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// Golden Prize 
// Story: Field Notes from Equestria 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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Golden Prize
Admiral Biscuit

I decided that I'd just wander around Manehatten for a little while, and maybe look at some of the shops. I didn't have a specific destination in mind, so I just flipped a mental coin when I got out to the street and started walking.

The streets were a mix of shops and apartments, with a few carts here and there on the sidewalk or the street. Between the residents and the ponies who were shopping or commuting, it was crowded, but not uncomfortably so. It reminded me of what New York or London must have looked like at the turn of the last century—streets full of pony-drawn carriages and wagons, foals playing on the sidewalk or even out in the street, and some tourists walking around looking at everything while the locals seemed to be more interested in getting to their destinations than beholding the wonders around them.

I went a few blocks north, and then I turned towards the east. I thought that it might be nice to get a look at the bay, since I wasn't all that far away from it. Some sentimental part of me really liked seeing all the sailing ships in the harbor.

This road was a little bit wider, and it even had traffic signals on some corners. They seemed kind of pointless to me—I didn't think that the ponies were pulling their wagons fast enough to collide. But I knew that they took them seriously: on my second day in the city, I'd ignored one and I'd only made one step into the street before I felt teeth in the back of my shirt and I had to endure an explanation of traffic signals from a young stallion. I would have blown him off, but he was so earnest.

After the signal was in my favor, I crossed the street and made it another couple of blocks before I came upon the mare. She was sitting on her haunches on the sidewalk right up against the road. Her head was down, and when I got closer I could see a damp patch on her cheek.

She was right in front of a bank, so my first thought was that she'd been turned down for a loan or something. I couldn't decide if I should talk to her or let her mope in peace. The ponies seemed to generally want to comfort each other, but as far as I could see, everybody was avoiding her.

I decided to hedge my bets, and instead of approaching her right away, I went around her, but I kept my eye on her back all the way around. There wasn't anything that struck me as dangerous about her, so I finally sat down next to her.

It took me a little while to draw her out of her funk—at first, she just ignored me completely, occasionally looking up and down the street, but for what I couldn't say.

That gave me a little bit of time to study her. She had an ash grey coat and a dark mane—it wasn't black, exactly, but it was close. I finally figured out that it was more of a deep purple.

I couldn't make much sense of her cutie mark. It looked like some kind of sack with a mask laid across it, at least that was the best I could figure. Her tail was curled along her side and it obscured the bottommost part.

Finally, I couldn't take just sitting there anymore, and when she sniffled and wiped her nose, I asked her what her name was.

“Oh, um, it's Golden Prize,” she said.

“Golden Prize?” I held out my hand.  “I’m Joe. You look kind of sad—bad news in the bank?”

“I guess you could say so,” she said, and looked back down at the ground again.

I didn't think that she was going to say anything else, but she finally scraped her hoof across the concrete and looked back over at me. “I tried to rob the bank.”

Had I been thinking better, there were a lot of questions I could have asked at that point, but my mind went on a temporary lockdown. Being a bank robber wasn't something that you'd expect someone to confess to a few minutes after you met them, especially if they were still in front of the bank in question..

“I . . . see.”

“It's my special talent.” She sniffled again, and then shifted around her tail so that I could see all of her cutie mark. “Only, this time I got caught.”

“When?” Maybe she was trying to get back on her feet, and I could help out.

She turned back and looked at the clock on the wall. “Um, let's see, it was about ten minutes ago.” She sighed. “I wonder what's taking so long?”

“If you got caught, why are you still here?”

Golden Prize perked her ears up. “'Cause I got caught. I was coming out the door and a policepony was coming in and he saw that I had a mask on and a sack of bits in my mouth, and he told me to take off the mask and spit out the bag, and when the teller told him that I'd robbed the bank, he told me to go sit on the corner and wait for a paddy wagon.”