• Member Since 13th Dec, 2011
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Raugos


T

Princess Twilight has contracted a severe case of Rainbow Dash.

The following is an excerpt from the journal of Sickle Cell of the Night Guard, detailing his experience with the Princess within the confines of her laboratory, which involved complete temporal isolation from the rest of the world.


An entry for The Twilight Files contest organised by Bicyclette.

Now with a reading by Skijarama!

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 38 )

So... what happens if Rainbow Dash gets infected with Rainbow Dash? Is she immune? It's tempting to experiment further here...

In any case, fascinating concept. Edging on the horrifying with some of those behavioral shifts, but never leaving the realm of good fun. Thank you for this, and best of luck in the judging.

Welcome to my favorites and good luck for the contest. I really enjoyed this.

11324198

So... what happens if Rainbow Dash gets infected with Rainbow Dash? Is she immune? It's tempting to experiment further here...

Double Rainboom?

Theory: The Cutie Pox is actually from an alternate universe where the Cutie Mark Crusaders are a disease.

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s undeniable now: we’ve turned into Rainbow Dashes. Same eyes, same coat, same rainbow mane, same restless energy. Same ass. At least we get to keep our original hairstyles, voices, cutie marks, species and sex. Alicorn and thestral Rainbow Dashes. How cool is that?

See! Becoming me will make you 120% cooler than before. :rainbowkiss:

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Heh, funny you should say that. The original concept involved Twilight going to Rainbow Dash for help because she expected her to be immune.

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Glad you enjoyed it. :twilightsmile:

That's a cool sickness.

Fun and original, very enjoyable reading, and a disease I'd sign up for LOL

Brilliant, creative, and cute in all the best ways.

Whatever happens, I’m glad I bumped into you. It’s about time I made more friends amongst the palace staff. And sometimes, the process of getting to know somepony better just takes you in an unexpected direction.

Whatever direction their friendship takes, I find myself really rooting for these two. I hope there are more tales featuring them in the future.

No rush. :raritywink:

This is kind of existentially horrifying

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:rainbowderp: Oh GOD, THE IMPLICATIONS!

11324662
20 percent cooler than the normal flu

Enjoyed the story. Also, nice reference.

I am Sickle Cell, a servant of the Mistress of the Night.
I am sworn to valour.
My heart knows only virtue.
My blade defends the helpless.
My might upholds the weak.
My word speaks only truth.
My wrath undoes the wicked.
My duty is eternal, never ending, until my liege release me, or death take me.
I am a Guardian of the Night.

D48

Well, that was a fun little experiment. It touched on some stuff that could have been horrifying, but you were able to keep the focus on the positives and limit the impact so it stayed on the right side of the line. The only bit that pushed it was the redacted bit, but the buildup was strong enough to make it feel plausible, if rushed (unsurprising under the circumstances), and there were clearly no regrets, so it really just launched a new ship. All in all, this was a good little story and I hope you do well in the contest.

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While I would also like to see more of this duo, it seems unlikely. Raugos just doesn't write that much any more, and what he does write seems to be limited to shorts for contests which don't leave room for more than a cameo.

This is a weird but good story.

11324198
Hmmm, If Rainbow Dash got infected and ran a fever, would that count as hot Rainbow-on-Rainbow action? :rainbowderp:

11324826
In a way, yeah. But at least it's not permanent, and hey, if you gotta be somepony for a few days, you might as well be Rainbow Dash. :rainbowdetermined2:

11324870
I was waiting for someone to get that. :pinkiehappy:

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Raugos just doesn't write that much any more

Oof, straight for the throat, huh? :twilightoops:

But yeah, fair enough.

I'm happy that I'm still able to crank one out every now and then. Thanks for reading! :twilightsheepish:

11324967
When Rainbow Dash is inside Rainbow Dash. :rainbowderp:

11324793
I'd rather have a Twilight Sparkle or Fluttershy one if I had to choose.

on a side note, I tried coming up with some clever disease name using actual medical latin but couldn't find anything that really fit.

11324198
Rainbow Dash will turn into collapsar under the weight of her double ego.

And please unban me.

Twilight leaving footnotes in someone else's journal is the Twilight thing she could do, much like how Rainbow having sex with an alternate version of herself is the most Rainbow thing she could do.

Night 7
We [-----------------redacted-------------------]
It was awesome!
Yeah, that’s right. Eat your hearts out!

[-----------------redacted-------------------]

derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/1/15/1633112.png

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I was thinking in Lighting Dust. For her to become her greatest rival in body and mind would be a nightmare.

11324474
That makes way too much sense for comfort. :applecry::scootangel::unsuresweetie:

Got to show off my cooking skills. Not sure why Princess Twilight has all the ingredients for pancakes in her larder when there’s no proper stove, but a Barnsen burner works well enough.

I LOL'd. Very nice.

Hmm....


I wonder if the potential foal will be a Dash clone?

11324198 Obviously, 100% chance of AWESOME!

(and me being me, I had to consider the possibility of a Rainbow Dash/batpony/alicorn foal.)

Great story. There are 2 things that stood out to me, first was that oath you had Sickle Cell say. I liked it and I recognized it from a movie called "Dragonheart" it was the oath Draco made both the evil prince and our hero Knight say. I'm surprised you remembered it in full and altered it as an oath the Night Guard say when joining. The second was the "•••••Redacted•••••" line and what you were clearly implying, I hope Twilight wasn't in Estrus when that took place or she and Sickle are going to have a very unique and unplanned foal born in a year's time. Aw who am i kidding that would be funny and ripe for the picking if you want to write a sequel based on that little indiscretion they had at the peek of their infection with Rainbow Dashities. Where they have to adapt to having a foal and raising it

11324198
Rainbow Dash isn’t Rainbow Dash! She is the patient zero...

This was a fun read. Good stuff, good stuff ^^

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11324198
If Rainbow gets exposed, she turns into G3 Rainbow Dash.

What would have happened if they didn't quarantine?

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Well, the disease would probably spread throughout the population and cause quite a bit of chaos.

Bat ears don’t mix well with loud noise in confined spaces, and oh boy, did she come in with a bang. There was a blast radius of soot on the floor, and my poor ears were ringing for a good thirty seconds or so.

aww, a bat pony guard!??!

Princess Twilight’s teleports are usually squeaky clean and no louder than smacking a buckball, so that’s symptom number one.

i do recall her teleports in the later seasons being pretty loud, but it is fun that her teleport quality is a sign of her being sick

Her snot had the consistency of diluted glue and an oily, almost iridescent sheen that reflected all the colours of the rainbow.

oh no, rainbow-itis!

Turns out, Princess Twilight has a secret laboratory in a pocket dimension, for the times when she wants to take a break from Equestria. It’s got a couple of beds, a larder, and even a shower and toilet, and it’s all temporally isolated from the rest of reality, so that time spent in there isn’t lost elsewhere. Which is a good thing, otherwise she’s going to have to find somepony else to move the sun and moon whilst she’s gone.

aww, i really like this idea! it is very much like Twilight to have such a place (though for a second i thought she was taking the narrator to the Equestria Girls world)

I’m not normally this verbose, but you try being stuck in a pocket dimension all night watching Princess Twilight sleep and---- That sounded better in my head.

phrasing!

Did you know that Princess Twilight snores like a yak?

combining this with Starlight's habits, maybe this is just what being a powerful magic user does to you

Buck my big mouth.

Stuff it with an apple and roast me on a spit.

well that is quite the evocative curse for a prey species!

- The dosage of Ponecillin needed to kill it would also give a pony seizures (an Alicorn might get a severe migraine, but she’s not keen on finding out)

i both love and hate the "Ponecillin" pun

Well, this one’s colonies are shaped like freaking thunderbolts, with rainbow streaks in the bolt leading up to cloudy white the farther they are from the tip, and light blue all around the borders.

yeah that is just gilding the lily

There’s a surprising amount of fresh fruit in supply.

this feels like a line that is implying something more but i can't figure out what. Twilight keeping it especially stocked for bat ponies?

Most of it’s her own personal business, so I’ll just relay the relevant part: she suspects that she got infected from this one universe where the locals had a ritual of deliberately exposing a chosen candidate to the pathogen, though she didn’t get to find out why.

that sounds very fascinating and i really want to know more about that society!

We’re both running fevers now.

Literally.

For some reason, we’re feeling the urge to run despite feeling like warmed-up death.

hehe that is a good pun, and very fitting for the Rainbow Dash disease

Same ass.

:newspaper2:

At least we get to keep our original hairstyles, voices, cutie marks, species and sex. Alicorn and thestral Rainbow Dashes. How cool is that?

that is pretty cool! and useful for telling the characters apart

We’ve retained our mental traits too. Princess Twilight made sure to evaluate us thoroughly with egghead stuff a wide spectrum of reasoning, logic and problem-solving tests.

hmm does quite seem like the changes in mental traits are starting to seep in

You’d have to ask Sarge to confirm if my intelligence has taken a hit. He’d probably tell you that even Rainbow Dash would be an improvement.

ooh, burn on Rainbow Dash

What the hay. Nopony told me that Daring Do is this awesome!

oh no...

Ever notice how a word doesn’t sound real anymore if you say it too many times?

semantic satiation is fun!

Pretty awesome, huh? I love my job.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, whoever you are, I’d bet you’re awesome too. And don’t let anypony tell you otherwise!

aww it's nice that he enjoys his job! i would too with such a cool motto

Turns out we’re still sick, so our motor skills suck.

yeah this doesn't seem like the best use of their energy right now, but that is Rainbow Dash brain for you.

I think she was more bummed out that some of her books caught fire.

oh no!

On the plus side, I got to show off my talent at patching up dumb, injured ponies who really should know better.

hey it was your idea!

1Oh, Sickle Cell, you sweet summer foal.

hehehe

2Aww, that’s really sweet. To be honest, it’s nice to let down my hair around you, too. I’m aware that Celestia and Luna had their ways of showing they cared, but I’m still figuring out how I’m supposed to show that I’m more than just ‘The Princess’ to my little ponies.

aww, always love it when the Princesses call their subjects their little ponies

See kids? This is why they say, “Never meet your heroes.”

so true, such a breach of decorum!

She beat me at Scrabble. And chess. And Monopony.

i mean i'd object that "monopoly" is a technical term that doesn't need to be ponified but

4So are you. And you squeak!

aww

Here’s the kicker – Twilight and I are both technically Rainbow Dash at this point, so what we have here is an unprecedented opportunity to make all of those dreams/curses a reality…

well that is certainly an unusual path to Rainbow Dash selfcest, but it still counts

Her theory is that she caught this pathogen from a universe where Rainbow Dash is a germ. And the local ponies deliberately infect one of their own so that the chosen can wield the Element of Loyalty.

I think the lightning-fast incubation period’s still too long if a villain’s already in town wrecking your stuff, but maybe they have ponies on rotation so that there’s always a Rainbow Dash in the correct stage of the disease to wield Loyalty. Who knows?

ooh that is a really cool idea! how have i not thought of combining biopunk and My Little Pony before?

Still found some time to read Daring Do together. I’m not viscerally excited and giddy about it anymore, but it’s still enjoyable.

aww, now it is just a children's book series!

Food supply’s pretty much depleted, but we still had enough left over for one last decent meal in this place. Hay and alfalfa, with a side of bread and cheese.

mmm delicious

We’ll need more time to figure out what this means for us moving forward.5

aww yeah i imagine that is a lot to navigate

Don’t tell her, but everypony in the palace staff and Royal Guard already knows about her weekly twelve-bit instalment on a heart attack at Little Big Burger’s. It’s our job to know where our Princess is at all times, even when she thinks she’s being sneaky about it.

a growing alicorn needs her calories! as do fully-grown alicorns, if Princess Celestia's cake habit is anything to go by

She had a moment of hesitation before doing the deed, wondering aloud about the ethics of germicide when said germ is technically her friend from another universe.

yeah that is a doozy to think about. evolution is not teleological, so on a long enough timescale it is conceivable an evolutionary branch of a complex animal would return to something like a bacteria, and honestly that is kind of horrifying to think about too much?

She put me in a shield bubble whilst she subjected the entire lab to extreme heat, cold, hard vacuum and ultraviolet light. Seeing her power up with those glowing eyes (even through the semi-opaque shield) was a reminder that our new Princess is just as powerful as Celestia and Luna; she just doesn’t project it as casually as they do.

so true

It’s been five nights, and nopony else appears to have been infected. Mellow’s in Canterlot GH, going through pretty much the same process that we did. She challenged every janitor and staff in the hospital to a cleaning contest because she didn’t like how they’d done her bed.

considering that this indicates no strict quarantine has been put into place (Twilight basically autoclaved her pocket dimension lab!), i am guessing this is how the Rainbowseum Dashcosis pandemic starts until herd (heh) immunity sets in

Still, it was totally worth it. No regrets!

but as far as pandemics go this one seems kind of nice! very fitting for the universe of My Little Pony.


a very cute and fun story, making good use of the Rainbow-Dash-As-Twilight-Sparkle cover image. i enjoyed it a lot, especially the fascinating ramifications of pony characters being literal bacteria. thanks for writing!

It's a good thing getting infected with the Rainbow Dash isn't permanent, because if it was, this fanfic would've been a horror story. :rainbowderp: :derpyderp1: :twilightoops: Luckily, it wasn't, so I had a good time reading the story and seeing what both Sickle and Twilight experienced for several nights. :rainbowkiss: :twilightsmile: :heart:

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"Hmm, I'm Miss Rainbow Dash!"
"Hmm, I'm Miss Rainbow Dash!"
"Hmm, I'm Miss Rainbow Dash!" "Hmm, I'm Miss Rainbow Dash!"

"... Run."

Until then, be on guard. Sickle Cell

I just got that joke.
Goddamnit.

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