Pilot's Story

Chapter 22: In Times of Peace: Part 2

"Batteries are connected, we've got power." James announced from the flight deck as the aircraft's interior lighting came up. The voltmeters slid up into the green arc as he toggled the aircraft's individual electrical systems up.

"Navigation looks good... despite the complete lack of nav beacons," Eva commented dryly from the co-pilot's seat, "fuel tanks are at about fifty percent... at least that's less weight to dig out. Not getting any obvious signs of malfunction."

James nodded and slid his headset on and keyed up, "Tommy, looks like those relays are holding up so far, I'm going to try to extend the flaps. Hell, we might even get this thing out of here today." He reached his hand out and pulled the flap actuator, there was a slight hesitation, and then the droning of the actuators reverberated throughout the flight deck.

"Slight hesitation, not bad. The man knows his craft," Eva commented as she checked the tire pressure indicator, "tires are good, if we can get this thing unstuck we shouldn't have much trouble getting it airborne. Shame Rarity couldn't be here to see the fruits of her labor."

"Well, we've still got Tommy's girlfriend to help get this thing unstuck, that unicorn magic can do some pretty wild things." James laughed as he pulled his headset off, "I'm gonna head down and help chain the truck up so we can give pulling this thing out a shot."

"His girlfriend eh? Don't let Trixie hear you say that about her." Eva commented with a chuckle as she started powering back down, she'd never had to jump start a turboprop before, and she didn't want to chance it now. "I'll be down in a minute, just gonna button everything up."

~~

"She hasn't answered my letters in days, Rainbow Dash! She left Canterlot and nobody has seen her since! Of course I'm going to panic!" Twilight shrilled as she paced back and forth through the library, to Dash's agitation.

"So something probably came up, she's the Princess, Twilight, she can take care of herself, I'm sure she's fine," Dash insisted as she rubbed her hoof along the bridge of her nose. A panicking Twlight was worse than a drunk Pinkie ten times out of ten.

Twilight whirled around on her, "Fine? Fine?! Dash, this is not just something that came up! Eva shows up, her friends show up, those metal things showed up, all inside of a month! Now the Princess is off doing who knows what!" The lavender mare's eyes turned glassy for a minute before she sighed and sat down against the wall.

Dash walked over and sat next to her and put a comforting hoof on her friend's back, "Look, I'm not gonna say that this isn't really weird, because it totally is, but Eva's a good pony and her friends seem alright... even if they have been hanging out with Trixie."

Twilight seemed to calm down a little, "It's not just that, I was talking to Pinkie, she hasn't been able to get a few of her shipments in for a few days, and nopony seems to know why. It's like that all over town, little things, scheduled deliveries not being met, and the courier companies have no idea why!"

Dash's ears drooped a little as her thoughts drifted back to the flying metal spheres. 'probes' Tommy had called them. "So... Do you think it's more of those 'probe' things?" she asked.

"I hope not but the coincidence is hard to ignore isn't it?" Twilight pressed as she got back to her hooves. This close, and now that she'd slowed down, Dash finally got a look at her. Her eyes were bloodshot, her mane unkempt, Dash had seen this before.

"You haven't been sleeping." It wasn't a question.

"I had eight hours of sleep," Twilight defended with a frown.

"How many days ago?"

"...three," Twilight admitted in defeat, her ears dropped and she sat down again, "Is it that obvious?"

"It's pretty obvious. Twi, go to bed, you need it. I'll see what I can find out, okay? If I find anything out and I need you I'll come get you alright?" Dash offered as she waved a hoof towards Twilight's bedroom.

Twilight raised her hoof and opened her mouth to protest "...yeah you're probably right." She turned for the stairs, swaying slightly from fatigue, "You'll tell me if anything important comes up, won't you Dash?"

"I promise, get some sleep okay?"

~~

"No, run the cable around the tree!" Tommy yelled at his brother as he stormed across the field. six hundred feet of winch cable lay coiled in a pile next to the truck while James attempted to lash a pulley to a tree.

"I'm working on it, it's not my first day ya know!" James yelled back. He grabbed tight onto the cable as he spun the ratchet on the u-bolt to secure the cable. "Why don't you go figure out where we're gonna lock onto the plane and let me fumble around blindly as I'm sure you must think I do when you're not around!"

Trixie eyed the two as she walked over to Eva, her left ear pivoted towards the quarreling brothers. "Are they always like this?" she asked the elder pegasus.

"Only on days that end in 'y'," Eva said with a rueful smile, "Now that the shock and stress has worn off they're back to bickering. Honestly I'm surprised they lasted this long without getting at each other's throats."

Trixie looked perturbed by the information her ears fell a little bit as she turned back to Tommy and James, who were gesticulating violently while yelling, she couldn't actually pick out any of the words. She seemed uncomfortable with the commotion, "So, they don't get along?"

Eva laughed and put her hoof on the unicorn's shoulder, "No, they get along like brothers do I'd guess. This just happens sometimes, they don't mean anything by it, it's... just an outlet," she explained. "So why did you want to come along? I'd have thought you had enough excitement lately."

"Trixie is... That is to say, I am not ponyville's most favorite pony, I did a few... potentially mean things to a few ponies and... well I feel a lot more welcome here than I do there," she said while digging at the ground with her forehoof, her ears were still drooped.

Eva frowned. 'No matter where or when you are, it seems like the people are always the same.' "Hey, don't worry about that alright? You seem like a nice enough pony, I'm sure everything will work out in the end, Twilight is a pretty decent sort, and so are her friends," she reassured the other pony.

Trixie idly noted that the fight seemed to have ended and the pair of brothers were running the cable back and forth between the two pulleys, one mounted to the tree and the other to the plane across the field. "Twilight and her friends are who I was horrible to," she explained while continuing to hoof the grass.

Eva rubbed the back of her head with a fetlock, "Ah... yeah that could be rough..." She stared at the plane stuck in the mud before smiling, "but hey you know, Twilight and her friends were pretty nice to you when we were in the library, and at the hospital. It's not hopeless!"

Trixie cocked an eyebrow at Eva's apparent enthusiasm, all thoughts of her own unhappiness pushed to the wayside in light of her companions uncharacteristic cheeriness. "Laying it on a little thick?" she asked flatly with a blank stare.

"That's entirely probable, it's been a long time since I had to give a pep talk. Still, not worth worrying about right now, if they could forgive me, they can forgive you," she explained with a shrug. Her ears perked up as she heard the engine on the truck starting, she turned her head.

The winch cable was drawn out of the spool on the front of the truck, attached to the wire looped through the block and tackle shackled to a thick ancient tree. The other end of the wire was latched onto the rear of the L-100, and smoke was steadily rising from the stack on the side of the truck.

"I feel like this is going to end in tears," Eva deadpanned as she heard the truck's engine throttle up and the winch drum started to turn, pulling the slack out of the cable and putting tension on the pulleys. The plane jerked slightly and the engine in the truck lugged down as the cables let out 'twang' as they became taut.

"The mud is like a suction cup..." Trixie noted as she watched the truck struggle with the cable, actually sliding forward in the grass despite the wheels being stationary while the cables groaned and the plane stayed stuck.

Eva nodded, "Yeah, we're gonna have to try something else before they end up breaking something. If there was some way to break the suct--" she was cut off as the unicorn stepped forward, her horn ablaze.

"Trixie can fix this!" she exclaimed as she broke into a run, "keep pulling!"

James looked at the sprinting pony from across the field, and then over to Eva, raising his hands in confusion.

Eva replied with a shrug and gestured over towards the truck, giving a 'go' signal with her hoof.

James passed the signal on to Tommy, and the engine in the truck revved up higher, increasing the load on the winch as Trixie finally made it over to the side of the aircraft.

There was a sound not unlike a whip-crack and Eva felt her ears pop uncomfortably, she shook the feeling out of her head and listened as the pitch of the truck's engine dropped. She turned her head towards the plane and saw it steadily inching out of the mud and onto the hard packed ground behind it.

Trixie was jumping around in excitement, though Eva couldn't hear anything she was saying over the sound of the engine and winch howling as they extracted the multiple thousand pound aircraft. Trixie stopped and turned back to the plane as a loud moan filled the air, her horn flared and another whip-crack filled the clearing, and again the struggle eased.

The rear tires of the plane had finally risen up to the surface and were rolling steadily across the hard dirt, shedding mud as they rolled along. Finally, the engine slowed and the whining decreased as the nose gear rolled out of the muck and the airplane easily coasted to a stop, having moved about two hundred feet backwards from where it had settled into the marsh originally.

Eva trotted over to the unicorn and immediately noted the rather smug expression on the latter's face, she wasn't going to begrudge her that, she'd just done something to move a forty ton aircraft. "What did you just do?" Eva asked with a half smile and a raised eyebrow, "my ears are still ringing, but that was pretty incredible."

Trixie's smug grin turned into a smirk as she flipped her mane over her shoulder, "Well you said 'if only there was some way to break the suction' so... I teleported packets of air into the mud under the plane to break the suction!"

Eva whistled, "wow!"

Trixie beamed, "It is just a minor example of Trixie's incredible skill."

"No, that's not what I mean. It was more of a 'wow Tommy's really rubbing off on you' kind of a whistle," Eva explained with a smirk.

Trixie harrumphed her annoyance and frowned.

"Hey, if you're done flirting with Tommy's girlfriend, we've got to clean the crud out of the undercarriage before we even think about flying this thing out of here," James chided as he jogged over to the pair, "let's get it going, I don't wanna be out here all night."

~~

Rainbow Dash glided through the sky in the dusk. She'd heard nothing in town of any substance, it was the same story over and over, missed shipments, packages not arriving, missing couriers. The more she heard, the more she thought Twilight was actually on to something, but nothing actually gave her a lead to go on, so she flew.

The road was a thin line below her, high as she was in the sky, but her keen vision made that irrelevant; she may not have been able to count the stones in the road, but she could count every pony she'd seen on it. She was about to turn back for ponyville when she caught a glint of the setting sun reflecting off something in the distance.

She descended, picking up speed as she shed altitude, closing in on the glint. Whatever was giving it off was moving closer to the road. She dropped under the cloud deck moving roughly twice as fast as she'd been moving before when the tingling in her ears started. There was a small caravan in front of her down on the road, and the reflective object was closing in on it from the tree line.

Everything clicked in her mind and she turned to the left and pumped her wings, screaming as she dove for the object, hoping the ponies in the caravan would hear, "Get down!"

Author's Note

apologies if the writing seems a little anemic, big things are planned I'm just... having a hard time getting there.

and, as always, if you like this, you'll like the other stuff I'm writing too, so go click stuff on the side bar!