A Game of Flats

For now, the teams were re-shuffled every day, and Aloha was benched out for one game.

She didn’t mind; an important strategy was watching other teams play to learn from them. How their moves could be countered, or if there was something really effective they could do which could be replicated.

It was also a chance to see the new rules play out. Yesterday the refs had held a discussion and experimented with putting a non-unicorn in the catcher role, instead of a unicorn. That diversified play, but also meant a further restriction on basket height.

For the first game, yesterday, they hadn’t thought to restrict the catcher’s movement—or how far her basket could move ahead of her, and some of the stronger unicorns could easily get the basket a quarter circle ahead. That wasn’t fair for a non-unicorn, so now the basket could be no further than one ponylength away from the catcher in any direction, measured from her head.

The rule change made the catchers run even more and rewarded quick turns and careful hoof-placement. Aloha watched as Lola—who was serving as catcher—stumbled on the grass and slid out of bounds when she tried to change directions too quickly.

She got back up and trotted after the stray ball. It could have been a catch.

The lesson was obvious—for a good offense, anticipate the catcher’s movement, get the ball to them or to where they’d be. Defensively, keep a tighter block. A lot of unicorns could move the basket really fast with their magic, so it wasn’t worth trying to block a shot that had already been taken, especially since most attackers knew to throw it wide.

Yuma, currently playing attacker on Lola’s team, had just figured out the same thing; this time, she kicked the ball in close, angling it just past Berry Blend, but not close enough for Cloud Kicker to dive and get it.

Aloha perked her ears as her roommate sat down beside her. “How’s your leg?”

Sweet Biscuit held it up. A bandage ran from pastern to cannon. “Looked worse than it was. Nurse just had to get all the grit out and bandage it up. Ref says I’m sidelined for the rest of the week, though.”

The two mares watched as Lola made a diving catch, gaining team Red another point. “Looks like I won’t be needed . . . she’s fast.”

“You gonna stick around and watch?”

“I got nothing else to do.”

•••

Aloha expected the showers to be nearly empty when she entered the locker room. She’d been in the last game of the evening; surely everypony else would be showered and at dinner by now.

She wouldn’t blame them; her stomach was growling. If it wasn’t rude, she’d show up to dinner all lathered. Some of the earth ponies did, that’s what happened when a pony was raised on a farm.

There was still plenty of locker room chatter to be had. Even if she wasn’t all that close with anypony she’d been playing with—ponies ought to stick together in teams. That was one thing that the earth ponies got right—when they figured out an order to be in harness, they kept that order. She’d overheard more than one conversation where position had been brought up: ‘Oh, I always did nearside swing; wheel teams fine if you’re bulky but wasted on a pony who’s nimble on her hooves.’

The rules change hadn’t helped her. She got half a dozen penalties for letting her basket get too far ahead, and it felt like she’d spent as much time making sure her basket wasn’t too far ahead as she’d spent actually watching the ball, or catching it.

“Hey.”

Aloha perked her ears. “Lola?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you’d be gone by now.”

“Gone?”

“Dinner.” Aloha peeled off her sweat-soaked jersey and lifted her bottle of Mane-n-Tail.

“No, I—well, I didn’t want to miss any of your game, figured I could shower off after.”

“Oh.”

“Plus the boys played at the same time we did, and—”

“You’ve got a weird attitude,” the unicorn declared. “No problem sharing a shower with a stallion, but if it’s one of your other friends . . . does that mean that I’m not a friend?”

Lola shook her head. “It’s because you’re a girl, and it’s normal.” She rubbed her hands on her temples. “Like, it’s weird to explain and I don’t think you’d understand it.”

“You know I don’t.” Aloha set the shampoo bottle on the bench while Lola undressed—she’d used a lot of magic on the field and her horn was sore, there was no sense in keeping it held when she didn’t have to. “You explained the rules but they don’t make any sense, how is it comfortable to wear clothes all the time?”

“It just is.” Lola stepped out of her shorts and panties and kicked them towards her locker. Lazy, but she wasn’t the only one who had left their clothes on the floor.

Admittedly, she had a larger pile of clothes in front of her cube than anybody else did.

•••

One thing that Lola hated was putting clothes over damp fur. Something that the ponies didn’t have to worry about—something that Aloha didn’t have to worry about. She didn’t even dry herself all the way off, before putting her beaded scrunchie back around the base of her tail, and that was it, she was dressed.

It wouldn’t have surprised Lola if the unicorn had gone off to dinner on her own. The locker room had almost completely emptied, leaving the two of them alone in their section.

“If you’re hungry,” Lola began.

“I can wait. You waited for me and you didn’t have to. You must be starving.”

“I am.” Some of the pros trimmed their fur really short, and a few years ago there had been furious debate when a college swimmer had shaved all his fur off to gain some speed in the pool, reasoning that dolphins didn’t have fur and they were fast, therefore. . . . He looked freaky; if Lola had to pick between having to go outside nude or go outside furless, she’d pick the former every time. There was something wrong with a bare-skin body. Maybe it was the thought that she’d look similar without fur. “Any of your pros or wannabe pros shave off their coats to gain some time?”

“What?” Aloha looked at her in confusion. “How would that make anypony faster?”

“Swimming—less water resistance.”

“We don’t really do competitive swimming, ponies aren’t built for it.”

“You can swim, though, right?”

Aloha nodded. “Yeah, about as well as anypony can. It’s relaxing in a pool or a shallow lake to float around, especially on a hot day or when I’m sore. Are you sore? ‘Cause there’s a spa with a nice hot tub not that far away. I don’t know if they’d let you wear clothes in it, though.”

“No, I was just thinking.” Lola wasn’t as dry as she wanted to be, but she also didn’t want to delay dinner any more.

Wetness and closeness were the enemy. Her bra would hold in moisture, but if she went without, she’d dry off naturally under her shirt. Sort of like wearing a robe.

At home, she never wore underwear after showering, not until her fur had had a chance to dry off on its own. In public was a different matter—but here, in public was among mostly nudists and if there was a little extra jiggling or maybe some nipple poke, they wouldn’t care, would they?

She pulled her shirt over her head and decided that she might as well go full commando. No sense in half-committing.

If Aloha thought it strange, she didn’t say anything about it. Of course, why would a pony whose idea of being dressed only extended as far as a tail-scrunchie comment on the choice of underwear, or lack thereof?

“Alright, let’s go.” She had more clothes in her room to change into later, or she could go back to the locker room and get her bra, at least. It was the most comfortable one she had.

•••

It wasn’t until they were halfway to the dining hall that Lola remembered that her friends were around, too. Even if the ponies didn’t notice she was going braless, they might.

Fuck them. Let them look. She’d already caught Sylvester checking her out in the showers.

•••

“So what sports do you ponies have?” Her locker room conversation had gotten her to thinking about things that hadn’t really been discussed. As interworld intramural sports were being figured out, it might be nice to get a heads-up on what options were on the table.

“Hoofball,” Sweet Biscuit said. She’d already finished eating but was just hanging out for the conversation and camaraderie.

“That’s like your soccer,” Aloha added. “Or pawball as I’ve also heard it called. Why does it have different names?”

“Because we have our own variant that’s very different,” Lola said. “Where the ball is a different shape and players are allowed to tackle each other, you can hold the ball, and instead of having to get it in a goal, it has to go across a goal line.”

“Did . . . did somepony only read some of the rules for the game and improvise?”

“Maybe it’s like the difference between proper hoofball and pegasus hoofball.”

“I don’t know,” Lola confessed. “I know how to play sports, not the history behind them.” She picked a peach off her plate and bit into it.

“There’s a bunch of flying sports,” Summer Breeze said. “Stunt shows, obstacle courses, speed races, marathons. I’m mostly an obstacle mare, which works well in buckball as well.”

“Non-fliers have similar sports. Barrel racing, marathons, drifting.”

“Drifting?” That was something that some of the guys did with cars, skidding around and making lots of tire smoke. She’d seen ponies pulling wagons, but none of them had done stunts with them, not that she’d seen anyway.

“Yeah, that’s where you gallop up to a mark and then plant your rump and slide . . . the further you go, the more points you get.”

“Same as with pony pulls,” Biscuit added. “Except there you’re pulling weight, and you have to get it a certain distance. Most weight wins.”

“Some ponies like to compete in Winter Wrap-Up,” Yuma Spurs said. “Which is dumb ‘cause it’s not a competition, but you get two mares vying for a stallion in front of plows, and watch out! Usually have a foal steering, too, and they’re just hanging on for dear life, the furrows go everywhere and it’s a huge mess when it’s time for planting; the gang seeders can’t follow a crooked line and so it’s back to the basics.

“And if it was just seeding it wouldn’t be so bad, but you can’t get a cultivator through crooked rows, either, so some poor filly’s gotta weed the old-fashioned way, and then when it comes time to harvest. The worst thing is that you’ll never see mares racing in their own fields, ‘cause they know better, but put them on somepony else’s plot of land or even worse Crown land.” She looked around the table—she was the only earth pony present.

“You wouldn’t think you could fuck up pasture grasses, but you can. Coupla years back, I was in Appleoosa and I could tell they’d drilled the field wrong. Got to asking around, and a couple of new mares in town were trying to impress Braeburn, guess they didn’t know he’s already hitched to Little Strongheart.” She snorted. “I’m sure he was impressed every time he saw that field. Heard they got demoted to waking up hibernating marmots the year after.”

Lola let the conversation wash over her as she gnawed on her peach, careful not to dribble juice on her shirt. The boys had noticed—they didn’t know she wasn’t wearing panties, though. Weird how it felt wrong, even though none of the mares at the table were.

It’s not cheating if it’s with a mare. Bugs leered at her and she turned her attention back to the ponies at her table. Sometimes sports brought out the worst in people . . . so far she hadn’t seen that with the ponies, but maybe she wasn’t picking up the right signs. Who knew if the group at their table was the normal group? Could it be that they’d shifted alliances as the teams had, or based on perceived slights during the exposition games? It was hard to know for sure as an outsider.

Most of her crew—for lack of a better way to describe them—had been sticking together, a team even as they got shifted around with ponies. Was she wrong for not staying with them? Or was she the only one who was really understanding how this was supposed to work?

The game was just a pretext; what it was really about was interspecies relationships and what they might learn. Having a game was an excuse, it was more symbolic than actually important. She knew that against a team of skilled buckball players, playing by their rules, she’d get smoked every time. It didn’t matter how fast she was on her feet (and she was faster than a pony), the magic reach of even a bottom-tier unicorn could move the basket faster. Maybe, in time, she could learn to kick the ball as well as the earth pony ‘grounder,’ but no matter how much she practiced, she didn't have the inherent advantage of being able to plant three hooves on the ground in a tripod, adding stability to the kick.

And it went both ways. By standard rules, ponies were both horrible at basketball, or absurdly OP. Pass the ball to a pegasus, hovering higher than even Michael Jordan could jump, and they’d dunk every time. But they couldn’t dribble. They couldn’t sink free throws without magical assistance—a team consisting of a couple of unicorns to get the ball, and a trio of pegasi to drop it in the net could, in theory, follow the rules and win a game, but it was a hollow shell of what the game was supposed to be, and days of tweaking and experimentation had come to an equitable version which could be enjoyed by all.

Magic—that was always the elephant in the room. As with physical activities, learning a new way to use their magic took some time, but most of the unicorns figured it out pretty quick, and when they had they were formidable opponents. Enough so that they sometimes had to wear suppressor rings to level out the playing field.

If she’d seen a society that had been ruled by unicorns while the other ponies served them, she wouldn’t have been surprised, and yet that’s not the way that they were. All three of the tribes—as they called themselves—worked together towards a common goal, recognizing their different skills and embracing them.

She might have mistaken it for a utopia, except she’d seen other creatures who sometimes watched the games but apparently weren’t allowed to play. Why, she didn’t know. Were they inferior in caste or skill, or were they somehow superior and would cause an upset? She wanted to think it was the second reason, but the fact that they were modifying the games so she and her friends could play suggested otherwise.

•••

Lola yawned and opened her eyes, focusing on the tousle of brown hair spilled across her chest. A stubby horn poked out of the middle of the hair.

“Hey.”

Aloha’s ears perked, and she turned to face Lola.

“You weren’t still asleep, were you?”

The unicorn shook her head. “I’ve been awake, but I didn’t want to get out of bed.”

From across the room: “Hey, did you two do it last night?”

Aloha stuck her tongue out, while Lola gave a vehement ‘no.’

“’Cause it’s totally not cheating if it’s with a mare.”

“Oh shut up, Biscuit.” Aloha pushed the covers partway down, then thought better of it and put her head back down on Lola’s chest.

“I’m going to breakfast so you two can have some alone time.”

Lola rolled her eyes and gave the unicorn the finger.