It was a morning like any other on the Apple Family Farm. Applejack sat by herself at the breakfast table, eating a bowl of ground oats. Her older brother had gone into town to set up the family’s apple stand at the town market, and the other two mares of the household were either too old or too young to do the farmwork. Today, everything rested on her strong, built shoulders.
Though that’s no different than usual, Applejack remarked. Celestia knows if Mac wasn’t working the cart he’d probably be sleeping in at one of his marefriends’.
The shades were closed, casting the room in a dark shadow, leaving her just enough light to see her bowl and some of her surroundings. Upon waking up, she’d been too tired to do anything but grab her breakfast and shove her face, but now with a little more energy, she forced herself from her chair and opened the sash.
As she was about to turn back to her bowl, she noticed something irregular. The sky was red. Not just that, but everything around her, as if Discord himself had spraypainted all the trees and the grass as some kind of sick joke. She stood befuddled for a moment, then raced outside, hoping that there was something wrong with the window. As the door slammed behind her, she saw that this was not the case.
The sun had already risen, and though there were still vestiges of the sunrise, it couldn’t account for the crimson aura that covered everything around her and, to her horror, her own body. The clouds were the same red color, as if they’d been soaked with blood. To say it was ominous would be an understatement. Was it a curse from on high or the harbinger of some new threat to Equestria? Applejack had no idea, but she knew she couldn’t just sit by. She had to take action!
Without a second thought, she set off for the center of town. There was one pony who could set this all straight: Twilight Sparkle. Though Applejack didn’t know how to read, much less what you could learn from it, she was certain that her good old alicorn princess friends would know something of use.
It only took her a few minutes to reach the library. She skidded to a halt at the front door and wasted no time pounding on it with her hoof. She waited nervously for a minute or so, afraid that the mere presence of this red aura would make her grow bat wings or something gross like that.
“Applejack, what the hell are you doing here this early?”
The farm pony turned to see a very drowsy-looking Twilight Sparkle looking back at her. She had enough bags under her eyes to fuel a grocery store for a day, and an angry glare to equal Fluttershy’s.
“Sorry, Twi, but it’s an emergency.”
Twilight looked out the door and both ways down the street. She looked back at Applejack skeptically.
“I don’t know about you, Applejack, but I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
“What? Y’all don’t see how red everythin’ is? How can ya possibly not see that?”
Twilight stared at Applejack blankly for a few moments. When she finally spoke, there was more than a hint of puzzlement on her tone.
“Applejack, it’s just sunrise, there’s nothing weird about that.”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean the sky, I mean why everything else is red. It’s darn spooky if ya ask me.”
Twilight bit her lip, presumably in an effort to keep from laughing, though Applejack failed to notice.
“Look, just because something is out of the ordinary or you can’t explain it doesn’t make that thing weird. It just means you have to do a little research on what that thing is.”
“Look, Twilight, your book are great and all, but at the moment we’ve got bigger problems.” Applejack looked back up at the sky, shuddering.
Twilight, having failed to hold it back, burst out laughing. The noise echoed through the morning streets of ponyville, sending a group of sparrows flying from the branches in a nearby tree and probably waking up a few of the neighbors to boot. She continued laughing as she closed the door to the library, leaving a puzzled earth pony on the other side.
“Well shucks, out of anypony in town I would’ve figured Twi would take this the most seriously. What, am I going crazy?”
Applejack turned and walked off back to the farm, thoughts swirling around in her head at hurricane velocity. Was Twilight being affected by the red miasma, or was she right to laugh? Was the red glow anything to worry about? Was it even there? These questions haunted her as she left the town limits, alone in the world and in her mind.
“Hey AJ, shouldn’t you be bucking trees right about now?”
The question broke her out of her trance, and she looked up to see Rainbow Dash, eternally lazy member of the weather team.
“Rainbow, what are ya doin’ up this early? I thought ya always slept in.”
Dash laughed playfully. “No, you’ve got it backward. I’ve got insomnia, so I fall asleep during the day a lot.”
“Oh,” Applejack replied. “I’m surprised I didn’t know that. Anyhow, I was just goin’ up to Twilight’s to ask her what’s up with all this red everywhere.”
“Yeah, it’s really cool looking, isn’t it?”
“Actually, it’s kinda freakin’ me out, to be honest.”
Rainbow laughed. “Why? It’s not like you’ve never seen this before, is it?”
“Actually, I ain’t,” Applejack replied with a puzzled expression.
“Oh, it’s actually pretty simple stuff, really. You know why the sky is blue, right?”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“Well, basically, light waves from the sun hit the air in the atmosphere and ones with shorter wavelengths bounce off. The blue ones have longer wavelengths, so most of them make it through without being bounced off, so we only see blue.”
“How in tarnation do you know all this, Dash? I mean, I never seen you read any books other than those Daring Do ones.”
“Well, I didn’t want to learn it,” Dash replied with a smile. “But I had to write a paper on it for my Rainbow production class back when I was a filly. Pegasi have to learn all this stuff.”
Applejack scoffed. “Well it seems pretty darn unnecessary to me. Y’all don’t work in the Rainbow Factory, unless you’ve got some second job I don’t know about.”
“Hey Applejack, why is Ponyville the ideal spot for farming?”
Applejack took a few seconds to think about it, then answered.
“Well, there’s problems to both sides of us. Near Canterlot, rain erodes salts from the cliffs into the atmosphere, and a lot of it ends up in the lakes and soil nearby, and salt can make soil infertile. To the west, most of the underground aquifers are linked to the ocean, so the water’s even more salty there. On the other hoof, the soil in ponyville has no problems with salt, and it’s high in nitrates, which makes it great for plants.”
Applejack looked back up at the pegasus hovering above her.
“Okay, I get yer point. That all sounded like nonsense to y’all just like all this rainbow hoo-ha don’t make sense to me.”
“Yeah. I knew the part about the rain but that’s about it. Anyway, so at morning and a night, the other colors can get through because it’s a narrower angle, so that makes it look red. When everything else looks red it probably just means that more light is getting through than usual.”
Applejack narrowed her eyes. “Ya sure about that? ‘Cause it don’t sound like you are.”
“Well, I guess you’ll never know then,” Rainbow Dash replied with a devilish smile. “Anyways, I should probably start working on the clouds, then. I’ll see you AJ!”
And with that, the pegasus took off like a bullet, off to do her job in her usual half-assed way. Applejack sat on the road for a few minutes, still not sure what to think of everything. In the end, she dusted herself off and headed back to the farm, content that the world wasn’t ending today.
And even if it does, at least I’ll have my chores finished by then.