It's that time of year for Filthy Rich; time to renew all of the licenses for his various businesses across Equestria. Thankfully, that sort of thing can be handled at each branch's local town hall... Except there's a new law, stating that all licenses must be filled out from a single central location in Canterlot.
Filthy Rich can't believe such a ludicrous decision, but he has no choice but to comply if he wants to keep his business operating.
Read it here
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Tropes found in this story include:
- Badass Bureaucrat: Sirocco, the one member of the licensing members who is neither incompetent nor corrupt. He does whatever he can to help ponies get through the convoluted mess that is the licensing department, neatly handles everything, and ultimately sets things up to bring the wrath of both the princesses down on Hiway and his whole scheme.
- Corrupt Bureaucrat: It's ultimately revealed that the entire licensing department had been reworked and deliberately made as slow and incompetent as possible by a high-level bureaucrat named Hiway, who had opened a number of failing hotels and planned to exploit this situation to force ponies to stay in his hotels. When the princesses learn of his scam, they come down on him in a legitimate fury.
- Heads or Tails?: Celestia and Luna are implied to have flipped a coin before dealing with Hiway and his scheme. Celestia wins, and therefore gets to decide what happens to the licensing department,note while Luna has to "settle" for deciding what happens to Hiway himself—and has already gotten many, many ideas from the disgruntled ponies who have inundated her suggestion box, which she proceeds to "empty" on Hiway as Filthy Rich leaves the scene.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: The bureaucrats at the licensing department, who do whatever they can in order to make things slow and unpleasant for their customers. Those who aren't on the take from Hiway are still too scared for their jobs to refuse to do otherwise, and just hoping that all the trouble will land on his head when the princesses find out.
- Take That!: Word of God in the comments is that the author wrote this fic based on their own negative experiences with the Department of Motor Vehicles, with Sirocco being based on the one employee they met who seemed to be legitimately competent and compassionate.
- Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Unsurprisingly, Filthy Rich has often wondered why his parents would give him that name.He'd asked them about it several times: his mother refused to discuss it, while his father only talked to other ponies about the matter and changed the tale with every telling. If the most frequent recital could be assumed as the truth, then Mr. Rich had been named because somepony had offered the patriarch ten percent off on an order if he followed through on a dare. The second-most common tale regarded an advertising campaign built around his newborn, something which hadn't quite come through. He'd tried listening in on the rest, and was still trying to translate some of them from the original Soused.
