Flash Fog

by Kwakerjak

September 2 – 11:55 AM

Thunderlane absently bit his lower lip as he continued his observations. Rainbow Dash’s instructions had been clear: he wasn’t supposed to sound the alert until the main body of the fog started making its way down the mountain, which meant he’d have to stick around until the very last minute. The fog was now piled up extremely high, and he could see where the semisolid cloud that the previous day’s bonfires had created was starting to bend and bow from the strain of the fog building up behind it. Meanwhile, the very top of the fog bank was even less stable, as the north winds were starting to break off snowball-sized pieces that hadn’t fully congealed with the rest of the formation.

As these clumps skidded down the south face of the Unicorn Range, Thunderlane nervously double-checked to make sure that no rips or tears had appeared in his fog suit. He could tell that it wasn’t quite time to hightail it out of the area just yet, but even with his protective gear, he wasn’t too keen on being wrong. As much as he liked Flitter, he had no interest in joining her as another patient in the hospital.

Then again, it might be nice to have a chance to spend more time with her outside of work, he thought absently. Thunderlane shook his head rapidly to expel the idea from his brain. In all likelihood, Flitter was way too doped up on painkillers at the moment to appreciate the arrival of her special somepony as a fellow patient. And besides, if he was injured severely enough to be placed in the same ward as Flitter...

Thunderlane shuddered as memories of his special somepony’s mangled hoof floated back to his consciousness. He was fairly sure that Flitter wouldn’t fault him for not wanting to experience anything like that himself. Heck, I wouldn’t want anypony to go through something like that.

A quick inspection of the trap revealed that everything was in good working order: absolutely nothing had happened to it in the previous three hours, and it looked like the Crusaders’ plan to trap a human would go off without a hitch, which was probably why Apple Bloom and Scootaloo were a bit perplexed by the rapid souring of Sweetie Belle’s mood.

“All that trouble, and we didn’t even need to leave the party,” the unicorn filly grumbled.

“Aw, buck up,” Apple Bloom said. “Now, we’ll be here to watch our trap in action.”

“No, we won’t!” Sweetie Belle shouted, leaning forward with a furious look in her eye. “In case you weren’t paying attention, there’s going to be an insanely thick fog rolling in! We won’t be able to see anything! Coming out here was completely pointless.”

“It wasn’t pointless,” Scootaloo insisted. “We had to make sure Mr. Shnookums was okay, didn’t we?”

“That hamster didn’t even need his food to be refilled!” Sweetie Belle yelled. “After what we did to Ms. Hooves, we’re probably going to be in more trouble than we’ve ever been in our entire lives, and there was absolutely no reason to do it!”

Scootaloo held up a hoof in protest. “Whoa, calm down—”

“I am not going to calm down!” Sweetie Belle retorted as she started pacing back and forth, shooting glares at her friends. “When our families find out about this, they’re going to completely flip out, and we didn’t even need to do it in the first place!”

“Sweetie Belle,” Apple Bloom said in her most diplomatic tone, “c’mon. Don’t ya think you might be overreactin’ just a little bit? I’m sure that Derpy’s gonna be okay, so what we did oughta be easy to forgive, right?”

“That’s not the point! You... you’re not even supposed to try to do what we were trying to do! It’s not right!” As Sweetie Belle’s pacing sped up, her mind was wandering far away from where she was putting her hooves, which might explain why it was at this point that she stepped on a stray sheet of bubble wrap, tripping and falling on her face as the popping noise echoed through the orchard. “Dammit!” the filly shouted through gritted teeth as she picked herself back up.

Scootaloo and Apple Bloom stared at her with their mouths agape. They didn’t remember Miss Cheerilee including that particular vocabulary word in their homework. “Okay,” Scootaloo said, “why don’t you take a few deep breaths before you go on.”

Sweetie Belle, however, only took one deep breath, and she followed it with a string of even more colorful vocabulary words.

Mr. Shnookums’ attention perked up immediately when he heard the distinctive sound of popping bubblewrap, but at first he hesitated. That noise was the signal for him to start running, sure, but he was under the impression that everything around him was supposed to be murky and grey and cold when that happened—that was why the fillies had gotten a heater for his cage, after all. Then again, the orange one had made it quite clear that there would be consequences for not fulfilling his duty, and since Angel Bunny had seemed respectful of the orange one after the negotiations were finished, Mr. Shnookums could only assume that the orange one shared his personality. That was enough to obliterate his doubts; it was time for him to start running in his wheel.

As the hamster spun his wheel as fast as he could, a length of twine wrapped around an extension of the wheel’s axle. Soon, all the slack in the string had been taken up, pulling the release on a latch in a trap door, and the bowling ball that Scootaloo had acquired from the stallion with the goatee dropped onto a long, curving ramp.

It didn’t take very long for Apple Bloom and Scootaloo to tire of listening to Sweetie Belle’s extensive linguistic demonstration, mostly because they were on the receiving end of it. “Okay, how about you stop cussin’ like a sailor for two seconds an’ let us get a word in?” Apple Bloom said.

“Like what?” Sweetie Belle replied with a snarl.

Scootaloo stepped forward. “Look, Sweetie Belle, you’re right that it was a mistake to—”

“‘A mistake’?! You think it was just a mistake?!”

The bowling ball reached the end of the path and collided with a bucket of sand, tipping it over and pouring out its contents onto a balance scale. As one would expect, this side of the balance descended as more weight was added to its pan, causing its lighter counterpart to rise. The scale bumped against a metal toggle switch protruding from a pile of pillows and blankets that had been wrapped around a bulky-looking object and tied to an apple tree.

“That’s it! I ain’t gonna just stand around an’ listen ta you acting all high an’ mighty!” Apple Bloom shouted.

“Yeah!” Scootaloo agreed. “You could have said something before we gave Derpy that muffin, but you decided to keep quiet.”

“Oh, so now it’s my fault?” Sweetie Belle asked, though it was rather obvious that she couldn’t care less how her friends answered.

The jackhammer had been muffled quite expertly by the Crusaders, which was probably why they didn’t notice when it turned on and began shaking the apple tree. After what amounted to several dozen bucks in a matter of seconds, the tree gave up its bounty and the apples fell towards the ground. Some landed in a basket perched on the end of a seesaw-like lever, which launched another apple sitting on its opposite side into the air. The apple landed in a smaller basket hanging over the edge of a table a short distance away. This basket, in turn, was rigged up using a pulley and a counterweight. As the basket descended, the spinning pulley wound up a toy robot on the table, which soon began to walk forward.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just head back to town and tell everypony what you’ve done!” Sweetie Belle said as she subconsciously adjusted her posture to make herself look taller and more intimidating.

“Well, for one thing, it wasn’t just the two of us that did it,” Scootaloo retorted. “You’re every bit as guilty as we are.”

“An’ for another, you’d just be snitchin’ on us to try an’ get outta whatever your family does to you,” Apple Bloom added, pointing her hoof at their accuser.

“You call it ‘snitching,’ but I call it telling the truth.”

The toy robot reached the opposite end of the table, where a rolling pin sat precariously close to the edge. A few bumps from the mechanical plaything was enough to send it falling to the ground, where it rolled until it knocked over a plank of wood that had been propping up a sheet of plywood that had been balanced on its edge. The plywood toppled over, creating a gust of air that caught a paper sail attached to the paper clip portion of Scootaloo’s hoof-made “thingamabob.” This was enough to overcome the friction of the bobbin on the string zipline, and the thingamabob sped along its path until it hit a ball-peen hammer that had been attached to a fulcrum at its base. The hammer tipped over and pressed the ignition switch of a butane lighter, creating a flame.

Scootaloo’s patience with Sweetie Belle had already worn away, but that unicorn simply refused to think through the matter rationally. “No, Sweetie Belle, you’re the one who’s lost sight of what’s important.”

Sweetie Belle rolled her eyes. “You mean our cutie marks? Come on, everypony around us keeps telling us that they aren’t everything. Maybe they’re right. Maybe there’s more important things in the world, like not poisoning innocent ponies!”

“For your information, I wasn’t talking about getting our cutie marks,” Scootaloo replied as she poked Sweetie Belle in the chest. “I was talking about protecting everypony from the humans. I say that keeping everypony safe is way more important than keeping just one pony safe.”

“Yeah,” Apple Bloom said with a firm nod of her head. “Maybe you oughta try thinkin’ about somepony other than yourself for once.”

Once again, Sweetie Belle seemed ready to blow a gasket. “What?!”

The rope had been selected for two properties: its strength and its relative flammability. Thus, it wasn’t long before the lighter’s flame burned through it, releasing Pinkie Pie’s reinforced disco ball, which swung on a pendulum until it slammed into Tom. The massive boulder was strapped to a pair of skateboards, and the force of the impact was more than enough to send him rolling down a wooden plank.

“Well, if you’re so freaking offended, why don’t you just leave?!” Scootaloo shouted.

“Fine! I will!” Sweetie Belle answered. The unicorn turned and began storming back towards Ponyville. “Maybe I’ll just quit this whole stupid crusade, too!”

“Whoa, hold up,” Apple Bloom said, raising a hoof.

Sweetie Belle turned back around. “No, I’m serious. It’s just not—”

“No,” Apple Bloom said, shaking her head. “I think I heard somethin’ like a bang...” She looked in the general direction of where she’d heard the noise, and noticed two things. First, most of their trap’s components had already been sprung. Second, Tom had just rolled onto a makeshift wooden pressure plate connected to the trebuchet’s firing mechanism. As the hoof-knotted, pine-tar-coated net was catapulted in the air, Apple Bloom looked down and realized that she and Scootaloo were standing on top of the target that they’d etched into the ground when they were calibrating their trap. She had just enough time to say, “Oh, horseapples,” before the sticky net landed on top of them.

The fog was close to its breaking point now—really close. Thunderlane was sure of it. It wasn’t just bits and pieces breaking off from the relatively unstable upper regions of the formation now. The chunks were starting to come out closer to the mountain’s peaks, and they were getting larger. Most were still the size of snowballs, but a few watermelon-sized globs of vapor were tumbling down the mountain. Even the fog near the ground was now undulating with increasing frequency. It was all creating an uneasy feeling in the pit of Thunderlane’s stomach, like an unpalatable cocktail of stage fright and indigestion. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt the urge to fly as far away as possible as strongly as he felt it now, standing alone on a treeless mountainside and staring at a grey wall that pulsated with indifferent menace.

Then, all of a sudden, it happened: a great tear formed in the fog’s edge to Thunderlane’s left, ripping the wall from bottom to top, and the contents which had been held back poured forth. Even with his fog suit, Thunderlane was nearly bowled over when some of the grey miasma clipped his wing. He managed to regain control of himself and took off for Ponyville. Powerful though it was, the fog was still slow compared to a full-grown pegasus flying at top speed, which was most fortunate; the morass now pouring down the mountainside was something that Thunderlane wouldn’t wish upon his worst enemy.