The Trouble with Unicorns II: Real Estate
Admiral Biscuit
Sal expected it to be the biggest sale of his career.
How they’d found him, he didn’t know. And when he got the phone call, he’d almost hung up on them—it sounded like a prank. But it hadn’t been; it was a group of unicorns who were looking to buy a building suitable for converting to pony apartments.
Sal didn’t handle commercial real estate, and he’d never dealt with unicorns before, either. On the rare occasions he thought of unicorns at all, he imagined sunshine, sparkles, rainbows, and other things that he didn’t particularly enjoy.
Just the same, he didn’t blow them off, and over the course of the next week he discovered a few things: first, that there was a higher commission on commercial real estate than there was on residential; and secondly, that ponies had lots of gold. Especially the unicorns.
That was enough to motivate him to gather together a list of all the commercial properties his real estate office had to offer, and to put in more prep work than he had in the ten years prior.
He even bought a new suit and rented a Suburban. He figured that they’d be more likely to buy if he looked prosperous.
Rather than arrange the showings in a geographically sensible order, he instead arranged them in increasing order of niceness. Unless they were cheap bastards—like his typical clientele—they’d only notice a vast improvement in quality and only small increments in price as he went from worst to best.
Sadly, the unicorns hadn’t been satisfied with any property he showed them. There was a constant litany of discussion about the unsuitability of the apartments to a pony, along with what they saw as an excessive number of parking spots. There weren’t enough windows or they weren’t big enough or the bricks were fake.
It was with increasing desperation that he reached what should have been the final apartment complex on his list. He already knew that they weren’t going to like it; they’d complain about how everything would have to be torn out and replaced before any pony would want to live there.
And then inspiration hit. It was a two part inspiration. First, that his office had a property for sale that would not need to be gutted, since it had already been gutted. And second, that ponies were probably rubes, and by the time they discovered that they’d been taken for a ride, he’d have already cashed his commission check.
The final property didn’t even have a sign out in front of it. It had been an albatross tied around his real estate company’s neck since the moment it had been listed. The Hoxie Brothers Electroplating Company had moved on, taking their equipment and leaving behind a barren brownfield wasteland.
Aside from broken windows and graffiti, the structures themselves were in good shape. It also had a good view of the river. The biggest problem was in the soil, which was why nobody had any interest in the property at all. Everybody knew that when there were enough government funds or somebody important complained loudly enough, the state would come in with excavators and remove the worst contamination; until then, the property was doomed to stay empty. Nobody would willingly saddle themselves with that kind of pollution liability, regardless of how good the river view was.
The unicorns loved it. There were no big parking lots to get in the way of the greenery, and they were talking about how earth ponies could have little fields out in front, and where they could put a playground for the foals. The cavernous insides of the building were an asset; there was nothing that had to be knocked down before pony apartments could be built. They appreciated the strong construction and the large windows, and even though he added twenty percent to the original asking price they thought it was a bargain, especially after all the other buildings they’d looked at.
Paperwork that normally took weeks or months to put together was fast-tracked through the real estate office—nobody wanted to be the one that screwed up this white elephant sale. Every hour that the deal was pending was another hour when the unicorns might discover local and federal industrial pollution laws and back out of the sale.
But they didn’t, and two weeks after putting down their earnest money, they all met back up in Sal’s office and spent hours going through the paperwork and signing form after form. The process took longer than he’d expected, especially since he had to explain many of the terms to them. In some ways, it was like he was re-taking his licensing exam again, and he sweated through the entire process.
They paid in full by bank draft—the largest check that Sal had ever seen. Ten percent of it was his commission.
An hour after the unicorns left as proud owners of a gutted old factory and a million cubic yards of contaminated soil, the party started at the real estate office.
Powder and Speckles were leads on the project. Like Sal, they’d spent the intervening two weeks preparing so that they’d be ready to hit the ground at a gallop. They’d had unfettered access to the property, and had drawn up blueprints so that they’d be ready to go as soon as they owned the building.
They didn’t have a champagne party to celebrate; instead, they began bringing in laborers. By the time the sun had set on the first night, a small team of Earth ponies was already replanting the barren ground around the factory, and scaffolding was going up inside.
Two days in, the building was a bustling hub of activity. Dozens of ponies were on site, with more showing up hourly. Bricklayers and stonemasons were hard at work on the walls, making minor repairs where they were needed, and a cluster of pegasi were going over the roof, making sure it was properly weathertight.
Powder and Speckles had set up their headquarters in the south corner of the building. That had once been an office, and once a door was fitted it would be again.
“How many more ponies are you gonna need for the fields outside?”
Sugarberry shrugged. “If we’re just planting alfalfa and clover for now, not too many. The soil’s not too good, ‘cause nopony’s been working it. Plus, we keep hitting stuff that’s buried in the dirt.”
“Like rocks?” Powder didn’t know very much about farming.
“Scrap metal. I guess when people get done with things that they don’t want, they bury them.” She sighed. “Then we’ve got to unhitch a couple of ponies and dig it up. It’s really slowing us down.”
“I’ll get a crew of unicorns to help with that,” Powder said. “For now, just mark out where you hit big things. If we can’t get any crops to grow, nopony will want to live here.”
Sugarberry snorted. “We can get crops to grow, don’t you worry about that. In a month, maybe two, we’ll have all this land productive again, at least for pasture grasses. Once we’ve figured out where the best soil is, we can start putting in trees, too.”
“Will you be able to get a row of trees along the road?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. Do you mind pine trees? The soil’s pretty salty there, and I don’t know why.”
“Whatever you think is best.”
“Okay, boss. We’ll get it done.” She turned and went back out of the makeshift office, nodding politely to the carpenters who were busy framing a door.
A month into the project and the site looked totally different. True to her word, Sugarberry’s team had managed to plow and seed the entire property, and the alfalfa was already fetlock-high over the clover. A row of bristly spruce trees had replaced the rusty chain link fence along the road, and the piles of scrap metal that the grounds team had found had all gotten hauled off.
The roof was half done. The pegasi had put temporary patches over the worst spots, and were working with a team of earth ponies to put proper slate shingles down in place of the tar and asphalt shingles. On the scaffoldings, the bricklayers had finished their work and been replaced by glaziers.
Inside, floors and walls were taking shape. Powder and Speckles’ office was complete, with proper desks, and they even had gotten a secretary named Lily Lightly.
Things were progressing quite well, at least until the official letter arrived.
It was an unassuming letter, and Lily opened it as a matter of course—then paled as she read it.
Neither Powder nor Speckles knew exactly how to deal with it, either, but they hadn’t gotten this far in life by panicking unnecessarily, so they put it aside until the end of the day. Then, once the workers had all left, they sat in the office and read over it again and again, trying to understand exactly what it meant.
Besides all the legalese, they didn’t know for sure what cadmium even was, although the letter indicated that they had quite a lot of it in the soil around their building.
“I hope it wasn’t in all the scrap metal that we shipped off,” Powder said. “I think somebody would have told us if it was . . . wouldn’t they?”
“The letter says that it’s leaching into the river,” Speckles observed. “That means that it’s small. I think. Plus, it sounds like a mineral, not a crushed barrel or pile of nails.”
“Don’t we own it?”
“No, we don’t have mineral rights, remember? Sal explained that to us.”
“Oh, yeah.” Powder nodded. “It’s like the easement for the city water line that runs by the road, or the sewer pipe.”
“Sort of, I think.” Speckles looked back down at the letter and skimmed over it again. “We’ve got a year to figure it out before they make us pay a whole lot of money.”
“I just don’t want to get something finished and then have to take it down again, that’s my worry.”
“I’ve got a friend who knows about mines. I’ll send her a letter and see if she can figure it out.”
It didn’t take too long to get a reply. Copper Glow knew what cadmium was; it was a bluish-white metal that was similar to zinc and mercury, and while it was useful to color glass and in paint pigments, she couldn’t think of any other reason that anypony would be interested in it.
She was even more confused when she got to the site, read the letter, and examined the field with her magic. “I don’t get it. There’s cadmium spread all over, but it’s not really concentrated anywhere. Nopony would want to mine here for it; there’s a really low yield. If you wanted to do something with the ground, you’d do better to make bricks from the soil.”
“So why do they want it back?”
“I don’t know.” The letter unambiguously stated that the Hoxie Brothers had left all that cadmium behind and if the unicorns didn’t get it out of the soil, the state would.
“It doesn’t seem fair that we have to put in the work to get the cadmium out of the ground when they’re the ones who forgot it in the first place.”
“Humans have weird rules,” Speckles said. “Like how they have to wear clothes all the time, or how drivers are allowed to run you over if you cross the road in the wrong place.”
“Well, there’s no sense in digging up all this dirt and undoing all of Sugarberry’s work just to get their stupid cadmium back. Especially if there isn’t that much of it.”
“Let me do some research,” Copper Glow said. “There might be another way.”
“I hope so.”
A month went by. The alfalfa was now barrel-high, and the scaffolding around the building had been removed. Bare framing had been covered with plaster walls, and the entire building had a constant odor of paint that the bouquets of flowers on Lily’s desk couldn’t quite cover.
A second letter had come, reiterating the necessity of removing the cadmium that the Hoxie Brothers had left behind, and reminding them that if they didn’t do it, the state would remove it themselves and bill them for the expense.
Powder was starting to get worried, but Speckles had faith that Copper Glow would come through.
“What do we do with it once we get it out?”
“I don’t know.” Speckles looked up from the blueprints. “I guess give it back to the Hoxie Brothers.” He floated his reading glasses down to the table. “Although I haven’t been able to figure out where they are.”
“They’ve got to be somewhere, if they want their cadmium back.” Powder stomped his hoof. “And then what? Are they going to ask for their bricks back, too? How come we can buy a building and then the previous owner wants some of it back? That’s not fair. If I bought a house with a gilded roof in Canterlot, I wouldn’t have to scrape the gold off if the previous owner decided after she sold it that she wanted the gold back.”
“We shoulda asked for mineral rights,” Speckles admitted. “That was a mistake. But I’ve had a couple of really smart barristers look over the contract, and that’s the only thing we don’t own. Well, we also don’t own the air above our property, so we can’t stop airships from flying overhead.”
“I’m just worried. I’ve been staying awake at night looking at how humans make mines, and they dig a big pit. I don’t want a big pit, not after all the work Sugarberry’s put in to make the fields look nice. Nopony’s going to want to look out their window and see a big pit.”
“There won’t be a pit,” Speckles said, although there was a note of doubt in his voice.
Sal drove by the site every now and then. He was grudgingly awed by the speed with which the ponies worked, and how quickly the site had turned from a barren wasteland into something that actually looked inviting. Every other construction project he’d seen had remained bare dirt until the final phase of the project when the landscaping was added; here, that had been the first step.
He wasn’t aware of the increasingly angry letters that the state had been sending, although he wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d known. He did occasionally google the site to see if there was any mention in the news, but thus far nothing newsworthy had happened after the initial sale.
This time when he drove by the property, there was something he’d never seen before. A strange, unearthly glow was coming from the entire site, and it only took him a moment to decide that the safest course of action was to stop rubbernecking and speed past as quickly as possible. His office was on the other side of town, and that was a far better place to be.
He ejected the audiobook he’d been listening to and switched to a local news station, just in case it turned out that the other side of town wasn’t far enough away.
Even though he tried not to think about it, the strange glow was on his mind all day at work and he stayed up late searching the internet for explanations. The best one he got was swamp gas, and he knew it wasn’t swamp gas.
The next morning, he once again drove by—the building and property looked unchanged. All was well.
Until he got to the office, that was. Cars were parked along the street, because the parking lot was fenced off with caution tape.
Even if it hadn’t been, there were no parking spaces available. They’d been covered by shining piles of cadmium: all of the soil contamination. Copper Glow had dutifully removed it and then—because neither Powder nor Speckles had been able to locate the Hoxie Brothers—left it in the parking lot of his office for him to deal with.
Author's Note
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