Does Not Contain Actual Shamrocks
Shamrock Shake
Admiral Biscuit
Tornado patrols meant going where the weather was, or at least going near where the weather was going to be in order to establish a home base.
Back in Equestria, of course, the pegasi made most of the weather. As a result, it was where they said it was going to be and what they said it was going to be. On Earth, that wasn’t the case, and there were week-by-week discussions about the most fertile ground for tornadoes.
When the tornado team had set up their first encampment at a Best Western in Texas, they had rated a front-page article in the newspaper, and a couple days of interviews and editorials in the second section for the week following. Doctor Tetsuya hadn’t approved—especially since the interviews focused less on his scientific work and more on the teams that found, measured, and attempted to break up the tornadoes.
He’d still done an interview, and so had Bill and Jo. Paradise had spoken for the team, and a few pegasi had rated separate interviews. Velvet Light had muddled her way through one interview without entirely understanding what was happening—the reporter had caught her in the parking lot of the Dillons while covering the latest iPhone craze at the AT&T store. Her answers to questions hadn’t been anything special, but the fact that she was sporting a gauze bandage around a foreleg as a result of windblown debris made her immediately sympathetic and the plucky underdog to an audience who knew full well the carnage a tornado could bring.
As the months went by, their fame and notoriety faded, at least in the eyes of the press. Their arrival at a new hotel was no longer newsworthy, although after a severe storm there was always some video footage of the ponies in action. At first, they were shaky cell-phone videos taken by locals, until some of the pegasi started wearing GoPros.
Brinkley, Arkansas wasn’t known for much. It was an unremarkable town located near where the thought to be extinct ivory-billed woodpecker was rediscovered; it was also surrounded by rice fields and popular for duck hunters in the late fall and early winter. It also was about halfway between Little Rock and Memphis, and often used that in some of their advertising campaigns.
It was mostly destroyed by a F4 tornado in 1909, and the local Days Inn was, for now, the headquarters of a dozen storm-fighting pegasi and their human crew, none of whom knew the history of the town.
They did know that the Days Inn had a continental breakfast. It wasn’t great.
Most mornings when they weren’t on the road, the ponies and some of their human crew would visit the Waffle House, to the point that they’d become temporary regulars. The first day, the waitresses had been caught off-guard at a dozen pegasi crowding into booths; now it had shifted to ‘Do you want the usual, hon?’
Los Pinos was next to the hotel, and Pizza Hut was close. They didn’t deliver, but Dusty’s van could carry plenty of pizza, and if it wasn’t available, most of the pegasi were competent enough fliers to carry a couple boxes on their back over the interstate and back to the hotel.
Even McDonald’s saw the ponies enough that the staff no longer freaked out if a pegaus came inside or made her way through the drive-through lane for some McCafe coffees or a sack of Filet-O-Fishes.
A couple of the more tech-savvy pegasi had even figured out the McDonald’s app.
•••
Thus it was one otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon that a lone pegasus made her way into the McLobby and trotted up to the counter. A few people in the lobby snapped pictures of her to post on their Facebook pages or Instagrams or whatever the kids these days are using, but for the most part the tornado ponies had become a common enough sight around town that nobody really remarked on her presence.
When it was her turn at the counter, she got right to the point. “One Shamrock shake, please.”
The clerk hesitated over the screen. “What size?”
Merry May frowned. Some of the ponies struggled with the idea of things coming in different sizes, even after all this time on Earth. They’d figured out what size they wanted for things they usually ordered, but when it was something new, they were often caught off-guard.
“Small, medium, or large.” McDonald’s had been fancifing its menu to appeal to a more nuanced customer base, but hadn’t gone full Starbucks when it came to sizing.
“Med—large.”
“Whipped cream?”
“Yes, please.”
He gave her a total, told her the order number—some of the clerks gave them the receipt, but he thought it strange to see them holding the slip of thermal paper in their mouth and occasionally looking at it cross-eyed as the order display updated. He’d learned that the ponies were more attentive than some of their customers; give them an order number and they’d remember it.
•••
One thing that the McDonald’s employees—and other fast-food employees—hadn’t noticed about the ponies was their constant surprise at how fast the food was ready. While there were thermopolia that sold ready-to-eat food for ponies on the go, they only had a few options. Anyplace with a large menu where the food hadn’t already been prepared, or nearly prepared, and there was going to be a wait.
Merry May stepped away from the counter and went around the corner to study the Happy Meal Toy display. It was at a low level to appeal to children, which was also convenient for pegasi. Curiously, there was also a fire extinguisher right next to it, also at a low level.
Currently they were offering Disney-themed toys. Collectable cards and giant posters—the whole team had spent a week at Disney World as part of their winter vacation and that had been an enjoyable place. Merry May didn’t quite understand it, but she enjoyed the roller coasters and water rides. Epcot was kind of like a quick tour of the world, and they even had an Equestrian area with ponies. The public-facing side of it was adapted to appeal to humans, but it was still nice to meet new friends and chat in Ponish.
Her ear perked as her order number was called, faster than she’d expected it to be. It couldn’t have been more than a minute.
She trotted to the counter and regarded it. Color-wise, it was a complimentary green to her coat, with a swirl of whipped cream on top, just like she’d asked. In a clear plastic cup with a domed top, much like the cups for Slurpees.
Merry May grabbed the shake off the counter, grabbed a straw out of the bin with her mouth, and then settled into a seat with her frosty treat.
•••
Getting proper pony foods was a treat. At first, the wide array of unfamiliar choices and ready availability of Taco Bell were appealing, but she was a simple pony and sometimes wanted something familiar.
Some of the ponies on the team had been motivated to get a free ticket to Earth and were willing to work extreme feral weather for the opportunity. Others were in it for just the weather, and willing to work on Earth to get it—Merry May fell into the latter camp. She relished the challenge, the chance to fight a new and different kind of storm that had never been touched by the hooves of ponies. She wanted to land with aching wings, soaked to the bone from driving rain; she wanted to feel rime ice in her forelock and be tossed around by cloud-winds.
Exploring new foods was an unfortunate consequence of being on Earth. They’d learned that pet stores sold alfalfa cubes and farm supply stores sold mineral blocks; at restaurants she ordered what was as close to a proper pony food as she could get and was often disappointed. Fish was skinned and fileted and sometimes breaded and deep-fried; and nobody had pasture grasses on the menu. Not until now, anyway.
Regardless of the clover supposedly in it, the shake was an artificial green. She wouldn’t have expected anything less. She’d overheard one of the humans say that McDonalds sold fake plastic food, and couldn’t agree more. Plastic food served in plastic cups and plastic-coated paper wrappers.
What mattered was the taste. She sniffed at it and could smell lots of things, none of them clover. Maybe the whipped cream had been a mistake; maybe it was covering up the sweet grassy smell of shamrocks.
She jammed the straw into the drink and leaned over it. The first taste was whipped cream—if it could be called that. The picture on the menu of the shake with whipped cream had enticed her even though she should have known by now that food pictures lied.
Behind that, what should have been clover was instead mint and a host of artificial flavors assaulting her senses, made all the worse because she wasn’t expecting it. Yes, she’d anticipated some fakeness to a McCafe shake, but not a blatant lie about what flavor it actually was. There was no grassiness whatsoever to her alleged shamrock shake.
Merry May was a dutiful pony, so she took a second sip just to be sure. Maybe the unexpectedness of the mint had covered the clover . . . but no, there was no clover to be found in the shake.
•••
Some ponies on the team would have taken it as a learning experience, unwilling to ruffle feathers. Others might have liked the flavor, even if had been unexpected. Mint was good for digestion, after all.
Merry May was not some ponies; the store had advertised a shamrock shake and that was what she ordered and that was not what she was given. She picked it up and marched to the front counter, where she had to wait in line behind a couple county employees on their lunch break.
They were fast; they had a usual order, and then stepped to the side to let her approach.
“This isn’t what I ordered.” She plopped the plastic cup on the counter. “This is terrible, it’s all mint and there isn’t any shamrock in it at all.”
The guy at the counter was taken aback. True, he hadn’t seen Merry May in the restaurant before, but he’d seen some of the other ponies and they were polite and undemanding; he hadn’t expected for one of them to be upset with the food she had been served.
“No, they don’t have shamrocks.” He didn’t even know for sure what a shamrock was. “That’s just a name, it’s a mint-flavored shake.”
“I should have expected that,” Merry May grumbled. “Since your Filet-O-Fish isn’t a proper fish, either. But it is a fish, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “One hundred percent Alaska Pollock from sustainable Alaskan fisheries.”
She’d give him the benefit of the doubt on that; it could have started as a pollock. “I don’t want mint, I want shamrocks. Clover. Why is this not clover?”
Because humans don’t eat clover. He was wise enough to not say that. “Let me get the manager.” If there was to be a refund—which was likely in this case—it would be the manager who had to approve it anyway.
“I don’t want a manager, I want a proper shamrock shake or I want my bits back.”
“Hold on.” He scurried away, and a moment later a manager appeared, even though Merry May didn’t want one.
“What seems to be the problem, uh, miss.”
“I ordered a shamrock shake, and this hasn’t got shamrock in it.”
“No, our shamrock—”
“I know.” Merry May let out a dramatic sigh and pushed the offending shake a few inches closer to the kitchen. “Now I know. Liegende klootzakken.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He punched a few buttons on the screen and the cash drawer popped open. “Here you go.” And, since he was feeling magnanimous and she was adorable, even if she was angry. “Here’s a five dollar gift card towards anything on the menu.”
•••
A five dollar gift card didn’t fix the deep offense Merry May felt towards McDonald’s and their lying menu. A lightning strike would go a long way, but she wasn’t supposed to do that. Likewise, tearing out the electrical wires that fed the building would get her in trouble, not only with the human authorities and her handlers, but also with the other pegasi on her team, some of whom actually enjoyed a few of the items on the McMenu. Even the Filet-O-Fish.
Instead, she took flight as soon as she was out the door, peppering the McDonald’s with a few more choice insults as she flew south along the US highway that bisected the town. Maybe she couldn’t get her clover milkshake like she wanted, but she could have the next best thing—a flower smoothie.
She landed in front of an unassuming beige metal building on the corner of Pine Street: the Flower Patch. They didn’t make flower smoothies there, or even serve food in the human sense of the word—but the ladies there were nice and friendly and they had some tasty flowers and would give her a deal on flowers that weren’t nice enough to put in bouquets.
•••
Some hotels had conference rooms where they could set up their headquarters, others didn’t. The Days Inn fell into the latter category, and so the team had purchased an extra two rooms with an adjoining door, set up some tables, and used it as an all-purpose room.
Besides the equipment packs, laptop computers, and a bank of coffee makers in the kitchenette, it also had the team’s blender. Merry May wasn’t the only pony who loved smoothies, blended finer than any in all of Equestria.
There was almost always at least some pony or person hanging out in the room, if they weren’t on the road somewhere. Today, there was only one pony in the room—Paradise, who was snoozing in the papasan. Rocky Storm had discovered it at a Crate and Barrel (which didn’t sell crates or barrels) and fallen in love with it. It was really comfy, almost as good as a cloud.
Merry May went right into the kitchen and started blending her smoothie, pouring it into a tall glass once it was wholly homogenized, then she sat down at one of the tables to enjoy her snack.
She was halfway done when Dewdrop came in, a brown paper McSack held in his mouth. He sat across from her, set it on the table, and pulled out a Shamrock shake. “Hey, have you tried one of these yet? They’re tasty!”
Author's Note
Story Notes!
