//------------------------------// // The Recovery // Story: The Winds of Change // by AgentSnail //------------------------------// The Recovery BANG The small canister exploded in a shower of light and tiny magnesium shards. The sound was louder than anything Jason had ever heard before, even with his hooves covering his ears. The bright light had blinded him momentarily, leaving his head spinning before he had the conscience of mind to lay down. Riiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnggggggggg He couldn't hear a thing, only the ringing of his ears keeping him company. He was laughing, but he couldn't hear himself. His vision started to clear, and he looked towards Dash, seeing her laughing as well. The ringing in his ears started to ease up, and he yelled over to her. "DASH!" "YEAH?!" "WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THAT?!" "THAT WAS, WITHOUT QUESTION, THE DEFINITION OF AWESOME." They both lay there, breathing heavily, waiting for their senses to return. After a few minutes, Jason decided that he could hear well enough to keep up a conversation, and spoke up. "Now imagine how incapacitated you'd be if that went off right next to you!" "You really need to carry one of those with you, just in case." "That wouldn't be suspicious at all..." They lapsed into silence. "Hey, we still have one more bomb to try." "Really?!?! How many different explosives can you make?" Jason chuckled. "Just this last one. It's not quite as good as the flashbang, so don't get your hopes up too high. Come watch." He grabbed a new canister and poured large amount of baby powder inside it, with a smaller amount of gunpowder, following the same pattern with the fuse. "This one should, in theory, create a small cloud of dust, but honestly I have no idea if it'll work." He pulled the pin and tossed it outside, being met with a low pop and a large cloud of white dust. "I think it works." Dash observed. "And you would be right. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that was the last of the new types of explosives." "Hey it's fine, it's not like I've ever seen anything like that before anyways." She paused. "You wanna go get some food or something? We can go stop by Sugarcube Corner and see Pinkie." "Yeah sure. I'll just order a milkshake I guess." "Oh yeah, you choked on the cupcake. What happened there anyway?" "It tasted inedible, which I guess is kinda strange, considering how good Pinkie's baking is supposed to be. I just assumed that it was too sugary to be of any nutritional value, and was thus considered inedible." He sighed. "Let's just get going before I get too depressed." Jason trotted over to the door, stopping just outside the door. "Why did you--" Dash stopped behind him. "The thing made a hole in your yard." "Good thing I built it out of cloud, I'll just go grab one, and--" "Hey, show me how to do it!" "Huh?" "Well I showed you a bunch of stuff I know, the least you can do is tell me how to make part of your house." "Fine. Grab that cloud." Jason hopped into the air, and flew a small distance away, grabbing onto a small cloud. He quickly flew back and presented it to Dash. "Here you go." "Now basically cram it into that hole and we're done." "That's it?" "Well how complicated could it be?" She smiled. Jason sighed and pushed the cloud into the gap, flattening it to be flush with the rest of the yard. He turned to look at Dash. "Ready to go then?" "Sure." She took off, and dove over the edge, with Jason close behind. The first thing that Jason noticed was that there were only a few ponies on the street, and all of them were running in random directions. Dash seemed to also take notice, and looked over at Jason. He sighed. "The bomb. They're scared about the bomb." "Well it was louder than pretty much everything else, ever. I guess they have a right to be scared." "I wonder how much of the light they saw. I don't really want to be forced to divulge any information on what happened or why there are huge amounts of explosives in your living room." He chuckled. "Although I guess no one actually knows that they're explosives." Dash pushed open the door to Sugarcube corner to see a very disheveled Pinkie Pie. "Dash! You're okay!" She wrapped Dash in a hug. "But where's..." Jason walked in. "Alternis! You're okay too!" Jason looked to Dash for an explanation, but she offered none. "What do you mean Pinkie?" "Well, I got a twitch in my leg, followed by an itch on the tip of my left ear, which means loud noises, so I figured it would be a sonic rainboom, so I went outside. Then I looked up and didn't see you, Dash, and I was like, 'but Dashie is the only one who can do the sonic rainboom,' and then there was this huge light on your cloud house Dash! And this huge, loud noise, that was even louder than the sonic rainboom! So anyways I figured one of you may have gotten hurt doing whatever that was. By the way what was that?" "I'll tell you later." She seemed fine with his answer, and looked back and forth between the two of them. "Soooooo, what can I get you two?" "I guess I'll take a milkshake." Jason answered. "And I'll take one of your spicy cupcakes." Dash winked at Pinky. Pinky winked back. Jason shrugged, deciding to ignore the two other ponies. Pinky retreated into the kitchen after her sixth return wink to Dash, and immediately made an inordinate amount of noise. Jason burst out laughing. "How did she manage to do that less than a second after the door closed? That would have been hard to do even if you were trying to make a mess." "Yeah, well I guess it's just--" "Pinkie being Pinkie, I know. You know there has to be an explanation for her acting how she does, and I swear, if I have some sort of vantage point with any additional knowledge I have, I'm figuring out why she acts like this." Dash laughed, and punched him in the shoulder. "Good luck with that." Pinkie walked back out with their orders balanced on a plate on her head, and slid them onto the table. Jason took a tentative sip of his milkshake, and finding nothing awry, continued to sip it. "So how's the cupcake?" "Mhmwnem menrwmme mwner." she said through a mouthful of food. "Oh really? I'm surprised you could taste the faint nutmeg flavor hidden behind the lemon zest." She laughed, and attempted to swallow her food. "I said, it's spicy. It's one of pinkie's specialty cupcakes." "A spicy cupcake?" "Yeah." "Weird." She shoved the rest of the cupcake into her mouth and swallowed it whole. Jason looked at her strangely before a pegasus walked in the front door. "Hey, Dash." The pegasus started. Dash turned to look at her. "Hey Raindrop, how's the weather going?" "Well, that's why I'm here, actually," she sighed. "There's a huge storm forming near the edge of the Everfree, and we need all of the on call weather ponies to report for duty." "Alright." she paused. "Hey Raindrop, how are we looking for job openings?" "Well, um, we have a temporary slot that Thunderlane left when he injured his wing." "Great, I'll be interviewing someone for that slot tomorrow." she got up to walk to the door. "See ya later Alternis." She waved He waved back. "See ya soon." He turned back to the counter and slurped down the rest of his shake. He placed a few bits on the counter and turned to leave. "And so I have nothing to do..." He walked back out through the door, and saw that the street was still mostly empty. He started to cross the road, but was immediately hit by an orange and red blur and flung down the street. "Ugh, SCOOTALOO!" From down the street, he heard a muffled, "Sorry!" He got up and spit some dirt out of his mouth, making his way over to the crusaders. "Why are you in such a hurry anyway?" "Oh hi Alternis!" Scootaloo said, "How's it going?" "Fine I guess, kinda bored." It looked like Applebloom and Sweetie Belle were starting to extract themselves from the wreckage that was their scooter-wagon combo thing. "Hey mister, are ya okay?" Applebloom asked. "Yeah I'm fine, I'm surprised you guys didn't kill yourselves or anything. So where are you trying to get to so fast?" "Well we heard this huge explosion, and everypony ran for cover, and I was like, 'what if our cutie mark is in explosion investigating'? So here we are. I thought that Rainbow Dash did another one of her Sonic Rainbooms, but I couldn't see the rainbow part." "Do you guys want to know what caused the explosion?" "Do you know?" Sweetie Belle asked. "Yup. I know because it was me that caused that explosion." They looked up at him dumbfounded. He chuckled. "You're just pulling our legs." Scootaloo punched him in the knee. "Do you guys remember the exploding apple?" They nodded. "It was like that, only bigger. And louder. And apparently it scared everypony." He looked around as some more of the ponies continued to come back out of their houses. "Ya did all that? You don't look like a unicorn pony ta me, how'd ya do all that then?" "Picked up some stuff, put it together, lit it on fire, and then that happened." He gestured towards Dash's house. "No magic." "So you're sayin' that ah could do that?" "Yes, but I'm not telling you the recipe or anything, these things are too dangerous." A unanimous 'Aww' was heard. It was kinda cute. "Hey, this isn't like, 'covered in tree sap' dangerous, this is like 'dead if you screw up' dangerous." They seemed to get the concept. "When you guys are older I'll show you. I promise." "Fine." Applebloom crossed her fore hooves and moped. Jason chuckled. "What's so funny?!" "You reacted the same way as Dash did when I delayed telling her." Sweetie Belle had finished putting the wagon upright. "Hey guys, lets go try something else, because I don't think we're going to be the Cutie Mark Crusaders Explosion Investigators." Scoots turned around. "Yeah, um, Cutie Mark Crusaders Stump Removers?" "Yeah!" the other two yelled before mounting their vehicle from hell and zipping away. Jason shook his head, and started walking aimlessly. He had only been here for about a day at this point, yet it felt like it had been weeks. Jason was shaken out of his thoughts by some feverish yelling somewhere up the road. It took him a moment to pinpoint the location of it's origin, before he determined that it had come from the one and only Ponyville library. Big surprise. He hesitated over intervening before he knocked on the door. A few seconds later, a bored looking Spike opened the door. He realized he hadn't seen the little guy yet. "Hey, I'm Alternis, I'm a friend of Twilight, could I come in?" He stared a few seconds before letting him in. At first glance, Jason saw Twilight near a blackboard with several crossed out equations pretty much all over it. She yelled again and turned, throwing a piece of chalk. It bounced off of Jason's face. "Oh, hi there, Alternis, was it? Sorry about the chalk, I just couldn't figure something out." "I understand. What were you working on?" "I doubt you'd understand it, but there is a system of energy used for spells, and I need to try to figure out the total energy of the spell from the energy used per second from this inverted parabolic graph." Jason looked at the board. The units made no sense to him, but he could at least understand the concepts. "Just take the definite integral of the area under the graph, in the parabolic region." He shaded the area under the graph. "And use the Fundamental Theorem of Calculous to find the exact area of this specific integral." he wrote out the equation and solved the problem only a few minutes later. He backed up from the board, perusing his work. He looked at Twilight. She looked completely dumbfounded. Jason smiled. "How did you--" "A magician never reveals his secrets." He turned to leave, having run out of entertainment. "Hey, you better come back and show me some more stuff eventually." "Always hungry for knowledge I see. Sure thing, I will." He left the library, and took a turn towards the market. He was quickly running out of things to do. He arrived a few minutes later, and perused the stalls momentarily before seeing one that had a sign with a picture of a fish hanging from it. Intrigued, he walked over, to find that it sold several different types of shellfish. Ignoring the fact that ponies apparently ate some meat, he bought a few dozen shrimp, and thanked the vender. Man, were they cheap. He picked some assorted spices from another stall, and having deridingly ran out of things to do, he flew up to Dash's cloud house. He set down the bag on the counter, and sat down near the explosives. He pulled out the rest of the canisters, and after a while, had succeeded in making them all into bombs. He wiped his forehead. The sun had descended further towards the horizon, but he doubted that Dash would be back this soon. He walked outside and jumped into the sky, deciding to attempt a few tricks. It was no wonder that Dash's tricks were all overly complicated, when flips and corkscrews are the easy material. Easy or not, the feeling of freedom was overwhelming to Jason. He could see why Dash loved flying as much as she did. As far as he could tell, when he finally decided to stop, the sun had nearly touched the horizon line. He went back inside, and managed to figure out how to start the cloud stove, however that works. Jason was in the middle of cooking the shrimp when Dash stumbled in, mumbling about the inadequacy of the weather team. "Hey, what's that great smell," she walked into the kitchen. Jason pushed her away with his magic. "It's a surprise. Hopefully you'll like it." She pouted and moved to the work table. "Where'd all the empty canisters go?" "I made the rest of them into bombs, they're over there in the corner." Jason said while he spread some spices over the food. "By the way, I'm no chef, but this should at least be cooked correctly." He walked over with the finished food, and dished it onto two plates. Dash decided she had stared at the explosives long enough, and sat down across from him. She looked down at the chopped up shrimp, then up at Jason, and then back to her food. "What in Tartarus is this stuff?" She frowned. "Shrimp. Try it." "You mean like seafood?" "Yeah. You should try it." "But, but--" Jason stared at her. "Fine." She stabbed a chunk with her fork, and put it into her mouth, chewing slowly. Her eyes widened. "This is amazing! I normally can't stand these things! What did you do to them to make them taste this good?" "A few spices, some lemon juice." "Well thanks bro." He pushed his plate of shrimp across the table, towards her. She eyed him uneasily. "You don't have to give me yours, you know." "Yeah, but it all tastes the same to me." "Aww, you're too good to me." She wolfed down the rest of the plate, and belched. "That was, without question, the best food I've had in a long time." "Not like you make a lot of your own food though..." Dash punched Jason in the shoulder. She leaned back into her chair, and yawned. "I'm gonna go hit the hay, if you know what I mean." "Yeah, I think I will too." They both ascended the stairs, and Jason went into the guest bedroom. "Hey Jason, where are you going exactly?" He pointed at the bed. She snorted. "Come on." Jason shrugged, and followed her down the hall into a much larger bedroom, with Wonderbolts posters covering most of the wall space. She jumped into the bed. "Hop in." Jason climbed under the covers. Dash snuggled up to him, and he put an arm around her. "Why are you so comfortable to lay on?" "They should probably give me an award." She smiled and closed her eyes. She was cute like that, Jason decided. Maybe living here in constant fear of being discovered had it's perks, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.