The moon was full, the grass was yet to be dampened with dew, and there were two bodies laying the in the grass of a meadow just outside of Ponyville. One possessed wings, and the other a horn upon her head. They both stared up into the nighttime sky, the stars twinkling down at them, and the moon basking the whole place in silvery light.
“Man, this is great,” remarked Scootaloo, the winged one. The horned one, Sweetie Belle, nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, it’s too bad she couldn’t make it,” she said with a hallmark squeak. “Apple Bloom, I mean.”
“Yeah, but what can you expect?” Scootaloo said, shrugging, her shoulders meshing with the grass. “Cutie Mark Crusader Demolition Experts wasn’t the safest of ideas, and honestly, Applejack would have had been a pretty lousy sister not not have grounded her!”
“I suppose you’re right,” Sweetie Belle said. “Still, I bet she doesn’t get this nice of a view of the sky from her room. I miss her.”
“Weirdest part, that’s not even the most dangerous thing we’ve done!” Scootaloo remarked, flailing her hooves about in the grass. “Fourteen megatons is barely anything!”
“I dunno, we were dealing with something petty terrible just waiting to happen,” Sweetie Belle said, giving her friend a concerned look. “I hope Applejack doesn’t tell Rarity about this whole mess. I’m gonna be in so much trouble if she finds out...”
“She’s probably going to have to,” Scootaloo reminded her. “Whole Element of Honesty crap and everything.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Sweetie Belle sighed.
Scootaloo furrowed her brow. “As I was saying, this is hardly the most dangerous thing we’ve ever done! Remember when we were the Cutie Mark Crusader Giant Ant Hive Researchers?”
“Oh yeah!” Sweetie Belle said with a laugh. The two smiled as they recollected delving into the giant mound of dirt and sand, the large ants scurrying around them, their large legs, their soulless eyes, the terrifying mandibles, the stench of acid and death...
The smiles of the two foals soon changed to grimaces of horror. Exchanging glances with each other, the two both swallowed hard.
“Let’s never remember again,” Scootaloo said in a hushed whisper. Sweetie Belle shook her head in vigorous agreement, her eyes flashing with the deadly memories of that terrible, terrible expedition.
The two lay in silence for a long while, staring simply up at the sky, which blinked back at them in all manner of little lights. The stars shone down on the pair of ponies, and they let themselves awash in the shared light of the stars and the moon.
“So...” Scootaloo began, but soon trailed off. She couldn’t keep forcing conversation. The two of them had to simply lay in silence on the grass in this meadow on the earth that made up Equus which spun through space, endlessly and over and over...
The orange pegasus shifted around on the grass somewhat uncomfortably. She knew that this grass was going to make her unbearably itchy eventually, she just didn’t know when. It snuck up on her like some sort of small, annoying, ever present tiger.
The little blinking lights fascinated her enough to divert her mind from the grass and its unavoidable itchiness. She looked over at Sweetie Belle, who had a blank look on her face that reminded her of when Sweetie did math work.
It was in that moment that something clicked in Scootaloo. Sweetie Belle was dumb as rocks, and Apple Bloom was her own cousin; she, however, was perfect... aside from all her flaws, that is. Furrowing her brow for the second time in recent text, she frowned. What the hell was her mind trying to do to her, sending her these conundrums? Shit, it was like it was trying to get her to think! Better say the first thing that comes to mind so that can be avoided.
“Those stars are pretty,” Scootaloo said intelligently. Sweetie Belle looked over at her, her large eyes reflecting those glittering specks of light in the vast universe.
“I was just thinking about that,” Sweetie said. “I’ve always wanted to visit the stars.”
“Yeah, think about the work Luna has to put into those things,” Scootaloo said. “They’re so small, and there’s so many... and they’re each as big as the sun Celestia rises! I guess she doesn’t really have to do anything but make sure that they’re out at night, but that’s still pretty impressive.”
Sweetie Belle nodded. Scootaloo sat up, her head pointing straight up at the sky, neck craning. “Think about how great that would feel, just to float in the vastness of space...”
There was a silence between the two where not much was done at all. Scootaloo thankfully avoided that dreadful act of thinking, and Sweetie Belle continued to stare at the sky, taking everything in.
And then, Scootaloo did something she almost never did. She thought. And this was no ordinary though, mind you; this was a brilliance, an explosion of mental workings. This was a universe coming into creation, a ten-watt bulb producing twelve watts— something that was almost literally mind blowing.
Scootaloo’s eyes were wide as her mind raced and calculated through this thought. She had to make sure this was delivered just perfectly, or else it could all go to waste.
“I envy them sometimes,” Scootaloo said after a little bit. “The stars, I mean.”
“Why?” was the response.
“I don’t know, I just do,” Scootaloo said, somewhat irritated by this dismissal of her deep thinking. “They get to hang in space, generating heat and light and all that other nice stuff— looking nice up there in the universe. Down here, I’m just some dumb filly who can’t fly to even attempt to get closer. I want to be able to float up in space, observing the cosmos as they rush past, as they blow through me...” Scootaloo took a deep breath. “I wanna be a star.”
There was an uneasy pause as Sweetie Belle looked at her friend. The unicorn, not used to such advanced thought coming from a pegasus who cringed away from any form of higher thinking, had to take a few moments to process it. After about a minute and a half of silence, Sweetie Belle finally spoke.
“Why not just be Scootaloo?”
Scootaloo rolled her eyes, her hoof clapping against her face. Sweetie obviously didn’t get this at all.
“Because I’m already Scootaloo, dummy; I want to be a star, more brilliant and more beautiful than Scootaloo could ever be. I don’t want to be down here, grounded to the earth. I already feel so small, so small compared to the universe... I’m smaller than the smallest fireball.”
Sweetie Belle paused again as the pegasus took a breather. Once again, she spoke her solution in the form of a question.
“Is that a problem?”
Scootaloo groaned again.
“Remind me to never discuss stuff like this with you.”