Mail It In

by re- Yamsmos

The Hardest Part Of Waking Up

High Flyer dreaded his front door's doorbell. That much was easy to say.

It was the scariest tether to the rest of Equestria that he still had. He could close the blinds on his many windows and shut away the sun and the other clouds floating routinely around him. He could grab the hammer from his closet and tear down his mailbox bit by bit until nothing but its small wooden post remained next to his porch. He could even grab some cumulus and stratus clouds and bury his entire house underneath them, effectively hiding his residence away under the very convincing disguise of a gargantuan cumulonimbus.

If he could muster up the courage to even grab hold of his door knob, he could go off and do all three of those right now, even.

But the door and its doorbell were a terrifying force, one to both cower and shy away from, in that exact order if he was able.

His wobbling, glazed eyeballs slowly focused on the lone item lying in front of him on his kitchen table.

This pen—this... daunting pen—with its dark blue exterior lined with golden lightning bolts and the title Ponyville Postal Service, was something else entirely. The horrifying beast with huge teeth and a taste for Pegasi that lived under his bed when he was a colt. The nightmares that woke him up every hour, on the hour, after his first day of school. The letters and reports, with their big red notices, filling his house after high school. He had been equally, gravely scared of each and every single one of them, and no matter how much he tried to fight them back, and no matter how many times he thought he'd succeeded in doing so, they still turned up right in front of him.

This was a more literal example, but he still shrank in his wooden chair and gulped all the same.

His height now reminiscent of his days as a child barely able to look over the counter of the local confectionary, High Flyer brought a shaky hoof up and inched it toward the writing tool now angrily glaring at him from its position next to his glass. Oh Gods, what if it had a tracer like those old spy movies?

High Flyer retracted the hoof with a breath of air sucking violently back into his troubled lungs. He turned his head and regarded the pen with a downturned flashing of his teeth. What if the post office knew where it was right now? He cleared his throat, not even realizing he was sitting up until he felt his leg press against his cheek. Their pens were pretty important to their jobs. It was the only way they could sign off packages. They couldn't just use any old pen. They probably had hundreds of these pens back at their headquarters!

What if they counted all of them? What if they had to take a tally of each and every one of these little itty bitty pens that came back day by day? What if they were checking off the pens for the day yesterday, humming along and waiting to get home and eat a nice bowl of ravioli, and when they reached Pen #36, they received nothing but a silent room and a shifting of beautiful golden eyes?

Oh Gods he'd gotten her in trouble. He'd dropped the pen and caused her to leave, and she'd left without getting it because he'd just hit her on the head and probably gave her a concussion or something and she wasn't thinking right. It was his fault. She was gonna get fired, or lose her week's pay or salary or whatever, and he was to blame. This one customer, this one shut-in with a dumb blender had been her downfall. She'd probably been working there for years, with not a single problem bothering her her whole career until the day she'd been sent to deliver a blender to one High Flyer in his isolated cloud house too high in the sky.

He flew back to reality when he realized he was touching the pen again. He shot back. Right. Tracking device. They probably had hoofprint detectors as well.

He decided that a monitor tiny enough to fit inside the pen would've been too expensive, so he craned his neck around, tilted his head, and simply stared at the writing—neigh, checkmarking—tool with a hint of anxiousness plaguing his brow. He could return it, couldn't he? He could go out and put it in the mailbox, couldn't he? He'd done it before with the blender form just last week, right? He could do it again!

Wait how was he gonna get it into the mailbox if he couldn't touch it.

Oh Gods.

He flicked his head around and stared into his kitchen.

Eyes narrowed when they landed on their mark, and so, hopping off his chair with a new mission on his mind, High Flyer walked toward the pair of tongs nestled peacefully inside the bucket next to his microwave, grabbed at them with his wings, missed, toppled the entire bucket to the floor, yelped a very girly yelp, stepped back, cleared his throat, looked at the nopony staring back at him in the microwave's reflection, bent over, grasped the tongs in his teeth, and promised he'd pick up the spatulas, scrapers, tossers, rubber chickens, and knives now littering his fluffy floor later.

Turning about, he walked back to his kitchen table with the tongs now tainting his tongue with a very gross taste of rubber. He opened his mouth and lulled his tongue out which, as expected, sent the tongs back to the ground where they honestly should have stayed. He stopped in his tracks, leaning over and picking it up in his teeth yet again, and finally reached the end of his table, where he now stood in silence.

His mane a horrible, stress tussled mess, his forehead matted with drops of sweat, his eyes wobbling violently in their homes, his hooves shaking on the spot, his mouth clenching down on a pair of rubber-tipped tongs, and his kitchen table bearing nothing but a small blue pen, High Flyer stared. His dining room seemed a lot larger than he'd thought right now. Since when did he make his current spot thousands of miles away from where he'd be eating? That was definitely gonna be a blinding headache—a lot like the one he was having now, actually—when he next made some mac 'n' cheese.

He wiped his brow with a hoof. He turned to the thermometer next to him on the wall. When did he crank it up to a thousand degrees? Was it getting hot in here? It definitely wasn't him, so he couldn't say that, but he was sure he would've noticed.

The pen lying on the table in front of him glared back with all the ferocity of the sun he didn't look at.

He shirked away, then realized he was about to run and hide from a pen.

He shot a burst of air out of his nose, cleared his throat, and leaned forward. As one would expect with a lack of opposable thumbs and the forced use of a mouth, using a pair of tongs to grab a pen on a table was looking to be a pretty difficult task. Only when he was in the most uncomfortable positions—his neck straining, molars crunching on the rubber tips, and his jaw surging with exhaustion—did he find success, and as he walked out of the kitchen, he realized all too late that he didn't know what the address for the delivery company was.

High Flyer halted, still in his position. Ponies came by and checked the mailbox though, didn't they? It wasn't magic that took his blender letter last week. Somepony had to fly by and get it, otherwise he wouldn't be not using it right now. They'd recognize their pen if he just threw it in there and left it. They had to. Their pens were one of a kind, with their own name printed right on it. Then again, he could very easily just get one at the actual building itself. He'd never been, but he was sure they had a little tin of them sitting on the counter for ponies to use if they needed them. People probably left with a lot of them by accident. He couldn't have been the only one to have one in his house. Maybe they needed a pen because they didn't have one at home. Maybe they had just forgotten they were holding it. He'd done that a few times with food. French fries especially.

He danced his eyes around and focused on the pen sitting crookedly within the iron grasp of his tongs.

Maybe they wouldn't take it. If it doesn't have an address, they can't take it. Return to sender.

He blinked. The pen reappeared in front of him each time.

He thought back to the mailmare in all her gorgeous glory. Her blonde mane and soft yellow eyes. Her cute little delivery cap with the company's logo sewn into it. The way she talked to him with the bubbly attitude and bunched-up grin of somepony who didn't know who he was. He didn't wanna get her in trouble. She obviously loved her job. You couldn't really enjoy talking to other ponies on a daily basis, because it didn't make much sense to him, but she clearly did. Maybe she liked the excited looks on a pony's face after getting letters from loved ones they hadn't talked to. Deliveries of flowers, or birthday presents, or food. Always with smiles, to and back.

She needed this pen.

High Flyer, very lightly, let go of the tongs and reached a hoof up to grab at them. Placing the cooking utensil onto his nearby couch, he looked at his coffee table and saw something that made his heart stop for longer than was considered still alive.

Trotting ever so slowly toward it, he knew exactly what it was and what it presented him.

Bringing up a hoof, he coiled his foreleg around and began staring at his Save More's catalog.

He could buy something else, and thereby have somepony to explain the whole situation to. They'd take the pen, and give it back to their boss, and she wouldn't be fired. He'd save her career, and feel good about himself.

What to buy, though? He wasn't really in a desperate need for something like he had been for the blender.

He blinked.

The catalog in his hold blurred as he looked behind it and at the table it had been sitting on.

Coffee.

Why did he even own a coffee table if he couldn't make coffee?

...

That's it!

Plopping his rear on his couch, he threw his available hoof against his catalog's pages, looking for a coffee maker. There had to be one! Save More's sold everything! Wait stop, there's one! Going back a few pages, he narrowed in on one such dastardly machine... and promptly felt his heart sink when he saw the price.

His mouth hung open and would begin attracting flies.

The catalog shook.

It didn't even take him a second before he took out an envelope and began scribbling down the address with her pen.

He was gonna save her, and he was gonna do it with nothing but paper, spit, and the courage of stepping out his front door.

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

7788045 The Wasteland Wailers are Fallout: Equestria related, right? I've never heard of them until now.

[Starlight Nova]

7814361 How did they do that?

[re- Yamsmos]

7886880 Yes, they are! hay, the commenter below us, is actually the one who sang the song! You never know though.

This fic's gotta have an ending eventually.

[hay]

7886881
The whole Overmare team is on a chat server. One of the other guys linked it. I stopped in to say thanks.

We're the music team for the game, we write the background music and the radio songs. So in that way, yes, we're FoE related. We try to keep the music palatable for anyone, however.