Rainbow Crash, first four and half pages



Rainbow Crash



Rainbow dash's leg hooves kicked against the chair legs, her wings pressed against her back as hard as their muscles would allow, her bladder filled, her teeth bit into her lips, all the symptoms of nervous anxiety. Either Spitfire couldn’t tell she was so uncomfortable or more likely she was making a point of being stern and professionally unsympathetic. What ever the reason spitfire was making no apparent effort to hurry as she slowly read through a pile of papers only ever occasionally taking her hooves of them to pick up and drink from a mug of hot chocolate.

A length of time passed that in Dash’s head felt eternal, but in actually was probably only about eighteen minutes. At the end of it spitfire finally put down the paperwork and looked Dash in the eyes.

“So, you applied for the fast track program?” she almost shouted across the desk.

Dash pulled her eyes away from Spitfire’s for a few seconds before forcing herself to drag them back. Dash knew Spitfire had spent several years in a support team before becoming a true wonderbolt, most ponies who’d done that didn’t particularly respect those who wanted to just get pushed right through. Dash didn’t want to disappoint somepony she respected so much, ….but then on the other hoof she REALY wanted to be a wonderbolt …right now!

“Yes ma'am” she answered with uncharacteristic timidity.

Spitfire frowned for a second, Dash momentarily wondered if she was disapproving of her application or her lack of confidence.

“Hmmmmm, well in terms of just the stuff I’ve seen you’re defiantly a cut above kid” Dash felt as if a heavy weight deep inside of her was lifting slightly, unfortunately It was only destined to stay there for a few moments “….Buuuuut” Spitfire painfully drew out as the weight slammed back down into Dash’s colon “these decisions aren’t just based on what I’ve seen with my own eyes” spitfire fanned the papers she’d been reading “they’re based on your record.” Dash started to feel slightly nauseous, she had a dread feeling she knew exactly where this was going “…and I’m afraid your records have some pretty damn relevant stuff in them.” she pushed forward a sheet from near the middle of the fan “Tell me about this?”

The paper was upside down from Dash’s perspective so she couldn’t read it, she could however recognise the coat of arms printed in the corner. It was a shield split down the middle with a dog on one side and a bird of pray on the other, she’d seen it at least once a day everyday for almost three years, it represented the flight school she’d spent the first few years of her adolescence as a student in.

“This is about the octuplehelix I screwed up, isn’t it?” Spitfire pushed all the papers aside and leaned forward across the desk towards dash in a successful attempt to be imposing.

“Yes it is” she answered in an oppressively judgmental tone “…but there’s more to it than that just screwing up a stunt, isn’t there?” Dash’s eyes dropped to the ground.

“Yes ma’am” she almost mumbled

“You crashed into something didn’t you?”

“Yes ma’am” she did mumble this time. Spitfire rolled her eyes

“What! Was! It!” Spitfire accentuated every word separately. Dash truly admired Spitfire but right now she just felt profoundly resentful towards her, Spitfire knew exactly what had happened. Why was she forcing her to go through this?

“I crashed into a school house and totally destroyed it!” Dash forced out clearly in an attempt to regain some dignity.

“Yes you did, it cost Ponyville 40 thousand bits to repair their school house and you were expelled from flight school.” added Spitfire compounding the event with all the consequences Dash preferred to push out of her mind when she rarely reflected on the event. “Kid I’m afraid that taking these events into considerations….”

At that moment Dash felt an intense desperation build up inside her and she could’nt help but cry out.

“No….. Please but….. I was just a filly…. and I didn’t mean to do anything wrong!”

Spitfire was dumbstruck for a moment by the blatant collapse of Dash’s military formality in having interrupted her. When she composed her self she got off of the chair to fully stand over Dash.

“Didn’t mean to!” she shouted in her full commanding officer’s bellow “Kid this wasn’t an accident. You knew what you were doing, you pulled a reckless stunt and you screwed up!”

“but I was only like 13!” Dash knew Spitfire had made up her mind and arguing was almost defiantly futile, but some how the knowledge of that futility just upset and drove her desire to keep trying

“So!?” Shouted Spitfire rhetorically “You still did it! You still have to live with the consequences!” Dash began to open her mouth to say something but before she could speak Spitfire carried on “No, I’m sick of listening to excuses!” Dash looked at the floor again “As I’m SURE you’ve already guessed your application has been refused!” Spitfire opened a draw, pulled out an almost comically oversized stamp, pulled a paper from the other side of the desk and rammed the stamp right into the middle of the paper with massive force. She pushed the paper into Dash’s lap and shouted

“Dismissed!” Dash just sat there staring at the paper “I said “DISMISSED!” Airpony!” Dash stared for a few seconds longer then lowly got up and trotted to the door. She opened the door but stopped for a moment to look back at Spitfire, she was looking through papers again as if nothing happened. Dash closed the door and left.

Dash walked out of the hallway that lead up to Spitfire’s office, and emerged into the main body of the flight camp. There was a lot of noise in the main hallway in which she now stood and every few seconds a group of Pegasus ponies passed her as she stood trying remember the way out of the building. Rainbow dash assumed that there must be another crop of fresh recruits going through the place like she her self had a year previously. When she finally got her bearings she felt a really strong need to keep her head down as walked through the hallways and out on to the plateau. She felt a strange irrational fear that her shame might somehow show on her face and if she met somepony she knew that’d just be awful. Of course she got to the edge of the plateau without anypony saying two words to her.

“Spitfire doesn’t give two shits about my failure, why should any pony else!?” she reflected bitterly just as she let her self tumble off the edge and into freefall.

She tilted her nose up slightly and opened her wings and causing her to shoot forward from the cliff and into open sky. She felt the wind on her face and couldn’t help but start to smile.

One of the main reasons Dash loved flying was that it made the world seem like such simple but also joy filled place. There was the blue void and also the joy you got from moving through it quickly. Nothing else existed, nothing else needed to exist. When she flew, REALLY flew just for the hell of it, it was like all the other stuff didn’t matter. In the blue void there was no one to tell her she couldn’t do things. There were no judgements, responsibilities and consequences to live with. There was just flying, no rules and no limits.

Her earliest memories were of flying and this feeling of sublime detachedness from the world.

“I shouldn’t have ever stopped” a dreamy voice said in her head. It seemed almost like she’d had two choices in life. She could have either kept flying, or she could have taken part in the world and try to compete with everypony else. She’d chosen to compete ….and she’d failed. She turned her back on innocence for nothing.

After about fourteen minutes she was over Ponyvile, back in the world of judgements, responsibilities and consequences. She looked towards the edge of the town and saw that apparently a responsibility had already presented it’s self. There was a gray cloud floating towards the Ponyvile from the east, she’d have to buck it out of existence in about an hour or two or else everypony would get angry with her for letting an unscheduled downpour hit at night.

Dash let out an audible

“Harrumph”

“The damn cloud can wait” she thought, Twilight had invited them to the tree house to see something “cool” as she described it. It was probably some boring egghead stuff but Dash really didn’t care, she wanted something to distract her right now.

She made a mental note of rain cloud and landed in front of the tree house. The door was slightly open so she just walked in. She saw that all five of her friends as well as spike, were standing on the far side of the room with their flanks to her. Dash felt her stomach turn over, what she was going to tell them if they asked? Even if she was willing she couldn’t tell them the truth, she’d told them that she’d left flight school because it was too easy.

“Rainbow you’re here!” shouted Twilight causing the entire group to turn around to look at her, as well as turning rainbow dash’s bowels to water. Dash opened her mouth to make an excuse but then realized twilight had said nothing to elicit one.

“….So …what are we here to see!?” she asked instead, deciding that she’d rather just avoid the subject if she could.

Pinkie pie rose up into Dash’s eye line about a foot in front of her.

“Yeah Twilight what are we here to see?” pinkie fell to the ground like she was in pain or something “The tension is killing me!” she almost sobbed.

“Deer Celesti, am I really late or something?” Dash asked. Twilight rolled her eyes

“Yeah, five minutes” she replied sarcastically. Her friends were standing in an ark around something with Twilight in the middle, there was some sort of giant bullet shaped thing in front of them under a tarp. The tarp suddenly developed a purple aura and started to rise of off the whatever it was “…but if you really can’t wait pinkie, we might as well get on with it!”

The tarp rose fully into the air and then flung it’s self across the room several feet away. The object it revealed was totally mysterious to Dash. It looked like a giant brass gyroscope with a unicorn purple unicorn horn attached to the inner most ring. In front of it there was what looked like typewriter on the end of a brass pole. The words

“Steam punk” went through Dash’s mind.

Twilight opened her mouth, words came out, they were meaningless. The five of them turned to spike.

“She means it’s a time machine” He said through a smug smile. Twilight started speaking again but again the words were meaningless to Dash, but this time it was mostly because she wasn’t listening. Her head was suddenly swimming.

“This is destiny” she said to her self. Just at the moment when her past was coming to bite her in the ass, the ability to change that past had virtually fallen into her lap.

“How does it work?!” she blurted out. Twilight stopped talking and looked at Dash, she started to open her mouth but dash added “In real English for once ….please?”

Twilight closed her mouth, then opened her mouth ….then closed her mouth again. Eventually Spike stepped forward and said

“Maybe I better field this one” he pointed to unicorn horn “that’s one of Twilight’s old horns, she can grow them back now she’s a princess, it powers the contraption with magic.” he then pointed to the type writer thing “That‘s the control panel, you put the date and coordinates of where you want to go in there.” He pointed to the Rings “When you do that those turn purple and start spinning faster and faster. When they look like a giant purple ball you jump in and get transported to where ever you want to go. You’re stuck there for 40 hours, after that another purple ball appears where you arrived, you have 10 minutes to jump into it or else you’re stranded.” he smiled, put his hands behind his back and rolled his eyes “that’s basically everything somepony with a normal noggin could possibly need to know” Twilight frowned at him

“Well that’s the idea there’s still some bugs to work out” she said before lunching back into incomprehensible jargon. Once again Dash’s mind was elsewhere. She was trying to think of how to get her self alone with the time machine.

“The fucking storm” she thought, things really were coming together, this had to be destiny!

“A storm!” she blurted out to no pony in particular prompting everypony to stare at her. The problem wasn’t exactly at Applejack levels but still she wasn’t exactly adept at deception. “....is blowing into town” she added after a few seconds. Dash put on an exaggerated fake look of annoyance “…and it’s too dangerous for us to go home before tomorrow”

Rarity put her arm hoof to her lower lip and a look of puzzlement came across her features.

“Storm?” she said questioningly “I didn’t read anything about a bad storm, a business mare has to keep up with these things”

“yeah well there must have been a misprint!” everypony went wide eyed, the words had come out much more confrontational than Dash would have liked “….yeah I just hate the guys in forecasting department sometimes!” she added to make it sound like her anger wasn’t Directed at Rarity.

For a couple of seconds longer everypony continued to stare at her …but then Applejack said.

“Well Twilight, better brake out the futons!” after that every pony stopped looking at her and the group started to disperse throughout the room to look for the aforementioned futons or to do other things, Dash knew the lie had been swallowed.

The next seven hours were excruciatingly for Rainbow Dash. For the first four she had to try and pretend to be interested in pointless town gossip, and slumber party games well her mind was as thoroughly elsewhere as that of a death row inmate trying to play chess, well for the next three after that she had to pretend to be asleep so see could be sure no pony would see her leaving (for lack of a better word)

Finally at 2 minutes past 2 o’clock exactly, she slowly and silently as could pulled of the covers of off her self and stood up. She looked around, the futons where arranged in a hexagon formation in the centre of the library that made up the entire lower level of the Treehouse. The only sounds she could hear were snoring and the howling winds outside, she decided it was safe to assume everypony was asleep. The time machine was directly opposite her and behind a slumbering Fluttershy. She decided that the best way to reach was to walk around the outside instead of flying. As trivial as it was the thought of that annoyed her for some reason. She became aware of a massive sense of pent up anticipation that seem to permeate her entire body, it was the reason the thought of restricting her self in anyway was so frustrating. Her entire past, present and future were about to change for the better and it seemed ridicules that any thing so small could stand in the way of that…. that… “Destiny”. Still though, she managed to force down her sense of outrage at reality and tip hoof her self around to in front of the control panel.

She saw that she had indeed been right to think that it resembled a typewriter, the only apparent difference was that it had a line of tumblers for date, time and coordinates, instead of paper. The tumblers were all at zero, she experimentally punched the key for the first number of the year she wanted. Sure enough the first 9 of 997ALB roled into place as soon as pushed the 9 key.

She already knew the date of by heart and like all good aviators she was pretty damn good with coordinates, so she had no issue with setting the Time machine for just outside the entrance to her old flight school, at 6 o’clock on the morning of July 7th 997ALB.

When the last tumbler rolled into place she looked up at the rings. For a heart stopping second or two nothing happened …but then the unicorn horn started to light up purple. When the purple aura totally obscured it, the aura started to expand outwards in a sphere. When it had fully covered the first ring it started spinning, soon after the second ring followed suit. Eventually all the rings were engulfed and spinning. The aura became progressively more opaque until she couldn’t see the rings any more. Dash’s eyes widened and she felt butterflies in her belly, according to spike this mean she was ready to go. Dash swallowed and jumped forward nose first in to the great purple yonder!