7.
He skipped from one front hoof to the other, from the front to the back, and from the back to the front again. “Follow me, I know a great place we can practice.”I stopped coughing and followed Larry to the street where we would spend most of our remaining months together when he wasn’t gambling with candy and I wasn’t working for Mikey. Yeah, I was a bouncer, but I also did some odd jobs: running candy across the ocean, learning how to teal at the tables, and once being a bodyguard. But that’s another story. I’ll just say I met a lot of strange and interesting unicorns and began to break out of my shell a bit. I started asking for things, and telling some things.
Anyway, Mikey heard we were practicing in front of human bars in the entertainment district. He approved. He even joined us a couple of times and gave some great pointers.
A memorable speech went like this: “Drunk humans are like babies. They won’t give you an actual location, and they will probably throw up by the end of the ride. But they think they know where they want to go, which makes them some of our best rides. That, and if they can see the street they can see you.” Those words have served me well in a pinch. I don’t usually give rides to drunk people, but sometimes I have to, and occasionally I want to. Mostly I forget their sloppiness if I remember their helplessness.
Mikey got me into a second race, and another and another. I only came in last twice before I started moving up in Mikey’s pack. My outside ranking grew, too, as I bounced more riders from place to place. I won enough for Mikey to ask Larry to take care of the candy in our bank accounts. While we practiced longer hours to keep up my streak, Larry spent hours handling all of our candy. With the extra time to practice, I climbed to the top twentieth percentile.
Experience really shouldn’t count when it comes to picking a unicorn. We will all get you where you need to go. Betting is a different story, however. The more time a unicorn spends time bouncing, the more likely they are going to learn the tricks of the trade, the shortcut calculations that my kind can all do with practice and a bit of clever application.
Larry helped me practice when he wasn’t at the bank. Mikey helped me apply strategies to real and imaginary races. I ended up winning most of the imaginary races, which pushed my ranking higher up the boards.
Okay, I wasn’t rookie of the year, but I came pretty close. Only a handful of the brightest and cleanest unicorns beat me out, including that Merida Hooveprint. I grudge her the title. I just find her methods a little nauseating. For instance, I would never set a hoof inside of a prison. But more and more I’m finding that is only my disinclination.
I stuck to my mentors’ methods for most of my brief career. That is, until my very last race. It was not a real race, but an imaginary race. I should have explained earlier, but an imaginary race is just like it sounds – imaginary – but unicorns are half-imaginary anyway and so we can do it. My kind can go where our branch of imaginary mathematics can map out a course, set some odds and conditions, and watch the race run its course. In the old day the officials monitored the imaginary races with chamber music. Now my kind tracks the outcomes with electronic and K-Pop.
Surprising? It’s unbelievably distracting and over-stimulating for one unicorn, but if the songs, or races, are divided into several frames and each frame is attended by a team of two or more unicorns, then the imaginary races can be tracked, and for the most part understood. Cross-continent bets can also occur when we sent the races under the guise of music. Our races have a lot of unaware human followers and imitators. Unlike our patent-pending vacuum cleaners.
The manners have changed, but our methods have not. I have tried to tell others this, but they flip their mane at me for it. Well, and for something else.
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