Ponies, Portals, and Physics: A Practical Study on Unscheduled Interplanetary Excursion

by superpurple

1.8 - Interplanetary Camping

I may have severely underestimated how far away the town was.

I’d been walking down this road for well over an hour and was only just now starting to see buildings through the trees. Maybe I’d misjudged it because of some combination of poor visibility and distorted perspective from my new eyes.

Or maybe it had been exactly as far as I’d estimated and I just really sucked at walking. Yeah, that was probably it. Plus, it was something like three in the morning and I was tired as hell.

Walking sucked. That was just a fact. I hadn’t been a huge fan of it even back when I had two legs and lots of practice using them. It was slow. But at least then it had been efficient or whatever advantage it was that bipedalism had. But this? This was just ridiculous. I had four legs but my gait was more akin to a literal crawl than… whatever it was supposed to be. I may not have been in the best of shapes, but I was getting worn out far faster than I should’ve.

I was sore in muscles I didn’t even know I had. Hell, I probably didn’t even have them before. Muscles in my arms and back that had never been required for walking now ached from the unusual exertion.

It also didn’t help that I was nearly barefoot. Barepaw? Bareclaw? Whatever. The road was muddy from the surrounding melting snow and my footwraps were getting caked with mud and grit. Grit that was slowly working its way between the strips of fabric and to my toes with every step I took. I’d also managed to stub my toe on a rock in the road. The retractable claw had got snagged on it, which was a new and uncomfortable experience I didn’t wish to repeat. Whatever entity had deemed my boots not worthy of keeping should probably be fired. First chance I got, I was going to file a formal complaint with the Department of Interplanetary Immigration and Species Reassignment… or whoever it was that could be blamed for this.

Oh, and to top it all off, like a big ‘fuck you’ cherry on the metaphorical sundae of inconveniences, every few steps my recently-bandaged tail bounced off the ground, just hard enough to make me wince.

I was sore, I was tired, and it was time to stop.

Sure, I could’ve kept going, but I’d need to stop for rest eventually and it made sense to do it now before I fucked something up from exhaustion. I still needed to figure out what the hell my plan was, and my brain was nowhere near up to the task right now.

Really, I’d probably be fine sleeping out here if I found a suitable location to make camp. Ignoring the slight chill from my somewhat-damp footwraps and the occasional breeze, I wasn’t really cold at all. The air was considerably warmer than it had been back in Griffonstone. Between my fur, feathers, and jacket, I felt like I could weather a blizzard without issue. And given that there wasn’t a cloud in sight, I doubted I’d have to worry about even that.

I just needed a place to rest that was out of sight in case someone wandered by or came looking for me. Scanning the terrain around the road, a potentially suitable spot caught my eye. Off to the side and back up the hill a bit, was a rocky outcropping mostly hidden within the trees and vegetation.

I made my way up the snowy hillside, stepping on exposed rocks and roots where I could and otherwise doing my best to not leave any obvious tracks in the snow. I found a spot where two rock faces came together at an angle behind some shrubs. After pushing between the plants and moving branches up and out of the way, I had a cleared-out volume a few feet around, untouched by the snow around it, with rocky walls on two sides and dense vegetation on all the others.

I sat my fuzzy butt down on the cool earth—manually moving my tail out of the way so as to not squash it—and unbuckled my bags. They slid unceremoniously to the ground and I let out a relieved sigh as the weight left my back. I propped the saddlebags up against the rocky wall and leaned back against them, trying to find a comfortable position.

A breeze blew across my little clearing, rattling the branches in front of me and ruffling the feathers on my face. It was a real shame that I didn’t have a tent, but sadly I hadn’t anticipated an unscheduled interplanetary camping trip when I packed my bag for class.

Actually, there might be one thing I had that might be useful in this situation. I rummaged through my bags and found the compact travel umbrella I kept in there in case of random rainstorms out of nowhere.¹ I pressed the button on the handle and the umbrella sprung open with a deep fwoomp. Fully expanded, the canopy was four feet across—which was big enough that it could be positioned at an angle to form a dome over my rocky corner with just enough space to lay back in.²
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¹Which are similar to Griffonstone’s other signature weather event, the random blizzard out of nowhere, but are more likely to occur during the warmer months, or on any day you need to carry something large or highly sensitive to water across campus.
²Suck it, Jack! I told you carrying an umbrella around through the winter wasn’t a totally dumb idea.
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I took a moment to admire my meager shelter, now with a roof and walls on all sides and gave a satisfied nod. With the passing wind more-or-less blocked, I could already feel the air trapped within starting to warm up.

It was warm enough that I felt comfortable taking off my jacket and laying it beneath me as an extra layer of insulation from the earth. I also took the opportunity to unravel my hand and foot wraps and hang them from one of the umbrella’s struts in front of me. Hopefully, they’d be at least somewhat dry by the time I got up.

Now wearing nothing but the sheet tied around my waist, I settled back against my bags and manually pulled my wings overtop of myself like a pair of big, shoulder-mounted, duvets. The feathers were disgustingly fluffy—which I guess made sense if griffons were actually able to fly and expected to not freeze to death at high altitude. Now they were going to help me not freeze to death under a rock.

I crossed my arms over my chest and closed my eyes, steadying my breathing and trying to relax.

Some part of my mind questioned the rationality of falling asleep in such an exposed location. Another part countered by pointing out that I was now a combination of two apex predators and was physically larger than everyone else I’d met so far, and so I’d totally be able to defend myself if the need arose.

The rational part rebutted by bringing up how those were only apex predators back on Earth where the very concept of a griffon was completely ludicrous and then began to prepare a statistics lecture on how three ponies was hardly a sufficient sample size to judge a whole populace by when the sleepy part interrupted both and said this isn’t really a discussion. It’s ass-o'clock in the morning, I’d been walking for hours, and sleep is happening now. This isn’t a democracy and never was.

Rationality started a revolution. Some other part grabbed a torch and pitchfork.

I pushed everything out of my mind, focusing my thoughts on nothing but the sounds of the forest. The wind blowing through the trees, crickets chirping, the trickle of flowing water… an owl hooting in the distance…

Comments

[Winter Quill]

Sooner or later he's going to work out the wings should be able to lift him, and then he's going to kick himself for not working it out sooner.

[Kevin Lee]

8895878
Up until now, he's not exactly had an opportunity to experiment with them.
And if I were him, I'd still consider it probably too close to the mansion to risk it.
Even when he starts, humans are NOT natural-born flyers. It's going to take him quite a while before he'll be able to overcome any acrophobia he might have, assuming he doesn't manage to break his neck the first time he tries to land.
Plus, every griffon, pegasi, and dragon he encounters is going to know right off the bat just how bad a flyer he is at their very first sight of him.

Scootaloo: "Wow, dude! And I thought I sucked at flying! Now I don't feel so bad anymore. "

[Kevin Lee]

8799997
8801501
The complaint about the distraction from the immersion is valid. Footnotes are okay, but they should at least be at the bottom of the chapter--not in the middle of the story.

[superpurple]

8895878
8896460
^This, plus the little bit that, so far, every time Garrett has attempted to move the wings (or tail), the result was little more than useless flopping. Active control of new limbs seems to be a bit iffy at the moment.

[superpurple]

8799997
8896474
It is a valid concern yes. However, in the usual medium of academic articles or reports, footnotes are located at the bottom of the current page, where the reader can immediately see without changing pages. Just a quick glance to the bottom of the page and back to reading. Minimal disruption.

Putting footnotes of this type at the end of a chapter would require scrolling all the way to the end, then back up. Or flipping through a dozen or more page of an e-reader. Or waiting until the end of the chapter to read them, by which time you've long forgotten the context. In my experience, these kinds are far more disruptive to immersion.

Without any convenient and consistent "bottom of page" to place footnotes at, the next best thing is the end of the current paragraph.

So between removing them altogether or not, I went with the latter placement.

(Obviously this still leaves the response of "just don't use footnotes". To which my only response is "Some people like them, some people don't. I like them. They fit the theme. Sorry.")

[maskedmustelid]

8896521
So, so appreciated, especially as a tablet reader. Attempting to scroll an indeterminate length down a page to the bottom of the story but before the comments, then back up again without reading ahead is ass to put up with. Properly formatted footnotes with like brackets can be easier to deal with with searching text in page, but still gets annoying having to pop up the keyboard and back every time.

Of course, with an entertaining read like this I'd just put up with it anyway regardless of how bad the footnotes are implemented.