Flim and Flam and the Road to Old Donado

by KFDirector

Flight of the Pinkie-esque

A great cry arose from the small island.

Flam looked straight ahead, blank-faced.

The screaming continued.

“Are you about done?” he asked.

“Nooooooooooooooooo!”

Fancypants rubbed his head with his hoof. “I must confess to lacking some understanding, chap,” he began, speaking under the mares’ screams, “but our fillyfriends seem rather put out and it’s making me a bit apprehensive.”

“Well,” Flam started to reply, before wincing and shaking his head. He wished for a watch, so that he could check it.

Finally, Trixie and Rarity faced the natural consequences of screaming for minutes straight without ever stopping to take a breath. Pinkie Pie might have been able avoid these consequences–in fact, she certainly could–but Rarity was no horn blower and Trixie was in too much a state to remember the circular breathing techniques necessary to a saxophone.

In short, they fainted, and quiet returned.

Bubble Berry looked on in confusion.

“They…don’t seem happy to see me,” he said. His voice had a squeak highly uncharacteristic of a Flimflam.

Part of the trick of the song was to not break the spell too early, Flam recalled, not when it was in this early vulnerable stage. “Not at all! The sight of you was just so unexpected, and they were so very startled, Berry boy!”

“That didn’t sound like excited—”

Flam cut him off: “What would you know, Bubble Berry? You just got here!”

“That’s a really good point! I haven’t even had a look around yet!” He immediately began to bound off, bouncing up and down, up and down, making strange ‘boinging’ sounds like a spring despite there being no part of his anatomy that had any business making that noise.

Fancypants attended himself to the business of wringing out rags of cold water over Rarity and Trixie’s foreheads until they finally came to—meanwhile Flam started to pursue Bubble Berry, changed his mind, reconsidered two more times, and then finally decided on chasing his wayward not-brother when Bubble Berry turned up right behind him.

“Wow! You look just like the pony with the moustache I just left! Do you have a twin?”

Flam realized that there was probably no safe answer to that question, and elected to avoid it entirely, keeping one eye on the awakening mares in case they were going to scream again.

“It’s not a terribly large island, is it, Bubble Berry?”

“I should say not! There’s so little grass here, I’d think we’d be dead in a month! Who were we planning on eating?”

Of the four slackened jaws in response to this statement, Rarity collected herself first, if only briefly—“It really is her, isn’t it?”

“It’s something very close to her,” Flam replied, out of the corner of his mouth. “Something, hopefully, close enough.”

Rarity nodded. “Berry, darling, we were hoping not to eat anypony—but we must get off this island soon, as you’ve noticed.”

“Well, good luck with that! I don’t know how we’re going to pull that off with four unicorns and an earth pony.”

“Dear sir,” Fancypants started, “there are five—” and was then shut up by a hoof to the mouth, courtesy of Trixie, who had by now caught on.

“Four rather dense unicorns and one earth pony with a record for thinking inside the chimney,” Rarity moved in, giving a knowing smile. “If anypony can get us out of here, it’ll have to be you.”

“Huh. Hmm. Hmmmmm.” Bubble Berry hummed to himself, screwing his face while he thought about this. He trotted back and forth on the beach, thinking furiously.

“Berry boy—” Flam failed to ask.

“Shush.” This was from Rarity, not from the former Flim. “Communication is not one of her strong suits. Her plans work better when she doesn’t explain them carefully.”

“So this must be one of the toy line episodes, handed down from corporate—but there’s nothing around here that looks like it goes in a box, I mean, it’s just trees and rocks and I don’t think corporate would put out a diorama of an island unless it was a tropical island and the ocean’s barely even ever been seen before if at all and argh!”

Flam was about to try to interrupt again, and this time was shushed by both Rarity and Trixie at once, both mares’ hooves touching inside his mouth. It was an odd sensation.

“It’s no use! I don’t see what toy is going to get us out of this! I’m gonna go talk to Ted.”

And then Bubble Berry reached into the air, and appeared to grasp something in his hoof. The unicorns who knew that they were unicorns thought that they heard the sound of a door opening, but that was absurd, there were no doors here—Bubble Berry disappeared through the door that obviously couldn’t be there, and then they heard the blatantly fictional sound of the door closing.

“So, um…” Flam looked around. “Is that, uh, a thing that happens?”

Rarity shook her head, wide-eyed. “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anything quite like that…but it’s not out of character.”

“So when does he—she—come back?”

“Couldn’t begin to tell you.”

For a few minutes, they waited.

For a few minutes more, they paced around the spot where Bubble Berry had vanished.

Then they waited in a more comfortable place, by the fire.

Then the minutes turned into hours, and Flam taught Rarity the trick behind tic-tac-toe (“You’re not stupid—how do you have this blind spot on this one thing?”), and Fancypants and Trixie played snooker using a miniature fold-out table from Fancypants’ luggage (“Trixie’s mind boggles that such a thing exists—corner pocket, foal, watch and learn”), and then, as the sun neared the horizon, there was that obviously fictional noise again.

“Whew!” Bubble Berry sighed, as he trotted back into visible reality, closing a door that wasn’t there behind him. He wiped his brow with his hoof, and shifted a new set of saddlebags on his back as he took a seat by the fire. His coat glistened with sweat (and pink dye), and none could fail to notice the big red lip prints on the side of his face. “Boy, those were a bunch of really great guys and gals. Just really fun-loving. Aren’t Canadians wonderful?”

None of the others had the remotest chance of answering this question intelligibly. Instead, they just stared.

“Oh! I was supposed to get something, wasn’t I?” He mouthed his saddlebag off, setting it on the ground, and rummaged through it. “Ohmm! ‘ere ‘e ‘o!” he mumbled, pulling a small strange contraption out of his saddlebag with his mouth, and setting it down on the ground.

“And that’s what gets us out of here…?” Flam asked.

Fancypants scrunched his face in contemplation. “Is it some sort of magic amplifier that will let us teleport home?”

Berry raised an eyebrow. “How would that sell? No, Ted said he hadn’t seen the storyboard for this episode yet, so he had to build the model for me by sort of guessing and hearing what we had to work with.”

“…model,” Flam said. “That’s a model?”

“Absolutely-dutily! I mean, Ted’s a hard worker but it’d be a bit much for me to ask him to build an aircraft capable of flying us all out of here when they’ve got the movie to work on. So we’ve just got to build this, but bigger.”

Flam scratched his head with his hoof. “And this is…what, again?”

“A heavier-than-air craft with a winded-elastic propulsion drive!”

Trixie’s magic plucked at one part. “Are we to take this bit here for a rubber band?”

“Yeppers!”

Fancypants was peering closely at the model, and scratching in the dirt with his hoof, outlining a diagram. Rarity glanced over his shoulder, shook her head, and corrected the angles and proportions. “So this is to what scale, darling?” she asked Berry.

Another rummage through the saddlebags—Berry used only his mouth, and no trace of magic—produced a small strange equine figurine that closely resembled Rarity in color of mane and coat, though its mane was thoroughly unstylish: a clear straight band bound the tips of its long purple hair together, and perfectly straightened, the mane lacked any kind of pizazz. This strange little toy Berry set onto the model plane.

“Ted had one of these on the shelf, so he built it to this scale. I’m supposed to give this back, though, so don’t lose it!”

Rarity did some mental math, trained from years as a tailor, as she calculated the proportions of the thing that apparently was supposed to be a model of her own self. Six lengths by two lengths…. “Bubble Berry, you do realize that this plan requires a rubber band…hmm…a hundred and forty-four feet in circumference?”

“Does it? Wow, that’s a lot of feet. Can you imagine all the socks that would take?”

Rarity knew enough now to ignore that. “For that matter, where are we going to get any rubber bands? This island is terribly short of shopping establishments.”

Berry threw a forearm over Rarity, and gave her a brief noogie. The alabaster unicorn, for her part, was too flabbergasted to respond. “You’re so silly, Rarity! Of course we’ve got to improvise. There’re pine trees on this island, right?”

“…right…” Flam answered, not seeing where this was going.

“And pine sap is sticky! And if you stick your hoof to it and then pull back, it’s all boingy-boingy, just like a rubber band! Q. E. D., pine sap can substitute for a rubber band!”

“Obviously,” Trixie cut in, rolling her eyes. “That’s just science.”

Fancypants considered this, being reasonably certain that latex and resin were entirely different things. “Notwithstanding that, ah, interesting interpretation of materials science…wouldn’t we need a rather awful lot of pine sap to make that work?”

“Yep! I mean, at least enough to fill a hundred and forty-four socks!” Berry nodded excitedly. “So you’d better get cracking!”

Trixie scowled. “And by ‘you’ you mean ‘all of us’, right?”

“Right! All you unicorns!”

“Now hold on, Berry boy,” Flam said, smelling an old trick. “What exactly will you be doing?”

“Supervising!”

Even Bubble Berry could not fail to guess at the meaning of five angry stares: more was required in the way of explanation.

“Musically supervising!”

---

Fiercely applied unicorn magic began to chisel at long straight branches—and, where necessary, make a gnarled branch straight enough to work.

“Your thoughts, Rarity?” Flam asked, squinting at the end of a branch. “Is it in Pinkie’s nature to dodge work?”

Rarity’s magic carefully augured a thick stick with a sharp stone. “Dodge work? No, that’s Rainbow Dash. But pick an assignment perhaps a bit easier? Let me put it to you this way—when Winter Wrap-Up rolls around, Pinkie Pie is ice-skating.”

Rarity looked up at the other three unicorns who knew that they were unicorns.

“‘Winter…Wrap-up’?” Flam asked.

“Who, pray tell, wraps up winter?” Trixie followed on.

“Indeed, my dear—why not just use magic, like in Canterlot?” was Fancypants’ contribution.

A touch of hometown pride and defensiveness surged in Rarity’s heart, and she stepped forward, releasing her magical grip on the stick. “Well, now,” she coughed, looking around. “When the time has come to welcome spring,” hints of rhythm began to infiltrate her voice, and a close listener might even say she sounded like a rather different pony altogether, “and all things warm and green—”

At once the pink pony, who had previously been rummaging through the luggage in search of instruments, was upon them, hanging upside down from a rope descending from nowhere in particular and clad in black ninja gear. “Whoa whoa whoa!” Bubble Berry held his hoofs forward, waving them wildly in alarm at Rarity. “First off, we don’t have anywhere near the choral line you need. And second—oh, jeez, you can’t do this one! I’ll check with Sarah if I gotta, but I’m pretty sure Danny’s still got some rights on this, and we’d have to negotiate something—his agent’s gonna want to know when the next royalty checks come in, and frankly I think Danny’s got a right to know, but when does this episode even air? I don’t know, Ted doesn’t know, Jayson and Meghan don’t know, and if they don’t know then I’m not sure this is even really a thing!” Berry huffed quickly, beginning to hyperventilate, while all four of his legs began gesticulating even faster. “Ohjeezwhatifthisisn’tevenreallyanepisode? Whatifthisisn’tactuallyashowafterallbutsomeothermediumlikeanovelizationthosecantotallydeviatefromcanonandaddstufflikeseaponiestosellmorecoloringbooksormaybeit’saflashgameandthosetotallyaren’talwaysfinishedbeforeuploadormaybeitsthatmobilegamewiththegemsandtheparaspritesandwedon’tevenreallyexistuntilsomeonedoestherightmicrotransactionsorworseyetwhatifthisisrealllifeohnoohnoifthisisallrealthen—”

The rest of his panicked rant was muffled, and then aborted altogether, by a pair of lips pressing suddenly and deeply against his. Trixie held his face in her hooves until, at last, the rope from which Bubble Berry was hanging noticed that it was attached to nothing at all and fell, dragging the pseudo-earth pony with it to the ground.

“Well now,” Fancypants said, “that seemed to do the trick.”

“You…” Flam stammered. “You kissed him.”

“His mind was going to a dangerous place; Trixie distracted him. Quite well, Trixie might add.”

“You kissed him!”

“If he began to question his reality the spell might’ve failed!”

“You kissed him!”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Oh, for the love of—” And then she threw her forelegs around Flam’s shoulders, and kissed him as well. Pulling away, she asked: “Are you happy now? That you’re even?”

“Yes! I mean no! I mean, I don’t want to be even! I mean—Fancypants, Rarity, back me up here!”

The stallion of sophistication shook his head. “Sorry, dear fellow, I’d have to say that she did the best she could, under the circumstances.”

Rarity slowly pulled her own jaw back up to its factory setting. “I obviously didn’t just watch Trixie make out with a male version of one of my best friends, so clearly the last two minutes or so never happened.”

Bubble Berry bounced back up on his hooves, recovering from his brief blackout. “So yeah, Winter Wrap-Up waaaaay off-limits. Maybe a parody from another company? That could work, yeah!”

The pink-dyed unicorn leapt onto a nearby boulder, and began tapping a beat with his hooves.

Rarity, Flam, Fancypants, and Trixie looked back down at their tools and materials, and magically lifted the not-yet-treetaps back up to continue their efforts.

“Just whistle while you work!” Berry sang.

The seamstress was more known for her sudden vocal shifts than her whistling, but she gave it the old college try nonetheless.

“And cheerfully together we can escape this sorry place!
So hum a merry tune…”

Flam carefully aligned a crude chisel, trying not to think about Trixie, Trixie’s lips on his brother’s, Trixie’s lips on his own, the smell of Trixie’s breath, that Flim had been the first to taste of it but wouldn’t even remember what was the sense in that and that thrice-damned humming was not helping him concentrate!

Bubble Berry continued to belt out his song. “It won’t take long when there’s a song to help you set the pace!”

“This is wretched!” Flam shouted as he spun and advanced on Berry; a careful listener would’ve thought that they heard a record scratching. “The beat is weak, the rhyme is corny, and it doesn’t even fit! This is hard work in an outdoor environment, and it sounds like you’re having us tidy house for a bunch of gem-mining midgets—” Then Flam stumbled, his vision going blurry and his head rushing with blood as he accidentally glimpsed into a dimension beyond the beyond, a place which only certain beings native to his own level of reality could bear to comprehend—clearly being near Bubble Berry had its risks.

When he at last recovered, Flam looked up into Berry’s hard cold stare. His hairdo had drooped ominously, already nearly straight. “You want a work song? Alright, Flam. I’ll give you a work song.”

---

The morning sun broke the horizon, and tall waves broke against the sides of the island; the knowing unicorns were already hard at work, using everything they had in the way of magic and muscle to pull ropes and chains against stubborn trees.

“Hrgh!” Trixie grunted, what little bulk the rock farm had given her already atrophied.

“Huaaah!” Flam replied, straining forward against the impromptu horse collar his rope was tied to.

“Uuuugh,” agreed Fancypants, as with his added force the roots of the tree began to creak.

“Uwaaaahaaahaaa!” Rarity called, finally applying enough pressure to bring the tall pine toppling over, crashing into sand and surf, just as another wave struck and sprayed them all with cold salt water.

Bubble Berry trotted nearby, brandishing a club in his mouth; now dressed in something between a Whinny Star uniform and a Griffin military uniform—nopony had the chance to ask how, as he gave them an icy glare and a menacing wave of a baton the moment their work began to slack.

“Eeeeerggh!”

“Ooooogh!’

“Unnnh!”

“Yaaaah!”

Another tree, drained of sap, toppled over, more timber for the construction—but still more was needed.

Berry trotted by; Trixie averted her gaze. “Look down, look down, don’t look him in the eye!”

The others agreed, as the next tree began to strain under their pull. “Look down, look down, that isn’t Pinkie Pie.”

Fancypants’s footing slipped in the sand as the tree began to topple, and he tumbled into the sea. Pulling himself out, he sang “The waves are strong—it’s cold as hell below!”

“Look down! Look down!” The others admonished, gesturing for him to watch his footing. “There’s twenty trees to go!”

“It’s all…so wrong,” Flam added, his gaze heading skywards towards the not-yet-set moon. “Sweet Luna hear our prayer!”

“Look down! Look down!” was the sang reply, as Trixie admonished him with a hoofslap to the back of the head, “Sweet Luna doesn’t care!”

By now all could agree that Rarity did not sound quite like Rarity, although Fancypants had adequate appraisal of her vocal range to not be concerned. “I know…they’ll wait! I know that they’ll be true!” Visions of Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Twilight, and Applejack danced in her mind—Pinkie Pie was temporarily excluded for obvious reasons.

Bubble Berry snarled, and she shuddered back to herself, shaking her head and remembering why this was all necessary. “Look down! Look down! They’ve all forgotten you!”

Desperately weak from hunger, Trixie stopped her work to lower her head and grab a mouthful of forage from the island—a slap from a forehoof halted her, and Bubble Berry glared. “While I am me, food isn’t free—back to the dust!”

“Look down! Look down! It’s us we’ve to save!
Look down! Look down! Or else we’ve seen our grave!”

Bubble Berry stood atop the flying machine, trotting back and forth with satisfaction, before turning to one of the groundling unicorns, leaping down to look him in the eye.

“Now you with the hat that looks so dumb!
The trees are down and the model's done!
You know what that means!”

Flam smiled wistfully. “Yes, it means we are free….”

Berry snorted. “No.” He whipped a piece of paper out of his Griffin army saddlebag and stuck it to Flam’s chest.

“Follow to the letter this itinerary!
Carry out directions and don't ask why!
You know it's a dangerous task!”

Flam carefully read through it, having pulled it in front of his face with unicorn magic.

“I'm to wind the big band?”
His face fell in despair, as he pleaded for sympathy.
“It's near a quarter-furlong long,
And I'm aching!”

Berry let his baton swing back and forth from its loop around his neck.
“You'll ache again!
Unless you learn the meaning of my law!”

Flam took a step back from Berry and his club.
“I know the meaning of those nineteen lashes…
...the pains of your law!”

Berry took a step forward.
“Five lashes for what you did!
The rest because I found it fun!
And your hat looks so dumb!”

He held his hat forward, waving it in front of the pink unicorn. “This hat is a straw boater!”

Berry waved his, a flat-top cap with a visor and gold braiding, right back.
“And mine's a kepi! You should get one as well!
You should get one...yours looks so dumb!”

The others interrupted in chorus, as they took their positions by the propeller, tail, and ground-brake:
“Look down! Look down! It's us we're to save!
Look down! Look down! Or else we've seen our grave!”

---

“I’m not…entirely certain…that this worked,” Fancypants mumbled, as he sat between two mares, Berry having planted himself in the pilot’s seat and Flam grunting and sweating to turn the propeller and wind the band just a few hundred more times.

Trixie rolled her eyes. “What’s to be uncertain of, foal? In five minutes of musical montage, we built a flying machine and deforested the island. If that’s not successful wild magic, what is?”

“We are still on the island, dear filly. And I’m quite certain that pine sap is used to make resin, that is, to make things harder, not—”

“Fancypants, darling,” Rarity cooed. “Don’t draw attention to these things. Pinkie Pie’s plans always succeed. Unless it’s funnier for them to fail. Or unless somepony needs to learn a valuable lesson about themselves.”

Flam finished winding the propeller, setting a safety latch and jumping aboard.

“Well,” Fancypants continued to protest, “perhaps we’re all to learn a valuable lesson about materials in general and the specific fact that pine sap loses its elasticity quite quickly.”

Flam trotted towards his place on the bench, nudging Fancypants out of the way so he could sit by Trixie. “Get beside me, Discord. You are thinking not as the universal spirit does, but as rational ponies do.”

Rarity’s magic nudged one lever, and the ground brakes of the flyer were released.

Fancypants shook his head again. “We could’ve built a boat with all of this.”

Rarity chuckled. “Oh, come now, a—”

Berry spun around in his seat, a look of panic on his face. “Oh, horse apples, you’re right!” He jumped up on his hooves. “A boat! That makes way more sense! I mean there’veneverbeenboatsontheshowbeforeunlessyoucountthepiratereferencesbutthosecouldbeskypiratesandcomeonlet’sthinktoylineheredoesthetargetdemographicevenplaywithmodelplanesImeanDUHnobutboatstheyworkboatsfloatinkiddypoolsandbathtubsandtheytotallymakewaymoresenseohcrapohcrapwhydidn’tTedandIthinkaboutthatmaybeTedjustthoughtaplanewascoolertobuildbutcoolerhasneverreallyguidedcorporate’sideaofwhattoystoaddandsowhatiftheepisodewasreallysupposedtobeaboutaboatohcrapthenthismightnotwork—”

And then Berry’s flailing legs smacked the release lever on the propeller catch, and the plane shot forward, rolling along the now-deforested island.

The crashing waves drew nearer, and nearer, as ponies tried to make up their minds whether to bail out, and then the crashing waves were no longer before them, but below, as the flier caught a draft and gained altitude.

The island, and what luggage they had left behind, became a part of their past, and their indeterminate future appeared to consist solely of what course they could chart between the realm of pegasus ponies and seaponies.

Berry giggled. “Boy, I hope we were pointed in the right direction! I mean, I’ve got this fancy lever up here butTeddidn’tactuallyrememberhowtoincorporatecontrolintoasimpleplaneandhesaidhe’dgohometolookituponlinebutthenwegotdistractedwhenalltheseladiescameinwithabigcakealllikeHeyIsThatPinkiePieandIwasn’tbutheyfreecake—”

Fancypants sighed. “Is he going to be like this…the whole trip?”

Flam shook his head. “I’m not going to kiss him, he’s my brother!”

“Trixie has learned her lesson and will have no more drama, thank you.” Certainly not until she had made up her mind about whether she preferred mustache or no mustache, anyway, she thought.

Rarity rolled her eyes. “If you’re waiting for me to kiss your brother impersonating my dear friend, you will wait for quite some time.”

They looked at Fancypants. He snorted in amusement. “I like mares, and I have the last set of ear plugs. So, as they say in the low-rent parts of Canterlot,” his magic withdrew from his damp coat pocket the a pair of small corks, “sucks to be you, dear chaps.”

The flying machine continued its journey eastward.

Comments

[KFDirector]

Rated T for Teen, because getting this meta can seriously damage a younger writer. I should know.

I've also started updating Summer of My Human Soldier again, in case any fans of my comedy want to know what it looks like when I take my writing semi-seriously.

[Mr. Grimm]

I cracked up at 'Gem-mining Midgets'. Though I'm curious; what was that song they sang?

Interesting to see where they go from here, now that they have a flying machine...

Also, having personal experience with this, do they know that pine sap is VERY flammable?

[KFDirector]

2951973

"Look Down (Prisoners)" / "The Work Song", opening track to Les Misérables.

And with your accurate points about the actual, non-cartoony properties of pine sap, you're sounding more like Fancypants! The minute Fancypants' version of reality takes hold again...well. Yeah.