Derpy had waited patiently for Karyn to finish her coffee and be fully aware before she started in on what she had waited all week to talk about.
“Ponyville’s been bustling all week.”
“Yeah? What with?”
“Tourists.” Derpy visualized the crowded streets that she had had to deal with. “For whatever reason, a whole bunch of Japonese ponies decided that Ponyville was the place to go this year.”
“Japonese?”
“Yeah, from Japony.”
Karyn pursed her lips and wondered if that wasn’t a little bit racist, but of course Derpy wouldn’t see it that way. It was just the name of where they came from.
“And what have they been doing in Ponyville?”
“What haven’t they been doing? Mainly it seems like they all want a photograph of every square inch of the town, each individually.”
“I guess they are a little bit like Japanese people here, except they don’t go to small towns, as far as I know,” said Karyn. “Of course, you do have a princess there, so maybe that’s it. Anyway, at least the shops can make some more money.”
“Yeah, it’s good for them, but for me all it means are crowded streets and ponies too busy to talk to me when I drop off their mail.”
“Well, I’d like to see them. Maybe I can make friends.”
Derpy shrugged and let Karyn get on her back. When she landed in the Ponyville town square, there didn’t seem to be the mass of ponies that Derpy had implied, and Karyn pointed this out.
“Wait a few minutes. They’re quick on their hooves.”
True to her word, a family of ponies that had a vaguely Asian look stepped out of an alley. Karyn tried to place where she’d seen that style before, and the only thing she could remember was Photo Finish’s assistant who helped her with Fluttershy.
Both of the adults of the family had cameras draped around their necks, and Karyn reflected that with all the technology that ponies didn’t have, photography seemed to be one place where they were close to humans. Of course, they still used film instead of digital, but the camera mechanism was the same.
The family flocked toward Karyn, pointing out this new oddity and snapping pictures. Karyn enjoyed this at first, but when she tried to talk to them, they ran off. A moment later they were leading another family and shouting for more. In short order Karyn was being mobbed by flashbulbs. Derpy tried to get to her, but she couldn’t make her way through the crowd, so she shouted, “Get away and meet at my house!”
“Right!”
Derpy took to the skies while Karyn ducked and dodged through the throng. When she finally came to the edge of the crowd she broke into a full run. She was no match in speed for the ponies, but she could make it through spaces that they couldn’t, and the ponies would have to take a longer trek. Finally Karyn got smart. When she lost her pursuers briefly she activated her changeling magic and adopted her pegasus form. When the Japonese ponies caught up this time, they only saw another resident of Ponyville, and left her alone to go after their quarry.
Karyn was then able to proceed at a leisurely pace to Derpy’s house where that pony was pacing testily. “There you are! I was so worried!”
“It wasn’t pleasant, but I wasn’t scared either. You’re lucky that you can just fly away whenever something like that happens.”
“It wouldn’t have helped if I were being chased by pegasi, but yeah.”
They went inside and Karyn resumed her accustomed form. “When was it that we first learned I couldn’t fly even if I changed into a pegasus? Oh, right, when you were doing the tornado.”
“Yes, you should remember that.”
“Maybe it’s time I learned how to fly.”
Derpy scratched her head. “I don’t know. If it’s something magical that’s specific to pegasi...”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that I haven’t learned it. You were trained how to fly as a little filly. It’s like, if no one taught me how to walk, even if I had perfectly functioning legs, I still couldn’t do it.”
“That’s an idea. But who can teach you to fly...wait! Rainbow Dash! She’s the best flyer, so she can probably teach anypony”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” said Karyn. “She might try to teach me all the advanced stuff like how to break the sound barrier before she even gets me in the air.”
“OK, let’s try Fluttershy then.”
“Rainbow Dash it is.”
They left again with Karyn on Derpy’s back, and none of the tourists were around to cause another scene. But Derpy took off right from the door so they wouldn’t have been caught anyway.
She went for height right away, saying, “Let’s see, where is she?”
“Do you know where to look?”
“Well, we’ll search the clouds. It shouldn’t be hard to spot blue and rainbow against the white.”
That was indeed where they found her, napping and snoring in the noonday sun. “Should we wake her?” asked Karyn.
“I wouldn’t want to be, so let’s give her a chance on her own.”
It took a few minutes of Derpy standing on an overhanging cloud, but Rainbow did wake up, and did so all at once. Derpy coughed and waved.
“Oh, hey, Derpy, Karyn. Good to see you. I had to get away from all the crowds down on the streets, and then I took a power nap. What’s up?”
“Karyn wants to learn how to fly.”
Karyn gave Derpy a love tap on the ear. “You don’t have to say it straight out like that. It needs some setup. See, Rainbow, I can go into pegasus form using changeling magic, but I can’t fly.”
“Hmm...let me see what you’ve got.”
Karyn focused and changed again, but as she did, Derpy let go and she found herself falling through the cloud. Before she could even react to be afraid, she felt a set of hooves grasping her, and then another.
“Nice catch, Derpy. You got her almost as fast as I did.”
“You have the speed, but when Karyn’s in trouble, I get the strength of ten Derpies!”
Rainbow and she had a laugh, and then they hauled Karyn back up to cloud level. Rainbow seemed surprised when, every time they tried to lower Karyn onto the cloud, she passed through as if it were only a thin mist of water.
“It just seems wrong to me to see a pony with wings who passes through clouds. You don’t even punch holes in them like an Earth pony would if one were unfortunate enough to come here. Hmm...try pumping your wings and show me what happens.”
Karyn recognized the phrase as one that she would use when conducting technical support and didn’t know exactly what the problem was, or to stall for time until she could think of something to try. But just as she would want one of her users to do, she followed directions. Flapping her wings, she gained no more lift than if she had stood in human form and flapped her arms.
“Can I change back. This is tiring.”
“You shouldn’t be worn out from such a quick workout, but if you say so. We’ve clearly seen that you’re not a true pegasus pony. But changelings themselves can fly, right? So what if you were to go into your changeling form?”
Karyn was confused. “I don’t have a changeling form. My magic was given to me by Queen Chrysalis, but she didn’t change my inner self. That’s why I don’t have to feed on love or be bound to a hive. I can try to make one that would be like a changeling and see what happens.”
Derpy agreed. “We’ll just try different things until we find something that lets you fly.”
Karyn focused, it being more difficult because she was distracted by being held up by the two pegasi instead of having her feet on the ground. She tried to picture what a changeling version of herself would look like, trying to round off the harsh eyes and blunt the fangs. She also tried to give herself large powerful wings. When she completed the transformation, she said, “OK, here I go.”
She buzzed her wings faster than before, since they were lighter and thinner than the heavy feathery pegasus wings were. Using all her strength, she squeezed her eyes and flapped for all she was worth.
“Do you feel that, Rainbow, or am I just making it up?”
“No, she’s definitely lighter in our hooves, but she’s still not getting enough lift to take off. Slow it down, Karyn. Don’t burn yourself out.”
Karyn panted and relaxed. “So what do we do now?”
“Well, what you need,” Rainbow said, “is to fly the way that birds or bats or wasps do. That is, on pure mechanics, not any kind of magic at all. Either that or I can try to fit you for a helicopter attachment like Tank has!”
“We’ll consider that a last resort. But here’s the problem. I don’t know exactly how mechanical flying works. Can you tell me a little about that?”
“I don’t know if I’m really the best pony for that job. I do know a lot about flying, but all of it’s predicated on getting in the air with my own wings. So I could tell you about wind shear and all that stuff, but it wouldn’t necessarily help.”
She changed back, and Derpy maneuvered her onto her back. “We could ask Twilight and see if she has any books that could explain it to us.”
“We could,” said Karyn, “but as much as she knows and can find, I think that we’re going to find our answers back on Earth. We know a lot about flight, with all our airplanes and such, and it’ll probably be written in a way that I can understand it.”
Rainbow hopped back onto her own cloud. “You could be right. Best of luck. Next time you’re back here, we’ll have a race.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because I only like competition when the outcome isn’t known ahead of time.”
She and Derpy waved good-bye, and Derpy swooped back to the changeover point. Back in her apartment, Karyn was grateful that for once the time difference worked in their favor; she had all day to figure out the problem with flight.
“So are we going to the library here?” asked Derpy.
“No. We should go sometime, I haven’t even seen the public one, just the research library at the school. But thankfully we’re back in the world where there’s Internet.”
Karyn did some searching. Most of what she found was talking about airplane flight, which might have been helpful, but was not directly on point. Karyn’s powers had limits, and she couldn’t form parts of herself into jet engines or propellers to move her forward at the speeds required to use the aerodynamic principles being discussed.
Derpy had expected a quick answer once Karyn had the computer, and was frustrated at the lack of progress. “Can’t find anything?”
“Turns out there’s a lot of debate still on what makes airplanes fly. They know they do, and they know how to deal with the way they do, but the base scientific reason, there are a lot of different explanations for. My guess is that the ones that are the most accurate are the ones I can least understand. The ones that have lots of math and graphs involved.”
“So it’s just like Rainbow Dash. She could explain how to fly, but not how. Wait, no. She could explain why, but not how. Or, is it how but not why?”
Karyn laughed. “I understand, even though I can’t put it into words either. Well, let me look for some info on how birds fly instead.”
This time Derpy was more involved with the search. Since she too flew on wings of feathers instead of aluminum, she was more curious and hoped to learn something about her own methods. But this too was complex.
“What if,” she said, “you just changed yourself into a bird to get the feeling of how it is to fly, and then we can see if that helps us any.”
“I don’t like changing into animals that are too small. I’m always afraid of getting into a situation where I’ll get hurt.”
“You don’t have to be a small bird. You could be like a falcon or something, a bird of prey. And besides, I’d go with you to chase off anything that would attack you, at least to give you enough time to get on the ground and change back.”
Karyn rubbed her arms. “I guess that’s the best thing for it. You’ll have to open the door for me once I change though.” She concentrated, but she couldn’t quite get the change to happen until she searched for a picture of a peregrine falcon that she got into the form. She also realized that she was without speech as a falcon.
Derpy went invisible, and it was a curious sight to see the little bird hopping around on its two legs trying to keep sight of something it couldn’t. She bounced over to the garden path and bobbed her head each way, still wary of anyone or anything looking. It may have been equal fear of embarrassment.
Karyn opened her wings and checked them, then she leaned forward and flapped. With a breath of wind in her face, she got just enough lift to slide a few inches with no part of her touching the ground.
On each pass she got some lift, but never true sustained flight. She kept her wings flapping and could arrange it so that she was rising more than she was falling, but it certainly never looked elegant. More like she was repeatedly jumping than flying.
It was also tiring. Not quite as bad as flapping in pegasus form, because the wings themselves were lighter, but it was still an effort. She let herself land and take a good rest before trying it again.
From behind, she heard a gentle voice. “Are you hurt, little bird? Did you break your wing?”
Karyn flipped around, itself an unfamiliar motion, to see Gayle kneeling down a good distance away. She held out her hand.
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. Is there some reason you can’t fly?” And then to herself. “I’ve never seen a bird like this around here.”
Karyn thought of playing it cool and letting Gayle think that she really was a bird, but Derpy ruined any plans of a prank. “Hey, Gayle, it’s Derpy here. The bird is actually Karyn. She wanted to learn how to fly, which is something that she can’t do as a pegasus pony.”
She bounced back away and resumed her usual shape, plus an image of some clothes which she’d had to take off when she transformed previously. “Yeah, it seems like I’m gilding the lilly or something. I should be happy enough to have the form but from an incident earlier today it felt like I should be able to fly when I need to, you know?”
“I can’t say I know, but I’ll believe you. But why as a bird?”
They brought her up to speed on the experiments they had performed so far. “No matter what she does,” said Derpy, “she can’t get consistent and efficient flight.”
“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if it isn’t more than just the shape. I mean, a bird has instincts that let it fly. It has to be trained by its mother, but it’s still instinctual. How about you, Derpy? Are pegasuses born knowing how to fly?”
“Pegasi. And no, we’re not. We have to be taught.”
Gayle sat down next to Karyn. “So I’m thinking maybe it’s not a skill that you can pick up immediately. It’s like painting. You know how to pick up a brush and move it across the canvas, but I would have to teach you if you wanted to actually get a picture out of it.”
Karyn swallowed and winced. “So what you’re saying is that it’s going to be difficult.”
“Yes. Which is why as a responsible adult I advise you to give up and go play video games.”
They had a laugh, but Derpy missed the sarcasm. “That’s not responsible at all! No, if anything, we have to stay out here until you can fly! No matter how hard it is!”
“Well, you heard her, Karyn. I’ll keep an eye out to make sure you get airborne.” Gayle headed back inside.
“Great. Somehow I wound up with homework.” Karyn rolled her eyes. “Well, if being a bird won’t help I’ll have to think of some other form.”
Derpy thought about that for a long time. “Maybe it’s not so much about the form being good for flying as it is a form that you’re comfortable in. I mean, it needs to be airworthy obviously. I’m not saying you could fly as a fish if, for some reason, you were comfortable as one. But don’t just think about the most efficient way to fly possible.”
“Maybe something closer to a human. Or something like a griffon?”
“I don’t think a griffon would help. I’m pretty sure that their flight methods are magical just like mine. Plus you probably wouldn’t look good as one.”
Karyn thought she could pull it off, but didn’t argue. “Maybe we need to think about this and do some planning before we actually try forms. Figure out what it is that will A, make me the most comfortable flying, B, get off the ground, and C, look good.”
“OK.” They sat down on the steps to Karyn’s apartment. Derpy didn’t understand a formal brainstorming session, but she got the idea.
“So what I’m thinking is that I should gain all the lightening advantages I can. I want to have minimal weight.”
“Fair enough.”
“Like, if I remember correctly birds have hollow bones to make themselves lighter.” Karyn pulled out her phone to confirm this fact.
“But let’s keep focus on what you think would be the best flying form.”
“See, I still think it would be like a pony, but instead of wings like yours I would need super-big ones. More like an eagle’s.”
Derpy flashed back to when Karyn was trying in the cloud. “I think that a lot of your problem as a pegasus is in the hooves. But I can’t say why.”
“Probably because without magic they create a lot of drag. Not so much weight in and of themselves, but positioned to slow me down. But I don’t want to look like a blob pony that doesn’t have any hooves.”
“What if you had retractable hooves like a cat’s claw?”
Karyn winced. “That’s almost as bad. But there’s an idea. What I want are aerodynamic hooves that will cut through the wind. Plus they can act like rudders for steering.”
Neither of them had any drawing talent, or they would have sketched out a picture of what they meant. As it was, Karyn just had to go with the picture she had. Glad that she was fully adept at using her changeling powers, she concentrated.
It looked similar to her pony form, but swept back and build more around lines than curves. Derpy did not find it attractive, but neither was it an abomination against nature. And as she said, Karyn had given herself oversized wings, such that she could almost use them as a cloak against the wind.
“Now, let’s see what you can do!”
“Maybe we should try this in Equestria? It might look a little weird around here.”
“Oh, right.” Once on Equestrian ground, Karyn spread her wings and gave a little trot forward. This time she knew. Airborne immediately, each flap was more like a swoop. It felt like rowing a boat, where the strokes weren’t constant, but each provided more momentum than was lost by the time she started again. Leaning forward, she was able to feel the wind in her face.
“I can’t believe I’m really doing it. This is a dream for lots of people, to fly unaided.” She swooped and soared, but soon enough the exhaustion came. So she skittered to a halt on some soft grass. “I need to work on the ends of my legs for better landings.”
“You want to try again?”
“In a few minutes. I’m going to have to work on my wind if this is going to be a regular thing.”
Derpy opened her own wings. “Any time you want to practice, I’ll be there to join you.”
“Deal.”
“Hey! What’s that?!” They turned to see the Japonese tourists, having reached the edge of Ponyville, notice them.
“Looks like practice time just started up.”
Karyn went right back into flight mode, and this time she was able to keep pace with Derpy. The sound of flashbulbs behind her told her that there would be mysterious pictures to be gawked over, possibly printed in the newspaper.
“Well, I guess I know that I can fly when I need to. I really feel like I’m exploring the full capacity of my changeling powers.”
“And I remember when you didn’t like them at first.”
She flashed back to herself. “Just so long as I can always go back.”