Chapter 1
Rainbow Dash Digs Herself Into A Hole
By Thanqol
“How about here?” asked Applejack.
Roseluck shook her head. “Platypus reserve,”
Applejack frowned. “Here?”
“Yeah, if you fancy digging through solid limestone to make it happen,” said Berry Punch.
“Here?” said Applejack, very maturely not making an exasperated sigh.
“No good,” said Carrot Top. “It’s technically free, but that’s right near Filthy Rich’s property and you can be sure he’ll raise one hell of a stink at Council if we start building there.”
“Well, what if we - “
“ATTEN-CHUN!”
None of the four earth ponies snapped to. Instead they just kind of slouched around on their chairs to face Rainbow Dash - who was doing enough military posturing for the lot of them. She was wearing her Wonderbolt Cadet uniform and was giving an over the top salute.
“Mornin’, Rainbow,” said Applejack. “Want some celery?”
“IS THAT HOW YOU ADDRESS A SUPERIOR OFFICER, SERGEANT?” yelled Rainbow Dash, demonstrating that she had passed her Drill Sergeant elective at the Academy. Strutting around and yelling at ponies? Easy A!
“Uh, with the what?” said Applejack.
Rainbow Dash dramatically pointed at the magnificent military banner - which, somewhat less magnificently, was currently being used as a tablecloth. It read PONY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. “Are you or are you not Ponyville’s Earth Pony Militia?” she snapped.
“Oh, yeah,” said Applejack. “I suppose.”
“Then WHY are your regimental colours being used so DISGRACEFULLY?”
“Because the good tablecloth is at the cleaners?” said Roseluck nervously.
Rainbow Dash clucked her tongue. “I guess this surprise inspection isn’t off to a good start. I’m going to have to dock you points!”
“Wait, what?” said Applejack. “Surprise with the what now?”
Rainbow Dash puffed herself up. She’d been waiting for that. “Commander Spitfire,” she let the words linger in the air as if they were meant to mean something, “has personally assigned me with the task of checking on the combat readiness of Ponyville’s Earth Pony Auxiliaries! And I can see already -“ she waved a hoof dramatically around Roseluck’s (admittedly somewhat scruffy) living room, “- that some changes are going to be necessary.”
Roseluck raised a hoof like a schoolfilly. Rainbow Dash puffed up even more as she pointed at her and said, “Name?”
“R-Roseluck.”
“Question?”
“Um, what’s an Auxiliary?” asked Roseluck.
“Uh - well, it means -“ Rainbow Dash thought for a second, and then remembered the term Auxiliary Power and made a mental leap - “You’re the ponies who do the fighting after all the proper soldiers are dead!”
Roseluck raised her hoof again. “Yes, Roseluck?” said Rainbow.
“Does that mean that we only fight things that are guaranteed to kill us all?”
“Hold your horses everypony!” said Applejack. “What’s all this about fighting? Rainbow, that ain’t exactly -“
“You will address me as Special Lieutenant, Sergeant!” barked Rainbow. “Special Lieutenant Rainbow Professionalism Dash!”
Applejack gave her friend a look that let her know that on account of their past friendship she wasn’t going to react to that the way she’d like to. “Special Lieutenant, fightin’ ain’t exactly what we do here.”
“Are you or are you not soldiers in the Solar Army, sworn to the defence of the Realm even unto death?” asked Rainbow.
“I didn’t swear to death!” said Roseluck panickedly.
“You did, actually,” said Berry Punch. “It was on your contract. Right at the top.”
“I didn’t read that! It doesn’t count! That’s unconscionable conduct!” said Roseluck, starting to hyperventilate. “I don’t want to fight Tirek! I’m a conscientious objector!”
Rainbow Dash didn’t feel like she’d come into this situation with unreasonably high expectations, but even so she was feeling deeply disappointed. “So what does the Ponyville Militia do, then?”
“We mostly do civil engineering projects,” said Applejack brightly, happy to be back on safer ground. “Right now we’re discussin’ where to put a dyke -“
“Applejack!” gasped Rainbow Dash.
“What?”
“I didn’t think that even you would go so far as to turn this once honourable military regiment into your own personal dating service!” said Rainbow Dash.
“A dyke’s actually -“
“No! Enough of this!” said Rainbow Dash. She pointed a hoof at Roseluck. “You! What would you do if a dragon attacked the town!?”
“Panic,” said Roseluck nervously.
“ - designed to prevent floodin’ and assist with maritime commerce -“
“You!” Rainbow jabbed her hoof in Berry Punch’s chest. “A swarm of timberwolves charges out of the Everfree forest. What do you do!?”
“A group of timberwolves is called a pack,” said Berry Punch. "Or was that a 'grove'?"
“What do you do to defend the town!?” yelled Rainbow.
“Oh! Panic!” she said, nodding firmly.
“- and the word’s derived from dijk, which is a really old fashioned way to say ‘dig’ -“
“You!” yelled Rainbow Dash, getting all up in Carrot Top’s grill. “What do you -“
“Panic.” said Carrot Top confidently.
“- griffon reavers! From the sky!” said Rainbow Dash, thrown off her game by three voices happening at once.
“Oh. Don’t panic,” said Carrot Top. “That's easy. We just go to the trenches.”
“- the first apple carried by river barge was in 202 A.C. -“
Rainbow Dash stuck her hoof in Applejack’s mouth to stop her talking. Her eyes were lit up and gleaming. “Trenches?”
“You know. Like a hole in the ground?”
“Show me,” said Rainbow Dash.
*
“This is it?” said Rainbow Dash, unable to keep the appalled disappointment out of her voice.
“Yep. Dug this one ourselves,” said Applejack.
“It’s - just a hole in the ground!” sputtered Rainbow Dash.
“Yup,” said Applejack with a tinge of pride.
“And it’s not even a big one!” said Rainbow Dash. “You couldn’t fit two ponies side by side in that thing!”
“Nope!” said Applejack, buffing her coat with a hoof as if she’d received a compliment.
“I thought - “ Rainbow Dash rummaged in her saddlebags and grabbed out a book titled The Fortifications Of Our Flightless Friends. It had an unflattering picture of an earth pony on the cover, in the foreground of a very flattering picture of a fortified castle. Rainbow Dash jabbed her hoof at the picture. “Why doesn’t it look like this?”
“That’s a castle, Special Lieutenant,” said Applejack patiently. “This here is a trench.”
“The castle has a moat!” said Rainbow Dash. “And that moat is filled with water and like four hundred times the size of that dinky little trench!”
All the earth ponies were frowning and looking at the picture. “That doesn’t look secure,” said Carrot Top.
“Yeah, that much water would undermine the foundations in a matter of years,” agreed Roseluck.
“I wasn’t expecting you to have a castle but I was expecting some sort of fort or something,” said Rainbow Dash. “This… this is nothing!”
“No, it ain’t nothing,” said Applejack patiently. “It’s a trench.”
“It’s not a trench! It’s a sad little pit!” said Rainbow Dash.
Applejack frowned. “Now there, Special Lieutenant. We spent a week on that -“
“A week!?” Rainbow’s jaw dropped.
Applejack beamed at what she took to be the compliment. “Yep! It was hard work, but what with the Everfree and all, we thought that the extra security was worth it -“
“It took all four of you a week to dig this?” said Rainbow Dash. “Fluttershy could jump across this!” To demonstrate, she hopped from one side to the other and gave them a totally flat look. “I thought earth ponies were supposed to be good at building things. This is absurd.”
“Now there, Special Lieutenant -” said Applejack, eyes narrowing.
“I could dig further than this by myself,” said Rainbow Dash.
“Oh, could you now?” said Applejack.
“Yeah!” said Rainbow Dash. “I could! Because I’m not lazy!”
“Oh yeah?” said Applejack, temper rising.
“Oh yeah!” said Rainbow Dash, pushing her nose against Applejack’s.
“Prove it!” said Applejack.
*
Day One
How hard could it be?
Rainbow Dash knew a thing or two about architecture. While it might take Applejack a week to dig a hole in the ground, when Rainbow Dash spent a week on a project - well, she could add an entire wing to her house. Or transform a cloud into a kilometre long copy of her cutie mark. Or kick up a thunderstorm that could level a minor city. And she could do all those things with style, grace and speed.
She picked up her shovel in her mouth. Yeah, this would be easy.
And it was easy. For the first foot of dirt. Then her shovel hit something hard.
“What the hay AJ?” said Rainbow Dash, looking up.
“Huh?” said Applejack, walking over.
“This ground is, like, solid rocks,” said Rainbow Dash.
“That ain’t rock,” said Applejack. “That’s just dry soil. Rock is much harder.”
Rainbow Dash scowled. She had already convinced herself that Applejack had tricked her into trying to dig into a rocky location. But - dry soil huh?
One quick raincloud later and she was digging again and making great progress - but the damp, soaked soil was heavier than boulders. Sweat was pouring down her neck as she shovelled and finally, after what felt like hours, she collapsed, panting. Five minute break -
She’d barely dug enough to fit herself in - if she curled up inside it. The dirt kept falling down the sides of the hole and she was chipping away at the rock with her shovel rather than getting the full, satisfying scoops she’d imagined. And she had to do the entire thing with her neck.
Okay. Okay. Let’s try it again without the water.
She couldn’t figure out the right stance. The shovel was an awkward length and she needed to get enough leverage to really power a slice in to crack the rock. She tried standing on her hind legs and then diving in but that just hurt her teeth. Then she tried a wide stance with her hooves spread out on either side of the pit, but as soon as the pit got a little too deep then she was having to bend her knees almost all the way down just to reach what she was getting at. She constantly tried repositioning, moving around to get the best angle on the rock or look for a weak point, but it was just the same stupid dirt no matter what direction she came at it from.
The longer she worked, the more breaks she took, and the longer each break became. The work was exhausting and she felt like she was going to break her neck! This was mental - doing all the work with the same part of your body? Who did that?
At the end of the day, Rainbow limped home, and then ate two nights worth of food in one meal, and collapsed into her bed. She was too exhausted to even blame Applejack.
*
Day Two
Okay. If Applejack could do this, she could do this.
Rainbow Dash worked hard and worked strong all day. She finally found a rhythm she could work to and just set into it. She started using her whole body with each shovel scoop, not just her neck. She took breathers when she needed them and paced herself like Twilight had taught her. Solid work. Marathon speed. She could do this.
By the end of the day she’d created some sort of terrible crater. She realised far too late she had no idea how she was supposed to grow the pit in any specific direction, let alone get the laser sharp sides that Applejack had done. It wasn’t even a satisfyingly big crater.
Okay, thought Rainbow Dash as she crawled pathetically into bed. Applejack has a lifetime experience digging holes and earth ponies probably have creepy magical dirt powers. Plus it was four against one. It was only fair that she evened the odds a bit.
*
Day Three
Rainbow Dash couldn’t get out of bed until late afternoon, excepting brief passages to and from the ice box to eat anything that looked vaguely organic. She’d never been more tired in her life. This was insane. She was an athlete! She should be able to handle a little dirt!
By the evening, realising she’d wasted almost the entire day, she set off for Cloudsdale. It was a long trip but there was a good tailwind and there was something there that could help her.
*
Day Four
The jackhammer! A masterpiece of modern engineering. Pegasi used it to carve precision cloud formations. She’d requisitioned it from a construction company for military purposes. With this she’d be able to make far more progress than with that wretched shovel.
She was almost cackling as she hammered away at the dirt and rock, pounding it into dust and then coming in with the shovel at the newly loosened dirt. It wasn’t until she looked at her progress at the end of the day that she realised that, while she’d made a little more distance than she had before, at this rate she wouldn’t even come close to a quarter of what the earth ponies had done. And she was exhausted again. And the jackhammer was making a dangerous rattling sound.
She needed something more drastic to beat that stupid, cheating Applejack.
*
Day Five
Of course! The answer was inside her all along! In her childhood, in fact!
The beach! Sand was much easier to dig than dirt! She was a genius.
Rainbow Dash’s crater-trench suddenly took a very sharp and very shallow detour across to one of the Ponyville lakes and then ran deep into the soft sand there. The trench went in two complete laps around the lake’s sandy shore, cutting straight through a prize sandcastle in the process. Its value as a defensive fortification was understandably suspect but Rainbow Dash felt proud of herself.
Still, she needed more than this if she wanted to beat Applejack in just two days. But, as she flopped down to sleep, a terrible, brilliant, ingenious idea came to her head….
*
Day Six
“From one to another, another to one. A mark of one’s destiny singled out alone, fulfilled…” said Rainbow Dash, reading aloud from the ancient tome of Starswirl the Bearded’s final spell.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon… one in six chance…
“Aw horseapples!” she cussed when she saw Twilight’s bright purple star appear on her flank in place of her familiar lightning bolt. Well, no harm in trying again, right? “From one to another, another to one. A mark of one’s destiny singled out alone, fulfilled!”
Once again, the shifting threads of destiny warped and screeched, and this time - bingo! Three diamonds! A cutie mark related to moving piles of dirt around, sort of! She’d win for sure with this! And then she’d read out the other half of the spell and get things back to normal before anypony noticed.
She hurried out to her trench and started digging, but her head wasn’t in it. She was swamping up with weird questions and they were killing her ability to get work done. The questions included, but were not limited to:
Had this been a dumb idea? When she’d had Fluttershy’s cutie mark the animals hadn’t listened to her - but when Rarity had her cutie mark she’d learned a weather spell she’d never had before. Was that a unicorn thing? She was making good progress with this hole but - oh horseapples! She’d forgotten, Twilight hadn’t fixed everypony’s cutie marks by reading out the second half of the spell, that had been like a weird bonus after she’d used her ordinary magic to fix the spell. Uh, did that mean she had to cast Starswirl’s spell again until she got Twilight’s cutie mark back and use that to figure out what she’d done? Would that even work? Hold on, why did she have her memories of her proper cutie mark? Twilight’s cutie mark hadn’t changed when she cast the spell. Was it because she wasn’t a unicorn? Or was it because she’d been through this all once before?
Rainbow Dash realised that she was in over her head with all this magic stuff and had maybe acted a bit impulsively in her attempt to cheat a victory against Applejack in hole digging. No wonder Twilight read so much.
Regretfully, she dropped the shovel, rushed back to the library, threw open the book and mumbled out Twilight’s completion to the spell. “From all of us together -“
“Rainbow?” said Spike, coming down the steps with a candle. “What are you doing here this late?”
“Oh hi Spike,” said Rainbow Dash. “I’m just - just reading the new Daring Do book! Yep, that’s me! Biggest fan out there!”
“Out loud?” he groaned. “At midnight? This is a lending library.”
“Ha ha - togetherwearefriends - “ said Rainbow Dash, glancing back at the book.
“What?” said Spike.
“I’ll just be a minute,” said Rainbow Dash. “Is that ‘destinies’ or ‘destined’?”
“Hey, isn’t that Twilight’s magical princess book?” said Spike.
“Uh! With the marks of our destined made one there is magic without end!” Rainbow Dash choked out.
All across the sleeping Ponyville, five great lights lit up, powering to the sky. Five great bolts shot out of five houses, from the hearts of five sleeping ponies. They broke walls and windows in their passage and burst in through the windows of the library. They struck Rainbow Dash on all sides and disintegrated her.
*
“Rainbow Dash?” said Princess Celestia. “You’re… early.”
“Princess Celestia!” said Rainbow Dash, snapping out of gaping at the brilliant, star-filled void she found herself floating in to remember to bow.
“No, really, when did this happen?” said Celestia with concern, horn glowing as she pulled large, floating screens towards her. Rainbow Dash was sure she could see herself in some of them.
“Oh!” said Rainbow Dash, eyes lighting up. “Princess Celestia! I need your help!”
“Of course, my little pony,” she said, smiling and turning her attention away from the screens. “What do you need?”
“I need you to take my wings away!”
“…”
“Like the opposite of what you did with Twilight!”
“I -“
“Just for a day!”
“… Why?”
“So I can be an earth pony and beat Applejack at digging…” Rainbow Dash stopped talking. “I guess that was even dumber than it sounded in my head.”
Princess Celestia actually laughed. “Yes, Rainbow Dash. Yes it was. Go home.”
*
Rainbow Dash arrived back in the library. Spike was just coming out of the kitchen with a plate of nachos, evidently having decided to have his midnight snack before waking Twilight r.e. the lightning bolt shaped scorch mark in the library floor.
“Goodnight, Spike,” said Rainbow Dash, trotting for the door, head hanging low.
“Goodnight, Rainbow!” said Spike, waving and then going upstairs.
*
Day Seven
“Yeah, I lose,” said Rainbow Dash to Applejack first thing in the morning. “Digging holes is super hard.”
“Well, that’s big of you to admit, Special Lieutenant -“
“It’s just Rainbow,” said Rainbow Dash, downcast. “Look, sorry I got all on your case about the trench thing. I just got excited about having a mission from Spitfire.”
“And I don’t imagine it looks like much to a pegasus who can just fly over the whole thing, right?” said Applejack.
“Yeah,” said Rainbow.
“C’mere, let me show you,” said Applejack. She jumped down into the trench. “Say you’re a flying griffon and you want to get me. What do you do?”
“Well, I come at you like this -“ said Rainbow Dash, lunging for Applejack - but the narrowness of the trench meant she couldn’t spread her wings while inside it, and the depth meant she couldn’t reach the top of Applejack’s hat without entering the trench.
“Yep. It’s that simple,” said Applejack. “Point of the trench is to get anything flying to land and come at us one on one. And then we whack ‘em with our shovels. It’s also good against timberwolves, dragons and most kinds of monster. Hoofington managed to trick a Hydra into getting its head stuck in a trench like this.”
“That’s… actually pretty clever AJ,” said Rainbow Dash.
“Aw, you’re too kind,” said Applejack, “but it ain’t my idea. Trenches like this have been around for a hundred years and the dimensions are standardised. I just dug it.”
“And that’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Rainbow Dash. She straightened a little. “Good job, Sergeant. I’ll let the Commander know that Ponyville stands ready.”
“Heh,” said Applejack. “Actually, give me a week? We’ve actually slacked off majorly on actual combat training and I want to get the grunts back in shape.”
“I suppose I can allow it,” said Rainbow Dash with a smile.
“Thanks, S.L.T,” said Applejack, saluting.
“I - hey!”