I Got Ninety Eight Problems and Parents Ain't Two
In the corner of the alley by the bridge on the river through the humble town of Ponyville, there sat a simple cardboard box. To the casual observer it appeared nothing more than an ordinary cardboard box, but to one little pony unnoticed by the world at large, it was home. The finest corrugated cardboard had been taped to its edges for insulation from the dreaded elements. Windows, drawn in new marker, adorned its simple brown sides. At the step of the front door (also drawn in) was a simple cardboard mat, reading FRAGILE HANDLE WITH CARE. They say that home is where the heart is, and it was clear enough here that this particular home had received all the love a malnourished orphan heart could pour into it without getting the cardboard all soggy.
Then Scootaloo came by and jacked it.
“Oi!” Pipsqueak shouted from the nearby dumpster. “You lot keep your thievin' mitts offa me property!”
“Fine, whatever.” Scootaloo preferred to keep her thieving mitts on when she was handling hot goods, but rules were rules. They were threadbare and moth-eaten anyways. She slid them off and loaded the box on her scooter. “Happy?”
“No I ain't happy! That's me house you're liftin', see?”
“Snort,” said Scootaloo, literally saying the word snort out loud. “I don't see your name on it.”
“It's right bloomin' there.” Pipsqueak pointed to his name drawn crudely in marker on the side. “Look!”
“Well.” Scootaloo flipped it over. “I don't SEE your name on it.”
Then she jetted with the goods, because honestly what was he going to do about it? Tell her mom?
The streets of Ponyville were the modern orphan's jungle and libertarian free-for-all. The sidewalks were littered with families, the roadside carts were littered with valuable theftables, and the streets themselves were surprisingly free of litter overall. It was practically a maze, but Scootaloo had grown up in this labyrinth and by the tender age of probably twelve she could navigate it with ease. Over ramps and under tunnels, her wings propelled her scooter at a pace moderately faster than walking speed. Pipsqueak's house was the heist of a lifetime. She wasn't going to waste it by botching the getaway.
Thankfully the fuzz had more important things to worry about than the homeless, and she arrived safely at her own damp alleyway on Sunshine Lane. Her own cardboard abode was a fridge shipment box from FedEqus. It wasn't as upscale as Pip's, but that was pretty much why she had stolen it from him in the first place. It was a pony eat pony world out there, and while she wasn't a cannibal herself she had good odds that Pipsqueak would be a Pipsnack before the week was out. The kid was just too nice to survive out on the streets of a quiet town like Ponyville. Like, he’d let her just take the thing in broad daylight. He had to leave his home to someone, and she was reasonably sure he would have wanted it to be her.
“Home sweet home!” She walked in and turned on the lights, or pretended to, and got busy with the duct tape. Two minutes cutting a hole in the original box and two more taping Pip’s house in, and voila. Brand new living room. She had just finished sealing the edges up with way more duct tape than necessary when someone knocked on her roof.
“Yello?” Scootaloo poked her head out from the open edge of the box. “What's the good word, miss?”
The mare, a recent hire for Ponyville's Social Worker Service, looked on the verge of tears. “You poor girl,” she said, drying her tears on her handkerchief. “Do you actually live in such conditions as these?”
“Uh, yeah?” Scootaloo cocked her head. She'd heard this spiel before. “Listen, lady, I know I haven't gotten around to putting up a No Solicitors sign yet, but I'm not interested in buying anything. I don't even eat Foal Scout cookies.”
That only seemed to make her even sadder, considering all the tears she was crying. Literally crying. Actual tearnados. It was honestly kind of embarrassing for everyone involved. “I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, Scootaloo, but your application for adoption has been rejected. The system is overbooked and we simply cannot accept another young foal this month. There are just too many fillies and colts in this town who don't have visible parents.” She tearfully handed Scootaloo a rolled-up piece of paper. “I beg you not to let this discourage you. We will surely be able to find somepony to adopt you next month.”
“Uh, okay.” Scootaloo accepted her rejected application with relatively fewer tears. Like none at all. Crying wasn't just bad for the cardboard, it was also a waste of good water, so she had learned to suppress her tears internally and never let her true emotions escape from their psychological vault. “Thanks for the delivery, I guess.” She ducked inside and fished an arcade token out from the basement gutter. “Here's your tip and everything. Keep the change.” Then she shut the flaps on her box to get away from all the extra crying that followed.
A lot of delivery ponies were weird like that.
The burrito was decent, but not great. Scootaloo usually preferred hers fresh with a lot of extra red ink, but the Mayor had announced plans for the town to "go green" a few months back and the Ponyville adoption agency had used recycled paper and green pens ever since. She didn't really get the whole vegan thing, but hey, free food was free food. She did pretty well for an orphaned pony, but she couldn't actually afford to eat out at the dumpsters every night. Meals at Subwaste's and Olive Garbage were really starting to put a crimp in her nonexistent wallet.
She was just about done with lunch when Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle showed up. Or more accurately walked by without actually noticing her.
“Hey guys!” she shouted, waving at them from her box. “Over here!”
“Hey, is that Scootaloo?” Apple Bloom stopped first, then Sweetie Belle, then they conferred on whether they really wanted to be seen around a street orphan, and then finally they got around to being shocked. “Wait...” Their freakishly huge bug-eyes bulged as they registered the sight. “Is that SCOOTALOO?”
“That's my name! Don't wear it out.” She laughed. “No, seriously, don't wear it out. I can't afford a new one yet.”
“So you actually live in a cardboard box?” asked Sweetie Belle. “Your address, That One Cardboard Box, Sunshine Lane, wasn't just a weird joke?”
“Yeah, sorry, I need to update that.” She pointed to her new living room, courtesy of Pipsqueak. “I just did some renovations, so now it's like two cardboard boxes. I'll get an application going with Town Hall. It’s time for everyone to recognize that I’m taking my rightful place in the world.”
“Um, all right,” Apple Bloom interjected. “But why a cardboard box? Ya already live in a house! We were all there with you once.”
“I'm staring at you blankly right now, because I don't remember that at all.”
“It was that one time when you were worried about not being able to fly,” said Sweetie. “You live in a cardboard box right now! How can you not remember living in a real house?”
“Geez, Sweetie Belle, that's kind of a rude thing to say about my cardboard box.” Scootaloo had mostly learned to live with insensitive questions with her friends. They weren't bad people, life had just given them a better roll on the dice. Apple Bloom was probably the richest orphan she knew, next to Silver Spoon, considering that she had a brother, a sister, and an ambiguously large number of cousins. Sweetie Belle had even been seen with parents once. They just didn't get life on the streets, so it was Scootaloo's job to remind them not to trip whenever they crossed a line. “I mean, it’s not like I’m homeless or anything.”
They looked at each other. Sweetie Belle coughed. “Apple Bloom? Should we say something, or...?”
“Nah.” Apple Bloom shook her head sorrowfully. “Nah.”
A breeze blew through the alleyway.
A balled up newspaper, the modern orphan's tumbleweed, rolled by.
A cat meowed.
Nobody said anything, except for that stupid cat.
It was one of those serendipitous moments where everyone just knows, in the deepest corners of their consciousness, that no more needs to be said, and no more ever should be said. In other words, it was a really awkward silence.
Scootaloo broke it first. “Anyways, are you guys ready to work on our volunteer project?”
“Heck yeah!” Apple Bloom tossed her a cap for the Onward Outward Postal Service. “C'mon, let's go get our deliveries!”
“Okay!” said Derpy, reading off the list. “Scootaloo, you're up next.”
“Ready for the job!” Scootaloo saluted, her cap on tight. The Onward Outward Postal Service was a respectable Ponyville institution, and she had never been prouder to wear a cap with the familiar red letters of OOPS emblazoned on it. OOPS was pretty much everything she'd ever wanted from a job. It gave her a uniform, reasonably flexible hours, and the misplaced trust of hundreds of ponies. The only station that could get her a better deal than that was an office in politics, and she wasn't old enough to run just yet. “You can trust me!”
“Okay!” said Derpy. “I see no reason not to.” She pulled a cartload of cardboard boxes off the truck and let the whole pile crash to the ground. “Your job is going to be delivering these, and once you get rid of all these boxes, you can come back to me and I'll give you another shipment. Okay?”
“Say no more,” said Scootaloo, working on the tape for the biggest package. “I've always wanted a kitchen.” She grabbed another box and started working on that one too. “Not to mention a bedroom, and an attic, and servants to tend to the hedges of my gardens!”
“Sorry,” Derpy laughed. "Maybe I didn't say that right. You need to deliver the package to the ponies they should go to."
"Uh, okay." That seemed like kind of an unnecessary step for Scootaloo, but as long as she was getting a home remodeling out of it she wasn't going to complain. She took her first box, a relatively tiny one that sounded like it had originally contained an intact teapot, and set off on her way. "So I guess I'll come right back once I've gotten this taken care of."
“Okay!” said Derpy, derpily. She gave Scootaloo a thumbs-up, but with her hooves. “You're a good kid, Scootaloo. I hope my daughter turns out to be half as great an orphan as you someday.”
“Hey, thanks.” Scootaloo shot her a thumbs-up back. “Here’s hoping.”
Delivering packages to front doors reminded Scootaloo that she deserved a front door. “Knock, knock.”
“Knock, knock?” Granny Smith answered. “Who's there?”
“Delivery!”
“Delivery?” She cocked her head. “Delivery who?”
“Delivery for you.” She pointed to her cap. The bright red OOPS could always be counted on to remind people of her. “It's me, Scootaloo.”
“Apple Bloom?”
“No,” said Scootaloo. “Not Apple Bloom. Scootaloo.”
“Scootawho?”
“Scootaloo.”
“Whodaloo?”
“Scootaloo.”
“Well why didn't you just say so, Apple Bloom?” Granny Smith shook her head. “Gadzooks, where do you get all those bad habits? Have you been hanging around that Scootaloo again?”
Scootaloo just smiled. "If I answered that, I’d be out of a job, ma'am. So if you could just sign this clipboard here, I can deliver you your package."
"Package?" said Granny Smith, totally baffled. "Ah don't recall ordering any sort of package."
“Sure you did.” Scootaloo held up a plastic bag full of porcelain shards. “You ordered a teapot last week. Your name was on the box.”
“Well, when you get to my age, Apple Bloom, you hardly remember anything.” She took the clipboard and signed, but stopped just short of handing it back. She squinted at the plastic bag in suspicion. Or maybe she just squinted because she was older than the original concept of time, Scootaloo wasn't really sure at this point. “Y'know, that doesn't really look like a teapot, now that I look at it.”
“It's a Do-It-Yourself kit,” Scootaloo lied through her teeth. “It's cheaper when you order it like that, remember?”
“No, Ah don't,” Granny Smith admitted, “but sometimes Ah can barely remember the dinosaurs." She took the bag and shook it, which probably wasn't doing the fragile porcelain in it any favors. “Where's the box?”
“Box?” Scootaloo coughed, shifting her head to hide the box on her back. “What box?”
“Don't packages normally come in some sort of a box?"
“Not that I know of, Granny Smith."
“Ah'm sure packages come in some sort of cardboard box, like the rats nest in.”
“We’re called orphans, ma’am, you can’t say that these days.” Now she felt no remorse for taking Granny Smith’s box. She didn’t before, but now she didn’t even more. Scootaloo backed off slowly. “Anyways, you signed, there's your package delivered, file all complaints with nobody ever. Enjoy the rest of your week.”
Then she jetted with the goods, because honestly what was Granny Smith going to do about it? Tell Apple Bloom's mom?
The cardboard spires of Castle Scootaloo cast shadows over the once sunny Sunshine Lane. The ponies of Ponyville had once looked down on the orphans that roamed the streets, but now it was Scootaloo who could look down on the ponies of Ponyville, from a position of approximate structural stability. She lounged on her cardboard balcony, sipping leftover water from the school's water fountains, and reflected on how far she had come in life. She had climbed to this lofty station with her own four hooves and her two stubby wings. And theft. Lots and lots of petty theft.
“Scootaloo!” a peasant she had once known as Sweetie Belle shouted up at her. “Is this where all your boxes went?”
“Begone, peasant!” Scootaloo shouted from her corrugated tower. “Beg me not for cardboard.”
“Okay, but a lot of ponies are really upset that you stole all the boxes from your deliveries, so if you don't return them now you'll probably be in some really big trouble.”
But Scootaloo's ears were already deaf to the cries of the plebeian masses.
She retired to her dark throne room, which was dark mostly because she hadn't cut in windows yet and open flames wouldn't ever be a good idea. She was rich now, rich beyond measure unless someone had a calculator with them. Her ownership of the orphan real estate market was unprecedented in Ponyville's relatively short history and she could finally afford anything her heart desired. She could even eat nightly at the finest trash heaps in town, feasting on McDumpster's and Taco Bell. Sure the peasants complained, but the peasants always complained. What were they going to do about it? Find a loving family to adopt her and then tell her new mom?
This was the life. She was living it.
Scootaloo settled on her seat of power and looked over her domain. She couldn't actually see any of it without cutting out a window or two, but she had a good imagination and that filled in most of the gaps. As she brooded in solitude, she began to mutter the dark words that would mark her reign. The words that would be remembered for a couple nights at most unless she decided to write them down first.
“Three Boxes for the Earth Ponies under the sky,
Seven for the Dragons in their halls of stone,
Nine for Parents doomed to die,
The rest for the Scootalord on her cardboard throne.”
She had nearly drifted off to sleep when the thunderous cracking of literal thunder roused her. Her glorious chandelier, made of the finest coat hangers and rarest toilet papers of the kingdom, fell to her cardboard floor. “No!” she shouted. The first drops were already leaking through the ceiling, an omen of water damage on an unprecedented scale. Her eyes went wide and her face went kind of a pale orange. “NOOOOOO!”
Scootaloo took the cardboard stairs slowly because they weren't actually that safe to run on, but she bolted the rest of her way out of the castle. The roof over her head was already collapsing as rain pattered down on it, a sign delivered from the heavens themselves to punish her for her hubris. Coincidentally, Sunshine Lane had also been in the middle of a pretty bad drought and the weather team had only just gotten around to fixing it. Getting rain to that part of town had originally been Derpy's job before she'd spontaneously left her post to start a package delivery service:
OOPS.
She just barely escaped her collapsing castle before it finished melting into a pile of wet cardboard.
It was rainy outside and kinda wet. There was lightning and thunder and stuff. She also didn't have a house anymore, so by extension she was getting rained on, and lightninged on, and thundered on. Scootaloo, formerly the Scootalord, could only kneel before the ruins of her once glorious empire and reflect on all that was. It was gone. All of it was gone. The castle. The cardboard. The warmth of her mother's embrace. The all-she-could-eat dumpster food. The—
“Oh, right,” she said simply. “Being an orphan sucks.”
