Duty Calls
Sometimes, the only solution to major problems wasn't nice. Sometimes, it wasn't pretty. Sometimes, it seemed almost callous and detached from the issue at hoof.
But Applejack understood that those solutions had to be made anyway. That was something that only a hard-working farmpony could really understand. Work wasn’t nice, work wasn’t pretty, and work often didn’t care about how you were feeling. But work needed to be done in order to keep a farm going. And Applejack had to keep the farm going.
Applejack’s stomach rumbled. It was a good omen.
It was close to midnight. The moon was full. The bigger-than-a-pony’s-body slingshot, made of the best materials Applejack could find and buy, seemed sturdy and stiff as ever. Earlier that day, Applejack had tested it out with a log that may or may not have come from a deceased Timberwolf’s corpse. To her delight, it had flown far and flown true. If a pony-sized creature flew up over the center of the apple orchard, scanning it with evil eyes while searching for the most succulent apples before swooping down to take its fill, the log would be able to hit it out of the air like a buckball hitting a clay pigeon.
Of course, Applejack didn’t want to make one of her friends explode into shards. The solution to this major problem wasn’t nice, but it didn’t involve murder of a close friend.
Still, though…
The fact that Fluttershy had once more lost control of her instincts and morphed back into Flutterbat was an ugly truth. Applejack didn’t want to believe it, at first. She didn’t want to believe that the stare-and-mirrors technique, which had first cured the problem and which everypony had tried two nights ago, didn’t work either. She didn’t want to have watched from her window last night as Flutterbat swooped up again at the stroke of midnight, silhouetted against the moon like a malevolent spirit, and hovered dead over the center of her orchard while sizing up her prey: Applejack’s livelihood.
She didn’t want her friends to have no concrete solutions, despite Twilight’s best efforts at researching a solution between all her princess duties and headmare duties and the endless string of other duties she had to deal with on a daily basis.
Well, there was one concrete solutions to the problem, though all the rest of the elements had flat-out refused to even consider it: If Flutterbat—or Fluttershy, or Flutterwhatever—encountered an apple-related incident that was traumatizing enough that she’d never want to eat an apple ever again, the Flutterbat part of her brain would shut down hard enough that it would erase itself from existence.
They’d even hemmed and hawed about how such a thing couldn’t even happen: what sort of apple, or apple-related or apple-containing object or situation, could ever traumatize somepony that badly? Of course, said hemming and hawing hadn’t taken the seriousness of the situation into account. Their livelihoods weren’t on the line.
Applejack’s stomach gurgled. It was an even better omen than before.
Applejack, of course, could think up an answer with her keen folksy intuition. When it came to nature, there were always some things that—when properly applied—could terrorize and traumatize anypony who wasn’t accustomed to working with the wild. And while Fluttershy technically knew all about that, too, she was easy enough to traumatize anyway.
Almost midnight. With her hoof, Applejack began to pull back the launchy-bit on the slingshot: too difficult a task for any weaker pony, but just right for a pony with her grit and her convictions. She’d calculated the angle of trajectory as it related to her body perfectly. If she laid a certain way, she’d launch herself belly-up and backside-first into the air like a missile, accurate as an arrow and fast as a freight train. It would be perfect.
Sometimes, the only solution to major problems wasn't nice. Sometimes, it wasn't pretty.
Everything below Applejack’s waist started to ache with the strain of an almost unbelievable amount of post-processed fruit. It was the best omen of all.
Applejack stretched the slingshot’s launchy-bit back as far as it would go and used her strong hind legs to hold it in place as she laid down on that exactly perfect angle. Right on time, Flutterbat swooped into the air, silhouetted perfectly against the moon as she sized up her prey.
Applejack let go. Soaring majestically through the air, belly-up and backside first, Applejack whooped loudly enough for Flutterbat to notice. The Vampire Bat-pony had just enough time to turn her head and open her mouth to skreee at the intruding menace before the two collided, Flutterface to Appleass.
“I’ll show you ‘vampire fruit bats!’ ” Applejack screeched, made her most disgruntled face ever, and pushed.
******************************************
“A lil’ bit of a fall never killed anypony.” Applejack grunted in pain as she scrubbed at her backside in the bathtub. “It was just a couple dozen meters, tops. Ain’t nothin’ an element of harmony couldn’t handle, even a lil’ frail mare like Fluttershy.”
“That isn’t the point!” Twilight snapped, glaring at Applejack and making no effort whatsoever to help Applejack out with her onerous labors. “Why in Equestria did you think your answer to the Flutterbat problem was acceptable?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Applejack shrugged. “Fluttershy ain’t part vampire fruit bat no more, an’ I don’t think she will be ever again. You said for yourself that the lil’ fangs she used to have were gone, right?”
"Yes, they’re gone. Not that it was easy to tell!" Twilight huffed. "You realize that she was trying to scream through at least part of it, right? As in open-mouthed screaming?"
"Good. Medicine's best taken orally." Applejack puffed out her chest in pride as she scritched herself clean with a charmingly rustic scrubbing brush. "I don't trust this new-fangled new-age 'osmosize this here crystal energy t'fill yourself with harmony an' get better real quick' Elements of Harmony mumbo-jumbo y'all are so keen on tryin.' "
“You traumatized one of your closest friends! Aren’t you even the least bit sorry for what you’ve done?”
“Am I sorry that she don’t like apples no more? Yeah. Yeah, that wasn't a good thing. Am I sorry that she might have t’go into therapy for th’ shock of it all? Yeah, that wasn't a good thing either. But am I sorry that I cleared up a problem that coulda bankrupted me forever? Heck no, I ain’t. You don’t understand, Twi. Your livelihood wasn't on the line like mine was.”
“Livelihood or not, do you seriously think you couldn’t have waited just a day or two more until we figured out a less…repulsive answer?” Twilight grimaced as she watched Applejack continued to scrub her sore, discolored behind.
“Didn’t figure we’d find a solution before my whole harvest went kaput. Asides, the mental damage aside, ain’t no real harm done to anypony. Didn’t figure anypony would get real angry about something as harmless as tha—”
With the sound of snapping fingers, the snake-like embodiment of chaos, disharmony and utter rage manifested right in front of Applejack. Sporting an expression so angry that no picture could properly depict it, Discord grabbed Applejack by the ponytail and yanked her clean out of the tub.
“Apple brightmac reliability pearbutter Jack!” Discord snarled at Applejack like he had reverted from being an affable antihero to a villain too frightening for a children’s cartoon. Applejack trembled as Discord sucked in a huge lungful of air and shouted at the top of his lungs:
“We do not, I repeat, do NOT make apple poopies on our friends!”
Applejack dangled over the tub, looking—for the first time in several weeks— vaguely ashamed of herself for getting into a figurative and quite literal mess. “...t’was just tryin’ to break a curse.”
“And you think that makes it somehow okay? You think what you did was the right thing to do?”
“...S’just pony apples.” Applejack mumbles. “Never killed nopony.”
“Oh, it didn’t,” Discord spat. “But I will. We’re going to go over to Fluttershy’s cottage right now, and you are going to give her your nicest apology. And if I think that it’s anything less than utterly sincere, then you are going to wish that I had been as nice as I was back when I was a full-fledged villain. Are we Crystal Empire clear?”
Meekly, Applejack nodded. Discord snapped his fingers, and the two of them disappeared.
Twilight sighed. For a moment, she shook her head and looked at the soap suds covering the thankfully-obscured contents of the basin below.
Then, realizing that she could derive helpful solutions to major problems from this, she summoned a scroll and a quill and began to write down a friendship lesson. Hopefully, Applejack wouldn’t be the only creature to learn from this incident.