Budget Reconciliation
"Clarence?"
"Hmm?" replied the stallion.
"Have you got a minute to talk?"
"Sure, what's up Gloria?"
The mare stepped into the room. "I just had a question about this sequence you approved."
Clarence, spotting a file held in Gloria's hooves, nodded his head. "Oh dear, what have I done wrong now?" he asked, pursing his lips and grimacing.
"Made quite a big error in judgement, if middle management's word counts for anything," Gloria chided. She dropped the file on Clarence's desk. "Tell me if that name rings a bell."
Peering down at the name on the label, Clarence read aloud. "Twilight Sparkle. Off the top of my head, doesn't mean much to me. Special case, is it?"
"That's what I've been sent here to find out, actually. Apparently you gave her quite the wild sequence."
Clarence shrugged. "It's what we do, isn't it?"
With a huff, Gloria flipped open the file and gestured to an extensive sprawl of numbers. "Nine times the average budget for a bog-standard sequence, you want to try explaining that to middle management?"
"You what?" Raising an eyebrow, Clarence reached over to pick up the file. He skipped past the budgetary figures and found the section regarding a summary of the sequence. It was quite lengthy. "Ohh... this one," he muttered as a wry grin spread up his face.
"So you do remember it?" Gloria gasped, throwing her hooves up in exasperation. "Care to explain then?"
"Well it was rather a sorry case, to be honest with you," Clarence replied, rubbing the back of his neck. "Bit of a loner, never really had any good friends to call her own. Well, none that she ever actually appreciated. I think if she'd had a bit more time, she could have had a chance. I just figured she deserved that chance."
"A chance for... making friends?"
"Yeah, you know, come out of her shell a bit. Get her nose out of those dusty old books, venture outside and experience the world around her."
"Oh for the love of..." Gloria frowned, scratching the bridge of her muzzle with her hoof. "For the umpteenth time, Clarence. It is not our jobs to create some fantastical sequence for these ponies where they can live out any kind of twisted fantasies. Our job is to create a sequence that seamlessly transitions them from that place, to the place that comes after."
"Urgghhh..." Clarence moaned, throwing his head back and spinning around in his swivel chair. "Are you sure middle management have nothing better to do than send you down here to stifle my creativity?"
"Oh I read the sequence summary. Several times. You didn't just go off-piste with it, you went off the whole bloody mountain. How many files piled onto your desk while you were scribing that tome?"
"Umm... one or two... thousand."
"And have you cleared the backlog yet?"
"I'm... I'm working on it." Clarence spun his chair back around, facing Gloria with a frown of his own. "Look, do I get any brownie points for creativity?"
"If it was up to me, yes," Gloria admitted. "Battling an immortal spirit of chaos, then fending off an insect queen who consumes love, and then I found the ascension to being a princess to be a delightfully absurd twist. It went a bit mad around the time you introduced that friendship school though."
Clarence shrugged. "She was a student. I figured it would be nice to see it come full circle, she could see herself grow to be a teacher. And in the very end, she could have a personal student of her own. Finish the story exactly how it started, only with her viewing it from the other perspective."
"Oh, and apparently the transitory breakdown got lost somewhere in accounting, if you remember how you did it, could you write up a fresh one while I'm here?"
"Sure, can do," Clarence replied. He pulled a blank form from one of the trays on his desk, and started to fill it in. "See, she was on this cliff," he explained as he wrote. "Some spirit monster destabilised the soil, caused that section of land to subside. From her perspective, she slipped down but grabbed the ledge before she went over. The ponies she was with, they were able to slow her fall and carry her to safety."
Gloria winced. "And what actually happened?"
"What do you think happened? She fell. Three hundred feet onto solid rock. It was instant, from what I could gather. She didn't suffer. But I guess when I read her file, saw the picture of her broken form crumpled there at the bottom of that ravine... awful way to end. It got to me, you know? It wasn't fair. I wanted to give her a sequence that wasn't just comforting, but better than how her life would have actually played out."
"I see..." Gloria murmured back. "Look, Clarence, a lot of new starters here want to do the same thing. These ponies suffer cruel twists of fate and suddenly... they're our responsibility. And believe me, if we had the time and budget to give them all a magical story where they are heroes in their own rights, I'd be all for it. But we are limited in what we can do. I'll do my best to smooth things over with middle management, but they're gonna have eyes on you for a while. Please, from now on, just stick to the standard guidelines."
"Fine," Clarence said under his breath. He slammed the completed paperwork down in front of Gloria, who nodded in appreciation and slipped it into the file.
"Look," she said, one hoof tapping awkwardly on the floor. "For the record, I thought it was a great story. If the rules here were less constricting, I'd love for every sequence to be that heartwarming."
"But?" Clarence asked.
"But... well, sometimes the transition to the other place isn't a wonderful journey of self-realisation. Sometimes it just... has to happen."