Author's Note
This was my first story I deemed "good enough" for public consumption. Hope y'all like it!
Terminal Velocity
An object, when in descent, usually has an acceleration dependent on its mass. If you throw a pen from, say, the sixth floor of a building, the pen won’t break because, believe it or not, in that time, it has not reached its top speed, or, as pencil pushers such as myself would say, its terminal velocity. Believe it or not, a pen would need a few more floors to reach the moment in which the wind resistance and mass proportional to gravity actually equal each other, and stopping the pen would actually make it explode.
As it happens, an unbroken fall from the sixth floor might kill or severely injure a human being, to the point where this person might not walk again.
As my lovers and I fell from almost twice as high, I wondered at the decisions that brought me to this point.
***
As a rule, I always check my work whenever an exploit strikes my fancy. After all, being safe usually trumps being sorry, especially if being sorry means you are dead.
Triple checking, quadruple checking; Imagining worst case scenarios, asking friends for help, bouncing off ideas; in any project, safety is always first, and for good reason too.
An extreme example… spitballing here… the Space Race. Do you have any idea how many tests they needed to do, before even considering sending animals to space? Well, two but… Russians, am I right? And it failed. The dog (R.I.P. Laika) died in space alone in Sputnik2. Doesn’t sound fun, now does it?
Anyway so, needless to say, I like safety, it feels… safe. Which is why I question my sanity when it comes to my choice of love interests.
“It’ll be fine!” said Rainbow Dash earlier this evening, as if it would all, indeed, be fine. “We just need to constantly pump the hot air into the balloon. What could possibly go wrong?”
I bit my lips in an attempt to tone down my exasperation. “Aren’t you supposed to be the one who knows not to say that, Rainbow Dash?” I said, looking longingly at my phone, wishing Twilight or Rarity were here to tell them this is a bad idea. Except even then they might not have listened.
“Relax, Sunny! I brought my Emergency Air Bouncing Ball in case we needed it!” Pinkie said while, in fact, bouncing on the balls of her feet while somehow jumping up and down. I classified that information as a “do not ask” and filed it away in the depths of my mind. Probably to forget and regret asking later.
I asked, “Are you sure this was made to go that high though? Shouldn’t we just, I don’t know, enjoy the view? For as polluted as it is, the Seine actually looks nice at this time of the year.”
To which they responded, almost in unison, “But what fun would that be?” while they packed our stuff, against my will, into our almost completely inflated air balloon.
Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s just an air balloon ride, right? This is Paris, and a trip to Paris is never complete without three, very important things: Visiting the Eiffel Tower, Kissing your future wives, and last but not least, a scenic and unwinding air balloon ride. Normally, I’d agree with all of that, however, not one, but two of the aforementioned lovers just so happened to be thrill seekers by nature.
They’d pulled out all the stops; The balloon company manager, which I’d made a point of calling once they revealed their ‘Surprise Ride with Sunny’ (they’d had the phone number in hand; they know me and I love them so much) had assured me that it was as safe as a ‘simple balloon ride’ could get.
My issue was not with the balloon itself, even though I had no idea of the details or how safe it actually was. I was just aware that while the normal answer was ‘pretty safe’, the combined might of Pinkie “Party” Pie and Rainbow “Danger” Dash could be enough to turn the seemingly safest endeavors into affairs of… questionable safety.
What bothers me till this moment is, “You know your version of fun is potentially deadly right?”
And again, almost in unison they responded, “it’ll be fine!” and that’s when, against my considerably better judgement, I gave in.
I said, “... Fine. And for all our sakes, I hope you two are right.”
They had the gall to chuckle, frustratingly in unison this time.
***
I wish I could say “I told you so” but even if I could, I’d sound like an idiot for going along with it.
To think a small tear could have led to so much misfortune in less than a minute. I actually had the audacity, while in the air, to maybe consider conceding to my lovers that, yes, they were right and I worried for nothing. That had been around the time when everything went wrong.
To be completely fair, it was not their fault that a bird had opened up a tear that had been so small, it shouldn’t have been a problem. Only one bird in existence could possibly have done that.
The Galapagos Large Ground finch has one of the strongest bites in the world, about 70 newtons of force, compared to its body size. Why is this related, you may ask? This was happening in Paris, France; the Galapagos Islands are all the way in Central America; How in the world did that bird get– I took a deep breath. I centered myself. This way of thinking was not helping. I looked down. I might have panicked, just a little.
Just before everything went wrong, I remember seeing Pinkie’s laughter while telling Dash to pump more fire, to go higher. Somehow I could still hear it echo through my panicked thoughts. Or so I thought until I glanced to the side, only to see Pinkie still laughing/screaming with joy as if this wasn’t a fall to certain death.
A few feet to my left was Rainbow Dash, also screaming with what seemed to be joy. I could not comprehend those feelings and combine them with the situation, so I just settled for staring at Pinkie in awe as she inflated something in midair, like a gigantic airbag that expanded itself over the three of us while she twisted in the air to grab me and Dash with a… practiced flourish? I decided that instead of questioning it, I should probably do something and grabbed her hand like a lifeline. Dash did the same, still whooping with unrestrained joy. I figured it was a nice sound; it probably meant we weren’t about to die, right?
And just like that, our falling didn’t reach terminal velocity. We were left dangling over the Seine, with a great view of the Eiffel Tower. “You see, Sunny?” Pinkie said, traces of laughter left in her voice. She was as energetic as ever, maybe even more so, “There was nothing to worry about!”
As much as I disagreed vehemently with that sentence… There was no use being mad at her, and of all the things I could have said, I settled for a chuckle and a sigh, “Is it a reach to tell you to never do that again. Both of you?”
“Yes!” They said, excitedly and in unison.
