“Mayor Mare? Are you okay? And, uh, alive?” Spike asked out of concern for Ponyville’s premier politician, who was currently slumped over at her desk, face planted firmly into the polished wood. A large crystal bottle of some rank brown liquid sat to her right, next to an empty glass and just behind a signing stamp. A shaft of sunlight further defined by countless floating dust particles shone through the window, cracked open slightly to allow air to circulate but with the downside of making the cacophony of Stirrup Street below all the more apparent.
“Guh…?” Mayor Meyer Mare responded as she slowly lifted her head, a trail of drool trickling out the right corner of her mouth to connect with the puddle that had formed in the spot where her snout had been a minute previous. Her eyes, bloodshot and glazed over, blinked out of unison.
Spike continued. “I’ll, uh, give you some time to… wake up.”
“Bluh,” the Mayor said to no one in particular, her head lolling to the side. Evidently the weight of her own head was too much for her, as she collapsed to the floor, smacking her right cheek on her desk on the way down.
Spike, slightly panicked, ran to Ponyville’s official leader and propped her back up. She was much heavier than he expected from a pony her size. Well, she is old, he reasoned to himself.
Eventually, Mayor Mare’s brain finished its tortuously slow booting-up sequence. Spike moved back to the other side of the desk before she realized he had, out of necessity, manhandled her. Her deep blue eyes slowly focused on the world around her. The amorphous purple blob opposite her eventually congealed itself into the figure of Spike.
“Oh. Spike,” the Mayor said flatly. She nearly followed up with ‘Why the buck are you here?’ but remembered her decorum at the last second and instead asked, “How can I help you?” albeit without enthusiasm.
“Honestly, you can’t,” said Spike. “I just needed some time away from Twilight. She’s on the main floor of Golden Oaks, walking in a circle, ranting about ponies wanting to check out books again.”
Mayor Mare groaned. “She DOES understand Golden Oaks is a PUBLIC lending library, right?”
“I honestly don’t think she does,” Spike admitted meekly.
“That’s Nobility for you. Plus she has the favour of the Princess. So I suppose she doesn’t realize her actions have consequences.”
“This is Twilight we’re talking about,” Spike tried in vain to salvage the reputation of his whatever-their-relationship-is, “I really doubt she’s malicious about it.”
Mayor Mare scoffed. “Maybe. It’d be nice if she thought about other ponies besides herself and those other five for a change. It’d make my life a lot easier.”
She reached over to the crystal bottle and, after a couple of misses, grabbed it and poured some of the rank brown liquid into the adjacent glass. Spike winced momentarily at the powerful bitter smell as the mayor gazed longingly into the glass.
“What is that?” asked Spike, utterly innocent.
“Hair of the dog,” replied Mayor Mare simply.
Spike cocked his head in confusion. “That doesn’t look like fur. I didn’t even know you could drink fur.”
The mayor rolled her eyes, then realized the youth of her conversation partner and chuckled. “It’s an expression, Spike. ‘Hair of the Dog’ means a stiff drink. In my line of work you often need one.”
“How come?” Spike wondered aloud.
The mayor let out a long sigh, her shoulders slumping.
“It’s been a year since Twilight’s insane ‘election’ experiment. Even after I lost, fate still intervened to make sure I kept this job. So every week, just like before, I have to deal with rabble rousers and idiots who want things done NOW, that cannot get it through their tiny horse brains that change is slow and things cost money, and they’re not the only ones who have to live in this town,” she said, her head turned upward, eyes fixated on a random piece of ceiling.
“Wow, Twilight was right,” Spike said, a slight cold edge entering into his voice, “You really don’t want to be mayor.”
“Not exactly,” the mayor replied. “This job isn’t so bad most of the time. I like being able to help other ponies. I like figuring out solutions to problems. I like promoting Ponyville on a regional level. I like giving speeches – that’s the easy part, by the way. I just hate it when ponies don’t listen to the experts and stay ignorant. Sometimes emphatically so. But even worse is the ponies who think they’re experts but are really just know-nothing know-it-alls who don’t realize that governing is hard sometimes.”
“I guess I get that,” Spike said.
“I suppose you do,” said the mayor. “The only reason you’re even here is because you needed someone to vent to about Twilight, and you thought I might be a sympathetic ear. You’re right, of course. But you need to be more honest about it.”
Spike nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sometimes she drives me up the wall. Not only when she treats me like a kid – I mean, I know I’m really young by dragon standards – but she acts like I don’t know anything, even though I’m the one who cleans her house, sorts her books, cooks her food, keeps her schedule, runs her errands, writes half her things… and I almost never get any thanks for it! In fact, most of the time I get yelled at for not doing my jobs perfectly. Then I get grounded like some bratty filly. Why? It’s not like I have any hobbies besides my comic books. Why does she have to take away the one piece of fun I have in my life?”
Mayor Mare pursed her lips and furrowed her eyebrows in thought. After a moment, she stood up and – slowly, unsteadily – made her way over to a wet bar and grabbed another glass. Returning to her desk, she poured some of the liquid into the glass and slid it over to Spike.
“What’s this?” he asked, reasonably confident of the answer.
“Drink it. You need it more than I do,” said the mayor simply, a wan smile on her haggard face.
Spike took the glass in his left hand, but something about the situation bugged him. “Um, is this legal?”
The mayor closed her eyes and laughed softly. “Spike, part of my job reque– requires me to know as many of our local laws as I can. Two weeks ago, I had to look up what the town code says about spirituous liquors thanks to Apple Bloom getting it in her head she could keep a still behind the school.”
“Oh yeah. That happened,” Spike remembered and agreed. Twilight and the others were absolutely apoplectic over that incident, but he thought it was funny.
“You bet it did. Where do ya think I got this stuff?” Mayor Mare smirked as she gestured to the now-open bottle. The smell wafting out of it was strong enough to seem nearly visible. “Shame I had to requisition it; that filly’s got a real talent for distilling. Anyway, law says she couldn’t do it ‘cause she’s underage and didn’t have a license. But it doesn’t say anything about dragons one way or the other. So drink up.”
“I don’t know, Mayor,” Spike said as he nervously scratched an invisible itch on his arm.
“Spike!! Where are you??” called a shrill voice from outside the window, overpowering the other noise. A quick glance down to the street confirmed it was Twilight, wandering around while sporting a look of extreme irritation. “Come back home! You only scrubbed my floors once! You need to do the post-scrub scrub! Also, I need you to re-sort my books again and triple-check my checklists and schedule for the next two weeks!”
Spike turned back to the mayor, a look of determination in his eyes. “Gimme that,” he said as he took the glass off the desk and downed the rank brown liquid in a single gulp. He winced at the burning bitterness as it slid down his gullet. Then it hit him.
“G’wah!” he said. “How can you drink this stuff? It’s like getting hit by a horsecart!”
“Not really,” the Mayor corrected him. “Wait ‘til you wake up tomorrow; then you’ll feel like you’ve been hit by a horsecart.”
“Still, I’ve never tasted anything like… Oh!” Spike trailed off as he felt a warm sensation permeate through his body, the weight of Equestria removing itself from his shoulders. Suddenly there was no such thing as Twilight Sparkle or Golden Oaks Library. Spike’s eyes glazed over and his shoulders slumped.
“Heh. Thiz stuff’z really not so bad after— *hic!*” Spike’s thoughts were interrupted by his diaphragm’s decision to start spasming, releasing a tiny burst of fire in the process.
“Uh, what was that?” Mayor Mare asked, almost concerned.
“Oh, well, I guess this drink you gave me gives me— *hic-GWAA!*” Spike let out a much more substantial firestream right at the mayor, who ducked just in time to avoid being barbecued. “Sorry,” he said, blushing.
“You say Apple Bloom’s moonshine caused this?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s something else? No pony really knows how dragons’ insides work, least not Twilight. I don’t know either. Just to be safe, I’d better stop and put this glass down over here next to the b—” Spike said as he turned to the opened liquor bottle. Suddenly his look changed to one of bug-cross-eyed concern as his cheeks puffed up.
The mayor had seen this face before; it was similar to the face he made whenever he became a magical inbox for Princess Celestia’s notes to Twilight, always accompanied by quite a lot of green fire. She realized what was coming next. All she could say beforehand was a defeated, “Oh no.”
Outside City Hall, a very peeved Twilight Sparkle looked toward the sky just in time to see a corner room on the top floor erupt in a massive fireball. Luckily for the civic structure, the fire brigade, whose office was in the building next door, arrived within two minutes to ensure the rest of City Hall did not burn to the ground. As smouldering debris rained down around her head, she headed into the building, using her nonexistent authority to force her way past every pony.
Once she reached the mayor’s office, she found the door burned and fallen off its hinges. Inside, she saw the remnants of a desk, a dazed and thoroughly charred Mayor Mare, and Spike – without a scratch and looking unbelievably guilty even before he turned and saw Twilight, at which point his expression flipped to utter panic.
As Twilight angrily dragged Spike out of the building, cursing under her breath, the Mayor regained her coherence and managed to lock eyes with the soon-to-be-grounded-forever dragon.
“Well, Spike, even with the whole burning-my-office thing, this might be the least stressful afternoon I’ve had in years,” she said. “Same time next week?”