//------------------------------// // A Multi-coloured Interlude // Story: Pinkie and Rainbow's Airship Adventures // by TimbukTurnip //------------------------------// It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It was like nothing she could’ve ever imagined. She doubted even Pinkie Pie could’ve dreamed of such a sight. There they were, sitting atop The Airship of Adventure, mouths agape, travelling at inconceivable speeds yet feeling like they we’re perfectly motionless. All around them, stretching far into distance beyond the range of their eyesight, was a tunnel made of all the colours of the rainbow, twisting as it went along, engulfing them in a multitude of bright hues like a thousand differently coloured spotlights. Inside the colours were images. Countless images – moving images, as if they were seeing what was happening in every possible location at that very moment. They speed past as they ship went along, far too quickly to be seen. Yet, she could see and comprehend each and every image; all of them at the same time too. She could see all her friends – minus Pinkie – asleep in their beds, she could see Princess Luna in a library studying, she could see every creature in the Everfree Forest, all of Ponyville, all of Equestria and beyond… It was like she was nowhere, but everywhere. Like she had been unbound from the laws of physics and removed from the universe, taken to a place beyond reality that was both beyond understanding but completely natural to her. A place where she was both non-existent and omnipresent. She expected her brain to explode, or melt, or just plain disappear, but it remained, entranced by the sights around it. It was perfectly calm. “Pinkie?” she asked, keeping her gaze locked on the colours and images that rocketed past her, “Was there anything in that cupcake you gave me that would make me think I’m looking at a multi-coloured tunnel? One with moving images inside it?” “No,” came the reply in a distant voice, the pink pony also captivated by the sight around the ship, “Those cupcakes just have lots and lots of energy in them… they wouldn’t make you… see this…” “So what I’m looking at is real? You see it too?” “Yup… it’s real” “…Cool.” They sat there for what felt like minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, eons – they didn’t know how long, they couldn’t wrench their gazes away and didn’t notice the passage of time. Assuming time even existed wherever they were. Probably not. Eventually however, they became accustomed to their indescribable location. As accustomed as they could be anyway. Finally turning her gaze away, Rainbow Dash looked to Pinkie for an explanation. “So Pinkie, where are we?” she asked calmly. Pinkie too removed her gaze from the tunnel and set it on Dash, a serene look upon her face and her eyes sparkling as she did so. “Your guess is as good as mine Dashie. I used the energy from your sonic rainboom to open a… sort-of wormhole, which we entered… beyond that I have no idea.” Rainbow opened her mouth to say something, but Pinkie raised a hoof in her direction and cut her off before she began. “And no, I don’t know where we’re going to end up. We could end up anywhere in Equestria, or outside of Equestria… we could even end up in a different time period – or a different universe, if you believe in that sort of thing.” The pink pony’s face was suddenly adorned with an impossibly large smile as she added “It’s gonna be a ton of fun, Dashie!” The cyan pegasus took several moments to absorb and consider this information before a thought struck her. “If you don’t know where we’re going to end up when we go through this… rainbow, wormhole… thing… how do we get back home?” Pinkie Pie’s smile froze on her face as her eyes widened and pupils contracted, staring at her friend, before she began to slowly shrink down into her legs like she was trying to curl up into a ball, trembling slightly as she did so. “Oopsie,” was her quiet answer. Dash’s face momentarily converted to one of puzzlement until her brow swiftly furrowed and her eyes shone with furious look of disbelief and infuriation. Of all the things – ALL the things Pinkie could’ve not thought of and meticulously planned for ahead of time, it had to be one of if not the most important; how they were going to get back home. They were heading Celestia knows where, not a clue whether they’d still be in the same time period they left from or even in the same universe. They were venturing into the entirely unknowable and unpredictable, with no way of getting back. No possible way of getting back. Rainbow Dash was far beyond incredulous, far beyond exasperated and far, far beyond angry. Her cyan face had turned crimson. The mixing of emotions she felt was churning up her insides, making her feel ready to explode and let them all come pouring out her, mangled in the resulting bits of her flesh that would rain down upon the ship. Before anything that could even come close to such a scene happened however, she was startled by a bright white light out of the corner of her eye. Turning to look at it, she discovered that it was filling the tunnel far in the distance. It was also fast approaching, the intensity of its brightness growing as it neared. The colours and images surrounding the two ponies began to stretch as they grew closer to the source of the light. The end of the tunnel. Previous emotions completely forgotten, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash shared a knowing glance before turning back to the luminous end of their first wormhole journey and the beginning of their new adventure, shielding their eyes as they did so. A few moments later, they and their ship were engulfed in the brightness of a thousand suns, leaving the multiple colours, images and the apparent plane of non-existent omnipresence behind them as they entered a new realm of reality.