Crossing Guard of the regional Immigration Department has had a long day doing hard work with too few ponies to help him. Managing both immigration into Equestria and the public concerns with migrants isn't an easy task. So, when his final case for the day turns out to be a surprisingly polite, well-mannered and well-behaved Griffon, he's not one to pay too much attention. Having confirmed that everything is in order, and that Gerald Gristle's intentions are honest work in the form of opening his own shop, Crossing Guard is content to just take the break he's been given and officially welcome Gerald into Equestria.
A pity. If he'd been less tired, he might have thought to ask what kind of shop Gerald wanted to open...
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Tropes found in this story include:
- Angry Chef: Crossing Guard initially concludes that Gerald is a professional cook, and doesn't play the usual dominance games that griffons do because he's spent so long being screamed at by head chefs that he just automatically places himself at the bottom of whatever pecking order he happens to be in until the day he'll have his own kitchen and be the one doing the screaming for a change.
- Blackmail: Luna's means of getting CUNET and the Murdocks Press Corps to back off the butcher shop: after the midnight luncheon, she's in possession of a picture showing the leader of the first and a lead reporter of the second eating what appears to be meat. As she points out, she's the legal owner of that picture, and she's well within her rights to fly over Canterlot dropping copies of it and letting ponies draw their own conclusions — also noting that both mares have preached that those who speak loudest against an act are most likely to practice it in secret, and wondering if their own followers will remember that... And she also makes sure to tell Wordia just who taught her about those practical aspects of the law, along with directly thanking her for the lesson.
- Cross Cultural Kerfuffle: Gerald Gristle nearly starts violent riots throughout Canterlot because he opens a butcher's shop, something that would be fine in his homeland of Protocera, but which drives the herbivorous ponies of Equestria mad with terror.
- Dumbass Has a Point: Although his ways of expressing it really are stupid in practice, Gerald does have a legitimate point. Individuals with specific dietary needs — ponies and other vegetable eaters in Protocera, meat-eaters and owners of carnivorous pets in Equestria — should not have to feel ashamed of themselves for the things they eat, and should be given the right to openly acquire the things they need.
- Innocently Insensitive: You might start to get the idea that Gerald really didn't think very much about how ponies might react to his shop. He does have a partial defense for this: as he later points out, the ponies of Protocera are used to the scents of both raw and cooked meat, and so don't go through any instinctive reactions. (Luna also indicates that any pony can adjust with sufficient exposure.) However, when it comes to the butcher shop's mascot... the palace is still trying to recover all the promotional scarves.
- Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: Griffins take parenthood very seriously, and view bringing a new life into the world as coming with an essentially sacred duty to guide and protect that new life as it grows. Should a parent be prevented from fulfilling that duty — such as, for instance, by being killed — this is passed on to the person who prevented them. As a result, there is a fairly large population of ponies living in Protocera, the griffin nation, descended from orphans adopted during the various Protoceran-Equestrian border conflicts by the griffin warriors who slew their birth parents in battle.
- Psychoactive Powers: A mild case. As in other Continuum stories, the visual display of a unicorn (or alicorn's) field can say something about their emotional state, and when Crossing is summoned to meet Luna, he immediately noticing that her field is showing spiking along the borders — something which generally indicates anger verging into rage. This ultimately turns out to be from a combination of her reaction to the various newspaper articles and seeing him injured, but it's still something which makes him fairly cautious for a while.
- Shout-Out:
- So the butcher shop's sign shows the upper half of a cattle, positioned so that it just might have served the steak it's balancing from its own hidden flank? Sounds familiar.
- The design of the exterior is a deliberate homage to the chocolate shop in Thief of Time, right down to the gratings designed to collect drool. Of course, since the shop is in Canterlot, they've mostly collected vomit.
- Testosterone Poisoning: Griffon cuisine in a nutshell. They only eat meat from creatures that can fight, and though they do need to eat vegetables, they consider their open, public consumption to mark an individual as "weak" and do everything they can to disguise their presence in a meal. (Protocera's native ponies — those who generally think of themselves as griffons — tend to eat in private, quickly, or both.) A green-grocer operating openly in a Protoceran city is treated with the exact same sort of outrage, disgust and moral indignation that a butcher shop receives in Equestria.
