Trotcon 2018
Rainbow Dash and Featherweight on the Moon
Trotcon 2018
Admiral Biscuit
The moon was very far away. Everypony knew that.
Princess Luna had once been on the moon. She was the only pony who had been, as far as anypony knew. This was, of course, a sensitive topic for both Luna and Celestia, so nopony had asked either diarch directly.
Rainbow Dash often sat on a cloud and contemplated the moon. It was further away than any cloud she knew of. As high as she’d flown on weather patrols, the moon had never appeared to get any closer.
She was going to fly to the moon.
This was certain. This was a fact, as much of a fact as Celestia raising the sun every morning.
Rainbow was a brash pony, and even she knew it. Thus, she kept some of her bragging to a minimum, not claiming that she was going to do something until she had actually accomplished it once.
And, if she’d kept her muzzle shut, nopony would have ever known that she planned to fly to the moon.
Scootaloo had been feeling down about her inability to fly, so Rainbow had tried to cheer her up the only way she knew--by bragging that she was going to fly to the moon.
Scootaloo had mentioned that to the other Crusaders. One of them had told Twist who had told Rumble and then word had gotten to Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon--neither who would have confronted an adult mare, no matter how ludicrous her claims.
Word had eventually gotten to Featherweight, who was clever enough to recognize a newsworthy story when it fell into his lap.
When he asked Rainbow for an interview, she realized that it was time to put up or shut up.
Rainbow was not a big believer in thinking before speaking (or thinking in general), and after winging her way thorough an interview, she began preparations in earnest.
Flying from the ground was impractical. Rainbow needed a higher launch point, which meant either a cloud or a balloon.
Staging took the better part of a day, along with special dispensation from the weather team. Snacks were cached on the clouds, and she took flight from Ponyville at sunset.
She did not make it to the moon. She was far, far above Ponyville when she finally tyurned back. So far that she could not see buildings on the ground, only small points of light that were Ponyville and Canterlot and Cloudsdale.
For all of Rainbow's brashness and bravado, she knew that it would take her time to build up her strength and endurance, so every day she flew higher and higher. She got a scarf and then a hat and then a sweater.
It was a week before the moon got appreciably larger in her vision and full month before she got close enough to begin to decide on a landing point. There were all sorts of crates on the moon, and while the bottom of a crater might be an easier landing spot it was further to fly.
It was almost six months before her first almost-landing.
It could have been an actual landing if she had desired. She’d gone below the rocky lip of the crater, briefly entering into its shadow, and then she’d focused on the ground below her and it looked almost like sand.
Grounded ponies didn’t appreciate that there were different landing techniques for different surfaces from sand to grass, from water to cloud. But there were!
She would have, if she'd had less confidence in her abilities, and if her flight had had less historical import. Being the first since Luna to set hoof on the moon was a special occasion, one that she was determined to have properly documented.
So she told Featherweight.
The next morning, Featherweight gave her an exclusive interview and then she began cloud-hopping, working her way up further and further.
The moon wasn’t up yet, and she took her time.
She was at the highest cloud, and she could see it over the edge of the horizon. It was not visible to anypony on the ground yet and would not be for a while.
Experience was her guide for the next length of her flight--with no aerial landmarks, she had to choose a direct course to where the moon would be when she got there.
That was where the practice came in.
No longer did she look back at the ground. Only the moon, and her position in the sky.
She had to make a few course corrections, but not many, and then she was skimming over the surface of the moon. She came up over the lip of a crater and then glided down into the flatter terrain underneath . . . craters were almost like upside-down mesas.
The ground was sandy and loose, looser than she had imagined, and for a moment she lost her footing.
She flared her wings and then dropped back down again and then she was down on the moon, the first pegasus ever to set her hooves on the lunar body.
Featherweight flat-out didn’t believe her. The lunar dust on her hove and in her fur wasn’t proof enough, and she had flown out of eyeshot. Even Twilight’s telescope wasn’t good enough to resolve her when she got close to the moon.
Not that anypony called her a liar, certainly not to her face. And Rainbow wasn’t the cleverest pony, but the more she read Featherweight’s interview the more she became convinced that the reporter didn’t believe her.
She started to question herself, and flew another flight to the moon, just to prove to herself that she had done it.
And that was good enough for her.
Almost.
“I believe you, Dashie.”
“Thanks, Pinkie.” Rainbow fluttered her wings. “But hardly anypony else does. If Featherweight’s article hadn’t been so . . . so. . . .”
“Condescending?”
“Yeah.”
“He writes fairly.”
That was something that Rainbow Dash could agree with.
“Take him up there with you,” Pinkie Pie suggested.
So she did.
Stats
Page generated in 0.019 seconds
Total duration
761 users online
1,429,524 hits today, 2,454,720 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
This one’s been sitting in the queue for far too long . . . the oldest chapter is a year and a half old (granted, it couldn’t have been published by itself at only 610 words).
When PP said, after this year’s Trotcon, that he was going to review all the Trotcon Speedwriting Fics from 2018 that were published, I decided it was time to collate them all into one story, and that only took six months because reasons. Mostly laziness; that’s the primary reason (after all, they were already written and I had no intention of critically editing them).
So here you go, for your enjoyment, three (for now) examples of what the Admiral can crank out in an hour or two, given a prompt and a typewriter or laptop computer.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2017/11/20/1590763__safe_artist-colon-nekokevin_starlight+glimmer_twilight+sparkle_4de_alicorn_animated_boop_chair_clothes_computer_computer+mouse_cute_desk_drawi.gif
Source
I find this (presumably) spelling error really funny, it makes me think that Luna packed up all her stuff at some point and hasn't gotten around to unpacking again.
9325019
Yeah, I think this is a typo that should be left as is.
9324988
I’m not really sure that Twilight Sparkle is an Input/Output device. Or is this another one *them* fics?
Well, if the moon is close enough for Celestia to lasso it, then RD can fly to it.
9325124
I dunno; what about Twi-Fi?
i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/642/518/f42.png
9325610
That was sort of my line of thinking as well.
9326945
Haha yeah, it’s from a company called Trimble and apparently it has Android software inside it.
9326953
That works :)
9325055
I'll have to show it to my truck driving dad, though I will probably trim it and have to translate it out of pony.
9327974
Some of the jokes don’t work without pony, but I suppose it could be done. Certainly, you could just show him the last part where she’s trying to fly the airplane.
9329485
Yeah, it's the last bit that he'd find amusing.
Given the previous two, I was worried there'd be some kind of flight disastwr in this one as well. Funny how all three follow a theme of air travel. Do you have poor luck when going to conventions?
9346173
I generally have good luck going to conventions. The only one I fly to is EFNW; I drive to Trotcon and Bronycon, since both are reasonably close [I’ve heard in the Midwest, ‘reasonably close’ translates to no more than a ten hour drive]. I think that in the first, I was just considering some convenient plot bunny to get Roseluck and Luna in Zebrica together, and that was a lazy solution. As for the EFNW one, I have no idea why that idea specifically came to me, but after I’d rejected the most obvious path to take with the prompt (to avoid stepping on Rescue Sunstreak’s toes), that was the next best thing that I could come up with.
Since I’ve got a friend who’s a truck driver, I have considered a complete re-write of the idea, one that’s better researched and doesn’t switch narrative POV halfway through.
9350307
Except the Mythbusters proved that, although it's never actually happened, a flight controller can talk someone who's never flown a plane before through landing it, at least well enough not to kill anyone. So.
9350430
It has actually happened with a private plane, in England (possible more than once). Potentially, a commercial jet might be easier to fly, since it’s got a lot of automatic programs and as long as the pilot configured them correctly, he’d be good to go.
In this case, she thinks she knows how to fly an airplane, and so does the control tower, so she doesn’t get the information that she needs to successfully land the thing.
Yay, I get to see what you wrote with your typewriter!
9366546
Huzzah!