secondhand gold is as good as new
Nightmare Moon sat on her throne, wearing an easy smirk and waiting for Celestia to come tell her off about the whole eternal darkness thing.
Among the rocks and debris from the battles they'd already had were a scatter of golden bits. Nightmare picked one up. Her expression dropped at the sight of Celestia's visage cast into one side. Grabbing a particularly sharp-looking rock, she set to work carefully scratching over the face of the coin, adding a mustache.
Before she could complete the devil horns and monocle, however, Celestia burst in with the Elements of Harmony and blasted Nightmare Moon to the moon.
The coin fell to the floor, unnoticed in the battle. It lay there for several hours until it was collected by a Royal Guard on cleanup duty. He scooped it into a bag.
Celestia, deciding that she never wanted to see this castle again, moved the capital of Equestria to Canterlot. As such, the royal coffers were placed in a vault beneath the new castle, where the altered golden bit was eventually deposited.
It lay there in a pile of similar fellows for a few years before eventually being unceremoniously scooped out into another bag to pay for road construction to enable better commerce throughout the land. This put it in the purse of a bridge builder named Bridge Builder, appropriate as he was the first pony to learn how to build bridges in all the land, and so became the namesake of the profession.
He spent the bit the next day on lunch at a small restaurant in Whinnynapolis. In so doing, he became the first customer. His brother, Burger Builder, had just opened the establishment. The coin occupied a place on the wall behind the counter with the honor of being the first bit ever spent at the new restaurant.
Burger Builder retired some forty years later and sold the business to a conglomerate called Hayburger. In an effort to assimilate the restaurant into their existing chain, a renovation was required, and there was no place for a random coin on the wall. Being that Burger Builder had asked his construction worker brother to affix it, it was stuck but good. The next contractor simply plastered over it.
Shortly thereafter, the building burned because the stove contractor was even lazier.
The rubble was carted off to the nearby garbage dump and rotted for several years before a group of foals practicing karate broke open some of the wreckage with a kick and found the golden bit inside. Naturally, there was a tournament to decide who got to keep it. A kid named Flying Dragon Punch won.
FDP kept the coin as a memento of that day for the rest of his life, which happened to be another eighty two years, and it was eventually discovered among his effects by his granddaughter, Flying Dragon Punch III.
She didn't much care for the name, and wasn't much interested in remembering the namesake. In traveling as far away from home as possible, she spent the bit on a slice of pizza in Manehattan.
The Neightalian pony who owned the pizza shop closed up at the end of the day and sealed the deposit in a bank bag. Unfortunately, during a gesture-heavy conversation, the bag slipped from his hooves and went flying into the back of a passing hay cart. The driver, not noticing, didn't stop. The load of hay was hitched to a wagon train headed west back to Canterlot.
On the other end of the line, the mare who took delivery of the hay was surprised to find an additional bag of jingling coins with it. However, the bag was locked and she certainly didn't have a key. She took it to her friend, a blacksmith. For a cut of the money, he was happy to open it.
The coin was one of those that he took for payment. On the Saturday night card game with his friends, he lost it on a bluff.
The new owner, having won big that night, tossed it to a down-on-his-luck pony outside the tavern, only for the bit to slip through his hooves in the dim street and tumble down a grate.
Over the next few years, the bit slowly made its way through the city sewers with each storm surge, slowly traveling a little further each time. It eventually reached the drain outlet at the Trotter river. There it lay in the mud, traveling even more slowly now, until in the next decade it came to rest on the outcurve of a bank miles downstream. A prospector, named Flash in the Pan, found it there, discovering quite a bit more gold than he had expected. He was so surprised that his heart gave out on the spot.
It was another year before four colts stumbled on the remains, inadvertently completing a childhood goal they didn't know they had of seeing a dead body. One of them picked up the coin, touching off a fierce argument over whether by stealing he had just doomed them all to a curse or if it was just looting.
Regardless of the answer, there was enough hesitance that the bit holder didn't dare spend it. He kept it locked away in a secret box in his bedroom. Eleven years later, when he was away at college and having long forgotten the bit, his mother found it while cleaning his room in a fit of emptynestesness. Not knowing anything of the story, especially the part that explained why her son had wet the bed for years, she spent it on a nice Eat, Hay, Love sign for the hallway.
The artist who'd made the sign put it in their savings account. Of course, this was before banks were heavily leveraged and that particular bit only ever sat in their safe deposit box before getting withdrawn almost sixty years later as a Hearth's Warming gift for her granddaughter. The present was part of starting a new savings account for the filly to set her up right in life, and so the bit went right back in the bank, transferred just one box below.
Almost twenty years later, the filly had grown up and appearently hadn't learned anything about financial responsibility, withdrawing her entire savings for a wedding ring for her mare friend. It turned out really awkwardly since the other pony wasn't a unicorn.
The jeweler who'd made the ring and received payment for it didn't care. Being a jeweler, they noticed the interesting carving upon the bit and decided it was interesting enough to put on display. However, it proved only interesting to them, and sat on a dusty shelf in the front window of the shop for several years before finally a numismatist named Numa walked in who was willing to spend more than a bit for a bit. It really did limit the coin collecting hobby when the same currency from hundreds of years ago was still in use.
At any rate, the coin went into Numa's collection where it stayed for another fifty years. Upon his death, the entire collection was donated to the Vanhoover Coin Museum. It took most of a decade for anyone to realize that it was anything notable. Shortly after going on display it was stolen by a stallion named Crooked Clive who broke into the museum one night. Given Equestria's system of continuously using the same currency, he was able to immediately spend the coin on a diamond necklace he'd been eyeing at the local pawn shop.
Crooked Clive then robbed the pawn shop and got the coin back.
However, this time he had the misfortune to be identified and found himself on the run out of town. Thinking that he would lighten the load, he tossed his coin purse into a tree at the side of the road.
His prison term was fifteen years, and once he was out, he was unable to find the place where he'd left his money. In fact, the purse had been grown around by the tree in that time. It was a nice tree, a sturdy oak, and would live for another two hundred years before being chopped down by a crew of lumberjacks to build a new settlement called Ponyville. Finding a cache of coins inside the tree, the loggers marveled at the incident, and then promptly split the money.
The coin ended up with a stallion who spent it that very evening. It was a for a decidedly carnal purpose, lonely loggers being prone to certain vices.
The new owner carried it with her until Ponyville was built up enough to have places to spend it, where she purchased a nice dress, a little chiffon number. It had been imported from Manehattan, and the coin eventually found its way back to the city. A couple of weeks later, it went towards the clothier's property taxes.
The City of Manehattan held onto it in a vault below city hall for several years before investing in infrastructure improvements to a small island in the bay, thereby creating a platform for the new Statue of Ponity. The contracting company that received the bit took the wealth onboard for the trip back to shore, but apparently their expertise in building things did not also apply to boats and it sank right off the pier.
There was some debate over whose jurisdiction the sinking had happened within, due to the newly improved island and the fact the boat hadn't yet touched the shore when it went under. Litigation tied up the proceedings for almost a year before the boat was finally raised.
Upon recovery, the bit was seized as part of a settlement between the owners of the boat and their unpaid bills due to having a good portion of their income at the bottom of the bay. It languished for several more years in a Manehattan bank before asset forfeiture and bankruptcy proceedings eventually worked themselves through and it was decided to send it to the Equestrian Civil Bank located in Canterlot.
However, as the mass of coins were being transferred, our bit slipped out, rolled across the floor, and lodged itself in the small crack between rows of safe deposit boxes and the wall of the safe.
Thirty seven years later, the bank was moved to another location and the existing building was decommissioned to make room for a strip mall. During demolition, one of the workers discovered the bit and pocketed it. He spent it that day down at the local Hayburger. Just hours later, it was given in change to a paranoid mare who shoved it under her mattress along with several thousand other coins.
Fifteen years later, she'd cleaned up her act, learned to laugh at her past habits, and cleaned out her house. She donated it to a local charity that specialized in recovering hoarders such as herself.
Unfortunately, the program was not always successful and the coin was taken by somepony else and hidden under another mattress for another three decades.
Due to the metric tons of stuff filling up his house, he was eventually forced to dig into his savings and the bit came out to be spent on a limited edition boxed set of one bit coins. He got exactly one bit for one bit, and the new bits went under his mattress.
The mint, knowing none of this, sent the coin to the Equestrian Civil Bank in Canterlot. Just a few minutes after being poured on top the pile in the vault, it was taken up along with 19,999 others and given to a mare for a loan. She was in the process of moving to Cloudsdale and needed a new house.
However, this was still the early years of Cloudsdale when everypony kept forgetting that only pegasi could be supported by clouds, so it was super awkward when she dropped the bits while paying for the new house and they all went plummeting down towards the swamp the city was currently hovering over.
This was a problem that was never fully fixed until many years later, and as a result, many earth ponies and unicorns used to follow Cloudsdale around waiting to see what might drop from it.
Around fifty years later, a talented surveyor named Plumb Bob found a historical record of Cloudsdale's routine circuit and logically predicted that found treasure would be most likely in that area. In tracing the path as best he could, he stumbled upon the sprinkle of coins. Of course, some were buried and treasure-finding spells were still in their infancy so he didn't get everything on the first attempt.
But upon learning that there was gold in them there flat lands, it brought a mini rush of prospectors to the area, and the bit was eventually unearthed five years later.
It was carried around for a few months in a purse before being spent for a new pickaxe at a small seed-feed store in Ponyville owned by a stallion named Seed Investor. Another few months passed in the store's safe before being transferred to a savings account in a local bank.
And there it stayed. In fact, two generations had passed before Seed Investor's grandson, Stinkin' Rich, needed money to open a new store called Rich's Barnyard Bargains. Being the largest, and nearly the only, store for miles around, it wasn't long before the bit came back to stay again.
The design on the coin was interesting, so Stinkin' Rich gave it to his kid to play with. It remained his toy, and eventual lucky charm for his entire life.
His son, Filthy Rich, apparently did not know the sentimental value to his father, and tossed the coin in the cash register on his next trip to the store.
A young stallion, new to town, stopped by Rich's Barnyard Bargains to buy an oven, as he was opening a baking shop. His name was Carrot Cake and he had decided that perhaps Ponyville was to be where he settled.
That was cemented when he spotted a pretty mare across the store who was shopping for whisks and rolling pins.
Too bashful to talk to her directly, he started trying to learn where she hung out, eventually meeting her face to face at the Ponyville library. Of all the excuses to get close to her, he'd taken out several irrelevant books, and sheepishly paid the late fees after being distracted by having a marefriend for once.
The bit sat in the libraries coffers for several years. There wasn't a lot of money coming in with fees, and even less going out, so the cash box was dusty when Twilight Sparkle arrived to take the position of librarian. She was an organized sort, and promptly - well as promptly as she could with the Nightmare Moon incident going on - conducted an audit.
Finding the coin, and curious as to what it could mean, she packaged it up and had it sent to her mentor, Princess Celestia, with a short note.
The package arrived on dragon fire at Canterlot Castle, directly to Princess Celestia. She opened the package, taking out the scroll. After reading Twilight's letter, she looked deeper in the box to find the coin.
It gleamed in the light despite its age. Celestia glanced at the design of her own face, but then did a double-take, seeing the impudent alteration.
"LUNA!"
Author's Note
The plot of this story was mostly stolen from Livingston Taylor's Dollar Bill Song, which I first heard from him at a joint concert with Tom Chapin in the early 2000's and for some reason have been thinking about a lot lately.
