Story Outline: Re: Rainbow Factory

The idea for this one came to me while I was updating a youtube playlist of some old favorite MLP fan music; in particular Rainbow Factory and its two sequels, Awoken and Pegasus Device. It occurred to me that the lyrics of Rainbow Factory don't really make much sense, so I tried writing some additional lyrics, and as I did so, I got to thinking about the original Rainbow Factory fanfiction and realized that the basic premise of that fic didn't make much sense either. Of all ponies, why would Rainbow Dash, the element of Loyalty, be the head of a facility that kills ponies to make rainbows? So I wrote my own take on how a concept like the Rainbow Factory could work.

Rated M for torture, gore, and death.

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Gather round children, let me tell you a tale
about a little floating city by the name of Cloudsdale
And I hope you will listen closely to my words
When its secrets are divulged and its history unveiled

The town is home to the ponies with wings
the pegasi and the weather that their magic brings

I hope that these words are satisfactory
this is the story of the Rainbow Factory

And that’s how we get those colorful hues
The Orange, Red, Yellow, Green, Violet and Blue
And now that you know what it is that we do,
It’s time, my children, to extract the rainbow from you

• A pegasus is found dead below Cloudsdale.  His death is confirmed to have been from the impact after a great fall, but one thing strikes them as odd; all the color has been drained from his body.
• A second pegasus is discovered a week later.  This one as well seems to have fallen out of the sky, all the color drained from her.
• Rainbow Dash catches wind of this news and asks her friends to help her investigate, as she is concerned that another villain like Tirek may be threatening her hometown.  Rarity and Fluttershy are terrified by the news, Applejack and Twilight are hesitant, and Pinkie remarks that she’s been getting unfamiliar twitches, but they ultimately agree to help.
• Twilight uses her authority as a princess to be granted access to the cadavers, where she discovers residue from unprocessed rainbow.  Rainbow Dash remarks that the only place they could have come from is the weather factory.
• Having cast the cloudwalking spell on the three non-fliers and acquired the hot air balloon, the six friends travel up to Cloudsdale and obtain visitor passes to the weather factory.  While there, they interrogate the workers near the rainbow vats, who tell them that they hadn’t seen anything strange, though one of them lets slip that the unprocessed rainbow is obtained from outside the factory, before being silenced by one of their colleagues.
• Rainbow Dash sneaks past security into one of the offices, where she finds shipping notices that refer to another facility.  She steals several of the notices and makes her way back to the group.
• That night at the Castle of Harmony, Rainbow shows the notices to the others.  Twilight tells the pegasus that she will try to learn what she can.
• Several days later, a third pony is found, once again dead from a fall, once again with the colors drained out of her; this one is an earth pony.  Rainbow urges Twilight to hurry, and the alicorn finally deduces a possible location for the origin of the unprocessed rainbow.
• The following day, the six friends meet and Twilight and Rainbow explain the situation to the others.  They agree to find the place mentioned in the shipping notices and investigate.
• They ultimately locate the place situated on a low mountaintop, miles away from Ponyville or Cloudsdale.  The building is made of clouds, and appears similar to the weather factory.
• The six friends sneak past security and make their way into the building, only for the doors to slam shut behind them.  Rainbow blacks out.
• When she comes to, Rainbow finds herself restrained on a gurney, and isolated from her friends.  As she struggles to get free, another pony walks into the room.  He is clad in a bloody lab coat and leering at her.  She struggles to escape and angrily demands to know who the other pony is, where her friends are, and why she’s tied down.  The pegasus simply wheels the gurney out the door.
• As Rainbow is wheeled through the facility, she witnesses several rooms where ponies are being tortured, vivisected, and otherwise experimented upon.  Finally the pegasus brings her through a door and into a rotunda, where she is horrified to witness the factory’s inner workings
• The factory is in fact built into the body of a gigantic monster.  It’s beating heart keeps the factory running.  One of its bodily functions is used to extract the rainbow hues from ponies, who are then fed to it to keep it alive.
• The pony wheels her over to one of his colleagues, who gleefully explains to her that this facility has been responsible for the production of rainbows for generations, but now the creature is dying, and they must find a way to either extend its lifespan or find a new power source.
• After the incident with Tirek, several of the workers had reported six ponies who had harnessed the power of the rainbow, one of whom was even capable of producing sonic rainbooms at will.  Thus, they had hatched a plan, several of the ponies whose lives were taken were planted near Cloudsdale in order to lure the bearers of harmony to the facility.
• Rainbow learns that her father was a former employee of the factory, but managed to escape.
• She does manage to escape, and finds that at least one of the others has been experimented on.
• She and the remainder manage to blow up the facility, though not all of them make it out.
• The survivors send a letter to Princess Celestia, informing her of where the rainbows have been coming from.
• It is unclear whether Celestia knew about what was happening or not.
• in the wreckage of the facility, a single piston slowly begins pumping once more.