The door lands closed.
She instantly flattens herself against it, hyperventilating as she searches the room. The well-lit room, with nothing in it.
Then she lets out a breath, calming herself quickly, and sweeps a forehoof across her forehead- just below the level of her horn. “Whew! And I thought the Crusaders were a hoof-full!” She lets out a sigh, looking cross-eyed up at the tip of her own horn. “Turns out I’m a little more of one. Ugh… But hey, at least I’ve figured out basic levitation.” She shudders. “At the expense of… Oh, what’s the total? Something like half a forest and at least a hundred Diamond Dogs? I hope they don’t send me the bill; I doubt I could pay it.”
She stops at the door. It’s the morning of the second day.
She pulls her horn sternly away from the door. “No, no you’re not. You’re going to scrub your house clean today… Uh, maybe? I guess I don’t have any cleaning supplies… Drat. Maybe I’ll make them… Nope, not happening. I’m going to have to go into town today, aren’t I?” She looks around for a second, and turns back towards the door, unlocking and opening it with her magic.
“GAAH!”
And leaping backwards at least ten feet, catching similar airtime, at the appearance at the door. Three sets of eyes blink innocently; one hoof, poised to knock, returns to the step.
She steps back forwards, returning to the door. “Sorry, uh… What brings you three up here?”
Applebloom shrugs. “Well, after the help you gave us on Monday with trying for our sledding cutie marks, we thought we might try helping you.”
“Helping me?”
“Yes,” Scootaloo states, like it’s obvious.
Sweetie Belle takes one look at the room behind the older unicorn. “Maybe some help cleaning?” She looks at the other two. “We haven’t tried for our cleaning cutie marks yet, have we?”
She raises an eyebrow. The scene playing out in front of her seems… Unnatural, to her. She might even label it out-of-character.
“Uh, how many buckets?”
“Buckets?” Sweetie Belle asks, looking startled.
Applebloom scowls briefly before pulling them into view, from where they had apparently been waiting against the outside wall of the house. “Four.”
She smiles. Especially after Monday, she can definitely see this going well… Or poorly. She’ll have to make sure it’s the former. She puts on a wide smile. “Let’s do this! What is it, Cutie Mark Crusaders…?” She holds out her forehoof.
The gleam in their eyes could outshine Celestia’s sun. “Cutie Mark Crusaders House Cleaners!”
She glances up at the waterproof laptop bag once again, resting solemnly on her desk, protecting the sensitive electronic device inside. She smiles to herself; if that were working, she could…
Oh wait! One of the things she’d done yesterday was to return to her original waking site and retrieve the other object that had come with her. She’d done it late in the day- and has yet to find out if its exposure to the snow damaged it. She looks down, under the desk, at where it rests on the floor… and reaches out with one gentle prod of magic, to touch the power button.
The red light comes on, with a pop and a hiss. It starts making a few other noises as well.
She puts on a wide grin, lifting it into the air with her magic- the thing is heavy, weighing as much as one of the fillies, she’s pretty sure- and carting it out to the kitchen, where she places it on the grimy counter.
Applebloom looks up at it as she does so. “What’s that?”
She turns one of the wheels on the top, watching the text changing on the un-backlit display. Oh, how much she wishes she had a proper power outlet to plug it into. “This? Oh, it’s just a little something cheerful.”
Sweetie Belle looks up at it. “Cheerful?” she asks. “That looks more… uh, what’s the word…”
“Powerful?” she offers, pushing at one of the buttons a few times.
Tilt. “Yeah, that works. So…?”
She smiles, and touches one last button. “Well, my noisemaker here is about as old as I am…”
Then the music starts.
“Woohoo!” Three fillies cheer, slapping their hooves together.
Together with an adult’s hoof, that is- probably a first, for them.
“Yeah!” Golden Locks agrees. “Good work, thank you! Um- Oh?”
A solid knock is heard at the front door, and the sound of hooves leaving the walk.
“Who’s knocking…?” She trots over to the door, pulling it open… to find nopony. At all. She looks both ways up the road… Still nopony.
Then she looks down.
She picks it up.
“I… I didn’t know UPS delivered in Equestria,” she states, bringing the yellow paper-and-bubble-wrap package into her home and closing the door.
Three fillies, standing in the door to the kitchen, tilt their heads at it.
“What’s that?” Applebloom asks.
She smiles, telekinetically ripping the top of the package open and removing the contents… and stuffing the packaging into the tiny, dilapidated trash can she’d discovered shortly after she moved in. She looks up at the three Crusaders. “Alright,” she states. “Who’s got a number two phillips screwdriver, who’s got a hammer, and who wants to turn off the power?” She flips the package around to show them what’s in it.
“Cutie Mark Crusaders Carpenters!”
“Cutie Mark Crusaders Electricians!”
“Yea-hah! Awesome job, Crusaders!”
As it turns out, she decides, all the Crusaders need is a little guidance and their destructive propensity to try everything can be converted into a very powerful constructive energy. With their able (and carefully guided) help, she just replaced the giant, ugly-looking electrical socket in the wall behind her desk with a small, dainty little one, complete with USB charging slots. Not that she expects to ever use them, but who knows? She might… Oh, get a phone. Or tablet. Or… Or any number of other products possibly charged by USB. Like… Just about any small device intended for use with a computer, like a headset, wireless mouse, keyboard… And so on.
She might need to get a hub as well.
Or another outlet.
The other outlet she had ordered- a GFI socket- they installed behind her fridge… Or at least, what had been behind her fridge. The named appliance is currently sitting in the backyard, awaiting recycling; the compressor pump caught fire when they tried plugging it in earlier. Oh well; if Amazon could ship her an outlet, chances are they can ship her a fridge, as well. She does remember that positive testimony video about the couple living on an island only reachable by propeller plane… that Amazon still got a washer and a dryer to, on two day shipping no less.
What’s more, the fillies don’t seem to have a clue what ‘Amazon dot com’ could be, nor what UPS might possibly be. Even when she showed them the shipping label, showing it had been delivered by UPS Second Day Air, they still didn’t recognize it.
Perhaps the only disappointing part of the installation was that none of the three got their Cutie Marks. While she would have been disappointed had one gotten a Mark while cleaning her house, a carpenter or electrician mark would be a splendid mark to have. Most people don’t have easy tickets into the skilled trades.
But now… It’s time for the Crusaders to enjoy a little of the fruits of their labor. She breaks out her laptop, setting it carefully onto the desk.
Like the boom box she’d introduced them to earlier- they’d taken to it like a fish to water, singing along with every song- it is first greeted by a row of tilted heads and a “Huh? What’s that?”
Without answering, she pulls out the power cord next, using her magic to slot one end into the side of the machine- right where it belongs- and the other end to stick it into the wall outlet.
“Oh,” Sweetie Belle nods. “That makes sense. I was wondering why the sockets were so small.”
Then she looks over to them, using her magic to- very gently- lift the screen.
It lights up.
Like it always does; some setting or another, she thinks. It automatically boots itself when she lifts the screen, removing the necessity of pushing the power button.
Three fillies gasp.
“This,” she smiles, “is a computer.” She glances at it. “It’s… Very delicate technology. I was thinking, though…” She chuckles, watching their expressions. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees it’s reached the login screen; a flurry of magic across the keyboard corrects this quickly, sending it straight to the desktop.
Then, the fillies watching with silent intensity, she pops open the web browser… By touching the symbol on the screen. Magic sure makes the keyboard a zillion times easier to use, but it doesn’t seem to work with touch screens. Or touch pads.
Meh.
She touches the URL bar, pushes the S key, and hits the Enter key. Then she turns to smile innocently at the three fillies. “This, Crusaders, is Amazon, dot com.” She glances at the computer. “Where I can buy anything… Well, almost anything; there’s a few things Amazon doesn’t have, but there aren’t very many.” She chuckles.
“Uh…” Scootaloo mumbles.
“Wait, is that a store someplace?” Sweetie Belle asks.
She shakes her head. “No. This is the only way one can reach- and order stuff- from Amazon.”
Nod. “And you got those outlets from Amazon?”
Nod. “I’m liking that thought,” she states.
Sweetie smiles. “Can we help?”
Shrug. “I’d have to make sure I can actually get the money to them first… But if that works, absolutely!”
Nod. “Please do!”
Five minutes and a bank login later, it turns out her loan from the Ponyville Bank shows up on her previous bank’s site. She’s got some rather significant debt on a credit card to deal with- to be specific, the card she’d used to order the outlets- but…
She tilts her head. If the loan carried over, a bank deposit should too… Problem solved.
She logs out.
“Right then, we can do this.” She smiles. “I’ll handle the financial side of things- who wants to fetch our first order?”
She spends the fifteen minutes or so it takes the Crusaders to find something hunting up something for herself. A fridge, a new range as well… Along with the 220 socket to plug the thing in. She’d confirmed, during her exploration of her home’s wiring with the Crusaders, that the circuit does exist there as a 220, just the socket is… Well, she could almost drive a truck through it.
In the end, the end result is Big Mac. His hammer broke yesterday- and none of the stores in town have a viable replacement. They’d caught him just before he’d placed an order with some Equestrian company- based out of Baltimare, it would seem- to acquire a shiny new claw hammer… for the price of only sixty bits. She’d almost balked at it, before getting some specification. Apparently, he was willing to spend up to a hundred bits on that hammer, so long as it got to the farm within the next week or so; that Baltimare company would have it out in two weeks at the earliest.
Then, she’d punched in a quick search on Amazon… and found a nice, forged steel claw hammer. Fancy handle, good reviews, even twenty ounces… and that little magnetic nail thingy on the tip should easily exceed anything Big Mac might expect from any Equestrian hammer.
What’s more, she’d found it for only twenty bucks… on Prime two-day shipping.
Judging by the numbers she’d found on that bank’s website, one bit equals one dollar.
So she tacks on a ten percent markup- for her own and the Crusaders’ profit, of course- and orders it for him at that price. Two dollars isn’t much- but if her prediction holds out and this ends up being the beginning of an enormous explosion in ordering, she’ll be reducing her markup fairly soon. Probably down to one percent. Or even lower, depending.