//------------------------------//
// Nightmare Audition 
// Story: I Dream of Daisies 
// by Ezn 
//------------------------------//


I Dream of Daisies: "Nightmare Audition"
by Ezn


Rainbow Dash glanced nervously over her left shoulder and slowly swept her eyes across the length of the hallway. She had to be sure that nopony had followed her – if word of where she was and whom she was visiting were to get out, it would ruin her reputation for sure, killing her chances of ever joining the Wonderbolts.
 
The hallway was silent and empty. After quickly checking for spies behind a large fern, Rainbow breathed a sigh of relief and finally stepped up to the door she had come in search of. Her hooves made no noise on the thick carpeting.
 
The door was a plain, wood affair with a small misted-glass window set into the frame above it and a rectangular white sign pinned to it at eye level. Rainbow cast her eyes over the neat black words.
 

Daisy Dreams
Subconscious Investigator


With a tentative forehoof, Rainbow knocked. For a brief moment between the second and third knocks, she considered turning around and sprinting away – she was certainly fast enough to get away with it – but she instead remained at her position before the door, her legs quivering only slightly.
 
"Come in," said a voice behind the door. "It's unlocked."
 
Steeling her resolve for the fiftieth time that day, Rainbow pushed the door open and stepped into the office beyond, her eyes staring straight ahead of her.
 
Compared to the images of the place that Rainbow's mind had been manufacturing ever since she had first heard of Daisy Dreams, the actual office was something of a let-down. Rather than a smoky den of mystique filled with crystal balls and exotic decorations, or a mess of wires, blinking lights and esoteric scientific equipment, the office was a plain room with a desk and a few filing cabinets. Behind the desk sat a purple earth pony with a two-tone pink mane; she was smiling at Rainbow.
 
"Hello there," she said. "How may I be of service, ma'am?"
 
Pushing her nervousness aside for a moment, Rainbow flashed a winning smile and said, "I'd like to talk to Daisy Dreams, please. I’ve heard she knows all about dreams, and I've been having some trouble with them lately."
 
"I am Daisy Dreams, ma'am," replied the mare behind the desk, pointing to a nameplate.
 
Rainbow did a double-take. "But, you're–"
 
"...an earth pony? Yes, yes I am."
 
Having never been known for her tact, Rainbow bluntly said, "Huh? How can an earth pony do all that dream stuff you do?"
 
"Oh, I have some equipment that helps me," Daisy replied. "It's quite astounding what technology allows us non-unicorn ponies to do these days."
 
"Oh, okay," replied Rainbow. "But, uh, are you sure that you're... um..."
 
"...qualified? Yes, yes I am." Daisy spoke with a deadly serious voice, her eyes narrowing to give her face a stern expression. "You might even say that being an earth pony makes me more qualified than the unicorns dominating this field."
 
Rainbow smiled uneasily. She hadn't been aware that "subconscious investigation" was a field.
 
"Oh, it is," Daisy said casually, as if she'd read Rainbow's mind. "The competition is ruthless, I'll tell you that much. Now, Ms..."
 
"Dash. Rainbow Dash."
 
Daisy nodded and picked up a pen in her mouth, quickly scribbling a few words down on the clipboard in the middle of her desk. "Ms Rainbow Dash, please walk to the back room with me. I’m going to set up my equipment and while I’m doing that, you can tell me all about your situation. Try to relax. I'm here to help."
 
With that, Daisy got up from her desk and led Rainbow into her office’s back room. Rainbow caught a glimpse of her cutie mark – a daisy with green petals.

"It's because daisies aren't supposed to have green petals, Ms Dash," Daisy said nonchalantly. "That's the kind of thing that can only happen in a dream."

Once they were in the small back room, Daisy pointed Rainbow to a red therapist's couch, which the latter obediently flopped down on.

"Now, please tell me about your troubles," Daisy said, as she sat down in the corner of the room and started fiddling with something.
 
"It's been going on for months, Doc," Rainbow said. "Every night, I have the same dream. It always starts the same way, always continues the same way, and always ends the same way – with my waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep!"
 
"Mm-hm," Daisy mumbled. "What happens in this dream?"
 
Rainbow closed her eyes and cast her mind back. Even though she'd been having the same dream over and over again, it still took her a few moments to formulate her thoughts around it and piece together how it would happen. "It always starts with my trying out for the Wonderbolts.
 
"I'm a flier, you see, but not just somepony who flaps her wings to get from A to B, no – I love to fly. I speed! I race! I do tricks! I feel the wind whipping through my mane and I blast through clouds! Getting accepted into the Wonderbolts would be a dream come true! Uh... well, another dream."
 
The ends of the wires in Daisy's hooves sparked as she jerked them apart. "I take it that this dream involves your getting rejected by the Wonderbolts, then?"
 
"Weellll... not exactly," Rainbow continued, squinting one eye. "The dream never gets that far. It starts in the Wonderbolts' stadium in Canterlot. I'm there with my friends, getting ready for my Wonderbolts audition. I'm doing my warm-ups, taking a few laps around the airspace, honing a few tricks, the usual. Anyway, my friends all cheer for me – they're sitting in the stadium – as I finish off my warm-up with a Buccaneer Blaze. I fly down to join them, and they're all excited and tell me what I good job I did. They're right, of course – Rainbow Dash always brings her A-game."
 
"And then?" prompted Daisy.
 
"And then I see the warm-up of the next pony. She's got this serious look in her eyes, and she does everything with this unbelievable precision. She carves sculptures in the clouds, and seems to never even break a sweat. So now I'm intimidated. Applejack – she's one of my friends – tells me I have nothing to worry about, and that that pony doesn't fly nearly as well as I do.
 
"That makes me feel a little better, but then we watch the next warm-up. And the next, and the next. Everypony who goes up is more perfect than the last, and I'm getting more and more nervous. I start to question my abilities..."
 
There was a pause. Rainbow Dash closed her mouth and took a few uneven breaths through her nose. Her eyes were still closed. To Daisy, it looked almost as if she were asleep.
 
"You stopped talking, Rainbow Dash," she said. "That's okay. You're obviously uncomfortable about discussing the rest of the dream. Or maybe you can't remember it. It's okay. I'll find out the rest soon enough."
 
During Rainbow's story, Daisy had moved the device she had been preparing to the middle of the small room. It was a grey plastic box with an input panel on the top and two tubes attached to its sides. The tubes ended in straps that were the perfect size to fit around a pony's foreleg.
 
"Give me your forehoof, Ms Dash," said Daisy.
 
Rainbow nodded and let her left front leg droop off the end of the couch.
 
Daisy quickly wrapped one of the straps around it, pressing the velcro sides together firmly to make sure they stuck. She then did the same thing to her own left front leg with the other tube.
 
Rainbow shifted uncomfortably on the couch and her left foreleg squirmed. A faintly itchy sensation had come over it, and she suddenly felt too numb to reach out and scratch.
 
Daisy spoke up, pronouncing her words slowly and deliberately. "Just relax, Ms Dash. The device will take about a minute to place me into your dreams. First, it needs to put both of us to sleep..."
 

***

 
Blackness surrounded Daisy. She was a part of the blackness, and it was a part of her. A faint ticking sounded in the back of her mind, and she waited.
 
She was in the space between wakefulness and sleep, and she took the opportunity to remind herself of a few things. Floating formless in the void, she was able to think with utmost clarity, and recounted Rainbow Dash's story to herself three times in quick succession, made a rough analysis of her patient’s personality, and thought back on previous cases that displayed some similarity.
 
She then took an opportunity to realise that none of this would prepare her for the dreamworld, because it never had.
 
Lastly, she told herself not to get too involved; not to let this end like so many of her previous jobs.
 
The ticking stopped.
 

***

 
The darkness exploded into bright lights and vibrant colours. Daisy's vision was fuzzy, her ears were ringing, her legs were wobbly, and she felt sick to her stomach. There was a tinge of comforting familiarity to these symptoms, but she had never fully gotten used to the feeling of entering another pony's dream.
 
Daisy concentrated on focusing her vision on a blurry white thing in front of her, and as it turned from an oblong smudge into a marble pillar, her knees steadied. The sounds of casual chatter and flapping wings reached her ears as the ringing died away.
 
She was sitting in one of the plastic seats in the Wonderbolts' stadium. Around her, a few clumps of other ponies chatted among themselves. They were all too far away for Daisy to be able to make out what they were saying, but she assumed they were all the friends and family of the pegasi who had come to audition. One of the groups had to be Rainbow Dash's friends, but there was no way she would be able to tell which just by looking.
 
Or would she? A quick glance into the middle of the stadium revealed a zigzagging streak of rainbow colours. All Daisy had to do was find the group that was paying the most attention to Dash's warm-up!
 
Daisy slowly scanned the stadium, paying careful attention to each group's body language. The signs that she was looking for were subtle things – movement of the eyes, slight upturns of the lips, dilation of the pupils and a hundred other little indicators. Dash's group of friends could be any one of the many clusters of ponies sitting on the stands.
 
"Woo-hoo! Go Dashie!" shouted an enthusiastic voice from behind her.
 
Daisy spun around to see a pink pony with a poofy mane whooping and hollering. She had yellow foam mitts on both of her forehooves, and was waving them around madly. The four friends who surrounded her – a pegasus, another earth pony and a unicorn, Daisy noted – seemed to pay no heed to her antics, and were displaying all the subtle body language quirks for which Daisy had been looking.
 
Rainbow Dash finished her warm-up and swooped down to join her friends just as Daisy was walking towards them. Daisy stopped in her tracks, taking the opportunity to listen in their conversation. Her instincts were screaming at her to join in and make some attempt to ingratiate herself with them, but she held back, telling herself not to get too involved.
 
She shuddered, remembering the early cases she'd bungled hopelessly by making her presence known too early. Although the directness of her methods was what made them so effective, they had caused their fair share of problems.
 
No, Daisy wouldn't make that mistake this time. For now, she would stay silent and observe.
 
"Wowie, Dashie!" shouted the pink pony. "That was sooooo cool! No! Amazing! No! Stupendous! No! Spectacular! No! Stu-tacular-zing! N– Yes! It was stu-tacular-zing!"
 
"You know it, Pinkie!" Dash said proudly. "And that was just the warm-up. Just wait 'til my actual audition and you'll see some real action!"
 
Daisy tuned out the rest of the conversation after noting that it consisted entirely of Dash's friends’ fawning over her flying and her hyping up the performance that was to come. These kinds of fawning dream conversations hadn't even appealed to her the first time she'd suffered through one.
 
Halfway through Dash's speech on how she was going to be the first pegasus to pull off the Ravenclaw Ricochet, Daisy noticed a shift. One moment, Dash was talking to her friends. The next, they were all gaping in awe at the tan-coated pegasus’s carving a rabbit into a cloud. She appeared to be quite far into her warm-up already.
 
Time skips were quite common in dreams, but it was utterly impossible to predict them. On the one hoof, Daisy quite liked the way they saved everypony from waiting through boring moments as they did in real life, but on the other hoof –
 
"Did you see that pegasus?!" Dash gasped. "She was even better than the cloud carver!"
 
– they were horribly disorientating.
 
A shining white pegasus stallion flew into the middle of the stadium, his head held high, letting his silver mane whip around in the wind.
 
"My, my, my," said Dash's white unicorn friend, "who is that?"
 
Dash glared at her. "The enemy, Rarity."
 
"Right, right, of course," Rarity replied, waving a hoof dismissively.
 
Judging by the pained expressions Dash's face was making, the stallion was a formidable enemy indeed. He blasted around the arena again and again in a silver streak, looped around countless times without even looking dizzy and nonchalantly performed three Buccaneer Blazes in rapid succession.
 
For a finishing move, he gathered up a hefty amount of cloud between his hooves, looped around a few times and then shot up, high above the stadium.
 
Daisy and Dash both had to squint to see the little white dot far above their heads, until it started getting bigger. The stallion was in freefall, cloud still gripped between his four legs. As he plummeted past, Daisy noticed his serene, quietly confident facial expression.
 
The stallion smacked into a cloud just below the level of the stands and immediately bounced off. Daisy heard Dash gasping in horror. Tears welled in her eyes as the stallion shot back up towards the stadium. Moments before hitting a column, he spun his body around and let his cloud hit it.
 
Daisy raised an eyebrow as the stallion bounced off the pillar and quickly turned around to do the same thing to another. As he ping-ponged around the stadium, Daisy scratched her head and wondered just how much of the trick was dream logic and how much was natural pegasus weirdness.
 
"The Ravenclaw Ricochet," Dash rasped. "He did it in the warm-up."
 

***

 
Rainbow Dash was in the shower-room underneath the stands, alone. Except she wasn't alone. Daisy stood by the door, watching Dash pace around the room, verbalising her many frustrations.
 
"Silver-Mane does Ravenclaw Ricochets in his sleep, Tan-Coat is better than me at flying and sculpture, and I'm sure Lightning Flash could do a Sonic Rainboom if she tried! I've got no chance!"
 
The despondency in Dash's voice was heartbreaking, and Daisy was hard-pressed to stop herself from rushing over to comfort the poor girl, but a deep breath and a stern reminder kept her at the door. The time to interfere was not yet right.
 
Dash slumped onto her haunches. "I might as well just give up and go home! But I've trained so hard for this! I've given up so much..."
 
Daisy had to hook a back leg around the doorframe to stop herself from rushing in to comfort Dash.
 
"I'm trying my absolute best, but I just..."
 
A shiver crawled down Daisy's spine. The atmosphere had become significantly colder. Daisy gulped, knowing that such a development couldn't lead anywhere good.
 
"Oooooh, Raaainbooowww..." whispered an airy, echoing voice that seemed to come from all directions at once. "Raaainbooooowwwww Daaaaaash..."
 
Wisps of black smoke entered the locker room, crawling through the open windows, out of grates in the lockers, and even directly through some of the walls. The smoke wafted towards a single spot right in front of Dash, where it began to take shape.
 
A blurry all-black pegasus with a shaven mane and tail slowly grew more distinct as it continued to chant, "Ooooooh, Raaaaaainbow Daaaaaaash..."
 
"What is it? What do you want?" asked Dash.
 
"I waaaant tooooo heeelp you, Rainbow Dash," the pegasus replied, its voice growing steadier as it finished solidifying. "I want you to realise your dreams, because you have worked hard for this audition, and you deserve to be a Wonderbolt. No other pony is as worthy as you, Rainbow Dash."
 
Daisy raised an eyebrow. This was something new – something she definitely had to observe before interfering with.
 
"As if!" Dash retorted. "If that were true, I'd be able to carve Mt Rushmare into the clouds, or do a Double Rainboom, but I'm not! The others are just better than me..."
 
The black pegasus smiled menacingly. "In raw physical ability, perhaps, but certainly not in spirit. Have you seen where they're from? Lightning Flash, at least, is the daughter of Stormy Skies, the owner of Cloud Works, the the largest chain of weather factories in all Equestria! She’s been trained by retired Wonderbolts since birth, and has probably seen more than a few magical wingspan enhancements. Don't even get me started on the others..."
 
"Don't worry. I won't," Dash said, her tone softening. "I'm sick of talking about them anyway... what's Rarity's problem, fawning over Silver-Mane or whoever that guy is? He's not even that good-looking!"
 
"My point, Rainbow Dash," said the black pegasus sternly, "is that you are the most deserving pony, because you have worked the hardest and overcome the most adversity to be here. It is your character and not your abilities that makes you worthy to be a Wonderbolt."
 
"Really?! Do you think they'll notice? Like, notice my character and stuff?"
 
The pegasus smirked. "Of course not! They're performers, not psychologists! No offense to any of them, but they lack the subtle analysis skills."
 
Dash's face fell. "Oh..."
 
"But you see," said the black pegasus, stepping forward to stare into Dash's magenta eyes with her black-on-black ones, "that's where I come in! I'm going to help you get the recognition you so richly deserve."
 
"But how?"
 
"I'm going to help you make the competition a little more fair. Level the playing field, so to speak."
 
"Huh?"
 
"I'm going to help you cheat, Rainbow Dash."
 
That was the sign. Daisy's back leg unhooked itself from the doorframe and she galloped into the locker room, making Dash and the black pegasus turn to the door and gasp.
 
"Stop! Don't do it, Rainbow Dash! You don't want to cheat!"
 
The black pegasus stared into Daisy's eyes, grinning madly. The vileness of her expression ignited some spark of rage deep within Daisy, who redoubled her galloping to charge the pegasus.
 
Determination in her eyes, Daisy lowered her head and dashed toward the pegasus.
 
CLANG! Her head collided with the hard metal surface of a locker, and all too late she remembered that the black pegasus was made out of smoke.
 
"Of course she doesn't want you to even the odds, Rainbow Dash," snarled the black pegasus. "She's one of your competitors!"
 
Daisy's eyes widened in horror as she focused her thoughts on her back. Sure enough, she felt a pair of wings unfurl and flap. She really hated dreams sometimes.
 

***

 
The world fell away.
 
Daisy stared at a blurry photo of a pegasus family that floated before her eyes. The mother had a green coat and an orange mane, and the father's indigo mane complemented his cyan coat. Their daughter had a similar-coloured coat to the father, but hers was slightly brighter. Her fuzzy rainbow mane confirmed her identity.
 
As Daisy stared at the photo, she saw the ponies in it stretch their limbs and get up from where they had been sitting. They slowly moved towards the edges of the photo, and it grew to accommodate their movement. It also grew in scale, until the mother and father were the same height as Daisy.
 
The carpet felt soft under Daisy's hooves. At some point, the photo had become a real scene, and she now found herself in Rainbow Dash's childhood home.
 
"Rainbow," she heard a stern voice say, "please try harder next time."
 
"B-but, Dad... I got second place!" squeaked a filly's voice.
 
Daisy turned around, and saw Rainbow and her father. The former was sitting on her haunches in front of a sofa, with a hopeful look in her eyes and a silver medal around her neck. The latter was sitting on the sofa, engrossed in a newspaper.
 
"Yes, I know. You've told me," Rainbow's father continued. "Just try a little harder next time and you'll get first place."
 
"But Dad, I tried my best! It's ju–"
 
"No excuses, young lady. If you'd tried your best, you'd have a gold medal."
 
Tears started to well up in Rainbow's eyes. Noticing this, her father shifted on the sofa and looked down at her, bearing a very slight smile.
 
"Rainbow, dearest, please listen: you need to understand now that life is hard, and that second place isn't going to get you anywhere. There's no use in saying that you tried your best if you didn't do the best. You need to win, because winning is what matters, and winners are the ones who count. I'm just looking out for you, Rainbow; do you understand?"
 
"Y-yes Dad."
 
"Good."
 
Its purpose fulfilled, the family scene melted away, leaving Daisy alone in the dark void.
 
Well, not completely alone.
 
"Heeelllllooooo, Daaaaaisyyyyy Dreeeeeeammmsssss," said a wispy voice. "Ssssooo nnice to make your acquaintance."
 
"The feeling's not mutual," Daisy retorted.
 
The voice cackled with sinister laughter. "Oh, you are rich! Do you even know who I am, Ms Dreams?"
 
"I have a few theories."
 
"Well then scrap all of them, 'cause they're wrong! Whatever you thought I was, I'm not that. I'm something far more powerful and dangerous than you could ever imagine – something capable of, on a whim, bending gods to its will."
 
"Do tell me more."
 
"Well, I was going to be more theatrical about this reveal, but your pony sarcasm is ruining it for me. May as well just spit it out now: I'm a Nightmare. I'm your greatest fears, your most potent insecurities, your darkest dreams, and your strengths used against you."
 
"You don't say."
 
"This sarcasm does not amuse me. I am a Nightmare – the same one that inhabited your Princess Luna for a thousand years! After she was cruelly stolen from me, I found a new home in the soul of young Rainbow Dash: a pony I take great delight in corrupting."
 
"I'm sure."
 
"This little pony is a delicious bundle of insecurities, wrapped up in a thin blanket of 'coolness'. Her great confidence is backed up by her tremendous skill, but both can be used as crippling weapons in the right circumstances – as you witnessed first-hoof, Ms Dreams."
 
"Uh-huh."
 
"In that way, she's not unlike you yourself."
 
"Really?"
 
"Little Daisy, the dream heroine. With the guts of a thousand ponies and the brains of none, you're able to meddle even where those stuffy unicorn competitors of yours fear to look. They're slow, detached, and cold where you're dynamic and vibrant. You get results where they get data points."
 
"I don't believe you're this interested in complimenting me. Where are you going with this?"
 
The Nightmare cackled. "The unicorns never would have caused what you did to your mother, Daisy. You just get too involved... your greatest strength is a glaring weakness."
 
Daisy was silent for a moment. For the briefest fraction of a second, her calm facade cracked into a slight frown. The darkness around her exploded with images – painful images. Her mother... a manticore... flashes of red...

Then, as suddenly as the images had come, they were gone. The Nightmare cackled.

Daisy fought to retain her calm demeanour and gathered her thoughts. "I know what you're trying to do, Nightmare. I know you're trying to make it out like you're some great and terrible force of evil, but I've been through one too many messed-up pony minds to believe that."
 
"Believe what you will. It changes nothing."
 
"Very true. Even if you fooled me into thinking you were what you say you are, you'd still just be a dark figment of Rainbow Dash's psyche, trying to spook me by reading my own darkness. Yeah, I know you can do that. Must be easy with me; I've got a lot of darkness."
 
"And eventually, it will overcome you. When that happens, I shall be ready. But for now, let's watch Rainbow Dash get accepted into the Wonderbolts, shall we?"
 

***

 
Daisy trotted into the grandstands and immediately sought out Dash's friends. They were sitting in the same place as before, chatting while they waited for Dash's audition.
 
While the Nightmare had been lecturing her, she'd come up with a desperate last-ditch attempt at salvaging the situation. Dash couldn't be allowed to get away with cheating.
 
A glance above her showed Daisy that four of the Wonderbolts were sitting behind a table in the box at the top of the stadium. She'd never kept up with aerial performance or been an attendee of the races, but she recognised Spitfire's orange mane among them.
 
Above the judges' heads, a speaker crackled. "Ms Lightning Flash! Please come to the arena, Ms Lightning Flash. The Wonderbolts are waiting."
 
Once again, Daisy knew that she had to act immediately. This time, however, she had a plan.
 
Daisy focused on Dash's pegasus friend, using one of her newer techniques. She breathed in and out steadily, feeling herself slowly fade out. When the feeling was right, she closed her eyes.
 
Fluttershy opened her green eyes and stared at the faces of her friends. She smiled serenely at the strangers, before spinning around to face the arena. Her wings flicked out.
 
"What are you doing, Fluttershy?!" cried the purple unicorn, as her friend lifted off the stands and soared into the center of the arena.
 
"You're not Lightning Flash!" added the pink earth pony. "Unless there's something you haven't told us... Are you Lightning Flash?!"
 
Fluttershy, who was Daisy, ignored her friends and barrelled towards the centre of the arena. If her intuition was correct, she would soon be joined by another interloper.


***


Dash sat on her haunches in the waiting area under the stands on the far side of the arena. The other fliers milled around her, talking incoherently amongst themselves. Dash's eyes darted to the underside of the area of the grandstands her friends occupied, but soon darted away as she refused to think about the trap she'd set up.

Dash told herself that her competitors deserved what they were going to get – for cheating, for being entitled, for having flawed personalities and cushy lives provided by privileged families. For them, failing a Wonderbolts try-out would be an uncomfortable blip in their otherwise perfect lives. For her, it would be crushing defeat.

Slowly, Dash's eyes wandered across the stands above her trap. They were an arena-length away, but she could make out the fuzzy dot-shapes of ponies sitting on them. Her friends were a blob of purples, pinks, whites, oranges and yellows.

A yellow-and-pink blur separated from the group as Dash watched. It opened its indistinct wings and soared, becoming clearer and clearer. Dash watched this for a moment before her mind fully processed it. Then she panicked.  
 
"Fluttershy, no!" The scream cut through the air like a knife. "Go back!"
 
A desperate rainbow streak shot towards the underside of the stands. Moments later, she reappeared with a mass of wires and bottles in her mouth. She dropped the object on the bottom level of the stands, and sunk into a moping heap. A gasp from the judges' box carried through their microphones and made her tighten herself into a fetal position.

Fluttershy smiled, noting that Dash's device was a Poison Joke Bomb. A very clever choice, she thought as she released Fluttershy and materialised unnoticed on the stands.
 
"I... I tried to cheat, Fluttershy," Dash whispered as her friend landed beside her. "I was going to ruin Lightning Flash's audition with Poison Joke. A stealth bomb... nopony would have known."
 
"Shhhh, it's okay, Rainbow Dash," Fluttershy said, patting her on the head. "We all make mistakes."
 
Daisy stood to one side, watching the tender scene. Things were going a lot better than she had expected. It put her on edge.
 
"NNNOOOOOO!" An unearthly scream ripped through the stadium, shaking the cloud columns and knocking Daisy to the floor. "Wwwwrrrrrong!"
 
Before Daisy's eyes, the stands warped into a black face with glowing red eyes and giant, sharp, white teeth. The screams of the ponies who had been sitting there were short and bone-chilling as they all fell into the creature's mouth.
 
"Nnnnooooo, Rrraainbow Dash, you should not have done that," said the voice, which still echoed all around them. "I do not appreciate such ungratefulness! Didn't your mother ever tell you not to look a gift horse in the mouth?!"
 
With the utterance of the word "mouth", the face floated free of the stage, and bubbled and wobbled as it stretched into the body of a great and terrible alicorn.
 
"W-what are you?" asked Dash. "No, never mind. I don't care. Whatever you are, you need to go away. Now. I'm not going to let you make me hurt my friends – or anypony else!"
 
The alicorn was now floating in the sky above them, which had gone dark with storm clouds. "Rainbow Dash... always loyal to her 'friends', even when it means destroying her only chance at making something of herself. You could be famous and powerful, but you tie millstones around your neck. Truly, that is your greatest weakness."
 
"No," Dash replied, raising herself to her hooves. "It's my greatest strength."
 
The alicorn's eyes widened in horror. With a chilling wail, it flew at her, horn lowered.

"And now I get involved," Daisy whispered to herself. Before the horn could make contact, she jumped between the alicorn and Dash.
 
The horn went straight through her, stopping just inches from Dash's nose.
 
Dash screamed.


***


Darkness returned.

"You're not a real Nightmare. You're just a nightmare."


***

 
"I think that should take care of it," said Daisy.
 
Blinking the light out of her eyes, Rainbow lifted herself up and rubbed her head. She had a bit of a headache, and her back was stiff from lying on the couch for so long. Nonetheless, she felt much better than she had when she came in. She was at peace.
 
Daisy was sitting next to the couch, patiently watching. "What did you learn today, Ms Dash?" she asked.
 
"It's fuzzy..." Rainbow replied slowly. "I was... I was going to cheat! I was going to ruin my competitors with a Poison Joke Bomb... but then I didn't because... because Fluttershy!"

Rainbow sprang up into a standing position on the couch. "Suddenly it was Fluttershy who flew out there, and I..."

Rainbow stepped down from the couch, her eyes moist with tears. "That dream usually... it usually goes on longer. There's a bit where Lightning Flash... she's a ghost and..."

Blinking the tears out of her eyes and quickly regaining her usual demeanour, Rainbow Dash straightened up and looked Daisy in the eyes. "Thank you. I know what's wrong now."
 
"Very good, ma'am," Daisy replied politely. "That'll be fifty bits, please."
 

***

 
That night, Daisy stood atop a great mountain. Tumultuous storm clouds crackled and rolled above her, and the land around and below was barren and eroded, save for the few green-petalled flowers that grew around each of her four hooves.
 
Hovering in front of her was another Daisy Dreams – one with a pitch-black coat, a pair of bat wings and jagged yellow teeth. The creature's mane was speckled with stars, and spread out from her head in countless tentacles.
 
"Once more, Daisy, you have defeated the darkness inside another only to grow the darkness within yourself," the Shadow-Daisy snarled. "Soon, you shall bend to your own wicked will and finally unlock your true potential."
 
Daisy blinked.

Shadow-Daisy flicked her starry mane. "I must thank you for this newest addition to my repertoire – Ms Dash's dark side had some ideas that were just too good not to take."

"If you say so," Daisy said, feeling bored.
 
"You cannot possibly hope to fight it much longer. I will consume you." Shadow-Daisy bared her discoloured teeth.
 
"Yeah," Daisy replied, "maybe."






[Story Notes]