Rainbow Dash was in her element.
The rush of the wind across her wings, the distant cheers of the spectators below, the whole world whipping all around her in a dizzying blur as she performed increasingly flashy and dangerous aerial stunts—these things exhilarated her like nothing else.
But the best was yet to come.
She paused, adjusted her flight goggles, and swept her gaze across the stadium, where thousands of ponies were fixated on her every movement. She waved a hoof and a hush of anticipation fell across the crowd.
It was time for the grand finale.
With a flap of her wings Rainbow began her ascent, rocketing skyward, the air around her growing ever colder and thinner as she flew higher than she had ever dared to fly before. At the apex she paused, turned to survey the magnificent sight of all Equestria laid out below her. To the west, the seemingly endless green expanse of the Everfree Forest. To the south, a silver ribbon of railroad track winding across the desert. In the north, the magnificent glittering spires of the Crystal Empire just barely visible in the distance. And below, so small she could cover it entirely with a hoof, the circle that was the Cloudsdale Colosseum.
A wry grin spread across her face, and she plummeted headfirst toward the stadium below.
To the gathered ponies, the suspense was nearly unbearable. All had their gazes turned skyward, none daring to blink lest they miss her descent. Several agonizing seconds passed in near-total silence, until one excited filly pointed a hoof and exclaimed, “Look! Look! Here she comes!”
A thousand pairs of eyes turned as one to the same piece of sky, where a rainbow-colored streak was rapidly accelerating toward them, moving faster than any pony should have been able to move. Closer she came, and closer still, speed building toward near-impossible levels.
The audience collectively held its breath.
With a blinding flash, a rainbow burst across the sky, radiating outward in all directions, reflected in a thousand pairs of unblinking eyes. The sound wave hit a moment later, a tremendous explosion rocking the Colosseum, reverberating in the ears of the ponies long after the colors had faded and the wind had died down. One by one, the ponies looked to the center of the arena.
And there she was, hovering, a satisfied smile on her face, the mare of the hour, Rainbow Dash.
The crowd erupted. Wild cheers, whistles, the stomping of thousands of hooves, a roar of approval approaching the Sonic Rainboom itself in magnitude. Rainbow Dash loved every moment. She floated there, eyes closed, hooves outstretched, basking in the adoration, as the ponies began chanting her name.
Rainbow Dash…
Rainbow Dash…
Rainbow Dash…
“Rainbow Dash! Rainbow Dash, wake up!”
Rainbow’s ears perked up, her tail twitched, and one eye reluctantly peeled itself open. Groaning, she hung her head over the edge of her fluffy white cloud to peer down at the annoyance who had taken it upon herself to ruin a perfectly good dream. She was mildly surprised to see that the culprit was, for once, not Pinkie Pie.
“Rarity?”
“Oh, wonderful,” Rarity said, “you’re awake! Well, mostly awake, anyway.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Rainbow yawned loudly. “So what do you want?”
“Lovely weather we’re having today, don’t you think, Rainbow?”
Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Please don’t tell me you woke me up from my nap to talk about the weather.”
Rarity ignored her. “Yes. Quite lovely indeed. As I recall reading in this morning’s paper, we’re scheduled for clear skies all week long, are we not?”
“Yup. So are you gonna get to your point any time soon, or can I get back to my nap?”
“Well,” Rarity huffed, “I beg your pardon. I simply assumed that the weather pony on duty might appreciate her good friend informing her that the skies are not as clear as they ought to be.”
“What are you talking about, Rarity? I cleared all the clouds hours ago! Well, except for this tiny little thing—” Rainbow patted her cloud-platform with a hoof, “—but it’s not doing anypony any harm.” She narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute. You woke me up because of my napping cloud, didn’t you.”
Rarity almost looked genuinely hurt, though Rainbow knew her well enough to suspect otherwise. “Rainbow Dash! Do you really think me so fussy and inconsiderate as to wake a dear friend from what I am certain is a well-deserved three-hour nap over such a trifling matter as one tiny cloud?”
Rainbow considered this for a few moments before answering. “Yeah, a little.”
Rarity rolled her eyes. “No, Rainbow, I’ll have you know I did not wake you because of your ‘napping cloud’, as you call it. I woke you because of that.” Rarity waved a hoof in the direction of the center of Ponyville.
Rainbow Dash turned and gaped at the mass of clouds that had accumulated over the town. “Whoa! Where did those come from?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, darling,” Rarity said, inspecting the tip of her hoof. “Perhaps they drifted in from the Everfree Forest. You know how unpredictable the weather can be there. So… spontaneous, and humid, and, well, downright dreadful.” A look of displeasure crossed her face at the thought of the horrid place. “But that is beside the point. Wherever they are from, the clouds are here now, and must be dealt with. I trust you can handle it.”
“Yeah, I should really get right on that. The next shift probably wouldn’t appreciate it if I left all that mess for them to clean up, heh. Thanks for the heads up, I guess.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m always willing to help a friend. Especially if it means not having to worry about getting caught in an unexpected downpour without my umbrella.”
Just then Rainbow noticed a familiar-looking fluffy white shape slinking quietly along the road toward the center of town, and pointed it out to her friend. “Hey, isn’t that your cat?”
“My…” Rarity turned her attention to where Rainbow was pointing, and gasped. “My darling Opalescence! What are you doing out of the house?”
Upon hearing its owner’s voice, the cat abandoned all efforts at stealth and scrambled away at top speed. Rarity was after it in a flash. “No, Opal, wait!” she exclaimed. “Stop right this instant! I am not playing around with you!”
Rainbow watched her charge away, her increasingly angry shouts and promises of violence gradually fading into the distance. “Man, I am so glad Tank’s not a cat. Tortoises are so much easier to deal with.” She pictured said tortoise in her mind’s eye, waiting patiently for her back home, then shuddered as the image shifted to that of a vicious, hissing ball of fur and claws strapped to a propeller, stalking the hallways of her cloud house.
Paragon of loyalty that she was, the thought of helping her friend corral her wayward pet crossed her mind for perhaps a second before she discarded it as not worth the trouble. Instead, she turned her attention back to the mysterious cloud bank that had sprung up over Ponyville while she was napping. Rainbow Dash stood up on her cloud, shaking out her legs and stretching her wings.
“Well, let’s get this over with.”
It took very little time for her to reach the first of the offending clouds, which had gathered, as she now saw, in the general vicinity of Sugarcube Corner. She attempted to burst it with a swift karate chop, and got her first indication that something was wrong when her hoof sank into the cloud and stuck there.
“What the—hey, let go!” A brief struggle, and she managed to pull her hoof free, bits of sticky white fluff still clinging to it. Upon closer inspection, she noticed that the cloud was whiter and fluffier than an ordinary cloud should be.
“Yeah, that’s definitely not normal.”
Suddenly, a terrible thought occurred to her. She raised her hoof to her mouth and gave it a tentative lick. It tasted like…
“Marshmallow fluff?”
The implications of this frightened her. She remembered the last time she had encountered clouds made up of some sort of sticky sweet confection.
“This had really better not be what I think it is.”
The cloud before her suddenly rumbled and darkened slightly, interrupting her train of thought. She looked down, and at that moment it registered in her conscious mind for the first time that a hundred or so kittens had been closely observing her actions from the moment she flew in.
“Whoa.”
She raised a hoof and waved it slowly, first to the left, then back to the right. A hundred kittens turned their heads in unison to follow the movement.
“Oooookay, that’s kinda creepy.”
The kittens continued to stare at her.
“So, uh, you wanna cut that out or what? It’s really weirding me out here.”
None of the kittens responded.
“Right,” Rainbow muttered. “Don’t know why I was expecting that to work.”
“Expecting what to work?”
If she hadn’t already been hovering over Sugarcube Corner, Rainbow Dash would have shrieked and jumped several feet straight up into the air in terror. Instead, she shrieked and nearly dropped out of the sky in terror. After recovering from the shock, she noticed Pinkie Pie grinning at her from the bakery’s second-story window.
“Hi, Rainbow Dash!” she called, waving a hoof enthusiastically.
“Geez, Pinkie!” Rainbow gasped. “You just about gave me a heart attack!”
Pinkie Pie giggled. “Oh Dashie, don’t be such a drama queen! I’ve scared you like that tons of times and you’re still ticking! So what brings you by? Care to sample some of our delicious chocolate chip cookies? We’re having a special today!”
“You know,” Rainbow said, “any other day I’d take you up on that, but right now there’s some seriously weird stuff going down that I gotta handle before it gets any weirder.”
“Really? What kind of stuff?”
“Well, for starters, there’s the massive pile of clouds hanging over our heads right now.”
Pinkie looked up. “Yup. Those are clouds all right. Not really that weird, though.”
“Well, the sky was clear just this morning. And clouds don’t just pop up out of nowhere like that. Take it from somepony who knows their clouds. Also, they’re, uh…” Rainbow trailed off as she considered the consequences of telling Pinkie Pie exactly what the clouds were made of, then decided to change the subject. “Yeah. And then there’s the kittens. There’s like a hundred of them, and they’re all just sitting there staring at me. It’s pretty freaky.”
Pinkie looked down. One particularly fluffy gray kitten looked back up at her and let out a tiny adorable meow.
“Holy moley, that’s a lot of kittens! There’s even more now than there were when I got back from Applejack’s place! Hey! You think they’re here for cookies? Do kittens even eat cookies? I don’t know much about cats, but I do know that Gummy really loves cookies! Well, actually, Gummy’ll eat pretty much anything he can fit into his mouth, and sometimes he even tries to eat things that’ll never fit in his mouth, but he’s got no teeth so he usually can’t pull it off, but kittens do have teeth so they can take bites out of stuff that’s too big to swallow all at once. Oh! I bet Fluttershy knows what kittens like to eat! I can ask her if—”
Rainbow Dash, already not the most patient of ponies, was about ready to lose it. But before she could, the cloud above her head, the same one she had previously tried to burst, rumbled again, darkened even further, and then proceeded to rain all over her.
Upon seeing a soaking wet Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie stopped her rambling. To her credit, she managed to contain herself for nearly two whole seconds before bursting out laughing at Rainbow’s plight.
Rainbow sighed and with a flap of her wings, shifted her position about a foot to the right, out of the stream of rain. After a few moments, the cloud followed, and Rainbow found herself once again under the downpour.
Pinkie laughed even harder.
“Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up,” Rainbow said. Suddenly her eyes widened. She stuck out her tongue and caught a few drops of the strange, pink-tinted rain. It tasted an awful lot like…
“Strawberry milk? Oh, that tears it! I knew we couldn’t trust that lying, no-good—”
“Ohmygosh it’s raining strawberry milk?! I gotta get in on this!” Before Rainbow even realized she had moved, Pinkie Pie was lying on her back in a puddle of strawberry milk, mouth wide open to catch as much of the deliciousness as possible. All around her, kittens had gathered around smaller puddles, lapping up the milk.
Rainbow mashed her hoof into her face. Pinkie Pie could be so random sometimes. And not always in a good way. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Come on, Pinkie, cut that out. You and I are going to Fluttershy’s cottage right now.”
“To ask about what kittens eat?”
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure, whatever floats your boat. Now let’s get moving!”
“Okey dokey!”
~ * ~
Not far away, a slightly disheveled and irritated Rarity was making her own way toward Fluttershy’s cottage, with a cat carrier floating along beside her.
“Honestly, Opal,” she addressed the cage, “I cannot for the life of me imagine what could have possessed you to run off like that.”
The cage growled.
Rarity stopped and glared at the cage. “Don’t you make those noises at me, you naughty kitty. You are in enough trouble already.”
A clawed paw shot out from between the bars and took a swipe at Rarity. Fortunately, she had kept herself just out of the ill-tempered feline’s reach and so remained unscathed.
“Ugh. You are simply impossible to deal with when you are in one of these moods of yours. Hopefully Fluttershy will be able to figure out what has you so bothered and we can put this whole ugly incident behind us.”
The cage hissed at her.
“Hmph.”
Rarity and her floating cat carrier resumed their trudge along the road to Fluttershy’s cottage in silence.
For those of you curious about what Rarity’s cat was doing wandering the streets of Ponyville so far from the Carousel Boutique, I must admit that is a very good question.
You see, Opalescence is an indoor cat, through and through. From the time she was a kitten, way back when Rarity’s parents gifted her to their daughter, Opal has been pampered and primped and spoiled rotten and enjoyed every minute of it. She has spent so much time with Rarity that she has even picked up a few of the pony’s personality traits herself, including an aversion to anything the least bit unclean. Cats are pretty clean animals by nature already, and Opal takes this to such an extreme that she even tolerates the frequent baths Rarity gives her, sitting there soaking wet and miserable and shivering in the tub being soaped and scrubbed, all without trying to claw her owner’s eyes out. Well, not trying as hard as she could, anyway.
Since the great outdoors is such a filthy disgusting place, Opal prefers not to spend too much time there. An occasional visit, for a pony pet playdate maybe, is acceptable, and she prefers to do her business outdoors (weather permitting) to keep her home clean, and she sometimes accompanies Rarity on long trips (in the safety of her cat carrier, naturally), but for the most part she is perfectly content to stay in.
So clearly it must have taken something dramatic to drive Opalescence out of the house and halfway across Ponyville. It is possible (though unlikely) that her deep-rooted feline instincts to hunt and explore temporarily overwhelmed her more fastidious qualities. Perhaps she was simply trying to avoid the escapades of Rarity’s little sister Sweetie Belle and her energetic friends. Or maybe it was that same mysterious force that had recently caused so many kittens to come from miles around and converge upon Sugarcube Corner.
Sadly, we may never know the true reason, unless cats learn to talk, in which case we can simply ask her and solve this mystery once and for all.