Scooter? Check.
Clubhouse? Check.
Tiny, useless orange wings? Check.
Well, looks like I'm ready, then.Scootaloo strapped her helmet on—she’d need that, for sure—and got on her scooter.
It was a badly formed plan that was likely to end up in lots of blood and possibly a broken wing. But at this point, she didn’t care. If she couldn’t use her silly little wings to fly, she would hurt them instead. The plan: get up on the roof of the clubhouse, get on the scooter, and scooter off. If she was really a pegasus, she would learn how to fly in the sudden shock. If she wasn’t, then she would break her wings.
Scootaloo swallowed. Did she want to break her wings? Well, of course she didn’t . . . right? She sighed. Miss Cherilee had told them that sometimes, ponies get so sad that they just want to disappear from Equestria forever. They want to hurt themselves. Kill themselves.
Scootaloo banished all thoughts of death from her mind. She hopped on her scooter and let herself fall down the slope.
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!” Scootaloo shrieked, flailing her hooves around. Panic coursed through her veins. Any moment now, she was going to hit the earth, and—
POOF! Scootaloo groaned. She hadn’t hit the earth, but her head still hurt. Hey . . . what had she landed on?
Wait. Was that cotton candy?
Several minutes earlier:
Wagon: Check.
Roller blades: Check.
Gummy: Check.
A stash of super-sugary cupcakes: Check.
Pinkie Pie bounced out the doors of Sugarcube Corner more cheerfully than she had for days. Today was going to be the day! Today, she was going to learn how to fly and prove everyone wrong! Earth ponies couldfly, and she would be the first to do it, ever.
She strapped herself into her roller blades, tied herself to the wagon, and put the saddle on her alligator. Now, if she could just get to the cliff at the edge of Ponyville . . .
“GO, GUMMY!” she screamed. Gummy looked back at her blankly. “Pull me!” she commanded. There was no reaction. She sighed and shook her head. There went her plan. She was tempted to ask Dashie, but she didn’t want to seem weak. If she was going to learn how to fly, she had to do it on her own.
“Well, Gummy, looks like you won’t be pulling me,” said Pinkie in her eternally cheerful tone. “I’ll have to do this on my own!” She tucked Gummy into her mane and began to skate towards the cliff.
Pinkie Pie smiled as she passed the CMC’s clubhouse. She remembered when she was a young filly, always dreaming of flight. But as a little pink rock farmer, she couldn’t suddenly grow wings. Now that she was older, she could
Pinkie Pie squinted at the top of the clubhouse. Was a pony up there? Yes! There was a small orange filly with a scooter, who was now soaring through the air! Pinkie Pie froze. Startled, she did the only thing she could think of: pointed her mane, the softest thing she could find, in the direction of the falling filly.
Scootaloo rubbed her head and moaned. “Ugh,” she whimpered.
“Are you all right?” asked a voice. Scootaloo was too woozy to recognize the voice.
“Cotton candy?” she whimpered, attempting to lick the puffy pink object in front of her. Ew! Definitely not cotton candy.
“My mane’s not cotton candy, you silly filly! Although I can understand why it might be a little confusing. They’re both puffy and pink, and they both smell good! I just had my weekly frosting shampoo. Mmmm, I wish I could have one of those shampoos every day, but I don’t want to run out of frosting!”
Scootaloo now understood who was talking. There was only one pony in Ponyville who could talk that much in one breath. “Pinkie Pie?” she groaned. “What are you talking about?”
“Duh, my frosting shampoo! Once a week, I wash my mane and tail with pink cupcake frosting. It helps give them body!” Pinkie Pie jumped up, unable to sit still for any longer than thirty seconds. Gummy scampered out of her mane, eager to escape.
Choosing to ignore Pinkie’s strange statement, Scootaloo got down to the important question: “Why are you here?”
Pinkie Pie made an uncharacteristic frown. “That’s what I was going to ask you! I mean, not why you’re here, since this is your clubhouse, but what were you doing? It’s not safe for ponies to climb up on rooftops like that. Well, pegasi can, but you’re not a—”
“YES, I AM!” bellowed Scootaloo. She fought back tears. “I’m just not a good pegasus.”
“At least you’re a pegasus,” sighed Pinkie Pie. “You’ll learn how to fly some day. But I’ll never be able to fly, at least on my own. Sometimes, I wonder why I was made an earth pony.”
Scootaloo fidgeted, unsure of what to say. Luckily, Pinkie Pie broke the silence.
“Want to know a secret?” Pinkie Pie asked. Scootaloo nodded nervously. She was worried what this strange mare’s secret could be. Luckily, it turned out to be something completely normal—more or less. “You know my Pinkie Promises?” she asked. “ ‘Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.’ I made the ‘cross my heart’ part because that’s part of a good promise, and I made the ‘cupcake in my eye’ part because I love cupcakes, but I made the ‘hope to fly’ part because I’ve always wanted to fly.” She sighed, looking up at the sky longingly. “But I’ve only gotten to go up to the sky once, and I didn’t get wings then. I sure wish that Twilight had given me wings instead of Rarity. I would have taken better care of them.”
Scootaloo understood only half of what Pinkie Pie had just said. Deciding it best not to ask, she cleared her throat. “Well, at least it’s not your fault that you can’t fly. You were just born that way. I have wings, but . . .” She gave them a few feeble flaps to demonstrate their uselessness.
“Hey, you never answered me—if you can’t fly, why were you up on the roof?” asked Pinkie Pie.
Scootaloo cast her eyes downwards. “I . . . I just wanted to fly. That’s it. I figured that I’d learn how to fly in the sudden panic, but I guess I didn’t.”
Pinkie Pie was silent, as if she was contemplating something important. She kept this silence going for so long that Scootaloo wondered if she was all right. “Pinkie Pie?” she asked nervously. “Did I say something?”
Pinkie Pie shook her head slowly. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I think I know exactly how you felt.” A smile slowly made its way across her face. “Hey! I just had the bestest, bestest, BESTEST idea ever! Come on!” She skated away from the clubhouse, Gummy hanging onto her mane. Scootaloo hesitated, then shrugged. It was better than jumping off roofs.
“Ta-DAA!” Pinkie Pie crowed, jumping up in the air. Stunned silence followed her great show of bravado.
“Er . . . what is it?” asked Scootaloo, scratching her head.
Pinkie Pie rolled her eyes. “Silly, it’s my special flying machine! Don’t you know what a flying machine looks like?”
“I know what it’s not meant to look like,” said Scootaloo, wrinkling her nose. “It’s not meant to look like a pile of trash—and that’s exactly what it looks like.”
Pinkie’s ears dropped. “Well, I guess it does need a little fixing. I was hoping that we could fix it up together. I’ve used it once, but Gilda broke it when she threw me out of the sky.”
Scootaloo hesitated. “I don’t know. I’m not good at fixing stuff like Applebloom.”
“Silly filly!” Pinkie Pie giggled. “Everypony’s good at fixing things, if they just give it a try! It’s easy!”
Her smile was so big that Scootaloo suspected a song coming up. “Pinkie?” she asked. “Look, I’ve really got to—”
“All you gotta do is take a hammer and paintbrush,
Fix that thing back up!
Now you take your wings and flap them once, not twice,
Fixing this machine is such a—”
Scootaloo groaned. “Pinkie, you don’t need to sing a song about it! The thing is, I wanted to spend the day flying, not fixing some totally lost cause.”
Pinkie Pie’s face fell. “Well . . . ooh!” Her face brightened as she thought of something. “How about I fix the flying machine, and you go find Rainbow Dash so you can stalk her and follow her around like you always do?”
Scootaloo shook her head. “She’s at a Wonderbolts show—wait, stalk? I do not stalkher!”
Pinkie Pie giggled. “Yes, you do, you silly filly!” Scootaloo opened her mouth to protest, but Pinkie changed the subject. “Well, if you don’t want to fix the machine, maybe we could just go to my special flying closet and pick something else out.”
Scootaloo frowned. “Special flying closet?”
Pinkie Pie nodded. “It’s my special closet for whenever I want to fly! This is my best invention so far, but it’ll take a while to fix.”
Scootaloo gawked at the pink pony. “You really want to fly, don’t you?”
Pinkie Pie swallowed hard. “More than anything. Mama and Papa always said that flight was unnatural, and ponies were meant to stay on the ground, and they got upset whenever I talked about flight. I’m sure that your parents think just the opposite.”
“But you have your cutie mark!” Scootaloo blurted out. “You can’t fly, but at least you know what you’re meant to do.”
Pinkie Pie’s smile returned to her face. “Well, you’re talented in plenty of things—especially riding that scooter of yours! It’s almost like you’re flying whenever I see you riding that thing.”
Scootaloo smiled slightly. “Yeah. I guess . . . I guess for now, I’ll just have to fly using my scooter.”
Pinkie Pie’s eyes widened. “Scootaloo, I think that I’m having an idea,” she said slowly. “We’re going to need, like, a hundred balloons . . .”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER
“Balloons?” asked Pinkie Pie gleefully.
“Check!” replied Scootaloo, just as gleefully.
“Scooter?”
“Check!”
Pinkie Pie pushed away the anchor and allowed the scooter, with a rainbow of colorful balloons tied to it, to float up into the clear blue sky.
“Look! Down there! It’s the clubhouse! And over there is Sugarcube Corner, and there’s the library, and . . .” Scootaloo was beside herself. So this was what flying was like! No wonder Rainbow Dash spent all her time in the air! To her embarrassment, she felt a few tears leak out of her eyes.
Pinkie Pie noticed the tears and gasped. “Are you all right? Are you sad? You can’t be sad! Please don’t be sad!”
“I’m not sad,” Scootaloo said softly. “I just want to thank you for doing this. I mean, nopony else cares about a little orange pegasus who can’t even fly. But you spent your whole day doing something nice for me.”
Pinkie Pie giggled. “Don’t be silly! We both got to do what we want to do the most—fly, and as a bonus, I got to help somepony!” She planted a kiss on top of Scootaloo’s head cheerfully.
“Yuck!” said Scootaloo, blushing and cringing. Deep down, there was something that she liked about that kiss, but right now she didn’t have the mindset to figure out what it was about that kiss that pleased her. Instead, she rested her head against Pinkie Pie’s side and shut her eyes, inhaling the sweet scent of frosting. There were so many things that she wanted to tell Pinkie Pie: that she liked the idea of frosting shampoos, that she liked it when Pinkie Pie spouted out nonsense, that this flight was the perfect flight. But in the end, only two words came out:
“Thank you.”
