Rarity Industries

by Blue Cloud Blues

Chapter 2: The Cider House

Rarity hadn’t been to Chokago. She’d heard little enough about it in relation to her personal interests that she’d seldom ever remembered there was such a place clearly enough to talk about it. But she might have tried a few visits by now, if she had known it wasn’t so far from Ponyville. That four ponies were willing to take a cab ride there for cider had first told her that. On the ride, the royal guards where Ponyville’s houses ended saw the wagon off and wished the cabbie a safe crossing, and then they’d climbed a hill, short on Ponyville’s side, on the other sloping long and on to a metropolitan gate across the horizon with angular buildings pointing up into the sky. A few stars had appeared; a few lights were on, setting armor on aerial sentries who passed close shining with goldenness barely detectable at their distance.

The other passengers’ eyes widened as the wagon lowered and Rarity would have sworn she heard Berry Punch salivating with her squealing gasp of anticipation – it was best that she didn’t look, instead peering around Berry and squinting at the lights while racking her memory for what was inside that much city that missed Ponyville. She knew there were restaurants, though the names and specialties escaped her. And she’d read the name of a well-regarded art gallery, or two, or three. Silly her – this would have been an excellent place for social activities, wouldn’t it? She and Twilight, Spike, Fluttershy, Pinkie, Rainbow, and Applejack could have ridden there the week after the Grand Galloping Gala and on her sales of party clothes she could have paid for a lunch for six, appetizers, entrée, and a shared dessert, and her budget at the time just may have allowed for her admission if not two or three other ponies’ to an art museum.

On the left passed a battered sticks-and-charcoal tree. On the right they passed a Welcome to CHOKAGO sign under the lettering of which a painted white Pegasus swooped and curved up into the corner as suggested by speed lines. Where they began was marked by a strange, bloodless sort of splatter of stuck, flapping pink feathers from a real Pegasus pony. From a scuffle with another pony, Rarity hoped, though no explanation her imagination played her failed to perturb.

With the welcome-in of the guards posted at Chokago’s own border, the cab had crossed.

The street leading further in was wider than any in Ponyville and had begun widening to that point as the ground had started to level. Rarity had realized she’d been looking forward to the inside of the city holding a bit more noise than that of back in town, and found herself jerked into a chilly disapproval, which she raised to express with a practiced pout that nopony noticed to ask about. The street was lined with yellowish lights on sleek black posts that lit a few colored awnings. Someplace that might have been a diner was lit further down, with the dark curved line of printing on the window standing out in shadow. One other wagon rolled solitary beyond that, without a single head above the silhouette of the cart. Rarity’s expectation – a perfectly reasonable one, if from past experiences in less thought-troubled times – was that all respectable cities had their nightly business to attend to, constant movement and productivity, and as all of these tidbits gathered in passing and now rising to the visit made plain, Chokago was, or at least had been, a perfectly good city.

She felt a brief shock of surprise when the cab turned down a narrower side street. Her face turned up along the walls to the lane of sky between the edges of the roofs, which was now murky purple, and she faced forward again. There was still not a pony on either sidewalk. There were no wagons in sight either – it struck that they hadn’t passed Big Macintosh on the way from Ponyville. But there were more bright windows and doorways. They’d be moving along the edge of the city rather than into its center, but activity increased anywhere past the entrance.

In another turn, the wagon passed by a strolling earth stallion, unless Rarity had missed a horn, who the mare whose name she wasn’t sure of called out a “Hey!” to. The little golden spur that had run Rarity into the cart returned with a sudden nip and she found herself turning to examine this first Chokagan specimen, but didn’t catch much but the white tail and green in his cutie mark and that he didn’t – somehow just didn’t – look like he would have come from the cider place.

Her forehoof had started to drum on the edge of the cart. She asked if they were close. “Aaalmost,” said the stallion.

The section of street spread to twice the width of the previous one. The cabbie pulled to the side just before its end. The cab hadn’t even quite stopped before Berry Punch let go a schoolfilly-like “This is it!” and scrambled out – nearly at the same time as the mare Rarity didn’t know, slamming sidelong into her but loosing herself first with a lucky and accidental kick. She landed with all fours slightly splayed on the sidewalk, her sister skipped out after her, and the stallion and mare disembarked.

Rarity paused to scan their stop. Underneath a red awning with a white trim – apple colors, of course – were widely-arched wooden double doors, marked symmetrically by a quaintly-carved apple, dark red curtains on either side hiding any windows in the front. She searched for an establishment name, but instead locked eyes with Berry Punch and was so puzzled to see that the other four hadn’t opened those doors yet that anything she was looking for spun away.

“Aren’t you coming, too?”

Her tail lashed and she hopped out, bobbed a “Thank you, sir” to the cabbie without looking back longer, and trotted to join the group, then to lead it.

Ponies’ voices and a little of a melody and pulses of beat thrummed out through the door. Rarity recoiled at a tingle down her neck and under her hooves as a wonder hit her whether the city had gotten filthier the further along they’d moved as well. She shook her back leg slightly and inspected the floor around her for puddles and her legs for stains, turning to do so. The cab was gone. Just behind her, the mare had her head cocked, the stallion looked away, and the Punch sisters stared at her in some inarticulate question.

A flustering chased through her and made her shudder – she felt her face starting to flush and she turned away and thrust her chin up to hide her face and shake the feeling loose, calling her dignity back into place: well, now, they didn’t have to wait for her. But if they were so insistent upon it...

She lifted a hoof flat to each door and pushed.

Through the doorway blasted an instant explosion of color and vivacity.

Rarity’s eyes popped. Ponies were already about their nightly business after all, it seemed – mares and stallions collected in rolling groups everywhere clear of the doors with enough space between crowds for a single pony to wriggle through. She glimpsed wings and horns and rainbow colors and what she was rather certain were artificial colors, and a constant gabbing; a wheezy laugh sawed out over the voices, and the singing coming from inside and out of sight, somewhere to the left.

Something nudged against her side and jolted her back to full consciousness – she looked down at the green mane of the mare, who, along with the stallion following suit, appeared to be done waiting behind. Rarity sniffed back an indignant snort and stepped aside to hold the left door open, letting Berry Punch and her sister inside first, glancing about herself to gauge any obstacles soon to be and following.

The light was dim, apart from a spotlight shining down onto the center of most of the congregation on the lounge’s left side, perhaps a stage, from the opposite edge of the ceiling. She had been right about the wriggling, wriggling after the pink mares on their way to the counter in the back as she made her assessments, past strange ponies, her teeth gritting as she bent strange wings and brushing up against strange sets of flanks – even though the hall was of a good size, impressive for anypony to muster the funds to rent out in a populous city. And the air was muggy, moist and apple juice-scented from drinks and the breaths and inevitable sweat of so many ponies splurging on cider!

Berry Punch turned left and Rarity jerked right to break through a pony wall to a space in the corner and panted, catching her breath and cooling herself of a fresh heat of frustration. Her ears pricked as a wolf-whistle needled into her brain from just in front of her. The first thing she looked up to see was the surface of a billiards table, a pony standing on each end: a green earth stallion and a striped mare, perhaps zebra, with a white stick poking out of her mouth that lost any mystery when Rarity caught a slight round bulge of her cheek. The whistler was a cream-colored Pegasus sitting on a sofa behind, but all three watched her, and she hauled and threw back their sport the best she could with a hauteur-heavy raise of her brow.

While the billiards ponies smirked back at the Pegasus, she scanned the bar for Berry Punch, who popped her head over the crowd and waved her over with an ebullient grin. The unicorn pushed through to her, taking some care to keep her hips relatively still as she turned them on the billiards table, and broke through to air again, sliding with a thank-you to good fortune into an empty stool to the earth pony’s left. “Berry Punch, dear, are you quite certain your little sister should be in a place like this?” She motioned across Berry’s length of counter to the little filly bouncing on her stool on the other side and met the addressee’s look with a teeth-clenched smile. She didn’t especially want to look back to the gambling corner.

Berry Punch gave her big, blank, sparkling grape juice eyes. “Fillies should have fun, Rarity.”

And this was the mare who had outraced her Sweetie Belle and her in the Sisterhooves Social, the mare who rushed to deal her bits out for apple cider in a nearly stopped economy – the pressure between Rarity’s teeth increased. She didn’t think she was smiling any longer, nor was Berry Punch paying her further attention.

Berry looked along the counter one way, then the other, and finally over her shoulder, then gave the wood a sharp pound. “That’s why the server’s not coming! C’mon, Sis...”

The pink ponies slipped off their stools and out of reach of Rarity’s hooves. She called for them to wait, but they pressed on to the stage and she pressed after. The closer they went, the clearer the music played – there was a gentle piano. She looked to the left end of the stage for its player, but line of sight to it was blocked out by ponies half-sprawled across the stage, some with forelegs hooked around half-drained mugs, all gazing up at the two singers on the stage.

Rarity’s sharp gasp lasted long enough for her to hear her breath stopping.

The golden spur melted back into pure, hot light. It burned in her stomach, her chest, and even her face – she was blushing, by Celestia, why in the world was she blushing? And she knew acutely what had been so wrong about cider – grade A top-notch blow-your-horseshoes-off cider!

The two stallions were unicorns, apple-yellow coats, green eyes, peculiar red-and-white striping to their manes, identical coloration, faces, and lean, lanky proportions. And they were handsome, which raked her nerves to blistering – why did that always need to happen? It was difficult to pretend that they weren’t but she despised them. Prince Blueblood was indisputably handsome as well, and she despised him, too. All that was different was that this time, they were dressed in dark blazers and bowler hats, bringing to her mind something along the lines of legal or salesponies. Some sort of ponies who bluff for money.

The one with the moustache – Flam, or Flim, no, most likely Flam – glided to the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, the Red Delicious engine in all its metal-tubed and embellished glory parked alongside the stage, very likely attached to the piano, she realized. He turned the valve, and set a mug foaming over.

The Flim Flam brothers were selling Apple Family cider – that was what was wrong.

“Bring in your troubles and your misery...” he crooned, “Send ‘em floating ‘cross the amber sea!”

He set down the mug and with a gentle push sent it skating in its own spilled foam to a spellbound Berry Punch, who Rarity had somehow and sometime found herself next to again, as Flim stepped up – and in all of one moment he recognized her, and he winked at her. A thrill of indignant horror – of all the nerve! “Everypony in? It’s warm and it’s cozy...” He reared with a hoof extended to the gambling corner. “...And the dice are ro-o-olling!”

“Ro-o-olling!” the crowd echoed.

“So – take your cider, simmer down! You’ve got the greatest seats in town! Friends at your flanks, so stick around! Pack up your day!”

They sang, staccato, synchronization in notes and that bogglingly nimble bipedal hoofwork with which they danced, cider-silly crowd enthralled, Rarity mortified.

“Swallow yourself an hour full! Let the most Great and Powerful – Trixie yours and ours – dis-ap-pear – i – fy – your – stress – a – WAAAAaaaaayyy!”

The piano jangled to a stop under their last note. With a final chord, they sprang apart from the center of the stage off entirely. Dead in the spotlight a puff of white smoke cracked into existence and as Rarity realized what they had just sung thought she felt bile corroding her stomach and lower throat.

The smoke was scattered and blown into dissolution with the flourish of a magician’s cape. Its wearer was a young unicorn, all cloud blue with a pale mane, whose eyes skimmed over her audience, smirking down at them as she made them hers one by one - stopping at Rarity.

Rarity narrowed her eyes. The two unicorns leered at each other in a heating magnetic current before Trixie huffed and snapped the look, raising it back to the crowd, and smirked again. “Fillies and gentlecolts,” she declared with her full-lunged showmare bravado, “watch and be amazed by the feats of the most crafty – the most br-r-rilliant – the most magical of equines... the Great and Powerful TR-R-RIXIE!”

Rarity averted her eyes quick as instinct before she could give up a moment of indulgence. All the while, Berry Punch reacted to nothing. She showed no sign of recollecting the twins’ interference last cider season or Trixie’s last spectacle in Ponyville and gaped obliviously up as she lifted her mug, and Rarity was alone among these ponies squandering away precious bits on games of pool and swindlers’ luxury beverages and parlor magic shows in a disreputable lounge in an Equestria of farmers and artists, calling out to passersby through Tartarus-trampled earth and wilderness to spare something for their work – “Berry, please – you’re not going to drink that, are you?” she hissed, peering fervently, desperately at her only remotely pleasant acquaintance.

Berry Punch didn’t hear. She brought the mug bottom of and loudly gulped, and gulped, and gulped, and gasped with some profound fulfillment. Rarity watched – her ears were flat, hooves cracking against the floor, body winding so tight it was beginning to snap muscle by muscle against itself – as her mortification was justified.

“Hey, now!” said a stallion’s voice.

Something struck her across the withers and she jerked, her head swinging back - and up. Flim had locked onto her. He had laid one of his forelegs around her shoulders and was smiling a casual, pleased smile down at her. Her head filled with a popping and sizzling.

“You’re one of the Honorary Apples, aren’t ya? Fancy meeting you here.”

Her mouth dropped open and she breathed hotly. “It’s such a small world,” she managed. Her skin crawled under his limb.

“I’ll say.” Flam had appeared on the other side. The twins had her flanked. The hair along her neck bristled. “You haven’t had a drop to drink yet, have you?”

Her eyes crossed as a fresh mug of cider closed in before her nose and she let her eyelids droop and a dry laugh puff out of her throat. “I don’t think I will.”

“Suit yourself – here, young filly, why don’t you help yourself?” Just a motion and the mug disappeared behind Berry Punch in the hooves of her foal sister. The sizzling had been under a teakettle. That kettle was now beginning to whistle. “How can we help ya, then – conversation?”

“Flam! Flim! Flam!” a third stallion voice called. Three unicorn heads turned. The whistling white Pegasus had left the corner. The kettle screeched as the Pegasus clicked his tongue with an unabashed leer. “You three know each other?”

“Oh, you could say so,” said Flim. “We met in Ponyville a while back, and, if we’re not terribly mistaken, we have some catching up to do.”

The kettle screamed and screamed and Rarity jerked her backside upward and bucked it over. “You’re not terribly mistaken,” she said. The lid popped off and the boiling water sprayed back. All over the Pegasus.

She didn’t want to. She wanted to go outside, into clearer, wind-moved air, where the light was even, the insufferable Trixie couldn’t look down at her, she could move without a bump or a boor eyeing her from the corner. But there was so very much that these two begged of her to be said.

“Straight from the pony’s mouth – go on, play another round or two while my brother and I talk to the lady!” Flim flicked his hoof back at the corner and the Pegasus rolled his eyes in humor and turned.

Flim and Flam crossed one foreleg each in front of her. “Better come with us to our V.I.P. lounge, ‘cause you, sweetheart, are a Very Important Pony and we’d be doing you a disservice if we talked with you where just anypony could listen,” one of them chattered in one half-whispering breath. She could have remarked that it wasn’t as if h was trying to sell her anything. Then again, she didn’t know that.

“’Specially those pool ponies,” said the other. “They’re trouble!”

They exchanged a sideways look over Rarity, the significance of which she couldn’t ascertain while ducking, and steered her in a round past the stage, excusing themselves to the occasional patron in singsong. They passed the cider press with a piano fixed in the back – the pianist was a gray unicorn mare, playing with orange flashes of magic. Behind her seat was a door in a divider a foot shorter than the ceiling, which Flim opened and posed alongside on his hind legs in a display. “After you,” he said as Flam ushered her through, and shut it behind himself.

The divider didn’t muffle the sound of crackling pyrotechnics from the magic show in the main hall – merely gave the cranny some superficial autonomy from the rest of the lounge, made it a space, which it was, though the air felt no less humid. A door in the side could be assumed to lead behind the stage to a dressing or prop room, and at the back wall, the twins had snugly worked in a long red couch that they draped themselves over, watching Rarity with one pony’s keen over-interest overbearingly doubled in identical faces over a glass-topped table. She bit the inside of her cheek and took her seat against the divider.

“…You’re…” Something about the mirroring tilts of their heads and raised brows stumbled her. She caught hold of her sentence. “…using Apple Family apples, aren’t you?”

“Yyyup!” they chirruped, and winked at each other. Rarity felt a pang at the brazenness, pawed at her memory of the cider contest for any time they might have talked to Big Macintosh. Flim continued, “Rightfully bought through a proxy. They’ll have no more trouble from us ever again.”

Rarity secreted all the poison she could into the smile she’d split into her face. It oozed like sap and the twins listened completely undaunted. “You know, Sweet Apple Acres isn’t meeting quite its old production standards. And you’re making a bit of profit off the apples, aren’t you?”

They looked at each other again. Well, of course! What’s wrong with that?

“Oh no no I’m not trying to call you…” Parasites, scoundrels, profiteers… “…opportunists, but isn’t cider a bit of a luxury, compared to apples?”

“The good ponies of Equestria could use a little luxury in their lives nowadays.” Rarity thought of those three poor waiting dresses, tags charging pocket change unreadable with the lights off in the boutique windows. “But the point is that we’re filling a constant need.”

Rarity’s voice curved high, slow, and sneering. “…Food and drink?”

Still unruffled, Flam beamed. “More to the tune of, ah – entertainment. Morale.”

“There were plenty of ways we could have done it, but the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 is our baby.” Flim tucked his front hooves together tight. “You saw it in action, my dear, and you saw that nopony can get enough of the Flim Flam Brothers’ fresh-pressed top quality cider – and there was still plenty of money in that! We lay low for a while, went looking for some place to take our product where the Ponyville fiasco wouldn’t come back to haunt us, looked into a few ways to get the apples. Tartarus opening up I’ll admit had us teensy bit worried about getting our business going again, but it led us to the lovely Trixie and a cheap place for rent. That’s where we are now, putting our contraption to work, making a comfortable living, all three of us, and pleasing paying customers.”

The self-pride with which they both glowed was the only rise she’d gotten out of them. They posed for nopony but themselves, heads high with an incongruously coltish enthusiasm – smiles rather than smirks, forelegs crossed, flank to flank, their cutie marks complement – Flim’s apple wedge and Flam’s apple sans a slice. Rarity thought of the sewing machine and needle again. “I do suppose you’re marked for cider-selling,” she remarked.

“Oh, these?” Their tails lifted slightly and flanks bumped closer – everything they did, so choreographed. “We got these years before we took up tinkering.”

They looked at each other as they talked now, instead of her.

“These led us to the cider business; not the other way around.”

“What these marks of ours actually mean is that we belong together, or at least that was what they first meant.”

“You can bet that they did nothing for the other foals asking us if we’d both feel it if they gave one of us a kick.”

“But we’ve seen plenty of cutie marks with some surprising versatility in their meanings.”

“There was a funny incident with apples not a month after these showed up.”

They suspended a bundle of shared storied between them, spinning it like a treasured crystal ball that showed them all their most amusing memories. That force was off Rarity. She began to relax, an exhaustion escaping whatever level of feeling her body had suppressed it to and diffusing. She leaned into the sofa, heard the cads banter on.

“What about you, Miss...”

No peace for long.

“Rarity.” She’d hoped they wouldn’t ask.

“Rarity. How did you find that very gorgeous cutie mark of yours?”

The patience for eye contact had left her. “I demonstrated a knack for finding gems in my schoolfilly days.”

“What is it you do for a living back in the sticks?”

“I run a boutique. I make outfits, especially dresses.” Referral to Ponyville as “the sticks” had given her nerves a pluck.

“Keeping afloat?” Flam was cockeyed under the rim of his hat.

The door opened. “Flim? If I could just cut in for a second…”

Rarity turned to fling a dagger of a look at Trixie. The other mare caught it in her teeth. All part of the show, everypony! “You,” she hissed, “Trixie saw you back in Ponyville a year or two ago, now, didn’t she?” It had been that long, and if she had learned anything, she was keeping it disguised. “The one with the green mane?”

Rarity froze, thought of the scrubbing and the apology to Golden Harvest for wailing over the color green – and she watched Trixie glance sideways at the twins and a bubble of pure amusement inflated warm in her chest. This little stage magician was no different than before. Back then she’d used every ostentatious measure to bind and pile the town’s admiration and sit herself on top of it like a throne. The Flim Flam Brothers had hired her to do so as she pleased, catch the admiration of cider-silly ponies in the security of a lounge, a new throne for every night. They admired her enough to pay her and now they had pulled Rarity, who couldn’t stand them, aside into their V.I.P. area for conversation – oh, Rarity knew well when a mare was jealous! “Don’t you talk to me about green, darling,” she said with a tone fringed with a giggle.

Trixie started to lower her horn. “Oh?” she said as it started to shine, “I could show you a thing or two I know about colors, show pony.”

“Ladies! Before we go jinxing each other, why don’t we all four of us get back into the conversation together?” Patronizing bemusement seeped cloyingly in Flim’s voice – he clacked his hooves. “Trixie, honey, we had no idea you knew Rarity here. What’s the story?”

“Oh, I’m sure she would be delighted to tell you, as she’s clearly dying to speak to you,” Rarity said, staring Trixie in the face, leaning in as she stepped off of the sofa, watching her blink and flinch with a warm burst of satisfaction. “But surely by now it’s quite late and I don’t want my cab devoured by a pack of ghouls on the way back to Ponyville.”

Trixie watched wide-eyed as she reached for the door. She was shaken and knew that the mare who had her so was one of the ones who had watched her shown up in the face of an Ursa Minor, she could tell. The blue unicorn turned to look at the twins, who didn’t stop her. “Suit yourself, sister. Guess it’s you and us after all, Trixie.”

“Good night,” said Rarity, and she shut the door.

She shut all three of those cosmic-gag twist-of-fate collected thorns in the sides of her friends and her behind the divider and squeezed a path for the door. The piano played on and a cider-hazed stallion arhythmically pounded his hoof on the stage and whooped out a song stripped of tune. Her head was pounding. She didn’t bother looking for the other four she’d rode in with. They’d been so excited to get here they would’ve still been having their fun, drinking themselves to bloating while the place was open. On the way to the door, she caught its name printed backwards on the window, no curtain covering the inside. FLIM FLAM CIDER HOUSE.

She yanked the door open and burst gasping through to clean space. It was dark. It was clear. Her head throbbed and her ears rushed.

But she wasn’t angry, now. Relieved. And she produced the one small victory she’d escaped with and appraised it: Trixie had been jealous.

She had gotten nothing from the Flim Flam Brothers, no remorse or sign of legitimate cheating. Trixie had refused to take a lesson from Twilight after the surprise calling of her Ursa Major bluff, was now working for the twins, living off her lust for attention, counting on it, and had consequently experienced jealousy. That was some victory.

Rarity, on the other hoof, had not been jealous. There was nothing in a success like theirs to envy, selling overpriced drinks and hollow pizzazz to halls full of ruffians. It was easy. It was too easy, and it was dirty.

Still, the three were very proud of themselves.

Now that nopony was there to hear, Rarity nickered in agitation – where is a cab at this hour? She levitated a few coins from out of her saddlebags, which it struck her she certainly hoped hadn’t been picked, rotated them in the corner of her eye and the gray moonlight in the band of sky above.

“And I am not your ’sister’!”

She imagined they heard through the noise, and the piano, and the graceless singing, and Trixie’s pomposity, and they looked at each other again in a private expression of profound smugness, and smirked.

The cads.

Comments

[Trickquestion]

Very nice. As the other reviewer pointed out, some of the language could be hard to follow at times, but with this chapter you've ironed out the problems while maintaining the artistic quality. The FlimFlam Brothers and Trixie make an excellent team, though I'd suggest you put Trixie into the character list.

A very satisfying chapter that has made me anxious to see what Rarity's titular industry is!

[Blue Cloud Blues]

458155

Your words made last evening for me. XD I'm deeply flattered and grateful that you say that. And that you approve of the Flim-Flam-Trixie teaming - and you're probably right about that. I hadn't meant to snub Trixie, but I suppose with the new five-character-tags rule, I'd wanted to be careful, and I knew early on that I'd wanted the Flim Flam Brothers to come to play into the story and it was because of that that I'd thought to include Trixie at all - I liked the idea of the three playing off of each other. I guess I still hadn't quite been thinking of her as on the same level as them for the purposes of what I have laid out, even though she is. And would probably hate me for selling her short.

Thank you so much, and again, I hope I don't disappoint you!