The Forest of the Golden Abalone

by Unwhole Hole


Chapter 2: The Lowest Bidders

The difficulty with Fluttershy, in general, was her distinct passivity. It was inscribed deep within her fundamental personality. This, in part, may have been due to her simple wants. Life, to her, was simply a matter of cuddling adorable animals, taking care of them, and occasionally spending time with her friends. The adventures she went on were at times stressful, but rarely were they events of her own making. She was responsive, not proactive. Things happened to her. She did not cause them.

This was the niche she filled, and she had come to understand it. It was her own personal place within the desperate social ecosystem she had so lately learned she occupied. Perhaps it would be easier if she had remained in her cottage, outside of town, and never spoken to any pony ever—but that was not what had occurred. And yet, despite her position, her status had never changed.

Her adaptation to this had been simple. It was not a matter of action, but reaction. Choices in the face of the unknown. Chaos could not be controlled, but it could be directed. This was something that Fluttershy had unfortunately come to know all-too intimately.

She did not know the means by which she was transported, or to where. To the outskirts of somewhere. Beyond the pun-named cities where ponies dwelt, to the spaces in between. The places ponies did not need to know about let alone go. But the motion was too fast. Bon Bon moved strangely, and Fluttershy halfway understood why.

When she found herself elsewhere, she did not know where she was—apart from a vast field. Except it was not quite a field. Although dry, rough grass covered most of it, much of it was paved. Although it was on the ground, it held a distinct air of Pegasus design. Fluttershy had no concept of an air-strip, although she may distantly have known what a hanger was. And that one of several were placed before her. It was rusted, the panels of its roof falling in, and overall seemed dilapidated to the highest degree—and Fluttershy gulped, fearing what monstrosity of an airship must be within.

“Oh dear,” she said.

Bon Bon raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”

“Well, um...this is a little embarrassing…”

“What part of you isn’t embarrassing?”

Fluttershy blushed. “I’m...terrified of flying.”

She felt Bon Bon’s eyes shift to her back, pause on her wings, and then turn back to her face. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”

She began walking to the slumping office on the edge of the hanger, and Fluttershy was forced to follow. Her only consolation—and the only thing that kept her from running away, screaming and blubbering, was the fact that the dry grass was absolutely stuffed with friendly rattlesnakes. Their rattling of encouragement kept her strong. The very softest of tarantulas applauded silently, encouraging her along, and even the scorpions looked up with admiration. She could not allow herself to disappoint the scorpions, not in front of their hundreds and hundreds of adorable, venomous children. What kind of example would she be setting?

A small bell was attached to the door. It jingled when it open, and Fluttershy stepped in from the brightness of the sun. As she did, she saw a desk—and saw who was sitting behind it.

“Nope,” she said, going right back out the door. Surely the scorpions would understand.

The door slammed closed, though, in a surge of green magic.

“Now now, wait right there, miss!”

Flam had suddenly appeared, lying in front of the door.

“Open the door or I scream.”

“Wait, wait! Surely this is a misunderstanding!”

“Eeeeeeek.”

The sound was quiet, and barely perceptible. Flim and Flam looked at each other, and shrugged.

“Do I need to do it again?” gasped Fluttershy, her voice suddenly oddly quiet.

Flim and Flam snorted, suddenly suppressing laughter.

“What?”

“Fluttershy, are you a little--”

“Eeeeek...gek...heh…” She coughed.

“Hoarse?”

They broke out into laughter, and Fluttershy just rolled her eyes. She looked to Bon Bon.

Bon Bon looked about how Fluttershy felt, except more tired and slightly more possessed. “Yeah. I know.”

“Why? Just...why?”

“Budget cuts,” she sighed. “We have to go through a private contractor.”

“And we are assuredly the most private of all!” exclaimed Flam.

“And for a matter of corporate budgets, why, we bid the very lowest!”

“But I assure you, we still offer safety comparable with some published reports of mechanical failures and accident rates!”

"And no legally proven fatalities!"

“We’ve spared no expense--”

“So that you can spare every expense!”

This was accompanied by distinct sale’s choreography.

Fluttershy just shook her head, and suddenly felt their hooves around her, holding her as if she were their very best friend.

“Now now, Ms. Fluttershy, I know us and your friends have a...certain history…”

“Motivated purely by misunderstandings, I assure you!”

“With no legal culpability!”

“But we were misguided! Terribly, terribly misguided!”

They fell to the floor, suddenly begging. Or seeming to. “We’ve turned over a new leaf!”

“We make an honest living now!”

“This new venture is guaranteed to make a safe, legal profit!”

“A hefty profit considering how much we overcharge—oof!”

Flim was elbowed by his brother, and he promptly smiled. “I mean, because of the quality service we offer!”

“Especially to one of the co-rulers of Equestria! Why, we could even roll out a red carpet!”

“If we could afford one!”

They promptly picked her up and nearly lobbed her through the door to the hanger. A small set of fireworks exploded as they entered, both of them smiling broadly and gesturing toward the airship it contained. An airship unlike anything Fluttershy had ever seen before.

It was probably the ugliest thing she had ever seen, though. It was not a big, elegant dirigible, but really something more like a sad parody of a bird. She could not tell what it was made of, but it had no feathers, only metal—and the wings were affixed in a way where it was clear they could not flap. How such a thing could fly, Fluttershy had no idea.

“What is this?”

“We’ve named her the Profiteer,” said Flam, stroking the metal of the vehicle—and causing a plate to fall off. He promptly slammed it back on with his magic, his brother putting more masking tape over the edges.

“A piece of ancient and nearly lost technology,” added Flim.

“You’ll never guess where we managed to find it,” continued Flam.

“In fact, we won it in a game of poker.”

“Not the card ones, we’re too cheap to gamble. The one where you actually get the poke.”

“But not like that!”

“No! No definitely not like that!”

“I still have the marks though…”

Flim cleared his throat. “Regardless, we assure you, this is almost definitely a flying machine of some sort!”

“Almost definitely?” demanded Bon Bon, pushing forward. “I read your bid requisition. You said you had five thousand hours experience flying this thing.”

“Well admittedly some numbers may have been inflated.”

“For the sake of making a more cosmetically appealing contract, yes—”

“You mean you fudged the numbers.”

Flim and Flam gasped in unison. “Heavens to Celestia’s rear! My dear, we have been accused of a great many things!”

“Forgery! Fraud! Horse theft!”

“But never, never have we been so insultingly called fudgers! We do not FUDGE!”

“We simply take creative license in our written works. Is that not an author’s prerogative?!”

“For a government bid? NO!” Bon Bon twisted suddenly. “Yes I know it’s silver, stop yelling at me, I’m not doing it!” She turned back to them. “Just tell me you can fly it!”

Flim and Flam both smiled, and then chuckled.

“Well…”

“Um…”

Bon Bon groaned. “You can’t, can you?”

“Oh thank Celestia,” whispered Fluttershy.

“We are more investors rather than, you know…”

“The ponies that actually do the doing.”

“But it’s not a problem!”

“Not at all!”

“We worked it into the contract, you see! So it’s really more your responsibility to fly it than ours!”

Bon Bon’s red-stained eyes widened. “MINE?!”

“Not exactly,” said the enormous earth-pony directly behind Flim and Flam.

They both screamed. Fluttershy simply fainted by the sudden surprise—and Bon Bon promptly began the ritual of kicking her back to wakefulness.

The earth-pony, despite his size, had entered the room silently through no obvious exit. No one had seen him coming, or even heard him. His color was a steely blue, his eyes wide and pale—and they stared without blinking. Eyes that seemed oddly perceptive but utterly blank.

The kicking roused Fluttershy, and she stared up at the pony—a pony that did not move, but regarded her with blank and peculiar interest. Her eyes drifted to his rear, and saw that his cutie mark was a half gear.

“Hello, Fluttershy,” he said. His voice was measured and strangely accented. Fluttershy was sure she had heard it before, but it took her a moment to realize that he spoke with the erudite tones of those who dwelt within the Crystal Empire. Strangely, though, he was not a crystal pony. “My name is agent Samson. I am the surveyor for this operation.”

“You?” Fluttershy stood, if shakily. She felt something was off about this pony, although she dismissed it as deriving from her inherent anxiety. She was naturally afraid of strangers. This one, though, did seem odd. She supposed it was in the way he did not blink. Or perhaps the way he did not move, except when he absolutely needed to. She could not even see him breathing.

Flim and Flam attempted to regain their composure. “Agent!” they said. “Do you...usually sneak up on ponies when they are so unsuspecting?”

“And vulnerable?”

“Yes,” he replied. His jaw did not move when he spoke, and his mouth only barely moved. “That is a component of my work. Would this not be unexpected?”

Flam cleared his through. “That said. Did you bring the final component of our aircraft?”

Sampson stared at him for far too long, his empty eyes unblinking. “How odd that you have facial hair,” he said at last. “Why would ponies grow facial hair? And how?”

“Um…”

“The question is rhetorical because you apparently lack the ability to answer. Perhaps I will grow a beard. With regard to the original question, yes.” He gestured toward a large wooden crate beside him.

“You mean it isn’t even in working condition?!” snapped Bon Bon.

“Of course it is!” retorted Flim. “Minus, of course, the most important piece.”

He and his brother both levitated a pair of crow bars to the box. Fluttershy disliked crowbars, as they had very little to do with actual crows.

They snapped open the crate. A terrible smell filled the room. Fluttershy winced, but could not help but look into the box—to see that it was utterly packed with an unpleasant brown waxy substance.

“Is that…”

“Earwax?” asked Flam, on the verge of spilling his oats.

“Of course not. It’s cosmoline. But why the Agency would store it in cosmoline—”

He promptly screamed like the littlest and shrillest of fillies as a hoof suddenly shot out of the greasy substance, grasping him—or rather, gently feeling his face.

“EEEEEEEEK!”

From the grease, a figure pulled himself upward—and then a pony was suddenly sitting there, dripping greasy preservatives. He did not seem especially confused, but rather perturbed.

“What in the name of Celestia’s cellulite did you open the lid for?!” he demanded. “You’re letting the fumes out!”

“Why are you—why were you—cosmoline—”

“The greatest antioxidant! I’m fully antoixidized and I don’t know where I am!”

“You’re—”

“Did I say I wanted to know?!” He climbed out of the box, tripping and falling on the floor with a greasy splat as he did so. Fluttershy saw that he was a gray earth-pony. “I’m not a cartographer! I don’t do geography, geology, or geometry! So don’t try to confuse me with your fancy mathematics!”

He hobbled toward the edge of the airplane, then looked up at it, confused. “Great! I got smaller! You idiots, I’m dry-clean only! You’ve shrunk me!”

Flim and Flam looked askance at Sampson, who looked back but did not seem especially engaged in whatever it was they were doing.

“You requested a pilot,” he said. “This is what we had in storage.”

Bon Bon let out a long sigh and yelled at the gray earth-pony who was currently engaged in drinking from the airplane’s fuel line.

“Hey! You can fly, right?”

“Of course I can fly! I’m a Pegasus, aren’t I?”

Everypony looked to his back. No wings were present.

He looked around. “Huh,” he said. “I don’t know where I am. It isn’t where I used to be.”

“You used to be in the box,” said Sampson. “I can place you back in, if you like.”

“Pfssh.” The pony climbed the edge of the box. “What kind of idiot doesn’t know how to cosmoline himself? I can get back in the box on my own.” He began to grasp the edge of the box, then started climbing back in.

“Why?”

The pony stopped, then frowned—and squinted. “I don’t like you,” he said, slowly. “You ask too many questions.”

“Or not enough,” said Bon Bon.

“Like who stole all my bones.” The pony at this point was sinking back into the cosmoline—but his eyes shifted from all of them to the others. “I know one of you did it. You don’t have to say who. I promise I won’t be angry. But I have a sneaking suspicion I’ve been boned.”

Green magic pulled him back from the cosmoline and he hung limply in the air.

“Ha. Told you I could fly.”

“We need you to fly the plane,” said Flim, sternly.

“How the heck did you grow a mustache?”

“He didn’t,” said Flam. “I did.”

“How am I supposed to know that, I can’t tell you two apart. Freaky apple-ponies, all a bunch of weirdos I say. Never trust an apple-pony, they’re all liars. Apples are just oranges that lie, and that’s a truth. Fruit isn’t trustworthy. No antioxidants at all.”

“Plane. Fly?”

“Fly? What do I look like to you, and entomologist? Like I go around studying ents? How should I know?” He pointed at the plane. “That’s basically half a biplane. I have half a mind to figure it out. Where am I going? Do you have a map?”

“We do,” said Sampson.

“Well then it’s too bad I can’t read. If it’s south, I can figure it out. But don’t you ask me to go weest! I don’t trust weest! That’s where the sun goes to hide. So, logically, that's where it keeps all the apples. You can’t trust the sun, you know. I mean, where does it go when it sets? Is there another Equestria on the other side, or is it gone? Does Celestia really demand our sacrifice to keep her sated with our respective juices?”

“Celestia no longer raises the sun.”

The pilot’s eyes widened. “Ah. So Nightmare Moon did win. I knew they were lying to me.” He pointed at Sampson. “So did we lose the war or what?”

“I assure you, I will be quite victorious in the end,” he said.

“Yeah, one of you would say that. Bunch of weirdos.”

“Lock him in the cockpit,” said Sampson, slowly. “Given enough time, I am sure he will eventually start the vehicle. Just like when we put those monkeys in that room.”

“Monkeys?” Fluttershy was suddenly interested in what was happening. “What did you do to monkeys?”

“Nothing that needs to concern you.”

“Monkey business,” whispered the pilot. “I knew it…”

Flim sighed and carried the grease-soaked pilot to where he needed to go. He struggled, but largely against himself. “I won’t talk, not ever! Do you think it’s the first time I’ve been thrown in the cock pit? HA! I don’t feel pain, they cut it out of my brain when they took my wings!”

Bon Bon turned to Sampson. “You know what you’re doing, right?”

“I do not make mistakes, Sweetie Drops.”

“You know what that thing is, don’t you?”

“According to the paperwork, it is an approved pilot. It meets the requirements.” He turned to Fluttershy. “The airplane is required. Many of the gastropods present in the zone have evolved flight.”

“They fly?”

“Yes. An airship would be far too slow. This is the quickest way to reach the target and obtain safe entry. The survey is anticipated to take me three ours with my current equipment. It will run smoothly with minimal effort on your part.”

“Really?” Fluttershy looked to Bon Bon. “And you?”

She shrugged. “I stay here. I can’t...be in a place like that. I can’t actually use this sword. Not anymore. I’m on desk duty. Permanently.”

“And sack duty, apparently.”

She nodded. “Get in, get out. It’s easy, clean.”

Fluttershy nodded. “I’m going to do it,” she said, more to herself than anypony else. “I’m going to be brave!”

She forced herself to smile, knowing that she was, in fact, a terrible liar.