//------------------------------//
// Ch 7: Unnatural  
// Story: Our girl Scootaloo 1 of 3 
// by Cozy Mark IV 
//------------------------------//

Our Girl Scootaloo

by Cozy Mark IV

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release


Chapter Seven: Unnatural

As Scootaloo's 9th grade year rolled on we got used to only seeing her in the evenings as her days were packed full of school, friends and cheerleading practice. She built lasting friendships with the other girls on the squad, and as winter gave way to spring they attended one competition after another. They made it to state because of their hard work and the long hours of drilling they all put in, but here the squad was confronted with a problem they had not expected.

Ms Chisholm had been right to train our girl as a base; the judges of the very first competition had tried to ban them from competition on grounds that Scootaloo's flight abilities were a 'safety risk'. The look on their faces had be priceless when Scootaloo performed without flying, instead carrying a partial pyramid by herself.

The judges at state called Scootaloo and Ms Chisholm up on the day before competition.

"We are sorry to inform you that Ms Scootaloo will not be eligible to compete in the state meet."

"You mean she won't be allowed to fly? That's not a problem, we understand your concern for everyone's safety, but she can compete without being a flyer."

Scootaloo and her coach shared a grin, but the Judge they had on the speaker phone wasn't done yet.

"Oh, we have no problem with her flying, we had to disqualify her for violations of the ethics code." The sneer as he said it was clearly audible. "You see we only allow fair competition of... Un-altered young men and women. We do not allow drugs, steroids, prosthetics, earings, or tattoos on any of our participants."

"But I take my arms off to drill! Why would you ban me?"

The tone of smug superiority only became more pronounced. "Why because of your hair color, Ms. Scootaloo. Purple hair is not a 'natural color' as defined in our rule book."

After a shocked silence it was Ms Chisholm who spoke with a hard edge to her voice: "You do realize that discrimination based on skin color is explicitly forbidden by that same rule book."

"Oh yes, and we would never dream of discrimination based on the color of your team member's orange skin. However, her purple hair is a clear violation of our policy, and so we regret to inform you that, due to her choice of unnatural hair dyes, she will not be welcome at the competition."

"What do you mean 'unnatural'?! I was born this way!"

"Oh, I am sooooo sorry, but any changes to the rules must be made by petition during the off season. Best of luck to you all. Goodbye!"

They heard the click and stared at each other in stunned silence.

"Damn. I should have known one of the other teams would try to cause problems, but this is really low... Scoot, how do you feel about a dye job?"

After a brief word with the assistant coach, they left for the local hair stylist, and gave her one of the strangest requests of her career.

As the hours wore on it soon became clear this would not be an easy fix. Despite their best efforts, the dyes refused to adhere, and after three messy attempts, all they had managed to do was darken her purple mane a few shades. As practice ended, the squad trickled in, and more hours ticked by as the light faded outside and the hair salon took on the air of a funeral parlor.

After a bleach job failed as well Josie burst out: "This is so wrong! There's got to be a way around it... What if we shave you?"

A soaking and bedraggled Scootaloo gave Ms Chisholm a hopeful look.

"No, the bastard thought of that -a bald head is considered 'unnatural' as well."

The whole squad groaned again. Kevin arrived as they made one last attempt, and it fell to him to towel her off and console her on the drive home.

Scootaloo exchanged texts with the other girls after dinner, and decided to at least attend the meet to cheer her friends on. I got the news around 11 PM that night -I was to drive Scootaloo to the meet the next day and be there by 9AM.

We arrived and made our way into the gym were all the other teams were warming up, but her squad wasn't there yet. We turned back to find them when the door swung open and Christina, Josie, Melisa and all the others burst through and practically tackled Scootaloo in a group hug. And every one of them, even Ms Chisholm, had bright purple hair.

"What?! You guys! Won't they disqualify you all now?"

"Nope. Melissa here found a loophole online after you left last night. The unnatural hair look came up once before in another district, the Barracudas, when a cheerleader suffering from cancer wanted to compete after her chemo, and her squad realized something. If every member of the squad wears something, it becomes the uniform. Our hair color is therefore part of our uniform, and hence, cannot be held against any of us."

"Yeah, you should have seen that Judge when Ms Chisholm showed him the line in his own rulebook!"

"You guys...I..." Scootaloo held back tears.

"Oh, don't give it another thought," Ms. Chisholm smiled. "We'd do the same for any member of the squad, because cheerleaders stick together!"

"And it beats having to shave all our heads," Melissa remarked. "That's how the other team beat the rules."

"And now that we can all compete, let's get out there and show them what we can do!"

The competition at state was fierce, and one of the city squads soon distinguished themselves with complicated drills executed with near military precision. They also stood out as the only squad with universally short hair. It didn't take long to pick out the barracuda logo and put it together.

During a break in the action the entire barracuda squad wandered over to say hi and wish everyone luck. "Wait, you're them! You're the squad we read about!" Melissa realized. "Thank you so much for putting your story online! We wouldn't be here if it weren't for you."

"Oh, you're welcome! We heard what you did and wanted to congratulate you. When you stand up for what's right, we all win."

"That's kind of you to say," Josie ventured "but you guys are so much better than us..."

"Well, its been a hard season... This is our first meet without Chrissy..."

"Oh, my God! You mean after all that she... didn't make it?"

It was suddenly quiet as our entire squad looked heartbroken. There were tears in the eyes of the barracudas, and their captain spoke up in a shaky voice. "Where is Scootaloo?"

She stepped forward. "I'm here, I'm so sorry to hear-"

"No you don't understand." She choked up... "She's going to live. Chrissy is going to live because of you! Thank you! Thank you so much!"

I watched in astonishment as the barracuda squad pulled Scootaloo and her entire squad in for hugs, some of them actually crying on each others shoulders.

"The chemo was only a last ditch effort, everyone knew she barely had a chance, but she fought it. She fought it long enough for a genetic treatment to become available. A treatment derived from you! She's recovering in the hospital now, but she's going to live! And we have you to thank Scootaloo!"

Nearly everyone was crying before they left, even our girl who usually got something in her eye at times like this.

The squad performed well, but not well enough to make it past state, however when the Barracuda squad placed second, they were cheered on like one of our own.

The summer between 9th and 10th grade saw the first flight of our family's newly-built aircraft, and we soon put it to good use. Over the summer Scootaloo and her friends visited at least a dozen amusement parks, Kevin and I took weekend vacations to New York, Baltimore, Tampa and two beaches, and the whole family attended several comic conventions.

In our city, 10th grade was the first grade in high school, and with that transition came the opportunity to enroll in 'distance learning' classes. The high schools offered a number of classes for college credit, taught by and graded by college professors, and viewed with video conferencing software so students at the high school could participate. With encouragement from Kevin, Mary and myself, Scootaloo signed up for a serious course-load with a math and biology leaning.

The high school cheerleaders welcomed Scootaloo, Christina and the other graduating squad members with open arms, and they were soon memorizing the cheers for the new school, and sweating to new, more complicated drills. Strangely, though she was making good grades in her college introductory biology and calculus classes, our girl seemed to be having a tough time with the new gymnastics needed for cheerleading, and she was soon spending long hours after school practicing with Christina. This worked out well as Christina found herself in need of tutoring in trigonometry, so we got to see more of her, and she even stayed for dinner some nights and helped Kevin in the kitchen.

Her ninth year with us also saw new breakthroughs in understanding her own biology. The mystery of how she was able to grow a complicated machine in her wings was partially explained when the doctors untangled some of her previously unintelligible DNA. Mary brought it up at one of our monthly visits.

"You probably don't remember, but years ago, an adorable little foal asked me if she was full of 'natobots'. Well it looks like you were on to something." She pulled up a series of

microscope photos showing cell cultures growing around and through a chip of bone. "It may not look like much, but your bones are wrapped in a latticework of synthetic cells. They look just like the biological cells around them, but split one open and the internal components are very different."

"You mean they're little robots?"

"No, robots have electrical circuits made of billions of transistors. These cells are built upon the model of an organic cell, but nearly all the internal parts have been heavily modified, and new interstellar systems added. We are still studying them, but it seems clear this synthetic biology is what holds you together, as well as giving you the ability to grow an EMFR flight unit into your wings."

We exchanged concerned looks. "What do you mean 'holds you together'?"

"You remember that your DNA contains sections from both horses and humans, as well as choice sections from a scattering of other animals? Well the job of combining all that together into a working animal is no minor task. The job was obviously done intelligently, but whoever did so seems to have had difficulty getting the reliability and robustness they needed. Now in nature, the fix would be to have generation after generation live and die, and survival of the fittest will result in a tried and true design in half a million years or so. Its tough to nail down the exact age of your species, but by counting the number of random changes in the DNA you share with other species we can make an educated guess."

"Well?" Scootaloo asked.

"If we have our baseline right, your species has been in existence for between 2000 and 10,000 years, certainly not the millions of years necessary to work out the bugs by natural means."

"But that's crazy; there was no one around with that skill level back then."

"And there still isn't anyone with the necessary skill today. But apparently there will be some day; the human DNA was difficult to nail down by age, but by the number and place of random changes, its first incorporation into your species is obviously from several hundred years... in the future."

We sat dumbstruck as it sunk in. "Wait, the people who donated DNA to build Scootaloo's species haven't even been born yet? How can you possibly know that?"

"Admittedly it is difficult to be sure with only one... Pony to study, but this is the same technique scientists used to figure out when humans first invented clothing."

We all looked confused. Mary sighed and mumbled "Public schools these days!"

"Okay, the question to be answered was 'when did humans first wear clothes?' and it seems impossible to solve. The best you would expect is to say 'we found a body this old with clothes, so that's when', but that's not much of an answer. Scientists know that body lice and head lice are two different species, and that body lice need clothes to live; they can't survive without them. So they got samples of DNA from each type of lice and looked at how many random changes had accumulated in the DNA since the two species had split. They knew that changes to DNA occur at about one change every X years, so they counted the number of differences (changes) between the species and multiplied by X to get the number of years since the species diverged: 170,000 years. Since the species could not have split without clothes for the body lice to live in, it therefor follows that humans first put on clothes about 170,000 years ago," she finished as though this was obvious.

"… So you counted the number of random changes to our daughter's human DNA and multiplied by 1 change per X years?"

"Now you've got it. Again, its tough to say with a sample size of only one pony, but it will take several hundred years for the changes to accumulate to the number we see today in Scootaloo's human DNA."

"So... I'm the only member of a species that doesn't exist yet?" She didn't seem to know what to make of that.

"Well, yes and no... We're just speculating now, but whoever built your species probably did so in the future of an alternate reality. You wound up here and altered our time line, so however your species was built, it probably won't happen the same way here, if it happens at all. We just don't have enough data to find out for sure."

Scootaloo shook her head to clear it; "Okay, go back to the part where you said something holds me together."

"Sorry, I was just saying that without millions of years of evolution to work out the bugs, the synthetic cells in your body act as an intermediary. Most of your systems can work without them... for a while, but when we removed them in the laboratory, problems soon show up. Cells attack each other, bones and muscle grow where they shouldn't -somehow your synthetic biology holds all your systems together, and it looks like its... programmable. Like whoever built your species gave it their best shot, and once they had a working Pony they fixed future problems by programing the synthetic cells instead of doing a complete redesign of your DNA. It would be like the difference between sending a mechanic to fix a car versus tearing the car down to its individual nuts and bolts every time they found a problem."

"So I'm designed to take... software updates?"

"That's the idea. And they also augment your organic systems – remember a year back when GE built that MRI brain scanner just for you so we could get images without hurting your wings? We're still going over the data, but it looks like your synthetic biology is helping your mind and memory."

"Yeah, I remember when they brought in that scanner. Aren't those things expensive? I wondered why they built on just for me..."

"Scoot, that MRI machine was custom built for you and cost about $50 million."

"They spent that much just for me?!"

Scootaloo was reeling from getting all this at once. Mary knelt down and put her arms around our girl. "I know its easy to forget sometimes, but you are incredibly important to a lot of people. There is only ever going to be one of you, and if it costs 50 million dollars to learn more then that is a small price to pay to jump hundreds of years forward in our understanding of medicine. More than a million people around the world owe their lives to treatments derived from you, and its continually impressive to me that someone whose work has healed more sick people than Jesus did in his lifetime still lives such a normal life."

The ride home that night was pretty quiet; it was a lot to take in all at once. After a long pause we asked Scootaloo if she was okay.

"I think so... I think I know what I want now."

I gave her a questioning look and gestured to a passing restaurant "Extra large Caesar with French dressing?"

That seemed to break the mood and she smiled. "No, Dad, I mean I think I know what I want to do with my life. I want to study medicine. I want to be a doctor or a scientist, to help people."

I held her hoof, "That makes me very proud, we always thought your future career would involve something dangerous and flight related."

She grinned mischievously, "Who said I can't have both?"

Her 10th grade year also saw the launch of the first satellites by EMFR technology derived from her wings. NASA had helped develop the technology, and with help form Lockheed Marten and Bechtel Bettis scaled it up to a something resembling an enormous floating barge trailing long cooling fins and a flat deck onto which the cargo was loaded. After a short speech about the new age of cheap space access, the small crowd cheered as Scootaloo broke a bottle of ceremonial champagne against its side, and with barely a sound the enormous machine lifted into the sky and climbed until it was lost from sight.

Not that we managed to get through a year without drama. It was a warm March evening and Scootaloo was helping Christina with Chemistry 101 at the kitchen table when we heard the booming of an overblown car stereo. The car pulled to a stop outside and a moment latter Christina's phone rang.

"Hello?... Brad, calm down... I'm kind of busy just now... Okay! Calm down, I'll be right out." She finished in a frustrated tone.

Scootaloo looked nervous as Christina got up from the table. "Its my boyfriend, I'll be back in a minute." She grabbed her purse and shut the door quietly behind her in stark contrast to the booming racket coming from outside.

Kevin and I looked at each other, then back to Scootaloo.

"Her boyfriend isn't a bad guy, but she's... been thinking about breaking it off," she added lamely.

We drew the curtains back and could see him yelling and waving his arms as Christina stood her ground, arms crossed. I looked at Kevin and he nodded. We both walked slowly and deliberately out to where they were arguing and took up positions on each side of Christina, and this seemed to bring 'Brad' back to reality.

"I've been good to you Chrissy, but I never see you anymore. Who have you been cheating with!"

"I haven't been with anyone else," she responded "but I've been wondering if I made the right choice with you." Her tone rapidly cooled as she added: "And what you've done tonight doesn't help your case. I think we're done, Brad."

She turned and walked back to the house as Brad tried to process what she said. His anger faded and he just looked heartbroken as he leaned against his still booming car. I reached through the open window and switched off the sound system so we didn't need to shout.

"I'm sorry Brad, I know it hurts, but don't take it too hard. If Christina chose you, for even a little while, you must be a good person with a bright future. Remember the good times and when you feel up to it, try again. There's bound to be someone out there waiting for you.

He didn't seem to notice as we went back inside, but it was a credit to his character that he did eventually get over it, and they managed to remain friends. I thought it said a lot about Christina that she chose someone who could make a mistake, learn from it, and grow into a better person.