The sun was shining brightly in a cloudless sky, the air was clean, crisp and faintly redolent with the scent of harvested crops, and tiny creatures scampered freely about the plains, darting rapidly in and out of their holes in the ground; in other words, it was an utterly revolting day in the foothills. The ground had changed from undergrowth and moss to rolling farmlands as we put distance behind us just as rapidly as was possible, and as if our sudden exodus from our usual home turf wasn’t a difficult and unpleasant enough trek to begin with, my traveling companions simply insisted on making it worse.
“How much longer is this going to take, Meg?” Nasal whining from the left interrupted my careful plotting, again. As always, Alex had insisted that she knew where to go, but when your only option is headlong flight, nobody can really take command. Now that we were no longer in imminent peril of being devoured, though, cooperation had turned into bickering once again. “Because I swear we got turned around when we passed by that town, and if we’re just heading back the way we came, we’ll be sure to run into—“
“I know where we’re going. I told you, I never forget a scent, and it was coming from this direction.” Not to brag, but I know a thing or two about tracking, and when I get ahold of you, you can’t hide from me even if you go to the ends of Equestria. Naturally, then, things should default to me as the leader of our little group, particularly considering that it also grants me a superb taste that my siblings, regrettable gourmands that they are, cannot appreciate. At the moment, I was inclined to forgive them for that and their previous grumbling about food along the way, since anything large enough to fill us would be a suitable meal. “And do you honestly think I could forget what would happen if we stumbled back home? Why we’re coming here? You’d be better off just practicing those lines I gave you, and making sure you get the right tone. We don’t want there to be any…misunderstandings here.”
“Oh, I don’t think they have anything to be worried about, given your track record…” muttered Alex.
“MY track record?!” I rumbled at her, wincing at the pain in my jaw and all the angrier at her for reminding me of it.
“Girls!” Tiss called out urgently, nudging us and then gesturing with her head over the nearest rise.
If one were to look for a definition of “homey”, I imagine they’d find a scene much like the one spread out before us next to the word in the dictionary. Acres upon acres of fruit-laden trees, cradling a hollow with a small farmhouse, barns, and various outbuildings scattered around, and another slightly ramshackle orange house behind it. In the farmyard there appeared to be some sort of large event going on, as tables, hay bales, and even some bits of athletic equipment were set up for the large crowd of ponies milling around, their chatter and music drifting faintly up to where we stood. The overpowering scent of apples, I admit, made me lick my lips.
“Why are there so many of them?” Alex wondered with a frown. “If they had that many to begin with, how did they let that happen the last time, and why didn’t they bring more?” It was a valid question, and worrisome. My plan had depended on their only being perhaps three or four, given the size of the band we saw. “Hmmm…I’m not sure we’d be able to work our usual charm on that many, even with what we’ve practiced…”
“A good point, sister,” I agreed with a sigh. “But we have to think of something, unless you’d prefer to starve to death.” Irritably, we began to pace back and forth from where we were sure we were out of sight.
“Maybe we should just…come back later, when some of them have gone to bed?” Tiss proposed with a worried huff. “In fact, if-if there are any more like the big one from before…we could probably go and look at their town, don’t you think?”
I was about to round on her as a coward, but with her sudden movement she had managed to get precisely in our way, and I felt the three of us slipping, stumbling and catching on a large rock. Before any of us could do more than just utter a startled cry, we’d lost our footings and were already beginning to slide down the steep surface of the hill. Sky, ground and sisters tumbled overhead as we bounced here and there painfully off a rock or a half-submerged root, jostling us all together. Reaching the bottom, we kept rolling, plowing through a stack of hay bales, knocking aside a table full of some sort of baked good, until finally we smacked into an empty cart, sawdust and wood fragments flying everywhere. Instantly, the music stopped somewhere in the background.
Slowly, groggily, we sat up one at a time, and blinking, I saw a sea of guileless pony faces, all colors and sizes, but not a horn to be seen on any of them, nor a pair of wings. They were all fixed directly on us, eyes going wide and white as ghosts. For a long, extremely awkward moment, we stared back at each other in silence, our eyes scanning the crowd until they froze on the small group standing together near the barn door. Orange mare, yellow filly…and an unfamiliar stallion helping an old mare move something inside, frozen in mid-step. Well, I supposed here was our chance, and opened my mouth to speak.
That’s when somepony screamed.
“CHIMERA!”
Instantly, the social gathering turned into a panicked mob, screaming ponies flailing around and knocking things over as they raced to get away, from us, from each other, from anything, kicking up dirt and racing into any shelter they could find. I sighed.
“Well…maybe this is going to be a bit more difficult than I imagined.”
Author's Note
This won't be a long story, but the other chapters should be substantially longer than this. Hopefully, just as a first dip in the water of actually writing fanfiction, it should do--and hope you like it.
