It had all started so innocently…
It was just another day at Sugar Cube Corner…
Another day of hanging out for notorious pranksters Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie…
“Nu-uh,” Pinkie declared.
“Yes-huh!” Rainbow Dash countered.
“Nu-uh!”
“Yes-huh!”
Rainbow Dash slammed her hoof down on the table, the old paper coffee cup, the wooden three-bit coin, and the plastic toy screwdriver clattering noisily.
“Well I bet you can’t,” Pinkie huffed, crossing her arms and turning away.
“You’re so dang on!” Rainbow Dash snapped as she picked up the objects and tucked them under her wing. “Usual stakes!?”
Pinkie thrust out her hoof and nodded as Rainbow bumped it with her own. “Agreed! A bet it shall be!”
***
The next day the citizens of Ponyville awoke to find their little hamlet blanketed with a thick, unscheduled fog.
Lyra walked out of her house and breathed deeply.
“Why doesn’t fog smell like anything?” she asked her roommate Bon-Bon as the other mare stepped out of the house behind her.
“Because it’s just water,” Bon-Bon explained. “You know, like a cloud.”
“Wait,” Lyra whispered, flattening her ears back nervously. “Does that mean if I breathe enough fog I could drown…?”
“Not even going to dignify that with an answer,” Bon-Bon sighed.
Lyra smirked and put a tally on the chalkboard in her mind that read: “Annoyed Bonnie.”
“Best part of wakin’ up,” she sang under her breath.
They walked together, joking about how thick the fog was, until they came upon Bon-Bon’s friend, Golden Harvest.
“Hey Goldie,” Bon-Bon greeted. “What’s the deal with this fog? It wasn’t on the schedule and it's kind of dense for what we normally get.”
“Hey Bonnie,” Golden Harvest replied. “I heard that Rainbow Dash never showed up for work yesterday, so Thunderlane got a temporary promotion until she turns up. Friend of mine in the Weather Patrol says that he added the fog last night as a way to take some initiative.”
“Trying to make himself look like a real leader and parlay it into a full time gig, huh?” Lyra proposed. “How’s that supposed to work? It's just extra thick fog. It's not like it's anything groundbreaking in weather sciences."
“No idea,” Golden Harvest shrugged. "He's not very bright, from what I hear."
A sudden clamor of excited murmurs and the sound of rushing ponies filled the air. A crowd began to gallop by, full steam in the direction of the fields outside of town.
“Hey Amethyst, what’s going on?” Bon-Bon asked as she spotted a young girl she recognized as her neighbor’s daughter, Amethyst Star.
Amethyst halted and turned to the group, an excited look in her eyes. “They found Rainbow Dash! She’s in a field outside of town and there’s something wrong with her!”
With that she took off again.
The three mares looked at each other before taking off after her, running full tilt to keep pace with the crowd.
The trio found the gathering of ponies just at the edge of town where the fog had gathered especially thickly. It looked like half the town had shown up to find out what was going on with the local hero.
Bon-Bon, Lyra, and Golden Harvest nudged and jostled their way to the front of the crowd to get a better look at what was going on.
Rainbow Dash appeared to be unhurt and completely conscious, despite the wide berth the assembled ponies gave her. She was standing on all four hooves, her wings tucked in, eyes open and scanning the crowd. She would blink periodically but other than that she made no attempt to move or address the crowd.
“She looks okay to me,” Lyra stated.
A stallion next to them, Time Turner, spoke up, raising his voice a little to be heard over the general hum of ponies whispering excitedly to one another.
“She’s not okay,” he told the newcomers. “She’s not moving and she won’t talk to anypony.”
Lyra blinked curiously and walked up to the pegasus. The crowd fell silent to watch in rapt attention.
“Hey Rainbow Dash,” she greeted, “ya’okay, girl?”
Rainbow Dash blinked at her.
“Say something,” Lyra pleaded. “You’re freaking everypony out.”
Rainbow Dash blinked at her.
“Lyra, get away from her!” Bon-Bon called out. “She’s sick or something!”
The crowd began to murmur again, but the general air of confusion and curiosity had curdled into a sense of fear at the notion that the fastest pegasus in Equestria might be sick with some unknown ailment.
“She’s a zombie, we have to put her down!” shouted a little brown colt with a propeller beanie. He was soon echoed by a chorus of agreement.
“She’s not a zombie!” Lyra shouted. “She’s not trying to eat my brains or anything!”
The crowd died down, returning to their previous concerned whispers.
“Maybe she’s a reverse zombie!” the little colt shouted.
“What does that even mean?” Bon-Bon asked.
“That she wants us to eat her brains!” he explained with a smirk, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. “That’s why she’s just standing there, making herself such an easy target! Well, I say we eat her before she mutates into a regular zombie and tries to eat us!”
“Yeah!” shouted the crowd, near-unanimously.
Rainbow Dash began blinking very rapidly at Lyra.
“She’s not a reverse…” Lyra started to protest before sighing in frustration and rubbing at the bridge of her nose with a hoof.
“I think it’s a political statement,” Time Turner voiced, sitting on his haunches and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “She’s protesting the… I’m not sure, but it’s probably something political – maybe even governmental!”
“Yeah, down with the government!” somepony from the back of the crowd cried. The sentiments were echoed enthusiastically as the gathered ponies began whipping themselves into a fervor of political awareness.
“It’s not a protest!” Lyra screamed shrilly. She locked eyes with Rainbow Dash questioningly. “It’s not, is it?”
Rainbow Dash blinked at her.
“See?” she announced to the mob. “It’s not political or governmental.”
They all settled down again, waiting for the next insane theory to pop up. A unicorn stallion in the back stood on his hind legs to be seen above the crowd, ready to put forward his theory on mind control, when a shriek pierced the air.
The crowd parted as a pink mare – a blonde maned earth pony that Bon-Bon quickly identified as Lily Valley – ran up to the front of the assembly. She turned and addressed the throng of onlookers, her breath coming raggedly from exertion.
“I just went to go see if Fluttershy could come and help since they’re friends!” Lily explained between gasps. “But something’s wrong with her too! She’s just standing in her doorway, not moving or saying anything! Whatever is going on, it’s spreading!”
The crowd froze.
As one they all turned to look down at the little brown colt with the propeller beanie. He held a hoof up, coughed into it politely, and shouted: “Zombie apocalypse!”
The mob exploded with activity. Ponies were running everywhere, rushing to get home, find weapons, and begin hoarding food and water. Within seconds, stores were already being looted and several fires looked to be raging in the distance, the light of the flames painting the fog an otherworldly orange.
Bon-Bon looked about and fretted excitedly, bouncing on her hooves in worry. “Should we be running?” she asked Lyra.
“It’s not zombies,” Lyra said with a shake of her head.
“How do you know?” Golden Harvest asked, casting worried glances back towards town in the direction of her house.
“Because it can’t be…” Lyra explained.
She looked at Rainbow Dash closely.
Rainbow Dash blinked at her.
Lyra frowned and took a deep breath. She looked up and noticed the hazy outline of Rainbow Dash’s cloudhome floating lazily in the distance. She idly thought how odd it had always been to her that pegasi lived in houses made of cloud the way other ponies lived in houses of wood and brick. To anypony else those clouds were no more solid than the unscheduled fog that had befallen Ponyville overnight, but to a pegasus they were as substantial as stone and mortar.
Lyra’s eyes widened as a theory formed in her mind. Had there been any other pegasi in the crowd that had come out to see Rainbow Dash? Thinking about it, she hadn't seen any...
“Noooo…” she muttered. “It can’t be that simple…”
Rainbow Dash blinked at her.
Lyra’s horn lit with magic and a matching aura surrounded Rainbow Dash. It shimmered and coalesced into a solid outline before ballooning into a bubble that completely surrounded the cyan pegasus.
No longer held in place by the fog, Rainbow Dash filled her lungs to capacity and bellowed at the top of her voice: “Thunderlane!!!”
***
“Son of an alicorn!” Rainbow Dash cursed as she watched Fluttershy’s bear float in Ponyville lake. Pinkie’s pet alligator Gummy was standing atop it, running in place and spinning the bear around like a lumberjack on a log. On the shore, the remnants of her house of cards blew away in a stiff breeze.
“Two out of three!” Dash demanded as she spun to glare at Pinkie Pie.
“As if we’d find another duck call at this time of day,” Pinkie giggled. “Afraid you’re stuck, Dashie. You lost the horse bet.”
“Fine!” Rainbow Dash shouted with a grimace. “Just let me to tell the Weather Patrol office I won’t be able to make it for the late shift tonight."
“No no no,” Pinkie insisted. “Horse bet starts now. I’ll tell them.”
Rainbow Dash growled in annoyance but nodded. “Just make sure to tell them that Flitter is in charge. Thunderlane has been angling for my job and he’s got these really, really, really stupid ideas for changes to my weather schedule to try and impress the mayor. It's experimental junk, too, like extra huge snowflakes and super thick fog.”
“Okie-dokie-lokie, Dashie!” Pinkie said.
”Remember, Flitter, Pinkie,” Rainbow Dash stressed.
“Oh my gosh, Dashie, I’m not going to forget,” Pinkie sighed.
“Repeat it.”
“Flitter’s in charge while you’re gone!” Pinkie repeated, sticking out her tongue as she did so.
“Okay, well then if you’ll excuse me, I have to go spend the rest of the day in a pasture neighing and eating wild grass,” Rainbow Dash said with a glower.
“Don’t forget, it’s until tomorrow morning,” Pinkie reminded her.
“Yeah, yeah I’ll sleep out there overnight,” Dash grumbled.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Pinkie asked with a puckish grin. “That sounded a lot like ponyspeak.”
Rainbow Dash narrowed her eyes and repeated herself, this time conveying her words as a series of whinnies and neighs.
“Music to my ears,” Pinkie chuckled. She slapped Rainbow Dash on the rump and sent her galloping on her way.
“Now to go and tell the Weather Patrol,” Pinkie said aloud to herself.
She only made it a few paces before she was stopped by somepony calling her name.
“Hey Pinkie Pie!” a young colt called to her from a clearing by the side of the road. “Come play stickball with us!”
“Stickball!?” she gasped. “That’s my second favorite activity involving sticks and balls!”
She trotted after the foal, glad that she didn’t have anything else to do all day.
Author's Note
In case it wasn't clear, a "horse bet" is a bet where the loser has to spend the day acting like a horse.
Well there we go, a silly little comedy as a break from the romance story I'm currently writing. I hope you enjoyed how silly and dumb it was.
If you liked this, try one of my other comedies, like Gator Patrol! Or if you missed it, check out my last romance, Berry Bitters and Apple Sours!
Thanks for reading and I hope you'll join me for my next big dumb pony thing.
