Prologue- The Winter Lab Went Boom
Prologue
“Thank goodness we managed to get all of those snowflakes done in time. And a day early at that,” Merry May counted the row of barrels in front of her, only twelve more to load on and they would finally be finished. “Granted, we had to use some leftover templates from last winter but, I don’t think anypony will notice,” She went back over the list with a critical eye. ”Hmmm...”
“Check, check, aaaand check! Okay, all of our trial runs show that we’ll be good to go in a few hours time.” Merry May laid down the clipboard with a sigh and pulled the hard hat off of her head, pressing down stray pieces of mane. “But until then, I think we’ve all worked hard enough to get this place back up to speed! So how about a break?”
Only minutes before, the atmosphere had been a flurry of activity up and down the winter room floor. A delicate balance was maintained with several ponies checking and rechecking pressure modules and water thermometers, making sure the clouds were just right to produce the softest snow possible, with the correct amount of precipitation and snowflakes.
Now that all of the preparations were complete ponies began to shuffle out in clusters, happy with the progress, their good natured chatter following close behind in the echoing chambers.
“We’ve still got a few barrels of soft stuff to pull out of storage.” A brown coated stallion rounded the corner pushing a sack barrow in front of him, loaded down with a barrel full of snowflakes still needing to be loaded into the machine.
“Just leave it, Dumbbell, we’ve got enough time to finish loading the snow machine after I get something to eat,” Rainbowshine grit her teeth as she stood up to rub her lower back. “I mean, seriously, after all that heavy lifting I think I’m going to break in half.”
“Heavy lifting?” Dumbbell scoffed. “That’s a weird way to say sleeping behind the storage crates.”
“Shaddap, Dummy, I’m not in the mood to argue. It’s hard to sleep with so many ponies yakking and stomping around. Food now, work later.”
“No wonder I didn’t see you at your station, Shine,” Merry May crossed her forelegs. “I need everypony to be at top performance for seasonal changes, and I cannot have ponies sleeping on the job!”
“It isn’t my fault!” Rainbowshine complained, and cringed backwards when the other two ponies did not seem convinced. “I just couldn’t get enough sleep last night, you’ve got to understand that.”
A light opal colored pony named April Showers trotted by, overhearing the conversation. “I thought you were taking something for that,” she said.
“It’s none of your business, April!” Rainbowshine shouted as she went by. “As if I need to put up with everyone’s gossip.”
Dumbbell rolled his eyes. “Whatever, you lazy sack of feathers, lets just get to the lunch hall already. I bet it’s already packed in there.”
“Well, if we fly fast enough, we can make it to the Lofty Waffle instead,” said Merry, her small ears waggled with the sudden inspiration. “Mmmm, waffles for lunch, yes, I’m suddenly in the mood!”
The stallion smiled. “Not a bad idea.”
“What about your friend,” asked Rainbowshine as they went along. “Should we grab him?”
“You mean Hoops? Nah he’s good, packed his own-uh,” Dumbbell scuffed the floor nervously. “Well he packed something.”
Moments later the room was empty of ponies, all was quiet, and all seemed well.
In the lunch hall, the food was still fresh in their steam trays when it happened.
“Aw yeah, my peanut butter,seaweed, carrot, and camembert cheese sandwich! You’ve been callin’ for me all day haven’t you, sweetheart?” said a tall, orange stallion named Hoops as he slipped his prize out of the paper bag. “Well, worry no more, my love, we are together at last.”
Then came the explosion.
“What in Equestria was that?” a pony shouted. They all turned to look outside the large lunch hall doors. It was like a dull but intense pop; as if somepony had hidden a heavy-duty fire rocket in a nearby cloud and then lit the fuse, multiplied by ten.
Hoops shifted involuntarily, and nearly dropped his sandwich when his seat seemed to come alive, almost throwing him off. The whole floor started to vibrate. Several ponies shouted and jumped up, hovering on instinct.
“Was that an earthquake?”
“Don’t be a complete idiot, Ruby!”
“Then what was that? Where did it come from?”
“It sounded like it came from deeper inside the building.”
“Uh-oh...”
Everyone looked down. Hoops followed suit.
“Huh? What the—?”
“Why is there water all over the floor?”
“It’s flooding!” Even as this realization passed Hoop’s lips, the walls around him began to shake.
Just outside the main area, Dumbbell was only a foot off the ground when the shock wave reached him; it was enough to send a foreboding shiver down his spine. “Did you guys just feel that?” he asked.
“I felt it and I heard it,” Merry May said. She had been a few feet ahead of him, but was the first to land back on the cloud. “I can’t believe it! It’s like an earthquake!”
“But where did it come from?” asked Rainbowshine as she looked around for any possible source before turning back slowly and glancing very hesitantly up at the high fog towers. “Like, it can’t be the factory.”
At that moment there was another rumble and something absolutely impossible happened: lightning shot out of the fog stack, violently lashing into the sky. Another jolt came, even louder than the first, it was enough to actually knock Merry May off her hooves.
“It is the factory!”
Everypony on duty dropped what they were doing to run to the source of the noise and chaos, finding themselves right in front of the big double doors of the winter lab. They flew open with enough force to send everypony tumbling backwards.
“Wait, High Note, don’t get so close!” one of the other ponies shouted, but too late. The weather stallion was knocked back by a powerful blast of wind.
“It’s a meltdown!” a yellow pony named Parasol screamed. They all had to, just to hear each other over the rushing wind.
“We’ve gotta get out of here!” said another pony, and some of them turned to run.
“No, not yet,” Merry May and Dumbbell rounded the corner but were immediately stifled by the wind and knee-high water bursting out the door like a geyser. She strained against the wind and saw the emergency pressure valve, it was their only hope. “We can still fix this! Rainbowshine, come with me!”
Rainbowshine looked at the green pony in shock. “What, are you serious? There’s water everywhere in there, it’s a death trap!”
“Just fly over it!” Dumbbell shouted. He was already ahead of her, flying to the control panel. Sparks of electricity licked at its sides, making it glow a ghostly yellow.
Rainbowshine blanched, partly out of annoyance, but mostly from fear. “Auuugh, okay, okay! Wait for me, May!”
“It can’t wait, hurry up!”
Dumbbell somehow managed to reach the main control panel, but when he reached for the console to enter a shutdown sequence, he was stopped by a jolt of electricity jumping up and crackling angrily.
“Yikes! The whole thing is overloaded, I can’t shut it off!” There was a loud pop, and Dumbbell nearly fell into the electrified water when a metal bolt flew right out of the tank, striking his helmet just behind his ear. The pressure meter dropped into the danger zone as boiling grey clouds filled the room, laced with lightning as the tank whined in its effort to hold back the inevitable.
“Nothing's gonna work, May! It’s gonna blow!” Dumbbell dodged another flying piece of debris and flew for safety.
The pressure tank screamed as it expanded, more bolts were flung out. One hit a tube, shattering the glass to bits, letting the wind push the shards out into the thin group of ponies. In desperation, Merry May grabbed Rainbowshine and pulled her away from the valve wheel.
“It’s critical mass,” she yelled. “Abandon ship, ponies!”
“Hey, Bell, can you hear me! Wake up, buddy!”
Dumbbell lifted his head from the pillow and glanced around him. He blinked and squinted his eyes against the too bright light of whatever room he was in, the shapes therein were too vague for him to fully understand. That and the drumbeat of discomfort in his skull made trying to focus a painful chore, accentuated by the light, the white walls only intensifying the brightness. But the voice he heard, floating somewhere above him, was familiar, and soon the big orange blob in front of his face solidified into Hoops.
“What...in Equestria happened?” Dumbbell asked, his words slurred together as he spoke.
“That’s what we’re all trying to figure out right now. But it was a close call when everything exploded, you’re lucky we even managed to drag you out from under that pipe.”
A pipe had fallen on him? Dumbbell groaned as he shifted on the bed, but winced when he tried to move his legs, which felt hot and stiff. “ Well I’m not dead, I guess. That’s a good sign,” he blinked and looked around. “So I’m, what, at the hospital or something?”
“Nah, you’re not that bad off, believe it or not. Just a big bump on your head.”
That made sense, he could feel, he could feel the cloth wrapped tightly around his ears. Then Hoops laughed a little, then faltered. “And you...well you managed to fall on some glass.”
“Managed!” Dumbbell shouted, becoming more awake in his outrage. Memories of recent events had finally returned. “What do you mean managed? Like it was somehow my fault?”
“Woah, woah, calm down, bro! That’s not what I meant! I’m just glad you’re okay.”
Dumbbell fell back onto his pillow and flinched again. “Dammit.” Even sudden movements caught him off guard with slices of pain.
“You’ve got stitches in your leg so try not to move so much.” Hoops cautioned.
Dumbbell rolled his eyes. “Gee, thanks for telling me now, feather-brain.” His scowl only pulled a goofy albeit apologetic smile onto his friend’s face.
“Whatever,” he signed and looked around, he had never been inside of the weather management’s infirmary ward before. It was pretty small, just four beds with no curtains and a desk supplied with a few shelves of medical equipment sat across from them. He wasn’t surprised to see that one of the other beds was occupied. High Note was two beds over, his head wrapped in bandages. Dumbbell had remembered seeing the poor guy flying face first into a wall just as things started going south, and he looked pretty limp. But there was a deep rumbling snore, so his condition couldn’t be all bad.
“You have got to be kidding me...”
Despite their failure to save the winter lab, Merry May and Rainbowshine succeeded in keeping the resulting explosion from taking half of the weather factory with it. Though most of the east wing suffered heavy damages, the other sections remained untouched and functioning. After nearly all of the snow, sleet, and a few thousand coins worth of equipment were somehow forced through the tube like excrement out of a virally inflamed colon, it took hours to even begin the process of digging through the rubble.
“It’s a mess everywhere you go, isn’t it?”
“A mess...is...an understatement.” Rainbowshine said, breathing heavily.
She and a few other ponies picked their way over the debris. Picking up the smaller pieces of lab equipment as they went along. But the larger pieces, like the conveyer belt, was a challenge. It was the second heaviest thing in the room next to the pressure tank which lay a shattered steaming husk with big pieces of it’s shrapnel lodged into the walls.
Merry May swept all of the broken microscopes into a pile. “It must have been a meltdown.”
“But we went over everything, the calculations, all of those numbers, three times!”
“Well, accidents happen don’t they?” said High Note who was wearing a long wrap of gauze around his head.
“Accidents this big shouldn’t be allowed.” April groaned.
It wasn’t long before a professional clean up crew arrived to take care of the larger pieces of broken hardware, which left the disheveled crew of weather ponies with nothing else to do but go home for the day.
Some pony pummeling the other side of his bedroom door woke Dumbbell from his uncomfortable and admittedly not very deep sleep.
“Dumbbell open the door!” followed by more furious knocking, no, hammering at the door. The stallion groaned and rubbed his shoulder gingerly, it was going to be a while before the stitches could come out.
Bam bam bam! “Come on, Dumbbell open up! This is seriously important!”
“Ugh,” Dumbbell groaned loudly as he eased himself from his bed. “What in the name of Celestia do you want?” he glanced at his bedside clock and realized it was already eight in the morning, usually he woke up earlier than that, but the pain medication must have zonked him fiercely.
“I want you to open the door, I gotta tell you something!”
Dumbbell rubbed his forehead, he was certain that if he was going to open that door, he was going to kick it open and send it and Hoops flying to the other side of the apartment.
“I swear this had better be worth it.” Dumbbell grumbled as he opened the door. He was greeted to Hoops standing like an orange specter in his doorway, a smile wide across his face.
“You are not gonna believe this!” he shouted, right in Dumbbell’s ear.
“Hoops, you’d better tell me what it is before I kill you.” Dumbbell shouted back, regretting it immediately as it served to feed a growing headache.
“Dude, you will not believe this. The big explosion at the weather factory? That wasn’t an accident! Somepony did that on purpose! She wrecked the system!”
That was a weird conversation starter. “Wha, huh, who?” Too many different lines of information running through his pulsating skull to form a coherent question.
Suddenly Hoops slumped a bit. “On the other hoof she could totally be dead but we don’t think so because that weather room would have been a lot messier if you know what I mean.”
“Hoops what the hell are you talking about.” He eyed his friend wearily, wanting nothing more than to fall back into his bed. Not that he had much chance of going back to sleep at this rate.
“Are you seriously tryin to tell me some pony sabotaged the weather factory.”
“I won’t go into any details.” said Hoops. ‘Probably because he doesn’t know any’ thought Dumbbell.
“But I will tell you,” Hoops tried to stifle a laugh. “A real good guess on who the culprit is.”
Dumbbell rolled his eyes. “Alright, who?”
“Brace yourself.”
“Hoops! Who?!”
“Dude!” Hoops exclaimed victoriously. “It was totally Rainbow Crash!”
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A sequel? I'm in.
7213175
Holy shit you're still alive???!?!!!?!!?
7213955
Yes, my child. I hath returned.
This is simply amazing, Pigeonsmall! Your writing is absolutely captivating. The characterization is perfect and drew me right in. Pacing? Perfect. And of course you included background ponies rather than dragging in a bunch of OC's.
I LOVED this! I hope you continue the story. ^.^
There were only a few grammar errors that needed addressed. I'd be happy to be your editor for that if you'd like.
Random added word there at the end. Fairly certain "prologue" shouldn't be there.
7220745
The best kind of reader!
So I just finished reading when two hearts are daring and the other sequel which hasn't finished yet. How do these work timeline wise? Is this a sequel to the unfinished sequel or does it work differently?
Who is this strange new author who's stories seem so familiar
But yeah, I agree this a more interesting take and its always good to build on something from the show.
In any case, glad to have you back!
More.
Still reading in 2016
7494935
Working on itttt