Rainbow Dash and the Shameless Self-Insert: Preview · 1:15pm Apr 3rd, 2017
It has been a while since I published anything new, being so busy with that sequel and all, and the art side of things (more on that as it develops)
So here's a preview of Rainbow Dash and the Shameless Self-Insert. It's kind of a short fic, clocking in at merely 7k words, but it's still set up to be split into chapters. Probably going to publish the first two on the day of it coming out, then publish the next two a few days later, see what happens. Probably going to get some random screenshot to use as cover art, too.
Anyways, enjoy, and stay tuned!
It was a sunny day in Horseytown. But then how could it not be, with an awesome Weather Patrol pony like Rainbow Flash in charge? The fastest pony in Equestria was just done with her morning routine of cloud punching, sky swerving, and (naturally) flying upstream of a downpour, before a cry demanded her attention in a most urgent fashion. And of course it was urgent; it was Rainbow Flash. When something demanded her involvement, it could be nothing but urgent. Except maybe critical, or pressing, perhaps. Imperative, that was starting to go into a grey area mostly dealt with by the fire brigade and possibly the librarian.
But the cry was urgent, and urgent meant it needed her. “Help! Help me, somepony, please!”
Rainbow Flash’s ears twitched. She froze in mid-air and cupped her hooves to her ears to track the source of the sound, spinning as she did. It didn’t take long for her to figure it out: high pitch, vague echo, no fading due to distance, but definitely from farther away. “What’s that? Little filly stuck down a well again? Have no fear, Rainbow Flash is here!”
The cyan-coated mare with the flashy rainbow mane wasted no time diving into the well from which the cries had come, and she instantly came out with the filly safe sound.
All around, Horseytown’s residents had already crowded to cheer on their hero.
“Rainbow Flash! Rainbow Flash!”
She revelled in the praise, as she always did. She waved down at the crowds, she spun, she even did a little victory dance. Finally, after five years of hard work on the Weather Patrol and prepping for Wonderbolt acceptance, after almost a year of serving as one of the Guardians of Peace with her friends getting all the glory, she was being treated like a celebrity.
And she was determined to enjoy it for as long as she could.
“Who do you love?!” She called out.
“Rainbow Flash! Rainbow Flash!”
The cheers and jubilations drowned out the discordant sounds of Flash’s friends. Guardians of Peace in the land, exemplars of friendship and understanding, they were, of course, thrilled to finally see Rainbow Flash be treated like they had been so often.
Give or take a few remarks, that is.
“Do you think maybe Rainbow is taking this a little too far?” Shady Tinkle asked.
“Well, she did save that filly from the well,” Flutterby replied. “And she stopped the retirement home from collapsing, and she diverted that storm all on her own last week-”
“I agree,” Applesauce added. “Rainbow Flash is taking too many risks, and she’s too darn cocky for her own good. We should do somethin’ about that.”
“Like what?” Index Radians asked.
“Well, you’re the one who can see the future. What do you think we should do?”
“Talk to her?”
“Besides that.”
“Tell her she’s doing a good job and we all appreciate her?”
“Besides that.”
Index gave it some thought. This was always a risk, because Index tended to get a long face from thinking too hard. “Interrupt her in the middle of her doing her job of rescue duties and abuse my powers of prophecy to prevent any harm from coming to us, but still let her chance certain death while we do nothing to actually prevent disasters from happening?”
“Excellent idea!” Shady said. “We should go ask Extinct for some outfits, make sure Rainbow doesn’t know it’s us.”
“Yeah, Rainbow loves a good prank. I’m sure it’ll go down just fine,” Applesauce noted.
–-
Rainbow Dash grumbled. This part still didn’t sit right with her. She had a good ending, a decent enough opener with all the rescuing, but she could never quite get Rainbow Flash’s friends to sound believable when they decided to turn on her.
She let her grumble grow, nurtured it and, carefully, allowed it to mature into a beautiful groan, that she let out as she threw herself back on her cloud bed. Her novel was a mess, and she knew it. An awesome mess, but a mess nonetheless. And the mess, she had to confess, was not up to her standards. If she wanted to publish, if she wanted her little vanity project done, it would have to be done right.
She shivered. Ponies would just laugh at her if she published it like this. That is, most ponies would. A few select other ponies would likely want to hurt her. Maybe another editing round was in order, at the very least to change the names. Rainbow Flash was good, but the others needed work. But that was just a minor patch. She needed to fix the big problem at hoof first: setting up the conflict.
Asking Twilight for advice on the matter was completely out of the question, for obvious reasons. So was asking Applejack, for the very same reasons. Actually, asking anypony for help on this story of hers was a bad idea.
To even call it a story would be exaggerating. Rainbow Dash had considered it an epic, a heroic tale of awesomeness when she’d started out. Now, as was often the case with her projects, she wasn’t sure if she’d even call it fit for the public eye.
The overall plot was much like her own life story: a mare who aspires to be a hero, a Wonderbolt, gets caught up in a prophecy that has absolutely nothing to do with her ambition but she does her part, despite the difficulties it lands her in. She encounters some obstacles on her way, conquers them, eventually becomes Wonderbolt captain. A mare named Rainbow Flash, which was totally different from Rainbow Dash.
The biggest problem right now was how to best fill up her plot. She’d gone not for a single story, but several smaller ones that would, she hoped, form a cohesive whole and take place in the same universe. She was sure there was a fancy term for that sort of thing, but every time she asked Twilight, the alicorn would sneeze, or spout some kind of gibberish. Rainbow Dash, while always on alert for her friends, drew the line at illness, and she wasn’t about to get infected with anything. There’s loyalty and self-sacrifice, and then there’s just plain dumb, she would say.
Now there was an idea: sick friends. Would that make for a good story? Why Rainbow Flash could be so stubborn about not being near sick friends? Or did she do that already? She really couldn’t keep track of these things. She wasn’t much of a writer.
She pushed the thought aside. The superhero thing first, that was the problematic one. She just needed to think of a good reasoning for Flash’s friends to do what Dash’s friends did. Even though, even after Twilight’s coronation – which involved a lot more fanfare than anything Rainbow Dash had gotten for her heroism, and which Twilight had basically earned for fixing a mistake she shouldn’t have made in the first place – and Applejack’s encounters with the Flim Flam Brothers – which demonstrated a distinct lack of humility in the Apple family – she couldn’t quite wrap her head around why her friends had done that Mare Do Well thing in the first place. Something about humility, but without the added remark on how that applies to ponies aiming for a career in show flying, or on why Rarity was exempt from expressing that same humility in her work, or Twilight, for that matter. They weren’t very good at explaining that sort of thing. Or maybe Rainbow just wasn’t very good at listening, possibly because she could go faster than the speed of sound. She snickered at the thought, then sighed.
Not that she blamed them, of course: Rainbow Dash was an athlete, and a professional. If she was going to mess up because of her behaviour, she expected nothing less than some helpful advice. She just couldn’t see what the connection was between her behaviour and the implied future failures. It’s not like she could magically stop a truck or plug a leaking dam, or dodge debris with her Pinkie Sense. Even at full attention, she couldn’t do any of that. But her friends sure thought she could. They must have been right; there’s no way Rainbow Dash was less awesome than what her friends thought she was.
She grumbled again as she looked at the clock. Almost time for the run over Palomino Hill and the check-up on Fluttershy’s beaver dam, then off to clear the mist over Canterlot Road, then check the water reservoir, because Twilight had tossed it again while fighting a flock of phoenixes.
A thought occurred to her then, as she put away her things in her saddlebag.
Maybe I should stop writing about Rainbow Flash. Maybe I should just make Shady Tinkle the main character. I mean, she never does anything wrong, just like Twilight.
Probably better.
She flew off to work.
–
“Okay, final round-up: water reservoir?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“We filled that to the brim,” Flitter replied,” and it’s ready for inspection by the Canterlot Fire Brigade tomorrow.”
“Good. The beaver dam is okay, we cleared the weather over Ponyville Park, and if the check-up is clear...”
Thunderlane came flying next to them. “The race track is all dried up now, all the gusts have been diverted, so the cart race in two days is still good to go.”
“Good, make sure no clouds get close. We don’t want Ponyville to get a bad reputation just because the race tracks are slippery.”
“And the request from the Writer’s Guild?” Flitter asked.
Rainbow Dash stopped. “I took care of that on my own before we got started.”
“Oh. Okay. I guess we’re done for now, then?”
“Yup,” Rainbow replied. “Nothing’s coming towards town right now, so that’s all. You can relax. Good job, everypony.”
“Err, just one thing, Rainbow Dash,” Thunderlane said, pointing to a dark cloud in town. “Are you sure the writers asked for a thundercloud?”
She scrunched her nose at the question. Always the same thing with the Writer’s Guild: they didn’t like their weather to be unnatural, so every few weeks they’d ask for a private rain shower. Something about adding atmosphere to the writing process when they all got together, and the sentence ‘It was a sunny day in Ponyville’ being considered about as evil and vile as a necromancy spell.
She never understood writers, or other writers, she mentally corrected herself. Writers had to be smart, and use big words. And they somehow managed to be a bunch that was at the same time very silly and yet no fun at all. But, regardless, she was trying her hoof at their craft, and while she didn’t understand it very well, she did have a duty towards them, so do it she did.
“Positive,” Rainbow Dash said. “They’re doing some kind of project today, something about ravens.”
“Oh, they’re doing gothic lit today? Yeesh, well, I’m sure they’ll appreciate the effort, then,” said Flitter.
“Let’s hope so. Dismissed, everypony. Enjoy the rest of your day, if you hear me shouting about anything, you know what to do.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” they all said with a curt salute.
Rainbow flew off with a smile. Work had just flown by today. Which wasn’t that surprising, because so had she.
Once she got back home, she flopped on her bed and grabbed for her novel, determined to fix it up at last.
Only, her novel wasn’t there anymore.
“Huh?”
She looked under her bed, next to it, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the roof, in the meadows underneath her house. Nothing.
Finally, she checked her saddlebags. “Oh no...”
She grabbed some sheets of paper with notes on them. She’d slid those in between the pages of her full story, but the book itself wasn’t there.
She must have packed it without noticing. And she probably lost it the same way. She slapped herself in the forehead. All those years of hearing her mom yacking on about it, and she still couldn’t fly carefully enough to stop her books from spilling out.
The momentary embarrassment was nothing, though, compared to what was to follow.
“Oh, no. It’s gone. I dropped my novel. I...” She felt faint as realisation set in. “I dropped it in Ponyville. Somepony’s gonna read my novel!”
Some of the lay-out doesn't carry over, italics and such, but you get the idea, right?
Huh. Sounds like this is going to be an interesting blend of Rainbow character piece and metafiction (in the "story about the writing process" sense rather than the "fun with the medium" sense.) Should be fun.