The Pony Dreadfuls Rise Again

by No one is home

First Case: Shadow of the rainbow

I walked openly into this dreadful little swamp of secrets, because I had seen too much of what crawls between the shadows of Canterlot. I had already crossed too many lines before I followed the baited line to my own place in the mire. What I couldn’t yet know was how little I understood how very terrible things could become.

There is a seed of truth behind every ghost story, and from every seed of truth there grow a thousand vines of possibility. What could have been… What should never be... I know that now…

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RCPCD Spatial Anomaly File 6673

The Rainbow Factory

Every colt and filly has heard the chilling tale of the Rainbow Factory around a flickering campfire,or within the sheltered walls of a sleep-over blanket fort. The details are as gruesome as the imagination of the foalish mind spinning the tale. It is that old weather factory that seems to be abandoned on the edge of every town.

A scant few scholars have speculated on the origin of the myth. Most concur that The Rainbow Factory myth is not a reference to a specific place, but rather to the grim realities of the industrialization of weather production. Before the weather factories, the life of pegasi families was very different than in modern equestria. By definition the pegasi were a regimented, and disciplined tribe where in every able bodied pony was required to pull their weight from a very young age, alongside their parents and siblings. Like all ponies their lives had but one purpose, the survival of ponykind, and unlike the unicorns no alicorn princess had arisen to lift this burden from them. Only the pegasi working together could master the weather on any meaningful scale.

Industrial factories would change the lives of ponies forever. It was the birth of a new age in Equestria. But it was a difficult birth and it would leave a scar. Pegasi parents happily led their colts and into the factories to work alongside them, believing it was no different from teaching them to tend natural weather… just like an earth pony taking their foals with them to tend the crops on their farm. They did not realize how wrong they were.

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“I never understand why ponies call them rainbow factories,” Lightning Dust rolled her eyes and quipped.

“It seems rather obvious,” Detective Skrye replied dryly, “Rainbows literally pour out of them.”

“Yeah,” the stunt mare countered, “But that’s just a byproduct. Nopony calls a steel mill a ‘smoke mill’.”

“It’s true,” the shackled changeling-thing laughed through it’s muzzle, “Everyone knows a steel mill is a ‘slag factory’…”

“What the buck is slag?” the mare glared suspiciously.

The factory loomed before them, like the ruins of an ancient castle. A titanic tombstone of a time that begged and pleaded to be forgotten. It’s shadows seemed unnaturally long and cold, seeming to suck the very color from the world itself where they fell.

“So… why is it on the ground?” The thing that looked like a changeling asked absently. “Aren’t these things supposed to be wing pony things? Like, in the clouds, and all?”

“Modern weather factories, yes,” Detective Skrye answered.

“It takes a lot to build a factory in the clouds,” Dust interjected, “It takes Pegasi and Unicorns working together to make a weather factory work at all. Early on, it was easier just to build more local factories on the ground than a few mobile cloud factories. It’s why so many pegasi still live down here… what? I read things!”

“Why is there a falcon trying to mate with your mane?” Skrye turned a baffled, disgusted, and mildly horrified look to the changeling thing.

“He’s just doing a funny dance, Pfft,” the thing casually dismissed, “Trust me it’s better to not think about it and feed on the ambient love magic…”

“Gah!” Dust raged, “Do you have to make things weird every single time they let us out?”

“Hey,” the thing snapped back, “they don’t keep you under thirteen different levels of magic locks. Exploiting narrative devices for comedic effect is literally my ONLY release. Thank blessed prozation Princess Twiggly can’t analyze the fourth wall or I couldn’t have any fun at all.”

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The details of the case were troubling. The old weather factory outside of Fillydelphia should have been demolished for scrap ages ago. Alternatively it should have been refurbished into a usable factory. At the very least it should have been the home to local homeless ponies, or the meeting place of some unsavory group. There are few things more unnatural than a truly abandoned building.

Most of the old, earth-bound weather factories had been demolished out-right. In their stead stood apartment complexes, shopping centers, or perhaps ironically, new factories. Even in those that still stood, the inner workings had been stripped for scrap, as industry hates little more than the waste of potential profit where there is profit to be made. The remaining shells were then most often converted into other things, such as the infamous Belfry nightclub in Lower Canterlot.

Most old weather factories stood like tombstones to a better-off-forgotten time. The Old Fillydelphia Weather Factory was more akin to a mummified corpes. Like all “Rainbow Factories” it had it’s own variations of the common foalish ghost stories surrounding such places. Unlike most, the kernel of truth behind its tale’s origins were very well documented...