“I just wanted a milkshake. Not a big, fancy one, with whipped cream and a cherry and cookie chunks. Just a vanilla milkshake,” Scootaloo muttered, her fur stuck against her skin with panic sweat.
She didn’t understand what was going on in town. Sweetie Belle hadn’t showed up today, and there were a bunch of mean-looking ponies with catapults outside Applejack’s house, so she thought she’d go alone for a nice milkshake. Scootaloo wasn’t even that hungry, but she wanted to stay out of the house for a while longer. It was boring back there, and mom was deep into the cider, and dad was in a really nasty mood, and sometimes she just wanted to stretch her wings and chill out without getting underhoof. Sometimes she thought she could replace her parents with a broken record that said “go play outside!” and not notice the difference for days. It wasn’t like changeling dad had been much worse anyway, and he was a bug-monster.
She’d heard a lot of commotion, and the streets seemed to be very empty, but she just thought it was something normal, like a bunny stampede, or Flim and Flam pulling some scam, or a small-scale outbreak of the 12-hour zombie virus. Anyway, the flower trio were always freaking out about something.
Then she’d felt the hairs on her back split, and a three-foot-long, knife-shaped icicle shuddered into the wooden wall right above her. She smelled burnt fur and sizzling tin and ozone. She’d sped up on her scooter just in time to get smacked in the face by something that gave her a goose egg, a black eye, and left her coughing, crying, and half-choking for minutes. (She NEVER cried where anypony could see her. Never!)
She had tried to ask Bonbon for directions, but the pony’s face was crusted with blood, and she couldn’t understand the word snarled out through a split lip and half a dozen broken teeth. Bonbon had actually paused to spit out two of her molars before charging head-first into Fizzy Whizz’s side, with a horrible crunching sound.
That was when Scootaloo had decided to hide. All the adults around her were acting like maniacs. Caramel was pummeling Berry Shine with a horseshoe while Berry Shine knocked him off his feet with a blast of purple concussive energy. Some ponies were just lying on the ground, moaning and holding ice to their gashes and bruises, but others were fighting through a mouthful of broken teeth and charging on wrenched and twisted limbs.
A particularly bitter blast of wind tore apart the bale of hay she’d been hiding in. Somepony shouted “Which side are you on?”
Scootaloo didn’t stick around to find out. She beat her wings hard enough to get a vertical acceleration of seven feet before the muscles seized up. She bit onto the handlebar of her scooter and scraped the ground with all four hooves, folding her wings to decrease the air resistance. She sped through directed snowballs, scalding-hot pies, tiny lightning bolts, flung beanbags, telekinetic discharges, and clouds of stinging gas.
“Go talk to an adult you trust,” Miss Cheerilee had said, years ago and a world away. She could trust dad for about six minutes, before his temper kicked in or he told her to go bother her mother. She could trust mom to ask her to “bring mommy a fresh Manehatten, and don’t use too much vermouth this time!”
It hit her like a high-speed bean bag, maybe because a launched bean-bag also hammered into her flank. She didn’t let it slow her down. Slowing down was when worse things happened to you. She needed to go faster.
Up above, like a sign from the heavens, was a little house made of cloud with a rainbow stream. Up in front of her was a bookstore with a long, metal gutter that leaned out at an awkward angle. She went faster. She bit her lip, forced through the painful cramps, and loosened up her wings enough to get a little bit of lift.
Grinding up a rain gutter that threatened to collapse under her weight with every second as she climbed wasn’t the scary part. Rocketing straight up the polished oak roof wasn’t the really scary part, either. The soaring moment of weightlessness as she shot off the roof, towards the high polished roof of the Celestia’s Head Inn, wasn’t quite scary, even with stray magic missiles and low-yield organic grenades shooting through the air.
No, the really scary part was when she bounced off that roof, onto the lip of the water tower, and had to swing around for three good loops, keeping her centrifugal force in check, (even though Twilight Sparkle said there wasn’t realy such a thing as centrifugal force because of lots of long boring words) and pulled in the slow-light field to create a localized gravitational slingshot effect, doing everything in her power to keep her breakfast and her pee inside her body.
That was the scary part.
Now, with cold wind all around her, and the tiny patch of cloud and rainbow growing in her sight, she could relax a little. She counted the heartbeats before she had to open her wings to kill momentum and prevent herself from shooting through the cloud like a cannonball through flan.
Three heartbeats. Four. Five.
Flap.
She skidded to a stop on the cloudy surface, bladder and stomach still fully intact.
Scootaloo set aside all thoughts of nerves. She could freak out later. This was serious.
She pressed her nose against the doorbell.
“Whoever you are, just buck off! I don’t have your humans!”