Her Royal Morning Coffee

by Georg


7. Live Now. Sleep Later

Her Royal Morning Coffee
Live now.  Sleep later.


~ ~ ☕ ~ ~

The next morning, for a given value of ‘morning,’ was going just as well as the previous one for Dry Roast, with a pleasant walk through town, a relaxing feeling about the brisk morning air, and a princess-free shop.  He brought the machinery up to a happy perking warmth, started the first pastries into the oven, and just relished the peace and quiet for a while.  After all, Twilight Sparkle had an entire bag of coffee beans to make coffee for a few weeks, so she would not get into his mane and everything would roll along like normal, without the sleepwalking.

Oh, wait.  She brought the beans back.  Still, maybe it will be a normal morning anyway.

The muted ding of the repaired bell made Dry Roast quickly turn toward the front door, and then relax fractionally when he saw Luna’s statuesque form strolling through it.

“Good morn, fair shopkeeper.  We are here for our shift.”

Maybe not that normal, even by Ponyville standards.

“Good—”  Dry Roast paused to look outside at the inky darkness covering Ponyville.  “Is it really morning until the sun comes up?”

“Verily, We say it is morning, therefore it is.”

Since she was the ultimate arbiter of the term, Dry Roast accepted her ruling and considered the second, slightly more important problem she represented.

“Are you sure you want to work at my store, Princess Luna?”

“Call me Luna,” she insisted, giving him a warm smile that he wished he could get all of his employees to copy, even during busy times.  To be honest, Dry Roast would have hired any unicorn or pegasus who behaved like Luna right on the spot.  She was bright, alert, quick to learn, and very friendly with the customers.  Raising and lowering the moon was really not on the job description of a barista, but Dry saw no reason why he could not allow a few minutes for her to perform her divine duties while on break.

That’s not to say hiring her was going to be too easy.  The amount of bits he was going to have to hold back for taxes was puzzling, but all of the rest of the paperwork had been completed, so he settled down with the princess for more specific training than yesterday.  It was so nice to have a few hours of quiet, and Luna’s comfortable personality made him almost forget her royal nature after she told a few dirty jokes.  In fact, when she took a break to lower the moon, he almost missed it due to his own mis-timed bathroom break.  But there she was, in a Java Le Choza apron, lowering the moon with the same ease a normal unicorn would use to move an apple.

She handled the rest of her morning duties alongside the other employees with a similar style, and took off for home after the noon rush with a ‘to go’ coffee floating along beside her, just as casually and comfortably as if she had been working at a coffee shop for the last few centuries.  He was watching her vanish into the distance and considering if Rarity really had needed to embroider her name on the apron when Dry Roast caught the glint of light from the other castle on the edge of Ponyville.

So he turned and gave a casual wave to Twilight Sparkle and her telescope.

~ ~ ☕ ~ ~

Once quitting time rolled around, the rest of the afternoon passed about the same way as Dry Roast expected.  The equipment was cleaned, the leftover pastries taken over to Meals on Wheels, and his late afternoon catchup weightlifting and sparring session with Rainbow Dash at the gym left him in a comfortable lather.  While trotting home, he was just starting to look forward to a relaxing hot shower and a good book.

Then he found something in his way, and it was holding a clipboard.

Dry Roast immediately began to dislike clipboards.

“Good afternoon,” said the Royal Guard pegasus, still standing quite solidly in front of Dry Roast’s door.  “Is your name Dry Roast?”

“Why?” asked Dry while pulling out his key.

“I have a few questions for you, sir.”

“No.”  Dry Roast unlocked the door and opened it up.

“It will only take a few minutes, sir.”  The guard moved to one side to allow Dry Roast to pass, but stopped after Dry went inside and held out a hoof.

“No it won’t.  Good day, sir.”  He closed the door with no small amount of irritation, as well as a slight guilty feeling as if he were carrying a few bags of stolen bits past a police station.  It gave him time during his brisk cold shower to consider the possibility of the Royal Guard actually arresting him for Aggravated Royal Kiss Theft in the First Degree or maybe Employing a Princess Without a Work Permit, but none of the charges really seemed plausible any more, particularly since he could call Luna as a witness to his inadvertent activities.

He grabbed a book out of Rain Check’s library pile and went out to the balcony to get some relaxing and reading done before bedtime, only to find the armored pegasus guard standing rather impatiently next to his telescope and waiting for him.

Darned pegasi.

The guard arranged his papers on his clipboard and opened his mouth, only for Dry Roast to cut him off.  “Unless you’re arresting me, go away.”

“Pardon me?” asked the guard, obviously uncomfortable at the way the conversation was going.

“I said, unless I’m under arrest, shoo.  Begone.  I have a book to read and you’re in my light.”

“I’m afraid I must insist,” said the guard with the most sincere voice and impassive face, which he must have practiced in front of a mirror for months to perfect.  “The security of the Princess is at stake.”

You could just hear the capital letter settle in over that word, but Dry quickly countered, “Which one?”

“Which one what?” asked the guard, obviously confused.

“Which princess?” asked Dry.  “The customer or the employee?”

“Emp—?”  The guard cut off his words so quickly that Dry Roast thought he might have bitten his tongue, then cleared his throat and said, “Customer.”

“Are you arresting me?” asked Dry.

There was a very long pause before the guard reluctantly said, “No.”

“Then buzz off.  Look, Princess Twilight’s castle is right over there.”  Dry Roast pointed and squinted at the glint of light coming from the top of the roof, right where he would put a telescope if it was his huge crystal castle.  “In fact, she’s probably over there with her telescope spying on me, so if you want answers to your questions, go talk to her.  Now beat it.”

For one long moment, Dry considered what would happen if the guard took his suggestion literally and beat him like a rug, but in the end, the pegasus turned tail and flew away without another word.

“Good.”  Dry settled down with his book, giving only a casual glance at the direction of the Royal Guard’s path and relaxed a little to see him headed for the nearer of the two castles, and in particular the one that Princess Celestia, the Living Sun did not live in.

He returned to reading his book in the warm afternoon sunshine with only a small itching desire to be a fly on the wall when the poor guard met Ponyville’s resident Princess of Confusion.

* * *

“Princess Twilight!  Princess Twilight!”  The Royal Guard fluttered down from the sky and pointed into Ponyville with a pensive pout.  “Your coltfriend is being mean to me!”

“Yes,” hissed the young alicorn, still hunched over her telescope viewfinder.  “What a naughty unicorn.  Go arrest him and throw him into my dungeons.”

The guard puffed out his chest and saluted.  “Yes, Your Highness.”

Princess Twilight Sparkle gave out a high-pitched cackle.  “Then I’ll torture him for days.  I’ll read him books with bad grammar and plot holes, and force him to write literary analysis of children’s picture books.  Maybe even—” Twilight’s voice became low and sultry “—force him to read Rainbow Dash’s Daring Do fanfiction.”

The guard trembled, shying away from the pure insanity of the image.

“Now, fly!” called out Twilight, pointing down into Ponyville.  “Fly, my pretty, and bring him to me!”

 * * *

Dry chuckled and settled into the recliner with his book.  He had read some of Rainbow’s fiction out of pure curiosity after being badgered, hounded and turtled at the gym about it for several weeks.  Her disdain for the common comma, an overriding enthusiasm expressed with excessive exclamation points even in the middle of sentences, and the worst disguised self-insert character made them less literature and more litter, but to his surprise, they were… um… fascinating in the same fashion a loaded pegasus wagon full of explosives crashing to the ground was.  After all, the end result was much the same, and you really were glad it happened to somepony else.

Just about at the time he was getting good and relaxed, a shadow fell over Dry Roast’s reading spot.  He looked up to see the Royal Guard again, only this time the pegasus looked embarrassed and chastised, much like a little colt who had messed the bed.

“…”  The guard’s voice was almost inaudible, with a pensive frown.

“Beg pardon?” asked Dry Roast almost automatically.

“I said, I’m sorry, and that I’m a….”  The guard paused and chewed his bottom lip before fairly spitting out the next words.  “…nattering numbskull.”

Dry Roast was not expecting that kind of a response.  “Is that it?”

The guard fairly growled, “She said you had her royal command to order me to do one task.”

“Oh.”  It took fairly little thought to add, “There’s a bunch of foam coffee cups over at her castle.  Could you run them up to the Canterlot recycling center for me?”

The guard, obviously expecting something far more degrading and humiliating, nodded once.  “Yes, sir?”

“That will be all.”  Dry Roast waved a hoof in a motion of Royal Dismissal and returned to his reading.  It took several pages while out in the warm sunshine, enjoying the even more beautiful afternoon, before he looked up and regarded the glittering castle.  “You know, she’s not that bad, for a princess.”

After a little more reading, he went back into the house and came out with a piece of paper, which he taped to the side of the house, then regarded it with a critical eye to spelling before returning to his book.  The words ‘Thank you!’ were in large enough letters to be read from the castle, if a telescope were used, and Dry Roast took the occasional glance at the sign while reading before eventually going to bed.

After all, he had to get up on time tomorrow.  He had more training to do with his new employee.

~ ~ ☕ ~ ~

The next morning, Dry Roast felt almost comfortable with having Princess Luna show up a few minutes after he had unlocked the shop.  He had assumed her work hours at the shop would be an imposition on her more important duties as a princess, but she shrugged and passed his concerns off with the explanation that there was a fairly boring lull around this time of night anyway, when all the day ponies had finally gone to bed and the morning ponies had not even heard the first bell of their alarm clocks.

In fact, while they stood at the coffee shop doorway and looked up at Canterlot, she waxed a little poetic about looking down from Canterlot into the silent darkness of Ponyville and seeing that one light of his store come on like a star, every morning without fail.  She had a few odd ideas about what was causing it over the last two years, particularly since Twilight’s light in the library oak quite often had a similar light in it around the same time.

“Two lights who pass in a ship?” asked Dry Roast.

“You have to admit, you two make a cute couple,” said Luna.

“I don’t have to admit that,” said Dry, a little defensively.

Luna continued as if he had not objected at all.  “One of the things Celly and I have done over the years is attempting to, I believe ‘poach’ is the word, each other’s coltfriends.  My sister is presently without a male companion, so I was looking greatly forward to playing with Twilight Sparkle in that fashion.”  She tapped a hoof on the ground and rolled her eyes.  “Upon investigation, I found her sex life is the subject of much theory but extremely little physical evidence.”

Dry Roast rolled his eyes too, then froze up as the words percolated through his thick head.  “You mean you were going to try to steal me away from Twilight, not that I’m with her, if we were dating, which we aren’t, right?”

Luna leaned over and sniffed slowly up his mane until she reached his twitching ears and whispered, “It is great sport.”

Trying to put forward an air of being offended without squeaking at the sensation of Luna’s cool breath against his ears, Dry Roast said, “I’m sure the hoofball feels the same at the end of the game.”

Luna drew back a little, but only so she could flick her eyelashes at him.  “Tell me, kind sir.  Doth your Princess of the Night not appeal to your masculine nature?  Are you not pleasured by my presence and wish to—”

“You’re an employee!” he blurted out.  “And… there’s no fraternization between employees.  Or supervisors.”

“As Princess of the Night, I watch over all ponies,” said Luna in a soft, breathy voice.  “Large and small, short and tall.  If there is to be no frating between the watcher and the watched, and the watcher watches over all, whatever is she to do with her natural urges?  Is she doomed never to feel the touch of a lover or the satisfaction of her desires?”

Then Luna shrugged, making her apron shift positions on her shoulders, before returning to her place by his side, looking up at the looming city on the mountain in silent contemplation.

~ ~ ☕ ~ ~

A sense of normality returned when the first customers began to show, as well as his morning temp, Sugar Lump.  Of course normality was relative, when dawn approached and Luna turned into Princess Luna by the simple expedient of stripping out of her store apron in long, slow motions, hanging it on his horn while she strolled outside, then lowering the moon.

When she strolled back inside to where Sugar Lump and Dry Roast were standing in awestruck silence, she plucked the apron off Dry’s horn and began to wriggle back into it with far more excessive wasted motions than necessary.  Dry was uncomfortably reminded of the Dressing Club he had attended in college, whistling along with his frat buddies while shouting “Put it on! Put it all on!” as young mares put on clothes on stage.  It did not help things when Luna took her place behind the coffee machine again and regarded him from under lowered lashes.

“As you said, it is a part-time job, kind sir.  In any case, it is a point of great mootness, since Princess Twilight Sparkle hath no feelings for you or your equipment other than this.”  Luna tapped the coffee machine with one hoof.  “As it is, I have a few questions about the proper usage of mine… equipment, good stallion.  Many of the citizens hath requested ‘extra foam’ in their beverage, which is unfortunate, for I know not the mysteries of the device which causes the creamy whiteness to be whipped into a passionate froth.  Could you show me again how to get a sufficient quantity of white froth from this piece of equipment?”

Dry Roast took a brief glance out into the main room, where several stallions and two mares were staring back with mixed expressions of terror and fascination.  He swallowed and moved over next to Luna in order to lecture instead of panicking like he wanted, and kept his calm demeanor through the rest of the morning rush until Luna departed for her mountain home.

Sugar Lump moved up to stand beside him while they watched the lunar princess ascend until she was lost from sight.  Then she sighed and brushed a lock of her tangled mane out of her eyes.  “Boss, that was awesome.”

“Tell me about it,” said Dry, still a little rattled from the morning’s activity.

“So,” started Sugar Lump cautiously, “you’re hitting on both princesses?”

~ ~ ☕ ~ ~

He was just locking up the store and getting ready to go home when Rainbow Dash showed up, hovering overhead with crossed forelegs and a fierce scowl.  It had been a very busy day, so Dry Roast tried his best to brush off the prickly pegasus to no avail.

“I’m sorry, Rainbow, but we’re closed.  I was just going to run the leftover pastries over to Pinkie Pie—”

“Come on,” growled Rainbow Dash.  “Spill it.”

“Spill what?” asked Dry.  After all, there were a lot of things that could be spilled.  Blood, for one.  His, in particular.

“What you and Twi have been up to,” she snapped.  “Yesterday, Twi came storming out to my favorite sleeping spot, kicked my cloud to pieces, and started ranting and raving about how I was in some sort of prank conspiracy with you to put a bag of coffee beans into her bedroom.  It sounded like an awesome prank, but she got all huffy when I asked about the details and flew off.  I was going to catch you at the gym yesterday, but I got caught up in practice.  So, like I said.”  Rainbow poked Dry Roast in the chest.  “Spill it.”

“You’ll never believe me.”  Dry Roast considered the situation.  “But I know somepony you will.”

~ ~ ☕ ~ ~

At that late hour of the afternoon, the Ponyville market was nearly deserted, but Applejack was still puttering around the other stalls, helping farmers get their spaces cleaned up after the morning sales.  Although her own wagon was already packed and ready to go, he had never seen the busy farm pony leave before offering all the help she was able.  When Dry Roast strolled up with the box of leftover pastries he was intending on taking over to Sugarcube Corner, Applejack gave him a smile and promptly nosed one of the cinnamon-apple pastries out of the box.

“Thanks, Dry.  That’ll hit the spot.”

He started to object when Rainbow Dash grabbed one too, but Pinkie Pie always had just exactly enough pastries of whatever kind to fill every last Meals on Wheels box, so he took one also, and Golden Harvest nabbed the last one, a carrot cookie of course.

“Service with a smile,” said Applejack through the crumbs.  “And darned tootin’ good, too.”

“That’s just because those were your apples in there,” said Golden Harvest between bites.

“Make’s ‘em better,” said Applejack.  “What can I do you for, Dry?  Ah’m plum out of apples today.”

Rainbow Dash promptly interrupted with a spray of her own crumbs.  “We want to know why Twilight’s being so weird lately.”

“Ah’m afraid you’re gonna have to be a little more specific there, sugarcube.”  Applejack took her hat off and scratched at the back of her head while most certainly not-looking at Dry Roast, which made him speak up quickly before any misconceptions could start.

“Twilight Sparkle seems to think that Rainbow was involved in some sort of prank that wound up with a big bag of coffee beans being left in her bed.”

“Oh, that.”  Applejack put her hat back on.  “Ah’m afraid that’s my doing, RD.”

“Really?”  Rainbow Dash floated up a few yards off the ground and scowled.  “No way. You’re just an amatuer.  It takes a real pro to prank Twilight like that.  She yelled at me for a good five minutes.  What did you do, really?”

Applejack held up a hoof.  “Honest, RD.  I’m responsible for the bag of beans.”  She paused with a small smile beginning to creep onto her face.  “Although Dry helped.”

“Not intentionally,” said Dry Roast.

“Really?”  Rainbow Dash landed in front of her friend and nodded.  “Come on, tell!”

“Well, since Twilight is spilling the beans all over town, I guess I can.”  Applejack settled back in a relaxed posture of storytelling.  “It all started yesterday morning when I found Dry there in bed with Twilight Sparkle.”

Dry Roast blew out some crumbs, while Golden Harvest choked a little on her cookie, but Applejack just kept going.

“They was all cuddled up there like two bugs in a rug with Twi having her legs wrapped around his—”

“Hey!”

“—neck all acquisitive like, a lot like that one day she got the new Daring Do book and wouldn’t let go of it for days.”

Dry interrupted before the story could get out of control.  “She was sleepwalking.  She chained herself to her bed and dragged it down to my store!”

Rainbow Dash frowned with unaccustomed thought.  “Couldn’t you have just taken her back to your place?  I mean if you wanted to chain her to the bed—”

“I didn’t chain her to the bed,” said Dry just as calmly as he could.  “She did.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Rainbow Dash, which set Dry Roast sputtering again.

“Are you done?” asked Applejack.

Rainbow Dash paused, then nodded.  “Yeah, I suppose.  Go on.”

“Anyhow, I rescued the good Prince from severe snuggling by swapping a bag of beans for him, and the two of us dragged her bed back to the castle.”  Applejack shrugged.  “He didn’t even stick around in Twi’s bedroom to help put things back.  Just lit out of there like a rocket an’ got lost on the way back to the front door, so I don’t think he’s been over to her boo-dwah before.”

“Thank you,” said Dry Roast before turning to Rainbow Dash.  “Happy?”

The pegasus replied with a fierce frown and a sulky-sounding, “You could have woke me up.”

“It were a couple minutes after dawn,” said Applejack.  “We couldn’t a woke you up with a pin.”

Golden Harvest abruptly spoke up.  “So how long have you been sleeping with Twilight Sparkle?”

“About twenty minutes,” spluttered Dry Roast.  “Maybe fifteen.”

“Was there any kissing?” she asked.  “Because I bought a ticket from Lyra for the pool, and—”

Dry Roast did not care to hear the rest and stalked away, leaving the three mares behind to chat and conspire behind his back.

At least tomorrow was his day off, and he would not have to deal with it.