Rainbow dash rolled over, the annoying buzzing of her alarm clock pierced the morning silence. With a groan of annoyance, she reached out with her hoof and hit the snooze button. Sighing in relief, she rolled back over and nuzzled her cloud pillow and drifted back off to sleep. Only for what seemed like moments later, for her peaceful sleep to be utterly destroyed by the alarm clock's blaring.
Dash jolted up in her bed, "For the love of Celestia! Who made this thing so loud!"She yelled, slamming her hoof down on the machine so hard it shattered into thousands of pieces. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, she got out of bed and trotted across her room to the bathroom. The cold cloud-marble (at least that's what I think it is) floor chilled her hooves with each step. She stopped in front of the sink and began to brush her teeth. Admiring her bed-head in the mirror she gurgled a cup of water and spat it out in the sink, best part about being a rocker weather-mare? You can totally get away with rocking your bed-head and never have to brush it.
After a quick meal, she shut her front door and flew off to go clear out some storm clouds. Dash raced about the sky at super-sonic speeds, bucking every single cloud in the sky in a matter of seconds, nine seconds to be exact. Dash grinned at her work wondering if it was a record time in an academy somewhere, since it was her personal best anyways. After she made sure that she didn't miss any clouds, which she didn't, she yawned and flew to the nearest fluffy cloud to nap because of her post-worklazyitus.
She awoke from her nap with yawn. Dash stretched out a bit and started flexing, judging from the position of the sun it was about midday. I wonder what AJ's up to? she thought as she took off at break-neck speeds towards Apple Acres.
When she touched down, she noticed Apple Jack pulling a wagon of apples toward the barn. "Hey AJ, what's up?"Dash greeted, trotting up to her friend whom looked towards her as she flashed a smile and waved.
"Well, Hi there,"AJ said wiping the glistening sweat from her fore-head, "What can I do ya for?"
Dash trotted up to AppleJack and followed her into the barn, "I finished clearing up the sky a bit earlier than I thought and I was wondering if you needed any help with some things around the farm."Dashie said, lifting the wagon harness off of Aj and gently setting it down on the barn floor. Aj trotted over to a corner of the barn, and dusted off her hat, "I'm sorry, I just finished up a lion's share of the work, but you could help me get rid of some of the rotten apples from the west part of the orchard."
Rainbow smiled,"Sounds awesome, how can I help?"
AJ rubbed her chin thoughtfully, "I suppose you could fly by the trees really fast and knock them off with your tailwind."
Dash leaped in the air hoof pumped, "Yes! That sounds awesome!"
* * *
Rainbow opened the door to her home. It took the latter half of the day just to pick up all the rotten apples off the ground. Yeah, she "forgot" to mention that little bit! Dash thought bitterly as she crossed into her room. Yawning, she pulled open the bottom drawer of the nightstand beside her bed and pulled out a spare alarm clock, didn't hurt to have a spare just in case she woke up in a mood. She set the alarm and crawled in bed. She looked at the poster of the Wonderbolts above her, it showed Spitfire and Soarin side by side performing a dive towards the viewer. "One day,"Rainbow began as she yawned and rolled over on her side,"I'll be in the Wonderbolts."
"Yay! Muffins!"Derpy cheered, bouncing through vast fields of muffins. If her smile got any wider, they'd probably touch the bottom of her ears. She was in a field of muffins of all sorts, blueberry, chocolate, strawberry, just about every type of muffin conceivable. a single dirt path wound through the seemingly endless muffin field. Derpy beamed, her heart felt like it was fluttering and she was walking on clouds. As she bounced along the path, she'd scoop up hoof-fulls of muffins and scarf them down in a flash. Derpy was a little surprised to discover that she didn't get full nor sick from scarfing them down. Normally, after a dozen or so she would feel sick to her stomach and be about as mobile as a tortoise. However, this fact only made her smile and binge muffins at a greater pace.
Then, she saw it. Her heart stopped, her eyes widened and sparkled, her smile was probably big enough to cover her face. A little ways down the trail a stage was set up. The stage was mainly white cloth with golden accents, a set of white stairs with gold rails led up to the center of the stage where it stood: atop a marble stand sat an enormous, gilded, banana-nut muffin.
The cross-eyed mare dropped her arm-loads of muffins, all of her mind consumed in awe of this gilded master piece--it also happened to be her favorite flavor of muffin of all time. She slowly ascended the stairs, every step closer to it making her lick her lips and drool even more. Finally, it was within her reach. She extended her hoof to touch it, she wanted nothing more than to eat it; to feel the soft warm texture of it between her teeth, the scrumptious flavor of banana-nuts coating her whole tongue.
Derpy whet her lips and slowly leaned in for the bite of a life-time. Just as she was about to take a bite, the whole field began to shake violently. Derpy struggled to stay on her hooves, a loud and rough voice shouted from above, "Derpy! Hey, Derpy wake up!"
Wha-? Derpy thought as she blacked out.
Derpy slowly opened her eyes, "I'm sorry for trying to eat you Mr.Muffin,"She apologized, half-awake and not taking notice of the fuming mad stallion glaring down at her.
"I tolds ya to wake up,"The stallion declared, his words dripping with frustration and his Manehattan accent, "and for the last time, I'm no Mr.Muffin, ya hear? The name's Quick Ship." Quick finished, calming down a little.
"Mr.--uh?"Derpy began, her sleep hazed mind slowly beginning to start functioning again, "Mr.Quick? Oh no!" Derpy jolted upwards out of surprise. Mr.Quick was in charge of mail shipment of the little post-office where she worked and also was known to have a short-temper for incompetence and the word "short". Derpy was helping load today's mail into the trailer, today was a weird set of things if she recalled correctly: outside of some miscellaneous things, there were some very heavy things like an anvil and a piano...stuff way too heavy for most pegasi to carry, but it wasn't her job to ask questions, just load the trailer. However, one thing was bugging her, that delivery should have taken a couple days at the least and if she only dozed off after hauling those heavy things into the trailer.
"Mr.Quick? How did you back to the warehouse already?"Derpy asked. cocking her head slightly to the side.
Quick stood for a minute in total silence, trying to process this amount of adorable clumsiness that was surprising, even-though it was coming from Derpy. "Look around ya, does this look like a warehouse to you?"He asked as he rubbed his temple with his hoof.
Derpy looked around her, she was in small metal trailer filled with boxes of all sizes. Then, it clicked: she must have fallen asleep after pushing that anvil into the trailer.
Derpy gasped, shooting straight up into the air, apologizing for dozing off as she hit her head on the top of the trailer, causing it to shake. Derpy picked herself off the floor and rubbed her head, "Ow."She stated, wincing as she rubbed the tender lump on her head. All of the delivery ponies were flying outside of the trailer, mouths gaping and eyes wide in terror. Derpy flew out to meet them, "Hey, guys what's going--"She trailed off and her mouth dropped. Her little accident in the trailer had shook it enough to allow some of the objects in the front to fall to the ground below them...on top of a very unlucky somepony; among the little vase that landed on her was an anvil, a piano, and a bail of hay.
Quick turned to her, his teeth were grinding and a vein throbbed on his forehead all he managed to say was, "Tartarus hath no fury."
Somehow, the unicorn mare that got hit by the stuff didn't sue or get seriously hurt. Management did, however, decide to simply demote Derpy to a simple mail-mare instead of firing her. After apologizing to the mare, whom Derpy learned was Princess Celestia's own protege (which cause Derpy to almost faint from worry of possible banishment), they became fast friends began seeing each other regularly due to Derpy's recent career change.
Wow, four likes, one favorite, and one read-later? Honestly, I never expected A.D.L.O. to actually go anywhere at all. Thank you guys for the liking this, I am honestly still flabbergasted that there isn't a single down-vote...especially since I literally wrote this fic straight from my head without any actual planning, or any other step in the writing process.
Admittedly, it hasn't gotten a lot of support, I know. However, this is a great deal more than what I thought it would get. In fact, I expected it to go two ways: either everyone hated it and burned with hateful comments till it was a pile of burning ashes at my feet, or it would go completely unnoticed except for a few views and comments here and there.
Again, thank you to all those who like this. So, now to business. Since it is getting some good feedback I will be uploading new chapters on a semi-regular basis...stupid job keeping me from working on this and other fics in the works. Speaking of other fics, I plan to release my Lost Lore series as I promised I would about two years ago. Note: this will not get in the way of this fic in the bit.
I'll see you all in the next chapter: Luna!