Rainbow Dash Lays An Egg
Admiral Biscuit
The Storm Astrophysix weighs fifteen pounds, has an asymmetric core, and a polished finish suitable for medium-heavy lanes. It’s part of Storm’s premier bowling ball line, and the $174 price not only includes a unique swirled charcoal, cyan, and indigo finish, but it even has a plum nectar scent.
Rainbow Dash wasn’t interested in any of those facts.
Much like the bowling ball, Rainbow Dash was generally performance-oriented, spending countless hours training for the Wonderbolts and honing her aeronautic skills.
That wasn’t the only skill she’d been practicing lately. While she was well-attuned to her body, spring brought changes, and this year those changes had started with an urge to build a nest in a high place.
She didn’t know much about nest-building, but that didn’t really matter; it was all instinctual. She gathered sticks and dead grass and wove them together into a bowl shape on a high place—in this case, the roof of an apartment building a few blocks from a bowling alley. Mud helped with adhering her makeshift building materials together, and once the basic structure was constructed, she looked around for shiny things that might make it stand out from other nests.
Luckily, Earth had plenty of those to offer. Some of them were found objects, a bit of leftover Christmas tinsel in a backyard, a few shards of broken headlight reflector she spotted alongside a road, an empty bottle of Budweiser Platinum in a ditch. Others were bought; human stores carried plenty of shiny things.
Her spring moult provided an abundance of feathers to line her nest, and for an hour around sunrise and an hour around sunset, she flew her acrobatics in sight of it, waiting for the arrival of a suitable stallion.
Only one arrived: Soarin. Rainbow should have known enough about the birds and the bees to know what was supposed to happen next. For that matter, Soarin also should have.
As it happened, neither was interested in the other on any level other than professional, and as spring gave way to summer, Rainbow would have left her nest behind as she had so many times in the past.
But this year wasn’t normal. Rainbow knew herself, knew her body, and had no idea that being on Earth might betray the normal balance of her hormones. Aside from an urge to return to her nest that kept recurring during her morning workouts and her normal spring craving for plum blossoms, her life went on as normal.
Until she spotted the Storm Astrophysix. It was behind a car with an open trunk, in its own leather carrying bag. Some fortuitous quirk of fate caused her to look down at just the right moment—normally she wasn’t terribly interested in what happened on the ground—and before she could even think about what she was doing, she swooped down and grabbed the bag’s handles in her teeth.
The owner of the bowling ball turned in time to see her taking to the air with his prize ball. His shouts fell on deaf ears; Rainbow had a biological imperative and was not to be denied.
She circled around her nest once, then landed beside it. She set the bag in the center of her nest and carefully tipped it over, letting the ball roll until it was in the center.
As for the bag, that was no use to her, so she tossed it off the edge of the roof.
She didn’t personally have any memory of being a hatchling, and she was an only foal, so she didn’t have any direct knowledge of what a pegasus egg should look like.
To a hormone-addled brain, the bowling ball was close enough. She piled some feathers around it to help keep it warm, then settled down on top of it.
At first, the unyielding sphere was unpleasant, and she shifted around, trying to find a way to sit that didn’t hurt her ribs or press into her belly. Lots of her friends had taken their turn incubating eggs, but she never had.
She turned around in her nest, her maternal instincts clashing with her go-fast impulses, finally managing to find a position that was at least reasonably comfortable.