Daring Do in Deepest Peru

by Shattubatu

Rating: everyone
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Rainbow Dash, Comedy, Random, Adventure, Daring Do, Twilight Sparkle
Length: 1162

Stranded after the loss of her Airship, Daring Do treks the trails of the Amapone Rainforest, searching for an path back to civilization. (Winner of BUCK 2013 Flash Fiction contest)

Stranded after the loss of her Airship, Daring Do treks the trails of the Amapone Rainforest, searching for an path back to civilization.

Written for the BUCK 2013 Flash Fic contest, a competition where we participants had to write a fic in 45 minutes about 3 random topics chosen at the start, which were Llamas Pihranas and pyjamas. This story somehow was deemed the best by a team of highly qualified judges (including Knighty) then rewritten from memory because I was too tipsy to remember to collect my story when I won...

Published 2013-09-05 19:30:04 UTC
Last updated 2013-09-05 19:30:04 UTC

Daring Do in Deepest Peru

Daring Do in Deepest Peru

Daring Do hacked her way through the dense undergrowth, each step draining her strength more and more. It was the sixth day since her airship had exploded over the largest verdant expanse known to ponykind: The Amapone Rainforest.

Her wing was broken again, meaning she’d have to face danger with her trademark cunning and quick thinking, instead of flying over it as she did on her adventures where she didn’t break her wing (adventures which were surprisingly few in number and by far the least popular of her stories when she told them to her friends back home. You'd think that for all they enjoy her intelligent solutions, the most intelligent solution of just flying over bad stuff would be wildly popular, but I guess there's no accounting for taste).

As she struggled her way through a dense thicket of creeper, a chance breeze brought the whispers of a familiar scent to her nose; a scent that was the surest sign yet of ~~civilisashun~~ civilization.

“Woodsmoke!”

She rushed off, following her nose, eager to find the source. As she entered into a clearing, she saw the steep slope in front of her too late. In her haste, she careened over the edge and tumbled down head over hooves more times than she could count before crumpling into a confused tangled heap of legs and wings in front of a large shadowy figure.

No… A herd of large shadowy figures!

Fluffier than any pony (with one exception), an entire tribe of semi-nomadic Llamas observed their strange new golden yellow arrival.

Daring dredged her mind for what little Llamaese she knew. It was a complex language for even the most skilled of speakers, with over 173 phonemes and a convoluted conjugation system. The slightest difference in pronunciation could drastically alter the message. She constructed a sentence in her mind and push it through her lips.

“Ata ka’ran d’ak chu aiara,” Daring Do pleaded.

An angry barrage of Llamaese hinted at what Daring would have know if she had paid more attention in “South Amareican Ungulate Dialects 101” during her studies at Oxenford University; she might have meant to explain how she was a lost traveller, but due to a tragic mispronounciation of ai’ara as aiara, she actually said:

“Hello! I am the father of your twelve illegitimate grandchildren.”

That might seem like an unlikely phrase for her to have said accidentally, but that’s Llamaese for you. In retrospect Llamas agree it is quite a silly language. There has been much avoidable violence towards mumblers.

Daring Do was quickly swept up in a sea of woolly hooves and roughly bound with vines. The Llamas carried her towards a pool in the center of their village. As she drew closer, Daring could see the pool start to roil and churn. As she was being suspended upside down above the water, silvery-orange fish leaped up at her, gnashing their rows of teeth.

“Oh no! I’m being hung over a pool of deadly pony-eating pirrahnas!” exclaimed a bored Daring Do, already searching for the lose knot she knew there would be in her bindings.

To the surprise of no one, she was slowly lowered towards the surface of the water, each second bringing her closer to her doom.

But her languid search slowly became frantic: her bindings were secure, she couldn’t reach her pockets, every normal avenue of escape that had served her in the past was failing her now. There wasn’t a gadget or magic artifact or even a handily placed trombone nearby to get her out of this pinch.

“Maybe this is it,” she pondered, growing still, “Maybe this is the end of Daring Do… Oh if only there was someone AWESOME enough to help me!”

Suddenly, a prismatic blur tore through the canopy. It was so fast! It must have been the fastest flier in all of ~~Ponyville~~ EquestriaTHE WORLD!

Daring Do couldn’t believe it, she was about to be saved by the amazing, the one, the only-

“RAINBOW DASH!” Twilight Sparkle shouted, knocking on her friend’s cloud home door for the fifth time, “You’re seven and a half minutes late for the eclipse tonight!”

The door opened, revealing a flustered Rainbow Dash, dressed in her Daring Do onesie pyjamas (complete with monochrome mane).

“Sorry Twi, I got a little wrapped up in what I was doing…” She grinned sheepishly.

“Well you better come now! Luna and I- What’s that you’re holding behind your back?”

Dash spluttered protestations as her fanfic was whisked away from her hooves in a purple haze of magic, bringing it to rest in front of Twilight's muzzle.

“Ok, Ok, it’s a story I’ve been working on,” a defeated Dash mumbled.

Twilight rushed and hugged her friend. “This is great! I knew you liked Daring Do but I didn’t know you were a big a fan as this!” Twilight waved the three hundred page, two hundred thousand word manuscript in front of Rainbow’s face.

“Rainbow, there’s going to be a Daring Do meet up next Saturday, would you like to come with me?”

“A meet-up? It’s sad enough that I write fan fiction? I mean, what a dumb waste of time! And anyway, aren’t those just filled with awkward ponies with terrible hygiene?”

“You might be surprised! And anyway, I’ll be going, so there’ll be at least one pony there with good hygiene!” Twilight laughed, shooting a friendly wink.

“Hah, yeah you do smell good!” agreed Rainbow wistfully.

“Wha-“

“I mean you read good! With the words! On the paper! Heh… I mean, um, could you proof read this for me?” Rainbow blushed furiously and pushed her story closer to her friend's eyes in an attempt to hide.Twilight peered around the stack of pages and smiled mysteriously at her friend.

“Of course I will!”

She looked briefly at the last few pages, eyes flitting from mistake to mistake, flow errors, grammatical failures and spelling mistakes as egresious as “civilisashun” and “egresious”. She put her wing over her friend's back and led her out into the night.

“But it maaay take me a while!”

And so next Saturday, Rainbow went to the meet up with one friend, and left with many more.

Author's Note

Hope you enjoyed my first story! Please not that to properly recreate the "Unpolished" aspect of the fic I wrote at BUCK, I wrote all this without spell check or correction in 45 minutes from memory, so all errors are, if not intentional, meant to be there!
The "please forgive my sins" misspelling of "civilisashun" was actually what made me add the second half of a story; it was a mistake so bad that I needed some kind of excuse for it's existence. Just crossing it out wouldn't do, so I made it so RD made the mistake instead! (I only hope people don't rage quit at the first paragraph after such a disgusting mistake!)