//------------------------------// // Injury // Story: My Little Dashie : A Threequel // by EpicBG //------------------------------// I awoke with blurry vision, a terrible headache, and I was freezing cold laying on the floor in the middle of Zecora’s hut. The first thing that I noticed once my vision cleared up was that I’d been wrapped in a blanket. I looked around and began to search for Zecora, I couldn‘t find her in the small, one roomed hut. I rolled over onto my back, something was making it a lot tougher to do, but I eventually got myself repositioned. I pushed out from under the blanket and threw it off of me. I felt something weighing me down when I stood up. I stretched my back, or at least tried to. When I reached my hands backwards to push against my lower back, I felt something blocking my arms. I turned my head to my left and out of the corner of my eye I saw large wings protruding from my back. WINGS! Giant grey feathered wings! It was all coming back to me, as it were. I remembered the potion, the plan, and the pain. Oh Celestia, the pain. It was unbearable! It felt as if somebody had taken a molten hot scalpel and driven it into to skin above my shoulder blade and made a five inch long incision along the bone, then turned it around some inside of me, and finally moved my scapulae to the outside of my body. However, When I woke up my scapulae were inside of my back, still exactly where they should be. “Zecora! It worked!” No Response. “Zecora? Hello?” I heard hoofsteps coming from the direction of the door. When the door inched open it revealed an over encumbered Zebra. She was struggling to carry her stuffed saddlebags, a few boxes that were resting on her back, she was balancing three or so boxes on her head, and kicking one medium sized one on the ground in front of her. I walked over to her and picked up the ones off of her head and the one she was kicking. I was met with a warm smile. “Thanks you dude, for assisting me in carrying the ingredients that I have accrued. I see that the brew, has been a success for you?” I nodded the best I could behind the massive tower of boxes in between my arms. I didn’t know how to fold up my newly formed wings, so I accidentally I ended up knocked over many of Zecora’s ‘souvenirs‘, as she calls them, that adorned the walls. I put the boxes down on the counter on the far side of the hut, opposite to the door. “Zecora, how long will I have these wings for?” She trotted over to a giant bookshelf, stood on her hind legs, and pulled out an enormous purple book down from the top shelf in her mouth. She threw the book down onto a wooden table which made an audible thud on contact, and began reading off the page. “Potion of the Pegasi, allows anypony the ability to fly, and the duration is not clearly specified. Possibly it is a few years, maybe just a single month, after that time the wings on your back will molt slowly and the bone will weaken until it must to be surgically, or magically - Oh, horseapples…” She sunk her head down and frowned, but I didn’t know why at first. Her head sunk down further in depression and her ears flopped down. I felt bad, so I walked over to her and knelt down next to her. She had just realized that nothing rhymes with month! “Zecora, are you okay?” She shook her head. “What’s wrong?” Of course I’d figured it out, I just wanted to hear her speak. I saw her open her mouth as if to talk, but she just sighed. She slowly walked over to the bookshelf once again and struggled to pull out an volume with a dark blue cover. As she pulled it out of the packed bookcase I saw her struggle heavily with it, it was even bigger than the last book. I tried to offer assistance but she shrugged me off as I went to grab the book from her. She dropped it once it slid out of the shelf, forcing out an enormous cloud of dust. When the dust cleared and we stopped choking I saw that the cover was written in some sort of language I couldn’t understand, even the characters were different! She flipped through to the back of the book and took a quick look at what I guessed was the index. She then flipped through a few hundred pages with her hooves and landed on the page she was looking for. She picked up the book in her mouth and handed it to me. The page had a picture of an earth pony walking with their head slumped down. The next picture to the right of it had the same pony flying in the air with a pair of newly acquired wings that were outlined with a dotted line. The pony was grinning ear to ear, above their back was velocity marks that indicated forward motion. Flying. “Zecora, what am I supposed to be looking for?” Zecora motioned to me with her arms in a flapping motion. She wanted me to try to fly. I said goodbye but she decided to follow me out of her hut. My wings were still at full span and getting out of the door normally was impossible, so I decided to go out sideways. I stepped outside into the smog and began trying to flap my wings. I could feel the muscles but I couldn’t move them. ----- “Rainbow Dash, please do not act Rash. This is my fault you see, it’s all because of me.” I heard the voice call out from behind a mountain of books. “I-I-I…” I couldn’t even put together a sentence, I noticed the shadowy figure emerging from behind the mountain as Zecora, nopony else rhymes like that. Dad was stirring in his sleep, I saw something on his back move under the blankets when he rolled over. “Zecora, what’d you do?” She told me the story of how Dad arrived at her hut, how he asked her if there’s a way he could fly, how he passed out, how he assisted her with the boxes, everything I’d come to knew Dad would do but then she told me why he was unconscious. He’d tried to fly, what a featherbrain! There’s a reason why Pegasus pony fillies and colts don’t fly. It’s because they don’t know how! From what Zecora told me I can gather that he’d tried to fly and, for the most part, succeeded. Somewhat. But, somewhere in the middle of Ponyville he’d lost control while trying to descend and plummeted down to the ground. Turns out he landed near the library and was in bad shape. Twilight did an x-ray spell with her magic, and turns out that he had broken his left arm in three places, gotten a bad concussion and even snapped his right wing’s ulna and dislocated his right shoulder entirely. Twilight interjected amidst Zecora’s diagnosis to tell me that they’d sent news of Dad’s accident to Nurse Redheart and that they were waiting for the hospital to send a doctor who could fix Dad. As soon as Twilight finished an ear piercing screech echoed through the library, it came from where the front door is, or rather where it was. Twilight and I raced to the door, Zecora was busy meditating in the middle of the floor. Once we arrived at the door we saw an unconscious Earth Pony. She had a light blue coat, mint green mane that was tied in a bun, and a red cross for a cutie mark. Yeah, no doubt she was the nurse, I thought. “Nurse!” I called out. “She must’ve fainted from the small pool of blood on the ground in front of the door. C‘mon Twi, help me wake her up.” Twilight shook Nurse Tenderheart awake with me, eventually she came to from her nap. She opened her eyes and her face turned crimson in a blush. She stood up and silently walked into the library after regaining her composure. The Nurse trotted over to Dad and sat down, she began doing some tests; Normal things like taking temperature with a thermometer, checking reflexes, as well as feeling around his limbs. She stood up and looked at Twilight, Zecora and I. “He’s, uhm, in really bad shape.”