Rainbow Dash Around the World

by MagicS

A Familiar Shoreline

Rainbow Dash took a big stretch and an even bigger yawn as she woke up the next morning. As she opened up her bleary eyes and blinked away the sleep, she took a look around and realized her internal clock had come through. It was probably still an hour before dawn and she’d be able to get in the air and make good progress before the sun was fully out. Rainbow Dash stood up on the cloud to better stretch her hooves and wings and work all the kinks out of her joints before she left. A few hours of straight, fast, flying and she’d be back over land. Then she’d have the entire day to make it even further back to Equestria and then… two? Three days at the most? And she’d be home.

Unless she got sidetracked during the brief stop she planned in Klugetown. But even then she’d still be close to finally ending this journey.

Rainbow Dash hopped up and down a few times and rotated her wings a moment to complete her stretching and exercising before she jumped off this cloud and got on her way.

“Okay!” She announced with a happy smile. “Everything’s good!”

With a nod and a spread of her wings, Rainbow Dash leaped off the side of the cloud. She let herself dive for a while
before leveling out and gliding northward. Once she felt herself start to naturally fall due to gravity, she started flapping her wings in earnest and sped forward.

“Here I come!”

---

The sun rose up over the horizon, at first a few beams of light were the only thing she saw, lancing across the sky and ocean. Before eventually it rose higher and higher until the morning sky was lit up completely. Warm rays of sunlight now poured down on her and Rainbow Dash hummed along in pleasant flight. The weather literally couldn’t be better for flying long distance right now, there wasn’t even a breeze.

Since dawn had now come she was estimating another hour at most before she hit the shore. She had kept up a fast pace since she had woken up and hadn’t slowed down for anything. No cloud gazing, no going down lower to the water just for fun, no searching around for small islands that might have some food on them. She was going straight to the southern coast.

“Goodbye ocean, hello… land,” Rainbow Dash frowned. “That’s not really that exciting when I say it like that is it?”

She shrugged and flew on.

Truthfully the first land she would see, that rocky coast, would have a lot of bad memories to go along with it. That was where things almost fell apart with Twilight—something she never wanted to relive. But unfortunately it was directly ahead and it would be way more of a pain to go around it all. She’d deal with it. Not like she planned to land there and dwell on bad memories or any dumb thing like that. She’d just be flying over it and go on her way. In fact, aside from the couple of times she’d been to Mt. Aris, she didn’t really have happy memories of the southern reaches of the continent at all. Everything was just sort of a mess down here.

The one good thing she could say now was that thanks to Fizzlepop the Stormlands would be getting better.

And that perhaps Berten’s home island might be a nice place to visit in the future too.

It wasn’t as much of a mess as… pretty much the entire other side of the world had been, but there was room for improvement. She did, after a considerable amount of relaxing and catching up, plan on making a few return trips and seeing how things were going elsewhere. It might be smart to first start here. Twilight herself would probably really want to visit Fizzlepop though.

The thought brought a smile to her face. Here she was about to finish her journey and she was already thinking about going back out there again. She couldn’t help it, she had made too many friends, seen too many cool places, knew that some of those places needed checking up on. Had left… some things unresolved or not in as good of a spot as she needed to.

Rainbow knew it would be easier next time. And maybe she could bring some friends with her, show them everything she had seen. It’d be fun. A lot of fun.

The world was a better place now thanks to her.

And that wasn’t just egotistical boasting. Even though she could visualize most of her friends rolling their eyes if she announced it like that to them.

Feeling energy welling up in her thanks to the positive thoughts that had eclipsed the bad memories of the stony shore, Rainbow Dash sped on at an even faster pace.

Sunlight, fluffy white clouds, and the shimmering ocean below were her companions. She knew it wouldn’t be long at all until she saw land. It was still pretty early in the morning too, just like she had predicted. She bet she could even reach Klugetown itself before the sun went back down today if she kept going this fast and didn’t get stopped. She was humming a song to herself to keep her mood up and her energy from ever depleting—going fast, fast, fast to north.

Ten more minutes.

Twenty more minutes.

Thirty more minutes.

Forty-five more minutes.

Rainbow Dash squinted her eyes, lifted up a hoof to block out the sun, and looked far ahead.

She could see the line of the stony shore emerging from the water. She could see the rocks piling up and up, right out of the water. She could see the land beyond.

And in ten more minutes she was there, flying above it. Flying somewhere familiar, somewhere she had been before, for the first time since leaving the Crystal Empire behind. A sense of calm came over her and Rainbow Dash let out a big sigh of relief. Just something about being here again was incredible. It was like she had passed through some sort of invisible veil—in a lot of ways it felt like she was already done. She was already back. There had been no finish line, no great ceremony, nothing to break through, or stop, she had just finally returned to her world.

She was flying through a sky she recognized. Over land she recognized. A place that was close enough to where she lived that she could easily travel to and from here without issue. The ponies and creatures that lived nearby would know her name, would know Equestria and the Princesses, wouldn’t be under the control of a tyrant, or victim to slaving pirates, or have some kind of magical plague attacking them.

It was just… home. Pretty much home at least.

Happy, happy, home. Where her friends were waiting for her.

Rainbow Dash looked down as she passed over the stony shore completely, now the waters of the ocean fully behind her and only visible if she looked back. Which she wasn’t planning on doing anytime soon. There were grasslands, rainforests, small mountains directly ahead now. And after that would be the scorching hot desert that Klugetown sat in.

Rainbow Dash closed her eyes for a moment, picturing the faces of Twilight, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and Rarity. She opened them back up with a grin. “See you all soon.”

Comments

[RoboRed]

Home is finally just within reach after so long.

[redmar]

She has reached the last part of her journey.