//------------------------------// // Chapulin // Story: Como Salsa para los Tacos // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Como Salsa para los Tacos: Chapulin Admiral Biscuit Chapulin hopped out of her Uber and stood in front of the restaurant. It was hard to believe that she was really here, but here she was. She shifted around in her uniform. Shirt, hat, and pants. According to the sign on the door, customers weren’t required to wear pants; as an employee, she was. At the door, she paused, checking her reflection in the window. Mane done up in a bun, uniform clean and complete, and on time. On time was important. Nopony—nobody liked an employee who was late to her job. She tugged the handle on the door and pulled it open, then walked into the restaurant. Her shoes clacked across the tile floor—she didn’t normally wear them, but Taco Bell also required shoes for employees and customers alike. The farrier had charged her extra for short notice and extra for brass, but that was a sacrifice that had to be made. Heads turned at the counter as she crossed the floor, employees who didn’t know she had a job here. She kept her head up and boldly walked to the ‘employees only’ door. It wasn’t bespelled and she could have opened it even without being an employee, but humans respected signs. Chapulin had to tell the computer clock that she was present, and that was one of the many difficulties that had occurred during the hiring process. The password was supposed to be the last four digits of her Social Security number, which she didn’t have. Her Q-1 Visa had lots of numbers, and they’d finally decided to use four of those. Most of the screens in Taco Bell could be touched for input, but didn’t accept hoof-pushes. She’d almost flunked her job interview then and there, until she’d shown them how accurately she could use a special pen on the screen. In fact, there had been a whole litany of skill tests to demonstrate how much she could lift at once, if she could fold a crunchwrap, and if she could pee in a cup. She’d passed all those tests with flying colors, and was now gainfully employed at Taco Bell store number 658. Back in Equestria, on-the-job training would have consisted of having an experienced pony stand beside her and give her pointers for her first few weeks. Here on Earth, they let a computer teach her in what they called modules, explaining the Taco Bell way and how the cash register worked and how to make tacos. She paid close attention to the last, since that was why she was here in the first place. In Chapulin’s mind, she was ready to go to the back of the house, ready to make tacos and burritos and chalupas and everything else that Taco Bell had on offer. Ziri, her manager, had other ideas, and for her very first shift, Chapulin got pressed into front counter duty. She was to be the interface between the people and their food, the face of Taco Bell for eight hours. The cash register was dumb and American money was dumb. The coins were obvious enough; the bigger the coin the more it was worth with the exception of the dime. Bills were all the same size and color and so she had to pay attention to the portrait and the number. Plastic cards had their own idiosyncrasies; most of them could just be stuffed into the reader but some of them didn’t like that and wanted to be slid instead. A few worked just by tapping them against the machine. Coupons were paper or digital; the paper ones sometimes had little tiny printing on them explaining when and how they were valid, and it was all very confusing. Sometimes she had to ask Ziri for help and she hated that; she was a smart pony and a graduate of Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns and it was just the cash register or the rules that were dumb but she knew better than to say that. Customers came in clusters, and she quickly learned that if she had time to lean, then she had time to clean. Washcloth in aura, she patrolled the restaurant and wiped down the tables and pushed the chairs back where they belonged—most of the restaurant was booths, so there weren’t all that many free-range chairs. Trays were supposed to be placed atop the garbage cans, but not everyone bothered. Her lunch break meant food. Taco Bell had lots of ingredients and they didn’t have to be used just to make a menu item. Ramón told her that she could have an enchirito if she wanted, a burrito-enchilada hybrid based on a bean burrito. That was too much for a first shift, so she instead had a veggie power bowl and a black bean quesarito and watched as her food was made. As learning went, it wasn’t much, but it was a start. A step on her journey. ••• Days in, some of the bloom had come off the rose. Unicorns didn’t generally get involved in industrialized labor—not least because there wasn’t much of that in Equestria. On one hoof, it was disheartening. Some of her managers were jerks or incompetent or both, and on top of that, her co-workers were wary of her. She wasn’t trusted to make food just yet, and instead got to work the cash register, clean the lobby, take out trash, and restock the various cups and taco wrappers.  Just the same, that was learning and it gave her a chance to see every nook and cranny in the store, to look at the boxes in the cooler and in the storeroom, and to learn every option Taco Bell had when it came to menu items and their customization. It was hard to remember her goal as she was taking a soggy garbage bag out ot the stinking dumpster while watching to make sure a car wasn’t about to run her over, but she needed to prove to her co-workers that she could correctly do menial tasks before they’d trust her to make tacos. The cartwright wouldn’t have her apprentice start out making a wagon, after all.  On Thursday, Chapulin got to help unload the delivery truck, and besides the stamps and stickers that said what was in the box, there were other stamps and stickers that said other things. She kept a journal, sometimes writing in it on the job. Chapulin didn’t have to be in the break room to write in her notebook: remote writing was a skill she’d learned at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. She didn’t even need an actual pen, which was for the best. Her fellow employees might have panicked if they’d seen a pen surrounded by a faint aura writing seemingly on its own. Instead, her notebook stayed secure in the small personal bag she was allowed to bring to work, the pony equivalent of a human purse, and by the end of every shift another page or two was filled with notes and observations. They could have been more concise, she supposed, but she was working covertly and didn’t always know what her handlers wanted or needed to learn. It was better to include all the little tidbits and let them sort it out. ••• The first time she got tapped for drive-through was disappointing. It was like the front counter except she had to listen to the orders through a scratchy headset and couldn’t see the faces of the people ordering. It was annoying, but it was also a step towards knowing everything, so she did it with the most grace she could muster. The headest wasn’t made for pony ears and the buttons on it weren’t made for hooves and it took her a while to learn how to tap them with her magic, but she did, and by the lunch rush she was taking orders like a pro. Taco shell preparation was another skill to learn; they had to be put in the basket just so and dropped in the oil. The machine kept track of the time so she didn’t have to; when it beeped, pull them out and stack them in the tray. She made a note of how the frying basket was shaped and how it held the taco shells in the proper shape, how long it had to be in the oil for—the machine counted down in seconds—and how hot the oil had to be. She didn’t figure out what the oil was, but it came in a box that held a jug, both of which had labels on them, and she remotely wrote that down in her journal. ••• Mostly she took Ubers to and from work, but some days when it was nice she walked to work. There weren’t very many sidewalks and the idea of walking on the busy road with cars rushing by didn’t appeal to her, but there was a clear, straight-line path from her apartment to Taco Bell that ran under power lines. It obviously wasn’t intended to be used as a path, since there were two water crossings without proper bridges. One had a cobbled-together bridge made out of rocks, tires, and planks; the other had nothing. She’d been smart enough to scout out the route on a day off, eventually finding a cheap rowboat she could ferry herself across in. It was already painted in camouflage, and when it was tucked away in the trees it was nearly impossible to see.  It had taken her a little bit of practice to use her telekinesis to pull herself across the bayou, and it turned out that it was even more difficult to pull the boat back until she thought to buy a big coil of rope, which she could easily lift across the water and then drag the boat to herself by tugging on that. There was also the railroad crossing to contend with: the embankments were gravel which liked to shift around underhoof, and she had to be alert for trains. The bayou ran almost to Taco Bell, and she thought about taking the boat the whole way, but decided against it since she would have to bring it back in darkness and she didn’t fully trust human woods or human waterways. There probably weren’t nocturnal monsters in them, but it was impossible to know for sure.