When one is alone in a cave except for a cocoon containing a presumably comatose changeling, one is essentially alone in the cave, period.

Cherry Berry had spent an hour or so listlessly fiddling with plants before walking over to the cocoon. Now she lay with her back against the cool, slightly pliable surface of the cocoon, staring at nothing, just chatting. “… and we ended up having to use the rover to drive kilometers out of our way to get enough rocks to even touch the underside of the ship! Load the rover, drive back, unload the rover, go get more rocks! Again, and again, and again! We were pretty darn tired after that, I can tell you! That’s why it took us two days to build the rock platform for the ship.”

Cherry sighed, leaning a little harder against Dragonfly, who didn’t complain. “Of course, that’s pretty much why I’m here in the cave by myself right now,” she said. “Today they’re cutting the tail off the ship. I just couldn’t stand to watch it. It just… well… it was my ship, you know? Not just another capsule, but a real, purpose-built spaceship that didn’t lose ninety percent of the hull to staging.”

She closed her eyes so she could see better. “I remember the first time I saw it. Twilight Sparkle showed it to me the second time I visited Cape Friendship. It was so lovely, all pink and sleek. It looked like it wanted to jump off the ground all by itself. Of course, it couldn’t, but if Twilight had had enough time, it would have got there.”

She shook her head. “And yet it only got to fly three times, and none of them went quite right, did they? And now it’ll never fly again. It’ll get towed like a caravan wagon, and then it’ll be left here to rust. Just like the rest of this stupid planet. What a horrible way to end.”

Cherry Berry stood up, allowing Dragonfly’s cocoon to slowly return to its normal, not-a-pillow shape. “Any minute now Starlight’s going to use that cutting spell of hers to cut through the engineering deck,” she said. “Faust, it’s like cutting through my own hide. Why not amputate my right hind leg while they’re at it?”

The pink pony flinched. “Ah! They just started! I can feel it!” She rose to her hind legs, tottering around dramatically, as all true Ponyville ponies learned to do from an early age. “Slice! Slice! And the tail section is sliding off the rocks to crash backwards! But that’s not enough! Starlight cuts again! Slice! Slice! Trimming the poor ship down as close as she can! Oh, the tragedy! Such a proud ship laid low by-“

The cave airlock hissed open. “We’re here, Cherry!” Mark shouted in English.

Cherry froze in her overdramatic pose, staring with shock and humiliation at the four people in the airlock. “Wh-wh-what??” she gasped, struggling to shift from the Equestrian she’d been using to speak to Dragonfly. “You said you wouldn’t be here til afternoon! What about cutting the ship?”

“NASA changed their minds,” Mark said. “The heavier the ship is, the less likely the wind will do anything to it. So we just loaded your engine room with scrap metal instead. We’ll remove the tail after the storm.”

“Nahsuh changed their minds??” Cherry snapped. She was going to have to live through this day a second time because Mark’s bosses couldn’t make up their minds about when to cut metal?? She wrestled with the unfamiliar language to find the words, and ended up with nothing better than, “How can you humans be so mean??” Furious, she dropped back to all fours and stormed off down the cave in a cloud of indignation.

Behind her, Mark turned to look at the others, asking, “What got into her?”

Author's Notes:

Good news: wrote 2700 words today.

Bad news: it's split up among four chapters, so I can have a three-day buffer going into the trip to Atlanta for Momocon.

But at least there will be a buffer. For a moment I was afraid there wouldn't be.