Code: Definitely the Final Chapter
Reaching into his lapel, Filthy Rich took out a monogrammed handkerchief, its singular, golden stitched ‘R’ flashing brightly against the sun as he wiped his brown-furred brow. There were only ten minutes left until two. An hour given for the noon lunch rush, and another besides for any stragglers. There would be nothing short of some sudden and inexplicable, magical emptying of stomachs to distract her from this. No twitches or flinches to indicate that somepony was in desperate need of a sweet snack or drink to help brighten their day, at least not until three when school got out, but he planned to have this business concluded long before then. However, even if the meeting did run long, he already had an ice-cream buffet ready to be wheeled out to the schoolhouse on stand-by.
No, he’d have Pinkamena Diane Pie’s full attention. Nothing short of it would do.
Looking down across the back of his estate from his cool stone porch, Rich watched as Randolph, his oldest and most trusted butler, was making a final pass across each of the ‘silent’ parties, tweaking the position of a conical party hat into a jauntier position on some, while moving the articulations on a Ponnyquin to better simulate their respective atmospheres on others. They stretched out almost to the hedge maze some hundreds of hooves away. ‘Foal’s First Birthday’, ‘Chess Club Pizza Party with a Chess Club that is Actually as Boring as the Largely Misattributed Stereotype’, and ‘Hearth’s Warming Office Party’ were just a few of the staged scenarios on display, but such a wide selection was needed for this.
Looking at the white marble sundial beside him, Rich exhaled slowly. He was beginning to get nervous. Not that he was particularly worried that she would dismiss him outright, he knew he had something here, in fact, it was nothing short of a veritable Party Pony Philosopher’s Stone.
It wasn’t even that he would have preferred to do this indoors. There were plenty of places he could have done this even in his own home after all: the ballroom, the drawing room, the dining hall, even his own private bowling room could have sufficed, but then it would risk being too similar to lab conditions. It needed to take place out of doors where the air wasn’t still, where somepony could even even get a wild gust thanks to the presence of The Everfree Forest, far away as it was.
No, what was really making him nervous was the thought of how Ms. Pie would possibly … apparate.
Turning around, his wide back porch, normally tastefully covered in statues, potted plants, and statues holding potted plants meant to conceal the sight of three umbrella-shaded patio tables and their matching chairs from each other as well as give a different view of the gardens and countryside respectively, was empty. All had been discreetly taken down and removed to a number of garden sheds across the premises. True, he had previously hired her to help construct a number of parties for both residential and business purposes, and she had come through the front door like a normal pony on each occasion, but … she didn’t have a reputation around town for moving in and around things which would otherwise be impossible or require a level of magic only an alicorn was capable of for nothing, especially when she was excited. And, given how he had sent word to Ms. Pie to make one of her famous Pinkie Swears (better than having somepony signing a contract with their own mother as the official witness and Princess Celestia presiding) to discreetly come to his residence to discuss what he believed to be an important matter in regards to Party Ponydom at two in the afternoon in two days’ time, and he certainly didn’t want to take any chances of her accidentally breaking something, or scaring one of his employees into doing the same, once she arrived.
“Hi Filthy,” Pinkie cheered as she opened the window-lined Prench doors as they swung silently along their well-oiled hinges in front of him.
“Gah,” Filthy Rich gasped, his flank bumping into the sundial behind him, both in surprise to the wholly normal means of appearing and the flash of sun that reflected off the windowpanes into his eyes as the door to his house was closed. “I should have known,” he muttered quietly to the resulting thump of stone striking stone as the sundial tipped over, noting it was now precisely two as Randolph began to remove the pieces without a word.
Turning his attention back quickly to Pinkamena, “Oh Ms. Pie,” he said, putting on his well-practiced smile and projecting an aura of easy confidence as he straightened himself up to conduct business, “please, call me Rich.”
“Okie-dokie,” she smiled, “but only if you call me Pinkie.”
“Why of course Pinkie, now, I hope you don’t mind if we get right down to business, as it were. I know how busy you can be, so,” he gestured down to the grounds with a hoof, “I’d like to have your educated opinion on a certain matter which I believe you may hold some interest in.”
“Oooo,” she gasped, looking down from the porch. “Looks like somepony’s been reading my diary,” she said, poking a hoof into his flank. “And here I thought that I was the only pony thinking about making a Museum of Party History and Ice-cream Bar. Though you’ll prooobably need to get somepony to get all those hats right. Oh! I could do that!”
“No, wait,” Rich coughed as he blinked past the puff of dust where Pinkie had just been, his watering eyes squinting to see how far she’d gotten. Thankfully, she had only managed to get three quarters of the way down the nearest stairway to the grounds proper. Trotting over quickly to her, he found her frozen in mid gallop, suspended in midair. Coughing, again, Rich centered himself. He knew this was never going to be an average business meeting, and this was still nothing compared to some of her oddest feats. “Ah, no. That’s not what I asked you here today for. But, if you would be kind enough to follow me, we can get right to, what I hope, will end up being quite … fun for everypony.”
“Mysterious,” Pinkie ooo-ed, hopping beside him.
Good, Rich thought, he had something approaching her attention. For now. Now, to build on it.
While they had previously been too high, now that they were on the grass, both ponies could see the small white, plastic folding table just a few hooves from the stairs. On it were sixteen separate wedges arranged in two parallel lines. Each was about the size of your average slice of single layer cake. There was two for each color of the rainbow, plus two black and two white ones, and none of them looked like anything but a wadded-up piece of tissue paper smushed into shape and then dried.
“What do you think?” asked Rich, gauging Pinkie’s reaction.
“Well, they’re pretty colorful,” Pinkie smiled, head tilting slightly to left, “but I don’t think they’d make very good door stops. They look they’re made of tissue paper.”
“That’s because they are made of tissue paper,” Rich nodded, as Randolph rolled up a small, silvery-grey cannon roughly half his own size beside them.
“Wowie, an Eludium party cannon. Is that the newest Pew model?” Pinkie asked, ignoring the crumpled looking pieces of colored paper for something that was finally party related.
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Rich said, passing the extra pair of protective glasses and ear plugs to Pinkie from Randolph. “Thank you, Randolph, that will be all for now.”
The elderly gray pony nodded and silently made his exit.
“Now,” Rich said moving to the table and removing a black and white wedge, “what do you think would be the best case scenario if I loaded these two into this cannon and fired it, say,” he paused, loading the two wedges into the cannon and wheeled it over to the stuffy looking chess pizza party, “a party like this?”
“Ooo,” Pinkie frowned, “best case scenario is those two pieces of wadded-up paper sail over everypony and nopony notices, but you’d need to aim that at least thirty degrees higher, otherwise you might hit somepony in the eye. And let me tell you, paper cuts in the eye are the worst.”
“I see.” Rich nodded, putting on his protective glasses, as Pinkie did the same a few moments later, “are you sure about that?”
“Weeeeelllll, not to toot my own horn or anything,” Pinkie said, rolling her eyes in a distinctly unhumble manner as she puffed out her chest, “but I kinda know my way around a party cannon pretty well, or at least more so than the average Ursa Major.”
Nodding, Rich inserted the plugs in his ears, Pinkie doing the same, before moving a hoof over to the cannon’s pull-cord, shouting, “I see,” and yanked it.
The muffled boom was followed quickly by a rain of black and white strips of paper, the explosion having shredded the black and white wedges entirely, covering the ‘party’ in front of them.
Removing his ear plugs, Rich looked over to Pinkie Pie, and waited.
Pinkie, for her part, simply stared, unmoving, as the shredded pieces of paper settled onto the party, the ponnyquins, and just a few inches of the surrounding grass. As far as parties were concerned, she knew of almost no pony who came close to the depth of knowledge she had on the vast subject. What kind of card-stock to use for what kind of party invitation, what sort of pastry paired best with what beverage, how both the natural and artificial lighting effected the color palette choice for decorations, to say nothing of the psychology and group dynamics that came into play during the thing itself. And each and every individual element had its own hanging subcategory that could and often did have their own dynamic, hanging subcategories almost ad infinitum. But for so long, there had been that single decoration that had been essentially unchanged and uncustomizable.
Stepping forward, carefully, Pinkie moved with her front left hoof outstretched, and was met half-way by a gust of wind Rich was nominally sure had to have been timed out for dramatic effect, as a two pieces of shredded paper landed into her hoof. Blinking, Pinkie raised it to her eye, and could no longer deny what she was seeing. The piece of white tissue paper was in the shape of a pawn, while the black was in the shape of a queen piece.
It was novelty shaped confetti.
True, it was a common enough party supply, and even your average pony could acquire specific shapes and cut-outs on special order easily enough if ordered a few days in advanced of the scheduled event, but it could only be used in a preplanned manner, held from above and left for gravity to do the work. Nopony to date had ever managed to get novelty shaped confetti that could be fired safely from a party cannon, or even fired in a controlled manner. The spread was simply too random for even the most talented of Party Pony to get a firm hoof on, often clumping in air and coming down in a wad, and on a few documented occasions had simply caused a plug in the cannon that rendered it unsafe for party conditions, and no self-respecting Party Pony would ever risk the health of a party goer or the party’s atmosphere on their watch.
But here it was, proof that it could be done, right in her hoof.
“eeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” Pinkie squealed, leaping into the air.
Rich winced, wishing he had kept the earplugs in, especially as Pinkie bounded across the distance between them in a single leap.
“HowDidYouDoThis?IThoughtItCouldn’tBeDone!DoYouHaveAnyIdeaHowManyPartiesICanUseJustChessPiecesIn?OhMyGosh,CanIUseTheRestOfThose?WhatShapesDoTheyComeIn?CanIGetMore?WhyDidn’tAnyponyTellMeThisWasAThing?!?”
Rich, in response, slowly peeled the face of the pink mare off of his own. The sound of Velcro releasing as he did so made him hope desperately she merely needed to wash some excess sugar off her face and mane to be the cause rather than something … unnatural.
“Yes well,” Rich paused, thankful for his time spent at auction, training his ear to listen to auctioneers who very nearly matched Pinkie for sheer verbal speed, “while the specific methods of pulping, straining, mixing, drying, and the like are company secrets, I feel confident in letting you know that we’re able to achieve a number of specific shapes due to wires we use during one of the dryings to put them into shape. However, the final ingredient is something you can actually thank your friend Mistmane for. You see, it turns out the last thing we needed to finally nail party cannon safe novelty confetti and streamers was something she calls origami. It’s actually something of a hobby for ponies in her home town, and is a special method of folding objects, namely paper, into novelty shapes like birds, frogs, ponies, and other things. With that in mind, it just took a few clever foldings here and there, and we got ourselves a working model. Oh, but enough talk, we’ve still got fourteen more units for you to try. Feel free to even use your own personal cannon if you have it on hoof. I can’t have something put onto the market if it isn’t fully tested for safety, now can I?”
Pinkie only nodded, her head a blur that soon spread to her whole body. It almost looked like she had turned into a miniature, pink whirlwind, and was soon whisking the remaining samples from the table and into a big blue party cannon Rich was sure had not been there a moment ago. And then, the world turned to color.
***
“Thanks for letting me keep the purple diamond shaped ones. Rarity’s going to love them the next time I use them for one of her special fancy parties,” Pinkie said, digging a chain of green, paper clovers from her ear. “And good thinking having those extra samples hidden away. I guess I went a little crazy with those first ones, huh?”
“Perhaps,” Rich conceded politely, combing back his graying mane with a hoof and returning with three different colors of confetti of his own. “But yes, I’m glad you enjoyed the product. And if it turns out to be as big of a game changer as you seem to think, perhaps I’ll have to ramp up production even sooner than expected. Have to meet the market demand if you want to keep the customers happy, especially if somepony as renowned as Pinkie is using it.”
“Oh Richy,” Pinkie giggled, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to use the name of one of the Elements of Harmony to sell a product?”
“Well,” Rich hummed, scratching his chin before giving her a small smile, “it couldn’t hurt.”
Sharing a laugh, the two ponies parted ways, Rich into his home and into his study, and Pinkie down the lane and back to Ponyville. Both now having some new business they were quite excited to start taking care of.
***Deep Beneath the Business of Sugarcube Corner in the Party Planning Lair of Pinkie Pie***
“The field test was a complete success everycreature,” Pinkie said to the row of shrouded faces from the mounted monitors before her, “and we should see it within store shelves in Ponyville within the month, and to stores in the closest metropolises just a few weeks after that.”
“You have done well Agent Definitely Not Pinkie Pie,” replied one of the black and gauzied faces, their voice too pitched and warped to tell precisely who it was.
“Thank you,” Pinkie nodded from her wide, pink cushioned chair as she continued stroking the head of her pet alligator, “but some amount of credit should also be given to Agent Definitely Not Cheese Sandwich for sneaking the suggestion into Filthy Rich’s R&D department idea box. I personally never thought they would have been able to achieve something the League Of Laughter’s top minds haven’t been able to solve.”
“A fresh set of eyes can work wonders,” said an equally distorted voice from another glowing screen, “I’m already on my fourth pair, and I'm still able to find new patterns for setting tea each time, even after all these moons.”
“Very well then” Pinkie shrugged, “if that’s all, I have some party plans I need to get back to. Thanks to this new product, I’ll finally be able to take a few names out of my ‘No Party Will Ever Be Good Enough’ file.”
“Very well then,” said a third screen. “Ha,” and the screen turned off.
“Ha,” said the remaining seven in turn, their screens going dark in succession.
“Ha,” Pinkie Pie said lastly, and pressed the small red button on the side of her chair. A section of the cave slid open behind the screens, which pulled themselves neatly into the hollow opening as the wall slid closed without a trace, leaving what appeared to be just another natural wall formation in her cave.
In the silence and ambient light, Pinkie grinned. There was going to be a lot of laughter and joy coming to Equestria, and beyond, especially if she had anything to say about it.