Gilda sat on a cloud, staring at the claws which held the photograph. Her claws, she noted, seemed to handle pony things better than ponies could; she looked at the appendage very closely, and inspected every little detail.
Yep. Her claws were pretty awesome, she decided. The way they went around things with such speed, and such agility; the way they worked together, curling around things without the slightest hesitation, acting as if they were one single thing even though they were so different.
The way they went so wonderfully together, fitting next to each other when they couldn’t even be seen and letting instinct take over when they should.
“Hey, Gilda!”
She whipped her head around, and became aware only then of the devastatingly loud sound of candyshop-component-derived stable-altitude turbines. The pink mare attached to them grinned enormously and waved, her entire body seeming almost to twitch with glee.
The photograph was very quickly tucked under her wing. “Whad’ya want, dweeb?”
She rolled her eyes and batted her hoof. “Oh, nothing! I was just flying over to Canterlot and I just saw you up here on the way and I thought ‘hey, isn’t that Gilda?’ and you were looking all depressed so I made this and then you were looking over that picture with you and Dash and—”
“Wait, hold up!”
“Okay!” Pinkie promptly held her hooves up.
Gilda put her palm against her face and took a deep sigh. “Right. First thing, I totally was not looking at that picture. Why’d I look at a picture of some lame pony? I was looking at my claws.” She poked a talon up. “See?”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, y’know! It’s kind of obvious your claws’re a metaphor for your relationship! It’s too bad my name wasn’t Middle Pie, or you’d be able to turn that into a metaphor too!” She seemed particularly pleased with her little deduction.
Gilda huffed and stuck her two Middle Pies up. “Stuff it and leave me alone, loser.”
Pinkie Pie tilted her head a bit, uncomprehending. “But you’re not happy yet! Come on, let me throw you a party! They’ve got really good cakes in Canterlot, you kn—”
“I said,” she said, trodding over towards Pinkie and rearing her arm back, the talons folding inwards, “Leave me alone!”
And she promptly did something incredibly stupid.
She swiped at Pinkie’s machine, hoping to drive her down as she had before—but she did not realise the complexity of candy-based propulsion systems, and found her talons very quickly stuck in the buoyancy compensator. “What the—”
There wasn’t very much time to complete the sentence; she promptly found herself pulling two gravities of acceleration upwards, and even her powerful throat wasn’t strong enough to manipulate the air as it pummelled its way out her lungs.
She coughed, and over the roar of the turbines, she managed to scream. “What did your stupid machine do, dweeb?”
Pinkie didn’t seem to be having any problems with the acceleration. “Just a minute! Gotta fix this!”
Gilda began to take deep breaths as the atmosphere begun to thin; she’d been in this situation before, although with far more control. In her anger and fear, as the air faded entirely, Gilda very quickly did something only slightly less stupid than sticking her claws into the turbine itself; she jammed her hand into the orientator, and found it just as stuck.
With a sickening lurch, they turned to what was coincidentally the perfect angle to capitalise on Equestria’s gravity—in less than a fraction of a second.
The griffon, if she’d been thinking straight, would have been glad she hadn’t eaten breakfast that day.
A sudden shout came from the mare attached to her; to her side, she could see smaller cylinders poking out of the sides. She was fairly sure that she’d never seen those before. “Oops!”
She struggled to look upwards. “Oops?”
“We turned around somehow and I kinda accidentally hit the pulsejet depl—”
Her sentence was drowned out by the incredible sound as a vapour cone formed around them, the Mach cone forming as a wave of pink, brown and white burst from them to accompany the sound. If not for her robust physiology, Gilda would have had her eardrums burst quite spectacularly; as it was, she only wished that they would.
“Woo-hoo!” Pinkie’s voice seemed to be amplified by the Mach cone. “This is so cool!”
“Get me off this thing!”
Pinkie didn’t seem to hear her, but she certainly had the same intention. “Alright,” she said, somehow contemplative even in the storm of sound and acceleration, “What if I—” She rested her hoof on what appeared to be a control panel.
“Hurry up!” She kneed upwards, trying to prod Pinkie into doing it quicker; she was beginning to see darkness at the edge of her vision as blood forced its way down her struggling veins, starting to pool in her legs.
The mare jerked up in shock, and her hoof landed on a button that Gilda couldn’t see; larger structures seemed to deploy from the turbines, around the pulsejets.
“Oops! I hit the —”
That was when Gilda blacked out.
—
Somewhere in lower orbit, two foreign beings looked over the world the ponies called Equestria.
“Pacifistic, non-senescent monarchy—”
“Pacifistic?”
“Indeed, sir. Not a war for a thousand years, from what we’ve gleaned.”
It gave an approximation of a grin, its flat face contorting very slightly. “Perfect. Their gems are fungal, correct?”
“They share a complete resemblance to ours in every respect but their method of proliferation. An analysis of native wildlife shows that some consume it wholesale.”
“Very acceptable.”
“Captain, I think the fact that this planet has sapient, immortal ponies and dragons is more important than—”
“Sir!” Sounds of footsteps resounded from the metal floor. “Sensors have detected what appears to be a ramjet-propelled missile heading on our trajectory!”
The one they called ‘captain’ raised on its alien skull what seemed to be a sort of bushy, black outgrowth—a smaller version of the almost bald mane he kept.
“Pacifistic, Madison?”
—
Aliens, however, were only the second-most-important thing in Pinkie’s mind as she looked frantically for a way to slow down; they had already crossed, by her estimation, a bajillion miles, gravity pushing them out like a slingshot. Not even Rainbow Dash could fly that fast. She tapped aimlessly at the control panel, wondering what she ought to do.
As if on cue, her construction did the job for her; the candy-cane ramjets began to melt from their own heat, the congealed sugar burning up and falling off. It wasn’t very long before the pulsejets followed, followed by the turbines and the rest of the machinery; Gilda went free, falling—’falling’—very slightly away from Pinkie.
Pinkie breathed a sigh of relief as she realised that now she was just orbiting the planet at several times the speed of sound without anything except air, her belly and Gilda standing between her and the solid ground. That solved one problem.
It was about then she realised that she didn’t so much breathe a sigh of relief as much as she had the air sucked out of her lungs by the semi-vacuum she found herself in.
Beginning to gasp deeply for air, she tried to think as hard as possible about what exactly could get her out of this situation; as she entered space along with the unconscious griffon, she found her problems had—once again—decided to work themselves out.
As she opened her eyes for a second, the moisture boiling away, she found herself looking at what appeared to be an enormous metal wall hurtling towards her at atmospheric escape velocity.
That was when Pinkie blacked out.
Pinkie Pie rubbed her head and blinked her eyes. As far as she could tell, she was somewhere red and shiny; a tiny, darkish room only about two times taller than her, a huge hole gaping out into the strangely bluish-tinged maw of space in front of her.
“Oooh. That was so fun,” she said to no one in particular as she put a hoof up on an enormous dangling cable to pull herself up onto her feet. “But it hurt so bad.”
“Not as much as I'm gonna hurt you.”
A series of claws struck out from behind her and smashed into the floor, metal shrieking as she carved it.
“Oh, hey, Gilda!” Pinkie said, leaning on her back and hanging a hoof over her shoulder, quickly back in top form. “We're alive! Funny how that works, right? I mean, you'd think going at es—”
Gilda swiped around and tried to stab Pinkie, managing to lacerate her shoulder quite thoroughly. “Stand still so I can cut you, dweeb!”
Pinkie stood still in front of her, looking up and thinking to herself. “Ooh! Like a hacksaw? Why do they call it a hacksaw if you don't hack with it?”
“You're not even—” Gilda swiped out, leaving several scratches on a black and blue spot, “—quoting the movie—” She cut a hole in a cable, sending severed wires flying, “—right!”
And with that, she slammed her claws at full force into something very important, and quite suddenly she found her face filled with a vision of Pinkie Pie's flank.
The pain came about a second later.
“Whoa, Gilda, how'd you make gravity turn that way? I didn't think even I could do that!”
She only screamed in response.
—
Lyra and Bon-Bon laid underneath the clear day sky on a grassy plain; they were close enough to the Everfree to see the beauty of the uncontrolled clouds, the usual overseer of their weekly jaunts.
“So,” Bon-Bon said carefully, shaking her head very slightly, “You honestly think humans exist?”
Lyra grinned. “Uh-huh! They're flying in space with their spaceships spreading science and progress!”
“Look, Lyra, I'm your best friend, and I'm okay with you being a broman—”
Lyra jumped up, shaking her head. “I'm not a broman, silly. I'm an afrosister!”
“You can't even jump that hi—” Bon-Bon interrupted herself, putting her hoof up to her head once more. “Look, look. I'm your friend, and I'm okay with you being an afrosister, but you've got to understand that humans aren't real.”
“But Merry Curie is my waifu!” She put her hooves on Bon-Bon's shoulders, shaking her violently. “If she doesn't exist, I have no reason to live!”
The shaking put Bon-Bon's eyes into a holding pattern over her superior orbital fissures; she shook her head and forced a sphenosteoynchronous orbit before raising an eyebrow. “Wasn't Flowers Nightingale your 'waifu' last week?”
“No, silly, that was Richie Nyx.”
Bon-Bon would have replied if not for the fact that her eardrums had just done the courtesy of filtering out a the sound of an enormous hunk of metal trying to compensate for a decaying orbit, engines billowing streams of fire.
As the enormous thing came slowly down towards them, she leaned over and hugged Lyra tight, pressing herself up against her as close as possible. She could see Lyra's lips moving excitedly, and she pushed her ear up against her lips.
“This is just like one of my fanfics!”
Bon-Bon'd never felt quite so much regret for an action in her entire life.
—
As gravity finished its civil dialogue with momentum and reasserted its authority, Pinkie Pie found herself falling from the prone Gilda and roughly down the hole she had created, hearing Gilda slam into the metal behind her; she landed in a heap on the gentle grass, a few metres away from the charred and broken earth besides her.
Pinkie looked up to see a terrified earth pony and a breathtaken unicorn, neither very far from relieving themselves.
“Oh hi, girls!”
Bon-Bon, being an earth pony, had the misfortune of recovering first. “Did Lyra ask you to get this thing down here, Pinkie?”
“Of course not! Don't be a silly filly. I mean, Lyra would never want me to put thousands of ponies' lives in danger just to fulfil her childish fantasy of possibly meeting the creatures of her disturbingly detailed fantasies that she tells everyone about all the time, would she?” Pinkie grinned widely.
Lyra, by then, was running her hooves all over the metal hull. “Oh, Celestia! You got a human spaceship! Look! There's human words and everything! This is the greatest thing you've ever done, Pinkie Pie!”
Bon-Bon shook her head, looking over to the rather enormous thing; “What is it, Pinkie?”
“I have nooo idea!”
Lyra squeed in delight “Humans! Look, Bon-Bon! I told you they were real!”
Bon-Bon managed to turn around just as she heard the very sudden and very loud sound of gunfire, seeing things that looked vaguely like Lyra's objects of admiration holding what looked like long, thick black sticks pointing up into the air.
“Ooh! Look, they've got muskets! They must be protecting Prince Richie!” She took a deep breath, seeming almost to faint at the thought. “What if Prince Richie's here?”
Bon-Bon stepped back a bit.
Pinkie hopped in place. “Oooh! It's a whole new species! I wonder if they like cake? Don't be silly, Pinkie, of course they like cake! Who doesn't like cake?” She promptly began to hop towards them and promptly was filled with holes.
Bon-Bon screamed in terror. “Pinkie!”
Lyra took a deep breath, standing up on two legs and shoving her hooves clumsily over her mouth. “Oh, dear sweet Richie Nyx! This isn't just like one of my fics, it's like a darkfic! I'm downvoting this!” She seemed to search physically for a downvote button, tapping furiously at the edges of her ambit.
“Come on!” Bon-Bon said, tugging at Lyra's hoof, dragging her away as the men drew closer.
“Yeah,” Pinkie said, hopping besides them, “We've gotta hurry and warn Ponyville before they hurt everypony!”
Bon-Bon nodded. “Just what I was thinking, Pinkie.”
She stopped in her tracks—Lyra toppling over her face and into the grass—and looked to her side to see a grinning pink mare. “Wait. Pinkie?”
Pinkie bounded ahead. “Hurry up!”
A series of convenient gunshots split the air; Bon-Bon quickly picked Lyra back up and began to canter.
She'd deal with it later.
—
Gilda shook her head and moaned in pain as she forced herself to her feet; the hole was certainly big enough for her to come in, but clearly not big enough for her to get out.
“When I get my claws on that little dweeb, I swear—”
A heavily-accented, almost-incomprehensible voice came over the loudspeakers; Equestrian, definitely, but far from it. “You are to have of more big things for doing, gryphon.”
Her eyes darted around the constrained space; she could hear the echoes. The voice was clearly physical. At least she could be sure Pinkie's antics hadn't got her skull beat up too hard. “Who in Tartarus is that?”
“An friend. Now, you listen near.”
“Oh, Tartarus no I'm not. Get the heck away from me before I claw you.” She put her claws up, happy as always to possibly put herself in an even worse predicament somehow.
“I am to know of what you are in position, and of air of yours—I can take away now.”
“Yeah, right.”
It became slightly harder to breathe where she was, and the ludicrous threat, even in all of its utterly butchered Equestrian, began to sound very real. “Alright, alright! Stop it!”
She immediately felt the air coming back, and took a few deep breaths before speaking again. “Alright. I'll do whatever you say, you crazy mule. Happy?”
“Super happy. Now, listen closely.”
She listened closely.
