Yonder Wandered Fluttershy

by Darkonshadows

20

Fluttershy sat underneath her favorite willow tree, she didn’t know whether she was dead or not from the crash, but she was definitely in a place of relative comfort.

“Fluttershy you are asleep earlier than usual, is there a problem where you are?” It was Princess Luna, a good sign that Fluttershy hadn’t died in the crash.

“Um… Luna I have an unusual question to ask if that’s okay with you.” Broaching the subject that she may be dead would have been a bit weird if she was only knocked out or in a coma.

“Yes Fluttershy, what is it?” Luna though she heard something in Fluttershy’s voice indicating she has been through another painful experience.

“Does my dream body always match my true form when I’m aware that I’m dreaming?” As Fluttershy mentioned it she looked at her body, bruises were started to become visible even through her fur.

“Surprisingly yes, if you’re aware that you’re dreaming. You can make yourself look like you currently… oh.” The lunar princess noticed why Fluttershy asked, her body looked like one giant bruise currently. “What has happened to you now my friend? Are your companions okay?”

“Well I’m sure my alien animal friends are okay, they got on this thing called an escape pod and I’m sure they made it to the planet alright. It’s a habitable jungle world so they should be fine.” Obviously Fluttershy was avoiding the other question, which is why Luna was giving her a disapproving stare. She hid behind her mane while poking at the imaginary grass with a hoof and winced. “I’m sorry Luna, I’m not feeling alright. I’ve just been in a horrific crash that knocked me out and I think I’m inside a large Galactic Federation vessel. Um… here let me show you, if that’s okay with you.”

Luna gave Fluttershy a nod and the pony dreamed up the memory for Luna so she could see what happened before Fluttershy became unconscious.

“Your alien animal friends should be fine. That you are mostly okay is also great news, but to not wake up anytime soon could be putting your body in danger even if your bruises would cause you agony. Did you not say that there are beings in the Galactic Federation that care little for those they are supposed to rule over and might do horrible things to you if you were caught by them?” If the Galactic Federation hurt one of her little ponies, Luna the princess of the night would not rest until they were brought to justice.

“I’m sorry I’m so weak princess, but being injured again is something I don’t really want to deal with right now.” Two large wings wrapped around the now crying Fluttershy and held her close, making her feel all warm and cozy in them.

“Rest, you are not weak Fluttershy, you just need time to get back on your hooves.” Luna cuddled Fluttershy until she went to sleep in her dream world. “Be safe Fluttershy.”

--

Fluttershy inhaled and then exhaled, her body was throbbing in pain at the moment and she was on her back. Opening her eyes she found herself in an enclosed space once more, dull red lights covered her form as it lay partially sticking out of a vent. This would count as the second ship she had woken up inside a vent on for the first time and her head hurt from where she destroyed the grating with her body.

Before she made any movements at all Fluttershy studied her surroundings, she was surrounding by small shards of alien glass from The Vagrant. It was a good thing she hadn’t immediately tried to roll onto her hooves. Rainbow Dash would have been covered in glass upon waking up by struggling unnecessarily, maybe Applejack and Rarity too. Pinkie might have seen the crash coming with her senses or possible chance of injury and Twilight would have already been home by now.

Slowly Fluttershy sat up avoiding the shards of sharp alien glass; she got to her hooves shakily and found that her right foreleg wouldn’t support her weight given the bruising done to her still healing shoulder. At least her torso wound felt better or was as bad as the rest of her body.

Flicking her ears, Fluttershy listened for any surrounding commotion as she sat at the edge of the vent and looked around herself, below and above. The vent opened into a desolate but roomy grey lined corridor, one of which that had the front of The Vagrant sticking into it across from her. In comparison to the ship she was on now, The Vagrant was probably not nearly as large a problem as the fight that had been going on before the crash. What was the name of this ship again, GFS Valhalla?

Fluttershy stretched out her wings, they weren’t too badly hurt and she wiggled her rump in an adorable manner as she leapt onto the nose of the crashed ship from the vent and crawled up the downward slanting slope to enter it. Her right shoulder started causing her grief about all these actions, but she continued on and made her way down to storage in The Vagrant. It was quite hard to maneuver around the ship that was sloped as it was.

After finding her saddlebags in the storage room, Fluttershy started gathering as much as the well preserved food left that she could carry in her right saddlebag which was now lined with a few leaves. Her alien animal friends wouldn’t need the food on the planet they went to and she knew they wouldn’t want this food to go to waste. She picked up one blue white speckled vegetable in particular that tasted like cheese; it was one of the more peculiar plants that she had enjoyed eating and sat down to enjoy it. She was going to be leaving behind a lot and getting her fill now was prudent.

After she was finished getting some food into her stomach, Fluttershy took a few leaves and wrapped them around her shoulder and torso using the sticky sap substance to hold the leaves in place. She even folded up three leaves into a makeshift pouch to carry some extra sap with her for when she left. She was now stocked full of stuff in her right saddlebag and her left saddlebag was carrying all her mementos.

As she turned to leave the ship Fluttershy stopped and saw a bright green feather laying on the floor, she picked it up and stowed it away in her left saddlebag as a reminder of the Dachora and Etecoons. She wondered if she’d ever see them again, shaking her head she made her way off the ship and wished they’d stay safe wherever they were now.

Idly Fluttershy wondered why no one was coming down to investigate the crashed ship stuck inside another ship. Were they still fighting or was the fight over and they were assessing the damage from the fight first before they got around to The Vagrant? Whatever the cause, she shook off any bit of glass that might have been on her and hopped back to the vent from the nose of The Vagrant despite the protest her shoulder gave her for doing it.

Once in the vent Fluttershy looked for a big knife like piece of glass and picked out a particular long piece that was sharp on one end and almost bluntly circular at the other and stowed it away in her left bag. She would mostly be use it for utility functions, never knew when a tough sharp object could be put to good use. Her hair was beginning to get to be a bother, so she might soon chop off a bit.

Notably the vents on this ship were much smaller than those of the Croakers mother ship and Fluttershy didn’t exactly have a full map of this ship. After checking all her things to make sure they were in place, she crawled deep into the ductworks to look for any signs of life.

If Fluttershy was going to be stuck alone in unknown territory she may as well learn something while she was here, she had been learning a lot lately. Being quiet as a mouse and incredibly shy was very helpful when it came to being sneaky. She still wasn’t quite sure how Rainbow Dash knew she wasn’t a tree that one time and considered that the root of the problems might have been the roots of the tree costume not digging into the soil around it. This situation also reminded her of Trixie and her spy costume which was more eye grabbing then anything.

Shaking her head Fluttershy tried to get it back on the task at hoof, she was in an unknown place with beings of an unknown capacity for love or hate. She looked like a monster and was sporting an almost fully bruised body… yeah she’d shoot at herself too if she was seen in the parts of the ship that were dark and filled with red lighting and was an intelligent alien being. It was best that she kept her head down and out of sight; intelligent beings didn’t react well to surprises and she looked like a big one.

The next thirty minutes of half limping, half crawling around in the small vents was rough on Fluttershy’s body. She didn’t know where she was on the ship or where she was going. Her ears twitched trying to listen for voices and after a moment she could smell something that reminded her of roasted carrots, she immediately started to follow her nose. The smell of cooked food was where she’d find life on this ship; she wished she were still hungry.

Fluttershy followed her nose sniffing the air and sighing wistfully at the attractive smell, her ears started twitching fiercely as she could hear voices. The dented translator plus her new supersonic hearing allowed her to hear quite a lot of beings speaking ahead of her from further away than she would normally be capable of.

Not once had Fluttershy wondered why she could handle her new senses so well, now that she thought of it her ears should be ringing or hurting from any loud noise near her. Her only problem was that there were a lot of voices and it was hard to separate them all invading her ears, they were in a large cavernous room ahead of her with a lot of tables, chairs and what she knew had to be a kitchen.

How did Fluttershy know this despite the fact that she couldn’t even see this alleged room yet? Her ears were giving her echolocation feedback that allowed her to physically see what she was hearing; it was as disorienting as it sounding seeing both the vent and everything the sound was bouncing off. The room was positively full of intelligent beings of a mostly biped persuasion judging by their echolocation forms that her eyes were seeing through the walls of the vents.

When she went to sleep again she would have to talk with Luna about this ability, maybe she knew a way to make this all less weird given she worked with naturally occurring bat ponies. She could see all kinds of movements and gestures, hear the shifting of clothing, the clinking of utensils and being able to visualize it all despite clearly seeing the actual vent in front her was amazing.

While being mutated into being part vampire fruit bat was horrific and Fluttershy still did feel that she needed to be returned to normal, it seemed the mutations had some form of a silver lining. One that made it so Fluttershy would always know what was going on around her within hearing range and getting caught was less likely now, in her low state of health this was a good thing as she was going to be moving very fast and she couldn’t fly with her wings mismatched like they were.

The closer Fluttershy got the more obscenely loud it was, it was hard picking out individual voices from masses in the lunchroom styled area that reminded her of what you could do if you didn’t bring your own sack lunch to school. The voices thundered in her ears.

“Took us forever” “so good today” “we need to” “Yeah I know” “Damage to Valhalla not all too bad” “All the smugglers” “It launched an escape pod before it” “got all of them” “potatoes for next week” “the technicians will look into it” “the captain wasn’t too” “this week was a rough one” “since she was rebuilt” “carrots are good today” “can’t we get anything decent” “then he was like, oh crap” “how come the hit sections didn’t decompress” “stayed entirely intact” “new experimental” “I would like to see that” “we have yet to test the newest model of Vic Viper and its AI systems” “working our asses off lately” “took so much time to capture them all and get them into holding” “Stiletto-class fighters are about to become highly obsolete” “but so much could go wrong, haven’t we dealt with enough AIs causing us problems” “what are the chances of that happening” “I don’t want another Aurora-313 incident, it’s bad enough we have so many problems with all the Space Pirates” “hey, can I get more green beans here” “oatmeal are you crazy, my health isn’t that bad and I can do my job perfectly fine” “ugh, I’m beginning to doubt our government” “not like we haven’t had worse than this before” “that bounty hunter is always causing planets to explode everywhere she goes” “the captain is so mad that the ship managed to ram into us” “I need a drink” “this missions sucks”

There were so many voices that Fluttershy had to put her hooves down on her ears to handle them better, it was becoming so loud the further forward she moved. It was too much information and her head was starting to really hurt. Keeping her ears pressed against her skull with her front hooves she propped herself up on her mismatched wings and crawled forward slowly.

Looking to her right through the slots in the closed grate she could see the lunchroom and it was packed with so many bipedal beings that were Twilight’s description of humans. Except their skin was less colorful then what Twilight had told them from the world she visited. Also by what she was currently seeing she wondered if these were the humans Lyra was always going on about, except far more technologically advanced then the world Twilight visited. Did this mean there were multiple kinds of human species out there?

There were also a lot of aliens in the room, but not many as there were the human creatures that reminded Fluttershy somewhat of Iron Will. The vent was high in the ceiling so it was unlikely that anyone would bother to look her way, these beings were also too big to fit into the vents which made her feel all that much safer. It did make her wonder how they kept the vents as clean as they were though. Maybe they used some form of technology to keep the vents cleaned?

Looking down at the lines picking up food Fluttershy saw what looked like the same kind of vegetables ponies at home enjoyed like carrots, broccoli and asparagus. There were also fruits and one of those fruits called out to her, there were apples here and she could smell them, she felt a gnawing hunger inside herself to fly out there and drain them dry.

Fluttershy wasn’t nearly stupid enough to expose herself now and fought her urge and need to stab her fang into some fruit to suck them dry, if there was an onboard plantation maybe Fluttershy could visit it for some fruit when there was nobody around. Until then she was going to resist temptation that may result in her inevitable doom, she’s survived thus far and she wasn’t going to stop surviving now by being stupid. She knew she was in no condition to be caught out in the open and that was the only reason why she managed to squash the instinct to break out of the vent and go for the tantalizing, succulent, juicy and tasty looking fruit.

Violently shaking her head Fluttershy back away from putting her face to grating, her mind wanted it but she logically knew she couldn’t have it. Also taking her hooves off her ears was a horrendously bad idea. She crawled forward as quickly as she could as all that noise in her ears might soon cause her to go deaf; it certainly was giving her real headache now. She fought against her bodies craving for fruit and pressed onwards.

A side effect of the bat mutations made Fluttershy crave fruit like nothing else and it was infuriating that she knew there was fruit like an apple nearby and that she couldn’t very well couldn’t safely touch it. It wasn’t her fault that she felt angry about it, she knew the cravings were a part of an effect of her twisted body and wished that it would go away. If it was twisting her mind then she would find it hard to trust herself anymore and she knew she was thinking clearly at the moment.

Carrying on her exploration of the ship Fluttershy found lots of hallways with lots of different beings doing different things of the likes that she had no inkling the purpose or the cause for doing them. She knew that keeping a space bound ship in tip top shape was important from her time on the stolen Croakers transport ship. If you didn’t care for that which was between you and a vacuum of space related death, you were definitely asking for a quick death.

Fluttershy needed to find some way off this ship and soon, she did not want to be caught dead on this ship and if she were caught she’d really be dead then and there. She noted that just about every being aboard this ship was armed with some form of weapon or another. Chances of finding a friendly face that wouldn’t shoot at her were less than likely and she had been shot three times already in the last few months. She was barely recovering from the last few damaging shots to her unprotected body.

Fluttershy eventually found a relatively safe and comfortable corner in a vent around what she figured to be the crew quarters on this massive ship. She would ask Luna for some help and wisdom on what to do in this situation when she next entered her dreams. Even if her friends back home didn’t have any advice to offer, it was still nice to hear their voices and know that they were waiting for her return.

Stopping to eat some of her food, Fluttershy hoped she was near the crew quarters as she figured might be able to find access to a toilet, a shower and some water to drink around here. She licked her hooves clean of sap, it wasn’t very tasty but it was sustaining.

Once finished with her meager meal, Fluttershy curled up and laid down for a nap. When she woke up she would go on a quest to look for a bathroom. She would need to use the little filly’s room eventually and she really didn’t feel like leaving her leavings lying around in the vents as the smell would certainly attract unwanted attention.

Author's Note:

Fluttershy will soon get her main mode of transportation, but there are a lot of problems and strings attached to holding onto something like it.

Especially if it happens to cause her to get a bounty planted on her head.