Beige burned into the eyes of our heroine as she sat in the office of her boss. The window curtains were rolled up just enough to catch a glimpse of the hot asphalt below. Oh, how our heroine longed to to throw herself out the window and plummet towards the asphalt below!

And then stretch out her wings and fly into the sky, of course. While Jotter hated her job, she didn’t hate it that much.

Jotter’s hooves clapped against the floor as her superior looked over some papers, strown about his mahogany desk. He sighed, twirling a pen in his mouth (it was quite an impressive feat, especially doing both at once!) as he sank back into his office chair. He removed the pen from his mouth and looked at Jotter. “Let’s talk about your performance lately.”

Our heroine stood up as straight as a building. Unless said building was the Leaning Tower of Pizza, of course; for as many toppings they had managed to put on that pizza, that delectable circle of Italianeigh goodness (if your idea of ‘delectable’ is thawed-out parmesan on stale dough, anyways), the engineers who built it failed to take into account how windy the area was. It tipped over in a light breeze. It would have fallen onto its side if a still-frozen anchovy hadn’t fallen off and provided something for the downwards delicacy to prop itself up on.

Her superior looked at her. “Why are you standing? You can sit down if you want. You just were a minute ago.”

Jotter looked down at the carpet and, sure enough, all four of her hooves were planted firlmy on the ground. “Oh!” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

Her boss slowly turned his attention away from her and to a paper laying on his desk. “Your productivity has really been plummeting lately. Even with all that night shift work you’ve been taking, you’re still underperforming. We have Great Expectationstm for all our employees here at Fillername Incorportated, and you’re not meeting them. What gives?”

Jotter bit her lip. “Well…”



“Come on, Jotter. You need to leave now. They’re about to turn off the building’s power.”

“Shut the hell up! I’m about to hit 400 trillion cookies!”



“… I’ve been double, triple, and quadruple checking everything to make sure it’s all correct. Yes. That is exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“And that takes you your entire work day to do?”

“… I’m very thorough?”

Boss Horse held up a paper to his face and adjusted his glasses. “I mean, come on. You’ve only turned in one 2674-D in two weeks, and even then, it was only yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda…”

Jotter scratched her chin. I really should buy some more interdimensional portals. Those give mad cookies. Hm.

“Jotter, are you even listening to a word I’m saying?”

She jumped in her seat. “Yes! 100%! Totally!”

“What am I talking about?”

“… the socioeconomic collapse of the Sovneighet Bloc?”

Boss Horse raised an eyebrow, and then shrugged. “I guess you really were paying attention. I just think that they got too big for them to handle, especially when they had such a powerful enemy in the first world. Couldn’t handle it all at once.”

Jotter nodded. “Yeah. Hey, boss?”

“Yes?”

“Can I quit? Like, my job?”

“I’ve been waiting for this day my entire life.”

---

Jotter nodded to a waitress when said waitress asked Jotter if she wanted another whiskey. Kicking the previous nineteen glasses off the table, she put a cigarette into her mouth and held a lighter up to the end. The flame danced at the end of the cigarette, but didn’t light it.

“What in the… why won’t it light?”

Boss Horse sighed. “Maybe because it’s a fork?”

Jotter looked at the mini-trident and pondered it for a moment. “Oh.” Her brow furrowed. “Wait. When did you get here, Boss Horse?”

“I’ve been with you the whole time. I’ve been sitting here for…” —he checked his weird circle-thingy with lines on it—“… two and a half half-hours.”

“Oh.” Jotter yawned as the waitress set her latest martini on the table. Or was it a shot of whiskey? Jotter shrugged and downed it in a single gulp. Whatever. Alcohol is alcohol. Alcohoooool. Aaaaalcohol? “Sorry for not noticing you.”

“That’s fine. I could care less,” said Boss Horse as he downed his thirty-ninth shot of tequila. “Truth be told, I don’t even know what an hour is anymore. All I know is that it’s wavy.”

“How wavy do you mean?”

“Like, really wavy.”

Jotter slapped her cheek. “That’s pretty wavy!”

“The waviest, maybe.”

Just then, a butterfly waved on her shoulder. “I have waved on your shoulder to wave you a very important message, Jotter.”

“What is it, magic butterfly?”

“First, that’s MAGIC BUTTERFLY to you, mortal. Second, I have to wave you that you’re destined to be really great at playing the stocks. The Gods of Stock have Great Expectationstm for you, so wave over there right now and start playing.” The MAGIC BUTTERFLY waved a wad of thousand-bit bits (how do you wad gold coins, anyways? That’s a pretty wavy strategy.) onto the counter. “Take these fat stacks and go start.”

“Yes! I will do as you ask, magic butterfly!”

“Ahem.”

“Oh, sorry. I will do as you ask, MAGIC BUTTERFLY.”

“That’s more like it! But, seriously? There’s no need to yell. We’re indoors.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry, MAGIC BUTTERFLY.”

“It is fine, my child. Now go! We’ve dragged this conversation on far too long! We can only hope to fill the void left by the absence of your total greatness at stocks by mere conversation.” With that piece of emotional and inspirational wisdom, the magic butterfly—

Wait, what? Oh, right. Sorry. Ahem. With that, the MAGIC BUTTERFLY flew out the door.

“I know where we need to go now!” Jotter exclaimed.

---

“That’ll be fourteen bits, please.”

Jotter reached into her wallet to find the bits to pay for the amazing meal she was about to consume. She tossed a ten at the acne-ridden cashier manning (stallioning?) the drive-thru window and dug around for a few ones or a five. “Can you make change?”

“Not since the spaghetti incident.”

“I’m not in the mood for tropes tonight.”

“No, I’m serious. It was really bad and it very much involved spaghetti.”

Jotter shrugged. “Whatever, Carl.”

“My name’s not Carl.”

“It is now! Here, catch!” Jotter threw four bits at Eugene.

“My name isn’t Eugene!” said Walter as he caught the bits in his mouth. Very unsanitary practice, that. That’ll hurt them in their health inspection.

“Sorry, Mickey!” said Jotter as she and Boss Horse drove away with their double hayburgers (hold the lettuce, of course). “WE’RE OFF TO WAVE THE STOCKS!”

Just then, Smithy’s boss came up behind him and patted him on the back. “You can’t always expect people to remember your name, George. Those are some pretty Great Expectationstm you’ve got there. People aren’t always going to remember your name.”

“That’s not my name.”

“I know,” said Stanley’s boss, as he wrapped a strand of spaghetti around Matt’s neck. “I know that you’re actually a Sovneighet spy out to destroy us all!” he shouted as he drop-kicked Greg to the floor.

“Таковы мои бананы!”

---

Jotter rubbed her nose with her hoof and looked up at the screen. Hundreds upon hundreds of abbreviated company names met her eyes, their adjacent numbers beaming down statistics about rises and falls, twists and turns, greens and reds.

She nudged Boss Horse with an elbow. “Hey, let’s put some money into this company here, eh?” She pointed to a startup called ‘Fillername Incorporated’.

Vaguely familiar.

“Sounds good to me,” said Boss Horse. He tapped a few buttons on a tablet and set it back on their table. “Done.”

Jotter nodded and looked back up on the screen. Thousands upon thousands of other stockplayers had come, here to either cash in or bust out on their predictions. Over to her left, a stallion jumped high into the air, shouting the loudest “yahoo!” Jotter had ever heard in her life. To the right, a lone stallion’s sobs rocked his body as his tablet fell to the floor, displaying a giant red “0” on the screen. The screen hit the floor and shattered into a thousand pieces.

Somewhere, a mare and her cronies laughed at this amateur, who had put his heart and soul into his predictions, only for it to fail miserably.

Jotter frowned.

Later that same hour, Fillername Incorporated lost an investor.

---

Jotter rolled around the last of her scotch in a tumbler and shot it down the back of her throat. It burned going down, but it was the good kind of burn. The kind that made you think.

Her ears perked up as the MAGIC BUTTERFLY gently landed on the table in front of her. “What happened?” it probed. “Why did you leave?”

Jotter leaned back. “Did you tell that stallion to go there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

The butterfly raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

The butterfly flittered onto Jotter’s shoulder and drew a breath. “I thought he had it in him. He showed promise.”

“You were wrong.”

“I was, yes. I’ll admit, maybe I expected a little too much.”

“What did you expect of me?”

“Success.”

“Why?”

“Because everyone can succeed.”

Jotter snorted. “There’s not enough success to go around for that.” She looked down at the ground. “What do you do when everyone succeeds? Can you call that success anymore?”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“Success implies… something greater. As if you’ve risen above the circumstances to really make something of yourself. Of course, we all expect ourselves to succeed. It’s what we want, right? To succeed?”

The butterfly slowly nodded. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“Take, for example, that stallion. He expected great things, right? Money, power, influence. Go to the stocks, play your cards right, and boom! It’s that simple, right?” She bit her lip. “You told me that the Gods of the Stocks had expectations. What were they?”

The butterfly tapped its chin. “Let’s see… For starters, they expected that you’d make quite a bit of money your first day. Maybe buy a nice car, house, clothes.” It paused. “I think they certainly expected you to stay in long enough to see.”

Jotter tapped her chin. “What did they base these expectations off of?”

“The other people, of course.”

“What other people?”

“The other gods!”

“And therein lies the problem.”

“What do you mean? Why not base expected success off the already successful?”

“There’s not enough of it to go around. The gods have been doing this for years. They know the ins and outs. Most of them were here long before we all were. We’re mere moths to the flame, but they are the tinder.

“I don’t know the first thing about stocks. I had no idea where to even begin, but I figured that if all these other people were here, they had just as good a chance as I did. So, I placed a few bets, watched some others do their thing, started to play around. I thought I had the hang of it after a while. But I didn’t. None of us did. We were just… unexpected players in a game that looked fun, but we didn’t know how to play. I just wish someone told us how to play.”

“It’s your fault for not learning the rules beforehand.”

“It would have been nice to know there were any rules! When you told me to go for it, you made it sound like I already knew everything I needed. Did that stallion know everything? Was he prepared?”

“No, but he knew what he was getting into. We all know!”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“The ones who have been here long enough to know. The experienced. The great.”

“That stallion wasn’t one of them, and we both know that.”

The butterfly sighed. “Will you just say your point and be done with it?”

Jotter let her head sink into the chair. “You can’t play the game when you don’t know the rules, so why should you expect great play?”

“What do you want me to do, then? Tell you that you’re doing great?”

“No. I want you to tell me that I’m going to need more practice. I need a trainer, not a fan club.”

They both sat in silence for a moment.












The butterfly coughed. “Hrmph. I have places to be.” As it took off towards the door, it glanced back over to Jotter. “But I’ll think about what you said, even if you are drunk.” It opened the door, flew through it, and shut it.

Jotter smiled. “What’d you expect from a failure?”

And then

she

was

finally

alone.