//------------------------------// // E1 Ch2: Rain(bow) Check // Story: Destiny Is Magic // by ColdGoldLazarus //------------------------------// Episode 1: Strange Mares in a Strange Place (part 1) Chapter 2: Rain(bow) Check The path she travelled down with uncharacteristic caution was bordered on either side by high embankments of smooth black stone. Her hooves, grayed with ash, were aching from the hard ground, her wings prickling uncomfortably, the salt rubbing between her feathers and sending a constant stream of unpleasant sensation into her nerves. She guessed based on the direction the sun had set that she was currently heading inland in a south-southwest direction, and beyond the hulking form of the volcano, a nasty storm was brewing. It seemed that wherever she was, it was like the Everfree forest back home in that the weather was uncontrolled. She hadn’t really given much thought to where she was or how she got here, but now that she thought of it, it didn’t take long to realize she was clueless. The last thing she remembered was cuddling up to Tank in her cloud home (It had taken lots of wheedling to get Twilight to cast a self-replenishing cloud-walker spell on the turt –err, tortoise, but it had been well worth it) to take a nap. Next thing she knew, she’d awoken lying on the beach. Part of her knew she should probably be in the middle of some sort of panic attack, considering the circumstances, but giving herself the goal of getting to the volcano had proven a nice distraction, keeping her from breaking down at a time when she probably really couldn’t afford to. One thing worried her, though. In Ponyville, there was always a kind of background chatter of birds or bees buzzing, and in the winter, there was often the sound of fillies playing in the snow or ice-skating. Heck, even in the Everfree Forest, there’d been the sound of crows or the distant rumbling of monsters. But here, there were no signs of life besides herself. The storm was beginning to rumble with thunder, and her hooves made a sound like a gunshot every time she took a step, but for all Rainbow Dash knew, she was completely alone in this strange place. She hated being alone. She was so lost in her uneasy thoughts that she nearly toppled into the river of lava blocking the path. It was just so abrupt. She simply turned a corner, funneled by the natural walls, and out of the blue there was a huge lava river. She took several awkward leaps backwards, wings flapping ineffectually, heart racing with surprise. That is to say, she totally stopped way before the river because she already knew it was there through the power of her sheer awesomeness. If only. Yeah, Rainbow Dash wasn’t going to tell anyone about this little incident anytime soon. Now, Rainbow Dash considered herself a mare of action, and while she had to admit reading was fun –especially adventure stories like those about Daring Do- but she still far from considered herself an egghead. Regardless, back at flight school there’d been as much lessons on physics as on how to flap your wings the right way, and while Dash hadn’t really paid much attention, she’d still gleaned enough to help with some of her more complex tricks for the Wonderbolts. And it was this background in mathematics that told her that without flight, she wouldn’t be able to cross the river. It wasn’t even a matter of distance; if it had been simple water or something, she’d be able to jump straight across, no problem. But even pressed as far back from it as she could go, the heat was intense, sweat pouring out like buckets and getting her wings all sticky again. In order to jump across, she’d have to get much closer to the flow, and such proximity would probably give her third-degree burns, at best. And that wasn’t accounting for the fact that she was a Pegasus, insensitive to cold but also far more prone to heat than Unicorns or Earth ponies. Unless some alternative way of crossing presented itself, she was pretty much stuck. You know what? Dash didn’t have to cross. Not at the moment, anyway. Maybe if Applejack were here instead, she’d stubbornly waste hours sitting here, trying to figure out how to get to the other side in this exact spot, but Dash wasn’t a stranger to adjusting her flight pattern when the wind changed direction. Turning to her left, she scaled the embankment. It was now dark out, and all but the brightest stars were hidden by outlying storm clouds and the smoke blowing her way from the volcano’s top. Lighting flashed from the south, illuminating the landscape like a malfunctioning strobe light. The landscape around her was rugged and hilly, long shadows cast by the lightning contrasting with blinding white. The lava river flowed to her right now, casting its own hellish red, and the volcano itself loomed beyond, the distance stubbornly resisting judgment. Ahead, there was a charred forest, lifeless branches reaching into the sky like mangled arms. Shaking her head to clear that particular bit of imagery, she headed for the trees. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened to the forest; all the limbs were bare of leaves and stained white, while small fires were scattered among what remained of the undergrowth, stubbornly refusing to go out. Like the badlands, the forest was devoid of any sort of life, and Dash’s uneasiness grew. Behind every tree seemed to lurk a phantom, every branch blocking the path seemed like a reaching claw, and at one point she’d come across a blackened skeleton of some unfamiliar creature. She found her thoughts drifting to her friends. What would they do in this situation? Applejack would probably react the best; Rainbow Dash had to admit her part-time rival at least had some sense, though her stubbornness would probably result in some roadblocks like the lava river. Twilight was an egghead, so she’d either wish she’d brought a wilderness survival handbook, or remember one she’d read before. And she was an insanely powerful unicorn, so she’d be fine if something jumped out at her. For the first time, Dash was almost willing to trade her wings in for a horn. Or maybe she could keep her wings… Then she’d be an Alicorn! Oh, that would be sweet; Rainbow Dash, princess of awesome! But she was getting off track. Rarity wouldn’t last a second; Dash laughed at the mental image of the dressmaker stopping every five seconds to clean her hooves off. Fluttershy… somehow the thought of the soft Pegasus scared and lost made her uncomfortable, and she quickly moved on. Pinkie Pie. That girl had less sense than… than some sort of weird Applejack-y metaphor, but she had more than enough spunk and good cheer to make up for it. Dash was reminded of the night of the most recent Summer Sun Celebration, six months ago now. When they’d gone into Everfree to find the Elements of Harmony, and Nightmare Moon’s illusions had frozen the group in terror, –Dash hadn’t been scared, she’d just been unpleasantly surprised!- it was the pink party pony who had proven there was nothing to fear. “When I was a little filly, and the sun was going doo-oown…” She began to sing to herself, straining to remember the lyrics. She ducked under another threatening branch without a second thought. “The darkness and the, um, shadows? They would always make me froo-oown…” She had the faint feeling she was butchering the tune, but the song was miraculously making her feel better, so she kept going. “I'd hide under my pillow from what I thought I saw, but Granny… ah, what the heck; Pie said that wasn't the way to deal with fears at all… She said, Rain-bow, you’ve got to stand up tall; learn to face your fears! You’ll see that they can’t hurt you, just laugh to make them disappear!” Bolstered, she began to trot faster, smiling despite herself as she sung purposefully off-tune into the trees. In fact, she was so lost in the uplifting memory that she stopped looking where she was going, and so didn’t see the stallion until she’d already plowed straight into him. Disorientation is a powerful thing. It has a way of pulling the cornerstone out of the tower that is your mind, sending all the carefully-laid brickwork, the wooden frame and rafters of well-ordered thoughts crashing down into a big heap, and you’re so busy building it back up again that outside influences you’d normally have seen coming a mile away, instead take you completely unawares. Rainbow Dash’s earlier joy was now replaced by pure, unadultered confusion as she scrambled back to her hooves. The stallion, despite being a bit smaller than her, had barely flinched, and was resuming his slow, calm walk through the forest. He was a burnt orange color, a darker shade than Applejack’s fur, and spotted with patches of soot. His mane and tail, Dash noted with bemusement, was almost the same exact color, and grown out as long as Fluttershy’s; his tail in particular being nearly grey from having dragged along the ashy ground. What sort of stallion wore their hair that long? Then she realized that she was looking at another pony. She wasn’t alone! If she’d been in a better state, she’d probably have swooped him up in a big hug, but as it was, she simply grinned hugely. “HI!” He turned towards her, cocking his head to one side and inspecting the Pegasus, though he kept slowly walking along the trail. “Hello. I am Kapura.” He had a weird way of talking, overly formal, his words drawn out and carefully measured, and yet unfocused, as though he was thinking about something completely different and simply throwing these ones out for the sake of conversation. All that was offset by his voice, however. After the incident with Discord, Twilight had done her usual egghead thing and looked up as much as she could find about the draconequus. There was one story, later proven false by Celestia herself, that Rainbow Dash had been forced to listen through. In it, while the sisters had been pursuing Discord, the chimera had tricked them into a cave and collapsed the roof, as one big slab, upon them. Their magic didn’t work against it, and they were forced to hold it up with their bodies or else be crushed. They eventually discovered that what they had mistaken for a cave roof was actually a giant pancake, and eaten it to escape. But Rainbow Dash felt, in the first few moments after hearing her new companion’s name, that whatever titanic force of character and strength the sisters had displayed was nothing to the struggle to hold in her laughter. “K-Kap-Kapura? What kind of name is that?” She finally gave in, rolling on the ground and howling with mirth. The stress of the day had taken more of a toll on her than she’d thought, and now it was showing, the weird stallion with his weird name and stupid-sounding voice suddenly becoming the funniest thing ever. “I, heh heh, I’m sorry, but you, he, are one weird guy.” Dash finally got out, getting back up again (again) and rubbing her eyes. Kapura just watched, yellow eyes following her with a vague sort of curiosity. He was now several meters away, and turned around and began moving back towards her with all the speed of a glacier. “Are you the Makuta?” At first, Dash was inclined to break down in laughter again, but she suddenly paused. That name… It had a subtle sort of menace to it, somehow inspiring the same sort of feelings of primal fear that Nightmare Moon and Discord invoked in their turn. She shivered slightly. “What is the Makuta?” Kapura’s slow walk stepped up to a snail’s pace. “If you do not know what is the Makuta, then I guess you are not it.” When he reached a point further down the path, he once again turned and ambled back towards Dash. “That is good. Jaller says I have to be careful of the Makuta when I am in the forest. He says the Makuta is everywhere.” He paused once again, eyes boring into Dash. His thick voice was the exact same, the dreamy vagueness still there, and yet suddenly he was a different pony altogether. “He means Rahi. Monsters. Things you can see. But I know the Makuta is here now, in these burnt trees, and in the dead soil. All of these things were destroyed by the Makuta, but the Makuta never left them. That is how he becomes strong. That is what the Makuta does.” He got back to pacing, but Dash could see he was beginning to actually get riled up now. “He destroys things.” Whoa. Dash stepped back; Kapura passed by again, now about as fast as Tank on a good day. “Hey, what are you even doing?” Indeed, he looked like he was more than just pacing; when Rainbow Dash looked closely, she could see that at either end of this segment of path, there was an unfamiliar symbol etched into the ash like somepony writing in the sand at a beach. When Kapura came just short of one, he’d turn around and start back the other way. “I am practicing.” He lost all the odd intensity from talking about Makuta, and in fact sounded a little bit eager, like Twilight when she was explaining some complex magical theorem to anypony who’d pretend to listen. “Vakama says that even though I am slow, I may be faster than all the others, and travel very far. He says I must practice. Jaller says I am being silly. I practice often.” He actually smiled. Well, it was more of a tiny grin, but for him, Dash gathered, it must have been a huge outpouring of emotion. Her fear of loneliness was starting to be outweighed by her desire not to be seen with this weirdo, but she decided to try to wrangle a few more answers from him. “So, ah, where am I?” And how can I get back home? She added mentally. “You are where you are. If I practice, I can be where I am not. I think I can feel it. It is hot where I am, but where I am not is cold, and I think I can feel it. I must practice more.” He stopped near one end of the marked section, and tilted his head upward in thought. He looked almost whimsical. “The island has many places to visit. I want to see all of them, but the others do not like to travel. Mata Nui is very big. Vakama says that in the beginning of time, Mata Nui fell from the sky, and landed here. The Makuta came after him and made him fall asleep, and sent his monsters out across the world to control it, and destroy it’s beautiful things, and to make the Matoran his slaves. Vakama says the Toa will save us.” Okay, this was too much weirdness, and Rainbow Dash had to dash. “Erm, goodbye…” she began to edge along the path. Kapura just gave her another content grin. “I am practicing.” He reassured her, turning around and moving to the further mark. Dash ran. There were many words that perfectly described the encounter, and for Rainbow Dash, all of them were synonyms for ‘strange.’ Still, it had provided some useful, if probably only fifty percent accurate, information. There were others, though they also had weird names. Jaller seemed like he was probably sane. Makuta was either a figment of Kapura’s imagination, or another bad guy that Dash was supposed to beat. She wondered who or what the ’Toa’ was. And she was on an island. All that stuff about ‘practicing’ was weird. Snickering, Dash wondered if it was just an excuse that this ‘Vakama’ guy had made up to get him away from everypony else. She came to a bend in the path, and beyond it, she found that the trees thinned out. There was a rickety-looking but short bridge across a gorge –looking down as she crossed, she saw the lava river from earlier flowing far below- and shortly beyond, a sign bearing the same strange symbols as had marked Kapura’s path, and one predominant glyph that clearly depicted a fiery volcano. The real volcano was dead ahead, looking considerably closer than before. Dash was almost there. I really hope I haven’t scared away all my readers with the long wait. I’ll admit I’ve kind of dropped the ball on this, though school and the joy of the return of unlimited internet access (Long story) have also contributed. I hate writing Rainbow Dash with a passion, too; it’s so hard to get her personality right! But anyway, this is here now, and subsequent chapters will hopefully be much sooner in the coming, though I make no promises. I’ve always been a slow writer, and as perfectionist as Rarity most of the time. No, I will not be having the characters replace the Toa; instead they’ll be… well, I don’t want to spoil things just yet. But there will be ponified Kopaka and Tahu and such. The Matoran are ponies too, but they still call themselves the Matoran. Alien cultures for the win! I think this chapter could have turned out better, and I really hope the conversation with Kapura isn’t too boring, but this is also the third and best attempt at that scene, so I decided this has delayed long enough. I also made a few changes to the Charred Forest and Kapura’s lines (otherwise directly copy-pasted from the MNOLG) but I think those edits are for the better. Comments, critisim, and outright flaming are all welcome below!