Rainbow Dash stared at the tiny, shrivelled, dead thing at her hooves.
A half-hour earlier, she had been doing her evening cooldown flight, bleeding the tension of the day's workload and training sessions off so she could go home, have dinner, and sleep without any damage to her lithe, perfect physique. The sun was a reddish-orange sliver on the horizon, and the stars were poking pinholes through the violet curtain of dusk.
Then, a screaming fireball had torn across the sky, slamming into the ground near Winsome Falls. Eyes wide with alarm, she tore off after it.
When she arrived, she had found a strange metal...something. It was crumpled, torn, and in flames, billowing greenish-black smoke into the sky. From what little she could see from the safest distance (for the burning metal mass was putting off quite a bit of heat), there were lots of peculiar things inside that would no doubt excite Twilight Sparkle. Pieces of the strange thing had been strewn by the collision, and sharp shards of torn metal lay all over the ground by the river.
Her nose had twitched as the gentle breeze carried a smell similar to burnt flesh to her nose. It wasn't unpleasant; on the contrary, there was something strangely enticing about it. Sure, it had that acrid wrongness of burning pony, but it also smelled vaguely like chestnuts and mushrooms. She had chosen to follow the smell, and a few hundred feet from the crash site, she'd discovered...the body.
It was a creature of some sort, completely unfamiliar to her. It was roughly a third the size of a pony, with stubby arms and legs, a round body, a skinny, squashed neck, and a wide, flat head. Its skin was hairless, wrinkly, and grey. It was also unmistakeably dead. She was no doctor, but she'd seen enough pegasi die in horrific training accidents to know an impact death when she saw it. The thing was also smoldering from the heat of the crash, which accounted for the smell. She inhaled deeply; a heady, damp scent filled her nostrils, faintly reminiscent of fried mushrooms.
Rainbow Dash loved mushrooms.
She studied the dead creature. She wasn't the smartest pony in Equestria, but she'd read enough comic books as a filly to know an alien when she saw one. It kinda sucked that Equestria's first brush with extraterrestrial intelligence had ended up being a dead alien in a UFO crash out in the wilderness, but...life was like that sometimes.
If she squinted, it kinda looked like a mushroom, too.
Licking her lips, Rainbow Dash snatched up the dead alien in her hooves and flew off into the night. She had to go a little less fast than normal, because the alien was heavier than it looked, but she still managed to get home before the moon had risen.
She whistled a happy tune to herself as she sliced, diced, sauteed, battered, seasoned, and sauced. One of her most well-kept secrets was that she enjoyed cooking from time to time, and was actually pretty good at it. An hour later, she settled down to a tantalizing lightly-floured grilled alien steak with thin soy gravy, sauteed onions and bell peppers, diced fried potatoes, and a salad of lettuce, cucumber slices, onion straws, shredded carrots, and croutons, drizzled with a dressing made from olive oil and the drippings from her alien.
She cut a bite from the steak, inhaled its aroma, and put it in her mouth. The flavor explosion across her tongue made her press her hooves to her face and moan in delight, eyes rolled to the sky. "This. Is. So. Awesome!"
She finished her meal, washed her dishes, and turned to the matter of the remaining alien. She prepared a few portions of alien meat to use over the next few days, storing it in her refrigerator, and put the rest of the alien in her deep freeze. Belly full, she let out a contented belch and headed for bed.
* * * * *
Three weeks had passed since the UFO incident. The discovery of the wreckage had been big news all over Equestria, as it had proven the existence of extraterrestrial life. Twilight had spent days examining the remains of the ship, and had been somewhat disappointed that no sign of its pilot had ever been discovered. Twilight and the rest of the investigators believed the alien occupant had likely either been completely incinerated in the crash, or its body had been thrown into the river and washed away before the wreck itself was even found. Rainbow Dash had never told anypony that she had in fact found the alien, taken it home, and eaten it.
Rainbow Dash flew in through one of the windows of the palace, gliding into the Royal Friendship Library. She was slightly depressed, having finally finished off the last of the alien for dinner the previous night. Fortunately, a new Daring Do book was out, and her copy was already waiting for her at the palace library.
She had just settled down and opened her book when Twilight flew in, looking worn and haggard. "What's wrong, Twilight?" she asked.
Twilight sighed. "The Ambassador from Giraffrica died in a tragic accident," she said. "I was at the state funeral with Celestia. His aids...made a scene."
Rainbow winced. "Ouch." She scanned the book's dedication page. "So how'd this ambassador die?"
Twilight grimaced. "He got his neck caught in a clock's gears," she said. "When they found him, it was all twisted up like a pretzel."
"Ouch."
* * * * *
Rainbow examined the sandwich that lay on her plate, a huge grin on her face. She'd done something really wrong and sick and unethical for this meal, and would probably be in a lot of trouble if anypony ever found out, but...
"So worth it," she decided as she took a big bite of grilled cheese and giraffe on pretzel bread.
Author's Note
Inspired by this story.
