Author's Note
Um, hello! Although this is my first story on Fimfiction, I have been working in the Fanfiction business for much longer.
Nonetheless, I'm far from being the best writer, and openly take criticism (Or even flames). Enjoy this short presentation!
The only Chapter
Snow fell silently on the Equestrian steppe, gathering up into layers on the frostbitten earth. The wind howled around in brief bursts, the currents of chill brushing the flakes on the ground into dune shaped crests and troughs from the occasional terrain irregularities. Considering how it was late December, the worst of old man winter has yet to strike.
Scootaloo trotted down a logging trail leading away from Ponyville towards a wooded area in the West. She finished her homework early today, and despite the sun going down by the time she was going out, she decided to take the rest of the evening off by taking an aimless hike around her village. Although she enjoyed playing with Applebloom and Sweetie Belle while their schedules conforms with one another, such was not the case at the time being.
Besides, she could use some alone time, where she would recollect her own thoughts in peace.
The filly located the hole in the nine foot fencing to the right of the path, which despite intending to keep ponies away from the rail traffic, it was breached anyways, by either some wild animals or a non-conforming citizen. The opening was torn near the edges of the pole at the base, large enough for a filly or a smaller creature to slip through. Furthermore, it was camouflaged by the increasingly deep snowfall, decreasing her chances of getting caught for trespassing on the railway company's property.
Stepping cautiously into the opening and towards the other side, Scootaloo felt the white give in on her hoof, sinking her deeper down into the reference level, to a point where her snout was almost against the wintery substance.
'Possibly from the drainage ravine,' she thought to herself, carefully making a move forwards and feeling her way around the path in front of her, trying to find a relief from the partially unexpected depression in the terrain before she froze up.
Her ears twitched from the holes in the hat, trying to make out the source of the noise. Although it was most likely a stretch from her imagination for as many times as she went here before, her prime instinct was to panic silently.
Instinctively, as if she was caught red handed in doing a major crime, she scrambled forwards towards a slightly wooded area on the hill, cresting the elevation and quickly galloping further into its cover. Her evasive maneuver was followed by a wide U-turn back to where she came up, taking up a prone position for a view from where she would be reasonably concealed from whatever she heard going up her direction.
Or, that's at least what she thought.
A good minute or two passed, with the only distinct noise being the ambient sounds of the wind howling gently past her ears, or her own breathing. No animals, creatures, or ponies following her. Just her own mind deceiving her with the usual set of hallucinations.
'Get a grip of yourself Scootaloo, that happened every time you came here,' she grumbled mentally, lifting herself up from the prone position in the snow, shaking herself quickly to get rid of some that stuck on her scarf and fur.
She reversed her bearing, heading back in the direction of the wooded growth. Although the narrow trail present in the area was covered in at least a foot of snow, she came here enough times to memorize the surrounding area like her own bedroom. Regardless of her following the same path just about a day or two ago, there were practically no signs of anyone passing the area left over from the previous expedition. It was the reason why the filly kept coming back here for her self recollection sessions; it was remote, with nobody to disturb her.
The treeline appeared to get thicker as Scootaloo advanced further down the path, prompting her to duck her head lower a bit to prevent snagging a twig to the eye, or forcing her to push aside some leafless shrubs that were unavoidable. Even when the thickening forest seemed to show no signs of an end, the trees seemingly dissipated in front of an artificially created plain covered in snow, stretching some fifty meters across the treeline towards the small elevation which rested the tracks, and its pack of gravel underneath as support.
The filly trotted over to the side of the tracks, instinctively looking in both directions to check if the coast is clear. Not that she was expecting anypony else to be in a rather remote area, it was more or less of a visual safety precaution before she decided that it was safe to proceed in climbing up onto the tracks and staying on its side.
Cresting the small mound with the speed of a mouse scurrying for its hole, Scootaloo crossed up onto the first pair of tracks, going across the intermission gap before going over the second pair of tracks. She stopped, looked, and listened again, as a safety benchmark, once again. She followed the tracks into the darkness of the night away from the dim lights from the village of Ponyville, with her only source of light being the dim light from Luna's moon.
Even though there was practically nothing special about a dual lane railroad being flanked by forest, with signal and power poles running by its near sides, Scootaloo kept on turning back to this place for whenever she needed to recollect herself. It was a feeling that not even she understands herself; every time when she comes back here, she would always have the feeling that something would happen. Something life changing, as if this was the major spark for a new opportunity. Yet nothing out of the ordinary happens, out of all the times she came.
Not that it really bothered her or anything when she came just to wind down.
She passed the usual landmarks, most noticeably a train signal, some circuitry boxes, and what appeared to be an abandoned campsite with a burnt out campfire. If her parents saw her by now, they would be screaming at her to leave the tracks as quickly as possible and that homeless ponies or changelings would kidnap her. She snickered at the thought, in how parents, or adults, would go that far to ensure the safety of the little fillies. She didn't know if she should appreciate it or not, as in all the helpfulness it may prove to be in keeping their offspring safe, it would also prove to be a largely unnecessary and extremely irritating nagging contest in the meantime of most probabilities.
The pegasus stopped upon noticing that the power and signal poles cut off from here, having their circuits directed underground instead. She never passed this point before, deeming to herself as the returning point in previous hikes up this distance.
Tonight however, she didn't feel like going back home just yet, and decided to exceed her set parameters. Of course she didn't plan on following the tracks all the way to the origin point, but she decided that just this once, she would at least find out what laid ahead from this point on. No actual objective, just the curiosity, supported by the strange gut feeling.
Scootaloo took notice of the pavement next to the railroad narrowing as she advanced, to a point eventually where she was forced to get over the second rail back to the centerline as the sides were getting exceedingly steep for traction. She came to a point where the gravel stopped, being replaced by weather battered steel plates instead. Looking up from the ground away from minding her own step, she was greeted by a railroad bridge, running over a river valley and a highway.
Mindlessly, she trotted towards the midpoint length of the bridge, hoofsteps echoing gently on the hollow metal sheets of the bridge. It wasn't designed to walk ponies, but was still sufficient in strength to sustain one. At this point, she could say that she threw all the rules of trespassing and safety right out the window.
She attentively leaned on the railing, not asserting too much force on the thin metal construction, observing the landscape from both directions of the bridge. To the slight left of her ran the new Highway 4, running from the outskirts of Canterlot towards Baltimare. As motor transport was still sparse from the widely dispersed population in Equestria, there would be the distinct lack of them during the later hours of evening, with only the occasional outliers passing the bridge in the span of every few minutes.
Parallel to the highway and directly under Scootaloo ran the Ponyville river, with a significantly larger flow rate than compared to the view in the village. Of course, the said was not perfectly parallel; there are turns in the route where the motorway has to pass over the bank of water. It had not yet fully frozen in the wakening weeks of winter, with most of the ice being concentrated at the side banks rather than across the entire span, where river current was clearly visible to the naked eye.
Scootaloo glanced over, taking a lengthy look on both bounds of the bridge. Behind her was the northbound, where the terrain features were increasingly hilly, and the section of the highways had their roadlights exchanged with reflecting panels and road signs as they passed through the depressions and elevations of the hills, running further into the cleared out strip of forest. It almost appeared to her that this bridge was some sort of a border, marking the demarcation between what was considered urban and rural.
To the contrary of that was the southbound view, with spaced out road lights running onto the more developed population centres, most noticeably the pearly white capital of Canterlot perched on the side of the mountain. Every other visible light in the valley not running in lines were from the developing population centres of Pleasant Valley, which akin to almost every urban centre in Equestria, was experiencing growth in the near exponential values, in terms of population, production and GDP values in the wake of early industrialization.
The pegasus stood there, with minutes passing by as if they were near tantamount to seconds. The wind blew the snow onto her scarf and hat, passing through her scarf and tail and pushing them like a windsock of some sort. Her eyes lowered slightly, before she squeezed them shut and mentally counted for a few seconds and opening them again. She was still there, the cold wind and snow ticking her with the cold and precipitate. Nothing was changing.
It was one of the few times in Scootaloo's short life in which she met the stark realization that time does fly. She can't remember even a quarter of what happened in her life, and yet she was already eight years old. She had seen university and senior high school questions once or twice from Twilight Sparkle; Though University was still about ten years away, it wouldn't be long at this rate.
Then there was the realization that the world was much too big for her to explore. She had walked for about an hour or so, and yet she was only at the outskirts of her town, merely two kilometres away from where she stands right now. She remembered boasting of getting her cutie mark in exploring earlier, but the taste of reality made her realize that as much as she wanted to live such a life, the probability of such succeeding would be nigh impossible.
The stream of reality proceeded, this time going about her own life and history. Some of the most pleasant memories she experienced passed by her mind, reminding her that she has lived and is still living a good life. But then there were questions; Why was she here? Why a pegasus? Why was she herself? Why can't she-
Scootaloo's train of thought derailed upon hearing that familiar rumbling of tracks and the sound of a hollow diesel engine closing in the distance, with its simple presence of it shaking her down to the very core.
The train's coming!
Quickly getting back from the railing, she looked both directions, seeing the torch of the headlights in both directions of rail. She had to act quickly, and any delay may as well prove fatal.
Standing on the side was right out the window, as even Scootaloo knew that railway bridges were merely wide enough for the trains on both sides to pass through. Trying to get to either end of the bridge to outrun the trail would take about a minute, and she barely had a third of that.
She had seen Rainbow Dash and some extreme sports players buckle down all loose clothing, manes and tails before laying prone facing the direction of the train. While they knew what trains they were dealing with, Scootaloo didn't; she had no idea of how many hoses, chains and other dangerous items were underneath the hundreds of cars. She had seen a train accident before, where the officers had to ask the train conductor for the victim's appearance, as she was reduced to a mere pulp by the train's overpass. Although dying was one thing for her, getting cut to pulp was another story, and she wasn't planning on trying to give the train engineer any guilt over her death.
The sound was getting louder, and the lights were getting brighter. She didn't have much time; the train engineer already saw her at this point, and only covered his eyes in guilt, as there was no way to put a cargo train, or any train, to a stop in a span of several hundred meters.
Climbing over the railing, she lowered herself downwards, trying to make her way towards one of the truss beams, where she could hopefully climb down to a more manageable position. It was a last resort, as it was perhaps the only way of her escaping with a reasonable chance of survival.
Unfortunately for Scootaloo, she was also right in the middle of two truss beams as well, a realization that only became apparent when she hung her forehooves on the railing. She was stuck here, as getting back onto the bridge would put her in position of getting run over again.
She glared back at the train, which was only seconds away from her by now. A grim thought and decision passes her mind, and she simply closed her eyes in acceptance.
She releases her grip from the railing, with the train's lower deck just mere centimetres from slicing her hooves off. Her instinct saved her limbs, but sent her whole body off the bridge, accelerating towards the earth some one hundred meters away.
It didn't bother her in the least- she was past the afraid phase. Instead, she cracked a grin on her face, growing wider before eventually starting to laugh softly at herself.
“Even if I live through a crippling injury to tell the tale, life would lose what I enjoy the most; Freedom.” she whispered to herself in a voice that she could barely hear over the wind crossing her ears, and the fading sound of the train on the bridge. Her only regrets were that she would not be able to say goodbye to her friends, family, and enemies. Other than that, she had nothing to lose.
'Everypony dies someday, right?' she thought lucidly, 'I guess I had my time. It was great while it lasted.'
Her life played back again in her mind, bringing up some memories that she had no event of remembering. From her mother giving birth to her all the way up to the events leading her to toss herself over the bridge, it was in such sharp detail that it felt almost scary. A life review played in real time, compressed to the span of only seconds. Even as she acknowledged her death coming, her mind would never cease to amaze her.
Bracing herself for impact out of complete instincts, Scootaloo instead felt herself slow down and eventually halt just above the ground level, where the river's water current was right up against her ears. She felt herself being lifted up, albeit much more slowly, in an almost alien sensation.
'Did I die? Am I going to heaven?' she snickered at the thought, in the fit of cliche that it sounds and makes.
She felt herself continuing to rise, hearing the trains on the railroad getting progressively louder, eventually sounding tantamount to her standing right next to the rails.
'No, I'm not dead. Something doesn’t sound right.'
Reluctantly, she cracked open one eye, then the other eye, and looked around. The train was there, still passing its dozens of cars across the rail bridge. Her body was still there, and upon physically feeling herself, determined that she was unhurt, and that even her hat and scarf were still in place. However, she was not on the bridge, rather beside it, hovering on the thin fluid of air as the carts roared past, with the world and environment being all around her in this new form of freedom.
She was finally flying.
