Prologue
“Alright” Scootaloo said to herself, “Rudders… Responsive. Ailerons… Responsive. Horizontal Stabilizers… Responsive. Exhaust vents, air intakes, fuel injectors, all functioning. Guns, revved up. Missile tracking radar, responsive. Okay, let’s go”. She waited for the control tower to patch her in. The tower got her through and said, “Pegasus 3-1, take runway two and wait for the all-clear”. Scootaloo taxied her F-15E Strike Eagle onto the mile-long road, and waited. “Pegasus 3-1, you’re all clear. Launch”. When she heard the signal, the F-15 roared as pure aircraft-grade fuel was being shot into the exhaust of the aircraft. The jet lurched forward, and zipped down the runway. Scootaloo pulled back on the stick, and the aircraft lifted into the air. The feeling of having your own aircraft is the feeling of having a child. It is yours, and no matter what, without it, you’ll never feel the same. This was an experience familiar to her, and it’s been that way for four years.
When Scootaloo graduated from flight school, Equestria was in the middle of a revolution. The land had been drifting into turmoil for quite some time. Terrorist attacks from a group called the group called “Al Questra” in Saddle Arabia had started when Scootaloo was around the half-way point of flight school. As the attacks grew stronger and more frequent, the general public started to panic. Attacks on large cities and small towns have been occurring for years, but one final event tipped the scale. An attempted assassination in the Canterlot High Embassy caused massive panic, and riots in the streets. The population of Equestria demanded some form of protection. The collective decision between Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and Princess Twilight Sparkle had created the Equestrian Military.
The Equestrian Military is composed of six branches; The Army, The Air Force, The Navy, The Coast Guard, The Homeland Defense, and the Elite Defense. Each branch has a designated task to carry out. With the establishment of the military, combustion firearms were legally allowed to be used by these forces.
As Cloudsdale is the Pegasus capital of Equestria, they were assigned the task of maintaining an Air Force. Scootaloo took up the call to arms after she had finished school, and enlisted.
776th Cloudsdale Strike Wing
“Wing Commander “Scoots” Scootaloo”
“776th Strike Wing”
“Cloudsdale, EQ”
“KIA”
This is the thought that Scootaloo had imprinted in the back of her mind. She was haunted by this, even though she refused to show that she feared death. The thought of dying brought tears to her eyes as the “radar lock” warning siren was beeping away into the cockpit. She turned around to see a heat-seeking missile flash to life from a rooftop and quickly close the distance between itself and her F-15. She dumped her flares, praying that it would shake the missile long enough to pull out of its range. After she burned through her flares, she returned to the rear-view mirror to see that the missile was mimicking her every move, but at twice the speed. Scootaloo, knowing it was her only option, kicked in the afterburner and yanked the stick back. She tensed up her legs, closed her eyes, and took a quick breath as she felt 9 times the force of gravity. This was a technique she learned in her 3rd month of training. Performing these steps before going into positive G’s prevents you from passing out in the intense maneuver. As she felt the blood from her head rush to her torso and her head strain to keep itself up, she opened her eyes for less than a second to the missile fail to keep up. After she leveled out her jet, she turned around in her seat to get a glance of the projectile. The missile flew directly under the aircraft without detonating. Before Scoots could sigh in relief, she heard a “BOOM”.
She watched as thousands of holes were punched into the Strike Eagle. She then looked down at herself to see many punctures in the flight suit, as well as her skin. She was mesmerized by the fact that she couldn’t feel anything in the adrenaline of the moments. Her self-wonder was cut off by the plane losing altitude, dropping like a rock. She noticed that the fuel tanks, left aileron and stabilizers, and rear fuselage were shredded by the shrapnel of the missile. There was no way to save the jet itself, but she could still save her own life. Putting her hooves on the seat release, she waited until she was seconds from hitting the ground to ensure that she wasn’t taken out on the way down. Scootaloo yanked the latch, and shot out of the cockpit of the aircraft.
The parachute deployed, and she looked up to see the massive dogfight between her fighter escort and enemy aircraft. The seat drifted to the ground, where Scootaloo unlatched the restraints and did her best to collect her mental processes that were destroyed in the heat of the moment. Her radio was ripped to pieces in the explosion, so that wasn’t an option. When she settled down, she made a mental checklist of what was to be done if she were to survive. In this order it was to: Get her bearings, find a working weapon (As she was in a DMZ in Saddle Arabia), find food/water, and find flare(s). She needed to find North. “Critical thinking,” She thought, “Will get me out of here. Okay, we flew in from the East. The missile was fired from the village over there, and It came up on my left. That means that the missile was fired from the North, the village is North of here, and there’s the village. The area I landed in was West of where the jet wreckage was, and that pillar of smoke is presumably the wreckage. I haven’t seen anypony else get hit, so there’s the wreckage. Now, that means that this way is North.” She turned to the left and started walking to the village.
