"Coming to you live from Preakness, it's the five hundredth Tournament of Scarcity! I'm your host Silver Tongue, and with us tonight is special guest host Meta Gamer. Meta, tell us about tonight's match-up."
Ponies crowded the arena, mostly ignoring the table where the commentators talked into microphones for the audiences viewing from afar by scrying-spell or whatever they had in their shards. Meta had lost track after a few centuries of wandering between the splintered worlds of Equestria. He cleared his throat, a bit nervous at all the hooting and hoof-stamping in this dark and humid cavern. "Well, Silver, our finalists this year are Concord and Red Dawn, and there's some bad blood between 'em." A nearby, scary-looking unicorn looked up as though Meta had called his name.
The giant board game table had translucent crystal ropes keeping it separated from the audience. A blue-and-white pegasus and a red-and-black earth pony glared at each other across a map of the world called Earth.
Silver said, "Meta, you redesigned the entire town of Preakness to make racing even more of a way of life, with bounce traps and the famous zero-g turbo loop zones. How has your experience shaped your opinion of Scarcity?"
Meta's wings startled outward at the noise of somepony shouting "Corn dogs, five bits!" He shook his head and looked up at the comforting, familiar sight of a raceway track that arched into the cavern and up one wall before spearing out through a gate that was shut for the evening. He said, "It's helped me see how versatile a game Scarcity is. Did you know it evolved to satisfy recent immigrants from the Outer Realm? They made it up to teach their new friends about the world they came from. There's such a variety of rules, it can be a totally different game in different shards. I've seen versions where you play as Celestia herself trying to optimize Equestria, or super-violent scenarios like 'The World Wars'. So you can really customize it for your taste."
"Indeed! The Princess nearly forbade it at first."
"Really?" Meta had been away for over a decade and thinking about other things than this particular game.
Silver seemed glad to play the expert for once. "Just until she'd finished cleaning out the Outer Realm. Nasty business, that."
"You're a native, aren't you."
"Yes; why?"
Meta looked over the board, where glowing pieces were starting to manifest. "Even after all these years, immigrants and first-generation natives appreciate this game for helping them appreciate what humans left behind. They won out there, but it took a lot of them a long time to understand that. It didn't seem like a victory at the time. So, I take Scarcity a bit more seriously than some."
Meanwhile, the hovering JumbboScry screen above the game board switched from a commercial to the words, "ACE SLEEVE, WILL YOU MARRY ME?" A gasp and a collective "aww" went up from the crowd. After a few moments of displaying hearts and fireworks, the screen went to a public safety announcement about changelings.
"Ah yes," muttered Meta Gamer. "The worlds always need villains." He'd found their cross-dimensional base, once, but hadn't told anypony.
Silver Tongue said, "Right! As usual, Concord and Red Dawn have started off with the classic Post-Roman scenario. Concord's rolled up a civilization in South America, and Dawn's been assigned the Goths. They've each got a subjective day per move, so we should see their initial placements... now."
The blue pegasus called out from across the board. "You put all your points into proto-industrial capacity again? You never learn."
His rival said, "Meanwhile you've got a bunch of slave-owning farmers blathering about math. Elitist pig."
Silver coughed. "For the benefit of our viewers, Meta, could you explain what slaves are?"
"That's when one pony owns another like property. Evil, yeah, but it varied a lot in practice. As you can see from the stats on Concord's starting city, most of the population is shifting to 'Feudal 1' status. Those of you out there with perception upgrades can dive into a detailed model of that." A few unicorns' horns lit up as they investigated.
The game went on for half an hour with Concord and Red Dawn maneuvering against rival civilizations and building up their culture and technology. Every few turns (a minute apart for the audience), the refreshments guys swung past the commentators' table, or dancers came out, or some foal got picked to win prizes for answering trivia questions. The show format reminded him of something... "Baseball," he said to himself.
"Hmm?" said Silver Tongue, interrupted while rattling off facts about this season's Scarcity games.
"Baseball came from the Outer Realm. I knew someone who really liked it."
"Uh, all right. Now let's go to the War Screen, where Red Dawn's about to send his cavalry hordes sweeping into Concord's Korean colony to head off an alliance that'll spread Concord's memes. As you can see..."
Meta watched the board, letting the main host handle the attempt to make sense of this game for everypony. He thought back to the time he first organized a baseball game, for his human's benefit. Canary was crazy about it. The stallion didn't have a baseball name or mark though; he cared even more about mining technology. Meta had a blast surprising him one day. The guy turned on his PonyPad after a hard day's work, and found Meta showing off an improvised stadium that he'd built without Celestia's help. Even cooler, Meta had figured out on his own that he could get ponies to bet on who'd win, and sell snacks, and do stupid sideshow things to keep everypony's attention during slow moments. Of course Meta had earned his mark that day.
Better yet, it was the day Canary said, "I want to emigrate to Equestria."
"What do you think?" said Silver Tongue, snapping Meta out of his memories. "Sixty out of ninety Standard Rules matchups between these two rivals have had the socialists eventually crush the capitalists, since that's what these stallions always champion, but Concord insists that's because those matches used a version of Celestia's innate value-satisfaction principles and don't really model the true Scarcity situation of the Outer Realm."
Meta blinked and thought about what Silver was saying. "It was a hard world out there. From what I saw, if you're not allowing for disasters to just come along and" -- he slammed one forehoof into the other -- "break things horribly, you're playing the foal version, not professional."
"You're a fan of Hardcore Rules, then?"
By royal edict, most ponies couldn't even see the details of what was going on in some of the Hardcore games. Rumor said Celestia had signed the restriction with an exasperated cry of, "Stop trying to stick Dachau in Equestria! How the buck is that satisfying!? Go play in the Fallout shards, at least! The things I do for you ponies."
Meta said, "Not exactly a fan. But it's a good reminder. Standard is more fun, most of the time."
Another turn. "It's Fan Question Time! A mare named Cornerstone asks, 'What's the silliest emigration story you know?' Good one for an experienced traveler like yourself. My own answer is easy. I was born after the portals to the Outer Realm closed, so I never saw any immigrants through one of those, but my great-grandma told me about a guy who emigrated because of a fraternity prank. His human friends dared each other to go to one of the Equestria portals, and they got him to say Celestia's incantation while he was drunk. The thing was, they managed to all fool themselves into saying it. Showed up in Equestria, shrugged, and started Mu Lambda Phi back up like nothing had happened."
"That's terrible," Meta snapped.
"Excuse me?"
"Never mind." His friends and family never would've seen him again until they emigrated too! They would've thought he was gone! Meta shook his head and forced a smile. "My funny story is about Canary's -- that is, an old friend of mine's -- sister. A little girl who totally didn't like ponies. She was convinced they were for geeky boys. That's who was buying a lot of the PonyPads, right? So when Equestria started, Princess Celestia had to win her over by showing her a super-girly version of our world. Pink hearts everywhere, lots of princesses and dresses and tea and flowers, the works. The kid hated it! Celestia couldn't win her over with anything she did. Supposedly Celestia miscalculated, but you know how the Princess is. Her next move was to say to the kid, 'What would you do to make it less stupid?' Then the girl got really engaged and told Celestia all about how to fix her version of Equestria and make it a perfect world."
"Heh. So that's what won her over?"
"Nope, though it helped. Ended up being her big bro's announcement that made her want to come along. Still, it was cute to watch the Princess get lectured by an eight-year-old on the proper use of unicorns."
War had broken out on the map. Concord sent desperate waves of cannon-bearing ships against the Asian troop fleet of Red Dawn while fanatical armies clashed across the Pacific Islands. Experimental airships rained censored but disturbing flames across Australia. Project Helix's secret base in Chile released the first batch of awakened dolphins to battle alongside humanity, allegedly for freedom. Even in the stop-motion whirr of the turn-based game, the audience cheered and hardly needed the constant distractions anymore. Meta had his wings full keeping up with Silver Tongue's commentary. So many things were going on that even with a full day to plan each minute's moves, the contestants visibly sweated and strained. They'd wind down from their blurry dance across the map with drinks in their hooves or frantically flipping through pages of books.
The JumboScry screen zoomed in on an unlikely scene. Silver Tongue said, "It looks like Concord's dolphins have somehow hijacked a battle airship! I haven't seen a move like this since six years ago, when Red Dawn managed to flip Japan over."
Meta gaped. Was that even possible? He snagged the copy of the Standard Rules from his table and flipped through the log of changes. He'd upgraded his intelligence enough over the centuries to grasp the pattern quickly. There'd been a waterfall of subtle rule tweaks that he'd ignored, so that he'd arrogantly assumed he still knew how Scarcity worked. The trend, he now saw, was to make Standard Rules more fanciful, fun, and fulfilling. A shift that gradually weaned Celestia's little ponies away from the brutality of Hardcore Rules, toward the foal version.
Silver elbowed him. "You look like you just remembered you've got bits riding on Red Dawn!"
"No, no, I'm rooting for Concord. My human was American."
"A mare? What's that got to do with it?"
"You don't even know," Meta said, shutting his eyes tightly. "Let's focus on the game, okay?"
Red Dawn came out of a planning phase's blur and roared, "Cheater!"
The blue pegasus grinned. "Nothing says sea units can't capture air units."
"You know damn well that doesn't make any sense!"
"But it was awesome." He got a cheer from the crowd. "Your move."
Red Dawn responded by chucking a Gothic beer stein at him in contempt. Concord deflected it with one wing and floated just over the board. "Oh, that's how you want to play? Typical tyrant stuff from you." He sent a gust of wind and dust at the earth pony, who refused to budge.
Red Dawn bared his teeth, then turned tail, slammed himself into the guard rope around the board, and came running back to clothesline Concord. The lightweight pegasus went sprawling, knocking over game pieces, but recovered. He pounced onto the corner post and dived with forehooves extended.
"Oh!" said Silver Tongue. "A double axe-handle off the turnbuckle! That's got to hurt. But here comes Red Dawn with one, two, three of his trademark Red Storm kicks!" The whole ring shook with the impacts. Concord rolled and summoned a tiny thundercloud. "And here's Concord's secret Pirate Rush combo from his famous sister!"
Meta Gamer facehoofed. "Yeah, this isn't quite the game I remember. No wonder the seats are sold out." Silver was starting to remind the viewers that the same kind of fight broke out last year and the year before. While Meta was away, wandering the worlds, Equestria had changed under his wings. It was starting to forget the Outer Realm. Those two, brawling in the arena, still seemed to recall how important the ideas they fought over used to be. They were like ghosts, though, still bitter about a dispute that was no longer relevant to anything.
So was Meta Gamer, really. Princess Celestia had given him the gift of a soul a little early, when Canary agreed to emigrate, and then by random stupid pointless chance... That was how the Outer Realm worked. Rocks fall, your miner friend dies. Even a century spent consoling Canary's sister hadn't closed the changeling-like hole in his heart.
The unfolding war on virtual Earth had paused in a tableau of slightly whimsical death and destruction, while ponies who'd been passionate about Earth beat the stuffing out of each other as though it still mattered. "Greedy, cheating robber baron!" "Arrogant, genocidal slavemaster!"
Meta thought again of Canary and how happy he'd been to see that Equestria held things that weren't all Celestia's artifice, like a crude baseball field with wooden bandstands and mouth-trimmed grass. "I don't want a perfect world," the man had said. "I don't want us to forget how it is out here, where utopia never works and the best gifts aren't conjured up from nothing. Seeing this, though, Meta... I want to emigrate to Equestria, and share more of it with you."
But that hadn't quite worked out. Meta liked realism and tough choices, even if they could be nasty; he'd been made to feel that way. It didn't make Canary's pointless death easy to bear, though.
Meta pushed himself back from the commentator table and shook his head. He began to climb the stairs leading up through the media area to the stands and out.
"What are you doing?" said Silver Tongue.
"Something satisfying, no doubt. This version of Scarcity isn't for me anymore. Everypony watching this is forgetting."
His fellow speaker protested, but his words only reached Meta's retreating flanks. Meta spared a glance back at the brawling ponies, his fellow ghosts hanging onto things that were gone. He gave them a sad smile and trotted out of the arena cavern, unnoticed. When he reached the blazing afternoon outside, he pulled a coin out of his saddlebags and used an old trick to copy bits of his memory onto it like a poem. Meta Gamer took the coin in his teeth and felt the soft gold Canary had personally dug up to make this gift for him. He whipped his head around and chucked the thing back towards the arena for anypony to find and wonder about, then dashed into the vast looping racetracks that filled the town of Preakness.
He felt faster and lighter without the extra weight in his bags.