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// The Universe Hates Me Today.... 
// Story: Oh, for the Love of Flight! 
// by Fiend from the Darkness 
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“Don’t get cocky now.” The laughing voice jolted Whirlwind out of her reverie. The interruption, sadly enough, also ruined her flow, forcing her to level out or risk going into a spin. This, in turn, nearly resulted in her running face first into a cloud, necessitating a hasty pull back, so she was running vertical up a wall of cloud. 

The lavender Pegasus was less than impressed as she looked around for where the voice had come from. It wasn’t Prism, weirdly enough, though he had been avoiding her recently for reasons unknown, and it wasn’t any other stallion she knew. The voice had been the quiet voice of a mare, something that would have been easy to ignore, or even miss entirely had she not known the voice from her time at school in Cloudsdale. “Hope?” she called the question, her voice somehow portraying annoyance and laughter at the same time. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Who me?” The mare that popped her head out of the cloud was a contrast to Whirlwind in many, many ways. “What makes you think that?”  The Pegasus was a light green, with a long forest green mane. The mane was long enough to be only a couple centimetres off the ground when she was standing. Her mane had no bangs, but one came across half her face, completely hiding her left eye. An eye Hope Dawn had no hope to see out of normally anyway.

This contrasted greatly with Whirlwind, a bit of a tomcolt, with her short, blue and white mane and windswept tail. A single eyebrow above her sky blue eyes went up at Hope’s question. “You’re the only one around here, as well as the only one I have ever met that can pull that off without giving away your watching position before hoof,” Whirlwind replied, deadpan.

“Oh, that,” the other mare stated, grinning rather unrepentantly, though her voice never rose above a glorified whisper. “Well, look at it this way! Last time I tried that is these conditions, you face-planted into a cloud!” She poked a forehoof out of the massive cumulous she was nestled within, gesturing to the sky, absolutely loaded with the huge puffballs, leaving a bit of a navigational maze. Since Whirlwind had had nothing better to do, she had originally been navigating through the maze to see how fast she could make the adaptions required for the relatively tight flying spaces. 

“So, how long have you been in that cloud for?” Whirlwind finally asked, giving Dawn the same ‘don’t question it’ status she did when dealing with Pinkie or Candy, rare as the latter was. 

“Since the roar and blast of lavender fire from earlier,” she admitted, smiling sheepishly.

“It’s safe. Prism tried to prank one of his friends and made her mad. You don’t have to stay up there,” Whirlwind sighed. She rather wanted to get back to the air. Things made sense up there at least. More sense than a teenage mare terrified of stallions and with a trickster streak that made her and Whirlwind friends in the first place. 

“Oh. Him. On second thought, I’ll just stay up here and work on my pep talk for next time you pass by,” she said, poking her head back into the cloud. Whirlwind blinked, but shook her head, knowing better than to try and follow. Instead she went back to her flight, upping her speed and hoping that by the time she felt she’d done enough Hope would have gotten bored. Either that or Whirlwind figured she’d just go across the top of the clouds and drop down in another area where she couldn’t be caught by the jade Pegasus. 

She shaking her head again, she went back to navigating the cloudbanks with impressive speeds. While Whirlwind wasn’t the fastest out there she was much faster than the average pony. Among those that trained regularly, however, she was average. It irked her to no end that one of the few ponies she knew that was better than her in town—and not a Wonderbolt or other professional athlete—also put zero work into it. Yet she worked hard, or felt she did, and couldn’t improve her speed to a level she thought was acceptable.

Still, the speed she was moving at was highly impressive for the turns she was taking and the sometimes split-second reactions time required to make the turns. Boredom might have been her motivator to start her flying session, but now it had become just another practice session. Maybe one day she’d make it to the Wonderbolts. 

Of course, once she’d finally gotten her rhythm again, another distraction just had to occur. She scowled as she was forced to roll to the side to avoid a goldenrod and black streak followed almost immediately behind by prismatic streak screaming out words that really weren’t for anypony less than fully adult to know, let alone use. 

Curious as to what this interruption was about, indirect as it was, she pulled off a one-hundred and eighty degree turn around the circumference of what would have been about the size of a basketball, something very few ponies could even hope to do. 

She followed behind the two streaks, finding it relatively easy to keep up. Though she was still pushing herself, whatever the golden mare, for Whirlwind could now see it was a mare, had said or done, had left Prism frustrated far beyond what would allow him to fly at his full ability, the colt seeming to just be trying to catch the other mare with sheer speed, his incoherent ranting giving not insight into the why of his chasing, though it made clear the reason he was acting like a bull in a china shop, versus the very good flier she knew he could be.

While this never would have worked in the open—and even here, if Prism had been able to think properly, it would have been difficult—it was working perfectly fine as the other mare slipped around from cloud to cloud and going through spaces that, while Prism could have made it with the right move, he was too large to go through with his current ‘sheer speed’ approach. 

Whirlwind had to wonder what had Prism so riled up, but lost that train of thought as the next widened space opened almost immediately into the wall of a massive cumulous, which the other mare had neatly pulled into a vertical climb to move up, with centimetres to spare. Whirlwind herself barely pulled up in time, and actually scraped the cloud a bit as she followed the mare. Prism wasn’t so lucky. Being the one that created the wider space and his speed doing so, Whirlwind just had time to watch him get very suddenly buried in the cloud with a soft poof.

The mare sighed before increasing her speed a bit so it was no longer just a challenge, but what would have been outright sprint speeds to try and find the mare, who’d taken another corner, but sighed as she found herself at a junction in the corridors within the clouds, the mare nowhere in sight as Whirlwind stalled to a hover, looking for any sign of the mare’s direction. Rolling her eyes and deciding to ask Prism later, Whirlwind just chose the lower one and flapped, her hover turning into a shallow dive to get back up to speed so she could use the cloud corridors as practise once more. 

Once more she got into a rhythm of moving through the clouds at speed, making turns that were far too tight for most ponies to make, and even would have given Prism some trouble in a perfectly calm mind. Though Prism doing this in a perfectly calm mind almost made her snort. No, the only time she could think of that he would voluntarily come do something like this is if he was challenged, insulted, or being chased. 

Again, much to her growing annoyance, Whirlwind’s combination introspective flight, agility training, and boredom killer was interrupted, this time as she nearly ran muzzle first into Illusion, Nidra, Starburst and another baut. The stopping distance would have been impressive for a pony that knew it was coming and waited until the last second. As it was, the sudden blind corner in the cloud obscuring the four and forcing her to stop without warning like that had made the stopping distance even more impressive. 

After she’d finished taking a couple of deep breathes from the near heart attack provided to her by… Her brain registered exactly who it was in the cloud and she immediately tried to bow to the alicorn and draconequus-pony, only to ram her face into a cloud that was not there a moment ago and smelled oddly of marshmallow.

“Nope, no bowing,” Prince Illusion stated. “You did not see me. Though if you could kindly help us with a decision.

Whirlwind blinked in confusion for a moment before shrugging. If Illusion and Nidra didn’t want to be treated as Prince and Princess, she didn’t see any harm out of public view like this. Though as she got rid of that confusion, a new one manifested. Why exactly were the four of them hanging from the relative ceiling? “Sure,” she said, wondering what exactly he had in mind. 

A second later, she found herself ‘standing’ on the ceiling. She still felt gravity as normal, but she knew that any movement she made would be reversed. She just decided not to think on the fact she was standing and could walk on the ceiling as if it were the floor, but gravity still felt the same as always, somehow pointing ‘up’. She just stomped out the thoughts before they gave her a migraine. 

“So, can’t you see how Baut’s sleep like this?” Illusion asked seriously. 

The question wasn’t exactly unexpected, considering the orientation of everypony and the fact he was a draconequus. What gave her pause was the absolute solemnness of the question. “What.” She blinked a couple of times, then looked over at Starburst, the only one of the group she could say she knew, even if she was just a mutual friend through Prism.

“Don’t ask me. The Princesses came to talk to Mom and said to go have fun to us. This is all somehow Nidra’s fault,” she said, her voice a little petulant, though bored. “I still don’t see it. Can we go down now?” 

Somehow the whole situation seemed just odd… “Well, the majority vote was in favour of sleeping upside down. We had to make you see the light,” Illusion said with a smirk. The retort was swift and completely calm in coming as they dissolved into something Whirlwind was sure counted as an argument, no matter how… weird. 

Whirlwind glanced at the fourth member of the part. “And how’d you get into this?” she asked after a moment as Illusion waxed on about the beauties of sleeping upside down, Nidra laughed, and Starburst continued her deadpan.

“I am protector of the Prince and Princesses. Where I go they go. And somehow my race got them on a tangent about sleeping upside down.”

Whirlwind nodded, still a little confused. “So, am I stuck here until they’re finished?” she asked after a moment, nodding to the three who had dissolved into what had to be the weirdest argument Whirlwind had ever seen.

“No. I do believe his highness only cast an area-of-effect spell. You should be find if you head the other way.”

Nodding, Whirlwind turned and trotted around the corner, not wanting to risk reversed flight. Once she reached the edge of the spell, though unexpected, she easily twisted in the air to become right side up and flapped once, heading the other way. It took her a moment to realize she had never given her vote on whether sleeping upside down really was the way to go.

Shrugging once more, and deciding she preferred right side up to head rush inducing upside down, she flew forward once more, getting back into her rhythm. Three times are it for Old Mare’s Tales, right? Yeah. No more distractions, she thought, no, willed. 

She was determined to finish her flight without any more distractions. No more Wonderbolt’s pep talks from Hope. No more insane cat-dog-curious pony chases. No more incomprehensible weirdness from royalty. She just wanted to fly, dammit!

As if on cue, there was a loud explosion below her. Sighing, and realizing today really wasn’t keen on giving her peace, she accelerated to near sprint to just get out of the clouds, and find a damn place to nap and hope that, when she woke up, things would go. Back. To. NORMAL!

Exiting the cloud at near sprint speeds, she glanced down and noted the source of the noise to be a stage set up with a white, cloaked unicorn. “Not worth it,” she sighed, noting that several of Prism’s friends, as well as Prism himself, still looking slightly surly, even from up here, were already on the case. Finding a nice, quiet place to rest, she closed her eyes and willed sleep to come. And to wake up to normality.

Then the thunder rolled….