//------------------------------//
// Chapter 5 
// Story: A Scootaloo Story 
// by Golden Tassel 
//------------------------------//

Scootaloo couldn't sleep. The sun had gone down hours ago, and all she had done since going to bed was to lie there alone in the dark. She couldn't bear to look at her poster of Rainbow Dash any more; it only reminded her of what she couldn't have. She wished she had never seen that flier about the stuntpony competition.

"Why did I have to get my hopes up?" Scootaloo sat up and started punching her pillow. "Why did they have to encourage me?" Her voice became a growl as she thought of her friends. She threw one last punch into her pillow then buried her face in it to muffle a scream. Scootaloo lay there silently for a while after that, catching her breath.

They had no idea how hard the last week had been on her. Each day had been one let-down after another. Giving up had been a relief. Now Scootaloo could just forget about the whole thing. She only hoped that her friends would forget about it too, so they wouldn't ask her why she's not in Manehattan competing for those tickets next month. Scootaloo didn't want to have to lie to her friends about why, though she had already picked out a good one: "I don't really need the tickets, so I figured I'd let some other kid win them."

"I bet he'll be real happy," Scootaloo said to herself.

Scootaloo's stomach growled; a wilted daisy and alfalfa sandwich was starting to sound pretty appetizing. So the young filly got out of bed and went downstairs. When she got to the kitchen, however, she found that Honeydew had used up the last of it for herself. All that was left was half a loaf of stale bread, and half a sandwich on the coffee table.

Scootaloo went over to claim that last half for herself, and there she found Honeydew asleep on the couch, as was not uncommon for the mare. Also on the table was a small bag with dried flower buds in it. Scootaloo had no way of knowing, but they were poison joke flowers, harvested before they bloomed—it was their pollen that caused the magical joke effects for which the flowers had been named.

In the ashtray on the table was a poison joke cigarette that Honeydew had lit shortly before falling asleep. It had smoldered down about a third of the way since then, and its end still glowed faintly while a wispy trail of smoke rose off it and swirled in the air. Scootaloo looked at it curiously. She glanced at Honeydew to make sure she was still sleeping before taking both the sandwich and the cigarette back to her room.