The town hall clock chimed four times. Only a single pony was there to hear it. Twilight Sparkle laid on her back onstage, the flowery bedsheet pulled up to her neck. She stared at the stars though the tall upper windows. She tried to remember when she had her last full night’s sleep. It must have been the night before she realized that she’d spent so much time planning her May schedule, that she’d forgotten to reserve time to plan her June schedule. That was easily more than a week ago. From her point of view, that is. Literally, it was more than two years ago. Lying here now in the dark and quiet, she could hardly tell the difference.
Sleep tugged desperately at the corners of her mind, but found no purchase in the unicorn’s brain. There was yet one more obstacle, a thought which made it no easier to succumb to slumber than if Pinkie Pie had been playing a trumpet in her ear.
Shining Armor is going to be married. My brother. Getting married. Sometime in the next two years. Previous two years. Whatever. Shining Armor is getting married. And I know it.
“Urrrrgh!”
She flung the bedsheet aside and sat on the edge of the stage, rubbing her temples.
She wished Spike were there. She needed someone to talk to. If Spike were here and he was asleep, she’d probably wake him up. Maybe accidentally-on-purpose. Maybe fake a loud sneeze, and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, Spike, I didn’t mean to wake you. But since you’re awake anyway, I’ve been thinking…”
It was no use. She was going to have to start talking to herself.
“Okay, Twilight,” said Twilight to Twilight, “Let’s keep it together. Eureka already made it clear that time travel doesn’t really cause paradoxes. Everything will be fine. It’s two years later, and all your friends appear to be alive and well, and apparently you and Spike are fine, too, wherever they are. No matter what you do, nothing will change that.”
She inhaled deeply through her nose, and blew her breath out slowly through her mouth. Then she laid back down, plopped her head on the pillow, and magically draped the bedsheet back over herself. She closed her eyes and sighed with contentment.
Three seconds later she returned to the edge of the stage again, the bedsheet wrapped around her.
“Who is he getting married to? Do I know her? When did that even start? Has he been dating somepony all along?”
Only then did the thought occur to her: she hasn’t seen Shining since she moved to Ponyville. Not once. And he’s never written her.
“But, let’s be fair, you haven’t written him either. I haven’t written to anypony except the Princess.”
She bit her lip and covered her head in the blanket.
“Am I a bad sister?”
She sat quite still for several seconds, hearing only the wind blowing through the trees outside.
A violet aura surrounded the blanket and it flung aside.
“No, it’s his fault as much as it’s mine! I’ve been busy! I’m Princess Celestia’s student, for pony’s sake.”
She stomped her hoof and started pacing back and forth. “So now he’s married. Right now, somewhere in Equestria, Shining Armor has a wife. Some mysterious pony. And all my friends know who she is. They were at the wedding. And...so was I.”
She stopped in front of the bedsheet. She illuminated her horn and looked at it. Purple, with little blue flowers. She tried to imagine Fluttershy wearing a bridesmaid’s dress with that pattern. She probably looked beautiful. All her friends probably did, knowing Rarity’s hoofiwork. Did she look beautiful, too?
She sat down and fought back a tear.
“I don’t want to know! I shouldn’t know! I want it to be a surprise! But...it’s too late. I already know.”
She wiped the corner of her eye and gave a hollow little laugh. This was the first time in her life that she didn’t want to know something. She wished she could just wipe that knowledge away, erase the spoiler. If her mind was a library, with all her accumulated knowledge as the books on the shelves, she would take that one book and burn it.
She gasped and covered her mouth.
“That’s so disturbing! C’mon, Twilight, get a hold of yourself. You know that you can’t just…”
Inspiration struck. Twilight’s eyes went wide. With a bang, she teleported over to one of the windows near the front door. Outside lay the slumbering little village, dimly lit by firefly lampposts. The most distant buildings were nothing more than vague silhouettes. But only one mattered: the tree-shaped one.
Twilight whispered the name of the time-travelling unicorn who inadvertently brought her there. Referring to the expression, of course, not the pony himself.
She had two thoughts in quick succession: the first, a natural by-product of a badly sleep-deprived mind, was that her home, in silhouette, resembled a giant stalk of broccoli. The second was of a small book with a slightly tattered brown cover, located in the lobby of her library, on the bottom row, threeshelves to the right of the staircase. Catalogue Number #30042. Advanced Neuromancy, or: Spells for the Pony Mind, by Dr. Conundrum, published in Trottingham by Arcana Press, Ltd., 1192 YCL.
Page 103. “Memory Spells.”
She had combined certain elements of one spell from that page with two others to create the spell she used to restore her friends’ memories after Discord had corrupted them. She already had experience with this kind of magic. That page also listed a spell with the opposite effect.
“An amnesia spell!”
Twilight paced around the hall, her hoofsteps echoing. “Now, that spell is very difficult to use on other ponies. But it might be a lot easier to cast it on myself. It only works on the most recent memories. So if I were to wipe out all of my memories from the moment Rarity spilled the beans about the wedding...I’d also lose everything that happened since. My calculations will have to be worked out precisely so I forget just enough.”
She stopped and grinned, and said the time-travelling pony’s name again.
“That’s it! Twilight, you’re a genious! When Eureka sends me back in time again, I’ll cast the amnesia spell on myself the moment I arrive in the Canterlot Archives. I’ll use it to forget everything from the moment I met myself! I’ll forget I was ever in 1219! It’ll be like it never happened! No spoilers! It’s the perfect plan! Now all I have to do is get that book!”
She galloped back to the window. Her smile faded.
“But...what if there’s a spoiler in town? Or inside the library?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she replied to herself. “I’m just going to forget it anyway!”
“But...what if it’s a spoiler that’s really, really bad?”
“C’mon, what could possibly be that bad?”
“What if it’s something that makes me...not want to forget?”
She didn’t have an answer for that right away. She butted her horn against the wall. When this is over, one way or another, she was never going to mess with time again. Ever. She sighed.
“I won’t walk there. It would just take two teleports. One jump to the bridge, then a jump inside the library, right in front of the shelf where the book can be found. I grab the book, jump back to the bridge, and right back here. I can even close my eyes between jumps. Okay?”
She looked around nervously, and waited a good thirty seconds in case Spike miraculously appeared from around the corner. But he didn’t show.
“Y’know, I don’t really have to get that book right now. I could just wait until morning when one of my friends comes to check on me. I can ask them to get the book.”
She teleported back onto the stage and settled down on the comforter, her mind thoroughly made up.
“I’ll just get some sleep in the meantime. No need to fret now. Everything will be just fine.”
She closed her eyes, and willed the Sandpony to work his magic on her.
A minute later, Twilight’s eyes opened again.
In a flash of purple, she disappeared from the hall.
Exactly thirty-eight seconds later, she returned, clutching a brown book to her chest. She dropped the book next to her pillow, collapsed onto her back, and was asleep in a heartbeat.
Twilight slept so soundly, she never heard the front door open around eight o’clock.
“Alright, I think I’ve almost got it. It’s step, ball-change, step, ball-change, buffalo, buffalo, step, step, and turn?”
“Ooo! You’re super-close! After the buffalos, it’s a step, cross, kick, and turn!”
“Cross, kick, turn, cross, kick, turn. Okay, got it. One more time?”
“Yeppers! Same place, Sweetie Belle?”
The little white unicorn dropped the needle on the appropriate groove. Energetic piano music burst from the gramophone's horn once more.
Pinkie Pie shouted, “Five-six-seven-eight!” Then she and Eureka tapped away, side by side, turning and kicking and shuffling and ball-changing all around the showroom floor at Carousel Boutique for an audience of one. Sweetie Belle sat on a cushion and beamed. She had no idea who this yellow unicorn with the funny tie was, but she liked him immediately.
Pinkie and Eureka side-stepped, side-stepped, tapped, crossed, turned, kicked, turned, and ended up in identical finale poses, each on one knee and with forelegs spread wide. The song wound down. Sweetie Belle turned the record off and clapped.
Eureka held the pose for a few seconds then collapsed onto his back, nearly knocking over the ponyquin behind him.
“Wow, I am so...very... out of practice!” he panted to the ceiling. Pinkie giggled and helped him up onto his haunches.
“You’re so silly! Your dancing is crazy good!”
“Thanks,” he gasped. “Look at you! We’ve been at this for twenty minutes and you’re not even winded!”
Sweetie Belle trotted over to his side.
“You should have a dancing cutie mark instead of those gears!”
“I didn’t know they taught jazz tap in engineery school!” said Pinkie.
“Well, they don’t,” laughed Eureka. “Not even where I’m...from.” Eureka gave the filly a careful glance. He hadn’t mentioned his future origins to Sweetie Belle yet, and wasn’t exactly sure if he should. Not that he was afraid of paradoxes or the like, but he wasn’t certain if it was a subject you should broach early on when you meet somepony new. He was a pioneer, after all, and the rules of time-travel etiquette hadn’t been invented yet. He might have to write them himself.
“No, I learned it from my parents. They’re entertainers.” He lowered his voice, as if entertainers was not something usually discussed in polite company.
“Really?’ said Sweetie Belle. “What do they do?”
“A little of everything. Mom, Dad, and my uncle Hooflights had a little cabaret show in Hoofington when they were young. They sang and danced, and they invited acrobats and earth pony magicians and actors as guest performers. I met a lot of interesting ponies in my impressionable years.” He blushed at the memory, and became abruptly aware of the filly staring at him.
“So, naturally, they wanted to teach me everything they knew about the stage. I was a fairly decent singer until my voice changed.”
Pinkie and Sweetie Belle shared a giggle. Eureka absently picked up a stray roll of measuring tape. He idly wrapped it around his hooves.
“But even as a colt, I think they knew I was destined for other pursuits. I enjoyed reading science-fiction more than comedies. I learned how to run the lights and sound board, and I could fix any equipment that went on the fritz.”
Eureka stared off into space, oblivious of the tape measure tangled around his hooves. Sweetie Belle lay down attentively. She had heard enough of these kinds of stories to know exactly where this was going.
“My dad and uncle Hootlights were twin brothers, and every show, they always had this dance routine they did together wearing identical tuxedos. They moved around each so fast, you lost track of which one was which. Then uncle Hooflights came down with pneumonia, and they couldn’t do the number for a while. Dad kept a stiff upper lip, but I could tell he was worried about him.”
The measuring tape in Eureka’s hooves formed various shapes: a pentagon, a hexagon, a trapezoid, a cube. He seemed to take no notice. Pinkie sat unusually still, but kept smiling.
“I wanted to cheer him up. So I stayed up for five straight nights working on a machine that would let him do the number until Hooflights got better, borrowing equipment from the lighting instruments.”
“What kind of machine?” asked Sweetie Belle.
“A hologram projector.”
“A holey-what?” asked Pinkie Pie.
“It’s like a movie projector, but it makes a three-dimensional picture. I filmed Dad rehearsing the number, and just reversed the image. You should have seen Dad’s face when I showed him how it worked.”
Eureka began to roll the tape up again, slowly and methodically.
“We used it for only one performance. It worked great, and Dad and Mirror-Dad got a standing ovation. Uncle Hooflights was there, too, as it turned out. He got better and wanted to surprise us. I was afraid that maybe he thought he was being replaced by a ghost image, but he and Mom and Dad all gave me a hug afterwards.”
Sweetie Belle pointed to his cutie mark.
“And that’s when you got this?” she asked.
“And that’s when I got that,” he nodded, setting the tape aside, smirking. He noticed the wide-eyed looks he was getting from his audience and cleared his throat, reclaiming his enthusiastic demeanor.
“What about you, Miss Pie? Where’d you learn to dance like that?”
“Self-taught!” she chirped.
“Of course.”
There was an ahem from the top of the stairs. Eureka turned towards the source, and blushed visibly. This was a unicorn who knew how to make an entrance. Rarity practically shined like a glossy porcelain figurine. She even made the saddlebags strapped about her middle look in vogue. Rarity gave her freshly-curled mane a calculated flip, turned up her nose just a couple of degrees, and descended the stairs with the grace of a princess.
“I can only assume that all that noise was the product of some sort of dancing, and I do hope you two haven’t scuffed my nice floor which I only just polished yesterday.”
Eureka promptly retrieved his coat from a chair back, slipped it on, and felt obliged to straighten his tie.
“Oh, erm, I’m terribly sorry, M-Miss Rarity,” he managed. Rarity flashed him an understanding smile.
“Please, just Rarity will be fine. And, it’s quite alright, Eureka, I’m not really blaming you.” She turned and stared daggers at Pinkie, who was too busy playing hot-hooves with Sweetie Belle to notice.
“Ouch!” said the filly, rubbing her hooves. “Jeez, Rarity, it took you long enough. They’ve been waiting for you for like an hour.”
“Just because we’re venturing into the Everfree doesn’t mean I’m going to neglect my morning ablutions.”
“Gesundheit!” chirped Pinkie. Eureka chuckled. Rarity frowned.
“Ouch!” said Sweetie Belle. She wasn’t good at hot-hooves.
“Anyway,” said Rarity, turning back to Eureka, “do you have the ruby fragments?”
“Of course,” he said. He magically pulled the broken halves of the unfortunate gem from the pocket of his coat. Rarity donned her red glasses and took the fragments in her own blue aura and studied them carefully.
“Ouch!” said Sweetie Belle. “Okay, you win, Pinkie.” Her opponent replied with a casual backflip.
Eureka tried to admire Rarity without really looking. A quick glance in her direction, then a show of intense interest in a pin cushion on a nearby worktable. Another furtive peek, then back to the same pin cushion. And so forth.
“Er...thank you for letting me sleep on your couch, Rarity.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Rarity gently, without looking up.
Eureka turned back and found Pinkie Pie staring at the pin cushion as if it were the Sapphire Statue of Daring Do lore.
“Do you ever wonder,” she whispered earnestly, “who was the first pony to look at a tomato and say, ‘Gee, I wish I had a pin cushion that looked just like that?’ Do you think they stuck pins in it just to see how it looked? I hope they took out the pins before they ate the tomato.”
Eureka laughed. Sweetie Belle laughed because he laughed. Eureka had an especially infectious laugh. Rarity, however, gritted her teeth. Apparently, she had been laugh-vaccinated.
“Alright, I think I can find this particular type of ruby. As I said, it might be a bit tricky. Does it need to have exactly twelve facets?”
“It needs to have six facets on one side so that it fits into the slot in the grappler.”
Rarity opened the flap of her saddlebag and floated the pieces inside. She then produced a smart-looking wide-brimmed hat with a blue plume that matched her eyes and settled it meticulously on her head.
“Shall we, then?”
Eureka held the front door open for Pinkie, who bounced into the sunny morning.
“Good luck, you guys!” chirped Sweetie Belle, waving at them.
“Touch nothing, young lady!” hissed Rarity, before giving her a nuzzle.
The town square had come alive with ponies, the air filled with the sound of happy voices. Pinkie, Eureka, and Rarity wound their way around the stalls. Eureka smelled fresh cucumber, lemons, currants, and oranges. The ponies behind the counters gave him a friendly nod or smile. He was obviously a stranger to them, but that didn’t seem to matter.
He paused briefly at the window of the candle and lantern shop. Lux Aeterna, proprietor, according to the hanging sign. Amongst the candles of every color and size, fixed in brass and pewter candlesticks, was a glass case containing dozens of sleeping fireflies. A free-standing sign next to it read, “Brightest in Equestria, Guaranteed! 1 B for 5 or 2 B for a doz.”
“Good morning!” said Lux, a green earth stallion, standing in the doorway.
“Firefly illumination,” mused Eureka. “How quaint!”
“‘Scuse me?” said Lux.
“Nothing! Have a good day!” Eureka trotted off to catch up, avoiding the shoppony’s puzzled squint.
Pinkie had been talking non-stop as she bounced, oblivious to Eureka’s temporary absence.
“And that’s Lemon Hearts over there, and that’s the Sofa and Quills shop, and that’s Berry Punch talking to Shoeshine, and that was where the boring old bank was before it got eaten by parasprites and they rebuilt it and now it’s an ice cream parlor where my favorite flavor is banana prickle, and there’s Derpy, and there’s all her mail spilled on the ground by the fountain where I fell in last week when Rainbow Dash dared me to spin around with my eyes closed, and that’s Cranky, and that’s his wig that keeps falling to one side, and—”
“Oh for Celestia’s sake, Pinkie,” huffed Rarity.
“No, it’s alright,” said Eureka. “It’s all so beautiful. It’s just so...full of life.”
He tried to take it all in. The laughter of happy ponies, the clear blue sky, the little rainbow growing near the horizon, the cheerful architecture of this humble hamlet.
Rarity stopped. “Is something the matter, Eureka?”
“Yeah,” said Pinkie. Even her expression betrayed concern. “I didn’t know happy places could make somepony sad.”
Only then did Eureka feel the tiny bit of moisture in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away quickly.
“I’m fine. It’s just...Ponyville is amazing. I’ve never been anywhere so...nice.”
“Isn’t it nice where you live?” asked Pinkie.
“Pinkie,” said Rarity, placing a hoof on her shoulder. “You know he can’t tell us anything about the future.”
“It’s fine. Let’s just get this ruby so I can fix this mess. But...there is something you ought to know.”
“No, no,” insisted Rarity, “Twilight wouldn’t approve of us knowing anything.”
“But maybe you should know that—”
A tremendous explosion, like a thousand bolts of lighting pummeling the ground at once, burst from above.
“What the crans?”
A gust of wind slammed across Ponyville, knocking down everypony, upsetting vending stalls, rattling windows, and bending trees. Rarity screamed as she and Eureka braced against a wall, while Pinkie clung to a lamppost with her tail.
Then everything was still. Ponies all over town could be heard groaning. They peeked out from under carts and out of doors until they were sure it was safe. Apart from the mess in the market, a lot of spilled produce, and a couple of broken windows, everything else seemed to be okay. A few of the braver pegasi hovered above the rooftops, surveying the damage.
Eureka let out a loud sigh, having held his breath throughout the ordeal, and turned to the mares.
“Are you alright?”
“I think so,” said Rarity, trying to smooth back her mane.
“Okie dokie,” sang Pinke, releasing her tail’s grip.
“Does this sort of thing happen a lot here?”
Before Rarity could respond with something appropriately pithy, a chorus of shouts rose up among the pegasi.
“Look!” shouted Sassaflash.
Eureka followed her pointing hoof to the sky, and his jaw joined many others in dropping.
A gigantic bulls-eye of luminescent concentric rings filled the southern half of the sky. The circles bloomed and slowly expanded in diameter, the outermost rings gradually vanishing.
Each ring painted the sky with every color of the rainbow.
Eleven minutes earlier, Blossomforth cringed as she knocked on Rainbow Dash’s door for the third time. She nervously blew the pink and green bangs from her eyes and shuffled her hooves on the welcome mat made of cloud. She looked up at the second floor window and wondered if maybe she should tap on it and see if her fellow weatherpony was still asleep. She glanced over her withers in the general direction of Cloudsdale.
The cloudy doorknob turned. The cloudy door silently swung open. Blossomforth steeled herself, preparing to withstand the sort of verbal assault that would invariably come from a pegasus who liked to sleep in on the weekends.
A many-hued mane came into view.
“Good morning, Rainbow Dash! I’m really, really, really sorry to wake you, but—”
The door opened all the way.
“—but you are...definitely not Rainbow Dash.”
A tall, cream-colored, drowsy-eyed stallion stood in the doorway instead. He yawned, and stretched out his wings, which Blossomforth could not help but notice were of a most impressive span. She was unaware of the frankly stupid smile she now wore.
“No, I’m definitely not, my freckled little filly,” he said in his most charming first-thing-in-the-morning voice. “The name’s Major Bravo Zulu.”
“H-hi, I’m B-Blossomforth.” She encountered difficulty in speaking around the grin that wouldn’t go away. Bravo turned his head back inside the house and took a deep breath.
“RAINBOW! YOU HAVE A VISITOR!” His deep, commanding bass resonated throughout the house, rattling the windows, and completely drowning out the faint sound of a voice a quarter-mile away that said, “Woah!” He turned back to her.
“She’ll be down in a minute,” he said much more softly.
“Th-thank you.”
Bravo leaned against the doorframe. He noticed that she had neither stopped staring at him, nor blinked, since he opened the door.
“So, you’re a friend of hers?”
Blossomforth nodded way too fast. “Uh huh. Um. We work together. With the, with the, with the, clouds, yes, clouds. Weather stuff.”
Bravo smirked. You still got it, old stallion, he thought.
“Are you and, um, um, uhhhh—”
“Rainbow Dash?” helped Bravo.
“Ha ha ha, yes, are you and Rainbow Dash...related?”
Bravo smoothed back his prismatic mane.
“Yes, I’m her…” His charisma mode paused momentarily, as it occurred to him that the correct answer was not “great-grandson.” Charisma mode resumed.
“I’m her uncle. From Las Pegasus.”
“Oh! That’s, that’s...nice. Must be nice to, to, to be an uncle.” Inside Blossomforth’s brain, the ponyfication of her rational mind facehoofed and shoved the ponyfication of her emotional mind from the controls and said, “Give me that!”
Blossomforth blinked at last. “I’m sorry to wake you guys, but there’s an emergency weather meeting in a hour. Fillydelphia is short eleven ponies for Monday’s tornado duty and they’re looking for volunteers from Ponyville.”
“Ah, tornado duty,” sighed Bravo wistfully. “That takes me back. Haven’t been part of a good water-raising in fifteen years. Wait just a sec, I’ll see if I can wake her.”
“‘Kay,” said Blossomforth, the mad grin returning, the controls changing hooves again.
Bravo climbed the cloud-stairs unsteadily, cursing the state of his back. I’ve slept on hard cots in the barracks for years, he thought, I’ve slept on the ground in the wilderness. But now that my age ends in a zero again, suddenly my back can’t handle a couch?
He reached the landing. The trinkets on the cloud-walls bore a common motif: Wonderbolts. There were signed photographs and posters, and a little plastic figurine in a glass case which Bravo recognized as Captain Firefly. In another case was an ornamental laurel with gold wings. Bravo had one of his own back home, maybe in a box in his attic; he’d won the Best Young Flyer Competition when he was 17. Above this was a framed photograph of Rainbow in a Wonderbolt cadet uniform, saluting a stunning mare with a fiery orange mane in a captain’s dress shirt. Bravo squinted in concentration. Who was the captain back in 1219? The name failed him, and he grimaced at his spotty knowledge of military history.
He gave the photo one last glance and whispered to himself, “You’re on your way, kid.”
The door to the left, which he correctly guessed lead to Rainbow’s bedroom, was ajar.
“Rainbow!” he bellowed, “Up and at ‘em! You got a visitor and a weather meeting to get to!”
He pounded on the door, causing it to swing open.
The unkempt bed, and the room in general, were absent a pegasus.
“Sorry, dear,” he said upon his return to the front door. “Looks like she’s out.”
Blossomforth cocked her head. “Really? That’s weird.”
“Why’s that, missy?”
“She’s never up before ten on a Saturday.”
“Pffft,” scoffed Bravo. “No discipline whatsoever. When I was her age, my father would have me up at dawn, every day, without fail. Pegasus kids these days, right?”
“Heh heh, yeah,” Blossomforth gushed, not sure if she liked being called a kid, considering she and Rainbow were the same age.
“They’ve got no honor, no sense of duty,” he growled. “They think they could do whatev...er…”
“Um...Major...are you alright?”
“Excuse me!” In an instant, Bravo made a gusty departure, leaving behind a brilliant rainbow streak.
The doors were already open when he touched down. He swooped inside the town hall and circled around, scanning every corner.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!”
He shouted a nasty obscenity at nopony in particular and zipped back outside.
On the stage, Twilight Sparkle laid on her belly and snored like a roaring waterfall, drooling on her pillow.
He climbed up to the edge of the troposphere at full speed, levelled off, and made a wide bank to the right in a tight circle describing the circumference of Ponyville, gritting his teeth against the rushing air. Fortunately, the weather was clear that morning; at this height, with good visibility, he could spot anything bigger than a hummingbird for miles. He spotted a few sparrows, an eagle, an owl, and about twenty pegasi going about their day, oblivious to the danger they could easily be in at that moment.
After two laps, Bravo was about to descend and start searching the ground level, in hopes that he might find his quarry there. Perhaps she was still trying to figure out how to—
“Sweet Celestia, no!”
His fears were confirmed. His quarry was flailing away to the southeast, and only 500 feet off the ground. He ignored the pain in his spine and pushed his wings hard.
“Woah! Woah! Wooooah!”
But the giant steel wings wouldn’t listen to Rainbow Dash. It was like Flight School all over again. The problem was trying to coordinate her wingbeats; even the slightest mistimed flap sent her careening to the side, spiralling and barrelrolling. The servos screeched and groaned, trying to make sense of their new pilot’s erratic commands.
“Stupid wings!” she shouted, wiping the fog from her goggles. “Just do what I do!”
She righted herself and leveled off, gliding. At least that part was easy. Experimentally, she dipped her left wing just slightly to attempt a simple bank. Her stomach rolled as she stalled out and dropped fifty feet, the rooftops below her spinning. She pumped both wings again and managed to straighten out.
“C’mon, Rainbow,” she shouted to the rushing air. “You can do this! It’s like anything else! It just takes practice!” With renewed confidence, she pitched up and flapped as hard as she could, her silvery wings rhythmically slicing the sky. She braced herself for another hard roll or stall-out, and closed her eyes.
But no jarring roll came, just the freedom of limitless ascent. She was doing it! The control! The speed! Higher and higher she climbed, not knowing or caring how far below the earth drifted away from her. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but the clear, wonderful blue that made life worth living.
She effortlessly leveled off and hovered. She pushed up her goggles and looked back.
“Wow!”
The rainbow trail she’d left was still visible, stretching for what must have been hundreds of feet. Normally it faded after only a second or two, but it was still there, a mighty column of color bisecting the ground.
A determined grin spread on her face. She pulled the goggles back down over her twinkling violet eyes.
“Alright, let’s see what these babies can really do!”
She pointed herself north, in the direction of the banners atop the roof of town hall, took three deep breaths…
And an extremely angry cream-white face emerged.
“What the belted kingfisher do you think you’re doing?”
“Uh oh.”
Bravo grabbed her by the shoulders. Rainbow swallowed hard against the sour guilt climbing her throat.
“Do you have any idea what a complicated and dangerous piece of machinery you have on your back? Do you know how many hundreds of millions of bits it cost? How many years it took to manufacture a successful prototype? This is not a surfboard or a parasail for your personal amusement!”
“What’s a para—”
“You’re going to follow me back to the town hall. You’re going to take it off. And you’re never going to come within a mile of it ever again! Do you hear me?”
Rainbow’s face turned as red as the stripe in her bangs. She shoved Bravo off her.
“Maybe you should show more respect for your elders!”
Bravo gaped for a moment, in shock. At the shove, at her brass, and most of all, at the apparent ease with which she hovered there. dwarfed by the enormous steel wings like a sleek blue and silver moth. He shook his head and recovered himself.
“That’s not funny. Don’t you understand? Ponies could get hurt!”
Rainbow lifted her goggles and crossed her forelegs.
“If you exist,” she said, “that means I’m going to live long enough to have a kid. So until that day comes, I’m, like, invincible, right?”
“I'm not convinced about that. And anyway, you could still get others killed!”
Rainbow dropped her forelegs to her sides, bobbing slightly, the servos monotonously whining around her. “What do you mean!”
Bravo drifted closer again, and spoke with practiced serenity, “I mean, if you flew fast enough, you’d generate enough wingpower to cause winds faster than any hurricane. I made my test flight over the middle of the ocean, in a 1,000-mile diameter circle. The wings have never been tested over land.”
Rainbow Dash scanned the rooftops of her hometown. She could barely make out the dots of color moving between the buildings. She frowned.
“Oh. Well...can’t we just go out over the desert somewhere?” she pleaded. “I won’t go too fast, I swear! I just want to try a couple of lazy eights and aileron rolls—”
Bravo slowly shook his head. His great-grandmother dropped her head and sighed.
“Okay, fine.”
Relief washed over Bravo. Without another word, he beckoned her and glided downwards, starting his descent next to the rainbow trail which only then evaporated.
Rainbow angled her wings, the mechanical ones following suit, and pitched downward to follow. But when she started to drop, her wings snapped inwards and folded, and Rainbow began dropping like a stone.
“Aaaighhh!”
She plummeted past Bravo with a whoosh!
“Rainbow!” He pumped his wings and nosedived after her.
Rainbow’s heart hammered. She pushed with all her strength but her wings were pinned to her sides by the framework. She started tumbling, the horizon spinning like a propeller, the earth and sky blurring together. She closed her eyes and screamed, a primal, deep throated cry borne from the darkest, most horrifying fear of every pegasus. She strained her wings desperately against the steel beams, so hard that she could feel welts and cuts forming.
There was a jolt, and the world stopped spinning. She opened her eyes. Bravo dug his forehooves under the strap beneath her belly, stark panic in his eyes.
“What’s happening?” she shouted hoarsely.
“The low gear is jammed!” he shouted into her ear.
“What??”
“The low gear is JAMMED!”
Bravo groaned and flapped hard, but it was no use. Rainbow and the dead weight of the wings combined were too heavy to lift. The air whistled angrily in their ears. The ground continued to swell up to them.
“Get them off me!!” Rainbow fumbled with the belly strap around Bravo’s hooves.
“There’s no time to disconnect them from your wings!”
He pulled one hoof from the strap and reached around the right side of Rainbow’s head.
“I’m gonna have to switch it over to the high gear! When I give the word, open your wings!”
Rainbow pinched her eyes shut and threw a foreleg around Bravo’s neck.
“Okay!”
Bravo slapped against the back of the mechanism, stretching his foreleg out so far, he thought he’d dislocate his shoulder. Where is it? Then he touched a small brass crank just above the right wing joint. He twisted it clockwise until he felt it click. He hastily jammed his hoof back under the belly strap.
“NOOOOOW!”
Rainbow prayed to Celestia, Luna, and anypony else who would listen. Then she flapped, twice.
On the first flap, the wings extended with blinding speed and matched Rainbow’s will. Rainbow and Bravo pitched back upwards, climbing into the sky four times as fast as they had been falling a split-second earlier, so fast that the movement was imperceptible. In an impossibly short amount of time, they were skimming the lowermost stratosphere, Ponyville shrinking into a distant dot surrounded by a patchwork of yellow fields and the green canopy of the Everfree Forest. As Rainbow swept the wings forwards again, they leveled out. Bravo clung to Rainbow underside and braced for the inevitable, knowing it was too late to warn her.
On the second flap, the world became an indistinct blur.
Behind them, there was a tremendous explosion, like a thousand bolts of lighting, that never ended.
Rainbow had never felt a g-force as strong as this. She fought against the blackness, willing the blood to stay in her head. She risked a glance behind her, under her belly, beyond Bravo’s body. She was leaving behind in her wake what appeared to be a tunnel made up of rainbow rings, stretching back to a vanishing point.
A perpetual series of sonic rainbooms.
In spite of the cold terror in her chest, the forces of nature yanking at her consciousness, she said simply:
“Awesome!”
She kept flapping. She couldn’t stop if she wanted to. For a full minute, she didn’t want to, and the world below became a sphere of brown nothingness, all color and light blurring. Then she looked back down at Bravo, his hooves still hooked into the strap, pressing into her belly, his head lolling to one side, eyes closed. The edges her vision became gray, and her ears rang internally. She knew what would come next.
She straightened the mechanical wings out and angled them for a slow descent.
She didn’t remember anything after that.
Wind.
Lots of wind.
Cold.
Bitter cold. Biting the face. Biting the tips of the ears.
Soft. Soft and cold.
Rainbow’s eyelids fluttered open.
White. White everywhere. Too much white.
She lifted her head.
“Whuuuuuuhhh,” said a distant voice. Most likely hers.
She pushed off the goggles, trying to make sense of the shapes around her. She was lying on her side, half buried in snow. She took a moment to gather up her strength and pulled both her right legs out of the snow. She tried to sit up, but felt something digging into her belly fur. She groaned and looked over her shoulder. One of the wings disappeared into the snowbank, the other stuck into the air, part of the leading edge sheared away, torn cables flapping in the wind.
With trembling, ice-laced hooves she managed to pop the strap open. She rolled forward to get on her hooves, only to feel the clamps tugging back on her wings. She grunted and strained against them.
“Don’t move,” said a deep voice behind her back. “Just hold still.”
She lay on her side and panted, her breath forming thick clouds from her mouth and nostrils. She heard a series of snapping sounds, and felt the grip on her wings gradually diminishing until she was able to pull them free.
“There,” said the voice. A hoof appeared. She grasped it, and it helped her up on all fours. Bravo stood there, shivering, spreading his wings around his sides. Not too far behind him was the divot in the snow from which he had probably emerged, already filling up.
“Are you okay?” he asked through chattering teeth.
“I think so.” She had a Tartarus of a headache, and she felt some cuts along her sides and in her wings, but she seemed alright otherwise, apart from being in a frozen wasteland. Thick flakes cut through the air. No horizon, or landmark of any kind, was visible in any direction.
“We’re a long way from home, missy.”
“Don’t call me ‘missy.’”
“Sorry. For what it’s worth...you might have broken my record.”
At any other time, this would be a source of enormous pride for Rainbow. At the moment, however, she was too cold and sore to do more than chuckle bitterly. She rubbed her forehooves together.
“So am I younger than my twin sister now?”
“You have a twin sister?”
“No.”
“Heh. Very funny.”
“This looks like the Frozen North,” she said. “Maybe the Crystal Empire is nearby.”
“I doubt it,” said Bravo. He walked over to the machine, hooves crunching in the snow, and blinked sadly at its crumpled frame. “Not with the trajectory we made. This is probably the Frozen South.”
“The Frozen South? I’ve never heard of it.”
“‘Course not. Nopony in 1219 has. I think the first pony explorers will reach here in about 45 years or so. Can’t remember the exact date.”
Rainbow Dash sat back on her haunches. She stared down at the snow.
“This is all my fault,” she whimpered.
“We’ll get out of this.”
“How?”
“I know we will.”
She looked up at him and shouted, “How can you possibly know that?”
“Over there.” She followed his pointed hoof. Sure enough, a dim yellow point of light bobbed in the distance, growing steady brighter. Rainbow put her hooves on either side of her snout and called.
“Hello!”
“Hello!” came a reply.
“Thank Celestia,” said Bravo, sitting down in the snow next to her. “At least we won’t freeze to death.” The light grew closer. A vague shape formed through the sideways-blowing sleet. It walked on four legs.
“Wait,” said Rainbow. “If nopony’s ever been this far south, then who…?”
“Ah, goodness, there you are!”
The shape resolved into their rescuer. He was quite tall, almost certainly as tall as Princess Celestia. He wore a bright red uniform with shiny gold buttons and a black satchel slung over one shoulder. A green, broad-rimmed hat festooned with icicles perched atop his head. His face was obscured by a wool scarf and goggles. But what really caught their attention were the huge antlers. A lantern dangled from the end of one of them.
He lifted the goggles and pulled down the scarf.
“Well,” he said, “you two are just aboot the funniest looking moose I’ve ever seen.”