Alienation

by Longtooth

Infatuation

The Whitetail Woods are the pleasant alternative to the Everfree Forest. Miles and miles of pristine wilderness broken only by a few paths tread into the ground by ponies passing from town to town, or, in the fall, by the annual Running of the Leaves. A proud memory of Twilight's but I would probably have been more interested in the antics of her two friends than keeping good running form.

Right now the woods were full of green leaves and singing birds. A shady paradise within trotting distance of Ponyville. I only had to take one look at them before I decided that they weren't for me. Nothing against a peaceful forest, of course, I just prefer the city. The million bugs that thought they could eat me alive might have had something to do with it.

I had worried for a bit whether I'd be able to find Dash amongst all that lush insect-filled greenery, but I needn't have worried. She was quite obvious, as was the heavy, black, lightning-spitting cloud she was battling.

The cloud roiled like a living thing, twisting and billowing as if caught in the throes of a tempest wind that did not touch the branches of the trees beneath it. Half a dozen pegasi circled it, diving in to deliver kicks and bursts of wind, trying to break it apart and drive it away from the forest below. Chief among them was the darting form of Rainbow Dash, her signature prismatic trail creating ribbons of light that encircled the monstrous cloud. The efforts of the weather ponies were making headway, but I could tell immediately that it was slow going, and they were tiring.

I came as close to the battle as I felt was safe and watched. I noted how some of the weaker pegasi were flagging, not dodging quite as fast as they should have, and the lightning strikes from the cloud were getting closer and closer to hitting them. When one inevitably wasn't fast enough I caught the injured pony in my magic and lowered them gently to the ground. It wasn't long before my efforts were noticed, and I was graced with a burst of colors as Dash zipped up to me.

"Hey, Twilight," she said, sounding casual despite the fight she had just been leading. "How's it going?"

"I'm good," I replied. "What the hay is that?"

"Dunno. It just appeared this morning. I figure it wandered out of the Everfree Forest or something."

"You look like you're having a lot of trouble with it," I noted.

She shrugged. "It was twice as big an hour ago. We'll get it eventually. So, have you seen any of the others today?"

I nodded. "You're the last one I was able to find. By the way, Pinkie might be stopping by inviting you to a picnic party tomorrow. Just warning you."

Dash smirked. "Figured she'd do something."

"Dash!" a pegasus called from above. "If you're done chatting can you please get back to work?"

"Hey, Cloudkicker, why don't you go and live up to your name?" Dash retorted, but her tone was one of good-natured ribbing, no real malice in it. She turned back to Twilight with an apologetic smile. "Sorry, gotta fly."

"Can I help?" I asked, the impulse to stay and watch her too strong to resist. Not that I was trying.

She frowned at the request. "I don't know, Twilight. Unicorns aren't really known for their weather finesse, you know?"

"I can help protect you guys from the lightning," I offered. "And I can probably carve it up into smaller clouds."

"Nuh-uh on the last one," Dash said, shaking her head. "We tried that already. That just makes a bunch of little clouds with as much kick as one big one. Trust me, it's easier when it's all in one place and we can hit it together." She paused for a moment as another pegasus was struck and sent spiraling down before recovering and winging her way back into the air. "The lightning stuff sounds pretty good, though."

There are a couple ways to make a pony resistant to electricity. The weather ponies were already not grounded, so they had that advantage, but the lightning still had enough kick to stun them, and the heat could burn badly if they weren't careful. I could use my magic to give them a shield against the heat and shock, but it might interfere with their flight and would probably prevent their strikes from being so effective on the cloud.

I decided to go with something that would draw the lightning away from the weather team. Fortunately, this was the same magic that I had weaponized against the addicts at that last hideout, so I'd studied up on it recently. I found a relatively clear area close to the cloud, pruning away any tree branches that might interfere. Then I began working a charge into the soil, being careful to keep myself well away from it.

Static lifted my mane into a frizzy mess, and I tasted ozone on my tongue as I let my magic work. It didn't take long to see results. Lightning flashed down from the cloud, striking the place that I had set up the opposing charge in. The strike jolted me, magic feeding back into my horn form the connection I had made. It was in that jolt that I felt something familiar: black magic.

I narrowed my eyes and snarled a curse under my breath. I didn't know who, but somepony had created this cloud, and infused it with dark powers. It wasn't impossible that this was the work of a rogue unicorn, but I knew even then that it was black crystal powering this monstrosity. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise.

Fury rose in me as the realization took hold, Ponyville should have been beyond the reach of the drug, but this showed me it was not. Twilight's life and Ponyville in general were hardly peaceful and idyllic, but this? None of them were ready for this. They couldn't fight it, not like I could. It would overwhelm them from the inside, and if whoever had created this cloud was in Ponyville, it already was. Whatever else Ponyville was to me, it was the place I was ‘born’. It was where I had the first memories I could call my own. It was home.

They were threatening my home.

I poured magic into the ground, overcoming the equalization of charge that the lightning had accomplished. Soon there were strikes falling every few seconds, draining the unnatural cloud of its power. It wasn't enough. I needed to confront it directly, to lay my hooves into it and rend it. If only clouds could bleed, I would paint the forest with it.

“Twilight!”

Dash’s cry knocked me free of my enraged reverie. I was stunned for a moment, completely overwhelmed by the power of the anger that had filled me. It was clear that the cloud was not just created by dark magic, but actively being powered by it. The lightning had interacted with my own magic to create a conduit from me to that power source, and it had reached out to influence me. Just like every damn time I encounter black crystal. Seriously, it’s like my brain’s got a Pinkie-esque ‘welcome dark magic’ banner on it. Not a problem anymore, of course, but that took a lot of effort and a… Sorry, not relevant.

“Twilight, stop it!” Dash shouted from somewhere just above me.

I glanced up and saw the wide-eyed panic on her face, then back to the cloud to find that my efforts had not gone unnoticed by the black magic animating it. The entirety of the cloud’s lightning output was flashing down into the ground where I had directed it, but while that threat was neutralized it had come up with an entirely new one. The cloud had gone from one solid mass of roiling vapors to a tentacled monstrosity, near-solid whips of cloud-stuff stretching out and lashing at the ponies desperately trying to evade it. As I watched one of those tendrils hit a tree, shearing through branches and leaving spot fires behind. I cut off the magic to my lightning-trap, but the damage was already done.

“Get away from it!” I screamed, teleporting myself and Dash half a mile away. She came out of the teleport looking dazed, but quickly shook it off and dropped down to me. The weather ponies wisely heeded my warning, scattering in all directions as the unnatural cloud attacked anything that came close to it.

“That,” Dash said. “Is one angry cumulonimbus.”

“We have to stop it,” I said, trying to think of all the ways I would create a beast like this, and how it could be defeated.

“Well, it’s not heading towards Ponyville anymore,” Dash pointed out. “So that’s good.”

“When you broke it up before, did it act strangely?”

“You mean stranger than sprouting tentacles and going all sky-kraken on us?”

I paused at that. “Sky-kraken?”

“Daring Do and the Oyster of Omens,” was Dash’s reply.

I nodded in understanding. “Right. Yes. I mean, no. Not stranger than… sky-kraken. I mean, did you have to push them back into one big lump, or did the little clouds come back together on their own?”

Dash thought about it for a moment. “I guess after we gave up on separating them, they kinda drifted back together. It was easier to get them bunched up than to pull them apart, that’s for sure.”

“Good,” I said, closing my eyes to better visualize the engineering that would go into it. “That means there’s a core.”

“A what?”

“A central place where all the magic is emanating from,” I said. “The heart of the sky-kraken. If I can reach that, I can shut it all down before it does more damage.” I looked at the cloud again, watching how its tendrils stretched. “It isn’t in the center of mass, and judging from the differing lengths that those limbs stretch, I’d say it’s… there.” I flared my horn, sending a beam of simple light-making magic into the storm. The dark cloud lit up except for a single spot where the magic was absorbed.

“Whoa. Cool,” Dash said. “So, how do we get it?”

“I need to get close,” I said. “Very close.”

“You can’t just, you know, magic it out?”

I shook my head. “It would resist. I’d get it eventually, but who knows what dangerous stuff it would do first?”

Dash took another look at the cloud, and a cocky smile lit up her features. Her wings flared out as she straightened, flexing her legs to limber them up. “Oh yeah,” she said. “We got this.”

I stared at her, thoughts of how to fight the cloud completely gone. All I could focus on was her. Standing there, pride and confidence coming off her like heat from a furnace. There was no doubt in her, no compromise, no hesitation. I wanted to bask in that. I wanted to wrap myself around her and let the fury of the storm be an appropriate backdrop.

Infatuation. I’d felt the edges of it before, on the day I left for Canterlot, but I was too wrapped up in myself then to fully realize it. Or, more accurately, too wrapped up in what wasn’t myself. I had separated myself from Twilight more completely now, I had learned that my desires were not echoes of hers. Twilight had liked Rainbow Dash as a friend, but saw her arrogance as both endearing and annoying. I found it sexy.

“Have you eaten lunch yet, Twilight?” Dash asked me. I answered with something unintelligible. “Uh, okay. Hope you can keep it down!” Then she pounced on top of me, wrapping her legs around my barrel and lifted us both into the sky.

I might have screamed at the sudden takeoff. Maybe. My memories are not the most accurate during those first few seconds. Contradictory impulses warred for supremacy. From the anger at being touched without permission to a raw spike of desire at who was doing the touching, and from panic at the sudden acceleration and altitude to the stark bliss of flight. In the end, my will won out over all and I focused on the sky-kraken.

“The tendrils are kept together with heavy electrostatic charges!” I shouted over the wind. “Any interaction will be catastrophic!”

“What?”

“Don’t let the tentacles hit us!”

“Gotcha!”

Rainbow Dash took us high, then dove towards the storm. The acceleration alone was enough to make me feel like I was going to be sick, but I managed to keep it together. The cloud reacted to our approach, sending whirling tentacles of dark cloud-stuff whipping at us in chaotic patterns. Dash responded by becoming extremely erratic in her flight. She dodged and weaved through the tendrils like she was navigating an obstacle course, moving so fast that we left a twisting pathway of light wherever we went. There were some close calls, but Rainbow Dash is the fastest pegasus in all of Equestria, and even with a passenger she was more than a match for any cloud, powered by black magic or not.

The speed, the danger, the g-forces that threatened to black me out every time Dash took a hairpin turn to avoid colliding with a deadly tentacle, all of it combined into a vicious joy within me. A visceral sense of being alive. A joy that I could see mirrored in Dash’s eyes.

With one final, pulse-pounding turn we were close to the center of the storm. The tendrils twisted above and around us, trying to close in. I spotted the place where the core was, its position clear as I scattered more magic into the cloud.

“How are you going to get it out?” Dash asked.

“You’ll have to toss me at it!” I yelled back, calculating how deep in the cloud the core was.

“Wouldn’t that be, uh, bad?”

“I can handle it!”

“Are you sure?”

I twisted in her grip turning to look her in the eye. “Dash. Trust me.”

She stared at me for a moment. I don’t know what she was thinking then, what she saw, but as the moment ended her cocky grin was back. “You got it! Just say when!” Then she accelerated at the storm.

I had only a moment to finish my calculations before I had to yell out: “Now!”

“Bomb’s away!” Dash cried, laughing as she released me and shot backwards between the encroaching tendrils.

I knew immediately that I was aimed wrong, so I called forth my magic and used my telekinesis to bump me onto a proper course. Then I surrounded myself with a bubble of power, blocking out the dangerous heat and charge of the cloud as I hit it. There was a moment of almost peaceful quiet as I entered the storm. It was dark, save for the glow of my horn, and without any external references I felt very still. The power raged around me, held at bay by my magic, and something in that felt right.

I hit the core a second after entering the cloud. Physically hit it, I mean. It was a chunk of black crystal about the size of my head, full of spiky protrusions and sharp edges. I slammed into it, parts of it piercing my skin, and grabbed hold. I carried it all the way out the other side of the storm, where I started the much-less-fun process of falling.

The cloud was still drawing its energy from the core, so I used my far too close contact with it to drain its power. That entailed magically reaching into the core and subduing whatever spells had been laid into it. That part was, surprisingly, very easy. The hard part was when the feedback threw a bunch of dark energy into me through the connection.

My horn bubbled with black power, my eyes trailed shadows that I could actually see as I fell. Rage and fear hit me in equal measure, making me want to lash out at anything and everything. I had been planning to do a quick teleport to bleed momentum before I hit the ground, but the turmoil of emotions the dark magic created destroyed my concentration. I fell, and probably would have been very badly hurt if it were not for Rainbow Dash.

She swooped in, catching me bare feet from the ground, swinging us up into the air before spiraling down for a gentle landing. She let go and smirked. “Told you we got this,” she said.

I leapt on her, crushing my mouth to hers in a passionate kiss that took her, and me, completely by surprise. It only lasted a moment before I was able to reassert my will and pull away from her. “Sorry!” I said. “Getting some magic feedback. Makes me do weird things.”

“Uh,” Dash’s slack expression said it all. “Huh?”

I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment and I looked away, choosing instead to focus on the sky-kraken. I had successfully ended the spells animating it, and the result was immediate and spectacular. Electricity bled from the cloud in a torrent of lightning, most of it going to where I had set up my magical lighting-trap. The rest struck trees or discharged harmlessly into the air. It was all over in a moment, thunder shaking the trees from the force of the discharge. Then, the power holding it together gone, it began to rain.

“I, uh,” Dash said, then shook her head hard to clear it. “Twilight! You’re bleeding!”

I looked down, seeing the cuts the core had made. “Yes, I am,” I mused. I absently sent a cleansing spell into the wounds, distantly worried about getting some of the black crystal into my system. Then I turned to the core. It lay there, quiescent, but still filled with dark power. This hadn’t been the work of some addict, this had been a deliberate act of engineering. Somepony with power and the knowledge of how to manipulate black crystal had done this, set a monster storm heading for Ponyville.

“Twilight, we’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

“It’s not that bad,” I replied. I looked up to see Dash’s worried eyes locked on me. “It’s not.”

“You’re hurt, Twilight,” Dash said, a steel resolve in her voice. “You’re going to the hospital, and that’s final.”

“I…” I trailed off as I realized the angry retort that I was about to say. I could argue that I was a grown mare and would make my own decisions, but she was just looking out for me. She cared, at least about who she thought I was. “You’re right,” I admitted, hanging my head. “Look, I’ll teleport over to the hospital and get looked at. You should make sure the other weather ponies are okay.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “You’re not going to pass out mid-teleport or something?”

“I won’t,” I assured. “I will make it to the hospital. Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye.”

She relaxed at my invoking of the inviolable promise. “Well, okay. I’ll see you there.” She turned to go, wings spread and legs bent for takeoff, but paused and looked back at me. I wish I had a camera to capture that image, sometimes it seems that memories are not enough. “Hey, Twilight?” she said.

“Yes?”

That smile again. That beautiful, confident smile. She was the master of her domain and she would not even allow the thought of failure to slow her. “You were awesome back there.” Then she launched herself up and vanished into the sky, trailing a shining rainbow all the way.

I let her go, feeling my heart pounding from more than just the fading adrenaline high, and took a deep, cleansing breath. That breath pulled at my wounds, reminding me that I was actually injured. I shrugged off the pain, it wasn’t worse than what I’d already felt in the past couple weeks. I picked up the core, quiet now, but full of such devastating potential. I considered it for a moment, and made a decision. I had promised to make it to the hospital, and therefore I’d have to go there, but I hadn’t promised that I would go there first. So I brought to mind the place I had decided to put my teleportation circle and, in a burst of light, I left.

Comments

[Gideon020]

Is this what they call puppy love?

[Confusion_]

3768765 What the is going on below your comment?

[Seattle_Lite]

3791652
Just business mate. No worries.

[Confusion_]

3792369 God damn time travellers... Posting in the wrong order and creating paradoxes....

[Rhulain]

3792561

Like I told you next week, Time Travel is confusing, okay!

[-Brutus]

And she still keeps the fact that she has spiraled down from her friends.