//------------------------------// // Amethyst Star Quits // Story: Amethyst Star Isn't Prepared For This // by MagicS //------------------------------// Thanks to the crowds that didn’t care in the slightest about where Amethyst Star wanted to go it took her far longer than it should’ve for her to make her way to the Learning Annex from the billboard where she had initially seen the test being advertised. Unlike the other city blocks that were perfect squares though it was easy for her to tell when she had arrived since the Learning Annex itself took up one huge block of the city. It was a building shaped like a large H on a grassy stretch of the city with the side closest to the river being two-stories taller than the other side. And much to her luck it turned out to indeed be Wednesday. A helpful sign set up right at one of the doorways to the Annex told her that the testing was beginning soon. So she was right on time in several ways. The amount of ponies heading in and out of the building paled in comparison to the ones walking on the streets and sidewalks right outside it so the unicorn had to think there weren’t as many responders to the test as the proctors would have liked. Well that wasn’t an issue to Amethyst Star. She didn’t really care about the results of the test or what they’d be used for, she just wanted to take it. So Amethyst Star walked past the sign and into the Annex in search of Hall B. Which shouldn’t be difficult to find at all, she suspected most of the ponies walking into the Annex right now were also heading right to the testing area. This time instead of fighting the stream of ponies she allowed herself to be carried along with them, only vaguely keeping her own eyes out for Hall B. The interior of the building was sterile and modern looking, she had expected something more like Twilight’s school but obviously this place wasn’t as open and free-form of a learning environment as that. From what she could tell there were nothing more than classrooms lining the building here but she couldn’t see inside any to see what was being taught. Further down this part of the building there was a large open doorway that the crowd seemed to slow down at while ponies entered it. Craning her neck to try and see it better she saw there were several suit wearing ponies handing out badges and booklets to everyone walking in. The stream of ponies she was in came to a stop along with the rest and Amethyst Star patiently waited to get up there and receive her testing materials. When it was finally her turn the pony greeted her with a smile as he hoofed her her things. “Thank you for your participation, Miss. Please do not open the booklet until instructed.” “You’re welcome,” Amethyst Star grinned and held the stuff in her magic, noticing her badge had the number of 84 on it, and walked into the hall where everything else was set up. About ten rows of long tables had been set up in Hall B for everyone, with pencils and other supplies at every seat. It looked to be about half full so far so Amethyst Star went up the rows to the next open seat, giving her an end seat in the row fifth from the front, sitting her next to a squirrely looking unicorn that wore glasses and had a particularly unkempt mane. Amethyst Star put her things down in front of her and waited for the room to fill up so the test could begin. She absentmindedly twirled a pencil around and checked out the front of the room where another smaller table was set up with some official looking ponies facing the test takers. She wondered if one of them was that Baobab pony. Amethyst Star looked over her shoulder to see that contrary to her expectations most of the room had filled up by now and the crowd at the door was thinning out. Good. She was getting tired of sitting around. Hopefully once everyone was seated they’d start immediately. She kept drumming her pencil on her booklet until the doors closed and the ponies that had been dispensing things outside came in and went up to that front table, also taking a seat and watching the soon to be test takers with the others. It was mostly silent in Hall B aside from some murmuring and the tap tap tap of Amethyst Star’s pencil. The bigwigs at the front table needed to get their things in order first and Amethyst Star had to sit there with a slumped posture and bored expression on her face. Finally the ones putting this test on seemed to be finished getting ready and the one in the very center of the front table cleared his throat and began to speak. “First of all I would like to thank you all for coming, this is very important to our city and I’m glad that so many of you seem to agree,” the old stallion smiled through thick glasses and a mane of white curls. “The booklets that were given to you contain every question for the tests with plenty of space for your work if needed. And further, you need not worry about how long it takes you to complete the tests, that isn’t the point of this study, just when you’re done please deposit your booklet and badge on the table at the back.” He pointed to the back of the hall and Amethyst Sta looked to see that another collapsible table had been set up next to the doors. “I now wish you all good luck, you may begin.” The professor who Amethyst Star could only assume was Baobab sat back down and she eagerly opened up her booklet to begin the test. Time to ace this thing just like Twilight Sparkle would! Amethyst Star confidently grinned to herself. She could hear the fluttering of booklets being opened and pencils scratching on paper as her eyes roamed over the contents of the first test and questions. It looked like the arithmetic section was first. Amethyst Star hummed a tune and checked out the first question, confident she would breeze through this and get to the reading and writing sections that she was sure would be even easier. “Okay,” she quietly spoke to herself to keep from bothering the others. “No three positive integers, a, b and c, can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. Prove.” Amethyst Star blinked. “What?” She had expected some kind of multiplication or division or something dealing with fractions. But what even was this? The unicorn scratched her head and glanced around, everyone else seemed to be writing stuff down and working. Maybe they skipped this one and moved onto the next problem? She almost raised her hoof and asked for help before realizing that not only would that be horribly embarrassing this wasn’t the type of situation where they would give her help. And it would essentially be the same as admitting defeat. Still, she had absolutely no idea where to even start on this math problem. “What is n even supposed to be? N’s a letter, not a number,” the unicorn from Ponyville was flummoxed. “Okay I’m… I’m gonna take a little break from the match section.” Amethyst Star flipped through the pages of her booklet to a section about analyzing a short story. “Read this narrative and explain how it relates to the struggle between individualism and collectivism, cite examples of the authors use of metaphor and allegory.” Amethyst Star swiped her hoof across her brow. “There, much easier.” She read the paragraphs of the story quickly, her mind astute and taking in every little detail. When she was finished she even went back and read it a second time. And then she blinked. Once, twice. “This is a story about talking vegetables. What does that have to do with anything?!” Amethyst Star grasped the booklet and held it up close to her face, narrowing her eyes at the story. “Am I missing something again? Is this supposed to mean something and I’m just crazy?” Grumbling under her breath she angrily turned the next few pages to get to a different topic. “Poetry. Okay, I can definitely do poetry. Not sure how great it’s gonna turn out but writing a poem is still something anyone can do.” She looked at the first problem in the poetry section. “Write a sestina and then create a sonnet featuring the key words of the sestina but with the opposite tone and meaning of the initial sestina.” The pink and purple unicorn let out a long exhale through her nose. She slowly deflated like a lightly squeezed balloon with a sigh. The sound of a pencil writing down another answer from next to her brought Amethyst Star back to reality. She chewed on the inside of her cheek and started flipping back through the pages of the booklet. “Okay, going back to the math section. Poetry isn’t important anyways.” She looked at the next math problem after the first one she had skipped over. Something about plotting points on a graph and making a parabola that she didn’t understand at all. Skip. The third problem had even more letters in it than the first one and asked something about functions and logs. Huh? The fourth was a word problem asking her to calculate the amount of time it would take for two trains to meet each other if one left its station at a specific time and the other left thirty minutes later but was going twenty-five percent faster but also made three more stops that each took twenty minutes and etc. etc. That one at least Amethyst Star had a chance at before all the numbers melted together in her head and her brain short-circuited trying to keep track of all the math. Her eyes were spinning around before she slammed her face into the table (which caused the ponies nearest to her to jump in alarm, not that she noticed). As she sat there like someone had just knocked her unconscious she had to wonder if this was all a big practical joke. Did every other pony in here really have the same booklet as her? How could this be normal? She didn’t even know where to begin on these problems and yet these tests were supposedly being used to determine the standard education level of the ponies in this city. Did that mean they were all geniuses and Amethyst Star hadn’t even realized? Maybe it really was a city of geniuses and that’s why everyone else in the room seemed to be having a perfectly fine time of answering these questions. Of course though there was also the alternative: Amethyst Star wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. But that couldn’t be it. Not at all. She picked her head back up from the table and frowned, attempting once more to tackle some of the problems in the reading and writing section now that math was looking like a total bust. The second problem in reading asked her to identify all the changes in tense during a story excerpt and the authors reasons for doing so and how they related to the political landscape at the time the passage was written. Amethyst Star ignored that. In the writing section she was asked to fix the problems in a diagrammed sentence while then giving an explanation on the purpose of sentence diagramming and write a brief history on the origins of current grammar. Amethyst Star flipped through every single page of the booklet and looked at every single problem. It took her about an hour after the testing had began and she had been growing more and more nervous with each passing second. Sweat had gathered at her forehead and her jaw threatened to grind her teeth into powder but by the time she got to the end and had scanned every question in each section she came to an impossible to avoid conclusion. She didn’t know how to answer any of these questions. Amethyst Star handled this realization as maturely and dignified as she could. “You know what? Forget this!” She stood up and slid her chair out away from the table, her exclamation and the loud scraping sound of the chair against the floor bringing the attention of the entire rest of the Hall to her. “Who cares about a dumb test anyways? This isn’t an adventure, it’s not what I wanted.” Noticing the silence she looked around and saw all the eyes of the other test takers on her, confusion written plain on their faces. “Yeah, what? These questions are too hard and I don’t know how to answer a single one of them! Laugh it up!” “Um, Miss? No one’s laughing,” the professor who had spoken earlier said to her from his table. “And it’s okay if you can’t answer the questions, the purpose of these tests is just for us to learn more.” “Yeah, well… whatever!” Amethyst Star threw her hooves up in the air. “Since I’m not getting anywhere I’ll just drop my booklet off and leave.” “Miss, can you please not make such a scene? You’re disturbing the others,” he scolded her. Amethyst Star did at least blush in embarrassment, knowing how loud she was being and how humiliating this was. There was another reason for her being so obstructive and obnoxious though, it allowed her to take her mind off of how Twilight Sparkle would’ve been fine. She didn’t want to admit that. She didn’t want to think about that. This didn’t count as a failure, it wasn’t an adventure, it wasn’t anything special. It was a dumb test with questions that were way too hard and even a really special pony like herself couldn’t answer. She had only come here for curiosity’s sake, it didn’t mean anything and she was originally looking to relax in this city before going out on another real adventure. This dumb test was a detour and she’d forget about it by tomorrow. “Fine, I’m going!” Amethyst Star shouted one last time and telekinetically grabbed her booklet and badge before walking to the door leading out of Hall B. She tossed the booklet and badge onto the back table without a care. “Hmph!” Not wanting to see if anyone was still watching her, although she figured there was more than one pitying gaze boring into the back of her head, Amethyst Star didn’t look back as she opened up the door and left. She also didn’t want anyone to see the humiliated grimace on her face. It was pretty clear that she could’ve just quietly left at any moment and not been humiliated but her emotions had really gotten the better of her back there and now she had just one more thing to try and push out of her mind and not tell anyone about on this journey.