When Wings are Earned

by Keeper of time RD

Chapter 2: To Learn

The trip to the Cloudsdale practice field had become a weekly tradition between Scootaloo and her mentor. With each passing week she had been slowly getting better at flying. Not that what she could do could be call flying. By far, her favorite part of the trips was when Rainbow Dash would try to teach her new things despite not having gotten basic flight down. Like teaching her how to flare her wings and drop her legs just before she hit cloud to land properly, and more importantly stop digging trenches in the cloud field for them to fill in every flight attempt.

Sometimes Rainbow Dash would even take the lesson into open sky to take another shot at glide practice. While Scootaloo’s minimum glide speed was coming down, it was still oddly high. Today, however, she didn’t have to worry about her glide speed. Today they were back at the practice field, so all the filly had to worry about was pulling out of a dive before slamming into the fluffy, white field of clouds.

Scootaloo had lost count of how many tries she had made today. Maybe it was frustration. Maybe it was just plain recklessness. Whatever the case, she decided to try something wildly different this attempt. Backing up as far as she could and even pressing herself against the cloud wall opposite the launch ramps. Digging her hooves into the cloud she brought her wings to life scooter style, drawing a raised eyebrow from her mentor. Once her wings were up to speed Scootaloo broke into a sprint, charging the launch ramp with speed that could give a cheetah a run for their money, then she leapt into the sky.

Once airborne she mentally commanded her wings to change to a flying form. With that command, she switched over to the wing beat pattern Rainbow Dash had taught her. She could feel the force of her wings fighting gravity and she could feel that she wasn’t truly falling anymore. But she also felt what was missing, the wind around her wings wasn’t stable. She was falling slowly, not flying.

Not satisfied with another attempt doomed to crater a hundred feet down range, Scootaloo pointed herself down into a dive. Her speed picked up and the wind around her wings stabilized. Wanting more speed she forced herself to stay in the dive.

Blitzing past the second floor, Scootaloo used that as her signal to pull up. Pulling out of the dive she flapped her wings as fast as she could. Next thing she knew, she was shooting down range like an arrow, even making it halfway down the field before she noticed she had slipped back into buzzing her wings scooter style. Correcting the error she found herself losing altitude at a slower rate.

Soon, out of the corner of her eye, Scootaloo caught sight of the cloud pylon marking the three-fourths point of the field. The safety wall at the far side of the field was her goal, and it looked like she still had the altitude to reach it.

Scootaloo felt herself losing momentum and the wind around her wings destabilizing. No. I’m not going to fall short again. Not this time. She encouraged herself. Knowing only one trick to get speed back, she pointed herself into a dive. The wind around her wings stabilized once more, and she only pulled out into a shallow dive to maintain the speed.

As she neared her target, she saw that she was aimed at the base of the safety wall and thought to herself. Why stop here? The wall isn’t that high. She pulled up hard and arched over the top of the cloud wall. The act cost her speed and the wind around her wings destabilized, and she fell. The stall may have forced Scootaloo into a dive but she had done it. The wall was behind her. She had cleared the practice field… and now she was falling through open sky.

It didn’t take more then a few seconds to get enough speed to pull up into a shallow dive again. But now Scootaloo had a new problem. She could only fly under her own power as well as a hang glider. And that meant she had no way to get back up to the practice field.

Her eyes darted around desperately, she could feel her heart beating like mad as she searched for anything useful. From her last glide test, Scootaloo knew that if she was flapping her wings she could bring her minimum flight speed down to about a hundred miles an hour. Not in her wildest dreams could she get her scooter going that fast, so there was no way she could land on the ground at those speeds. Clouds, she needed clouds to land on. Her eyes went wide in panic as she looked around and saw none below her.

A shadow passed over Scootaloo. Looking up she saw the prismatic wake of her mentor shooting down toward her and she calmed, knowing her mentor would soon lift her back skyward. Only Rainbow Dash didn’t lift her out of her shallow dive. Instead she looked at Scootaloo and then measured the angle of her decent. “Hey Scoots! Point yourself to Ponyville!” Dash shouted, pointing to the south.

“Wha-huh?” Scootaloo cried, but did as commanded. “There’s no way I can make it all the way to Ponyville on my own!” she protested, once she realized where this idea was going.

Rainbow Dash smiled the kind of smile that meant she had a plan. “I know. I’ll be right back. I’m going to sign us out of the practice field so they don’t get worried and come looking for us,” she called back to her student. Dash didn’t give Scootaloo a second chance to protest and darted back up to the cloud field above them.

Scootaloo couldn’t help but frequently checking back over her shoulder to see if her mentor was coming back yet. The half-minute she spent out of sight felt like an hour to the filly, but eventually she looked back and spotted a prismatic motion blur headed her way again.

Rainbow Dash pulled up along side Scootaloo and stayed there. “You’re not going to catch me are you?” the filly asked.

“Not if I can help it. But I will teach you the rules of gliding,” Rainbow Dash responded, with a bit of a confident smirk.

Scootaloo’s eyes went back and forth between herself and her mentor. She was flapping her wings trying to fly, but she was getting the same result Dash was getting just gliding. “But! Rainbow Dash, even like this I can’t make it back to Ponyville!” Scootaloo protested.

“Sure you can. Just follow me and I’ll show you how to ride thermals.”

Thermals? The only time Scootaloo had heard that word used was when Sweetie Belle’s older sister Rarity was designing winter clothes. How that had anything to do with flying was beyond her. She watched her mentor scanning the ground below and even looking to some of the clouds above. Then Rainbow Dash made a gentle turn to the west, motioning for Scootaloo to follow. The filly did so and soon felt a rush of warm air slam into her from below, forcing her skyward.

Looking ahead Scootaloo saw her mentor in a shallow turn, so she turned to match. As she did, she felt the air settle and chill. Rainbow Dash led the way around back through the pillar of rising air. The two of them did a few more passes through the powerful upward rush of air, pushing them skyward, before Rainbow Dash pointed them back at Ponyville.

“What was that?” Scootaloo couldn’t help but ask, as she looked down and saw how much higher they were now then when they had first found the upward air current.

“That’s a thermal, a column of rising hot air. I don’t remember the details, but I recall something about the way the sun heats the ground differently in different places or something,” her mentor answered.

Smiling, Scootaloo realized that this was how she was going to make it to Ponyville.

* * * * * * *

Rainbow Dash had been leading Scootaloo from one thermal to the next on a path to Ponyville. They were only halfway there when the filly found a new problem. “Rainbow Dash! Can we stop and rest somewhere?” she called out to her mentor.

Rainbow Dash looked at her student as if that was the dumbest question ever for a moment. Then after looking between her own gliding wings and the filly’s flapping ones, she slapped herself in the face with her own hoof. “Right, the trick to long distance flying is to alternate between flying and gliding. Just rest your wings by gliding for a while.”

“But Rainbow Dash I lose altitude faster when I’m actually gliding!” Scootaloo complained, fearing she wouldn’t be able to make it form one thermal to the next.

“Let me worry about that!” Rainbow Dash called back.

Scootaloo hesitated for a minute, but as long as she had been mentored by Rainbow Dash her hero had always come through for her. So she fixed her wings in a glide form and pointed herself down until she had enough speed to truly glide. Scootaloo found it wasn’t truly restful, but it was like the difference between standing and running. Her wings were still supporting her weight, but at least they didn’t have to work hard at it.

With her increased speed Scootaloo found that reaching the next thermal wasn’t a problem. It did, however, take significantly more passes through them to reach the top of any given thermal since she was spending less time in the updraft and more looping around to get back in it.

* * * * * * *

A few thermals latter Rainbow Dash pointed down and smiled, “Told ya I could get you here.”

Scootaloo had been fixated on matching her mentor’s path so long that she hadn’t bothered to look at the ground recently. As she did so, she saw Ponyville ahead and close enough that she knew she didn’t need to ride any more thermals to reach it riding her own wings. “Great! We’re here, so can you catch me now?” Scootaloo half asked, half pleaded. Her wings aching, wanting true rest.

“Why? You’ve been landing just fine at the practice field?” Dash asked.

“On clouds! This is way too fast to hit ground with my hooves!” Scootaloo shouted, in near panic at the idea of landing on the ground this fast.

Rainbow Dash looked at her student and the ground to gauge their speed. A smile formed on her face. “How about with wheels?”

Looking down Scootaloo thought about the question. Maybe when she was going full throttle downhill she could get her scooter to somewhere around seventy or so, that wasn’t too far off from her current speed, was it? The wind rushing through her mane reminder her she lacked her helmet. With as many helmets as she had to replace just riding normally, she didn’t like the idea of testing her scooter riding skills without one. Then she saw the expecting eyes of her mentor and she swallowed. “Heh, sure, no problem,” she finally answered, nervously.

“Scooter’s at the clubhouse right?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Just inside the door to the right.”

With that, Rainbow Dash took off like a rocket, leaving a prismatic trail all the way to sweet apple acres. When she came blitzing back she had the scooter hanging from her front legs, shouting a warning to the residents below. Dash did a quick half loop to turn around and lined herself up ahead and slightly above Scootaloo. “Say when and I’ll drop it!” Rainbow Dash called out.

Scootaloo swallowed, she had half expected her mentor to admit it was a joke and catch her when she returned with the scooter. But this was real. Dash really expected her to go through with landing herself scooter style.

Looking down the street, she found that most of the ponies that had been minding their own business were now ducking for cover in alleyways or just against the nearest building, leaving the street mostly free. Turned out when Rainbow Dash gave a warning ponies listened.

A glance to the side Scootaloo saw that she was below rooftop level. It was now or never. “Now!” she practically screamed.

Rainbow Dash dropped the scooter. Scootaloo stopped trying to fly and hooked it with her front legs, while bringing her hind legs down on the baseboard. Firmly in possession of her scooter, she flared her wings as hard as she could to kill as much speed as possible before touching ground.

When the scooter’s wheels touched down they bounced, resisting the demand that they go from a stand still to spinning at high speed. That made Scootaloo tilt forward. She was already trying to air brake at this point, so angling some of the thrust to counter the unwanted spin was easy enough. When she came down again the scooter’s wheels already spinning, so they didn’t try to flip her as bad as the first bounce. After the third bounce she stayed on the ground and now it was just a matter of keeping the speed wobbles in check while she slowed down. She came screeching to a halt still more or less in the middle of the street that had served as her makeshift runway. Unable to move, Scootaloo just stood there, as her mind tried to figure out what had just happened.

“And you didn’t think you could make it all the way back,” Rainbow Dash said, landing beside her student with a smile that practically beamed confidence incarnate.

Turning to look over her shoulder, Scootaloo's movements were slow. Still partly stunned as her eyes fell on Cloudsdale distantly behind her. Her mentor was right. The weight of what really happened this day made her sit down on her scooter. She had just flown all the way from Cloudsdale on her own wings. She may have flown like a glider, but she had still flown a serious distance, and it was her wings that had carried her all that way.

Comments

[Kenshinryuu]

MOST... AWESOME...LANDING.... EVER!!!!! LET'S SEE HUMAN EXTREME SPORTS TOP THAT!!!!!

[RoyalBardofCanterlot]

Very exciting scene! I thought Scoots wasn't going to make it!