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// Chapter 3: Friday 
// Story: We Get Diplomatic Immunity, Right? 
// by Pascoite 
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“I need twice the product you’re importing,” Greased Palm said, leaning over his desk.

Berry Punch huffed a breath and looked out the expansive window. It gave a rather nice view of Baltimare’s harbor area. “Mr. Mayor, I don’t think I can move any more of it than I already am. Somepony will notice.”

“You leave that to me.”

Berry only shook her head. “You mean like how you’re facing a recall election? Immediately after getting in office? Yeah, you’re great at dealing with problems.”

“I can be,” he said with a glint to his eyes. “So you’d best avoid making yourself into one.”

With a scowl, she started to leave, but Palm shouted, “Hang on, hang on. Don’t be like that.” So she turned around but stayed near the door. “Look,” he continued, “I still need that money, or I’ll never be able to pay my way onto the Canterlot Council.”

That was his game? “Why should I care about that?” she said with a shrug.

“Because if I make money, I spread it around.”

“I’m making enough as it is.”

Palm snorted at her and grabbed a piece of gum from his desk drawer. “You think any other mayor is gonna let you sell that? Our arrangement goes, your market goes, unless you just wanna do small potatoes stuff with a few customers.”

“That’s sounding better all the time,” she muttered. Berry glanced back up, halfway expecting him to tear into her, but he only grinned.

“I was thinking I could get my associate Pile Driver to assist you.” At the mention of his name, that lummox stepped out of the shadowed corner near the private elevator. “He can accompany you, carry a lot more than you…”

Now it was Berry’s turn to snort. “He’d never be allowed.”

“Unless I got him certified as—”

Berry Punch burst out laughing. “As a cultural ambassador? You have to be joking! Would you… Hang on, I have to remember the phrasing. A foreign idiom a friend taught me. Um… would you cheat ghosts to eat tofu?”

Exchanging a glance with Pile Driver, Greased Palm shrugged.

So Berry trotted back over to the desk and unpacked her saddlebag. A glass tumbler, a dozen bottles of fruit juices and extracts. She poured a little of one into the glass, then a splash of a second, a dram of another, three drops of this, a jigger of that.

Soon enough, the glass sat there all beautifully arrayed, the liquid inside perfectly layered in rainbow stripes. In the correct order even. Palm’s eyes widened, and he reached for the glass. “Not yet,” Berry said. “Just wait.”

Then the glass fizzed up and fogged, and after another few seconds, it reverted to its former coloration, only in reverse order now. “Yeah. Getting your thug certified as a master drink mixer should pose no problem.”

Quickly, she packed up her bottles, leaving the drink behind for him to enjoy. She departed before Palm could come up with any further argument.

But all she could think about on her way out the door was that only a few days ago, it had seemed like such a good idea to work out of one of the larger cities, not so close to home…