Our girl Scootaloo 1 of 3

Our Girl Scootaloo

by Cozy Mark IV

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release

Chapter One: Why is There a Time Portal in the Backyard?

I am fortunate, in the place and the time I live, I am blessed to have the life I have, to have a husband who loves me, a job to pay down the student loans, the car loan, the home loan… We met during school, fell in love, and this time deeply, truly. Every day for the last five years when I wake up and feel him laying beside me, his arms holding me close, I feel so safe and loved.

Of course how we feel didn't matter to our parents. I still remember the sting in my cheek where my mother slapped me after I told them. The yelling and the rage "No child of mine is marrying some black man! I won't have it! Get out, both of you! And don't you dare come back! GET OUT YOU FILTHY WHORE AND DON'T YOU DARE SHOW YOUR FACE HERE AGAIN!"

We got a run down apartment and finished our degrees, but while he got done first, a degree in theater and marketing communications turned out to be worth only slightly more than the paper it was printed on. Kevin got a job in a retail store, and another in a call center to make ends meet. He would come home late to find me working through some math or engineering textbook and say "Put that away, dear, we have a new one tonight."

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

It was our safe place, a place where discrimination, hate and violence were rare, made manageable, even comical by the serene landscape of Equestria. The ponies had their problems, but they always looked out for each other, cared for each other. No problem was insurmountable, and no families separated or disowned their foals.

In time I graduated as well. As I walked across the stage, I looked up into the stands of proud parents, knowing I wouldn't see my own. But Kevin was still there; his boss gave him hell but he made it to my graduation anyway and was there cheering me on.

When I found a job in my field we both rejoiced; even in this economy there was still a need for engineers. Our friends helped us pack the moving van and we said our tearful goodbyes and promised to keep in touch.

Our new place was small but without the leaking pipes and sagging floors of our old apartment. I dove into my work, but the town was tiny and Kevin had a hard time finding a job. This was only made worse as many people took a dim view of us and we soon learned not to hold hands in public. I came home in tears one evening after someone vandalized our old civic with spray paint and rocks. "Its okay, Jayne," he said as I sobbed in his arms. "You are safe with me, and if this town doesn't want us here, well, we're only renting."

We cut our spending down to next to nothing, but by eating ramen and skipping Christmas we saved enough to put a down payment on a small house out in the woods between my work and a larger city were Kevin could find employment.

With no neighbors for a half mile down our little dirt road we had no one to bother us, but it made for a lonely life. By now most of our friends from school had children of their own, and their lives revolved around the new additions to the family. They posted adorable pictures and heart warming stories of the little ones playing, learning, growing. We both wanted children so, but it just wasn't possible.

Kevin took up gardening in an ever-expanding patch of the backyard, and I kept the two old cars running as best I could – he liked to kid me that I looked good with a bit of engine grease. I enjoyed my office job, but it wasn't easy being the only one who didn't watch football and NASCAR, the odd one out on any team. Our student debt and home loan meant we had very little left over each week, but through it all we would come home every night and watch the ponies in their world without hate, without debt and dream; if only.

A nervous sense of anticipation I could not explain woke me in the wee hours of morning. Slipping out of bed I glanced out the window overlooking the dead end road –nothing to see at first but… why was the car casting two shadows? The moon was full tonight, but we didn't have any lights on…

I pulled on slippers and my bathrobe over my pajamas and grabbed the bat we keep by the bedroom door. Stepping out onto the porch I could see the light was coming from the backyard, and it seemed to have gotten ever so slightly brighter. I looked around the corner and nearly shrieked when Kevin put a hand on my shoulder. "I heard you get up and the bat was gone" he whispered. "What is it?"

I gestured at the dim glow around the corner and we cautiously made our way around the house to the fence separating the garden from the surrounding woods. There was a ill defined area of dimly glowing light several feet around and about 6 feet off the ground out in the woods a few paces past the fence. No one else was around.

I stepped closer for a better look when Kevin grabbed my hand.

"Jayne, weren't those trees the same height as the rest of the wood yesterday?"

I followed his gaze to the forest – it looked like a normal enough sight, but now that I was looking for it I saw it too. "The trees around the light are shorter!" Then looking down and closer to us – "and look, the fence we put in is gone!"

The fence that separated the garden had a 6 ft section missing, the bare wires hanging limp on ether side, and the grass in a circle around the light got progressively shorter as it got closer to the light, with a patch of bare dirt directly underneath the light that seemed to have gotten bigger in the several minutes we had been watching.

"Jayne, what the hell is going on?"

I stared blankly at the dim light; it almost looked like storm clouds in the very center, like someone had taken a flash photo of a hurricane and…

"Find me a stone" I said. He gave me a confused look but brought me an egg size rock which I tossed as close to the light as I could. The stone arced up, but as it got closer to the light it flew slower and slower until it almost hovered in mid air, hitting the ground several minutes later.

"What the hell? How can it…" And then it clicked. "Wait here" he said "I have a useless rusted old spade in the tool shed – got it new eight years ago. He came back moments later with the rusty shovel and with a glance at me threw it at the dimly lit circle. The shovel spun slower and slower as it got deeper in, but it also changed. As we watched the rust faded away, the old bend from being run over by a car unbent, and in an hour the shiny new spade seemed to pass though circle and disappear.

"Okay. We have a time portal in our back yard." The silence stretched on. "Jayne, why do we have a time portal in our backyard?"

I gave him a 'who me' look: "I have no idea." More minutes passed. "But I think I will worry about it in the morning when I am properly awake"

He looked at me like I was nuts "But we can't just…"

"Exactly. Who would we call? Who in their right mind would even believe us?" I thought for a moment. "That camera we have can do time lapse shots right? Lets set it up out here and leave it running overnight. We can check the results in the morning."

I woke to see Kevin sitting on the edge of the bed fawning over something wrapped in a blanket. He turned and showed me the sleeping form of an orange and purple Pegasus who squirmed in her sleep and yawned adorably. I had no idea what was going on, but my heart just melted in my chest. "Awww!"

"I setup the camera last night, but when I came back to check on it a few yours later, this little girl was coming out of the light. It took an hour, but I caught her before she fell, and she's been asleep ever since."

"Kevin. That is a foal sized Scootaloo. From the cartoon. How…?"

"I don't know either, but the light thing started to shrink right after she came through and was gone before sunrise. Aside from a hole in the fence and trees, there's no sign it was ever there."

"Then…" I reached out and stroked her mane and she snuggled deeper into the blanket. I couldn't help it, my heart melted again.

"She is ours," he said with tears in his eyes "our little one to take care of, just like we wanted for so long."

I couldn't help it, I was crying too "Okay," sniff "I can live with that."

The next few days were a wonderful whirl wind blur as we got to know each other. Scootaloo, as we took to calling her, was momentarily worried by her strange surroundings, but seemed to be too young to talk or care for long. She was soon bounding about the house, getting into everything and looking for things to play with. I drove out to the larger city and bought tools to child proof the house, vegetables and horse feed, as well as a bag of kids toys and a child size bed from the good will. Kevin called mid way through and added fence wire for the backyard, and pet doors to the list; "She went right in the house plant! Lets just hope she can learn to go outside, I don't think they make diapers in her size."

Scootaloo made her favorite foods clear when she got out into the garden – who knew someone so small could eat so much? We soon settled into a routine – Kevin cut his hours back to just a few on the weekends when I was home, and together we raised our little one, playing with her and trying to teach her to speak. There was no doubt she was smart, and in a few weeks she was already making fumbling attempts at words.

Kevin brought it up one evening after we tucked her into bed. "I think she's going to grow up able to speak and think. We can't hide her forever… how will we introduce her to the world?"

We had talked about this, and there was good reason to worry –beyond the risk that social services might try to take her, she could also wind up in a laboratory or worse. But if she was growing up like a normal child we had to find her friends to play with, a school to go to, medical care for when she got sick…

"I've been talking with Mary and Stephanie from our college days –Mary's working on her residency at a hospital not far from here, and Stephanie got her degree and works in a vets office within driving distance. We have to tell someone, and they both have kids of their own already. I think if we asked them to, they would help us."

So we took the risk. We asked them to visit with their children, and said simply that we needed their help. While Kevin watched the little ones playing in the backyard, I sat down with Mary and Stephanie and caught up on old times. Eventually they asked what we needed help with, and I told them we had adopted, though circumstances outside our control, and that we needed their help medically for when our little one got sick.

"You have a little one? Congratulations!" Mary said as she hugged me. "I'm so happy for you! But I thought you couldn't adopt… Oh." She finished as the realization sunk in. "But they'll come and take her if you stay here!"

I couldn't help a rueful smile "I'm afraid it's not what you think. Why don't you come meet her?"

I lead them around to the back yard were their little ones were romping and playing with our Scootaloo as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Kevin looked up and waved as our two guests stood slack jawed trying to process what they were seeing.

"You painted a pony to look like a cartoon character?" Mary finally managed.

"That's no breed of pony I ever saw…" Stephanie replied.

Scootaloo had seen us by now and ran up, stopped right in front of the two mothers and said "Hi!" before turning around and running back to the children.

After another minute of astonished silence I lamely added: "So you see now why our daughter needs your help." Mary looked ready to faint, but it was Stephanie who finally broke the silence.

"Ok Jayne, What The Fuck? Seriously, whatthefuck!? How can this…?"

I handed them each a sheet of paper. "It's a lot to take in, so we made a pamphlet. Read that and you will know as much as we do." More blank stares. "What's important is that she is our daughter and we need your help."

It took most of the afternoon, but the moms were eventually able to accept what their children had without question. Kevin and I had baby cartoon pony, were raising her as our own, and needed their help to gather medical data so when her story inevitably got out, all the data anyone wanted would already be available, and no one would have any reason to try to steal her away.

This soon set the pattern for the next year. Mary and Stephanie would bring their children by to play from time to time, and once a month we made a "Hosifal trip" as Scootaloo soon termed our late night visits to the city hospital. We would try to tire our girl out during the day, and usually brought her in sleeping or half asleep. Each month we took blood and other samples, and held her in our arms as we rode through the hospital's MRI scanner. She didn't like the needles, but both Kevin and I got stuck too so she learned to think of it as a boring family thing that we all had to put up with. We sent off her DNA for sequencing mixed in with legitimate hospital lab work, and when the results came back months latter, Mary added them into a file from a zoo, labeled the file 'Pegasus', and sent the data for analysis to see what the experts made of it.

We weren't sure how old Scootaloo was, so we settled on her finding day as her birthday and celebrated her first birthday with a party. Carrot cake, party hats, lots of vegetables; Mary and Stephanie brought their kids and everyone had a good time. The guests rode their bicycles with training wheels up and down the back yard while our Scootaloo raced them on hooves.

Scootaloo had learned to talk by now and Kevin and I were teaching her reading and writing too. She picked up reading faster than any child I ever heard of, but writing was much more difficult. Without hands she couldn't grip a pencil or use a keyboard effectively, and trying to work with something in her mouth was an exercise in frustration.

"I can't do it daddy, I want to write but it's so hard!" She wailed in frustration after Kevin tried again with the mouth pen. "Its not fair, writing is so easy for you, but all I have are these!" she stomped her hooves on the floor in frustration, tears forming in her eyes. We both held her close while she sniffled, and I said I would figure something out. In a week I had found and ordered a speech recognition program for her computer, and an Emotiv EPOC headset to go with a robotic arm.

Scootaloo loved the speech recognition tool, and soon caught up on her writing practice, learning spelling along the way, but it was the headset and arm she really liked. I used the software on the headset to drive the high-end toy robotic arm through a cheap netbook, and Kevin sewed together a 'saddle bag' to hold the battery and netbook on her left side, and the arm on her right. The whole thing buckled on, and after a few halting attempts, she was able to move the arm! Inside of a week she was wearing her new prosthetic arm everywhere, getting into places she never did before, and having a blast being able to manipulate smaller toys like Legos for the first time.

Her newfound ability to work human controls soon had her using the computer for educational games, music and video. She was learning fast, so we took the next step and found a few local families with young children who were home-schooled. After vetting them and rejecting a few, we had 4 local families who learned our little orange secret and came by for play dates and lessons. After the initial shock it worked out well. I enjoyed teaching math and science, and the other parents and Kevin filled in each others academic weak spots. As the kids and our Scootaloo got older, some of them did ask obvious questions, but we only let in families with kids under 12 so, if they did talk, who would believe them?

Even as our Scootaloo had her second birthday, our world, which had been made so much brighter by her presence, began to change again. The DNA data in the zoo samples had been analyzed and the results were attracting attention. A lot of attention. At first they had thought the Pegasus file was some kind of prank, but it soon became obvious the file was too well put together, and too huge to be a prank –a forgery of this magnitude couldn't have been accomplished without years of work by hundreds of the best PhD's in the field, and if it couldn't be a fake…

Inquires were being made around the country and around the world – had anyone ever seen anything like this? The hospital Mary worked at was turned upside down looking for the source. Mary told us about all this in a visit late one evening after we had tucked Scootaloo in for the night.

"I don't understand, so she has new DNA, doesn't every animal have different DNA?"

"You guys don't understand; normal DNA is evolved, it changes slowly and randomly from generation to generation, but any change that doesn't kill the animal gets passed on to the next generation. There is no larger plan, just; 'did it kill the animal?' yes/no. If no then its in the offspring." She took a breath and looked around conspiratorially "This DNA is designed!" she hissed. "We are only beginning to understand it, but there is definitely equine and human DNA in there, and its assembled in a coherent, thought out way. There are several extra chromosomes and big sections of code we have never seen in any other plant or animal. We even found something that looks like a goddamn 'read me' file!"

"Okay, what did it say?"

"We don't know! We can tell its text of some kind but it not in any known language! This is big guys, this would be like someone in 1890 opening the hood of one of the first automobiles and finding the hybrid electric drive train from a 2014 Toyota. We can only write a few lines of basic DNA, and even then it takes enormous effort to make synthetic code function properly. This isn't a few lines, this is fucking War and Peace, it's the Windows 7 operating system of DNA!"

There was silence as we looked at each other. "So…?"

She looked miffed that we didn't understand "So we have to come forward with the truth. Someone will soon find the records of blood and other samples, the MRI images, and it would be better to go public now and make all this available to everyone. This information is incredibly valuable –scientist will be able to reverse engineer all kinds of useful tools and cures from what they have, but we have to let them know the whole story."

We agreed we had to come forward, but worried about how this would affect our poor Scootaloo. When Mary had left we looked in on Scootaloo, sleeping peacefully in her room, her prosthetic arm in a pile by the foot of the bed… I couldn't help it, I cried. For what we had, for the uncertain future to come, and Kevin held me close as he shut the door.

"It will be okay, we won't let anyone hurt her."

"No, we won't!"

And then we planned.