Ari marched back from the grocery store on foot. Marshal law wasn’t clearing up any time soon.
Every once in a while when she was out like this, Ari got approached by some strange person in a heavy coat. She had one eye out for the nearest soldier when that happened. But until now all they wanted was to sell her contraband.
“Hey.” The latest guy took out a small packet and gave it a shake. “You wanna buy some oatmeal?”
He was part of the food cartel. Those were a thing now.
Nobody knew how they got the oatmeal… but they got the oatmeal. Seemingly all of it. Not one time had Ari seen oatmeal or Ramen in the stores, but these guys always had some. If you wanted food without getting more stamps on your ration card, this new black market was the only game in town. At a significant markup.
And he had a Kodiak oatmeal too. That was the good stuff.
“How much?” Ari asked.
“15 for a box. 3 for one packet.”
“15?! For one box?!” That was pricey even for this day and age! That was almost twice what it hypothetically was in the store, which was already way more than it’d been in 2022, which was way more than it’d been in 2019! At this rate, she’d be paying a hundred bucks for a box of oatmeal by 2030!
“If you can’t afford it there’s plenty who can,” he warned.
That was the problem, wasn’t it?
“I’d better not.”
Ari lowered her head in defeat and walked away.
Getting to pick what you ate these days was a luxury reserved exclusively for the upper class. As was coffee and a host of other commodities. Like Spring Breeze warned, the government seemed determined to ‘save the food industry’. That meant taking whatever you could get.
Most people were understandably depressed about that fact. There were small riots here and there despite the military presence, but most were simply too depressed to do anything but complain at work.
But since meeting Spring Breeze and the other ponies, Ari’s mood had been picking up a little. Certainly, she was a rung higher on the mood chart than the broken masses around her.
Spring Breeze gave Ari some advice on seeing the positive side of things. It wasn’t forever. It wouldn’t be the new normal. The ponies would fight to save them from that fate. So instead… Ari could see it as an adventure.
Certainly, Ari was eating things she never would have even thought to buy before… foods she likely never would have even seen. The grocery store suddenly became an international hub as the US imported foods from anywhere that would sell it.
All kinds of weird Canadian brands appeared on the shelves, becoming more common than what you’d normally see. Other days, suddenly half the store would be in German or French. And you often found things exported from Brazil too.
Other times, you just got white bags with simply ‘flour’, ‘sugar’, or ‘corn meal’ and a bar code stamped on them. Those last and most mysterious food items never lasted long as they were the cheapest and most sought-after. A pound of white bag flour was half the cost of even the store-brand stuff, which was even more elusive these days.
The rumor was that those secretly came from ponies. It was something the government profusely denied, claiming it was simply heavily subsidized grain, but there was zero trust left in the world. Plenty of people refused to touch the white bag foods just in case.
The final source of new foods was the military itself.
Every so often, you’d get a text on your phone letting you know a distribution was about to take place. Then, about 30 minutes later, an army truck would roll up onto your block and a soldier would throw food off the back to you. It was free but you had to wait in line for a good while.
Recently, they gave out three MREs per person. Those were these military food kits with what you needed to survive for about a day. And it could be anything in there. Rumor had it, they could even contain pizza. Though no one had actually seen the pizza MRE in person.
Of course, rumors challenged the absolute altruism of these food distributions.
It was highly suspected that the army was eating food provided by ponies, enabling them to pass the MREs on to civilians. They didn’t just give the food from ponies directly to civilians because they wanted to be the ones who appeared as the good guys. One soldier all but confirmed the rumor to Ari, telling her he was all but certain they were being given food grown by earth ponies.
But to be fair, her opinion on the military was slowly rising. The army guys were surprisingly reasonable and seemed like the only ones around here interested in actually helping with anything. The police never seemed to do anything useful, meaning it was the military who actually kept violence and riots in check. The military tended to treat you like an actual person and Ari had yet to see them point their guns at anybody.
Conversely… the police had either let marshal law go to their head or the police chief really didn’t like partials for some reason and Ari was getting a biased view. But they had become completely insufferable, taking out their guns at the drop of a hat, pepper spraying people all the time, and harassing the already destitute.
The Netherlands, which had been the second largest exporter of food after the US, had a pony population of about 10 percent. They were much keener on embracing their pony population and had managed to overtake the US, at least for now, to become number one.
Needless to say, Ari never got any food from the Netherlands. Directly. But that was just the same kind of domino show they like to play. Part of the reason Germany and France were able to export so much to the US was that they were buying from the glut of the Netherlands.
Europe seemed so much more rational about the situation right now. But when had America ever been sensible about anything?
Ari got home and looked through one of her MREs, a ‘First Strike Ration’. Now it was really like this was WWII.
There was a lot of stuff in there. A shelf-stable bagel, ‘orange drink base’, barbeque pork wrap, pretzels, caffeinated chocolate pudding, osmotic cranberries…
Military energy gum?
Ari sat down to eat some of this as she opened her laptop to talk to Spring Breeze some more.
“Interesting experience ho!”
Sure! Other people were getting to fly, control weather and dreams, talk to bugs, use telekinesis, reshape the fabric of reality…
But Ari had her military energy gum!
She could just imagine Purple smugly lecturing her about how that was just as good. ‘You see! You can have human adventures instead. Adventures like food insecurity. Isn't that just as good? Being a pony wouldn’t have made you happy.’
At least she could live vicariously through Spring Breeze’s amazing adventures. Hear about her learning to fly, make little cloud structures… and of course establish the pony commune of Ari’s dreams.
She was explaining the details of how her pony community worked now.
They managed better than a lot of communities did. In Lazy Pines, for example, just about the entire town was lost to the banks and the ponies had to go live out in the woods, building their communities there.
But since Spring Breeze’s town didn’t have the government keeping them all locked up, they were able to move fast enough to save themselves the same fate. Even still, with various banks merging together, Blackrock, whom they all began fusing into, loomed ever over them.
One could divide the ponies into three camps. First, mostly out west, were the suckers who didn’t organize fast enough and got thrown out into the woods when Blackrock foreclosed on their houses. But at least they got to build their own little pony communes out there.
Next, mostly to the south, were the double suckers. Not only did Blackrock kick them out of their houses, but they didn’t even escape the system.
Then, scattered all about, were the pony communities who acted in time. Like Spring Breeze, they moved swiftly to secure enough private property and political power to seize control of their town before Blackrock did. That or they had a load-bearing pony who had a massive estate they were willing to donate to the cause.
Blackrock hated that last group.
Needless to say, Blackrock was the big winner in all this. One man’s disaster is another man’s jackpot and Blackrock hit it big time. They were happily buying up massive swaths of the nation. All those empty, foreclosed homes had to go somewhere.
Even here, in New York…
“Hi. I’m from Blackrock.”
Oh no.
“We bought out the apartment you live in.”
Oh fuck!
“How do you feel about the rent going up?”
What a stupid question. Ari’s legs felt numb.
She could survive this! If they had mercy and only raised the rent fifty percent or so…
“I wouldn’t like it,” said Ari.
“Well prices are going way up in general. Inflation.”
Of course.
“The increase will be about 1600 a month.”
“Excuse me?! That’s almost double what I’m paying now!”
“You were already paying below the market value. And with inflation the rate it is, we really have no choice.”
“Inflation is 30%, not 100%!”
“If you can’t afford it someone else can,” he said plainly. “No one owes you anything, especially not now. You can agree or you can get evicted. It’s a free country.”
Like Hell it was.
Ari couldn’t survive this. She’d go from being in the green seven hundred a month to being in the red nine hundred!
She had some money saved up… going through her head, she could hold out for a year and a half. She had time to figure something out. That was, as long as nothing else bad happened.
And in her mind, she knew it would. It always seemed to.
Ari had managed to save up some twenty thousand dollars only for house prices to skyrocket so fast that she was much further away from buying a house than when she started. Trying seemed like such a sick joke at this point.
But… there was nothing she could do about it. Was there?
Sometime later, Ari went to check rent prices in the area. Surely enough, all of them were unaffordable. The nation was generally unaffordable at this point.
But unlike the first day of ETS, there was one tiny spark of hope now. Ari wasn’t completely alone.
A>Spring Breeze? You don’t let humans into your commune, do you?
SB<April really doesn’t want to do that right now. Sorry.
April Showers was the leader of Spring Breeze’s community. She had a very young daughter named May Flowers which… was a little too saccharine for Ari. The third generation would have to be June Bug.
But Spring did speak of her with boundless admiration. Most pony leaders commanded similar respect from their community.
Ari couldn’t really be angry about her, specifically not being let in. Ari didn’t really have a great deal to offer. If she could at least buy one of the ‘blight’ houses by Spring Breeze she could make a case for herself.
But not letting any humans in at all sounded… wrong.
A>Why not?
SB<I don’t want you thinking this is just as simple as ‘we don’t like humans’. A lot of other ponies want to act like we’re a bunch of racists but that’s not the case at all. Blackrock is screwing with us too.
So they had a common enemy.
A>Don’t you have total control over the town?
SB<For now. That’s the whole thing. Blackrock is weaponizing humans against us. They’re already doing this with a couple of other pony communities. They bus in tons and tons of humans with promises of cheap rent. Then they instill a puppet mayor and clamp down on the commune we’re trying to build.
SB<Local governments decide so much! What you can build. Where you can farm. Right now, the local government is what decides whether pegasi are even allowed to fly.
A>Yeah! I heard about how that’s banned in the city. I still can’t believe they’d do that.
SB<I hope you can understand why we’re weary about that sort of thing, then. Blackrock’s human pawns are incredibly dangerous to us right now. If what you want is the peace of mind you won’t be on the streets next year, we still can’t give that to you.
SB<The humans who take those deals don’t even end up winning in the end. Blackrok will just screw them over once they get control, I’m sure.
That sounded about right. It was depressing to think that not even the ponies who held on were safe. Them getting to build their communities seemed like the one bright spot in the world. To know even that was under threat sank Ari’s heart.
A>You know I’d side with you over the banks every time, right? I’d always vote in your favor if you let me in.
SB<I don’t doubt it, friendo! You’re on my whitelist.
SB<I’ll tell you this much, if we ever need to bring in a ton of other people to save the town, I’ll make sure you’re one of them. But now’s not a good time. Not until we get more federal laws passed protecting the right to fly and respecting pony communities on some level. Until we’ve secured the town a bit better.
So there was at least a little hope.
A>Is there any hope of that? The government seems so desperate to rewind the clocks right now.
SB<We’re forming a political party to push for it!
SB<A bunch of the communities in the same situation, I mean.
A>I’d vote for you guys! The Democrats are so damn useless. You can’t possibly be any worse.
SB<Thanks.
A>Are you guys at least winning? Please tell me you’re beating the banks in your town. I need some kind of good news right now.
SB<We’re hitting back at them hard, lately. We started weaponizing the home owner’s association that most of their houses in our town fall under. Basically, they either have to send someone out here to put pink shudders on every window of their one thousand houses, or start getting clobbered by HOA fines.
SB<And we can just keep screwing with them like that forever. Apparently, we can even foreclose on them if we play all the cards right.
Foreclosing on the banks! What a wonderful dream!
Homeowner's associations, Ari knew, were like miniature fascist regimes. It was nice to hear about one of them being used for good just this once.
A>Do it! Avenge me!
SB<PS! You will be avenged and we will fight back against the banks one day!
A lot of her pony friends did these cute little post-scripts before they signed out. Usually, it was something like ‘PS! Stay strong’, of ‘PS! Love you’.
Ari wondered who started that trend. Either way, she liked it.
A>PS! I’m with you!