My name is Scootaloo, and I've been caught in a conspiracy.
It all started with the math test this morning. We had been learning about decimals, and she wanted to give us a test because, umm, I dunno. That's just kind of what teachers do.
Anyway, I kind of needed to get a good grade on that test because I wasn't doing so hot with math. I actually studied for it and everything. Don't tell anypony that though. I'm supposed to be Rainbow Dash's honorary little sister, not Rainbow Decimal's. I'm not an egghead.
That's not the point though. I could tell something was off when Miss Cheerilee gave me a hundred percent on the test. That's not a thing that happens.
There was something off about her smile when she handed it back, too, like she knew something that I didn't. Her lips had this smug little quirk to them; she was daring me to figure out what was going on.
Of course, I figured it out right off the bat. Miss Cheerilee is a changeling. But I couldn't just go running to Princess Twilight. I needed evidence. I needed proof. And there was only one way to get it.
I hated the idea. If anypony—especially Applebloom or Sweetie Belle—found out, I would be ruined. I wouldn't ever be able to show my face in Ponyville again. Not only that, I had other, more important stuff to do, like practicing scooter tricks, or getting my cutie mark in whitewater rafting, or convincing Rainbow Dash to give me an autographed copy of a picture of her saving the Wonderbolts at the Best Young Fliers Competition.
It was a hard choice, but I knew I had to do it, for the good of everypony. I was going to go and re-check my math test.
I told Sweetie Belle and Applebloom that I wasn't feeling good and was just going to go home after school so I could get out of crusading business. It almost didn't work. I should have known that they would want to come and try to make me feel better, but I managed to convince them to stay away by telling them I was just going to go to bed and it would be really boring to watch me sleep.
I took every precaution when I got home. I closed the windows and the curtains, locked the bedroom door, and even pushed my bed in front of it. Then I got my math book out and read it.
I stuck with it for the whole afternoon. I re-read the whole chapter. Then I went back to my test and did every single problem over again and then checking it against my first answer. I didn't find anything though, so I did it again, and again, and again. I did it until numbers started crawling out my ears and I cried (I don't actually cry) tears of plus signs.
I didn't think I'd ever find it, but I did. I've finally figured out where I went wrong. On problem sixteen, I drew the decimal point one place over to the right in the answer.
Now I've got my proof. Cheerilee would have docked my grade for a mistake like that. But the changeling didn't. I know it didn't make a mistake. They're smarter than that. It knew I would know and knew I'd do anything to figure out what it was doing. But what it didn't know was that I'd figure out why it left that mistake in. When a filly locks herself in her room to do math problems, she's got a lot of time to think. I know the changeling's game. I know its nefarious plan.
My name is Scootaloo. I have been caught in a conspiracy. My teacher has been replaced by a changeling, and it is trying to trick me into understanding how math works.
It wants to turn me into an egghead.
Author's Note
I wrote this for a short story contest that I never bothered to actually enter.
ASMGDA Deleted Rainbow Dash Scene
The streets of Canterlot withdrew beneath her once again into a confusing maze of meandering lines, but this time she studied them carefully until she found what she wanted.
There was a small street that went from the palace to the Pony Express station. It was narrow, not much more than an alley really, and it went all over the place; but that just made it perfect for what she wanted. Even better, it was downhill all the way.
She might not be able to do a Sonic Rainboom right now, but Rainbow Dash wasn't just going to sit around on her plot. She had more than one trick up her sleeve, she was the best darn flyer in Equestria and she was going to prove it, even if it wasn't to anypony besides herself.
Never a pony to do something slow, she climbed hard and steep, pumping her wings like she was chasing a lightning bolt. Up and up she went. In less than a minute she found herself pulling past the peak of the mountain and out of its shadow. The entire world exploded into a burst of sunlight and she blinked her eyes rapidly to try and clear away the spots dancing in her vision so she could take in the view.
There was something that no earth pony or unicorn could ever understand, and even a lot of pegasi never ventured high enough to really figure out, but the sky was big. Really big. Those other ponies only ever saw it framed by the ground, with its trees and buildings and mountains right up in your face. Even in the boring empty places where there weren't any of those, the horizon was still way too close to really see the sky.
Those ponies never got to know the sky on its own terms. They were so used to thinking of things a mile or ten away as "far" and so to them, the sky was flat and empty because it was so much bigger than anything they were used to thinking about. It wasn't "pony you don't dare pick a fight with" big. Not "as big as a city" big. Not even "the biggest mountain in the world" big. The sky was a world of its own, and one completely different than its more solid neighbor down below. And it was one that was a whole lot cooler.
To Rainbow Dash, mountains were nothing. None but the very tallest in the whole world could touch the heights any average pegasus could fly, and even those weren't going to stop somepony like her. She laughed at mountains. She scoffed at oceans. Canterlot was right below her, that little street way too small to see now, though she still remembered exactly where it was.
The most important city in the world was down there, and it was nothing more than a dark splotch on the side of a slightly bigger dark splotch. The sun on the horizon lit up the mountains and valleys around her in a breathtaking panorama of golden yellows and blues and blacks as they stretched out forever into the distance, and Rainbow Dash couldn't do anything but laugh uncontrollably when she felt the warm glow of its light on the underside of her wings. She was probably high enough now. Without a second's hesitation, she dipped her left wing, rolling sideways and backwards into an inverted dive.
In no time at all, Rainbow Dash was streaking past the very tip of the mountain and down the cliff that made up the south face. By this point, she wasn't even trying to go any faster. Instead, she opened her wings just wide enough to maintain some maneuverability and lift, holding as close as possible to that dangerous precipice while keeping in the sweet spot between gliding and free-fall.
Up ahead, the side of the mountain transitioned from sheer cliff to dizzying slope. What that meant to Dash was that if she didn't change course real quick, the ground was going to jump up right in her face and give her a good pummeling. With a miniscule twitch of her leading edges, she pulled up and veered right just in time to keep from creaming herself against a boulder. And now the real fun was about to start.
The sky might be big, but that sometimes meant it was boring. There was no thrill of danger when you did stunts at high altitude, no risk, no fun. That was the first boulder, and not by a long shot was it going to be the last. She could have pulled up and flown over them, but that wasn't the point. She twisted to the left as another rock rocketed by and then dodged immediately right again.
The boulders whizzed by on either side, getting both more frequent and bigger, and the whole situation turned into a balancing act between opening her wings wide enough to give her the maneuverability and lift she needed while not so much that she lost all her speed. She started buzzing the rocks as closely as possible to minimize bleed-off from turning, and was rewarded for her efforts with the sensation of her primaries brushing up against granite.
Right in front of Dash, a line of rocks big enough to be mistaken for houses popped up, all close enough together that they might as well have been a wall, and a little pony in the back of her brain started screaming for her to pull up. But she wasn't going to pull up. Only wusses pulled up. Pulling up slowed you down.
In less time than it took to blink, she scanned the line for an opening, and her eyes alit on a small triangular hole where one rock had fallen and leaned against another. It was little, tiny in fact, but she could see clear sky on the other side, meaning that just beyond them, the mountainside dropped away. Probably another cliff.
At this point, Rainbow Dash wasn't thinking any more. Thinking took too much time. There were a lot of things that she would have thought if she did have the time though. She would have thought that the hole was too small for her to fly through. She would have thought that she could still make it if she snapped her wings closed at the exact right instant and let momentum take her through. She would have thought that a moment ago, she'd glimpsed Canterlot, and it was close enough that if she pulled up now she would either overshoot her approach to the city, or else she would have to bleed off a lot of speed in order to re-align herself. And she would have also thought how freaking awesome it would be when she pulled this off; an improvised stunt that was loads more dangerous and cool than what she had planned for her flight through the streets.
But she didn't have time to think. She saw. She surged forward. And she pulled her wings in.
Her right ear clipped one granite wall, and a few strands of her tail were yanked out when they brushed the other and got caught in a crack in the boulder, and for a split second, she felt her heart stop as she just barely missed disemboweling herself on a small rock sticking up from the bottom, and then she burst out into the open air, only to plummet down and away from the face of another cliff with her wings still folded and a rainbow trail behind her.
Rainbow Dash had missed the fact that she'd passed the palace already because it had been hidden behind a fold of ground, but now that she was clear of the mountain, she could see she was right above her target. The entrance to a little street. Instead of opening her wings to fine-tune her free-fall, she made minute twitches of her tail, using its drag as a rudder to steer her straight for the gap between two sparkling white buildings.
In less time than it took to blink, she was in the city, plummeting nearly straight down towards the cobblestones. Ten feet above the ground she snapped her wings open and did the Fantastic Filly Flash. In less than two feet, she pulled a ninety degree turn, going from a downward plunge to flying parallel to the ground while her rainbow trail burst into a bright flash of light. The strain felt like it was going to snap her wings, and she nearly blacked out, but she didn't. Instead, she went straight into her next trick, the Super Speed Strut.
The Super Speed Strut was one of those tricks that looked cool, unless you were a stunt flyer and knew what was going on, and then it was amazing. It was pretty much exactly what it sounded like, a combination of running and flying really really fast, and it was incredibly dangerous. Nopony wanted to risk tripping at a bazillion miles per hour even on flat ground, and this was cobblestone. In a narrow-winding street, that was littered with parked wagons and sharp turns.
Each time her hooves clopped down, the stones gave them a stinging smack, even though with her wings out she wasn't putting even close to her full weight on them. Up ahead, the first real turn loomed, curving off to her right. She was going way too fast to take the inside of the curve, and there was a closed-up fruit stand blocking her way on the outside. Above, the street was criss-crossed with laundry lines, making it suicide to pull up. Without missing a stride, she leapt up and twisted sideways to clear the stand, plant all four hooves on the wall of the building behind it, and push off in the new direction the street took.
Turn after twist, obstacle after straightaway, she owned that street. It was like a zen moment. No thought, no doubts, only action. And before she knew it, she found herself speeding up on the Pony Express station. With a burst of lightning, she pulled up to get above the building, did a tight loop and swooped down onto the pad, sticking the landing with a Buccaneer Blaze.
Rainbow Dash stood there panting, unwilling to break the moment. She just stood there with her eyes still down and fixed on the landing pad beneath her hooves. It took her a full thirty seconds to realize that there was another pony up there with her, clapping wildly.
Long ago, in the days when words were still new and ponies lived in the grasslands under the sky, before the magics of friendship and love were known, before the sun and the moon took on pony form and walked among them, a foal was born in secret. Alone in the grass, under the silver moon, an earth pony looked upon her newborn foal and recoiled in horror. She had given birth to a monster.
The new child was a filly, broken and twisted beyond all recognition. Instead of fur, she had a black, glistening shell. On her head was a tiny, crooked horn. A shredded pair of insect wings weakly twitched, trying to free themselves from the birthing fluids that clung to them. The thing that should have been a pony opened it's mouth and let out a mewling wail, revealing, instead of teeth for chewing grass, a set of fangs meant only to catch and hold prey before she killed and devoured it.
The mare knew she could not take her child back to the herd, they would never welcome a cursed thing like it into their midst, nor the mare that birthed it. She could not leave the herd either, for the land they lived in was a harsh and dangerous place, filled with creatures that would not hesitate to kill a pony who was foolish enough to wander on her own for too long.
Working quickly, she did the only thing she could think of. She pulled up the grass from the plains and piled them over the thing that came forth from her womb. When she was done, she leaned in close and whispered, "This land is full of monsters, but they will not harm you, for you are one of theirs. You are not a pony, but if you try hard, you can be someday. If you become beautiful, then they will love you. Until then, farewell, Chrysalis."
The earth pony turned and walked off into the darkness.
"I like plump plots and I cannot lie
You other fillies can't deny
—record scratch—
What's that? What did you just say?
Yes I'm a mare!
What? You think a girl can't appreciate the plot?
The booty?
The bounteous, bodacious, bubbleicious backside?
I want my stallions to have a little bounce!
A little junk in the trunk if you please!
So yeah!
—record scratch—
You other fillies can't deny!
That when a guy walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get libidinous!"
***
The adolescent young mare froze in abject terror as her mom opened the bedroom door and walked in. The older mare looked around the room, taking in the dozens of pictures of a certain young stallion hanging on the wall, the filly frozen mid-dance in the middle of the floor, and the bouncing beats coming from the record player.
Slowly, she lifted her hoof to her temple and rubbed, as if trying to stave off a migrane.
"Look Cadance. I know it's your special talent and all. Just... Don't do anything stupid, okay?"
Cadance's ears drooped as a fire bloomed in her cheeks. Staring down at the carpet, she managed to squeak out. "I won't, mom.
"And where did you even pick up that word? Have you been reading the dictionary to Twilight out loud again?"