Truffle catches the train

A young, shy lopunny girl stood in the river. It was a shallow, fairly broad river with its share of rapids and calm spots, flowing down the middle of a canyon. The girl was clad in a black top that barely reached her midriff, and a matching black skirt that struggled to cover half her thighs. Its red trim and white frilled edges made it seem like some kind of unusual uniform; perhaps something a cheerleader would wear. She kept her hair in large, controlled, poofy curls, and her natural lopunny fluff seemed well-groomed.

Her bare paws splashed in the water below as she took a step forward and crouched, looking through some of the foliage on the bottom of the rock wall. She was slightly hungry and hoped to find some of the canyon's delicious berries, ripe and ready for picking. As her eyes scanned the bushes, her ears twitched at a sudden noise in the distance. It was a loud, metallic crashing sound, and it came from downriver.

She blinked. "Hm? What was that?" The girl turned her head to look down the canyon. It had too many twists and bends for her to see what had made the sound, so she stood up for a better look. As the girl's body unbent from its crouched pose, stretching to be stood fully up, her head and shoulders rose out of the canyon's upper boundaries.

She was huge. But this was no surprise to her, for she had always been this way. The gigantic lopunny peered over the tops of the rocky walls that formed the canyon, looking past the bends in the river, and seeing a bridge on the horizon. As she looked closer, she noticed something was wrong--the bridge was shaped funny, as if a piece of it was missing.

"That's not right..." she blinked a few more times, holding a hand up to her forehead to block the sun and let her see more clearly. She drew back a bit with a slight shock when she realized that a piece was indeed missing from the middle of the bridge! And to make matters worse, at the very edge of her view, she saw the unmistakeable metallic glimmer of a string of train cars, headed for the bridge.

"Oh no!" The girl forgot about her hunger as she bounded out of the canyon, digging her hands and paws into the rock wall to scale it. Covering a great distance with each step, the lightly-built girl ran across the bare, grassy plain with a slight bounce to each step.

Meanwhile, the train rolled right along. It was a newer, more modern train, based on the subways that ran through large cities--except that each car contained its own engine and power source, negating the need for electrified rails or engine cars. The people onboard has no idea of the danger that lie ahead. Mysteriously, there was no warning signal from the bridge's systems, so the train's network didn't pick up on the problem.

There was a slight irregularity to the train's movement. It started subtly, almost unnoticably, but it became more severe with each instance. It felt like the train was rocking, or bouncing, as if it was traversing a series of perpetually-worsening bumps in the track. One by one, the passengers started to lean to each other and ask if they felt it. The idle chatter grew into a conversation that filled the train cars as the bouncing became more severe. Was something wrong with the train? Should they alert someone?

The tension erupted into panic when an observant passenger noticed the figure headed towards the train. He pointed out the window and exclaimed something about a giant, though his exact words were lost as a collective scream came from the crowds before he could finish. They saw it, too. They all saw this massive, oddly-shaped giant figure headed for them, its footfalls shaking the train.

The lopunny girl took a final leap, landing daintily with a paw on either side of the track, sliding slightly as her form drove its inertia into the ground. She waved her arms. "Stop the train! Stop the train! The bridge is out!"

Her attempts to signal the train were lost on the panicking crowd. Her words, loud as they were, were lost in the screams, and her waving arms looked more like a menacing monster threatening an invader to its territory. Arguments were traded back and forth between the terrified crowd members.

"Stop the train! The emergency brakes, use them!"

"No way, we'll be sitting ducks!"

"But we're headed right for it!"

It continued. A few instances even came to blows as the passengers fought over whether or not to pull the emergency brake levers.

Meanwhile, the girl's expression grew even more worried. The train wasn't stopping. Didn't they see her? Didn't they hear her? Not knowing what else to do, she crouched lower, holding her hands out to stop the train--but then she thought about what would happen. The train would crash into her hands, regardless of how much or how little resistance her arms offered, and many of the passengers would no doubt be hurt, or maybe even killed if the train crumpled badly.

Her own nerves a bit frazzled at this point, she lifted her hands up out of the way again. "Umm..umm..." What to do? How would she stop the train? How would she save those people, since they refused to stop it themselves? She was running out of time. The girl looked back and forth between the oncoming train and the bridge a short distance behind her. She held her hands up to her chin, whimpering a bit as she tried to think of something.

Time was up. A breeze tickled her leg floof as the train whooshed past between her ankles. "Oh no!" She turned to look behind her as the train barrelled towards the broken bridge. Reacting before she had time to plan, the girl spun on her toes, jumping after the train and bounding past it, getting in front of it again. She continued past it, and then suddenly leaned back, digging her paws in as she slid through the grass and dirt, before sliding down into the canyon again with a loud thud and a splash from the river below. She stopped herself from ramming completely into the far wall of the canyon with her hands, flinching at the sudden stop. The girl turned, her hair and earfloof whirling in the air, and she stepped up to the bridge.

The passengers took notice.

"Hey! It's attacking the bridge!"

"It's totally gone! The bridge is out!"

"We're gonna crash! Pull the brakes!"

More collective, terrified screams echoed through the cars as a few able-bodied passengers pushed their way to the sets of emergency brakes. It only took one to trigger them all, but the panicked passengers pulled several of them. The sharp, shrill tone of metal grinding against metal accompanied a shower of sparks from the train's wheels. Inside, the passengers were shoved forwards by the sudden deceleration, some of them falling to the ground; others bounced against seats or grabbed handrails.

The girl heard the shreiking brakes, too. She looked, a slight bit of hope in her eyes, as the train was slowing down. That hope soon faded as she realized it wasn't slowing quickly enough. It wouldn't stop in time!

"Eep! Look out!" She again held her hands up--but this time, she blinked, and looked at them--then looked at the train. She shifted her hands to be palms-up, and stood just to the side of the bridge, hoping she could do this right.

The train, its wheels grinding until they had their own slight glow, slid up to the bridge. The passengers inside screamed, some holding onto each other; others holding onto the rails or seats, as many of them experienced near or total weightlessness. The train came off the broken rails at one side of the bridge, angling downwards. Those in the front car had mostly moved to the back of it, others piling into cars towards the rear in hopes of somehow surviving the impact. Still, there was a palpable surge of dread that it was all over.

And then the impact came. Not once, but twice--and much sooner than would be instinctively expected. Moreover, the impact didn't totally stop the train, at least not all at once. Of course, as the various passengers were thrown forwards into each other, into walls, over seats and so on, they hardly noticed that the impact was more of a rapid deceleration than a sudden, jarring stop. But the stop came, nonetheless. People looked at each other, and around--where was the giant beast? What about the fall? What was going on?

And where had the sun gone?

The people looked out the windows of one side of the train, and a growing sense of panic again managed to rise out of them. Rather than seeing sky, or canyon walls, or anything of the sort, they saw brown fur and the red trim and white frills of a black blouse. There were more screams as the train again lurched, moving upwards this time.

The girl, as carefully as she could, was holding two of the large train cars. They were a little longer than her forearms, and heavier than she expected them to be. Still, she'd managed to catch them before they hit anything. The third car in the series had been caught on the absolute edge of the bridge, hanging over it. It was pushed back, along with the train behind it, grinding against the rails as the brakes were still on, as the lopunny did her best to set the train back on its rails. She didn't quite manage to pull it off, but she did get it safely on the ground before the edge of the bridge.

With a sigh of relief, she looked the train over. Again, worry bubbled up as she hoped she'd been gentle enough--she hoped she hadn't caught it too harshly, or stopped it too quickly. "I--Is everyone...okay in there?" She asked, timidly. "Um...it's safe now...I think. Er...yeah, it is! Em...you can come out, now..."

At first, nothing happened. The people were too busy trying to find their friends or families, or were simply overwhelmed by the experience, collapsing into states of shock. A few of them worked up the courage to peek out of a shattered window, at the worried-looking brown lopunny who was standing in the canyon, leaned forwards so that she was eye-level with the train.

The girl sighed, relieved to see movement from inside the train. She hoped they weren't the only ones that survived.

Before she could do much else, her ears again twitched with a new sound. An airy, whipping noise--she recognized it as the blades of approaching helicopters. She knew that it'd be hard for her to escape if they managed to follow her. Stealing one last glance into the train's windows and seeing a few more people, the girl turned and bounded back down the canyon, splashing and leaving paw-shaped footprints in the riverbed as she went.

Ever since that day, the legend of the giant lopunny who had destroyed the bridge, attacked the train, and then miraculously changed its mind before eating everyone has lived in the area. Few outsiders believed it, but they never managed to explain the hundreds of enormous pawprints in the field and riverbed. No part of the mystery, not even how the bridge was demolished, was ever solved. As for the lopunny girl, this wasn't the only tale of such a thing.