Here’s a question, does Twilight ever get lost in her castle?

I’m wondering because I’m lost in her castle, again. This place has too many hallways to go through, it’s all made of the same crystal stuff, and there are no landmarks. I don’t know if I’m in a different hallway or running in circles in the same one over and over. Would hanging a few signs kill the Princess of Friendship?

Back when Twilight first got her castle, the entire town paraded behind her to check out what’s inside. It was a pretty good party. Problem was no one knew how to get back out. The entire town got lost. Some ponies were wandering this place for days. Rumor has it the search teams never found Misses Walnut. Mister Walnut said this was fine, and he left town the next day.

Did I pass that staircase? I swear I’ve seen that staircase at least five times. This is getting on my nerves! I’m going to be wandering this castle for days! Where’s Rainbow Dash? She showed me the way last time.

“Hey, Scoots!”

I jump at the voice, and spin around to find Dash standing in a door way, waving for me to come over.

Dash is smiling, so she’s not mad at me for being late. That’s good. “You walked by this door six times. I was wondering when you’d figure it out.”

I walked by six times?! And she didn’t say anything?! “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugs. “It was funny. But we got bored and want to start now, so joke’s over. Come on in. We’re all set up.”

My eyes roll. Element of Loyalty my flank. I follow Dash through the door and into the room beyond.

This place is called the Map Room, because there’s a big, magic map of Equestria in the middle of the room. It usually tells Dash and her friends where to go to find a friendship problem, but we managed to grab it for our game. Twilight even figured out how to zoom into places, and she made Manehattan big for us. Moving play pieces in an exact replica of a city is so much cooler than imagining it in your head.

Rainbow Dash takes her seat in the big chair with her cutie mark on it, and I sit in the chair with the butterflies. Dash adjusts the DM board, stands up, and grins. “Welcome, ladies and gentle-dragon, to another night of Prototype: Equestria Strains!”

The little dragon next to me tosses a handful of chips in his mouth and crushes them in a big bite. “Finally, I thought we’d never start.” Pieces of crumbs fly out of his mouth. Mom would freak if she saw this.

I shrug. “What can I say, this castle doesn’t have any maps.”

“Yeah, I need to talk to Twilight about that.” Spike points to the yellow section Manehattan. We color coded parts of the map to represent the zones. Pretty nifty trick. “Twilight and Applejack went to solve a friendship problem yesterday, and they moved all the pieces around. It’s not perfect, but I put them back where I remember. Most of us where in the daycare, anyways.”

I look at where he’s pointing at. It’s a flat, long building that’s glowing yellow. Three figurines are standing in it. The smallest one is a green pegasus with a camera around his neck. The middle one is a unicorn in a black jumpsuit. The largest is a griffon showing off her monster claws. The biggest one is mine.

A twenty sided die rolls across the table and lands in front of me. I read it aloud. “Twelve.”

Dash grins. “Oh good, none of you were attacked by zombies in the middle of the night. We can start where we left off. It’s now the next day. Tensions are rising”-

A voice from the other side of the table interrupts Dash. “Before we start, I need to say this. Scootaloo, change your character’s name.”

Spike smacks his forehead and groans. “Can’t we play the game? We’ve been sitting for half an hour already.”

I agree with him. I want to get down and dirty today. “Why, what’s wrong with my character?”

The griffon at the other end of the table leans over and glares at me. “You’re character is me. She is literally me.”

My hooves go up in the air. “Don’t look at me, Dash helped me make her… you… it…”

The griffon directs her glare to the mare behind the gameboard and growls. “Rainbow. Tell her to change the name.”

Dash leans back in her chair and waves a hoof at the griffon. “Lighten up, Gilda. Scoots needed a character to rollplay, and I gave her the first thing that came to mind.”

Gilda’s head cocks to the side. “I get that, but you could have at least used a different name.”

Dash shrugs. “I don’t know any other griffon names. What else was I supposed to give her?”

Gilda holds up a claw. “Robin, Beatrice, Francine, Edna.” She counts each name with a talon. “Martha, Wanda, Lorene, Irene, Daphne, Hilda”-

“Okay, okay, I get it. But we were short on time, and I needed to make up a quick character.”

“Use a friend other than me. Pinkie is already an NPC, and you’re the damsel in distress. Why not Twilight, or Applejack? Heck, I’d like to see Fluttershy cut up some minions. Can we replace me with her?”

A monster Fluttershy would be weird to play as. She’d probably tame the zombies and ogres and invite Blackwatch to have a picnic with them. That’s one way to win a game, but it’s not my style. “You weren’t complaining last time we played,” I say. “And I kind of like playing monster Gilda. She’s fun.”

Gilda looks at me with the same look Cheerilee gave me when I broke her chalk board. “Look, I’m just as new to this as you are. All the rules and numbers are already enough trouble to wrap my head around. I don’t need the DM calling my name out every time something happens. Is she talking to me, is she talking about your character? Is the damage going to Cherry or monster Gilda? I don’t know. It’s messing me up.”

Spike stands up on the chair and waves his bag above his head, grabbing our attention. “While we’re talking about Scootaloo’s character, can we talk about how over-powered she is? She’s level two, yet she has stealth powers, kills most enemies in one hit, has an insane amount of health and regeneration, has max stats, and is immune to magic.”

Gilda’s head perks up. “Immune to magic? Let me see her stat sheet.”

Spike grabs the top paper from my stack and hands it over to the end. Gilda takes it and reads it over like she’s grading my grammar. “It’s insane, you just gave her random abilities and broke her character!” Spike continues. “I got Tanya to level seven with almost max strength stats, and monster Gilda outclasses me by miles, at level two! She has final boss level stats! Heck, she even killed one of the biggest bosses in the game.”

“Someone misspelled ‘gryphon,’” Gilda mutters. “And they can’t choose between griffin or griffon. Who wrote this game?”

Dash’s eyebrows scrunch up, ignoring Gilda’s complaint. “How’d you know that guy was a boss?”

“I do my homework, unlike everyone else. If she gets up to level five, monster Gilda can take down a Hydra on her own! That’s the strongest monster she can fight!”

Gilda taps the paper with a talon. “I don’t see ‘immune to magic’. Where did she get that?”

“It’s the class she picked, Infected Experiment,” Spike says. “All infected are immune to magic. They get a penalty to intelligence and stamina to balance it out, but somepony forgot about that little detail.”

Gilda glances back at the paper, and then her beak twists into a snarl. “Negative three intelligence?! Is this a joke? Why is my character dumber than a rock?!”

Rainbow Dash shakes her head. “I gave you… her… it max strength and luck. Those are the best stats to have.”

“Screw luck! I don’t want to be a dumb ass.” Gilda slams the paper on the table. “Change the name, now.”

“Forget that,” Spike says. “Make a completely new character, and don’t add random abilities this time. They way this is built, Scootaloo could solo the game and the rest of us would be on the side twiddling our thumbs!”

Gilda’s raises an eyebrow. “Don’t you do that in real life?”

“What? No, not at all! Tanya won’t have anything to do if Scootaloo is going do everything for us. It’s not fun.”

I think I know where this is going. Rainbow talked about how they once had to kill a character off because the rest of the party had nothing to do. Everyone is looking at Rainbow, who is rubbing the back of her head. “I see where you two are coming from, but this is Scoots’ character.” She looks at me and gives me a smile. “What do you want, squirt? We can reroll a new character for you.”

I shake my head. “I can’t. I’ve played Gilda for too long to let her go. And I like having the monster claws. They’re fun.”

“There you go, she’s too attached.”

Gilda points a talon at Rainbow. “That’s BS, and you know it.”

With a griffon in the room, I can see this turning into a fight if something isn’t done. Gilda is kind of scary, even when she isn’t yelling at everyone. She’s the last person I want to make angry. “Why not give my character a nickname?” I say. “She’s fighting against Blackwatch, and they use codenames for everything. Why not call her something cool, like Eris?”

Gilda thinks for a moment. Her head nods a little, so I think she likes the idea. I wanted to give my character a nickname anyways since last session, but I couldn’t think of one at the time. Eris sounds cool. Twist helped me come up with that in math class.

“Zero,” Gilda says. “We’ll call her Zero.”

“What?!” I shout. “I am not calling her Zero! Why not Eris? Eris actually means something.”

Gilda’s eyes roll. “You can’t pick your nickname. That’s not how it works. Blackwatch was already calling her Zero over the radio. Hell, Cherry would be happy to call you Zero. It’s in character. So for now on, we’ll refer to her as Zero. There, problem solved.”

My hooves slam on the table. “Problem not solved! We can’t call her Zero. Zero sounds like she’s a zero at everything. That’s not true!”

Spike mutters under his breath. “You’re right. She’s negative three in intelligence.”

Gilda grins. “Alright, let’s settle this. Rock paper scissors, winner chooses the nick name.”

“You’re on!”

We stretch over the table, leaning over Spike to meet in our field of battle. We hold our fists out, and we chant the countdown. “Rock, paper, scissors, go!”

I throw down rock.

Gilda throws out paper.

“Zero it is.”

“Best two out of three!”

She shrugs. “Sure, whatever floats your boat.”

Again. “Rock, paper, scissors, go!”

I have rock. She has paper.

“Come on, how did you beat me twice?!”

“You have hooves. You always play rock.”

That’s dirty. She rigged the game. “That’s cheating!”

“You agreed to play. You knew what you were getting into.” Gilda looks at Rainbow and holds out a claw. “Toss me a pencil. We have a new name.”

Rainbow tosses a pencil, and Gilda catches it. “Sorry Scoots, nothing I can do about it. Now let’s start playing before Spike eats all the chips.”

Spike freezes in mid bite. His claw already has the next handful of chips ready to go. “We have more. But don’t start yet. Scootaloo’s character is still too OP.”

Rainbow waves him off. “I’ll just throw stronger monsters at her. Problem solved.”

“And watch her experience skyrocket? No. You need to nerf her.”

A shiver runs down my spine. Something about that word doesn’t sit well with me. Rainbow, on the other hoof, isn’t fazed by it. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll talk to Twilight about what we can do. We can go one play session with an OP character.”

Spike cocks an eyebrow. “Just so you know, I live with Twilight. I’ll make sure you do.”

“While you’re at it, tell her to return my feather preener. It’s about time for her to get her own.” Ew, I did not need to hear that! Spike blushes a bit, and a smug grin crosses Rainbow’s face. “Enough of that, time to- hey, where’s Pinkie Pie?”

I smack my forehead. “I thought you said we were ready.”

“I did, but Pinkie slipped off somewhere. Where’d she go?”

A high-pitched voice yells from down the hall. “I’m coming!” The doors burst open, and a pink blur dashes in and sits at the seat with the balloons. “Sorry I’m late. I had to pick up snacks. Who wants carrot platters?”

Rainbow and I raise our hooves, and Pinkie slides a couple of plates filled with carrots and ranch dip towards us. Spike and Gilda give each other a look, and they both stick their tongues out in disgust. I have no clue what’s wrong with them. Carrots are delicious.

Rainbow takes a ranch-covered carrot and crunches on it. “Alright, that’s everyone. Let’s start”-

“Hold on,” Pinkie yells.

Rainbow’s head rolls back. “This better be important. We’ve wasted too much time already.”

“Trust me, it is.” Knowing Pinkie, it is and isn’t important at the same time. “I know this is the apocalypse, and I know everyone is sad, and so would I if I lost all my friends, but N-Pinkie-C was giving me the downers last time we were playing. I didn’t vibe with her at all. Can you make her more cheerful this time, please?”

“Yeah, that was weird,” Spike says. “I thought you replaced her with a changeling.”

“It’s the real Pinkie,” Rainbow says. “Well, real in the game. Although…”

Pinkie munches on a carrot, and offers a plate to Gilda. The griffon gives her an evil eye, and the hyperactive pony pulls the plate back. “Doesn’t this game have a potion system? Give me a truckload of uppers and throw the biggest party the Yellow Zone has ever seen!”

The rest of us just want to get the game going at this point. Although, Gilda has a curious look in her eye. “Pinkie, are you okay? You’re asking for your NPC to overdose on happiness.”

“N-Pinkie-C has Doctor Heart. She can wipe away the side effects.”

“It’s not just that. Last time, all your character did was spout out how much he hates Blackwatch. I get you’re in character, but your character is a kid, a very angry kid.”

Pinkie shrugs. “When in Roam…”

Gilda is the last person I would think would be concerned about Pinkie. Weird. Rainbow is also showing a bit of concern on her face, too. “Gilda has a point. You’ve been… extreme with this game.”

Pinkie finishes licking the ranch of a carrot before eating it in one bite. She swallows, and gives both Gilda and Rainbow a soft smile. “This is an RPG. It’s all about the escapism. If I want to play a little psychopath, I can do that. I don’t have to be the number one party pony in everything I do.”

Pinkie pulls out a bottle of pop and takes a sip. Everyone else looks at each other, and I’m wondering what the heck just came out of her mouth. “We just didn’t expect you to go that route. Happy pills and a stalker kid, where did that come from?”

Pinkie shakes her head and finishes her drink with a sigh. “I’ve been watching a lot of B-rated horror movies lately. I can’t help it, they’re so cheesy. Start us off, Dash! It’s morning and Eureka is waiting for us!”

Rainbow nods her head, slowly. It’s weird, but Pinkie is always weird. I’m not complaining. We have a game to play! “Well, today’s a new day, and no zombies attacked, and no one has been kidnapped, yet…”

Author's Notes:

Happy April 1st. Chapters should become regular this summer. Fewer commitments, more time to write.