To the Moon

"Whose idea was this!?"

--CRAAAASH--

"So, not quite as gentle a landing as I predicted." James sat sagged in his chair.

Looking around, he tried to figure out exactly what had happened.

"Bloody moon and its bloody speed can’t stay bloody constant." He swore repeatedly.

Still swearing like a sailor, James carefully extracted himself from the various belts and buckles holding him down and clambered around till he was standing upright. Well, upright to the moon anyway.

"How in blue blazes did I land upside-down without any obvious damage?"

This was a question and like all questions, it had an answer. Also like most questions that currently plagued James, it's answer was sitting, haughtily, in a book somewhere, jeering at him for his ignorance. Like most books, that book was stuffed in between two other books in The Library, secure in its knowledge that James would never touch it. It was mere coincidence that this particular library happened to be located somewhere not on the moon.

"Damn, where did that come from?" James spoke in his manly man’s voice.

"Wait...." James was proud of his voice, a deep baritone voice, but something was... off.

James could not quite put his finger on what was off, but he had never tried to really notice anything about it before.

But his manly man’s voice seemed to be... missing some of its gravel.

Shrugging it off as another question for the, now getting uncomfortably full, unanswerable book, he turned to the monitors and rotated them to face him properly. Running his eyes over the calculated damages, he grunted in annoyance.

"Why is the coffee machine always the first thing to break?" Grumbling James turned on the outside cameras, to check that he hadn't ended up on mars or inside a space squid. Eyes widening in shock, he stared at the landscape before him: The crater he had crashed landed in was a large, slightly oval shaped plateau, completely surrounded by a sheer cliff face. The kind of cliff face that said: "Hey, you like climbing? Yeah well I like crushing bones into diamond with my teeth."

As if unsatisfied with just this, the top of the cliff had some kind of ...wind? Barrier on top of it, in fact, the whole area was under some sort of bubble. To top it all off, there appeared to be a small lake in the middle, or was it just ice? Sighing James turned to the screens beside him.

Checking the readouts, James did a double take, then a triple take to make sure.

"oxygen levels: zero point three" Jumping into action almost before this had registered in his brain, James quickly tapped several buttons on the screen in front of him, all lapse of trained professionalism gone, replaced by cold determination. The screen flared as a fuse exploded somewhere under him, shining a blinding light for a moment then died, all the screens in the cabin quickly followed. James scrambled over to the older measurement devices that did not need power, but his difficulty in breathing made clear his plight.

"No air, no backup, suit has half an hour... SUIT!" James practically leaped into his space suit, hurriedly doing up the straps and making sure the seal connected. The self-powered suit HUD flashed to life, leaving spots in his vision. James was now holding his last breath as he slammed the visor shut and snapped the seal closed.

He fought for consciousness, slapping the lever beside him to release the suit and activate the automatic life support built into the suit, then took a deep breath of the cool air that blew gently into his face.

Falling to the floor/roof with a mild exclamation of a few choice words, James turned to the door. If he was going to die on the moon, he was going to do it outside, perhaps he could build a deck chair out of the table and some cloth?

For now he settled on heading out.

"Crap! without power, this damned door won’t open and there is no way I can defeat the pressure of space with my bare hands" being a few drinks short of the crazy amounts of bravado he needed to pry the door off, James slumped against it instead. Slowly he brought his hands up to the latch, although there was no way he could pull against the vast expanses of space, there was also no way he could land this lander upside down and live.

"C’mon physics, don't fix yourself yet!" His somewhat crazy statement seemed to work however, as the door ground open without even a hiss of pressure equalizing and/or crushing him into a pulp. Bolstered by this knowledge, James put his boot on the door frame and heaved, pulling the door open with minimal effort all things considered and stood in the airlock chamber.

If James had not been wearing a bullet proof visor over his face, his palm would have met it hard enough to knock stars into his eyes.

Gripping the door frame around him, he delivered a strong, two footed kick to the outer door, slamming it open to the outside....air?

Luna sat inside the eye crater where she had created her new body, then jumped back on her hooves and started prancing around, laughing in the slightly lower than normal gravity as she revelled in the fact that-

"HAHAHA, I can walk, I can run and I can talk too!"

Luna started to trot around the lake, it was larger than she remembered when she was the moon, her sense of scale must be different when she was a large ball of rock. Giggling to herself she slowed to a walk and walked up to the water’s edge, there she paused for a moment before jumping as far into it as she could.

After splashing around in the lake (it seemed only deep enough to come to her stomach no matter where she went) for an hour or so, she noticed another thing her body could be.

"Cold..." Luna shivered. Being cold on the moon was completely preposterous as the temperature should be freezing anyway, maybe the magic she had used to keep the water liquid was somehow affecting the temperature on the surface around it. Shelving the thought for later inspection, Luna focused on the matter at hoof; how to warm up?

Luna decided at that moment, that she wanted to be within the largest, softest and most snug blanket she could dream up.

Luna looked back at her newly formed wings, each feather was as undamaged as a foal’s and with relative ease, she would be able to age them 'till she shed enough to make said blanket. Sitting back down beside the lake, Luna concentrated on her wings, carefully ageing them until enough feathers fell and regrew to make substantial amounts of bedding.

Suddenly, Luna was struck with inspiration. Using each feather, she broke them down into individual strands and wove them into the finest silk ever created, or so she thought. Carefully curling them into a thick, fuzzy sheet of fabric that matched her coat perfectly (obviously). She then crafted the whole thing into a thick hoodie, even putting her cutie mark on the side with a little coloration magic.

Thus equipped, the now adorable Luna wandered around the lake edge to warm up. Glancing up at the dome of air and magic above her, Luna wished to see the light of day once again. Two hours later, Luna had managed to create an allusion of sky and clouds on the inside of the dome, even going so far as to re-create the suns heat for a few minutes. After the heat spell wore off, Luna realized how taxed she really was, for although her magic was now condensed into the space of one pony again and therefore much more powerful for such small scale things as these, she was still the mare of the moon, and its waning seemed to be affecting her more so than normal.

Finding a comfortable spot near the lake, Luna curled up into a ball in her snuggie and fell asleep.