Como Salsa para los Tacos: S.C.S. Livery
Admiral Biscuit
The Powerhouse at Union Station—located across the street from Union Station—was, despite its name, not a powerhouse, although perhaps it had once been. It had a smokestack in back, between the building and interstate 64. It was also conveniently located only two blocks from the Gateway Transportation Center, which had buses and trains.
It also had a 1274 square-foot office for lease on the fourth floor, and a Taco Bell within easy flight distance for Sweet Pepper.
S.C.S. Livery, named for the three ponies who had founded it, had the stated mission of helping ponies get jobs on Earth, which they did. Their unstated mission was industrial espionage, and they were good at that too. They found jobs with access for field agents, as well as for ponies who had no idea they were helping.
Reports were sent in by post or e-mail. Their IT department, such as it was, was totally overwhelmed, and they were scrambling to get more equipment put in. Even after months of operation, they still kept underestimating just how much could or should be done on computers.
On the plus side, they had a big operational purse with bits to burn, so purchasing the equipment wasn’t a problem. The challenge was figuring out just what they needed and finding trustworthy ponies to operate it.
Aside from computers, Creme Brulee dealt with the rest of their office needs. He occasionally clashed with the two mares, since he preferred function over form, and usually bought the cheapest used desks and filing cabinets that would get the job done from the Warehouse of Fixtures.
He also got the daily mail. Besides field reports and other official business, they also got a fair number of unwanted junk mailings; those got shredded and recycled and if they were plain white paper some of the strips got repurposed into a nest for Sweet Pepper. It wasn’t as good as a proper cloud, but it was good enough for morning and afternoon power naps.
They’d split the office into two halves. Up front was the legitimate side of the business; in the back they had their desks as well as a conference room lined with maps, charts, and filing cabinets, which was where the three ponies were gathered along with a special guest.
“So tomatoes are a dead end, nothing new to learn there.” Sweet Pepper tossed a cluster of papers on the table. “We’ll keep Rosella on until her visa expires, of course, but we can go mostly hooves-off.”
“We didn’t learn ‘nothing,’” Creme Brulee objected. “We learned that they use inferior tomatoes for fast food.”
“And steaming and canning and salsaing and juicing and everything else where you don’t see the whole fruit . . . tomatoes are a fruit, aren’t they?”
The other ponies nodded.
“Nothing we needed to know.” Sweet Pepper said. “We already knew the tomato varieties they use, so unless we want to build a human-style harvester. . . .”
Creme Brulee shook his head. “There’d be a riot.”
“What about Grace’s reports?”
“Pure gold, from one end to the other, just like you’d expect. She’s a natural. We got feelers out, ponies in place and others moving in . . . still working on Kenosha Beef, I’ve got some information on the recall but not entirely sure if they’re still a supplier. Sometimes companies get bad blood between them, especially when there’s a lot of money involved. Plus, it’s hard to find a pony who’ll go into an abattoir, even for what we’d pay.”
“You have consulted with griffons, right?”
“Of course,” the pegasus huffed. “No stone unturned and all that.”
“I’d prefer to get a pony into the office end of things; she’d have more access. Rather than a griffon on the, uh, processing line.” Sweetcream Scoops lit her horn and pulled up a stack of papers. “We’ve got good leads on fat/lean ratios and cooking times and the size the beef’s milled to, and we can get exports made to our standards if we want. I am going to get a filming crew into a processing plant, I’m still working on negotiations for that. Moving on, what do we know about McLean Co.?”
“Trucks working for Pepsico, they’re just a delivery service.” Creme Brulee pointed to a flowchart. “Not likely to be fertile ground there, but we can put a truck driver or laborer in place if we think there’s gonna be anything useful. I was on the Matchbox truck logistics team, and shipping isn’t what we really need to know. The products go in a box from the factory, sit for a while in a big barn which they call a warehouse, then go on another truck or boat or train to be shipped to a different distribution barn and eventually a store. From what I can tell, they have the same process with their food distribution.”
“Chapulin’s been sending in good reports. What do we have for follow-up?”
“Let’s see. She gave us another company name and address, probably an intermediate but we’ve got a pony on payroll there starting next week.” Creme Brulee consulted his notes. “Restaurant Supply Chain Solutions LLC; they’ve got an opening in Dallas.
“There’s a lot we knew about the ingredients. They make the hard taco shells out of tortillas in-house, so that’s why we couldn’t find a source on those. Food holding temperatures, cooking times, POS interface—that’s not worth pursuing—machine names.”
“We got anypony on the machines?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I think that they’re all custom-made for Taco Bell, not commercially available. But there have to be companies who build them to spec, and we’ve got feelers out there. Between Grace and Chapulin, I think we’ll get most of the equipment sources in time.”
Starlight Glimmer licked her lips. “How about the sauces?”
Sweetcream Scoops stood up. “Bulk sauces and salsa packets come from two different sources, I think. Their salsa’s proprietary, and we’re working our way up the chain on that one. Kraft sells some kinds in bottles but we’re not sure if it’s exactly the same stuff.
“They’ll usually give you as many little packets as you want at the store and sometimes you can get the other kinds in little cups, so we’ve got plenty to study and maybe reverse-engineer. That’s not actually our operation; we don’t have the space. There’s a test kitchen set up outside of Kansas City.” She pointed a hoof to the west. “The train goes there, so it’s really convenient.
“They’ve got hot and mild mostly figured out, but diablo is proving to be a tougher nut to crack. We haven’t found out where they make them, yet, but we will. Hopefully it’s the same kitchen where they make the bulk sauces, or else we’re gonna have to get more ponies involved.”
“I can get however many you need,” Starlight assured her. “What about the tortillas?”
She shrugged. “We’re working on that. Grace said that some of the flour is milled at Star of the West, we found that, and we’ve got a miller we can get in there once there’s an opening. I’ve been twisting legs on that end. A lot of big companies don’t want too much cross-pollination though, so it’s tougher. She should get in eventually—I padded her resume to make her look more appealing to humans.”
Starlight Glimmer nodded. “Okay, so you’ve got basic logistics, preparation techniques, and some suppliers nailed on and folded over. Flour’s on the to-do list, logistics is a maybe, and you’re working up the sources for machines.”
“And cheese, that’s important too. We haven’t forgotten about that. We’ve got a cheesemaker named Beemster sniffing around in Wisconsin, learning what he can, and when we’ve figured out who supplies Taco Bell, we’ll get him in there.”
I really enjoy the fact that, because my Tracking and Feed indicators lit up at the same time, I instantly knew that 1) it had to be Admiral Biscuit and 2) because Admiral Biscuit apparently works on a FILO stack, it was necessarily about tacos.
Ah, yes, an Equestrian variant of beef would be problematic, and not just because it'd make the ponies uncomfortable. "Meat is murder" is a bit more literal there when it comes to beef, after all.
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Oh, I very much do not work on a FILO stack. It’s way more complex than that.
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Yeah, exactly. There are probably some ponies who are at least slightly on board with the process, but for the most part ‘this taco was made from someone you might have known’ isn’t going to be a viable marketing strategy. Given Taco Bell’s menu customization options, they certainly could offer practically everything without meat, which might be best for most ponies; for ones who did go to Earth and picked up a taste maybe without knowing exactly what they were eating, it’s likely less offensive if it’s sourced from Earth.
But even then, that might be too much for ponies.
I wonder if temple grandin would be willing to help the ponies understand the slaughterhouse stuff.
Tantas investigaciones solo para hacer su propia versión de un restaurante en donde el 50% o mas de su comida no es comestible para ellos XD
Actually, mechanical harvesters are rougher on the tomatoes (both fruit & plant) than hand picking. They had to develop a thicker skinned tomato to be able to use harvesters. Plus, previous tomatoes ripened over a wider span of time.
In short, Equestrian tomatoes probably taste better. Vine ripened, hoof picked, 100% natural grown
(no chemical insecticides or fertilizers). There could well be a market for such on Earth.
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It's like saying "don't worry! this human meat is from a world where humans are non-sapient animals." Sure, there's always going to be some who will take the plunge, but the majority of people will still be going for the other options.
Every good conspiracy needs someone at the top who knows what all's going on. Even if they're not quite sure on the IT front.
But yeah, the beef issue will be almost as challenging as bringing human-style combine harvesters to Equestria. Though I imagine chicken will be an easier sell. (No one tell Twilight about the quesadillas; she'd shut down the whole operation in a heartbeat.)
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IT ponies only need to look at /etc/sudoers to know who they (probably grudgingly) answer to. Though Glimmer would probably melt the brain of any pony who asked her to make them a sandwich. Friendship bedamned.
nmap (and the zenmap gui frontend) and wireshark to get an idea of who's controlling the local company network. They're great fun to play around with.
https://www.kali.org/docs/nethunter/nethunter-rootless/
I wonder what the endgame of the ponies is.
Copying the human food industry?
Edit:
Silly me! I should have just re-read the description...
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Ethically sourced long-pig? Hmmmm, there might be marked for that. After all, you are what you eat, and if you want to stay human...
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Possibly . . . I haven’t read any of their stuff, so I don’t know exactly where they stand (they might advise ‘don’t’, for example).
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Heh, that’s true, but they’ve got to know it all in order to pick and choose what they want.
EDIT: also, it’s not technically ‘inedible’ (in small doses); horses can and will eat meat when they get the chance, but they usually don’t, since they’re generally terrible predators.
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That doesn’t surprise me. Due to the nature of commercial growing and harvesting, they probably also had to make a tomato that was more shelf-stable then previous varieties.
There probably would be. All heritage varieties, essentially, pure organic, non GMO, etc.
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As I recall, there was a guy who got his foot amputated and took the opportunity . . .
Anyway, yeah, there’s generally a strong taboo against it.
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Surely they’ve got ponies learning computer stuff as fast as they can, given the value of computers in modern society. But that’s a steep learning curve for ponies.
And Glimmy gets to use her evil powers for good, so that’s a win.
Possibly, it depends on how much ponies like their chickens (and by extension, chickens that aren’t theirs). I mean, Fluttershy stared down a cockatrice to get a chicken back. . . .
I feel like she’s a good enough ruler to let other ponies have their joys in life, even if she’s not pro-quesadilla herself.
derpicdn.net/img/2017/8/4/1502369/large.png
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Just Taco Bell.
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With modern tissue-growing techniques, you could theoretically make it in a lab if you wanted to (some organs and tissues have been successfully lab-grown, and I suppose if you were going to eat it, it wouldn’t have to work right). Incidentally, I had to look that up (because it was one of those things I thought I’d heard but wasn’t sure) and it turns out that there are more things than I thought.
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Tample grandin is a lady who desighns cattle shoots and holding devices and audits plants and such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMqYYXswono&ab_channel=meatnewsnetwork
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Actually, Gulliver's fourth voyage, to Houyhnhnm Land, the horse people had unintelligent humans, called Yahoos & did exactly that. (IIRC) They did keep the Yahoos as domestic animals.
10436456
Will the three S.C.S. ponies wage war over their Pony Taco Company's name?
"Why can't we just call it S.C.S. Tacos?"
"Because we're trying to hide our connection to industrial espionage."
"Oops."
So the only reason computers caught on so fast in Equestria was because ponies needed computers to steal/copy tacos and matchbox race cars? That's adorable!
P.S.
What else would ponies long for once they have their tacos and matchbox race cars?
Business Pony: (melodramatic) "And when Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer."
Well, in addition to the general continuation of the adorable industrial espionage, that answered in-story some questions I had from before, so thanks. :)
A little surprised to see Starlight Glimmer at the reins here, but I can't say it's not appropriate.
A fascinating peek behind the curtain.
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Gotcha . . .
I suppose if ponies did slaughter animals for whatever reason, they’d want to be humane about it (ponies like Fluttershy would have input on the process, I’m sure).
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I really need to re-read that. It’s been decades.
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Depending on trademark laws in Equestria, they might just call it ‘Taco Bell’ or even better, ‘Not Taco Bell’ (or ‘Almost Taco Bell’ or ‘I can’t believe it’s not Taco Bell’)
Pfft, S.C.S. could stand for anything, right? Like SweetCream Scoops . . . oh, wait, no, that’s not good either.
Computers finally reach their real potential.
Well, pegasi want Camelbaks and Earth Ponies especially want Air Secretariat hoofboots. Cars named for horses are likely to be popular, too; Ford’s got an edge there. And Budweiser may or may not have a marketing edge.
True story, there are a number of cars I’ve always wanted to own. Two of them are too exotic for me to ever afford unless I suddenly win the lottery or something, but as for the rest . . . well, one day I bought the last one on the list, and that moment of realizing that I now owned or had owned every single car I’d ever aspired to was both a happy and a sad feeling.
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Is there a better pony for the job? I think not.
Thank you!
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And now I am certain you work on a phyllo stack.
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That’s getting closer to the truth
Ah, Horse Spooks. Somepony important must really like tacos.
The whole story has been great so far, loving the different aspects from the varied points of view.
I wonder if we will see a gryphon's perspective. That's something I've honestly been thinking of for a while now.
How Gryphons and Hippogryphs would fit into this world.
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Or a lot of someponies, enough of them to make somepony important notice and Do Something.
Thank you!
I hadn’t thought of that, honestly. (Besides a passing mention.) There aren’t currently plans for that in this story, I’m afraid.
Did this chapter take place in the United States or Equestria? I don't think that was made clear.
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St. Louis, MO.
IMO, they'll get purer ingredients in Equestria (no chemical fertilizers or insecticides). Figuring import duties, maybe cheaper as well.
Equestria has cows that sell milk so they can likely duplicate the cheese. The sauce being proprietary, if they can't substitute they might be able to get a license to make their own.
They will probably need to import their beef, but might be able to use local chicken and fish.
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Yeah, and they’ll also have been influenced by Earth Pony magic, which will surely help, too.
Or else they’ll reverse-engineer it and won’t need to bother with a license at all. I could see the ponies going either way on that, and I also think (not a lawyer) that while you can certainly trademark food names, there’s not much you can do about the ingredients. If somebody on their own figures out how to make Baja sauce, not much Taco Bell can do so long as they don’t market it as Baja sauce.
Assuming no weird dystopian world, yeah, Equestrian beef is probably out. Chicken is questionable, there’s no canon that I know of that implies ponies would eat chickens or raise them for meat, but it’s not impossible. I do think that they’re okay with eating fish, there’s a reasonable number of canon examples that suggest it’s not unheard of.
Wow. I now know more about the Taco Bell supply chain than I ever needed, wanted, or even thought of before.
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You learn all sorts of things in my stories.