I apologize for the short chapter last time. Here, try this.
“Swimming, huh?"
“That’s right, we had to get cleaned up, and it was a nice day,” said Twilight.
“That water isn’t very deep.”
“We can splash,” said Rainbow, demonstrating on Applejack, who responded in kind.
“So how come Rarity didn’t get drenched and all of you did?” I asked.
“Oh, she caused the mess. It was all directed away from her.”
“What was she doing with tomato juice?”
“She told you it was juice of the tomato kind?” said Pinkie. “Oh no, it was blood.”
I looked at the five of them, speechless. “She just…sprayed blood all over you? Doesn’t that freak you out a little?”
Applejack said, “Not tomato juice, blood orange juice.”
“Okay, fine, what was she doing with blood orange juice?”
“We were having lunch, and she offered to serve,” said Twilight.
“Where do blood oranges even grow around here?” I wondered. I shook my head. “Nevermind. I’ve got stuff to do.” I left them to their water-based activities.
I wondered why Rarity would lie to me. I wasn’t sure whether to be worried. On the one hand, telling falsehoods about the kind of juice on the floor wasn’t too terrible of a thing to do, but on the other, if she started here, where would it stop?
I decided to sleep on it and make a decision later.
Twilight pulled me out of bed the next morning and made me walk down to the fields where they’d built a hunting blind. All the ponies were wearing cammo. I had no idea what they were doing, as they didn’t have weapons. Wasn’t that the point of hunting?
“I don’t see any dragons,” said Twilight.
“Me neither,” agreed Rainbow.
“Me neither neither,” added Pinkie.
Dragons? We were waiting, unarmed, for dragons? Well, good thing my camouflage was good.
Shortly, a whole sky-filling swarm of dragons passed overhead. I felt kind of glad to be hiding.
“Lame,” said Rainbow.
“If you think so,” I said.
“Huh? Was that Valiant? I didn’t know he was here.”
“I brought him,” said Twilight. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen him since then.”
“I’m right here,” I said, standing up. They all fell over in surprise.
“What in tarnation is that?” demanded Applejack.
“It’s ghillie cammo. You seriously didn’t see me there?” Darn it, I wish I’d thought of this back when I was actively trying kill most of them.
The dragons kept passing by overhead. Spike apparently wanted to join them, and Rarity, Twilight, and Rainbow wanted to follow him.
“You know that’s a breach of a friend’s trust?” I said. “He wanted to go alone, and don’t you three have, like, jobs or something to be doing instead?”
“Why don’t you come along, Valiant? You like to be creepy and spy on ponies, right?”
“He’s technically a dragon.”
“Still, you want to go. Admit it.”
“Okay…”
“Worst plan ever,” I told the three of them. The cloth dragon costume they’d come up with might fool the real dragons, but putting them inside it and expecting everything to be okay was probably not going to work. Dragons liked fire, if I understood correctly.
“Well, what do you suggest?” asked Twilight, annoyed.
“I was just going to fly around in the Monstrosity and do what I feel.”
“Well, if we’re going to be in the costume, we could use air support,” said Rainbow.
“I just wish Pinkie would let me borrow the party cannon long enough to get it converted to an artillery cannon. Looks like my dreams of a gunship will have to wait.” I shrugged. “Anyway, the biggest problem of all this is communication. How am I supposed to talk to you if I’m in the air?”
“I have just the spell for that,” said Twilight. She fetched a pair of winter earmuffs and with a quick flash of purple light, got some magic up in that shiznit.
“Voilà! Two way communication!” She applied the same spell to another pair of muffs.
“A magical walkie-talkie,” I said, impressed. The earmuffs were hot and uncomfortable in the summer weather, but they worked.
We set off. The three ponies crawling along in the dragon costume, and Captain Falcon and I in the aircraft.
For quite a while, we stalked Spike. He never looked back, and never stopped. It was…kind of boring, really.
While Captain couldn’t speak, I began to suspect that he was getting tired of the same jokes over and over again. Luckily, we happened on a volcano after not too long, and Spike climbed over the edge into the caldera. I caught a glimpse of lava over the side, and decided not to overfly it. Unstable air currents, and all that.
“Valiant, come in, Valiant,” said Twilight’s voice.
“What’s up?”
“’What’s up?’ You go through that whole lecture about proper communications procedures and then just say that?”
“I never said that I was going to be following them.”
“Whatever. Anyway, we’ve spotted Spike. He’s hanging out with some teenage dragons. They appear to be hazing him.”
“Is that a request for backup?”
“Um, not quite yet. Standby.”
Well, I stood by. Flew by. Something. Captain preened himself a little and several minutes passed.
“Valiant, you are go for intervention.”
“Copy that.” I grinned, twisting the throttle wide open and zooming towards the volcano. “What are they doing?”
“They’re having a celebration! It looks pretty crazy.”
I rolled my eyes and pulled out of my attack run. “Seriously? Are you afraid he’ll party his brains out or something? Spike loves festivities. They don’t call him Mr. Lampshade for nothing.”
Nobody called him Mr. Lampshade, actually. Spike did party pretty hard, though.
“Wait, they’re leaving,” reported Twilight. “They’re going on…a raid? This can’t be good.”
I ducked the Monstrosity down behind a hill and out of sight. “So what do you want to do about it?”
“Do something!”
“Yes, but something what?”
“What? Something!”
“You’re not being very specific about it,” I grumped. “And furthermore, don’t you think it’s really assuming a lot that I’m able to make a tactical decision like this all by myself? Also, where’s your usual micromanaging tendencies? I worry about you sometimes, Twilight. You really need to take it easy and—”
“Stop them!”
“Well, that I can do.”
I pushed the control stick forward and thundered into the forest. If I had once slammed into a school without harming the aircraft, I figured flying at treetop level wasn’t too dangerous.
…Except for that freaking pair of enraged phoenixes that I almost sucked into the engines.
I jerked the controls hard and spiraled into the trees. Monstrosity bounced off the ground and came to rest in a treetop. The engines died. I frantically checked the gauges. The fuel pressure was low, so I figured that a fuel line must have come loose in the bump.
I crawled out of the cockpit and slid down the tree. Captain fluttered down and perched on my shoulder. I heard voices coming closer, and hid myself in a bush.
“What have you got there, Spike? Is that an egg?”
I peeped out and spotted a couple of dragons with Spike. The little purple dragon was holding a flame-colored egg. I could only assume it came from the phoenix next.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Smash it!”
“I can’t do that,” said Spike. “I mean, I used to be an egg, too.”
“You can’t say no to me!” said the larger dragon. He started forward, but three ponies ran up just then.
“Nopony's gonna lay a claw on him!” shouted Rainbow.
“That's right!” said Twilight.
“Fighting's not really my thing,” began Rarity, “but I'll rip you to pieces if you touch one scale on his cute little head!”
“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, climbing out of the bush. Captain squawked noncommittally.
“Ooh, scary!” laughed one of the dragons. “Spike, are these namby-pamby ponies your friends?”
“Yes, they are, and they're better friends than you could ever be!” said Spike, taking a level in badass. “Now, if you don't back off, you'll see what us ponies do when confronted by a big jerk dragon.”
“Oh yeah?” said the dragon. He snorted. “What's that?”
“Kill it with fire!” I screamed, diving out of the way. One of the other dragons had just spit a fireball at me, and it ignited the fuel dripping out of the Monstrosity.
The whole tree went up in flames and the dragons fled. Apparently being fireproof doesn’t prevent you from getting crushed by fire-weakened timber. The aircraft came crashing to the ground, luckily out of the reach of the fire.
It was spreading fast, though, so I managed to get the fuel line reconnected quickly and got everyone aboard. We flew away as the whole forest began to burn.
“Such destruction,” whispered Rarity, looking down at the inferno.
“It was a combination of dragons and flammable hydrocarbons,” I pointed out. “It was bound to happen eventually.”
“We’ll have to notify the Ponyville Fire Department and make sure it doesn’t spread all the way over to the Everfree Forest,” said Twilight. “This is going to affect a lot of ponies.”
I shrugged. “Well, I didn’t start the fire.”
Shortly thereafter, I discovered that ponies don’t care for Billy Joel.
Back in town, I let everyone out and performed a little routine maintenance on Monstrosity. It had earned some attention.
I saw a couple of Twilight’s friends go into the library, but didn’t think too much about it. I asked Fluttershy when I saw her what it was about.
“I don’t know,” she told me. “Rarity just wanted to get all of us together in one place.” She went inside.
Spike came out a little while later.
“What’s going on in there?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Rarity told me it was a secret and gave me some ice cream. Anyway, look at this!” He showed me a newly-hatched phoenix chick.
“Wait, so instead of smashing it, you stole the egg? If Equestria had a department of natural resources, you’d be in big trouble. And did you stop and think about bringing a firebird into a treehouse?”
“Well, no.” He looked kind of ashamed. “Anyway, Rarity told me to tell you that they want to see you inside.”
“Okay.” I finished up one last task on the aircraft and walked in.
The inside of the library was empty. “Where is everybody?”
The door slammed shut behind me. I jumped, noticing the distinctive blue glow of Rarity’s magic. I turned back, finding the six ponies in front of me.
“What’s going on?” I asked. There was something about the expression they all wore that I didn’t like.
“What are we going to do to him?” asked Twilight.
“Why, the same thing I did to the rest of you,” said Rarity.
“Uh, guys?” I said, taking a few steps backward. “You’re weirding me out.” They walked towards me. I felt my rump against the door.
“Come on,” said Rainbow. “It’ll be fun.”
I stared at them as they closed in.
“Oh, buck my life.”
I put up a fight. As egotistical as I am, I can honestly say that I held them off for a while. Eventually, they took me to the floor and held me down. Rarity walked up.
“Hold still,” she said. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
The next morning, I stumbled off the couch. Everything seemed different, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to go back to the way things were before. I felt kind of violated.
It was a good thing the mirror had been broken during my struggles. I didn’t want to see myself as I was now.
They’d given me a makeover.