Strange Currencies

Strange Mirror’s apartment was full of mirrors. They helped her to keep track of things.

Morning was the time when her condition was most difficult to manage, so she liked to rise early. Her assistant, a lavender crow named Matthew, would fly through the window before dawn. He'd light the gas lamps in her tiny one-room apartment and make her coffee. Then he would rouse her with gentle cawing. If she needed extra encouragement, he would hop on her face. His ice-cold claws always did the trick.

Once she had risen, he would help her tie red strings around her fetlocks so that she could see where her hooves were.

She would sit at her desk and drink her coffee while Matthew did her hair. He flickered back and forth in the mirror, dive bombing with the brush until he was satisfied with the overall effect. Then he walked on her head, giving her a nice scalp massage while he arranged strands like he was building a nest. Then he would twine one of his feathers into her hair so that she could have a better idea where the top of her head was.

While Matthew did this, Strange Mirror would go over her schedule for the day. Her condition would do most of the work for her, but it paid to be careful — it would not do to be discovered.

So.

By seven fifteen she was dressed and ready to go. Today she wore a striped shirt and dark purple skirt that looked lovely together. She could only guess if they matched her fur color. She walked down three flights of stairs to the walled courtyard of her apartment. A narrow cobblestone pathway wound through a grassy lawn scattered with yellow roses, escapees from the riot of greenery the landlord called a garden.

Matthew had flown down from her half-open window and was sitting in the basket of her bicycle. Counter-intuitively, riding was safer than walking — at least she could see where the bike was. She unchained the bike from the rusty old bike rack, pulled off the flowering vines that had grown onto it during the night, and rode it out into the cobblestone streets of Canterlot.

The first stop was at Crusty Biscuits’ street cart. Mirror parked her bike, and Matthew flapped off to scavenge crumbs.

“Good morning, Missus Biscuits,” she said, making her voice higher and more child-like than it already was. This wasn't strictly necessary, but it helped the illusion.

“Good morning!” said Crusty Biscuits, a smile on her wrinkly face. “How’s my favorite little filly?”

“I’d like my donuts, please,” said Mirror cheerily.

“Oh yes, yes, let me get those. You children are so impatient.”

Mirror smiled as sweetly as she could. Tricking a nice old mare out of a sack of day-olds stung her normally stony conscience. But whatever Crusty saw when she looked at Strange Mirror made it worthwhile to her.

Mirror ate one of the day-olds straddling her unmoving bike. Even stale, Crusty’s donuts were sublime — buttery, soft, covered in gooey glaze. Matthew hopped back into her basket, clutching a scrap of muffin in his beak. She rolled downhill towards the Saddle Buckle District, taking care to obey traffic signals. It was near the end of the month, and traffic guards would be looking for naughty ponies so that they could fill their ticket quotas. The attention would light her condition up like a festival bonfire if she wasn’t careful.

At work, she pushed her (fake) glasses down over her eyes and became Mildred Do, scribe. Mil Do had been hired to assist with transferring centuries worth of Principality financial records from the old, outdated, system to a new one devised by HRH Twilight Sparkle. The new system allowed three times as much data to be stored per ledger.

She left her donuts in the break room, got her list of ledgers to be copied from her office, and went to the massive, vaulted halls of the Principality Central Archives. She would bring three ledgers at a time back to her office and get to work.

Mildred Do was seen by her supervisor and fellow scribes as a diligent worker. More importantly, she was seen as the kind of pony who always brought treats for the break room. If she made an additional copy of her ledgers on loose-leaf paper, well, she was just being very thorough.

At the end of the day, she bound up the loose leaf paper into a parcel with twine and put it into her bicycle bag. She took the old ledgers to the furnace room for destruction, and the new one to Records Processing for filing. Then she would mount her bicycle and head for home.

On the way, Mirror would stop at a small bookseller to purchase romance novels. Matthew — lately returned from doing bird things all day while she worked — would watch her bike while she shopped. That bird did not hesitate to use his beak in defense of Strange Mirror or her property. He would go for blood, and this was well known to the petty thieves, pickpockets and bottom gropers of Canterlot. His mere presence was all the deterrent they needed.

Strange Mirror would spend some time here. She read at least one novel a day, and she needed to be sure she had not already read the book she chose. While browsing, she would casually leave the parcel on the middle shelf of the cooking section. The employees and owner knew as a regular customer who made regular purchases, so they assumed this was a regular thing for her to do.

Mirror could see the cooking section quite well from where she browsed. Between five forty-five and six o'clock, the Unremarkable Brown Pony would collect the parcel. It bothered her that he was clearly a changeling, but she didn’t see what harm he could do with such mundane information. As an illusion herself, she could easily see through the illusions of others.

She wondered if he knew she was watching him. He never seemed to notice her. Perhaps he was, in fact, fooled by her condition — he did not wish to be observed while he collected the parcel, so, to his mind, he was not.

After the Unremarkable Brown Pony was gone, she would pay for her new books and meet Matthew at her bicycle. He would give her the small bag of bits he had collected from the dead drop under the trash bin in the park. She would give Matthew one bit as payment for his services. Harmony only knew what he did with the money, but it was all he asked, and he was worth ten times as much or more.

On the way home, she would stop at Crusty’s cart again.

“Good evening, little filly!” said Crusty.

“Good evening, Missus Biscuit!”

“And what would you like today?”

“One loaf of bread, please,” she said, pushing a bit across the top of the cart. “Mommy says to keep the change.” That change wouldn’t cover the price of a bag of day old donuts, but it made Strange Mirror feel a little better.

Crusty would hand her the bread in a brown paper bag. Its hard crust would yield enticingly under her hooves, hinting at the tender, succulent fluffiness underneath. The smell would keep her company the rest of the way back to her apartment.

Once there, she would lock up her remaining bits in the safe under her bed, undress, eat the bread with butter and fruit, and give the scraps to Matthew. Then she would review her schedule for the next day, get ready for bed, untie the strings from around her fetlocks, and read romance novels until she got sleepy.

After she turned off the last gas lamp, she'd dream of the time when her contract with the Unremarkable Brown Pony was completed. She would take her bits to the bank, convert them to Dapplemarks, get on a boat, and spend the rest of her life touring the Old World in luxuriant style.

Nopony would ever see her as anything but a wealthy tourist ever again.