My plan worked flawlessly.
Of course it did, otherwise I wouldn't be here writing about it. I mean, yeah, I kind of had to ram three times, then I had to drop the poptart box, and then I shoved it forward just as the door was swinging back closed and managed to jam it in the space between the door and the frame so I'd have a tiny crack to fly out...
But that, I think, counts as flawless.
Once I was outside, my first order of business was... to actually figure out what my first order of business was. After all, I wasn't exactly strapped for noms anymore, now that I was smaller than a rat. Well, assuming that my metabolism was somewhat similar to what it had been and wasn't hyper-processing like... actually, as a flying creature, I would in theory need more calories to body mass, and that's not factoring in the energy needed to keep the brain running since I was still sapient--
I shook my head. Alright, food was a bigger priority than I had thought. But there was a grocery store just down the road... which would be quite some distance in the beating sun.
There's an old list I stumbled on once, before this all happened. It's called the survivor's rule of three. Granted, it was tailored toward humans, but at this point I decided to operate under a 'similar until proven different' schema. So, I went through a mental review.
Three seconds without blood flow? Well, even if I got cut, there would still be blood flowing through my body. Still, best to try to avoid it, getting infected at this size would be bad.
Three minutes without air? Simple enough, I didn't have a bathing suit that fit me anyway. Also, probably smaller lungs, so probably not as long.
Three hours without warmth? Oklahoma in the middle of summer had a lot of that! I supposed I could stay indoors to avoid heat stroke... oh, yeah, the AC would give out eventually. Probably a good idea to look that up at some point.
Three days without water? That would be the first big problem, but there was a grocery store down the road after all. I could figure it out from there. It might take some effort to unscrew a water bottle, but they were designed to be unscrewed, so I wasn't... too worried.
Three weeks without food? Grocery store. Assuming the food kept long enough anyway. And that I could still eat it... well, I was able to eat that poptart knockoff, so that wasn't a problem.
And then, the big one. Three months without companionship. Three months alone. Three months, three months without seeing another face. The list had emphasized this one; humans that tried to make it past that usually just grew so depressed that they would lie down and die without complaint.
Now, I hadn't been that social offline, and in fact most of my interactions up until that point were either digital, necessary, or... well, not forced, but definitely somewhat awkward. Now, though... now there was a chance that the internet would fail. And more than that, there was the chance that all the people I had known had been suffocated by their sheets when they became ponyflies. Everything else, I had at the least a good idea how to handle. This last thing, though...
I made up my mind then and there. I would search the apartments for other survivors, and failing that.... I would think of something. I was good at that, thinking of things.
About twenty or thirty smashed window panes later, I had come to the conclusion that I was the only one to have avoided sheet suffocation. That not only sucked personally, as save for the various ex-pet dogs I encountered I was alone, but I did recall seeing and hearing children about. Including a few that still traveled primarily via stroller. Or baby carrier.
...Yes, I did spend a few hours perched on a roof, staring into nothing. You have to remember the assumptions I was operating under. I thought they were all dead! I was technically wrong, thank God, but I wouldn't learn that for... let me think... okay, it was less than a year, in hindsight, but the point still stands. Those early days were a lot more horrifying than anything you youngsters have to deal with.
Yes, I did just call you youngsters, you young whippersnappers, because back in my day we had to fly for a mile just to get to the grocery store and we did it under burning hot sunlight knowing full well we could be a morsel for any animal that caught sight of us and we didn't have all this fancy-shmancy solar tech, nooooo, we were running without AC and we absolutely hated it but we did it without complaining!
Aaaaaanywho, I could go into detail about my little angst coma, but honestly? There's not much to tell. I had to work through a lot, don't get me wrong, but... well... it's one of those things that would drag down the story. I mean, I've already spent three chapters on my first day alone. And you didn't pick up this book to read about my early day angst, oh no, you wanted to know how I went from pathetic to powerful. It's right there, in the title. So, let me summarize what happened next.
I got my head on straight, filled with determination to survive and at least ensure that I myself would not become a lost footnote in this new world. So I flew home, set up my grandmother's computer to download all of Wikipedia--great source of info back in the day, and it's not like she would use it--and immediately set about planning the rest of the week.
And then I basically did nothing productive for the rest of the day. Well, okay, I prepped for some of the things that would happen in the morning, but nothing really dramatic happened. The next day, though... and the day after that, and the day after that...
Well, those were filled with a LOT of things.