"So, we ready?" Coffee croaked out.
His name was Earl Grey, the unofficial leader of the Herd, and he watched Ratcatcher attempt to mop up a broken ceramic cup after having attended to the tea stain on the floor. Grey noted that he'd have to hide the stain on the wall somehow. "Ready for what, Coffee?" Grey asked. "Look, whatever wacky scheme you've got in your head, we own a cafe and we actually need to operate it. Sometimes."
"Oh, you're gonna like this one, Grey," Coffee said, with a broad smile on his face. "So, a little bird told me—"
"Hey, don't call me a bird!" Sweet Tea said.
"As I was sayin', a little birdie told me that there's this new pony in town, and I think we can fleece 'er for everything she's got!"
"Who's the bird if not Tea, Coffee?" Earl Grey asked.
"Figure of speech, but I know these two guys, you know, the Flim-Flam Brothers? The apple cider machine ponies? They told me this rich traveling magician named Trixie's come into town. They've been selling their cider at her shows. All we have to do is get her to pay us before she moves out of town, and by the time she leaves she'll be far away enough that she can't call us out!" Coffee said.
"Uh, why would she pay us? What could we even offer her?" Ratcatcher asked.
"...Didn't really get that far." Black Coffee shrugged.
Earl Grey brought up an idea. "Wait a minute. Tea, what if we pretended to be talent agents? If she's a traveling magician, she probably doesn't have a dedicated place to perform, you know? So all we have to do is convince her we can make her big, take a hefty 'cut' of what she's making, and she leaves town none the wiser!"
Tea nodded. "That...That could actually work."
Midday, lunch hour. Sweet Tea wore a yellow blazer and skirt with a white blouse, while Earl Grey wore a black tie, a white collared undershirt, and a mustard suit jacket and trilby. "You really think this is gonna work?" she whispered to Earl Grey, looking up at the covered wagon they stood outside of in the middle of town.
"Yeah, of course it'll work, I came up with the idea. What are you gonna spend your cut on?" Grey asked.
"I kinda wanna get a poetry journal," Tea said.
"...A journal? Tea, don't be stupid, we're going to make bits hand over fist, you can buy a lot more with that than a poetry journal!"
"Fair, yeah." She hmmm-ed. "What about a train?"
"An entire train?"
"Yeah."
"How would a traveling magician be able to afford...Celestia, Tea, do you know at all how money works?"
"What are you gonna spend it on, then, if you're such a genius?" Tea asked. A bush begun to blow in the wind.
"I'll probably use it to get some nicer clothes, work on my wardrobe, you know, enhance my options with the EARL GREY system."
"The what?"
"My strategy for picking up mares. E stands for Engage Persuasively. For example, let's take the time I seduced Minuette. I Engaged Persuasively by approaching her in her pharmacy with a forged prescription for my 'sick grandma'. That helped to persuade her that I was a compassionate person. It was a good first impression. Next, there's A. A stands for Artificial Vulnerability. Ponies can be easily convinced to trust someone with someone using just a bit of vulnerability. Not too much, but a bit. I mentioned that I was worried about my 'grandma' and she told me that she was confident that my relative would be OK, and that if I ever needed someone to talk to she was there. So I had her on the hook."
"Oh, geez," Tea mumbled.
"Next I had to: R: Reorient the Conversation. In the case of Minuette, I asked her how she was doing, and said I hoped she had some things she was proud of. She told me she did, that she was working on composing some sheet music. I told her that sounded fascinating, and I'd love to talk to her sometime about it. So I: L: Leave and Make Plans with her. We agreed to meet the next day in the town square. So at that point I was able to enact G: Get Intimate. I started to get a bit closer to her, and asked her if she was single. She said she was, and so I casually dropped that I was too. I told her she was beautiful in the sunlight and that I'd love to get to know her better. I guided the conversation towards a romantic topic, and we decided to go to a nice restaurant for a date.
"That brings us to R. Restrict Location. Now, I knew that the restaurant I was bringing her to was closed on Sundays, so I offered that we could order a pizza and go back to my apartment instead once we saw the sign and I 'realized' we couldn't go to the restaurant. So, having trapped her in my apartment, I used E: Engage Sexually. You know how that'd go, of course. Finally, there's Y: You Leave Her Forever. Having gotten what I wanted, I said goodbye to her and never talked to her again, avoiding the pharmacy entirely."
Tea's face had drained of all color. "You're an awful person."
Earl Grey chuckled. "Maybe, but I didn't even get into the times that I had to simulate an aggressive stalker to drive the mare into my grasp—"
"...Uh, can we get back to the scam?" Tea asked.
"Right, yeah," Earl Grey noted, running a hoof through his gelled-up hair. "Excuse me?" he asked, loudly, before walking up the flimsy wooden stairs of the wagon to knock at the door. Knock, knock, knock. He walked back down.
There was silence.
Tea waited, tapping her hoof against the dirt floor.
Earl Grey checked his watch.
Then, the door finally opened, and a blue unicorn with a white-ish blue mane and tail opened the door with a wooden whine. "Hello? Who is bothering the Great and Powerful Trixie?" she asked in a haughty tone.
Earl Grey put on his best fast-talking salesman voice. "Well, miss, I'm Honey Drop and this is Humblebee, and we're talent scouts for the Mantis Toboggan Talent Agency and we couldn't help but watch your latest act!"
Trixie's eyes widened just a bit. "...Talent scouts?"
"Yes, yes, we wanted to strike a deal with you! A talent such as yourself shouldn't be living in this dingy little wagon, huh?"
The magician blinked a few times. "Where's the Mantis Toboggan Talent Agency located?" she asked.
Earl Grey whispered to Tea. "Shit!" He turned back to Trixie. "Do you mind if my esteemed colleague and I have a bit of a huddle?"
"...Sure?" Trixie asked. "Don't waste the Great and Powerful Trixie's time, please, the Great and Powerful Trixie was in the middle of lunch."
Earl Grey and Tea, well, huddled. "...Fuck, what are we supposed to..." Tea asked.
Earl Grey thought for a moment. "Canterlot."
"Canterlot," Tea responded, nodding.
Earl Grey turned back to Trixie. "We're from Canterlot."
Trixie nodded. "The Great and Powerful Trixie supposes that does make some sense. What's the catch?"
Earl Grey spoke, first thing to come to mind. "Well, we take a 40% cut of all of your profits retroactively, but in exchange we can—"
It was at that moment that two boater-hat-wearing redheaded unicorns approached the wagon. One had a handlebar mustache, the other was more of a baby face. "Well, lookie what we got here, brother of mine!" said the clean-shaven one. "It seems like we've got two clowns around here lying their flanks off!"
"Were you always there?" Tea asked.
"We hid behind that bush, sister!" said the one with the mustache. "And Miss Great and Powerful, these two aren't talent scouts! They're just two little scam artists from the worst cafe in Ponyville! If you want a real talent agency, we know some ponies!" he gloated.
Earl Grey's breath hitched in his throat, and Tea's face contorted into an expression of anger.
Plan Voting Please!
Plans should follow the example format:
[ ]Plan [whatever you name the plan]
-[ ] Option One
-[ ] Option Two
-[ ] Option Three
Choose three of this list to make up your plan.
[ ] Accuse the Flim-Flam Brothers of being con artists.
[ ] Beat the stuffing out of the Flim-Flam Brothers.
[ ] Run away.
[ ] Pretend that Earl Grey died in a train accident and that you're actually his twin brother Yorkshire.
[ ] Pretend that you and the Flim-Flam Brothers are both talent agent groups who work together, thus hopefully sharing the wealth from the con.
[ ] Try to convince the Flim-Flam Brothers that you're actually not talent agents, you're investors in their product so you can try and scam them because they might have more money than Trixie.
[ ] Call the Flim-Flam Brothers "fruit machine cucks".
[ ] Fake having a heart attack to reorient the situation around you so you can throw Trixie and the Flim-Flam Brothers off their game.
[ ] Throw Sweet Tea under the bus.