Rocket-Powered Pony

by bronyZ

Blowing Off Steam

Blowing Off Steam

Whirlie woke the next morning lying on her back in the middle of the workshop. She ached from the awkward sleeping position. She blinked her eyes a few times at the upside-down stack of parchment in front of her face, shut her eyes again, and rolled onto her side, making a low growl. When she opened her eyes again a few minutes later, her nose was touching a different stack. “ARGH!” she shouted, as the stack teetered over her head. Still half asleep, she sleep-ran her way toward her bedroom. Just as she reached the stairs, she started, realizing she was actually living her nightmare: there were stacks and stacks of reading material all over her workshop. Fortunately, unlike what she had dreamed all night, these papers did not collapse on her and sweep her out to sea. Unfortunately, there was still paper everywhere. And her friend expected her to read all of it. And she expected the project to wait in the meantime. Whirlie surveyed the room, feeling her spirits drop. Instead of reading, she headed out to town for coffee.

On her return, she was much more awake, but no less depressed and irritated about all of the paper. She stood just inside the doorway, thinking as her coffee hovered nearby. She jumped, nearly spilling her coffee and toppling a stack of parchment, as Twilight burst into the workshop behind her with a cheery, sing-song, “Good morning! I hope you slept well and are ready to study!” She had a number of books in her saddlebags.

Whirlie turned and glared at her.

“Umm...not a good morning?” Twilight hazarded. Without saying a word, Whirlie turned and tromped off to the basement, the cup of coffee floating along behind her. “I guess she’s not a morning-pony,” Twilight said, puzzled, to the empty room.

Whirlie was feeling more and more irritated about the whole ordeal. She slammed the coffee down on one of the work benches, and stomped around the basement, selecting equipment and materials. She did not do this in the usual unicorn way of levitating things before her face to assess them; she was working off anger. She stormed in circles around the basement, yanking objects seemingly at random and either placing them on one of the benches, or tossing them into corners. Her name started to seem fitting as the basement became a whirlwind of parts, tools, and pony.

Twilight Sparkle, apparently sensing that this was no simple case of morning grouchiness, decided Whirlie was best left alone. She peeked down the entrance every so often, observing with a scientific interest the activity that had taken on a ritual quality below.

The basement transitioned into a huge mess, save the one workbench with the coffee and a neatly arrayed set of parts. Whirlie stood next to it, her front hooves on the table, and she set to work. Building things always helped her calm down.

A few hours later, when Whirlie came back up, Twilight was sitting on the floor again, writing away on parchment. Whirlie walked through, with a cluster of parts made up of bits of metal, an egg-shaped object of some sort, and some folded up canvas, floating along behind her. She walked into the room, surveyed it, found it still irritating, and stormed out the front door. Twilight quietly watched, curious and confused as the door slammed.

Out front, Whirlie meticulously arranged her materials in midair, then let them crash to the ground. Focusing her magic on the phase coil, which was still attached to the forge and not yet installed in a backpack, she started heating metal. Getting into her work, she hammered away for several hours.

Finally starting to cool down, Whirlie decided she would try out what she had made while going for a walk. She strapped on an array of gear and set off, muttering to herself. “I know I sometimes screw things up, but we’re being very careful this time. I don’t see why Twilight won’t just let me test out the equipment! Why doesn’t she trust me...” She stopped occasionally to adjust a strap here and there.

Her self-absorbed reverie was broken when she noticed the sound of flapping wings. She looked up to see Rainbow Dash pacing her a few feet to the side and up. Apparently ready to make her entrance now that she was noticed, Rainbow rolled in midair, backwards, in front of Whirlie, pausing just long enough to eye her dead-on with a slight tilt of her head. “You’re lopsided,” Rainbow Dash commented by way of greeting, “I think you forgot a few parts.” She snickered.

“I’m not flying yet, am I?” Whirlie retorted, sarcastically. “I’m just trying to see how this stuff fits,” she explained. Rainbow Dash paused to stare at her oddly equipped acquaintance. Whirlie had spent the morning and most of the afternoon building a harness for the phase coil and finishing the prototype rocket pod she had been working on. She was now wearing the harness on her back with the phase coil tied to it, just to test the weight and positioning. The rocket pod had the overall shape of an egg, and her hoof fit inside it so that it wrapped three-quarters of the way around. It had small holes in the bottom, which were covered by a cloth wrapping to keep from damaging them while she walked. The way the pod was positioned on her right foreleg meant that it was not flush with the end of her hoof, not to mention that it was heavy steel, so she walked with an odd limp. She made a klunking noise with every fourth step.

“You look a little like you’re going to start Spike’s fanclub,” Rainbow giggled.

She was referring to a ridge of metal plates that stuck out of the back of the harness. It did give her a bit of a dragon look, Whirlie supposed, eyeing herself. “They’re heat sinks to keep it from catching fire,” she explained.

“Got any good aerial stunts worked out yet?” Rainbow asked Whirlie.

“No, we haven’t even achieved first liftoff!” she explained, a bit of exasperation entering her voice.

“It’s never too early to start thinking about your repertoire,” Rainbow chided.

“I think it’s still a little early for that,” Whirlie warmed.

“But how will you even control your flight with all that...stuff...on? You said you were gonna take on the Wonderbolts earlier.”

“I didn’t say that...exactly. But since you asked,” and here Whirlie unconsciously adopted Twilight’s teacher demeanor, “with one pod on each hoof, we, that is, the flyer, can control the direction of thrust by pointing our legs in the opposite direction that we want to fly.” She demonstrated by pointing with her right forehoof. Unused to the additional weight, she promptly toppled onto her face before she could stop herself.

“Nice control!” Rainbow Dash giggled.

Unflustered, she picked herself up and went on. “So, if I wanted to go forward, I would point my front hooves toward the ground, to maintain lift, and point my rear ones behind me, giving me thrust.”

“Huh. And if you wanted to turn, you’d just point your leg in the opposite direction you wanted to go. I get it. But what about a barrel roll?” the pegasus asked, getting excited. After Whirlie’s puzzled expression, Rainbow began demonstrating by rolling in midair in front of the unicorn.

Whirlie watched for a few moments, contemplating. “I think...something like...” she trailed off. Using her magic and a stick, she started scratching diagrams in the dirt. After a few minutes of talkative (to herself) contemplation, she looked up at Rainbow Dash. “I don’t know that it can be done in the current design. You would need to vary the thrust on a per-rocket basis,” she explained.

Now it was Rainbow Dash’s turn to look puzzled.

“When you do your...barrel roll? You flap one wing a little harder, and the other a little softer, right?” Rainbow nodded an affirmative. “That gives you more lift on one side than the other, so you flip over in midair. You do some other maneuvering in there, too, so that you perform a lateral slide. I think to do the same thing with this pack, you would need more thrust from the rockets on one side, and less on the other. Which we can’t do: all of the rockets will fire with the same power. You might be able to adjust the thrust vector angle, but that does not seem likely to provide enough control. We’ll have to work out some way to regulate the plasma flows to the individual rockets, and design an additional control to go with the throttle. Oh why didn’t I bring my notebook!?”

“You’re welcome,” Rainbow said, crossing her forehooves while hovering nearby, “Glad I could help.”

Whirlie blinked at her, then smiled.

“I am soooo going to fly circles around both of you. But it’ll be fun to see if you can put up any kind of a challenge in a straightaway,” she said excitedly. Whirlie frowned, trying to work out when this had become a competition. “But you guys are soooo slow! I’m ready to see a unicorn fly now, but you’re telling me you have to do more work?!” Rainbow’s idle comment, intended more as a joke than anything else, drew Whirlie back to the source of her frustration, making her remember Twilight and her protocol, both of which were sitting in her house right now.

Whirlie suddenly looked furious. “You know, I may have a knack for breaking things, but no one seems to notice all the successes along the way. I modified the train engines in Trottingham and they now run 14.2% more efficiently than they used to. And none of them blew up. Not to mention the modifications to the propulsion system on what is now Princess Celestia’s airship. And that didn’t blow up either!” she stated with finality. “Just because that tower to Cloudsdale fell over and destroyed half the neighborhood, Twilight doesn’t think I can do this! I am not in favor of going so slow!” she almost shouted at the bewildered pegasus. “If I were running this project my way I’d already be up there with you. Failure is how we learn!”

Rainbow looked taken aback by the sudden change, as she dropped to the ground to face Whirlie. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” she started, then went on, “I don’t think Twilight is judging you like that. She’s just really into checklists and stuff. She can be like that sometimes. Twilight taught me to be a little more careful, that’s one of the great things about her.”

Whirlie looked unconvinced, continuing to frown at Rainbow.

“Ya know, and I don’t tell this to anypony,” she confided, “I once had a crash landing and broke my wing. After that, Twilight brought me this huuuge scroll!” Rainbow had started snickering again. “It was a pre-flight checklist to make sure I monitored the weather conditions and checked all my wing feathers before I took off!” She had started laughing uncontrollably now, and poked Whirlie to try to get her to laugh. The unicorn lightened up a bit.

“So...you use it every time you go flying?”

“Nope!” she laughed. She straightened up before continuing, “But I appreciated her thinking about me. And there was some good thought that went into it. So I internalized some of it.” Kicking the dirt with her front hoof, Dash went on, “Actually, it was all good advice. Twilight just has this way of making things really complicated sometimes.”

“I guess so,” Whirlie sighed. “I probably owe her an apology. She did say she was looking out for me. And,” she said, perking up, “I think she’ll be interested in seeing what I made. Thanks, Rainbow, for the advice...and the inspiration.”

The two ponies waved goodbye as Dash hurtled away at top speed, while Whirlie slowly clunked and clopped her way back to the workshop.