//------------------------------//
// Chapter 8 - A Bitter Taste 
// Story: Empathy is Magic, Pt. 1 
// by SisterHorseteeth 
//------------------------------//

Smolder threw up her arms as she gestured to the unremarkable building Sunset had stopped in front of, in order to hunt her bags for the dossier. “What are we doing here? Your grocery shopping?”
To be fair, they were standing outside of a large corner store.
But, “No,” – though she did need to pick up more tortilla chips – “this is where the next candidate works.”
Smolder crossed her arms and huffed. “Lame.”
“We won’t be here too long.”
The dragon just grumbled, still displeased.
The thing about stores, of course, is that they were deeply boring places for children, on account of having no money and thus no investment in the intended purpose of the store. It never took long before they started making their own fun, which was another way of saying ‘causing trouble’. Sunset had been there. Her parents (and then her aunt, and then, early on, Celestia) had had to smooth things over with upset managers plenty of times before.
So, she would try to mollify Smolder. “Look, if it keeps you out of trouble, I’ll let you pick out something to buy.”
Smolder clapped, rubbing her hands together. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
Before Sunset could even lift a hoof, Smolder had already started pushing her forward. The cover letter would have to come after. Sunset was going in blind, once again.
The very moment the bell chimed to signal their entrance, the two of them were greeted by a smiling earth pony cashier with pale yellow fur and a pink mane, neatly bunned. “Hi there! Welcome to Cran Convenience!”
Nearby, another yellow earth pony, with another reddish mane, stocked the shelves with cans of cranberry sauce. Forcefully. “Yeah. Hi.” She barely turned to look at the customers before getting back to work.
Glancing from one earth pony to another, it was immediately apparent that they were identical twins – or nearly-identical, at least.
The biggest difference between the two of them was that the stocker had a streak of mint-green running through the center of both her mane and her tail, the former of which she had tied into a ponytail with a red-beaded scrunchie to look exactly like the real one. On closer inspection, her cheeks were freckled, and her eyes were a dull lavender instead of her sister’s bright aqua. She also wore eye shadow the same color as the streak in her mane.
Now, the problem was, Sunset didn’t have a photo of this candidate. She could swear she did, but she hadn’t given it more than a passing glance before apparently losing it. It must have slipped out while reading one of Cinch’s gas-ups.
So, one of these two mares was the pony she needed. She just wasn’t sure which.
Sunset would have remembered the green streak… if the photo hadn’t been in black and white, and she couldn’t remember if it had freckles or not.
She’d have to look for other clues to go off of.
Sunset tried to see if either of the orange-brown-and-red plaid aprons they wore bore a name tag, but they didn’t seem to be wearing any.
Their cutie marks gave no hints, either. The cashier’s appeared to be a pair of crossed batons. Or barber poles. It was hard to tell, since she was behind a counter.
The stocker, meanwhile, had a horizontal diamond of four red berries, with as many leaves; each minty as the streak in her hair and emerging from between each pair of berries.
The stocker cleared her throat.
“Uh, heya,” Sunset finally responded.
“Anything we can help you with?”, the cashier asked, smiling even wider and fluttering her eyelids.
She was kinda laying it on thick, wasn’t she? Smolder mimed gagging at the sweetness, before scampering off down some aisle or other.
“Actually, I’m here to–”
“Buy some cranberries?”, the stocker interjected, shifting into a resentful growl. “Why else would you come here? Produce section’s on the right.”
…Okay, then. Sunset wasn’t frankly sure if the stocker wanted her to buy cranberries, or anything but cranberries.
But it was Neighvember, after all. Maybe she should. And maybe she’d order cinnamon carrots and spice cake for dinner, once she… got back to the… palace…
Wait.
Wait.
Sunset blinked.
It wasn’t Neighvember at all!
It was the middle of Equust! The hottest days of summer!
What on Equus had convinced Sunset otherwise?
It took just one sniff to be tempted back into delusion. Out-of-season autumn spices hung in the air, wafting over from the little bakery in one corner of the store. All the windows were tinted blue, making the sunny afternoon they had just walked in from look like an overcast early evening. Prismaplastic leaves, colored like the pegasi had already painted them in chlorokill and shaken them from the trees months ahead of schedule, decorated the sills. The chalkboard above the front checkout counted down the days until both the Hocktober Harvestfest in the north and the Neighvember Harvestfest in the south.
Why?
“Come on,” responded the cashier to her sister, with unflagging cheer, “you can make a better sales pitch than that! I know you can!”
Ah. There it was. This store made its money in the fall, and that was why so much effort went into convincing her that fall had come.
With a disgruntled hiss, the stocker kicked the pallet of sauce cans aside and turned to face Sunset with a smile that did not reach her eyes. She said, “Just because it’s still the middle of summer doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the complex, sophisticated notes of Cran Convenience’s signature cranberries and cranberry products. We’ve got craisins, cranberry juice, cranberry tarts, cranberry pies, cranberry sauce, and, obviously, fresh cranberries, delivered fresh, daily, from the Cranberry family bogs of Maresachusetts County. If you’re not a fruit churl, you’ll be sure to buy some! Happy, now?”
The cashier beamed. “That’s much better!” Turning to Sunset, she added, “But, if you’re still not convinced–” She reached below the counter and pulled out a cranberry scone, balanced on her forehoof. “Try a free sample!~”
Sunset wasn’t big on cranberries, but free pastry was free pastry. She levved it into her mouth and took a bite and wow, okay, that was actually pretty good. Tart, but not overpoweringly so, in part because they must have been glazed two or three times more than strictly necessary. What nuance the icing took away from the flavor profile, the undertones of orange zest brought back.
“No, yeah, that’s not bad,” she finally reported, through a mouth full of crumbs.
“D’aw, thanks! I baked them this morning!” The cashier then made a show of hugging herself, which Sunset calculated was only because Sunset wasn’t quite in range to be the victim of that hug, herself.
“But are you going to buy some?”, demanded the stocker. “I’d be delighted to show you where they are!”
“Actually, I’m here–”
The stocker’s eye twitched.
“–Okay, okay, I’m not saying I won’t pick something up while I’m here–”
The twitching stopped.
“–but I’m actually here to meet with…” She’d have to bite the bullet. “Which one of you is Sour Sweet?”
‘Please don’t be the nag,’ prayed Sunset. ‘Please don’t be the nag. Please don’t be the nag.’
“Oh! You came all this way to see me, specifically? You could have said so before I wasted a sales pitch on you!”
Nominative determinism struck again.
Before Sunset could respond, Sour Sweet stepped rigidly over to a glass-faced icebox by the front checkout and flung the door open forcefully enough to teeter the entire refrigerator on its feet. From inside, she lifted out a can of cran-lemon-lime soda, the tab flexing as she pinched it between her teeth.
In one violent motion, she kicked her head back, popping the tab and guzzling the entire thing in ten seconds flat.
She spat the can over the counter, past her sister, where it ricocheted off the rim of the wastebasket, bounced off a locked case of trading cards sitting on the back counter, arced elegantly through the air, flipping six or seven times, and landed squarely in that same wastebasket.
“Syrupy, I’m going on break,” she grumbled, beckoning Sunset to follow her to the back of the store.
It occurred to Sunset that she could stop this now. She wasn’t obligated to recruit all five of these candidates. Cinch hadn’t made her sign anything. If one of them seemed blatantly unfit for the job, Cadance would almost certainly understand if Sunset made an executive decision to put her hoof down and find somepony else.
It would be as easy as turning around and walk out of the store. Or offering the job to Syrupy, since she seemed much more normal by comparison.
And yet, Sunset’s hooves carried her forward, following Sour into their meeting.
Because, beneath the mare’s aggression, Sunset detected, in her choice of words, a tangible… she wasn’t sure if it went as far as sadness, but there was definitely some slurry of resentment and dissatisfaction swirling in her brain. Sour was not happy with her lot in life.
And Sunset had the power to possibly change that.
Just as… Princess Celestia… had changed hers.
Or maybe the alcohol still in her system was just making her sentimental and stupid. Still, she followed.
Apparently, Sour Sweet took her breaks in the store’s little warehouse. It was dead silent, except for the cart-door that rattled in the breeze through the back-alley like a dozen rusty trash cans rolling down a hill, the moment it seemed like the silence was there to stay.
Sour took a seat on one of the many crates, and crowbarred open another with her hoof. The nails came with the lid. There was that earth pony strength in action.
Inside was… Sunset shouldn’t have been surprised. The box was packed full of bright, juicy, glistening, ruby-red cranberries. Sour filled the frog of her hoof with berries and shoveled them into her mouth, their gleaming viscera shining on her teeth beneath the glaring white magelight hanging oppressively overhead.
“Have some! They’ll just rot on the shelves if you don’t,” she urged, all but confirming that their staple fruit didn’t sell in the off-season.
If asked, Sunset would say she was being polite, but in truth, the reason she levitated a cluster of cranberries into her mouth was because Sunset started to get this sinking feeling that she might not leave the store alive if she did not. She was already 0 for 1 on magical self-defense that day.
The first wave was the bitterness, far exceeding any latent sweetness to the berries – and then the astringency hit her. For all the juices bursting from their ruptured skins, they only stole the water from her mouth and left her parched. It was all deeply unpleasant.
Still, it seemed to placate Sour. “So! Whatever could you want from little old me?~”
Too late to back out, now. Sunset grit her teeth and said, “I’ve got a job offer for you.”
“So this is what my dear former headmare checked in on me for! Without buying anything.” She rolled her eyes. Sunset guessed it was the first time Cinch so much as said hello to Sour Sweet since she graduated. “I was told it would be good, so it had really better be. I’m busy enough with our humble little branch of the family store and our zero employees.”
Ah, family. The chains of birth. If nothing else, it was liberating to be without such obligations.
Perhaps Sour’s loyalty to the Principality of Equestria would be greater than to her family? “She didn’t happen to tell you it was a job with the Crown, did she?”
Sour Sweet blinked. Slowly. Several times. Finally, she spoke: “…No.” Another blink. “If you could just give me a minute.”
Sunset cocked her brow. “Uh, sure?”
“Thank you.”
And then Sour Sweet erupted into a cacophony of manic laughter, horrid and horrified in equal measure. As wide as she stretched her smile (if you could call it that), Sunset could swear she saw Sour’s lips crack and bleed, but that could have just been a stray cranberry skin. She wrapped her mane in her hooves and tugged hard enough that her displaced eyelids revealed the red bits they were supposed to cover, her unfocused eyes cast up in the purest terror and regret.
Sunset’s entire face ached just looking at it, and it lasted for the entire – deeply perturbing – minute she requested.
And when that minute was up, she just as abruptly spooled herself back down into just a few nervous giggles.
“Oh, I’ve been such a meanie to you, haven’t I?” She placed a hoof over her heart. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know who you were!” More than a few strands of hair had snapped or slipped out of Sour’s hair tie, which she casually swept aside. “So, tell me more about this job!”
“Uh…” Sunset shook her head and tried to forget what she just saw, because if nothing else, this candidate was now interested. “Okay, lemme introduce myself first. Hi, I’m Sunset Shimmer, Royal Student and assistant to the acting Princess. Princess Cadance is having me recruit coordinators for her coronation ceremony.”
Sour put her forehooves to her cheeks and fluttered her eyelashes. Now that she knew how important Sunset was, she was pulling the Syrupy act, except twice as insincerely. “You don’t mean there’s a catering position open, do you?”
Ah, shoot. On the one hoof, yes, they needed a caterer, and yes, this was a responsibility Sour was clearly interested in and volunteering to take on. Sunset hadn’t marked anypony down as caterer material yet. Maybe Lemon, if Sunset had any evidence she knew how to wash her hooves.
On the other hoof, Sunset would be giving control over the entire menu to a member of one of Equestria’s many, many zealously-monocultural farming families. And Sour’s single-minded passion was for rutting cranberries, no less.
On the other, other hoof, her sister made a pretty darn good scone. Maybe they could make this work?
“Well,” Sunset answered, putting on a smile, “all I need to know right now is if you wanna be part of the project as a whole. But, to answer your question, yeah, we need a caterer. I’ll make a note that you’re interested in doing that and we’ll get back to you once we’ve got everypony we need.”
“That’s just wonderful!~” She clapped her hooves and rested them beneath her chin. “Now, were there any other monumental, life-changing opportunities you came here to dump into my lap, or was it just that one?”
“Yeah, that was it.”
“Good! Good. Then why don’t you head back out and finish your shopping? Don’t you have an unsupervised salamander to check on?”
Oh. Right. Sunset had told Smolder to go shopping, hadn’t she. She’d probably picked out the priciest (cranberry-flavored) rock candy they had on their shelves.
Well, explaining why that expense was being charged to the Royal Treasury couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than spending another second in this warehouse with Sour Sweet. “Right, I’ll go… do that. Bye.”
Sunset hastened back into the safety-in-numbers of the store.
“Toodles!~”, Sour bid, waving her off.
The first thing she heard when she got back to the front checkout was, “That’ll be ฿153.78! Would you like that bagged?”, out of Syrupy’s mouth.
That was a few more bits than Sunset was expecting.
Then she saw the heap of what she could only describe as random junk piled onto the counter. Holiday decor for every season, bags of raw flour and sugar and other baking supplies, candy that would go bad before the holidays printed on its wrappers, and just a bunch of loose cranberries sprinkled throughout.
“I. uh,” Smolder began, “couldn’t decide on just one thing.”
Sunset was pretty sure dragons didn’t even do Arbor Day, and yet, as the cranberry on top, a lonely pine-tree air freshener stood at the summit of Mt. Miscellany.
“What do you need all that for?”
Smolder shrugged. “I wanted it.”
Well. She couldn’t be accused of being an atypical dragon.
Sunset took a deep breath, vowed to hoof-fight the royal treasurer if she had to, and declared, “Yes. I do want that bagged,” as she forked over the cash.
As they left the store, all the bags were stacked, precariously, in Smolder’s arms, because even if Sunset wanted to carry the dragon’s groceries for her – and she did not – Smolder looked at the other ponies passing on the street with a suspicion that bordered on the venomous. Sunset didn’t want to lose a leg.
A few minutes down the road, Smolder did ask, head craned around her hoard, “So how did that one go?”
Solemnly, Sunset declared, “I think I made a mistake.”
Smolder didn’t press her for details, which was fine, because her mind was elsewhere.
Just how on Equus did Cinch try to sell this basket-case? Sunset had to know.
The cover letter, which she read as she walked, had this to say on her: |Sour Sweet is a mare of many talents. Though her prowess in archery, a skill ever so uncommon to her tribe, brought her to the attention of our headhunters outside of Canterlot,| – this, Sunset chose to interpret as ‘we were desperate for literally anypony to fill a slot on our archery team because nopony even does archery anymore’ – |Miss Sweet has proven, time and time again, to be a quick learner and swifter master. Such mental flexibility, coupled with her natural kinesthetic grace, has enabled her to rise to the top of each and every team she was encouraged to join, no matter how obscure or challenging to teach.|
Or, as it seemed to say, Sour was pressured into being their wildcard, picking up the slack in whatever obscure, pointless sports teams nopony actually cared to a part of, but which Crystal Prep insisted they simply had to remain competitive in. The mare could probably weave a mean underwater basket.
|No matter the assignment, Miss Sweet will rise to the occasion. Put her to whatever task you need, and it will be done.|
Predictably, there was nothing about Sour being a semi-feral orthrus in a pony’s skin.
Whatever. Hopefully, Cadance would take one look at Sour Sweet and disqualify her from the runnings. They’d be short two bearers instead of one, but there were plenty of competent, capable, and sane ponies in Canterlot. Somewhere. They’d find somepony.
In the meantime, there was a tour of Canterlot to finish. Already, the afternoon sun was shifting into its yellower hours. One more stop, and a bet to settle.