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// 1: The Queen's City 
// Story: Rarified Airs 
// by SpinelStride 
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	It could be lonely, up there in the sky. She had learned young to climb quickly, to get out of reach of the magic of the unicorns of The Queen’s City; even today, after her entire lifetime of flying, still thousands of ponies saw a body in the air and assumed it was a dragon or a griffon trying a mad long-distance raid. What else could it be?
Pegasi, after all, had been extinct for a thousand years.
Her hooves shoved a couple of clouds together. It felt so natural, she’d had a long time when she was a filly coming to understand that neither Mommy nor the Princess could touch clouds like she could. Not until the Princess studied her and figured out a spell for it, anyway, and even the Princess couldn’t make that spell last more than a day at a time. So only little Dashie got to have the most comfortable bed in the world, a little puff of cloud in her room.
If nothing else, no matter what happened, being a freaky science experiment had those benefits. She had the sky all to herself, and she had the best bed of anypony in Unicornia anywhere she looked. If she went high enough, only the Princess could reach her clouds to pull her back down. Even the weather mages couldn’t reach as high as she could fly. Any time she got to feeling a little overwhelmed, the sky was always there for her. Princess Twilight said it was natural for her to need to get outside a lot; being a flying species probably meant a tendency toward claustrophobia.
Rainbow Dash was pretty sure Princess Twilight knew she used that as an excuse to get out of her lessons and experiments a lot more often than it was true. It didn’t always work. When the Princess was really excited about a subject and wanted to share it… or when Dash had gotten her really good with a prank… then there was no getting around it. Fortunately, the Princess was really, really smart, and some of those experiments when Dash was a little filly had shown how her brain activity skyrocketed when she was flying, so the Princess didn’t make her sit on a stool for lectures except when she had to take tests. So she got to learn her way, which nopony else in all Unicornia could do, from the best teacher anywhere.
Having a horn of her own, she still sometimes thought, might have been worth not being special, though. She was pretty, she knew that; her mother was Princess Twilight’s personal tailor and fashion designer, and every time she came home with a dress singed from lightning or torn from getting grabbed by magic, Mom always sighed that such a beautiful little pony deserved a dress that could keep up with her, and Dash did usually feel bad then. Not that it stopped her from going back out in the next one, unless Mom had a real drama-fit complete with fainting couch to show it was time to settle down for a bit.
Dash looked down. At least Mom didn’t try to make her wear dresses on a regular basis anymore. She’d even designed the new outfit just for her. Tight-fitting so it wouldn’t mess with her flying, but still modest enough to walk around Canterlot in if she needed to. And stylish enough she could yank on a skirt and get into some Court meeting or whatever without making a social faux pas. At least by fashion choices. Any faux pas she made after that were her own doing. And usually intentional. When she saw Princess Twilight’s ear give that telltale twitch, that meant it was Dash Time.
Last time it had been the griffon ambassador being just way too obnoxious, so Dash Time that time meant pulling out one of the Big Ones. The ones Princess Twilight helped her plan in advance. The ones that meant a loud, angry official scolding and then laughing herself sick at the Princess’ side in one of the private tea rooms in front of an enormous cake later. And she never got to play with other fliers, so having a furious griffon chasing her through the halls had been awesome. That perfect little last-second jink to the side to leave him stuck waist-deep in a too-small window, she was proud of that. He might have a culture of flying, but she was just better.
She looked down at the city below. All the unicorns walking through the streets, doing their own thing… they probably never got lonely like this. Mom and the Princess were great, and the Guards and the staff were too, and so on. But she was different. Most of the time different was fine because it meant awesome. But sometimes it just meant… not having anywhere to hide. The clouds were out of reach, but never out of sight. The Princess’ greatest triumph ever, always on display. Usually that was good. Usually she liked having all eyes on her.
Usually.
Lately, though, she kept losing her train of awesome and getting into a blue mood.  Even the Princess had noticed, and for all her smarts and her political savvy, she wasn’t usually all that great at picking up on feelings. They’d been down in the castle yard, where Dash usually got her lessons, flying laps and sometimes doing obstacle courses with rings and stuff, while the Princess lectured from the middle, and Dash would just pick it all up without noticing. Three times in the last two weeks, the Princess had called her in after just a couple of laps. Today made a fourth, and the Princess had hugged her and told her to take a break, and that never happened.
So here she was. Alone in the clouds. Nothing around her but air in any direction.
Why did it feel like she was in a cage?

***

“Rainbow, darling?” came Mom’s voice through the door. It just made Dash feel guiltier. Here she was, getting Mom upset for no good reason, and she didn’t even know why.
“Yeah, Mom?” she called back, and got to her hooves. The puff of cloud silently shifted as her weight moved, its single thin sheet tucked into place underneath her. She had to turn the key in the lock with her hoof; the thing was only there as a symbol, something to show that Mom would respect it even if they both knew she could turn the key from outside any time she wanted. A foal lock, but Dash couldn’t use an adult one.
“I saw you in the clouds all afternoon, dear.” Mom’s perfect white coat and expertly-coiffed purple mane were waiting outside the door, along with her worried expression. “Is something wrong? Is there anything I can do to help?” She reached out a foreleg to pull Dash against her.
Dash let her. Mom could have used her magic, but she never did. No unicorn in The Queen’s City used her magic less than Mom. At home, anyway. Another little way Mom tried to make Dash feel less alone. She’d seen her at work, guiding what looked like a hundred needles at once, all in different patterns, and knew that Lady Rarity was a unicorn of rare talent. But at home, she did things the way Dash did them. By hoof. From breakfast to hugging to making the bed.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, leaning into the hug. “I just start feeling… stuff. Maybe it’s another pegasus thing?”
Mom’s hoof moved to brush along Dash’s wing, a very slight preening movement, but one that always made Dash feel better. Mom had taught herself how to preen a pegasus filly’s wings with hoof and mouth, so that when Dash got old enough to learn, there’d be someone to teach her. Even if now, with all her own practice at it, she could recognize how clumsy Mom’s technique actually was, it still felt right the way Mom did it. Even if she had to fix the feathers herself later.
“It might be,” Mom said. “But I know it happens to a lot of young unicorn mares. You grow up and start to wonder about your place in the world.” Her hoof ran down to pat Dash’s cutie mark. The tri-colored rainbow was no more sensitive than anywhere else on her flank, and much less sensitive than her wings. “Just because your mark says something about you, doesn’t mean it says everything about you.”
“Controlling the weather is what Princess Twilight made me for,” Dash replied. The day she’d learned she could make clouds spit out lightning bolts by jumping on them had been one of the best days of her life. Princess Twilight had been thrilled - not just with the proof that the ancient records of pegasus abilities were validated, but that Dash had shown that pegasi could indeed develop a Cutie Mark via the normal process of discovery and not, as some of the other, more fantastical stories had it, only by cutting them from defeated unicorn foes. It meant that pegasus magic had something in common with unicorn magic after all. “That and pumping out a bunch more pegasi, eventually.” She felt mixed about that one. She’d have other pegasi, at least, but they’d all be babies. Her babies. Her as a mother. That just sounded weird even in her head.
“Originally, yes,” Mom conceded. “But ever since the day you were born, we’ve both known that you’d decide for yourself who you are.”
“Well… when I figure it out, I’ll let you know, I guess.”

***

Rainbow Dash was used to getting a Royal Summons. Sometimes several of them in a day. Princess Twilight came up with new tests for her all the time, and liked to share tea or lunch or whatever with her. Sometimes she had all sorts of scientific stuff she wanted to share, and she said Dash was her best audience for telling her if she’d condensed it down properly. She could never quite trust that her courtiers wouldn’t go study on their own so as to follow along, but she knew if Dash wasn’t getting it, she’d just say so.
Not that a Royal Summons was always a good thing. A couple of times when she was a filly, she’d had to walk up in front of the whole court and apologize to some noble or another. One time when she was a teenager and had done something that in retrospect was really, really dumb, she’d been called up in front of the throne and a steaming-mad Princess Twilight had the guards spank her flank bright red with a paddle on the grounds that if she was going to be foalish, she’d get a foalish punishment. But this one was in the Royal Labs, which almost always meant some sort of test, which could go either way. Rainbow Dash didn’t know any unicorns who liked having blood drawn any better than she did.
Princess Twilight was sitting at her primary lab table when Dash came in. She wasn’t wearing her goggles or any other protective gear, and the table was completely cleared off. That wasn’t a good sign or a bad sign; that was just unprecedented. There’d always be something on the table for an experiment.
Princess Twilight spoke first. “Come in, Rainbow Dash. I have some results I want to show you.”
Dash felt like her feathers were trying to stick out every which way in nerves. She kept her wings tightly pressed to her sides. She had lots of practice not making her wings too obvious. Results? Princess Twilight didn’t show her results. She showed her the papers at the end, if anything. Other than when the results gave her something to compete against, a new personal best, like the wing-power thing. Anemometer. Maybe a prank? Princess Twilight didn’t tend to pull pranks, though. “Results, Princess?” she asked cautiously.
Princess Twilight smiled. Her head was down a little bit, though; not an attack position, despite the lowered horn. A sad head-down, but not like to her chest. Just a little down. “Yes, Rainbow Dash. Results.”
The pegasus walked in and settled herself on the stool across from Princess Twilight. She’d long since internalized the no-flying-in-the-lab rule. Too much stuff got tossed around by the air moving. “Results on what?” she went ahead and asked. Maybe she’d messed up some test lately, or not done as well as the Princess hoped? A bolt of fear ran down her back. Was there something wrong with her? Was she going to turn into some mutant pony-eating monster?
The princess’s purple aura lifted a neatly-bound set of papers from a drawer on the table and set them in front of her pupil and experiment. “Read,” she said. Ordered, technically, but she’d always given Rainbow Dash lots of leeway on that. Dash usually obeyed anyway.
Rainbow Dash read. Princess Twilight had clearly spent quite a bit of her precious time on this, boiling tons of results down into graphs with nice clear labels and meanings. She still took her time. Sitting and reading wasn’t her thing, usually, but there was something big up. It didn’t take her that long to hit the first major bit.
Her head snapped up. “If I’d been a unicorn, I woulda been set to challenge for a throne,” she said. It wasn’t angry, or wondering, or excited. She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. “But all that magic goes into my wings instead.”
Princess Twilight smiled a little at her. Just a little. “If you hadn’t been destined to be a pegasus, I don’t think I would have combined those particular genetic strains. The feather aside, Lady Rarity might not have objected, but my brother had another mare in mind. Fortunately, Princess Cadence talked him into contributing. So you have two powerful bloodlines behind you, and I do assume that whatever pegasus originally owned the feather I used was a late-surviving and therefore powerful pegasus himself. It’s not really surprising that you have powerful magic. Keep reading.”
Rainbow Dash forced herself to keep going, even though she really, really wanted to sit and let that one percolate in her head for a bit. All that magic, and she couldn’t use any of it except to fly… which, to be fair, was worth a lot. She went to the next page. “... Birds?”
Another royal smile. “The first non-caged, non-predatory songbirds to be verifiably spotted building nests in a thousand years, Rainbow Dash. Near the southern border, but definitely in Unicornia. They left when the pegasi died, but somehow they know you’re here. They’re coming back.”
Dash huhed. Well, pretty cool, she guessed. She’d seen the caged songbirds at the palace often enough, and they seemed to like her pretty well. She kept going, and then her head snapped up. “I am not a bird!” she protested, hurt. There hadn’t been any shortage of unicorns who’d called her that, all her life. But neither Mom or the princess had…
“Of course you aren’t,” Princess Twilight immediately said, holding up a hoof in a placatory gesture. “But you do have some non-unicorn characteristics, and they’re the closest model. You need more sugar and more protein than a unicorn, and less calcium. But more importantly, you display more and more signals of claustrophobia around this time of year.” She smiled, the fond kind, not the sad kind. “Even if I don’t count the ones you faked to get out of a lesson. Simply put, Dash, a pegasus is supposed to move.”
“But I do move,” Dash said, trying to figure out where this all was going. “You’ve got a new exercise routine?” she guessed. “Those are fun, sometimes.”
Twilight laughed. “Not like that, Rainbow Dash. No, I mean move like migrate. Travel. Not stay in The Queen’s City all the time.” She reached over to put a hoof on the pegasus’ shoulder. “I’m assigning you to a diplomatic caravan. I want you to go show Unicornia what the future holds - and the place you have in it. You’ll be travelling with an ambassador and plenty of guards, but hopefully this will help you.”
“And make lots of data,” Dash added.
“And make lots of data,” Twilight confirmed. “But first, read the last page. I haven’t shown you this part before because I don’t want you to be reckless, but… well, things can happen on the road, and you might need to know this part.”
Rainbow Dash immediately flipped to the next page. Reckless? Okay, that sounded like fun. All the best stuff involved being reckless. She looked at the graphs on the last page, then tilted her head. “... Are you sure this isn’t backward?” she asked.
Twilight laughed quietly. “I checked six times. You sprained your wing falling out of bed a few times as a foal… and you recall that time we did speed trials out by the Whitetail Woods?”
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “You called it off after like ten minutes and wouldn’t even say why.”
Twilight set her hoof on Dash’s shoulder again. “You clipped the tops of the trees. At the speeds you were going, I thought you were about to die. Instead, your wing sheared right through two feet of solid wood and you didn’t even notice. The thaumometer recorded the whole thing. The faster you go, the more magic you put out - and the safer you are. So if you get into trouble, if there’s something dangerous - or, worst of all, if you run into a griffon raid - then fly. As fast as you can. The guards can take care of themselves, and that’s what they’re trained for. You just fly. All the way back home, if that’s what it takes to keep you safe.”
Dash looked over her shoulder at her wing. It didn’t look like she was hiding a buzzsaw back there. “... I cut through a tree? And you didn’t tell me?”
Twilight nodded. “I didn’t tell anypony, Rainbow Dash. Do you understand what it would mean if this got out?”
“Ummm… I’d have a lot more respect?” Rainbow Dash guessed, picturing it. Those jerks in the court all with their jaws dropped as she like chopped her way through marble columns or something…
The Princess shook her head. “There would be a demand that I stop this experiment,” she said flatly. “History says unicorns defeated pegasi because pegasi couldn’t do anything against magic. What you prove is that a sufficiently powerful pegasus could in fact get up to speed and be able to overcome unicorn magic. That the War of Survival was not as one-sided as history says.” She sighed. “That we won because we happened to have more powerful ponies at that moment, not because every unicorn was destined to defeat the other tribes. And that means if I bring back more pegasi, and they turn out to be as powerful as you, they might decide to avenge the falls of Roam and Pegasopolis.”
Rainbow Dash gaped. Not at the idea of ponies wanting her ‘experiment’ ended; some of them said that kind of stuff to her face in court all the time. But… “I’m not gonna do anything like that!” she exclaimed, horrified. “I’m not a unicorn, but I’m still a loyal Unicornian!  And… and if anypony brings back pegasi, it’d be you, and they’d all know you were doing it because you’re a good princess, and that you really care about ponies, even pegasi! They wouldn’t turn on you! They couldn’t!”
Princess Twilight reached across the table and hugged her. “I know they wouldn’t. But other unicorns might not want to believe it. So don’t let anypony know. Just stay safe for me. Let the guards do their jobs, and if something is overwhelming them, then fly back to me. Don’t be a hero. You’re too special for that.”
Being a hero… That had never been on the horizon for Rainbow Dash. Famous, maybe, and even important in her own way as part of Princess Twilight’s plan, but a hero? … She sort of liked the idea of it. Saving the guards from a dragon attack, kicking some scaly firebreather right in the face.
“Rainbow Dash?”
Dash ummmed. “If there’s trouble, Princess, then I’ll fly.”
Princess Twilight Sparkle smiled ruefully. “I suppose that’s the best I’m going to get.”