Surviving Sand Island

by The 24th Pegasus

Sand Island Weather Control

The wind tugged on Rainbow Dash’s feathers, trying to tear them from her wings and scatter them every which way. The rain came down sharper and much heavier than before, like the clouds were doing their best to beat her out of the sky. But she persisted, climbing higher and higher with each beat of her blue wings, leading a charge against the very heavens themselves.

Her heart fell into a steady rhythm with the beating of her wings, constant and strong. Her feathers grabbed at the air like hands on a ladder, pulling herself higher and higher in defiance of gravity. Out here, there was nothing but the sky and the rain and the wind, the very essence of the pegasus soul. The charge in the air tingled along Rainbow’s soggy coat, and little sparks of electricity would discharge from her wingtips into nearby cloudstuff to disperse the buildup before she became a target for a lightning bolt. And though there hadn’t been any thunder and lightning over the island so far, Rainbow could feel the storm growing around her. It wouldn’t be long before the island would be drowning under a repeat of last night.

Behind her, her three fellow pegasi also braved the growing storm to climb up with her. Stargazer stayed right by her side the entire flight up, while Champagne and Soft Step lagged behind. Rainbow could easily tell that Stargazer was a strong flier like her, while Champagne was somewhere in the middle and Soft Step obviously lagged behind due to the injury to her wing. But the masseuse persisted, even though Rainbow could tell by the grimace on her face that she was flying in pain, and she couldn’t tell if Champagne was flying behind to keep an eye on Soft Step or was actually topping out on the climb.

“Almost there!” Rainbow shouted into the storm, letting the wind carry her voice back to her team. “Keep pushing! Once we hit cloud we can rest for five before we start clearing a hole!”

Though her team didn’t say anything in return, Rainbow knew they’d heard the message, so she kept pushing on. Down below, she could make out the vague shape of the ruins, but the swaying and lashing palm trees obscured the overgrown temple, making it difficult to spot. But the one thing she could see was the stairs and the trench carved into the earth that housed the door, and that was all she needed to make sure she got the moonlight on target.

The sky briefly became a pitch black malaise as Rainbow entered the clouds. Whatever patches of dry skin she might have held onto beneath her coat immediately became flushed out with water. The wind and rain tearing past her eyes caused her to squint and angle her head to the side. Even with her third eyelid sheltering her eyes from the worst of the weather, the innards of storming clouds were always too rough and chaotic to see clearly. Her years on the weather team had taught her to rely on her feathers and magic more than her sight, however, and Rainbow continued pushing upwards until suddenly the sky brightened around her.

Dark wisps of raincloud flew off of the ends of her wings, spinning and spiraling into the air before dissolving or landing on nearby clouds. The wind was much more constant up here, but now Rainbow could see the moon and the stars. Up here, above the storm, the world seemed peaceful and quiet. If Rainbow didn’t know better, it wouldn’t have been too hard to make the assumption that she was the only pony to have ever existed in this world of rolling cloud and boundless night.

It was why she loved being a pegasus. No matter where she went, the sky would be her home.

The clouds hissed and shifted behind her, and soon the rest of her team likewise emerged above the gray layer. One by one, they settled on the clouds, or in Soft Step’s case, simply collapsed against the doughy surface. They lied there and caught their breath for several seconds, and eventually Rainbow decided to join them, the pain in her only recently healed wing beginning to bother her again. At least she wasn’t feeling as dizzy as she had when she’d first ended up at the pirate camp.

Almost as soon as she sat down on the clouds, however, she knew something was strange about them. They weren’t soft and soggy like she was used to dealing with back in Ponyville, but instead were firm, sturdy, even pliable. She could already tell from a few quick experiments that the clouds would be much more difficult to break and clear than what she was used to back home, but she couldn’t let that stop her. It simply must’ve been a property of natural, wild weather, not the clouds and rainstorms manufactured at the weather factories in Cloudsdale. These clouds weren’t specifically designed to be easily manipulated by pegasus magic, so of course they’d be a little bit more difficult to clear.

Rainbow smirked to herself. She liked a challenge.

“Alright, good job, everypony, we’re above the storm,” she said while simultaneously checking her crew for any obvious injuries or handicaps sustained during the flight up. “Take a minute to catch your breath, and then we’ve got a job to do. I want to fly ten miles southwest and start clearing a zone there. With the current windspeed, that should take us back over the tomb in twenty minutes, so we’ll have twenty minutes to clear what we can. We need to get enough of a hole through the clouds so that the moonlight can stay on the temple for as long as possible. Not only that, but after we get a hole in the clouds and let it drift over the tomb, we’ve gotta keep it clear and push back or divert the incoming storm. I doubt this temple’s gonna stay open if the moonlight goes away, and we don’t want to trap our friends inside, okay?”

The other pegasi nodded, and Rainbow quickly oriented herself with her inborn natural sense of direction. “These clouds are gonna be tougher than clouds made by the weather factory, so they’ll take a beating before they break. Stay at it, though, and we’ll get a good hole cleared in no time.” Spreading her wings once more, she hopped off of a cloudy bluff and caught the air with her feathers before her hooves hit the next cloud. “Time to fly!”

Comments

[RoboRed]

[UniqueSKD]

Just a steel town girl on a Saturday night
Looking for the fight of her life
In the real time world no one sees her at all
They all say she's crazy

Locking rhythm to the beat of her heart
Changing movement into light
She had danced into the danger zone
When the dancer becomes the dance

It can cut you like a knife
If the gift becomes the fire
On the wire between will and what will be

She's a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she's dancing like she's never danced before

She's a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she's dancing like she's never danced before

On the ice blue line of insanity
Is a place most never see
It's a hard won place of mystery
Touch it but can't hold it
You work all your life, for that moment in time
It could come or pass you by
It's a push shove world
But there's always a chance
If the hunger stays the night

There's a cold connective heat
Struggling stretching for the peak
Never stopping with her head against the wind

She's a maniac, maniac I sure know
And she's dancing like she's never danced before

She's a maniac, maniac I sure know
And she's dancing like she's never danced before

It can cut you like a knife
If the fight becomes the fire
On the wire between will and what will be

She's a maniac, maniac I sure know
And she's dancing like she's never danced before

She's a maniac, maniac I sure know
And she's dancing like she's never danced before

Maniac, maniac I sure know

Not a bad story to be honest.

[Merula]

Hit the tires, light the fires!

[BroBpony]

This chapter was ok.

I'm not against small chapters buuuuuut.....this is a bit too short in my opinion to be its own chapter.

[zaponator]

And then everything went fine and they got the statue and went back to their island. The end.

[PonyDragon]

8717260
Maybe, but he is writing one chapter each day.
IMO that makes more than up for it.

8717332
I'll just leave this quote here:
"Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong."