Our Girl Scootaloo

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

Scootaloo followed Josie into the building with the stained-glass windows. As they walked, the sound of soft music seemed to surround them. It went from the sounds of a traditional church organ to a pedal-driven electric guitar even as they walked.

“My church, anyway,” Josie explained, a shy grin turning up the corner of her mouth.

“Goin' up to the spirit in the sky
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best…”

“Yeah, Norman Greenbaum,” Josie grinned. “Your biggest problem, Scoot, is that you’ve gotten the faith confused with the supposedly-faithful.”

It was then that Scootaloo realized there was what essentially amounted to a rock band rehearsing by the side of the pews near the organ. So she took a seat next to Josie on a likely-looking pew and listened to them finish the familiar old classic-rock song. They were really quite good.

“Miss Scootaloo?” a voice called. Scoot looked up and saw a smiling, friendly young man in a pastoral collar, with a bass guitar slung over his broad shoulders. He was taller than average, but not as tall as her Papa, and older than her, but not as old as Pastor Gray. “I’m Josh. We’re so glad you came!”

“Yeah,” the man grinned, reaching out a big hand to shake. “Though the ‘Pastor’ part is kinda limited to my actual flock and stuff,” he explained. Scootaloo realized that he couldn’t be much more than thirty years old. “Josie has told us so much about you.”

“Yeah, it can be a lot to take in,” the long-haired man agreed. “I bet most people don’t think of religion and picture our Josie.”

“Well, this is St. Francis of Assisi’s, we’re a Unitarian Universalist chapel, and every person of every faith is welcome here. I myself lean pretty far towards Christian, but you can be anything whatsoever and you’re one of us,” Pastor Josh explained, his blond beard making him look a bit more like a hippie than a preacher of the variety Scoot was used to. “I don’t suppose you’re an atheist, by any chance? The Theists vs. Atheists softball game is coming up, and one side is short.”

“Yep. Josie plays catcher most years,” Pastor Josh explained with a grin, waving as Josie scurried off to go do something. “You’ve got that dub-tee-eff look on your face right now, so I figure I’d better explain a bit.”

“It might be a good idea, yeah,” Scootaloo agreed. “I thought Josie said this is a Christian church.”

“Kinda-sorta-maybe, yeah,” Pastor Josh agreed. “Unitarians believe that every religion, or no religion, or some any-of-the-above combination, all of them might be right. So we pretty much welcome everyone. You might believe in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Moses son of Yocheved of Egypt or even Spock son of Sarek of Vulcan, doesn’t matter to us. So long as you’re trying to find the truth of existence and trying to be the best possible person you can, you’re more than welcome to come and be one of us.”

“And isn’t truth potentially everywhere?” Pastor Josh shrugged. “You could be a Muslim, a Christian, an atheist, a Trekker or an observant Jew. Everyone is welcome here. We mean that. You could invite the Vogons to read us their poetry and I promise you we’d give it the college try.”

Just then, a handsome man with dark hair and a shorter beard appeared in the doorway.

“Darling?” he called. “I found macaroni-and-cheese at the Aldi on sale, three-for-a-dollar, so I got fifty dollars’ worth. Think that’ll be enough?”

“Every little bit helps,” Pastor Josh agreed, hopping down from the dais surrounding the altar and kissing the newcomer on the cheek. “It should be enough for many dinners indeed,” he grinned, hugging the dark-haired fellow. Scootaloo smiled as she realized this was a couple just like her Dads. “We have a newcomer here today. Miss Scootaloo Scott, this is Andrew Cacciatore,” the pastor introduced.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Andrew replied, shaking her prosthetic hand. “You must be Josie Findlay’s friend.”

“We’ve heard so much. The protest you girls carried out, I was quite impressed. It isn’t often we see that kind of courage from girls your age.”

“Girls, yes, sixteen-year-olds, not so much,” Andrew clarified. “You handled it like college sophomores. About time we had young women with the courage of their convictions behind them.”

“Really?” Josie chirped, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. “It’s okay to be uppity young wenches?”

“I hardly consider you a wench, Josie,” Pastor Josh remarked, patting Josie’s shoulder even as he kissed Andrew’s cheek. “You are a child of God and our dear sister. Our dear, opinionated, somewhat uppity sister who occasionally leads the Sunday School children to start fires, but our dear sister nonetheless.”

“I kind of thought this was what Catholic churches look like,” Scootaloo observed, gesturing to the stained-glass that still adorned some of the windows, and the mix of old and new pews, some of which still had kneeling pads.

“St. Francis’ was once a Roman Catholic church,” Pastor Josh explained, setting the bass onto a little stand near the piano. “But their flock declined in numbers over time and couldn’t afford the maintenance or a priest’s salary anymore, so the Diocese decided to put it up for sale. That’s when our congregation bought the place. Some of the most historically important stained-glass windows were sold to a museum, both to lower the cost of insurance and to help us restore the building, and since then we’ve replaced them either with blank glass or the work of our Tuesday evening craft group.” The pastor gestured to a window with new-looking solder that depicted a series of famous authors, including Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain and a middle-aged lady whom, from the little dimension-diagram motif near her, was probably Madeleine L’Engle.

“Someday we shall have every window done. Our pews are a mix of originals, some new ones people have donated and some we got from fire or renovation sales from other houses of worship,” Pastor patted one beautiful wooden bench with a Star of David and some Hebrew lettering on the side lovingly. “The synagogue’s contribution is especially comfortable.”

“Is that patch on the side with no benches –pews, I mean, for visitors in wheelchairs?” Scoot asked.

“We do have some parishioners who use chairs, yes, and they do tend to sit there, though you’ll also notice where the carpet is a bit fluffier?” Pastor Josh gestured to a section where the carpet puffed up a little. “There’s a double-layer of padding under that section because, for a while, we were the closest thing to a mosque in town. We still have several Muslims who worship with us, and the softer floor, well, one of our parishioners made it his special penance for thoughts he had previously held about that faith.”

“Not quite. Self-atonement is more like it. We do not assign penance here, but if a person comes to me with guilt and recrimination in his heart, I have found that suggesting some physical task of their choosing, as well as prayer, sometimes helps. We have one parishioner who realized late in life that she had been brought up with beliefs that today we would consider very racist, and she took it upon herself to volunteer as a photographer for adoption days at the courthouse. She takes great pains to produce beautiful formal portraits of all the new families, even when said families include several skin colors. Apparently creating lighting that flatters all faces has taught her the beauty of all people, and as age limits her mobility, she’s acquired a series of photographer apprentices from the at-risk youth program. Almost all of them are young people of color, and she loves them like her own children.”

“Our padded carpet section is much the same. We have a brother parishioner who had worshiped here for many years, but when the mosque in the next town burned and we welcomed so many Muslim brothers and sisters, he realized that he felt resentment and xenophobia toward members of his chapel family. He came to me for advice, and we talked and prayed for many hours. I had an imam, a good friend of mine, come and visit from out of state, to explain Islam better to the entire chapel, and he met in private with my parishioner who had such hate and fear in his heart.

“In time, our brother came to accept his brothers and sisters, but he felt so ashamed of how he had been before that he wanted to do something kind for them and for his chapel family as a whole. As it happens, his skills include the installation of flooring, and I arrived at St. Francis one Thursday evening eight years ago to find him with a pry bar and a linoleum knife, taking out the old, worn rugs we had and putting in this beautiful carpet. He paid for every square foot and every staple himself and would have refused all help installing it if not for the fact that he wasn’t quite done by two a.m. Friday morning. So my imam friend and I helped him finish the last of it, and then we all prayed together.

“When his Muslim brothers and sisters came for salah –prayers, that is, the next morning, laid down their prayer mats and felt that the floor had been made softer and warmer for them, they smiled, and after our next nondenominational service, our brother broke bread with his new siblings in faith –well, ate donuts and had orange juice, really. It’s so easy to let your language slip, as a pastor.

“He now has many dear Muslim friends, and he and one of his Muslim brothers are making plans to take their families to the Holy Land together. The Nasser family shall make the Hajj and the Findlays shall visit Jerusalem. They have told me that by sharing hotels and traveling together to both sites (with the exception of those which are closed to outsiders of each faith,) apparently it is possible to qualify for the group package and save a significant sum, which they intend to give as alms to the poor, and by traveling together as fathers of families, they hope to show others in that land that peace is possible. I am told, also, that they are hoping the Bernsteins might join them.”

“Her father, yes,” Pastor Josh explained. “You see, Miss Scott, even for people who have lived their entire lives in a good land, a blessed country where every man, woman and child has the freedom to choose whatever faith their God, Goddess, Pantheon or belief in Reason alone may draw them to, it is still possible for people to misunderstand and fear one another, and for one of the greatest gifts we have as humans, people really, to become a weapon of hate and mistrust.

“Josie tells me that you and your family have suffered from the intolerance of others, and that for this reason, religion has not been a part of your life before. So…I felt it might help, to show you that this is a place where hate cannot live. Have you had occasion to take wood or metal shop class yet?”

“Many things, really. A person who seeks truth can find their faith anywhere. I have a parishioner who found his faith in the lenses of a microscope, another who found it in the singing of children and still another, my dear fiancé in fact, who found his faith on roller coasters –God grants me patience, if not quite understanding of that last one,” Pastor Josh smiled ruefully and Scootaloo sensed that Dramamine was as essential to their relationship as coffee was to her Daddy and Papa’s. “In this case, though, I was wondering if you’d ever seen the little metal cabinet with the disinfectant light inside. The one where everyone puts their safety goggles at the end of class?”

“Well, metaphorically speaking, St. Francis’ Chapel is like that cabinet. We have a safe place for every pair of goggles, no matter how differently shaped.” Here, he patted two mismatched pews. “Remember how Josie’s goggles and yours were probably different from the other students’ pairs, because hers must go over her prescription glasses and yours…don’t they have longer ear-thingies?”

“I should get a set of that kind myself,” Pastor Josh observed absently. “But still, there was a place in the cabinet for every pair. We try to be like that here. You can be eighty years old and walk in with seventy-five years of experience in one single church, you can be thirty-six and have traveled to more houses of worship than some people try coffee shops, or you can be four years old and just hearing about faith for the first time. You can be sixteen and curious, sixty and fed up with the place where you used to pray…it doesn’t matter. Anyone, from anywhere, with any beliefs, is welcome here. We’re open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day and there’s always someone here to talk to, hot meals for the poor and as soon as we can finish installing them, we’ll have showers for the homeless in the basement as well as cots and blankets.

“And that is part of what gives us the light. Just as the anti-microbial light burns away any bacteria that may exist on the safety goggles, the light of understanding and truth burns away hate and misunderstanding. You cannot fear a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian or even a Satanist when you’ve been sitting three feet away from them and praying together for a while. You cannot misunderstand your brothers and sisters when you have spoken and shared with them. What love has filled, hate cannot fit inside.” Pastor Josh stopped suddenly, as if realizing how he sounded. “Am I sounding too much like a daft hippie?” he asked.

“…I won’t say this doesn’t sound a fair amount like Dr. Gregerson’s description of Woodstock, but it does sound pretty darn awesome.”

“You probably have questions, and if you’re anything like me, could probably do with some coffee right about now, or maybe some orange juice?”

“Coffee would be great, thank you.” Together, they headed toward the fellowship hall.

“Just please don’t make a fuss over getting it. We’ve found that it is best to keep our sister Josie on the decaf. After Brother James brought us the espresso machine, there was a bit of an incident.”

“I had asked our choir director to prepare a production of ‘Godspell’ for the Christian celebration of Easter, in the hopes that a performance might bring joy to the various senior citizens’ homes and nursery schools we visit. That, and we hoped to raise a little money for the hospital. Josie consumed something on the order of three cups of espresso, used her smartphone to place an ad on Craigslist and incited the entire cast to move their dress rehearsal to a nearby Walmart. There, I am told that no less than three hundred musical-theater fans descended in a flash mob, accompanied our cast in song and somehow performed the entire show from ‘Prepare Ye’ to ‘Light of the World’ without incident. Then, while Josie was purchasing inexpensive grape soda and Dixie cups with the choir director, some members of the flash mob decided actual wine would be more ecclesiastically appropriate, ‘On The Willows’ became a decidedly somber eleven o’clock number and the Crucifixion on the racks of the bicycle department provoked a more emotional response than expected. And then the police arrived.”

“No, but I’m familiar with Josie. Is that why she’s not allowed in the Walmart now?”

“Well, and it did work out for the best. Several influential critics were there, either in response to the Craigslist and Twitter postings or, in the case of that nice fellow from the Times, actually to buy groceries. Apparently the decision to stage a musical about the Gospel according to St. Matthew in an actual big-box store, with props simply pulled from the shelves and everyone in the crowd participating with the cast…well…long story short, we wound up having to perform the piece for five solid weeks after school to accommodate the demand for tickets. We raised enough to buy some kidney-dialysis machines for Children’s Hospital.”

“Aww! I do remember Josie being excited about the dialysis machines. She …never did explain how her church managed that.”

“I suspect it was her entirely unexpected and frankly unbelievable sense of modesty.”

“More like shyness, perhaps. She is actually somewhat insecure when it comes to her own public-speaking and especially singing abilities. Catch her up in the moment and she’s a wonderful performer. Give her a moment to think about it and she’s terrified. It was for that reason that our director found it essential to give her a song toward the middle of the piece, one with great energy, lest Josie think about it and risk stage fright.”

“It’s called ‘Bless the Lord.’ Lovely pop-gospel-type number. Lynne Thigpen sang it in the movie. Takes a lot of vocal power and makes some demands of the singer’s range.”

Suddenly, Scootaloo remembered. Her Dad and Papa hadn’t been very serious about religion, but they were big musical-theater fans. Huge.

“Wait. Isn’t ‘Godspell’ the one where the John the Baptist guy in the ringmaster coat comes and collects people from their everyday lives in the Seventies, and it’s kind of like Jesus as explained by clowns?”

“Quite well, yes. And she also had the lead on ‘By My Side.’ It wasn’t a very big cast, I’m afraid, folks had to double up.”

“Most people don’t realize she has a good singing voice. She seems to avoid solos in your school Chorus and only joins in here under the duress of her little Sunday School students. I suspect it’s a combination of stage fright and the fact that as a young child, her voice was decidedly…squeaky. She was teased once in the chorus for one of our pageants, and since then it’s been very hard to get her to share her gifts.”

“I’m having trouble even picturing that. Josie being afraid to do anything is just weird to me.”

“She puts on a brave front, yes, but I’ve known her for ten years. Did you know she was more nervous about your coming today than she was about performing in a musical for a packed chapel?”

“‘What if homophobes show up, Pastor?’ ‘What if she thinks we’re all insane people who sing at the ceiling for no reason?’ ‘What if the kids try to ride on her? If any of my third-graders try that, then so help me…’ She’s been a mess ever since she found out you were coming to visit.” Pastor Josh grinned. “You should have heard her pestering the brothers and sisters on kitchen duty about making sure there was something vegetarian available. For mercy’s sake, we have two Jains, a Sikh and a Hindu on kitchen duty today!”

“No, that’s for the food bank. We try to feed as many of the poor as we can. Today, I believe there shall be hummus and something that smells of curry, as well as those delicious little cookies with seeds on them. Oh, and donuts. We are a house of worship, after all. There really is no way to avoid donuts.”

Scootaloo saw the people working in the kitchen, who waved, and she waved back. The Fellowship Hall was really just a big room with tables in it, but special tracks between the acoustic tiles in the ceiling allowed thick vinyl curtains to be pulled out to form several rooms. It was a lot like the multi-purpose room at her middle school, just on a smaller scale, and at present it was nothing but classrooms with two ‘hallways’ between curtained-off sections.

“The kindergartners and preschoolers are in the Noah’s Ark room upstairs,” Pastor Josh explained, “and first through sixth grades, as well as the adult small-group discussion classes, are held in the Fellowship Hall between services. I believe the second grade is studying the story of Mohammed (peace-be-upon-him,) and Muezza the cat, the first grade is doing a coloring book on the Hindu gods and goddesses, the fourth grade is comparing different religions’ humor by compiling a joke book for the sick children, and the fifth and sixth grades are collaborating on a geodesic dome structure for the playground. We’ll either put plastic over the triangles to make a greenhouse for plants or use it as a kind of gazebo to keep Muezza the Third and Daniel out of the preschool’s sandbox. Many things are sacred, but not to the chapel cats.”

“There were church mice that took it upon themselves to…test the food we had gathered for the human poor. We could not, in good conscience, begrudge them this, but we also couldn’t risk myxomycosis or hantavirus. So now there are chapel cats. It was Nature’s solution. Daniel was named as a bit of a bible pun, being a long-haired cat who had gotten a lion cut while in the shelter, and Muezza the Third is literally our third Muezza. We try to adopt older cats from the shelter, and the first two were in their late teens and early twenties respectively. Thirdsie is only six, so we should have her awhile, God willing.”

There was a loud ‘whack’ sound from one of the curtained-off classrooms, the one with a ‘3’ by the door-gap.

“Jesus knows! That’s Josie’s class. Their big project for the year is making a special calendar of all the holidays they can find, from every faith and culture, and I must say, it’s been nice to have that many new HTML programmers in the chapel, but as for what they might be doing on any given day, well…why don’t we take a look?”

There was a small assembly-line of children, happily sharing little two-paragraph essays they had written about the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. The first two children were pulling apart some flattened cardboard boxes from what looked like a liquor store, Josie was moderating the discussion and working a large manual paper-cutter to lop the cardboard into three-inch-thick strips with the odd ‘whack’ as she made a slice, and the other children were patiently gluing, aligning, and clamping the cardboard strips together between stacks of heavy books. Then they fit them into empty soda flats with the corrugation exposed, and then the last few pairs of children were drawing some happy cat faces , paw prints and such on the sides with Crayola markers. The last two children had a bowl of water with greenish herbs in it and a paintbrush, with which they gently brushed the corrugated tops of the resulting product.

“Okay, rotate stations!” Josie called. Every two children then moved to the next station, with only the dangerous paper-cutter manned by the closest thing to an adult they had. “How many have we made so far?”

“The goddess I chose was Demeter, also known as Hestia. She is frequently shown with a cat because she is the goddess of the home and hearf’ and cats eat the mice who come to desp…despoil the harvest. That means they eat it. Her daughter is Perseph’ne, who eventually married Hades, also called Pluto, and became the Queen of the Dead. Demeter was totally pissed about this and went to get Perseph’ne back, and ‘ventually they decided that ‘cause Perseph’ne ate three pomegranate seeds, she’d stay wif’ Hades for three months, and the rest of the time she’d live with her Mom. So every winter, Perseph’ne goes to the netherworld to hang out with her husband and Demeter gets all depressed, which is where winter comes from, and when Perseph’ne comes back, Demeter is like totally ‘party time!’ with flowers an’ stuff, which a’splains spring.”

“Do you think the shelter cats will like the scratchers?” a little boy asked.

“I think so, Mark. What does the QC department think?” The little boy looked behind a file cabinet.

“That’s a solid endorsement if ever I’ve heard one. Which god or goddess did you pick to research, Jake?”

“Yep. That guy. He couldn’t walk but he made himself robots to help himself get around. They were called automa…automata. And even though he was the ugliest god, Afro-dight-”

“Aph-ro-di-te,” Mark agreed, sounding it out, “she married Hephaestus. She is the goddess of love. And in this one book I found at the library, when Pollux got his hands lopped off in a freaky bladed-Frisbee game during the quest for the Golden Fleece, the blacksmith of the Argo asked Hephaestus for help and made Pollux new super-strong robot hands!”

“I remember that book, yes!” Josie agreed. “Definitely one of the more Tarentino-esque representations of Greco-Roman mythology. What other things did Hephaestus do?”

“Not lots. He made Zeus’s thunderbolts and that’s pretty much all I found.”

“Well, at least he had good job security,” Josie lopped another few strips of cardboard for her team, then realized Pastor Josh and Scootaloo were watching. “Hey, Pastor! Class, this is my friend Scootaloo Scott. She’s a cheerleader from my school.”

Scootaloo braced for a storm of questions, but the children were strangely quiet. For about three seconds, there was silence, and then everyone’s hand went up.

“It’s nice ta’ meet you Miss Scott,” the little boy who’d written about Hephaestus remarked, putting out his little hand, which Scootaloo shook with her prosthetic, surprising him a little.

“I have a question but what if it’s not polite?” Mark continued, shooting a look to his young teacher.

“They were made for me by a team of prosthetic scientists. I believe this specific pair was assembled in a small factory in Maryland.” Mark was trying not to stare, but was clearly very fascinated. “They’re made from titanium and carbon fiber.”

“Oh, good, I love to fly!” Scootaloo gave the cheerful smile which was good for addressing audiences of children.

“What effects would you say your fur and mane have on your aer’dynamics with regard to drag, and if you were to put on a skin-tight bodysuit, would that fix it? And what if it were Teflon?”

“Wendy’s parents are engineers,” Pastor Josh explained. “I’m just going to go get ready for the service. You all have fun!”

And with that, Scootaloo was left to face the children of Josie’s Sunday School class.

“…I see. Well, in all honesty, I have to admit that I have no idea what effect my fur and mane have in terms of drag. I would imagine that there’s probably some, but I haven’t had occasion to take the appropriate measurements and find out for sure.”

“Would you be open to a ‘speriment?” Wendy took out a notebook with a pretty good crayon drawing of Scootaloo in it and several different-colored arrows. “We could determine your velocity with a GPS, as well as your heart rate and caloric output, then put you into a bodysuit and have you fly at the same speed, internally speaking, then compare the external velocities to see if the reduction in drag made you go faster. And then we could measure lateral G-forces with an accelerometer.”

“Since your fur is all over you, the drag may be consistent enough to improve your overall control when flying. If that’s the case, then airplanes need to be fuzzy.” Little Wendy solemnly turned the page to a picture of several airplanes colored in bright, pony-fur hues. “It’s science.”

“But couldn’t you also say that since Miss Scott can feel her fur, that her being fuzzy isn’t just for drag, but for full-body airspeed sensors?” another little girl asked.

“Good point, Katie, but try not to interrupt if you can,” Josie took a sip of what Scootaloo hoped was decaf coffee.

“That is a good point, Katie. I really can feel my fur, just the same way you can feel the wind in your hair when you ride on rollercoasters or roll down the car windows.”

“Does it seem to help you react to conditions?” little Katie asked, taking out her notebook and big blue pencil, ready to take down exactly what Scootaloo said next.

“It seems to. I can definitely feel differences in moisture and temperature, and it seems to be a pretty good insulator.” Josie pointed to the next kid.

“Exactly like clothes, yes. My fur helps me maintain my internal temperature.” Scootaloo looked over to a little boy in a dress shirt and tie. “You have a question, too?”

“I have no idea. I was born orange, with this kind of pinkish-purple hair in my mane, and my colors have never changed, so it’s almost certainly hereditary.”

“It does help with visibility, yes. I guess I’m lucky to be orange. Imagine if I were sky blue, instead; birds and bugs would fly into me all the time.”

“Actually, no. The first airport I trained at was within a short distance of a swamp, and I was so afraid of swallowing a dragonfly that I got into the habit of keeping my mouth shut on takeoffs and landings…that, and above a certain height, the bugs simply don’t fly that high.”

“One of the ultralight pilots already had and he told me they taste like yuck.”

“I have occasionally had some, yes, but it’s very bland, so I don’t really go out of my way to eat it. Imagine oatmeal with no sugar or raisins or anything, or graham crackers with the sugar and cinnamon scraped off or maybe Grape-Nuts cereal. It’s like what old people eat when they need to go to the bathroom.” That made the children laugh.

“Probably either pasta with mushroom Alfredo sauce and broccoli, or a big veggie burger with everything.”

That seemed to divide the room momentarily into pro- and anti-pickle camps which were, respectively, vindicated and horrified.
“Josie said that you’re a vegetarian like Mr. Singh. Does that mean you don’t like chicken nuggets?”

“Well, I had some veggie nuggets once that I liked. They were made from batter-dipped tofu.”

“Would you like one?” the same little boy asked. “There are awesome ones at the shelter.”

“You have two dads, like us?” a little boy asked, a big grin lighting up his face. Scootaloo realized that the little boy next to him, despite completely different outfits, was his twin brother.

“The Sticky Lick on Fifth Avenue,” Josie explained with a whisper in Scootaloo’s ear. Scoot had never been to that particular establishment, but she had seen the neon sign with a rainbow-colored lollipop and enormous lips, as well as had a very awkward conversation around third-grade age with her Daddy about why anyplace that wasn’t a candy store would have that kind of sign. “Oscar and Harvey have two dads just like you, and Katie has two moms, and Wendy and her little brother have grandparents.”

“And my family has three cats!” the little boy who had suggested one announced, as if cats were only slightly less rare and expensive than Rolls-Royces. “You should get a cat. Then when you shed feathers, you can make her a feather toy, and she’ll pounce it.”

“Evan is going to be a lion tamer when he grows up,” Josie explained, absolutely deadpan.

“Like one or two at a time. It’s like how you find hair in your hairbrush.”

“I thought you would preen them like a bird,” little Katie observed, miming the action with her arm and a beaky facial expression.

“Neither, actually. I just sort of…oh, here.” Scootaloo spread her wings, shook them out and then smoothed over her feathers with her prosthetics as usual. “See? Like that.” A few feathers came loose as she did this, and she offered them to Josie. “Craft supply?”

“Could we add them to the dreamcatcher?” little Wendy asked, pointing to one that the class had made with yarn and which hung from the bulletin board.

“Or cat toys!” little Evan suggested. Somehow, the kids had managed to keep working on their cat scratchers, and Scootaloo, at a gesture from Josie, took a seat in the gluing-in part of the assembly line.

“What brings you to St. Francis today?” a quiet little girl near the box disassembly asked Scootaloo suddenly.

“…Nowhere, I suppose. My Dad and Papa didn’t take me to one when I was little, probably because I had to be a secret for a while, and after that, I guess they either never got around to picking one or didn’t see a need for it.”

“Actually, I don’t know. We never really discussed religion. So I’m really new to all of this.”

“That means we can help,” Little Evan remarked with the authority of a nine-year-old. “Do you prefer polytheism, monotheism or atheism?”

“…I actually don’t know. I mean, some people have told me about the Christian and Jewish God-”

“Plus we did read about the Greek and Roman gods in school, as well as some stuff about the Egyptians and Norse ones.”

“How about Bastet?” Evan perked up. “She’s the Egyptian goddess of cats. Excellent first goddess, very easy to worship. Or Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and battle. She rides in a chariot pulled by cats.”

“Oh, me?” Evan smiled. “I’m a Christian, but I worship Jesus in his aspect as Aslan, the Savior of Narnia.”

“Sure,” Little Katie explained. “Some kids get mad at their parents and say they’re going to switch religions sometimes. So they go sit with different kids and learn about other faiths, and sooner or later they either go back or meet their parents in one of the middle pews. My uncle Jon became a Muslim while he was in the war, and when he came home, my moms decided to worship here so we could all be in the same building and church family.”

“I got mad at the Bible and worshipped Bastet for like two weeks,” Evan explained. “She’s okay as a starter goddess, but Aslan is better.”

“Isn’t your god or goddess supposed to be the best, and that’s why you pick them?”

“I was thinking about maybe Princess Celestia and Princess Luna being good goddesses,” the quiet little girl explained shyly. “They could represent the two sides of a balanced universe, in accordance with the Tao.”

“I got grounded for a week and threw up from drinking a whole gallon of chocolate milk. Discord and Loki are crummy gods.”

For a moment, Scootaloo wondered if Josie’s frivolity and Pastor Josh’s incredible tolerance had simply diluted the very idea of religion down to an amusing game for little kids. It certainly sounded like something between favorite-books and Pokemon, to hear the third-graders speak of faith.

“What would you want to get from religion, Miss Scott?” the quiet little girl asked.

“Yeah. Pastor Josh says that we should all be seekers of the truth, and that faith takes what we put into it and returns it tenfold. So what do you want to put into it?”

She also realized that if anyone could take a complex concept like faith, or religion, and understand the good and bad perfectly, it was probably these intelligent little kids. They didn’t have decades of enculturation or bias to overcome. They just saw things and tried their best to interpret them.

“I have a friend at school named Conner,” she explained. “Conner is gay, like my Dad and Papa, and because his parents’ religion says gay people are bad, he had to come and live with me because his parents were…they were very unkind to him. And the principal at my high school, his religion told him to not teach the students some very important things, just because he was afraid they might use them to do things he thinks are bad, and that caused a lot of really bad problems.”

“Some people believe in reincarnation,” Little Evan smiled. “Cats have nine lives, and when my oldest cat died, she went to the Heaviside Layer and came back to a different Jellicle life. T.S. Eliot wrote poems about it.”

“Most likely. Right now she’s probably someone else’s cat, and that might be in a different place or time. But when we die and go to heaven, the first place we go is the Rainbow Bridge. There’s a meadow where all the pets are healthy and young and not sick at all, and they play there until their humans come, and then they cross the Rainbow Bridge to heaven together.”

“Her body went to our backyard,” Evan explained, as if he realized he was talking to someone who knew rather less than himself on the topic. “Her spirit, though, the part of her that made her Molly Fuzzypaws, that part went to the Heaviside Layer, I think, which is where T.S. Eliot says cats go to come back to a different life. They get nine, I think, and then they go to the Rainbow Bridge.”

“So…there’s reincarnation and heaven, it doesn’t have to be an ‘or’?”

“Nope,” Katie agreed. “Some religions don’t think cats have souls or that they go anywhere when they die.”

“But we know better,” Evan explained. “I had a dream about Molly Fuzzypaws a few days after she passed away. She was younger and wasn’t sick anymore. In my dream, I opened a can of tuna and gave it to her, and she ate it, then she purred for me and followed a big lion to someplace nice. That’s how I knew she was with Aslan and that everything would be okay.”

“But…but how do you know that your subconscious mind didn’t just make that up to make you feel better?” Scootaloo was confused.

“I don’t know.” Evan glued some more cardboard into a scratcher and passed it to the next kid for decorating with a smile. “But I have faith that that’s what it meant.”

“Faith means that you don’t know, but you believe.” Little Katie explained.

“But what if you believe something that’s…well…that’s wrong? Like Noah’s Ark. That makes no biological sense. No way is every animal descended from only two specimens, and even then, how on Earth is Noah supposed to have built an ark that holds every animal, let alone gotten the animals from all over the world?”

“Well, in Bible times people didn’t understand science quite so well,” Little Wendy smiled. “Like me. I’m nine. I understand science now, and when I flip a light switch, it breaks the circuit and the electrons can’t flow to my lamp anymore, so the light goes out. But when I was four or five, I thought that was magic. People in Bible times were like little kids with science. Almost all the religions have a big flood story, because floods were a thing that happened, just like they have stories of where different languages come from, different skin colors, lightning, fire and all sorts of things that we know why they’re there today. But they didn’t understand things like evolution or language-science-”

“Linguistics,” Wendy grinned at her teacher, “or how fire happens, or why lightning, because there was almost no science then. So they guessed at it the best they could, like me thinking light switches were magic, and that’s what they wrote down.”

“So if the Old Testament says Noah built an ark, what’s-his-head got swallowed by a whale and that gay people are bad, does that mean it’s something people have to have faith in?” Scootaloo asked.

“Not with context,” Little Wendy smiled. “Context is really super important.”

“Context means you look at who is saying a thing, and when, and you think about why they said it and what it might mean later, like now,” Evan scratched his head. “Like even if Noah’s Ark isn’t scientifically possible, it still makes a good story about God’s love and when you put it in coloring books, it’s good for memorizing the names of all the animals before our zoo field trip. It’s not literally true, but it’s still good for something.”

“Yeah, that. You don’t look at the story, but at what the story is trying to tell you.”

“Daddy says that the prohibition in Leviticus might have been for population reasons,” his brother Harvey continued. “If gay men married each other back then before people understood God’s plan for gay people-”

“We believe God made our Dads specially to adopt us and be our dads,” Oscar explained.

“And the people back then didn’t adopt so much. They also had way higher infant mortality and shorter lifespans. They needed everybody to reper’duce as much as they could, or else their tribes and faith and all might die out.” Harvey was the twin in a polo shirt and khakis…assuming Scootaloo had gotten the right name to the right twin.

“They also thought that only men made babies by…well…they didn’t understand biology at all, and they didn’t realize biological mothers contributed the egg part and that half a baby comes from its’ mom. They also thought that men…well…doing sex things without a lady, that since baby seeds came from men, that that was like killing babies.” Oscar wore a tie-dye shirt and jeans.

“In context, they meant well, but they totally didn’t know what they were talking about,” Harvey smiled.

“It’s like when our aunt forwarded us an email that said WD-40 comes from fish oil and that it’ll cure warts and stuff,” Oscar agreed. “She meant well, but she didn’t know what she was talking about. WD-40 is a petroleum deriv’tive and you have to use sal’cylic acid or freezing to cure warts.”

“But why? If a grownup sent you the email, why wouldn’t you trust your aunt?”

“It was for not using crit’cal thinking, like using the Innernet to find out how the WD-40 was supposed to cure the warts before we tried it,” Oscar explained.

“And for not telling Daddy we were going to cure his warts by putting it on his feet while he was sleeping. That was bad effics, doing a med’cal procedure wif’out patient consent.”

This made Scootaloo laugh, and Oscar and Harvey laughed, too. Soon the whole class was laughing, smiling, and telling funny stories. Some had to do with faith, others were just hilarious. Scoot looked over at her friend and realized Josie wasn’t actually so much teaching as just being a kind of moderator and source of any miscellaneous vocabulary the kids might need. It was as if they didn’t really need a teacher at all, just some reasonable excuse for a grownup to work the paper-cutter, keep the group on-track and make sure everyone got a turn to talk.

And then Scootaloo realized something else. She was learning more about faith and belief than she ever had, just by being around believers, of every sort, who were comfortable discussing their own faith non-judgmentally. These children, these adorable, funny little people who petted her fur every time she changed cat-scratcher-making stations, told her stories from Bible, Qur’an and What Happened Last Tuesday as if there were little difference and raised their hands in competition to see who would have the privilege of bringing her another cocoa and Josie a second cup of the decaf…they were just so cool to be around. She was teaching them, sure, especially when they had more questions about flying and what they called ‘big-kid chapter books,’ but they were teaching her just as much, if not more.

The fact that there were no other Equestrian ponies on Earth and that outside of adoption, she might never have a child of her own had never once bothered her until this moment, and all of a sudden the realization of what she wouldn’t have really began to hurt.

The fact that she knew of the ‘Readme file’ element of her own DNA from her talks with the Doctors Gregerson and therefore had more concrete, scientific proof that she, at least, had a Creator, even if the whole universe, humans, or the Earth might not, than any other being in human history…well…that hadn’t really meant anything to her before. But as the children were singing the clean-up song and tidying away their many completed cat-scratchers for Josie to take to the animal shelter, the quiet little girl mentioned having read a big-kids’ genetics textbook and asked what Scootaloo thought of the Readme File.

“Well…I never really thought about it. I mean, obviously somebody had to make Ponies.”

“I know. But…well…do you think that maybe, once we understand all of your DNA, and ours, too…maybe we’ll find our Readme files next and can find out who signed them?” The quiet little girl’s eyes shone with hope. “All the other kids have either gods or bodhisattvas or favorite philosophers, but …I’ve never found mine. I…I kind of wanted someone to thank for things.”

“Oh, I do. But what about the things that are really important? Like my foster parents. They’re adopting me this month, and I’m finally going to have a family like other kids. I thanked the social workers and I’m going to thank the judge on Adoption Day and Mrs. Phillips when she takes our special family portrait, but …who do I thank for bringing me my family? I thanked the firefighters who saved me even if they couldn’t save my birth mom, and I thanked the doctors who made sure I was okay, but who do I thank for starting the fire?”

“Starting the fire?” Scootaloo gasped. “But the fire was…didn’t it …kill your birth mom?”

“Yeah,” the quiet girl sighed. “I also need to know who to apologize to for being kinda glad that happened. My birth mom was cooking meth, and she didn’t always have food for me. My new parents love me and I’m safe now. I don’t even have nightmares anymore.”

Scootaloo, by some instinct she never knew she had before, put an arm around the little girl and gave her a snuggle.

“Under the circumstances, I don’t think you should feel bad about being happy your birth mom is gone. Addiction is a terrible thing, and even if she only went to that place full of kittycats Evan was talking about, I don’t think people stay addicted after they die. So she’s healthy and happy wherever she is, and probably trying her best to look out for you.”

“That’s kinda what Pastor Josh said, that people on the other side lose the flaws that maybe made them less than perfect on Earth. I don’t believe in Christianity like Evan, because I had a Christian foster mom once who was really…well…she meant to be nice, I guess. But the Tao says that there must be balance in the world, and while I feel like I’m getting good things now that kind of make up for the bad things, I kind of worry about there always being some bad in the world. A deity who could maybe be more than just bad or good, maybe someone with light inside the darkness…I don’t know. I was kind of hoping genetics might have some of the truth inside.”

“I prefer Kelly. It’s my new mom’s big sister’s name, and I wanted a new name for my new family, so I’m going to change it on my adoption day. I don’t like the name my birth mom gave me.”

“Well, Kelly…I know less about faith than you do, but I do know this. If there’s a God or a Goddess or a flying pony princess in the sky somewhere, they didn’t send you to a bad birth mom because of anything you did and they didn’t send you wonderful new parents because of the bad stuff you’d already been through. Life is just …like that sometimes, and it isn’t always going to balance out. We can try to make it balance, by looking for the good stuff even when bad stuff comes, but even if all the gods and goddesses and…giant magic lions from Narnia are all real and friends and up there somewhere…I don’t really think we could change their minds. Either they love us very much and the bad things happen to make us strong, which is what I’d like to think of any god of mine, or maybe they barely even see us amidst everything else that’s going on. Maybe they just set the world running and left us to sort it out.”

“Yeah, like Deism. But no matter what’s going on up there, or down there, or anywhere, all we can really ever change is ourselves and maybe the world around us. So while we can keep looking and learning and praying forever…the change we want to see, we have to make ourselves. We can’t wait for magical men in the sky to change how the world is or how we feel, but we can work on making good change happen.”

Little Kelly, who was so quiet, so serious and with such tired eyes for a little girl, smiled.

“…I really don’t know what I’m talking about at all,” Scootaloo admitted. “The nothing-but-the-change-we-make theory, that’s something my friend Melissa said once when something really sad happened. My Papa says that as long as there is love, there is always hope. And my Daddy says that with a smart brain, a strong heart and people to love you, you’ll always be okay in the end. Josie says any minor world that breaks apart…something. I really don’t know what I believe, so I have no idea what to tell you. I can’t imagine my life without my parents, or having to wait for them as long as you did, and I can barely imagine what having a birth mom with such problems and then losing her must have been like. I’m not even sure what to say besides ‘I am so sorry.’ I just know that it makes me feel sad to not be able to help at all, especially when such awful things have happened, and…well…I want to help you not be sad. I want to help you find your faith –hell, I want to find mine! I want to make everything okay and I don’t know how!”

She felt like crying, and suddenly she realized little Kelly was petting her mane and snuggling her.

“It’s okay. We don’t have to make everything okay for each other. Just the fact that we wish we could because we understand how others feel and so we’re trying to help one another means that everything stands a really good chance of being okay someday. Pastor Josh says so. That’s what empathy means.”

All the good she’d done with her medical and scientific volunteering, the Readme File in her very own DNA, the fact that something, somewhere, had created her…there was absolutely a force, entity or being somewhere out there which she could consider God the way these children accepted and regarded any of their personal deities. All her life she had demanded proof, just as so many bitter atheists condemning the faith of others and hopeful-but-rational agnostics wishing to feel it themselves had demanded something, anything, to prove that there was a benevolent Creator somewhere in the universe.

God was real. There was good in the universe, and there was a good reason. Sure, there was bad in the universe as well, but without a better understanding of what God was actually like, she wasn’t quite certain of how to parse that. Was it something like Princess Celestia and Nightmare Moon and good needed to triumph over evil and drive it from the corrupted until they were pure and whole once more? Or was it like the Tao, where good needed bad even to exist and balance was the point of the universe? Was bad a bit like how Christians viewed sin, or was the ‘bad’ merely part of nature, like animals who ate other animals to live? Was it a bit like Deism, where God created us, but gave us free will and then backed off? Or was it something else entirely?

It was a lot to take in, and Scootaloo didn’t have too many people whose faith she understood well enough to compare.

She thought of kind atheists like Melissa, who insisted that there was no God because she couldn’t imagine a world where God and cruelty could exist at the same time. She thought of agnostics like her father, who would be happy to believe, but whom some religious people had managed to sour on the idea of organized religion because of the intolerance that accompanied some of them. She thought of irritating atheists like the guy on the one talk show who seemed to really just resent religion in general. She thought of religious people with one well-organized, strict and absolute faith, like Pastor Gray, and then she thought of religious people whose faith adapted, took in new ideas here and cast off old ideas there, people for whom new information might change, but never, ever break their faith… people like Josie.

“Empathy is good,” little Kelly nodded, petting the orange pony again. “There’s animal crackers for snack, do you want to go get some?”

“Yeah,” Scootaloo agreed. Her view of the universe and her place in it had just been rocked, but there were still animal crackers.

Scootaloo accepted a Dixie cupful of animal crackers on a napkin and a second Dixie cup filled with apple juice. Little Kelly told her some more about her new family, and some of the other children joined them to talk about their families before being collected from Sunday School by those families. Little Kelly’s foster, soon-to-be-adoptive parents in particular looked like wonderful people, and Oscar and Harvey’s dads reminded her of her own, just a little bit.

And then it was time to go with Josie to her first church services. They went out the side door to walk around.

“So…how do you like my anklebiters?” Josie asked as they put the boxes of cat-scratchers into the back of Demi’s shabby Subaru on the way to the sanctuary.

“I’m glad they were on best-behavior for you. They can be a bit hyper sometimes.”

“Coming from you, that’s saying something,” Scoot grinned. “I think I kind of understand what you mean about God now. I mean, something created me…why shouldn’t I worship whatever that something is, or at least thank it?”

Josie’s facial expression did something interesting. First she looked elated, then puzzled, then calmly cheerful.

“Isn’t this the part where you’re all ‘yay!’ about me believing in God and then start trying to persuade me to worship your personal version?”

“We really aren’t that kind of church. You’ll figure things out in your own time. All we can really do is compare notes, at least where the personal search for truth and faith is concerned. That’s, y’know, what makes personal convictions personal.”

“So…does that mean you can tell me more about yours? We can share notes here, too?”

“Sure. First, though, you might want to listen to Pastor Josh’s sermon and experience church at least once. Then you can decide, like, whether you even want my notes. You might very easily not need ‘em. I don’t want to push my views over top of yours or anything.”

“Beats being Pinkie Pie. I get the impression I’m kind of your Pinkie Pie. Which is weird, you know.” She sighed and patted her friend on the shoulder near her wings. “We can share notes. Do you need me to explain any of the rituals or the hymn-singing or anything?”

“I read a lot of Wikipedia before today, but…well…can you kind of whisper the next part to do if I’m not getting it on my own and just kind of catch me if I’m making a big idiot of myself?”

“Sure.” By now they were in the sanctuary, and Josie found them a seat near her brothers and parents. Scootaloo said hi to Mr. and Mrs. Findlay, who were happy to see her, and Demi and Laurie shook hands and told her they were glad she was there. Next, Josie handed her a hymnal and a program and showed her how to mark the hymns with the six different-colored ribbons of its’ bookmark. “That’s so we don’t get page-shuffling noises while people find their spots,” Josie explained. “The hymns that aren’t listed from this book or the blue one are printed in the program, see?”

“It’s okay. They play an intro, and if you aren’t a good singer or aren’t confident, you can just kind of mouth the words. Nobody’ll notice, or if they do, well…they’ll likely just assume the show was right and you’re mildly tone-deaf.”

“I am not,” Scootaloo groused, before smiling again. “This one doesn’t have music, and this one’s in…Sanskrit?”

“A psalm and a passage from the Vedas, respectively,” Josie explained. “We’ve also got a cantor to read us some of the Torah today, and if you come back at the right time of day, you can try Muslim prayers, though their Sabbath is on Friday. There’s also a Greek food festival planned for this Thursday night, we’re clubbing together with St. Basil’s Orthodox since their kitchen’s being fixed.”

“This explains how you slept through World Cultures class and still scraped an A.”

“And the Christians get Gospel according to St. Matthew today, definitely one of the better texts.”

“Isn’t that what this is, just for faith instead of food?” Josie grinned, then her eyes went cold. “Oh…hell,” she cursed softly.

“Be subtle about it, but look behind us, at who just walked in.” Scootaloo checked, subtly as could be managed.

“What the hell is he doing here?” she whispered. There was a susurrus and she realized that several members of the congregation were asking the same thing. But Josie didn’t respond. Instead, she was standing up and walking over to him.

“Hi, there!” the cheerleader greeted the disgraced former principal, her expression neutral. Scootaloo saw Pastor Josh peek out from behind a door marked ‘Sacristy’ in his vestments, blanch and then shut his eyes in obvious prayer.

“Miss Findlay! Oh, I…erm…uh…” Pastor Gray stammered. “I didn’t know you came here.”

“I…well…em…” And then Scootaloo realized that Gray was, well, gray. He was pale, visibly sweating and did not look well. It even looked like he might have been ill lately. “Please…can I stay just for services? My own church…well…they’ve asked me to leave and I…I…”

Scootaloo suddenly realized something about worship. Some people got a lot out of it, some people just showed up for the coffee and fellowship afterward, some people balanced their checkbooks there and called it close-enough and some people legitimately needed the peace it brought for their mental health. She had figured out a while ago that this was the place Josie went at unusually stressful times, but she had never quite realized why.

“Well, I’m terribly sorry, but you can’t sit there,” Josie informed Pastor Gray coldly.

“New parishioners who didn’t come with friends get to sit in front,” Josie explained with a cheerful smile. “You get to see better and the front pews are cushiony-soft. The Gospel’s from St. Matthew today, and the listed hymns are all in the green hymnal, not the blue.”

And with that, Josie shook Pastor Gray’s hand, pointed him toward a front pew, and slipped back into her pew next to Scootaloo.

“Oh, what is that look about?” Josie whispered, seeing the shocked stare Scoot was giving her. “You’ve read the Gospels, right?”

Our girl Scootaloo 1 of 3

by Cozy Mark IV

Ch 20: Scootaloo goes to Church