//------------------------------//
// Rainboom 
// Story: One Last Trick 
// by Cloud Hop 
//------------------------------//

Eventually, Rainbow Dash's concern draws her back to my bedside. She is quiet, still recovering from contracting a particularly nasty case of hoof-in-mouth disease. I realize that I'm staring at her mane, entranced by its multicolored hues. Such a vibrant display of color. Even under the sterile light of the hospital, it seems more real than anything else. The colors of the room fade away, until the only thing left is Rainbow Dash's mane, shifting ever so slightly in the still air of the room.

"...Are you okay?"

Her voice snaps me out of my trance. "Wha—Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Really."

Rainbow Dash looks at me with a half-smile. "...There something wrong with my mane, dude?"

Now it's my turn to blush. "It's just... mesmerizing. It's like your mane is the only thing that's real, and everything else is just a drab gray in comparison. Even the sun and the sky are just pale forgeries of the vivid colors that fly with you."

It’s only after the words leave my mouth that I realize how… romantic they sound. Still, I expect her to respond with brash confidence, bashfulness, an attempt at modesty, shyness, or even flustered speech. All of those would have been perfectly reasonable reactions.

Instead, she practically chokes on her own saliva.

"Oh jeez, are you okay?” I ask, “Was it something I said? I'm sorry!"

It takes a moment for Rainbow Dash to collect herself. "You said the same thing—cough—those same words, when we were in the restaurant—cough—and I just... I just..." She looks up at me with eyes so full of grief my heart practically breaks in two. "I wish I was there again, so I could have one more night with you." She turns away, her ears flattening against her mane. "...before I ruined everything."

"...We were in a restaurant?" The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. This is not how you're supposed to comfort a grief-stricken mare.

"Yeah," she mumbles glumly, "Two, actually. We haven't gotten that far yet."

I lean back onto my pillow, giving Rainbow Dash some time to collect herself. Questions race through my mind, but my memory is still muddy. I can remember most of the day I had met Rainbow Dash, but the day after was like a giant puzzle I only had a few scattered pieces to. Tilting my head towards the window, I stare at the water in the distance, barely visible through a crack between the skyscrapers. 

"Well," I sigh, "there's no time like the present."

One of Rainbow Dash's ears perks up. "Do you wanna keep going?" she asked, quietly. I'm surprised by how delicate and sensitive her voice sounds when she's quiet. I would never have expected this from the bombastic Rainbow Dash in my memories.

As more and more of my memories return, I feel something tighten in my chest. The Rainbow Dash sitting by my bedside is... different. Her loud, aggressive voice is gone. Her wit is still there, but it’s buried beneath a blanket of sadness, and the whole of her being seems subdued. There is a sadness in her eyes that never seems to go away, and it leaves me wondering... What happened?

My mind starts trying to stitch things together, but there are too many missing pieces. I'm missing something, I know I am, some critical piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, all I have are my shattered memories. I have nothing left to do but go through them.

At length, I finally reply. "Yeah, let's keep going."





"Prism Glider, huh?" Rainbow Dash replies, seemingly oblivious to my wheezing. "Pretty cool name, if you ask me."

I manage to blindly nod in thanks as I slowly get my breathing under control.

"I'm planning on getting a hayburger over at Frosty Skies after this is all over," she continues, "You should head on over there with me. Waddaya say?"

"I-I, uh, th-th-thanks, I'll b-be there." I try to pretend that my stuttering is because I'm still out of breath and not because the fastest pegasus I've ever seen in my life just asked me to hang out with her. I'm lucky I didn't get a wingboner right then and there.

Thankfully, by this point, a number of other pegasi have reached the finish line, and are starting to congregate around us. Most of them are limping around with wings that have been worked to exhaustion. Another burly pegasus starts up a conversation with Rainbow Dash, and I take the opportunity to collapse onto the sandy beach. My wings are sore beyond belief, and if I couldn't see them with my own eyes I'd be convinced they had fallen off.

Winged ponies wander around me. I hear whispers as they speak in hushed tones about the one pegasus who had flown faster than all the rest. Had he overexerted himself? Why was he lying on the sand, barely moving? Could he even still fly after that? Their questions drift in and out of earshot, but I pay them no heed. Unfocused eyes stare off along the yellow beach, as multi-colored hooves trot across the surface, criss-crossing between each other. 

"Are you gonna be ok there?" Rainbow Dash's voice lifts me out of my daydreams, and I look up just as a flash of concern leaves her face.

I barely manage to get back on to my haunches. "Oh, don't worry about me," I assure her, "I'll be fine."

Blatant lies. She looks like she knows, too, but she seems content to leave me be. "Whatever you say, dude."

She takes off, presumably back towards the stunt flier gathering spot, and a wave of pegasi follows. I watch them with blurry eyes, as a hundred different hues fly back into the sky and curve across the city in a huge, majestic arc of beating wings. In stark contrast to the race before, each pegasus now lazily flaps their wings at a comfortable pace. It's a mesmerizing sight, at least until I remember how much my wings hurt.

"Celestia, I can't move," I moan, now that everypony else is out of earshot. It takes another five minutes for me to recover enough to tuck my wings into my sides, and start the long trek back to the park.





Rainbow Dash owned the stunt fliers gathering after that race. If she had flown straight into a hurricane, we probably would have followed. She was bombarded with questions about her flying techniques, and she answered every single one of them. She was loving this, and she knew none of us had a leaf's chance in a cyclone of catching her. She could fly faster than us while upside down and backwards. She could probably eat a sandwich while beating us in a race, then finish off dessert before lapping us.

I arrived at the park a while ago, after a half hour's trek across the city, and now I'm relaxing on a low hanging cloud. The other pegasi are practicing hairpin banking techniques. Quite a few are simply trying to keep up with Rainbow Dash, who seems to enjoy toying with them. She'd let them barely catch her tailwind before leaving them in a rainbow-colored wake.

I really can't believe how bucking fast this mare is. She doesn't seem to rely on catching tailwinds like most stunt fliers did for extra speed. Instead, she simply tears straight through the air currents. I'm pretty sure her incredible acceleration forms some kind of mach cone around her, which probably helps her slice through the turbulence. I also notice that her flying technique is subtly tweaked to maximize the amount of atmosphere she has behind her wings. She tilts her wings slightly forwards when retracting from a full extension, which enables the wind she's flying into to fill the lowfall behind her wing, ensuring she's always pumping as much air as possible.

I'm also pretty sure she has pegasus magic pouring out of her ears. The girl probably has more flight magic powering her wings than half the stunt fliers here—combined. She is just unreal.

Several pegasi have flown laps around my cloud by the time I pick myself up. Standing tall on my little piece of sky, I start stretching out my wings, and heads start to turn. Stunt flying is about skill. You demonstrate skill, you get respect. Rainbow Dash might have gotten the griffon's share of the attention, but everypony there recognized me as "the guy who got to Rainbow Dash first". I haven't even taken off yet, and a dozen pegasi are already circling around me, eager to see what I can do.

I feel my muzzle curl into a grin. Oh, the things I would show them. With a lightning fast buck, I launch off of my cloud and roar into the air. My rejuvenated wings spread out beside me, and I soar through the sky, catching an updraft that launches me over a thousand meters up.

I am catching wind like nopony else could. I curve around in a huge half circle, then come screaming down towards the ground in a classic Rocket Wing maneuver. I roll out from my death defying drop into an upside-down glide, before corkscrewing into a vertical spin. I do a short 90 degree flip to get me moving horizontally, then start speeding up towards the crowd of pegasi.

For the first time, I notice that almost the entire gathering has stopped dead just to watch my stunt flying. I'd have indulged in a fair amount of feeling awesome, but I'm hurtling at them like a missile, and the trick I'm about to perform is exceedingly difficult. I break into a glide a couple hundred meters from the group, before abruptly pulling my wings back in and dropping like a rock. Momentum carries me just underneath the gathering, as I flare my wings out and do a barrel roll to bleed speed, followed by a hairpin 180. I rocket out in the opposite direction, an eruption of applause and shouting fading behind me as I complete my stunt flight.

I am rocking this party.





"So then I stumble into this guy in the gym, and I'm like, buddy, what are you doing? And he tells me he's shredding!"

The table erupts in laughter, with various pegasi pounding their hooves on the table in mirth. Rainbow Dash, several other stunt fliers, and I are at Frosty Skies for what I'd call an early dinner, and one of the more burly stunt pegasi is in the middle of describing his friend’s ill-fated attempt at improving his speed by building muscle mass.

"I can't believe it! You don't get fast at flying by getting ripped, you'll just get weighed down!" He pauses. "Unless you want a job as a wrecking ball, that is."

More laughter. I chuckle along, but my stomach grumbles, and I'm honestly more interested in where the food is than the current conversation. Couldn't they hurry it up back there?

"Seriously though, you look at all the top flyers, and they're all lean muscle, toned to perfection. Stunt flying is a game of agility, and being Bulk Biceps won't do you any favors. I mean, just look at Ms. Dash over there. She doesn't have a lick of fat on those sexy flanks and she's whipping our tails like it's yesterday morning!"

Rainbow Dash is sitting next to me at the table, and she's doing her usual cool act. "Aww, you guys are too nice." I spot her eyes flicking towards the kitchen area, and I wonder if she's just as hungry as I am.

"Don't you know it," says the burly one with a wink. Several of the mares at the table roll their eyes. "So, I tell my friend that a metric ton of muscle ain't gonna do shit for him, but he totally blows me off, and I'm like, your funeral, pal!"

The burly pegasus is too self-absorbed to notice, but Rainbow Dash's stoic face slips for just a moment, and lets a grimace slip through. She clearly does not like this stallion. The next thought to pass through my mind is, does that give me a better chance? I'm tempted to slap myself thinking like that, but at just that moment, our food arrives, and I am grateful for the short respite from socializing it brings me. 

"Now, everypony knows that not a single pegasus here can raise a wing against Rainbow Dash. She is just unreal. But I gotta say," he adds, turning towards me, "I saw you catching tail back there like nopony I've ever seen. I was trading wind with you for a good tenth of a mile, but you kept riding thermals like a madpony. Those wings of yours have some magic in them, hotshot."

I'm caught off guard by his compliment. I was expecting him to downplay my skills in a ploy to woo Rainbow Dash away from me, but perhaps he doesn't quite realize we're—wait a minute. Rainbow Dash just invited me over for lunch. She hasn't said a single thing. Why am I suddenly assuming I'm with her? I'm just as bad as him.

Confused and embarrassed by both his compliment and my out of control mating urge, I blush. "I-it's nothing, really," I manage to squeak out in voice that was far too high-pitched for a stallion.

I can almost feel him giving me a predatory grin. That was a trick question. I realize, too late, that he was testing the waters to see what the competition was, and now I'd painted myself as a wanting target. He'd try to tear me apart now just to get at Rainbow Dash. Her warm smile at my admittedly stupid answer only further cemented his impression that I needed to be taken down.

He lets out a chuckle. "Come on, boy, you can't go around talking like that or mares'll think you've got a dud under the hood!"

"Don't tell me flying is the only thing you know how to do?" A smaller stallion pipes up, but a glare from Rainbow Dash is sufficient to shut him up. Sadly, the same can't be said for the burly one.

"Man, wouldn't that be a bummer?" he adds. "No mare wants a pegasus who finishes in bed just as fast as he finishes a race."

Come on, Prism Glider,  I think, trying to dredge a retort from my addled brain, defend yourself! “Well, I—”

He completely ignores me. “I mean, kicking clouds is nice, but if that’s the only thing you’re good for, that’s kinda sad.”

“But, that’s not—” I try to formulate a defense, only to get cut off again.

“And really, this whole conversation you’ve just been sitting there awkwardly, like a—”

“Shut up!” Rainbow Dash’s voice echoed through the diner. I spare a peek at the other diners, and several of them are unsuccessfully attempting to pretend they aren’t staring at us. If I hadn’t felt uncomfortable before, I sure do now.

The burly pegasus is taken aback by Rainbow Dash’s sudden outburst. “Whoa, miss, what’s got your tail in a knot? Surely you aren’t defending that guy?” He jabs a hoof in my direction, like he’s pointing out a pile of manure.

Rainbow Dash snarls, and her wings fan outwards. “Yeah, well, last time I checked, you couldn’t even keep up with that guy.”

There is a noticeable shift in weight as the burly pegasus stands up and puts his hooves on the table. “You take that back.”

Rainbow Dash leans forward, pushing her muzzle straight against his. “Make me.”

For a moment, I think it might come to blows. My gaze flickers over to the other pegasi at the table, searching for some kind of reaction, but all of them seem to be reaching for the metaphorical popcorn instead. I look back towards Rainbow Dash, and she has a fire in her eyes I’ve never seen before. It’s obvious that she wouldn’t hesitate to beat the feathers off this guy. He seems to realize it too, because he eventually relents.

“Well, we wouldn’t want to accidentally hurt the queen of speed, now would we?” The burly pegasus sits down with a smirk on his face, but the angry glance tells me that it’s just another ploy, another attempt to save face. 

Rainbow Dash is having none of it. “If I’m the queen of speed, you’re not even a prince.” She leaps out of her seat and flicks her tail at him. “We’re leaving,” she says. It isn’t a request, or an order, it’s simply a statement of fact. I quietly follow her out the door, sparing only a single glance at the pegasus glaring at me from the table. We walk a couple blocks before Rainbow Dash finally breaks the silence.

"Ugh, stallions," she mutters. "Always thinking with the thing between their legs instead of the thing between their ears."

I let out a quiet cough, and her gaze turns to me.

"Well, except you," she adds with a smile.

I nervously swallow a large lump of irony. Or maybe I’m just better at hiding it, I think to myself. My cheeks burn with shame, but she mistakes it for flattery.

“No, really,” she insists. “You’re not like those other assholes, you don’t treat this like some kind of dating game. You’re all about the flying. You’re doing this because you love it, not because you’re just trying to get laid.”

“Uh, thanks.” I awkwardly scratch the back of my neck with a hoof.

“And even if you are trying to get laid, at least you’re not a dick about it.”

I almost trip over my own hooves.





The sun is setting, and I’m idly flying around the city with Rainbow Dash. We’re weaving through the skyscrapers and chatting about flying techniques when a thought occurs to me.

“Just how fast can you go?” I ask.

Rainbow Dash giggles. “Well, for that race I was doing about 19 wingpower, but I can go a lot faster. Normally I can’t do more than 30 wingpower.”

I blink. “But… but that’s Mach 1! Are you saying you can’t fly faster because you hit the sound barrier?!”

Rainbow Dash grins, and it is the most lovably manic grin I’ve seen on her for a while. “Oh no, I just said that normally I can’t fly faster because of the sound barrier.” She tosses her mane in the wind. “Until I break it.”

At this point, something finally connects in my brain, and my jaw drops. “You’re the filly they were talking about all those years ago! The one that did a Sonic Rainboom!”

“The one and only,” she boasts, clearly delighted by my revelation. We take a sharp turn around the narrow peak of a skyscraper and start riding a thermal down towards the roof of another.

Naturally, there is only one question I could possibly ask next. “So… can you do one now?”

She hesitates. Somewhere behind the glint of the setting sun in her eyes, I see a flash of uncertainty. “Weeeeeeeeell, maybe. I didn’t say it was easy, I just said I could do one.”

I nod. “Can you... try?”

She takes a deep breath and starts flapping her way out of the thermal. “Alright, just for you, I’ll try to do a Rocket Dive from the cloud layer, and I should be able to accelerate fast enough to pull it off. Keep out of the way, though, I honestly don’t know what happens when a pony is near me and it goes off.”

“I’ll wait here,” I call out, letting the thermal gently deposit me on the roof of some fancy hotel. I gallop towards the other edge and eagerly watch Rainbow Dash’s quickly diminishing form vanish into the clouds.

For a moment, nothing happens. Then, I spot a rainbow blur rocket out of the clouds at speeds that simply should not have been possible. Rainbow Dash isn’t flying through the air so much as she’s tearing through it. A bright tail of rainbow light trails her form as she accelerates faster and faster. A mach cone is already developing around her, but it doesn’t last long enough to fully materialize.

There is a sudden flash of light, followed by a slightly delayed crack of thunder I can feel in my bones. A huge, mind-blowing shockwave made out of every color imaginable ripples outwards over the city, soaring over me like some kind of aerial aurora, leaving shimmering wisps of scintillating cloud in its wake.

My jaw is still hanging open a few moments later as Rainbow Dash zooms over to my vantage point. “Come on! I know that was probably the most awesome thing you’ve ever seen in your life, but we gotta get out of here!” she shouts at me, hovering in the air.

It’s at this point that I notice the faint shimmer of broken glass slowly falling from several buildings near the epicenter of the blast. A huge gathering of pegasi are flying towards the disturbance, and I could just make out several of them gesturing towards our location.

“What did you do?!” I shout back, leaping up into the air beside her.

“Oh I just performed an extremely powerful sonic boom right above the city and shattered a few hundred windows,” she responds, casually shrugging her shoulders. “Now come on, we gotta lose ‘em!”

I look back and spot two entire squads of pegasus guards barreling down on us. “Those are guards, you crazy bitch!”

“Yeah, so?” she grins, not missing a beat, “We’re the two fastest pegasi in the entire city right now. Besides, this was all your idea!”

I don’t have time to hover and sputter, as Rainbow Dash rockets off at mind-blowing speeds and the police draw closer with every passing second. I spare a glance backwards and note that the guards are now the least of our worries, as practically every stunt flier in the city is trying to catch the pegasus who just pulled off the first sonic rainboom over Manehatten in recorded history.

I turn tail and fly, racing after the rainbow blur that was the cause of this giant mess. At first, I figure there is no way I could possibly keep up, but I notice that Rainbow Dash seems to be slowing down. It takes every ounce of wingpower I have, but I manage to catch up with her. We dive straight down the side of the skyscraper, the square glass windows nothing more than grey stripes painting a runway into the ground. Ten stories up, we pull out of the dive and bank right, ripping through the Manehatten streets. Ponies point and gasp, mothers sweep up their foals, and it seems as though every eye on the street is on the pair of suicidal stunt fliers currently making hairpin turns at incredibly unsafe speeds.

Part of me wonders why I had to ask Rainbow Dash to do a Sonic Rainboom in the middle of a city. The other part is too busy having fun to care. I won’t readily admit it, but I don’t really like the guards much. The triumphant feeling of having done something totally awesome and being too fast for the guards to actually catch awakens a childish joy in my heart as we whip around another corner.

Even with Rainbow Dash slowing down so I could keep up, we outrun all the other pegasi with ease. They simply couldn’t pin down our location long enough to close any distance. Eventually, we sail clean out of the city, flying towards a small hill with a single tree. Rainbow Dash calmly sits down beside it, and I practically fall out of the sky, panting in exertion simply from the effort of trying to keep up with her. It takes several minutes for me to catch my breath, but Rainbow Dash seems willing to wait until my wings have stopped trembling to ask me a question.

“So, how fast do you think we were going back there?”

I’m so exhausted its hard for my brain to string together coherent words. “I… I… I don’t know, probably 15 wingpower? That’s my max speed, I think. Thanks for slowing down, by the way,” I add.

She looks at me with a smirk. “I didn’t.”

The words take a moment to register. “W-what? No way. No way I was pulling 19 wingpower.”

She tilts her head a bit. “Weeeeell, maybe I slowed down a little, but it was more like 17 wingpower. Something I’d do in an easy race. Still,” she says, wrapping a wing around me, “you’re a lot faster than you think, dude.”

For a moment, I’m still too stunned by the revelation that I had just broken my record speed by 2 wingpower to notice her wing giving me a sidelong hug. Like a true stallion, I immediately blush and start stumbling over my words. “B-b-buh, w-w-w-w-well, you s-see, I—”

She gives me a peck on the cheek.

I stare at her. “Am I dead? Are you for real?”

She bursts out laughing. “Hell yeah, I’m real! I’m as real as it gets! And no, you’re not dead,” she adds. “You can’t be dead, because then I couldn’t go see the Wonderbolt opening ceremonies with you tomorrow.”

“W-w-what?!” I blink. “Won’t you get arrested after that?”

“Pfffft, nah, I’m friends with Princess Twilight, I’ll just write her a letter tonight. Trust me, by tomorrow, everything will be smooth as silk.” She pokes my chest with a hoof. “And I expect to see you in the park at noon, sharp!”

She takes off, leaving me alone under the tree. I stare into the last sliver of sun as it slips beneath the mountains, barely able to process the day’s events. So much is happening, I can’t keep up with it all. My mind is running circles around itself, but one thought keeps returning to the surface.

Did… did she just ask me out?!