//------------------------------// // Games // Story: Scars // by pabrony //------------------------------// "Oooh, this is so exciting, Spike," I told my purple furred dog. "This is the third time this week I picked up these EM readings. Let's see... this one seems to be coming from... The Flim-Flam Brothers' Everything Under The Sun Emporium."    Something was up with these EM readings. Considering Neon Light's and Flim-Flam Brothers' weren't too far from each other, I hypothesized that they had to be connected. I wanted to find out more but I didn't have enough money for another trip into town, so I did the next best thing.     "Thanks for calling The Flim-Flam Brothers' Everything Under The Sun Emporium. My name is Flam. How can I serve you today?"     "Um, hello. My name's Twilight Sparkle. I'm a student at Crystal Prep Academy involved in a research project."     "Well, yes. I see. We will be more than happy to provide you with anything you need. Provided you can afford it, that is."     "Thanks but I don't need any equipment, however, I do have a question to ask you."     "Hmmm, whatever could this question be? Prices, products, the legality of what we're doing?"     "What? No. I just would like to know if anything strange happened there in the last couple hours."     Mr. Flam regaled me of an incident with someone named Applejack coming in claiming to have sold them her bass by accident. It seemed like a fairy tale, the girl glowed and then grew pony-shaped ears and an extra long ponytail.     I thanked Mr. Flam for his time and entered the information into my data journal.     After weeks of picking up more strange energy readings, all of which coming from Canterlot High, I decided that it was time for a direct reading. So I built a spectrometer to scan for any energy waves and got on a bus headed towards the suburbs.     I stepped off the bus wearing jeans with a light aqua hoodie and began scanning the Wondercolt statue with the spectrometer. As I worked my way around the statue, the readings got stronger. The part I found most interesting was the side facing the school had almost a fluid feel to it. Was that a gateway to an alternate dimension? However, I was interrupted before I could fully test my theory.     "Hey!" shouted some girl with red and gold hair.     Scared of what might happen, I took off running from there. I mean, I was technically trespassing on the school property.     "What are you doing? Wait! Stop!" the girl continued to shout as she chased me back to the bus.     There was no way I was going to stop. Who knew what that girl was going to do if she would've caught me?     After being bribed into competing in the Friendship Games by Principal Cinch, I loaded up Spike and everything else I needed to compete in my backpack and headed toward the parking lot.     "You could try the end of the line," I heard behind me.     "What did you say?" I asked as I spun around to come face-to-face with Sour Sweet.     "Just that someone as smart as you should definitely go first," Sour Sweet replied.     "I... I didn't mean to... I was just asking..." I stuttered.     "This is the right bus Twilight," Dean Cadence told me. "Go ahead."     "I didn't mean to cut in front," I replied sadly.     "Well it's too late now," Sour Sweet remarked.     I climbed on the bus only to be ambushed by Indigo Zap.     "Are we gonna win?" she yelled.     "I... I don't know," I replied.     "Wrong answer! Try again!" she shouted. "Are we gonna win?"     I then proceeded to ramble a speech that mirrored what Principal Cinch had used to talk me into competing before she resorted to bribery. It would probably go down as the least motivational speech in CPA history and I was reminded of it when I sat down.     "That was a really bad speech. You should consider not speaking in public," Sugarcoat degraded me.     As I rubbed Spike behind the ears, Lemon Zest tried to deafen me with her headphones.     The mistreatment from my fellow CPA students continued after arriving at CHS. I tried sneaking off the bus unnoticed but that went as planned after Indigo Zap knocked me onto Sunny Flare.     "Seriously?" Sunny Flare asked, understandably annoyed.     "Sorry. I didn't mean to," I replied as I tugged on my hair nervously. Of course, I would run into Sour Sweet upon standing up. "Oh, sorry. Why don't you go ahead?"     "You are such a sweetie," Sour Sweet said before lowering her tone. "I am watching you."     "You are kind of being a doormat right now," Sugarcoat deadpanned after almost getting run over by her and Lemon Zest.     But in times of darkness, there is light. Just as everyone was lining up to check in, my pendant came to life and began blinking in the direction of the school.     As I followed the pendant to the location of the energy signature, everyone in the school was not only kind but somehow knew my name and then I bumped into some blue-haired guitarist who seemed smitten with me. You talk about awkward. After removing myself from the situation, I continued to follow the pendant down one of the corridors to just outside one of the classrooms.     After collecting the energy in my pendant, I figured I'd head inside the classroom to dig up any other information. I got the shock of my life when the red and gold-haired girl that chased me the day before was with five other girls, all of whom knew my name and Spike's.     I enjoyed the short, awkward conversation with the group but I wanted to scream when I heard my name come from Principal Celestia.     "This is getting ridiculous," I moaned.     After being dragged back to the buses the pendant began to light up again. Luckily I didn't have to go far as the readings were coming from the Wondercolt statue. After collecting the energy I had another encounter with the red and gold-haired girl.     "What did you do?" she asked me.     I didn't answer her. Instead, I joined the rest of my fellow Crystal Prep classmates upon Dean Cadence's encouragement.     "Where's the portal? Wh-wh-where's the portal?" I heard her shout as I ran back to the bus.     I picked up some more of the energy from a girl who introduced herself as Pinkie Pie before having to take a break to compete in the games. We didn't do too bad, sweeping everything except the baking competition.     My opinion of Canterlot High became more confusing when the entire school started cheering, even though they lost. You would think that after a defeat everybody would be sad but these crazy kids acted like they won. The six girls that I met earlier were the ones moving on to the second round, which meant they had to know something.     I followed them from the shadows during the next break to try and learn something from one of them, besides that red and gold-haired girl, obviously. One of them broke off from the group and snuck into the bushes so I figured I would follow her and see what she knew.     The yellow-skinned girl and I talked for a few minutes before she gave me a bunny to hold. That's when stuff got weird. Cool but weird.     She began to glow, levitate, sprout wings and an extended ponytail. I was awestruck from the sight but I hypothesized that these girls were the source of the strange energy that's appeared since last fall. The pendant had a mind of its own and started siphoning the energy out of the nice girl while simultaneously opening rifts in the space-time continuum. Spike decided to chase a jackalope through the rifts until he got zapped in the energy beam between the girl and my pendant. That's when I gained a talking dog.     I got paired up for archery with Sour Sweet (Yay!) and that worked just great. Sour Sweet hit a bulls-eye on the first try giving me the chance to go quickly. Of course, I fell flat on my face after the first hay bale, then almost fell in the mud after the rope swing. All the pressure was on me and the school's reputation was at stake. I couldn't let them down.     "Well, that's just fantastic!" Sour Sweet hollered causing tears to form in my eyes.     "I'm sure glad I don't go to Crystal Prep," I heard the yellow-skinned girl say to her friend.     "You said it," her blonde haired friend replied.     The stress was getting to me so bad that I tried firing on my knees before I heard Sugarcoat from the motocross starting line.     "You're really bad at this!"     "Ah can't take any more," I heard the blonde girl yell before she came over to my podium. "Ya hafta stop aimin' at the target."     "Oh, that makes perfect sense. Don't aim at the target. Thanks so much," Sour Sweet said.     "Ya hafta stop aiming where the target is an' aim at where it's gonna to be," the CHS girl said.     Much to Sour Sweet's objection, I took the blond girl's advice and managed to hit the moving target. It was then that I dropped the pendant on the ground causing more rifts and monster vines to appear. Canterlot High ended up winning the tri-cross relay but the confrontation afterward is something I'll never forget.     "Um, excuse me," I said to the group of friends, "I didn't mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted to learn about the strange energy coming from your school. I didn't know that it was magic or how it works."     "That's okay. Neither do we," a rainbow-haired girl with wings told me.     "No, no. No, no, no. Not again!" I protested as the pendant sucked the magic out of the girl. "I'm sorry. It just starting absorbing energy on its own but I'm not sure how."     The red and gold-haired girl approached me with a look to kill "What do you mean, you don't know how?"     "It also causes these corresponding rifts to appear. I don't know how that works either," I panicked.     "Is there anything you do know? Like how to get our magic back or how to fix the portal to Equestria?" she continued to yell at me.     "Equestria?" I asked.     "You're supposed to be so smart but did you ever think you shouldn't be messing around with things you don't understand?" she hollered.     "But I want to understand," I told her.     "But you don't," she continued. "And worst of all you put the lives of my friends in danger."     "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to," I cried as I ran off.