Dreadwing watched the young filly, Scootaloo, as she left school for the day. He had gone back to the house a couple of times in the past few days, and while all three ponies seemed tense around each other, nothing signified anything out of the ordinary. It appeared to just be the usual case of two parents fighting, leaving their foal to suffer the unintentional consequences.
Scootaloo grabbed a scooter she had stashed in a bush and kicked off down the road. She rode her scooter for hours every day, probably wanting to avoid going home for as long as possible. It was hard to blame her with such a tough situation.
Dreadwing floated high above Ponyville, observing the orange pony as she zipped around the streets of the town. As with every other foal he fed off of that encountered problems, he liked to follow the situations through to the end. He never helped in any way, but it gave him at least some entertainment in his painfully dull life. With Scootaloo, though, it was strangely difficult. A horrible chill he couldn't explain went down his spine every time he entered her home, and it was such an unsettling feeling that he decided to observe only from a distance. That meant he couldn't go directly there to gather information. He'd have to get what he could from listening to Scootaloo's thoughts.
The problem with this was Scootaloo never thought about her problems. Like what she did after school every day, riding her scooter for hours on end, the only way she knew how to cope with her problems was to run from them. Every time her mind wandered to anything even remotely related to home, she pulled her thoughts to her happy fantasies as a distraction. Dreadwing tried to work around this by prodding through her memories, but like with his presence she was able to sense when he did that, and an instinctive barrier went up around her mind. It didn't seem like it was on purpose, and Dreadwing was sure she had no dark secrets to hide, but it was still an unusual case that he wanted answers for.
Dreadwing scratched the back of his head and frowned. "I guess I'll have to observe longer to figure out what's really going on."