//------------------------------// // The Awakening // Story: Doctor Whooves: Shadow Of A Ghost // by Scyphi //------------------------------// Rainbow Dash wasn’t ever one to have much in the way of dreams. Usually she either slept too deeply to have them, or couldn’t remember them by the time she awoke again. Even what dreams she did have usually weren’t anything to write home about, as the saying went. Most of her dreams, in fact, were just about her flying around and seeing she did that regularly during the day, she didn’t see them as anything special. This dream was different, though. It had started out as your usual flying dream, but after the full-grown dragon appeared and started to chase Rainbow’s dream self, the dream then turned into an action tale that was part chase, part race, and part game of cat and mouse. Twice in the dream the dragon nearly caught her. It was very awesome. But the dream was doomed to have a cliffhanger as Rainbow suddenly jolted awake. Blearily, she glanced around her dark bedroom, not quite aware of what was going on. She was about to lay her tired head back down on her pillow when she noticed a picture she kept on her bedside table had fallen over. She gave it a blank look for a few moments then rolled over to examine the rest of her room, seeing it had several items that had been knocked out of place too. Rainbow sat up, blinking sleep from her eyes as she worked to remember what had woken her up. Dimly, she started to recall a loud bang of some sort sounding somewhere in Rainbow’s general area, probably outside. Whatever it was, it had been big and loud enough to briefly shake Rainbow’s whole house. This wasn’t that unusual seeing it was a cloud house; it was light enough that a whole number of things could affect it, and because it wasn’t mounted to anything like a cloud city, it was at the total mercy of storm clouds too (which was why storm clouds were kept well away from Ponyville’s pegasi houses, so long as the owners of said homes made sure the ground under them remained cared for through other means). Thus Rainbow deduced that the bang was probably just some stray thundercloud that had gotten away from somepony and wasn’t going to worry about it until morning. She started to go back to sleep, hoping it might not be too late to resume her epic dream. But she was quickly interrupted again when another bang, somewhat softer this time but longer lasting, echoed out and again rattling her home. It definitely did not sound like thunder. Rainbow wasn’t happy about it either way. “Oh c’mon!” she hollered, throwing off her covers and left her room at a reluctant trot to go investigate the racket. She navigated her sparsely furnished house in silence, having to squint in the darkness. She thought about what could have made the noise, but arrived at no immediate explanation. She also noticed it had stopped and she had yet to hear it again. She hoped that this meant she could go back to bed, and, suddenly wondering what time it was, she glanced at a clock that hung in her living room. Nearly midnight. Waaay too late to be up and about looking for mysterious noises anyway. But then the noise sounded once again, sounding closer and this time didn’t fade away entirely. Instead, it dropped down to a dull whisper, barely audible, but it was there nonetheless. Rainbow couldn’t make much out of it, but it definitely wasn’t any sound she had heard a cloud make. As such, she starting to suspect it was pony-made. “Whatever pony is making that noise is going to get a hoof to the snout, or so help me Celestia…” Rainbow grumbled under her breath as she went down a long hallway that ran through the middle of her house, ending with a patio door leading outside. Pushing open the door and strolling out onto the adjoining balcony made out of shaped clouds, the blue pony glanced around at the night-shrouded pegasi neighborhood she lived in, searching for the source of the noise. She wasn’t finding it, but she took some pleasure in noting that she apparently wasn’t the only pony who had been disturbed by the odd noise. Rainbow saw the lights switch on in her neighbor Flitter’s home, and more lights were coming on in the other houses with ponies visibly moving about in them. No doubt they were all searching for the source of the noise as well. Rainbow strained her ears trying to pinpoint it, swiveling them around as she moved her head. There hadn’t been another bang, but the dim whisper noise had persisted and was slowly getting louder. She frowned at the noise, realizing she had never heard anything quite like it before. She worked to analyze it in her head, attempting to explain it. Whirr…whirr…whirr… She ultimately failed, and now she started to grow curious. What was making that noise? She looked left, seeing nothing but Equestrian fields stretching on to the mountains on the horizon. She looked right, seeing nothing but the familiar houses of fellow Ponyville pegasi. Looking straight ahead, she saw nothing but the distant mountain on which Canterlot was perched, too far away to be the source of the noise. She knew it wasn’t coming from behind her, and a glance downward revealed nothing but the usual fields the whole cloud neighborhood hung over. So finally, she looked up, and there it was. At present, it was a mere speck way up in the sky, nearly lost from sight against the inky darkness of the night sky. Rainbow wouldn’t have been able to spy it at all if it wasn’t for the fact that a star seemed to be closely following it. She realized that whatever it was, it was producing light of its own, and it didn’t seem to be the right shape to be some pegasus and his or her carriage. Maybe some kind of airship then? But Rainbow had been around plenty of airships of all types when she lived in Cloudsdale, and none of them had sounded like that. Maybe it was some new kind she had never encountered before? She was in the middle of pondering the neat possibility of it being some kind of new and top secret prototype airship being developed by the Equestrian military when she realized something else about the mysterious object. It was getting closer. Mentally, she plotted a course for the object. If it stuck to its current flight pattern, which was a big if because it was starting to fly somewhat erratically, it was going to shoot right over her house. But it was going to do so rather dangerously close, and that still didn’t explain what it was. Whatever it was, the haunting sound it was making was getting louder still as it got closer. Whirr…whirr…whirr… Rainbow listened to it for a few seconds. She still could not identify the noise, and now that it was getting closer and clearer, it sounded that much more…unearthly. Whirr…Whir—prr—prr—prr… The sound suddenly started to stutter, and then with a sudden flare of its light source, the object started to drop straight down. Alarmed, Rainbow almost jumped to the air with the vague idea of saving it, but the object suddenly righted itself and started to resume something along the lines of normal flight for it, just at a much lower altitude. It was also now heading right for her. Eyes going wide, Rainbow started to back up, but once it was clear the object was going to slam right into her balcony, she turned and galloped back into her house. Pausing only long enough to close the patio door behind her, panicky thinking that would somehow stop the object, Rainbow raced back down the hallway of her home, suddenly and consciously aware of how very long and straight it actually was. She was just about to take flight to speed up when she heard an almighty crash as the object smashed through the mostly-glass patio door, followed by rapid whooshing as it disturbed the cloud walls of the hallway and continued to speed towards her. She barely had time enough to acknowledge this before the object slammed into her from behind, its momentum pinning her flat against the horizontal surface of the object. She tried to peel herself off, but it was going too fast. She couldn’t move out of the spread-eagle position she was trapped in, and could only watch helplessly as she and the object sped towards the end of the hallway where a wall of cloud greeted her. It only being cloud, it burst apart on impact, and the object continued flying back out into the night, surging out of the cloud house and out towards Ponyville itself with its unplanned passenger still pinned to it. Rainbow was helpless to get off the object herself, but relief of a sort finally came when the object started to sputter again and abruptly started to spin, the face that had been pointing forward suddenly moving to face behind itself. Thanks to inertia, Rainbow spun off the object at the same time, and went into an immediate spin as she started to fall, greatly disoriented, towards ground. She quickly flung out her wings to try and regain stability, momentarily getting her first good glance at the object itself as it continued flying on, still spinning, without her. The wing maneuver proved to be too little too late, though, and Rainbow soon found herself plowing snout first into a row of bushes that ran along the road connecting the pegasi neighborhood with Ponyville. Groaning, but not seriously hurt, Rainbow pulled her head free from the bush in time to see the object, now distant again, vanish within the Ponyville skyline. She stared after it, trying to compute exactly what had just happened. She was like that for a few moments, before her musing was suddenly interrupted as another pegasus pony landed beside the bush. “Rainbow Dash!” Rainbow’s neighbor, Flitter, exclaimed with worry, helping the rainbow-maned mare out of the bush. “I saw that thing slam into your house, and then you dive-bombing here! Are you all right?” Rainbow shook her body and popped her back before answering. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she responded. Inwardly, she was surprised she had gotten out of that unscathed, but outwardly she pretended like she had planned that because she was just that awesome. Flitter didn’t seem to notice, though. “What happened?” the mare asked, hovering by Rainbow’s side still, just in case. “I woke up when I heard this loud bang, and came outside to investigate in time to see…see…” she blew a raspberry in frustration, in able to find words to describe it. “What was that thing?” Rainbow gazed back in the direction the object had gone. When she answered, she did so becoming increasingly aware that with each word she said, the stranger it sounded. “It looked like a…flying…blue…box.” The Doctor Rainbow Dash and Spike in DOCTOR WHOOVES Shadow of a Ghost