It has been a peaceful few years under the reign of Princess Twilight Sparkle. Ponies are happy. Equestria is progressing. New technologies have appeared, including the first fixed-wing planes. The first intercontinental flights now soar across Equestria, allowing long-distance friends and family to meet up for the first time without an arduous journey or fancy magic.
Earth Ponies are not meant to fly. Rind Watermelon knows this—and it terrifies him—but he will go with his fiancée Smoldering Ember to meet her family in Kiria, realm of the Kirins. It is only a twenty-hour flight away. He just has to look out the window, and ignore that he is in a metal tube hurtling through the sky on flimsy wings.
And there is something on the wing.
Chapters (1)
Ha!
That was cute & well-written. Good job characterizing Smoldering by her dialogue. I can't love it because casting Celestia & Luna as the imp from the Twilight Zone would create too much dissonance in my head-canon if I let this story sit in my mind, but I can enjoy it.
This was amazing. I
I was a bit skeptical at first, because I'm not intimately familiar with the source of inspiration here, but this made me snicker for sure
It's good to see an author that have a knack for writing poetic, comedy, as well as something epic. Multifacetedness ftw
Rind Watermelon, a stallion who's irrational fears on what flight became a deadly reality. He now faces a difficult journey to return home. It is possible, maybe even probable, that part, or even all of his journey, will involve stepping through...The Scary Door.
This was pretty funny but the ending was just fantastic.
And then Watermelon notices a Discord out on the wing, tinkering with the engines!
11551337 And that Twilight Zone episode was inspired by the Gremlin character in the Bugs Bunny film shorts of the 1940's. Gremlins were a popularized modern myth to explain unexplained engine failures in early aircraft, especially during the Second World War.
It became pop culture as one of Roald Dahl's early works, with a short film version even being planned by Disney, though this was cancelled due to unresolved copyright disputes between Disney and the RAF.
Gremlin sightings are one well-documented case studies in pop culture-induced hallucinations, a mental coping mechanism by pilots under enormous stress.
The earliest use of the term appears to have come from the RAF in the 1920's, as a portmanteau of either the words 'goblin' or 'Grimm', and 'Fremlin'; the latter being the name of a beer brand commonly available to the RAF at the time.
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Huh, I had no idea it was such a recent term. Google n-grams supports this etymology. The RAF would lose its court case, as you can't copyright a word in the US; you can only trademark a word, and that only within a specific market. (Technically. I suspect you wouldn't get away with it if you started selling Mickey Mouse beer, although I don't know of any legal reason why you couldn't.)