A Game of Flats

Once Sweet Biscuit had left, Lola and Aloha looked at each other. “She’s always like that,” Aloha explained. “Whenever I have a friend over, or spend the night with a friend. A lot of ponies who know her are just used to it. At least she’s not as crude as Cloud Kicker.”

“That’s not just a pony thing,” Lola said. “I’m used to it. If we were back home, the gossip mill would be going full tilt. You want to surprise her by showing up to breakfast?”

“She’d be more surprised if we didn’ti. You wanna surprise her?”

“How?”

“Well, Hayburger has breakfast now, we could eat there, and she’ll spend all breakfast wondering if we’re back in the room making out.”

“Hayburger, huh.”

“It’s pretty good.”

•••

Fast food hadn’t been the right choice for breakfast, Lola decided. Her stomach wasn’t happy with her choice. She should have expected it; pony fast food wasn’t as greasy as the stuff back home, but it was still fast food.

She tried to ignore the grumbling in her belly as she checked out the team assignments with Aloha.

When she’d first gotten to Equestria, she wouldn’t have seen the significance of the team rosters—she’d learned a lot. The team make-ups didn’t make sense: all the pegasi were benched and unicorns seemed to be assigned wherever, not to mention that there was a null-symbol after Aloha’s name.

Also, they were on opposite teams, something Aloha noticed as well, judging by how her ears drooped.

Or maybe it was for a different reason. “I have to wear a suppressor? Gah.”

“A suppressor?”

Aloha nodded. “It’s an anti-magic ring that goes on my horn so I can’t use it.” She pointed to the symbol on the chart. “That’s what that means. Sometimes when—well, it depends on how you’re playing and who you’re playing, but if you can’t field enough grounders, you can sub in a unicorn or a pegasus who aren’t allowed to use their other abilities. If it’s a friendly game, you just play as if you can’t use other abilities, but for competition, there’s suppressors and wing-binders.

“Pegasi always say that it’s worse for them ‘cause they use their wings for balance, and maybe it is, but . . . I’m not looking forward to this.”

“Should I go easy on you?”

Aloha shook her head. “That’s not in the spirit of the game.”

•••

As the two squared off in the center of the field, Lola couldn’t help but notice that Aloha wasn’t as chipper as usual.

Just the same, she had a wry smile as the two faced off, not quite her game face, and she was slow when the ball was tossed, missing what should have been an easy catch.

Some people could play a game with full intensity even against a friend and some couldn’t.

Some people would take advantage of that.

Lola wasn’t in the latter camp. She wanted to play the game, she wanted to win, and she wanted it to not really matter when the game was over—she didn’t want the game to affect friendships and relationships, she didn’t want to be one of those toxic players where everything was about winning or dunking on an opponent. Especially not now; the rules were in flux and every new game changed the balance.

It nagged at the back of her mind, the kind of thing she’d want to think over in a locker room or in her dorm room or maybe sitting on the bench watching a game—hoofball didn’t have large teams, they didn’t have players in reserve who could be subbed in. Each team had three starters and the same three closers. There were no breaks until it was done.

No rest for the wicked. Even with the suppressor, Aloha was a formidable opponent; her kicks weren’t as strong or as accurate as a plain pony, but she could muster more force with her hindquarters than Lola could with her arms.

Legs were stronger, and if she’d spent any time playing soccer or kickball she might have been able to use that to her advantage. She was a bunny, after all.

•••

As the game neared halftime, Aloha was panting in the center of the ring, her coat drenched in lather. Even her vest was soaked through. Lola’s team was already up in points, by what she considered an insurmountable lead.

And then the temporarily handicapped unicorn got two good kicks in—one really good kick, Lola had heard the ball whistle as it went by her head. She also did have some game with her forehooves, going bipedal long enough to hook the ball as it went by and then set herself for a kick.

It missed, but it was a reminder to not underestimate the unicorn. Any sympathy Lola had felt during their short halftime break vanished in the love of the game; her view of Aloha changed from ‘friend’ to ‘opponent,’ at least for the duration of the match.

They rallied in the second half. There was no epic pep talk in the locker room; the teams only went to the benches to drink some water and relax for a few minutes before restarting. Lola guessed that they’d started to figure out a winning strategy. Yuma was fast on her hooves, she kept the bucket moving and would dive to get a catch if she had to. Orion had a decent jump and a knack for not only blocking, but getting the ball to Aloha.

They still lost. Decisively, although it wasn’t a blowout.

The moment the final whistle blew, the game ended in Lola’s mind, and instead of grouping up with her temporary teammates, she went over to the other side, first for fistbumps and then to walk with her friend.

Aloha didn’t wait until they got to the locker room; as soon as the final whistle was blown and she was off the field, she sat down on the sidelines and reached for her horn, trying to get a hoof around the silvery ring.

Seeing ponies doing things with their hooves that should have been impossible was a common enough occurrence that Lola didn’t really think about it any more. She hardly even noticed, in fact. But Aloha was struggling; she bumped the ring with her hoof and it kind of moved, there was a spark from her horn, and then it slipped back down and she tried again.

There was no joy in watching a friend struggle. Without being asked, Lola walked over and grabbed the ring.

She didn’t know what exactly made a suppressor ring work, nor did she know what its effects on her might be, but she did know what its effects on her friend were, and that was enough for her.

Lola tugged it off, feeling an unexpected resistance before it came free. Almost like it was magnetic—the resistance dropped as it left Aloha’s horn, and once she was holding it in her paw, it was inert. Just a simple ring of metal, not looking like much of anything, and yet. . .

“I get wearing them to be fair,” Aloha said. “Even if I didn’t mean to cheat, I could use my magic without thinking, and maybe the ref wouldn’t catch it. Or the game might be less competitive, ‘cause I’d be focusing too much on not using my magic and not enough on actually playing. With the suppressor, I don’t have to think about it one way or another, if I try to do something magical it just doesn’t work.

“But it completely robs me of one of my defenses. If I needed to use my magic for something, I couldn’t, and that’s always on my mind.”

“You mean outside of the game?”

“I mean anything, inside or out. It’s like being hobbled. Plus it hurts; they do their best to match them to a pony, but unless it’s a really expensive custom one tuned to an individual magic field, there’s always feedback. It’s like having a splinter and every time you move wrong, it sticks in.” She nuzzled Lola. “Thanks for taking it off.”

“Where does it go?”

Aloha wrinkled her muzzle. “It should go in the trash. But it takes a lot of work to make them and I’d get in trouble if I lost it.”

“Alright.” Lola twirled it around a finger and then offered it to the unicorn, expecting her to take it with her magical field.

She didn’t, because it was an anti-magic ring. She leaned in and plucked it from Lola’s grasp with her lips, a shockingly unexpected intimate gesture. Lola stiffened, a bolt of lightning shot up her arm and all the way through her.

It wasn’t until Aloha stopped and turned that she realized she’d been standing there, completely gobsmacked.

“You okay?” Her voice sounded weird around the suppressor ring.

“Yeah, sorry.” Lola reminded her legs how to move, and set out after the unicorn. “Say, I wasn’t too hard on you in the game, was I?”

“I wasn’t expecting mercy, if that’s what you’re asking. I was also expecting to lose.”

“You don’t sound all that bothered by it.”

“When the rules keep changing?” Aloha shrugged. “Sometimes I think it’s easier for you, ‘cause you’ve never played buckball before, so you’ve got less to unlearn before each new variation. I’m changing to a position I don’t normally play, and I can’t use one of my skills to play that position.”

“Huh, I hadn’t really considered it that way. You’re not upset by it, are you?”

“Nah, not really. I like winning but I know when I’m outmatched. At the end of the day, it’s just a game. Win, lose, what does it matter?”

Lola snorted. “Some of the serious players would take offense to that.”

“I know . . . ask Yuma Spurs how she feels about losing. Or Cloud Kicker—well, that’s a bad example, she cares more about winning in bed and not on the field.” She paused, and then chuckled. “Well, sometimes on the field if the opportunity presents itself.”

“Not during a game, I hope.”

“I think there’d be a penalty for that,” Aloha said. “She has tried to use her feminine wiles on opposing players.”

“Feminine wiles, huh?”

“Yeah, lifting her tail, showing off her stuff. Not like anypony’s going to be distracted by that in the middle of a game.”

“Speak for yourself. I still haven’t entirely gotten used to your, ah, nudist lifestyle. Guarantee if I lifted my shirt in the game, every boy on the other team would be distracted.”

“Ought to try it, it’s not against the rules.” Aloha lit her horn and pushed open the locker room door.

“Would it distract you?” Lola tugged at the hem of her shirt and then pulled it up as the door closed behind them.

“No . . . maybe.” Aloha stopped and looked at the bunny. “You’ve got really cute udders and they’re really soft and warm and nice to sleep on. Like a really downy pillow.”

Lola frowned, while the unicorn continued. “Although maybe I shouldn’t cause it makes you nervous.”

“Okay, back that train up.” The two were in front of their lockers, but Lola pulled her shirt back down anyway. “First, boobs. Tits. Breasts. Calling them udders is an insult. Cows have udders, I have tits.”

“Sorry, everypony calls them udders or teats.”

“Just because I’m the only—” Lola took a deep breath. “Sorry, force of habit. You guys are built different, you don’t have boobs.”

“Not like that, couldn’t walk if I did. Well, maybe I could, some stallions have dangly balls and they manage.”

“Does that mean you don’t—if you were to have a kit, how would you feed it?”

“A kit?”

“A baby.”

“With my udders.”

“So you do have boobs? Do they fill out or something?”

“Yeah, some, or so I’ve heard, never had a foal. Not gonna unless there’s magical intervention.”

“No guy’s caught—oh, right, lesbian.” Lola eyed the mare. “So, I dunno if this is too personal, but where are they?”

“Under my belly, back by my hind legs—hold on, this is gonna be a little weird.”

Sometimes the ponies went bipedal. It was almost natural for the pegasi; they’d often hover in an almost standing position, with their hind legs dangled down as if they were standing on something. The other two kinds of ponies could stand on their hind legs but generally didn’t stay there, not without something to support them. They simply weren’t built for that, any more than Lola could walk on all four like a proper quadruped.

Aloha pushed herself up on the bench, then planted a hoof on the bank of locker cubicles for balance, then motioned down to—

It wasn’t exactly her crotch, but it kind of was. She’d already noticed that the ponies had bare skin there and hadn’t really paid any more attention to the region, figuring that staring there wasn’t considered polite. Now that she was looking, the mounds and nipples were clearly obvious.

•••

The game calendar was clear for the day; everyone had been given a bye. It was marked as ‘rain,’ which Lola hadn’t questioned. Much.

Back home, weather forecasts came weeks in advance, and were reasonably accurate, so it wasn’t that odd that they knew rain was going to happen, and it did.

She noticed at breakfast that the dining hall was emptier than usual; by the time she was finishing her pancakes, she realized that most of the pegasi were absent.

There was no requirement to eat in the dining hall; it was convenient and it was free, but anybody could eat wherever they wanted to. Even the Hayburger if they felt like taking a chance. But for most of the pegasi to be absent, that seemed like more than just a coincidence.

“They’re out watering the fields,” Aloha explained. “So the grass is nice and green and healthy.”

“Why just the pegasi?”

“‘Cause they can fly. Unicorns can do weather management in a pinch, but most of us aren’t very good at it. Pegasi get trained from when they’re foals so they know how.”

“It’s not that hard, you turn on the sprinkler when the grass is dry.” Lola motioned towards the window, streaked with raindrops. “Or let nature take its course.”

“We tried that and it didn’t work out so good, Crops drowned or dried out,” Yuma said. “So now the pegasi handle the weather, we handle the crops, and the unicorns do unicorn things.”

“Unicorn things?”

Aloha nodded. “We used to raise the sun but that was too much, so now we handle other things. It’s complicated to explain but it all works out for everypony’s benefit.”

“Do they do a rain dance? The pegasi?”

“I dunno if I’d call it a dance. Maybe a ritual if I was feeling literary, but you could say the same about tending a field—prepare it, plant a seed, nurture it, and then you get fruit some time later.”

“I can’t explain in a way that would really do it justice, ‘cause I don’t know how to do it,” Aloha said. “But they’ve all—almost all—been trained in managing clouds and water and stuff, and so there’s a schedule and when rain is needed, they make it by pushing the right kinds of clouds into the right places and that’s how weather happens.”

“Back home, it just does what it does.”

“That’s a bad system, how can you control if you get too much water or not enough?”

“I dunno, it just works. Are they out there now?”

“Probably, it just started and there’s a lot of setup and maintenance to keep things going. I don’t really pay all that much attention; when I was younger I kinda wished I’d been a pegasus so I could fly in the clouds and I looked up a lot, but now I really don’t so much.”

“I want to see.”

Aloha shrugged and lit her horn; a moment later the window rose. A gust of wind blew spray into the room, but that wasn’t enough to deter Lola.

At first there wasn’t anything to see. Clouds and rain, the same as it was back home—and then she saw a pegasus pushing a cloud, a darker gray against the overcast background.

Lola kind of recognised him—she’d seen him on the fields before and in the locker room but hadn’t played any games against him. Which was strange; the ponies were all distinctive colors which ought to have been an easy way to identify them, but she’d kind of fallen into the trap of using their marks to tell them apart.

Not entirely, of course; even if Aloha had her mark covered Lola would have known it was her. Which was even funnier, since the unicorn was about as plain as ponies came. Blonde fur, and a brown mane and tail. Plausible enough colors on an actual horse, contrasted with the bright green of Yuma Spurs, for example.

She watched as he positioned the cloud, then turned and kicked it. A flash of lightning, and then it started raining from that cloud.

Really, the cloud was a tiny thing when compared to the sky at large. If they had to bring in every cloud like that, how could there ever be enough ponies to do it? No wonder the players had to participate.

Would they all be tired tomorrow?

Could she use that to her advantage?

“Does that one little cloud make that much of a difference?”

Aloha shrugged. “It must. One of my friends said that they set up the skies to give them the weather they wanted, whether that was clearing clouds or putting them into place. They need the right kinds and the right conditions—I don’t get all of it, but I kind of do. It’s a lot like magic, there’s a lot of subtlety if you don’t want to exhaust yourself. Like, there’s a couple of ways to move the basket, some of them are easier than others. Really powerful unicorns can just teleport them. That’s really fast but it takes a lot of energy and you can burn yourself out. Plus it’s not exactly fair, the other team can’t see the basket moving, so it’s a lot harder to defend against.”

“It’s not a banned move, is it?”

“Not specifically, but just ‘cause most unicorns can’t keep it up for a whole game. The ones who are strong enough to teleport can just as easily move the basket a different way, faster and with more accuracy, and they can keep that up for a whole game. But you do sometimes see a few crucial points scored in a teleported basket.”

“Can you do it?”

“I did once.” Aloha nested up against Lola, her eyes on the distant sky. “By accident, if you’d believe. I knew the spell, I’d seen some pros use it before and I’d practiced in the hopes I could get good, but it was a lot of energy and once you send it there’s no real correction you can do until it arrives.

“Late in the game, we were one point away from winning, and I wasn’t really thinking about it, I whipped the basket for a wide kick and all of a sudden it blinked out and then it was there in front of the ball, and I caught it again with my magic and that was the winning point.

“Kinda sucks to have my best move ever in a non-tournament game, but that’s life. There’s only one other unicorn at school who can teleport the basket, and she hardly ever does ‘cause she’s got terrible accuracy. More of an instinctive desperation move if you ask me.”

“Who is it?”

“Firecracker Burst—you haven’t met her, she’s not one of the ponies playing in this tournament.”