Rainbow Dash finds herself somewhere new. For the novelty of it, she flies West.
Rainbow Dash finds herself somewhere new. For the novelty of it, she flies West.
Inspired by ImplodingColon'sAustraeoh. A collaborative effort created by a large group of writers, fans, and friends.
Made as a last minute birthday gift turned belated birthday gift for ShortSkirtsandExplosions, and in appreciation for all the writing and hard work he's done for us.
Rainbow Dash awoke with a sputter and a splash of water. It was dark and she was floating, limbs askew and wings out.
For one panicked, fluttering moment, as the water clung to her coat and feathers, she feared she'd fallen asleep flying. She'd been exhausted, waiting for the plummet over the edge. Waiting for the onrushing armies, a clash to end all clashes. The last thing she remembered was telling Fluttershy that her wings were feeling tired, and then...
Gasping, Rainbow Dash stuck her legs out, flapped her wings mightily, and tried to catch air. If she was in the water, she had mere seconds before the falls at Bleak's Plummet pulled her over the edge of the world and into open space. When she reached out, though, her legs touched bottom. Mud and silt swirled beneath her hooves as she found herself standing up, wings flared, ready to fly. She blinked, whirling around in a quick circle in an attempt to get her bearings.
"This... is impossible..."
She was on a beach. There was a moon overhead, covered mostly by clouds. But, this was not the moon she knew. This was different. The craters on the face were wrong. The light from it was... dim. Not just because of the clouds. Something about it was wrong. Rainbow Dash tore her gaze away from the sky to the beach.
It was a sand bar, the sand white and rocky. A little inlet wrapped around the sand bar, water shallow and muddy, and led right to grass and low scrub and brush. There were lights to her right and left in the distance, oddly white for firelight and too bright to be anything but magic. She could dimly make out the shapes of square buildings and black-roofed houses, but little else. She turned, slowly, towards the water.
Beyond her, to the east, was an ocean. There was nothing else it could possibly be. There was no land beyond, as far as she could see, and the salt water was making her feathers sting and itch and her nose and eyes burn. She reached up and touched the Element of Loyalty, but the ruby did not react. She swallowed hard, and said quietly, "Girls?"
There was no answer.
Rainbow Dash tapped the Element of Loyalty several times, trying different things, but it did not react. Nothing she did made a difference; the ruby did not glow and her friends did not appear.
"What the buck is going on?" she snarled, slamming her hoof against the necklace to no avail.
"Girls? Twilight? Anypony?" she called, turning in a slow circle, feeling fear grip her. "This is not cool. This is a dream. I must be dreaming."
Even as she spoke, she knew it wasn't true. The details were too precise. The sand was too gritty beneath her hooves, the salty sting of briny ocean in her nostrils too raw. This was real, and her Element was not working.
She swallowed, hard. "Okay. Okay. Maybe... this is some kind of vision?" She looked up at the sky, searching the stars, looking for... something. She shouted, loud, "Hey! Come on! Where's the big voices? The grand speech? I'm here, and I'm tired of waiting!"
There was no response, cosmic or otherwise, other than the sound of some birds that were hidden in the brush nearby fleeing her fruitless shouts for acknowledgement. Rainbow Dash scowled. "Fine. You wanna play rough? We can play this game."
She reached up to her necklace, hooves on the clasp, and then hesitated. Was this smart? No. It was stupid. She bit her lip, snarling, and moved her hooves away from the Element of Loyalty. "No. Let's not be stupid."
She left the necklace alone, and trotted towards the shallow river mouth that wound its way into the brush. The water was fresher, here, and didn't sting her eyes when she splashed some on her face. She took a careful taste and scowled, spitting it out. "Bleh. Tastes like lamp oil."
She washed the salt residue from her coat and feathers, though, glad to be free of the itchy sting of the salt, and she gave her wings a few flaps. It was hard, strangely difficult. Like the air was thick, or... maybe she was heavier? She blew her bangs out of her eyes, and then blinked. "My... my mane is back?" She turned quickly, and saw her tail had grown long once more, back to its usual length. "How... how long was I out?"
There were no answers here, though. She swallowed, facing the ocean to her east... and then turned west. There was no way she was crossing an ocean. Maybe she could find some supplies around, gather up what she needed. As she turned and faced the west, she noticed something curious. The pendant, her Element of Loyalty, glowed briefly. The light dimmed immediately and was gone, almost like a dream, but she had seen it.
Her gaze slowly turned to the starry sky. She shook out her wings, flinging the last droplets of moisture away, and then leapt into the sky. It was difficult for a moment, but she adjusted quickly, adding a few extra beats to her usual rhythm, and she soared into the sky. She wheeled in a slow circle, getting the lay of the land. Lights spread out, framing buildings, but to her west was open land and stands of trees. The pendant had been clear.
Rainbow Dash soared west, the early morning sun at her tail. She observed the terrain far beneath her, tree-covered hills that stretched to all horizons. Taller mountains in the distance cast long shadows across the earth in the low sun. Rivers wound between the hills, cutting dark paths through the endless swaths of green.
Every once in awhile, Rainbow would spot a dirt road far below, and if she tried hard enough, she might catch sight of movement along it, only to lose it as she carried on westward. From altitude, everything blurred together into the same dark green trees. Rolling hills coated in trees. Followed by more trees, and the some more after that, ever consistent as Rainbow flew.
As the morning grew on Rainbow Dash grew bored of the monotony and angled her wings downward, dropping towards the terrain. Her descent took her past the peak of a mountain, and she matched her rate of descent to that of the terrain as she followed its curving slopes down.
Rainbow steered her dive to intersect with a stream that ran down the mountainside. She dropped down below the treeline and traced the flow just above its surface as it meandered down the slope. Back and forth, she followed the stream, snaking between the surrounding conifers and rocky cliffs. As the flow sped up, so did Rainbow, keeping low and matching every twist and turn of the stream with quick and controlled wing movements. Rainbow Dash grinned as the twists grew tighter and the flow more rapid, cutting swiftly through the rocky landscape.
Suddenly the surrounding trees disappeared, dropping away as the the water spilled over a short cliff into a lake. As Rainbow shot out over the water, she pulled up, trading speed for altitude. Her momentum took her into a half-loop, and at the apex of her ascent she rolled over and hovered in place, looking out over the lake.
The water extended out to the west, glittering in the sunlight. The shore was an unbroken line of trees all around the lake, though to the far end she spotted what looked like a small dock sticking out over the water.
Rainbow Dash dove back towards the lake at a shallow angle, but still building up considerable speed as she neared the water. She cruised swifty above the surface, occasionally dipping low so her hooves came in contact with it, causing twin sprays of water to shoot up behind her. The mist hung in the air, refracting the sun and leaving a rainbow trail in her wake.
Nearing the other end of the lake, Rainbow Dash could better the dock, and also noticed a cabin nestled in the woods near it. With the slightest of adjustments, she steered her flight to a spot just to the side of the dock. Rainbow flared her wings, bleeding off speed on the approach, then with a final flap, came to a stop just over the shore.
Gravel crunched under her hooves where she landed and she trotted up to the cabin, looking around the exterior. There was no sign of any occupants, no lights visible, nor any sign that the place has been used for months at the least.
Her search did, however, turn up a patch of tasty looking wildflowers near the cabin that were completely untouched. Rainbow grabbed a double-hoofful of the treats and flew over to the dock where she sat down to enjoy her snack. She rested there, nibbling on the flowers, and enjoying the feeling of warm afternoon sun on her coat.
A nearby sound caught her attention, her ears rotated and homed in on the source, head quickly following. A large bull moose had emerged from the woods and walked casually down to the water.
“Oh hey. Is this your place?” Rainbow asked.
The moose flicked an ear at the question but otherwise didn't say a word.
“So uh, I hope you don’t mind me chilling here for a bit. I was just taking a quick break from my flight, then I’m off.”
The moose looked at her and stared for a moment, then made a grunting sound and lowered its muzzle down to the water.
“So…” Rainbow said, “You know any good places around here to grab some grub? Maybe some supplies too?”
The moose just stared blankly at her with its beady black eyes. Dash fidgeted uncomfortably under its gaze. She coughed into her hoof. Her conversation partner remained vigorously silent.
Dash got to her hooves, and started to approach him. “Uhh, you alright there dude, or do you just not talk much?” The moose let out a low bellow in response, shaking its massive head and antlers at the petite pegasus. She stopped, wings flaring. The moose pivoted, hooves kicking up earth as it bounded off, disappearing into the brush.
Rainbow stood motionless on the dock, wings raised, ruby eyes fixed on treeline. “Jee, hope all the locals aren’t like that.” She shrugged, then galloped down the dock, leaping off the end, wings catching the air.
She flew in wide circles over the water, using the sun-warmed air rising from it to carry her higher. Up and up she she climbed, until she reached a suitable altitude where she straightened out. The lake under her narrowed out into a river that continued westward. Rainbow soared high above it as it wove between the many trees, and she followed the sun in its journey across the sky.
Rainbow Dash was many things. Starting with awesome… but flying across lake big enough to be a small ocean alone was enough to make her bored.
So. Dang. Bored.
And for once in her life she was loving it.
No one chasing her, no one needing her help, no one interrupting her naps… Other than the loud aircraft she was sharing the sky with. They reminded her of the airships she had seen in Gray Smoke except instead of being covered in a layer of soot and grunge seemed as clean as the day they were built.
At first nothing more than a green and grey smear on the horizon where the water grew lighter but as she got closer the mouth of a river started making its presence known. On the left was farmland looking much like that of Verdestone.
Swooping low over the seawall Rainbow Dash spotted a welcome sign. One welcoming her to Buffalo. Homes tall enough for buffalo but not quite wide enough dotted the area near the shoreline.
A city called Buffalo with no buffalo to buffalo? It wasn’t enough to hold her interest for too long, worse yet it seemed just busy enough that she might be drawn into something exciting, something she had decided to avoid for the moment.
Crossing the river back to the other side she noticed a fort that seemed to be watching the mouth of the river. She couldn’t help but wonder about what kind of strained relationship the 2 sides must have if they felt the need for a fort.
All kinds of farms seemed to exist with more grapes than anything. Several signs at the end of paths to the road were labeled “winery” which probably meant wine…. Or creatures like Rarity on a bad day, whining about everything.
Deciding to continue up the river and to avoid everyone Rainbow began to wonder about the lack of boats on the river. It didn’t look very fast or even all that deep but no one seemed to have a boat on it.
Looking farther up the route of the river she spotted mist, a sure sign of a waterfall or maybe a series of them with how much mist she was seeing. Deciding that it might be more fun to be surprised Rainbow dropped down low over the water, ignoring warning signs strung on cables over the river stating that ships needed to turn back and that ahead was unsafe.
Unsafe for boats perhaps, but not Rainbow Dash. She had faced colossal mountains, vast deserts devoid of magic and skies filled with some of the harshest weather in existence. No way was something like a fast moving river going to be a risk to her.
After the river split and seeing more warning signs Rainbow had a moment of concern but chose to brush it off even as she encountered a wrecked ship. Examining the wreck it was obvious that it had been there for some time, trees were growing through a hole in the deck and it was little more than rust on some rocks. Rainbow didn’t even want to let her hooves touch the deck as she was afraid the whole thing would dissolve the second something stronger than a gentle just of wind touched it.
Moving from shore to shore again she noticed that the farmlands had been replaced by sparse forest.
Sticking more to the left side and its nature but keeping near the river made her feel more comfortable, as if she’d been here often as a foal.
Coming around a bend in the river Rainbow could hear the roar of waterfalls, the closer she got the louder it grew until finally it was in sight.
It was massive.
More water poured over it than all the waterfalls of Canterlot combined. A giant horseshoe shaped waterfall with a surprisingly gentle roar for its size. Or maybe it was just because of the distance the water was falling. Looking down it had to be at least fifteen stories to the bottom. Nothing compared to Canterlot but that was at the top of a mountain, this cut down into a ravine. Just a little further up were another pair of waterfalls.
Neither matched the sheer scale of the horseshoe but they were still impressive… Well the one was about the size of one of the larger falls in Canterlot, but compared to the bigger two it was almost a let down.
Below her there were boats in the water, they would fight their way to a position where they were surrounded by a semicircle of waterfalls before letting themselves be pushed back. People lined the one side of the waterfall and on the other stood on a ledge overshooting the medium and small falls on the other side.
It was a tourist trap.
Everywhere she looked she could see parks, casinos and other things designed to part people from their money but everyone seemed happy to do so. It was a sign of harmony that she hadn’t seen since a time she could barely remember.
And it warmed her heart.
Continuing on she decided to fly a bit more casually, flying between the supports of the viewing platform and under the big bridge before dropping lower to follow the river, the canyon full of nature and no sign of caves.
Something she was intensely glad for.
As she continued Rainbow saw a suspended tram crossing the gorge and rapids that would have been awesome to go rafting on, even if she wouldn’t admit to herself that they looked a touch too dangerous, even for her.
A sharp turn in the river netted her a surprise, a boat full of people in lifejackets roaring up a slight rapid. The engine roaring against the fast moving river, a roar of mechanical determination built by people that wouldn’t take “it can’t be done” for an answer. It appealed to her and reminded her of Roake, it would have probably gotten dismissed as pathetic by the metal mare but deep down Rainbow was certain that Roarke would find it appealing.
Rainbow pushed on before melancholy could overwhelm her, the walls of the gorge dropping lower and lower as she pushed on, following the river to it’s end.
The sun getting lower in the sky Rainbow Dash decided to continue West along the shoreline. One giant lake was enough, two in one day would be too much and there weren’t enough clouds in the sky for her to reliably find one to spend the night on. She would stop at the first truly interesting sight she found.
After resuming her Westward course she came across what looked like another river, only this one had an extremely tall bridge over it. Finding her curiosity peaked she decided to give it a quick look. Maybe it’d be her resting point for the night, maybe not.
A ship up the straight passage of the river answered her curiosity. It was a canal. An exceptionally straight one that seemed to span to the horizon even from altitude. Was it a river that people widened or did they cut their way through the ridge… The ridge that she had just noticed also spanned the horizon in both directions.
The cliff face was obvious and yet at the same time seemed covered in woods. The decision on if she should continue along the shoreline was made by hovering in place and waiting for a breeze. Whichever way the breeze favoured would decide her path. The wind came mostly from the West but angled ever so slightly to the North, towards the lake.
Shoreline it was.
West of the canal things changed rapidly from the green of growth to the urban sprawl she had seen in cities, but unlike others touches of green still existed. In fact they seemed surprisingly prevalent almost to the level she would expect from the earth ponies in Equestria.
Soon enough however the city seemed to vanish back into green space dotted with houses and farms. The highway she had seen earlier made a reappearance. Whoever this Queen Elizabeth was her “Way” seemed to be a pretty big important roadway. It seemed like even in the short time she had seen it the traffic had surpassed that of all Equestria.
Another marina (it had to be the fourth or fifth on this lake alone) but this one had a burned out ship. Mostly covered in rust but something about the setting sun made it appear like a magical place, something about it called to her.
Landing on it she watched as the sunset, the sky turning a brilliant orange. No real drive for the moment, but maybe that would change for tomorrow.
Rainbow Dash laid her head down for the night and dreamed of one pony in particular.
Waking up in the morning with the sun at her back was all the reason Rainbow Dash needed to continue her fateful journey West.
Rainbow followed the highway as it wound through the rugged hills and tree topped rocks that passed for mountains in Appalachia. The road wound back and forth so often that she started to fall into a rhythm; left, right, left, right. Occasionally, the highway would disappear into a tunnel under a particularly troublesome mountain and reemerge on the other side. When they did, Rainbow simply flapped her wings a few times and fluttered over the mountains before dropping back down and following the road again.
She did try to fly through one of the tunnels just once. Nothing more awesome than dodging trucks and vans while flying at a hundred miles per hour, right?
She was just proud that she didn’t slam into the side of the Taylor truck she was racing when she finally reached the exit and the sun on the other side momentarily blinded her.
On the other side of the tunnel it was mostly clouds, so Rainbow stayed low to navigate. On her left, to the south, the mountains rose up again, but to the north, they fell low into open plains and gently rolling hills. She slowed her flight just enough to take it all in as she passed. Farmland covered everything she could see, with a few small roads connecting them together. Mountains rose again a fair bit to the north, but the valley was a nice change of scenery from the hills and highway she’d been staring at for the past hour.
Ahead of her was one last tunnel, and then everything began to open up. Most of the mountains were behind her now, and out ahead, they slowly declined into broad hills and uneven terrain. Beyond that was a city, somewhat hidden in the midday haze. But there were tall buildings there, and where there were skyscrapers, there was food and a place to rest. She’d need that; a brief look at her map showed that she wouldn’t be stopping until she was in the next state over, at least.
The highway devolved into a complicated mess of branching roads, toll lanes, and mergers, so Rainbow decided to just fly straight toward the buildings in front of her. It was much easier that way; she didn’t have to mimic the contours of the land to the follow the roads. After passing over a few more hills, she finally found herself over buildings and houses; over real civilization.
She sought out a place to rest her wings for a moment, and there was no better place she could see than the building in front of her. It was a tower of concrete sculpted and molded to mimic stone and the gothic cathedrals of Europe—or so she’d heard, at least. She was pretty sure that cathedrals were shaped like crosses, not squares, and she knew that they weren’t supposed to be forty stories tall. But she wasn’t going to complain; she’d have some peace and seclusion for as long as she wanted it, and she could see all of the city beneath her from way up there.
She actually had to flutter up a little bit as she got close to the tower; she’d been drifting and gliding since coming off the highway, and she’d lost more altitude than she expected. But once Rainbow got to the top of the tower, the view was impressive, even with the dreary overcast overhead. She could tell she was on a college campus of sorts; three round buildings that looked like dorm buildings stood clustered next to each other not too far away, and the squat concrete buildings all around her had people with backpacks walking in and out almost constantly. Back to the east, a wide open lawn surrounded by Baroque buildings must’ve been the center of another campus. Even more buildings loomed to the west and east, adding to the overall feeling of eggheaded-ness.
Twilight would’ve loved it here.
Something fluttered up after her and began squawking at her, and Rainbow shuffled to the side a bit as a peregrine falcon landed on the railing next to her, hissing and squawking. Rainbow noticed a big nest jammed into the crook of the crenellations and decorations on the building, holding two large eggs—obviously she was intruding on the mother’s territory. “Alright, alright, I’ll leave, sheesh,” Rainbow said, holding her hooves up in a placating manner and spreading her wings. The falcon hissed at her once more, and shaking her head, Rainbow leapt off of the tower, spreading her wings and gliding across the city.
Her stomach rumbled at her, and she realized just how late it must’ve been getting. Food was the new priority number one, so she landed on a busy street, looking for something to eat. She got a few surprised looks from college students, and several of them pulled out their phones to take a few pictures or videos of her. While Rainbow normally loved the attention, she was a mare on a mission, and that mission was finding something good to eat. A nearby door opened and she smelled something good cooking inside, so she trotted up to a building with a green awning in front that said “Primanti Bros.” up top. She stepped inside and looked around, but there wasn’t a waitress or anybody to take her to a table. There was an upper level, though, so she simply flew up to the balcony overlooking the bar below and found a seat. After a minute or so, a waitress came up and passed her a menu, and she looked over it before ordering a cheese-combo sandwich. Normally cheese sandwiches would be kind of lean eating, but all of their sandwiches came stuffed with coleslaw and french fries, so she figured that’d be enough to last her for the night at least.
Maybe two nights, once she saw how enormous the sandwich was. It was way too much for her to eat in one sitting, even after a day’s flight, so she ate half of it and stuck the other half in a box. It’d make a good lunch tomorrow, at least; she didn’t need to worry about it keeping that long. Even only half of the sandwich was a lot for her to eat; she felt stuffed afterwards, so flying fast was out of the question. At this point, she figured that she might as well find someplace to stay the night.
She payed for her sandwich and left, then spread her wings and took to the air again before she had to stop and talk to any college students. She had a reputation as the fastest pegasus alive, and she definitely wasn’t going to be able to live up to that moniker after the feast she just had. So she continued west, flying over the city, looking for someplace to crash for the night. Unfortunately, most of the trees here were kind of sickly and thin, and the further toward the rivers she got, the dirtier everything felt. All the old buildings were stained black with soot and ash; it looked like a dragon had come by a long time ago, but as far as she knew, Earth didn’t have any dragons. But they had myths about them, so maybe they were out there and just didn’t show their faces. Or maybe they’d killed them all long ago; that was sad to think about, but a lot of human fairy tales had to do with knights slaying dragons and rescuing princesses.
Which was absurd. Celestia or Luna would be able to beat a dragon with one hoof tied behind their back.
In front of her, two rivers joined together before flowing further off to the west. It was strange to watch them mix; one was brown and muddy, while the other was blue, so she could clearly see where the two rivers became one, where the smaller brown river disappeared into the bigger blue river. She realized that the whole city had been built all around these rivers. It would explain why there were so many bridges everywhere, but couldn’t the humans have just chosen someplace more convenient to settle down?
She followed the river for a little bit, not wanting to sleep near the city. The noise of the traffic and the lights of the buildings would keep her up way too late, and the light pollution meant that she wouldn’t even see the stars at all. So she flew and flew until she came to a complex of old buildings along the river. Curious, she flew down closer to get a better look, and hovered over them as she made sense of what she saw.
There were a lot of old, long buildings, with rusted roofs and roads overgrown with vegetation. Tall brick smokestacks stood silent, dead, and a few vehicles had been abandoned near the buildings, their sides collecting rust. At one end of the complex, just inside the barbed wire intended to keep people out, a massive pile of twisted and rusted slag dominated everything around it. The piers reaching out into the river like fingers were decaying, collapsing, no longer receiving shipments off of huge boats or sending their product down the waterways to where it was needed most.
The slag and the furnaces told Rainbow that this must’ve been an abandoned steel mill. The city was once legendary for its steel output, but all the mills had packed up and gone overseas long ago, leaving it a shadow of its former self. It would explain to Rainbow why the city felt so dead and dirty, like it too was falling apart just like the mills on its rivers.
Pony cities were much happier, she decided. They weren’t always overcast, and the colors of their denizens helped brighten the streets.
The sun was going down now, and yawning, Rainbow descended to the mill. As much as she would’ve liked to have slept on a cloud, the wind was blowing west to east; she would’ve lost her entire day’s progress in a night of sleeping and have to start over again. At least the mill was abandoned and quiet. She could get all the rest she wanted to here.
She snooped around some administrator’s office for a bit before finding someplace mostly dry and clean to sleep for the night. Plus it had windows and skylights; she could easily bolt it out of there if she absolutely needed to. Though really, what would she have to fly from? About the nastiest thing in the mill was probably the rats. She didn’t see any herself, but the droppings lying around told her that they had to be pretty big.
But she couldn’t keep herself awake any longer. Yawning, she threw her supplies down and curled up on top of them, using them like a makeshift mattress. It certainly wasn’t the best bed she’d slept on, but it wasn’t the worst, either. So, closing her eyes and dreaming of a magical, far-off place, she finally drifted off to sleep.
And in the morning, she took wing again and flew off with the sun on her back, casting long shadows on the river beneath her.
Rainbow Dash squinted through her goggles at the river below, tracing its chocolate-milk curves all the way to the horizon where it melted into the sunset. Its sinuous lengths were interrupted only by a single latticework bridge, painted a shimmering pink by the western sky.
The chill spring air was getting chillier, and that only increased the stiffness in Rainbow’s wings. With a subtle twist of her feathers, Rainbow began a shallow glide toward one of the bridge’s towers.
She touched down on an iron girder, balancing comfortably as only a pegasus can as she pulled the goggles up to the top of her head. Several vertebrae cracked as she stood on the tips of four hooves and arched her back. One wing after the other coiled and uncoiled, finally free to relax after hours and hours of uninterrupted flight.
The scent of farm animals and rich earth mixed with the odor of car exhaust from the traffic below. The river seemed to separate two worlds; lush, soft fields on her right, freshly plowed and stretching as far as the fading light could show her, and the city on her left, all bright lights and brick buildings stacked onto hillsides and surrounded by thick forest.
This was the first bridge she’d seen in hours. Here she sat, at the only point of connection between two worlds as different as night and day. Light and dark. The steel span of the bridge fell away on either side of her like a swooping, expansive dress. Twisting her neck around, she looked at the bridge’s long shadow on the water behind her. Her own shadow was miniscule, perched at the top of a spire woven of darkness as fine as spider’s silk against the chocolate surface.
Above the noise of the passing vehicles, Rainbow’s ears caught the sound of a blues band strumming over the rooftops. She turned back around and gazed toward the center of town, squinting against the sunset and the streetlights. Hundreds of people were gathered in the brightly lit downtown, their laughter adding to the noise, even from this distance.
Rainbow looked at the horizon again and tensed her muscles for an instant, with the thought that she might take off again. She had a long way to go, and she was so very tired, but something about the music reminded her of Ponyville, of ponies in bowties sharing a single voice. Before she knew it, she was gliding downtown on wings that didn’t feel her own.
She landed on the outskirts of the festivities, on a side street with a closed bakery and a newspaper office. Her little blue hooves carried her forward, past the bakery’s sign that said, “See us Downtown!” and the dress shop and the candy shop and the model train store and…
A wooden barricade stood blocking the road. On the other side, throngs of people crowded around booths set up in the middle of the street, eating fried food, standing in line, or just laughing with their friends. Everyone was smiling, and nobody seemed to notice Rainbow Dash shuffling through their midst.
Rainbow walked past a flagpole sticking out of a fountain, with a dozen people sitting on the concrete edges with drinks in their hands. Spotlights illuminated an American flag and a sign that said, “Welcome to Washington, Missouri.”
Deep bass notes and the twang of a banjo reverbrated off the red brick facades, cracked and held upright by cast iron star-shaped anchor plates, filling the air with soulful blues. The smell of funnel cakes tickled Rainbow’s nostrils, tugging at her empty stomach and turning her head toward a parking lot packed with merrymakers and food hawkers. The sky had fallen into a deep, rich indigo, and despite the streetlights and bonfires, a wealth of stars, galaxies, and nebulae shone unmistakeably stark above. As she squeezed through the crowd, a young girl’s voice captured Rainbow’s attention, piercing through the noise and echoing through the bright void where the pegasus had been pulled time and again.
“Restore what was lost.”
Rainbow Dash tilted her head and said, “Buh?”
The child stretched out her arm and held a giant fluff of pink cotton candy in front of Rainbow’s muzzle. Rainbow reached out a hoof and accepted the feathery confection, then took a bite and let it dissolve into nothingness on her tongue. When she looked back up, she could see that everyone was now looking at her. She should have been surprised, but… for some reason she felt as if she’d always known that they were watching her.
A man in a denim jacket knelt down next to the girl and said, “You have what you need, Rainbow. To go beyond.”
Rainbow spun around as a woman behind her spoke up. “The wind is with you.”
The petite pegasus spun in a slow circle as she listened to the murmurs of the crowd, their words blurring together but their message only becoming clearer. She came to a stop when she saw the little girl again. The girl smiled and said, “Restore what was lost.”
Rainbow looked up, into the depths of the infinite ocean above her swirling with life and magic, and leapt into the air. With only a few powerful beats of her wings, she was high into the crisp night air and following the river again. It felt good to fly, to be moving again, to have the wind with her.
She smiled and opened her eyes with a jolt. The ache in her wings told of hours of uninterrupted flight, and the sky had lost its otherworldly luminescence. Rainbow turned her head and looked at the inky serpentine shape of the river behind her, finding no trace of a bridge in the cool white moonlight. There was no city, no festival, no lights.
Everything since her brief rest on the bridge was fading into the blurry sharpness of those who have just awakened from a nap, but the wind was with her, and the taste of cotton candy was on her lips.
Rainbow flapped her wings hard, propelling her petite body through the air. Though, if asked, she would have described it as “swimming.” She had no idea a place could be so muggy. Her journey westward had started fine, and most recently she’d enjoyed a flight above a pristine gulf that seemed endless. The cool high altitude breezes blew through her feathers as she drifted over the ocean.
However, as soon as she hit land, the cool breezes died, and the air became stifling, cloying, like somepony had wrapped a thick blanket of hot air around her fuzzy body. It didn’t help that it was likely over a hundred degrees, and the tall buildings in front of her reflected back the light, and heat, of the blazing midday sun. Each pump of her wings dislodged more of the sweat that was clinging to her like a sponge.
Panting, she looked around for a place to land and rest. A bustling city sprawled out beneath her. A central hub of glass and steel skyscrapers surrounded by shorter, more squat buildings, dominated the view. Rainbow refused to land on any of them, as they had no doubtedly soaked up even more of the blinding heat than she had. She lost count of the many highways and byways entering and exiting the city, carrying motored carriages of all shapes and sizes. Though she did notice that most of them more resembled parking lots.
Her search seemed in vain until she spotted an odd structure: a giant dome of white and grey. Four parapets held at equidistant points around it, and it was surrounded by abandoned parking lots. Next to it was an even larger building, but this one was more rectangular and it seemed filled with the strange creatures that inhabited this land. Not wanting yo make waves, she altered her flight path into a gentle glide, finally landing atop the dome with a loud sigh.
Rainbow stretched her wings with another groan. The trip across the gulf, while comfortable, was long. She nosed into her saddlebags and produced a canteen, which she gulped from eagerly. As she drank, she looked down to the other structure. Multitudes of people were going in and out. She assumed this must be some sort of event center or stadium. Why they built it right next to the empty dome instead of using it baffled her.
A scent caught her nose: a rich, earthy smell, musky yet inviting. Her tail twitched when she placed it. “Sweet Apple Acres” she breathed. Sure, it lacked the ever present scent of apples, but there was no denying the similarities. Intrigued, she replaced her canteen and took wing again, this time heading for the roof of the other building.
As she approached, she something she had missed on the other side of the stadium. It was a carnival, an honest to Celestia carnival! Towering roller coasters, motorized swings, large structures that launched shrieking people high into the air and back down again. She could see endless rows of booths serving deep fried foods, candied apples, popcorn, cotton candy. Even from altitude, she could hear the squeals and laughter of excited children, see them dragging their parents around to the various colorful fun houses and spooky haunted ones. Lovers walked hand-in-hand, a garden area was serving what she assumed was wine of all kinds. At the far end there was a petting zoo, where pigs, ducks, sheep,and all kinds of fuzzy little animals were being chased by excited kids. Above it, a large red banned declared, “Welcome to the 2017 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo!” In a word it reminded her of...
“Home.” Her heart ached a bit. Pinkie Pie would love it down there with all the laughing and screaming. Twilight would be studying the strange creatures with a scholar's eye. Rarity would be having a heart attack at the strange and, even to her untrained eye, tacky garb.
She was pulled from her trance by a very welcome sight. Standing at the very edge of the petting zoo was a pony. I was rather drab in color, and it was simply munching from a trough of hay. Still, eager to have some conversation, but not wanting to cause a scene, she surreptitiously made her way down and into the tented area, landing with a soft pomf upon the hay covered ground.
She trotted up to the pony, sidling up beside her at the trough. “Hey sister! How’s it hangin’?”
The other pony neighed softly and continued to eat.
“So, what do you call those weird things walking on two legs?”
The pony snuffled.
“Uh... not much for conversation are you?”
“Pony!”
“Bweh?”
The high-pitched squeal made Rainbow jump. She spun around to see a little girl with curly blonde hair sprinting towards her, gleeful smile on her face, shouting the entire way, “Pony, pony, pony, pony, pony!” Rainbow made to move, but it was too late. With speed and strength borne of too much cotton candy, the little girl launched herself at Rainbow and latched on to her with a steely grip. Without wasting a second, the girl buried her head into Rainbow’s floofy chest, nuzzling back and forth like a cat. “Heeeeeeeeee, so fuzzy and soooofffffffft!”
Rainbow snapped out of her daze. “Okay, I don’t know what you are or what you’re doing, but please stop it.”
“Gasp!” the girl gasped and pulled away from Rainbow. “You can talk?!”
“Uh, of course I can talk.”
The girl put her hands on her hips. “Ponies aren’t a-posed to talk.”
Rainbow scoffed. “Yes, we are!”
“This one don’t talk,” the girl said, pointing to the brown pony next to Rainbow. The pony let out a soft whinny and went back to its oats. Rainbow studied the pony for a few seconds then turned back towards the little girl.
“Wait... you mean ponies here don’t talk?”
“Nu-uh.” The girl seemed to ponder this statement for a second. Suddenly, her eyes went wide, accompanied by a loud gasp. “You’re not from here?!”
“Uh, I don’t think I should be—”
“Do you come from a magical land of rainbows, unicorns, butterflies, and all sorts-a cute stuff?!”
Rainbow blinked. “Um, yes actually. Yes, I do.”
“Squeeeeeeee!” The girl clapped her hands together. “I hafta go tell daddy! Daddy!” she shrieked as she ran away.
After watching the girl run off, Rainbow turned back to the brown pony. “Geez, these things are friggin’ weird, ya know?”
The pony nickered.
“Oh, right. I guess you don’t know.” Making a quick decision that she didn’t want to raise any alarms or cause any kind of trouble, Rainbow turned to the end of the tent and bent at the legs, ready to take off.
“Daddy, I told you, the pony talked!”
Rainbow sighed. She glanced over her shoulder to see the girl from before, only this time she was dragging a larger male by the hand. His other hand held a brown bottle, one that Rainbow assumed was some kind of cider judging by the flustered color on his cheeks. The man walked up to the pair of ponies. “Okay, sweetheart, is this the ‘talking pony’?”
“It’s this one, Daddy,” she said, pointing at Rainbow.
The man appraised Rainbow with a shifty eye. “Man, kinda sick what they’ll do to drum up attendance. Blue dye, fake wings, and that mane! Must have cost a fortune to buy all those colors and taken hours to make it so perfect.” He reached out to grasp Rainbow’s mane.
Just before his hand made contact, Rainbow jumped back and flared her wings. “Hey, hands to yourself, pal!” The man’s eyes went wide as saucers, and he dropped his bottle. Rainbow realized her mistake. “Uh, I-I mean... w-whinny?”
A breath passed.
“Jesus fuck, the pony is talking!” The man grabbed up his daughter and ran towards the front gate, screaming for help.
Rainbow, making an astute observation that the following events would likely suck, whipped around and flared her wings for flight. “Later, sister,” she said to the brown pony. “Don’t let these freaky things get to you.”
The pony passed gas.
“Uh... right.”
With nimble grace, Rainbow launched herself into the air and once more went swimming through the thick, cloying air. She flapped her wings hard to gain altitude, her wings no longer as sore from her flight over the gulf. Desperate to put this weird place behind her, she once more angled her body westward.
* * *
Deputy Harrison of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department sighed as he followed the man leading him, all the while ranting about talking horses with wings. While Harrison couldn’t exactly smell the sauce on him, he could tell from the profuse sweating and slightly unsteady gait that the man had a bit more than his fair share of Shiners. Still, “serve and protect” and all that jazz.
“I’m telling you, it talked! And flared its wings! I ran for my life, me and my daughter were scared out of our minds!”
“Of course, sir.”
They rounded the corner and entered the petting zoo. The man made a beeline right towards the back of the tent where stood a regular-looking pony snuffling in a trough filled with oats. The pony seemed to pay them no mind as it ate. Harrison looked to the man. “Seems like a normal pony to me, sir.”
“Wait, where did it go?!” the man said, his head darting around. “It was right here!”
“Aww, Daddy, you scared the nice pony away!” his daughter said with a pout.
“Well, if you two will excuse me...” Harrison said, turning to leave.
The man ran in front of him and screamed at him. “I’m telling the truth! The blue-coated, rainbow-maned pegasus talked!”
“Of course it did, sir. Might I suggest you lay off the Lone Stars unless you have a D-D?”
She couldn’t rightly tell at the moment. She’d made the mistake of underestimating that cloud formation from earlier, and now the violent air around her was intent on tossing her in every which direction. Darkness was everywhere and her wings were heavy with the weight from sheets of cold rain and the effort of sustained flight. She needed to find shelter, now. Desperately, she scanned the ground while fighting the angry storm, but all she could find for minutes on end was open, wet rocky ground. Everything seemed too exposed to keep her safe from the rainstorm. She was about ready to pick anywhere to land just for the sake of making sure she wasn’t knocked dead out of the sky, when her eyes suddenly caught something illuminated by a bright flash of lightning. It appeared to be some rocky overhang with darkness in the middle - possibly some sort of cave.
It would have to do for now. Putting in all the effort she could, Rainbow Dash dove hard towards her target, determined to outfly the storm’s wrath. As luck would have it, it indeed was the mouth of a cave. Seconds seemed to stretch into minutes until she finally arrived, rocketing her way in. A back part of her mind was surprised that there were lights placed randomly in the cave, illuminating it enough to where she could see, but the front part was more focused on just landing. Awkwardly accomplishing just that, Rainbow Dash tossed aside her saddlebags in some random direction and flopped against the cave wall, short of breath. Panting, she took a brief look around at her surroundings, observing the strange fluorescent glow that painted the cave’s features before closing her eyes.
The cave’s lights went out shortly after her’s did.
Rainbow Dash slowly stirred awake.
Blearily, she slowly opened her eyes, momentarily confused as to why her surroundings were still rather dark. As her eyes adjusted and the rest of her senses caught up with her, she saw the slick wall her face was nearly up against, heard irregular sounds of dripping water and squeaking noises and lastly, felt the cold, hard ground she had been lying on.
Cave floors don’t exactly make the most comfortable sleeping spaces, after all. The furry, leather-winged masses covering the stalactite-studded ceiling didn’t make the situation any better, either.
Groaning, Rainbow slowly got up, joints popping and feathers ruffling as she attempted to stretch and relieve the previous night’s stiffness from her body. She turned and searched in the dim light for her saddlebags to find them lying alone against a large stalagmite, the belongings still packed tightly inside. She could barely remember what happened, but she must’ve been so exhausted that she’d tossed them aside and passed out that night without a second thought. That rainstorm had come down so hard and turbulently and so late in the evening that there was just no point in fighting her way through it.
And this was supposed to be a desert for pony’s sake!
With a yawn, Rainbow Dash donned her saddlebags and began trotting out towards the mouth of the cave. A metal trail of posts and railings had been laid out sometime previously alongside a relatively smooth pathway ground down into the cave floor. Both of these together marked an uneven, ascending path out towards the entrance, making navigation to the outside thankfully easy.
Most of the walk was rather uneventful, save for Rainbow catching a couple unpleasantly cold drops of cave water on her head. Though as she made her way closer to the outermost entrance, the pathway began to change. The surface itself transitioned from a natural rough rocky surface to pavement, with the railings turning into neat and organized stone rows and walls that snaked tightly up alongside a extremely steep and layered rocky incline like a twisted stairway. The cave entrance arched high above the path like a vaulted ceiling. Rainbow took in the sight of the long winding path, semi-consciously ruffling her wings. Noting a feeling of stiffness still lingering from her night on the cave floor, she decided to continue following the long pathway up on hoof.
Ambient noises from all around began to slip Rainbow Dash’s mind into an almost meditative state as she ascended the winding pathway. Sounds from the waking desert life outside filtered into the cave, echoing and reverberating off the walls with the monotonous clopping sound of her hooves on the still-damp path that all combined into an almost rhythmic trance that surrounded her, yet was still partially lost in the vast cavern behind her.
The paved path widened out to an open area filled with row after ascending row of what looked like long stone benches. Small puddles of water leftover from the deluge of last night’s storm adorned the several of the uneven surfaces of the benches, bejeweling them with reflected colors from the early morning sky. The ambient noise from earlier had grown from a dull hum to more discernable noises from nature. A droning buzz from multitudes of insects filled the ever-so-slightly-damp air, punctuated by the occasional chirping of some species of bird. The gap in the noise once created by the void of the cave was now filled as the sound echoed back towards Rainbow’s twitching ears off of the top of the vaulted cave entrance behind her.
Rainbow Dash stood for a moment in the stone amphitheater, taking in more of the sights around her. Half of the area was still covered in shadow from the rocky cave wall’s obstruction of the light of the morning sun. Clusters of desert grasses and shrubs grew among the rugged rock and dirt and sand of the terrain, invigorated by the moisture delivered from the sky and altogether making the landscape appear a little greener than before. Groups of prickly pear cacti clustered together with some sprouting arrays of different brightly colored flowers, but all of them displaying sharp protective spines, daring anyone to get too close. To the left, a pair of information plaques stood vigilantly together; one listing various facts about bats and the other showing some kind of squiggling, odd map of some “Carlsbad Caverns”. As Rainbow looked higher, she could see the barest tips of higher parts of the terrain highlighted by the sun’s rays, kissed by its red-orange glow.
Rainbow turned her gaze fully towards the sky. Large, grey clouds were floating lazily above, contrasted on their fringes with the morning sunlight. The masses of water vapor were spread out in layered, almost patchwork groups that covered an otherwise deep blue sky mixed with a gradient of dawn. A light breeze occasionally blew over the area, lightly tossing wisps of Rainbow’s namesake mane around.
Inhaling deeply of the morning air, Rainbow Dash looked at her wings, giving them another stretch and a few experimental flaps. Satisfied that the stiffness from earlier now seemed to be somewhat worked out, she took to the sky to get a better look at the area.
Air rushed past Rainbow as she climbed higher in the sky. The slight dampness was now unnoticeable as she dove through the currents, as if in the span of a moment it had decided to return to its arid state from before the storm.
The wind was more pronounced as Rainbow hovered at a higher point above the surface, surveying the land. The light bending over the far horizon from the rising sun crept over almost every surface of the desert, bathing its normally beige, rocky surface in hues of red and gold that were contrasted in darker, almost blue-grey shadows from the many undulating surfaces of the terrain. The golden canvas was mottled with green and gray from many clumps of desert vegetation and changing rock formations. The cave had apparently been located in mountain range, high above the more-travelled valley. A latticework of smaller, less-travelled roads covered the landscape, wandering unevenly in every which direction save for a few areas, with small buildings appearing alongside some of the roads. In the far-off distance, Rainbow noticed a larger pair of parallel roads from the East that were winding in a mostly Southwestern direction through the valley below.
Rainbow observed the still looming clouds travelling in the direction she wanted to go ahead and behind her. In the event of another storm, it would be possible to fly above them ahead of time, but she would then be exposed to the direct sunlight as the day dragged on. Though it was not directly westward, Rainbow decided the road would be a safer landmark to follow in case of another storm, and that there might even be a safer (and possibly more comfortable) shelter along its path. And so, Rainbow decided to fly above the road, following it to wherever off-westward direction it went, keeping the jagged mountain range to her right.
The morning sun was higher in the sky now, hanging almost level with the many layered clouds, most of which had begun to dissipate. The roads below had become fewer, with the pair that comprised the highway that Rainbow flew alongside having since merged into a single two-lane road that wound over the uneven terrain, though now in a more directly Westward direction.
Rainbow Dash soared through the desert air, largely alone save for the occasional car either passing or being passed with ease as she sped by. Nary a bird was present with her in the air to keep her company, though the mountain range remained an ever-constant companion on her westward flight. It changed very little relative to Rainbow due to its massive size, yet was always moving around with its subtle changes in surface height. And as time passed on, it even began to slowly grow larger in size as it and the highway drew ever nearer together.
Ground began to meet sky as the road started to wind its way over and through the mountain, carving multiple sections through it in whatever open spaces could be found between the many smaller rocky growths on its surface. Feeling daring, Rainbow decided to amuse herself by adjusting her flight to closely match the surface and direction of the road. Its rapid peaks and valleys forced the pegasus to exercise her well-honed flight skills as she bobbed up, down, left, and right, constantly adjusting her wings to match the pace of the winding surface.
Eventually, the area began to open up and start descending. Rainbow’s keen eyesight caught sight of the telltale signs of a rest stop as she soared past. Branching roads sat offset from each other like opposing asphalt bulbs, topped with an assortment of shades and benches. Rainbow performed a tight turn as she wheeled back to make use of the area for a moment, deciding it was a good time to have some breakfast before travelling onwards.
Rainbow Dash sat on the bench in the shade, nibbling on her morning rations and taking in the scenery as she ate. More of the desert had woken up now as the mid-morning sun shone brighter. The song of birds and insects still filled the air. There was a brief rustle in some shrubs, the source soon revealing itself as a lizard dashed out into the open with a roadrunner hot on its tail. A locust buzzed past, tracing random patterns in the air. A brightly colored butterfly gave a more steady movement, its wings slowly opening and closing as it perched on a cactus flower. Out of the corner of Rainbow’s vision, tiny red ants busily made trails in an out of an anthill.
Behind her, one of the large clouds from the East had slowly rolled its way in. She observed it float harmlessly by, intersecting the peaks of the mountains behind her. As it did so, she began to realize just how high she was above sea level. The wisping, almost solid mass was markedly close to where she currently was, as if any small movement would put her on either side of it. It loomed over like an almost tangible ceiling of water vapor, seemingly able to be reached out and touched by any creature not already blessed with the gift of flight.
Of course, for a pegasus such as her, touching a cloud was just second nature. Still, Rainbow couldn’t help but be enthralled by the rather uncommon display of cloud meeting land in any other way besides a morning fog. Finishing off her breakfast, she decided to make a quick detour to the closest mountain peak enshrouded by the passing cloud. It wasn’t that much further away, anyhow.
Cottony masses burst in all directions as Rainbow Dash pierced through the bottom of the cloud some distance before the mountain peak. The once-ceiling had turned into a wide, wisping carpet as she slowly landed on the soft surface. The wide, white expanse stretched for what seemed like hundreds of feet in all directions until where the very ends broke off into a sky-blue void. Many peaks from the mountain burst through the surface of the cloud, floating triumphantly above it like islands in a rolling sea of white. Rainbow took a few steps forward on the cloud’s surface, relishing in the feeling of it beneath her hooves with each step. The surface in the sky reminded her a lot of home, and her mind soon drifted off to thoughts of Cloudsdale and its floating majesty as she ambled over the familiar surface.
Rainbow looked towards the closest peak - her original intended destination. A glint of bright light reflected off something on the top of the peak in the distance, catching her eye. Curious as to what this could be, she took wing and made for the mountain peak. As she drew closer, the reflecting light took a more noticeable shape. A strange, three-sided metal pyramid of some sort was perched solitarily on the rocky surface, as if standing guard on the mountain’s edge.
Particles of dust, rock, and small plant matter kicked up to the winds as Rainbow gracefully landed on the mountain peak. She had a much clearer view of the monument now as it stood in front of her. Scratches and corrosion on the surface of the monument imparted its age to the pegasus, leading her to figure that people must’ve placed it at this location long, long ago. Cracked stone masonry bordered each side at the base of the pyramid with the words “EL CAPITAN” etched in fading letters. Its apex was topped with a smaller, similar three-sided pyramid. Each surface of the larger shape was adorned with what looked like round, ornate bronze placards. One depicted an eagle in flight with the letters on both sides. Another side depicted a man riding a horse, with writing on the outer rim of the circle. On the final side closest to the edge of the peak, a compass rose was depicted on the the placard with a man wearing a goggled leather flight cap standing proudly in the center. A smaller placard sat below it, depicting a stagecoach and an airplane, and a dedication to brave airmen who formed some sort of airline transportation system.
Rainbow couldn’t help but smirk a little. She had seen much so far on her flight West, but she was still amazed at what the people in this world had accomplished. A people with no magic whatsoever had instead used their ingenuity and the tools they had to perform amazing feats such as achieving flight and carving their presence into the tallest of mountains.
Rainbow’s gaze followed the direction the West marker on the compass rose was pointing. Parts of the cloud had broken up below and now Rainbow could see the horizon much further than before. Much of the area lay visible below her from her vantage point, colored in a light haze made up of the dust blowing over the desert surface combined with the atmosphere itself. She followed the winding highway road from earlier, tracing its path as it ran down the mountain and off to its destination into the far-off Western horizon. Smaller roads branched off in multiple other directions, travelling to locations yet unseen. Circular patches of bright green lay grouped together in some parts of the horizon, likely from farmland belonging to farmers tenacious enough to tame the desert land. Beyond these, large splotches of bright white were spread out across most of the visible horizon, one of them bisected by the highway. These were far too white to be normal desert sands, Rainbow thought, but she didn’t have any other answers on hoof. Perhaps she’d take a closer look later.
As she stood there taking in the hazy desert expanse, Rainbow couldn’t help but feel as if she were on top of the world. She’d been to heights such as this peak back at home, but that was while flying. She’d never really taken the time to sit and look around, preferring to keep moving around. Her thoughts drifted back to the monument in front of her. She looked at it again, and began to briefly wonder if those who had placed it here had felt the same way, having traveled so high above the ground for possibly the first time in their lives.
Turning away from the shining monument, Rainbow Dash closed her eyes and took a deep breath of the dry mountain air. Slowly, she spread out her wings, feeling the wind blow through her feathers and her prismatic mane and tail. A moment later, she opened her eyes again. That was enough reflecting for now - she had a journey to make. With a quick run and a dive, Rainbow Dash glided off, continuing westward once more.
Rainbow Dash was flying west. Beneath her, an alpine sea of lodgepole pines stretched as far as she could see, blanketing the nearby mountains. Large swathes of snow still lingered this time of year, dotting the predominantly green landscape below with drifts of white; hidden in the shadows of hills and mountains. Flying at 10,000 feet, the air was equal parts crisp and chill, whipping past her wings at a steady pace as she worked her way across the great rocky mountains.
Holding a wildly flapping map in front of her eyes, Rainbow looked it over once more, muttering to herself. She looked down, poking her fuzzy blue muzzle below the paper, scanning the ground for a landmark… Any landmark!
“Stupid mountains go on forever!” the pegasus complained out loud. “You’d think the whole country was just-” She stopped mid sentence, eyes darting back to her map. She squinted, then looked forward again at a glint of blue between white peaks. Folding the map and stuffing it into her bag, Rainbow redoubled her effort, rocketing toward the large body of water in the distance.
Cresting one last line of forested hills, Rainbow Dash entered a great bowl shaped valley that stretched on for miles. Directly beneath her, in the south-western part of the valley, was a rather expansive alpine lake.
“This has gotta be it!” Rainbow exclaimed “There’s no other lakes this big anywhere near here.”
With that, she descended swiftly down to the surface of the water, only to find a solid layer of ice where lapping waves ought be. Pulling up short of becoming a blue pegasus-shaped pancake, Rainbow Dash hovered just above the hardened surface.
“Huh. Frozen solid, this time of year?” she said, landing lightly on the cold expanse, “Well, it is way up in the mountains after all,” she laughed, jumping in place a few times.
With a sound that sent shivers down her spine, Rainbow Dash watched a crack shoot off as far as she could see. “Umm…”
Slowly, so very slowly, she moved her hoof away from the single large brake in the otherwise pristine surface of the lake. With a low groan and a sharp popping sound, a second crack made its way, lighting fast in another direction. “Nope,” she noped, unfolding her wings and kicking off the doomed ice with what some might call an unseemly haste.
Floating now at what she perceived to be a far healthier distance from the breaking ice, Rainbow Dash watched in no small fascination as hundreds of cracks began spider-webbing their way out for miles in every direction. Then, without any fuss or an ounce of aplomb, the whole of the ice topping the lake sunk beneath the surface in one go, leaving not a single ripple behind.
It all happened much faster than one would have thought, especially considering the size of the body of water in question. Rainbow Dash blinked, then—cold sweat running down her neck—she looked about for any witnesses. Seeing nobody around, she booked it out of dodge, double fast.
Flying over the west thumb of the lake, she looked back with a grimace and a muttered. “Um, it was like that when I got here. Yeah.” With an assertive nod she turned back west, gaining altitude.
“Now then,” She pulled her map back out of her bag, “where was I again?” Her eyes darted across the map until she once more found the lake she had so recently watched sink.
She blinked, thinking of how odd that sounded, then moved on. After fifteen minutes or so of flying in a generally westerly direction, her attention was again seized. Below, the wooden sea of ever present evergreens was broken once more, this time by the first sign of civilization she had seen all day.
Several large wooden buildings were spaced out below, surrounded by proportionately over sized parking lots on all sides. All of which seemed to be focused on -or rather, radiating out from- a large patch of lifeless bone white earth, no more than a thousand feet across. Picking the largest of the structures, Rainbow Dash made a beeline for the front doors; intending to get directions. Not that she needed them or anything.
Getting closer, Rainbow noticed that the building she was flying to was made completely out of logs. In fact, it had to be the biggest log cabin she had ever seen. The thing was a hundred feet tall, if not more! The entrance way was lined with what looked to have been the cross sections of whole trees, that five Ponies could have wrapped themselves around tip-to-tail.
As she approached the the line of front doors, a large group of people were just leaving. Darting to one side, Rainbow Dash waited for the last of them to pass through the large hinged, glass and brass portals. The last one through was a young girl, no more than eight years old. Rainbow darted between the little girl and the closing door, giving a wink to the gawking child as she slipped inside.
Rainbow Dash was still smirking as she turned her head to survey the inside of the lodge she had just entered. Pulling up short, she looked out at the hall around her. “Woah.” This part of the building was one great room, the centerpiece of which was a colossal rough stone fireplace. 500-tons, and 85 feet tall, it went all the way up and out one side of the slanting roof; a roof that was supported by a framework of logs that brought to mind a mixture of living trees, and some kind of great over sized tree house. Juxtaposed against these was a floor of pine that was polished to a shining gleam. Rugs dotted the room, as well as many pieces of beautifully crafted log furniture. All the railings were the same brass as the front doors had been made from. The room had few windows, instead being lit up be a hundred electric lights, all made to resemble candles. The overall effect was stunning. The whole of it had been made with one thought in mind: rustic opulence.
About to find someone to help her with those directions, Rainbow Dash was instead distracted by the smell of something. A something that reminded her that her last meal had been longer ago than she cared to think. After a short search, she homed in on the source of that smell. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” She muttered, trotting her way to one of the doorways leading off the great hall.
A wooden host stand—trimmed in polished brass—sat at the entrance to the dining room beyond, the source of her tummies' rumblings. Manning the post this time of day were two hosts in matching uniforms. They both saw her approach with looks of disbelief on their faces.
The first to snap out of her shock was a middle aged woman with her hair in a bun and sporting a pair of glasses. Her years of experience bringing a smile to her face. “Wel-” She cleared her throat. “Ahem. Welcome to the Old Faithful dining room, are we going to be a party of one for lunch?” She asked in a pleasant tone, with only a small waver to her voice.
Rainbow Dash smiled back. “One awesome blue pegasus pony for lunch please,” she replied with a smirk.
“Of course, if you would be so kind as to follow Tim, he’ll take you to your table.” She gestured to her fellow host standing next to her.
Looking over at him, a slight grimace appeared on her face. She unobtrusively kicked the young man in the ankle. He yelped, breaking his open-mouthed stare at the little Pony looking up at him expectantly. “Right this way please!” He said, a little too loudly.
He turned and started walking away when he was stopped by the older woman. He looked at her questioningly. She simply looked back at him, holding out a menu in her hand. With a blush, he grabbed the proffered menu and continued to the table. A very amused Rainbow Dash suppressed a snigger as she followed in his wake. This never got old.
When she got to her table, the host told her that her server would be right with her, and retreated back to the host stand. Rainbow Dash hopped up onto her seat and unfolded her menu. By the time the server had arrived, Rainbow had decided on lunch. “Summer squash soup, Three cheese fettuccine and…” She looked over the drink list. “A stinger hard apple cider.” She finished.
The server -A young woman this time- blinked. Deciding against asking for ID, for her own sanity if for nothing else. She left to put in the order.
After the meal had met its doom, Rainbow Dash left a small pile of Bits on the check. “Keep the change!” she said, turning towards the door. The servers smile went a little crooked, her eye twitched ever so slightly. Picking up the check, She sighed. “Have a lovely day.”
Just outside the front doors of the lodge, Rainbow Dash saw that there were far more people out then there were when she had arrived. A crowd of hundreds, if not thousands were gathered on the boardwalks surrounding the large patch of lifeless ground she had noticed before. Never one to be left out, she flapped her wings and made her way over to see what all the hullabaloo was about.
Floating over the heads of all the spectators below, she had a great view of what lay at the center of the area. About five hundred feet away was a small, spurting geyser of water. Every time it so much as made a hiccup of steam, the people murmured and pointed. The thing never got more than four feet up before sputtering out.
“That’s it?” She asked no one in particular. “Wow, these people have gotta be starved for entertainment if they all come out to flank-fudge nowhere to see this thing.”
She was about to flap away, when the little geyser of water dropped out of sight completely. The crowd fell silent in anticipation. Rainbow Dash turned back to look. Suddenly, the water came back with a vengeance. Pouring out of the ground in astonishing volume, the burning hot water went up up up into the air. Reaching a peak of 180 feet, the geyser was twice as tall as the wooden building Rainbow Dash had just had lunch in. The full eruption went on for almost four minutes.
“Well… That was snazzy!” She said with a smile. Giving her wings a great flap, she launched back into the high air. A grin still on her face, she made her way west. Only later did she realize she had forgotten to ask for directions.
Rainbow Dash closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the strange dichotomy of the chill morning wind in her face and basking in the warm sunlight bathing her back as the dawn rose behind her.
She'd gotten an early start this morning, too filled with nervous, excited energy to sleep for long. As she looked down across the plains beneath her She decided the view was worth the lack of sleep.
As far as the eye could see in every direction, the ground beneath her was covered in tall stalks of wheat. This in tandem with the fresh sunlight created the illusion that the whole world was covered in a near endless rippling wave of gold dancing in the wind, with only the occasional field of vibrant flax, forming purple-blue lakes and the occasional bright red farmhouse the otherwise unbroken view.
All this was further punctuated by the vast sprawl of the rocky mountains peaking up over the far western horizon.
Dash smiled and laughed soaring above the fields doing lazy zig-zags and flips, dashing her way between stray clouds soaking in the natural beauty of the lands around her. The hours seemed to slip away like this, small towns popping up in the distance and drifting away behind her. At one point she even stopped to take a nap and eat a quick lunch in a small copse of trees that stuck up like an island amidst the golden waves of the world around her.
As dawn turned to dusk the scenery began to shift, fields of blue and golden yellow shifting to the green of grass, roads and highways began to criss-cross the landscape and much more regular intervals, and a great city began to rise up above the distant horizon. Sprawling residential districts and massive skyscrapers overtook everything in sight as the sun began to set.
Lights... that was perhaps the best way to describe the cityscape from above. As the sun settled gently behind the mountains The whole city filled with lights, from street lamps along the roads to the hundreds of windows in the towers that loomed above them.
One such tower was a tall spire, beneath a large glass room topped by an antenna. Its colours and shape were vaguely reminiscent of a lighthouse until it suddenly lit up in a vibrant display of flashing colours and neon lights.
Rainbow Dash flew in for a closer look, admiring the myriad of colours as the lights shifted and flickered. The cyan pegasus flew a few loops around the building, taking a peek inside the windows to find a restaurant that rotated slowly as the customers ate, providing them a constantly shifting view of the cities skyline, and now of a certain curious rainbow-coloured observer peeking in on them.
She laughed and saluted as a few of the diners took notice of her and began to point and stare before zipping away as quick as her wings could carry her, The night was still young and she wanted to put some distance between her and the city before settling down to sleep under the stars.
She flew deep into the night. Some kind of manic energy drove Rainbow Dash forward far after the sun had dipped beyond the western horizon. So onward she flew, using senses other than sight to guide her path. There was no moon tonight, and what faint glimmer of starlight there was did nothing to illuminate the terrain far beneath her wings.
Flying blindly, Rainbow Dash was still aware of her general direction and the currents of the winds, yet, as she continued onward, she encountered a patch of still air. The prevailing winds had calmed, and for several minutes she had to put significant effort into maintaining her altitude. She paused, hovering for a moment to assess her situation, and realized now with a sudden intensity that she was exhausted. It was time to land and rest.
She began a slow, careful descent through the darkness, senses hyper-aware for sudden shifts in air currents, but she felt almost nothing in the air around her to give her clues as to the terrain beneath her. Then, suddenly, the winds picked up again. She was overwhelmed by the speed and intensity of the change. Sound assailed her as the wind built into a gale and then just as swiftly calmed again. She was buffeted by several more gusts as she neared the ground, but while the unpredictable winds made it more difficult to fly, they also gave her clues about the ground beneath her: wind whistled through stone in the distance, plants beneath her brushed against their surroundings, and the scattering of tiny updrafts told her how close she was to the ground. It was enough, barely, to make a landing in unseen territory possible.
The landing was still difficult, and a surprising downdraft made Rainbow Dash land harder than she intended. Some kind of large, loose gravel shifted beneath her hooves as she touched down, and, for a moment, Rainbow Dash lost her footing and began to slide down some unseen slope. Rainbow Dash wouldn’t have any of that, however, and she cut the slide short by grinding her hooves hard into the stones and fanned her wings to halt her forward motion.
Rocks continued to tumble past her as Rainbow Dash crouched in the darkness, ready to leap back into the air if the ground shifted unexpectedly again, but after the brief mishap the space around her seemed stable once more. The rocks beneath her hooves were strangely irregular as she took a few cautious steps: some were sharp and jagged, others hard and brittle, still others almost powdery. It was a bizarre mix of sensations still further confounded when her next step landed on a much larger stone surface. Yet even this rock had a confusing texture to it: hard, yet pocked with countless holes and almost granular in feeling. She could feel small chunks of the rock coming free as she tested it further with a hoof. It was brittle and weak.
Rainbow Dash considered taking wing again and attempting to find some more hospitable, or at least comfortable, location for her bed for the night, but a wave of exhaustion flooded into her at the thought. What was the point? In this pitch blackness she would as likely find a worse spot as a better one, if one even existed. She could make due by clearing a space of the more jagged and uncomfortable stones before wrapping herself up in her blanket. She positioned herself to use the larger stone as a windbreak against the inconsistent gusts. Dawn would only be a few hours away in any case, and then she could make a proper assessment of her location.
##
When Rainbow Dash opened her eyes, she was still surrounded by darkness. It was just past dawn. The sun shone down directly on her, and yet everything around her was covered in black. The stones beneath her, and that larger rock she had huddled next to as a windbreak, everything she could see in every direction from where she stood, they were all variations on the theme of black.
Everything in the vicinity looked as if it had been burned, yet as Rainbow Dash inhaled deeply, searching for the telltale scent of burnt earth and vegetation, she smelled none of it. The only thing that caught her notice was the faint scent of flowers. Whenever this destruction had happened, it had been a long time ago.
At first glance, everything around her seemed desolate and utterly devoid of life, but there were patches of dry scrub scattered about in little divots all around. Life always finds a way, somehow, she thought. She strode slowly to the top of the small hill she had landed on the night before imagining all the while the scope of whatever cataclysmic event had caused this level of destruction. She had seen volcanoes before, but this place was missing the obvious source: there was no mountain cone, nothing that could account for the sheer scale of this devastation.
The small hill Rainbow Dash stood on was just one of many in the area. There were perhaps a dozen similar formations of loose volcanic fragments within a short walk of each other, and she stood atop one of the smaller ones. In the distance, to the northeast perhaps a couple miles out, she could just make out a spot of color in the otherwise bleak expanse. It would be worth a closer look at least, for the chance of water if nothing else.
She took flight then, rising far higher than necessary for the distance to get a better sense of the lay of the land around her. But as she flew higher, a chill settled itself deep into her bones. The black swath of destruction spread in every direction as far as she could see. It wasn’t regular: some areas had what looked to be fine black sand, others matched her first landing zone with mounds of gravel, still others had monolithic spires of stone. One area, which looked smooth and glassy from above, looked almost like a riverbed, but with no trace of moisture to it
Still, her current goal was to examine the color in the distance. As she grew nearer, the spot grew more defined: there were rows of wildflowers planted, as if in a garden along the south-facing slope of the hill. The flowers stood in sharp contrast to the black soil they were planted in, and, even from a distance, it was clear to Rainbow Dash that the gravel of this hill was as fine as soil. She landed briefly and nibbled at one of the flowers. It held only the barest amount of moisture in it, enough to barely keep it alive, but hardly enough to sustain a pony such as Rainbow Dash.
She checked the ground more thoroughly, looking for signs of someone who might tend the garden of flowers, but the only traces she spotted in the loose ground looked like those of field mice. The flowers formed precise rows and columns, but there was nothing to indicate this little patch of life had ever been tended to. With a shrug, Rainbow Dash ate a few more flowers. Despite being wild, and a bit dry, they had a trace of a familiar taste to them that reminded her of home. But this was not the time and definitely not the place for aimlessly reminiscing about the past. She took to the sky again, spiraling rapidly upward on an updraft. She had a decision to make: she could turn back briefly and avoid this dead landscape (she would only have to fly back at most a few hours), or she could press onward into uncertain danger and the unknown vastness of the devastation. Aww, who am I kidding, she thought, I’m Rainbow Dash. There’s no choice to make at all.
She flew west, deeper into the darkness.
##
As she flew, Rainbow Dash was surprised at how a landscape of seemingly singular color could have so much variation in it. There were hills, valleys, crags, caves, fissures, craters, riverbeds, and even open flat regions of the black rock. She maintained a relatively low altitude, making use of the air currents being created as the dark ground absorbed the sun’s heat. She was almost buoyed by a wave of air cooking off the black fields. It was faster than she had expected, and almost effortless once she found the right altitude. Above or below her, the air swirled unpredictably, but here she had almost constant lift and forward momentum.
She still spotted the occasional little patch of dry scrub or the infrequent wildflower, but nothing quite caught her attention as much as that first garden-like hill. She kept her senses alert for anything that might indicate a source of water or a change in the landscape ahead. Hours passed without anything, and as the sun began to set, Rainbow Dash felt that tiny trace of fear that she might have made a mistake.
The leading edge of the sun dipped into the horizon just as she found a suitable place to rest for the night. A pony-sized ledge jutted out from a short cliff that overlooked a patch of flat ground that went North and South for miles. It had good visibility of anything that might approach, would be difficult for anything but a fellow flyer to reach, and would shelter her from the chill gusts of wind that had made the previous night less than comfortable. She would need to find water in the next day or so, or things would turn ugly, but that was a problem for the next day, and now that she’d finally stopped to rest, she fell almost instantly asleep.
##
When Rainbow Dash awoke the next morning, she noticed that her exposed skin and blanket were slightly damp. There were traces of dew all along the rock outcropping she had rested in. Of course, the rapid swings in temperature between night and day would cause some condensation on sections of stone that didn’t start the day in the sun. The amount wasn’t so much that a pony could live on, but it explained the garden-like arrangement of the flowers: they were simply spaced just far enough apart that each flower consumed its own area of what little daily moisture was available. Still, the sun was already up, and if she wanted to make full use of the currents of air, she’d best set out sooner rather than later.
Down below her perch, there was no visible trace of water, so whatever dew might have collected overnight must have already either seeped into the ground or evaporated in the direct sunlight. There was no point in sticking around and wasting daylight, so Rainbow Dash set off once again. The landscape shifted as she flew, from large swaths of the varied gravel to stretches of smoother rock formations and deep craters. There were deep pockets of shadow in certain of these, and as Rainbow Dash flew low over one, she flew into a chill breeze flowing out of one deep patch of shadow with the telltale scent of water.
She landed carefully on the edge of the crater. There were several cave entrances here, but only in one did she see something that immediately caught her attention: the gleam of white against the black of the rock: snow. She rushed forward, eager to slake a thirst, which once acknowledged could not be ignored. A mere step from the edge of the pile of snow, something gave in the rock beneath her hooves. A loud CRACK filled her ears, and a section of the rock the size of a small room sank beneath her. Rainbow Dash started to catch her fall with her wings when the bulk of the pile of snow slid into her and carried both of them down into darkness.
##
She must’ve hit her head on something on the way down, because she woke up half-buried by snow at the bottom of a wide hole in the rock. Apparently, there was a tunnel just below the first cave, and it had a very weak roof to it. Shivering uncontrollably, Rainbow Dash crawled out of the snow and looked around. The hole in the roof above let in some light, enough that she could see the tunnel she was now in extended out of sight in two directions. One side was noticeably lower than the other, so it was clear the tunnel burrowed deeper into the rock in that direction. The other direction curved up slightly and the walls curled somewhat to the side before fading into darkness.
But it didn’t really matter where this tunnel went. Rainbow Dash intended to fly back out of the hole she had fallen through. She packed as much snow into her canteen as she could and ate as much as she could until her face started to hurt with the cold. Her body heat would melt the rest in time once she was out of here. With a final look in either direction, Rainbow Dash flew upward back through the hole in the floor of the cavern above. It wasn’t a difficult ascent, though she felt a little wobbly on the wing after her blow to the head. Still, it was nothing she couldn’t handle.
Now with water once more, she left the cave and took to the open sky. The caverns and tunnels beneath the dead wasteland intrigued her, but their mystery would have to remain unsolved unless she ever made it back here with the proper resources. For now she would simply have to continue on her way west.
Within a few hours she caught sight of a line of brown and green on the horizon. Whatever destruction had claimed the land she had been in had reached its end not too far away. She looked back at the wastelands behind her. The division between the hills around the expanse of darkness was sharp, like the difference between night and day. It was almost as if the landscape itself was a dark cousin of the moon, pocked with craters and almost devoid of life. But she was past it now, and the rest of her journey lay ahead of her. Rainbow Dash turned again toward the setting sun and flew west.
Rainbow Dash shivered, the cold wind blowing blisteringly cold rain directly against her petite body. This was nothing new to the cyan pegasus, as she had endured hours of this painful weather in her journey west. However, by now Rainbow’s normally fuzzy fur had become quite damp and stuck to her skin, chilling her to the core. Knowing that she couldn’t handle this weather for much longer, Rainbow’s eyes searched constantly downwards, hoping to spot a safe landing sight. Unfortunately, an icy mist surrounded her—blocking out much of the light—and giving Rainbow no vision of the ground below. In fact, the only reason Rainbow knew she was still moving westwards were the mountain peaks that occasionally broke out of the mist, often directly in front of the fuzzy pony. Only her swift reactions had prevented her from smashing into these looming peaks. With a deep sigh and no land in sight, Rainbow steeled herself against the storm and pushed onward; her westward flight path slowly descending towards what she hoped was the ground.
There! Thrust out from the sea of mists stood a grand mountain, several times larger than any peaks she’d found beforehand. A smile graced Rainbow’s face as she moved towards it, searching for a somewhat flat area in order to land.
Once again, luck was with the pegasus as she spotted a flat cliff face on which to land. Moving with newfound purpose, Rainbow’s decent steepened before leveling off for a landing on the cold, rocky mountainside.
Rainbow’s morale only continued to raise as she noticed a shallow cavern in which she could shelter from the freezing rain. She quickly cantered over to the cavern and set to work creating a fire to dry her damp fur. After a short struggle to remember her camp outs with Applejack, Rainbow managed to get a fire going, and soon a small light filled the cavern. Rainbow let out a content sigh as the warmth of the flames finally reached her. She laid down as comfortably as she could manage, as the warmth slowly lulled her into a dreamless sleep.
It was daylight that finally pulled the pony from the warm clutches of sleep. Rainbow let out a loud yawn and blinked the sleep from her eyes. In doing so she let a gasp as she took in the environment before her. The mist had long since burned away in the morning light and the mountain range was fully visible. It seemed that the mountain she had spend the night on was one that overlooked a vibrant valley teeming with life, with a lazy river snaking its way through the center of it all, flanked by tall trees. All of this lush greenery was framed by the mountains on either side.
Rainbow smiled, for it was sights such as these that gave her the drive to keep moving it on; and with no further ado she leaped off the cliff and soared into the sky. Heading forever westwards.
Rainbow Dash skimmed low across the desert plain, thirsty eyes fixed beadily on the blessedly white mountain on the horizon. Below her, exposed topsoil mixed with sand reflected the sun’s heat like a yellow mirror, baking her blue body top and bottom. She would have panted, but the black smudges on her goggles told her that was never a good idea mid-flight.
There was a highway in the distance to her left, far enough that its noise was inaudible, yet close enough that she could make out and race against any cars that happened to be fast enough. That had been her plan, at least. Both were presently irrelevant due to the absence of traffic, so the road remained nothing more than a black, two-lane line in her peripheral, serving no purpose aside from being long for long’s sake. It reminded her of her journey.
The mountain still swam in her vision, growing no closer despite her speed. She wanted to think herself an expert at judging distances, but the only units she could presently think of were “almost there” and “not close enough”. Wings beating only six times a minute, Rainbow let the heat do the work for her, riding the bubble of energy that emitted from the ground for most of her lift. Pegasus magic was interesting, sometimes.
In the distance to her right, a jet trail stretched across the sky like a gash from a fluffy white knife. At that, she smirked; an airplane would be fun to race. But it was going the wrong way, and the last time she’d tried, she hadn’t been anywhere near able to match its altitude before forced down by ice forming in her wings.
She felt herself sagging in altitude and looked down, deciding not to pull up. Sparse strands of tall yellow grass- more likely some sort of weed- waved at her belly, never quite tall enough to tickle her but always an inch away. Rainbow smirked harder; this was one field of grass that would never get to see her again. Or maybe it would. She hadn’t really thought that far in advance.
The mountain was growing closer, causing Rainbow’s heart to simultaneously raise and sink. It still looked so tiny on the horizon, and if it was enlarging at this speed, she had to be close. It couldn’t possibly be as big as she’d hoped. On the other hoof, though, the empty canteen sitting limply in her saddlebag reminded her of what she really was after, as did the dry lump in her throat. Stretching her neck out and adding in a few extra flaps for speed, Rainbow Dash shot ahead, mind filling with images of cold snow.
Ten minutes later, Rainbow Dash breezed up an incline that would have been impossible on hoof, watching with smug satisfaction as yellow turned to black beneath her and hard gray stones became the dominating factor in the environment. The temperature dropped noticeably as she gained altitude, sliding across her finely-tunes weatherpony senses like a stream around a rock. Each degree ticked in her eyes like a clock, and she broke her no-panting rule out of anticipation. It wasn’t like there were any bugs this high up, anyway.
The moment she breached the snow line, Rainbow Dash flipped up, pulled herself into a midair roll, and cannonballed downwards. Being Rainbow Dash, this still left her dozens of meters further than she needed to go, and she found herself ploughing headfirst into a massive drift as a result. She burst out on the other side grinning, a snowball in each hoof and twice as much clinging to her mane.
Ommmpfhg. Rainbow instantly stuffed one hooffull into her parched muzzle, sighing internally at the wonderful cold. She could have flown higher up to stay cool until she found water, true, but that made moments like this much less rewarding. And, if nothing else, unnecessary challenges and well-earned rewards made a journey like hers that much more worth making.
As she crammed in the second one and reached to scoop up more, she realized she wasn’t alone. She lay on the edge of a recently-ploughed parking lot, and several mighty vehicles were parked there, dormant and abandoned. Just as well, Rainbow thought. She was exotic enough that any time she stopped, there would be questions, and those questions would lead to stories and a storm of admiration or- less fortunately- her being ran off. Right now, all she wanted to do was enjoy her snow.
Raising a double-hooffull, Rainbow Dash slammed it into her face like a throwing pie, giggling slightly at the mental image. She let herself fall backwards, stretching out all four legs and swinging them about, doing her best to make an impression in the snow. Mostly, she just succeeded in trapping her prismatic tail in packed whiteness.
Pouting slightly, Rainbow freed herself, taking a last bite of snow for good measure. She then laid out her saddlebag, pulled out and uncorked her flask, and swished it through the snow like a net.
She pulled it out and stared down into it with one ruby eye, gave it a shake, and tapped at the bit of snow stuck on top with the edge of a hoof. Sighing, she flopped backwards again, taking snow one bit at a time and pushing it down the neck with her wingtips. The thought to just look for a fountain crossed her mind, but like her flight earlier, this way made it much more well-deserved.
With a rush of satisfaction, Rainbow Dash finally finished refilling her water. As she twisted and shoved the cap back into place, a low growl sounded across the mountain, heralding a new car driving its way into the lot.
Rainbow’s eyes widened. “Whuh-oh. Looks like I better bail.” Hurriedly and with the grace of someone who didn’t need to practice, but had done so anyway, she tossed the canteen back into her mostly-empty bags, snapped them closed, flipped them onto her back and kicked off the ground in one smooth motion, not forgetting to take a final helping of snow in her hooves.
Briefly, she considered dropping it on the antlike car that was crawling into a parking space below her, and she cackled softly. It would be funny, wouldn’t hurt anyone, and they had just accidentally evicted her… but instead she opened her mouth and pushed all the snow in. It was her reward, after all. And if she got cold enough crossing to the west, the desert beyond would taste that much sweeter when she got there.
Rainbow Dash slowly lowered herself down onto the small perch below her and looked around, trying to make heads or tails out of her surroundings. Far below her, the world was lit up. Lights in every direction, lots of motion, and noise. So much noise. Not even Manehattan created this much of a din.
Rainbow Dash dropped off her perch and onto the circular platform far below it. She could feel it moving under her hooves; there was a lot of movement coming from whatever it was she was standing on. She hadn’t gotten a good look at it; she had just seen the massive structure, and homed in on the large needle that reached to the sky.
The whole structure seemed to be alive with activity. As she trotted along the platform, she could feel gentle vibrations coming from directly below her. And above the sound of the wind rushing by her ears, she could hear the unmistakable sound of voices.
She pressed her ear to the cold surface; there was no doubt about it, there were voices directly below her. Her curiosity was starting to get the better of her, and she started inching towards the edge to peek over. She wasn’t sure what kind of creatures could be lurking down there, and as eager as she was to find out who was down there, she had too many nagging concerns to rush in as she usually did.
She was just starting to peek out over the edge, when something cold batted the back of her head. Rainbow Dash turned skyward, only to start getting hit with a volley of raindrops coming from a rain cloud far above. Only seconds later, the few drops had turned into an outright downpour, and she suddenly found herself completely soaked.
Abandoning her quest to find out where the voices from, Rainbow scrambled up into the air and shot skyward, her eyes shut tightly as she sped through the cloud.
Though the sun had set below the clouds, the remaining warmth of the day was enough for Rainbow Dash, and she settled down on the top of the cloud to dry off. As she did, she carved out a hole in the cloud below her and poked her head through, hoping to get some sort of glimpse at what could have been inside the giant needle building.
It was directly below her, and she couldn’t get a good view of whatever lie below it. But as she looked around, she started to get a scope of the world around her. She pulled her head back through and carefully cut a circular patch of cloud below her, then gently flapped her wings until it had lowered enough below the rest of the clouds so she could look around freely.
Below her, things were lighting up more and more as the sun was lowering, but it was still just barely high enough in the sky to illuminate a lot of the world. Despite all the artificial light below her, she could also see large patches of green dotted throughout. It was the opposite of every town she had even seen in Equestria; the green was there, but it was dominated by buildings that stretched higher than anything she had seen before. And in the distance, she could make out a great mountain stretching high into the sky. Rainbow Dash slowly looked back and forth at the scenery before her: she had never seen anything quite like it, even in the busiest parts of Equestria.
Equestria… Rainbow Dash sighed. She missed home. Everything here was so different, so unnatural, so…
She stopped as she gazed towards the West. There were a few scattered islands, but most importantly, she could see water. A lot of water. And in the back of her mind, she knew that if she just kept flying that way, there would be more. This was no time to think about Equestria; right now, something was calling her name, she was determined to find out what.
She stood back up and stretched her wings out, then took off into the air again. The cloud below her dissipated as she kicked off of it, and she took one last look at the rainy scene below her before turning and flying West.
She had left the lush mountains behind, many miles ago. The start of her journey lay back east, across days and days of flying. Below her, now, were green valleys, almost reminiscent of Equestria in some ways. Towns and cities dotted the landscape below her, and buildings stretched towards the sky. She chose to stay up high, out of sight of prying eyes, but below some of the strange vehicles that she'd seen flying in the upper atmosphere above the clouds. There was a happy altitude where her only companions were birds, who chirped and wheeled around her, curious. She thought, briefly, of Fluttershy. Experimentally, she reached down and tapped on her pendant, but the Element of Loyalty did not react. She sighed and pushed herself through a fluffy cloud, darting through the mass of cloud stuff to survey the ground below.
Below her was an urban sprawl, the likes of which she'd only seen on this world. It was grey and a little depressing, with dots of green and blue where homeowners maintained lawns or pools. She flew over a winding river that was widening out, the grey water impenetrable to even her excellent vision. To her west was another big city, with masses of the giant glass buildings that glittered in the sun. They were beautiful, in their own way, these behemoths, but nothing like the artistry of Canterlot, or the soaring spires of Cloudsdale.
She missed home.
Her eyes roamed over the landscape ahead, following the line of the river towards... bridges. Two of them. They were both very large, but one... one stood out. This bridge was a russet-red color that shone in the setting sun, with massive cables that ran along the length of it, supporting the structure on great towers that sat at either end of the span. It was majestic, with these swooping supports and lines spaced evenly in a masterpiece of engineering and artistry. It would have been comfortable in Equestria, where the architects cared for form as well as function.
Beyond this bridge was a glittering expanse of blue that stretched out beyond the horizon. An ocean. Rainbow Dash gasped, glancing over her shoulder, taking in for a brief moment the fact that she'd crossed a continent. It wasn't a new feeling, exactly, but it was new to her in this place. She'd crossed a lot of continents in her time. The excitement of the moment faded a bit, until she realized that she was likely the first pegasus pony to fly across this continent, ever. That was a little bit cooler.
There was a problem ahead of her, though. An ocean. She scowled and muttered under her breath, "Stupid oceans. I hate crossing oceans."
They were just so big, and it took such a long time to cross them. She sighed and did a wing-over maneuver, bleeding away airspeed and dropping in a swift arc downward, to land on the roof of a larger building. She'd been able to read the words easily enough. "Community Center."
She perched atop the roof as the sun set, and the lights inside turned on, bathing the area around the building in a warm glow. She flew a quick circuit around the building, before dropping down to the front entrance and trotting in through the glass doors. The foyer of the place was small, with a table set off to one side, and a branching hallway that went deeper into the community center. Rainbow Dash looked over the contents of the table. She saw advertisements, job postings, self-help pamphlets, before spotting what she wanted: travel guides and maps. She hopped up on the table and grabbed the maps with her mouth, her nose scrunching at the taste. She fluttered back out of the front door and back onto the roof.
There was enough light to read by, and she examined the maps carefully, noting distances and orienting herself to the nearby landmarks. She plotted a route over the ocean, noting that there were a multitude of small islands between her position in "San Francisco" and "Japan", the next major landmass across the ocean. She nodded to herself and stretched her wings, before hopping into the air once more. She needed to find a place to sleep for the night, and she had an idea as to where she wanted to perch.
Across river she went, and over the city, to a wharf area that was lined with small shops. There were restaurants here, and she could smell food in the air... food, and one very distinct scent: bread. Good bread.
She landed on the roof of a warehouse-like building that sat along the wharf. A huge white tower sat nearby, with a nearly heraldic crest stamped on its side. The words "Boudin Sourdough" flanked wheat stalks and a stylized 'B'. The smell of the bread was incredible, and mouth-watering. Rainbow Dash watched as people came and went through the front doors of this place. She snuck around the back, to perch over a rear entrance. It wasn't long before an employee wearing an apron and a white hat stepped outside, their eyes glued to a little glowing device in their hands. They didn't even notice that the door took a few extra seconds to close behind them. Rainbow Dash found herself in a back room, surrounded by bread. Bread on racks and racks, cooling, setting, being prepared for sale. She eyed a few loaves with uncertainty, before her eyes settled on something unique.
A loaf of bread shaped like a tortoise.
Rainbow Dash grinned and, with a flap of her wings, grabbed the tortoise and absconded out the rear exit. She reached the roof of the building and smirked, holding up her prize. The carbohydrate tortoise stared back unblinkingly. Without hesitation, Rainbow Dash bit into the bread, savoring the complex, yeasty flavor. It was very, very good. Maybe not Sugarcube Corner good, but it was perhaps the best bread she'd had in this world. The food filled her up quickly, left her satisfied, and she flew to a perch next to a chimney spout atop the bakery, where the warmth of the ovens heated the metal chimney. The chill off the ocean wasn't as bad, here.
Rainbow Dash slept soundly.
In the morning, she woke up before the dawn as the sound of bakers arriving early to work roused her. She grumbled a bit, but she used the same trick she had the previous evening, snagging a second loaf of bread and having breakfast. She felt great. Ready to tackle an ocean. She closed her eyes, thinking back to the map she'd memorized the previous night, and then nodded to herself. She glanced down at the pendant. "So... are we going west?"
Rainbow Dash reached out a hoof and tapped the element of harmony, and it finally sparked. Her eyes widened in surprise. "Seriously? Now? After all these miles, now's the time you decide to work?"
A red flicker of light, very dim, was her only answer. She turned in a slow circle, and the light grew brighter as she faced West. With a final wink, the light went out again. Rainbow Dash faced west, and nodded. "Island hopping, then. Let's see what kind of strange stuff happens on this ocean crossing."
Rainbow Dash flew west, over the ocean, towards parts unknown.
Rainbow Dash stretched her wings, feathers fluttering in the high winds. Her hooves pushed against the cloud she rested on. Oceanic crossings were never fun, though being able to fly over it made it much less of a headache.
Her late lunch finished, the pegasus pushed off the cloud to get as far as she could before the setting sun in front of her disappeared over the horizon. It was a fairly uneventful day, with the occasional seabird gliding by to blink curiously at the prismatic mare.
As the sun was about to set, Rainbow Dash caught sight of a glint of light far below her. Eager for a bit of mental stimulation, she darted below the cloud cover to examine it. It was a floating golden ring, with strange runes stamped on the edges. There was crackling energy dancing inside the ring, blurring the view of the other side.
Huh. Cool, she thought to herself. She bobbed around the construct, a bit confused at what was holding it up when suddenly
CheeeeZoom
She blinked. She was suddenly underwater, with a bubble of air around her head. A glance behind her showed a giant tear space, of which she could see glimpses of the world she had suddenly left behind. It would be so easy to just swim back out ...
No, not looking, Rainbow twisted her head to the side. I said no, she thought, flapping her wings to reorient herself. One wrong move later, a string of numbers was forced into her vision. A softly pulsing line of text that read Time Record: 19:53
The pegasus squinted at the numbers. “....Fine. You got me.”
She turned around and floated towards a giant circular platform below her. Lines of green LEDs pointed her towards the center. Hardlight wrapped around her hooves, forming into roller-skates. Right. Ground race. I can still do that.
The platform opened up when she grew near, and the race was on.
Rainbow took a deep breath as she fell in free fall, then slapped her skates onto the curved track as it came rushing towards her, wings pumping.
Moments later, she saw a passage with the road passing over water, somehow without flooding the pipe. On the other side of the glass-like walls, Rainbow spied the shadow of a large fish racing for the gap. She gave a devilish smirk, and shot forwards in a blur of colors.
Moments before impact, she leapt into the air. The fish, a giant angler, was unable to correct itself in time and shot below her. “Boop,” Rainbow called, slapping her tail against the fish’s back as she somersaulted.
She laughed at the glowering eyes through the murky depths, and continued. The flickering light from the ocean above was soothing, and the sense of speed as she dashed through the narrow road and skimmed over water-strewn gaps made her wings tingle with excitement.
She cruised through at high speed, absent-mindedly navigating the tack as she admired the sea life she passed by.
Eighteen minutes later, she burst out of the ocean, her mane soaked and a hoof raised in victory. “Aww yeah! Who’s the fastest? I’m the fastest.” She looked around. “Annd it’s dark now. Finding a cloud to rest on is going to be annoying.”
She was prepared to dart for the skies when she saw a dark shape bobbing in the distance. She changed course, and soon discovered a medium-sized cruise ship bobbing, its lights dark. Curious, she hovered over and landed on the deck, looking around.
Everything seemed to be in perfect condition, if scuffed and somewhat dusty. She could even feel the rhythmic hum of some engine pulsing beneath her hooves...
One that was quickly dying out. She felt the pressure of some alien gaze pushing against her. She froze, her muscles tense and sweat starting to bead on her brow. Slowly, her wings began to unfurl...
Crash!
Timbers ripped apart, and towers fell as the ship seemed to split in half. Claws punched through the deck, reaching for the sky.
“Gah!” Rainbow shouted, taking flight, barely dodging the claws that swung at her. Then a new growth made her eyes widen. Gun barrels shown in the moonlight. “Ah, Luna poop,” she muttered as she began frantically dodging tracers and getting away as fast as possible.
And there was a shockwave of fire blossoming from the demonic ship’s deck, sending tracers in every which way. Propeller planes barely larger than she was buzzed over her, dropping bombs that seemed to inflate in size in mid air before smashing into the dark ship. Cannon fire from distance rained overhead smashing into or around the burning craft.
The reprieve let Rainbow quickly gain in altitude, and she was soon joined by an escort of the tiny planes. Below, the shape-changer ship burned. Rainbow glanced at her rescuers. “Um, thanks for the save. I’d probably have been able to get away ... but it would’ve been a lot harder.”
“Desu.”
“...Right. You know of a place I can rest for a bit?”
“Desu.” The tiny pilot waved at her, and broke off. Rainbow glanced at the night sky, smiled, and began to dive towards a runway of blinking lights.
She blinked.
Rainbow Dash looked up from the arms of a human female wearing archery equipment. “Bwuh?”
At the dawn of the next day, a rainbow trailed blurred into the dark blue of western sky. Far below, and escort ship tracked her shrinking figure with her rangefinders, and smiled. “Good luck,” she whispered. “We’re all counting on you, dess.”
Being hungry sucked. Being hungry while on the wing sucked even harder. It double-sucked. But Rainbow Dash was a trooper! Her stomach could gnaw its way out of her gut like a living blender made out of chainsaws, and she’d just grit her teeth and keep flying west! She was a mare on a missio-
Grrrrrrruuurrrrgle
“Uugh... freakin’... frackin’... okay! Fine! You win, ‘biology’, if that is your real name! I’ll get some food.” Rainbow Dash grumbled and proceeded to actually pay attention to what was below her for the first time in, like, at least several chapters. Magenta eyes popped a bit wider, reflecting the neon shine of a thousand colorful electrical signs posted along an expanse of towering glass and steel towers. She’d been flying over a city vast enough that you could fart the entirety of Canterlot into the middle of it and it might take up a bit of parking space.
A city that big had to have food! Unless it’s residents were robots. Which was a possibility, all things considered, but nothing ventured, nothing punctured. With her customary determination Dash bent wing and dived down into the most colorful part of the neon coated city she could see, landing on a concrete sidewalk filled to the brim with enough humans to fill a Stratopolis or ten.
Most of the humans alternated between google eyeing the prismatic pegasus in their midst, or politely pretending to ignore her while muttering something about “Guy Jin”, whoever the hay that was.
Dash followed her keen, primal horse senses, sniffing the air to search out the nearest source of deliciousity, while her stomach still pretended it was an irate panther in both the noise it was making and its attempts to claw her insides. Just trotting down this one street already clued her into this place being a bit odd. It looked like every ten feet some excruciatingly colorful cartoon character with eyes bigger than her head was plastered on walls, on billboards, on street posts, most of them either adorable enough to make less awesome ponies pause and squee (which Dash did not do, and there’s no photo evidence to the contrary!...That she knows of) or in revealing outfits that looked about as comfortable to wear as rubber bands over one’s junk.
Not in a million years would Dash ever be caught, dead or alive, in such a skimpy outfit! Nope! Wasn’t going to happen. Not to this Easthorse!
Finally finding the source of the tummylicious food smells Dash trotted into an open front restaurant/bar type place where a human dude was serving up bowls of mouth watering noodles. Sure some of the bowls had meat in them, but others had veggies, and Dash was entranced enough by food delirium to set aside her prejudices. Plopping herself onto a seat at the bar, much to the confused yet completely polite nod of the soup dude, Dash said, “Soup! No meat.”
Hunger was a universal language, as was pleading horse noises, so in short order Dash had a steaming bowl of noodles and soup, thick with crunchy veggies. She proceeded to destroy the meal with the kind of vengeance usually reserved for mortal foes. It was brutal. And filling. Dash’s ravenous appetite demanded more, and the human running the counter provided. About four bowls later Dash was blissfully enjoying the afterglow when the man slapped something on the counter in front of her.
“What’s this?” she asked, looking at the chicken scrawl on the paper, which she had a sneaking feeling involved numbers.
The human fellow held out one of his hairless hand things with too many digits. “Okane, kudasai.”
“Oakwhat?” At Dash’s confused look the dude pointed at other people at the bar who provided slips of paper to wave about, and Dash suddenly understood that while hunger was a universal language... so was money.
“Eeeeeh...heheh...sooooo, I don’t suppose we could call this one a freebie?”
Wow, human faces could get seriously red when they were pissed off. The veins were pretty impressive too. Before things degenerated into violence, however, an adorable female human with pigtails who’d been seated at the bar nearby proceeded to get into a swift and incomprehensible argument with the noodle soup dude. In the span of an eyeblink Dash found herself being ushered out by the small human girl, who knelt down to speak with Dash eye to eye.
“Hello! I’m Miki! Will you help me?”
“Hey! Somebody who speaks horse words! Sweetness. Uh, wait, Mickey? That sounds like somebody familiar. Whatever, not important. Um, you need help?”
Miki bounced her head like a bobble, pigtails flying. “Yes! You are just what the cafe needs. I helped you with Goro, so can you please, please, please help me!?”
Dash wasn’t exactly on a schedule, and Miki had just calmed the angry noodle dude down, so she gave a shrug. “Fair’s fair. I ain’t in a rush. Whaddya need?”
“The cafe needs lots of business this week to make rent. Be our special attraction! You’re super cute and nobody in town has done a pony theme yet! It’ll be perfect! We even have an outfit that’s just the right size!”
“Outfit?” Dash asked with a sinking feeling, a feeling that grew to titanic proportions as Miki produced a photo of herself in a dress that looked as if Rarity had manifested the power to puke fabulous frills and lace onto a person and tighten it around a skirt just short enough to suggest ideas that didn’t belong in a TV-Y rated situation.
“Yeeeeeah, I, uh, you know I’d love to help out but I just forgot I got a train wreck I got to attend elsewhere. SUPER important Austraeoh junk. Sooooo-”
Miki pouted. She put on the blubbery eyes. It was... incredibly annoying in its effectiveness. “Just one day! I’ll buy you more ramen.”
Assuming that ramen was the delicious concoction of noodle soup she’d just enjoyed too much of, Dash’s resistance was crumbling. With a final sigh she nodded, “Fine. One day only, with ramen at the end! Ugh, can’t believe I’m agreeing to this. This is so not my thing...”
Four hours later...
“Okaerinasai, goshujin-sama! Or in horse-speak, later dudes!” Dash cried with enthusiastic glee, totally in character as she waved goodbye to the last set of customers at the Blueberry Maid Cafe. Normally it was more traditional to bow to the customers as they left, but Dash was the “Bokukko”, or “tomboy” persona of the maid lineup, so she was expected to be more outgoing a rough around the edges. Good thing too, because there was no way she was going to pull off any of the other maid types.
Like, Miki did the whole “Dojikko” schickt, which near as Dash could tell meant she paid to fall flat on her face and bump into things. Dudes seemed to didg the clumsy chick. Then there were the “Tsundere” types, who every time Dash saw one of those maids in action her mind went straight to Roarke. In a maid outfit. With those short skirts riding up juuuuuust enough...
“Dassshuuu-chan!” Miki bounced up to her like a pig-tailed dolphin, somehow going from faux clumsy to absurdly graceful in the span of an eyeblink. “Ara? Why is your nose bleeding?”
“Wha!?” Dash wiped her nose, along with thoughts of Roarke and garter belts. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Uh, so I’m having a blast here, which shocks me beyond belief, but how much longer am I gonna be wearing this?”
She gestured at the frilly get up that surprisingly fit her like a snug glove, with a tastefully short train and matching socks that Dash was thinking about asking to keep because the black and magenta striping really did match her eyes and... and she was channeling Rarity, which disturbed her in ways she didn’t care to think too hard about.
She could’ve done without the lacey as hell hat, and Miki insisted her mane looked good in a ponytail, but that just seemed redundant on an actual pony.
Miki smiled, a touch of sadness in it, “Hai, you brought in more business in four hours then we get in a week! I promised you ramen before you left, so I’ll pay up. Shift is over in just half an hour. Meet you there?”
“You know it! Guess I’ll get out of this froo-froo costume.”
She zipped back into the changing room, pausing only to wave to some of the other customers, and then proceeded to strip out of the maid outfit in front of one of the changing room mirrors. As she did so she slowed down, eyeing herself in the mirror, and after glancing around to make sure none were looking... she turned back to the mirror with what Dash surmised was a seductive pose.
“So, uh, Roarke, I see you’ve got a lot of blood on you from, like, conquering the Goblin Kingdoms or some junk. Shall I... polish you off?”
She drifted closer to the mirror, batting her eyelashes and running a hoof over the edges of her skirt, “I know all sorts of ways to serve you, goshujin-sama.”
Giving the mirror a kiss she murmured, “And once I’ve finished polishing you, you can polish me. Mmm, it may take all night. But plenty of time, my sweet, plenty of ti-”
“Dash-chan? You still in here?” Miki asked, poking her head through the door. She spotted a frozen statue of a pegasus, mid-kiss upon her own reflection.
“What are you doing?” Miki’s head titled a tick, eyes blinking with shining innocence.
“Umm... making out with myself?”
“For half an hour?”
“I’ve been in here that long!?”
About ten minutes later she was chowing down on her second bowl of noodles, Miki sitting at the bar next to her, glancing at her prismatic companion curiously.
“Dash-kun, may I ask something?”
Face going into full blush-mode, Dash hid half-way behind her ramen bowl and said, “Shoot.”
“Who is Roarke?”
“...Someone I really miss.”
“Oh.” Miki was silent for a second, then smiled encouragingly, “I hope you get to see them again.”
Dash stared into her soup, unblinking. “You and me both.”
“When you do, I’m sure she’ll like seeing you in a maid outfit. Super cute!” Miki said, giggling and patting Dash on the head.
“Ugh, forget you ever saw that. Scrub it from your mind! It will never happen again!”
Miki hid her mouth as she kept laughing, “You ever come back this way then feel free to drop by the cafe anytime! You are a natural at being a maid! Amazing even!”
Dash, face blazing like a cherry, slurped the last of her soup and stepped away from the bar, turning to give Miki a quick, semi-formal bow. “Well, as usual wrong A-word, but I’ll take it. This was more fun than I thought it’d be. Keep it real Miki-chan.”
Before she could do anything else she found herself being subjected to a crushing hug, almost making her spit up her soup.
“Ja ne, Dash-chan.”
“Yeah, check ya later, maid-girl.”
Dash, once free of the fierce bear-hug, trotted back out into the shining Akihabara evening, and took to the air, a slip of blue in an ocean of neon. With a full belly and a good mood stretching her wings out to catch the wind, Dash banked towards the setting sun and flew west.
If there was one thing Rainbow Dash knew – and she knew lots of things, because she was super smart, almost as smart as Twilight Sparkle – it was that the world needed more places you could lie in the grass with your wings spread, with the sun gently toasting your belly, the salt scent of the ocean tickling the place where your nose touched your brain, all surrounded by the quiet bustle of a busy city on a lazy afternoon.
The world needed more places like that. Her world and this world, because she was starting to wonder if maybe they were two different worlds, but that was a scary thought so she stomped it into submission and shoved it into the deep recesses of her mind where dwelled memories of the first colt she kissed and that time she almost gave up her dream of being a Wonderbolt and the lyrics to the nursery rhyme her mother sang when she was sick with croup and couldn’t sleep. She bound the idea in denial’s twine and left it behind and went back to enjoying the hot sun on her chest.
Yeah, that was nice. She could do this for another hour, easy.
In time, though the weather conspired against her, pulling in clouds from the south and hiding away the sun. She felt the air pressure fall in her hollow bones and tasted the promise of rain. She sighed and rolled up onto her haunches with a yawn and a stretch.
This Japan-city was a lot like the other Japan-cities, though it had a lot more rivers. Apparently the people here liked water, because rivers weren’t enough for them – they wanted to live by the ocean, too. It wasn’t as big as the capital Japan-city, the one that extended for dozens of kilometers, crowded with so many buildings, as though every single person in the metropolis had their own skyscratcher. And yet this city was still larger than any pony city she’d ever known. Not even Manehattan dared to sprawl as wide as this city of wide islands.
The park – the beautiful park the world needed more of – was dotted with families, out enjoying their afternoon. Foals chased balls and flew kites while their parents watched from plastic blankets and sipped wine in little plastic boxes, which incidentally was a brilliant invention she intended to patent once she made it back to Ponyville. There was a market for that – heck, she was a market for that.
Across the river was an old, abandoned castle, starkly out of place in the modern, well-kempt city. Stone, a few stories tall, with exposed iron girders in the shape of a dome. Several of its walls had collapsed into rubble. Gardens surrounded it, and a steady stream of people decked out in brilliant spring plumage flowed past. She walked to the edge of the park and hopped up on the railing to watch.
Some time later, an elderly stallion – no, man – joined her at the rail. He leaned against it, squinting against the glare of the clouds, and watched it as well. She considered flying away before he could snatch her, but discarded the idea.
“Utsukushii, ne? Mata, kanashii.” He spoke quietly, in a low rumble. A voice like the earth.
Oh, thank Celestia. She still wasn’t sure what English was, but it was pretty similar to Equestrian, apparently. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“I worked for the government, many years,” the man said. “Must speak English. Very difficult language.”
“Uh, yeah.” It didn’t seem hard to her. Maybe she was just super-good at languages, though. “You from around here?”
“Yes. Parents lived here. My daughters, though, they live in Tokyo now.” He seemed to shrink a bit at this, and clasped his hands on the railing. “I think maybe should move there, be with them.”
“Maybe they should move back here?” Rainbow countered. “This city’s nice. Lots of rivers, you know?”
He smiled, his face vanishing in wrinkles. Somehow, despite the creases, he looked younger. “Maybe they should. You like Hiroshima?”
Was that this place’s name? Yeah, probably. She nodded. “I do. Your castle is falling apart, though.”
“Castle?” He stared at her, then followed her gaze across the river to the ruins. “Ah, the genbakudomu. It is not a castle.”
“Oh.” She stared at the half-collapsed structure and frowned. If not a castle, then…? She turned it in her mind, slotting it like a jigsaw piece against every other bit of her knowledge, looking for the perfect fit. “What is it?”
“It is a memorial. A monument to peace.”
Rainbow Dash turned her head. She had missed something, clearly. “It is?”
“It is.” He extended his foreleg and pointed a finger at the ruins. “Do you know what war is, little one?”
“Pssh, yeah.” Rainbow puffed out her chest. “Pegasi are, like, natural warriors. Commander Hurricane was the best warrior ever!”
“That is an interesting name for a general,” he said. “He must have been quite fierce—”
“She.”
“Ah, sorry. She must have been quite fierce to earn such a name.”
“You bet. I mean, uh, probably. We don’t remember much about her, you know? Long time ago.”
“That is good. We were warriors, once, not so long ago.” He nodded toward the ruins. “This memorial reminds us of those days. Whenever we start to forget what war is like, or start to remember it too fondly, this dome is there to warn us.”
“Oh.” Rainbow stared at the memorial, then leaned back to consider the gardens and park around it. “How, uh… All the other stuff around us is fine. The park, those buildings. How was that building the only one damaged?”
He was silent for a while, so long that Rainbow Dash wondered if maybe he hadn’t understood. Perhaps English and Equestrian weren’t so good after all? She was struggling to find some other way to phrase her question when finally he spoke.
“Ah, sorry. This building was not the only one damaged,” he said. “It was the only one that survived.”
Survived? Rainbow frowned at the destruction, at the saw-toothed walls and empty windows. The stone facade that had peeled away like skin, revealing brick and metal bones beneath. The streaks of rust and cracked foundation. Survived was not a word she would ever use to describe such remains.
“What happened to the rest of the city?” she asked with a quiet voice.
“Ah. Ee-tou…” Silence again. He looked around at the bustling city, the gardens, the herd of people. “It is so beautiful today, is it not?”
She swallowed. Yeah, it was.
In time, the crowds began to thin, and Rainbow Dash took that as her cue to leave. She gave the elderly gentlestallion a nod, leapt into the air, and rode with the drifting cherry blossoms to the west.
A haze ran deep through the forest, a mix of morning dew and high atmosphere concocting a soothing mist below the foliage. Rainbow Dash could clearly spot the gentle opacity sprawling out for miles in every direction, peeking through canopy and seeping down small cliffs scattered throughout the seemingly endless mountain range. Dawn had broken, and with it, silence; birds sang openly to the morning breeze, a familiar sound but an alien song to the misplaced pegasus. Still, the tranquility was not lost to her; she’d spent just under half a week in this environment, taking her time to appreciate the sights, sounds, and the plethora of fresh flowers it provided. After travelling through the veritable desert of the previous ocean, it was a godsend. Rainbow Dash had found her welcome reprieve, and was savouring all she could.
She breathed in… and out. Then she did it again. And again. And again, and again, and-
NNNEEEEOOOOOWWWW!
BZZZ-BZZZT!
W-W-WOOOOOOOOSH!
Blue feathers fell free as tail hairs were singed. She could feel the heat and air distortion as a flurry of projectiles flew past her diving figure, which was her cue to corkscrew and take off in as sharp a left as she could muster. Two sleek and massive aircrafts mimicked, although with less maneuverability. They were both a muddled green in color, with sharp angles and slants designed to cut through the air and achieve maximum speed in a pursuit, Rainbow noted as she took a moment's breather from a distance. She could easily afford to; their turn rate and acceleration were vastly inferior to her own, and she knew it. In two seconds she could be flying beneath the trees and presumably lose them within half a minute. But these were undeniably advanced machines, and their sheer destructive capabilities were clear. What were they doing out here in a forest, attacking an innocent traveller without a word of warning? She didn’t see any signs, what if somepony else were to make the same mistake?
The roaring grew closer, and Rainbow had a decision to make. She could always just fly away, assume she was intruding on some holy ground and book it to the next continent. Pretend she never saw anything, there were probably signs on the roads. After all, it seemed air travel was extremely rare in this world. What’s the point in unnecessary, stupid risk? Because after all…
She wasn’t the type to shy away from a challenge.
Taking a deep breath out of a now smirking muzzle, she flapped her wings with a resounding CLAP, just as the buzzing began again. Moments later, she was being tailed by the twin jets, with a deafening mix of bullets and engines. Zigging, zagging, and most importantly, zooping, she dodged oncoming fire through expert prediction of positioning as she ascended into even higher altitudes. Far sooner than Rainbow had hoped, one of the pair had broken off to grant the other unobstructed sightlines and either reposition itself or to go get help. Considering the technology, she assumed the former. So with a flick of her feathers and with no small strain on her wings, she began climbing straight up towards the open sky, and the remaining pursuer followed suit. She’d have to be quick about this one to deal with the next.
She strained to stay inconsistent despite her slowing speed, growing ever more worried about the possibility of taking a hit. Near the ground, a wound to her wing could be healed, given time. But this high up…
Another burst went off a foot to her left. No time to think about it. But she didn’t have long to wait, anyways. Just as she was about to level out from exhaustion, she saw the plane give first, and begin to angle away. Just as she had hoped. A backflip, one last burst of effort from her wings, and she soared straight at the thing, colliding with four hooves and sliding down its length before coming to a stop at the front of a vessel. It was only as she was splayed across the nose of the plane that she could tell there was a glass encased cockpit occupying the front. It was also the only time she could tell tell what was occupying it; an apparently stunned and wide eyed “person,” like the others she’d seen, jumping in place with its forearms in front of its face. She could see her blinking expression in its darkened visor as it lowered its hands slowly, and the two stared at each other for what must have been three seconds. Both seemed unsure how to proceed; she had made it on board, but hadn’t planned what to do next.
Its mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear a thing. Small statements, single words, and despite sharing eye contact, Rainbow knew it wasn’t meant for her. She could feel the wind blowing her mane into a frenzy and kicking her tail up along her side as the jet meandered at an even pace, even with the horizon. Everything was relatively still. It glanced down, if only for a second. She looked. Various glowing buttons lined the interior, and a jumbo joystick like on one of those Neighntendo systems occupied the center. Realization struck as she looked back up to see its hand stop in place, moved inches from its previous position on its lap. She slowly shook her head.
“No…”
It glanced down, back to her.
“Nuh uh. No. No, no, no. No.”
An inch.
“No!”
It lunged, grasping the stick and pushing it all the way forward.
They instantly nosedived, the noise picking up as engines worked overdrive, and seconds later the entire craft began to corkscrew one way, slow down, and then the other. Rainbow was tossed back and forth, a pendulum attached only by her forelegs hugging grip on the smooth front of the thing. Her body flipped with the momentum, stuck upside down with her head pointed to the nose, her grasp on the cone giving way. Her loyalty pendant loudly clanked against the glass, but was almost inaudible next to the rushing wind and screaming engines. Then it hit her.
With nothing left to do, she spread her wings with the wind, with her back still to the plane, and began making adjustments. She’d only have one shot at this. So when the plane slowed its corkscrew roll to shake the other way… she let go. Just as fast, she angled her wings and was flipped upright with the plane in half a second, and the other half was spent positioning her hooves for-
THUNK!
She collided with the front of the cockpit, her legs instantly clamouring to reacquire a grip with the easier surface. After finally, LUCKILY coming to a stop, she could see her impact didn’t leave a scratch against the clear surface, but she wasn’t the least bit surprised. Instead, she went right to work with her hoof, using the other five appendages to slow her slide just long enough for her to reach to her neck and rub the pendant. Almost instantly, the cockpit lit up with amplified crimson light, nearly blinding Rainbow herself with the reflection against the shiny interior. She look away, and only then realized just how long they’d been falling. With twin fins slicing the air behind her, letting go wasn’t much of an option. Still, she could feel her legs give way as she slid halfway down the glass, and with no way to kick off the thing-
She was suddenly in the air, flying off in a different direction completely, trying to scream but incapable of doing so with the air knocked out of her. She felt herself pressed up against whatever had struck her, sailing with it until it suddenly lurched, almost throwing her off completely. If she had any sense left in her, she would’ve let go and taken to the open air, but the thrashing had left her completely disoriented. So, she instead opted to hold on for her dear pony life and to wait for the world to stop spinning. The object tumbled, spinning, eventually began to fall with gravity, but Rainbow couldn’t move. Eventually, she realized it was… slowing, not plummeting, and the twisting was coming to a stop. She unburrowed her face, looked over her shoulder and opened her eyes to a sea of green. She heard wooshing air against canvas and the distant roar of engines, and a second later, a large explosion went off somewhere beneath her.
She flinched in unison with her seat. She stopped. She became aware of heavy breathing. She looked in front of her, and then up. She saw it, and it saw her. Because she was sat squarely in its lap, clinging to its stomach while it clung to her with nearly equal fearful vigor, in an almost cartoonish display of comedic happenstance. She instantly untangled herself from its hands, kicking it in the gut as she took off and rounded about to kick him across the visor. It had little real effect against the giant, but it made it yell… something. Something Grazian, from the sound of it, in a masculine voice. This didn’t stop her from getting in its relatively enormous face and butting helmet with furry skull.
“HEY! You com-pren-dey, mister? I need you to tell your buds back home something for me, alright? So listen close, or turn on your soundstone, or whatever. DON'T,” she accentuated the word with a hard kick to the helmet, “mess with me, or anypony else just minding their own friggin’ business. DON’T come after me, and make sure your friend over there gets the memo. And DON’T…” a harder kick “...get off the ground again, or I’ll PERSONALLY fly back here to make sure it happens. Capiche?”
“...Yeah, ok. I’m gone.” And with that, Rainbow pushed off the parachuting chair, flying west to meet her next competitor, and beyond that, the western horizon.
Rainbow Dash flew westward at a swift pace, nothing remarkable for her, but the kind of speed that was slow enough that she could maintain for many hours at a time, but fast enough that she could feel in her muscles that trace of burning that reminded her that she was still alive.
Below her, she could see the stark black ribbon of stone that she had been following since she awoke that morning. To either side were fields filled with crops of various types. No doubt Applejack could have told her just what varieties on sight, but to her the crisp straight lines were simply one more reminder of just how artificial things were here.
Her keen eyes could see the carriages of various types that traveled the dark ribbon as it passed ever westward. She could see them, but they couldn't see her, which was exactly how she wanted it.
The steady motions of her flight, and the monotony of the terrain served to put her into a semi-hypnotic state. Miles passed without her paying much attention to them.
In the distance she could see some puffy altocumulus. They reminded her of cotton candy, which triggered her to increase her speed.
She gained altitude to meet the clouds, then carefully gathered them together into a bundle, and with one swift kick of her hind hooves, they started to release their moisture in a cascade of rainfall.
She cooled herself off by flying through the spray then went back to following the ribbon.
More clouds presented themselves before her. She responded by flying over them, the greys and whites of the clouds obscuring the unsettling geometric shapes below her, and the cooler air providing some meaningful respite from the heat of the day.
The clouds eventually thinned out then cleared, leaving her with the ribbon, far below her, as her only companion. She reluctantly tilted her wings, flying downwards to meet it.
She again got lost in herself, flying over the rectangular fields along the seemingly endless black line of stone.
She spotted some wispy cirrus clouds way up in the sky, far ahead of her. Responding to the challenge, she angled her flightpath upwards.
Pulsing her strength with every beat of her wings, the ground fell away from her rapidly.
She could feel her lungs burn as the air thinned, but she continued upward towards her quarry.
Proud of herself, she came to a soft landing on the surface of the cloud. Few pegasi had the stamina and fitness to feel cirrus under their hooves, and this bank was particularly high up in the sky.
She peered over the edge at the world below. From this vantage, it looked just like home. The world that curved at the horizons beneath her, that looked so artificial at close range, looked normal to her.
Clouds were the same, and on the deepest levels other aspects of this world must be also.
Revitalized, she dove back to the west, continuing her journey.
The cold air bit at her wings, but she kept going. She had to—even in what seemed like eternal darkness, she could feel a force welling up inside of her, drawing her forward, the path laid out in front of her like an invisible arrow. Even with the twists and turns, the surprise obstacles of hazy clouds Rainbow Dash couldn’t see, even with detours north and south… somehow she knew she had to keep moving from latitude line to latitude line.
Rainbow Dash shivered. The air grew colder and frostier around her, and from the taste of it and the way it hung heavily on her wingtips, the pegasus could tell the gusts were shifting her northward. Grumbling, she started the grueling process of curving her wings to the side, pushing against the pull of the breeze and trying to shift further southward. Moving back and forth was fine, but too far off course could lead her frustratingly lost—especially in the far north, where the freezing weather could be unpredictable.
As the minutes wore on, Rainbow started to see just the first hints of light in her peripheral vision. Briefly, she turned her head—and, past the outline of her back and the rustling of her tail, she could make out the first rays of the sun shining up over the horizon. She had to squint, but sure enough she could make out a line of trees below—or at least the frost-coated tips of them. Humming, she turned her head back to the front—and just in time, too, as her eyes opened wide, taking in the sight of a family of geese flying right in front of her face. Shivering, the pegasus jerked her head back suddenly, letting the birds pass before letting out a breath.
It hung in the air for a moment, before Rainbow blew past it. Her lips curved.
Hours passed uneventfully, but for the sun rising further into the sky. Rainbow could hear birds calling in the distance, though no more were careless enough to fly past her face; she briefly entertained herself with the thought that the ones she’d nearly ran into had gone to warn their friends, but then reminded herself that that sort of thing only happened under Fluttershy’s gentle watch. Still, the brightening land below gave her something to look at. Even if it was just trees.
Every so often, there would be a break in the snow-covered taiga and Rainbow could see dry ground below—covered in snow in patches, but in others she could see the permafrost-encrusted dirt poking up, cracked and lifeless as it spread out across the empty tundra.
Rainbow Dash yawned. And below her, the world yawned back. Sleepily, she closed her eyes, just for a second…
No, no, no. She could feel her wings locking up mid-flight and she jittered to life, swerving to catch herself before she’d fall.
A close call. It wasn’t the first, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Rainbow took a deep breath. She would just need to pay more attention, she supposed.
At least the brightening sky around her made her job easier, if just a bit. Off in the distance, the shapes of mountain peaks rose out of the clouds, somehow looking more welcoming than ominous. Rainbow turned her head from side to side, carefully taking stock of the landscape—and then, after a moment of reflection, swung a sharp left turn. Trees passed below her in a green-grey blur, but the mare was hardly paying attention; with her velocity, all she could see were the shapes of the land before her and the wind rushing by in her peripheral vision. She let the green move beneath her for quite some time, still moving westward but with that southern bent. It wasn’t until she saw a thin line of blue snake through her vision that she let her feathers catch on the wind, slowing her down.
And before her lay a valley—frost-covered at the tips, sure, but with a heart of green, trees lining the river as it moved along the banks. And at the edges of the trees, peppering the bankside—Rainbow Dash could make out the distinct shape of rooftops, chimneys blowing out tufts of smoke above them. They weren’t densely packed like some of the cities she had passed, but a few were clustered in groups with here and there, strung together by small roads that connected to a larger path along the riverside.
Curious, Rainbow Dash began to descend. Before long, she could hear more noises below—the soft hum of cars moving by on the road, as well as more birds cawing out in the trees. The river splooshed and splashed over rocks as it brushed by.
Rainbow flew low over the main roadway, eyeing the cars carefully as they passed. Not too low, though; nobody seemed to notice, at least as far as she could tell. Shrugging, she moved onward. She began to come upon a few of the houses, and as she passed a chimney, she held her nose.
It was then that she hear a voice, calling from below—a high pitched voice, accent unfamiliar. Rainbow Dash glanced east… then north, south, and finally west. And then she looked down.
There was one of the humans, about a dozen metres below her, in one of the fenced-off backyards behind a house. It wasn’t one of the larger, adult ones; this one was smaller, squatter, and looked obviously younger in the face. A puffy purple jacket covered her torso, and a fuzzy brown hat covered her head.
The child looked up to Rainbow, and then down to somewhere below, covered from the pegasus’ view by the roof’s overhang. “Vot eta goluboy loshat! Fnebye!”
There was a laugh, presumably from whoever the child was talking to. “Kanyechna, kanyechna.”
The child frowned, and looked back up at Rainbow Dash. The frown didn’t last long, though; it smiled again once it took notice that Rainbow was hovering there above it, gazing down curiously.
“Privyet, lashadka!” the child called.
Rainbow gulped. “Um… ‘privvit’ to you too, kiddo.” Hoping the human would know what she meant, she gave a nervous smile and waved a hoof.
The child’s eyes lit up instantly, and it let out a joyous laugh. “Mama, mama! Ona gavarila! Gavarila!”
“Tshhh, ya zanyat,” came the adult’s voice in reply. Rainbow had no idea what this meant, but from the child’s expression, it didn’t look good. She bit her lip, and then looked both directions.
“Look, I don’t think I’m supposed to do this, kid, but… uh…” The pegasus swooped down quickly, landing with her hooves firmly onto the hard ground. The child’s eyes were wide as saucers as the blue horse wrapped it between her forelegs into a big hug.
“Bozhe moy!” the child exclaimed, and shook there as it stood in Rainbow’s embrace. It didn’t seem afraid or uncomfortable, though—just surprised.
Rainbow stood there only for a few moments before letting go. She brushed herself off with a hoof, shot another smirk in the child’s direction, and then leapt into the air without further warning.
“Mama, mama!” she could hear the child calling excitedly from below, but Rainbow didn’t look back. The western sky lay ahead of her and she had a long way to go. The sun was already high above, and she didn’t have time to waste.
But as she continued on her journey, she reminded herself… it never hurts to stop for a hug.
Dash settled down upon the rough, greying asphalt. Her head on a swivel, looking for any end to this strange road in the middle of nowhere. on her left, there was plenty of fence work, for keeping livestock or unwanted guests from a field. A few steps further had her squint at a green sign on the road into the lush overgrowth swaying in the wind.
"Th' heck is an staat boss be-here?"
Her eyes scanned the alien, foreign language for what it was worth. But all it got here was a strange mix of jumbled equish and..other words, Germane maybe?
She snorted and turned down the road again. the forest lining the road on her left. A gentle breeze cut through the empty plot of land to the right. If she squinted down to her right, she could see the outline of a village of sorts but a few minutes away on wing.
But for now, she felt like walking. And the road straightened out. coming to an abrupt turn to the right at a lost bench in the middle of nowhere. Complete with a bin depicting some strange glyph. On its left, there was a locked gate.
Unmarked and uninteresting, she went back to the road, following it toward the village in the distance, curving along the edge of the forest, as the sun shines it's last rays down through the leaves. It was a nice, spring evening.
She took in the sight of the village laying in the distance. It's most prominent landmark has got to be the large tower in the near middle of it all. jutting out proudly, coated in corroded bronze, tiled slants for a needle-like roof. A clock on all its faces, kept the local time. She could hear the distant call of a large bell, denoting another hour passed.
Rainbow guessed this was some sort of important temple of time.
Another bend curved slightly away from the village. She was in no mood to stop for a chat with the locals. Now that the road ahead would be part of a larger system she figured to turn more westward.
Only to turn towards a squat, large building in the middle of nowhere. a large field of fresh grass laid before it. a driveway to two large doors proofed large enough to park a multitude of carts and the such. In front of the building, standing in a uniform line and paced apart: large long poles with a sort of pipe-ish construction on top.
An covered one with a much wider base was fenced in, and looked much more advanced. But her attention returned to the Squat building.
A large fabric-like billboard covered what little she could see from an large canopy that covered a small terrace. It was in a deep hue of blue, much unlike the grey building itself.
It featured a dozen figures marching along to an invisible drum. holding weapons against their shoulder. uniformly with a single left limb forward.
"Ess Tee Stepa-What kinda word is that?"
Her curiosity and hooves took her to the front of the building, sealed away from the world from the tree-line at the road from whence she came. Tightly grown greenery blocking view now. But her eyes scanned the large metal ports sealing the windows. Thick metal doors seemly locked tight.
A short hike along the paved path running along the building, got her to another small paved square, in the back, a thick wooden workstation and a fire barrel overflowing with left-over wood from recent construction she guessed. Here in the shadow of the hedge and the locked building, she sighed contently in the lingering warmth, looking at the dimming skies. She stared at it for a short while, before shaking her head and spreading her wings. Launching to the skies banking slightly to chase the sun going down.
The setting sun cast an ethereal glow across the rolling clouds as Rainbow Dash touched down. Pastels of pink and yellow and orange danced across the stratosphere, in stark contrast to the perturbed clouds below, heavy with moisture and anxious to unleash their mighty fury.
Rainbow took a deep breath and sprang from her fluffy perch and whipped across the sky, clearing the thunderheads in no time at all. The last wisps of the clouds dissipated, then reformed as the pegasus pulled together a new cushion, this one small and white. She stretched, and several joints popped, eliciting a satisfied sigh from the weathermare.
She was overcome with a fit of coughing, and she touched her ruby pendant. There was a small pulse of crimson light, and the coughing subsided. Rainbow wheezed once, twice, then rummaged in her now damp saddlebags.
Settling down into her cloud, she pulled out and tipped up her canteen and took a swig of water. What came out was little more than a dribble, and she scowled and gnashed her teeth. Her eyes scanned the ground below and spotted a narrow lake far to the northeast, partially obscured by tall dunes.
With little fanfare, Rainbow adjusted her goggles and kicked off from her cloud, descending on the lake in a lazy circle. To the west lay a placid sea, its waves lapping and foaming against the sands as they churned back upon each other. Cliffs and dunes rose around the shore, reaching towards the prismatic sky in some desperate attempt to pierce the heavens.
Rainbow Dash flew to the southern end of the lake and felt the earth give as her hooves made contact with solid ground for the first time in hours. The dirt was mushy, almost bog-like, but gave the pegasus little resistance as she trotted up close to the serene pool. She lifted her goggles, and twin points of ruby pierced the darkening world around her as she lowered her head to drink.
Cool, sweet freshwater graced her rapidly curving lips.
Rainbow eagerly drank and, once finished, filled her canteen with the crystal-clear liquid. She relaxed and simply stood in the marshy soil, taking in her surroundings. In the distance, she watched several sheep mill about the hills and plains without any apparent purpose. Frogs and bugs sounded off around the pegasus, who flexed her wings to drive the more curious insects away.
A door banged open from a ramshackle house in the distance, and Rainbow heard a voice call out from within, unintelligible but commanding. The milling sheep turned and, with one mind, headed off in the direction of the stone hut. Rainbow Dash turned as if to follow them, but instead glanced up at the sky and saw only glimmers of orange among the undersides of the clouds far above the ones she had dissolved.
Frowning, Rainbow sat down and shuddered as the moistness of the earth soaked through her coat. She savored the sensation, allowing a sigh to escape. As she closed her eyes, she felt the wind pick up slightly, and a shiver ran through her petite body. Rainbow Dash tucked her wings in tighter to stave off the cold, but eventually sighed and picked herself back up.
After some stretching, the petite mare trotted towards the sand dunes, beyond which the sea lay. The harmony of the creatures here faded until a uniform hum remained behind the dunes. As she stumbled through the undergrowth and up over the hills, Rainbow saw the great ocean before her and stopped, as if in reverence.
A crescent of untainted beach spread out before her, tapering up and around a small pocket of the vast water. Seaweed was scattered here and there along the shore, forming broken lines where the waves could carry them no further. Small wooden paths wrapped up and around on either side of her, from behind the dunes and then some. In the ocean, a ways away, smooth plateaus and jagged pillars of rock crested the highest waves, reminiscent of the cliffs near the dunes.
Rainbow caught a weathered sign out of the corner of her eye, and she trotted up to read it. Bàgh Seannabhad agus Am Buachaille, the splintered text read, and the pegasus scrunched up her nose in confusion. Below, in smaller letters, was a translation: Sandwood Bay and The Herdsman, followed by a crude image of one of the largest pillars of rock jutting up from the water.
With a devilish smirk, Rainbow lowered her goggles and bolted from the sand, sand billowing behind her as she sped towards the formation of rock pictured on the sign. Within seconds, she descended and perched delicately on the stone, smooth from nature but still rougher than she had imagined.
She remained for a second or two before flopping over onto her back to catch the last warmth of the sun.
Scratching her back against the rock gave rise to a groan of satisfaction as Rainbow’s muscles loosened and debris flaked from her coat. Her support was warm to the touch as a result of being basked in the sun’s radiation all day, and Rainbow had never felt more grateful than she did at that moment. Her tail whisked beneath her and the pegasus let out a hum of content.
At last, she picked herself up off the rock and cast a glance over the vast beach behind her. The moon had peeked curiously over the horizon and was beginning its dominating rise to the apex of the night. Rainbow sighed, crouched, and took off.
As the last vestiges of light finally vanished over the horizon, Rainbow turned back to look at the bay behind her. A flash caught her eye, and as she turned fully, she could see a sweeping beam of brilliance cut through the thick night, set atop a structure on the brink of a jagged cliff.
Rainbow Dash smiled and rocketed away to the west, leaving her own brilliance in her wake.
Ever since she left the rocky lands behind in the east, she’d seen nothing but water and waves. Maybe a day’s flight after departing, she crossed some islands and stopped briefly, realizing this would be the last landmass she’d see until she crossed the ocean. There were some people on the islands, but they weren’t all that populated. There were a lot of yellow birds flitting from branch to branch, though. They were pretty to look at, and probably the last colorful thing she’d seen before leaving the islands behind.
And then there was water.
For days and days, she’d flown for as long as she could, just trying to cross the vast ocean. She was so sick of seeing it that she was tempted to push herself just to get it over with. But that would’ve been a bad idea; the distance she’d lose from exhausting herself in a quick sprint would mean that she’d only have to stare at the ocean longer. At least there were a lot of clouds to rest on, though. She must’ve been approaching a budding storm, because there were more and more clouds in front of her each day. But she wasn’t going to complain, not at the moment, at least. They were the only thing offering her rest and respite over the ocean, and she was thankful that they were there so she could get some sleep. Otherwise, sheer attrition would’ve eventually gotten the best of her, and without anywhere to sleep and rest, she would’ve plummeted into the ocean and drowned once her wings couldn’t carry her any longer.
Occasionally, she saw ships steaming across the ocean far beneath her. They were much more massive than any ship she’d seen back home; they could probably carry twenty or thirty Equestrian freighters on their decks. She was tempted to fly down and talk to somebody, but then she’d have to give up all the altitude she’d gained on her flight, and she’d only have to climb back up when she wanted to continue flying. The winds were too rough and unpredictable down on the ocean’s surface for continuous flying, and the salt spray would probably cake her limbs in so much salt that they’d hardly be able to move. Plus, salty feathers don’t carry a pegasus all that far.
When the days ended, the moon would rise overhead, casting a ghostly illumination on the rippling ocean surface. Rainbow would spend hours staring at the moon, watching it rise and fall, studying every crater, every detail. The humans said there was a man in the moon, but Rainbow couldn’t really see him all that well. She thought she saw something that might have looked like a human head, but she couldn’t be sure. At least the Mare in the Moon had had the courtesy to look distinguishable, despite her tragic history.
Rainbow wondered who controlled the sun and the moon on Earth, and if their brother had once tried to seize power like Princess Luna and had been banished. The humans had never said anything about that, though, what little she’d talked to them.
The clouds started getting thicker and thicker the more Rainbow flew to the west. Soon they started interfering with her ability to fly. They were so close together that she couldn’t simply weave around them anymore. So for lack of a better option, Rainbow began to climb. As the clouds continued to tower, Rainbow flapped her wings harder and harder, gaining altitude with every stroke. After a few thousand feet of climbing, Rainbow crested the tallest cloud in her vicinity, but at that point, it’d become a game to her to see how high she could climb. So she kept going.
Higher. Higher. Higher.
Sweat soaked every inch of Rainbow’s being. She felt like she was more sweat than mare—for a moment. She suddenly felt very cold, and as she looked around, the sweat on her body began crystallizing, turning into tiny flakes of ice. Every breath she took of the thin air turned into a cloud of vapor that just hung in the sky, unmoving in front of her face. There was so little air that she had to frantically beat her wings just to keep altitude. She’d flown high before, but never this high.
Smirking, Rainbow shut her eyes, folded her wings at her sides, and fell.
She didn’t know how high she was, only that it was easier to measure in miles, not feet. She opened her eyes only after falling for a full minute, when the air began pulling at her mane and tail like fingers, trying to grab onto her and pull her back. She picked up speed, going faster and faster and faster, until finally, gravity couldn’t do anything more for her.
Which was disappointing. All it took was a few more flaps of her wings to push her right to the edge of the speed of sound. Just as she was about to break it, though, she spotted a swirling mass of clouds ahead of her, with a distinctive hole in the middle.
Rainbow grinned and twitched her feathers a millimeter to adjust her course.
It took her another full minute of diving to make it to the top of the hurricane, and then she was plummeting through the eye before she could even blink. Thick cloud walls reached up around her like columns of marble trying to touch the sky. The storm roared and howled just outside of the dozen miles she had to herself on either side, dead center in the hurricane’s eye. With such low air pressure, it hardly took any more effort from Rainbow to pull off a sonic rainboom. The cone of air around her shattered, and a ring of color burst forth in a blinding blast of light. She changed her course almost immediately after, chasing the rainbow rocketing westwards, but staying a mile behind it until it hit the eyewall.
She looked around herself as the clouds tumbled and collapsed. Her rainboom had decapitated the head of the hurricane, and now the storm began to fall apart all around her. Which was a good thing, too; she didn’t want to have to deal with a hurricane when she finally arrived. Besides, she could see a few islands in the distance, green and yellow on top of vibrant and clear blue waters and a white seafloor.
She was close. Just a little further.
A feather or two flew out of her wings as she disappeared into the west, riding the air currents of the storm she shattered in her wake.
The ocean stretched behind Rainbow Dash, now, having been finally left behind in favor of white sand beaches and palm trees. The air was humid and hot, and sweat stung Rainbow Dash's eyes as she flew. She grimaced and wiped her brow, brushing back her forelock with one hoof. She was getting tired, and hungry, so a stopping place was definitely warranted. "There's gotta be... somewhere?"
Rainbow Dash's eyes had swept a little bit south, and they widened. "What the buck? Is that...?"
Red brick outlined lush, green lawns around a cavalcade of buildings of different colors and architectural styles. There were hundreds of specs of tiny people, far below, filling these pavillions and walkways. That, however, wasn't what drew Rainbow Dash's gaze. The focus of her attention was the castle. White brick that shone like ivory, with blue and gold tower peaks and minarets. It was stunning, instantly striking a chord deep in Rainbow Dash, because it looked so very much like home. She banked hard, her westward flight forgotten, and went south like it was winter wrap-up. The peaks and towers of this place beckoned to her, and within moments she was circling overhead, taking in the view.
It was a theme park, of some kind, but big; Bigger than anything they had in Equestria. Around this castle's grounds, set away from this central park, was a massive tree surrounded by what looked like different, displaced terrain of various biomes, and a huge, round sphere. Rainbow Dash's eyes were drawn, briefly, towards the other two odd constructions, but the castle called to her. She flew in closer, taking in the building, eyes wide with wonder. Soon, she found herself on the red brick walkway, surrounded by people. She had a few brief moments of peace, before suddenly flashbulbs were going off around her. She whirled in place, startled, and people clapped, laughing. They were taking pictures of... her? "Cool, a new costumed cast member!" she heard somebody say.
"Is it the pegasus from Hercules?"
"Maybe? Wasn't it white?"
Rainbow Dash cleared her throat, "Uhh, yeah! I'm... a new cast pony! So, uh, nothin' to see here. Move along!"
That got a lot more laughs than she'd anticipated, and another burst of flashbulbs. She was about to turn around and ignore the people, her gaze drifting up towards the castle, when she was confronted by a tiny, tiny person. A little girl, with pigtails and a blue dress with a white smock. She looked shyly up at Rainbow Dash, and her arms spread open in a universal gesture for 'hug'.
Rainbow Dash glanced around. There were a number of people watching with interest, and a man with a baseball cap held a camera ready. Rainbow rolled her eyes, "Yeah, yeah, c'mere, squirt."
Rainbow Dash gave the tiny girl a hug, which got a happy giggle in return and a flash of lights, before the girl ran off into the crowd. Rainbow Dash smirked and turned to face the castle, looking up at it with interest. It was so familiar, in many ways, but... not, at the same time. It just reminded her of home.
When was the last time she'd thought about Canterlot? It had been a while. Princess Luna lived there, since Celestia was displaced in Ponyville, dealing with the mess she'd left behind. Rainbow Dash sighed and trotted down the lane, pausing every so often as pictures were taken of her or small children waddled up for hugs. It wasn't her favorite social camouflage, but it'd have to do. She trotted along in a meandering path that took her near to the groups of buildings. They were tight-packed, and all manner of shops filled the area. There were souvenier shops and clothing shops, and a half-dozen restaurants, bakeries, and candy shops. Rainbow Dash's mouth watered, and she found herself inside a shop selling baked goods.
The person behind the counter, dressed in a clean white smock and chef hat, smiled and eyed her as she came in. "Wow! They're getting so good with the animatronics."
"Uh, yeah! So, I'm a new cast pony... and those cookies look awfully good..." Rainbow Dash looked up at him and waggled her eyebrows in an encouraging manner.
"Oh, do you need a break?" the man asked.
"Uh... yeah!" she replied.
"Sure, come on back. We've got water and some food for cast members," he said, leading her around the inside of the bakery and behind a counter to a door. Rainbow Dash pushed it open and found herself in a little back room. There were chairs around a circular table, and a water cooler was set up on the side. A plate of cookies and some sandwiches sat out. The man gestured her inside. "I have to man the counter. Grab what you need and get hydrated."
With that, Rainbow Dash was alone in the little room. She exhaled slowly, allowing some of the nervous tension she'd built up to dissipate. She grabbed a few cookies and a cup of water and munched contentedly, hopping up onto a chair and sitting there happily for several minutes. Before long, she was feeling energized. "This is... pretty cool. I wonder if there are any rides?"
One of the perks of being a "new cast member", it seemed, was being able to trot through long lines and nobody would stop you... except for pictures. But that was easy. She got a few questioning looks from a few of the ride operators, but a quick word or two of reassurance about "debuting a new costume" usually got her a seat on a ride.
And what rides there were!
"AHHHHhahahahaha!" Rainbow crowed, her hooves in the air, as she rocketed through the darkness while blaring, epic music played. A roller coaster was sweet, but a roller coaster in the dark? "This is awwwesome!"
She hopped off the ride at the end, waving to people and laughing. As she approached a group of buildings, she was approached by two older women. Both of them wore black suit pants and black vests over white collared shirts, and red bow ties. They both had lanyards around their necks, and were frowning slightly. Rainbow halted in front of them and they stopped before her, looking her over. "Uh, hey!"
"Are you lost? We only let certain costumes out into this area. Are you assigned to fantasy land?" one of the women asked, reaching for a device on her waist.
"No, she's a pegasus. Maybe she's supposed to be in the Greek pavilion?" The other woman said to her partner, before turning to Rainbow Dash and addressing her directly, "You must be new. Were you supposed to be assigned to the MK for a debut of some new costume? Do you remember what park you were assigned to?"
"Uh... yeah. Totally a new costume, debuting it today!" Rainbow Dash flared her wings and stood up on her hind legs, giving her some needed height. "Pretty sweet, yeah?"
"Those animatronics are impressive... anyway, where were you supposed to be working?"
"Uhhh..." Rainbow tried to recall what they'd said earlier, "... the... Greek pavilion?"
Both of the women stared at her, aghast, before shaking their heads. "Wow. You are lost. That's in Epcot, not here. You're a whole park off."
Rainbow Dash frowned, and decided to play it cool. "Oh, uh, yeah, well, they told me to go by the castle first to show off the new costume, and then head to the Greek palindrome. So... here I am."
One woman began speaking into a device, which appeared to be some kind of soundstone or radio, based on the voices that responded to her. The other shook her head. "Well, we need to get you to your park, then. Come with us, we'll take the back ways. You can probably catch a ride over to Epcot on one of the people movers."
"Yeah, sure!" Rainbow Dash smiled, and one of the women lead her off to a side doorway that was tucked behind some light poles.
Within minutes, she was lost, deep in the labyrinth-like underbelly of the park. Employees and costumed people rushed to and fro, and Rainbow had to trot to keep up with the woman. She lead the way with confidence, taking a set of stairs down to an underground roadway. There were buggies here, and long vehicles that held a dozen seats. She pointed to one of the buggies. "Tom will take you out to Epcot. Just head up to the Greek pavilion when you get there."
Rainbow Dash nodded, "Uh, okay!" With a wave and a spry jump, she leapt up into the front seat of the buggy, next to an older gentleman with a thin beard and a black baseball cap on.
"Hey. Uh, so, I'm going to Epcot?" Rainbow said, glancing at the driver.
"Mm. All right. You sure you're not supposed to be up in the magic kingdom? You look more... fantasy-ish," the driver said.
"Mm, okay then," Tom said, and he hit the pedal on the floor of the buggy.
Rainbow Dash leaned back in her seat as the vehicle accellerated, and she grinned. "Cool."
Rainbow Dash exited one of the back areas, heading out into this different park. They'd called it Epcot, and for some reason it struck a chord with Rainbow Dash, though she couldn't quite pin down why. The massive sphere structure dominated the landscape of the park, always visible. It wasn't a smooth sphere, Rainbow Dash discovered, but rather a strange geometric construction. It was definitely fascinating. The place that she'd been directed to, the 'Greek pavilion', was a little area with unique architecture, surrounded by all manner of strange buildings. There were pagodas, castle-like edifices, more standard architecture, and all sorts of other things. It was fascinating. There was food everywhere, all different types, more food than she'd seen anywhere. People walked around the parks and fountains and ponds between the buildings, strolling at a leisurely pace. There were less people, here. It seemed like a quieter place than the area surrounding the big castle.
Rainbow Dash peered around and let out a sigh, before trotting over to a bench to sit down. The sun was starting to set, and the park was lighting up in response. The massive sphere was lit from beneath, making it appear even more impressive than it had during the day. Lights dangled from strings along lightpoles, fountains glowed, and the place transformed before her eyes as the darkness started to encroach. She attempted to take it all in, sitting quietly. She found a serene smile on her face, and decided to let it stay there for a while longer. "Well. Where am I supposed to go from here?"
Rainbow Dash felt warmth bloom around her neck, and she glanced down. The Element of Loyalty had lit up, brighter than it had ever been. The red light bathed the area around her for a moment, before growing dim. Rainbow Dash blinked as her night vision slowly restored itself, and she raised her eyebrows in surprise. "Wow. So, there's... something about this place, then."
"Huh. I didn't know the Big Mouse had a deal with that toy company," said a voice nearby, drawing her attention.
A man in a blue t-shirt with a lady in a ball gown on it stood in front of her, a wry smirk across his stubbly face, and he ran fingers through his short, dark hair. "Hey. Can I get a picture?" he asked, holding out a glowing device with one hand.
"Uh, yeah, sure!" Rainbow Dash said, grinning and hopping up on her rear legs, striking a pose with her wings out.
"Damn. That suit is really incredible. I have a few friends that I'm sure would get a kick out of it," the man said, chuckling to himself.
Rainbow paused, taking stock of the man before her. He looked... tired. Like somepony that stayed up long nights. She was instantly reminded of Twilight Sparkle, whenever she would get too focused on some nerdy thing and stay up studying. He had an air of somebody that was perpetually amused by the things around him, but an ease that said he wasn't a new visitor to this place. Rainbow Dash realized that she was staring, and chuckled, sitting back down on the bench. "Pegasus enthusiast... yep, that's me. Big fan."
"No joke. Do the wings work?" he asked, a sarcastic tone to his voice.
Rainbow Dash cast him a sidelong glance, rising to the challenge. "I dunno. You tell me."
She flapped a few times, and jumped into the air, and did a quick somersault loop, before hovering back down to land on the bench. Right away, she knew this was a mistake. The man was frozen, eyes wide, staring at her. He'd dropped the little glowing device, but hadn't stooped to pick it up. Rainbow Dash swallowed hard, and managed a nervous laugh, "Yeah... uh... animatronics?"
The man recovered slightly, rubbing at his eyes, before stooping down almost automatically to pick up his device and pocket it. "... That's impossible."
Rainbow Dash glanced around quickly, before leaning closer to the man. "Dude, don't blow my cover. Please? I'm having a really good time, and I'd hate to have to run off now," she asked, giving him a plaintive look.
The man glanced around, before shuffling over to slump down on the bench next to Rainbow Dash, rubbing at his temples. "Well, that's it. I've obviously, finally cracked."
Rainbow Dash shook her head, focusing on the distressed man, "So, are you gonna be cool, or am I going to have to fly out of here?"
"Yeah, yeah, no, I'm fine. Just talking with something that's probably the beginnings of a psychotic break. No problem," he muttered.
"Uh, okay. Cool, I guess," Rainbow Dash said, settling back on the bench.
The man kept casting glances her way, examining her with one part curiosity and one part trepidation. Rainbow Dash sighed after a moment. "I'm not a figment of your imagination. I promise. Here, hoofbump?" She extended one hoof towards the man.
The man stared at the hoof. "I'm really, really terrified that I'm going to reach out and touch you, and you're going to be solid."
"What's there to be afraid of?" Rainbow Dash asked, her hoof still held out.
"Lots of things..." the man said, but he reached out, extending a clenched fist to bump lightly against her hoof. His hand jerked away as it made contact, and he stared at her openly.
"See? I don't bite. You gonna be okay?" she asked, smirking at him.
"Probably not, but I think I can cope. At least, until more pastel ponies start showing up. God, what if Lyra is next? She'll probably give me an earful. I haven't exactly been kind to her."
"Lyra?" Rainbow Dash said, staring at the man, "You mean... Lyra, from Ponyville?"
"God, that just clinches it, doesn't it? I'm losing my mind," the man said, standing up as if to walk away.
"Woah! Woah! Wait! Hold up, guy! What if I could prove to you that I'm real?" Rainbow Dash said, standing up and leaping off the bench to bar his way. He knew about Ponyville, somehow, and maybe he knew how to get her back to the edge of the world.
The man stopped. "It's impossible. You can't be real. You're Rainbow friggin' Dash."
"Listen, this might be crazy, but you're the first person here that I've talked to that knows... knows me. I've been flying around this world and looking for a way back home, and I've been lonely, and scared, and..." she swallowed, emotion making her voice crack, "lost. I thought maybe I was dreaming, or hallucinating, or that Seraphimus had caught me and killed me and I was in some kind of pre-death fuge state, and it wouldn't be the first time something awful like that has happened to me! So can you give me a second of your time? Please?!" The last word was a hoarse shout, and she felt tears at the corners of her eyes.
The man was frozen, staring down at her with something like fear in his eyes. Rainbow Dash wiped at her eyes, growling to herself. "Look. Just... just, look, okay?" She trotted away from him, quickly, to a nearby group of people, and shouted, "Hey! Come take a picture with a pegasus!"
The group turned, cooing and gasping in surprise.
"Wow! They get more advanced every year!"
"It's so cute!"
"They must have some kind of new thing going on."
"The wings move!"
The crowed ooh'd and ahh'd, taking pictures and chattering excitedly as Rainbow Dash posed and gave hugs, and then she trotted back to the man. "So?"
The man stared at the group of people as they waved at the retreating pony, and then looked down at her. "So... I'll admit that I have a really good imagination."
"Well, tough luck, buddy!" Rainbow Dash said, giving his stomach a shove that nearly doubled him over, "Because I'm real, and we need to talk, because you're obviously important or something!"
The man stood up, rubbing his stomach and muttering something about hooves under his breath, before he turned around and sat down on the bench again. She eyed him, and he gave an exaggerated shrug. "What do you want, Rainbow Dash?"
"How do you know my name?"
"Doesn't matter. I know who you are. I think I know exactly who you are."
"I never told you anything about me. We've never met. I've never seen you around ponyville. How is it possible that you know me?"
"Austraeoh," the man said, suddenly.
Rainbow Dash's eyes widened, and simultaneously her pendant glowed with a red light, illuminating the area briefly before extinguishing again. Rainbow Dash stared at him. "Okay... now I'm the one that doesn't believe this is real."
"Join the club, sister," the man said wryly, looking up at the night sky.
They were both quiet for a long time, the man staring contemplatively at the sky, Rainbow Dash watching him with intensity. "Who are you?" Rainbow Dash asked, finally.
The man chuckled. "I don't know if I should tell you. It's like... indulging the part of me that's gone insane? But, sure, since we're playing this game, I guess I'll go all-in," the man leaned forward, considering something briefly, before smirking. "You can call me Lower Case. Or just 'Case', if you prefer."
"Lower... Case? That's like..." Rainbow Dash's face screwed up in a confused scrunch.
"A pony name? Yeah. It is. I figured it would be appropriate," the man, Lower Case, said. "Also, just a side note, since I'm indulging in this fantasy of mine, you look totally adorable when your face scrunches up like that."
Rainbow Dash scowled at him. "Whatever! So, tell me, 'Lower Case', what's the deal? Why am I here?"
"Theoretically? A chemical imbalance in my brain has caused a schizophrenic break, and I'm hallucinating," the man said, idly poking at the glowing device in his hands.
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes and trotted over to the bench and hopped up on it, sitting next to him. "Yeah, okay. Let's indulge the fantasy, then, because the 'I'm crazy' thing is getting really boring. Why else would I be here?"
"I don't know, Rainbow Dash. You tell me," Lower Case said, looking up at her briefly before retreating his gaze to the surface of the device. Rainbow Dash could see text and little pictures on the device, lit from within.
"Well, so, I was... I was at Bleak's Plummet. I'd been getting ready to face down the whole friggin' army of baddies and idiots that were after me because they thought I'd killed their goddess... it's a long story."
"You don't have to tell me," Lower Case said, his gaze drifting up from the device to fix on her.
"Anyway, I was flying... and suddenly I was in the ocean. But, like, not the ocean at Bleak's Plummet, right? I was here, on a shoreline, with ocean to my east. It was night, and nopony else was around. My Element wasn't reacting, the girls were gone, and... well, my only clue was that the Element of Loyalty started glowing when I faced west."
"So, you flew west?" Lower Case asked.
"Yeah. Flew west, following the glow of the pendant. Crossed two continents and two oceans, and ended up here," Rainbow Dash said, gesturing out at the theme park.
"You went west... and crossed two continents and two oceans, and ended up here?" Lower Case asked, squinting at her.
"Yeah. What's with the look?" Rainbow Dash asked, glancing down at the pendant.
"It's just, if you crossed two oceans and two continents, and ended up here... you probably flew around the world to get right back to where you started," Lower Case said.
Rainbow Dash stared at him for a moment, trying to see if he was making a joke, before she rolled her eyes, "Mnff, isn't that just the story of my friggin' life? Of course I went around the world to get back to where I started."
"Yeah, that's pretty much your job," Lower Case said, chuckling at her exasperation.
"Yeah. Pretty much. So, what... is this some weird Austraeoh thing? Are you my Eljunbryo, then? Or what?"
"I doubt it. I'm frankly not good for much, these days," Case said.
"Well... you're here, talking to me, aren't you? So that's something. And my Element reacts to you, too. It's never done that for anypon—er, anybody else," Rainbow Dash pointed out.
"Yeah, well, your magic necklace is probably wrong. I'm just a fat, lazy guy puttering around and indulging himself in one of the few places that still feels magical in this world," Case said, looking up at the stars again.
Rainbow Dash stared at him for a long moment, before she gave him a light shove on the shoulder. "C'mon. Cut the crap. You're important. I wouldn't be here if you weren't. And, even if I'm not real, like you think, you're probably important to somebody. You said you have friends, right? Pegasus enthusiasts?"
Case shrugged, not meeting her look, but he rubbed at his shoulder absentmindedly. Rainbow Dash frowned. "Dude, everypony brings something to the table, and right now, I need you to get out of whatever bad place your head is in right now and help me out. I'm sorry you're feeling... I dunno, existential?... but you're looking like the only shot I have of getting home."
"It's going to be awful," Case said, suddenly, his tone somber.
"What?" Rainbow Dash said, blinking.
"Getting home. You're the Austraeoh. It's going to be hard. Really, really hard. Is the world... worth it? I mean, you know how much of a shit show it is. You've seen the darkness, spreading. Bad ponies in power, doing bad things, and you... you're so small. Your effect is so tiny, even if the ripples are big in the long run. Why... why don't you quit, Rainbow Dash?"
Rainbow Dash stared at him, feeling a lump form in her throat, before speaking quietly. "Why should I quit?"
"Because you're going to suffer. You're at the edge of the darkness, looking over, and you know that everything you've faced is nothing compared to what's on the other side. Everything in your way... it's bad stuff. Why not turn around? Why not fly back, snuggle up with Roarke, make a life of it? The girls, they'd understand. It's so much to ask one pony. It's a weight that I can't believe you choose to bear. You could stop and be happy, for what time there is left before chaos takes over and swallows up everything harmonious. You probably wouldn't even see it happen in your lifetime, Rainbow Dash. You could... quit."
Rainbow Dash sniffled, audibly, drawing Lower Case's gaze. She pawed at her eyes, wiping away tears, and gave him a fierce grin. "You... you s-sure know how to hit a girl where she lives, dreit?"
"I—I'm sorry, but," Lower Case said, but she held up a hoof, stopping him.
"I made a promise. I know it's going to be hard... but I'm loyalty. I'm the Austraeoh. I have so many ponies, so many beings, depending on me to see this through to the end. I couldn't ever let them down, even if it's going to be hard. After all, it's the hard stuff in life that's worth doing, right?" Rainbow Dash said, smiling through the pain.
Lower Case stared at her for a long moment, before giving her a slow nod. He spoke, voice gentle, "It's a stupid thing to do."
Rainbow Dash laughed, wiping the last tears off of her muzzle. "I'm good at stupid."
"You really are, though, aren't you?" Lower Case said, reaching out suddenly and wiping a tear off her nose. It was an affectionate gesture, almost parental, and Rainbow Dash didn't flinch away from it.
Rainbow Dash chuckled and sighed, looking up at the stars. Lower Case joined her, and both were silent, taking in the atmosphere of the park and the deepening darkness. Across the park, fireworks began to blossom in the sky, exploding in time to distant music and cheers. Lower Case spoke, softly. "Have you tried taking off the necklace?"
Rainbow Dash stiffened. "No. That's a really stupid idea."
"Yeah, it is. But I can't think of anything else, and if it goes bad, well, then I can probably get it back onto you before you... you know."
Rainbow Dash turned to look at him, her eyes reflecting the fireworks. "... Yeah. I guess, maybe, it's worth a shot."
Lower Case turned to face her on the bench, watching with consternation. Rainbow Dash reached up, placing both hooves on the Element of Loyalty, and brushing her mane aside to reach for the clasp. She paused, hooves on the clasp, to look at Lower Case. "This is a monumentally stupid thing to do."
Lower Case snorted. "It's okay. I'm pretty good at stupid, too."
Rainbow Dash took the Element of Loyalty off.
She winced her eyes closed, feeling a wash of dizziness pass over her, and she closed her eyes, her hooves trembling as pain sprouted from her forehead. She felt blood, running down her muzzle, and she whimpered as she fumbled with the clasp, but numbness overtook her hooves and she felt the Element of Loyalty begin to slip from her grasp. Her hooves, suddenly, were joined by hands, fingers nimbly finding the clasp, securing the necklace with a shove. The Element of Loyalty flared, bright and ruby red, lighting the area like a rogue firework that had flown off course, and she heard Lower Case grunt. The clasp closed, and suddenly the pain was gone, replaced by a headache and woozy feeling that left her breathless and gasping for air. She felt hands supporting her, helping her sit up and lean back on the bench, and the warmth of the Element of Loyalty on her neck.
"That was way scarier than I ever imagined it," Lower Case said, his voice shaking.
"Ughhh," Rainbow Dash ugh'd, swallowing back bile as she struggled to control her breathing. She winced one eye open, and was greeted by the ruby glow of her Element, lighting the area around her and Lower Case. She smirked through the pain. "Well... you did something."
"I think I almost killed you... not that it would be the first time," Lower Case said, some measure of humor returning to his voice, though it still trembled slightly.
"I'm gonna ignore that comment," Rainbow Dash said, rubbing some blood off of her forehead and nose as her breathing came easier. She sat up straighter, and tapped a hoof to her pendant. It glowed brighter in response, but nothing more.
"Well. You got your mojo back, right?" Lower Case said, scratching at the back of his head.
"I... guess so?" Rainbow Dash frowned, and shifted position. It glowed brigher when she moved nearer to Lower Case. She looked up at him, slowly. "I think you need to do something to it."
Lower Case sighed. "What more could I possibly do? Haven't I done enough?"
"I'm not the important one, here, dude. You are. You seem to know all about this stuff. What's your gut tell you?" Rainbow Dash said.
Lower Case stared at her. "My gut tells me I need a Doctor Pepper," he said.
Rainbow Dash scowled. "Come on. Think! What do you need to do?"
Lower Case muttered something under his breath, staring at her for a moment before nodding. "I know how I would write it."
"How's that?" Rainbow Dash said.
"Friendship is magic, right?"
"Right."
"Well, c'mere and sit close," Lower Case said, and he pulled out the glowing device, tapping on it a few times, before he pressed a button.
The device made a ringing noise a few times, and Rainbow Dash stared at it. A telephone? After a moment, a voice picked up on the other end. "Yo!"
"Hey," Lower Case said.
"What's up, man? Isn't it a little late for you?" said the voice.
"You know me. I'm a night owl. I'm actually out at Epcot right now."
"Rad. Thinking up pony stuff?"
Lower Case cast a glance at the prismatic pegasus sitting next to him and chuckled, drawing a confused look from Rainbow Dash. "Yeah, you could say that," he said.
"See any princesses?"
"A few. You know how it goes. Anyway, I just wanted to call and say hello."
"Ah, well, hello! Hope things are goin' well. I'm just about to start dinner, but I'm glad to hear from you."
"Yeah, I appreciate it. Anyway, you have fun, I'll let you go."
"Ya sure? I've got a minute."
"Nah. I appreciate it, though. You're a good friend."
"Pssh, whatever. We're all excited, by the way. About the new stuff. You getting your head in the right place?"
Lower Case laughed, a genuine thing, and said, "I think so. This trip might have been what I needed."
"Cool. Well, we're all excited! Take your time, though. You do you."
"Thanks. Catch you later?"
"Take it easy!"
The screen dimmed. What did not dim, however, was the Element of Loyalty. It positively burned with energy. Rainbow Dash smirked at Lower Case. "Sounds like you have good friends."
"I really do," Lower Case said, looking at the Element of Loyalty.
"So...?"
"I think... I think it's time for you to go back, Rainbow Dash. A lot of people are counting on you, and you've got a promise to keep. You've got a world to save," Lower Case said solemnly, staring at Rainbow Dash.
The Element of Loyalty responded to his words, brightening further, almost blinding. Rainbow Dash stood up and gave the man before her a smile. "I think it's working!"
"Yeah. It is. But, before you go, I just... I just want to say sorry," Lower Case said, standing up.
"Sorry?" Rainbow Dash said, frowning.
"Yeah. You said some stuff that... resonated, ya know? And I was doubting you, but I think I might be past that, just a bit. I've got things to work on. It'll be hard."
"The stuff that's worth it always is."
Lower Case chuckled, "Yeah. Okay, Rainbow Dash. Give me that devilish smirk, and go save the world. Go be stupid."
Rainbow Dash mustered the most devilish smirk she could manage, her wings flaring out as the light of the pendant enveloped her.
Lower Case looked away, and when the light dimmed, Rainbow Dash was gone. He stared at the spot for several long moments, before scratching the back of his head. "...Friendship is magic? That was the best solution I could muster? C'mon, you're a better writer than that."
He paused, than burst out laughing. "Who am I kidding? I'm totally not!"
Lower Case turned, still laughing to himself, and headed for the exit to the park, while the fireworks burst overhead in the sky.
