"The Moneysisters Go For A Ride"
By Mr_Sympathy (https://pastebin.com/u/Mr_Sympathy)

URL: https://pastebin.com/hCuW4Spm
Created on: Tuesday 3rd of October 2017 05:21:57 PM CDT
Retrieved on: Saturday 31 of October 2020 11:01:26 PM UTC


"What if we...found pirate treasure?" asked Penny, looking over at her sister. This HAD to be the one. Pirate treasure is free! All you need is someone who's good at swimming to dive down and get it.
Dollar was not impressed. She didn't even have to take her eyes away from whatever she was sketching to completely dismantle the idea.
"How do you even look for something like that? Check the whole ocean floor manually? You know that's over eighty percent of the planet, right? Plus you've got to deal with the water pressure, the possibility that a descendant of the pirates might claim it, and all the horrible monsters down there..."
"Okay, no treasure." Penny was not deterred. "We could...buy up all the cheese in town and sell it back to everybody at ten times the old price!" This one, she was sure. It was shrewd! It was cunning! And people weren't going to just not eat cheese!
"Penny that's illegal. And immoral." said Dollar, reminding herself that children often had underdeveloped senses of right and wrong like that. But she wouldn't let her sister be cruel without meaning to if she could help it. "Even if we did something like that, everybody in town would riot, and come to our house with torches and pitchforks."
"OKay," said Penny, determined to not let it end there. "What if we...built like a really big thing, and charged people money to see it? We could sell t-shirts, and-"
Dollar didn't even let her finish. "We'd have to compete with *that*." she said, pointing out the carriage's window at a giant sphinx that some other enterprising millionaire had airlifted from some faraway desert. "Plus we'd have to make absolutely, positively sure that people couldn't see it for free, so there'd have to be a huge fence around it, and we couldn't let people take pictures. And once everybody's seen it once, we won't make any more money, but we'd be stuck paying taxes on the land the big thing is on. Plus if somebody opens a scrying window to the big thing, we're completely out of luck."
Penny didn't have an answer for that, so she stewed, crossing her arms, and summoning a scowl to her cute, little face.
Dollar didn't like making her sister feel like that, even though all she had done was be honest and sensible.
"But...you could open a school to teach people how to scry and do all other kinds of magic." she said, "Private schools make plenty of money." There were, after all, sensible ways to make money.
"No way." said Penny, "Schools are lame. Everybody knows that." That sort of response was to be expected. After all, Penny was a child, and every child knows with absolute certainty that school is the worst thing in the whole world. Dollar, by contrast, was all grown up, which meant she had been a child once, and for quite some time, so she also knew with absolute certainty that school was pretty terrible.
Things were silent. Dollar kept working on her drawing. A line here, a circle there, a- The carriage jerked upwards as its wheels hit a bump in the road. Dollar's pen skipped across the paper, and she frowned. She put the pad down and turned to stare out the window.
Penny frowned at this, and took the pen and paper from her sister's lap. The image's secrets were revealed to her - it was Dollar, as a great, big stallion, complete with a monocle and top hat. And the offending pen - which would surely apologize if it had the faculties to do so - had drawn a line right across his face.
But Penny knew what to do. She set to work, and with a few curves and other details, that line became a big, bushy mustache, lying on stallion-Dollar's head like a cat lying on the one patch of carpet where sunlight falls.
She handed it back to Dollar. "Here! I fixed it!"
But before Dollar could respond to this reminder of Penny's ever-blooming optimism, Penny kept talking, "I guess we don't some crazy scheme to make money anyway. We're already rich."
The carriage was, after all, just arriving at their estate, dominated as it was by a splendid mansion that promised from the very bottom of its heart to keep standing for years and year and years to come.
"I just...like to feel like I'm helping. You and everyone else helps me all the time, so I..." she trailed off.
Dollar tried to think up the right words for her feelings as the carriage's driver came around to open the door for his two passengers. It took her a moment. She was never good with words.
She decided to buy some time with a hug. It seemed to do the trick.