But at least they didn't hatch and create a parasitic mall
The stallion had never been particularly fond of winter. Freezing air which was scheduled and regulated, with every degree determined in advance, remained cold. And as he'd aged, he found that cold sinking deeper into his body, with the midpoint of his life turning it into something which reached the bones. All things considered, having a local weather coordinator who occasionally slept through her temperature-dipping assignments would have been a benefit if it wasn't for the rather more alert presence of the rest of the team. And of course, there was snow. Sneaking onto a pony's property was hard enough without adding in the crunch of snow underhoof.
The season did bring one benefit: any day beyond equinox and Wrap-Up would have seen him conducting early-morning operations under full view of Sun -- but winter allowed him to use those hours for moving in the dark. Not that it helped all that much: Moon was about half-full. It was enough to help him see his target, but also threatened to reveal his presence to anypony who happened to look outside at just the right moment. A brown coat wasn't good for blending in against too many things, and the limited possibilities for natural camouflage certainly didn't include snow. And the lights were already on within the nearby house: even with her crop asleep until spring, the occupant kept a farmer's hours: up too early, in bed too late.
There was a shadow moving behind the closed kitchen curtains. He was keeping a very close eye on that shadow.
But it has to be now. This is going to be my only opportunity for moons. I may not get out here again until it's nearly summer, and by the time that happens, things could be so much worse...
Another hoofstep. Snow crunched. Of course it crunched. There hadn't been any need for the owner to plow a path all the way to his target, which meant there was going to be a lot more crunching once he got it moving. Was there any chance that she would go deeper into the house? Might she think the sounds were being produced by animals -- no, probably not, especially not once the squeaking got involved. She'd left things in a state which was seemingly guaranteed to create at least one high-pitched squeal, and probably at the exact moment before he stepped off the property.
Still... he had to try.
One slow hoofstep at a time, with cold soaking into his skeleton, he approached the target. It was full, of course. Naturally it was full, and only part of that was from snow. It meant he had to slowly extract every last occupant, all of which were covered in chill white, have tiny flakes of foul-tasting ice melting on his tongue, and then he had to set everything down in the snow in a way which only sounded like an explosion of frozen popcorn from a single hoofwidth away.
Piece after piece, all the way to the bottom. He was starting to shiver now, and only some of that was from the cold. He kept checking the window, and the shadow would be at the left edge. Right. Center. Still in the kitchen, and the target was nearly empty. The true cacophony would probably begin at the first moment of movement, with her well within hearing range. And yet it was his only chance.
He got into position, carefully moving around the discarded items. Forced shoulders into the proper setting, planted his forelegs against trampled-down snow. One more check of the window --
-- no shadow.
"What are you doing? That's my property!"
He sighed as he turned his head, bringing light blue tired eyes into the illumination which streamed through the open door.
"Actually, Goldie," Mr. Rich wearily said, "I'm completely certain it's mine."
The carrot farmer blinked.
"Oh," Golden Harvest eventually said, which struck Mr. Rich as a fair choice of initial utterance for a pony who was working from a pretty scant list.
He nodded. A long moment of silence settled across the snow.
"I meant to bring it back," the carrot farmer finally declared. "I just --" Which was when the internal search hit the bottom of the paper. "-- things."
"Things," Mr. Rich tried. There was a certain degree of futile valiance in the attempt.
"Things," the mare stated.
He briefly glanced down at all the farming implements he'd removed. Back up to green eyes.
"...things?" she tried, mostly for lack of all other viable options.
Mr. Rich adjusted his shoulders again, turned away from her.
"So if you'll excuse me?"
"Yes," Goldie tried. "Of course. I -- well, it's a good thing you came by, really. Because that means I didn't have to -- well, it's certainly yours, and... um... I've been meaning to order a -- tiller?"
His mind said really? His voice went with "That's more of a specialty item than I usually carry, Goldie."
"But you know where to get the best ones, surely!" she declared with desperate brightness. "You could order it for me! And of course it's past Hearth's Warming, it's the slow time and I just thought, Barnyard Bargains, it's the oldest store in town, it could surely use one extra --"
"-- drop by during business hours and talk to my purchasing department," Mr. Rich suggested. "They'll do what they can."
"Oh." A long pause found itself silhouetted in the door frame. "Thank -- you?"
"So if there's nothing else," Mr. Rich said, "I have to get to work."
And with the farmer silently watching him, her face flush with both embarrassment and the pain of an unexpected purchase commitment, Mr. Rich towed the reclaimed shopping cart through the loudly crunching snow.
On one night when he'd been at his daughter's bedside, with her tired of hearing the stories which lined her bookshelves and his imagination frozen in a way that no snow could ever create because his mark was for envisioning product lines, he'd become desperate enough to weave dark beliefs into a tale. Mr. Rich had taken a deep breath, brought a touch of airiness to words which had originally been constructed out of pure frustration, and told Diamond where shopping carts came from. He'd told her how some of them grew from metal-laced trees, free for the picking to anypony who wandered by. Others grew out of the ground. More than a few simply materialized from the air itself, and presumably vanished the same way. He'd spun it all for her as a bedtime story, turning dark fantasies into fable until she fell asleep, and he'd staggered into the hallway wondering if he'd just done to her what so many ponies seemed to have accomplished on their own: created belief in every last tenth-bit of it.
Because the way that ponies treated shopping carts suggested nopony believed they would ever cost money.
As inventions went, pony shopping carts were decidedly imperfect. They were basically adapted versions of the more classic wooden hauling carts, scaled down in size so they would fit comfortably within a store's aisles, and that meant a pony typically stepped into the shoulder harnesses at the front and pulled the cart along behind them -- an arrangement which created several problems. Most ponies had to head-toss everything into the cart, which created some rather awkward landing positions. A cart puller would need to back up by a hoofstep and the pony behind them would get a cart in the snout. Nopony had eyes in their tail and the top of the cart was open to the air: it created opportunity for pegasi who were criminally inclined (or, around Hearth's Warming, just that desperate) to swoop a choice item for themselves.
Some unicorns pushed their carts along in front of them, using their fields. Glowing wheels indicated a cart which was fully under its user's control: accelerating ones were the sign of a pony who'd gotten distracted by a conversation and forgotten that there was a cart involved at all, much less the fact that her excitement over the latest gossip had just sped the thing up to a full gallop. (A frozen cart was typically the sign of a caster who'd forgotten that an empty vessel was well within their mass manipulation limit, and a full one -- wasn't.) Ponies of all three species had occasionally tried rearing up on their hind legs, bracing the fore against the cart, and pushing the thing along minotaur-style: for all but Lyra, the long-term assumption of the unnatural position typically ended with hooves slipping, a chin smacking into wood, and the extremely rare threat to sue Mr. Rich for the results of an action they'd taken of their own accord.
Carts collided. Carts went into shelves, displays, and ponies. And even for those who were careful with them, there was a simple fact in play: Barnyard Bargains was located near the center of Ponyville. The vast majority of Mr. Rich's customers lived at least a short trot away from the store, and some were much further out. And in every case, those ponies had to get their purchases home.
A very few parked their own, larger carts in front of the store, transferred the load from one to the other. A number of Ponyville's unicorns were capable of simply levitating everything home. Most of the rest just pulled the store's carts all the way to their own doors. And it was true that the majority of his customers brought them back on the next trip before starting the cycle all over again...
...but a shopping cart could be repurposed to haul gardening tools. Some were loaded up with fillies and colts for downhill races which typically ended with parents browsing through his First Aid section. They were suitable for storing junk or mixing grain or moving just about anything under Sun and they certainly didn't cost money...
Mr. Rich lost carts every moon. During the busier shopping seasons, it was every day. And he had a rather forceful option for getting them back, but asking the police chief to charge a good percentage of his customer base with theft felt like something which would be bad for business. Instead, he simply asked his employees to bring them back whenever they saw them and could manage the extraction in privacy, because to do so in public view often led to accusations of stealing being made by the original culprit. (The associated beatings about his employees' heads were optional. Unfortunately, it was a frequently utilized option.) And he performed more than a few retrievals himself, because he would never ask an employee to do something he wouldn't personally risk.
In this case -- he'd been heading out to the Apple farm. It was Granny Smith's birthday and Mr. Rich knew he would be stuck at the store for the entirety of the Sun-lit portion, but that never kept him from dropping his gift off on the doorstep under Moon. And then he'd been trotting away, going past the entrance to Goldie's lands, silvery light had illuminated a familiar shadow...
Moon after moon, ordering replacement carts. (He'd stopped ordering extra Please Return Your Carts signs two years into his management of the Ponyville franchise, as it had taken that long to give up on the hope that certain ponies would ever consider reading.) And contrary to the town's collective belief, they had a cost. It wasn't a particularly small cost, and it came with a frequently-repeated multiplier. He had to get that cost back, which meant increasing a few of his prices, and that led to customers grumbling as they considered picking up those items elsewhere, lost business which would still wind up being pulled home from the other stores in what had been his carts...
His family had built Ponyville's first store. Certain things came from that, and every last one was precious to him. Bringing back carts wasn't the smallest aspect for any of them.
In some ways, it could be looked at as part of the cost for doing business. But his employees understood the frustration, especially those whose bruises were still healing. They knew how much he wished for a solution to the problem, how dearly he longed for the day when the hunts would stop and every day saw each cart parked in its proper place. On those occasions when Mr. Rich did the hiring himself, he did so with extreme care, and it had produced a core of employees who cared about the business nearly as much as he did. That quality was precious to him, for it meant that they acted not from pure desire for salary and profit, but with care. Occasionally, even with something very close to love.
It was the heart of winter. Much like the farms, Barnyard Bargains was half-asleep, waiting for its time to come around again. The staff worked on orders for the spring, straightened shelves, tried out new display arrangements, took too many glances at the calendar as they wondered just when the next purchase-creating holiday would finally arrive. It was a period which gave most of his employees very little to do, and so it formed one of the best times for simply thinking. Making plans. Problem-solving.
They cared about the business, and they cared about him. His frustrations were theirs.
Afterwards, he did his best to remember that one had essentially acted out of love, especially during those frozen hours when they were all working overtime to help put the street back together.
He'd been away from the store for two days. The annual toy show had taken up the whole of the Björnvits Center, and so he'd spent the time in Canterlot accordingly, working in concert with that department's buyer -- and, for one precious post-school evening, Diamond, because if you truly wished to know what the hot plaything of next Hearth's Warming was going to be, there were far worse ponies to ask than the filly who would be playing with them. It left the flagship of the franchise pressed between the hooves of his employees for the entire duration, but he trusted them to keep things steady. Mr. Rich ran his business as something very far removed from a dictatorship, and that meant his most skilled had the authorization to make certain decisions on his behalf: customer relations, sales, payments, and purchasing. On the whole, he'd found allowing them to act without somepony constantly peering past their manes at all times generally worked out.
Mr. Rich expected the store to still be standing when he got back, and it was. He also expected the cart return stall in front to be populated by less than half of the full count, and that held true as well. (Some carts were stored outside Barnyard Bargains, with a secondary pickup area to the immediate inner right of the front doors. That section tended to run out first.) The tingle which ran across his fur as he went through the doorway, however, was something entirely new.
He frowned. Hooves backed up, carrying him through the initial blast from the heaters for a second time, which was no bad thing. The tingle registered just as his exposed tail began to pick up a fresh load of ice crystals.
A quick survey was taken of the area. Things were normal to the right. The left was perfectly fine. In fact, if not for the faintly green-glowing thin metal rod which was now suspended about three hoof-heights below his ceiling, the store would have pretty much been just as he'd left it --
"-- Mr. Rich!" Another blast of warm air hit his face, this time driven by the downbeat of quickly-descending wings, and another second found a beaming Jestine touching down in front of him. "Welcome back! Did you feel it? We just got it started up this morning! Of course, it was only installed last night. And worked on for the last two days, while the store was closed. I stayed to supervise!" A quick yawn. "But everypony could feel it, as soon as the spells were activated! I just wish the inventors had stayed around long enough for you to congratulate them --"
"-- Jestine?" he carefully tried, looking at the happy face of the young adult mare who'd so recently been promoted into Purchasing. (Following the post-Homecoming sale, the rank increase had at least been partially been for meritorious service in the face of combat.)
"Sir?"
"Is this," and he nodded upwards, towards the thin glowing rod, "associated with that?"
Her skin flushed under pale blue fur. "Oh. Um... yes, sir. I'm sorry." With happiness rapidly fading, "I'm sorry, I just -- we were all so excited, and I wanted to be the first pony to tell you --"
"-- it's all right," he gently interrupted, smile adding reassurance. "The store purchased something while I was in Canterlot. I recognize that." Something which had been set up in -- two days, during the closed hours? And she'd gotten it from inventors --
-- who hadn't stayed around.
There were several sayings associated with the original generations for new enchanted devices, and Mr. Rich was now completely certain Jestine had never heard of the most prominent one: first adopters get first explosions. Most convenience stores wouldn't touch the things, leaving the test sales for the most risk-taking of thaumaturgy shops. The majority of initial buyers tended to be the sort of ponies who would write the creator with suggestions for improvements and if they were lucky, their letter would be only moderately singed.
Somehow, he forced the smile to remain where it was. "So what is it? Some kind of new security device?"
"Well -- I guess you could call it that. Sort of," Jestine thoughtfully considered, still smiling. "But it's only meant to prevent one theft. It's for the carts, sir. It'll keep them from being taken!" A brief pause, too short to let the shock reach his face. "Well -- sort of. I mean, it won't keep them from being initially taken, because some of our customers still need to get things home. But it'll keep them from being claimed permanently." And with those happy purple eyes shining, "Sir -- it brings them home!"
Mr. Rich managed a slow breath. The actual oxygen gained seemed to stop just short of giving his shivering tail something to work with.
"I think," he reasonably tried, "I need a little more of an explanation."
Jestine's restored happiness didn't quite falter. It did, however, take a quick survey of the local audience before considering whether it was truly appropriate to the situation.
"We were -- all so happy, sir," she tentatively tried. "We were all happy for you... I started on cart detail, and... we all just thought..."
"I'm not upset, Jestine," he gently told her. "I just need to know exactly what you purchased. What it does, in detail. Who made it would also be helpful. And where they might be located, in case I need to ask them any questions." (His heart hoped they were close. His mind, which was operating with rather more in the way of experience, suspected they were long-gone.)
The mare took a slow breath.
"Well -- the carts were just enchanted. By the inventors. Attuned, I guess. I really don't -- well, the vocabulary they were kicking around, especially once the song started..." Feathers apologetically rustled. "I'm a pegasus, sir. I really don't keep up with unicorn advancements."
Song.
It took an effort of will to slam his vibrating tail against his hindquarters. "Still, I'm sure they explained the basics," he calmly went on, "or you wouldn't have found it worth purchasing."
Which triggered an enthusiastic nod. "You saw the rod, right?" (Which made him look up again, taking note of that exact shade of glowing green.) "Well, when a cart leaves the store, the rod sets off the spells inside that cart! Well -- it's the visible sign that the spells were triggered, because there's sort of an aura around the whole store. In case anypony smuggles a cart out the back. The rod's just the central focus. But the spells don't take effect immediately, of course, because ponies have to get home. It takes about a day, if the inventors aren't making things go faster for the demonstration."
"And after a day?" Patient. Calm. Mentally totaling up every tenth-bit which could be funneled into the emergency repair budget.
"First," Jestine declared, "the wheels lock. Wherever the cart is, it won't move. Not a hoofstep, not a tail strand -- unless somepony's pulling it back to the store. That's the only direction it'll go at all. And if they keep it for another day anyway, if they're using it as a planter or birdbath -- the next part of the spell starts. That's when the cart moves on its own, sir, homing in on the outer stall! It's a preset animation spell with aim! They come back to the store all by themselves! We'll never have to go searching or sneaking onto property or get beaten about the head with saddlebags again! Because some of those saddlebags are surprisingly heavy, sir." A brief pause. "I know Miss Rarity loves her gems and I've been saving up for one of her designs, but being hit in the ear with something ruby-encrusted sort of stings." And a longer one. "...sir?"
"What did the inventors look like?" He tried to make it sound like a completely casual question, and her worried expression informed him of the total failure.
"Well... they were both on the tall side. Very narrow hips, sir, narrower than I've seen before on stallions. They were both the exact same shade of robin's-egg blue, from what little I saw of their fur. They were very bundled up for the winter." With a faint note of wonder, "Both of them were actually wearing pants."
He'd had the grand total of the equation from the moment he glanced at the twisting figures, and every piece of data added now was just from a subconscious memory of a teacher who'd demanded that no matter how quick a pony was with their sums, they still had to show all the work. "Did they smell like anything?"
"...smell?" Jestine tried, with the word not quite at Diamond Dog level.
"Smell," Mr. Rich repeated.
She thought about it.
"Dye," she eventually said. "I think their clothing must have been fairly new."
Mr. Rich mentally reviewed his scratch sheet.
Green casting field. Two stallions. Narrow hips. Singing. Smelled like fur dye. Oh, and they managed to luck into meeting the one mare in Ponyville who's allergic to the mulling ingredients in apple cider and so generously covers multiple partial shifts while her co-workers take some extremely long lunch breaks in the fall.
They have an entire continent. They have every nation beyond Equestria, presuming they can sneak over the borders because they'd be arrested under warrant at any supervised crossing point. Why do they keep coming here?
But part of him knew that answer. It could be hard to give up on a business venture, no matter how hard -- and publicly -- you'd seen it fail. There was a certain degree of pride involved, that internal demand to prove yourself before those who'd watched you fall. That was how it was in business, and he imagined the same could easily apply to -- other enterprises.
Still... they did create that rolling cider press. And it worked --
No. It had partially worked.
"We do have to get a unicorn to recharge the central rod every so often," Jestine worriedly ventured. "But that shouldn't cost much, not compared to the cost of replacing all those carts... sir?" Because the last words had been addressed to his hard-pressed tail.
"I'd better go see about that, then," Mr. Rich told her, trotting towards the front doors.
"...sir?"
"I'm going to see a unicorn," Mr. Rich stated, "about the carts." And paused in his movements. "Jestine -- did they provide a way to turn the enchantments off?"
The silence gave the first part of the answer, and he glanced back in time to see the confusion. "Why would anypony create a way to turn a security spell off? That would let somepony take the carts again."
He swallowed.
"I'll be back as soon as I can," he told her. "Keep an eye on those carts."
"...sir?" It didn't get any less tremulous with repetition.
"They're first-generation devices, Jestine," he said as he went through the door, forcing his legs to work at a normal pace. "I'd bet the Cookery aisle on it. First-generation, because I've never read about them in any trade magazine or seen them at a show. First-generation is -- chancy. And I think I might know the inventors. So I'm going to go see a unicorn. Watch the carts, Jestine. Please."
"Am -- am I in trouble?"
The fear in her words hit him at the same instant as the cold.
She started on cart retrieval. We've all done cart retrieval. She's just the only one who wouldn't have known. If it had been anypony else coming up as the inventors, even for first-generation, I might have taken the chance myself.
But everything those two had done operated as a fraction of what was meant to be whole. Like a slice removed from an apple.
The doors began to close behind him, and he realized he'd waited too long before answering.
"No," he told her, just before they shut. And he held the casual trot right up until he got around the corner and out of sight, which was where the desperate all-out gallop began.
He'd gone to see a unicorn, and now the unicorn was trotting back with him. Unfortunately, it was a trot: she didn't have a teleport arrival point set up for the store, nor was there anything close which she was willing to trust. Additionally, she'd insisted on bringing a few reference texts, just in case they would be of any help. In this case, 'few' worked out to most of three shelves, some of which she'd loaded into her saddlebags, with the rest levitated in a field bubble. The ones which were actually pressing their considerable (and hardcover) weight against the slender body had a way of slowing the mare down.
Mr. Rich had been resisting the urge to race ahead and meet her at the store. He hadn't. In the event that something had gone wrong, it wouldn't have helped.
"But it could work," she uncertainly proposed. "I mean... animation spells are tricky: I've done a few, and -- well, I recommend keeping your field visible at all times, because having it as a hidden working tends to -- distort the spell." Twilight winced. "Oh. Right. You didn't -- and you can't -- um..."
"So you're saying it's at least theoretically possible?" He was trying to hold on hope, which wasn't easy when hope was expending most of its strength to wriggle its way out from between his teeth.
"Yes," Twilight nodded, and the book-filled bubble bobbed in time with the movement. "Actually, I've done some parallel research in the exact same department."
He glanced back at her. "Really?"
"For books," the librarian clarified. "I was thinking -- if the covers didn't open after the loan period ran out, and then the book -- well, I was really hoping to do something with dragon flame. Have the book teleport home. But that's still just theory, Mr. Rich. Animation would be a little easier, and the rod -- well, that's a central homing point. A signal to anything moving: come here. I think I can understand part of how that would operate, and I'll know more when I get a chance to feel what they did. But..."
The hesitation was an awkward one, her wavering expression uncertain of just what was appropriate for the situation. Even after so many moons in Ponyville, there were times when everypony had to be patient with her, and so Mr. Rich waited.
"...Mr. Rich," she finally said, "I don't want to insult you, or make you feel insulted. I don't want you to think I'm speaking over your head, or --" and the pain briefly had its way with her eyes "-- talking down to you. I know that when I start talking about magic, I can go into lecturing, really easily. I go past most ponies. Even with postgraduate students, I -- lose ponies. And -- you... you're..."
Speech and movement stopped at the same moment, with the field bubble miserably dipping towards the snow.
She was incredibly intelligent: he'd recognized that early on in her stay. But for some things, she was still limited. And so when dealing with Twilight, it was best to be patient. To let her, even in the face of potential emergency, proceed at her own pace. That was what you did when somepony was still trying to catch up to the herd. You waited, and you did your best to understand.
Sometimes, it was even possible to help.
"Twilight," he gently began, "I'm aware that I'm an earth pony. I know that I could read about your kind of magic for the rest of my life and none of the words would ever give me the feel of it. I don't have some of the vocabulary you use every day, and the same is probably true for the majority of unicorns. I'm not going to be insulted if you talk about workings around me, or to me. I'm going to listen, and I'll do my best to ask questions when they're needed. I can't cast. I can learn." He tilted his head toward her, watched as her cloud of breath dissipated into the air. "Please?"
Four long seconds, and then her eyes came up.
"Books can't see," Twilight said.
He couldn't cast, not her kind of magic. But he could think, and at the sound of those three perfect words, he nearly had the whole of it.
"If I used an animation spell on a book, all by itself, and told it to come back to the library, focusing on a central signal," she continued as his skin began to pale beneath cold fur, "I think -- it would try to take the most direct route. It would lift off the table, or a shelf, or tear through a saddlebag, and -- it would move in a straight line. Homing in. It wouldn't notice buildings, or trees. It wouldn't know anything was in the way. It would just go forward until it hit something, and then maybe it would keep hitting it. There might be a way to make it so the spell knew what the streets were like, give it some kind of map, or tell it to start by flying high -- but that still doesn't tell it what the inside of a house looks like, or how to get out. You'd have to give a book a sensorium, Mr. Rich. Proximity detection of solids, at the very least. And then it would have to act on whatever it's sensing. That's hard. A single command -- come home, search for an empty spot and hide -- that's not so bad. But to react to everything around it and keep reacting... you're getting close to making something which can think, if only about how not to crash into things. Creating true thought is supposed to be impossible, and just setting up the right series of automatic reactions..."
The horror had taken over both faces now.
"Mr. Rich," Twilight reluctantly said, "maybe they could have given the carts a map. But a map is just a bunch of empty lines showing roads. It doesn't -- it..."
Desperate eyes looked to him, and he recognized the signal. Her need to have somepony else say words she didn't want to voice.
"It shows the road," he finished for her. "But not the ponies using it."
She miserably nodded.
"Would they have thought of that?"
"They're really good," Twilight sadly said, "at coming up with half of an idea. And that doesn't even get into why they'd want to enchant shopping carts. I don't understand that, Mr. Rich. Maybe they were finally trying to do something legitimate, but I just don't understand why they'd start with --"
-- which was when the sound of the first crash reached them.
Four ears rotated, focused. And by the time the second crash began to echo through the streets, their owners were already moving.
Twilight's skill in splitting her attention had also been improving since her arrival in Ponyville, and so the only surprise which came from having her field envelop Mr. Rich just before yanking him out of the way came from the actual movement.
The onrushing cart crashed into the receiving stall. Then it backed up by two body lengths, rushed forward, and crashed again.
"...oh," Twilight softly said. "Oh no... Mr. Rich!"
It was possible, with some effort and a distracted caster, to push one's way out of a field bubble. The sounds coming from the interior of his store provided the incentive, earth pony muscles supplied the energy, and Mr. Rich hit the snow-coated ground at full gallop, getting through the front doors and reaching the interior before Twilight could even think about trying to keep pace.
A distant part of him considered that she probably would have reacted the same way if the tree had been at risk. The majority took over in time to send his body lunging off to the left, just before the next cart would have hit him.
Green flashed above his head, and carts moved. One of them was racing down the Toys aisle, and the foal who'd been sitting inside it was treating the movement as just one more game, albeit one which the screaming parent trying to follow would never buy. That mother was desperately trying to catch up, but the cart was accelerating for the endcap display faster than she could gallop, there was no time --
-- pale blue feathers blurred, and Jestine swooped the foal out of the cart a split-second ahead of the impact.
"Sir!" she screamed over the freshest din, which had just been produced by a fast-crashing doll display added to a flash-crying child. "We can't stop them! We can't --" and with tears in her own eyes, "-- I'm sorry...!"
His entire staff was on the sales floor, including ponies who only ventured out of their offices under protest or, more often, under snout prod. Burma was in the Sports aisle and much to his lack of surprise, the mare in charge of coming up with the store's best promotional ideas had just gone through the direct lightning strike of another brainstorm -- even if it took a moment to recognize that the result had been something other than shocked stupidity. At first, it seemed as if she was idiotically charging directly towards an oncoming cart, head low, body starting to twist sideways as the moment of collision rapidly approached --
-- she dropped, and the cart hit a body with the approximate positioning and huddled shape of a inverted ditch. The wood flipped, skidded a few body lengths down the aisle before coming to a stop with spinning wheels pointing towards the air.
"They can't move when they're upside down!" a gasping, wincing, and bruised head of Advertising got out. "Flip them!"
It was a plan. It also wasn't as easy as it sounded. Invoice didn't have the field strength to casually lift a cart, and pulling the front end sharply down didn't do enough. P.R. tried to work from overhead, but she couldn't get her mouth into alignment for a grip, not with the way the carts were veering about. And all the while, customers screamed (although the majority were doing their best to help) and children were frightened as green flashed overhead and just kept flashing...
...which was when Twilight reached the interior, and promptly lost a few seconds to staring.
"Mr. Rich!" she gasped. "This is --"
"-- can you stop it?"
Her eyes went up, found the rod. A desperate gaze moved across the store.
"I think -- I think the aura you told me about is fluctuating!" Twilight shouted, trying to get her voice heard over the din. "A cart left the area, it registered the departure, and now the aura is changing size! It's unstable, it's shifting all over the store! It moves over the carts and they react like they've been gone too long, they try to home in, but the aura is changing and they don't have a true central target --"
There were times when you had to be patient with Twilight: when feelings were involved, when something emotionally complicated enough to justify a scroll was under way. This wasn't one of those times.
Mr. Rich was patient with his employees, as much as he could be. Careful, whenever he had to be. As reasonable as the situation allowed. But he was also a parent, and that meant there were times when he looked at a young mare and recognized a moment when he had to push.
"What can you do?"
Twilight blinked.
"Too many carts!" she sped through the words. "Can't field-effect that many targets at once, not when they're everywhere and mobile! Too much going on! Don't understand the workings well enough to counter! Too many carts and --"
Her eyes went up again. There was a pinkish flare of light.
It would have been appropriate for the moment to have been followed by one of absolute silence. Instead, several aching ponies groaned, and one recently-impacted shelf chose that exact second to majestically fall over.
Mr. Rich looked around, regarded hurting staff, injured customers, and a weeping pegasus. Saw damaged and broken merchandise, then disregarded that part and went back to the ponies, several of whom were already being approached by his employees, all offering help. And finally, he looked at Twilight, whose field was slowly lowering the sundered halves of green-flashing metal.
As he watched, the last of the familiar hue surged, threw off a final group of sparks, and vanished. Dull grey metal pieces clanked onto the floor.
"-- one rod," Twilight finished.
Thankfully, it was much more cleanup than triage. There were injuries, but the worst of them required nothing more than bandaging (and rather than just wait for help to arrive, he readily sacrificed the store's medical supplies). There were also a few mutters about lawsuits, but he told his staff just who he believed the inventors had been, scowling employees passed the information on, and angry customers reflected on the portions of Equestrian law which stated that just about everything which could be traced to a first-generation device had to be legally brought to the creators. But there were very few of those mutters to begin with, for Mr. Rich's family had just about been in the settled zone since the beginning. His family had built the first store. He was as fair as he could be: never gouged, never took advantage, paid back into the community when he could. Certain things came from that.
Medical personnel came, did their jobs, left. The police arrived, and Mr. Rich had a few words with Miranda. Chief Rights left the meeting with a scowl on her dark face, flashing eyes vowing a thousand kinds of vengeance -- but most of the best fantasies were illegal and with the current location of the inventors unknown, all were impossible.
The majority of Mr. Rich's time was spent with Jestine. He told her she wasn't fired. Then he had to forcibly prevent her from quitting. After the third round, he sent somepony to stand guard over her locker, set another to watch over Jestine, and had a third galloping around Ponyville to find all of her non-work friends and bring them to the store, where they could be added to the work set so that all could take her out for a much-needed dinner and reassure her for as long as it took for belief and self-forgiveness to begin settling in. He wasn't about to let somepony go for having acted with good intentions. After all, they'd all been on cart retrieval duty at least once.
Twilight, her horn's corona usually ablaze at a full single, stayed the whole time. Mr. Rich and his staff recovered what could be repaired, threw away some of what was beyond hope, donated that which was past selling, and still she stayed. Poking around the carts, making certain portions glow here and there. Frowning.
Finally, the store was -- well, it wasn't back to normal. That would take at least another day for the appearance, and perhaps a moon for the emotional reality. But everypony was exhausted, and he'd sent them home. No customers: there hadn't been a single sale since the chaos had begun. No staff. Just him, still working his way up and down the aisles, cleaning. And Twilight.
(He'd sent word ahead to the estate. Diamond knew he worked late, and generally didn't worry when he missed dinner. But he wouldn't be home in time to read her to sleep, and that needed forgiving. And he'd also asked somepony to update Spike, because Twilight could forget things when deep in focus. He'd already had to have two employees force her to pause long enough to consume a single piece of fruit.)
"You should go back to the tree," he told her. They were currently sharing the toy aisle: he was restoring the pegboard items and she was crouched down next to a cart.
"You should go home," she countered. "I can keep going."
"The store's closed," Mr. Rich pointed out. "It's been closed for a while, and you don't work for me. No customers in the store after closing, Twilight."
She looked up, and he was surprised to see a small smile on her lips. "How's the pay?"
"...sorry?"
"If I did work for you," she clarified. "Is it better than being a librarian?"
The part of him which spoke from his mark took it seriously. "For a new hire with no prior retail experience -- actually, what do you make?" She quoted the number. "No. Not really, not without comparing benefits. And --" he hesitated "-- that's really your full salary?"
"I get a research grant from the palace," Twilight said. "But that has to go towards my research, obviously. And there's some small awards for spell improvement, here and there: I can spend that however I like, and..." she blushed. "...it usually goes back into research. But that's what I make for being a librarian."
He sighed, and thought about having a word with the mayor. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
And he couldn't answer.
She watched his face for a while, then shrugged the silence away. "Anyway, I don't want to leave until I've countered as much as I can. I can't..." The wince was automatic, and the little flash of self-doubt which came with it might never fully leave. "I can't work out the animation spell. It won't trigger, not without something to home in on -- but that's part of why I can't undo it. It's nowhere near a standard version, Mr. Rich, and trying to counter something I don't fully understand -- your store's been damaged enough."
"But they won't move on their own?"
"Not without a central target. And the spell is stable enough that I'm not worried about leaving it in place for a while. The aura... that was a mess. But the carts aren't going to explode. Or catch fire. Or explode twice. So they'll be safe to use until you can find replacements, or I figure out how to counter the last of it."
And if anypony in the world would know... Wait. "Can something explode twice?"
"I'm not sure," Twilight admitted. "Anyway, I'm almost done getting rid of the other spells."
He blinked. "Other spells?"
"There's..." Another frown. "I've only seen one of them a couple of times, and it never really worked on this scale. It's sort of trying to give an object its own unicorn field. Make something capable of moving something else. You can sort of make an object act a little like a magnet: that's not too bad. But this -- it feels like they were trying to improve it. Pull with more strength." She looked directly at him. "It's a weird thing to be cast on a shopping cart, isn't it? Why would a cart need to move things? I can understand if they were trying to cancel some of the weight for the contents, having the cart levitate the purchases, but..." And a little shrug. "Anyway, that one came apart really easily. I don't think they quite knew what they were doing there."
Twilight's mark was for magic, and so that was what she most readily understood. His was for business, and so he immediately came up with an idea. But he didn't voice it -- at least, not immediately. "And the rest? From what you said, there's at least one more."
"Two, actually. I think one's for homing in on the rod," Twilight said. "I left that one alone, because it's all tangled up in the animation spell, and there's no more rod. The last one is really standard." Her face briefly twisted into insult. "Inferior, really. It's supposed to alert the caster if anything about the spells is changed. And it was also worked very poorly, so nopony knows anything. Mr. Rich, I just want to finish all the carts tonight, everything I can do, so your store is as safe as it can be. And I'll come back once I've worked out how to counter the rest, I promise. There's only a few carts to go, so -- may I please stay?"
"You're using a lot of energy." (It would be hours before he realized he'd used the same tones he would when speaking to Diamond, on a night when his daughter was trying to override her bedtime.)
She started to answer, and her own yawn interrupted her. "Um..."
"And you haven't eaten, not more than a little fruit. Spike is in here every other week for small, high-energy snacks he can stick under your snout. I think I'm starting to understand why." (She blushed again.) "So just for an hour, let's both stop. There's some restaurants still open. I'll buy you dinner: I owe my temporary at least that much. And then we'll both finish, and go home."
She managed a smile. "All right." The slender unicorn began to stand up in slow stages, wincing as she shifted cramped joints. "Will you be okay, Mr. Rich? After everything?"
"I'll be fine. I'm more worried about Jestine." He sighed, started for the front doors. "And I don't think we've seen the last of the inventors."
Twilight groaned. "They keep coming back. We're always looking for them and they won't quit --"
"-- it's not just that," he carefully interrupted. "Twilight -- there's a very good reason for trying to make a cart levitate objects."
She frowned. "What?" He told her, and her eyes went wide. "But... you have to tell --!"
"I will," he reassured her. "Tonight. I think we have at least that long, because they would have wanted us to have a few days of thinking everything was fine. That the carts were working and the world was normal. And even if I'm wrong, every last one of the carts is currently inverted: nothing can happen." Back to the more immediately important topic. "So. Do you like Prance cuisine, or...?"
And for three days, the world was normal.
The repairs were completed. The carts acted as they should, even with Twilight still trying to figure out how to remove the last of the spells. (He'd asked her to take her time. He had certain suspicions, and had shared every last one of them.) Jestine came in to work, but was visibly miserable during every moment spent within the aisles. He was talking to her, and had asked so many others to do the same, but... some ponies needed more than mere words before they accepted any degree of redemption. There was nothing he could do about that. Or at least, he couldn't do it yet.
On the third night -- a very early part of the night, but it was winter and Moon dominated the hours -- there was a knock on his office door. Or rather, there was a knock on the frame: he usually left the thing open. Ponies were in and out all day anyway.
Mr. Rich looked up, saw a smiling Twilight standing on the other side of the opening. The slim body wasn't enough to block sight of the steel-grey pegasus behind her, much less the full saddlebags which had been carefully aligned to avoid the wings. "Mr. Rich," the openly happy unicorn greeted him. "Do you have a minute?"
"Or ten," he said, left forehoof pushing paperwork aside. "Come in, Twilight -- and Ratchette?" Ponyville's lone mechanic shyly nodded as she trotted into the room. "What brings the two of you here? Is it something about the cart spells?" Technically, the carts did count as a sort of device, which could explain Ratchette's presence. "Because we're still waiting --"
"No," Twilight smiled. "Well, it's not about the spells, but it is about the carts. Ratchette?"
The pegasus' head tilted back towards her left saddlebag, and a lank copper mane briefly covered the lid. After a moment, a small box was deposited on Mr. Rich's desk.
He looked it over for a long moment. The box itself appeared to be mostly steel. It had a small slot in the front, just big enough to partially hold a coin: the forward edge would be sticking out. There was a short length of chain dangling below the slot, perhaps two hoofwidths long, ending in a ridged metal key.
Ratchette pushed the edge of her right wing into the box, rotating it just enough to reveal a key-shaped slot in the back. "It'll work," she shyly said. "We tried it out at my shop. And it's completely mechanical, Mr. Rich. Not a spell or thaum anywhere."
He was still looking at it, well into the point when he had to ask, and then a little past that.
"What is it?" he finally said.
"It's for your carts!" Twilight enthused. "To prevent ponies from taking them home and just keeping them!"
More questions seemed to be required. "And -- how does it work?"
"Well," Ratchette carefully said, "you know how one end of a cart swings inwards? So you can sort of push them into each other, and have them take up less space, at least once the shoulder mounts are folded back on their hinges? I'm going to attach this to the pivot point, on a mounting which will let it rotate and always face forward. Do you see that chain, Mr. Rich? When the carts are pushed all the way together, it'll just reach the box on the cart in front of it. You put the key into the slot, and it locks them together."
He understood that part of the functionality. The reasoning was still escaping him. "So all the carts are tied in a line."
"Yes!" Twilight beamed.
"How do you free them up?"
"You put a half-bit coin in the front slot," Ratchette explained. "Push it forward until it clicks. That knocks the key out of the back." A momentary pause. "After we did the first test, I realized there was always going to be a backmost cart. So I'm going to put some hitching posts into your sidewalk, where the cart corrals are. And a few more inside. The chains have to be longer on those, but Twilight brought me all the measurements..."
"And," Mr. Rich carefully tried, "how does this prevent cart theft?"
"Because nopony can get their half-bit out of the box unless they bring the cart back!" Twilight giggled. "Nopony's going to keep a cart if it costs them money!"
She laughed a little more, amused by the silliness of the concept. Ratchette managed a shy smile. And Mr. Rich looked at the two young adults, one of whom understand magic, the other devices, and quietly considered how neither of those powerful talents gave the mares any insight into how ponies acted.
But they were happy. They thought they had helped him.
"I can have them installed tonight," Ratchette softly offered. "It won't take long..."
Mr. Rich's mark was purely for business. There were many aspects to such a talent, and one of them was an inherent understanding for certain kinds of pony behavior. He could see it all coming, and there was a moment when he could have stopped it. But if there was anything Diamond could testify to, it was that her father often had trouble saying no to enthusiastic, excited, and happy young mares.
"Did you bring your cost sheet? -- oh, good. Yes, that seems fair... well, best get started, then," he told them. "Please submit the invoice to my accounts payable department."
They left, quietly chatting to each other all the way down the hall. He waited until they were well out of both sight and hearing before risking the facehoof.
Maybe it won't be so bad.
On a typical day, Barnyard Bargains would be open for far longer than the duration of a normal pony workshift. Mr. Rich hired extra staff members accordingly, for asking somepony to labor too long was asking them to work at something less than their best. And even though he put in more time than anypony, he made a conscious effort not to be at the store from first hour to last, as that first hour was well before opening, the last ones went on long after the final customers had departed, and he had a daughter waiting for him at home. So if there wasn't a holiday push underway, there would be times when he arrived early and departed while winter Sun was being lowered, or came in later and left under Moon. The day after Twilight and Ratchette had come in was one of the latter.
He'd slept in, or what passed for it with him: awake in time to have breakfast with Diamond and see her off, for there was no school that day, and she was planning on playing at Silver's home. (It was pretty much always Silver's home.) There had been some time for checking in on the servants -- one was getting married soon, and he felt the need to arrange some level of dowry -- and then a little more for going through the newspaper in his study. He'd even had the time for some casual reading. And then he'd bundled himself up against the cold, indulged in the usual glare at the weather schedule, and trotted towards the store.
The sounds of the first argument reached him while he was still half a block away, and both voices were familiar ones.
"But it's costing me money!" Golden Harvest quickly decided. "You expect me to pay money just to shop here?"
"But you get it back," one of his youngest interns weakly protested. "It's just... a rental..."
"And what if the half-bit I put into that box is the half-bit I need to finish paying for all of my shopping?" the farmer objected. "What am I going to do then? What if I don't have a half-bit? Tenth-bits just fall out of the slot! Why isn't somepony out here making change? Why aren't you giving us all half-bits?"
Twister, who was far too young and innocent to have something like an angry Golden Harvest happen to him, winced. "We can -- make change inside the store, if you need --"
"-- so I have to go inside, then come back out?"
"There's carts inside..."
"I," Goldie declared, her eyes briefly moving over a rather familiar specimen, "like that cart."
Mr. Rich forced himself to trot closer, to the point where it was now possible to see some of the other results. For starters... well, it was winter, and it was cold. There had always been ponies who simply took their things out of his cart and brought them home, and some of those had decided that bringing the cart back to the corral and its new hitching post just wasn't worth their shivering time, much less the recovery of a half-bit. So carts had been left in the street, as usual. The new part was the other carts, for several ponies had decided that as long as one cart was out in the open, they could just use the chain on that to get their coin back. Unfortunately, somepony else had then discovered that it wasn't necessary to push one cart fully into another in order to get the chains aligned, especially since that took so much (relative) time and (brief) working with the shoulder mount hinges. Why, if you placed one cart ninety degrees to the right of the first, the key would lock in just fine!
A single pony had made that discovery. At least two dozen others had followed up. The resulting nautilus spiral was truly something to see, and Mr. Rich got to keep seeing it for some time: it also took a while to go around.
Two carts stood abandoned, locked into -- well, to Mr. Rich's best guess, somepony, probably a pair of unicorns with rather fine field control and very little desire to return anything, had discovered that if you bent the chain over the top of the box just so, you could put the front key into the back lock of the same cart. Both ponies would have then discovered that doing so warped the chain to the point of making future key dislodging nearly impossible. Additionally, one strained link of metal was now directly in front of their half-bit, which wasn't going anywhere. Ever.
And at the far right outer edge of the store, a decidedly opportunistic Scootaloo was busy Helping.
"Take your cart back for you, sir?"
"Well -- all right," the stallion decided. "Thank you --"
Tiny wings buzzed, and the orange filly lunged herself at the cart. Then she repeated the process a few times, because she was too short to properly fit into the shoulder mounts and lunging was just about the only way anything was going to happen, especially fighting against the resistance of fresh snow. Some rather awkward jumps and fast mouth movements were required before the lock was engaged.
"All done!" she said, and started to move away.
"HEY! That's my half-bit!"
"Yeah!" Scootaloo declared. "Carts put back for you! That's the service! And the service charge is one half-bit!"
He saw all of that, ignored most of the subsequent argument, and also noted that unless things were unusually busy for the hour, several carts had probably already gone missing. After all, everypony knew they were free -- or had been. And when it came to the cost for keeping such things, going from 'free' to a mere half-bit just hadn't felt like an acquisition-preventing change, plus they weren't going to read any of the new signs any more than they had the old.
So actually, it's just about exactly that bad.
Everypony had been through cart retrieval duty. And now somepony was going to be responsible for getting carts untangled, bringing them all back to the hitching post, making change -- and that was just for the ones which were still in sight. It was going to be a whole new occupation, and it would probably need a brand-new hire, somepony willing to put up with every kind of scheduled weather. In fact, given store hours and days of operation, it was probably going to take at least three of them.
He thought about smiling, happy, enthusiastic faces, sighed to himself, and went inside.
Start late, end late.
He was looking over order forms. Planning out one of the early spring sales. Longing for spring. And there were a few staff members on the floor, finishing the restocking stage -- but for the office area, it was down to just him and a quiet pool of light.
There was very little noise from the aisles. Yes, his staff joked with each other as they moved, made plans for what they would do after the shift ended -- but that was just background music. On many nights, he could easily relax while basking in such sounds, feel some of his tension melt away as the song of success soaked into his ears. It wasn't happening on that night. He was waiting for something, and had been waiting for a while.
Then the waiting ended.
The sound was distinctly non-musical. It had a bit of screech, and a lot of strain. There was absolutely no orchestration to it whatsoever, and any conductor in the vicinity would have fainted from sheer embarrassment. In fact, if you really wanted to get down to it, what it sounded like was several dozen shopping carts simultaneously lunging forward by the stretched-out length of one chain, just before they were yanked back down with the mandatory near-thunder of the concluding crash.
That sound then repeated. Enthusiastically.
"Mr. Rich!" somepony desperately called out. "It's happening!"
He practically vaulted his own desk, charged through the open door, letting his words lead the way. "Free up the back chain!" he called out. "Use your bodies, push the whole line into position, guide them out the door! Herd them!"
"Yes, sir!" somepony else called back. "I've got the coin --"
Another, more distant crash, partially muffled by the walls.
"And that's the outside ones!" he shouted. "Somepony get those! Sledge, you know where to gallop! Start with Miranda, and she'll take it from there!"
That other crash seemed to be getting louder.
"Is anypony --"
That was the moment he reached the sales floor. It gave him a direct line of sight down the aisle, through the glass of his own front windows, and a perfect view of the moment when several dozen lunging, green-glowing shopping carts pulled up their hitching posts, along with a good part of the street. And then they headed off into the unknown.
It was possible to hear them, if you were in range and listening closely. Having some attention focused on the glowing green rod which was being levitated above the elder's head was forgivable -- it was almost on a level with the most direct sight line from the little valley's upper ridge -- but the words themselves were important.
You had to listen closely, as there was a certain degree of squeaking to overcome. But if anypony had truly been on the verge of losing track for both sight and hearing, it was also possible to follow the smell of fur dye.
"And that's the first of them now," the elder grinned. "Get ready. We'll have to unload quickly. I'm sure there's at least a few ponies who tried a merry chase, even at this hour -- but the surprise should have wrecked most of it, and the chaos would done its part. Still, if we get somepony truly dedicated..."
"We can take care of them," the younger declared. "They're just shears, after all."
The elder laughed. "And what are shears good for?"
"Us," the younger chuckled, the mirth of an old joke whose humor had never faded. "They're good for us, because we take their wool over and over, and they just grow new coats -- oh, there it is! That's the lead cart!"
"About time," the elder grumbled. "Hard enough hiding out here in the wild zone, hard enough trying to feel where they were going and guide them to us. I expected to hit a few trees, but with as long as that took..."
And then there was silence.
It didn't last long. "...what happened to them? Who -- who did that to the pivot points? Why are they chained together?"
"Why," the younger half-shouted as he got directly to the central point, "are they empty? The spell should have pulled in everything off the shelves!"
"They can't be filled when they're all together like this," the elder pointed out, his voice suddenly shaky, the rod dipping in the air. "There's no way to get anything inside. Those pushed panels cover -- no, there's still room, I can see that. The larger pieces would have bounced off, but the smaller ones should have slipped in!"
Another, lesser group of squeaks.
"Here's one by itself," the younger said. "And it's full..." Closer inspection was conducted by green corona light. "I think somepony tried to turn it into a planter."
The next line of carts came over the little ridge within the Everfree, pulled up to the waiting empty wagon.
"And this group is chained!" the elder screamed. "And empty -- no, look: it's not a total loss, because we've got ourselves a free hitching post! What's happening --"
"-- evening," Mr. Rich said as he stepped out from behind the tree, forcing himself not to shiver in the night's cold. The rising inner heat helped.
They stared at him, and every last tenth-bit of their twinned gazes carried blame.
"I know you," the elder said. "I've seen you in the papers. You're that Filthy pony."
"Rarely," Mr. Rich told them as his inner core recoiled at the sound of his first name. "But you're just dirty. Self-loading, self-delivering carts? Quite the plan. Shoplifting on a grand scale. Pity you don't understand a few things. About proper business hours, and ponies still being at work when your final phase goes into effect. About casting proper workings, because yours didn't quite hold, not even for a single day -- at least, not the ones you thought weren't really important. And ponies. Neither of you truly understand ponies, do you? Not when all you see is shears."
"I understand that you're an earth pony," the elder declared with that false joviality, voice seemingly about to burst into song. "I understand that you can't do anything about this --"
His horn's corona blazed as the rod dropped, went to a full single --
Mr. Rich's left forehoof moved. Back, then forward.
The rock flew down the slope, sharply impacted the cone of something not quite bone, completely unbreakable and, when it was channeling energy, fully vulnerable. The field winked out, and the elder staggered, choked back a scream as the disrupted power pushed against his own body, hard enough to visibly bruise his exposed right flank under Moon's light.
"...oh," said the younger. "You... know about that."
Mr. Rich just stared at them for a few seconds. Eyes narrowed. Waiting.
"Well, it's hardly a secret," the younger finally shrugged. "But magic or no magic, it's still two of us against one of you. And if we both start casting, you can't hit our horns every time out. Not when we're working at the same time. I'm sure you're stronger, but you're all the way up there. You can't reach us. A smart businesspony like you should understand that. And I'd frankly much rather run, but we can't do that when somepony's on their hooves to follow us. So if you don't mind --"
"I understand something you don't, not seeing ponies as things to be sheared," Mr. Rich softly said. "Being in the same place for more than a generation, instead of looking for new victims everywhere I go. It also means I have something you don't."
"A pre-purchased burial plot?" the younger cheerfully asked, risking a step forward, protectively moving in front of his injured sibling.
Mr. Rich lashed his tail. Left, right, and then right again.
Two hundred ponies came out of the woods.
Several of them were tired, while others were slightly bruised: in both cases, the results had come from the intensive efforts required to herd the carts through Ponyville in a way which prevented ponies from being truly injured and also happened to stop any major property damage before it could occur. Others were silently raging, which was the typical reaction that could be expected from somepony who'd claimed a cart at a cost of a half-bit and then seen it break out of their stable for an eventual repair price of considerably more. Several were grimly pleased, as they now had inventors to deal with. Some were still thinking about cider. A few were representing local law enforcement, although they were all both currently out of uniform and fully prepared to ignore quite a lot as long as it left con artists who could be brought in on their hooves. Every last one had come in under the sonic cover of squeaking wheels. And they were all overshadowed by a smiling Jestine, mere seconds away from redemption as she hovered above a quickly-woven cloud.
Her hooves lightly touched the vapor. It crackled.
"Customer loyalty," Mr. Rich informed the brothers, and led the charge.
