Just Dropping In

by Gunsmith

Chapter 6

Reliving the more recent events in my memory every night has become a reoccurring event for me. I lay on the couch with my eyes closed, feeling physically rested but mentally tired. Last night was plagued by my dreams of my last waking moments on Earth, of falling for what felt like forever, and even of my memory of seeing my new body for the first time (although the panic of the moment is somewhat lost by now). I sigh and open my eyes, then lean off of the couch and on to the floor that is composed of the same material.

I review in my head what I will do today, in a checklist sort of way. Breakfast, mess with my wings, wait for Dash, learn to fly. I trot over to the staircase and head downward, my hooves making soft whumps of air being released from the clouds compressed by them. I decide to start the day with a muffin, and go over to the cabinets in the kitchen/dining room. I place my forelegs on the plushy counter tops and select a cabinet. I look inside and find the flowers and hay, realizing I am one cabinet off. I strafe over and open the muffin cabinet, biting and holding on to a muffin with red splotches on it.

I eat the muffin, which turns out to be rhubarb flavored (you know, the stuff that looks like red celery?). It's been sweetened with sugar; rhubarb is somewhat bitter or sour without some form of sweetening. After cleaning up what crumbs I have left on the low-sitting table, I headbutt the front door open and trot outside.

Judging by where the sun is, it's probably close to ten or eleven o' clock. in the morning. It is nearing its highest point in the sky, but is offset towards what I assume to be the east. I wonder if the sun-rises-in-the-east-and-sets-in-the-west rule still applies in Equestria. I look away from the bright yellow orb of fire and glance around me. There are a few thin clouds here and there. Darker and thicker clouds still hang over the white canopy I know to be the Everfree Forest. Cloudsdale still sits high above me, and I can see a few colorful specks moving around above it. I peer over the edge of Rainbow Dash's cloud home, looking at Ponyville. Equally small specks roam around slowly amongst the white coating on the ground. I want to go down there and explore, but I'm stuck up here on condensed water particles. Hopefully that will change soon...

I glance back to my wings on the thought. Both look healthy, soft, powerful, sleek, and majestic, all at once. I tense up a bit and watch them spread out behind me, admiring them. I move away from the edge of the cloud, back to the open area in front of Rainbow Dash's house in the sky.

I spend the next few hours in this area, attempting to move my wings around as much as I can. I find that fully tensing the muscles in my upper back fully extend and raise my wings, and fully relaxing these same muscles cause them to condense and begin collapsing onto my sides. Deciding to improve upon this as best I can, I begin tensing up my back at various intensities. Eventually, I am able to move my wings up and down, finding how hard to contract or release the muscles to do so while maintaining the same spread and length of my wings.

I can compare my wings functioning similarly to how an airplanes' function. They can be tilted up and down, extended outward and inward to control how I fly, at least while gliding, like the rudders of a plane. Having to flap them to propel myself instead of having a jet thruster do it for me will be a challenge, I can see. I suppose that is what I am having Rainbow Dash train me for, though.

I think of how I didn't exactly tell her the truth and feel some guilt. I truly wish I could tell her everything, but I know she probably wouldn't understand, or would shun me for who I really was. I already have her suspicious, I think, so a white lie probably was a good idea anyways.

Rainbow arrives home when the sun is a little over halfway between high noon and the horizon; I estimate around four or five o'clock. She flaps down to her cloud, settling down and folding her wings at her sides.

"Hey, Ferrum! Ready to get started?" She seems eager, and I decide that I am as well.

"Yep! Where should we start?"

"Okay, so I figured we need to figure out how to move your wings around, up and down and stuff, first."

It seems like a good enough place to begin, and I've been attempting to do this very thing most of the day. "Sounds good," I say, intending to show her I'm ready to begin.

"So...move your wings...up."

I tense up my upper back and shoulders, and feel the shift in my back as my wings rise, spreading the feathers in them a little.

"Awesome. Now, down." She sounds like she's playing Simon Says.

I relax most of the way, letting my wings fall level with my body.

She looks at my wings and her face screws up a little in concentration. "Hmm...you're letting your wings just drop. Try pushing them down. You gotta push them down to push off the air."

I contort my own face a little in concentration, and attempt to push my wings down. I flex a few muscles, but my wings just extend out or raise.

Dash watches me attempt to do what she has instructed, then cuts in. "Here, umm..." I watch her close her eyes and concentrate, lifting her wings and then bringing them down. I note that her wings reach the same angle from her body when lowered as when raised, nearly brushing the cloud ground when they are lowered. "Okay, so, y'know when you tighten up your back to raise your wings?" She pauses momentarily, and I nod in acknowledgment. "Try pulling your shoulders back, and then do that."

"Okay..." I close my eyes so I won't be distracted by anything and lower my eyebrows, concentrating. I tense up, lifting my wings. I pull my shoulders backwards a little, and feel my wings begin dropping. I continue pulling my shoulders back and tensing my upper back's muscles until I feel the tips of both my wings brush the ground. I open my eyes and relax. Rainbow Dash is watching me, smiling. I smile myself, and turn back to watch my wings as I repeat the action. Keeping my back somewhat tense, I pull my shoulders back, then move them forward, watching the black wings move down, then up. I experiment a bit with this, finding the more tense my back is, the more extended my wings are when moving up and down, and vice versa. I turn back to Rainbow, still smiling.

"Nice!" She says. "Okay, now try tilting them a bit."

I actually figured this out earlier in the day. I position my shoulders around halfway back, which keeps my wings level with my body and still extended, and tense up or relax in small increments on either side of my back. As I do, the wing that corresponds with the side of muscles I relax or tense tilts up or down, extending or compacting slightly as it does so. They really do look like the rudders and flaps on an airplane as they shift various degrees up and down.

"Awesome," Rainbow Dash says before continuing. "See, doing that makes you turn in the air, if you move just one wing at a time, or makes you go up or down while you're gliding, if you move both."

"Ahh, okay." It makes sense, and wings indeed function as those of planes do. Or more, plane wings function like wings do; birds, or in this case, pegasi, were there before airplanes. "Is that it?" I ask.

"Pretty much, yeah. You gotta know what to do with your legs and stuff, too, because they can throw you off balance if they're flailing around or something. You pretty much just let them hang there, unless you're flying fast, then you just lift them up under you or in front of you to make yourself go faster." She definitely knew what to do when it came to flying. I suppose you have to to become Best Young Flier in Equestria, though.

"Alright, cool." I don't know what else to say, really.

"I think that's pretty good for today. You're doing awesome, I bet you'll be flying really soon." She motions towards the front door of her house, and we begin trotting to it.

"Thanks, I hope so. Thanks for the lesson, too, I really appreciate it."

She glances towards the grounds, smiling. "Hah, yeah, no problem."

We walk inside her house of clouds and begin what has become a nightly routine over the past few days of eating, discussing various things (tonight was of tomorrow's plans to see if I could gain some lift, of her job, and of preferred types of flowers and plants in sandwiches), and then going to sleep for the night. I lie down tonight feeling satisfied and excited for tomorrow, and drift off to sleep.

***

The next three days pass fairly close to the same way. Every day I awake, plagued again and again by my nightmares, my memories. Some of the dreams that I can remember are good, and are usually of flying or of Rainbow Dash, but the bad memories seem dominant. I eat my breakfast, the first day being one composed of two carrots, the second being a banana muffin, the third of a blueberry muffin. I go outside of Rainbow Dash's house and enjoy the nice weather, despite the lower temperatures in the air, stretching my wings and moving the around. One day I re-sample the rainbow pool that I find quite tasty. And I wait the day away until Rainbow returns home.

On the first day, I make an attempt to hover. I am successful, finding I am able to lift myself a few feet off the ground. I don't attempt to do much more than that for fear of taking things a bit too fast. I fly around, hover around, slowly, and begin to get the hang of maneuvering using wings. On the next day, I push myself farther, and am soon flying at about a jogging speed around Rainbow Dash's property, doing circles around and over her house. On the third day, I am able to fly fairly stably, and I venture outside of her cloud property to reach other clouds. She flies with me, and we venture steadily around the afternoon sky.

We finish with dinner, composing of first apples, then of muffins, then hay-and-flower sandwiches. Though my diet is somewhat lacking in variety, it doesn't get repetitive. Dash and I talk about my progress, about her job, and on the third day, of Hearthswarming Eve. I bring it up because I remember that the day is December 28th, a Friday, and that Christmas would have been three days ago. I nearly feel bad for not saying anything like "Happy Hearthswarming Eve" to her, but then she tells me that the holiday is on the 31st, at the end of the year. The days come to an end, me (or my wings, more specifically) feeling tired and anticipating the following day.

***

My first thought of the day is All right, it's Saturday! I open my eyes and hop off the couch. My memories had visited me yet again, and even though they shook me up a bit, as they always did, it was very hard to ruin a Saturday. A thought enters my head as I trot towards the doorway leading to the spiral staircase:

I've been here a week.

I stop, standing a foot away from the doorway. I can feel my wings begin to lower; they must have been raised from my excitement at the fact that it was Saturday. Has it really been a week? Only a week? It seems like it has been so much longer since I first awoke in Equestria, in the bed of my favorite pony from a television show, as a black pegasus with a broken wing. I think back over the days. What happened on Earth had happened on the 21st, a Friday. I woke up on Saturday, explored her house Sunday, unwrapped my healed wing Monday, and learned to fly Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And here I am now.

I decide it has been the best week I have ever had. Yes, I most likely died, received a pretty serious injury, and had pretty much had my brain fried from the amount of confusion and surprise I had endured; however, I landed somewhere I had only previously dreamed of going to, and had gotten to spend the week with my favorite rainbow-maned cyan-coated pegasus. I smile as I hear "Best. Week. Ever!" within my own head, spoken by said pegasus pony. I resume trotting towards the stairs and begin making my way downward.

As I near the bottom of the stairs, I can hear some rustling and other noises I can't place a...hoof...on. I step off the last of the cloud stairs and onto the floor of the kitchen, and am greeted by an odd whirring noise. It sounds like an R/C helicopter. I glance up, and find myself face to face with a turtle. Tortoise. Yes, tortoise. A tortoise wearing a miniature aviator's helmet, flight goggles, and an odd contraption upon its back that is generating the whirring I hear. The contraption is a propeller, and is lifting the tortoise to my eye level through helicopter-style propulsion. I recognize this hovering reptile immediately.

"Oh, hey, Tank," I say aloud. The tortoise appears to begin to smile. I can't really tell because his mouth is moving at the speed of...well, a tortoise.

Rainbow Dash appears in my sight picture. "Hey, Ferrum, that's..." She trails off momentarily, and a frown crosses her face. She shakes her head a little and continues. "...Tank. He's my pet tortoise."

I realize she probably made a connection in her head, and frown inwardly, hoping she would pass it off as something like me already having met Tank. "He's pretty awesome. Where has he been?" I aim to redirect her thoughts away from my knowledge of Tank prior to meeting him.

"Twilight was fixing his propeller-thingy, making it be more "energy-efficient" or something like that. I guess his batteries run off of the sun, which is pretty cool, I guess."

"Ahh, okay." I look back at Tank and smile at him. I think he's still attempting to smile, but he hovers away beside Dash, unblocking my path into the kitchen. I trot further inward, and realize something.

"Rainbow Dash, aren't you supposed to be at work?" I ask.

"Nah, I get the weekends off. I only had to go in last weekend because we had some snow clouds come in from Everfree Forest that we didn't want. I'm head weatherpony, so I've got to go in for stuff like that, even on my days off," she replies.

"Oh, sweet. So, what do you want to have for breakfast?"

"We should probably get some apples. I want to fly today, so we'll need some energy, y'know?"

"Fine by me," I answer, and trot over to the icebox, lifting the lid with my teeth and grabbing an apple before motioning her over to do the same.

We quickly eat our apples. Tank eats an apple, too, though very, very slowly. As I drop my core in the trash can, I hear Rainbow Dash behind me and turn around.

"Will you be good here, Tank? Me and Ferrum are gonna go fly for a while."

I watch the tortoise slowly lift its head, closing its eyes, then bring its head back down and open its eyes. The whole process takes about ten seconds. Rainbow Dash smiles and turns to me.

"You ready?"

"Yep, let's go."

I turn and push open the door with my nose, stopping a few feet outside and holding the door with a foreleg for Dash. After she trots through, I let the door swing shut. We walk further out into her front yard. She turns and looks at me, asking with her magenta eyes, Ready to go? I smile in response and turn forward, bending my knees. I shove off from the soft cloud, into the air, before thrusting downward with my wings and flapping them to maintain my height. She follows suit, and then begins flying in a random direction. I follow her, beating my wings to keep beside her as best I can.

We fly leisurely for a few minutes, just enjoying the feeling of flying in open, crisp, cloudless air. The sun feels warm on my fur, and I feel comfortable despite the cold wind blowing past me. I glance over at Rainbow Dash, and see that her eyes are set ahead. She has her competitive look on, like some unknown competitor is challenging her to do something. All of a sudden, she begins rapidly accelerating. I attempt to mimic her increasing speed, but find that she pulls away at an amazing rate. I stop flying forward and just hover, watching her. She streaks farther and farther ahead. I can see a blur of color forming behind her, creating a trail of rainbow streaming off her tail.

She changes direction, heading straight upward, rainbow streak marking her ascending path. I watch her go higher and higher until she reaches a point about a thousand feet above her where she began traveling up. She then begins to drop. Rainbow Dash allows herself to fall for a few seconds, and then begins changing direction rapidly. She goes down, left, down again, to the right, straight back up, loops around, comes back down, and makes a few more jagged turns, all within a matter of around a second. She finally levels out and shoots straight back to where I continue to hover, stopping beside me. I stare, likely open-mouthed, at where she was only a short time ago.

In the sky is a faint rainbow outline of a design I have seen many times. It is of a thundercloud and a lightning bolt shooting out of it, and is the cutie mark of Rainbow Dash, created from her own rainbow streak. It remains visible for five seconds or so before dissipating back into the late morning sky.

"That was awesome!" I say, feeling giddy. I look over at Rainbow Dash, who is now lightly panting.

"Heh..." She takes in a few breaths. "That was nothing." She continues panting for a few more seconds, then inhales deeply, letting the breath out before continuing. "Watch this!"

The next two hours pass with Rainbow Dash performing various stunts for me, some of which are combinations of well-known tricks, others that are her own creations, and all of them impressive. I eventually get tired of hovering and find a nearby cloud, one that is large and fluffy, and sit down to enjoy the show. Dash pulls off stunt after stunt, from corkscrews, loop-de-loops, corkscrews within loop-de-loops, and a few of her own tricks. One of them I recognize as her "buccaneer blaze" after a few bolts of lightning crack through the air following her maneuvering. After one especially long line of tricks, finished by one of her own, she returns to the cloud I am sitting upon.

"Rainbow Dash, you're amazing!" I cry. "Those stunts were ridiculously awesome." I feel like attempting to describe just how awesome they were, but can't find good enough words to use.

Her chest is heaving, struggling to take in as much air as it possibly can. If ponies could sweat, it would be pouring off her by now. Between huffs of breath, she says, "Thanks!"

I grin and watch her cool off for another minute or so. When she seems to have recovered, she sighs.

"Whew!"

I laugh, and she smiles at me, still lightly panting.

"Alright...I'm going to try one more trick, something new. If I mess it up, you gotta promise not to laugh, okay?" She stands back up and looks at me, awaiting an answer.

I stand as well and look her in the eyes. "I promise. Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye," I say, completing the motions as I do so and smiling afterward. Wait...

Her slight smile completely disappears. A blank look covers her face again, with the hint of a frown on her lips. Her magenta eyes seem to stare completely past my own and at something else. Her eyes seem to refocus back on mine after a second. Rainbow Dash's eyebrows close together a little, and her eyes begin to narrow.

Shit, shit, shit! Why the fuck did I--

My thoughts are cut off by a hard impact on my chest and neck. My eyes slam shut on the hit, and I am thrown backwards. I feel my back make contact with a soft surface, and feel my wings are spread completely out behind me. My head makes its own contact with the same soft surface. I can feel my legs splayed out in a spread-eagle formation. I open my eyes.

I am staring directly into the face of one very-pissed-off Rainbow Dash. I can see that she is standing over me. I feel pressure upon my wings, near the bases of both; I realize she is not standing over me, but on me, on my wings. Her breathing is short and hard, and I can feel lights puffs of it every few seconds on my face. She glares at me, eyes narrowed, eyebrows together, jaw set tight. Her eyes burn with fury; they almost appear to be red instead of their usual magenta.

Oh, shit...

Comments

[Gunsmith]

Chapter Six, hooray! Flying ponies and weekends. Seven will be coming soon, tomorrow at best, the following day at worst. Tell me what you think.

[Ledomare]

I like where this is going.
Also, it was sort of funny imagining the dumb smile on Ferrum's face suddenly transforming into a "wait, shit" face, and then, momentarily, to an "OHFUCKSHITSHIT" face.

You, sir, have earned a watch.

[Material Defender]

Oh, snap. What's going to happen next? Or a better question: just what exactly did he do?

[All American]

pichars.org/store/3522_original_1304835379476.jpg

[Rarelygood]

If Dash says 'Are you a spy' or at least something like that. I'm going to laugh.

[Gunsmith]

Rarelygood: I laughed pretty damn hard at that. I don't think I can do that without compromising the seriousness of the moment, though. "Are you a wizard" probably won't fit too well either.

Starting on the next chapter now. I hope to finish it by tonight, tomorrow if not.

[Rarelygood]

673442 Well you better write at the speed of a Sonic Rainboom

[Crach Vonoff]

oooooh snap

[Lord Etters]

dammit you foal....he's about as bright as a tyre iron! get it cus his name means iron? hehe

I'm so punny

[CORRUPTED-DATA]

1803536
I just realized something he said that he was a blacksmith and he's literally black does that mean it's racist