//------------------------------// // I Could Live For Better // Story: The Highest Shelf // by re- Yamsmos //------------------------------// And here she is stopping again. It was the ragged, violently whipping-about coat-tails of a long line of bad ideas, and horrible mistakes, and unspeakable atrocities better kept locked far and away inside some kind of vault, let alone her own poor head, but it was more a cautious kind of thing than a voluntary one in the end. Her own jacket might not stretch much further than her hindlegs—something she constantly felt a little annoyed with to be honest, looking up from time to time and fully realizing the weather she'd been riding through the past few days—but it was doing its job more than her natural-born Pegasus coat would. She's been driving on a regrettably full stomach since the very first crack of morning, and her ride wishes it could crack a little grin and quietly say the same beneath her. It reminds her a bit of her, honestly—well, who she was—as she need only cast a quick second glance down at the meter above her fuel tank to see that the tiny arrow has gone down by just a tick since she last looked in early yesterday's torrent of rainwater. Just barely starving, and already causing her to begrudgingly go about and alleviate the aching, even if she's more than just a hundred-percent sure that her pangs echo much worse than her bike's. With a frown, a grumble between her practiced clenched teeth, and a flick of her chin, she finally halts the engine's idling, turning her foreleg and the keys nestled snugly inside the ignition with it. As the constant rumbling and bumbling of the 992 cc motor flees her life with incredibly eerily reminiscent fashion, she suddenly widens her eyes with a noise escaping her hardly-opened lips. In response, her breath fogs up the inside of her helmet's visor, only to dissipate and allow her an undeterred moment of quietly, silently, faintly, just looking around the area she's currently, mistakenly, residing. Her navigational skills were always a bit on the awful, terrible, no good, very bad side, but her observational skills were at least somewhat sub-par at best. She shakes her head quickly, flinging away her wanderlust thoughts and letting only one slip through the hair-thin cracks: refueling. Reigniting the flame in her sole objective. Feeding the one thing that had remained fixated by her side through the thick, thin, and even curvaceous. And so, rising a scarce few inches out of her upright seat, minding her hopelessly swishing tail, and swinging her right hindleg over the front of the motorcycle, she hops onto the ground with a dull thud and immediately regrets the decision. Her scarf begins to itch at the back of her neck where it meets both the bottom of her helmet and her mane, and, reaching up to scratch it, she ceases her mobility and can finally call herself immobile again. Her shoulders are aching; her hooves can still feel the vibrations of the road down to her bones; her ears are ringing and still clogged from her altitude. But, pulling cold air in through her nose and blowing it back out as a fog to temporarily cloud her sights, she shakes like a damp dog and trots toward the back of her motorcycle with only a hoof full of steps. She feels an almost absent, unnoticeable satisfaction at first in the sudden discontinuation of the engine below her body, but, as she feels the dry, crusty dirt give way and sink underneath her eternally quaking fores and then hinds, flares her nostrils obsessively, reaches up with a heavy hoof toward the mess of bags behind her upright seat, and annoyedly yanks the red gas can from its clasps, she finds an odd kind of longing for it. Her mind attempts to whisk her away to some sort of do-well fantasy and evocative of similar sensations, but, shaking her head and juggling them around her empty skull, she settles the container onto the ground in front of her, crouches down, coils a strong hoof around its black cap, and wrenches it free of its chains. Looking at it for all but a few seconds of wasted time, she pushes the nozzle back through the hole, switches its orientation, then screws the cap back on. Again, the thoughts come, but she rises back to all fours much faster than they knock, awkwardly holds the canister up, pops the top off of her gas tank with a flick of a temporarily free hoof, and begins to pour gasoline down its gullet so her companion doesn't feel left out. The last thing she'd want is to keep up her streak with her days far and far away from her. Her slow remembrance of the tank's capacity—along with the ambient, unchanging drizzle of the gasoline—almost causes a catastrophic spill and a flurry of bad choices, but her brain somehow reaches its peak performance just in time, and she hurriedly pulls the gas can away, curses as a few drops bespeckle her jacket's sleeves, and newly frustratedly reverses the cap a third time, finally thunking the bright red, sloshing container on the ground by her side. As the freshly-poured liquid splashes about and mingles with its new friends, she lets out a sigh that chills and freezes her unhealthily-straightened spine up, down, and up again, shuts her eyes, dips her chin, and repeats the gesture to the rear of her motorcycle as if to sympathize somewhat. Her heart beats, and the shrill wind blows through the pine trees, the wet grass, the choppy air, her unkempt mane, the snow-tipped mountains, the low valley, in pleasantly naive response. She takes another dare in a long series, and cracks open both her eyes at once, staring up the bumpy, dirty, rocky road ahead of her and her trusty companion. A high-pitched whistle gets through the blockade in her mind, and she instinctively turns to the source with a full swivel of her body that disturbs her ensemble and bunches it up in all the wrong places. She only realizes she's staring down at the wooded valley when her purple eyes regain their focus and widen at the sight wholly, not yet touched by the slanderous hooves of unnatural life she so pledged allegiance to. Crowds of sharp pines sit atop large blocks of mixed brown and black and white rock, high above the unabashed masses of their brethren trying—and failing—to reach their level of higher status, first appearing to try and cling to the tall rock and then descending toward the middle of the earthly crevice in the landscape, settling here and there and fading away with heavenly blue hues the farther back their endless struggle extends, which seems to sit down and stop right at the feet of the low mountains assuredly much larger up close and dangerously personal, their distant figures like cookies and cream ice cream spilling down to try and help the lowerclassmen out of their predicament. Even with the rain barely discernible amidst the clouds, Celestia's sun is still doing its best to warm her up and put an end to her discomfort, practically lighting her way and presently kissing whatever skin she was revealing with her grizzled road attire. Her dirt road runs along a parallel line to all of it, never minding the cuts and curves of the bumps in the area and keeping right on its goal the whole way, providing her with ample-enough shade should the sun ever get more self-secure with intermittent, sometimes naked trees standing tall, and proud, and occasionally happy. She's still watching, if only for a second. A second turns to two, then to three, then from three seconds to three minutes, and as if wielding some kind of internal, determined alarm clock, she realizes her aimless activity at the distinct strike of the two hands and attempts to appear as if lost in a simple, dead stare at nothing in particular. Another thought, betraying her after all this time, pops up in her head like the button of an office pen, and, eyes dwarfing fine dinner plates, she rotates about, first one hoof—then, after falling to her haunches, two hooves—dancing across her jacket. Not there, not... there. Not there either. A split second panic attack hits her with the ferocity and merciless impact of a five-mile-long freight train, and then, shaking the ice creeping to the tip of her skull, she hops up onto all fours again, calmly reaches for her backpack's straps hugging her seat in a cross-pattern, and, reminding herself what had happened last time, instead goes straight for the front pocket, which she unzips and thereafter fishes around inside, her dry tongue poking out her mouth and flopping onto the right corner of her lip. There it is. She pulls out her current desire and feels it around awkwardly with her two hooves. She fiddles with it like a foal first gaining object permanence—which, honestly, isn't too far a comparison at this point—and finally holds it in a prime position to do what she'd probably end up tossing away when she settled for the evening, if she did so at all. Holding it up, tilting it a quarter of a millimeter downward to try and get all of the valley in the shot, and keeping it still, she depresses the button and swiftly pulls it back down after it clicks away. She sucks in a breath, and her heart returns to beating up her brain with fists of hot steel. Oh. Right. She can't see the pictures immediately. She deflates with a sigh, then catches herself before she can speak her disgruntlement. These things never turned out as good as they first looked anyhow. The dissatisfaction with her novice, low-hanging-fruit of a picture brings about an insatiable want for a snack. Something quick, and easy, like a granola bar, or a bag of chips, that would only take her less than a minute to open up and chow down on. So she quickly straps her gas can back on with its bungee cords, hooks it to the rest of her gear, mounts up, starts her ride anew with a flick of her foreleg and a rev of the handlebar, and folds up her kickstand with a tap of her hindleg before beginning to slowly drive away from the accursed spot, clenching her teeth tightly long before the road even gets bumpy. As she goes, she becomes aware of, and aptly ignores, her left breast pocket as it vibrates three times in rapid succession before—thankfully—quieting again. "Onward," she whispers, to nopony, nowhere, for no reason but to just hear another voice again.