On the Road to '63

by niBBoi

Apples and Oranges

Of all the things she imagined herself becoming in thirty years, "Manehattan socialite and S.M.I.L.E secret agent" would not have crossed Orange Sherbet's mind when she was still a young farm filly with an Apple name.

Life was so simple back then. The farm and the family was all Sherbet knew, and she was happy with her sisters and her cousins and all the apple pie they could eat. But of course, the peace and simplicity of her childhood years wouldn't last. Her beloved Mosely finally stole her heart one day after helping the poor stallion make a profit as a manager of a Barnyard Bargains in sleepy little Ponyville, and soon, she was living in the big city trying her best to fit in with Manehattan's upper crust by shaking off the notion that she was just a country bumpkin that got lucky by marrying the heir to the Orange family businesses.

In truth, Orange Sherbet really did love her Mosely, with or without the money. Before long, they brought their precious little Tangerine into the world, and for several years, everything was dandy despite all the bumps and cracks up the social ladder and Sherbet's increasing estrangement with her family.

Then the war came, and the problems started coming as well.

Equestria's economy really struggled in those first couple of years with the fall of major cities such as Vanhoover and Tall Tale early on having no small part in it. As a result, Mosely and Sherbet struggled to keep afloat some of the businesses the Orange Conglomerate owned and keep as much of their workers employed as possible while the country geared up for military production.

A year into the war, and the problems kept piling up as Orange Sherbet's past came knocking on her door quite literally and her Apple family relatives who lived in the western side of Equestria ran from the invasion and started trickling east. Quite a bit ended up in Manehattan, and so Sherbet had to take care of her estranged family members on top of juggling financial troubles in wartime economic conditions.

It was a nightmare, and the mass paranoia regarding the changeling infiltration of Equestrian cities kept Orange Sherbet wide awake at night. She had already heard of neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues, and even close friends encountering infiltrators who had replaced people they knew, and some had even been outright replaced themselves.

It all came together to put the fear of changeling saboteurs coming to hurt Sherbet and her family. And so on one fateful day when she eventually found out that one of her Apple relatives in Manehattan had been replaced by a changeling, the war was getting too close for comfort. It didn't take much then to convince her to accept the offer when Equestrian military intelligence officers visited her a couple days after the incident and talked to her about becoming part of a new S.M.I.L.E spy ring that was tasked with catching changeling operatives in the city. With her numerous connections, abundant resources, charisma both natural and acquired, and access to the most exclusive of Manehattan's elite, it wasn't long before Orange Sherbet became an effective asset in the city when it came to snooping on wealthy socialites who were suspected of being connected to covert changeling operations in the region.

However, even as Equestrian intelligence surprised her in how quickly it had begun keeping up with the VOPS, Orange Sherbet's fears had not been placated all that much. If anything, it grew worse as she bore witness to more and more of the bugs penetrating the homefront while she worked, making the poor mare fear for her family if she were ever to be compromised. Nevertheless, it gave Sherbet a sense of control over the situation and a feeling that she was doing something about the problem instead of doing nothing and hoping for the best.

At that moment, Orange Sherbet thought about her absurd predicament in life as she sat at her table discreetly eyeing a mare wearing a fancy chapeau - an acquaintance of Sherbet's suspected to have knowledge about another changeling intelligence network in the region - sitting across the room from her in her own hotel's restaurant. Sherbet was an Apple who fell in love with an Orange which inadvertently caused her to strike it rich and move to Manehattan where she would change her name, become part of the wealthy elite, make a family with her beloved, and eventually get hired by the S.M.I.L.E and find herself entangled in a game of cat and mouse with changeling spies in the middle of a massive war the likes of which had never been seen by Equestria in its entire millennium of history.

Sherbet sighed and her mind wandered. She thought randomly about her niece Applejack and wondered what the Element of Honesty herself would think about her aunt from Manehattan stalking people, taking advantage of the trust of her peers, and generally committing less than scrupulous acts of espionage. Would the mare praise her as simply another Apple doing their duty for the nation? Would she fume and accuse Sherbet of disgracing the Apple family name by lowering herself to the changelings' level?

Would it give the Apples another reason to think of themselves and her as being as different as apples and oranges - the little apple having fallen too far from the tree and finally outing herself as a shallow mare who left the farm for a life of luxury without looking back?

Sherbet shook her a head a bit, and brought herself back to reality. As much as it troubled her, she had no time to worry about her insecurities with her family. Her target had just gotten up and left, and Sherbet was hoping she could catch up to her to ask her about a visit to her penthouse in downtown Bronclyn that week to see if she could find anything there...

Author's Note:

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/equestriaatwar/comments/17y5joa/apples_and_oranges/