I meet Twinkleshine in the bustling coffee shop on the second floor of the massive Manehattan Daughter. The surfaces gleam like they have been freshly scrubbed—they have, she assures me—and the food is much better fare than at the crowded Coffee Buck across the street. Our meeting got off to a bad start when I smiled at her, asked her if she was visiting her mother here, and looked around for my scheduled interviewee.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were, like, busy,” she snarled with a schoolgirl tick. She looks at something on my neck. A slow grin spreads across her face like rumors of my bed-wetting habit had across the popular girls in middle school.

Hot self-consciousness floods my face. Surreptitiously touching the spot on my neck, I detect nothing. She giggles. I have nowhere to look. My legs shift like they want to get away from the fire spreading down my cheeks and neck.

“I am a gosh-darned adult,” I tell myself, censored out of awareness that I might transcribe my own thoughts for this interview you are now reading. “I cannot be made to feel embarrassed by pretty high school girls.” It is something I had believed, and like a good scientist, Twinkleshine falsified my hypothesis.

“Are you done being stupid?” she says kindly, taking mercy on me. “I am the Chief Executive Economist of the Daughter Bank of Manehattan.”

The sheer scale of the Manehattan Daughter is nothing short of astounding. Five stories tall, with a clear glass elevator that zips up and down at sickening speeds, it towers over the (in)famous Manehattan financial district like a black monolith here to bring civilization to the animalistic chaos. The lobby has a fountain of water spouting out of the horn of a marble Unicorn. Coins glitter at the bottom and patterns of light play on the marble columns. I am told the bank already employs over one hundred economists. The line of applicants for job openings bends around the street.

She is a schoolfilly, I can’t help thinking. Her mane style is immature, she has a terrible habit of checking some automated message device that whirs along the wall with short letters. I wonder if she wears those fuzzy winter boots that are so popular. Her voice has a habit of going up? At the end of a sentence? Like she’s always asking a question? It’s starting to infect me as well, and slowly drives me mad.

A background chorus of derivatives and interest rates and something that blurs together into hedge-pension-index-premium provides a suitable refrain for our lunch. Twinkleshine treats it all like the conductor of a school choir with an unruly filly on the bassinet: controlling yet dismissive, and utterly unconcerned.

“My job is making sure that no matter what silliness they get up to, the symphony goes on without a single note missed,” she says, sipping her coffee, some ethereal and flowery concoction of cream and sugar. I’ve elected for an actual coffee, no milk, two sugars: A reporter’s coffee should look black and taste sweet. It’s good, and more importantly, doesn’t look like something that should have a little plastic umbrella on top.

“Everypony got the financial crisis totally wrong.” She levitates a bit of whipped cream into her mouth, swallows. It’s extremely disconcerting. “You have to, like, see the bigger picture.”

Twinkleshine is the bigger picture. A student of Princess Celestia’s less than six months ago, she leapfrogged over the usual series of bureaucratic or low-level academic positions to wind up as chief executive economist of the biggest daughter bank. Her eggshell white coat and solid pink mane and tail give the appearance of somepony girlish and approachable, and she does giggle and simper like a champion. But her mind is like a rock lying wait in gushing white water. Sharp, and deadly.

“They need to be afraid of me,” she says, now blowing bubbles into the milky remains of her drink. “At the beginning a lot of, like, incentives and rules were suggested, but I didn’t like that. The ponies on the corner of Fourth and Wall Street, I taught them not to make me unhappy. They know better than me, like, what they would be doing to make me unhappy and how to keep themselves from doing it.”

I do not ask if she knows what “like” means or if she has Tourette's syndrome. Either way, it’s very tragic.

“How do you maintain control?”

“By showing no weakness, no mercy.”

“Isn’t that lonely?”

She blows bubbles, apparently unconcerned.

Caffeine rushes into my bloodstream. I’m ready to begin the interview.

Let’s start with the obvious. You saved the world from a financial crisis. Princess Celestia commended you. How does it feel to be a national hero?

Wait, wait. We can’t have the interview here; I can barely concentrate. Let’s go up to my office.

I follow her into the elevator and up to the fifth floor. There is only one door here, and it is guarded by a pair of monsters.

“Don’t mind my Diamond Dogs.” She pats one on its stony arm. “You get a pet if you save the world, you know.”

I can’t remember if the same was true of Twilight Sparkle, but I decide not to argue with the mare who commands golems. The Diamond Dogs are almost as tall as an Alicorn and much more massive, hunched over far enough that their glittering gemstone claws almost touch the ground. Two pairs of coal-black eyes turn my way, but the golems offer no resistance as Twinkleshine ushers me into her office. It is well-furnished, has a nice view and a comfortable chair to sit in while I ask her questions, a definite upgrade from the Ponyville daughter bank.

Less than two weeks ago the world’s economy teetered on the brink of collapse…again. This time it was a financial crisis. How would you explain what happened?

I wouldn’t.

Pardon?

I will not tell you what caused the financial crisis.

Um…why not?

Financial crises are old, possibly older than the Bank itself if we follow the few, knotted and burnt threads of history remaining to us. But all it really means is that the financial institutions are not doing well, at least the loudest and most obvious ones. They declare the crisis, not us. You can fake a financial crisis, you know, if the financial “leaders” (she makes hoofquotes) are willing to run about like chickens. No offense to any critters.

[Out of sensitivity to the concerns and welfare of critters, a remark about chickens has been edited. —Ed]

Is that what happened?

No.

Aha! If you’re willing to say no, then I can go down the list asking every possible explanation until you can’t say no.

Fine, do that. List every possible explanation.

(She looks at me bored and slightly disgusted. She has played intellectual games before, she seems to be saying, chess and greater, and here I am challenging her to a game of tic-tac-toe and immediately connecting three of her own marks for her. I find myself apologizing, feeling like the colt I was back in school when I accidentally sat next to the popular filly at lunch.)

How were the concerns of the affected financial institutions addressed?

The usual method. (Singing) Lend at high interest on all good securities! (Laughs)

What about more direct aid?

Aid? We’re a bank; we don’t aid anypony. Only, like, fillies think we’re trying to save businesses. The businesses will save themselves or die, and good riddance.

(The untouchable scorn in her voice amazes me; she is so effortlessly above other ponies it can only be the result of great effort. I have the strangest desire to ask her to a dance in a squeaky voice and be summarily rejected.)

When something totally bad happens, somepony’s got to be worse off, or what’s the point of calling it a bad thing? If the financial institutions, like, need to be held up by my bank, then the financial institutions don’t work.

On the personal side of things, how do you feel about running Equestria’s biggest daughter bank? You were a student only months ago.

Economics is a meritocracy.

So the ‘crats would say. How did you convince a bunch of stallions in the financial sector, most of whom are old enough to be your father, that you’re the boss?

For the first time since the interview started, she looks actually interested in answering.

Lunch tables.

Lunch tables…?

I sat them in lunch tables. A table, B table, C table, and so on. It was a, like, requirement of the new bank if they wanted to eat on Fourth and Wall. I put a chart on the wall, names to seats.

They obeyed?

(Laughs) We had a lot of fun at A table. And why would somepony from B table want to sit with C table ponies? See, I picked it so everypony knew the A table ponies were a little smarter, a little more successful than the B table ponies. And B table ponies were a little younger, a little more ambitious than C table ponies. Don’t even ask about the losers at D table.

Sometimes an A table pony would find her name on a seat at B table. Who knows why? Never a lot of them all at once, only one, maaaaybe two. I don’t know what kinds of conversations they’d have with their new table, but I can’t imagine it was very fun. Oh, and of course, sometimes the tables would be full.

I was the one constant. I was the only one who wasn’t afraid. They didn’t fear me. They clung to me like shipwrecked ponies clinging to driftwood in a storm.

If the tables were full, where did ponies eat?

(Smiles) The, like, janitors told me they kept finding food and plates dumped in the bathroom disposals. Who knows?

You are evil.

Thank you.

Why do you think your first instinct was control, rather than, say, friendship?

Hm?

She looks at the clock; we have at least fifteen minutes scheduled left.

I have time for one more question.

Do you wear those fluffy boots in winter that are so popular with fillies?

Are you seriously a reporter?

[Not in the presence of a pretty mare, apparently. —Ed]

Author's Notes:

Incidentally, when Twinkleshine was just a filly, she heard a voice coming from a copy of The Theory of Interest in the library and ended up reading it.