It had been three weeks, quite a long time for Fluttershy to be traveling aimlessly around in space and learning a lot of new facts about the section of space she currently occupied. She was currently in the middle of an area of space labeled a deathtrap by her personally as at anytime her life could be ended by any number of strange happenings.
To start off Fluttershy had made contact with every one of her pony friends in her dreams, they were happy to see her and only Applejack and Twilight were really bad off emotionally, they almost spent their entire time with her apologizing about what happened to her. The bat mutations were a very sore point as a conversational topic and Fluttershy was getting quite tired of them being mentioned by her friends, especially coming from Rainbow who thought they were awesome.
Twilight and Luna had really helped Fluttershy learn about the history of the creatures known as the Chozo. The Chozo were or are a race of hyper intelligent birds that were good at technology as much as they were at being unobtrusive to the nature of any of the worlds they lived on, in fact they meshed quite with and sometimes became part of nature on the worlds they visited and settled down upon.
How did ponies know about the Chozo? Well one had to look at the griffon race, which are remarkably the descendants of Chozo and Fluttershy had knowledge of the griffon written language. Apparently a few of the Chozo fell in love with some sentient lions long ago. A few of the lions may have been sphinxes of old as determined by the increased magical nature of some griffons at times. The birth of the griffon race was before Celestia and Luna’s time, but around the time of the three tribes.
It was a good thing Fluttershy understood how to read griffon as it was a derivative of the Chozo language, therefore getting the information off the computers of the Chozo passenger ship, known as The Vagrant, wasn’t all too difficult. It was amazing to learn how the culture that Gilda came from was the mixture of an omnivore and a carnivore. It made her wonder why the griffons weren’t more technologically advanced, but then again it seemed like all Chozo preferred not to mess with the natural flow of things and the ones on Equus probably destroyed their technology to proceed living on Equus in harmony with nature until they perished.
This knowledge prompted Luna and Twilight to start researching into griffons and then a lot of history came to light. Discord was also mentioned that he remembered those old quacks that traveled the stars when they came for a visit; he found them to be entirely boring since his chaos magic was highly ineffective against them. This is why Discord started bothering ponies in the first place since the Chozo protected their selves with spiritual magic.
The Chozo aren’t the only creatures Fluttershy learned about, the Etecoons really helped her with downloading information into her universal map. Unfortunately the Chozo who previously owned The Vagrant had not been to the planet of Equus. The maps she acquired were quite old and compared to where they were now. They were currently headed to a place called Horus IV as it seemed like a nice planet to stop for food and possibly live on until another mode of transportation could be found.
Fluttershy was a long way away from the Aniverse and Lylat systems; distance was hard to measure in the vastness of space but it was quite clear how far she had gone. She was amazed that she was still alive to see it and would probably earn a world record for the most distance traveled by a pony if she ever got back to Equus.
The Etecoons were almost fully sentient beings for the most adorable monkey aliens Fluttershy had met thus far, aside from the Dachora chick which had eventually managed to jump out of the egg and slam into the ceiling much to Fluttershy’s shock when it happened. The chick was perfectly fine, but there was a dent up there where its beak had hit the solid metal; its tiny beak was perfectly fine and was apparently as tough as the material the ship was made out of.
An Etecoon was an extremely curious creature and knew how to work advanced technology, the more Etecoons there were together the quicker they figured out things. They were attracted to most forms of machinery, especially machines that gave off a humming sound. They were like mammalian insects except they didn’t have a hive, but could put their minds towards a single goal of figuring out what something did and it was made clear that they could share their minds with each other through their antenna by being within a close distance of one another. Sometimes it caused them to become stuck together in packs which didn’t stay separated for very long, but could do things individually. On a mental scale they were almost always like children as far as Chozo could tell, exceptionally bright friendly children but children nonetheless.
The Dachora were quite different, in fact one would say their biological makeup was completely absurd and Twilight hadn’t held back her opinion when Fluttershy heard of what the Chozo had learned from them. They were asexually reproducing hermaphrodites, so it didn’t matter what gender you called them because it would be right. The most amazing thing about these creatures was how fast they could run and exactly how high they could truly jump and fall without injury. These creatures could become invincible once they entered a full straight run and unless they were stopped by a wall anything in their path will definitely end up getting ripped apart by the sheer force that was being generated when a Dachora rammed into something that wasn’t as solidly built.
The reason why Twilight couldn’t hold back her opinion was because she didn’t think a land based creature could run at least more than three times the speed Rainbow could fly or could even gain that kind of acceleration so quickly. Fluttershy had yet to see a Dachora running full speed, but she had seen how powerful the mother’s legs were. Whatever armor the Space Pirates had was completely ineffective against a Dachora’s leg strength.
Space Pirates were one of the races in the surrounding bit of space that had no qualms when it came to killing and stealing. The fact that she even survived one encounter was enough for Fluttershy to immediately start running should she ever see them again, they after all were one of the reasons the Chozo were on the decline or disappeared from this section of space entirely. She still felt sorry for her involvement in the death of three of them as her heart was still aching about it.
Meeting any race that was part of the Galactic Federation was something Fluttershy wished to avoid entirely, they all had weapons and there was a large grey area with most of the government and how they treated meeting new races.
Chances were that even if Fluttershy were to be determined entirely sentient by the Galactic Federation, they’d still feel like they’d have to capture her, strap her down to an operation table and would proceed to do many nasty things to her. The least nasty thing they would do is shave her completely bare, the worst would likely involve brain surgery while she was completely aware of what they were doing and not on any anesthetic at all. Getting her wings surgically ripped off would have also been another horrible occurrence and they wouldn’t put them back either.
Only when the Galactic Federation felt they were finally done torturing Fluttershy, would they even consider releasing her in a less then mentally sound state with incredibly cheap words of apology about it.
The Chozo who previously owned The Vagrant had recorded enough of this actually happening to other sentient beings who could communicate quite clearly enough to make Fluttershy entirely wary any being of the Galactic Federation doing the same to her as well. In fact it was an obvious reason why many Chozo chose to live in out of the way places and observe things from quite a fair distance away.
Fluttershy was quite sure that someone in the Galactic Federation only needed to make up a single excuse about trying to fix her broken appearance to do this and would get away with it completely free of retribution as it would be a logical excuse. At least with the Space Pirates you knew what they were about, if it couldn’t be turned into a weapon or used productively in some way to further their own goals, then they weren’t interested. They would also terminate anything if it was seen as being intelligent enough to even remotely get in their way and Fluttershy definitively met that criterion whereas the Etecoons and the lone Dachora at the time did not.
If there was one species Fluttershy would rather run into more than any other around here, it would have to be a Vhozon. A species that would never hurt anything that was clearly innocent. It really depended on how far their definition of innocent went for their entire race as to whether or not Fluttershy would be safe to even be near one. They made for great prosecutors in a court of law and were at odds with the Galactic Federation a lot of the time because of some of the things those in power tried to get away with.
Which brought Fluttershy to where she was now, she was walking around the upper deck of the seed or egg shaped ship. Her right foreleg was hard to walk on as her shoulder ached with every step she took. She moved up to the consoles and got a status reading on the ship, the Chozo built things to last and this ship was impressive in that its power source would likely never run out. Not that Fluttershy knew even a half of how any kind of advanced technology worked, but at least the Etecoons certainly did as they had a talent for it.
Fluttershy checked the fuel on the ship as it was pretty low to start with since the planet they left behind; then she moved on to the gathered food that was very well preserved because of all that sticky sap her alien animal friends had gathered. Seeing the food in storage on the ships internal cameras which weren’t entirely obvious, she could see they were quickly running low. They were truly in what was considered safe territory of Galactic Federation space nowhere near a planet where a Vhozon could be found and Fluttershy was wary of meeting anything else out here that wasn’t an animal that she could easily befriend.
The ships current heading was going to take them near a planet known as Horus IV and with no inkling as to what would happen once they got there. Fluttershy was worried, the Etecoons were less so but picked up on her feelings quite well and tried to be reassuring that everything would be fine. The Dachora was too busy caring for her young chick all the time to truly worry about what was going on around them or the fact that they might start starving to death soon and the growing chick needed a lot of healthy food.
The one good thing about this ship was that it had a toilet; Fluttershy didn’t want to know how the Dachora or Etecoons dealt with her leavings previously nor did she ever want to question it fully. The Etecoons were strangely toilet trained most likely because they figured out the purpose of the toilet early on. They had to help the Dachora when it came to using the alien toilet that had no toilet paper, but it did have a cleansing station that still had soap like fluids.
The Chozo used toilets somewhat similar to those found in Equestria so it wasn’t hard for Fluttershy to figure out how to use one and the ship had its own water system, only it didn’t have a shower. The Chozo obviously kept themselves clean through several other possible means. Toilets weren’t universal, though Fluttershy wishes they were as much as math was.
After musing about the wonders of alien technology, Fluttershy hit a few things on the interactive screens that the Chozo used and looked out into the stars as the ship slowly moved through them. Fluttershy considered other problems, like currency and linguistics.
Even if she had her translator fully working, it would take some time for it to translate the dialect of any species and if it came up that Fluttershy needed to verbally communicate then there would undoubtedly be problems.
She only had a smattering of some of the languages in the Galactic Federation and plenty of them were all centered on rather exceedingly violent moments from the information stores in The Vagrant. The same reason why Fluttershy was scared to be caught by anyone as she didn’t take the idea to keenly of being sliced open to see what made her tick.
Currency was not a likely thing to come by; if it really came down to it Fluttershy could possibly trade the ship with all its valuable information for another one fully fueled if of poorer quality along with some food. Bartering was a universal thing as long as the ones you were bartering with wasn’t part of a race of that shoots first and questions later.
Sighing to herself, no matter where Fluttershy would go there was always going to be some form of way for her to die a quick painless death or one long ruthlessly brutally painfully drawn out one. Her continued survival despite the odds was leading her to believe the second one was and would be ongoing until she got back to Equus, because of all the violence she had seen in the universe thus far.
Fluttershy had to admit that despite all the violence, the universe had many strange and wondrous things to explore and see that were breathtaking. Things that were so beyond the imaginations of anyone back on Equus; it was hard for even Celestia or Luna to contemplate how they would go about forming peace treaties with even half of the beings Fluttershy had learned about because they were so technologically beyond ponies.
All in all it was very quiet, almost too quiet, not even Fluttershy thought space could be so desolate or quiet for long. She reached up with her left hoof and hit what was called the scanners; they had entered the sector where Horus IV was located. There was a lot of activity going on around here, she could only wonder what it was all about and hopefully it wasn’t a Space Pirate attack. The Vagrant wasn’t made to be very fast or evasive, just heavily armored to take quite a pounding which was not saying much if a young Dachora can dent the ceiling with its tiny beak after flying out of its egg like it was shot from cannon.
--
“Sir we have an unknown signal on the long range scanners, there doesn’t seem to be a signature for weapons and it doesn’t look anything like a Space Pirate scout for an incursion. It is too out in the open and not trying to hide anything.” The being sitting at the scanning station turned in his chair to the captain. “What should we do sir?”
“Try to keep it on the scanners and tell me where it’s currently heading.” The captain said after a moment of thought. “Also, we need to keep an eye out on anything else suspicious going on out there.”
“It seems to be on course for Horus Four Sir.” The scanners person answered.
“These might be the smugglers we’re looking for, when the ship gets in range hail it and tell it to stop. Everyone we are now on red alert as we have a possible enemy contact on radar. This is not a drill.” The activity around the ship at hearing the captain’s words immediately increased at this.
“We’re also picking up a few signals; they look to be trying to hide their signatures from us. They are sending out the correct form of Galactic Federation IFF signals from them, but those signals don’t match the type of ships they are coming from and they appear to be on a direct course for Horus Four as well.” The moment the communications officer said this, everyone knew that things were about to get a lot more hectic around Horus IV.
“Shields up, arm all weapons and electronic countermeasures!” The captain shouted.
--
Fluttershy sat looking at the scanners and listening to the noise that was obviously a lot of vocal communications; her slightly broken translator would hopefully translate what she was hearing eventually. Then there were these other ships on the scanners and a long distance view showed that when they got close enough to each other they were firing on one another. Fluttershy hit the ship wide communications.
“Um… can I please get an Etecoon up here? Please come to the bridge quickly, I don’t mean to be an alarmist or anything… not that the situation we’re flying into isn’t alarming enough. We’re about to come under attack and I’m certainly not okay with this…” Fluttershy drifted off as they were getting closer and closer to the battle ahead.
The three Etecoons and the two Dachora were quickly on the bridge, all of them having entered into a slightly frenzied panic given the tremble in Fluttershy’s voice had set them off. Well almost all of them went into a slightly frenzied panic. The little Dachora chick didn’t know what was going on as it rested upon its mothers back, but it was definitely not happy about the sudden panic.
The Etecoons tried to steer The Vagrant away from the action, unfortunately they couldn’t get it completely clear of it. The Vagrant had finally completely run out of fuel and they were on a collision course for the really big ship fighting several other large ships that were smaller then it. Beams and missiles were flying everywhere between the vessels.
“This is the GFS Valhalla, unidentified space vessel you are to stop you’re… what in the world? It’s on a collision course with us now; we need to shoot it before it rams us!” The voice on the other end of the communications sounded quite panicked and Fluttershy’s large bat ears wilted at was about to happen, she just knew somebody was going to die soon.
Thinking of how to get out of this situation, Fluttershy remembered there were these things called escape pods. This was the exact time and situation to be using them.
“Escape pods!” Fluttershy screamed as she turned around and burst into a hobbling gallop through the open doors leading off bridge, the animals were immediately following knowing exactly why she screamed it. They all were all heading down the corridor towards the back of the ship where the escape pods were, from what little she knew about them they were made to be safely dropped onto habitable planets even if they had very little in the ways of maneuverability.
The Vagrant shuddered violently sending everyone aboard flying into the air. By happenstance the mother Dachora tripped and she flew forward over the pony with the Etecoons and her chick clinging to her back, the animals had safely made it by tumbling into one of the escape pods. It was immediately launched when Fluttershy slammed into a button specifically for that pod.
The pods had an internal launch control and an external one. Fluttershy had just set off the external one and she sat up to watch blankly as two doors closed between her and her animal companions. The pod shot down towards the planet without her on it and the sad looks on the faces of her alien animal friends would be stay with her for quite a while.
Quickly turning for another escape pod she didn’t have time to get in, for when she looked towards the bridge and saw the other ship become very large through the bridges viewing window and The Vagrant seemed to be spinning out of control as it got closer. Fluttershy’s pupils shrunk as The Vagrant crashed into what she could only guess was the GFS Valhalla. She had managed to sigh before being flung forwards by the impact towards the cracked viewing glass that had survived the impact while the ship pierced the larger vessel.
Surprisingly The Vagrant mostly held together despite the fact that it was took so many glancing hits from beam weaponry and had been hit by a rocket a few seconds ago. Luckily enough it hadn’t exploded as it bored its way into the side of what Fluttershy thought was the ship called the GFS Valhalla.
There was but this one sad thought on Fluttershy’s mind before her body was to impact with the cracked glass like substance. Why did this have to happen when she had finally just gotten used to walking again?