Four staccato sneezes were followed by a hearty amount of cursing as Claribelle scrambled in her pocket for a handkerchief. The storeroom was full of dust, having not been cleaned in living memory. And now, it was her job and her punishment to go through the files, cleaning and organizing as she went.

In a way, it was a relief. No more stupid meetings with impossible tasks and a boss who didn't understand that demanding something didn't automatically make it possible. On the other hand, being up to your ankles in dust and mildew wasn't fun for anygnome, and the resentment she felt towards her management was taken out in a myriad small ways in the storage room as she slammed down boxes, rifled roughly through folders, and generally handled ancient documents with as little care as possible without actively destroying them.

There was almost no filing system to speak of. The best there was were date ranges written on the outside of each storage box, going back to the founding of Ponyville.

All the while Clari was working, she was grumbling in frustration. She'd worked so hard to advance in this stupid organization, and now she was doing work that no gnome anywhere could consider even remotely important. There hadn't even been a head of Records or any staff in decades, which meant that she was now a department of one. As if that weren't enough by itself, her memory kept replaying the dressing-down she'd gotten after her outburst at the Planning Session meeting.

Not to mention that she was getting her outfit just filthy.

Clari spent a few more minutes flinging boxes around and taking inventory before she stalked off. She returned a half-hour later with a rolling, portable table, several file cabinets, and an entire department's worth of office supplies.

Demeaning busy-work or not, if she was going to be stuck organizing and auditing the CMAA's filing system, she was going to do it right.

"Now, once again: what's the most important rule?"

"Umm..." Tinseltoes tilted his head back and scrunched up his face in earnest concentration. "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes?" he ventured.

"What? No!" Glumm took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Stay..?" he prompted, and Tinseltoes beamed as he got it.

"Stay inside the cloaking field!" he crowed.

"That's right!" Glumm said, relieved. "That's within three paces of me at all times. We can't allow the ponies to see or hear us, remember?"

"Right, Uncle!"

"All right, now. That one up there, that's one of the three banes of my existence, Sweetie Belle. She's currently at 60% epiphany and rising slowly."

"What's she doing?" Tinseltoes asked, peeking over his uncle's shoulder.

"Looks like she's hanging a bunch of items out on a clothes line," Glumm replied. "Probably doing some chores for her sister."

They watched the happily humming filly for a short while longer.

"So, what now?" Tinseltoes asked.

"We wait."

"For what?"

"For her to reach at least 80% epiphany, and then we set up the Cutie Cannon."

"And then what?"

"And then we wait until she hits 100% epiphany, and we fire the Cutie Cannon."

"And then what?"

"And then we go back to the office and fill out a ton of paperwork."

"And then—"

"Look, kid," Glumm interrupted, "this will all go much faster if you keep your mouth shut and just wait patiently."

"Oh, okay," Tinseltoes said, looking abashed. They waited for a few more minutes. "What's her epiphany score now?"

Glumm sighed. It was turning out to be an even longer day than he'd expected.

"Ah, Sarabonn," Tiddwiddle said, putting aside his latest case and grinning hugely. "Do come in!"

"Thanks, Tidd," Sara said, easing her way into the cluttered office of the Cutie Mark Counselor. "I'm here about the Quarter-end check-in meeting for the pre-meeting."

Tiddwiddle sighed, feeling vexed. "And here I thought I'd neatly dodged that particular problem," he said. "I'd given your subordinate... er..."

"Claribelle," Sara supplied, her face as rigid as a mask.

"Her, yes. I was quite clear to her that I wouldn't be able to attend."

"She's been... reassigned. I wanted to try and convince you myself."

"Ah, I see," Tidd said, leaning back in his overstuffed office chair. "I hope you understand, I'm so very busy these days. My office and agents are currently handling the highest volume of newly-deployed cutie marks in recent history. Taking time out for a meeting to discuss a pre-meeting isn't an effective use of my time at the moment."

"It's of critical importance that we have all of our ducks in a row before we have the actual meeting," Sara urged. "Come on, Tidd. We go way back. Do this for me, please?"

Tiddwiddle gaped in surprised as Sarabonn apparently had a stroke, right there in his office. Then he realized that she was trying to flutter her eyelashes at him, an activity that looked severely out of place on her stern face, with its severe hair style and minimalist makeup. It was as if a pike had popped up out of the water to blow kisses at him. With a shudder, he tried to shake off that image and answer her, before it got any worse.

"It's not that I want to make your life more difficult," Tidd said, trying to sound reasonable and gentle, and unknowingly coming across as condescending instead. "It's just that... well, I have so much work here to do. But!" he said, urgently, as it looked like Sara might try the puppy-dog eyes, which likely would have given him nightmares for a week. "But, I'll see what I can do. I'll have my assistant see if she can clear up some time on my calendar."

"Thank you," Sara said, once again all business. "That's all I ask."

She said her goodbyes and was almost out the door when Tiddwiddle stopped her with a question.

"By the way, this Claribelle. Just out of curiosity, where was she reassigned?"

Clari, through sheer determination and pluck, had actually managed to get on his calendar more than once to talk with him. Of course, he'd dropped those appointments as soon as he'd seen them, but anygnome with that kind of tenacity was a gnome he liked to keep track of.

"Oh, just busywork," Sara said dismissively. "I've got her going through and auditing the records in the storeroom."

If Sara had been paying attention, she might have notice Tiddwiddle's face go from a jolly, flushed red to an ashen, waxy pale in two heartbeats.

"Oh," Tiddwiddle said shakily. "You don't say?"

A short time later, a voice piped up, saying, "What's the percentage now?"

"Sixty two percent."

A few more minutes passed, and the first voice sounded out again, "How about now?"

"Still sixty two, kid."

After a few more minutes, there was the sound of young gnome lungs inflating in preparation to ask a question.

"Still sixty two and will you stop asking!" Glumm shouted.

Organization and planning. Those were the two keys to make any job reasonably easy. Clari smiled in satisfaction at her current set up.

The first thing she had done was scrap the old tracking system. That was so last century. These days, everything should be cross-referenced and indexed, rather than just stuffed into a box and quietly ignored.

The second thing she'd done was to pull out all of the boxes in the room and stack them in the hallway, then clean the floor and all of the shelves, in order to give herself a reasonably dust-free environment. And now she was retrieving a single box at a time from the hallway, cataloging the contents, labeling the folders, and finally entering names, dates, cutie marks and assigned personnel from each case onto a single spreadsheet.

Granted, this was adding a considerable amount of work to the whole process, but if there was anything Claribelle loved, it was paperwork. She was in her element now, happily sorting through and recording things. When she was done, a gnome would be able to simply look at her index, find whatever information they wanted, and immediately know what file in what box to look in to get that information.

It was funny, really. She'd worked so hard to get ahead in the cutthroat world of meetings and agendas, and here she was, happier than she'd been in a long time, just focusing on a job that any other gnome would have considered beneath them. Maybe she'd been focusing on the wrong things all this time?

Humming happily to herself, she went and put her most recently indexed box back on the shelf. As she was pushing the box in, though, something caught her eye: a stray folder, stuck outside of its box, wedged and crinkled behind the shelves. She carefully removed it and glanced at the contents.

Hmm... this is pretty recent, she thought, flipping through the folder. Inside were pictures of an adorable little blank-flanked earth pony filly, along with her designated cutie mark, and the Counselor's notes for that particular case: Subject is from a wealthy family, but shows signs of early maturity and generosity. It is expected that subject's epiphany will involve kindness and a giving spirit towards those ponies less fortunate than she is.

"Well, I guess that explains the cutie mark. She must be some sort of princess among ponies, or something." Clari said. "Well, I suppose I'd better put you off to one side until I find your home, little folder!"

Eventually, she'd come across the box that this folder belonged to, and she'd get it back where it belonged. For now, Clari just stuck Diamond Tiara's folder under her table for the moment and got back to work.