Scootaloo and her friends were currently in the rolling hills north of Ponyville. The orange pegasus was on her scooter, pulling her friends in the little red wagon hitched to said scooter with the thrust from her wings.
“That it! That’s one of the places you saw with Rainbow Dash, right?” the white unicorn filly, with the pink and purple mane, asked.
“Yes Sweetie Belle, that’s it,” Scootaloo answered.
“Why couldn’t ya find someplace with a road to it? Ah’m getting real tiered of getting shook numb riding through rough fields like this,” complained the yellow earth pony, who’s red mane was adorned with a pink bow.
“Apple Bloom. If ponies came here all the time we wouldn’t be exploring,” Sweetie Belle guessed even though the question had been aimed at Scootaloo. That answer sounded as good as any she could come up with so Scootaloo kept quiet as she continued to power their preferred mode of transportation.
That bought the young pegasus some silence while she pulled the group up the last hill, until they came to a stop at the top of the hill and just outside a large stone building. The stones of the building had long since been bleached white from the sun. Old stain glass windows adorned some of the frames, although some of the windows had succumbed to the ravages of time.
Scootaloo rested her wings for a moment as her friends stretched away the numbness from sitting in a prolonged rattling metal wagon ride. Apple Bloom opened her saddlebags and passed out some apple tarts for the three friends to snack on while they rested.
Once the break was over Apple Bloom looked up at the impressive building and smiled. “Today is the day crusaders. Today we will find our special talent and earn our cutie marks as…” the earth pony began. “Cutie mark crusader explorers!” all three fillies called out together.
Going inside the three young ponies found rows of bookshelves. Some of the books seemed to have enchantments protecting them from decay while others had disintegrated to dust on the shelves over the years. A balcony from a second level overlooked the main chamber and several hallways were off to the sides. Overhead the wooden roof seemed to have tolerated the years of neglect fairly well but some small parts had collapsed, leaving debris on some of the bookshelves below.
“What is this place, a library?” Scootaloo asked, a tone of disappointment at the seemingly mundane nature of the ruin hung in her voice.
“I think it’s a monastery,” Sweetie Belle’s voice squeaked a little as she answered.
“Monastery? What’s that?”
“Ah think it’s what they had before libraries,” Apple Bloom gave the short answer.
Sweetie Belle expanded on the short answer, “Yeah, back when books were expensive to make, small towns couldn’t afford to get a lot of books. So they would work together with the nearby towns to build a monastery, usually somewhere between them. Then ponies would come live here while they learned about whatever they wanted to know. Once they invented the printing press books became cheap enough that even small towns could afford to make their own libraries so places like this weren’t needed anymore.”
“Sweetie Belle why do you know that?” Scootaloo couldn’t help but ask.
“Because I don’t fall asleep in class.” Sweetie’s reply wasn’t meant to be a jab at her friend but Scootaloo lowered her ears in embarrassment anyway.
Scootaloo spotted something to change the subject with, as a gentle breeze turned the pages of two books on a nearby table. “Hey, somepony was here recently.”
“Why do ya think that?” Apple Bloom asked her friend.
“Because somepony wiped the dust off this half of the table. They must have been reading these two books.” Scootaloo answered, motioning to the evidence before her.
“Well, what are they?” Sweetie Belle asked as she trotted up beside her pegasus friend and began to examine one of the books.
“This one looks like an old to new equestrian translation book.” Scootaloo said as she looked down at the mix of symbols like horseshoes, lightning bolts, stars and accompanied by alphabet letters. Both written languages were still taught in Equestria, so she could read both sets of symbols and they seemed to repeat the same thing in both written sets. “They must have been using this to read the other one. What is it?” Scootaloo asked, noticing that the book Sweetie was examining had only the old runic writing on its pages.
Sweetie Belle closed the book and read the title aloud. “War of the Pegasus Tribe.”
“Oh that’s Commander Tempest’s story,” Scootaloo remarked, beaming that she remembered it.
“How do you know that?” Sweetie Belle asked, with a curious eyebrow raised.
“Didn’t Cheerilee talk about it last month in history?” Scootaloo asked, no longer sure when or where she’d heard the story.
“Yeah… but you sleep through history class,” Sweetie Belle responded, causing Apple Bloom to giggle at the honest observation.
“Only when it’s boring. And war isn’t boring,” Scootaloo defended herself. Noticing something beyond her unicorn friend the young pegasus, pointed while adding, “And neither is that!”
Her friends turned to look at the wall Scootaloo had pointed to and found a painting almost the size of the wall it had once been attached to. Nether filly was sure if the landscape depicted in the old painting was of a real landmark or a fictional place, and not knowing the place made it impossible to tell if the sun setting the light in the scene was a sunset or a sunrise. Apple Bloom was the first to ask what they were looking for. “A giant painting? What’s interesting about that?”
“Not the painting. Look at the holes in it, there’s a hall or something hidden behind it!” Scootaloo beamed as she answered.
The table with the books was abandoned as the three fillies darted over to the painting, and pushing the giant painting aside they found a stairwell leading downward. Another detail caught the eyes of the three young ponies, that being, there were no torch stands in the subterranean tunnel. With no doubt in their minds that they had found a secret passage the three crusaders grinned at each other.
Scootaloo opened her saddlebag and pulled out three head-mounted flashlights. With the cloth straps of the lights secured, the three friends descended the stone steps into the darkness below.
* * * * * * *
“Ah can’t believe we haven’t found anything down here!” Apple Bloom complained as they walked down another dark stone hallway, after having passed through three essentially empty rooms.
“I can,” Sweetie Belle remarked. The look drawn from her earth pony friend prompted the unicorn to explain her reasoning. “These ruins have to be hundreds of years old and that secret entrance wasn’t exactly well hidden. So I’m not surprised that we aren’t the first to find this basement. I bet anything interesting was taken by other explorers long before we got here.”
“How’s this for interesting?” Scootaloo’s voice made the other two crusaders realize they’d entered into another room, and that this room was full of statues. The statues were larger than life and while the one Scootaloo was looking up at when she spoke was of a pegasus there were also statues of earth ponies and unicorns.
The three friends spent a few minutes examining the status, many having been built in heroic poses, until Apple Bloom spoke up. “Darn, nothing. Any of you get a cutie mark?”
Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle looked to their flanks only to find they still lacked any magical symbol telling them they had found their special talent and their purpose in life.
“No,” was Sweetie’s reply, as her ears fell flat in disappointment.
“Nope,” Scootaloo answered in a casual tone, hardly upset at all. Then motioning to the doorway she was near she added, “This room isn’t enough. Let’s keep exploring.”
With that the three friends ventured deeper into the ruins.
* * * * * * *
Four mostly empty rooms later and the cutie mark crusaders were venturing down yet another hallway. Until they found their path blocked by a large and ornately carved stone door. Three lines divided the pattern into three sections.
“Is that Arcanous?” Sweetie Belle asked, looking to the section on the lower right part of the door. Looking to the upper section and then the lower left she added, “Who’s that? And what’s with the star chart in the top part?”
Apple Bloom answered for the section of the patter on the lower left that depicted an earth pony mare surrounded by plants. “Ah think that’s the earth mother. Granny Smith told me stories about her. Ah think they went something like-”
“-When the world was new, the spirit of the earth awoke and found nothing but stone, and sea. She was not happy that the world was lifeless, and so she made the plants and the wild animals of nature. But it wasn’t enough. Nature was wild and untamed on its own. It needed someone to guide and to watch over it. So she gave a part of her own spirit to created the earth ponies, and that’s why we earth ponies have such a strong connection to the earth and to the plants she made.”
“Wow,” was all Apple Bloom’s friends said as she finished her story.
Apple Bloom didn’t let the silence last as she pointed to the section in the lower right depicting a unicorn stallion surrounded to all kinds of swirls and sparkles and asked, “Sweetie Belle you called this guy by name. Do you know his story?”
Sweetie Belle nodded and smiled as she launched into the story she had head, “Yes, Arcanous, The father of magic. The story I was told said that he was the sprit of magic itself. And one day he looked forth from the realm of magic as saw the world, it was teaming with life but it’s magic was wild and chaotic. He saw ponies trying to tame the land, but they lacked the ability to interact with magic. He thought to himself that ‘no good could come from that.’ So he used his magic to make a new breed of ponies, the unicorns. He taught them to use magic as he could, so they could bring order to the young and chaotic world.”
With Sweetie Belle’s story finished the two crusaders who had told their stories looked to the top section. Finally Sweetie conceded, “I’m not sure why there’s a star map up there.”
Unicorn and earth pony both looked to their pegasus friend. Scootaloo shook her head, not because she didn’t know what her friends wanted to hear, but because she did. She had already figured out the pattern to the door’s ornate design.
Scootaloo gave a weak smile and then answered, “That’s not a star map. Every pegasus knows that constellation. The constellation of the celestial pegasus. Her story says that she was flying among the heavens when she noticed the world below. Looking down on it she saw the earth ponies and unicorns, and she could tell they had good spirits. But they were hiding in caves from the terrors of the sky, dragons, gargoyles, harpies and other demons of the sky. So long as they hid the ponies of the world couldn’t tame the world before them. So she came down into the world and gave birth to the first mortal pegasi. When her children were numerous enough to be called a tribe, she taught them to fight and commanded them to be the guardians of the skies. Then she left them, returning to the heavens. But she gave the pegasi one last promise before she left, that when any pegasus, who lived their life doing what was right and just, died that she would call their spirit up the heavens to fly among the stars with her in eternal paradise.”
The other crusaders stared at their pegasus friend as they put the pieces together in their mind. Apple Bloom became the first of Scootaloo’s friends to solve the riddle by saying, “So the door, it has the three tribes origin stories.”
The three young ponies’ eyes were drawn to the other thing in each section of the design, a single hoofprint. “Ya don’t think…” Apple Bloom said as she stood up on her hind legs, reached up and with a little difficulty placed her small hoof in the shape that would have been more accommodating to an adult pony’s hoof than her youthful one.
Sweetie Belle shrugged and reached up to place her hoof in the hoofprint beside the image of Arcanous, saying, “Couldn’t hurt to try.” Though a shiver ran down her spine, as her experience had long taught her that any crusading activity had a good chance of finding a way to be painful.
“Ready?” Scootaloo asked her friends. They broadened their shoulders in response, so that Scootaloo could climb up on them, to reach the hoofprint in the upper section, below the celestial pegasus.
The moment Scootaloo fit her hoof into the last hoofprint a pulse of light ran through the pattern. A line of light cut down the middle of the door and the two halves started moving back, slowly opening the stone door.
Scootaloo leapt down before the door had moved enough to force her friends to come back down on all fours. “Cool!” the three friends whispered in unison, as they waited for the door to finish opening.
The cutie mark crusaders entered the now open doorway, into a dead end chamber. The room was simple, with only a few things of note in it. A small table with the remnants of two place mats for sitting on either side of it. Beyond the table was a small podium, as if somepony was suppose to stand at it to preside over whatever was happening at the table.
Finally on the table itself was a small figurine, made of three colors of stone. The figurine depicted three ponies, a unicorn made of purple stone sitting up with its front legs holding up the back legs of a pegasus. The pegasus part of the figurine was made of a blue color of stone and had its wings spread as if in flight. Though the pegasus’ front legs came down on the back legs of an earth pony made of green stone. The earth pony part of the figurine looked as if it was lying on its back with its back legs holding up the other half of the pegasus, and its front legs stretching out to connect with back legs of the unicorn. All together the three ponies of the figurine created a loop with a perfectly smooth center hole just the right size for a unicorn’s horn to be placed in the middle.
Scootaloo and Apple Bloom approached the table with the figurine on it, both muttering, “Cool.”
“Girls, wait!” Sweetie Belle’s cry snapped her two friends out of their awe.
“What?” Apple Bloom asked.
“Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that this is here?” Sweetie asked in return.
“What do ya mean?”
“That door wasn’t exactly hard to open, and you can’t tell me that we’re the first ponies in hundreds of years to figure out how to get in here. So why hasn’t this been taken by other explorers already?”
Sweetie Belle’s question had some merit to it and it gave her two friends pause as they began looking around the room for an answer.
Scootaloo spoke once she’d given the room a good looking at. “No holes in the walls. No bones laying around. I don’t see anything that looks like a booby trap,” she thought out loud as she brought her muzzle next to the figurine.
Scootaloo then gave the figurine a little nudge, moving it slightly, squinting, trying to see if there were any lines on the table that would hint at a pressure plate trigger. Although she found the task difficult thanks to how dim the table was. Wait, why was the table dim? Come to think of it why was the room dim? The thoughts made Scootaloo lift her head only to notice the spot on the wall in front of her flicker.
“Umm, Scootaloo? Did you recharge the batteries in the flashlights?” Apple Bloom asked, as she noticed the dimness too.
“I thought it was your turn to maintain the equipment,” Scootaloo confessed, already feeling that she knew she was wrong.
“No. I brought the snacks. Remember?” Apple Bloom sighed.
Right then Scootaloo’s headlamp flickered out completely. Throwing caution to the wind Scootaloo grabbed the figurine, tossed it in her saddlebag and bolted for the doorway saying, “Come on! We gota get out of here before yours run out.”
Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle joined their pegasus friend in running back the way they had come, but they had just left the room when their headlamps also flickered out. “Wait!” Sweetie Belle cried, bringing the trio to a halt in the now infinitely dark hallway.
“What’s wrong?” her friends asked together.
“I can’t see,” Sweetie said with a hint of panic in her voice.
“Yeah, none of us can. But how’s standing still going to get us out of here?” Scootaloo asked.
“No Sweetie Belle’s right, we can’t afford to get lost and separated down here. We need someway to stay together while we find our way out,” Apple Bloom said.
The three friends pondered their situation for a moment. As she did so, Scootaloo remembered one of Rainbow Dash’s flight lessons had been about navigation and making a mental map of the area. And when she applied the lesson to her current problem she envisioned a map of the ruin’s rooms and their path through them. “I think I remember the way out,” she said, smiling to the darkness.
“Great, but how do we stay together now that we can’t see anything?” Apple Bloom asked. Then a second latter adding, “Oops, sorry Sweetie.”
“No big deal, it’s just my tail,” Sweetie forgave her friend.
“Sweetie Belle you’re a genius! Take my tail, Apple Bloom take hers we can make a pony chain to stay together!” Scootaloo said, swishing her tail back and forth until she felt somepony bite down on it.
Once she heard her friends sound off with muffled voiced that they each had the tail of the pony in front of them, Scootaloo held one wing out to brush along the wall of the hallway, to keep herself from bumping into the walls as she lead the trio onwards.
* * * * * * *
The plan worked perfectly. Until Scootaloo had led them out of yet another hallway and felt her wing brush not a wall, but a statue’s base. The young pegasus froze as she remembered the room. But unlike the mostly empty rooms where the only thing to remember was what door they had left from, here she remembered the statues she’d looked at. She remembered that statues had lined the outer wall and another set of statues had been lines up in the middle of the room, and that she had gone three fourths of the way around the walking path from where she entered before going out the door she just returned through. But she couldn’t remember what way around the room she had gone.
“Uh, guys, we’re in the room with all the statues. Do either of you remember if we went left or right when we left that room?”
“Left!” Apple Bloom exclaimed.
“Right!” Sweetie Belle answered at the same time.
Scootaloo lowered her ears in annoyance. They were doomed to get lost down here weren’t they? Closing her eyes, not that she could see anything anyway, she tried once more to remember what way she had gone around the room. However, whether she played the memory with herself going left or right both versions felt just as real, even though only one could be. What she did remember was the pegasus statue that had been right by the door they had entered from, if she could see that statute again she’d know where they had come from.
“Sweetie Belle, you need to use your magic,” Scootaloo said, knowing the retort that was about to come.
“You know I can’t use magic yet,” the young unicorn said.
“I remember a statue by the entrance to this room, if I can see it again I’ll know which way is out.”
“That’s nice and all Scootaloo but that doesn’t change that part about me not knowing how to cast an illumination spell,” Sweetie Belle protested.
“I don’t need a real spell! I’ve seen you get sparks from that horn of yours before. That’s all I need, just enough to see for a second or two! Only you can do that!” the orange pegasus practically begged her friend.
“Okay, I’ll try,” Sweetie whimpered, fearing that she would fail to be helpful to her friends.
A moment latter Sweetie Belle could be heard groaning as she tried to focus her will into her horn in a desperate attempt to force any kind of reaction. After a moment of trying a few green sparks of light shot from her horn and fell like the embers of a firework.
The light from the sparks was dim and lasted only a second, but it was enough. Scootaloo saw that the doorway currently on the left side of the room didn’t even have a pegasus statue next to it, and that the statue she remembered was on the right. “Got it!” she announced as the veil of darkness once more hid the room from sight, and she resumed leading her friends out.
The remaining rooms were easy enough to navigate by memory, even to the point were Scootaloo could feel the slack on her tail indicating that even her friends were retracing their paths more by memory than the tugs of the tails keeping them together. Finally they stumbled onto the stairs, and once they started ascending they caught the first glimpse of natural light their eyes had seen in over an hour.
The trio of friends rushed out into the monastery ruins and kept running until they were outside entirely, where they collapsed onto the grass beside Scootaloo’s scooter.
After a moment of laughing the three crusaders looked eagerly to their flanks only to find no magic symbol had appeared on any of them. Apple Bloom sighed, but then perked up as she said, “No cutie marks. But at least we found some treasure! Come on! Let’s get back to the clubhouse!”
* * * * * * *
Scootaloo was the last to enter the tree-house clubhouse. She was hot, sweaty, and tired. Although, she knew she was overacting how tired she was as she trudged across the clubhouse to the first body pillow she could find and fell on it like she had just died. Her friends didn’t deny her the act of the heroic and battle worn champion. Apple Bloom did however help herself to Scootaloo’s saddlebag to retrieve the figurine from it and set it on the floor in the middle of the room.
“What do you suppose it is?” the earth pony filly asked.
“Looks like a figurine to me,” Sweetie Belle stated the obvious.
“Well duh, but ya don’t go and make a figurine of an earth pony, a unicorn, and a pegasus forming a loop with their bodies, and hide in a secret basement, behind a magic door with the three tribes origin story characters on it, if it ain’t special.” Apple Bloom stated the even more obvious.
“Oh, right,” was all Sweetie said, before returning to examining the figurine in question.
Scootaloo just continued to lie on the pillow and watch her friends. Guessing the nature of an artifact hidden in an abandon monastery’s basement was for intellectual ponies. And the young pegasus knew she was a pony of action, just like her hero, mentor and honorary big sister, Rainbow Dash. Scootaloo’s eyes drifted to a picture on the wall of her hero, depicting the sky blue pegasus with the rainbow mane, and smiled as she thought. Rainbow Dash will be so proud of me when I tell her this story.
By now the figurine was sitting snugly on Sweetie Belle’s horn, although the unicorn filly was frowning. “See I told you it’s too big to be a horn ring,” she complained as she reached up to remove the figurine.
“Wait, maybe your only suppose to put your horn in there to turn it on or something. Try using magic on it,” Apple Bloom suggested.
Scootaloo couldn’t help but smirk at how silly her unicorn friend looked right now. Whatever the artifact was it certainly wasn’t a fashion accessory.
“Fine,” Sweetie Belle said, rolling her eyes before closing them to concentrate.
A few tiny sparks of green magic came from the filly’s horn, and immediately a powerful pulse of light came off the artifact, even knocking itself free of Sweetie Belle’s horn. Apple Bloom also visibly recoiled from the wave of light as it filled the clubhouse. Scootaloo felt the wave of light push slightly against her as it washed over her body, but she didn’t move nearly as much as her friends.
“Wow, that tingled,” Scootaloo said, as she finally got up from the pillow she’d been resting on.
Her friend also confirmed having felt a tingling feeling pass through them with the light, but other than that the three friends were at a loss as to what, if anything, the magic artifact had done. Aside from the fact that the artifact had a constant glow now, nothing else seemed different about the clubhouse or themselves.
“Maybe it was a dud? Or maybe I didn’t do something right, so it didn’t do anything? No that doesn’t sound right, it’s glowing now so it had to do something. We should probably take it to Twilight. If nothing else I bet she could tell us what it is,” Sweetie Belle suggested.
“Agreed, but it’s gonna have to wait until tomorrow. It’s getting kinda late, and ah don’t want to be late for dinner,” Apple Bloom said, pointing out the window at the sun low on the horizon.
The three friends nodded in agreement and went their separate ways, all heading home.
* * * * * * *
Scootaloo rolled in her front door and closed the door behind her. Seting her scooter beside the door she hung her helmet from its handlebars. A growl from her belly drew her into the kitchen, where she made a sandwich.
As Scootaloo ate the cold, plain meal she had prepared she couldn’t help but wonder what truly tasty dinners her friends were having, thanks to having somepony around to cook a real dinner for them. Despite her thoughts Scootaloo wasn’t jealous of her friends. She knew that her friends’ lives weren’t any more perfect than her own, only imperfect in different ways.
Every now and then Scootaloo would daydream that someday her family would be back together. And that could happen. All she needed was for her father to stop working so hard and her mother to find a job that didn’t keep her on the other side of the world all the time, granted that wasn’t likely to happen but Scootaloo could dream it. But that was a dream Apple Bloom couldn’t have because her parents were dead, and nothing fixed dead.
And then there was Sweetie Belle. It really wasn’t that hard to see how Sweetie longed for her big sister, Rarity’s, love. But it also wasn’t hard to see that Rarity was perfectly content living her own life, in which Sweetie Belle’s presence was not only optional, but usually deemed a distraction. And yet in only one night, all Scootaloo had had to do was bare her soul to Rainbow Dash, and already Dash had become a better big sister to her than Rarity was to Sweetie Belle. So no, Scootaloo wasn’t jealous of her friends, and knowing what she knew, how could she be?
With her dinner finished and darkness having clamed the land outside the windows, Scootaloo looked up from her spot on the couch at the stairs up to the second floor and her room. Feeling too tired to want to climb the stairs tonight, a smile crept across her face as she thought about the fact that there wasn’t anypony else in the house to care where she slept. So she turned out the lights and curled up on the couch.