Full Lance half consciously peered out at his curtains from under his quilted covers. Full Lance didn't want to wake up today. He would much rather lay in bed all day like a nice sack of grain. Unfortunately that was ultimately the problem.
Sometime during the night he had realized what the problem with "Moist Grain" was: moisture. Moisture led to rot and rot led to inedible or at the very least distasteful food (for most ponies anyway). Full Lance had found this revelation neatly rendered on his bedroom curtains in beer and and at least two other questionable fluids. It read something like: "Gross stuff on wheat imminent, have fun dealing with that. The night is still young. <3"
Full Lance ultimately rolled out of bed and opened the curtains, the rising sun stabbing painfully at his eyes as he looked down onto the descending slope and shining lake below the manor house. Off to the left there was the row of pine trees that obscured the view of the fields and various distributed homes that comprised the manor.
Full Lance was in the middle of some morning stretches when someone knocked loudly at his door.
"Yes, come in, whoever you are," Full Lance rumbled.
The door screeched in protest as it opened, and Thistle Flourish appeared, curiously eyeing Full Lance's room.
"So here's where you've been, I see," murmured Thistle.
"No," Full Lance paused. "I've actually been gallivanting out woods chasing pixies for the past sixteen hours, I just got back."
Thistle eyed him levelly and cocked a brown eyebrow.
Lance sighed, "It's called sarcasm, boy."
"Master, I have a name," thistle remarked.
"Care to remind me?"
It was Thistle's turn to sigh now. "Look, I just came here because Minty thought you should know that the gr--"
"--ian is wet and bound to turn bad? Yes, I already know," Full Lance pointed to his curtains. "Or at least... some version of me last night knew."
"She also wanted you to know that Gray Root had some fungal problems with his field."
"Mm, I remember." Lance lifted his hoof to his chin in thought, "Verdammt. We did pretty well during the growing season. Why now?"
"Don't ask me, master. So uh..." Thistle leaned forward and bounced on his hooves, "You gonna do anything about it?"
"Well, we actually don't have much a choice." Lance said, looking at his curtain, "If our grain goes bad then we might not make it through winter on our own."
Full lance took a steep inhale through his nose, "Luckily we discovered it early. This is probably the best time to have noticed a thing like this. Everyone has just finished harvest which hopefully means no one is particularly attached to their grain."
Full Lance eyed Thistle, "My theory is that we can find someone in the city who will probably be just as willing to trade one bag of grain for the next provided we do all the heavy lifting since they'll probably be eating it pretty soon one way or another."
Thistle nodded and put his dark brown fetlock to his chin in thought.
"Well at any rate," Full Lance started, "I figure that there's probably a leak in the pantry somewhere where water's been dripping in. Go find it then have Grind Seed seal it up. If he doesn't want to, tell him I'll kick him and his wife off the property. "
"Jeez, you're really ornery this morning, slept on the wrong side of the bed?"
"No, I made some questionable choices last night. You'll get to understand when you're old enough to drink more." After a moment Full Lance added, "Sorry about my lack of decorum, it's all just... a little unpleasant. *Ahem,*" Full Lance straightened out his posture. "Well, I have make sure the wagon ready to start loading grain." As he exited his room, he called back to Thistle, "Hey you have a job too!"
Thistle scurried off toward the pantry.
"Well," Full Lance said to himself. "looks like I get to go see how the city's been developing again. Always a silver lining."