//------------------------------// // [ARC II] Chapter 26- Freezer Burn // Story: Building Walls, Burning Bridges // by MonolithiuM //------------------------------// "Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own." -Mark Twain “So, Mono’s been gone for like… a week, right?” Scootaloo asked. The other girls nodded, confirming Scootaloo’s observation. Mono had indeed been lost since that fateful day he decided to use the massive slingshot. Whether he was lost in space, orbiting the planet as the first satellite, or in another country as a smoking pile of ash was unknown to the girls. “Knowing him, though, he’ll probably be back just in time for the Championship,” Silver Spoon looked over their team, taking notes on the number of physical exercises they could do and for how long they could continue performing them. “Which we are very well prepared for, I might add.” “Good job, Spoon. Now where is Diamond Tiara? She’s supposed to be gettin’ us some ice cream.” Applebloom narrowed her eyes at the path to the town. “She’s been gone way too long!” Silver Spoon sighed. “Oh, don’t worry about her. With the way she’s been acting, you just know she’s going to try to please you with something-“ A massive parade float stacked high with tubs of ice cream blasted its way past Silver Spoon and came to a grinding halt farther away. Diamond Tiara jumped out of the driver seat and smiled wide. “Ice cream for everypony!” “Something ridiculous,” Silver Spoon sighed and went back to her checklist, marking off ‘ice cream’. “I have a feeling that we got more done while Mono wasn’t around, though. It’s like he just radiates procrastination.” Sweetie Belle mumbled an absent-minded “yeah” and continued to stare into the sky with a look of crushing boredom and disappointment. With Mono gone, thing had been… normal. Normal was boring, and it seemed that, unlike the past, the Elements’ presence did nothing to spice up the life of the town. Even the Cutie Mark Crusaders hadn’t done anything exciting lately. They were just, well… out of imagination. As insane as that concept was, they were really out of ideas for Cutie Marks. It had happened around the time Mono had arrived on Terran, actually. But the very idea that imagination was a physical substance and capable of trickling out of one’s body was a ludicrous notion. But ever since Mono had left Sweetie Belle had felt a sort of… emptiness inside. She couldn’t quite place it, but she’d ask her sister about it some other time. \\\\||||//// “What are we supposed to do now? Do we consider him dead? Or do we try to find him?” Fleur Di Lis paced about her home, fussing over the details of Mono’s unfortunate, tragic, sudden, and assumed, demise. Fancy Pants waved a hoof. “Dear, I wouldn’t worry about him.” Fleur spun about to face him. “He could have suffocated in the atmosphere!” Fancy Pants set his tea cup down. “Fleur, this is Mono we are talking about. The most stubborn, heinous, bad-mouthed and utterly spiteful creature we’ve ever associated with publicly. Given his hard-headed attitude I expect that he’ll be back to complete his debt to the three little fillies and return here promptly.” “I seriously doubt that he’d give up the chance at making more bits,” Fancy said as he took another sip. Fleur gave him a questioning look and he deadpanned. “The legitimate way, of course. No alchemy around here, I say.” “Too bad he missed Shining Armor’s coronation,” Script commented from another sofa. She held a glass of milk in her golden aura, reading the Canterlot Times while she drank. “I hear that there was no way out of that one. He was actually forced to be a princess.” The three of them stayed quiet as they pondered the statement. “Would that make Cadence and Shining lesbians?” Fleur’s question plunged the three into even deeper thought. “Voila!” The shout came from downstairs, followed by four pairs of excited hooves up the stairs to the lounge where the others sat. Flim and Flam hopped into the center of the room, a large blueprint rolled into a tube held in Flam’s magical grasp. “Mares and Gentlecolts,” Flim began. “We present to you,” Flam continued. “THE PDQ PEN PUSHER!” The two shouted at the same time, unraveling the blueprint of a large machine. “Completely pony operated, to create jobs of course, and safe to use for anypony utilizing it,” the mustached brother stated. “Not only that, but this unit will increase pen output by sixty-eight percent per pony! That’s ten pens per minute compared to a measly one!” Flim grinned widely, while his brother Flam did the same. “The PDQ Pen Pusher requires little maintenance and the materials for a prototype can be gathered easily in Canterlot.” Flam popped up behind Fancy and grinned. “All we need is the patent and the go-ahead from you, oh Second in Command.” Fancy Pants’ answer was instantaneous. “Yes.” \\\\||||//// Things were… peaceful without Mono. No rogue tidal waves of gold or gouts of geothermic flame rising from the ground. In fact, it was a normal day for Applejack. Not normal like having to stop a super villain in twelve minutes normal, but before Twilight arrived in town normal. The sun was shining, her apples were growing, and all kinds of critters flew, crawled, and hopped about her orchard. Except for beetles, Applejack hates beetles. Loading more apples into a cart, the mare took a moment to stare out over the hills that made up her pristine, perfect orchard. This orchard was so goddamn perfect Jesus Christ himself called up Buddha who then invited Muhammed who brought along Zeus to check this apple farm out. And they was all like: damn girl. Applejack was very proud of herself and her perfect, flawless, absolutely untouched masterpiece of fruit. A crack ripped through the air, causing Applejack to swivel her ears, followed by her entire head, toward the sky. There, pushing through the clouds and punching Rainbow Dash from her napping spot, was a chunk of ice hurtling toward the earth at terminal velocity. Applejack could only watch, helpless, as the titanic block of ice twice her size slammed into her perfect orchard and obliterated two-hundred of her trees like a fist through tissue paper. The flawless trees were uprooted as the block of ice tore along the ground. It came to a grinding halt some two-hundred feet away from her, leaving deep gouges in the orchard’s dirt. With a scream of bewilderment, she ran into town, looking for the ever-talented Miss Sparkle. \\\\||||//// “And you’re saying it just crashed into your orchard from the sky?” Twilight asked, her eyebrow raised in disbelief. Rainbow Dash swooped down from the sky beside Applejack. “You guys! I decided to peek into that giant ice block thing and uh… Well, you’re not gonna believe this one.” \\\\||||//// Scootaloo saw the glacial strike from the ground, along with the other fillies and colts. Rushing as fast as they could, they meant to check the cool-looking giant ice cube out before the adults kept them from it. Now inside the orchard, the kids stared at the slowly melting ice block. Inside the opaque crystallized water was a black shape, curled up slightly. Diamond Tiara leaned closer, squinting her eyes to get a better view. “Is that…” \\\\||||//// “Mono?” Twilight stood at the block of ice, her jaw completely slack. When she had arrived with the rest of her friends, the fillies and colts from Ponyville had already gathered about the crash-site. Applejack and Rainbow Dash had gotten them to move back from the area so Twilight could examine it thoroughly. He was indeed stuck in a sort of cryogenic stasis, perfectly preserved. “This… how… what?” Twilight simply couldn’t comprehend the fact that Mono had actually managed to essentially freeze fast enough to bring a hiatus to his vital functions. The very prospect of the situation was impossible, and yet there Mono was. Although… Twilight wasn’t totally sure if the human was alive or dead. For all she knew, he actually died due to hypothermia and wasn’t preserved at all. The only way to find out, though, was to thaw him out. “Magic is completely useless in this situation, girls. But we can’t heat him up too fast because if he’s still alive, he’ll go into shock and die for sure. So we can’t build a fire,” Twilight said as she stared at the mansicle. “So, what you’re saying Twi, is that we just have to wait for him to thaw out?” Rainbow Dash kicked the ice, cursing under her breath and rubbing her hoof directly after. No way were they breaking through that. Twilight sighed and nodded. “Yes, Rainbow. And even if we could blast through it with brute force, I think that we would end up seriously hurting Mono.” Applejack rubbed her chin, scrutinizing Mono’s blurry form. “So that option is on the table then…” “AJ! We need him for the Championship,” Applebloom whined. Applejack glanced down at her sister and then back at the ice. Sighing, Applejack pulled her hat down and grumbled. “Fine. We wait for him to thaw out.” \\\\||||//// I blinked some water out of my eyes, not that it helped much. “Gah! Help, I’m fucking blind,” I screamed to the world. The very fact that I could scream without filling my lungs with ice crystals pointed to the fact that I was back on the surface of Terran. Good shit. I still hung suspended by my waist, which was just beginning to gain back feeling. I wiggled my arms about to try and wrench my way out of my frozen prison. “Grr! Fuck!” “Maybe if I…” I immediately began to focus on shaking, which was aided by the fact that I was really fucking cold. Shivering, I then reached out into my mind for my ability and embraced it. My shivering shifted into high-speed vibrations, melting the ice much faster. While floating about in a block of ice, I had had some time to hone my powers. Sounds silly, I know, but fuck you. I discovered, during my icy reflection, that my power was an integral part of me, like an arm or a leg. I had to consciously flex the ability and tell it how to work. Turns out, I can direct it to separate limbs or keep my mind moving in the present while my body does something like, say… vibrate incredibly fast to cause friction against the ice and melt it? Yeah, just like that. The only dangers with selective power manipulation were not being able to properly communicate between my mind and body while sending my flesh bag into a supercharged state. The science behind it, I assume, is needlessly complicated, but somehow my nervous system could translate messages between my lobes and my super-powered body. I chose not to argue and instead just rolled with it. Long story short, now I could not pay attention and slam my body into walls at high-speed while I would barely have any time to react. More practice would be needed, then. “Finally.” I swung my head to look into a bright light being held aloft in a purple glow. The light significantly dimmed and I saw Twilight Sparkle holding a lantern in her magical aura. “That took forever,” she said, setting the lantern down as she did so. “How long have I been frozen here?” I asked her. “Four days.” “Shit.” “You’ve been off-planet for a week, though.” “Fuck! The Championship! The team!” “Relax, Mono, we got it covered.” I saw the Crusaders enter the little circle of light, a smug grin plastered on all their muzzles. Letting out a sigh and feeling a sweat drop run down my head, I grinned. “Good save, then. Now if you’ll excuse me…” I went back to vibrating while the ponies stared at me blankly. VVVVVVVVVVVVVRRRRRRRRRRR “I’m going back inside,” Scootaloo said before heading back to the farm house. “Yeah, me too.” “Me three, ya’ll.” The lantern knocked Applebloom to the ground. Everypony glared at Mono, whose outstretched hand was aimed directly at Applebloom. “Aw yeah… I’m back, bitches.”