If there was one thing Rainbow Dash was sure about, it was that her friends came before everything. As the Pegasus strained against the large valve holding the water in the tank behind her, she knew it was her only option. It had come to a choice between one of her closest pals and the season.
Leveraging the valve open, she kicked the hose off of the pipe, then quickly did the same to the other valve. Hundreds of gallons of water began pouring out of the tank and onto the floor of the lab. Dash looked around, wiping her forehead of accumulated sweat. Between winter and her pet tortoise, her pet won. There would be no hiber-
-All thought was cut off as she glanced over at her loving pet, Tank, and saw him drifting on his magic propeller right toward a heavy ventilation fan in the wall. She took flight, catching him in time and pulling him to safety. But the large magnifier Rainbow Dash had tied his leash to caught in the fan, making a horrible crunching sound as the blades caught.
An explosion sent the pony tumbling; she lost hold of Tank as she slid into a nearby storage closet. Sitting up to catch her breath, she paused. Around her were hundreds of jarred lightning bolts. She watched as one of the jars jiggled from her impact with the shelf. Then it fell. Dash headed for the door, but the bolt went off before she could finish turning. The detonation of electrical charge sent her flying through the door and across the room beyond.
A number of other lightning bolts exploded out of their containers behind her, flying into the room and hitting all around her. One landed close to her, pushing a large red button on impact. The half-dismantled machinery dominating half of the room whirred into action. A storm began to form inside the room, lighting bolts illuminating the swirling clouds which had condensed from the water pooled across the floor.
Rainbow Dash sprang into the air, searching- spotting Tank, she grabbed him and made a break for the door. But she was stopped by a giant hose that used to connect to the water tank. Now it sucked at the air, pulling Dash off balance. Tank flew from her grip again, sliding across the room and coming to a rest near the exit. She strained her wings for all she had, but the suction pulled her back, and she slipped into the hose, butt first.
She was quickly pulled into a transparent pipe, narrow enough to rub against her legs, flanks, and wings from all sides, but smooth enough that she couldn’t wedge herself against it to stop her movement deeper into the apparatus. The roar of the suction whipped her mane into her eyes and drowned out even her own screams as she was forced around u-bends and directed into the cloud-maker proper.
Just before she reached the end of the pipe, it occurred to her that she was almost certainly about to come to a very painful end herself. She tensed all over and scrunched her eyes shut as she slipped into the metal cylinder below.
It took a few moments to occur to her that all motion had stopped. Dash opened her eyes. Some light diffused into the chamber from a little glass window on one side. She had just enough room to stand and turn around, but not enough to do much else. She doubted anybody would hear her from inside this thing, so she pushed herself against the window in hopes that somepony might see her.
The room beyond was in total chaos, with a thunderstorm in full swing near the ceiling, but it seemed that lunch breaks were taken seriously at the weather factory. Not a single worker had yet come to check on the commotion.
At least she wasn’t being torn to pieces like she thought she would be. She sat back and stretched her legs as best she could. What could the purpose of this chamber possibly be?
Rainbow Dash yawned. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep while she was trapped in there, but perhaps she could find a more comfortable position. She slid forward slowly until she was lying against the side of the tank, half-curled. Her gaze drifted up to just above her head, where her little yawn-cloud lazily floated.
…Her what?
Sitting back up, she muttered a “huh” at the sight, only to be baffled as a second wisp escaped her mouth, rising up to join the first. She watched them slowly circle around each other, wondering where they came from.
Then it hit her. This was a cloud chamber. It made clouds from water. If she remembered one of her friend Twilight’s many random lectures, ponies were three-fourths water. She was three-fourths water. She was about to be turned into a cloud.
Dash stood back up, pounding her hooves against the window and screaming for help. She knew it was useless; there was still nobody in the room outside to see or hear her. Worse, as her forehoof hit the window, it barely made a sound anyway; just a slight ‘puff’ noise. She stopped to examine her hoof as it rested against the window. It was smooshed against the glass like a balloon. Her skin seemed to be holding nothing but air… or water vapor.
A tingling ran down the leg, and soon the other three, as her joints faded away. Her bones were dissolving. Dash began to truly panic, each of her desperate gasps for oxygen filling the chamber with more wisps of cloud, forming a fog of her breath. Then she stopped breathing.
Looking down, in desperation, she found her chest was expanding outward and rounding off. Her skin felt stretched everywhere as the vapor expanded and filled her evenly. Even her fur began to curl up in little spirals of vapor as she floated just above the chamber’s floor.
Her head bumped the ceiling, but it didn’t hurt; it squished. Her vision blurred, her head swam, and the skin of her legs finally began to evaporate. She waited for it to end; for the final moment when everything would go black. But it never came.
She couldn’t see, nor hear, but she could feel the air currents tugging at her. They strengthened, and it quickly became clear that the suction had returned. She felt herself be squeezed through a pipe the size of her former hoof. Parts of herself momentarily condensed around the sides and flowed down the pipe beside her gaseous form. At the bottom, she found herself with just enough room.
She felt her center condense around something metallic; several long, thin somethings. They moved. It was a mixing blade, and she was being stirred thoroughly and fluffed up. Her inner portion moved faster than her outer portion, and she began to lose track of the directions formerly known as forward and backward, left and right. At least she still had up and down.
As the mixing continued, frothing her into a single fluffy mass, she began to feel like a proper cloud. This was not a feeling that Dash welcomed. She did appreciate the relieving of tension; the smoothing of her lumps and whisking of her wisps… but she was not a cloud. Or, she corrected herself, she wasn’t supposed to be. Despite the sensations coursing through her droplets, she focused on a memory: flying, having wings and limbs and a defined form, soaring through the air on the wind, feeling the currents tugging at her fur and feathers, drifting on a morning breeze, fluffing out as she prepared to rain-
-No! No raining. She was not a cloud, she was not a cloud, she was not a cloud…
The blades stopped. Rainbow Dash briefly missed the peaceful churning, before recalling that she wasn’t supposed to be enjoying this situation. One side of the chamber gave way; a hatch had opened, and she popped through it into the open air. She had no idea what to do, now. Before, she had the excuse of being trapped. But she was finally free from the machine, she was a cloud, and she didn’t even know whether she could do anything, much less what her goal should be.
Twilight Sparkle. Her friend, and more importantly, the most powerful mage of their generation. If she could find Twilight, maybe she could fix this. She’d turned them into Breezies and back, once; this wasn’t too different, right? Given, the Breezies were animals, but they drifted on the wind, and… and… there must be other similarities. So, find Twilight. As soon as she figured out how to do that, she was good to go.
The tickling sensation that had been in the background since she had popped out of the cloud-maker finally caught her attention. She thought it sounded familiar… sounded! The vibrations she was feeling were sounds! She concentrated on them, trying to piece together what they were. Slowly, it began to make sense. It was a conversation.
“So the turtle-”
Tortoise!
“Tortoise.”
Thank you.
“…So the tortoise is on the way to the pound, they’ll take care of finding the owner. Shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out who owns a tortoise with a magic propeller.”
Tank was going to the pound? At least he was okay, but the pound? Dash needed to get him back as soon as possible. Before finding Twilight, if need be.
“That thing caused a lot of damage. How do you think it got in here?”
Tank was a he. And he didn’t cause this damage, she did. Oh. Right. That. Oops.
“Cirrus probably left the window open. It has a propeller, it could have flown in.”
“So, what do you think about this cloud?”
Wait, where they talking about her? They were going to do something to her? Well, she was a cloud floating in the middle of the room, so of course they would do something about her, but… They knew what she meant. Well, they would know what she meant. Or… no, they won’t. They’d never know. Nopony would ever know. She’s a cloud, all she could do was float there, and her friends would never know what had happened to her!
…She hoped Fluttershy would take good care of Tank…
“Well, it’s a cloud.”
Duh. She wasn’t in the mood for that; could they get on to what horrible thing they were going to do with her?
“It’s a raincloud.”
She was? But, this was the winter lab. Shouldn’t she have been a snow cloud? Not that it mattered, but that didn’t make sense.
“Yes, it’s a raincloud. Probably had too much rainbow in the mix.”
Ha ha, he’s a comedian. Wait, did that count as a joke if he didn’t know what happened?
“So, should we just store it away with the spring line, then?”
What was she, a piece of clothing? Would anypony answer her questions?
“Yeah, rope it up and put it in the freezer.”
At least it wasn’t like she was going to be disposed of, but spending all winter in storage did not sound very appealing. She decided to escape. If she could move, that was. And she did. Move; not escape. It wasn’t her, though. She felt a rough surface loop around her middle and pull tight. Pegasus-enchanted rope. Rainbow Dash was tugged across the room, despite her unsuccessful attempts to even try to pull away. She bumped against what she assumed was a doorframe, deforming around it briefly before springing back into shape.
Eventually, the motion stopped. A sudden vibration signaled the opening of a heavy door. The rope was loosened and slid off, and she was shoved into the storage room. The door slammed closed.
It was cold. Rainbow Dash could feel her water droplets turning into ice crystals. More than anything, it made her feel heavy and slow; certainly not as puffy as she had been before. This, apparently, was her home for the next three months.
⁂
Lap twenty… lap twenty-one… lap twenty-two…
The freezer wasn’t the nicest prison, but at least there was room to move. The place was roughly a cube, a few dozen meters on a side, and the clouds scattered around provided ever shifting obstacles to dodge. Well, the other clouds.
Lap fifty. Rainbow Dash stopped to rest. She still wasn’t sure whether she physically needed rest, but she certainly felt mentally exhausted after exercising.
It had taken a few days (by her estimate) to figure out that she could, in fact, move on her own power. It involved lifting her mass into herself on one side and pushing out on the other; she compared it mentally to a snail, but was pretty sure the comparison didn’t really hold up. Moving like this also served to mix her, rejuvenating her fluff. She couldn’t get back to the consistency she had in the warmer air, but it felt nice nonetheless.
Dash idly twirled around her center, thinking. Besides racing herself around the freezer, that was the only thing she could really do. If it could be called racing. She had no way to judge time, but it felt like she could barely go walking pace. Well, she had heard of snail races. Maybe it was like that.
A sudden concussive blast ruffled her surface. It wasn’t much, but after being alone for so long, any sound was unexpected. She didn’t turn toward the door; she’d given up on accounting for her front and back long ago. But she was definitely paying attention, and wondering.
As a cloud, she still slept regularly, and counting those cycles (night, morning nap, afternoon nap), she thought she’d been keeping pretty good time. By her count, however, it had only been two weeks or so since she was put in there. Winter couldn’t have been over yet, could it?
Hold on, she heard those voices again.
“…so we put it in here. What’s so important about it?”
“Well, it’s just a hunch, but given the machinery you have in there…”
Wait, was that…?
“Look, I have a job to get back to. Take any cloud you want, and lock the door on your way out.”
“…huh. Thank you?”
Was it?
“I hope I’m right about his.”
It was! It was it was it was!
“Rainbow Dash? Are you in here?”
Dash was moving toward the voice before the question was asked. Twilight was here, and she was going to fix everything! The nightmare was over!
“Rainbow Dash?”
Yes, she was coming, she was right there! Right in front of Twilight! Come on come on come on…
“I guess she wasn’t trapped in that cloud, after all. Tank must have gotten away from her. I hope she’s okay…”
No! Not okay, cloud! Right there, the one that’s moving! Twilight’s voice was fading; she was leaving the room. She was going to close the door, and trap her inside forever. Or for the next two and a half months, but that was pretty close to forever.
Just as the rumbling of the door began, Dash smacked against something, curling around it, her ice crystals melting on warm strings, on fur. Twilight stopped moving.
A pause.
“Rainbow Dash?”
Dash drifted slightly back from Twilight’s side, and spread herself as wide as possible.
“That’s really you? This is somewhat… worse than I thought.”
The cloud drifted down a little bit. That was not the sort of thing she wanted to hear from her one and only hope.
“No, don’t worry; I’ll fix this. Come on, Rainbow Dash, I’ll take you back to Ponyville.”
Twilight started walking down the hall, creating a slight breeze that rippled across Dash’s side. She tried to follow, but couldn’t quite keep up. Twilight noticed and came back.
“Hmm…”
After a moment’s thought, there was a wave of displaced air as something was conjured into existence beside Twilight. Then there was a tingling Dash recognized as magic all around her… and she was stuffed into a glass jug about the size of a cider barrel. A top was screwed on, trapping her in.
Great. She felt more like her pony-self already.
⁂
Rainbow Dash stretched her wings. Her wings. Oh, how she’d missed her wings! She could do without the hooves, as long as she had those feathered appendages again! But before she could flight-test them, Twilight cleared her throat, obviously trying to grab her attention.
Rainbow looked back across the throne room of Friendship Castle, Twilight’s house. “I guess I’m going to get a long lecture now, aren’t I?”
Twilight turned her eyes to the side, thinking. “I wasn’t going to lecture you, no. I think two weeks stuck in a freezer is enough of a lesson for trying to stop the change of seasons.”
She turned to catch Dash’s eyes before the Pegasus could take that as an excuse to leave. “You do, however, need to know a few things.”
Dash didn’t like the sound of that, but she folded her wings and sat on her throne, one of seven arranged in a circle. Twilight remained standing.
“First, Tank is hibernating.”
Rainbow Dash didn’t move. She’d figured as much since hearing that Fluttershy had taken him back from the Cloudsdale Pound. She still hadn’t decided what to feel about it.
After examining Rainbow’s face for a reaction and finding none, Twilight moved to her next item. “Second, I couldn’t reverse the spells you were subjected to.”
Dash reacted to that one. “What do you mean? I’m a pony again; what else is there?”
“Well,” Twilight decided to examine her hooves. “You aren’t a pony. Technically, you’re a cloud transfigured into a pony.”
The Pegasus turned her head to the side, trying to see the point. “And before that, I was a pony transfigured into a cloud. So everything’s back to normal. Right?”
Twilight was still looking at her hooves. Her wings ruffled nervously behind her. “No. You see, your transformation into a cloud was very complex… you know how glass can shatter, and only magic can put it back together without cracks? Well, there are some things that not even magic can reverse perfectly.”
Rainbow Dash sat there, trying futilely to figure out what her friend was trying to say. Finally, she gave up. “I don’t get it. I’m a pony. You fixed it. What’s the problem?”
The Alicorn finally looked back up from her hooves and met Dash’s eyes again. There was a tear in one of them, but it was quickly blinked away. “I couldn’t fix it, it's impossible. All I’ve done is use a standard transfiguration spell to form you into the shape and substance of a pony. But transfiguration spells are temporary. Given time, you’ll evaporate back into a cloud.”
Dash’s eyes went wide. Maybe it wasn’t as fixed as she had thought. “How… how long do I have?”
“About a day; 24 hours, give or take. But it shouldn’t matter too much.” Twilight paused, pulling a small paper bag in from the side of the room with her magic. She proffered it to Rainbow Dash. “These are pills containing charge-matrix for the spell. Take one every 12 hours, and the spell should last indefinitely.”
Dash reached out slowly with a hoof, and lifted the bag out of the air. She looked at the brown surface. “So… I’ll need to take these for the rest of my life?”
Twilight turned her head to the side, checking the imaginary clock on the wall. “Yes.” She looked back at Dash. “And tell me before you run out; they take some preparation to make.”
The rainbow-maned Pegasus flashed a grin that she tried to make sincere. “I will.” With that, she stood up, spreading her wings to leave.
“Wait!” She turned to look at Twilight just as a warm tingling raced over her; the feeling of a spell being cast.
“What was that?” Dash was looking over her shoulder at the purple pony behind her, still ready to lift off.
“A semi-permanent tracer. This way, if you turn back into a cloud, I know where to find you.” Twilight’s face showed no emotion.
Dash turned around fully. “Doesn’t that mean you’ll always know where I am?”
Twilight grinned. “Since the Weather Board decided not to press charges for your acts of trespassing and sabotage, just think of this as your punishment.”
Dash scowled. “I thought you said being stuck in a freezer was my punishment.”
The grin remained in place. “I said that was enough to teach you not to mess with the seasons. I didn’t say anything about trashing factories.”
Rainbow Dash looked back at Twilight, huffed, and launched herself up and out through an open window into the Ponyville sky. The breeze on her fur was the best feeling in the world, and she soon forgot all about freezers, and clouds, and Twilights; and just reveled in the open sky.
Author's Note
This went through my head the moment I saw that scene. I had to.
Since I'm horrible at finishing things, I rushed this to get it up before the inspiration left. So, I didn't do my usual edit passes.
Anyway, judge my story, judge my writing, judge my sanity; all that stuff below.