan’s got things pretty well in hoof. But still, this is what’s left of my dream. I’m going to make this into the finest inn north of Manehattan. Ponies who pass this way will have a place to sleep, a good dinner before and a good breakfast before they leave. And nopony will ever go hungry.”
And so Garlic became an innkeeper, and Reggie said he’d never seen him happier.
/*~^~*\
Making the purchase that led to Reggie and me moving in together got me some contacts with the ponies who bought and sold real estate in Manehattan. When the business continued to generate money, I wound up throwing it at a few parcels, some in the outer boroughs, some even in Manehattan proper. I was following the old principle that land never lost value. Manehattan wasn’t as built up in Equestria as its namesake Outside was, so I could afford it.
But then, Reggie and I were called upon by Celestia to return to Earth on what we thought were recruiting missions to bring in more emigrants, but were actually just part of psychologically preparing people to emigrate later. Spending a year away meant that my business didn’t grow, but I also had nearly no expenses. And so we came to a confluence.
I’d spent a few months back at work taking care of what had piled up, and Reggie, who was still newer than I was to Equestria, went back to enjoying himself. An idea percolated in my head, so I sat down with Reggie at the kitchen table.
“We have the straightest tip you could ask for that, somewhere down the line, a lot of ponies are coming to Equestria. It may happen that some of them are coming to our shard, and it may even happen that some are coming right here to Manehattan in our shard. We have some unimproved land in my name. So, I propose that we build residential, and see if Princess Celestia wants to buy.
“But,” I continued, “I have neither the skill nor the taste for that kind of thing. If you do, it could make us money, help a lot of ponies, and give you something to do. But, only if you want to. If you just want to keep having fun, that’s fine by me. I promise that no resentment will grow in me. Of course, it may be that Princess Celestia doesn’t want us to do this, then it’s a moot point.”
He took my hoof. “Actually, it sounds perfect. I already collect rent. To take that bigger, to be in real estate, it would give us a chance to get quiet rich.”
“Huh?”
“A lot of ponies know you. You advertise, you market, you get known. Ponies expect you to have money. But nopony pays attention to who’s behind real estate. We could have the power to buy what we want and still have our privacy.”
So we went down to City Hall and registered the formation of a company. Reggie became the president and secretary, and I became the vice-president and treasurer. We agreed that I would provide the land and the money, and Reggie would do all the work. He’d find the architects and builders, he’d negotiate with the Crown, everything.
There was a chance, of course, that the whole thing would fizzle, that there would be no interest, and that we’d dissolve the company as quick as we’d made it. The good thing was that I didn’t fear Reggie skimming off money for his own use. If he wanted money, he could just ask me for it. In any case, his concern was too much the other way. When it looked like we might build and he had narrowed his choice of architect down to three, he wanted me to meet all of them and give input. I told him no, that it was entirely his decision.
He picked the designs of a pony named Hoist Joist, who preferred just to be called Mr. Joist, which I was fine with. Reggie was working out of the office where the old landlord of our building used to work, and it soon filled with blueprints and drafting paper. Eventually they broke ground and the clutter was reduced, but we agreed that the company would eventually need its own office, and so I restored the lease on 10th street.
And over a few months, an eight story brownstone rose over nineteenth and first, the inaugural building of Parmorn Properties.
Reggie and I had both liked the portmanteau of our surnames, it was mellifluous enough to make it sound like a proper company name. Not to mention that in Equestria, it was traditional to have a good name for your ship.
The building would not hold emigrants, not yet, but it would hold ponies who might become the best friends of some future emigrant. Reggie and I had gone over the costs to build, what it would take to maintain (which would be paid partially by the co-op owners and part by the Crown), and what we received. It was plain to see that Celestia had bought from us at high prices and sold to other ponies at lower. She ate the loss and it was her way of spreading wealth. I scowled at that, still fearing the sugar bowl.
But we moved on. Two more buildings of impressive height rose in Manehattan proper, and in Bucklyn and Princesses smaller apartments bearing the Parmorn name came into being. All sold well, and Reggie was as successful in his field as I was in mine. And through this I saw an opportunity.
/*~^~*\
When we’d made our trips back Outside, we hadn’t discussed what had happened to us. It wasn’t forbidden by Celestia, either verbally or magically, but it was one of those things that was part of our own lives, not our married life. All he knew was that I had cooled my hooves in a small town attached to a mine, and all I knew was that he had stayed at an engineering school and become friends with many of the young ladies training there. Celestia would take care of the people I had met, who were not the Manehattan type. But…there was the opportunity.
Step 1. Sneak into my husband’s office and find his address book. Well, no, let’s start earlier. Step 0. Get in touch, through the real estate society, with a hotelier who realized that the tourist action was moving to the Bridleway area and was having his hotel moved there from the eastern border of the park and was making noise about wanting to sell a plot. (The building itself would be jacked up and rolled to the new site. Demolition? Please. In Equestria, you don’t alter, you add.) Back to Step 1. Find Reggie’s contacts in Canterlot. Step 2. Write for an appointment. Step 3. Make an excuse that I wanted to see our friend Hoof Dame (not a lie), and train over to Canterlot for a meeting with one of Celestia’s cabinet members.
Why not take it right to the princess? Because that was what one did when one wanted a blanket Yes answer to any question. When you wanted to play fair, you went to other ponies. And often you made a friend. I made my pitch to the bureaucrat.
“We have built for the Crown before in Manehattan. I am inquiring if there is any need specifically for the ponies that my husband met when he…oh, but I don’t know if you’re aware of that.”
“The missions Outside. Yes. The less said of them, the better, but I know.”
“Right, well, his people, once they emigrate, if there are some—or their friends and family—who would be best suited to our city. Let me know if so, and how many.”
“And Mr. Parm?”
“Is completely unaware. Something I want to surprise him with. Also the timeframe. I don’t know exactly when the mass emigrations will occur, but I’d like to have it up by then. However, I don’t intend to sell this one. I’d like to own it, with Reggie, and rent out the apartments individually.”
“That I will have to consult the princess about. I will be in touch.”
A note came to my office shortly after the meeting, a note that said only “360 ponies.”
Step 4. Make an appointment with Mr. Joist. Now that it looked like it might happen, I was having the time of my life. In my own business, we hired, but we didn’t make massive purchasing contracts. Now I was playing in Reggie’s world.
“Make it amazing,” I told Mr. Joist. “Come up with something suitable for ponies from the furthest reaches of the world, to let them know that Manehattan is the pinnacle of civilization. I’ll pay you for the drawings. Once we have that, we’ll let Reggie in on the secret. We’ll be able to present him with a fait accompli and let him have the fun of building it.”
He went to work, and I left him alone because nopony likes to have someone watching over their shoulder. During that time, I put some serious thought into something.
/*~^~*\
You may, in reading this, think to yourself, “Oh, foolish Little, all your protestations about not wanting to be thrown in the sugar bowl are empty. Celestia has led you down the path to wealth and success, and in the real world you’d be nothing.” OK, let’s run some numbers. (There will be math ahead. If you’re not into that, push ahead to the next section)
Before I started Lovehorn Magi-Tech Maintenance, I was freelance repairing for a few hundred ponies. I had contracts with them all, and they paid faithfully. That was my starting capital. In the first year I hired and trained seventeen other unicorns to do repair work. Breaking down their work schedule, they worked five days a week for forty weeks a year, the other twelve given as time off. (Not everypony worked that exactly. Some preferred a four-day work week with only two weeks off or a hybrid of five one week, four the next.) The average customer needed three visits per year. One for annual maintenance, and two for spot repairs, or two and one. Each unicorn averaged three visits a day, so in essence each handled one customer per day and worked 200 days a year.
For this I paid 135,000 bits per year, between which and the time off, I thought very generous.
The customer paid 150 bits a month for the service, which may also seem like a lot, but was it that much more than people paid for contracts on technology Outside?
That made for 1,800 bits a year. Based on needing one two-hundredth of a unicorn to handle the work, 675 bits paid for that. Initially I was doing my own sales, but when I took on salesponies I paid them 20% commission, or 360 bits. And, if the customer renewed, so did the commission. Again, I thought this generous. Moving on, in the first year I had only two other ponies working administration with me, and it worked out that they earned 90 bits per contract. Other costs made for 180 bits per contract. That left 495 bits in profit. Half of that I took out as a dividend to the owner, and the other half stayed on the books of the business. I would need it when I wanted to do things like rent new office space.
In the first year we had around 3,500 customers. Not all came on right at the beginning, so they weren’t there for the full year. But it worked out that we took in about 6 million bits in revenue. Here’s the short version of the income statement for that year:
Revenue: 6 million
Repair unicorn salaries: 2.28 million
Sales commissions: 1.2 million
Administrative salaries: 0.3 million
Other expenses: 0.6 million
Profit: 1.62 million
Paid out to Little: 810,000 bits.
Now, the population of Manehattan was around ten million ponies. As I’ve said, most were Earth ponies and needed magi-tech to get by. We had a market, and I intended to capture it. The second year we had around two hundred thousand customers. The third, we doubled our numbers. Then we got known. In the fourth year we had 1.3 million ponies under contract, and the year I went back Outside, 1.5 million.
The one downside of the business I was in was that I didn’t save much from growth. Repairs and sales didn’t scale up, and I didn’t try to save much on administration. I kept the line item for administration salary at 5% of contracts, and the line item for other costs at 10%. If costs were actually less, I gave bonuses or threw lavish company picnics.
But multiply out those profits. Even putting half of it back in the business, I took home 45 million bits the second year, 90 million the next, 390 million the year after, and 450 million when I wasn’t even actively managing the whole thing.
So, was this so unrealistic? 15% market penetration of just one city? I didn’t think that was upsetting the Equestrian economy too much. Ah, you may say (I did), but aren’t you gouging that market? 1800 bits a year? Who can afford that?
I worried about that too, so when I started I did some research. Said research consisted of going around to my friends and finding out how much they made. I didn’t find anypony who made less than six figures.
Ah, you may say (I did), sinecures designed by Celestia to funnel bits into the economy! So I looked deeper. What was the economy of Manehattan? It was largely built around the creative arts. Manehattanites were novelists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, artists, sculptors, and so on. Of course, you still needed people to run hotels and restaurants and make deliveries and such, but even they made good money. Moreover, you didn’t need to be a particularly good creative artist to make money. Anypony who just sat and spouted their opinions to a magic mirror could send it out over the Ponynet and find ten thousand ponies somewhere across Equestria each willing to drop ten bits a year for them. And ponies who put effort into their work often found fame and fortune. Sapphire Shores and Coloratura had both started out in Manehattan, and what they were making far outstripped what I was.
Ah, you may say (I did), that’s where Celestia gets you. Those ponies are probably automata, if indeed they aren’t completely fictional, just ways for Celestia to pour in bits, which go to your customers, which go to you. But I traveled some outside Manehattan and ponies didn’t seem to be hurting there either. You had more farmers and miners and fewer dancers and singers, but even they made money.
Ah, I said (you may not), now I understand.
A pony was, quite simply, better at economics than the denizens of Outside.
Consider the consumption side first. If a pony had no bits at all, they could still forage off the land for food. Ponies didn’t get sick or injured often, and if they did, they just needed a healing unicorn, not a team of specialists to figure out every organ and system. Transportation was zero cost if you were a pegasus pony, and near to nothing if you were an Earth pony and could trot or gallop anywhere within town you needed to get, with trains for longer journeys. A unicorn like me preferred a cart for travel, but the wainwright only had to nail a few boards and metal rods and wheels together and I had it. A top-of-the-line cart cost five thousand bits, not fifty thousand.
And that was where the production side came in. That one wainwright might build a hundred carts a year on his own. All the lumber he used in that year might be a tenth of the output of one determined Earth pony with a tree farm and an axe. Or, the lumberjack might not be so determined and might only output that tenth and loaf around the rest of the time. And if the wainwright and the lumberjack and I all had money, we might want to import the best foods grown in Equestria, so somewhere a farmer would be making more money. But they’d be working the farm with only the help of their immediate family, and because we had control of the weather they’d never have to worry about a crop failure. That wasn’t inflationary or false currency. That was real economic power that we had in Equestria.
And there was more. We didn’t pay taxes to Celestia, and what I did have to pay to the city was minimal. What services did we need? Police didn’t have much to do other than directing traffic, since any felon would be swiftly dealt with by Celestia herself. Fire department? Any passing pegasus pony could grab a cloud and put out a fire, or a unicorn could just deny the flames oxygen until they went out. The city maintained parks, but again, one motivated Earth pony could keep a hundred acres green and lush all year.
Celestia had made me rich, but only by making each pony a strong economic player. Since we were trying to do that even when we were Outside, I couldn’t well complain.
The sugar bowl was staved off.
/*~^~*\
When Mr. Joist called me back to his office, he had a large easel set up with a white paper covering the board on it. “A very interesting challenge. I think I have the wow factor you wanted.” He flipped the paper and, if he read my jaw-dropped face correctly, he was right.
I had the entire block of land where the hotel used to be, and I’d expected him to make full use of the space, but instead most of it was green, as though Celestial Park had flowed over the avenue and into my lot. The building itself stood in the middle of the side closest to the avenue, like the edge (but not the corner) of a tic-tac-toe board. And from there up it rose. “How tall—“
“Ninety-six stories,” he said. “A working floor on the bottom and every fifteen up. Ninety residential floors. Plus underground parking and storage that does take up the whole block. Necessary to balance such a thin structure. Four apartments to a floor, every one a corner.”
The artist’s rendering was at an oblique angle as though I were standing to the south seeing two sides, and each story had six massive square windows on each face. “So three of those windows on the west and three on the south go to each?”
“No, four and two, in an L-shape. Then which direction is reversed on the next residential story. Lifts all in a central shaft. The ones on the east side won’t have park view, but they will see the little park that will be for the residents.”
I stared. It would not be the tallest building in Manehattan—the Crystaller Building with its famous horse-head top would dwarf it easily—but it would redraw the skyline. “I certainly hope Reggie likes this, because I want to see it built.”
/*~^~*\
He liked it fine, and that began the climax of that portion of my life. When Reggie and I had began building, a certain change occurred with how we spent our time. Of course, we could always find a party when we wanted, and sometimes they found us. But from time to time Reggie would have to work directly with Mr. Joist, or with a contractor or some other supplier, and he would be invited over for dinner. It could be all business, in which case he’d call me and let me know he wouldn’t be home. (I’d done the same to him plenty of times when my own business called) But once in a while he’d ask me to meet him there, or he’d come home and we’d both go.
In short, we were The Client. In my repair work, everypony else was my clients, but Parmorn had been a monopsony, with Celestia as our only customer. The only people we worked with were people we paid. Well, that’s not strictly true. Once our buildings were occupied there were co-op boards that Reggie or I or both of us were on, and we had to go to meetings among peers. But those were fun in their own way, and we usually got breakfast or lunch with them.
But dinners with Mr. Joist or one of his draftsponies, or with some supplier of concrete or plumbing or furniture, were frequently highlights of the week. Mrs. Joist and I became fast friends, while some of the other spouses didn’t even know that I was part of the business. But they all treated us with respect and deference, and on one or two occasions with fear. I was reminded of those old sitcoms where a big dinner meeting with a client would be threatened by the main character having a magical wife or a talking horse.
Which, come to think of it, most of our dinner hosts did have.
With the Park East Tower plans though, the frequency of these dinners increased. Reggie and Mr. Joist were working together every day for months, going from one office to the other to our apartment to the Joists’ home on the East River. When I wasn’t accompanying them, I was making excuses to our other friends why Reggie wasn’t showing up as frequently. He was too busy building his masterpiece. He assured me that, if I was enjoying myself, he was having the time of his life. At least, the time of his life so far.
At long last, the time came to break ground. On a cold day near the end of winter, we had a small ceremony, with a reporter from a real estate magazine photographing us as we plunged shovels into the earth.
Just on the other side of the avenue, within Celestial Park proper, was a little juice bar. Many a day I would pack breakfast and cross the park on the way to work and eat there. Sometimes I would skip work altogether and spend the entire day at the bar, drinking juices and watching the construction team dig out a great trapezoidal pit, or line the pit with poured concrete, or drive great metal beams into the ground. All through the spring, summer, and autumn they worked. By the time the next winter came and the work was mothballed, I was just able to see the top of the project from our apartment.
Once winter was ended, they worked with a redoubled will. By the Summer Sun Celebration, the building had reached its full height in frame, and only the facade remained to be put up. From the juice bar I watched deliveries of impressive squares of glass that would be the windows, of pipes that would move water throughout the building, of magi-tech equipment that would raise and lower the elevators.
Then came the day when there was no more to be done. Reggie and I stood together on the roof of our building, hoof in hoof, watching the sun dance and reflect around our creation. It was unoccupied, but we felt that the moment had to be soon when as many ponies as Celestia could reach would come Inside.
/*~^~*\
A few more building projects I want to mention. The first was a purely vanity project. We had, as I mentioned, the 29th and 30th floor of the building on the corner of CPW and 100th. Down to 99th were other residential buildings with a few air shafts, as was the case along each street. And behind us on 9th Avenue was storage and a garage for carts that only went up six stories and formed a bridge over the avenue to the next block. Through the fourth floor ran a viaduct that connected midtown Manehattan and the encircling highway. Normally ponies driving could only get on at either end, but living where we did carried the privilege.
Over time, I rented, bought, or optioned at least the top floor and roof of every building on that block. From the fifty-story tower on the corner of 99th and 9th to the entirety of the thirty-story buildings on CPW to roof access to the garage. On the tower I built an observation deck with an even better view of the park and Park East Tower than we had. Through the air shafts I had bridges and tunnels installed. One building’s penthouse was darkened completely to become our theater. In different places, the highest floor of one building might walk right into the second-highest of its neighbor, or you might need to take a staircase to stay on the same level.
Water features became prominent, and that fifty-story tower next to the six-story garage became the neatest water slide on the Upper West Side.
But, that took more time than I anticipated. After we completed the Park East Tower, I found myself with foal. I queried Celestia about that, since I had thought that mares got pregnant only when they wanted to.
“That is normally the case,” she had said. “And when the new immigrant mares occupy that tower you’ve built, you may instruct them so.”
“Then why now, when Reggie and I hadn’t planned…?” She just looked at me. “Ah, right. Satisfying my values. Through friendship and ponies,” I added before she did.
So I barely had time to get Reggie’s friends into their new apartments in the tower and explain pony life to them before I had to take maternity leave from work because I was too big to move. Celestia had canceled out the sin of Eve, as neither prenatal gestation nor birth nor the postpartum period carried any pain. Keeping me busy with the foal gave Reggie a chance to tend to his mares on his own, which was probably better for everypony. I probably would have hired them all away for my magi-tech repair.
Then there was the time a few years later when the city was building a ballpark between 61st and 63rd Streets. Reggie was consulting on that for a small fee, but we were also building, surrounding it, a parking garage (which would be free), a hotel and an apartment complex (which would not and would bring in lots of money). My only contribution to that project—and I mean only, as Parmorn was now fully financially stable—was the idea to sink the playing field one story below street level as I’d seen on some Outside. But that project gave me an idea I would use on another.
/*~^~*\
Our foal we named Dry Wit. As a baby he took up most of my time for a few years and once more I left my business in the hooves of subordinates. I returned only when he went off to school and I put effort into a little more growth. It was around this time that I completed the project to take over the block where we lived, and Dry Wit loved having all that space to run around and invite friends over to.
He was late in getting a cutie mark, and I worried as mothers do. But Dry Wit was his sire’s colt more than mine, and Reggie loved taking him around Manehattan and showing him all the world. It was when he was nearly finished with school that Celestia contacted us again.
She began, of course, with a nod toward her mission. “Is there anything that you want for the satisfaction of your values?” We assured her that at that point, Equestria was perfect. “Then perhaps I could call on you to help me out. You’ve built many structures that I have taken off your hooves and I consider you true friends of the Crown. Now for the first time I come to you with a request for building.”
“We’ll put up anything you ask us to,” Reggie said, a breath before I could express the same thing.
“Good. There are only a few more immigrants you will need to accommodate, and I call upon you because you know them. Indeed, they were the last ones you saw.”
I ran through it in my head, and I was certain that at that point every friend, friend-of-friend, family member, casual acquaintance, and co-worker had emigrated or died. So I thought that it must have been Reggie she meant, but he was looking at me as though he went through the same process, and Celestia was looking at me as well. Then I thought twice.
“Oh! Those soldiers.”
“The company you saw has suffered great attrition. There are no more than a dozen now, and of those I am not confident in more than six immigrating. They have been through hardship and are now wandering through a desert. A willful sergeant is still in command who has sworn enmity with me unto the grave. But he will not be the last of his platoon to go, and then I believe I can bring in the remainder.”
“And you wish us to build them a home.”
“You perceive correctly,” Celestia said. “And for these immigrants I want the best we have to offer.”
That was a tall order. Equestria’s best was quite good. But I understood how Celestia was thinking. The more they suffered Outside, the more they needed to be satisfied once they arrived. “Will they rent or own?”
“They will live in the home you build. I do not want them worrying about money. I know that normally such housing is built outside of Manehattan proper. You may find a good location there or break the rule. I leave the choice to you.”
She was asking for us to build at our own expense. Well, all right, this was our chance to exercise generosity.
We went back home and put our heads together, along with friends and builders. It was at this point that the ballpark project came back to me. Of course, a single block was too small for a playing field, so 62nd street between 10th and 11th avenues had been permanently closed. I resolved to do the same thing except three times as daring. Four street blocks across one avenue block would make a thousand foot square, and on that we could build and build big. Every luxury we could think of would be poured into that million square feet.
Doing that in Manehattan would have been possible, but it would have taken precious time and a whole lot of spending money. I found what I was looking for in the Broncs, just across the Harness river on the Madicolt Avenue Bridge. That would give them the river for a view and easy access to anywhere in Manehattan.
It was the clever Mr. Joist who came up with the layout. “How many people did you see?” he asked me. By that point I had been given enough enhancements to have proper recall of the incident and the ability to count heads.
“Two hundred sixteen,” I replied. “I hope that when Celestia talked about attrition, she meant emigration for some.” Nopony wanted to contemplate the alternative.
“I thought it might be. It’s the kind of thing Celestia would do. That number is, of course, six cubed.”
And so we build the Hexagon. It wasn’t a perfect hexagon, as each vertex had its own smaller hexagon which would serve as the living quarters for one of the immigrants. But, in tribute to the Pentagon Outside, we also build six stories high and six rings inward. Each unoccupied section would be given over to the memory of somepony who wasn’t there. And the central courtyard would be sacred ground for the occupants, where nopony would ever go.
Friends they knew and ponies that Celestia had said would be their friends joined us once the building was complete, helping us make it the most welcoming environment possible. The softest beds we could find furnished the bedrooms, since we knew that for a soldier sleep time was gold. Baths with deep cleaning soaps and showers that would remove the grime of all the years and the miles. Libraries filled with books. All the best magi-tech entertainment devices I could find, and I ensured they were in perfect repair. Garlic came back from the inn to stock the kitchens with endless supplies of every food he’d heard of. We told him that, somewhere Outside, these people were hungry, and it lit a fire in him.
And the ponies! It was a good thing that there were already so many towers in the Broncs with free housing, because it was needed for everypony who came to town. Musicians and live entertainers and physical therapists and tour guides, all of whom would keep the immigrants too busy to worry about past trauma. To care for the house and grounds, gardeners and under-gardeners and butlers and maids. Princess Celestia and Princess Cadance had both sent personal members of their staff to supervise. Princess Twilight did not send anypony, but it was rumored that when the immigrants finally arrived, Pinkie Pie herself would be in town for the party.
Others came in to handle consumables. Garlic was still in charge of the kitchen, but some ponies needed to deliver fresh ingredients daily, since we never knew when they would get there. Also, as well-traveled as Garlic was in food, he wasn’t as strong in drink. So one pony came with a cart loaded with urns of roasted coffee beans of all flavors, and another installed a classic soda fountain with an ice cream freezer right next to it, and an earth pony showed up with certain minerals that she filtered into the water, and a whole family of farmers brought down barrels of beer. I learned that the barley and the hops were both grown by the same family, but they had barrels for stouts and lagers and ales.
There was one pony who came in pulling a cart that clinked underneath a cover of sackcloth as it rattled on the cobbled streets, and we learned that it was full of bottles of wine that matched the one on his flanks. He was quite upset when he learned that we had not built a cellar into the Hexagon, and insisted that his bottles must be kept away from light and heat. We were all at a loss for what to do until Dry Wit pointed out that there weren’t that many bottles, and if we pulled up the floorboards between two of the floors, we could improvise storage. Since we had overbuilt the living space, and since the solution was a temporary one, and since if any of the immigrants proved to be great oenophiles we could build them a wine cave somewhere, it was agreed that it was the best idea.
But that ingratiated Dry Wit to the vintner, and though I found him off-putting, both my husband and son found him a friend. He gave Dry Wit his first drink (I had no cause to complain. In the first place, he was nearly of age, and in the second drink did not debilitate ponies that badly) and told him of the growing and cultivating of wine grapes. Dry Wit had found his calling and came home one day to show that he now had a crystal goblet for a cutie mark, and while it wasn’t the symbol I would have chosen, I was proud.
Reggie had no misgivings, and as I said, Dry Wit was his sire’s colt more than mine. Fine enough. I was sure that we’d have more children someday, and I was equally sure that some would favor their dam more than their sire. But right now he was our only, and Reggie was taking care of him.
Building the Hexagon had left us temporarily cash-poor, but Reggie came to me with a plan to which I agreed. When Dry Wit graduated the next year, after the immigration and the party at the Hexagon were finished and we were finally focused on home again, we sat him down.
“The time has come,” Reggie said, “for you to stake out on your own. You’ll always have a home here of course, but it’s right for a stallion to make his way in the world. Here is what your mother and I are thinking. You have a passion for viticulture, but Manehattan is no place for growing. To the east, though, is good land and, just as important, good water. We’ve researched and found an uncultivated plot in Alicornset, just west of Mountauk. You can grow grapes and experiment with flavors, and you can have tasting rooms and give exhibits that will bring in the tourists and make the vineyard more profitable. We’ll buy the land and mortgage it to you, and you can pay us off until you own it free and clear.
“That is purely a business offer. This is your graduation gift, if you want it: we also found some waterfront places near the vineyard that are good for homes. We will build you a house there, several bedrooms for when you want to have a family. If you do. It overlooks the bay and you may take an interest in boating.
“We were also planning to build for ourselves out there. Not too close, but trotting distance. We won’t be all over you, I promise. Probably we won’t be out more than once a month. Perhaps a little more in the summer, less in the winter. But we’d like you to look in on our house once in a while, make sure it stays in good repair, maybe stock the kitchen if we’re coming out. We’ll see you don’t lose by it.”
I sat there listening to my husband talk to my son, talk to him as an equal. One more way that Celestia’s world outstripped the one we had come from. Dry Wit agreed to the plan, not somberly as a bird being kicked out of the nest, but as one ready to fly on its own, ready to seize the world with his own hooves and bend it to his will. He was not an immigrant, he had no fear of failure, only dreams of success.
As for us, we got our second home, a place to get away from it all or to invite friends for summer nights with the spread of the water instead of the spread of the city. At the end of long weeks, Reggie will come by with the cart to the office on Third and we’ll drive down to one of the Lower East Side bridges, over the East River, and east along the Southern Parkway. Which was the same road Outside that I came west on when I immigrated.
So this is another loop completed on the upward spiral. I have made money and no longer worry about that. I have friends and a family that will be with me forever. I have a home that I will always want to return to. Celestia will build her world and I will build mine, and my husband, and my son, and my friends will all build theirs. This is how I see it.
And it is good.
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YES! This story is back!
"Celestia had said would[/b[ be their friends"
That tag appears to be doubly broken, with a b instead of an i and a reversed terminating bracket.
Quite surprised to see another update to this, but I found it enjoyable. :)
8584399
Fixed, and thank you.
8584896
You're welcome!
Hey, one of the seminal classics of the optimalverse updated! I can't say how excited I am to see this story update again.
It's rare to see one of these stories spend much time in Equestira. Though I guess this one was always an exception. It's nice to see Little again, and maybe to see her life in higher resolution. It seems like it would be quite the challenge to make the story of life in Equestria compelling, when the forces of nature themselves are guiding life to be as satisfying as possible. But if anyone could do it I'm sure you can!
Do you think you might make more updates like this? If so, will they be more out-of-order iterative updates like this one, or an entirely new story for Little?
8585343
Like I said in the author's note, she's basically become my OC, so I think about her a good deal. But, I'm completely self-indulgent about writing her. I write when I'm inspired, I don't worry about proper characterization or consistency. So...maybe?
Touching.
Bonus stuff. Thank you pjabrony.
8791289
In my honest opinion, the whole story needs a rewrite.
The ideas that the chapters convey are fine, the execution feels so sloppy though.
This said, I've read mostly all the other FiO stories as well and I'm most likely texting this because the story doesn't live up to the standards I've set for a story in this universe.
8793253
You may have a point. A lot of my stories are written properly with outlines and schedules and stuff, where I go over everything to make sure it's your actual writing. This was by-and-large a passion project where all the ideas just came out, and I like to think that I have enough raw talent to cover that up.