//------------------------------// // May 23rd: Ruminations // Story: Perilous Postapocalyptic Podunk Ponyfly Proceedings, or: How I Went From Pathetic to Powerful! // by Masterweaver //------------------------------// A lot of what happened next is not going to make sense if you don't understand exactly what I was thinking at the time. First of all, I assumed that my grandmother--and by extension all of humanity--had also been turned into microhorsebugs somehow. Furthermore, I thought that my grandmother's now much tinier form had been smothered in her sleep by the sheets of her bed; I hadn't really poked under because, well, I didn't know if I could survive in there for long... ...and, well, I didn't want to find a tiny me-sized corpse. Especially not one that had been family at some time. As I continued thinking, though, I realized that if all of humanity had become, well, microhorsebugs overnight, a lot of them would have went out like she did--which meant that the delicate network supporting civilization would have lost a lot of its support, in addition to everyone now living in homes for giants. Factor in the freakout aspect leading a good one out of a hundred to kill themselves accidentally, and then accidents like pets eating their former masters and... Let's just say I've seen The Borrowers. And that old Honey I Shrank The Kids movie. Although to be fair, I wasn't quite that small. The point was, for the moment I was effectively alone. Maybe if I could get outside the apartment, like through the air ducts possibly, I could locate others and we could do... whatever it was we needed to survive. But that would require me getting outside, and I didn't know exactly where the exit air duct was located, or if it was covered by a fan of some sort. I let my eyes drift over to my bedroom door; more specifically, I gazed contemplatively at its handle. The door itself was open, but I knew I wouldn't have been able to head out if it was closed; the door handle I could push down, but I wouldn't have been able to pull it. And the doors leading outside-- My antennae perked. The front door opened inward. But the porch door opened outward. If I could just get the handle to stay turned, I might be able to ram into it and push it wide! Of course, that required the effort of one more microhorsebug than was functionally present in the apartment. The door handles weren't knobs, thank goodness, but they were smooth with no hook on the end, making it difficult to attach a weight to them-- Tape. My tiny hoof hit my face. Of course! I could tape weight to the handle tip until it drooped, then I could... hmm. I brought my tiny blue hooves in front of my face. There wasn't a lot of contact space there, I needed a way to spread it out if I was going to ram the door. Some sort of wide surface, easy for me to pick up but sturdy enough that I could charge with it-- The poptart boxes, of course! They were a bit bulky, true, but if I just grabbed one and made sure it was full, I could push against the door. And they could be dropped as doorstoppers! After the door was open. Which required tape. Lots of scotch tape, I didn't want to get my wings anywhere near duct tape. I glanced back at my shimmering wings as they revved up again. It was odd, I could count something like... three? Four of them? Three and a half. Insects only had two, maximum, but then again I demonstrated some decidedly non-insect traits. Like the flexible ears. Or the long green mane. Or the incredibly large eyes with ludicrously large eyelashes... Now that I was focused on the eyelashes, I realized that I was actually feeling something from them. It was... well, very strange to experience. Like somebody tugging at the scruff of a new beard, only around my cheekbones and not... painful? I tilted my head to try to get a glimpse at them out of my peripheral vision--and the sensation changed. It took me a few seconds of tilting before I hit on what was going on. My ludicrously large eyelashes were reacting to the wind kicked up by the ceiling fan. Or... rather, they were telling me which way the wind was blowing, I just needed time to interpret it. That... actually, as a tiny flying creature, that made a lot of sense. True, eyelashes as whiskers was something that seemed a little bizarre to me, but humans had fingernails which served next to no purpose, and that wasn't counting all the weird and wacky traits animals had evolved in nature. The musings on my eyelashes fueled a more general curiosity, and I turned to look at the new appendages sprouting from my back. The frontmost and largest set was almost bifurcated, and twitching the muscles I had only recently discovered did make them feel as though they were... different fingertips on my back, if that makes sense. I'd already figured out the how of my flying, but that was trial and error; the why was something I hadn't looked into. Well... I could figure that all out later. With a shake of my head I buzzed out the door, whispering through the air as I searched for the roll of scotch tape--ah, there! Hiding behind various objects on the desk in the computer room. So many useful items would float around the apartment, being used here and there... ...well, back when there were people to float them around. No time to focus on the past. I hovered down, grabbing the roll of tape and flying it to the handle of the porch door. There was a little space between the roll and the... cutty blade thing on the end of most plastic tape rollers, so it was easy to hang it on the handle for the moment. As soon as I was sure it would stay, I flew over to the silverware drawer and... well, have you ever braced against a waill whil traing to shove something heavy across a room? The next, oh, half hour consisted of me picking up a fork, or a spoon, or a knife, and flying it over to the handle where I would carefully attach it in two or three wraparounds of tape. Wash, rinse, repeat. After a few trips, the handle looked like it had grown some sort of exotic metal sea anemone on it, but I didn't stop until I'd emptied out half the silverware drawer. I remember looking at my amalgamated door handle weight and nodding in pride. Of course, I didn't push the handle down right then--I suspected that when I did, the weight would start to slip off. No, I set up the poptart battering ram on the coffee table nearby first. Then I buzzed up to the handle, giving it a critical eye. It was now... or never.