Later that evening, he startled Twilight when she saw him writing with his fetlock grasping the quill

“Well, I already know how to write, and my tongue and lips were getting tired, so I decided to try to write with my hoof,” he explained. He pointed with his other hoof, “This is like the tip of my finger.” He pointed at his fetlock joint, “and this is my knuckle.” He indicated the big bone that was next, “This is my palm. And this is my wrist.” He pointed much farther up his foreleg.

He grinned at her and held up his fetlock-held quill. “This is like holding a pen in the palm of my hand instead of with my fingers.” He frowned. “I don’t have nearly as much control as I used to. I have to move my whole arm to write, but it’s so much easier than that mouth-writing,” he concluded.

“Really?” She came over and inspected how he was holding his quill. Books started to fly over and a moment later they were both looking at a drawing of a pony’s foreleg and comparing it to a drawing of a dragons “hand.”

“You’re right!” she said excitedly. “You’ll have to show this to Cheerilee, this might be a new and better way to write!”

He stared at his hoof. “It would be even easier if I had something I could fit onto my hoof to hold the pen. Then I’d only have to move my hoof instead of my leg. It’d make it much easier and faster!”

A spoon came flying out of the kitchen. A minute later, with the help of a couple of sticking and bending spells, Harry was writing much better than he had been, and almost as well as he used to in Little Whinging Primary.

Harry grinned happily. No more staying after school learning to write all over again.

Unfortunately, Harry discovered on the next day, Miss Cheerilee disagreed. While she allowed him to write how he wanted, she insisted he learn how to mouth-write, just in case he ever hurt his right foreleg. This afternoon lesson would be the last one, but she did tell him she planned to test him periodically. And have Twilight work with him in the evenings.

To Harry’s surprise, after finishing practice mouth-writing that afternoon, the three fillies were waiting for him.

“We thought you might like to join us in crusading today,” said Sweetie Belle.

“Yeah,” said Apple Bloom, “We’re almost finished with our siege engine!”

“Cutie Mark Crusaders Mass Destruction Engineers! YAY!” shouted Scootaloo.

Harry stared at the three ponies. “Ookkkaaaay,” he said slowly. Were they pretending they were ancient warriors or something?

“Come on,” Scootaloo said, turning and heading for a scooter with a small wagon behind it. The other two quickly hurried after her and hopped into the wagon. Harry followed a bit slower, taking steps carefully.

So, this was the contraption that they had used to convey him to the hospital. The scooter was surprisingly familiar, just not as tall and much longer than the ones he was familiar with — not unreasonable considering the fillies were longer than they were tall and needed the extra foot-space.

One leg at a time, he climbed into the wagon, which was barely large enough for the three of them. The other two didn’t seem to mind the close quarters at all, so Harry tried to ignore his uncomfortableness at being in close contact with others. And wearing no clothes.

Scootaloo gave a solid push with her right-rear leg and started flapping her wings at an incredible rate. That, Harry realized, was the odd buzzing sound he had heard that first day. And it was a very easy method for moving the scooter. Much better than periodically pushing with one foot. And allowed faster speeds, as he discovered to his dismay.

“We’re goin’ ta my place,” Apple Bloom explained as they hurtled through the town at an insane speed for such a small vehicle.“That’s whar we’re building the tree-book-shed.” Harry gripped the sides of the wagon tightly as they bounced up, down, left and right, and sometimes on two wheels even though they were going straight. He briefly considered grabbing the wagon-side with his mouth for additional safety, but was afraid he might lose a few teeth on the bigger bumps. The ride became progressively worse as they left the road and started across the orchard in Sweet Apple Acres.

A few terror-filled minutes later they coasted to a stop beside something Harry had only seen in books. A trebuchet on wheels — a stone-powered catapult with a sling.

It had a horizontal rectangular frame, with one set of three poles on each side forming the vertical supports — which had to be twelve feet high, at the shortest. They held up the throwing arm, which towered over them by another twelve feet. Attached to the bottom of the arm, barely above the bed of the trebuchet, was a large empty bucket. A rope hung from the top of the arm. Midway down the rope was what looked like a heavy-weave section of cloth. The end of the rope dangled into a trough, centred between the supports, which ran the length of the rectangular base. Carved into the side was “Made by Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and Apple Bloom — Cutie Mark Crusaders.”

Harry slowly walked around the device, staring in disbelief. He turned to the fillies who were at the edge of the path separating the property from the forest. They were filling Scootaloo’s wagon with rocks as fast as they could find them.

“Where did you get this?!”

Scootaloo looked up and said, “Come on, help us fill the bucket.”

Harry walked over to them and half-heartedly picked up a fist-sized rock in his fetlock and dropped it in the wagon. “Where did you get that?” he repeated.

“We built it!” Apple Bloom said proudly after dropping another rock in the wagon.

“And let me tell you the arithmetic on how big to make it was a killer!” added Sweetie Belle, adding another rock.

Harry just stared at them, speechless. Finally, he said, disbelievingly, “You built it?”

“Yep.” came the chorus, accompanied by the thuds of three more rocks dropping into the wagon. “Took us almost a whole week after school,” explained Sweetie Belle as she levitated another rock into the wagon.

It took them the rest of the afternoon to load the trebuchet’s bucket using the ladder and their saddlebags. By the end, Harry was levitating rocks the size of his hoof into the wagon. And he was almost exhausted.

Then they pulled the throwing rope down until the top of the throwing arm was at bed and the bucket was lifted high. A short rope loop tethered the arm to the trebuchet’s bed. The end of the throwing rope had a small loop, which they placed over a pin sticking out of the throwing arm.

Now that it was closer he could see there were two ropes, one tied to each end of the sack. They pulled the sack down the length of the trebuchet’s trough until the ropes was stretched out almost completely to the opposite end from the pinned throwing arm. It took all four of them to roll a small boulder onto the sack. They pulled the sack edges out around it to form a cloth cup. Just like the cup of a slingshot, Harry realized.

Finally, Scootaloo ran up to the lynch-pin holding down the throwing arm. “Okay, fillies! Ready?” She grabbed it in her teeth. Harry tackled her before she could pull it.

“NO! NO! NO!” he shouted. “NOT SAFE!” In a calmer voice, he said, “Let’s tie a rope to the pin and pull it out when we’re at a safe distance, so if something goes wrong nobody gets hurt! Okay?”

Grumbling about unnecessary delays, Apple Bloom ran back to their clubhouse and returned with a coiled rope. Far more than they needed, but that was alright.

A few minutes later, the four of them stood thirty feet away. Harry felt they were still far too close but he couldn’t convince the girls to go any farther away. Scootaloo again said, “Ready? Here goes!” She grabbed the rope in her mouth and backed up quickly. The rope went taut and then slack as the pin popped out.

It looked like it was moving slow at first as the arm started to swing upright, but the sling moved quickly down the trough in the middle of the bed and then lifted the boulder into the air. They watched the boulder shoot out over the orchard.

“IT WORKS!” shouted Scootaloo.

“WAHOO!” shouted Apple Bloom.

“YES!” shouted Sweetie Bell, pumping her right foreleg.

“Oh my god,” said Harry, “It worked. And it didn’t kill us.”

The three fillies ignored him in favour of immediately turning to look at their flanks. “Ah, horsefeathers,” said Scootaloo at not seeing a cutie mark.

A moment later, they heard a crash. The fillies ran as fast as they could while Harry hurried as fast as he dared. The boulder had gone almost two hundred feet before hitting a tree — and snapping it in half while knocking it over.

“Uh, oops?” said Scootaloo.

“Aw, horsefeathers! AJ’s gonna kill me!”

They started kicking and pushing the boulder back to the siege machine. They had barely moved it fifty feet before they heard the pounding of hoof-beats. “Aw, Celestia, I’m in so much trouble!” mumbled Apple Bloom, shaking her head dejectedly.

Applejack came into view at a full run, with Big Mac right beside her. They slowed on seeing the three fillies and Harry.

Harry sighed. He knew the script for this story. He would end up being blamed and banned from seeing Apple Bloom, which would mean losing the other two as friends as well. Well, it had been fun for the short while it lasted. On the other hand, or hoof, they had saved his life. And the few times he had admitted to doing something wrong back in Little Whinging his punishments had not been as severe — at least at school.

Applejack and Big Mac came to a halt and alternated looking at the four, the boulder, and the splintered broken tree. “What in tarnation happened here?” Applejack stared at Apple Bloom accusingly. She already suspected the CMC were responsible for this mayhem, the only question was how.

“Well . . . ,” started Apple Bloom.

“Um . . . ,” started Sweetie Belle.

Scootaloo tried to look innocent, as if she had no idea what Applejack was talking about.

“It’s my fault,” Harry said.

Five heads swivelled to look at him, with expressions of varying degrees of incredulity.

“When the girls showed me the trebuchet they built, I couldn’t wait to see it work,” he continued.

Applejack looked at Big Mac and mouthed the word trebuchet?

“It looked just so cool! So we loaded the bucket with rocks and then put this boulder in it. I should have said something about which way we were aiming, but I was in too much of a hurry to see it work, so I didn’t say anything.”

Which was a lie. He hadn’t paid any attention at all to which way the silly thing was pointing, he hadn’t even expected it to work!

But if it kept the girls from getting into any trouble, then it was worth it.

Applejack looked at him, then sadly shook her head. “Oh, Harry, ya can’t lie to me. Didn’t Apple Bloom tell you Ah hold the Element of Honesty? I ken smell a lie faster than you can say it.”

Harry let his head hang down. That was right, Apple Bloom had mentioned it. He had just thought it meant she was really bad at telling lies, not that she could detect lies, too.

“Let’s try again. What happened?”

Ten minutes later, the two adult ponies watched with dropped jaws as a repositioned trebuchet launched its boulder two hundred feet down the path between Sweet Apple Acres and the Everfree forest. It smashed into a tree at the edge of the forest, breaking the trunk in half. They had been aiming for the middle of the path

Applejack looked at the siege engine. “Why in tarnation did you all build this?”

“Well,” Apple Bloom explained, “I was doing homework on the Earth Pony tribe two weeks ago and the book mentioned the ancient siege engines the Minotaurs used against them.” She started to get excited, “And I thought, ‘Hey, there’s something we could try, building siege engines. So I went to the library and asked Twilight Sparkle if she had any books on how siege engines were made. She pulled a couple off the shelves and I copied the one plans for the one that looked easiest to build. The arithmetic was difficult, but Sweetie Belle worked it out.”

“Yeah,” said Sweetie Belle, getting into the story. “The book had these e-qua-sions that all I had to do was put in the weight we wanted to throw and then when I finished the arithmetic it told us how long each piece in the engine had to be to work. I figured about a pony’s weight would be cool.”

Applejack sat down and stared at the trebuchet. Harry figured she would be having words with Twilight about just which books she allowed the fillies to read.

Harry turned and looked, too. It was quite a work of art, actually. And three fillies had built it in a week. That said volumes about their commitment to the project and how hard they had worked. It even had their names carved into its side. Harry was impressed. He couldn’t imagine anyone from his primary school doing anything like this, not even if a whole class worked on it.

Applejack slowly stood, then faced the four of them. “Ah’m impressed,” she said slowly.

The fillies burst into brilliant smiles. Harry frowned. He knew there was a big “But . . . .” about to be said. In cases like this, there always was.

“But,” she continued as the fillies’ ears fell back, “Ya’ll made quite a mess out of one of my trees.” She stared at them threateningly.

They spent the rest of the day, and after school the next day, chopping the ruined apple tree into smaller woodstove-sized pieces. They picked up the cut pieces and hauled them back to the house to cure for next year’s use. Big Mac was their occasional supervisor.

Oddly, they discovered that the centre of the tree was rotted out. Applejack had noticed that for the last two harvests that tree’s apples hadn’t been as good as the other trees. She would have probably had it removed in a few years, anyway. The CMC had just moved up the removal date.

Two weeks later, on Saturday, when the fillies were finally off being grounded, they were once more standing beside their siege engine — at Scootaloo’s insistence.

“You know,” Scootaloo said speculatively, “I bet I could fly farther than that apple tree with this thing . . . .”

Sweetie Belle looked at her. “What?”

Apple Bloom looked at Scootaloo, and then at the trebuchet, and then back at her again. Then the red-maned pony’s eyes went wide open. “Ya aren’t thinkin’ . . . ?”

Harry looked at Scootaloo and put his right foreleg over his eyes. “Yes, Apple Bloom, that is exactly what she’s thinking.” He walked over to Scootaloo. “It’s too dangerous. We have no control over where you would go, and hitting a tree, even by accident could kill you!”

“But that won’t happen! I can fly! I know I can!”

Harry closed his eyes. He had a headache starting.

Then, he had an idea. He smiled.

“Sweetie Belle?”

She looked at him.

“Isn’t there a lake nearby?”

“Yes. Ponyville Lake.” After a thoughtful pause, she smiled, too.

It took them almost two hours to haul the siege engine to the lake. Just following the path didn’t do it as sometimes two trees grew too close together for the trebuchet to fit between them, thus they had to find a way around them. Still, soon enough, they were looking down the small incline to the lake.

Harry studied the lake and then the trebuchet. They were about a hundred feet away and the lake looked easily to be twice the length of a football field across from here. Perfect. No chance of overshooting.

“Let’s move the trebuchet over to the side by that tree. We don’t want to block the path,” he suggested.

Once it was in place, and blocks placed to prevent it from rolling, they pulled the throwing arm down, set the lynch-pin, and then set the looped-end of the throwing rope over the holding peg at the tip of the arm. With four of them at work, it didn’t take long.

While the three fillies started getting Scootaloo ready, Harry ran the rope from the lynch-pin over around a nearby tree trunk and back over to the fillies. This was a dangerous scheme, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to talk Scootaloo out of it.

And she had saved his life. It was his turn to keep her safe.

“Is your helmet on tight?” asked Sweetie Belle as she used her magic to give the strap a sharp tug.

“Yep.”

“Give me yer saddlebags, ya don’t need them,” said Apple Bloom pulling the release strap with her teeth.

He knelt down and tied the rope loosely around Scootaloo’s leg.

“Are your wings okay? Not tired er anythin’?”

Scootaloo rolled her eyes, but stretched her small wings out. “They’re just fine.”

Harry trotted calmly over to the trough and settled himself onto the cloth launching cup. He pulled the cloth cup up over his back and made sure all his hooves were tucked tight against his torso.

“Hey!” called Scootaloo, “What’re you doing, Harry?” She started towards him.

“Just making sure this is safe for you girls,” Harry called back.

Harry saw Scootaloo feel her left-rear leg get pulled as the rope went tight against the tree. Scowling she took another step and yanked her leg forward, thinking Apple Bloom had grabbed her hoof.

The rope went taut. Apple Bloom said, “Hey! What’s with the rope?”

Sweetie Belle said, “Stop, Scootaloo, stop!”

Harry watched as Scootaloo yanked her leg again, turned, and yelled at Apple Bloom, “Let mah leg go!” He heard the “pop” as the lynch-pin came free. The cloth cup was suddenly hard against his back. He slid halfway down the trough, then felt himself lifted into the air. The world shot by faster than any car he had ever ridden in as he was slung around in a half-circle and found himself flying through the air upside down. To the side, then below, and then behind him he heard three shrill voices crying “HARRYYY!”

He tumbled out of control through the air. The sky alternated with ground and then water. It was kinda fun, he thought, until he realized all he could see was the water rushing up at him. Then his plan's flaw in trying the trebuchet first came to mind.

He didn’t know how to swim.

The splashdown knocked the air out of him. He kicked furiously, terrified he was about to drown. His head popped to the surface and he took a deep breath before going under again.

But he had kicked himself to the surface, He started paddling and kicking as hard as he could. And, remarkably, he returned to the surface and stayed there. He was doing a dog . . . pony paddle.

He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was going, but at least he wasn’t drowning. Until, that is, Scootaloo almost ran him over. She was clutching a board in the water barely bigger than she was, and her wings were beating like a hummingbird. “Are you alright?” she cried.

“Ahhhh!” he said, “Don’t kill me!” He paddled frantically, turning to keep her in sight after the board’s wake rolled water over his head.

She didn’t. Instead, she gave him the board to hold while she hooked her legs around his body and used her wings to propel them back to shore.

Now that he knew it wouldn’t kill them, the trebuchet became the ultimate diving board. They each took turns, with Scootaloo going the farthest, of course. Harry kept his hooves on the ground, and would stay there until he felt confident that he could swim across the lake without drowning first.

By then it was midmorning and the other kids seeking a little recreational swimming started to show up. And they wanted to try the pony thrower, as they called it. A line rapidly developed with eager teams of Earth and Unicorn fillies and colts pulling down the firing arm in anticipation of their own experience at flying like a Pegasus.

Contests quickly developed for the most tricks performed before splashdown. And most graceful. And biggest splash.

The loud, and unusually clear, happy screams coming from the vicinity of the Ponyville Lake — now that the screamers were higher than the hill between the town and the lake — quickly drew the attention of the adults. Just what were the fillies and colts up to this time?

“But it’s not made for adults,” Sweetie Belle explained. “I designed the weight for a filly or colt. You won’t make it to the lake.”

“I’ll go first,” said a pegasus stallion. “If I fall short, I can just fly instead.”

He didn’t fall short. He didn’t go as far as the fillies and colts, but he made it past the shallows. Screaming adults brought the rest of the town to the lake.

Unfortunately, the adults “modified” the “pony-pitcher,” as it had now been renamed, so that an adult had to be there to “unlock” the arm for use.

But, then again, that wouldn’t be too difficult a thing to accomplish — based on the adult scream coming from the trebuchet as it swept yet another earth mare off the trough and flung her out across the lake at almost one hundred miles an hour. That was by-far faster than any non-Pegasus had ever moved before — even the fastest of Equestria’s trains didn’t top more than forty-five.

Indeed, the problem might be getting the adults to leave enough time for the fillies and colts to use it!

To prevent the trebuchet from being moved, the CMC, with some help from the other colts and fillies, levelled part of the hill, removed the wheels, and anchored the frame with vertically mounted short posts. The trebuchet was now a permanent fixture for lakeside fun. A fitting end, Harry thought, for something designed to destroy.

Almost every morning was surreal — Harry had never shared a room before. Waking to a room lit by the morning sun was merely unusual — when he stayed with Mrs. Figg she let him sleep in a real bed, which was softer and more comfortable that his cot in the cupboard, but not by much — and she didn’t make him fix her breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

But the rest? Yeah, Surreal. Listening to them lightly snoring — was there a spell that could stop that? Not that it was a real problem, just curiosity — while lying in a bed so soft it might as well have been a cloud. Moving his legs under the covers — no hands or feet anymore, watching the shadows play across the ceiling and walls as he just . . . enjoyed not doing anything and knowing he wasn’t going to be punished for it.

He usually started on his meditations.

Eventually, though, his bladder would inform him that he needed to move.

The bathroom upstairs was spacious, much more so than he had expected. The tub and shower were larger, which they would have to be to fit a mostly horizontal quadruped instead of a vertical biped. The toilet . . . was an experience. And awkward for a biped, which he wasn’t anymore. But he was never in a hurry. At first, he didn’t use the tub/shower because he was afraid he’d make Twilight angry if he woke her and she couldn’t immediately use the facilities herself. Later, he waited as a courtesy to his host.

As quietly as possible, he’d sneak down the stairs — no easy feat when your feet are actually hard bone hooves! No matter how gently he placed his hooves down there was always a little “clunk.” Still he usually managed to make it to the ground floor without waking the others.

He always started the day reading and studying. He tried to find the simplest of the books on a given subject and levitate it down — that is, he used his levitation magic to pull the book far enough forward off the shelf for it to fall. The first time he had done that, it hit him in head. Hooves, he had found, were terrible at catching things. He had sighed. “Note to self,” he had murmured, rubbing his forehead, “don’t stand under objects you are learning to levitate.”

Then he would retire to the reading table and settle in.

Which was where Twilight and Spike would find him when they came down stairs.

After breakfast, and his shower, he would go off to school during the week, and off with the Cutie Mark Crusaders on the weekends. The evenings he spent reading up on the topics he didn’t know that every colt and filly knew — history, literature, geography, and everything about the Princesses and nobles in Canterlot. Which, coming from a human world, he found fascinating instead of the boring tedium that the other colts and fillies complained about.

And being grounded in a library, after yet another Cutie Mark Crusade misadventure, wasn't something he would call punishment.