A Rainbow in the Dark

by Sparky Brony


Chapter 3. Waking up in a New World (edited)

The sun lances bright light through Rainbow Dash's eyelids. She wakes up with a yell and falls from her branches. Hitting every other branch on the way down and landing with a thud.

"Owww." She moans as she rubs everywhere where an errant branch has hit her on her impromptu descent. Her low grumbling is interrupted by a soft knicker. She finally looks around. To find a brown snout in her face.

"Oh, hi there." There is no response. The horse sniffs her and knickers again.

"Hello, anypony home?" She waves a hoof in front of the horse's face.

"Come on, I'm lost, I'm so glad to find a fellow equine." The horse just looks at her.

"Can you talk?" The horse seems to lose interest and starts cropping grass next to her. She flares her wings and hovers just off the ground. The horse whinnies and shies away from her.

"What is with these ponies?" She hovers and looks closer at the horse. In moments she realizes what it is. Far larger than she is, and yet, somehow incapable of speech.

"Oh my Celestia, horses are extinct in Equestria. As if those weird creatures were bad enough, we've got horses here, and they can't talk." She flies a bit higher to look around. There's a small herd of the horses around the grove of trees that she had sheltered in the previous night.

She takes off, as she's evaluating her surroundings she sees a bank of clouds, ah, a good place to gather my thoughts she thinks as she zooms off towards the cloud bank. In moments she's laying on fluffy whiteness, the best place for Rainbow Dash to think. She looks down at the ground.

"Okay, I remember the storm. I got hit by lightning, but I didn't die, I ended up in that city." She looks back in the direction she had flown from the previous night, and shudders.

"There are weird ape-like creatures here. They talk, but they also have horses here. And horses haven't been in Equestria for thousands of years. But the crazy thing is, the horses here don't talk." She puts a hoof to her chin as she tries to puzzle everything out. She slams her hoof down on the cloud. "I've got it. I'm not in Equestria anymore." In moments what she just said dawns on her.

"Oh no, I'm not in Equestria anymore!" With a flash of cyan she spreads her wings and tears back the way she had flown the previous night. In a few minutes she notices how hungry she is, she sees a bale of hay. Well, beggars can't be choosers. She lands on top of the bales. She's too hungry to care about it just being hay, she's starving. She's tearing into a bale and eating as fast as she can. She feels a presence near her, but again, she's too hungry to care.

"And what the hell is this?" The voice jars her from her feeding. She freezes in place, only allowing her head enough movement to look for the source of the voice.

Please be a pony, please be a pony, please be a pony, she desperately thinks as the source of the voice comes into view.

"Oh buck," she moans as one of those crazy looking creatures sits up. She can smell it from ten feet away. Her nose crinkles at the pungent smell of alcohol and sweat wafts to her. She looks around, the creature is surrounded by cans, and a box with more cans is lying next to him, another box is empty and has blown some distance away.

"Now, I usually have hallucinations." He pauses to belch loudly. His voice is surprisingly steady despite his obvious drunken state. "But I've never seen a blue horse while I've been drunk."

"I'm a pony, you idiot, and not just a pony, I'm a pegasus." She briefly flares her wings, and is gratified by the very inebriated creature falling over. She edges closer to him, has he passed back out? The answer comes quickly as he starts wheezing heavily, she's alarmed until she finally realizes that wheezing is him laughing.

"Well, Merle, you've finally gone and done it. You've fallen off the wagon, and ended up in crazy town." He continues his wheezing laughter.

"Mister, are you okay?" she asks tentatively. Her question causes him to stop laughing. He slowly levers himself up.

"Damn, Merle, you are getting too old for this shit," he mumbles to himself. He reaches into the box next to him and comes away with another can. He pulls the ring off the top and brings it towards his face. His eyes fall on Rainbow Dash. With a muttered curse he stops and looks at her closely. She's close enough for him to touch her. He slowly extends a finger gently pokes her.

"Are you real?"

"Are you?" she snaps back.

He looks at her, at his can, back at her, back at the can. After a moment he makes a decision. "Never again," he says as he dumps the beverage on the ground. Once the can is empty he crushes it and throws it away from him.

"You know, drinking too much is bad for you," she says in a matter of fact tone.

"Don't I know it," the old man says. He starts, "You still here?" He looks at her through his blurred vision.

She can't help it, she's amused by the very inebriated human. Surely a creature that drunk can't do anything to harm her. She sits and ponders the incapacitated human in front of her for several very long minutes. He's very drunk, is her first revelation, and the most obvious one. Upon further inspection, she takes in the rest of his appearance. His hair is white, and there isn't much of it. His face is covered by fine white stubble. His skin is wrinkled, and his eyes are sunken into his skull. There wasn't very much of him. He is extremely skinny. His legs ended in dark brown, very scuffed boots, he was just wearing a pair of overalls with a thin white t-shirt underneath. His jacket was hanging loose, and he was shivering in the cold. As a pegasus, she could ignore the cold better than any other type of pony. And it was pretty cold this morning. She looked around, she had no experience in anything here. Maybe if he could get used to her being so different than him, maybe she could get used to his being different than her. She trotted up to him. It was time to take a huge chance.

"My name is Rainbow Dash. Can you help me?" She was never one to mince words.

Her words slowly penetrated the fog in his mind. "Huh?"

A flash of irritation. "My name is Rainbow…"

He cut her off irritably, "I heard you, I just don't understand. You are a talking horse, with wings."

"A talking pony with wings," she corrected.

"Why would you need my help?"

She sighed. She quickly launched into her story of what happened before she met him. He listened as best as he could.

"So, again, I am Rainbow Dash, and can you help me?" She gingerly held out a cyan hoof to the human. He stared at it, bemused.

"I have seen some weird shit in my time, miss Rainbow Dash, but you take the cake." He ponders her outstretched hoof for a moment and hesitantly takes it and shakes it. "But if you need help, I'll help you. But first I need a little bit of help myself."

Uh oh, not a good way to start. "What can I do?" She asks timorously.

A low chuckle from the inebriated human. "I need help getting to my home. It's just over that hill." He points.
She smiles. "I think I can do that." She moves over next to him so he can stand up, he does so. Swaying slightly as he finally works his way to his feet. He puts his hand on her head as she slowly guides him towards the indicated direction. And they start off. They get to a barbed wire fence, and after a few moments of him trying to figure out how to get through the fence on his own she gets irritated with the situation. She picks him up in her hooves and flies him over the fence. Her powerful wings getting him off the ground fairly easily. To make it easier for both of them, she decides to carry him the rest of the way. With her flying, they are at his house fairly quickly. A rundown farmhouse, she places him gently on the front doorstep.

"You actually can fly?" he asks incredulously.

"Fastest flier in all of Equestria," she says proudly as she lands next to him. In moments he's started a pot of coffee and sits heavily in an old overstuffed recliner in the living room. Rainbow Dash prances around the room, looking at everything.

"So, Merle, I've told you how I got here, why don't you tell me about you?"

"What? Huh?" he says, apparently the alcohol is still making everything fuzzy for him. She bounces in front of him.

"Hello, Merle. You in there?" she asks as she waves a hoof in front of his face. He leans back and seems on the verge of passing out.

"Ugh, you are a lost cause," she grumbles as she moves back to the kitchen. Despite the initial run down appearance of the house, it's actually very well taken care of. It's just very old. The furniture is in excellent shape, and the appliances, while they are old, even though Rainbow has no idea how to tell, she can tell they are well maintained. In moments the coffee maker is done with its cycle, and she finds a couple of coffee mugs, she carefully pours a couple of cups of coffee, the lack of sugar or cream near the coffee maker says he likes his black, but she was able to find the sugar and pours a generous amount in her cup. She couldn't find any kind of tray, so she takes the cups one at a time, turning her head sideways to carry them into the living room. In moments there is a steaming cup next to him, and one on the floor in front of her. She takes the cup in her hooves and takes a sip.

"Merle, wake up. There's coffee."

The aged human jolts awake at the sound of her voice. He looks around and notices the cup next to him. He picks it up and takes a deep sip, sighing in relief.

"Ahhh, that's good coffee." His voice is sounding a bit better.

"Yes, it is. Now, are you going to tell me about you?"

He stops and looks at her. "You know, I'm going to have to get used to talking to a rainbow maned pegasus," he says with a smile as he takes another sip.

"Yeah, well, I have to get used to talking to a bald monkey myself, so we are even."

A chuckle, "We are called humans."

Well, one question down, about a million to go. "Are there earth humans, magic humans and flying humans?"

That question apparently throws him for a loop. "No, there are just humans."

Her brow furrows in thought. "You don't have magic? You don't fly?"

"Oh, we fly, but we have machines to help us fly, we don't have wings like you do."

A hard shake of her head. "No magic." This world is certainly odd.

"No. No magic."

"So, tell me your tragic story."

Another chuckle from him. "Well, my story is a bit tragic, but probably not as tragic as yours." And he launches into some of his life's story. He was an ironworker. He retired some years before back to his old family homestead in western New York state. He served in the first world war, being twenty one when it started. At eighty two years of age, he lived in the house alone, surviving his wife of thirty years, children he rarely saw, and grandchildren he knew of, but had never met, and God knows how many great-grandchildren. He confessed he drank a lot, admitted more than just a lot. He was basically just waiting for death. He didn't feel he had much left to live for. And dying while drunk didn't seem like too bad a proposition.

"Well, we both have pretty sad stories." The rainbow maned pegasus said somberly to the aged human. "I do have a question though."

"Shoot."

"Are you humans the only ones that talk here? Where I come from, the cows, the pigs, many of the animals talk. Then we have the small critters, only Fluttershy is able to talk to them, but I talked to the horses here, and they acted as though they didn't understand me."

The human smiled. "No, none of the farm animals talk. Though it would be pretty nice if they did. Sometimes gets kind of lonely out here with no one to talk to."

Rainbow Dash thought furiously for a minute. "I've got a favor to ask."

"Sure, ask anything."

"Well, actually a couple of things. First off, could you not tell anypony… uh, sorry…" she rubbed the back of her head with a hoof, "anyone that I'm out here. Also, can I stay here for a little while, so I can get my bearings, and try to figure out what to do next?"

"Done, and done. Miss Rainbow Dash, welcome to Merle's place. You can stay as long as you want. Nobody visits me here. I'm glad for the company. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get some actual sleep." He pointed towards the hallway. "There's a spare bed down that way, I know it's still morning, but when you need to sleep, go ahead and sleep there. I never bought one of those silly televisions, so if you want, you can listen to the radio, or you can read one of my books. You can read right?"

"Of course I can read, do you have any Daring Do?"

"Uhh, Daring what?"

"Heh, heh, never mind, I'll see about reading. But before dark, I want to fly around and get a lay for the land so I can try to figure out how I'm going to get back home."

The old man levered himself out of the chair and shuffled slowly down the hall to his room. And Rainbow Dash was left alone with her thoughts.