219 Stand By Me
Stand by Me
Huckleberry circled over town, searching for his friend. This time of day, she’s sometimes hanging out around Sugarcube Corner . . . or she might still be back at school.
The thought of going back to school when he didn’t have to grated at him. He didn’t have classes right now and no homework that urgently needed to be done, so there was no reason to be cooped up in a building when he could be out and free. Going back to the school would be a reminder of the shackles that bound him, the teachers that clip his wings.
And then he spotted her, walking away from Sugarcube Corner, a giant cinnamon roll floating in her field. Citrine Spark’s yellow coat and blue mane really stand out.
He caught a wing on a thermal and twisted, losing altitude, arcing around until he was lined up in front of her. Her ears went up and her eyes followed as he came in for a landing, skidding to a stop on the road.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Huckleberry replied back. “Dinner?”
“Just a snack.” She took a bite and held it out to her. “Want some?”
“Well. . . .”
“It’s more than I can eat.” Citrine floated it in front of his muzzle.
Huckleberry nibbled on an unbitten edge. It was delicious—he’d expect nothing less from Sugarcube Corner. Everything there was made with love.
And lots of sugar and butter.
He fluffed his wings as Citrine Spark took another bite. “Hey, you like blueberries, don’t you?”
“Yeah, who doesn’t?” She looked him over. “Why?’
“Well.” He moved closer, ready to impart a great secret. She hovered the cinnamon roll near his muzzle and he couldn’t help but take another bite before speaking. “I was flying around and I found a great patch of wild blueberries just outside town.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Ripe and juicy.”
“How far out of town?”
•••
The two of them turned as they passed the train station. “It’s not a direct path,” he explained, “but I was following the railroad tracks when I saw them, so if we follow them we’ll get there.”
Citrine gave the tracks a dubious look and then turned back to the pegasus. “It’s not safe to walk on the tracks, a train could come along and squish us.”
“We'd hear it coming,” he said. “And then engineer would blow the whistle. Besides, we're not walking on the tracks, we’re walking next to them.” He gestured with a hoof. “It’s open along the side, and we’ll be clear of any trains.”
“Hmm.” She looked at him, back at the station, and then down the tracks, studying where the rails converged down the line. It’s a weird illusion from being on the ground—they don’t look like that in the air. “Okay.”
“Good choice,” he said. “All we’ve got to do is keep the tracks on our right, and we’ll get there.”
•••
He could fly ahead, but he didn’t. The two talked about schoolword and teachers and classmates and then life in general. Citrine was a very chatty pony, which was more noticeable after leaving Ponyville behind. Even on the ground, Huckleberry was used to being alone when he was out in the wilds. Still, it was nice to have company; the mostly one-sided conversation made the trek go faster.
There are places where there was practically a road alongside the tracks, and other times where it narrowed down. Walking on the sloping ballast wasn’t any fun; the rocks seemed solid but the shifted underhoof. The second time they got to a narrow spot, they checked in both directions for oncoming trains, and when they didn’t see any, they walked between the rails, adjusting their gait to match the spacing of the crossties.
An hour in, the modified gait is second nature.
“Are we close?”
Huckleberry wasn’t sure. If he was up in the air, he’d know. “Hold on, let me check.”
“‘Cause I don’t want to be out after dark.”
He took flight and climbed above the trees, orienting himself. He was still close enough to Ponyville to see some buildings, although they were hazy with the distance. Up ahead, he could clearly see the twisting path of the river—the blueberries are just on the other side of that, in a forest glade.
As he came down for a landing, he noticed how his perspective changed from a progressively lower altitude. Something he rarely thought about, since he didn’t often land on railroad tracks in a forest.
“Well?”
“Yeah, we’re really close. They’re just the other side of the river.”
“Good thing I wore my saddlebags.” She floated teh cinnamon roll out of them and nibbled on it, then offered Huckleberry a bite. “Alright, let’s go.”
The ground near the river was soft and wet—the land dropped away and the railroad stayed level, first on an embankment and then a wooden trestle.
Without even thinking, the two of them scrambled up the weed-choked embankment until they were on the tracks again; in a few minutes more they were on the trestle.
Huckleberry’s mind was focused on wild blueberries—he’d already caught a whiff of them, a tantalizing scent that wasn’t quite masked by the river and the soggy ground and the stink of the crossties. He couldn’t see them just yet, but he could see where the trees thinned out.
His hoof slipped and dropped between a pair of ties, and he jerked it back, refocusing his attention down to the ties, then he looked back to see how she was doing. Citrine was a few ponylengths behind, her head down, concentrating on her footing. What had been natural pace on the ballasted track now felt awkward when there was only air between the crossties.
Just then, Huckleberry felt the trestle start to tremble.
The curve leading up to the trestle was subtle, unremarkable—but it masked a train from view for longer than either of them had anticipated. The Friendship Express comes into view and a second later you hear the first warning whistle.
For Huckleberry, it was a no-brainer: he snapped out his wings and leapt off the side of the bridge. He looked back, expecting Citrine Spark to be right on his tail, but she wasn’t.
Of course she wasn’t. She had a horn, not wings.
She snapped her head back, estimating the train’s speed, the distance to the water, and the distance to the opposite bank.
Huckleberry did the same. He didn’t like the answers he was coming up with.
She burst into a gallop, trying to outrun the train, her hooves flying over the perilous footing. One slip, and that would be it.
[CHOICE]
>Fly in and save her; you got her into this mess (hero)
>She’s got this, she’s faster than she looks (chaos)
[CHOICE A: Hero]
Pure instinct kicked in. Huckleberry snapped around in the air, rolling to gain speed. He locked eyes on where her path and his would intersect, and it’s going to be uncomfortably close to locomotive, but what choice did he have? He’d invited her out for blueberries, enticed her to cross the bridge, and he’d never be able to live with himself if something happened to her.
The locomotive whistle was screaming in his ears and the train’s brakes were shrieking and he tuned that out as he flexed his primaries and altered his course ever so slightly. He had one chance to make this work.
He slammed into her, wrapping his forehooves around her barrel as he pulled up and back. The train roared by, bathing them in a blast of steam, followed by a rain of cinders. You hear the engineer shouting at you but can’t tell what he’s saying over all the noise.
It’s probably for the best.
Citrine is heavy for a unicorn and Huckleberry had never been going at carrying a pony, but adrenaline did strange things. He glided across the river and landed on the bank, the two of them skidding to a stop in the mud.
Both ponies watched wide-eyed as the train disappeared in the forest.
Citrine Spark got to her hooves first, and shook off what mud she could. She looked at the trestle, and then back at Huckleberry. “Let’s not do that again.”
[CHOICE B: Chaos]
Huckleberry was completely frozen and could only watch as she sped up, flying across the crossties with a mechanical monster hot on her tail. It was catching up fast—but not fast enough. With one final leap, she cleared the tracks and skidded to a halt on the soggy ground. The train roared past, its whistle shouting out one last note of displeasure.
“Whoo, what a run!” She looked back at the railroad tracks.
“I’m so sorry,” Huckleberry said, fluttering to a landing beside her. “This is gonna sound so dumb, but I forgot you couldn’t fly.”
“Oh.” She regarded him thoughtfully, a strange glint in her eyes. “But I did fly, faster than a train. Stars, that was invigorating.” She leaned over and gave him a nuzzle. “I wonder how long I could keep ahead of a train?”
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¡Trains are very dangerous!:
11776888
They are. Don't trespass on the train tracks; trains will sneak up on you.
11776888, 11778665
They do! And once they have your scent...
11801176
¡Sneaky trains!
In case you did not catch the reference it parodies, the original scene was from the the movie the Fugitive. In the Fugitive, a derailment frees a wrongly convicted Doctor. The movie is based off of a TV-Show. The TV-Show is based off of a real wrongful conviction. This brings up an interesting point:
Some monsters deserve to die, but if one executes the wrong person and we discover the error later, we cannot reverse it. Given that Texas once executed the wrong Carlos, it might be prudent to have life in prison with no possibility of parole, so that, if we discover that a conviction is in error, we can let the wrongfully convicted person out of prison.
11801385
So perhaps your stance of executing alleged drunk drivers is perhaps a little too Draconian?
11810734
In the case of drunker driving, one caught the future-murderers red-handed. Knowingly using an impairing substance and operating dangerous machinery is unacceptable. Because these murderers chose to impair themselves, their actions should be considered premeditated, with no recourse to a defense based on impaired judgment. If we execute drunk drivers at sobriety-checkspots and harvest their organs, it might act as a deterrent and will definitely prevent recidivism.
Texas released a live wrong Carlos. It is bad to be a Carlos in Texas because if the police cannot solve a crime, they blame the nearest Carlos. Texas refuses to pay compensation:
Given that one cannot get back time and people only live a few decades, the only way to compensate people for the time is to give them enough money for squeezing the living of the missing years into the remaining years. In other words, we need to give the wrongfully convicted enough money to that they can get hookers and blow and blowjobs from hookers everyday for the rest of their lives.
11810883
So you're saying some cop with a brethalyzer gets to be judge, jury, and executioner? You've got a lot more faith in cops than I do; I spent the night in jail once 'cause the cop who arrested me misunderstood the law. Imagine if he'd misunderstood how to properly use a breathalyzer.
Just for giggles, I did some more research on false positives on a brethalyzer, and one thing that can cause it is diabetes: apparently (I'M NOT A DOCTOR) ketones are similar enough to ethyl alcohol that the machine thinks you've been drinking (and in fact according to the NIH, a breathalyzer can be used to diagnose ketoacidosis).
11817080
Thanks for the information. Evidently, we need to give GlucoseMeters and breathalyzers to cops. If the suspect fails the breathalizer and is between 50 to 150 milligrams per deciliter of sugar, the cop can summarily execute the drunk driver. If else, we send the suspect to an hospital for further testing (this is convenient if the suspect fails the 2nd test because the physicians can just tigh down the criminal and start extracting organs.
I believe that I might be a little biased against these drunk-driving monster, driving around murdering people.
11817080
Pennsylvania just released a wrongfully convicted man after 4 decades. He is not a Carlos (railroading Carloses is a RexasThing). ¡Pennsylvania did not compensate him!
Maybe, the deathpenalty is a bad idea.
11818006
I've got mixed feelings on that; certainly there are some crimes so horrific that it seems appropriate. Lawrence Singleton, for example.
11826164
Sorry for the delay, but I had to calm down and collect my thoughts:
Singleton definitely deserves to dies. I have done happy dances at the execution of monsters. The trouble is that we have states like Texas which execute Carloses willy-nilly. I am afraid that we have to let let monsters die of natural causes for avoiding executing the innocent (maybe, we shall discover the mistake and friend the innocent later and compensate them). We should get rid of isolated units in prison:
What Singleton did was so horrendous that the other prisoners wanted to gang rape him, chop off an arm, gang rape him som more, chop of the other arm, gang rape him even more. When he finally gets that rape and mutilation are bad, they would have killed him. This is called a PrisonJusticeParty (PrisonJusticeParties are reserved for the worst of the worst who have committed particularly heinous crimes like serial-killing torturing ChildMolesters who abduct children, torture and mutilate them, molest them, torture and mutilate some more, murder them molest the corpses, mutilate them some more, molest the corpses some more, and eat the evidence —— ¡other prisoners hate those monsters and are very eager to throw them PrisonJusticeParties!). Maybe, we should put monsters like Singleton in the general population and let the other prisoners punish these monsters.
11826164
It is the 60th Anniversary of the murder of Kitty Genovese. The necrophile Winston Moseley stabbed her multiple times, raped, and murdered her. In 1984 Mosley was up for parole and said this:
¡Ho that poor man! he should have gotten parole. Incase the sarcasm does not come across, that was sarcasm.
I am against the DeathPenalty because accidents are irreversible —— ¡Texas executes random Carloses! —— but that said, I would execute Mosley and sleep very well that night.
Mosley rotted in prison for 52 years until his death. Not only did he never show remorse, but he considered himself the victim because he felt that he should be free. He claimed that he learned his lesson and would not rape and murder any more, but his own history disproves that:
He escaped for a few days in 1968. ¡He raped Mrs. Kulada, tied up her and her husband, and took a mother and daughter hostage! ¡He certainly learned his lesson and turned over a new leaf!