When the Sky Isn’t High Enough

by Keeper of time RD

Chapter 1: Chance Meeting

“Are we there yet?”

Sweetie Belle’s question was answered by a growl from the pegasus filly driver, that and allowing the wagon to run over a rock she could have easily dodged. The jolt and a glare that clearly implied ‘don’t distract me’ silenced Scootaloo’s friends quickly enough. But the reprieve was shot lived.

“Are you sure ya know where we are?”

“Yes Apple Bloom, I know exactly where we are.” Scootaloo lied. She knew they were in the hills north of Ponyville. Exactly where in those hills eluded her and more to the point she was starting to think she miss-counted how hills they had passed.

“Ya sure? Ya said that abandon building ya wanted to explore was ‘like five hills away’ somethi’n like ten hills ago.”

Scootaloo sighed, she was frustrated, but her earth pony friend was right, she had said that. While Apple Bloom didn’t seem to notice that they had been snaking their way through the area the young pegasus thought the building should be at it was also clear that it, or they, wasn’t where she thought. Scootaloo double checked Cloudsdale and Canterlot. North and northeast respectively so she knew she wasn’t totally lost, though it crossed her mind that maybe she had overshot before leaving the dirt road and maybe her target was now south instead of north. She motored her wings to push her scooter and the wagon of friends onward. One more hill, then I’ll try south. She promised herself.

As Scootaloo crested the next hill she slowed and scanned the area. Something caught her eye. It was either an oddly colored boulder behind that hill north of them or it was the corner of the building she was looking for. She veered hard to inspect the aberration, in the back of her mind she was praying for it to be the building so she wouldn’t have to admit defeat to her friends. The orange filly ignored the questions coming from her friends about the sudden change of direction and powered her wings one more time to rush down the current hill and up the next.

“Hey, there it is! See? Told you I knew where I was going!” Scootaloo cheered at her vindication as she crested the next hill and spotted the lone rusty metal structure, built in the style of a pegasus cloud hanger building.

“Finally! You’ve been rattling us around that wagon so long my bottom went numb.” Sweetie Belle said as the while unicorn filly jumped out of the wagon and started shaking her pink and purple tail about while kicking her back legs to get the tingling to go away.

Performing a similar stretch Apple Bloom shared her newfound concerns, “Umm… Scootaloo, Ah don’t think this building is as abandon as you think.” She pointed a yellow hoof at the sheet metal skin of the building, “Some of those welds look recent.”

“Yeah, because I could totally see that from a thousand feet up when Rainbow Dash brought me back from Cloudsdale,” Scootaloo rolled her eyes to add to her sarcasm, as she tossed her helmet in the wagon and shook the sweat from her purple mane.

“An listen, is that ah run’n faucet?” Apple Bloom added as she fixed the pink bow in her red mane so it would be comfortable again.

“Naw that sounds like a welding torch.” Scootaloo guessed.

“How do you know what a welding torch sounds like?” Sweetie Belle questioned her pegasus friend.

“What? You never hang out at the machine shop just to watch them weld stuff? It’s like those sparklers they give out at the fireworks festival, only bigger and cooler!” Scootaloo defended her odd knowledge.

“Girls… does it really matter? Exploring an abandon building is one thing but somepony’s here, we can’t just go barg’n in there without permission, that’d be trespass’n!” Apple Bloom tried to bring the conversation back on topic.

“Then we won’t. But I didn’t just haul you two all the way out here just to go home empty hoofed,” Scootaloo asserted as she boldly pounded her hoof on the metal door as loud as she could.

“It’s not locked!” a young male voice shouted back from inside.

“Sounds like an invitation to me,” Scootaloo gave a sly smirk as she turned the handle of the door.

Inside the three fillies found several smashed up sets of metal wings, what looked like a diving suit with a fancy helmet and a worktable. Standing at the worktable was a lone pegasus colt who seemed to be welding small metal tubes to a set of triangular wings, connected by a thin frame. One observation of note about the wings was that the middle section of the bottom wing was cut out.

The colt welding the wings only looked to have maybe two years on any of the crusaders at best, placing him to be of the age were he would be expected to have just finished basic schooling and be apprenticing at a job. His coat seemed white and his mane was a sky blue, though it was hard to tell given the only light in the room was coming from a lone lantern that was way too small to light the hanger it was in.

Sweetie Belle immediately zipped over to the strange suit and began examining it, pondering if its design was something that might impress her older sister. Ultimately concluding it was too plane and too simple.

Apple Bloom stopped to admire the welding sparks with Scootaloo for a moment before she ran out of patience and left her pegasus friend to go admire the metal wings instead, wondering why anypony would make hang gliders from metal.

Scootaloo watched the welding sparks just long enough to feel she had made her point about them being fun to watch before darting into the maze of scarped metal wings.

With the last part of the current weld finished the colt turned off the welding torch, set his mask aside and turned to address his guests, “You can just… oh, uh, hi.” He blinked his greenish hazel eyes in bewilderment.

“Were you expecting somepony else? We knocked and you gave us permission to come in.” the pegasus filly answered him, while she and her friends came out of the scrap heap and lined up.

“Hmm, I guess I did, but who are you? And why are you out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“Apple Bloom! Sweetie Belle! Scootaloo, And we are the cutie mark crusaders! We were out here crusading for our cutie marks as cutie mark crusader explorers!” The three fillies introduced themselves, while Scootaloo continued, “I saw this place on my way back from Cloudsdale and wanted to come explore it.”

“I guess that’s as good a reason as any to be in the middle of nowhere.” The colt thought aloud.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? What is this place? Why is it in the middle of nowhere?” The fillies peppered him with a rapid-fire barrage of questions.

“Whoa slow down!” He said, as he replayed the questions in his mind, sorting them out from each other. “Okay let’s see, My name is Light Seeker. This is my workshop and it’s in the middle of nowhere because rocket experiments and cloud buildings don’t mix well.”

“Do you live here? You own this place? How do rockets and cloud building have anything to do with this place being in the middle of nowhere?” Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle continued to ask questions together, although Scootaloo seemed to have gotten lost in thought the moment she heard his name.

“No, I Live in Cloudsdale…” Light Seeker answered the first question but paused on the second, as he didn’t actually know who technically owned the land. “…I’m not sure. As for being here, well the short version is. My first rocket kinda blowup in my face and the blast wave tore apart my cloud house… and some of the neighbor’s too. And while cloud houses are really easy to rebuild you’d be surprised how mad some ponies get when you drop their stuff twenty feet or so… or five thousand for the stuff that didn’t have cloud-walker enchantments on them and got knocked off whatever was holding them up. Anyway the mayor of Cloudsdale made my dad promise to never let me do rocket experiments at home again, so he helped me buy this field and we made this workshop.”

“If you live in Cloudsdale why here instead of closer to there?” Sweetie Belle Asked.

“Because trains don’t go to Cloudsdale and sometimes I need to order heavy custom parts and stuff. So I didn’t want to be too much of a hassle to the ponies who have to deliver them.”

“Then why so far outside of town?”

“Look at me. I’m just a colt, I don’t have the kinda money to buy a proper place in town. We had to come this far out to find something affordable considering the only thing we put here was a hobby workshop,” Light Seeker gestured to the simple workspace around him.

“Y’all kept talk’n about rockets but all ah see here is these metal wings. Where are these rockets of yours?” Apple Bloom asked.

Light Seeker pointed at the tubes on the underside of the wing he was just welding, “What do you think these tubes with the pointy ends are? That’s where the rocket motors go.” In the back of the colt’s mind he was thinking to himself, asking why he was even bothering to talk to these fillies so much when he wasn’t even a sociable pony, all he wanted to do was get back to his hobby work. But he didn’t want to be mean and just tell them to leave either.

“How did you afford all of this? When we need to make big stuff we usually have to borrow the supplies from our big sisters.” Sweetie Belle inquired, with a hint of suspicion in her voice.

“I’m an apprentice at the Cloudsdale machine shop. And while the salary of an apprentice may not be much, you’d be surprised how cheap stuff is when you make most of it yourself.”

“Light Seeker!” Scootaloo suddenly shouted, bringing all eyes on to her. “I know you! You’re the one next to Rainbow Dash! That’s where I’ve heard your name before!”

“Wait. What are you talking about, Rainbow Dash isn’t here?” Sweetie Belle asked her friend.

“No. In the Equestrian book of pegasus records! It’s like the only book I own. And next to Rainbow Dash’s page for ‘Fastest pegasus flight ever’ is the one for ‘highest pegasus flight ever’ and that’s where I’ve seen him before,” Scootaloo explained.

Light Seeker sighed, then corrected the filly, “It’s ‘Highest altitude achieved, without the aid of magic’ I’m pretty sure Luna’s still got me beat on highest altitude ever.” In the back of his mind he was still trying to figure out why the three fillies were still asking these questions. How did knowing his life story possibly help them in anyway? Didn’t they come here to explore? Well, they had seen what was here so why hadn’t they moved on?

A bang on the door rescued Him for more questions. This time Light Seeker opened the door himself. As he opened the door and was bathed in the full light of day for the first time since the crusaders had arrived, they saw his coat wasn’t the pure white they had first assumed and that it actually had the slightest tint of blue to it.

Beyond the door were several pegasi, a stallion and two mares were waiting with a crate. The stallion spoke for them, “Hey Light, you know the deal.” He then nudged a clipboard on the corner of the crate.

The crusaders watched silently while the young colt signed the paper on the clipboard, making note of the nervous look on the two mare’s faces. “As always, you can put it in the back.” Light Seeker said once he’d finished the paperwork, pointing to the far corner of the hanger. The two mares took the towlines attached to the crate and slowly hovered their way over to the indicated spot. Once the crate was set gently down the two pegasus mares couldn’t seem to get out of the hanger fast enough.

A sad look appeared on the face of the stallion as he looked on Light Seeker, before he sighed and spoke to the colt, “Light, Why do you keep doing this? It’s like everypony but you knows you’re throwing your life away chasing these silly dreams of your. You’ll never find your place in life and earn your cutie mark if you don’t give up on this waste of time first.” The stallion’s tone was sincere, making it clear he was just trying to offer honest advice.

“Yeah you’re way too old to still be a blank flank, so you’ve got to be doing something wrong.” One of the mares said in a teasing tone, drawing a glare from the stallion. After a moments pause, the stallion took the clipboard in his mouth and took off, the two mares followed soon after.

“Hey you’re ah blank flank too?!” Apple Bloom asked excitedly.

The sudden sound and feeling of presence close behind him startled Light Seeker, so that he leapt into the air, coming to a hover a few feet off the ground before he remembered he had three fillies visiting his workshop. He then noticed the earth pony’s words, namely ‘too’ and took note that, despite also being a little on the old side to not have a cutie mark, all three of the fillies flanks were as blank as his own.

“Yes I am, as are you apparently.” He said when he finally got around to responding.

“Ah don’t get it. Ya earned a spot in a record book but not a cutie mark? How’d ya pull that off?”

“I suspect if I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t still be a blank flank. But my understanding is that a cutie mark is earned when a pony realizes what their destiny is. In my case it I think destiny and I disagree.”

“What does that mean?”

“I know what my destiny is, I can feel it every time I use one of my rocket assist wing packs to fly higher then ever before. I just… need to get higher… I know my destiny is up there, I just know it.” Light Seeker answered, not even close to convinced by the words he’d been telling himself for years.

“Wait these metal wing thingies actually flew? But they look so beat up!” Sweetie Belle inquired.

Happy to change the subject, Light Seeker stated showing the fillies the collection of his past wing packs, “Somepony once said ‘success teaches you nothing, but you can learn a great deal from your failures.’ These are my failures, I keep them here to remind me why I made the changes I did to the wing pack’s design. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My first attempt was what you’d expect from any pegasus, I just flew as high as my wings would carry me. Turns out when you get too high the air gets too thin and I passed out, and woke up once I’d fallen back into denser air. After that I took a diver’s air tank up with me but then the thin air got in my way again, seems thinner air also means less lift from your wings, and that’s where this comes in.”

Light Seeker paused, the glint of joy from talking about something he liked seemed to lessen as he moved on. Then he pointed at the stripped down remains of a wing pack that, when it was whole, would have doubled his wingspan but was little more than a frame now, “This is my first rocket assist wing pack. It helped me fly higher then I had before but it just wasn’t good enough. It was still in good shape when I realized I needed to make a better one so I kinda stripped it for parts when I made the second one.”

He then trotted over to a pile of scraps, “Once I realized that rocket motors burn up their fuel too fast I knew I needed a wing pack that could go faster if it was going to get me as high as I needed. This was my first wing pack to go supersonic. And as you can see it turns out if you push a straight wing that fast they kinda shake themselves apart. It tore itself apart on my first test flight with it.”

“Wait! You’ve been supersonic? You’ve done a sonic rainboom?” Scootaloo stopped him from going on.

“Yes and No, it seems if you use rockets to push a pegasus supersonic you only get a regular sonic boom. Although I do recall hearing somepony proved the legend of the sonic rainboom was true. If what you said about the record book is right them I’m guessing that would be that Rainbow Dash you mentioned.”

“Yeah! She’s the fastest, most awesome pegasus ever!” the orange pegasus asserted.

“Moving on then,” Light Seeker moved over to a badly smashed up wing pack that had once been a similar triangle design to the one he was working on, though only it was a single-decker. “This was the first rocket wing pack to earn me the record for ‘highest altitude unaided by magic’. It also landed me in the hospital for a week with depressurization sickness. Turns out that divers aren’t the only ones that can get that, go figure. Thankfully my aunt was watching that flight and intercepted me on the way down. She got me out of the wing pack and took me to the hospital, leaving the wing pack to fall to its doom.” He lingered for a moment as a shiver ran down his spine recalling the pain of recovering from the attempt before moving on.

Coming to the final set of metal wings, it too shared the design of the previous one but like the very first one had been salvaged for parts, “This is my most recent failure… actually it didn’t go that bad. It was the first one that I had that pressure suit for,” Light Seeker gestured to the strange gray suit not far from his worktable. “It took me higher then ever before and the suit kept me from getting sick, but there were two problems. First I ran out of rockets before I could get high enough. And second a delta-wing metal glider has to fly way too fast to land on the ground safely so I had to improvise last second and land on a lake water-ski-style. Scared myself half to death when I thought I’d run out of lake before I’d run out of momentum.”

Light Seeker came back to the double-decker wing pack on his worktable, “I wanted to make sure I had enough rockets to fire to keep going until I reach… whatever I’m looking for… So that’s way I added the second deck to this one… and then there’s… no never mind.”

“What’s wrong? Why do you look sad all of a sudden?” Sweetie Belle asked in a soft tone.

Light Seeker deflated. The more he thought about it, the more this walk through his past made him think of how else everything could go wrong. “It’s just… who am I kidding? I’ve almost killed myself twice doing this… Maybe those guys were right. Maybe my dream is impossible, maybe I can’t make my destiny what I want it to be, maybe I should just give up,” he whimpered.

“No.” The bold simple statement drew all eyes to its speaker, Scootaloo. Her eyes were glaring right into his, burning with a righteous indignation that demanded his attention as she continued, “You will make this work. You will fly higher then ever before. You will find your destiny up there. You will earn your cutie mark. You will make your dream come true! And we’re going to help you!” The passion in her eyes and voice made it clear these weren’t just statements, to her these were cold hard truths that made Light Seeker feel like a foal for even doubting them for a second.

Scootaloo then turned to her friends, showing them the smile on her face and a glint in her eye that meant something new entirely. Together the three fillies shouted, “Cutie mark crusader rocket scientists!”

Light Seeker’s mind was spinning. Why did these fillies want to help him? Why did they care? It was obvious that something he had said triggered something in the pegasus filly and that there was more to this than just helping some random colt trying to satisfy an inexplicable desire to fly higher than ever, but what? Were her friends only helping because she wanted to? Or was it because they too had reached an advanced age without earning a cutie mark? They called themselves ‘cutie mark crusaders’ after all, so was this all about cutie marks to them? All these questions and more ran through his head, yet he wouldn’t have time to answer any of them.

“What do you need us to do?” The question drew his attention to three smiling fillies, eagerly awaiting a response.

What did he need them to do? What could they do? Sure they were close to his age but everything he had learned about rockets and stuff he had learned on his own, outside the classroom so did they know anything about rockets? One was a fellow pegasus so she should know about basic flight but so did he so that didn’t help. There wasn’t really much left to do on his wing pack anyway, only finish welding on the last three rocket mount points, wiring up the last of the controls for the rocket. And…

His eyes drifted to the pressure suit. On his last flight he noticed that the air tank was draining much faster than it should have. That meant the suit wasn’t truly airtight and needed to be redesigned. A smile graced the colt’s face.

“Come here,” he said as he made his way over to a desk not far from the pressure suit and pulled a piece of thick fabric from one of the drawers. “This is a sample of the fabric the pressure suit is made of. The thing is, the pressure suit I have isn’t good enough, so if you can find somepony willing to help me make one that’s truly airtight that would really help me. Show them this sample and tell them this is what they will need to make the full body suit out of.”

“This is perfect!” The crusaders cheered as they took the sample fabric and darted out the door.

The colt stepped outside long enough to politely wave goodbye to the fillies as Scootaloo motored her wings setting out on her scooter and towing her friends in the wagon hitched to it. Light Seeker could admire their enthusiasm, it reminded him of himself before the mistakes with the rocket wings packs had taught him to take everything he did with the deadly seriousness it deserved. However, given how hard it had been for him just to find a dive shop all the way in Fillydelphia willing to work with such a stiff unforgiving resin-covered fabric, he seriously doubted the crusaders would have any luck finding anyplace around here willing to work with it. But this wild goose chase did get them out of his mane so he could finally get back to work.

He turned to go back inside when he noticed the shadow cast by the open door frame. The sun told him that the day was almost over and that he barely had time to fly back to Cloudsdale if he was going to be home before sunset like he promised. How had he let the day slip by? He quickly locked the door to the hanger and took off flying for home.

* * * * * * *

Technically shadows had covered the land by the time Light Seeker neared his home in Cloudsdale. However, at the cloud city’s altitude it took another few minutes before the sun would fade from that high up and that was all the buffer he needed to reach the front door before the promised deadline.

“Cutting it rather close aren’t you mister?” the blue pegasus mare with the silver mane remarked, as the colt zipped in the door sliding to a stop more or less in the middle of the living room.

“Sorry mom, some fillies wandered into the workshop and wouldn’t stop talking to me, I lost track of time.”

“Really? Somepony just wandered into your workshop way out in the middle of nowhere?” she asked, clearly doubting the likelihood of such a claim.

“Yeah, they said they were out exploring. Called themselves ‘crusaders’ or something.” Light Seeker said, dismissing the topic.

With a sigh his mother pushed him toward the dining room, “I hope you were at least polite to them, now come on you’ve kept your family waiting long enough.”

As the two sat down at the table the white stallion with a dark blue mane lowered the paper he was reading and let out a sigh of relief, “Finally, I was beginning to think it would be worth your mother’s wrath to start without you.” A glare of daggers came from the mare in question. “What? Come on dear, I’m sure he’s old enough to understand ideas like family tradition and honor without having to eat dinner together every night.” He defended himself with a nervous laugh.

“And that’s why I give him a pass when you let him stay overnight in that shack, but as long as he’s home we should at lest try to be a family.”

Halfway through dinner the day’s events were creating some nagging questions Light Seeker’s mind, experience had taught him that his father was usually a good source of answers to general life questions. But he just couldn’t think of a good way to phrase the questions in his head, they either became too wordy or seemed too rude. “Dad. Can I ask you something?” the colt asked, recalling that to be the safest way of asking something that might hurt somepony’s feelings.

“Sure, what’s on you’re mind?”

“Are all fillies crazy?”

“No, just most of them.” The stallion then glanced over to his wife and sighed, “I’m sleeping on the roof tonight aren’t I? Well, I guess I should clarify…”

Author's Note:

So here we are practice story number 3, probably my first real attempt to 'just tell a good story' with an OC. Hope you like it.

Anyway for those of you more accustom to writing/reading accents, how'd I do on Apple Bloom's? too much too little?