Fluttershy managed to prove to herself that she could not, in fact, be brave. Every fiber of her being was overwhelmed. The immense noise of the machine as it pulled its impossible metal frame through the air, driven by a pair of spinning blades grafted into its wings—and the shudders it made as it struck turbulence, its ridiculous inflexible body finding itself unable to compensate.
An airship was bad enough, but they were slow. Hot air balloons were worse, because they tended to run into things and had no actual means of directing their flight. This, though, was madness.
She found herself breathing hard into a paper bag, trying to control the hyperventilation and keep her lunch down.
Sampson, sitting across from her in the worn Naugahyde seats, seemed utterly calm.
“You appear to be distressed.”
“Ponies—were not—meant—to—FLY!”
“Evolution would seem to indicate the contrary. Assuming that your species is in fact a product of evolution rather than one created artificially.” He shrugged. “Nevertheless, I assess the risk of this vehicle as relativly low.”
“Relative compared to what?”
“What we do once we get to the zone. That will be much more dangerous. Does this not reassure you?”
The answer should have been obvious—but Fluttershy could not answer as the plane suddenly struck turbulence, causing her to fill the bag she was holding with something far more viscous than air.
As this was occurring, something squeaked beside her—and not a squeak of fear. A squeak of a wheel.
Fluttershy looked up and saw Flim standing beside her, dressed in a fancy but conservative suit, pushing a cart loaded with rusty cans of soda and loaded with jars of budget-grade snacks. This made Fluttershy feel significantly sicker.
“Would you like a biscuit or pretzels?”
“Um…”
“Here you go.” He placed a pretzel on a plate and gave it to Fluttershy. The smallest pretzel she had ever seen. So small she could barely see it. At the same time, he cracked open a can—something only a unicorn could do, or Applejack with her teeth—and poured its contents into a cup. Except when he set it down, Fluttershy could barely even see the color of the generic-brand cola she had been given.
“Um…”
“That will be thirty-two ninety nine,” said Flim. “I’ll add it to your bill.”
“I’m not here on my own volition,” whined Fluttershy. "I got stolen."
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay for the in-flight service.”
Fluttershy was about to protest when a gray hoof emerged from beneath her seat and felt around for a moment before grabbing the pretzel, pulling it under. She looked down to see that a face was staring back up at her.
“Aren’t you supposed to be flying the plane?”
The pilot shrugged. “It hasn’t crashed yet. So it’s still flying. So I must be doing something right.”
Flim blanched and, grabbing the pilot, quickly levitated him, shoving him back into the room where he was supposed to see.
“You did not see that,” he said. “In fact, for your trouble, why don’t I drop the price of the concessions? A discount. It’ll now be forty-four ninety-nine. A special deal, just for you—”
The plane shuddered and something broke off it. Whatever it lost, though, seemed only marginally critical, as they did not crash. Although the sudden realization that they could, in fact, crash, made Fluttershy sick all over again. Flim, himself looking slightly green, scuttled off to hide elsewhere.
Fluttershy looked to Sampson. “And you aren’t even bothered by this a little?”
“No. Why would I be?”
“Because it’s all...a lot?”
“Not really. I’m just sitting here. This is the easiest thing I’ve done all day.”
“What if we...crash?” Fluttershy whispered the last word, as if speaking it too loud would cause it to crash. As she said it, the plane shifted suddenly.
“Stupid air bumps!” cried a voice from the cockpit. “Get out of my way!”
Sampson shrugged. “This vehicle is powered by a rare alchemical mixture of hydrocarbons. The explosion on impact would be quite impressive. Assuming it requires impact to trigger. It is just as liable to detonate in the air. Perhaps you will take comfort in that fact?”
“Why would I take comfort in that fact?”
Sampson looked at her, blank but seemingly confused. “Because if you explode in the air, you do not need to fall.”
Fluttershy felt faint.
She stood up suddenly, nearly falling over from the exertion. She felt trapped. The airplane was small and the air was still. It smelled bad. Like mold and burning electronics. There were no animals save for the lice in the seats, and they were not any more talkative than lice normally were. Which was not at all. Fluttershy desperately wished for some friendly motherbucking snakes on the motherbucking plane, but none materialized. She was alone.
She went for a walk. To the cockpit. Upon entering it, though, she wished she had avoided it entirely.
Flam was dressed in a copilot uniform, pale, and had he possessed knuckles they almost surely would have been white. The pilot, though, was squinting at something that was blinking red on the front of his controls. Controls that seemed to cover every single surface—and that mostly seemed inoperable.
“So many buttons,” groaned the pilot. “I don’t even wear pants, what am I supposed to do with buttons? And what is this thing?”
“Your instruments,” moaned Flam.
“What am I, some kind of trombonist? We don’t need instruments where we’re going!”
“And where are we going?” squeaked Fluttershy.
The pilot shrugged. “Based of previous experience? Probably the ground. Very, very quickly. They can’t shoot you down if you ram them with your plane! Except I haven’t figured out where the down switch is, so landing might not happen as violently as it usually does.”
Fluttershy looked to Flam, who just shook his head.
“Are we almost there, at least?” she managed to act.
Flam consulted a map. He nodded, his whole body shaking. “We’re right over it now. We just need to figure out a way down.”
“Down’s usually the easy part,” mumbled the pilot. “Stupid metal planes. I never liked the bombers.” He paused. “Maybe if I just tossed you all out? Or if I wait for the fuel to run out? I drank a lot of it when you weren't looking, so that will probably happen pretty soon.”
Fluttershy could not take the stress of knowing how these things were operated. She moved to turn and escape, probably to the back, but as she did, something caught her eye through the dirty windscreen.
She paused, squinting. It was an object, and at first, terrified, she thought that it might be a bird—but it was moving far too fast. As it grew closer, she saw translucent wings beating incredibly fast—wings not made of feathers or chitin, but made from something far more translucent. Translucent and glowing.
Then, too late, she realized what it was. A figure clad in dark armor, charging them at full speed, held aloft by the beating of magically generated wings.
“TURN!” she cried.
“Tern? Where?" The gray pony squinted, then gesticulated through the cracked windscreen. "I was here first, he can move!”
He did not move—until the last second. And as he did, Fluttershy felt the vibration of a single, simple spell. And, as the plane slipped from the air, she heard the thump of a cutting spell against its tail, severing its rear controls. The whole plane immediately shuddered and began to drop.
“Ha!” laughed the pilot, slamming the accelerator. “Problem solved! We’re going down real fast now! Everypony get ready to land at MAXIMUM VELOCITY!”
He did not have long to rejoice. The figure came back, performing an aerial motion that would have made Rainbow Dash jelous—and leveled from their port side. His long, curved horn ignited, and a blast of red light tore through the cockpit. The glass on one side erupted in a plume of metal and molten rubber, coating the pilot. He looked down at himself, confused—and was promptly sucked out the hole and directly into one of the propellers.
The effect was immediate. The engine detonated in a plume of fire.
“Welp,” said Flam. “I believe this constitutes an emergency. Ladies and gentleman, please return your table trays to the upright positions!”
He stood up and raced out of the cockpit. His brother, likewise, ran to the front of the plane, throwing a parachute to his brother. In an instant, they had strapped themselves in and donned protective goggles.
“Wait!” cried Fluttershy. “What are you doing?!”
“Leaving,” said Flim.
“Yes. Before the gravity gets us.”
“But—don’t we need parachutes too?!”
They shrugged. “Budget cuts, my dear. Costs must be kept low. We only bought the two.”
With that, they pulled the emergency exit, pushed down their goggles, and jumped out. By this time, the airplane was in a severe, spiraling dive, and Fluttershy felt herself being lifted off the ground by the g-forces—only to be suddenly grasped by an oversize hoof.
“Sampson—”
“Unfortunately, the Laws compel me to insist you leave the vehicle. Immediately.”
“Wait—WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT NO DON’T YOU DARE—”
With a single motion, he threw her out the exit. She bounced once off the wing of the airplane and then began screaming as she fell, waving her hooves uselessly and leaving a trail of fluid that was most likely tears.
She twisted and turned as she fell, occasionally catching glimpses of the ground—a vast and unruly forest or swamp, too far to have any detail but growing closer with every passing second. Then, sometimes, above her, she saw the flaming remains of the airplane trailing forward in a downward arc.
The ground, though, was a more pressing concern. The descent was overwhelming, the fear palpable beyond what her mind could handle. The lack of ground, with nothing but the air surrounding her, nothing to hold her up and the impossible speed of Equestria itself pulling her ever closer toward a violent and messy hug.
It was too much to bear, and she pleaded silently through her screams that somepony, ANYPONY would save her, would keep her from hitting the ground, of that unpleasant and quiet thump that awaited her below.
She closed her eyes, attempting to shield herself from the inevitable. By then, the ground had much better resolution. She could see the trees coming toward her, and doing so with great haste.
She whimpered, out of breath and petrified—and only then, in the farthest reaches of her mind, did she suddenly remember a certain critical fact.
Summoning the entirety of her courage and wherewithal, she spread her wings.
Unfortunately, she had already allowed herself to descend too fast. Fluttershy was at best marginally athletic, and only when it came to Buckball or jazzercise—not flying. She was not Rainbow Dash; even Twilight could out-fly her. A diet of Pinkie’s cupcakes had not assisted the situation. She was not able to pull herself out of the dive.
She struck the trees, hard, the wind knocked out of her as she broke through branches and leaves. This was followed by a horrible and severe thump, one that sent stars through her brain as she impacted the mud. But, as Rainbow Dash often explained, if you heard the thump when you hit, it meant you survived the crash.
Fluttershy was not so sure. She was, in fact, totally sure that she had not in fact survived. She refused to accept that she had not until she could force herself to open her eyes. By then, the sun was at an odd position in the sky. More time had passed than she had thought.
She stood, wobbling, and promptly fell to one side. Looking back, she nearly fainted at the sight of her wing. It was hanging limply at her side. Possibly broken, or possibly dislocated. An injury that she had seen hundreds if not thousands of times before. Except in those cases, it had always been on Rainbow Dash.
She nearly fainted. The only thing that kept her fear from overwhelming her was the far greater fear that she would awake in a muddy, impassible forest at night. A forest that she was fully aware was indeed full of monsters.
She sat up, took a breath, and stood—only to realize that she was covered in something other than mud.
Looking down, she saw a number of brightly-colored shells over her body.
“Hello there,” she said, smiling. “Are you here to help me?”
The sudden realization of pain was an indication that they were, in fact, not very friendly. They were activly eating her.
“Oh no,” gasped Fluttershy. “I am delicious!”
She then began screaming, pushing the snails away and running into the forest.
A forest that seemed to exude a sense of ominousness. It was the sort of untamed, uncontrolled wilderness that populated some strange regions of Equestria where ponies simply did not go. The Everfree was another snippet of the same type. This one, though, seemed somehow far worse.
The trees were thin and massive, stretching upward as enormous gray columns and leaving the mossy, swampy area beneath largely free of undergrowth. Too much was visible and yet, through the mist, not nearly enough could be seen. It was too silent. No birds, no skittering of mammals. No sounds at all. Save for the dull hiss of trees, and of the occasional strange scream from the distance.
Those screams were of course drowned out by Fluttershy’s shrieks as she fled in no particular direction, thinking she saw monsters around every tree. Things flitted by in the air, gibbering and almost laughing—but she could not see them. Not in the slowly dimming light of the forest.
A light was visible in the distance and, although already winded and with her legs burning, she charged for it—to escape, to get somewhere not scary.
She broke free into a clearing and nearly collapsed, breathing hard, her mouth tasting like metal. She laughed, slightly, glad she had escaped the forest—until she looked up and began to whimper. Because the snail was looking back at her.
It seemed almost confused. It seemed also rather large. On a nearly ridiculous scale. Fluttershy could have perched her cottage on top of its shell and still had room for a vegetable garden—and its long, wet, alien eyes were as large as she was long.
She stood there, covered in mud and moss, unable to run—until it raised a mouth adorned with a little pair of feelers. For a moment, it almost seemed adorable—until with a wet slap, its lips peeled back to reveal a circular mouth filled with thousands of sharp, serrated teeth.
Fluttershy screamed and turned to run. The snail pursued, driving itself into the forest, moving its vast frame dexterously between the trees. Those that did not move simply bent, an adaptation to its imense and overpowering girth.
The result, had it been viewed by an outsider, would have perhaps seemed comical. Namely because the snail was a distinctly slow creature, moving at a relative speed no greater than any ordinary snail. However, due to its size, this manifested as an almost absurd velocity as it passed one or two of its body length every few seconds. Fluttershy, being so much smaller relative to it, could barely outrun it. Even in a dead sprint.
The operant word in this case being “dead”.
Fluttershy’s mind was, for the most part, a complete blank from terror—and yet, at the same time, she found herself in the state of clarity that she could only accomplish from a very specific level of stress.
This was not how she imagined it would happen. She had always imagined that, like several species of the most noble of spiders, she would be eaten by swarms of her young. Unfortunately, due to her physiology, she was not capable of giving birth—or probably being properly eaten. The process of digestion in a creature larger than her terrified her far more than the chewing, but she supposed both would be unpleasant.
Her body was about to fail. She could no longer run, and she fell to her knees in the moss and mud. She awaited the chewing—but out of the corner of her eye, she saw a sudden flash. A thin slash of violet across a tree, then a sound curiously similar to hooves against wood.
With a crash, the tree fell, blocking the progression of the snail. It seemed confused for moment, stopping its slow forward progression. Out of the shadows, a figure ran elegantly up the trunk of the tree, directly to the snail’s face—and raised a pointed stick toward it.
Fluttershy gasped, overwhelmed but also feeling horrible for having put the beast in danger—only to realize that although the stick was pointed, it was not brandished as a weapon. Rather, a bright blue cabbage had been skewered on the end.
The snail paused, then felt this offering with its feelers—before closing its mouth entirely over the pony holding it. Fluttershy gasped, but the mouth slowly pulled back, revealing the pony unharmed and covered in a thick layer of mucous. The bladed teeth had not been directed at him, but at gently removing the cabbage from the stick. The snail began to leisurely munch on it, slowly chewing it.
“Hmm...how interesting.” The figure produced a mucous-covered notepad and an equally mucous-covered pencil and began to write notes. “Blue...preferred over red...I know that feeling…”
He continued writing and the snail continued eating—apparently not noticing Fluttershy in the slightest.
Fluttershy, when she had finally regained her ability to breath, coughed slightly. “Um...excuse me?”
He looked up from his notes. He was wearing what amounted to a worn, hooded poncho, a piece of ordinary rain gear—but as he turned, Fluttershy was able to see him far more clearly. In doing so, her wings suddenly tingled and popped outward—or attempted to. One did not move aside from an agonizing twitch.
He was muscular, but in the wiry, lanky way that only a unicorn could be. Not hypertrophic like some earth-ponies, or thinly athletic like Pegasi, but almost elven in appearance—taller than Fluttershy, but clearly strong. His coat, though dirty in places, was itself a light brown, an unusual color for a unicorn—although his long, soft mane and extensive sideburns were distinctly blue-green.
“Oh. Hey Fluttershy.”
Fluttershy squeaked and partially blushed. She did not know how this stallion knew her, and at first started to panic—only to remember that she had become a rather public figure over time. Perhaps he was an admirer. This thought pleased her more than it should have, and the pain in her dislocated wing increased.
His dull smile faded, turning to an expression of concern. He patted the snail on its squishy head and jumped down, elegantly landing on a mossy hillock. “That wing looks pretty bad, eh? Is it supposed to be like that?”
“What do you think?!” snapped Fluttershy, immediately clapping her muddy hooves over her mouth. His handsomeness had caused her to become perturbed. Her assertiveness had become unstable.
He shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not that kind of doctor.”
Fluttershy pointed a shaking hoof at the snail. “It was…it was going to eat me…”
The stallion looked over his shoulder and let out a low chuckle. “What, Mildred? She wouldn’t do that. She’s such a pretty girl, isn’t she?”
The snail looked up and huffed.
“Besides, the gigantus species is entirely vegetarian. The pharynx is tiny. She couldn’t even swallow a kumquat without chewing it.”
“That’s what I was worried about. She—she was chasing me—”
The stallion poked her fluffy chest, causing her to shiver. When he drew his hoof back, it was covered in moss. “Well, sure. You’re covered in her favorite food. Mildred can’t see so good these days. She must have smelled it.”
Fluttershy blushed even deeper. “Oh no…” She leaned, looking past the stallion at the giant snail still munching its cabbage. “Mildred, I’m so sorry! Please forgive me, I was scared and got a little surprised, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings if—”
The snail’s eyes suddenly pricked up. It stopped munching. Then, with surprising speed, it retracted back under its shell. Fluttershy was about to feel bad about this when she heard something in the trees. She looked up to find that the sun had started to set—and in the forest, darkness had already set.
Things moved quickly through the trees. She did not see them clearly. Only that each of them had a long—impossibly long—pair of legs. They sprinted behind trees, hiding, so she could only catch the barest glimpses of their shadows. She heard twigs breaking and saw the glow of eyes.
“What—what is that?” she squeaked.
The stallion sighed. “Snailwalkers. They must have heard all the noise.”
“Are they...friendly?”
“Well...no. We should probably get back to my camp. It’s not safe out here anymore.”
He began walking into the woods—and quickly. Fluttershy paused, knowing that it was always bad to trust a stranger. Still, though, she heard the sound of things sprinting in the forest—and growing closer. So she had no choice but to follow.