Love's a Roller Coaster Ride

by The Lord Thunder

Chapter 3

Starlight and Sunburst stopped on the paved walkway to observe an odd spectacle.

“Huh. What’s this?” Starlight wondered out loud.

They watched a unicorn stallion slowly being hoisted two hundred feet in the air towards the tops of two parallel poles. The only thing keeping him from falling was a chest harness attached to two pairs of elastic cords which, in turn, were attached to another set of cables running between the tops of the poles.

Starlight read the nearby sign out loud. “‘The High Horse?’”

“High indeed,” Sunburst agreed. “What’s it do, anyway?”

Starlight had her eyes glued to the pony suspended high above the ground. Once he reached the tops of the poles, the pony dropped and screamed in delight as he plummeted towards what seemed to be certain doom.

“WOW! That’s insane!” Starlight shouted.

“Holy Celestia!” Sunburst shielded his eyes as if expecting the worst. The bungee cords held fast, however, and flung the pony forward several yards, then retracted and sent him sailing backwards, swinging him like a pendulum until he at last came to a halt, dangling a few feet above the ground.

“Sunburst!” Starlight yelled with a smile he’d come to recognize all too well.

“No way. No how. Not even once. You’re nuts.” Sunburst shook his head. “Roller coasters are bad enough; I am NOT doing a bungee drop.”

Giggling, Starlight nudged Sunburst playfully. “I was only kidding.”

Sunburst turned away from the High Horse and started down the path away from it. “If unicorns were meant to fly, we’d have been given wings.”

“Actually, there’s a spell for that,” Starlight answered, keeping pace with him. “I’ve mastered it.”

“A flight spell?” Sunburst rubbed his chin in thought as he walked. “Hmmm. I’ve heard of it. Rare, but not impossible. I’m impressed, Starlight.”

Starlight flashed a confident smile as she ran her hoof through her hair. “Well, I always have been something of a natural.”

***

A funnel cake frosted with powdered sugar hovered in front of Trixie as she weaved her way through crowds of ponies on the way back to her wagon. After getting some food in her belly, she could do with a nap.

Halfway back to her portable home, Trixie stopped in midstep at a familiar sight among the swarms of ponies.
Starlight Glimmer was here! What were the odds of that? Trixie's tour had occupied so much of her time that she hadn't taken any of it to write to Starlight in a while. She trotted over to say "hello", but stopped when she saw another familiar pony next to Starlight.

Is that Sunburst with her? Trixie thought. Oh, this is too good to be true! Go for him, Starlight, you sly little mare, you.

Seeing the two of them brought a warm, giddy feeling to the pit of Trixie’s stomach. The nap could wait. This little show was sure to be too good to miss.

***

Starlight and Sunburst came up on a square game booth housing rows of glass bottles arranged in a grid. Several hopeful ponies threw plastic rings at the bottles. It was a simple premise and a familiar carnival game: toss a ring, get it to land on one of the bottles and win a prize.

“Twenty rings for five bits?” She looked up at the large, filly-sized plush animals dangling from the booth’s ceiling. “That’s all you have to do to win one of those?”

“Do the math, Starlight,” Sunburst said. “A low-cost game for a high-cost prize? They have to make a profit, you know.”

“What’s five bits?” Starlight countered with a shrug. “Can’t hurt to try.”

“Sure! Looks like fun.”

Starlight fished five coins from her pouch and placed them on the counter in front of the griffon running the game. “Twenty rings, please.”

The game operator scooped up the bits and replaced them with a box of multi-colored plastic rings. Starlight grabbed one with a telekinesis spell, closing one eye in aim.

“Excuse me.”

Starlight halted, glancing at the sign the game operator was pointing to. It had a picture of a glittering unicorn horn in a circle with a line through it: No magic. Starlight’s ears flattened with embarrassment. “Oops.”

She let the ring drop onto her hoof, took aim and threw it towards the bottles. It clattered off her target, dropping between it and an adjacent one.

“Drat. Missed.”

Starlight took another ring and tossed it. It bounced off a bottle and flew outside the play area.

“Little too much on that one, Starlight,” Sunburst said.

The next five fared no better, all of them ricocheting clumsily off the bottles without making a ringer.

“Wow, this is a lot harder than it looks,” Starlight said.

“You got this, Starlight!” Sunburst cheered.

Starlight nodded with newfound confidence, taking a deep focusing breath. She let the ring fly, only for the thick glass to deflect it back at them. Starlight covered her face on instinct, but the ring flew towards Sunburst and landed perfectly on his horn.

“It’s a ringer!” Starlight said with a chuckle as she watched the ring dangle in front of Sunburst's eyes. “Does that count?”

The griffon shook his head, straight-faced.

“You take your job way too seriously, you know that?” Starlight asked. The griffon tightened his beak in response. “Come on, it was funny! This is a carnival, you really should at least pretend like you’re having a good time.”

“They don’t pay me enough to care,” he grumbled.

Sunburst lowered his head, allowing the ring to slide off his horn and onto his hoof. Tapping it several times with his free hoof, he eyed it closely with a questioning hum. “I understand. It’s the composition of the rings. They’re made out of a very thick and hard plastic so they have no shock absorption. Not to mention the rings aren’t much wider than the necks of those bottles.” He bounced the ring in his hoof, testing it thoroughly. “Then there’s the matter of their weight. So what we have here is an object with too much density and not enough impact absorption to cover its mass. In other words, these rings are designed to bounce. The trick would be to land them on the bottles with almost no force at all, and good luck with that. Your only hope is to get lucky enough to make a ringer off of a bounced throw.”

“That’s a nice speech,” the griffon commented. “Are you saying my game isn’t fair?”

“Actually, for the low cost of the game and prizes like those I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

The griffon shrugged again. Starlight chucked several rings towards the bottles, but the glass rejected every throw until she was left with an empty box of rings.

“Shoot.” Starlight held up a hoof in defeat. “I’m out.”

Sunburst’s horn glittered as he reached into his own pouch. “Here, let me give it a try.”

Starlight grinned and backed off to a spectating position. “Go for it, Sunburst!”

Comments

[ElAfrakao]

I really like their dynamic!

[PopopamAJ]

Starlight flashed a confident smile as she ran her hoof through her hair. “Well, I always have been something of a natural.”

:D episode quotes!

[RoyalBardofCanterlot]

I like Sunburst encouraging her, it was sweet. The scene where she got the ring on his horn was funny...and maybe foreshadowing?

[Yoshifan30]

“They don’t pay me enough to care,” he grumbled.

Yeah that's pretty much how they feel at the carnival

[Yoshifan30]

So it looks like they are continuing walking through the Carnival and they saw a catapult which to me I'm always afraid of that but Starlight was pretty nice enough not going in there for sunburst sake so they check out the carnival games and they did a ring tossed of course one of those games are very rigged and very unfair I wonder how Sunburst is going to do this but little do they know Trixie is here in the carnival as well