“Dear!” said Cinnamon disapprovingly. The ladder shook a little as she adjusted it, and she wished her husband wouldn't move so much. “Don’t you think you’re overdoing things a little?”
Ester, Proprietor of the Crystal Pony Spa, lowered the handkerchief to give his wife a look of pity mingled with irritation. “You can’t overdo a good polish. Not when you’re going to be hosting the Equestria Games!”
He jumped down and hurried over to the counter, shouting as he went; “Myrrh, don’t forget Miss Amethyst in the mud bath. Careful with the perm, Granita; you don’t want to ruin your hard work! Good job with that massage, Lustre! You got the sheen just right, as always.” He barely noticed their shrugs and stares as he rushed past them to the counter.
Cinnamon hurried after him. "Yes," she said, "but I think there's such a thing as moderation, and this isn't..."
“After all, Cinnamon,” he said, turning around to face her, “we are the few – we lucky few, we sauna sisters – who have defied the odds after a thousand years lagging behind. What does that say about us, then?”
“It says a lot, dear," said Cinnamon warily. "But inspection’s been and gone. The games won’t be for months.”
“And we shall not be found a-slacking, my dear! Oh, those six mares did a good job, I imagine. Used some mysterious Equestrian charm on her, I imagine. They did it, though, and in my spa shop too! What does that tell you?”
Cinnamon looked around the spa, taking in the hectic pace of the crystal pony workforce. “I still don’t understand why we couldn’t do it ourselves. Defying the odds of a millennium is all very well, but you’d think we could defy it a little more without needing to be ‘saved’ by outsiders again?”
Ester’s face contorted for a long moment before he tipped his forelock to her. “Well, it’s only fair, isn’t it? Don’t want to be left out of the running by too wide a margin, or it’d be ridiculous. Our Princess kind of commissioned them to do the job. That’s good judgement. And she's our Princess, so in a way it's our judgement, too. Clever of us! And our polishing helped, right?” He flapped the cloth enthusiastically.
"Yes, that's what I wanted to talk to you about," said Cinnamon uneasily. "It's been selling like hotcakes, but recently I've had my suspicions. So I examined the stuff out the back, sent some off to the Spa Standards Union for examination -"
"The what?"
Cinnamon bit her lip. "The Spa Standards Union. And I just heard back from them today."
"Thank you, come again!" Ester shouted to a pony leaving through the double doors. "What luck! Today's the one hundredth anniversary of our Spa! Glowing report, I imagine?"
"Uh, no. In their letter, they said -"
A dull stallion strode into the spa and made a beeline for the desk. Ester took one look at his face and felt the smile begin to shuffle on his own.
“Hello sir,” he said carefully. “How can I help… at… all?”
Thunk! Ester nearly ducked below the counter until he saw the label on the bottle.
“Your crystal skin oil,” said the dull stallion.
“So it is,” said Ester, chuckling weakly.
Cinnamon was suddenly not there, but Ester was sure he had heard the words "oh boy" a second ago.
“Three weeks ago, I bought this from you for a do-it-yourself home-made mud bath, complete with the ‘special ingredient’ that, and I quote, ‘will really bring out the shine on your skin’.”
“Yes?” Ester looked from the bottle to the other and back again. “I’m sorry. Is there something wrong? It looks like you haven’t even tried it yet.”
The stallion leaned across the counter and almost head-butted him. “I have! It’s left me with a skin condition! My physician had to spend three hours diagnosing it. You know what dermacrystallitis is?”
Ester shook his head.
“Neither do I, but apparently I have it. And it happened right after I started using this.” He tipped the bottle over.
Ester swelled up in rage, as many animals do when cornered. “Excuse me, excuse me! And what makes you so certain that the mud bath oil was the problem?”
The door swung open, and a herd of dull-coloured, red-eyed, and teeth-baring ponies marched in, all brandishing the same bottles, and all of them homing in on the counter like a swarm of bees.
“Mr Ester! Your crystal skin oil abolished when it should have polished my shine!”
“The mud baths here are contaminated!”
Ester looked around nervously. The occupants of the bath in the corner were staring in horror at the mob. Some of them leaped out almost immediately.
He struggled to get the words out. “Con - Contaminated?”
“It’s not just the skin oil, either!” said a normal-looking crystal pony. “Your perfume smells foul! And it does stuff to your head! My uncle got a big whiff of it and then bought the crystal empire palace from a con artist! He’s an actuary, for goodness’ sake!”
“My wife used the stuff and tried to hit on my boss at a cocktail party!”
“My friend used the stuff and hugged her friend for ruining her headdress. A family heirloom!”
“There’s something funny in that stuff you used, and we want to know what it is!”
“We have a right to know what we’re buying!”
“Excuse me,” said Ester, and fled.
Ester slammed the door behind him, and hurried down the steps into the cellar while Cinnamon began boarding up the door. Hooves battered it from the other side.
“What’s gotten into them?” He almost choked on the hooves stuffed between his teeth. “I don’t know what's going on! The special ingredient shouldn’t be doing this! Why is it doing this to me?” He hurried down to the stock and checked the labels on the barrels before hurrying back up. “It’s the right stuff. The stuff we’ve been using since we set up hundreds of years ago! It’s the finest traditional –”
He gasped suddenly.
The fear pierced each other’s eyes silently.
“Hundreds of years of tradition, yes,” said Cinnamon White, and gulped.
“But one thousand years out of date,” said Ester. “Who knows how many practices might have changed since then?”
“Or been improved upon?”
“I’m remembering now…” said Ester.
There was a pause.
“We did change the stock a thousand years ago, right?” he said.
“I don’t know,” wailed Cinnamon. “We were so busy, what with being enslaved and having our minds wiped and the depression.”
“Oh, now you’re making jokes. How can you joke at a time like this?”
A vat bubbled behind them. Cinnamon winced. "That's what the investigation found. In that letter. I don’t think we ever had time to change the stock.”
“So this stuff,” he said carefully, “is ripe?”
“And as strong as a diamond battering ram.”
Ester fell onto his haunches. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner? We’ve been burning the stuff for incense and spraying the perfume and lotion all over the shop since the Princess’ accession.”
“When we had the games looming over us, waiting for us to trip up?”
Ester turned white. “Oh no…”
“What? What?”
Ester didn’t reply for a moment. “Those mares who came into the capital.”
“Yes?”
“They were in here, weren’t they?”
“Um, yes?”
“While we were burning this stuff and putting it in the perfumes and the mud bath and the oils?”
They heard shouting and banging overhead. A light clicked on in their heads. “You think they might have been affected?"
Ester paced up and down. The fumes in the room were getting to him. "How much can you remember about them?”
“Well, I remember listening to that tourist pony talk about them. You know, when she had the massage and it turned out the inspector was next to her? She said they seemed awfully cheery and confident, right up until they found out who she was.”
“Oh.”
“Ah, here’s a good one: you know when the inspector came, and they had to figure out who she was? You know how they did it? The messenger suggested –”
“That was while she was in here, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Drat!” Ester screamed at the sound of breaking glass from upstairs.
“Get this: she suggested looking for a suitcase with flowers on it. That’s it!”
“Don’t you dare start laughing! We could have lost the games because of that!”
“I think we nearly did.”
Ester turned white. “What do you mean?”
“After the tourist had a laugh over her story, they came in and made a scene, and one of them pretty much fell a-crowing about how she’d personally never had the chance to host the games – it was really sad stuff –”
Ester turned whiter. “Maudlin behaviour...”
“Yep.”
“Drat, drat, drat.”
“Then the inspector let them have the games anyway.”
“What, after all that?”
“Uh, yeah…” She had a hunted look now. “Yeah. I thought it was oddly generous of her, given how she’d been moaning at first about being splashed in the street and whatnot.”
“So… thanks to that stuff, we got the games?”
“Yeah. Yeah I guess so.”
“You think we could use that somehow? It’d sound pretty good to that mob upstairs, wouldn’t it?”
Someone screamed obscenities, and there was the sound of gallons of water sloshing over the floor. Something metal snapped. “Mm, I don’t think they care very much about the games at the moment.”
“Ah.”
Ester sighed. “OK, we might be able to manage some damage control here. You go up and give the ponies the refunds. It’s only fair.”
“Plus the Princess’ husband will be on us like a ton of bricks if he finds out.”
“Don’t you make this any worse than it is! We’ll order new stock. Free oils for every customer affected when we get the next batch in. Anything so long as they don’t cause a stink about this.”
“Or a perfume, so to speak.” Cinnamon peered over his shoulder. “So what do we do with the stuff?”
“Pour it down the drain. It has to go. And I might as well get started, so off you go.”
Cinnamon hurried up the stairs. Ester turned around and began heaving the barrel over his shoulder. As he did so, he peered mournfully at the label.
“Crystal grape juice,” he muttered. “And cinnamon ethanol. Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into…”