It turns out, pegasi have antigravity magic. Changelings do too, but only while in a form with wings. The wings serve not only for their physical aerodynamics, but also as a sort of focus for their magic to lift them off the ground, or propel them forward. It's commonly used just to augment the effects of their physical wing beats, but they can use it in a few other modes, such as to drift lazily upside down with only occasional flaps to keep the magic going, or give physics the middle finger in a wide variety of interesting ways. Without that magic, pegasi wings are simply too small to lift their bodies aloft.
I actually had it a little worse off. Walking around I didn't really notice, but Deus was dense. I hadn't gained any size, and had actually trimmed down quite a bit since arriving in this world between injury repair, a near starvation diet, and low level optimization from the nanomachines in my blood. Nevertheless, I was a good 23% heavier than I started in my human form, solely from Deus' extremely heavy molecules. Switching to pegasus form, I ended up smaller and lighter, but the nanospiders in my bloodstream merely changed their layout. Being extra dense is the last thing a flier needs, so I was fighting an even steeper uphill battle trying to get off the ground.
Despite her attempted cooperation, Wind Chaser wasn't anywhere near as helpful with flight magic as she had been with shapechanging. While changing forms was a necessarily very conscious effort, flight was at its core a very natural and instinctive thing. The wing beats and maneuvers took thought, but the magic just kind of.. happened for them. And for that matter, while unicorn telekinesis and changeling shapeshifting had auras that were visibly obvious to my eyes, flight magic just wasn't obvious outside the fact of, you know, being airborne. So we ended up with me walking, after all, while Wind Chaser flew circles around me lazily.
It got us practicing a few other techniques, though. We shouted back and forth various inanities, as she helped me practice talking like a pony, while we both developed our skills communicating through our spider networks. Thinking messages back and forth was easy enough unless you were trying to have an unrelated verbal conversation at the same time. Viewing through another's senses was completely new to her, and still a little jarring for me when those senses were being controlled by an independent will. A lifetime of TV and movies made it a lot easier for me to adapt to of course, and changelings are nothing if not adaptable.
Meanwhile, despite being grounded, I was still a pegasus. Trotting was rather disturbingly easy, which Wind Chaser attributed to the magic. She had had no trouble walking as a human the first time she tried mimicking one of the enemy soldiers, and she had never attempted bipedal locomotion before that. Meanwhile, Deus was trying all kinds of experiments within my wings to try to emulate the flight magic. At one point he managed to flip me over with a sudden burst from one wing, but sadly nothing useful came out of it.
As the sun drifted lower, Wind Chaser spotted an orchard of cherry trees extending down the far side of the hill I was climbing. The buildings beyond were the nearest of a small town. I quickly unmade my wings before any of the locals had a chance to question a flightless pegasus, returning to the bulkier build of my earth pony form, while Wind Chaser dropped to the ground beside me. We passed the cherry orchard without incident before entering Dodge Junction, proper.
The old western theme was uncanny. While I couldn't name them for the life of me, there were specific reasons for every aspect of why the old west was the way it was on Earth, and there was no way all of them could be applicable here, in equal measure, on this alien world full of creatures that were completely inhuman, in shape if nothing else. There were even watering troughs outside here, though there were of course no horses tied to them. Civilized ponies drank from glasses, after all. (Though the dust of the road made the trough seem fairly attractive to me. I didn't want to make a bad first impression though, even if we were just passing through.)
As we approached the town square, we saw an unexpected figure. A human leaned against the wall beside the swinging doors of the saloon. It was a man, wearing a cowboy outfit that reminded me of 'Clint Eastwood' in Back to the Future III: far too bright and cheery for the real old west, but it fit in absolutely here with his surroundings: if anything it was his tanned and 'realistically' colored skin and hair that felt out of place, like in those old animated films with a green-screened human edited in, but with the wardrobe also cartoonified. His right hip had a holster, a dull grey fabric square that seemed as out of place as he did, far too blocky to hold the likes of a gun. Its flap was closed, concealing whatever might have been contained within. He looked out at us from under the brim of a remarkably familiar looking stetson hat before checking his cell phone with a frown. Whoever he was, this man was a jumble of jarring juxtaposition.
Wind Chaser and I neared him on our path into the saloon. I knew I was going to need to talk to him at some point, to get him on our side, but I wasn't eager to reveal to anyone my possession of changeling magic, much less that of my companion. So I had been hoping to deal with him later, perhaps on my way back out from the badlands. But he stopped us as we approached the door.
"Pardon me, lady and gent." He said, in a poorly forced accent, all the more reminding me of Marty. "My name's Ezekiel, but you can call me Zeke if you like. I was just wondering if you had seen someone of my, shall we say, 'tribe' coming up the road behind you. I have good reason to believe they should have been right behind you, if not in your midst, but I can see neither hide nor hair of them."
"I haven't seen another looking like you in at least a day," Wind Chaser replied, being more accurate than I would have liked. "Did you arrange for a meeting?"
"Well, no, not exactly per se, but I rather think a meeting is in order. I think you for your-" He was interrupted by a buzz from both of our phones at once. His phone was in his hand, and lighted up to display a message to him; another player elimination message I feared, though I couldn't see it from this angle. My own phone was in my pants pocket. While being a fully clothed pony was uncommon, it was nothing too far fetched, and I had been able to shift Rarity's handiwork easily enough with my changeling magic to keep my pants on, literally enough.
With a dramatic flair best reserved for ludicrous shows like Yugioh (and only Yugioh. Why would there ever be another like it. Why?!) he drew a deck of cards from his holster, and ominously brandished a hand of seven. They were Magic cards. Of course they were. His demeanor suggested they would work here, and I had little reason to doubt it. "Tell me, pardner.. where did you get that phone?"
"T-Mobile," I answered. "But what ought to be more important to you is, what do I plan to do with it? Do you even know what kind of game we're in?"
"A survival game.. and one I intend to win. Lucky for me, I hold all the cards!" With that a pair of cards vanished from his hand, one after the other. As the first vanished, a glowing red orb appeared in the air beside him before dimming as small horde of ugly green humanoids appeared between us. The goblins rushed forth, charging hastily, while Wind Chaser stepped in to fight them off. There was no contest here: even outnumbered a dozen to one, Wind Chaser dispatched them without breaking a sweat, only for their battered and broken bodies to vanish into the thin air from whence they had come.
"You'll never win if you don't understand the rules of the game! Follow me if you dare to know the truth." With that, I turned and fled, running for the edge of town with Wind Chaser on my heels. The last thing I wanted was to turn this into a public scene. Meanwhile, I left a trail of spiders burrowing into the ground in my wake. There was no guarantee I could end this peacefully, after all, especially without a show of force.
Zeke followed after me, continuing to draw and play cards as he followed, though for whatever reason he held back his attacks for the moment. I got around a rock outcropping, beyond the prying eyes and ears of townsfolk, and changed back to my natural form, assembling more and larger spiders as fast as I could. When Zeke came around the corner, he had a veritable army of goblins of his own, some brandishing primitive looking shamanistic staves amidst the various blade wielders. A brightly burning fire elemental by his side kept the scene well lit as the sun finally dipped below the horizon.
"I see you have more than just the one blocker," he noted, seeming to be pleased by the challenge, "this might be a real contest after all."
"You have two, very serious problems to contend with here, Zeke. The first is that I have you outflanked." With a glance, he finally noticed the army of spiders that had grown out of the ground behind him, bringing up the rear. That got his attention enough to give him pause. "The second.. is that you're going PVP in a cooperative game. Do I really have to tell you how well that is going to work?"
"Cooperative.. do you think I don't know what a Survival Game is? Or what you were doing trying to sneak up on me?"
"Were you thinking something like this?" I asked, pulling aside the scarf to show the scar from Frank's betrayal. "Zeke. You know what a <Survival Game> is but you don't understand what a Survival Game is. And it's that all too common misunderstanding that is going to make us all lose. We cooperate or we don't survive."
"What makes you so sure your understanding is the right one?" he demanded. He wasn't sold, but at least he wasn't attacking. Progress! "What evidence do you have?"
I dug out my cell phone, looking for the QR code from Twilight's library in the photo gallery. "A few things. For one, our introduction. What destination did you give <the Text>?"
He laughed a bit at my name for the mysterious force that had brought us here. "What makes you so sure our arrival process was the same, huh? Anyways.. yeah, <the Text> as you call it asked me where I wanted to go, and I told it <Honolulu>, but it sent me here anyways."
"So it sent you to Equestria, regardless of where you wanted to go. It's a Survival Game in Equestria, not an <Earth Survival Game> that happens to be in Equestria. That was our first clue, but there's more. Even telling us it was a Survival Game was a part of the game: in Equestrian Survival Games the host often takes some steps to ensure the players will have a hard time cooperating.. and that line of text was enough to get some of us at each other's throats, literally, and ensure we couldn't trust each other easily. But there's also this. What does your phone make of it?" I showed him the QR code.
"It's a QR code." He said blankly. After I returned his blank look, he remembered what I had just said and scanned the code. He got a nearly identical interface on his screen, except that the Activate button under Magic was enabled. "Should I activate it?"
"What? Hmm. We should maybe wait on that. I'm curious why it's enabled for you, and not me."
"Do you really have to ask?" He waved his handful of Magic cards in my general direction.
"Yes." I said as I turned into a unicorn in a flash of green light.
He blinked at me a few times, before chuckling and putting his cards away. The monsters he had summoned turned into a red light and dissipated. "So.. is that some kind of power of the item he gave you? Or is that really, you know, you doing it?"
"It's.. even more indirect than that, but yeah, let's call it the item. Why?"
He held up his left hand, electricity crackling up and down between his fingers. "It isn't much but I can do a little magic myself. When I'm using the cards, it's like they pour power into me and direct it, but.. after enough practice I was able to muster a little bit of it myself. Just the barest echoes, to be sure, but it's something."
"Wow.. Call me impressed. So that's one down, at least potentially. My working theory is that we need six people to each activate a different one of these QR codes to win. I could be wrong, but at least it's a theory. That one was at one of the safer starting locations, so I'm trying to check out other starting locations for more of them. There might be duplicates around, otherwise half our starting locations are duds."
"So, should I go with you then? Get a nice little party going?"
I shook my head. "Was your starting point nearby? You should check there for a code.. it will likely be well hidden if it's there at all. Take one of my spiders with you." I tossed him a fist size one that he let settle on his shoulder. "It can help you search, and help you keep in contact. After you search, I'd like you to head to Ponyville to check in and check on Frank. Let's call the library there our alpha meeting site going forward. We need to gather more people and more codes, as quickly as we can."
"That makes sense, but what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to search the badlands for signs of Robert's fate, and any QR codes in the area. I'm also.. concerned I may need to intervene against one of the other players. Someone's been going xenocidal against the locals, and I only hope we can turn things peaceful as easily as you and I have." Wind Chaser bristled a bit at the suggestion of a peaceful ending. Zeke obviously noticed but didn't derail the conversation. "Hey, how did you know I was coming, anyways?"
"Don't you have a Locate Players app on your phone?" he asked, a bit surprised. I took a look at the apps on my phone and found an unfamiliar icon with a radar-screen icon. Opening it, I got a list of numbers from 2-12, each paired with a distance in kilometers. Zeke showed as merely '<Less than 1km>'. There were a couple numbers in the single digits, and those over 10km included a direction. With a tool like this, hiding out from your fellow players indefinitely was an impossibility, though stealth could still be an asset in a tactical sense. It could make either cooperating or hunting each other down much easier. Players 3, 4 and 10 didn't have distance indicators, saying instead '<Eliminated>'.
"That's going to help a lot.. which honestly worries me. I don't think <the Text> would make things that easy unless it was confident we would be quite adequately challenged."
"I'm chalking it up as part of the challenge, honestly. Who's to say it won't get half of us killed before you can convince the rest of us to cooperate? We're well on the way already."
"Right.. so we'd better hurry. Be safe!" I turned and started to walk away, Wind Chaser in tow, while Zeke made his way back into town. Three players down, and three on the path to cooperation, if I dared to count Frank. It was a start, if a daunting one.