Depression is Tragic

by artistwithouttalent

Just the Right Change

The creme-colored filly looked down from the cloud with uncertainty. She hesitated a moment more before she spread open her wings and jumped.

She flapped her wings helplessly through a second or two of terrifying free fall before tumbling onto a lower cloud, much to the amusement of the two colts watching her.

“Ha ha! Good going, Klutzershy!” Mach called out.

“Yea! My baby brother can fly better than you!” Bullet joined in.

As Fluttershy sat on the cloud, feeling humiliated, a sky blue filly with a multicolored mane came to her aid.

“Hey! Leave her alone!” Rainbow Dash asserted to the bullies.

“Oh yeah?” Mach called back. “Who’s gonna make us, Rainbow Crash? You?”

“Bring it on!” Rainbow challenged back.

“Listen, blank flank,” Bullet spat, “you’re a filly, and everyone knows that colts beat fillies when it comes to sports.”

Now it was personal. “You wanna go, Bullet?”

“Can’t. I don’t hit fillies,” he replied.

“Well, that doesn’t mean they don’t hit you!” Rainbow replied, and with that she charged at Bullet, ready for a fight.

Bullet, caught off guard, was instantly knocked on his back. Mach jumped into the fray to help Bullet, but the rainbow whirlwind surrounding them was quite the fighter. Rainbow kicked, bit, slammed, and generally beat the living crap out of them. Given that this was still a 2-on-1 fight, however, she took as well as she was giving. As a crowd of interested fliers gathered around the tussle, an instructor noticed the scene and immediately flew over to assess the situation. Before he could get to the scene and separate the parties, however, a loud KERRRACKK was heard, followed shortly after by shrieks of agonizing pain from Mach. Rainbow Dash and Bullet separated to see what had happened, but it was all too obvious.

Mach was on his back, and his wings were splayed in unusual and unnatural positions. The final evidence, however, was that the bones, clearly broken, were poking out of his wings in different places. The flight instructor inspected the damage, and glared angrily at Rainbow Dash and Bullet. He approached them, and they matched his gait with a step backwards, right into a corner. He moved in closer, his face inches from theirs.

“In my office,” he growled. “NOW!”

The pair flew slowly to the venue mentioned, heads hung low and faces awash with fear. The instructor called for medical help, and after the ambulance had left with Mach, he joined them, sitting opposite them in an executive chair behind his desk.

“What happened?” the instructor asked simply.

Rainbow Dash and Bullet merely shook with fear. They knew this instructor well, and knew that his was an anger without limits. With him, it was the “quiet” anger you had to watch out for.

“What HAPPENED?” the instructor said again, no longer trying to feign calm.

Rainbow tried to respond, but an incomprehensible muddle of syllables was all that came out.

“Cadet Dash,” he replied, “I DON’T RECALL STAMMERING QUALIFYING AS AN ANSWER. NOW ARE YOU GOING TO TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED OR ARE YOU GOING TO SIT THERE LIKE AN INVALID UNTIL THE CLOUDSDALE POLICE ARRIVE?”

This snapped Dash out of the state of fear and put her into a catatonic state of relentless terror. Her usually colorful mane and body turned white. The instructor then turned to Bullet, and he sat bolt straight.

“Now Cadet Bullet,” he began, “WHERE THE HAY WERE YOU IN ALL THIS, HUH? AT LEAST CADET DASH ANSWERED! WHAT, DID YOU JUST SUDDENLY APPEAR IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS SCRAPE?”

Bullet’s natural response was to leap from his seat and cower in the opposite corner of the office.

“GET BACK HERE, CADET BULLET, I AM NOT FINISHED WITH YOU!” he bellowed. At this point, his next tirade was interrupted by the ER surgeon. The Pegasus was in scrubs and had an understandably nervous look on his face.

“Uh, Sergeant Wilde, sir? We just got finished doing a preliminary exam.” he called from the crack in the door.

“Doctor, please come in,” the sergeant replied, resuming his calm demeanor. “You have some results, I trust?”

“Uh, yes sir. Well, there are compound fractures along each wing−”

“DAMN IT, I KNOW THAT, DOCTOR! I’M NOT PAYING YOU TO TELL ME THAT MY CADET’S BONES ARE STICKING OUT OF HIS WINGS! I WANT TO KNOW HIS PROGNOSIS, IS HE EVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO FLY AGAIN, IMPORTANT THINGS!” Sergeant Wilde hollered.

“Uh, yes, sir!” The obviously frightened scrub replied, scrambling through his paperwork to try and find an answer. “Well, he will recover, but it will be a slow and difficult recovery, and I seriously doubt he will ever reach his full flight potential.”

“Thank you, doctor, that will be all,” the sergeant replied. “Dismissed.”

The disheveled doctor scrambled for his papers and quickly left the room without another word. Sergeant Wilde the turned his attention to the two young ponies sitting in front of him.With a small chuckle, he said to the small, frightened cadets sitting before him,”Well, well, well now. Wing clipping is a very serious offense, isn’t it? You two are in more trouble than you’ll know what to do with.”

All Rainbow Dash and Bullet could do now was squirm as the instructor leered at them.

Comments

[DistractionDragon]

I've just got a quick critical comment to offer. In writing you generally wanna use as few adverbs (like "uncertainly") as possible, as they tend to cut corners around what would otherwise be smoother-flowing sentences that convey more elaborate information, immersing the reader that much deeper in the scene. It's a subtle touch, but an important one. So it's often better to use a few words of description than a single adverb: for example, try variations like "he replied with a self-satisfied shrug" instead of "he nonchalantly replied".

Worse than using adverbs too often is the choice of starting a sentence with one. It should generally only happen as a part of an informal character's narration, as in "Normally, I wouldn't put up with that kind of thing from her."

A sentence like "Uncertainly, the creme-colored filly spread open her wings and jumped" is called past-tense, which we avoid because the order of words is awkward. Sentences like these are always improved by reordering so that they're not broken up with a pesky comma damaging the flow. Thus, you want to work towards something like "The creme-colored filly spread her wings open with uncertainty and jumped", but that only achieves technical correctness. In this case, you're trying to cram too much information into one short sentence. What you want to do is spread it out more. "The creme-colored filly was shaking with uncertainty as she spread her wings, but she hesitated only a moment longer and took a jump into the air before she could think twice about it." Obviously you'd work on those sentences to reflect what you really want that opener to convey, but hopefully you get what I mean.

In short, opening the first sentence of the first chapter of your story with an adverb and a comma is just an awkward way to start out, and easy to fix.

And finally a quick note on punctuation: if you follow a line of dialogue with "he said" or "said (x pony)", never end the dialogue itself with a period. See: "Even if the spoken sentence is complete, it's always ended with a comma," I advise. "Dialogue only ever ends in a period if the next word outside the quotation marks begins a completely separate sentence."

Thus:
“Thank you, doctor, that will be all,” the sergeant replied. “Dismissed.”

I really hope these notes don't come off sounding fussy and impolite. Knowing some of the little things to pay attention to when I write has really helped my confidence, so I hope I'm being helpful. I need to read more chapters to comment on the story.