The Legend of Private Apple Applefly

by R5h

The Legend Begins

It was a perfect, sunlit Equestrian morning that found a restless Applejack gazing out of the north window of her room, resplendent in full-body coveralls and a vacant grin. The work clothes had been modified into a farcical pegasus disguise, a pair of hastily taped-on cardboard wings jutting precariously from her withers.

Actually, resplendent was quite possibly not the appropriate term…. The diplomatic description of her wings would imply that the shapes were on the jagged side, suggesting some asymmetry; the Rarity description would involve shrieks of horror, as one wing was nearly twice the size of the other with several fewer of the triangular notches intended as flight feathers. Clutching at the brim of her trademark hat was a pair of chemistry goggles that may have at one time resided in Twilight’s basement. The coveralls themselves were stained, threadbare, torn, tattered, and a failing zipper meant it bowed open for half its length. In several places, corners of wide packaging tape meant to hold the wings in place had already begun to pull free from the ragged fabric.

No—she was neither resplendent in, nor was she wearing: Applejack bore the shameless display with clueless abandon. She jerked around as the door clattered open, Apple Bloom darting in with a can each of blue and gold paint in her mouth.

“Well, finally!” Applejack yelled, sprinting across the room, all wistfulness replaced with a wild urgency. “I was plum near ready to bolt!” She danced from hoof to hoof, ready to make good on her word at any moment.

Apple Bloom dropped the paint cans to the floor. “I left the room for four seconds.”

“I don’t have four seconds! My long hidden, suddenly-surging love for her is like the first bursts of apples from the bud after a long winter! It’s like a sea of emotion breaking through a dam of restraint! It’s like… uh….” Applejack, wings swaying precariously as she shifted her weight back and forth on her hind legs, waved her hoof at Apple Bloom in a supplicatory gesture.

“Like when you’re on a long wagon ride and you really really gotta use the little filly’s room?”

“Exactly!” She set her face and said, with the gravity of an epigram that defined the universe, “My love for her is like pee, filling my heart!” She growled, teeth gritted. “I gotta get up to the Wonderbolts Academy, pronto! It’s like you an’ your friends waitin for your Cutie Marks times a hundred!”

“Uh, you’ve said.” After a quick dip of the brush, Apple Bloom approached her with blue paint ready to use. “So who’s this her you keep saying you love so much, forever and ever, but mostly right now? Why’s it so important you get up there all a sudden… and painted up?”

A distant smile spread once again across Applejack’s face. “Rainbow Dash.”

“Oh, really? Huh.” Apple Bloom glanced away for a moment. “On a completely unrelated topic of conversation, can I have twenty bits? I think Scootaloo just won a—I mean, for the, uh, paint and cardboard. Cost of supplies, y’know.”

“Huh? Right, yeah, sure. Now get paintin’!” Applejack shivered as her sister slathered the blue paint all over her overalls, chilling them like fine apple wine—if she wore fine apple wine, which she didn’t, ever, while sober. “That’s it, get ‘em nice and covered. And the gold parts! It’s gotta look like a genuine Wonderbolt uniform or they won’t let me in. They’ll be on guard for the smallest inconsistencies!”

Apple Bloom recognized vaguely that the gold and blue whorled and mixed with visible brushstrokes, but thought little of it. Similarly, the marker on the cardboard wings didn’t merit much criticism, all things considered. Certainly not worth any effort in correcting, if Applejack’s urgent fidgeting was any indication. She dropped the brush, beamed an awkward smile, and declared, “Perfect!”

“Hoo-ee!” Applejack spun in a circle, giving her costume the careful analysis of one wearing rose-tinted glasses that had been dipped in tar. “They’ll think I’m a pegasus for sure! Now, I’ve gotta convince her to stick around… are you sure those pick-up lines you told me will work?” she asked, looking down desperately at Bloom.

“Trust me.” Apple Bloom beamed. “I’m great at hooking up ponies temporarily-to-permanently.”

“Really?”

“Remember that time I fed an illegal, mind-altering drug to my teacher and brother? And they’re still together, ain’t they? Don’t you sweat it, AJ,” Apple Bloom said, nudging her sister’s ribs.

“Fantastic! Y’all wouldn’t happen to have any more of that stuff lying around, would ya? Just to be on the safe side?”

“Nah. We had a bunch left over, but we dumped it out back behind the barn. Sweetie Belle got all concerned about it, sayin’ something about ‘ground-water’.” Apple Bloom trotted to the window with a shrug, trying to ignore the anxious staccato beats of Applejack’s increasingly rapid tap-dance. “We probably don’t even have a ‘ground-water’ here, right? Sounds to me like a fancy-pony kinda thing, like a fountain or whatnot.

“And even if the poison got into the fancy ‘ground-water’, what’s the worst thing that could….” Apple Bloom realized that the tapping had stopped, and turned back around to see a distinct lack of Applejack. In her place, black skid marks traced lines from her former location through several walls, each punched clean through with an Applejack-like shape.

---

The throne room of Princess Twilight’s castle was presently undergoing a manner of renovations. In addition to the chairs surrounding the central table-cum-map, piles of books now occupied the area, spreading about like large, blocky parasprite corpses, jumbled and stacked against the foot of a chair or lounging indecorously on the table itself.

Piles of books which, unfortunately, had a habit of tumbling down whenever the castle’s newest occupant felt like making a particularly forceful point.

“I’m talking about socialism as a means of preserving freedom!” Starlight said, stamping her hoof and creating a resounding echo. Right on cue, the Leaning Tower of Fluttershy—a multi-story pile of magazines on her chair—collapsed.

So much for Fluttershy’s burgeoning Neighponese manga section. Twilight resisted an urge to rub what felt like deep bags beneath her eyes, and said, “You mean like it did when you tried implementing a socialist commune?”

“I concede my implementation was faulty!” Starlight yelled, not sounding at all conciliatory. “Don’t use my flawed ways, which I have absolutely seen the error of, for the record—” she adopted a pious tone and used her magic to trace a glowing halo around her head “—to condemn all social progress! Right now, Celestia and Luna’s faulty diarchy is allowing weeds to flourish beneath them! Weeds like Blueblood.”

The two shared a mutual shudder of revulsion.

“Those who got close to Celestia,” Starlight said with a tap of her hoof, “have had their descendants rewarded with dozens of minor titles over the centuries, and their influence grows like cancer. They encroach more upon the rights of the proletariat each day! Don’t you see how this demonstrates an inherent flaw in the system?”

“So, let me get this straight,” Twilight said with a twisted smile. “You don’t want me to hold your town against all of socialism, but you get to hold minor failings of Equestrian politics against all theoretical diarchies!” She summoned a microphone from yet another pile with her magic, then dropped it to the floor. The lack of an attached speaker sadly deprived her of any satisfying burst of feedback.

Starlight sighed with exasperation. “Well, I mean, when you put it like that—” She stopped talking and looked over to the side. “Spike, what are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

Twilight glanced over to see Spike standing before a blackboard with the names Glimmer and Sparkle written on it. Beneath these names were three and five tally marks, respectively, and Twilight watched with no small amount of satisfaction as he placed a sixth beneath her own name. “You really gotta work on your debate skills,” he said, chuckling at Starlight. “Twilight’s got a logical fallacies book I can lend you—she makes me read it once a month.”

“In any case,” Twilight said, pulling a volume from her chair’s pile (and making a mental note to have Spike clean it up later), “there’s something in The Incredibly Abridged Political History of Equestria, Volume Four, Third Revision that counters your point entirely, on page… one thousand, six hundred seventy two?” She squinted at the ages-old hunk of pages. “Or was it in the two thousands?”

The door burst open behind her and, judging by a large cracking sound, splintered into pieces. “Twilight! I need your help!”

“Oh, hi, Applejack.” Her nose already buried, Twilight didn’t even blink.

“What in Tartarus are you wearing?” Starlight said.

“Is it a friendship problem?” Twilight flipped through page after page, her eyes flitting wildly across the lines. Her reference was somewhere in the area, she could almost smell it—talking was enough of a distraction as it was.

“Bigger!”

“Ha! Good one, Applejack! Everypony knows there’s no such thing as ‘bigger than a friendship problem’.” Twilight chuckled to herself as she crossed the page two-thousand threshold. “Starlight, be a friend—open the First Edition over there and help me refute your entire philosophy.”

“Forget philosomophizing!” Applejack yelled from behind her. “I need to get to the Wonderbolts training camp, stat!”

“Sure thing, Applejack,” Twilight said.

“Seriously,” said Starlight, having not moved since Applejack’s abrupt arrival, “what is she wearing?”

“Shh, Starlight,” Twilight said, “I gotta concentrate.”

“Thanks a dozen! So, how can I get there?”

Twilight ignored the question. Her thoughts were already committed to calculating the vector to the Wonderbolts academy, the trajectory based on intervening weather conditions, and which window in the general path she was objectively least fond of.

“Do I, uh, borrow your balloon, or—”

Screaming, and one crash of glass, replaced the rest of her words, as Twilight grabbed Applejack with her magic and flung her in the right—vaguely northerly—direction. “Bend your knees for landing!” she called toward Applejack’s retreating butt. “Now where were we?”

She glanced up to see Starlight staring at a point behind her. “What?” Twilight asked.

“Did you see what she—cardboard….” Starlight took a deep breath. “Never mind.”

With a sigh, Twilight tossed the volume, wincing at the cracks it left in the crystalline floor. “Forget it, linear search is too inefficient. Point is, Starlight, that we’ve always had a centralized autocracy, and it’s always worked well enough in the past, so—”

The BRAP of an air horn cut her off. “Penalty! Argumentum ad Antiquitatem!” Spike called out. “Half-point deduction!”

“Spike!” Twilight yelled.

He shrugged after he erased one of Twilight’s ticks halfway. “Fallacy of appeal to history. I call ‘em like I see ‘em.”

“Oh, hey, here it is!” Starlight said, staring down at the Abridged Political History. “Page two thousand four hundred seventy!”

Twilight gasped. “Really?”

Starlight lifted the tome in her magic and began to read: “With the Noonday Accords of five hundred twenty eight, in order to curb the power of the nascent nobility, it was decreed….” She turned the page as Twilight rushed over to see for herself. “That Twilight Sparkle is an idiot who just let her guard down.”

“What?”

The book flew upward, smacking Twilight across the snout.

“Gotcha!” Starlight pumped a hoof as Twilight reeled. “Mark it, Spike!”

Twilight heard the sound of chalk on board and narrowed her eyes, even as tears streamed from them—tears are a perfectly natural biological reaction when the nose is struck, nothing to be ashamed of. However, with the curse of having a prodigal intellect, she knew she was only kidding herself.

It was so on.

---

In the northern reaches of Equestria, visible from the train route to the Crystal Empire, there stands a two mile-tall column of granite named Mount Pinocchio. Encircling its base lies its namesake, a massive pin oak forest home to five dozen recorded squirrel species. From the ground, much of the mountain’s height is lost, obscured by layer upon sheet cake-like layer of clouds.

Above the summit of Mount Pinocchio, one may find Camp Hiyassekyte: the Wonderbolts reserve training facility, airstrip, and last resort. In the event of a breach in other layers of Equestrian air power, this camp was designed to serve as the final line of defense before Canterlot. A single standard-issue megacloud stretched for a half-mile in every direction, supporting a Thundersteel-brand aerial runway. In a ring above that plane, cloud structures of barracks, armory, mess hall, and other warehouses and air cannons provided the infrastructure for everyday operations.

Soarin paced back and forth on the tarmac, staring at the dozen uniformed ponies gathered before him. “The final approach will not be easy. You will be required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point.” He flicked a pointer towards a squiggle on the chalkboard behind him. “This is a qualifying marathon individual timed event race thing! I must have been the only one who had Wheaties for breakfast, ‘cause none of you are champions yet. You wanna impress me… again… I expect all you ladies back here in ten hours, or you’re out! Questions? Yes, Private…!”

“Ah, Flitter, ma’am… uh, sir. Why aren’t we being lead by Captain Spitfire?”

“Captain Spitfire is away on special assignment. That means you ladies have to answer to me for these next three days of your training at Camp Hiyassekyte.” He winked. “Charmed, I’m sure. Rainbow Dash, you have a question as well?”

Rainbow puffed out her chest but held her gaze fixed up on the clouds as ordered. “What was your time, ma’am—sir?”

“Please,” Soarin said with a chuckle. “What kind of question is that! Please!” He waved his hoof dismissively. “The very idea that I flunked this test eight times and scraped through with three minutes left on my ninth! ‘What was my time,’ indeed, ha!”

His ears pricked as a high-pitched sound slowly built. “What is that?”

“Over there!” Flitter shouted, pointing. “It’s a bird!”

“It’s a pony!”

“It’s a plane!”

“What’s a plane?”

“It just looks really flat, is all.”

“It’s gonna crash!”

With a thick smack, an “oof”, further screaming, a subsequent thud, some rolling, and an impressive slide, Applejack finally came to a stop at Soarin’s hooves.

“Whoa,” he said, taking in the new arrival. “It was a pony after all! Not much of a landing, though. Shoulda bent your knees.” He squinted and brought his head low. “Say, what’s your name?”

Applejack looked up at him like a deer looks at an oncoming train. “Uh… uh…”

She couldn’t just say ‘Applejack,’ not in front of so many ponies. It didn’t even sound like a pegasus name! She needed a name that sounded like it belonged to a Wonderbolt… a name that Rainbow Dash would love! Pegasi had names that involved flying, she knew, except for the simple one. So all she needed were some flight-themed words…

“Apple!” Not quite. She had to think. What would Rainbow Dash do?

“Uh, Apple….” So close, almost there….

“…Fly?”

Nailed it.

Soarin leaned in even closer, scrutinizing. “Apple Applefly, is it?”

“Uh, yes? Say, d’you know where Rainbow—”

“I don’t have any ‘Apple Applefly’ on my roster, miss ‘Apple Applefly’.”

“That’s, uh, well, y’see—“

Soarin abruptly pulled away, beaming. “I wish I did, and—because I’m in charge—I do now! Anypony who can fly like that deserves a shot at the Wonderbolts! And what a war cry! See you’ve got your uniform and everything! Now get up on your hooves and file in!”

Applejack quickly got to her hooves to mixed cheers and hissing from the other cadets. She swooned the instant she was upright. “Whoa, nelly….”

“Snap to, Private Applefly!”

Applejack shook her head, still reeling, but started cantering to the line of mares. The lightheadedness was probably nothing, anyway. “Any of you ponies seen Rainbow Dash around? I’m lookin’ for—“

“Privates,” Soarin barked, “you have your route. I expect each and every one of you ladies back here before night call! On your marks!”

There, in the line, she saw Rainbow Dash, apple of her eye and other parts of anatomy, picking a bug from her teeth. She quickly closed the distance, remembering one of Apple Bloom’s pick up lines. “Rainbow! Hey, Rainbow, look, I gotta ask you, did you sit in sugar? Because your—”

“Just you try showing me up again,” Rainbow Dash spat, sparing only half a glance. “I already have that Lightning Dust to deal with, I don’t need you going against me too. Only one pony’s gonna be made a Wonderbolt, and that’s me, got it, Private Pearbye?”

“Set!”

Applejack gaped. “Pear? Rainbow, it’s me, Apple—”

“Nice try, Berrydry, but I’ve got my eye on the prize.” Rainbow locked down her goggles and put on a goal-set grin. “You won’t distract me with those adorable freckles and your lying, luscious lips.”

“And go!”

The other dozen-plus cadets were off like a shot. Applejack’s goggled hat and cardboard wings wobbled in their wake. She stood there with a crushed heart, watching the colored specks grow smaller and smaller.

“Applefly!” Soarin said, seemingly shocked. “Go! You have only ten hours to complete the course!”

Applejack turned around too quickly, stutter-stepped to catch herself. “R-right. I, uh, just wanna give them a sporting chance, is all, sir. Ma’am.”

“Are you,” Soarin’s face soured as he drew the word out into five syllables, “slacking?”

Applejack backpedaled, promptly stepping off the Thundersteel-brand tarmac. She hovered in the air for a moment before—like any self-respecting earth pony supported by only a standard-issue megacloud—she plummeted out of the sky.

“That pegasus is gonna go far,” Soarin said to himself, walking back and settling into his cloud chair. He opened the latest issue of Equestrian Pie to the centerfold, and salivation started immediately. “Oh yeah, girl, work that crust.”

---

Well below him—a thousand feet below and counting—Applejack was going far, just in the wrong direction.

Cloudwalking. She knew she’d forgotten something, and now here she was, cursing her wingless fate. Ah, if only she’d been born into a different family. Rainbow Dash’s family, maybe! Idyllic, cloud-edged scenes flowed through her mind of Dash showing her the ropes of flight, her watching Dash’s first rainboom, the two going to prom together and doing freaky stuff in the back of a hijacked royal phaeton—

Wait, she hadn’t thought this through. Rainbow Dash would have had to be in her family for that to work out. Not okay.

The images changed. Now she pictured Rainbow Dash swooping down, collecting her in her legs, and flying them both back to Ponyville. She imagined them competing again in their completely-necessary Iron Pony competition, and the Running of the Leaves. She pictured fighting together against a gigantic tentacle-armed, paint stripper-spewing abomination. She dreamt of diving together deep into the ocean to save a race of ocean-ponies…

Things were becoming quite wet. The blurry-edged images in her mind dissolved to blurry-edged images of the world around her.

She redirected her attention downward and saw a cloudbank rising fast, looking fairly solid and poofy, though a bit wispy around the edges. Thus far, she must have been plummeting through them, but maybe if she increased her surface area, the wings on her back would convince the cloud to support her weight. Worth a try, anyhow. With as much urgency as if Rainbow Dash herself were there, Applejack spread her legs wide and braced for impact—

She passed harmlessly through and got a little wetter. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Another cloudbank, slightly less wispy, was not far below and, lacking better options at the moment, Applejack tried once again. She spread her legs as wide as she could possibly stretch, and was rewarded a moment later with predictable results and increased moisture content.

But there! That third one that looked very solid, and very gray, and had regular lines running across it for some reason, so Applejack again increased her surface area to maximum and dared to hope.

The large cloud-like thing flew past on her right.

Dang-nabbit.

But wait, there was one final chance! Something not from Rainbow Dash’s world, but her own: good old fashioned rope, hanging down from that strange cloud for whatever reason. She angled her body that way and grabbed it with all of her strength.

At last, she finally came to a screaming, smoking halt. The good news was she’d come to a stop. Bad news was, rope burn had cost her precious disguise some of its already-pathetic integrity, and some of the blue paint was gone to reveal the denim beneath. They’d be sure to spot her now, unless she made some repairs. Oh well.

She looked down again to see only a few hundred feet between her and sweet, merciful, probably-not-going-to-squish-her ground. With a sigh of relief, she carefully relaxed her muscles and slid to the ground.

Once there, she shook herself and set out at a gallop toward Twilight’s castle. With any luck, she could be there within about five hours from here, and get herself a quartet of cloudwalking hooves.

From there, she would return to Camp Hiyassekyte, find Rainbow Dash, and they would be together again.

---

Perhaps she should have looked up—looked more closely at the ‘cloud’ she’d missed. Should have paused to consider that ropes to not hang from clouds at random, or even at all, given their penchant to pass through clouds entirely. For the rope that had saved her life was not an ordinary rope, dangling from the heavens: it was a mooring rope, tied firmly around several trees at ground level.

And it was no cloud that Applejack had fallen past—unless a massive, long, thin warship supported by hydrogen confined in cotton skin, carrying a contingent of griffon warriors armed to their beaks, counted as a cloud.

(For Equestrian regulatory purposes, it technically did. Not that the griffons cared.)

“Ah, ze great airship Überkompensation. Beauteeful, iss she nott?” General Bekloppte paced the bridge, back and forth before its gorgeous windows and their view of the nigh-vertical slopes of Mount Pinocchio. His face, hard and cruel, bore several dueling scars that crisscrossed his beak and one eye: painful souvenirs of a carnival that had sold them next to the stick-on tattoos. “Grand enough to destvoy un Eqvestrian air battalion vithout fleenching; neemble enough to hide vithin zis cloud-layer; and vith enough cargo capacity to plunder ze entirety of Eqvestria’s gold reserves!”

He cackled. “Yes, yes! And soon, ven our informant und saboteur has disabled Camp Hiyassekyte’s defenses, we will destroy the Wonderbolts with vun qvick strike!”

“Who are you talking to?” asked one of his guards.

“What?” He whipped around and stared at her. Somewhere in the back of his mind, an imagined imperial orchestra screeched to a halt. “I’m talking to… meinself. So vat?”

She rubbed the bridge of her beak, between her eyes. “Okay, a question… Actually, two questions.”

“Zwei qvestions!”

“Two,” she said, emphasizing the ‘w’ sounds, “questions. Why do you want us all to talk like that? No one talks like that!”

“Das ist not obviouss? Eet is appropriate upon un vessel such as zis!”

“Which brings me to question two.” The guard gestured all around herself with her spear. “Why do we even have a zeppelin? We’re griffons. We can fly.”

“Vell….” General Bekloppte’s beak opened and shut several times in succession, like a broken cuckoo’s on a clock striking nine. Eventually finding himself again, he drew himself up to his full pompous girth. "Zu vill show ze proper respekt bevore zur Erste Luftgeneral, Unverhohlen Bekloppte!" he bellowed. “Gvard! Take ze fraulein vrom zis place and—” he grinned wickedly “—punish herr.”

“At vunce, Luftgeneral!” The other guard snapped a salute, then started poking his counterpart with his spear. “Move it, uh, zu!”

“But it’s dumb! It doesn’t make any sense!” She turned indignantly to her escort as she was pushed past the bulkhead. “You know it’s dumb, right?”

“Just go with it,” he whispered back.

Comments

[Salad king]

This is utterly rediculous so far. i love it

[Aatxe360]

This is beyond parody. This is a parody of parodies. I didn't really like it at all.

[bahatumay]

roundstable.com/forums/images/smilies/DashEmote2.png