Attack of the Killer Muffins!: Muffins on a Plane
by
TotallyNotaBrony
The afternoon flight out of Tucson was crowded. It wasn’t that Arizona was a particularly bad place, sometimes people and ponies just needed a change of scenery and a little taste of vacation adventure. They were about to get it in heaps.
The pilots finished their preflight checklist. The passengers were aboard and the luggage was stowed. The in-flight meals had been delivered and the food truck was just pulling away.
In the cockpit, Captain Washington leaned forward slightly to look at the clouds through the windshield. Here I come again, sky. He was not particularly fond of atmosphere, believing that it had done him wrong at some point in the past. The solution, in his mind, was the fly jets though it until the air begged for mercy.
The plane was pushed away from the terminal. Captain Washington knew his 737 weighed close to one hundred thousand pounds, loaded as it was for a cross-country flight. He always thought it was kind of amazing how the little truck could push it around.
He shook his head and refocused on the task at hand. Tearing a hole in the sky. Beside him, First Officer Tasco gave Washington a glance. He knew the look the other pilot got before a flight. It was like Flying: With a Vengance.
The runway was clear and no planes blocked their speedy takeoff. In the back, as the wheels left the ground, a flight attendant began opening a box of snacks. For some reason, more than usual had been delivered. It was not unheard of for things to be changed at the last minute.
To her surprise, the box contained muffins. That was about as far from peanuts and stale crackers as airline food could get. The food had to be species-neutral so both pony and human passengers could partake. Well, better pass them out before someone realized their mistake and called the plane back.
As the aircraft continued to climb, the flight attendant opened the other boxes and prepared her snack cart. As soon as the seatbelt light turned off, she put on a friendly smile and began pushing the cart down the aisle.
The first passenger to receive a muffin was pleasantly surprised and raised it to his mouth for a bite. The muffin punched him before he could sink his teeth in.
Surprised in a completely different way, the man stared in shock. The muffin grabbed his lip and launched into a face-savaging assault. His screams were like the battle cry to alert the rest of the baked cargo to attack.
Two young men sat watching the muffins overrun the cabin of the plane. One said, “Dude, am I baked, or are those little guys baked?”
“Can it be both?” asked his friend. They two of them began to giggle, their humor made possible by all that premium grass they had smoked prior to the flight to calm their nerves. They were quickly overrun by a swarm of killer muffins. The lesson here is that drugs are bad.
An entirely different lesson was being learned in the cockpit at the moment. It was hard to ignore the screams, and being the non-idiots that they were, Washington and Tasco didn’t open the cockpit door. A flight attendant called through the intercom, sobbing something about murderous muffins slaughtering everyone and everypony.
Washington began unbuckling his seatbelt. Tasco stared at him in disbelief. “What are you doing?”
Washington reached into his briefcase and pulled out a midnight black beret, which he put on with the peak facing back. “We took an oath to serve and protect our passengers through any hardship.” Washington picked up a fire extinguisher, the only thing in the cockpit that could be reasonably considered a weapon. “And if they’re all dead, we can at least avenge them.”
The Captain threw open the door and stepped into the cabin. Carnage greeted him. Blood, bones, and muffins everywhere.
A flight attendant was crawling towards him down the aisle, her legs a gruesome mess. She reached out a hand towards Washington when suddenly a muffin bored its way out of her chest with a spray of guts and gore. He instinctively swung the fire extinguisher, swatting the muffin against the cabin wall.
Grabbing the intercom microphone, Washington shouted, “Put the plane into a parabolic flight path!”
“This isn’t NASA!” replied Tasco. “What are you trying to do?”
“Trust me!” Washington braced as he felt the plane’s nose drop. The sudden descent caused everything in the cabin to begin falling – albeit at the same rate as the plane itself. Astronauts used a similar method for training.
Fighting killer muffins in zero-g was not what Washington had planned to do that day, but he was nothing if not adaptable. He discovered that a blast from the carbon dioxide fire extinguisher would freeze them, leaving the way open for blunt force trauma to take care of the problem.
As the plane reached the minimum safe altitude, Tasco yanked back on the controls and put the aircraft into a steep climb. Suddenly, gravity was much more than normal. Washington had planned for it, but the muffins certainly hadn’t. Many of them splatted after falling from near the ceiling all the way to the floor.
His legs heavy, Washington managed to take a few steps, trying not to drop towards the rear of the plane. The muffins may have been murderous, but they didn’t have the strength in their tiny limbs to fight the enhanced gravity.
“Come at me, you bran bastards!” Washington felt the plane reaching the top of its arc and starting back down to begin another cycle of weightlessness. He whacked a few more muffins. The spray of the fire extinguisher provided enough force to move him through the air even if he didn’t intend to. The next high-gravity cycle found him near the tail of the aircraft.
A muffin that had been missed in Washington’s initial sweep through the plane tumbled from its hiding place near the forward bulkhead. It sped downwards through the cabin, aided by the extra gravity-like force. The Captain saw it coming, but the fire extinguisher felt too heavy to lift quickly enough to block.
The muffin clipped his head at almost seventy miles an hour and he fell to the floor.
Gravity reduced to zero as they passed apogee and began free fall. Sticky globules of his own blood were floating around him. In a panic Washington took off his beret, and saw several large bloodstains marring its formerly pristine felt, already partially clotted. This won't wash out!
He peered back up the aisle, and saw the muffin, obviously injured, trying to repair itself with the crushed contents of a paper Starbuck's pastry bag. He grabbed the fire extinguisher and pushed off in the direction of the muffin, snarling, "I am motherbucking tired of these motherbucking muffins on this motherbucking plane!"
The muffin saw him coming, and spat bits of bran at him. He tried to block them with the fire extinguisher, and where the bran hit the canister surface it began to bubble.
Knowing what was coming, he threw the extinguisher at the muffin. Just as it crushed the pastry into crumbs the pressurized container exploded, tearing a rent in the cabin ceiling, and Washington was sucked out of the plane by the explosive decompression.
He had only moments before the cold would begin to freeze him solid, so he tucked himself into a tight ball. I'm gonna make terminal velocity earn its name! He laughed. And I'm gonna tear the sky a new one!