Ch 2: A Slimy Ghost
Our Girl Scootaloo
by Cozy Mark IV
Disclaimer: This is a non-profit fan-made work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the property of Hasbro. Please support the official release
Chapter Two: A Slimy Ghost
I got a job across state lines in the big city, and we moved into modest house on the opposite side of the city. In this state we could adopt a child, and we soon had the paperwork filled for our adopted daughter Scootaloo.
When I brought home the completed paperwork and the approval letter Kevin prepared a feast and a cake to celebrate. Our little one insisted on candles, so we put some on and let her have the fun of blowing them out.
“So I’m officially part of the family now? That is so cool! Does this mean I won’t have to hide anymore?” She asked pleadingly.
“It won’t be much longer now, Scootaloo.”
On one of last trips to the hospital before the big day Mary showed us something strange on the MRI image from last time.
“These spots on the top of her brain, isn’t that where the contacts for her prosthetic are?”
I looked at Kevin, mortified. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine as far as I can tell, but these spots look almost like RFID tags or tiny antennas…” She frowned “Is it possible her body is adapting, trying to improve the sensitivity of the connection?”
Scootaloo looked puzzled. “Does that mean I’m some kind of Borg pony?”
Stephanie raised an eyebrow. “You let her watch Star Trek?”
I smiled as Kevin got down on his knees and made a show of looking Scootaloo over before pronouncing “Nope, you 100% pony. Know how I know?” She shrugged her right arm “Because Borg ponies aren’t TICKLISH!”
They rolled on the floor laughing as he tickled her ribs under the saddle bag and the rest of us watched and smiled.
After the usual samples were taken and cataloged Mary made sure the MRI room was empty and I unbuckled her prosthetic arm, but as Scootaloo got closer to the scanner she started to fidget with her wings.
“Daddy, my wings feel funny” Her face took on a confused look “and kind of ouchy.” Stephanie was already at her side and looking her over.
“Does it hurt when I do this? This?” She put both wings through the full range of motion with no ill effects. Scootaloo was quite a trooper, and didn’t complain easily, and more than once she had come in with a skinned knee or scrapped flank without letting us know because “You make such a fuss! I’m fine!”
“Are you okay to finish up the scan? It might tell us if something is wrong with your wings.”
“Our little foal squared her shoulders and looked determined “I can take it. Its not that bad.” And with a sidelong glance at me “I’m not a little foal anymore” she pouted “I’m a big girl now.”
We had to tell not to squirm because it would ruin the image, and she set her jaw, tucked her nose under my chin and nodded. Every time the MRI started up I could feel her tense up and shiver a bit, but she stuck with it, and we soon finished and left Mary and Stephanie to look over the image. Moments after stepping out the door of the MRI room she seemed to perk up.
“Hey, it doesn’t hurt anymore!” We gave each other relived looks and hugged her close as she squirmed “You guys! It was just a little ouchy, I’m fine.”
We opened the door to the MRI room and went back in to tell Mary had Stephanie, but Scootaloo walked slower and slower as she entered the room.
“Hey ow! Now my wings hurt again.”
Mary came out from behind the computer console “I’ll bet they do, now out with you, all of you! Shoo!”
We scurried back to the waiting room with Mary in tow, and again Scootaloo perked right up within a few steps. “Hey, I feel better again!”
Kevin and I looked at each other, then Mary.
“I think I know what’s happening” She said pulling up the MRI image on the computer terminal in the corner. “See these shadowy blurs around her mid section? Those distortions in the image follow the outline of her wings. The only thing that can cause distortions like this is metal of some kind.”
We all looked at Scootaloo who fluffed out her wings and examined them carefully before looking back at us with a confused expression. “I have metal in my wings? And metal hurts?”
Stephanie joined us and pulled the door closed “I looks like you are growing some kind of pattern with metal parts in there.” She said as she knelt and stroked a wing. “And metal can heat up in an MRI scanner – its because of the magnets. It doesn’t look like an illness, the pattern is the same in both wings, but until we figure out what is going on I think you and your Daddy get to skip the monthly MRI.”
That seemed to satisfy her “Yay! The MRI is sooo boorring! And I have to hold still for soooo long!” She hopped and pranced a bit before a thought hit her “Does this mean I am a Borg pony all full of impants and natobots and stuffs?”
“No sweetie,” Stephanie chimed in. “I don’t know what this is, but it doesn’t look like a disease – it’s the same pattern on both sides, so apparently you’re supposed to grow up like this.” Then to us: “We’ll keep an eye on this, but it doesn’t look threatening yet. We will just have to use the ultrasound next time.”
Scootaloo gave us a sharp look “An ultra what? Am I going to have to hold still again for this?”
“No sweety, you can move around if you need to, and its usually faster, but it does involve goo.”
“Goo?” She asked.
An hour and one full body ultrasound later found us herding our little one into the hospital shower. “OOOHHHH! I am a slimy ghooooost!” she wailed as she slid into the shower and I helped her set the water temperature. Kevin waited outside while I wondered about the wisdom of letter her watch Ghostbusters. A passing janitor mopping the floor looked up at Kevin as an enthusiastic rendition of ‘sponge bob’ rang loudly from the shower.
“Aren’t they just adorable at this age?”
With pressure mounting from Mary, we made some discreet inquires into the only news outlet we felt could safely release the news of our little one to the world – NPR radio. They had already run a few small pieces on the mysterious DNA sample no one could explain that was revolutionizing medical science, and when we called and identified ourselves as the source they were skeptical, but agreed to send a Ms Neighmond out to meet us.
We had Scootaloo wait in her room while we sat with Patti and went over the full file; the time portal, the medical records, photos of her growing up, everything we knew. When we were finished she was silent for a moment.
“This has got to be the most elaborate hoax I have ever seen. You have obviously spent a lot of time on this, but why would you concoct this ridiculous story?”
“Scootaloo,” I called down the hall “please come say hello to our guest.”
The only sound was the clop of her hooves as she trotted down the hall, right up to Patti and held out a crayon drawing with her prosthetic right arm “Hi Ms Patti! I drew this picture of you reporting on a health policys.”
Thank goodness for smelling salts.
Patti had to bring several people from the editor’s desk before they finally ran the story on the radio, and as we requested, they made the entire file and all the information available online except the pictures, only a few of which went up. This had the desired effect of spreading the impact over a couple of weeks as the world gradually got wind of the ‘fact’ that NPR had collectively lost their minds.
As various people with knowledge of science sifted through the records, the consensus soon developed that this was somehow real, even as the pundits continued to slam NPR. At the three-week mark Scootaloo, Kevin and myself made our first appearance on a major network and introduced our family to the world. Into the astonished silence we all asked the same thing, but Scootaloo summed it up best:
“I don’t know where I came from or how I got here, but I have friends to play with, teachers who care, a good home and two daddies who love me. Please don’t take that away from me.”
As the world looked into her big purple eyes there wasn’t a dry eye to be had in the house.
...
As the furor gradually built, our friends and fellow home school parents were a great help. When not traveling, we had been having almost nightly sleepovers since it all started to deal with the people and crazies who inevitably showed up.
We were very fortunate to find one of our home-school dads was a member of Bikers Against Child Abuse (BACA), and his help and support was invaluable. It was one thing for a group of parents have to stay up all night trying to put on a brave front as one crazy after another would drive by to yell obscenities and threats. When those same nutters drove up to threaten our daughter and were met instead by four or five huge bikers in full leathers, their Harrlies rumbling in the driveway, the result was very different.
Then next month was a roller coaster ride of publicity, stress and interviews. The days were stress and travel, and one amazed person after another as we traveled to the major television studios on the east and west coasts. In the evenings we spent at the hotels, we tried to keep up some sense of normalcy.
Keven and I had always been fans of Judy Garlin, and our daughter had grown up around her work, the Wizard of Oz being her favorite movie. She was still little enough to be scared of the flying monkeys, so we fast forwarded through those parts, just aw we did some scary parts in other films, but she had the main song memorized, and the cowardly lion was her very favorite character. Most evenings after a long day of travel we would all wind down to one of her favorite movies; she would hold still so we could un-strap her prosthetic, remover her pickup hat, and then she would climb into her bed for the night with her cowardly lion stuffed animal clutched in her mouth.
The stuffed lion had come home in that original batch of toys on our first day together, and she had latched onto it and immediately to the point that she couldn't get to sleep without it anymore. She had carried it with her everywhere at first, and the poor toy had needed repair after repair, until Kevin had finally given in and begun replacing torn fabric with duck canvas under the new orange fux fur. Despite all the abuse it took from her teeth, she dearly loved the little lion, and no matter what happened, we always put the wind up music box back in.
Like most things done with hands, the music box was beyond her abilities until her first prosthetic, and we made a habit of winding it up each night before we tucked her in to sleep. Some of her first words to us came on a night that first year when we forgot to wind her lion, and she had pushed her toy towards us with her nose, asking; “Daddy help Lion sing? Please?”
So even during all the stress we were all dealing with, no matter where we found ourselves on a given night, there were some familiar routines to rely on. We would plug her prosthetic in to charge, tuck her in with her stuffed lion, and both kiss her goodnight before winding up the little music box so she could fall asleep as her lion played 'Somewhere over the rainbow'.
…
There was one talk-show host that Kevin and I really did admire, and after the first week of morning news shows and feel-good regional affiliates, we got the call asking us to come and appear with Ellen DeGeneres. Scootaloo actually knew her show well, and after she had noticed that the kind blond lady sounded just like Dory the fish from 'Finding Nemo,' that was how we had explained the concept of actors and actresses, and that sometimes when people are on TV, they are pretending to be somebody else. This made her sad for a moment or two, but then Kevin had explained that what she was watching now was a talk show, and that Ellen was very real.
So, as we had traveled around from show to show, meeting second-string newscasters on the 'guaranteed good news' segments and slow-news-days, Scoot had occasionally, before cameras rolled, asked them if they were real talk-show hosts or just pretending. One poor newscaster on feel-good duty had confessed that he was really more of a meteorologist, and after explaining what that meant, his segment with Scootaloo had involved a surprising amount of discussion involving the various types of clouds, which Scootaloo knew well from one of the more scientific coloring books Mary had sent.
But none of the hosts she met was as real to her as Ellen was, and we debated whether or not to tell her just whom she would be meeting as the plane touched down in Los Angeles.
It turned out we didn't need to worry. The kind lady knew our daughter very well, partly through having mentored a few of the younger newscasters coming up in the business whom we'd already met, and partly because, well, she's Ellen, and I got the impression that she really just is that nice. Instead of the usual “and what is it like to have four legs?” or “Do you like it here with people?” (as if Scootaloo were some kind of alien space pony,) Ms. DeGeneres talked with her exclusively about matters of great cultural importance to little girls. Favorite cartoons (both preferred She-Ra, Princess of Power to Strawberry Shortcake,) favorite foods, and especially favorite movies came up during their conversation.
It struck Kevin and I that instead of how the newscasters and morning talk-show hosts had been a little nervous and edgy around our 'alien space pony,' to Ellen, Scootaloo was just another little girl who just happened to have four legs. As they talked about 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Wizard of Oz' as if they were the absolute height of cinematic art, and Scootaloo informed Ellen that her favorite was the Cowardly Lion, we could sense almost a tangible aura of 'aww' and 'she is so freakin' cute' coming out of the audience. As it happened, Ellen's present for the audience that day was a new make of portable Blu-Ray player suitable for the car (a fine choice, given the demographics who made up her typical audience,) and, since Scootaloo was present, a brand-new copy of the special anniversary edition of 'The Wizard of Oz' to go with it, as well as copies of the original book by L. Frank Baum to go with that for the audience, Scootaloo, and a lucky elementary school somewhere in America.
That night, Scootaloo fell asleep reading the original novel to her Cowardly Lion and telling him, at intervals, how awesome Ellen was in person. And so she had been.
We did what we could to shield her from it all, but some things were impossible to hide. During the next interview, at a morning talk show somewhere in the Midwest, Scootaloo was comparing favorite flavors of ice cream with a nice newscaster when a man stood up in the audience and began shouting obscenities.
“YOU FAGGOTS ARE GOING TO BURN IN HELL, ALONG WITH THAT GODLESS ORANGE FREAK!”
There was a lot more about evil liberals, black helicopters, and something about a pagan spaghetti monster being in violation of the word of god as security hauled him out. Poor Scootaloo cowered in my arms until everyone settled down and then looked right at the anchor and asked in a shaking voice “Why does that man hate my daddies?”
Dead silence followed.
“Daddy,” she almost whispered “am I a freak?”
Tears flowed, and we held her while she sobbed, comforting her as best we could. That one clip was probably played more than any other over the next week, but painful as it was, it seemed to help. The hate mail our friends had been sorting though dropped way off, and the news cameras seemed to keep a more respectful distance.
But then, of course, the clip got onto the Internet, and with that came the comments, the conspiracy theorists, the death threats and worse. A stern-faced female agent from the FBI or the NSA, we were never entirely certain which, began assisting with travel arrangements, checking in and I sometimes had the feeling Agent C.A. Tyler was watching us everywhere we went. When a strange-looking cab swerved to try and pick us up at the next airport and the agent had him suddenly arrested by local police and the TSA before ushering us smoothly into a black luxury car driven by one of her subordinates, we began to wonder, and when studios began bringing us in via back doors on unwritten, need-to-know timetables directed by that serious lady in shades and an earpiece, I realized two things.
One, our government was protecting their most unusual genetic and scientific asset. And two, they had sent us a vigilant watchdog. An ersatz delivery person with a box of Cowardly Lion dolls had managed to get past studio security, but when Agent Tyler met him at the door of our dressing room with her gun drawn, handcuffed him, had the Lions removed by another agent, frisked the man, background-checked him with someone on the other end of her earpiece and then proceeded to give him a very stern lecture about bringing things to be autographed without requesting clearance first, even if they were for the children on the cancer ward where his residency was underway and what did they teach you oncologists nowadays, really! Scootaloo thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened, laughed for the first time in two days and happily signed each and every Lion right on the tag for the terrified med student's sick patients, informing him that they would help them be brave, but Kevin and I realized exactly how dangerous the world could be. We knew all too well what could hide inside a Cowardly Lion doll from mending our daughter's, and even Agent Tyler's gruff 'Line of duty, no problem at all,' didn't muffle the fact that we were surprisingly grateful to have a Fed on our side.
Still, it was the scariest week of our lives.
And then it all got better.
We got word over Agent C.A. ('Cassandra, if you must know,') Tyler's earpiece that we were needed in Los Angeles urgently. Scootaloo was on the plane the next morning, surrounded by an extra detail of agents, one of whom made remarkably good coffee and another of whom had enough of T.S. Eliot's cat poems memorized to keep our daughter exceedingly entertained while the inexplicable private jet landed. We transitioned smoothly from the fanciest Cessna Citation I had ever seen outside of magazines into a sleek black Lexus limousine that took us, surprisingly, right back to-
“Daddy, I know this place! This is where Ellen works!”
We had occasionally seen our favorite talk-show personality angry. We had occasionally seen her frustrated. But as we waited in the soundstage wings to go onstage, the clip of the horrible, bigoted man from the audience playing on a screen behind Ms. DeGeneres, we had never seen such a look of absolute contempt on her usually calm features.
“This happened just the other day, in America,” she explained, as the audience booed the man, his views and everything even remotely connected with him. “As you know, I'm familiar with what it feels like to have small-minded people trying to make me think I'm a freak. But Scootaloo is just a little girl. And I wanted to make sure she knew that not everybody in the world is like that. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back the Scott family!”
Scootaloo came racing out at high pony speed to hug her TV heroine. And, to Ms. DeGeneres' credit, she was completely cool with being hugged by a little cartoon pony. I didn't quite catch the exact words she used when she told Scootaloo about how mean and intolerant people had said the very same things about her when she was younger and just out of the closet, but I'll never forget how personally Scootaloo took that news.
“They called you a freak? But...but you're you!”
“I know, right? And you're you, Scootaloo. The kind of person who says mean, nasty things like that just doesn't understand that it's okay to be different. It's okay to be a cartoon pony, and it's okay to fall in love with whomever you want, just like your Daddies and I did. You just have to remember that for every one of those intolerant people, there will always be many, many more people who like difference, and who love you for who you are.”
The audience went wild.
“So, Scootaloo, what do you think we should do about intolerant people?”
“Daddy says we need ta' set a good example.”
“I think that's a great idea,” the dear lady agreed. “So I thought really hard, and I realized that the prosthetics you use to write and to pick things up, well, wouldn't those be nice for some other children who are different?”
“Can we give them some?” Scootaloo asked excitedly. “Mine are really nice. I write LOTS better wif' my prosfetic than wif' my mouth!”
“Actually, yes!” The same screen that had shown the horrible clip went to a split-screen satellite feed from no less than four Children's Hospitals, where two little boys and two little girls, victims of land mines abroad, childhood bone cancer, a nasty birth defect and an awful freak accident, were all waving and smiling with brand-new prosthetics. They weren't 100% the same as Scootaloo's, but they were very clearly from the same manufacturer, and for a second I wondered where Ellen had possibly found the money, but then one of the girls did a twirl with her new arms in a ballet position and I saw the sponsorship stickers on the harness near her shoulder blades.
Evidently, when one is an actress, comedienne and beloved TV personality, there are somewhat richer places from which to call in favors.
Scootaloo waved excitedly at the other children and actually hopped up and down, hovering a little between hops as her little wings beat wildly. That soon replaced the Horrible Clip on the Internet, kick-started the new Web tradition of LOLScootaloos, and helped raise many hundreds of thousands of dollars for the new serious illness, prosthetic and tolerance education fund Ellen and Scootaloo founded together.
Our daughter's nightmares stopped, the death threats disappeared (we were never sure if it was our FBI agent or our TV heroine stopping those, but some combination of both seemed logical,) and before she learned her multiplication tables, Scootaloo was in Forbes' top 500 philanthropists.
So it wasn't that bad after all, dealing with the American media.
Stats
Page generated in 0.033 seconds
Total duration
906 users online
499,943 hits today, 2,244,100 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
WAIT.......
wasnt she adopted by an straight couple in the first chapter
2307544
Jayne is one of the Dad's middle names, but he prefers to go by it. Don't know why, but can you fault the guy?
2935512
Musta been an Adam Baldwin fan...
Forgot to comment on the previous chapter, but CAD ftw.
Ellen DeGeneres
^This^
Speaking of...
Apparently that is an actual religion now. One of my friend's at my school got his dad to create a petition for it, and now the Unites States government recognizes it as a religion.
Ellin from what I watch on tv IS a really nice person I think she'd enjoy my little pony personally since it teaches love and tolerance