Commutation

by Toraka

A fun day

"All the stuff I could do," Rainbow Dash whispered to herself. "So much stuff that I don't know what to do. Suppose I can just keep wandering randomly and wait for something to drop out of the sky, that always seems to work."

Thus, she kept going without a goal, eyes more in the sky than anywhere else. If she could avoid direct confrontation with ponies that knew her, she could probably squeeze by unnoticed. Perhaps she could claim to be another pony recently arrived from Canterlot Castle to avoid having to explain things. Certainly, her horn would be proof enough of this story, even when fighting against her unchanged mane and cutie mark. Despite this ingenious plan, she kept her head low and avoided eye contact with anypony. Simple tactics were often all that needed to blend in, unless one happened to wear all colours of the rainbow.

Eventually, she ended up in one of the many interchangeable snack businesses in Ponyville. Only when she was already well inside, too far to back out again, did that fact make it through to her brain, however. Determined to take life as it came, she shrugged and sat down. Seconds after, an enormous pink explosion went off, showering her in confetti. In that moment, she felt fortunate to no longer possess wings as she would've gone straight through the roof otherwise.

As it was, she only toppled over from the shock and it took her no more than a few seconds of pain and confusion to figure out in which direction gravity was supposed to go. "Pinkie Pie! What are you doing here?" she asked while picking herself up.

"Uh, I work here?" Pinkie replied. In fact, Dash had wandered straight to Sugarcube Corner without even realising. Sometimes, she could hit herself for her own ignorance. How could she have missed unique blend of homely wood and bright candy colours? Or, for that matter, the endless supply of sweets and smells on permanent display? She wouldn't go unnoticed any more, that much was certain. When her gaze returned to Pinkie, she seemed to be simply bursting with questions which she unleashed now that Rainbow's attention was upon her. "Ooh! Dashie! You look different!"

"Twilight," she responded with her face locked in stoicism. The impact had hurt quite a lot. Of course, it melted into a warm grin right afterwards and she added, "She wanted help testing a configurination and I kinda happened to crash into her window at the right time. Now she's prolly in the sky with my wings while I'm here and don't know what to do with the power I've got."

"So now you have her magic, huh?" The possibilities took a moment to sink into Pinkie Pie. While they did, there was no holding to her eyes which darted to and fro across the bakery. "Amazing! Can you, like, make pastries now? Then I wouldn't have to bake them any more, I mean, not that I don't love doing it, but having more always means more, and Twilight said she couldn't do it, but I'm sure you can!"

Rainbow Dash knew there was a very good reason why her love hadn't obeyed Pinkie's desires the first time. She'd been given a brief introduction to magic as part of the experiment. She already remembered little of it, but conjuring any matter out of the Æther, be it solid, liquid, or dough, was prohibited by at least five laws from three different fields of study. Still, there was nothing speaking against trying to make the earth pony happy. While pondering the best approach, she found one particular spell in the back of her mind. She tried to hide any reactions, but couldn't prevent a smile from growing beyond bonds as she bundled energy for it.

As wide as Rainbow's smile was, as big did Pinkie's eyes grow once Dash released the spell, creating an entire platter of cupcakes stacked into a neat pyramid between them. "Awesome!" Pinkie exclaimed before tossing the top one high into the air. After far too much air time, it arced and landed right in her open mouth. Unfortunately for her, biting down on it yielded nothing but hitting onto her own jaw as the illusion faded from physical stress.

"Sorry Pinks, couldn't do any better." Rainbow let out a small giggle which made her own heart melt from cuteness, if only because it belonged to a certain mare born a unicorn. "Besides, you totally fell for it!"

Pinkie Pie stared at the floor, mourning the loss of what she had never had. "Aww... Dashie, just you wait 'til I got magic too, you're so gonna get payback!" She looked up to Dash with an unmistakable expression of friendly malice on her face.

"Tell me when that is, I'm gonna get to a bomb shelter." Rainbow leaned back in her chair.

"Okie dokie! Hmm, I guess we could market those as extra light cupcakes, guaranteed no calories! And no anything else, too! Super healthy!" A quick counterspell thought out by the unicorn destroyed the remaining evidence, as well as Pinkie's plans for it. "Okay, enough foaling around," she said, all of a sudden serious as never before. "Let's talk business. Like I know Twilight, you won't have this for long, so let's make the most of it."

Dash paused for a moment, wondering if she should play along. Pinkie's ideas were usually anything but normal. Then again, she'd never propose anything dangerous, not by bad intention anyway. Daring perhaps, a bit unsafe, or insane, but never dangerous. "Whatcha got in mind?" she carefully asked.

The smile that had crept back on Pinkie's face in the meantime expanded even further with the vague consent. "You know how ponies love to come here to get their cupcakes and stuff? Let's improve on that and give them legs and sentience and we could even make a big one the king, although he'd probably have to be two meters across for that."

"Well, I suppose I could do that, except they'd still be illusions. To make this work properly, we'd need an army of maybe fifty cupcakes at least, plus a full-size kingpin, all of which already modelled out." She met Pinkie's gaze. "Let me guess, you happen to have just that lying around? Where in the heck do you get that kinda thing?"

"Oh, I just have some sources," Pinkie said with a sinner's innocent look on her face. "Now, are we gonna get to baking life or what?"

"Something tells me I shouldn't." Dash pondered the situation for almost three seconds, then stood up and followed Pinkie Pie into the kitchen. "Eh, what could possibly go wrong."

---

Not too many minutes later, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie sat on the roof of Sugarcube Corner. It was a wonderful place and time to enjoy the sun's warmth, Dash found. Not to mention, of course, that it provided cover from what went on in the streets. Unable to reach them, a mass of baked goods raged on below as their strike teams occasionally stormed nearby houses before rejoining the rest.

"Nice spell," Pinkie said.

"Thanks. Never imagined how powerful Twilight really is. Just imagine holding all this back," Rainbow replied.

"This is your last warning," something called from below. "I, Grand Consul Napastrian the Second, demand the immediate surrender of both my father's reliquary and our yet inanimate brethren, so that we may liberate one and sacrament the other!"

"You can have him when you pry him from my soft, warm belly!" At times, Pinkie could be a true lioness. Ponyville could probably be thankful to whomever that those times almost never came. Losing all aggressiveness and combat spirit visible within her from one second to the next, she then turned to Rainbow Dash. "I always wanted to say that. Should we dispel them now?"

"Yeah, before anypony finds out it's been us," Dash responded. Digging her hooves into whatever grip there was, she concentrated all energy she could muster into a counterspell. Making a magical mess was hard, but cleaning it up would always form the harder part. She could remember Twilight lecturing her about something like that, but now she was experiencing it firsthand.

After long seconds of charging up, she progressed into shaping the spell. Something changed within her as she did, an alternate conscious that not even her greatest efforts could have unlocked before. Her eyes lit up with pure energy as she strid to the building's edge with grace that put Pinkie into genuine awe. Although she no longer possessed wings, she floated smoother than ever as she fired ætherical bolts of pure blue energy down into the rabble.

Watching his people be reduced into deliciousness, the frosted emperor was quick to propose a peace treaty. However, for some reason, the ponies didn't seem to want to accept his offer. Thus, being the generous monarch that he was, he tried again with far more modest demands. Again, though, no success. In the end, he was on his knees, begging for but the freedom of his people when another bolt struck him. With the Consul down, the revolution was over, and his people bent down to be deanimated. They didn't have to wait long for this silent plea to be fulfilled.

After the eradication of an entire people which happened to coincide with an impressive lightshow, Rainbow was depleted of energy. She collapsed right where she stood, causing Pinkie to rush over and pick her up. She wasn't hurt, just exhausted, but also content, carrying a victorious grin on her face. "I need a nap... get me back to the library if you kindly would, and don't mention this to Twilight, alright?" She dozed off.

---

While Ponyville's streets shook with a frosted revolution, the sky could not show any less change from other days, except for a lavender smear making its way through it.

"Okay, so beacon Eta should be around here," Twilight muttered during her ascent into the higher layers. For a good minute, she hovered on the spot, straining her eyes for the distance, before she turned around and spotted the curved cloud right behind her. "Huh. Simple measures are the best, I suppose. South from here on out, she said. Where– there's the sun. Let's see." She snatched a nearby fragment of cloud. As she scribbled calculations into it, she just so managed to read the local clocktower down on the ground. "Seven past one, on the current date that equals a deviation of... oh, screw it."

She let the figment drift away and simply set course straight towards the sun. It'd still be an accurate enough approximation for the short distance between her and Cloudsdale. For some reason, her wings already reported exhaustion despite an airtime of mere minutes. It had to be the different centres of mass between pegasi and unicorns, she figured. That combined with her lack of practice could explain everything if needed. While most of Rainbow Dash's muscle memory had found a place within her, she still found herself having to balance out after a missed beat every now and again. She just had to keep flying and all of her problems would go away.

As she approached the floating city and corrected her course, Twilight sped up her wing beats by the lightest margin. She wasn't afraid of being seen as a pegasus, of course. She just had plans and diddling around pretending to care about other pegasi wasn't part of them. Thus, she kept her fair distance away from anypony who could recognise her.

Eventually, even her extremely disciplined mind got bored of watching sky and clouds and she risked a look down. To say that she was amazed wouldn't be an understatement, albeit just barely. At long last, she truly understood Rainbow's love for flying as Ponyville stretched out beneath her. Any pegasus could detail the feeling better than she would ever be able to, but she found a strict difference between telling and experiecing. None of their descriptions could hope to match the true awe that she felt in this moment. Since they saw the same each day in their lives above the clouds, it was but a matter of habit to them. To Twilight, it was a novelty unmatched by anything she could even imagine.

She'd been at such heights before. Looking down from Canterlot Castle, riding the carriage into Ponyville, she'd even been to Cloudsdale itself a few times. Not one of those times had she had wings of her own, though. She felt like she'd at long last broken chains that she'd been carrying her entire life, shattering the constraints of gravity to achieve true freedom. Once that freedom's full extent dawned onto her, she was hard pressed not to cry out in joy. Instead, she could settle for flying a few loopings to express what she felt deep inside.

As she pulled into the third however, she felt an abrupt break in movement speed, accompanied by softness instead of air surrounding her. As it seemed, during her excited maneuvers, she'd flown into the exact cloud that had been her goal the entire time. Scanning around to ensure nopony had seen her crash, she pulled herself free, traveled to the top, and laid down in its fluffy whiteness. She didn't need a break of course, but the view was at the very least as breathtaking as Dash had made it out to be, so she could just as well stay for a moment and enjoy it.

In such a situation, many ponies would expect Twilight to fall into deep philosophy. She'd been one of them, until this moment. She wanted to ponder life and everything, but it felt wrong in some mysterious way. There was no true explanation for it, but the peace and quiet above the clouds seemed to want to put her away from reason. None of her scientific method or objective analyses counted any more, not this high up. Lulled by the sun's warmth gently invading all of her coat and surprisingly sensitive wings, she decided to test the common cloud's usability as a mattress.

Comments

[Rainbow87dash]

We're being invaded!!
By who?
CUPCAKES!!!

[Toraka]

- Ascendancy has been merged into A fun day. Seeing as the two are pretty much simultaneous, I only had them split due to the difference in when I wrote them.

Soon, we shall head out. All in time. We... are patient.

[THEO2006]

Adorei