The MARE drinks from the POND. In a Flash it is Gone. Now Damned with Gluttony, to the MARE the other Sins no longer seem so villainous. One in particular she has eyed with interest for quite some time....

This is a story about ponies and death.

Ponies have died for a long time. They have gotten very good at it. According to plays, ponies used to take ages to die. A spear-thrust alone wouldn’t do it, and even the most potent poison left time for a monologue and dramatic flourish before a pony collapsed to the floor.

Nowadays dying takes ponies no effort at all.

This is a story about ponies and death…and economics. It begins with our economist, Twilight Sparkle.

It begins with Twilight Sparkle running. She is about to die.

Twilight Sparkle ran through the upstairs of her treehouse, barely dodging the shuffling, mindless ponies who lunged at her as she passed. She half-fell half-teleported down the stairs, landing in a painful heap on the floor.

But it didn’t hurt half as bad as having half her ribcage crushed. Twilight kept running.

She could flee, abandon the treehouse to the madness and destruction. But it would mean leaving her books.

A heavy thump from upstairs stole her attention. They were coming. She had to decide.

No.

Instead she tore across the room, seeking refuge in the shelves of books that spread across the room like tombstone stacks, the panic response part of her brain being somewhat disconnected from the threat evaluation module. The pen is mightier than the sword, it is true, but not in a here-and-now sort of way.

Twilight huddled in the back of the room. They were coming.

They came down the stairs, hard hoofs striking the wood like hammers. Five of them, all after the same prize. Twilight fought to keep her ears raised to listen rather than flattened against her head. They were coming through the shelves. They had a way of finding her, or it, they could sense it somehow. No matter where she ran, they would find her.

Twilight’s Hobbesian heart prepared to die. Her Smithian soul spoke.

“Girls, let’s be reasonable,” she trembled as they emerged from the sanctuary of dead trees and dead ponies. “There’s no need to fight over scarce resources.”

Her five best friends shuffled towards her with the unthinking, hungry stares of zombies or prepubescent fillies at a BBBFF concert.

“Give me the ticket,” Rarity said. “I need to be at that gala. Showing off my latest designs, meeting all the high-society ponies…it’s where I belong.”

“I need an in with anypony who has connections to financial regulators,” Rainbow Dash said. A sheen of sweat covered her face like wet plastic.

“It’s the biggest party ever!” Pinkie Pie said. “I have to be there to introduce my newest line of pastries and pastry products!”

“I want to meet the pony in charge of Missing Animals,” Fluttershy said. “To, um, voice some concerns I have about her operation. In the nicest possible way, of course.”

“I don’t know what this Grand Galloping Gala is or why anypony would care,” Applejack said, “But since everypony else is hankering for that ticket, I want it too.”

They pressed around her.

“Spike!” Twilight shouted. “Spike, help!”

“He won’t answer,” Rarity said.

“We…made it so he won’t answer,” Fluttershy said.

“Now give us…the ticket….”

“The ticket….”

“The ticket….”

Black, greedy hoofs reached for her. Twilight screamed.

“I’ll auction it off!”

The sound reverberated through the ancient wood of the treehouse. It shook the Bearers, who remembered too well a darker pony and a more terrible cry. They stepped back from Twilight, who had read about the nature of non-market competition over resources. Quite reasonably, she thought she was about to die.

When a soldier is pushed to her limits, when her sword has grown too heavy to wield and she can no longer run in her boots, yet the press of pointed metal surrounds her, sometimes, if she is well trained, if she has faced Death before and still doesn’t like the look of her, sometimes what comes out of her is everything.

Economists are used to thinking of the world as…elastic in a way physicists would find alien. Value can be created and destroyed, after all, unlike matter and energy. But if we restrict our analysis to the glandular, meaty stuff of sweat, blood and memory, no pony can become anything that she is not already. Though no pony can be more than herself, it’s worth pondering whether a pony can be less than herself.

Rarity would tell you that most ponies never fully become themselves. They speak like other ponies, act like other ponies, even wear the designs of other ponies—she’ll help the poor creatures, but that hardly precludes making a sale—and the tiny little part that makes a pony that pony and no pony else stays chained up in some mental basement, fed on twice-digested neuronic slop, and, on those rare occasions when a pony needs to be herself, the door creaks open, and the dim light reflected from a rusty blade reveals a pair of glowing red eyes….

…Which might tell you more about Rarity’s reading habits than the pony condition.

Fluttershy, if she could be distracted from her animals long enough to answer, might point out that if all ponies are unique in some way, then being yourself by definition is something that’s never been tried before. In Twilight’s vernacular, self-confidence is an untested hypothesis. Imagine being told that in order to live your life as you, you have to be the first to be you, and everypony is watching. This fact explains a lot about e.g, high school, Rarity’s old hunting ground.

If you asked Pinkie Pie or Applejack, they wouldn’t understand the question, and by the way, not to be rude, but are you going to just stand around talking or were you planning to buy something? Rainbow Dash wouldn’t let you inside until you could prove you aren’t a cop.

(And Princess Celestia would say that the real pony always comes out when she’s really up against it, where every tried-and-true method has failed and there’s no place left to go but somewhere new. She would also say, alone in private her best students, that most new hypotheses really are terribly wrong, and ponies are right to be afraid of them. And when you get the chance to ask Death what she would say, she might grin and tell you the princess’s argument implies a selection effect.)

But maybe you would say something different.

The point is, what I’m trying to get at, is that what a soldier pony draws out of herself in that adrenalized state of fury and power is only more of herself. And if what she is is a warrior, then everything borrowed fades, and the warrior takes over completely….

The ponies of one of the desert tribes have a legend about a pony named Samantha. In battle she was mighty and fierce, and her enemies knew it. They sent seven hundred ponies against the lone Samantha, and—

I already told you it’s a legend. You know who won.

Is it possible that one pony can vanquish seven hundred? Of course not. But if you ever have the misfortune to look into the empty black eyes of a pony on the brink of death as she lifts a sword that should be too heavy, as she takes a step forward with legs that should be exhausted beyond movement, as she gazes into your eyes and through them, then you might think that there’s something to this legend after all.

If you still have a head to think with, that is.

(In the collapsing chamber of the soldier’s thoughts that she can no longer access, as a blackest pony in a blackest cloak locks the pieces of her mind with care, compassion, and zero mercy, the voice of some distant descendant screams, “To the very margins! To the very margins, and strike them with such momentum that they are forced outward! If the force blows you back, let it, because now you can really gather some speed….”)

Anyway.

Twilight was an economist, and when backed into a corner, economics bubbled out.

“I’ll give the ticket to whoever demands it the most,” said Twilight, caught in that curious place between terror and the pure rush of economics. “That is, I’ll give it to whoever names the highest price they’re willing and able to pay for it.”

They stared at her.

“Ten bits,” Applejack said.

“What what what?” said Rarity, scandalized. “You want us to bid on the ticket? Like commoners?”

Twilight briefly wondered just what Rarity thought the life of a “commoner” was like.

“I’m not going to buy the ticket from you,” Rainbow Dash said. “That’d be weird. Why can’t you just pick somepony to give it to?”

“Five bits,” Applejack said.

“We’re trying to decide how to allocate a scare resource,” Twilight said. “You can’t beat the price system for allocating scarce resources.”

“I still got some of the rotted apples we usually throw out,” Applejack said.

“What’s a ‘scarce resource,’” Rainbow Dash made hoof-quotes in the air, “And how does a price system allocate them?”

Twilight beamed through the terror.

“I’m so glad you asked! You see, a scarce resource is something a pony wants more of than she can get….”

At this point Twilight made the fatal mistake of trying to explain price theory to her friends.

They stared when she explained that most of the things ponies want to use have alternative uses. This is called scarcity, she said, and it is often considered the fundamental quality of economics.

They frowned when she pointed out that ponies needed some way of allocating those scarce resources in a rational manner.

They looked at each other when she proposed that a system that allowed ponies to freely attach relative numerical weights to each and every resource for sales so that the resources would be pulled in the direction of the greatest weights would maximize the value of the resources, if the ponies each had a finite amount of weight such that assigning a weight to one good meant less weight could be assigned to another good. That way ponies would assign the most weight to their most valued resources, and less weight to their less valued resources, ensuring the resources would go where they are most valued and away from where they are least valued. Maximizing the value of the resources, Twilight said breathlessly, was a good thing, the very best thing.

They stepped back nervously when she said that such a system was called a price system, and it was the reason all the ponies here were alive today. Her eyes wide with worshipful adoration, she gushed about the complex problem of global coordination among ponies so diverse that, that, that you don’t even know how diverse they are, and how a price system makes solving this impossible, literally impossible, problem so easy that you pay less attention to it than you do the weather.

At an urgent nod from the others, Pinkie Pie sneezed away the exposition.

“Oh, Twilight, economics is just for saving the world from the forces of evil,” Pinkie Pie said brightly, wiping her nose on the back of her leg. “No pony actually cares.”

Twilight had to concede that Pinkie Pie probably had the empirical edge on that point.

“Have I ever told you all about how pencils are made?” she tried, but her friends turned away.

“Twilight sure is weird, y’all,” Applejack commented as they headed toward the door.

“I can’t believe she wanted us to pay money for that ticket,” said Rarity, appalled. “What happened to patronage? What happened to class?”

“Twilight’s weird all right,” Pinkie Pie said. “She’s so weird I even wrote a song about her!”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

Pinkie Pie sang, “She’s a weirdo economist, her stomach is bottomless, if she gets near your pastries they’ll disappear down her esophagus—”

“You said I could have those!”

Pinkie Pie’s singing voice floated out the door. Twilight heaved a sigh of relief. Almost subconsciously she pinched the side of her stomach. Despite all the “scientific research” that “proved” having friends is “healthy” according to a bunch of psychologists who aren't even real scientists nothing beat constant social isolation and desperate loneliness for keeping a trim figure.

Dear Princess Celestia,

Why did you send only two (2) tickets to the Grand Galloping Gala, knowing that I have five (5) friends, not counting Spike?

Your faithful student,

Twilight Sparkle

To the Chief Executive Economist of the Daughter of Ponyville Twilight Sparkle,

Did you teach them about scarcity and the price system yet?

Cheers,

Princess Celestia

P.S. Enclosed are four additional tickets to the gala.

The Daughter of Ponyville that Princess Celestia had made was wrought not by the esteemed architects of Canterlot but by the humble Ponyvillites. This was symbolic, Princess Celestia said, of the need for the Daughters to be enmeshed in and able to represent the diversity of the nine regions, and also it saved on construction costs. The Daughter of Ponyville, which Twilight privately thought of as the One Bank Mark II, was a curious blend of wood and brick, with carpeted interiors and plenty of space for cabinets, shelves and an enormous spinning table on which Twilight kept all manner of different up-to-date reports and data in a very carefully organized order. She wasn’t sure it was really the most optimal way of managing her work, but spinning the table was a lot of fun.

When she wasn’t at the treehouse taking care of Spike, Twilight was entrenched firmly within the Mark II and its thick double-locked doors. Taking care of Ponyville’s monetary matters in the aftermath of the Great Nightmare was important and difficult, and she was pleased to learn that it was easy to let the work expand to fill the time.

Habits of mind are the hardest to change. The body is dumb and follows like a sheep, but the brain is smart and figures out how to get stuck in all kinds of interesting and, eventually, fatal places.

She missed Princess Celestia, of course. She missed her a lot. Which isn’t to say that her brain wasn’t running a very efficient simulation of the princess all the while she was in the Mark II. The voice of Princess Celestia guided the money supply of Ponyville as if with an invisible hoof. One long night trying to make accounts add up—the Ponyvillites had been buying and selling way more than Nightmare Moon’s money drought should have allowed for—Twilight brought a pillow into the Mark II and caught a few fitful hours of sleep before resuming work. After that, it was easy to start sleeping in the bank.

A knock at the door. Twilight awoke with a start. She peeled her face off the drool-damp pillow and stared groggily and the door. Another knock.

“What time is it?” Twilight said in that slurred, mumbling morning voice that so enchants one’s significant other and no pony else. She had covered the windows with thick curtains some time ago.

Twilight pushed herself up at the third knock and stumbled toward the door. Suspiciously she peered through the peephole. It was Pinkie Pie, or rather, Pinkie Pie’s hoof as it swung up for another strike.

With some effort Twilight managed to undo the locks and pried open the door. She was rewarded by nearly being punched out by Pinkie Pie, who was going for a fifth knock.

“Hi, Twilight!” Pinkie Pie said in that cheerful, bright morning voice that makes one's significant other want to commit murder. “We haven’t seen you in a while since you locked yourself away in here!”

Twilight blinked. How long had it been?

“Anyway,” Pinkie Pie continued, her bright, beaming eyes blinding Twilight like she was staring into twin lamps that emitted long random strings of high-pitched squeaks, “I was wondering if you wanted to come eat dinner with us.”

“Dinner?” Twilight squinted at the darkening evening sky, still more natural light that she had gotten in the past week. “What time is it?”

“Time to see your friends, silly! Got to put the economics on hold!”

Twilight flushed the latter sentence away and focused on the former. “Friends?”

“Yup! Me, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, everypony! You know, your friends!”

“Oh.” Twilight cast a longing look into the gloom of the Mark II. “I thought that was just for saving the world from the forces of evil. I didn’t think anypony actually cared.”

“You thought wrong! Now get moving, sister!”

Twilight demurred.

Pinkie Pie insisted.

And that is the story of how Twilight was dragged kicking and screaming through a dirt road to one of the many Sugarcube Corners Pinkie Pie had stationed around Ponyville like silent, cake-filled sentinels. There she met her friends, and, after realizing that the world wasn’t ending and no pony was about to rip her limb-from-limb for a golden ticket, she managed to relax a bit, though she was still mad about being caked in a fine layer of dust, not to mention the fact that Pinkie Pie apparently thought cake was dinner. Spike was there, subdued sitting next to Rarity, and Twilight began to have suspicions about who had really set this up. Rarity did most of the talking, as usual.

“…And that’s when I said, ‘Discount? Does my boutique look like some kind of thrift shop for ponies to go bargain-hunting? Get out!’ Honestly, the nerve of some ponies.”

“So you didn’t make the sale?” Applejack asked.

“I didn’t want to make the sale, not to a pony who doesn’t appreciate my art,” Rarity sniffed. “But that wasn’t even the worst customer I had this week. Just the other day this frightful mare came in asking for a dress all in black, with a black cowl. I asked what style and cut. She said a poison dress. Well, we had a chat about that, and it turned out that didn’t mean quite what she thought it did. So she said she needed a dress for a funeral. I asked if she wanted a veil. She said no, she needed to see well. I asked if she wanted something a bit trimmed around the hoofs so she wouldn’t trip. She said she didn’t trip. Well, it was quite bizarre. I mean, I made the dress of course, but honestly, it was unnerving.”

“Now that you mention it,” said Applejack, “A pony visited our farm yesterday asking if we had black apples. Funny question. I told we as we had only red, green, and yellow. She asked if we could do one black, and I told her she had a lot of nerve coming in here and asking us to change things up.”

“There, um, was a pony who wanted to adopt a bat,” said Fluttershy. “To, uh, pull her her carriage. I said we were out of bats, and I thought to venture that bats can’t pull carriages, but she said, no, I didn’t understand, she wanted a skeletal bat. I, uh, thought it was a little odd, so I even mentioned that a skeletal bat would be dead, and she said yes, it would be.”

“I just remembered!” Pinkie Pie slammed her hoof on the table in excitement, nearly upsetting the grasscakes. “Just the other day a pony came to the Corner to buy a black cake. I said, ‘You mean chocolate?!’ and she said no, she meant black.”

Everypony looked expectantly at Rainbow Dash, who shrugged.

“Stocks don’t come in black,” she said. “Or skeletal. I’ve had a pretty normal week.”

Now five heads swung toward Twilight Sparkle.

“I think it’s obvious that this town is full of weird ponies,” Twilight said grumpily. “I’ve been busy doing important work in the Mark—in the Daughter, and—“

“Twilight’s staying shut inside and avoiding her friends,” Pinkie Pie said loudly.

“—And I haven’t really noticed anything more unusual than usual lately,” Twilight said, glaring at Pinkie Pie.

She pushed away from the table, stopping only to horn-grab half-a-dozen cupcakes for later. “I’ll be in my castle preventing economic catastrophe. Don’t bother me if Equestria isn’t in danger.”

But Twilight awoke next morning to the sound of somepony knocking on the door. Blearily she opened it. Applejack’s brown cowpony hat was pulled over her distraught, conflicted face. She had looked a lot more confident confronting the Cerberus than she did now.

“It ain’t quite the same as Equestria being in danger,” Applejack said. She looked at the ground, then behind her.

Twilight rubbed her face. “Applejack, what do you need?”

Applejack didn’t quite look at her.

“I need your help,” she said. “Sweet Apple Acres is losing money. We’re going broke.” Next Chapter: Allocating Scarce Resources Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 59 Minutes