Anyone who is impressed by Pavlov’s dogs is a bit of an intellectual idiot, of which there is a good number. For those who’ve had better and more interesting things to do than read up on obscure and largely unimportant science that was done ‘just cuz’: these dogs were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell.
Whoop dee frigging (Daring) doo. Dude trains dogs to associate sounds with food, and they call it science. Sheesh. It’d be entirely more respectable if they were trained to feed entirely off sound waves, unleash ultrasonic bark blasts or, at the very least, be some kind of avant garde choir.
Of all the hilarious, clever, and ridiculously pointless things ad potentia, these dogs were trained, at what is the fundamental truth, to like food.
Science can be a bit of a tard at times.
All the same, science was coming in very handy as it haphazardly went in the interesting and delightfully manic array of circuit boards and wires that made up the communications device. It was not an array, per se, because that word implied precision and sophistication. Even ‘device’ stretched the concept of technological ‘order’ and ‘function.’
In short, it was a an absolute mess of wires and blinking diodes, and the entire system had more bugs than an insect’s house warming party.
Static crackled across the comm lines, but it was the enthusiastic and hopeful static that, with a couple of loving applications of percussive maintenance by means of boot and reboot might yield an almost intelligible message.
This is what the comms device, in principle an achievement in technological development but in truth, a demonstration of chaos theory in practice, yielded:
“Holy shi--sir! We’ve just picked up the largest bio signature I’ve ever seen, and it’s coming this way! And it’s going really fast!”
It’s important to say at this point that the voice was from a throat that was connected to a brain that was fairly comfortable and accustomed to space travel, and resided in a body that typically strolled along the corridors of starships only easily measured in kilometres.
These starships traveled in packs, or, to be more precise, herds, because there were bigger and nastier things than them roaming the stars. The ship with the body with the brain with the voice was also used to dealing with these on a fairly punch-clock basis, so when it says, poetic as only curses can manage, that this is the biggest bio signature it has ever seen...don’t just take note of it, take the whole damn encyclopedia. Preferably as some kind of extra layer of armour, or something.
For the bio signature, which was indeed very big, it wished (with its very big brain and very big network of vascular organ systems) that it was not quite so big. At least, not so flabby.
“You call that flying? Move it!” The incessant voice roared. Pavlov had made dogs learn to think of bells and food. Rainbow Dash had made a million-tonne monstrosity massive beyond all sanity to fear her hat and shades, because those meant training time.
Against the backdrop of the leviathan, Rainbow Dash wasn’t even an annoying wasp. In scale she might have been the mite prowling through the hairs of the wasp that hassled the huge monstrous sky whale, but her small relative size only meant that all the more force of personality was focused on a single crushing point, like an elephant trying to trample you with high heels.
The stuff of nightmares, right there.
As for the scale of the soul, she was much more like a great rainbow shark, with jet propulsion, samurai blades, laser light shows, flaming contrails, and obligatory explosions to not look at from behind her radical awesome shades of coolness.
And she was making the monster sweat. The stuff poured off the bulk of the leviathan like rain, which was not actually a simile for those unfortunates caught below the cubic kilometres of monster. It was the grossest rain, ever, and fell from the beast in nearly horizontal sheets as it roared across the sky.
It was also rather impressive, considering that before the pegasus had shown up, the leviathan hadn’t even had sweat glands. If necessity is the mother of invention, than Rainbow Dash was the big, heavy rolling pin she beat the stupid out of you with.
It’d had to grow several thousand extra tracts of lungs just to keep out of breath, and the swarm of mutalisks, savage half-bat half-snakes that lived throughout its body, clung on for dear life.
Mountain ranges rolled by while the leviathan, big as any of them, howled with fury and thunder.
“Raaaa!” Rainbow Dash shouted in its face, and somehow, impossibly, that won the screaming contest. She flew backwards with lazy ease, all the while yelling obscenities. The monstrosity almost wanted to cry, but mostly it wanted to annihilate everything.
It shook a haze of maddened, swarming stingers at the pegasus, whom lazily flitted between the shrieking death and spun dexterously to redirect the last to fly back into the hellish beast’s face, where it exploded and elicited a booming shriek of anger.
“You giving me attitude? You trying to give me attitude?!” Dash kept pace just inches ahead of the surging leviathan and and prodded an eye the size of a lake, one of many.
“You’re nothing but a punk! I don’t know why I bother trying to whip you into shape! If Celestia hadn’t asked for this as a favour to some friend or other, I wouldn’t even be here! So MOVE IT AND FLAP THOSE...whatever it is you use to fly!”
The monster screamed and mountain tops in the distance...under them...now in the other distance, trembled.
Rainbow Dash shrugged it off with a flippant wave of her hoof. “Just try to keep up!”
The leviathan’s bulk rippled with its anger and it pushed every gram of effort into catching the damnable mare which - when ‘big as a whale’ is not only not a hyperbole, but an extreme understatement - amounted to a lot of grams. Thunder boomed perpetually in its atmospheric wake.
-=-=-=
Somewhere on the ground a base was in utter panic. A non descript bit of land consumed by tectonic storms and surging lava flows, it was rather mundane for what the standards of the planet with its curious and eccentric natives had to offer. The armoured troops (like the voice of the brain of the body of the ship) were accustomed to these.
But then, having a million metric tonne-oh-shits ripping across the sky towards you can have a whole new effect.
“Sir,” the comms crackled crazily, and a fair bit of that was the voice’s own. “Sir! It’s...holy shit it’s breaching the sound barrier!”
The force of the detonation was a precious few seconds away, which gave those on the ground a chance to make a very brief peace on a very short notice, dive into the nearest meagre spot of shelter, and truly test the bravery of their bowels...and not necessarily in that order.
Light travels faster than sound. This is a well understood fact, but is not often appreciated enough. The explosion of light more than made up for that.
Every one of those precious seconds was filled with blinding radiance, blazing in all the colours of the rainbow - and some other dazzling colours that only show up after reason and sanity decide to take a holiday or six.
“BRACE FOR IMPAC----”
There is no possible way to describe the event. The world, the cosmos themselves went haywire and all the laws of the universe, for here and now, decided to just kick it and rock out. The only way this can even be attempted is to merely say that Rainbow Dash happened. Rainbow Dash happened big time.
Sense was a long time in coming back, and not a single sentient being caught in the explosion didn’t stand in a state of absolute shock and awe. Not just shock and awe, but the shock of pure unmoderated awesome and awe yeeeeaah!
One heavily-armoured marine looked to another, and blinked.
“When...when did you get those bubbles painted on your armor?”
“What?”
“You got bubbles. On your armour. Right there.”
The be-bubbled marine blinked and looked. “Oh. Huh. So I do.” He blinked again. “Hey, you got, like, an hourglass on yours.”
“What? I ain’t got no... oh. Ain’t seen this before. What just happened? What’d these mean?” the marine said, gesturing to the strange new image on his paintjob.
“I don’t know...I just don’t know.”
Dumbstruck marines emerged from shelter. Each with their own strange and colourful little marking, they looked at them in a stupor. Nobody knew yet what to think.
“You know...it’s actually kinda cute,” one marine hazarded while flexing his shoulders, making the colourful instrument there dance a little.
“Cute?” another questioned aloud. “Are you fucking...you know actually, they are...wait, look at this, I can make this quill look like it’s writing in this book! Unh, yeah, check it!”
The general consensus came to be that these colourful and friendly marks were worth keeping, like badges of honour for making it through whatever the flying fuck had just happened. You had to be seriously badass to go to war adorned with something so non-threatening.
High above and getting farther away every second, a contrail of blazing lights lit up the horizon. Tears of terror and elation from oceanic eyes mingled with the sweaty monsoon of the monster. Ahead of it, egging the leviathan on, Rainbow Dash tore across the heavens.