//------------------------------//
// Run Out On A Rainbow 
// Story: Grounded: The Ballad of Greased Lightning 
// by Green Akers 
//------------------------------//

	Apple Bloom stood dumbfounded, paralyzed by the sudden sight of the pony she had been searching for. "You're... You're alive!" she finally managed to say.

Greased Lightning rolled his eyes. "I suppose, if you want to call this living," he conceded.

Apple Bloom began trembling with excitement. She had been following Lightning's trail for two days, chasing him through every book and newspaper in Twilight's library. All the while, she had prayed to Celestia that he was still alive, and that he held the secret to life without a special talent. Finally, the moment she had been waiting for was at hoof: Greased Lightning now stood before her, waiting to be interviewed. A million questions quickly flooded her mind, but as she reached back to get a pencil and pad of paper from her saddlebag, she knew exactly which one she would ask Lightning first. "First of all," she demanded, "where have you been?!"

"Here, mostly," Greasy replied, waving a front hoof around the canyon. "Traveling really isn't my thing anymore, and growing stuff out here—and then protecting it—is a full-time job and then some. Who knew so many things in this stupid forest ate pumpkins?"

"So you've been out here, all alone, by yourself, with no other ponies, for six years?" Apple Bloom asked.

"Well, yeah," Lightning said with a shrug. "By the way, if this interview is going to take more than thirty seconds, we should probably get out of the garden before it gets any darker. We can talk more at my place."

"Good idea," Apple Bloom agreed. "Applejack says that in this forest, you're always bein' watched. I don't want to get scooped on a story like this."

"Personally," Lightning commented, "the forest can watch all it wants. I'm more worried about its teeth than its eyes."



Greased Lightning's "place" turned out to be a cave carved into one of the inner walls of the chasm, just a short walk from the pumpkin patch. The cave itself resembled a gardener's shed more than a home, with seed pouches, buckets, and various tools scattered around the floor, and the smell coming from a stack of fertilizer bags in one corner of the room was enough to make a normal pony sick. Being a farm pony herself, however, Apple Bloom felt strangely at home in the cave.

"I know, I know, it's a bit of a fixer-upper," Greased Lightning admitted, "but hey, the price was right."

Apple Bloom made a beeline for a flat rock in the middle of the cave, which appeared to serve as some sort of table. She brushed aside a couple of unwashed bowls, then grabbed her notepad from her saddle bag and slapped in down on the rock. "Let's get down to business," she demanded. "Tell me about your childhood."

"My childhood?" Lightning gave Apple Bloom a funny look. "I thought you were a reporter, not a psychologist."

"I'm here for the whole story," Apple Bloom proclaimed, "so we need to start from the beginnin'."

"Um... Okay," Greased Lightning said with a shrug. "There isn't much to say, really. I was born and raised in Cloudsdale, my parents worked at the weather factory, I was consistently mediocre in school—"

"Well, what about that?" Apple Bloom pointed at hoof at the lightning bolt on Lightning's flank.

"You mean you haven't heard that story?" Greased Lightning sighed. "I guess I really have been forgotten, huh? Anyway, I got that when I was—" He hesitated as he remembered exactly who he was talking to. "Gosh, I forget now," he fibbed. "I was leaving school one afternoon, and I heard somepony screaming on the playground out back, so I flew over to see what was going on."

"Was somepony in trouble?" Apple Bloom asked.

"Oh yeah, somepony was in trouble. A bunch of older kids were standing in front of the school's flying coach, and he was reading them the riot act at one hundred decibels." Greased Lightning chuckled as he recalled the incident. "Apparently he was timing them all as they raced to some far-off cloud and back, and let me tell you, he was not impressed. I remember him saying that they hadn't broken one-and-a-half minutes yet, and that Fireball had run that course in under a minute back in his younger days."

"Fireball?" Apple Bloom arched an eyebrow at the unfamiliar name.

"You don't know who Fireball is either!?" Greased Lightning mouth nearly fell on the floor at the filly's ignorance. "You're kidding, right? Fireball's a legend in Cloudsdale! He was my all-time favorite racer back when I was a foal! He just dominated everypony! Heck, he was..." Greased Lightning paused for a moment, as he tried to find the best way to describe his hero. "I guess you could say he was me before I was."

"Oh wow." Apple Bloom made a mental note to look up Fireball when she got back to the library, hoping he would be a lot easier to find than Greased Lightning.

"My sole goal in life was to be just like him," Lightning continued. "I use to run around the yard pretending that I was racing at Haytona, and then make my mom interview me in the 'winner's circle.' Anyway, when I heard the coach drop Fireball's name, I decided that I was gonna be just like Fireball, and I walked right up to the crowd and said I could cover the distance in under a minute. Never mind the fact that the I hadn't been flying all that long—I thought I could do it, and I told everypony so."

"So what did the coach say?" Apple Bloom asked.

"He said something like 'I'll bet this foal could fly faster than any of you' to the other kids," Lightning replied. "I stepped up to the starting line, chest stuck like I was some big shot, and waited for the signal to go."

"So how do you do? Did you beat Fireball's time?"

Greased Lightning shook his head. "Just missed it," he revealed. "I clocked a one-oh-two. I was all mad about it, and wanted to try again, but as soon as I got to the finish line, the other kids swarmed me, all saying how awesome a run it was, and how fast I went. Eventually the coach pushed through them and started giving me the third degree, asking who I was, where I was from, where I learned to fly, stuff like that. Eventually he asked me if I thought I was fast, and I told him I was lightning fast—it seemed witty at the time—and he told me that I flew like a bumblebee, and that I should come to flying practice the next day and see what fast really looked like."

Lightning paused for a moment to take a deep breath and wipe a tear from his eye. "That was the day it all began," he stated. "I decided right then and there that I was going to be the fastest pony in the sky, faster than anypony who had ever lived."

"And that's when you got your cutie mark, right?" Apple Bloom guessed.

"Well, truthfully, I'm not sure exactly when it happened," Lightning admitted sheepishly. "I raced home to tell my mom I was going to flying practice, and she told me my cutie mark had appeared." He looked back at the lightning bolt on his flank. "I got lucky, I guess. After a day like that, I would have been really disappointed if my special talent had turned out to be rainbow-making or something."

Apple Bloom nodded in agreement. "So what happened next?"

Greased Lightning smiled. "From then on, I was riding a rocketship to the top of the mountain," he declared. "I put every ounce of sweat and blood and tears I had into being the best. I was running with the high school ponies by the time I was twelve, and ended up breaking every record that Cloudsdale High had to break, most of which Fireball had set back in the day. It felt a little surreal, to be honest—I mean, this guy was my hero, and I pretty much erased his name from the record books."

"Did you ever get a chance to race against him head-to-head?" Apple Bloom asked.

"Eventually." A smile began forming on Lightning's lips. "I jumped to the big show right out of high school, and made my official debut in Neighagra Falls two weeks later. Fireball was pretty old by then, and was only a part-time racer, but hey, he was still the greatest racer ever to fly! I was really nervous about meeting him, but he turned out to be a really nice guy. He said he'd been following me for a while, and was really looking forward to seeing my speed."

"How did the race turn out?" Apple Bloom asked. "Did you beat him?"

"Actually, nearly everypony did," Greased Lightning revealed. "Like I said, he was way past his prime by then. I don't think he ever beat me in a race. Heck, I had more competitive races against slowponies like Crazy Train and—"

"And Turbo Jet?" Apple Bloom suggested.

Lightning froze in place for a few seconds at the mention of Turbo's name. "You know," he realized, "it's been longer than I thought since I've thought about TJ. But yeah, he falls in that category. He was the living ponification of the phrase 'nice guys finish last.'"

Apple Bloom arched an eyebrow. "Nice?" She sputtered. "He's the reason you lost your wing!"

"Ponies crashed all the time during a race," Greased Lightning countered. "Just because he wrecked me doesn't make him a bad guy."

"So you don't think it was—"

"Intentional?" Greased Lightning shook his head. "No way. I heard all the theories about gamblers and fixed races and stuff, and I know it's happened before, but not here. It was an accident, plain and simple."

"How can you be so sure?" Apple Bloom pressed, leaning over the rock to close the distance between herself and her subject. "Was it somethin' you saw during the race?"

"Honestly, I don't remember the race at all." Lightning gave Apple Bloom a sheepish smile and reached back to scratch the back of his head with his hoof. "I went to bed the day before and woke up two days later with a broken—well, everything. I don't remember the race, the crash, nothing."

"You don't remember anythin'?"

"Well, I mean, I hit my head pretty hard when I went down. Still, you've probably heard the story a hundred times already. Apparently I got a little too close to Turbo coming around a corner, his wing gave out, and he knocked me into some trees lining the course." Greased Lightning sighed and looked down at the floor. "I should have known better and backed off before we reached the turn. TJ was really hurting going into that race, and he couldn't have held an inside line if his life depended on it."

"That doesn't mean anythin'," Apple Bloom huffed. "He could have been hammin' it up to give himself a convenient excuse. How do you really know he wasn't some shady hack who accepted bits on the side to keep himself afloat?"

"Because that wasn't the way Turbo operated," Lightning declared. "If there was ever a pony who always played the game on the up and up, it was him."

"What makes you say that?"

"It was the way he handled his business." Greased Lightning turned away from Apple Bloom and looked over at the wall as he spoke. "A lot of ponies talk a good game about playing fair and respecting others and stuff like that, but he actually lived it. I remember this one time we were in Maretinsville, and about halfway through the race, Three Wide, like he always did, decided to take his name literally, and ended up causing this huge crash that wiped out eight or ten guys. Well, the guy he hit first was this big old pony named Diesel, who was this big, ornery cuss out of Mustangia with a seriously bad attitude. Not the kind of pony you want to irritate, if you catch my drift."

Apple Bloom nodded. "So how did Diesel react?"

"Oh, he took it about as well as we expected," Lightning recalled, as he turned back towards Apple Bloom. "He came tearing into the locker room after the race with steam shooting out of his ears. He was swearing up a storm and looking to have a 'discussion'"—Lightning made air-quotes with his front hooves—"with Three Wide about what happened."

"What did Three Wide have to say?"

"Nothing. TW knew darn well what Diesel planned to 'discuss,' and he made himself scarce in a hurry. The rest of us made sure to give Diesel his space—except Turbo Jet. That crazy dude walked right up to Diesel and apologized for wrecking him!" Greased Lightning couldn't help but laugh at the memory. "It turned out that Turbo had crowded Three Wide too much when he tried to pass, and clipped him on the wing."

"What did Diesel say to that?"

"Well, he took a few seconds to think about what TJ said—" Lightning paused a few moments for effect "—and then spun around and bucked out a couple of Turbo's teeth. He beat TJ up pretty bad before we could pull him off." Greased Lightning shook his head. "I still can't believe TJ fessed up like that. He knew that Diesel was looking for a punching bag, and he could have just kept his mouth shut and let Three Wide take the blame and the beating. No one would have thought twice about it, even if they knew the truth—heck, I'll bet half the ponies who raced with TW wanted to smack him at one time or another."

"But Turbo didn't," Apple Bloom noted.

"Nope. He told his tale and took his lumps." Lightning turned and looked off towards the cave entrance. "That told me and everypony who saw it what kind of pony Turbo Jet was. He was somepony you could always count on to tell the truth."

"So when he crashed into you..." Apple Bloom left the sentence open for Lightning to complete.

"He told me he couldn't make the turn. That was enough for me."

Apple Bloom spit her pencil out onto the stone table. "You seem awfully—" It took her a few moments to find the right word. "Calm about this whole thing," she concluded. "Weren't you at least angry about getting wrecked?"

"Not at first," Greased Lightning admitted. "I'd been hurt before, and it was always a matter of resting, letting things heal, and getting back into the air. No harm, no foul, I figured."

"So what happened when you found out your were going to lose your wing?"

Greased Lightning took a deep breath. "That was tough," he said. "I'd spent my entire life working to be the fastest flyer around, and everything that I had in life—fame, fortune, and most of all, fun—I owed to my speed. I lost more than my way of life that day. I lost my reason for living, and it took me a long time to find another one."

"Speakin' of which," Apple Bloom asked, "what happened after the accident? How in the world did you end up out here?"

"It's a long story," Lightning admitted. "The first month after the accident was pretty crazy. I was stuck in the hospital and couldn't do much, but everypony and their brother wanted to know how I was feeling, and what I was feeling, and what the future held... I'll bet I did an interview with every media outlet on the planet. It was kind of tiring at the time, but it was nice to think that so many ponies cared."

"Did things calm down after you left the hospital?"

Greased Lightning smirked. "It got crazier, if you can believe it. I didn't have anything else to do, so I hit the all-night clubs pretty hard. Gosh, I was out almost every night for..." Lightning looked towards the ceiling and scratched his chin with his hoof. "I couldn't even put a number on it," he finally declared.

"To forget about your wing, right?" Apple Bloom guessed.

"Oh, no!" Lightning shook his head emphatically. "I didn't do it to forget—I did it to remember."

"Remember? Remember what?"

"Well, I may not have been able to race like a champion, but I could still party like one. Even without the wing, going out and painting the town red was the one thing I could still do that made me feel like a winner."

Apple Bloom's ears perked up. "Wait, so you did a lot of partying when you were racing?"

"More than I'd like to admit, yes."

"Hold on a minute." Apple Bloom flipped back to a previous page in her notebook. "'I put every ounce of sweat and blood and tears I had into bein' the best,'" she read, looking back up at Greased Lightning with a slight frown and a furrowed brow. "I don't see how stayin' out partyin' would make you any faster."

"Yeah..." Lightning laughed nervously, his face turning a bit red at the contradiction. "I, uh, I kind of let myself go for a while."

"Why?"

"Believe it or not, Fireball inspired me," Greased Lightning revealed. "He asked me one time if I ever stepped back and took a few moments to smell the roses while I was winning. He told me his biggest regret was that he was always working towards the next race, the next opponent, the next year, and never really appreciated things as they happened. He said that as his career wound down, he realized that he wasn't having all that much fun racing anymore, and that he might have been happier with his career if he taken the time to enjoy it."

"So you decided to enjoy your career while you still had one," Apple Bloom concluded.

"And how," Lightning confirmed. "I realized that I was spending all my time trying to stay at the top of the mountain, just like Fireball, and I wasn't taking any time to enjoy the view. I started indulging myself a little, which eventually turned into indulging myself a lot. My and my crew spread some bits around and brought the party to every city on the circuit—the best nightspots, the best spirits, and of course, the finest-looking mar—" Greased Lightning suddenly remembered that he was talking to an underage filly, and cut his sentence short. "Uh, what I mean is that we enjoyed some mild refreshments and had intellectually-stimulating discussions about important issues with some female friends."

"That doesn't sound like fun," Apple Bloom commented. "That sounds like the time when Twilight came to our school and started talkin' about form policy."

"Foreign policy," Lightning corrected the filly, "and for now, just know that we enjoyed our nights out. Heck, I think I was on the back page of The Equestrian Enquirer for about two months straight."

"So how does partyin' lead you to a cave in the Everfree Forest?" Apple Bloom demanded. "My family always said the forest was the last place you wanted to be at night."

"Well, my source of income disappeared the day I became a one-wing wonder," Lightning revealed. "Once the money ran out, the partying—and the friends—didn't last too much longer. I went from the life of the party to just another lonely drunk on a stool." The pegasus went silent for a few seconds, as visions of ponies he once knew flashed through his mind.

"Are you okay?" Apple Bloom asked.

"I'm alright," Lightning confirmed. "It's just... I still can't believe some of the ponies who stopped taking my calls when things got bad. Training partners, business partners, even friends who I had known since high school! All of them disappeared the minute my life started falling apart. I even had a steady marefriend—okay, a couple of steady marefriends—drop me like a hot potato after I lost my wing." Lightning shook his head. "Most of the guys on the circuit tried to keep in touch, but eventually they all went back to racing, and left me to drown my sorrows in hard apple cider."

"And then came the arrests?"

"Pretty much. It was the same old story most of the time. One drink would turn into ten, and then some mouthy barfly would start talking trash about how bad I was, and since I couldn't settle the dispute with my wings, I used my hooves instead."

"What did they say to you?"

Lightning shook his head. "You're not old enough to hear most of it. Still, things like 'you're overrated' and 'you couldn't hold a candle to this pony or that pony' got me in plenty of trouble."

"Really?" Apple Bloom glanced up from her notebook and looked over at Greased Lightning in disbelief. "That sounds pretty weak to me."

"Well, everything sounds wittier when you're marinated in alcohol," Greased Lightning countered. "Besides, everypony knew whose name to drop to get my blood boiling."

"Really? Like who? Turbo Jet?"

"No," Lightning said, his tone becoming more serious. "I knew I was better than most ponies—Turbo Jet, Three Wide, even Fireball. There was one pony, though, that I could never really say that about."

"You think there might have been somepony better than you?" Apple Bloom's eyes popped wide open at the suggestion. "What was his name?"

"Her name," Lightning corrected his interviewer. "A couple of ponies were called 'the next Greased Lightning,' but she was the only one who really deserved the title. She started her career the same way I did, actually—by breaking every speed record Cloudsdale had to claim. Of course, this time it was me getting wiped from the record books instead of Fireball."

"Wow. So what was her name?"

"I tell you, she was like nopony I'd even run into before," Lightning continued, ignoring Apple Bloom's question. "Talk about a pony with an edge—she had a take-no-prisoners attitude, a serious problem with authority, and above all, she had speed to burn! She would tell you how badly she would beat you before the race, inform you as to how badly she was beating you during the race, and then remind you how badly she beat you after the race. And believe me, she was not afraid to mix it up with the big boys—she even picked a fight with Diesel a couple of times!" Lightning shook his head. "She was a really sore loser too. I heard she got mad at some track and field event because she thought somepony had crowded her and cost her the race, and she grabbed a ball and chain from one of the hammer throwers and nailed the guy who crowded her from three hundred feet away!" The pegasus laughed at the story. "She got her revenge and broke the Equestrian hammer throw record at the same time."

"What was her name?" Apple Bloom practically screamed.

"Come on now," Lightning replied. "You have to know who I'm talking about, right? I mean, you might be too young to remember me or Fireball, but you can't tell me you've never heard of Rainbow Dash!"

"Oh! I know Rainbow!" Apple Bloom confirmed. "She lives ten clouds down from the farm!"

"Huh?" Greased Lightning's jaw hit the floor. "She's living in Ponyville now? What in the world is she doing there?"

Apple Bloom shrugged. "I dunno, but that's where she is."

"Well I'll be..." Lightning stared down at the floor for a few moments. "I told you that how I got here was a long story," he finally offered as he looked back toward Apple Bloom, "but I guess the truth is that I'm out here because of her."

Apple Bloom nearly spit her pencil across the room. "Really? Rainbow Dash is the reason you disappeared?"

"Well, not the reason," Lightning clarified, "but certainly the biggest one."

Apple Bloom's hooves began to tremble as potential headlines popped into her mind. Run Out On A Rainbow: Local pegasus drives legend into exile! Lightning strikes: Racer says Rainbow "the biggest" reason he walked away! Greased Lightning tell-all earns writer Pulitzer Prize AND cutie mark! Of course, it remained to be seen how Rainbow Dash might feel about such a story, and as both she and Lightning knew, Rainbow didn't get mad, she got even. Still, this kind of bombshell was the opportunity Apple Bloom had been waiting for, and besides, she could just write a second article telling Rainbow's side of the story.

Apple Bloom reached back into her saddlebag and pulled out a fresh pencil, then gave Greased Lightning the most serious-looking glare she could muster. "I want to know how, when, where, and why Rainbow Dash pushed you all the way out here," she declared. "Tell me everything."

Lightning took a deep breath. "Well, like I said, Rainbow—"

"Hold it right there, varmint!" A voice suddenly echoed through the cabin, causing Greased Lightning to flinch and Apple Bloom to jump three feet into the air.

Greased Lightning quickly stepped in between Apple Bloom and the cave entrance. "Who's there?" He demanded, unable to see the intruders standing outside his home.

In response, a bright-pink laser came shooting out of the darkness, striking Lightning square in the chest. "Ahhhh!" Lightning screamed, as the force of the blow flung him against the back wall of the cave. He came to rest in a crumpled heap at the base of the wall, and the last thing he saw before losing consciousness was a frightened Apple Bloom running to his side just as three ponies he didn't recognize stepped into the cave.