They still tell legends of the Scootaloo Track.
It was a massive road cutting right through the realm of dreams, they said. Every single pony who ever lived, who lives right now, and who would live in future generations: all had their own corner of the dream world to run around in. Each night, a pony could retreat from reality and, for a few blessed hours, be or see or do or dare anything they wanted. Make the rules, in a world that obeyed none.
Through the entire realm, one impossible road ran.
Many have seen it. Many have walked part of it, but no one’s really happy leaving their quiet corners behind, not far enough to get the sudden strange headaches, so they always retreat before they’ve gone too far. Only the toughest would try.
No one knows how to get to it any other way except via dreams. Yet they say one pony has crossed it. Had laid down the route in the first place. Had paved the way for Princess Twilight Sparkle to even try building it at all.
All on a scooter.
Some say this is nonsense. Some say it’s impossible. Some say it could never have been done by anyone who wasn’t already an alicorn princess.
This is what we say:
Her name in those days was Scootaloo.
She’d grown up in some backwater town, or at least in what had been a backwater town until Princess Twilight Sparkle rode in on her golden chariot and put it firmly on the map. They tell many stories about Princess Twilight Sparkle, and of those lucky few who were given her blessing.
One of them was Scootaloo.
A nuisance on a scooter, in the early days. Then Ponyville grew, and so did its ponies. The nuisance became a hellion, the streets her frontier, the scooter her devil’s ride. Orange like the tiger, she was. Faster than death. Tougher than an earth pony’s earth pony.
They said she couldn’t fly. Not with her stunted wings, maybe. But get her on a scooter – the old kiddie kind, at first, then the newer, more robust kind they still make in Manehattan alloy – and she flew all right. Flew into spikes. Flew into infernos. Flew into things that’d terrify Cerberus himself, the guard dog in the depths of hell.
Well, all that was just nails for breakfast, to a grown mare like her. So she dreamed. She dreamed bigger. She dreamed of the whole world.
Scootaloo: the first mare – the first pony – ever to circumnavigate the globe. At all.
And on a scooter.
Course, you won’t find this in the history books. Technicalities got to her in the end. You don’t make history on technicalities. Only by doing or dying.
But she sure scooted, all right. They say she started in Ponyville, outside Sugarcube Corner – the bakery where kids used to hang out. She’d start in her childhood, and she’d end there, and she’d come back a true mare. Imagine the whole town watching, breath bated, eyes on the mane cut with buzz-saws and the wings too small to hold her sheer will. Too small to tear off in the wind, too. Never judge a pegasus by her wings: always look for the grit in her teeth.
She scooted.
She scooted across Equestria, through Manehattan, and then went beyond. Past the Frozen North. Past the Griffon Kingdom. Through the Dragon Badlands. Through Qilinland. Across Nippon No Hippon. Right through Didgeridoo itself, even, and that wasn’t exactly a picnic. Darn near everything that moves will kill you, in the wrong parts of Didgeridoo. They say there’s still kangaroo tribes there that hate outsiders and their guts.
Course, she’d prepped ahead of time. Unicorns waited at checkpoints all along the route. If her scooter broke down – it before her – she’d take it to the last checkpoint. Never the next one: she said she was scooting the route or nothing. Her own precious make, that scooter. Crusader, she called it. Beautiful thing. Only pieces left today, more’s the pity. They said she was a beauty when she was alive and kicking.
But Scootaloo pushed her too hard.
So when it couldn’t take much more, the whole thing shattered. Broke. Fell apart. Died there and then.
Broke Scootaloo’s leg, they said. It threw her off at breakneck speed. Better her leg than her neck, at least. Perhaps the luck of Tartarus watched over her.
The worst part? She was yards away from Ponyville. Right at the finish too, and then that happened.
Poor thing’s still pony, deep down. She cussed, all right. Moaned and whined on her bad leg. Didn’t stop her, though: she got up, she dragged what was left of Crusader behind her, and then she limped the last few yards to the finish line.
Oh, history books say it was Thunderlane who was the first to circumnavigate the globe. Technically he was, an hour before her finish, on another mission. Some think his attempt on wings was what inspired Scootaloo to try on her scooter in the first place. He set off a month before she did. She still almost beat him.
Flying it is easy. Natural. Boring. Tame.
Whereas scooting’s harder. You need the wild and the tame all at once. You need skill on treacherous ground. You need endurance where the wind can never cool you and the sea can never just fall away. You need your wits and not your wings. You need patience. You need determination. You need luck.
Anyway, Scootaloo really finished it first. Her soul would have finished faster. If her body had finished the last few yards on Crusader, the history books would be telling it different.
And she would have been the first to do it by scooter, if Crusader hadn’t died on her at the finish. Technicality, see?
So close to making history, but so far too. Couldn’t do it twice, neither. Maybe fate was giving her a warning at the finish. Don’t push your luck. Don’t get hubris, and all that. Besides, there’s no reward for doing it properly the second time. Not after that. Copycats got there soon enough.
Most ponies clapped her politely. She’d nearly made it, but by limping. Not much triumph in a limp when you nearly made it.
Besides, they say she wasn’t the easiest type to approach. Not if you valued your life. They told stories about her. Stories about the hellion hiding inside. The punk openly bold on the scooter. How Tartarus gave her the “wings” she never had. Stories get around. Stories of ponies frightened by her mere presence.
Only one pony cheered. Only one pony. One loyal friend.
Plenty helped her. Comforted her. Tried to make excuses for her. But only one cheered.
They got this right about Scootaloo, if nothing else: she wasn’t a quitter.
You can’t try again, they said. You can’t pick another world to circumnavigate, they said. Well, they were wrong.
True, if it had been any ordinary pony, the naysayers would have gotten it in one. Scootaloo was no ordinary pony.
Going around the world weren’t a good enough dream? Try going around the dream world.
All of it.
Every dream. Every link from mind to mind. Every space between dreams, from the first imagining to the last nightmare of a dying world.
Can’t be done, they said. Maybe it shouldn’t, at that. Could be that in reality she only went through the dreams of living ponies, not those of all ponies past or ponies yet to come. Could be reality’s all there is. Could very well be.
But that’s not what the stories say. The stories say she went to see the Princess Twilight Sparkle herself, and she told her a dream, and she told her how she was gonna do it, and she told her she was gonna do it. No one else would’ve dared. No one, except Scootaloo.
The princess agreed.
So they had talks with dream-keepers. They put it about it’d be a kind of “experiment”, but everyone knew that was just Twilight talk. They knew the real reason was because no one would dare say no to Scootaloo. Not the spirit of speed. Not the lightning demon. Not even the mare who chewed the iron of time and spat ashes and scorched the earth with rage. Rage at the fate that had stunted her wings from birth in a desperate attempt to crush her spirit.
They set up the spells needed to get her across to the other side. A portal in Ponyville, outside Sugarcube Corner. Not just any portal. The dream world ain’t exactly normal living space. Only the strong-willed can ever pass through that kind of portal safely and fight the anti-logic of the dream world for longer than a single night. That’s why no one’s tried it since. You gotta have the gift.
One thing going for her: no need for food or rest in the dream world. No mortal weaknesses. Pure spirit only.
Scootaloo took her dream to that world, instead of waiting around for a dream to come. Not many can do that.
So she’d become the first pony to cross from one side of the dream world to the other. The whole shebang. No dream missed. No link beyond her. No part of the nexus left uncrossed. Circumnavigate the lot.
Of course, Princess Twilight Sparkle was no fool. To prove it was all done, Scootaloo had to trail a line of infinity string behind her, start to finish. Then the princess would fly back from the finish and check every single dream had been touched. Only then would history be told.
The crowd that watched her go wasn’t that big. Plenty wanted to be there, mind. Just not many thought she’d do it this time.
Then they waited. Some at the finish. She’d come back in Ponyville again, crossing the portal left for her. Ponies waited.
And waited.
And waited…
No one heard anything for days. The string unwound. The portal stayed open like a fizzing ring. But no one heard nothing.
Then weeks. Then months. Then seasons.
No one could tell if the string unwound anymore. Magical string don’t move easy enough to spot. It might have always looked like that, after so long. No one remembers, see. Memory plays tricks on a mind.
The spirit of Scootaloo might have become just that: a spirit. A ghost. A memory. A legend, fading away.
Oh, some ponies searched the dreams, Princess Twilight Sparkle especially. Some searched for the thread, but it’d be hard to spot from the inside. Some looked for signs: tricky, since some impressionable foals dream of their heroes all the time. Nowhere was the real deal found.
Most reckoned worse. Most reckoned she’d gotten lost in a nightmare. Or in some stranger plane of reality. Maybe somewhere not even real at all. Maybe she wasn’t real anymore, neither.
They gave up on her.
They darn well gave up on her. Even friends started believing the worst. They left the string, and the portal stayed open, because hope’s cruel like that. No one waited, not when the years began to roll.
All gave up on her.
All, that is, except for one pony.
It’s funny how legends all know each other. Something must rub off from one pony to another. Heroism’s like laughter: once you meet a pony risking their neck, you start feeling you ought to jump in and lay your neck down too. Or maybe heroism’s just in the blood, and blood will seek blood.
Either way, another legend waited for Scootaloo. That was Rainbow Dash, 65th Captain of the Wonderbolts, the Sonic Rainboom, One of the Six, and Loyalty Itself.
They say she found Scootaloo as a filly and whispered secrets in her ear. Better than magic, because magic just needs unicorn horns or potion ingredients or all kinds of mumbo-jumbo. Even pegasus magic needs good, strong wings. This, though? This was fire in the soul, and the rainbow in the eye. When you got that, you don’t need no magic mumbo-jumbo to kick life between the eyes and leave your hoofprint in the bone.
She’d been the one who cheered when Scootaloo had first limped to the finish line. She’d cheer again. She just had to wait.
They say Captain Rainbow Dash was the only one waiting, every day, every morning, outside the portal, watching the string sparkle and listening for the sounds of the scooter’s engine roaring back home.
Point of fact, they say folks tried to get her to leave. Told her it weren’t gonna end well. Move on and live your life.
She said no. She said she never left no pony hanging. Eventually, they gave up trying to make her give up.
It was her – and her alone – waiting at the finish when Scootaloo finally came back.
Same as last time. Broken leg. Cussing. Moaning. Whining. Limping. Dragging what was left of her scooter behind her. But still going.
Three years, six months, nineteen days, and fifteen seconds to the moment she went in, she came back out. She crossed the portal.
With fire in her soul, and the rainbow in her eye.
Princess Twilight Sparkle had to check, of course. Going back along the route was faster. When you got magic, you can speed things up a bit, especially in a dream world where time’s a little loosey-goosey anyway. Only a mind like Princess Twilight Sparkle’s would understand it. All the same, it took a few weeks for her to come back and give the nod.
What a few weeks they must have been. Stories grew stories grew yet more stories. Soon, there was not a soul in Equestria and beyond but didn’t know what Scootaloo had seen, what worlds she’d sighted, what weird terrain she’s stamped with her metal monster, that scooter that crossed dreams and ran down nightmares.
It was the nightmaring that did it. Evil and bad luck and disaster leaks out of them. Even the new scooter couldn’t take it, and it was reinforced with strange metals and secret magic for safety. As good a thing of earth as could be sent there, and it hadn’t held.
Scootaloo had, though. Sheer spirit had.
They listened to her after that. Crowds poured into Ponyville. Pilgrims, hero worshippers, and ponies who’d up and near start a cult if it meant hearing one day’s worth of otherworldly secrets.
Course, one pony had truly earned it. One pony had believed. One pony had seen what others hadn’t. That was why she’d been waiting, when everyone else had moved on.
Thereafter, to commemorate it, Princess Twilight Sparkle built a road between dreams, following Scootaloo’s route. Called it the Scootaloo Track. Made it out of one long rainbow.
That was a long time ago.
Dream worlds aren’t easy to get to these days, not with all the red tape and passes and special protection suits you have to wear. Some folks think it never happened. That it was some kind of tall tale. Those kinds of things cling to ponies like Scootaloo. But that’s what they always say.
What they know, though, is what we know. That, on some nights, if you’re dreaming just right, if you’ve shown the right spirit, if the ghost of Scootaloo sees you and judges you, she lets you go where most can’t. She opens a way – her own way, that she made herself.
And if she honours you with that, you might just be blessed. You might just see the rainbow road. You might even find a piece of the sparkling magic string she left behind, and wake up with it on your pillow. You might hear the roar of the engine, of the scooter that died circumnavigating the dream world but lived on as a soul for her to ride forever.
You might hear the roar of Dreamdasher, the scooter with a hundred names.
Crusader Two of the Scootaloo Track. Queen of the Rainbow Road. Steed of Tartarus. Speed Incarnate. Heart of Loyalty.
The Friend That Never Died.
