Blood, Tears and Laughter. A Rainbow Factory Fan-Fic

Prologue:

  It was the day of the flight school final exam, Flash was nervous but confident. He was almost positive that he would pass.

  "Just clear, fly, fall, complete." He said quietly to himself. "Nothing I can't handle." He didn't want to be one of the failures, sent off into exile, never seen or heard from again.

  "Hey Flash, you ready for this?" Updraft, Flash's best friend said as he walked up next to him.

  "As ready as I'll ever be." He replied.

  Updraft was a young griffon who's parents had signed him up for a flight school in Cloudsdale. He was about four inches taller than Flash and had feather patterns like that of a hawk.

  "Alright, alright. Places all of you, line up by name, A to Z." Said a well muscled stallion as he walked in front of the assembled group of pegasi. "The test will consist of three stages. One, you take off and bust the clouds. Two, fly through the loops. Three, ascend to the marked elevation and hold your wings in for no less than three seconds and recover before you hit the cloud floor. Am I clear?"

  "Sir yes sir!" All of the fillies and colts (and griffon) said in unison. One by one, they all took off, and one by one they either passed or failed. When it came to Flash's turn, he stepped up to the takeoff spot, crouched, and shot into the air. He started by shooting through all of the clouds, smashing them into bits.

  'Alright, so far so good. Now to the loops.' He thought.

  He gracefully and quickly flew through the loops, and then ascended to the designated altitude. He pulled on his wings as he thought, 'Well, here goes nothing.'

  He felt himself falling, wind rushing over his small body, the cloud layer rapidly drawing closer. "One, two, three!" He counted, and opened his wings on three. To his relief nothing broke and he continued forward and came to a stop. He looked over at the judges, three hooves up. 'I passed...' he thought. "I passed!" He shouted excitedly and flew to the opposite end of the coliseum, and sat there. Watching everypony else complete their tests. That is, until Updraft.

  Everything had started out fine, he quickly busted up all of the clouds and made his way through the loops, until the last one. As he passed through the loop, he had flown a little too low and one of his hind legs caught on the loop and he spun out and fell, spinning out of control.

  'Oh no,' Flash thought. "Updraft!" He yelled as he took off to help his friend. The griffon was spinning rapidly as he plummeted down to the cloud layer. Flash tackled him mid fall and they both tumbled to the clouds and rolled to a stop.

  Flash slowly got up, groaning from the painful landing. Once they were both standing again, Flash said.

  "Hey, you okay buddy?"

  "No, I'm not. I failed." He replied as he looked over at the judges, all three of them had their hooves pointed down.

  "Hey, it'll be alright. I bet that they'll just send you back to Griffonstone. I'll be there to see you off, you don't need some diploma from a bunch of pegasi to tell you that you can fly, you're a griffon!"

  "Yeah, I guess you're right. But that's not gonna change how disappointed my parents will be."

  He walked with Updraft over to where the other two flunk-outs we're standing, sitting silently next to each other, wondering where they would be sent and if they'd ever see their families again.

  "Don't worry, I'm sure it'll all be fine." Flash told his friend one last time as a transport cart usually used for moving cargo, not other ponies, pulled up and came to a stop. Two pegasi hopped off, opened the back, and shoved all of them inside.

  "Hey, what's the big idea!" Flash said as he, Updraft, and the two failures were crammed inside and the door was shut and locked.

  "Let me out! I'm not even supposed to be here! I passed my flight exam!"

  But none of the pegasi outside the cart heard him, they just got back on and the other two started pulling the cart again.

  "Well, I guess now we're both getting exiled." Updraft said.

  Flash started pacing back and forth inside the small space. There was enough room to do so because only two other ponies were in the cart. A blue pegasus with a lighter blue mane with red streaks in it and in her wings, and green eyes, and a dark red pegasus with a mane that had clearly been dyed black and grey eyes.

  "There has to be a way I can get back." Flash said, thinking out loud. "If I can just convince the pegasi driving this cart I think I can get back."

  "It's no use," said the blue pegasus in the cart. "There's too much noise and the walls are too thick." She looked so scared, though in this situation, who wouldn't be.

  "Well I'm not just gonna sit in here and get exiled, I'm gonna get out and get home."

  "Good luck with that." She said, sounding downtrodden. "By the way, my name is Sapphire, Sapphire Phoenix."

  "My name is Flash Lightning and the griffon is Updraft."

  The other pony in the cart remained silent for the entire trip.

  Fast forward a few hours.

  Flash had tried desperately to get the pegasi's attention, but his words were drowned out by the thick wooden walls of the cart.

  After a long while they finally came to a stop and the door on the cart was opened. What they saw startled them. They weren't being deported, they were inside the weather factory.

Chapter One: The Factory

  Long metal pipes ran along the ceiling and walls, occasionally hissing steam. And there was a large machine in the back of the room with what appeared to be lots of rust at the top.

  "What are we doing here?" Sapphire said as the four of them were forced into the huge room with a large number of other colts and fillies.

  "I don't know, but I really don't like this." Flash responded.

  Once they were all seated on the hard metal floor, a pegasus stepped out onto a catwalk above them. No words were spoken, but he pushed a button and a projector started playing a short film touring the factory and a song started to play.

Now a rainbow's tale isn't quite as nice

As the story we knew of sugar and spice

But a rainbow's easy once you get to know it

With the help of the magic of a pegasus device

Let's delve deeper into rainbow philosophy

Far beyond that of Cloudsdale's mythology

It's easy to misjudge that floating city

With it's alluring decor and social psychology

But with all great things comes a great responsibility

That of Cloudsdale's being weather stability

How, you ask, are they up to the task

To which the answer is in a simple facility

In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true

In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through

In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true

A long moment of instrumentals followed, but the the singing returned

In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true

In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through

In the Rainbow Factory, where your fears and horrors come true

In the Rainbow Factory, where not a single soul gets through

  All of the young pegasi in the room were either too scared or shocked to move. Then, the pegasus on the catwalk spoke.

  "By now, you’ve all clearly determined that you are not going into exile. There is no deportation. There never was. You are in The Factory. You will never leave The Factory. And while you may be called useless, that’s also not entirely true. You’re worthless to The Flock as a Pony. But you still have purpose!"

"Purpose to all the ponies in this land, far and wide. You get to help us make rainbows! Beautiful, magical rainbows, doesn’t that excite you?” The mysterious announcer grinned ecstatically, taking in all the disgusted looks from every foal on the floor below him.

“I thought so,” he chuckled. “It is just such an honor, you know, it leaves every pony entrusted with the task speechless too! Now, do we have any volunteers?”

  The other pony who had been in the cart with them, spoke up.

  "How can you do this? This is torture, slavery. Surely if any of the princesses found out about this you would have hell to pay."

“I think you’ll find it’s more than that,” a second official pegasus walked out of the shadows and to the end of the catwalk. The pony was suited and masked. The first pony walked away and allowed the second to talk.

“A thousand years ago, when Celestia banished Luna from Equestria and sent her to the moon, she was charged with three tasks. She originally was in charge of raising the sun, and showering the land with rainbows. But, with the moon being an additional task, she had to hand down the responsibility of rainbows. Celestia entrusted the Pegasi of Cloudsdale to make the rainbows for her from them on. For the first dozen years, we were given powerful unicorns to help create Spectra. Spectra is pure pigment, pure color. Everything is full of Spectra, but you can’t just harvest it. You can never separate color from an object. So it was made artificially with magic.”

The masked pony never took her eyes off the red one that had spoken. “That is, until our top engineers made a breakthrough. They discovered an ingenious way to extract pigment, and it was so beautiful even a simple machine could do it. But it couldn’t be done with just anything. The conditions had to be right.”

  "What did those monsters do!?" The red pony yelled up at the suited pegasus, growing angrier.

  “It had to be live ponies! Only in ponies, where magic and Spectra ran freely together!” The Pegasus threw its head back and laughed maniacally. “Only then could the Spectra be separated! And it was such a beautiful idea, such a wonderfully horrible idea. It worked so well; we could create exponentially more rainbows, of better quality with real Spectra. And it finally gave us a way to prevent Cloudsdale from being tainted by all those horrible pegasi that couldn’t fly! Ahahahah!”

  "STOP!" Flash yelled, cutting the pegasus off mid laugh. "Just stop it! I'm not even supposed to be here! I was saying goodbye to my friend when I got thrown into a cart and taken here. I passed my flight exam!"

  This caught the pegasus off guard. She didn't know what exactly to say (for it sounded like a she), for a moment there was just silence, then she spoke again.

  "I'm afraid now that you're here, we can't let you leave. But you won't be joining them." The pony motioned to every other colt and filly in the room. "So you have no need to worry. You'll receive an authoritative position, so you won't be working with them. But if you step out of line, you'll be joining them faster than you can say Wonderbolts. Now, enough of that, where was I? Oh yes."

  "Time to make an example of what happens here if you mess up. Workers, take that red one right there." The pony was pointing at the dark red one who had spoken earlier.

  "Wait, no! Please don't! Please!" The poor colt exclaimed, but it was too late. They fastened his hooves into shackles and the strange machine in the back of the room came to life. The chains rose above the top of the machine and stretched the colt's legs out straight up and down.

  "Also, the machine tends to work better if the ribs are broken first." The suited pegasus said, and then the chains began to twist, a loud series of cracks could be heard from the colt's bones as bits of his ribs poked out of his chest, all the while he was screaming in pain and agony. Once the chains stopped twisting and so did the screaming, the shackles released the pony and the machine ground him to mush, bright red spectra started coming out of the bottom of the machine, flowing into a large vat. It was then that Flash noticed that it wasn't rust on the top of the machine, but blood.

  Flash didn't want any part in this, so when everyone started to panic, he found Updraft and they made a plan. While all of the workers were distracted by everyone else flying around, they would sneak into a ventilation duct on the wall and try to find a way out of the building.

  Updraft was already inside the duct and Flash was almost inside when the workers noticed them. "Get them! They're inside the ventilation system!" Flash shoved the rest of himself inside the vent and started shoving Updraft forward. "Come on! Move faster they're going to catch us!" After traveling a good distance inside the ducts, Updraft found a metal grate in the top with sunlight coming out of it.

  "Yes! A way out, we'll be free!" Updraft smashed the grate off and climbed out, Flash was just about to when the bottom of the vent gave out beneath him partially and his hoof got stuck between the two metal panels.

  "Updraft, help me, please!" Flash said, then workers below the duct noticed this and started pulling on his hoof.

  "Please Updraft, you're my friend, please!" But Updraft just glanced at him before flying away.

"I thought you were my friend..." Flash said before the workers pulled on him hard enough and the panel gave out completely and they pulled him out of the duct.-

"I can't escape this hell,

So many times I've tried.

But I'm still caged inside,

Somebody get me through this nightmare!

I can't control myself!"

  -Later, Flash was lead away by another worker. "Even though you tried to escape, we've decided to give you a second chance." The worker said as they arrived at a supply closet. "Here," the worker said as he handed Flash a white lab coat and an ID tag. "Put those on, you'll need them." Flash didn't question what he had been told and did as he was instructed, putting on the lab coat and clipping on the name tag. "You will be co-supervising the failures with me, I'm Thundercloud, you are?" The worker said. "Me? I'm Flash, Flash Lightning." His voice saddened by the betrayal of his friend-

  -A few days later-

  -Flash had started to get used to supervising the others with Thunder, you just had to make sure they kept working. And if they stopped, you zapped them with your tazer-stick. That was usually enough to get them back to work. But if it wasn't, sometimes you had to get brutal.

  It was on this day that one of the failures, a large brown pony that was at least 6 inches taller than Flash, decided that he'd had enough.

  "Hey you!" The pony said to Flash, he looked over in his direction. "You're going to let me out of here or regret you didn't"

  "Oh really?" Flash said, charging the tazer-stick.

  "Yeah really," said the pony and he then lunged at Flash. He saw it coming and dogged to the left, spinning around tazer at the ready. But the brown pegasus turned and kicked the tazer out of his grip.

  "Now I've got you," said the pegasus, "you couldn't defend yourself if your life depended on it." He then hit Flash hard in the face.

  "You're so pathetic, I bet your parents didn't even want you." He hit Flash again, sending him sprawling on the hard metal floor, his eyes started tearing up. "Heh, what a little cry-baby."

  "Stop it!" Flash said as he struggled to his hooves. "You don't know what it was like for me growing up!" Flash hit him back hard in the side of his head, then again in the other side, before launching a barrage of well placed punches as he said, "My mother hated me and I never even knew my father, so shut the buck up!" On the word 'up' he spun around and bucked him in the side of his chest, sending the bruised pegasus flying, his neck hit a pipe with a sickening crunch and he lay there still, while tears still slid down Flash's face.-

"So what if you can see,

The darkest side of me?

No one will ever change this animal I have become."