Dangerous Goods - Standalone

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

The chill of the pre-dawn air bit deeply into Ditsy’s coat as she climbed into the dark sky, a hasty breakfast filling her belly and her saddlebags firmly attached to her flanks. It was a relatively fast run to Canterlot this morning to earn a few more bits for Dinky’s school fund. With a little luck she would be able to get there, pick up the shipment, and deliver it back to Ponyville before Dinky needed to get from her sleepover at Applebloom’s to school. The grey pegasus leaned into her ascent with long strong strokes. It made her feel all warm and tingly inside to fly this fast, to soar this high. Ever since she had begun giving her little Muffin rides, her wings had gotten stronger and stronger even as Dinky got heavier and heavier. In physical strength at least she bore little resemblance to the hesitant young mare who found herself a destitute widow in Fillydelphia with a tiny foal. She may have lost most of her vision, and her near-worthless husband, but the little filly she brought out of that debacle was worth it, and she was determined to make Dinky’s dreams come true.

Ditsy’s days of precision aerial ballet were long behind her, the accident had seen to that. Vision was something you take for granted until it is taken away from you, and once it is gone, it never returns. She closed one eye to take a bearing on the dawn sky and changed course slightly, arriving over the factory of Charlie’s Custom Colas and Candies with time to spare before her scheduled pickup. It felt so good to be early for a change with such good flying weather she tucked one wing gently in to begin a clockwise turn. Picking a factory smokestack that smelled like apricots as a pivot point, she kept her distance and inscribed a perfect circle in the dawning sky. Then she switched wings effortlessly, inscribing circles in the sky around one of the large vats that had suffered some sort of industrial accident, a giant hole melted in the bottom with the scaffolding of a work crew around it extracting the ruined vat for repair or replacement. In her prime, she could have danced through the holes and openings of the scaffolding like an earth pony playing hopscotch on the city street, with her vision now it would be a crashing disaster. Instead she picked a can-shaped building on the ground that had opened its top like some giant flower, and used the three landmarks to inscribe a perfect trefoil in the sky.

She sighed as she descended to the shipping dock, stopping to hover at a good distance up and then slowly descending from there, as not to ruin such a perfect day with some ungainly crash.

“You Miss Hooves?” The voice came from an object that Ditsy had originally thought to be some sort of cloth-draped dressmaker dummy, but on closer examination turned out to be an earth pony dressed from hock to crest in a thick padded outfit, with goggles like aviator glasses. She pushed up her own goggles in response and cocked her head to one side to get a better look at the peculiar pony.

“That’s my married name. I go by my maiden name now, of Doo.”

“Oh good.” He made a checkmark on a padded clipboard he was carrying, and signaled several other padded ponies, who pushed a low cart up to them. In the padded cart were two frozen blocks of ice about the size of saddlebags, and in each ice lump were a half-dozen bottles. “Now Miss Hooves, this shipment should be perfectly safe. We’ve frozen the bottles in ice so we won’t have any more problems with thermal instability, and added a neutralizing agent to the mix so any exothermic reactions in the reagents should not catalyze a runaway reaction like the old mix did during compression and containment. Plus I think we’ve totally solved the pH problem, although I still don’t think that negative number reading we got on the first batch is accurate, more likely it was just a instrumentation error. Still we think it would be advisable for you to avoid any unnecessary aerial activity on your delivery route, and to expedite your delivery before the thermal barrier dissipates. Any questions?”

Ditsy nodded vigorously. “Do you have any jawbreakers? I mean they really don’t break your jaw, just give you a toothache if you bite down on them, but they taste really good and my little Muffin loves them. Oh, and me too.”

“Um. Yeah.” There was a brief discussion and both icy packages were secured in her bags, one to each side. And a dozen wrapped jawbreakers dropped into her left saddlebag completed the packing. “Sign here. And here. And here. And one last one here. Payment will be deposited on delivery, have a safe trip, Miss Hooves.”

Ditsy climbed into the morning dawn, the faintest sliver of sunlight just beginning to peek over the horizon. They must not have stamps, she thought as she climbed. If they did, they could have just stamped the packages ‘Rush’ and ‘Fragile’ and ‘Time Sensitive’ and ‘Refrigerated’ instead of talking about it for so long. She loved the ‘Fragile’ stamp at work, when she was working she always made sure anything with that stamp was treated extra-special careful, and she even made sure to stamp it a bunch of extra times just so everypony else could see it too. And ‘Refrigerated’ was neat too, she loved the way the word sounded. Reeee Frrr Idgeeeee Ateeee Ed. Although the post office did not get very many of them, she made sure whenever they showed up to put them in the office refrigerator. It was getting sort of full.

Below her the city of Canterlot spread out as if it were a map, and a nice warming blast of dawn sunshine struck her, feeling very pleasant since the cold ice was making her flanks shiver. She turned to put the sun on her right as she climbed, a nice warm feeling that countered the icy chill from the saddlebags. It was kind of sad she was not able to warm up both sides of her flanks on the way home, but the only way she could have done that was to fly upside down half the trip, and that always made her nose run.

She had just leveled out and adjusted her course for Ponyville when she heard a strange noise, like a snake. It probably was not a snake, because snakes did not fly, but she looked around anyway. No snakes. But it still sounded like snakes. Well, one snake. And it was making a little jingling noise too. She had heard of rattlesnakes before of course, but never a jinglesnake. And it sounded like it was coming from her right saddlebag. She unlatched the cover and peeked inside, being careful to fly straight and level so nothing would fall out onto the city below. She had gotten in such trouble for dropping stuff out of the wagon on Twilight Sparkle. That was a sticky latch, and the latches on her saddlebags were nice and unsticky.

The lump of ice in the saddlebag was looking a lot smaller, and one of the bottles stuck in it was trembling like it wanted to get out. She latched the top back down and thought really hard. If she flew just as hard as she could, she might be able to get to Sugarcube Corner before all the ice melted. But if she turned around right now, she was sure she would be able to get to the factory before the ice melted. Maybe they could get some icy-er ice for it that would not melt so fast in the sun. Or fly it at night. Or put it in a really big chunk of ice and take it by wagon.

Then three things happened at once: An ear splitting CRACK, the whizz of a bottlecap zipping past her right ear, and the world suddenly spinning out of control.

A mindless roar filled her ears, it sounded like being at the bottom of a giant waterfall, only this waterfall smelled of a hundred varieties of carbonated fruit. First she tried tucking in her legs and wings but the roaring soda bottle in the saddlebag only spun the grey pegasus faster in the sky, until she extended all her limbs at once. The rotation slowed as the roaring began to diminish, blood that had rushed to her hooves finally returned to her head but just as she twisted to level out her course there was a hideously large explosion on her right side, and what felt like a giant hand swatted her out of the sky.

Pain! Her right wing had been forced straight up by the explosion and by the feeling it had been dislocated yet again. A few bloody grey feathers floated by her face seemingly in slow motion as her spin turned her around. The remains of a lump of ice spun away in the distance, one side of it ripped apart and the few bottles that remained in it detonating in fuschia and pink clouds, thankfully far enough away to not send more glass sharding through her body, Still feeling as if the world had slowed to a crawl, the far-away spires and towers of Canterlot rotated by her vision next. Her stunned mind mentally mapped out her crashing point, if she continued to fall at this rate given air resistance and her initial velocity, she would hit that big red-roofed building down right in the middle of their south roof, and break every bone in her body. That sounded familiar...

“Attention Flight Campers! My name is Councilor Bulldozer, and I will be your trainer for this exercise!” The hefty dark orange pegasus with the lime-yellow mane would have looked impressive even without the obligatory sweatshirt and ball cap, rippled primary muscles across his chest made it seem as if he could shove all of Cloudsdale around all by himself. “Now you’re going to have to learn this maneuver if you ever hurt a wing in an accident above the ground, because dirt ain’t like clouds. You fall onto the dirt, you’re gonna break every bone in your body. Fall from far enough up, and we won’t even have to dig a hole for you. Now my Junior Councilor Terminal Velocity here is going to show you all how it’s done, isn’t that right Terminal?”

Ditsy nodded, she had never had the courage to correct the councilors and each one of them seemed to find a different name for her.

“Now we’re about high enough off that pad down there to get you a good chunk of speed. Show ‘em how its done Terminal.”

She fluffed her filly wings, and tucked one back, extending the other fully. “This one is called the Maple Leaf...err...Seed because you fall down spinning like one of those tree seeds. You need to cup your wing like so, angle it a bit forward so you get some spin, but not so much you spin out of control. And right before landing, you bend your knees and flare it up like this. Watch.” She hopped over the edge of the cloud with one wing stuck out and began to spin down to the landing pad....

Ditsy blinked, her left wing was stuck out in a perfect Maple Seed position, knees were bent for impact, and the world slowly whirled around as she descended. For one brief moment she felt relief. Then she heard the snakes.

Her left saddlebag fairly buzzed and clanked from loose bottles, almost all the ice was gone. If they took as long to blow up as the other bottles, she was either going to explode on contact with the ground or just before, and this time all the bottles were right next to her flank. She reached back painfully and flipped the latch on the saddlebag, all it would take was an inversion during her fall and all the bottles would fall out, landing harmlessly on...the ponies below. Her big yellow eyes looked downwards at the streets filled with ponies, the buildings filled with ponies, and the towers filled with ponies. Her heart hammered in her chest, somewhere in Canterlot was Sparkler, her adopted all-grown up daughter from her destroyed marriage. And everypony down there was some other ponies daughter or son, she could not risk their lives to save her own.

In less than a heartbeat, she made her decision. Her left wing tucked up, her head pointed down, and she plummeted like an anvil for the ground. Wind screamed past her head and the buildings grew ahead of her until wind resistance snapped her right wing back into joint. With a scream of pain, she leaned into her wings, pulling out of the dive with only one target in mind: Canterlot Lake. Buildings flickered by as she gained a little altitude, washing lines and banners across the streets passed in an endless stream either above or below her. To the left, the hissing of the bottles raised to a banshee scream just as she burst out of the streets with nothing between her and the lake but...a line of trees. She rolled into a four-point roll as cold as if she were in a routine, first vertical between the trees so fast the branches left lines of agony along her belly, then inverted across the lake feeling the bottles drop away and plunge to the blue water, then trying for an inverted loop to gain altitude before---

The snap of her wing dislocating again was almost simultaneous with the explosion as the entire lake seemed to rise up in a giant carbonated wave that smashed her down into the water and blackness.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

“I’m sorry sir, you can’t come in here.”

“Princesses orders.” There was a rustling of paper. “What have you got?”

“Oh. Well, then. By the soggy papers she was carrying, her name seems to be Ditsy Hooves .”

“Doo. She went back to her maiden name after her husband died.”

“Oh. I’ll have to correct the records. Seems she was contracted to carry a shipment from Charlie’s Custom Colas and Candies...” Papers rustled again. “This morning to a P. Pie in Ponyville. Would this have anything to do with the explosions down at the factory over the last few days? They have a similar aroma. Like fruit. ”

“I can’t say. Anything else?”

“No, not really. We’ve got a lot of pain medication going through her, dislocated right wing, strained muscles, one mother of a huge bruise along her right flank, and bits of glass all through it. Also she’s got quite a bit of existing scar tissue, and some symptoms of strabismus or minor brain damage.” rustle, rustle. “Looks like most of it is a few years old. Broken bones, burns. We really should fill out a suspicion of spousal abuse form.”

“My bro-- Her husband died a few years back. Natural causes.”

“Oh. Pity. Any family, since you seem to know her so well?”

“Two daughters. One’s in town, she’s being sent for, should show up shortly. Unicorn. Make sure she’s cleared. Other one’s a filly back in Ponyville. The Princess already sent word, she’s got a pen pal in the area. Is that it?”

“Well. She fades in and out every so often. Must be hungry, she keeps asking for a muffin.”

“That’s the youngest daughter. She fades in again, you make sure to tell her they’re both fine. I need to get back.”

“So...what interest does the Princess have in a delivery pegasus from Ponyville.”

There was a long pause with no noises but the beep, beep, beep of the monitor.

“Let’s just say I’m a friend of the family.”