Glorified

Shortly after the event ended, we were gathered and herded away from the stadium to be assigned our dorms within the barracks. The obvious discrimination continued when I was awarded a nicer room to myself in the newer side of the building, and everyone else was paired and sent off to the early ‘historic’ parts of the barracks. Old, hard cloud that had been there for centuries made up the walls of this place and you could feel it in the decrepit state of some of the facilities. The stallion’s showers were actually the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a sky city, and I’m lucky to not be a part of this. ‘Apart’ was the word though because ‘they’ had already formed a group and I was with the Captain, Raptor, and that color picker pony who I really shouldn’t be calling that.

Once everypony was settled, we were then gathered for our first training session out in the private tracks. Mostly, this was a runway and floating cloud rings set up to be half the length of the Cloudsdale 500. These were for speed training, which meant we were probably about to take initial times based on how Dad ran the high school team.

Everypony in uniform and in line by number order, Spitfire and Raptor stood in front of us by the runway.

“Alright, newbies, you have your numbers and the media outlets have your names, so now training begins.”

“They have his name, anyways…” somepony mumbled.

The captain ignored that. “Some of you have been part of the amateur circuits, and a surprising lot of you have only seen the high school circuits. Our first step is to gauge how fast and far you can fly.” She looked above us. “Effie! Do you have everything?”

When it rains, it pours. The name sent a chill down my spine. I turned my head to see a violet pegasus mare with a yellow-orange mane like lightning. She was carrying a brown box with a laptop on top and, surprisingly, not doing so very well. You would think, being the captain’s daughter, she would be a pretty good flier.

“Yes, ma’am! I—”

I saw it before it happened. She was losing her grip on the box and everything she was carrying was about to fall into the lake miles below. Without thinking, I launched, darting across the launch pad just beneath Effie, turning, and catching the big box before it plummeted. It was not light, but I had it secure enough to flip back to right side up and bring it to the runway. By the time I’d landed, Effie made it to the runway.

“Ohmygoshi’msosorry!”

I’m not sure how she managed to cram so many words into a single instant. Her mother smacked her in the back of the head. “Klutz! Do you know how expensive it is to have everything in that box cloud proofed?”

“I’m sorry! There aren’t any handles!”

The captain poked a hoof into Effie’s chest. “Then get a box with handles, it’s your job to deal with this crap! You almost lost like ten grand worth of equipment! You got ten grand to replace it!?”

“N-no, Ma’am…”

Man, this feels bad. “Uh, I mean, I caught it, so it’s fine, right?”

The captain turned her ire on me, but then tilted her head into a smile. “You sure did, number 1.” She put a hoof around my neck and motioned to all the other rookies. “What’s your excuse, newbies?”

Ah, here we go again.

“Raptor!”

“Yes, ma’am!” the C-team captain saluted.

“Did you happen to time how fast Prism here launched?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“In your best estimate—” she turned to Raptor “—just how fast do you think he went to catch this?”

The red-maned stallion frowned. He was silent for a moment before coming up with, “About sixty miles per hour in six seconds, Ma’am.”

She turned back to the rest of the group. “Six for sixty, newbies.” The captain let me go, then took a stroll in front of all the other members. “I see the stares, and I know you can tell we’re giving him special treatment here, but if you’ve never raced against him, if you’ve never seen him fly in person, now you know why. If you want special treatment beyond being a C-team Wonderbolt, make his times and we’ll talk. Until then, you’re all C-team Wonderbolts.”

Then she sent her challenging eyes at Raptor. “That includes you, by the by.”

He tried his best not to show it, but his jaw tightened and his lips slammed against each other. “Yes, ma’am.”

Satisfied with that, Spitfire returned to the front of the group and motioned me to go back to my place in line. “Effie, give out the trackers.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Setting the laptop aside, she dug into the box and took out what looked like very large wristwatches on elastic bands. She came to me first. “Please put this around your neck.”

I took hold of the device. The band was stretchy and the device itself was oblong and sort of octagonal with concave curvy sides for every other side of it. It had two buttons on the face next to a square screen in the middle.

“Thanks for saving me,” Effie whispered before moving on.

Another shiver, the ghost of Cheesette in strangling range. If watching anime with Fallacy over the years has taught me anything, that was not an innocent 'thank you.' Another headache to build on my compounding migraine.

“Courtesy of Princess Twilight, these are ‘projector monitoring devices,’ but we’ve come to call them PMDs. Pressing the button will activate the PMD which then tunes itself to your internal magical frequency. It gives us real time data on your body and your state of motion. Altitude, speed, heart rate, blood pressure, BMI—you name it, the PMD records it.

“As mentioned earlier, they are very expensive and difficult to replace, so don’t take it off unless you absolutely have to while you’re on the clock. When you are off the clock, leave it in my office to be picked up later if you take it off. It’s heat and cold-resistant within reason, and entirely waterproof, so most liquids will slide right off it. Again, unless you really need to, don’t take it off.

“I and any other Wonderbolt trainer, captain, or staffer can get the data off it, and it is constantly connected to our cloud computing system, so don’t try to falsify your data. We’ll know if you do.” She scanned across the team, slowing down over a couple of the guys. “Now, since most of you are gonna be gunning for him anyways, we’ll start this session by getting Prism’s two-lap time. This is the speed portion of initial training, so go as fast as you can. You get three attempts.”

And more singling out. I have to sleep here! I could already tell that the big guy, the angry mare, and the guy I didn’t like have been giving me the most intense angry stares of the group, but it was like most of these ponies were snapping at my heels. We’ve only just started! Why is it like this? Whatever. I’m just gonna fly and clear my head and not worry about any of that.

“Go stand by Effie,” the Captain commanded. “She’ll count you off.”

“Yes, Captain.” I moved to my place, set my hooves in the starting blocks, and brought my wings forward.

“Okay buddy, imagine yourself like a spring. How it gets tighter and tighter the more you push it down, ya know? You want your wings like that before you launch. Don’t just push down either. More than that, you want to go forward. Your wings are shaped to make you go up, so all you have to do is push straight ahead. A bolt from the blue, just like me, okay?”

Mom could go so fast that she breaks the sky. I was three years old the first time I ever saw it, but I‘d never forget it. It’s up in the air if she could still do it now, and she’s gotten slower and slower with each year that passes. One of these days, I’ll do it too. Just, in a safe place and not by accident.

“Three.”

Every individual muscle in my wings tightened.

“Two.”

Legs lowered, curling and curling and curling, just like a spring.

“One, launch!”

The combined force of my legs and my wings shot me forward and up. I hit the first ring as the training ground flew by and began my bank. Another push, more speed, turning at the first curve. The sunset world turned around me as my eyes adjusted to the speed. The strange slowness combined with the extra range I could suddenly see made it feel like I was beyond the vast blue that extended in every direction. Ring after ring, I finally reached the straightaway and flapped and ran.

“It’s easier to go down than up. Get as high as you can, then push and fall. Even if it’s just a little bit, that makes the difference between winning and losing.”

Mom’s power and Dad's efficiency. Gravity and power, my whole body working with and against the forces around me to fly faster. The next turn comes and I tilt my feathers one by one to change my angle. Strain hits my shoulders, the swing threatens to tear my wings off. Too against the wind, relax and flex. The turn becomes easier, and flattens into the second straight. I’m going too fast to straighten out completely before the next turn, so I twist and lean in, flying sideways to get more speed. Faster, faster, faster, the third straight is over before I realize it. My body is pulling apart, but that just makes me want to go even faster. I hit the end of the last straight and the Captain sounds her whistle. I pull up and out, then stall to cut my speed.

The laps felt great. It was just me and the sky up here, and in spite of the summer heat, it was wonderful. For the fun of it, I fell into a backwards dive and spun until I came right to the ground. I threw my wings out, swooped and flipped once for good measure before gently touching down.

Of course, then I looked up and remembered where I was. Instead of Dad coming over to congratulate me on my time which I just assume was pretty good based on how it felt, it was Spitfire and Effie. “Talk about a hell of a lap!” the Captain exclaimed. “You wanna guess how fast you did that?”

Based on the looks of my peers, it was likely a lot faster than most of them had ever flown. It was only three quarters of a mile, and I can actually fly faster in curves than straights. A good guess would tell me I did both laps in under a minute, which would be… even faster than my exam time. “Uh, two minutes?”

“Not even close!” Spitfire pressed her hoof to my neck and a screen made of magic light flew out in front of me. For all that exercise, my heart rate wasn’t even at 170, and I’d only just broken a sweat. Everything was pretty normal… then I noticed the lap time. For the short distances, even a second faster is a lot. Most races are decided by seconds in the higher ends of competition, and I’d just broken my best record by a whole ten seconds. Mom was faster in her prime… but not by much. “Fifty four seconds. You’re faster than most of B-team with a score like that! Look, you even broke 100 miles per hour in that second lap. Provided you’ve got the endurance to match, you’ll beat Dash and Soarin’s records by the time you’re either of their ages.”

I frowned. “I don’t even wanna try for Dad’s records. Twelve hundred laps at the 500… no, thanks.”

Spitfire patted my back. “Well, we’ll see if you’ve got that in you later. What’s the scoreboard look like, Effie?”

She literally grabbed the magic screen from my PMD and dragged it into her computer. The laptop then put out an even larger display with everyone’s names and columns for time and speed. “Fastest lap at 21 seconds, top speed of 104, average speed of 100, completed at 54 seconds. That’s a hard time to beat…”

“Well, you heard her, newbies! Who wants first shot at the king’s crown?”

All the sudden everyone seemed shy. Even Raptor. Still, there was the one guy who didn’t exactly feel like he ended up here on purpose, and like me, he wasn’t exactly with the group. “I can give it a shot,” he said. I’m gonna have to learn their names at some point.

The captain’s face dropped. “Oh, right. Yeah, sure, Number 57, you go for it.”

Right. This is the guy who looks like a bird, but like, in a more literal way than pegasi usually do.

“I just need to go around this as fast as I can, right?” he asked, like he’d never done this before. Geez, maybe he did end up here by accident.

Spitfire looked like she wanted to strangle him. “Uh, yeah? Did you not do this in the exam phase?”

The purple-gray stallion set up on the starting blocks. “Oh, I did, I just want to make sure I have clear instructions. I can get paid more if I go faster than him, right?”

There was a competitive edge in this guy's voice. The confidence was pretty astounding when I’d clearly knocked the wind out of the more intense guys' sails. The Captain felt it too. “Well, I mean, there are three major areas as far as Wonderbolt performance goes, but if you can beat his times, you’re probably qualified to move up to B-team at least.”

“And B-team includes,” Effie began, “a flat pay raise, an increase in benefits, moving to the B-team barracks which is nicer than the C-team is, and of course you’re much more likely to be sponsored in B-team.”

“That’s all I needed to hear! Count me off!”

He was enthusiastic at least. He set up to launch, and his form was really good too. This guy might actually do it.

“Three, two, one, launch!”

The stallion shot off at a really good pace. He hit the curve though, and he wasn’t controlling his flight path very well. After clipping the edge of every single ring on the curve, he made it back to the straight and sped up a lot… only to totally lose the track at the curve. It was kinda like he didn’t know how to turn himself to take a curve and made up for it with brute force on the straights. This continued until he completed the track, racking up time penalties for each ring he clipped… which was pretty much all of them.

He landed sharply, and I could feel it in my knees when he did because it was more of a crash than a stop. Breathing hard and sweating pretty good, he approached Effie. “How’d I do?”

“Well…” Effie began.

Spitfire marched up to him and pressed the top button on his PMD. “Do you know how to bank a turn? Because I’ve seen frisbees with better aim than you.”

We all looked at his stats, and honestly, they were pretty impressive, in spite of the lack of control. “Oh, man, I didn’t even get to go as fast as him. I could go faster if we had a straighter track.”

The captain shook her head. “Nuh-uh, you gotta get a handle on turning before you can do any kind of top speed exercises. How did you manage to pass the acrobatics test?”

The orange-eyed stallion furrowed his brow. “How long ago did we do that, again?”

“It should’ve been back in early May,” Effie said.

“Nah, I’ve slept since then.”

Spitfire slapped her forehead. “Goddess among us.” She sighed, then turned to the others in line. “If any of you get a lower time than him, just go home and don’t come back.”

That would be pretty hard to do though. With all the penalties he racked up, his time came out to fifteen minutes, even though he completed the circuit in about one and a half.

“Haven’t even made it to the technical section yet, and already we have a candidate for control training. Goddess. Get back in line, and one of you others come up here and do this”

The color picker mare raised her hoof. “I’ll go, Spitfire Ma’am!”

“Number 15, great!”

Effie got back in position and waved the mare over. “Over here, Miss Edelweiss.”

From launch to finish, it took her about a minute, which is respectable for this course. Her top speed only hit eighty though which I felt was sort of low for a mare on the Wonderbolts. Interestingly, she hit her highest speeds in the curves as opposed to the straights, which told me she was more of a technical flier. She had a way of moving and bending her body in flight that was strange to me. Not sure where she learned to fly, but unlike most pegasi, she did so with her whole body. I’d imagine she’d be slower on the actual CD 500 track which was less compact than this one.

With a top, middle and bottom established, the rest of the group was more willing to come along and each took their turn. As I’m terrible with names, I marked them by the numbers on their flanks. Under me was the mean mare, 42; the red stallion, 63; Trade Wind, the mare who promoted herself, 77; and then the rest. Not that I didn’t watch them or anything, but they just all seem a whole lot more average in this category than the top three. The mean mare was close. A top speed of 100 and a 58-second time. The red stallion was behind her with a half-second slower time and a higher top speed of 101. Trade Wind was exactly two seconds behind the mean mare at a minute even. These guys were all really fast and could maybe keep up with me at some point, but they all lacked some of the things that Mom and Dad have taught me over the years. The red stallion does weird stuff with his feathers in turns, the mean mare uses brute force to compensate for her smaller body and honestly I’m a little worried about her hurting herself, and Trade Wind… I felt like could be a lot better than she was. Talent-wise, she and Pigeonhole seemed to be the ones to watch. He’d be nearly as fast as me if he could control any of the speed he gets.

When everyone had finished their laps, Spitfire used her own PMD to display the scoreboard for all of us to see. “And would ya look at that? Nopony can touch the king. Second place is four whole seconds behind on this little track. A few months' training here and at least a few of you could enter the top cut for the half-track’s overall time.”

She scanned over everypony, then turned her eyes on Raptor. “Go show them what the captain’s time looks like. You can beat his time, can’t you?”

The brown stallion’s eye twitched. “Yes, ma’am.”

I happened to catch a glance from him on his way to the starting blocks, and if looks could kill… He set up and Effie counted him off.

Unlike me, Raptor spread the full length of his wings upwards and slammed them down against his sides. He shot into the air and started to flap like a madman, gaining speed with every powerful push. With large wings like his, he could get more power out of each stroke than me, but it would take a bigger toll on his body the more he did it. It was clear that he knew what he was doing, but his talent was not for speed. He dipped, dove and swooped as much as he could during the straights, picking up speed each time, but losing a lot when he had to slow down to bank in each turn. He, like the red stallion, did some funky stuff with his feathers in the turn, which made it harder for him to keep the pace up. Still, he had raw power on me for sure.

When he finished and landed, breathing like he’d just worked his hardest in the shortest amount of time, he gasped for air. “W-what’s the time?”

We looked to Spitfire’s scoreboard and Raptor’s number was added. I was a little relieved that he’d beaten me. He’s the captain after all, and he’s Spitfire’s student. He should be faster than me. But with the way Spitfire smiled at him, I wasn’t so sure about that.

“Fifty seconds. Top speed of 108. That’s your best time on this track, Raptor.”

“Shit!” Raptor punched the cloud, his hind legs sliding out from under him. After a couple of deep breaths, he got up and approached the captain. “Let me do it again, I can make a better time than that!”

The Captain tilted her head. “Oh, really? Should I let Prism give it another go too?”

Raptor’s eyes widened and his mouth shut. “Never mind.”

“Thought so.” She turned back to us. “Next, we’ll be testing endurance. Everypony get some water and then take three laps around Cloudsdale. Anypony who beats Prism gets a free dinner courtesy of Wonderbolts Super Fan Kitchen. If Raptor doesn’t beat him, he doesn’t get dinner, and if Prism beats Raptor, he gets the dinner. Oh, and no foul play; we’ll know if you do.”

She dragged her PMD screen back to where she could see it and turned it to a timer screen. “It’s currently three PM. If you’re not back before six… good luck finding food.”

Pigeonhole’s eyes widened. “G-good luck? Food, board, and pay was included in the job description!”

Effie stood, and the timer started counting down. I took to the air knowing all too well that the game was already on but managed to catch the last of what she said. “At the discretion of your trainer. It’s part of the clause on page 45.”

“Wh-what does that mean?” Pigeonhole asked.

“Better fly quick. The timer’s already counting down.”

Raptor had worked hard on the time trial, and it showed. As a matter of fact, it showed on everypony… but me who had more or less made a time for fun. True, it was one of my fastest times, but I was the measuring stick and not aiming for anything to beat. If I went as hard as Raptor did, there’s a good chance I could beat the time he set. Especially because, during the Cloudsdale race, I could’ve passed him more than once.

It felt… bad to be here. Spitfire more or less has control over the lives of everypony who signed the contract to be a Wonderbolt now, and though I’m not worried about anypony passing me, I am worried about Raptor not eating. Food is something you share with your friends and your family. It’s not a means to an end, it’s a time to be with the ponies you care about. I really don’t want anypony to hate me any more than they already do, and if I pass Raptor, he’s gonna hurt himself trying to catch up, and given his performance at the half-track… he’s not gonna eat tonight. In the end, I decided to not pass him and just stick behind him. This was supposed to be endurance training, but three laps around Cloudsdale isn’t near the distance between here and Ponyville, and I could make that in three hours.

When I landed about five seconds after Raptor because I’d tried to keep pace with him the whole route, Spitfire patted Raptor on the back and told him to go shower off, but then took me aside, leaving Effie to watch for the rest of the team.

Safely away from ears in her office, she looked at me with a spiteful frown. “What is it you think you’re doing, kid?”

I didn’t know what to say. “Sitting in your office?”

A vein bubbled on her forehead. “No shit, Sherlock. Why didn’t you pass Raptor?”

My body betrayed me before I could even make the lie. “Well, he was going faster than me…”

She stomped right up to my face. “The hell he was! Were you not listening when I said we’re tracking your vitals!? You were matching him beat for beat and you hadn’t reached a hard exercise heart rate the whole time! Why in the world were you going easy on him?”

“Didn’t you say he wouldn’t get food if he didn’t beat me?”

Her eye twitched. “This is exactly the kinda shit I was talking about when you brought Soarin to defend you back in May.” She moved around her desk and took a seat. “I hate kids like you, ya know that?” She dug around in her desk and pulled out a whole cigar and an ashtray. The Captain has always sounded like she smokes a lot, but it still surprised me that a former Wonderbolt of her caliber could do that to her lungs.

Man, what does she even want from me? It’s not like I asked to be a Wonderbolt for this city in the first place. “If you don’t like me, why did you hire me? There are other branches, and I shouldn’t have passed the exam in the first place!”

She blew smoke at me and set her cigar down. “Skittles, if you saw a thousand bits just lying around in a bag on the ground in the middle of nowhere, would you just walk away from it?”

That’s a lot of plastic and paint worth of bits for my collection. Still, a thousand bits is actually super heavy. “I mean, maybe, I might not be able to lift a thousand bits.”

She rubbed at her forehead. “Ya know what? Fine, a hundred bits. That’s possible, right?”

“Yeah, I could do that, but what if that belongs to somepony?”

“Holy shit.” She huffed and puffed on her cigar for a solid minute before she set it down again. “I can’t even talk to you. How are you this stupid? No, don’t answer that, I should know better considering what I had to do to get you here. Let me put this in plain terms for you, Skittles: You’re here to break the current state of the Wonderbolts.”

While I’ve never been called smart, those words don’t mean much without an explanation. “Which means…?”

“To change the way things currently are. Do you know the last time the CD500 had its speed record broken?”

I did, actually. “About twenty years ago, right? Mom was complaining about that.”

Spitfire nodded. “So even Dash is upset her record hasn’t been broken yet…”

“Well, that’s not—”

“Twenty years. Two whole decades worth of Wonderbolts have come and gone since then, and nopony has even gotten close to Dash’s four-hour time. It’s pathetic. All this technology, all these advancements in what we know and how we can train ponies, and no one has even begun to take advantage of it yet! Her record should’ve been broken ten years ago, we had the talent here! It just wasn’t cultivated enough to cross the finish line.”

Mom was complaining about being old, not her record. Honestly, she might be sad even if I break that record. She kinda uses it to promote herself these days.

Spitfire trained her eyes on me. “You watched them all fly, what’d you think?”

So I’ve gone from being too stupid to talk to smart enough to get an opinion from? Well, this is an improvement at least, even if it is built on a misunderstanding. “I thought they flew pretty well, even if there were some mistakes in there.”

She nodded slowly. “Alright, tell me about the mistakes then. Who was making them, and what were the mistakes, exactly?”

“Well, the pigeon guy was the most guilty of this, but a lot of the guys don’t bank properly. Almost all of them, really.”

The captain took a pen and paper from her desk and wrote that down. “Who was banking properly, in your opinion?”

“The mean mare and Trade Wind, but the mean mare was working a lot harder than Trade Wind.”

Spitfire raised a brow and took more notes. “Makes sense. 42’s been trying to catch your tail all her life. But 77, really? That… internet personality?”

42? The mean mare? I guess I have raced against her before. I nodded to Spitfire’s question. “I mean, between her and the bird guy, I’d say they have the most potential.”

She rubbed at her forehead. “57? The guy who can’t turn to save his life? Him?”

“Turning aside, he’s really fast down the line and he’s got great form too. He’d probably beat Raptor if he could turn as fast as he can fly straight.”

Her lips curled into a smirk. She puffed her cigar. “Well, that’s interesting. Speaking of, you didn’t mention him yet. What do you make of him?”

A few years ago, I remember sitting on the couch with Dad watching a race on TV. It was an amateur circuit race and there was one guy who was clearly winning, but working too hard for it. He was doing everything in his power to stay ahead of second place, and that’s when it happened. He pushed too hard and tore his wing. Fell out of the sky into the safety nets and would go on to retire the next year after several failed attempts to get back on the leaderboard. He never flew professionally, and the guy who came in second became a Wonderbolt.

Raptor is a lot like that first guy.

“He’ll hurt himself if he keeps going the way he is, but that’s the same for a few of them, the big guy and the mean mare and that uppity stallion.” I felt my wing shoulder. I’ve seen videos of the race where Mom did it too. All too often, ponies are too driven to win and forget the fun of flying for the sake of the competition. Like Dad always said, second place has a higher chance of getting first than first does.

Spitfire nodded and took more notes. “And what about the opposite? Who could work harder?”

Thinking back to the time trials and the race he’d finished, there were at least three stallions who were definitely coasting. “The, uh… the RGB guys. Red, green and blue.”

“63, 29, and 64? What makes you say that?”

Very different things for each of them, actually. “Well, the red guy with the neglectful parents has more to give but didn’t during either exercise. He’s pretty good already, but I think he could be better if he tried more. The green guy who reminds me of Dad did everything he could to not work hard and gain speed. Always found favorable winds to ride during the city race and even once during the time trial. The blue guy likes to attract attention to himself and makes a show of flying more than he tries to go fast. I think he said he wasn’t fast this morning, but he could be if he put more into efficiency.”

The captain took her notes and after looking them over, she tilted her head at me. “The only ones you didn’t mention were Edelweiss and Monsoon, 15 and 99, the other two mares. Anything?”

The first mare and the last mare. Funnily enough, nothing about them stood out in particular. “Uh, well, I guess the white mare has really good fine control, but she doesn’t seem like she’s all that fast. She could probably try harder, but I don’t think she was coasting like the guys were. The blue mare though… well, I don’t know really, she just didn’t catch my eye. If our team had, like, an exact middle, I think it’d be her.”

She wrote all that down, and then set the clipboard aside. “Alright, that’s good info. I guess you really are Soarin’s kid. You’ve got the eyes of a trainer on top of your mother’s talent. You are something else, Skittles.” She sucked down the last of her cigar, then buried it in her ashtray. “Here’s a hypothetical scenario for you: you’re C-team Captain, and while you’re set to move up next year, your teammates here are under threat of having their contracts terminated if they don’t perform better. What do you do?”

Hold on, Dad made me do this last year. I’m fine, but I have to help because the team isn’t up to par. He knows that they can do better, but he didn’t have the time to help everypony individually. I ended up going around to all the other guys with Fallacy and we talked about stuff—what they wanted to do, what their plans after high school were, whether they wanted to keep flying or not. While a few were just on the team because it was a way to pass the time, the rest just wanted different things. It was more Fallacy than me, but we’d convinced most of them that it would look good on their records, or it would be more fun if we won as much as we could while we still had the time. While I, individually, have never lost an event, as a team, we placed really high in the national rankings last year, even going so far as to get first in the performance section, which we’d basically never been close to in previous years.

“I think the best way to do that is to sit down with everypony individually and find out how to motivate them. Like, I can’t make them do better; they have to want to do it, right? If we’re gonna win any team events, we have to, ya know, be a team, right?”

Spitfire let her face sink into her hooves. “I didn’t know it was possible for anypony other than Dash to make me this frustrated, but I swear to the Goddess, your very existence is a source of agony.”

“Oh. Is that not right?”

She took a deep breath. “No, Skittles, you’re perfectly correct. I’m sure that’s what your dad taught you. He was my best junior and took over when I left. It’s your obliviousness that causes me pain.” She put her hooves together and sat up. “That thing you just said? We’re gonna put it into practice.”

Gonna have to look that word up later, I literally don’t know what it means. “Alright. What do we do?”

“Oh, we will not be doing anything. I’m gonna send a couple ponies to work with you and Effie a few days at a time. Too many ponies to train individually myself, but you are your dad’s kid since you already know what you’re doing and how to train other ponies.”

My skin crawled and the vengeful specter of Cheesette was weighing on my back. “W-with Effie? Why is that?”

“Dude, have you not seen the looks some of these ponies give you? They hate your guts. You’ve gotta have somepony around to keep you from getting killed.”

“Ah…” Yeah, no, that’s like… a valid reason.

She picked up her clipboard. “Given this and your performance, it’s clear to me that you’d be a better captain than Raptor, but I’d rather move you up to B-team next year where we’ve actually got talent closer to your level. But my finagling with the test has apparently backfired on me and left me with some edge-case newbies that probably shouldn’t be here. Since you’re so nice, help them keep their jobs.”

Man, she’s comfortable enough to just admit that now? Ugh, being captain is a lot of work though. I guess, this is my job now though, so like… yeah, alright. It’s only a year, I can do this. “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

“It is what I want!” She stood and held a hoof out. “Looking forward to what you make of this little team of yours, C-team captain in all but name.”

Good Goddess, it’s only been a day. This is going to be a long year. “Yeah…”

I shook the hoof, but then she brought me in close. “Do be good to Effie, alright? She likes you a lot. I’m not really against being a grandma either.” She patted my shoulder, winked, and let me go.

I did my best not to gag. “Uh, don’t think that would fly with my fiancé…”

Spitfire shrugged. “Figures. Eighteen and already taken. You’d probably be a lot older if Soarin had his way at the start, though. Like father, like son.”

Then, a knock came at the door. “Spitfire, Ma’am? Are you around?”

“And there’s my next appointment. You’re dismissed.”