A split second before the white lump could knock her from the sky, Rainbow Dash rolled from its path. She let the projectile come within inches of her cyan flank, then with a subtle flick of her pegasus wings was spiraling away, grinning at her own theatrics.
Her rainbow mane fluttered back in the wind as she arched her neck in self-satisfied pride. Her smug moment was cut short as two more blobs streaked up from the ground below, white blurs against the clear, afternoon sky.
She grunted and flipped sideways. The blobs changed direction in midair, darting away from each other to skirt around in a wide circle. Her eyes jumped from one to the other, her wings tense, ready to shift her momentum any direction. She spun a quick barrel roll, pausing upside down to sneak a peek at the ground.
A pony so pristine white she seemed tinged in silver glared a look of steely determination up from the bright green grass of the field below. The pony’s purple mane, curled like thick lengths of silken ribbon, bounced when she shuffled her hooves to widen her stance. A shimmering glow of magical energy pulsed around the little unicorn horn perched on her forehead.
Rainbow Dash stifled a laugh. Ever since she was a young pony, even before she earned her cloud-and-rainbow-striped-lightning-bolt cutie mark, unicorn-pony horns had always made her giggle a bit. A little forehead bump sure did look kind of goofy when compared to something as totally awesome as pegasus wings. But in the fraction of a second she took to scout below, she saw nothing humorous in the way the power in that horn was floating dozens more of the white lumps into an orderly queue, all primed and waiting for their chance to take her down.
Flipping upright, she reoriented on the two blobs prowling through the air like wingless birds of prey. “What is she waiting for?” she asked in her tomboy rasp, sandpapered from years of high altitudes and hurricane-force headwinds. “This is getting…”
Then she felt it. Her body tingled, thickening as if she were suddenly flying at ten thousand feet. She blinked in surprise and looked down. The ground was still close. Too close. Her sky pony instinct for altitude seemed to be malfunctioning in a major way. Her wings flailed, struggling to find purchase in the thinning air. The previously sweet, green-scented afternoon refused to fill her lungs. She pumped furiously to maintain her flight path.
“Hailstones!” she said as she remembered the other, very magically gifted pony down below assisting the first. She looked back through her own thrashing pinion feathers to pick out the second pony on the ground.
A violet and pink unicorn stood beside a pile of leaves near the edge of an apple orchard with her eyes heavy-lidded in concentration. For some reason, the horn on this particular unicorn never made Rainbow Dash want to laugh. She had seen it take on an Ursa Minor. And win. A feat that even she, Rainbow Dash, brave and fearless as she was, might struggle with.
The pink-striped forelock of the violet unicorn slipped further down over her eyes as she lowered her head and let out a girly groan of exertion. The already respectable magical corona around her horn flashed and doubled to twice the size of the pony wielding it.
The air around Rainbow Dash changed again. She suddenly felt as if she were flying through pudding. Before she could pull her wings in to compensate, five of the white blurs attacked in unison.
Rainbow Dash grinned. “That’s more like it.” She pumped her wings. The thick muscles along her spine already burned at their limits, but she ignored the pain and pushed harder. She ducked one white blur. Jerked her hooves tight to her underside, zipping over another. Slapped her wings flat to her sides to slip between two more. The air thinned in a prickling wave, but the white shapes came even faster.
She dodged; over, under, between, and still they came. She deflected one with a hoof, batted another with a wing, but the relentless attack continued amid the ever-changing air. She angled straight up toward the cresting sun with wings, chest, ribs, and neck all screaming as she fought to gain altitude. Ropes of mist and thickened air swirled around her. Bubbles of alternating high and low pressure attacked, causing the lift generated by her wings to fluctuate wildly.
Something approached fast from behind. She ducked just as a white blur grazed the length of her spine, plowing through every hair of her multi-colored mane. The air thinned once again as she laughed and turned back to shout, “You’ll have to do better than-”
Wham.
A large, lumpy missile blindsided her, slamming into the side of her face and flipping her mane-over-tail. Feathers exploded in a downy cloud. A clear, musical, “Ahaha!” floated up from the grassy field below.
Rainbow Dash hacked and wiped at her eyes, trying to rid her face of the clinging fluffiness. She flapped frantically but didn’t realize she was falling until somepony shouted, “Rarity, catch her!” Rainbow Dash tried to sputter out that she didn’t need help, but was too busy coughing up feathers.
“Oh my! I have her,” a singsong voice said a moment before Rainbow Dash slammed into a heap of soft lumps.
Thundering silence engulfed her. Her breath came in ragged gasps. She felt hot all over and slick with hard-earned sweat. Her back and wing muscles hummed silently, but all else was still. She groaned and curled into a tiny ball of pony. Everything was dark and muffled inside the pile and smelled of lightly perfumed linen. Her head still felt like she was spinning, but the ground was solid beneath her. She worked her tongue around her mouth and managed to hawk out a glob of soggy feathers. The staccato rhythm of approaching hoof beats reverberated through the ground.
“Rainbow!” a voice called out. “Rainbow Dash, are you okay?”
Rainbow Dash let out a small whimper that only she could hear. She pictured herself sinking into the ground where no one could find her to comment on her wipeout. If she held still, maybe they’d forget she was there and go away.
“Goodness,” the musical voice said. “I hope I didn’t hurt her!”
The weight pressing around Rainbow Dash disappeared as the lumps shimmered with a magical glow. They lifted away, exposing her once again to the bright afternoon. She blinked and looked from the concerned violet face staring down at her, to the white one wearing a similar expression.
“Hey, Twilight,” she said to the violet pony. “Hey, Rarity,” she said to the white face. She forced herself to grin and popped up to her hooves, masking her wobbly balance with a wing flap. “Me? All right?” she said, putting a hoof to her chest and raising her chin. “Of course I’m all right! Takes more than that to keep the greatest flier in all Equestria down.”
The other three ponies let out a sigh of relief. Wait… three? Rainbow Dash shook her head and blinked. Another pony with a cotton candy pink face and a fluffy shock of magenta mane blinked her bright, blue eyes and grinned.
“Hi Rainbow Dash!” the pink pony said, so fast it almost sounded like one word.
“Pinkie Pie?” Rainbow Dash said. “What are you doing here?” Two ponies seeing her humiliated was bad enough, why did this one have to show up, too?
Pinkie Pie whipped up a hoof with a caramel covered apple stuck to it. “Eating candied apples. I had some caramel but no apples. So I came here!” She licked the hazel glaze near the base of the stick, managing to somehow land a glob on the end of her nose. “But then I saw you flipping around in the air, and stuff flying, and Twilight Sparkle going all ‘grrrrr’, And Rarity going all ‘Fwip! Fwip! Fwip!’” Pinkie Pie tossed her head, throwing invisible things.
Rainbow Dash covered her face with a hoof. “Pinkie Pie….”
“And the winds swirling, and you were going all ‘Whoom! Whoom! Whoom!” Pinkie Pie hopped side to side as if dodging flying objects.
“Pinkie Pie!” Twilight Sparkle said.
“And then Spike was all ‘we’re never gonna make it!’ And Big Macintosh was all ‘Eeeeeeyup!’”
“Pinkie Pie, please!” Rarity said.
“What the hay is all the commotion about?” a voice called out from behind Rainbow Dash.
Rainbow Dash spun, feeling her cheeks heat. “Applejack! What are you doing here?”
A light orange pony wearing a cowgirl hat over her blonde mane trotted to a stop. “This’s mah farm, ah live here!” She pointed a hoof at a red, rickety farmhouse in the near distance.
Rainbow Dash’s head and tail drooped. “Great.” She hadn’t realized they were so close to Sweet Apple Acres.
Pinkie Pie bounced in a circle around Applejack like she had springs stuck to her hooves. “Did you see that, A.J.? Huh? Wasn’t it amazing?” Rainbow Dash picked her head up, one side of her mouth trying to smile.
“Ah sure as sugar did!” Applejack said, crossing her forelegs. Rainbow Dash’s smile widened. “Rarity knocked her fer a loop! I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it! Amazin’ ain’t the half of it.”
Rainbow Dash’s stomach clenched. Her mane and tail suddenly felt as if they weighed five hundred pounds. “Rarity was amazing?” she muttered.
The white unicorn in question raised her perfectly coiffed head, closed her eyes and touched a velvet hoof to the hollow of her throat. “I was amazing, wasn’t I? Ahaha! Imagine… me, Rarity, vanquishing the greatest flier in all Equestria…” a white lump jumped up next to her face, floating in a magical aura, “with a pillow!” Every pony besides Rainbow Dash started laughing. Her head drooped further, her nose almost touching the ground.
“Now I guess we know Rainbow’s weakness,” Twilight Sparkle said between laughs.
“It was just a lucky shot,” Rainbow Dash mumbled.
“It most certainly was not luck,” Rarity said in mock offense. “I was doing exactly what you asked me to, you simply didn’t expect me to do it so well.”
Rainbow Dash felt her wings trying to rise on their own. Despite common misconception, pegasus wings are closely tied to all strong emotion and don’t rise only when a pegasus is excited, but also for surprise, fear, anger, and embarrassment. Which is what they were responding to right then: the desperate desire to depart. She kept them locked firmly in place to hide her mounting shame, but could do nothing to abate the burning in her cheeks and ears.
Pinkie Pie stopped bouncing and slapped her candied apple to her forehead with the stick pointing out like a horn. She tilted her head back, and in a surprisingly accurate imitation of Twilight Sparkle said, “Spike, take a note, please. Dear Princess Celestia, please send us a new champion flier, because if Ponyville is ever overrun by evil, winged pillows… we’re doomed!” The others burst out laughing even harder. Rainbow Dash felt like she was about to burst into flames.
“Everypony, wait a minute,” Twilight Sparkle said. “Rainbow’s not laughing.” They all quieted.
Applejack put a hoof on Rainbow Dash’s shoulder. “Easy, sugar cube, we didn’t mean no harm.”
“Of course not,” Rarity said. “Sorry if we took it too far, we were only horsing around with you. You are the greatest flier in Ponyville, after all.”
“And you won the Young Flier Competition!” Pinkie Pie said.
A nearby pile of leaves erupted as a small orange face topped with a dark-pink forelock burst from it. Two tiny, orange wings flipped up behind, sending a second spray of leaves skyward. “And you can do the Sonic Rainboom!”
Rainbow Dash squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. “Not her, too.” Her entire body started quivering.
“That’s right! Thank you, Scootaloo,” Twilight Sparkle said to the little orange pegasus in the leaf pile. “The Sonic Rainboom!”
“Yeah! The Sonic Rainboom!” the other ponies said in unison.
Why did Scootaloo have to bring up the Rainboom? It was a nearly impossible trick Rainbow Dash had been trying to recreate ever since she accidentally did it once as a little filly. It happened when she flew so fast that the very air around her detonated in a multi-colored sonic boom. She recently pulled it off again, saving her friends and winning a competition in the process. But since then….
“It’s only the most spectacular thing ah’ve ever seen!” Applejack said.
“And you are the only one who can perform the Sonic Rainboom,” Rarity said.
Rainbow Dash’s jaw was clenched so tight she thought her teeth might shatter. Her entire body was taut, stretched like a rubber band about to snap.
Pinkie Pie lifted her back leg and looked down at it. “Umm… girls? My foot feels knocky… that means something’s about to blow up.”
Little Scootaloo liberated herself from the leaf pile and pranced over to the group with her wings upright. “Seriously, if I could do the Sonic Rainboom,” she said, “I would-”
Rainbow Dash spun and thrust her face down, bumping foreheads with Scootaloo, their eyes millimeters apart. “Sonic Rainboom?” she said through gritted teeth. “Sonic Rainboom?” she said again, anger flaring.
Scootaloo’s eyes doubled in size. She pulled her head back and stepped away. Rainbow Dash followed her retreat, punctuating every few words with a pounding step forward. “So what if I can do the Sonic Rainboom? What’s so great about it? I don’t even care about it anymore! And I’m not going to teach you, and I’m not giving flying lessons, so stop following me around already!”
Eyes quivering, Scootaloo’s face scrunched in toward her nose as she bit her lower lip. Rainbow Dash turned back to the other ponies when Scootaloo streaked away leaving hiccupping sobs in her wake.
“Sonic Rainboom,” Rainbow Dash said again, spitting out the words. “Sonic Rainboom, Sonic Rainboom… that’s all anypony says about me anymore. ‘Oh look,” she pointed into the distance at nothing in particular, “‘there goes that Sonic Rainboom pony!’” She touched her front hooves to her cheeks and squeezed until her lips puckered. “‘Oooh, I wonder what’s next for the Sonic Rainboom pony?’”
She looked at each of them in turn. “Apparently nothing, because I can’t even out-fly a stupid pillow!” She kicked one of the offending objects, sending it spinning high into the air. She glared at the other ponies, breathing heavily, until the pillow thumped back down on the top of her head with a muffled ‘poof’.
Nopony said a word.
The pillow slid from her head and plopped to the ground.
She glared harder, daring any of them to speak.
They stared back with blank expressions.
One corner of Applejack’s mouth quivered, pulling out to the side and letting a small snicker escape her strained face. Rarity slapped a white hoof over Applejack’s mouth without the slightest change in her own expression.
Twilight Sparkle snickered.
“That’s it!” Rainbow Dash shouted, rearing up with wings and hooves flailing. The others all jumped in fright and leaped together in a group hug. “Everypony just… just leave me alone!” She scanned the perfect sky. Of course the sky ponies would make it a clear day the one time she desperately needed a cloud.
But luck hadn’t completely deserted her. Nearby, a lone, puffy cloud drifted lazily above the treetops. She was off the ground and flying before she even knew she had spread her wings.