It wasn't long ago. My friend Sweetie Belle had just turned eighteen, and she's the youngest of the three of us—me, her, and Apple Bloom. So we were all finally officially adults, and to celebrate, we decided to go on a little vacation, just the three of us. See, we'd always wanted to travel. When we pretended to be adults years ago, that's the first thing we did, travel somewhere together—but that's another story.
We went to Saddle Arabia. Have you been there, Flurry Heart? I thought not. It's not a place your parents would take you. The weather's nuts—melting heat all day, freezing cold all night, blowing sandstorms all the time. And it's full of magic, maybe more than Equestria. You can go to the bazaar—the market—and they sell all these awesome potions and rings. Blooms got all these ingredients she and Zecora—Blooms's old alchemy teacher—had always wanted to use. Anyway, we weren't there to do any crusading—that's a thing we do, another long story—I mean, we were just there to kick back, see the sights, have fun. But we always like to help other ponies, especially fillies and colts who don't have their cutie marks, or are worried about their cutie marks, and one night we overheard that there was this colt who'd gone missing, and he had a map cutie mark and decided his special talent was exploring, and it sounded like he'd gone to explore a deep cave out in the desert, only his parents were too old for that kind of thing, so they couldn't go after him. So we said "Cutie Mark Crusader cave rescue team!" or something like that. There was this weird musk ox who heard us say that, and he said we could use this submarine he'd made, but we had to explain that we didn't think there'd be a lot of water in a desert cave, so he got angry and called us… a really bad name. I don't know what you've heard, Flurry Heart.
Anyway, that same night, we rode my scooter through the desert over to the cave. It was a… wondrous cave. We could see why nopony wanted to go in. Just the entrance was uncanny. It looked kind of like a big cat that was gonna swallow you up if you went in. But Sweetie called out, in this squeaky voice she still has—we thought that was gonna change, but some things never change—she called out that she could see little hoofprints. And there they were. So she lit up her horn and down we went. Sweetie and Blooms were so scared, but I wasn't scared, of course; I'm not scared of anything, just like Rainbow Dash. I just said we had to be careful. And I kept my helmet on, because it had a headlamp, and in case there were any falling stella… stigri… stalagoo… pointy things. I don't know; ask the dictionary.
It was so big and dark in there. Sweetie's horn and my and Blooms's lanterns were like faint little stars in a whole night sky. It was craggy and rough, too. Sweetie almost fell into a pit so deep we couldn't see the bottom of it, but I grabbed hold of her hoof just in time—I'm really fast, y'know—and Blooms threw us a rope, and Sweetie tied the rope with her magic. It looked like nopony had ever been there before, except this colt we were looking for—his name was Sirocco—but Blooms looked real close at the walls, and she said there was stonework there, really old stonework. So somepony had dug the tunnels, or some of the tunnels, but it was a long, long time ago. We could only see the hoofprints we were tracking sometimes. Sirocco could crawl through these tiny tunnels we couldn't fit through, so we had to find other ways around. I guess being a kid has advantages.
We'd been there a million years, and the map Sweetie was drawing looked really complicated, and finally we heard somepony else's hooves. We scrambled along and we found a big chamber, and there in the center was a little earth pony with a map cutie mark, just as described. He was sitting in front of a big ancient silver bottle, and out of the bottle was this thick black smoke, and these big red and purple eyes glaring at you from the smoke. And… there was a lot of talking, but I think it went like this.
Sirocco was talking to the smoke. He said "And why do you want me to do that?"
The smoke said—he had this deep, dark voice; I can't imitate it real well—"Because I've been imprisoned in this flask and buried in this cave for a thousand years, and I yearn for the sun and moon; and would you, too, not wish to be free, my little pony, were you imprisoned in a silver flask in a deep, dark cave for a thousand years?"
Sirocco said "Okay… I guess that makes sense."
I said "What's going on?" and Blooms said "What are you doing?" and Sweetie said "Don't do it!". We were all talking at once.
Sweetie was just guessing, anyway, but it didn't matter, because Sirocco wasn't listening to us, and he said "Genie, I wish you were free!"
There was this horrible laughter, and the smoke grew and changed into this vast, terrifying shape—terrifying to Blooms and Sweetie and the kid, I mean—a sort of jet-black pony, only his hind legs were just smoke, and he had a big curved horn like the evil old King Sombra. He kept bellowing out "Free at last; free at last!", and he had a long, forked tongue that made us all feel like he shouldn't have been free. Sweetie was talking a mile a minute about how sometimes things that are imprisoned for a thousand years are imprisoned for a reason, and you have to check first, but she always has her best ideas after they're useful, and she let Discord out of the statue just as much as me and Blooms, anyway. Then the genie said "Now the sun and moon shall be mine, and I shall once more crush Saddle Arabia beneath my hooves!", in case we hadn't figured out he was a bad guy yet.
Sirocco looked just as upset as we were, and he held up the bottle and said "That's not what I freed you for! Get back in here!"
But the genie just laughed its horrible laugh again, and it shot a ray of dark magic from its horn and sent the bottle flying. I'm really fast, y'know, in more ways than one, so I knew we needed that bottle. I broke into a run, and I made a mad dash for it—I couldn't take my scooter into the cave. But then there was another burst of dark magic, the earth trembled, and the cave floor where the bottle was lying crumbled into pieces. The bottle was falling down an enormous chasm and… what could I do? I jumped down after it, into the darkness.
I slammed into something with a bone-rattling thud. I hadn't hit the bottom of the chasm—I'd just come to rest on a rough chunk of rock jutting out from the wall. And my teeth were clenched around the neck of the bottle. I told you I was fast! But I looked up and the mouth of the chasm seemed impossibly high above me. I could hear Blooms and Sweetie giving the genie a good fight. Sweetie knows some good spells, and Blooms is super-strong from all those years of applebucking—her whole family is. But we're all just regular ponies, y'know, Flurry—not alicorns, not Elements of Harmony, just the CMC. I knew they couldn't go the distance against something that old and evil. We needed to get it back in the bottle, which it had told us pretty clearly it needed to stay away from. Actions speak louder than words.
So Sirocco, trembling like a leaf, lowered Apple Bloom's rope down to me, down the side of the chasm. But it wasn't nearly long enough. And I still had to get up there. Lemme tell you, Flurry Heart—see my wings? I can't fly. Never could. And there are so many times I've desperately wished I could fly, and I never wished it harder than that moment, when the distance between me and the lip of the chasm was what stood between the world and this genie. But the genie was done granting wishes.
I'd done rock climbing before, actually. It's fun. But you usually have more equipment. Ropes and hooks and things. All I had was a rope I was trying to reach. And y'know what else I didn't have? My mouth. A good climber uses her mouth like a flexible third forehoof. But my mouth was clutching the bottle. I thought of tossing it up to another ledge, but if it bounced off or rolled away, it would be gone forever.
So I couldn't fly, and I didn't have any climbing equipment, and I didn't have my scooter, whatever good it would've done me there. But y'know what I still had, Flurry? I was fast. So that's what I used. I had to go fast. I threw the bottle straight up in the air, as high as I dared. While it was up, quick as I could, I used my mouth to climb one more step up and get my hooves in position, so I could catch it in my mouth on the way down. And that's what I kept doing. I got into a rhythm. Throw, climb, catch; throw, climb, catch; leaving the bottle on the next ledge whenever there was enough room for both me and it. It was crazy, but I didn't have time to think about how crazy it was. I didn't have time to think about what I couldn't do. I had to do what I could do, and, well, I had to do it fast. I heard Blooms and Sweetie still fighting the genie, but then I heard Sweetie collapse. I went faster. I made it to the rope, but it slipped out of Sirocco's mouth and I nearly went tumbling again.
Finally, panting, I got topside. The genie was there, and he saw me, but Blooms gave him one more good flying kick—she's better at karate than she used to be—and that was the opening I needed to leap at him with the bottle. He wailed and screamed and he got sucked inside, and luckily Sirocco still had the stopper, and he wasted no time putting it back in.
So when we were all rested, we took Sirocco back to his parents, who gave him a good talking-to about going off on his own. We told him that a cutie mark of a map could be about revising maps while relaxing back home, too, and I hope that made some kind of impression on him. The bottle's in Tartarus now. So I think that's all worth a commemorative stained-glass window or two, don't you?