When Rainbow Dash wakes up, she can still feel her skin tingling from the wind rubbing against her face during yesterday’s deliveries.
She puts her geode around her neck, and looks at herself in the mirror. She notices a blemish on her cheek, that turns to just be pencil markings. She also makes a mental note to get a haircut.
She takes a deep breath.
She gives pet tortoise Tank a gentle pat. She refills his water bowl, and gives him some hay and carrot shavings for breakfast.
“Wake up, Tank. Your breakfast is here.”
The tortoise yawns slowly, and takes two whole minutes to pull his head out the fake tree log in his terrarium.
She goes down the stairs, one step per second. She stops at the twelfth step, noticing that it creaks louder than the rest. She makes a mental note to fix it.
She steps into the kitchen, and pours herself a small glass of ultra-rich nutritional shake. Her face cringes. She puts the glass down, half-drunk. After another long deep breath, she walks into her living room. She turns on the TV and plays her daily morning yoga. She carefully contorts her leg muscles into eagle pose.
Remember not to strain. Slowly work into the pose. Now…
…breathe in…
…hold it…
…feel the energy from the Earth, slowly filling the muscles of your body.
…slowly…
…slowly…
She hadn’t planned on becoming a delivery worker. For a while, she wanted to be a professional athlete, but because she has to take off her geode during games, she would be competing with everyone else in the world. And Rainbow Dash is good at soccer, but not that good.
This delivery job pays very (very) well. And in some ways, it’s like being an athlete. She has to keep her muscles loose and stay in top physical shape. She wears a special uniform to speed up her delivery times. She has to control her diet—she only eats one meal a day, because there’s no time for lunch during her shift, and she quickly learned that eating anything more than an apple for breakfast would lead to trails of puke all across Canterlot.
She has a “coach” too. Mr. Bae-zos, the warehouse supervisor. Although Rainbow Dash is technically an independent contractor, she still thinks of him as her “boss.” He gives her a daily brief on a clipboard on anticipated volume for the day and local weather conditions. He also invites her to the warehouse Christmas parties and summer cookouts. Best of all, though, they’re both huge sports fans.
“I don’t care what you say, Dash, Canterlot FC is not getting into the playoffs this year without Larsen on offense,” Mr. Prime says to her in the parking lot this morning.
Rainbow Dash rolls her car window down all the way. “Aww, c’mon Mr. Baezos, I only just heard on the radio today that the competition up in Fillydelphia…”—she made a clicking sound with her teeth—“…not a chance against us.”
Rainbow Dash drives her car to work everyday. She has to conserve as much energy as possible before making deliveries. She drives 25 minutes each way from home to the distribution warehouse, where packages from all across the world are sent to homes and business across Canterlot.
The rainbow-haired girl parks her car in her reserved space. She steps out, one leg at a time, and locks the door. She enters the warehouse through the giant loading dock door, and carefully navigates around the moving forklift trucks.
She’s pretty popular in the warehouse, even if they don’t see her that often. “‘Sup Dash!” someone calls out. Interestingly enough, her friend Derpy Muffins from high school works at the warehouse.
What was far more interesting, though, was that they allowed her to operate a forklift truck without supervision.
CRASH!
“Uh-oh. I just don’t know went wrong.”
Rainbow Dash only handles “pager jobs,” or things that need to be delivered during the day. For example, a toy set stored in the warehouse is ordered at 10am, for delivery by 10:02am. Or, someone orders pizza online. She picks it up from the restaurant, and delivers it to their door in 30 seconds or less.
She walks into her private office. She hangs up her long coat, revealing her tight Spandex onesie to minimize air resistance during deliveries. Even though it’s chilly today, she moves so fast that the friction from the moving air can actually cause her to overheat. There’s a cooling station set up outside the warehouse that drenches her whole body and clothing in ice water.
She unplugs her pager from the charger, and fastens it on her tool belt. She fills her business card holder with a fresh stack. She pulls up a large map of Canterlot on her tablet, and studies it to refresh her memory.
Since GPS turn-by-turn navigation is useless at such high speeds, Rainbow Dash has to essentially learn the entire layout of the 215-square-mile city of Canterlot. Her high-school friend Twilight taught her some memorization tricks used by cab drivers.
Rainbow Dash’s pager is connected to her phone, which automatically shows her a map of the route she needs to take to get the next address. One quick glance of the map, and she knows exactly which turns to make, and at what millisecond to turn.
Sometimes she feels like her memory is more superhuman than her speed.
Before starting her shift, Rainbow Dash brews herself a cup of weak chamomile tea (caffeine makes her especially jittery at high speeds). She takes a few sips.
She looks down at the right side of her belt, and she turns on the little switch on the back of her pager. Her finger slips a few times, and she almost chips her nail.
But after 1.7 seconds, the switch goes click.
It’s go time.
First delivery of the day is a bag of golf clubs that was ordered online, picked up at the warehouse, sent to a country club 13.6 seconds away. It’s just 2 ounces under the 20lb weight limit. She sees they have not signed up for the premium membership. She takes 2.7 seconds to mark the $100 overweight charge on her phone.
Delivery time: 16.3 seconds.
Her pager interjects shortly after. She zips out of the country club parking lot, leaving her business card on the asphalt.
A brief flash of sun, blacktop, and a close call with a manhole cover, and she arrives at her next job. She picks up the arrest warrant with the judge’s signature, and hand-delivers it to the police precinct. She catches a brief glimpse of Sunset Shimmer, but before they can even notice each other, her pager beeps again.
Delivery time: 9.7 seconds.
She zips to her next job. She waits for 14.5 seconds at the rear loading dock of the hospital. The nurse assistant rushes out with a living liver tissue sealed in a fluid-filled bag and placed in a ~~twenty percent~~ cooler backpack. Rainbow Dash and the nurse barely exchange a “hi” before she’s off to the hospital across town. She runs especially fast for this delivery, until the little hairs on her face almost get singed from the friction.
Delivery time: 2.4 seconds.
Before the immense satisfaction of saving some person’s life can hit her, her pager buzzes again, and the world turns back into a linear blur.
She completes several deliveries of toys, sporting goods, and clothing. She goes to a mansion in the Everfree Hills to pick up a large briefcase with part of a 1000-dollar bill sticking out, then delivers it to a back alley in the shady part of town. A couple of shifty-eyed characters start eyeing her Spandex. She decides not to drop her business card (or drop anything else, for that matter).
Then comes the lunch rush. Several restaurants contract her to deliver (lightweight) food products directly to homes. She opens the restaurant’s deposit box with her wristband key, straps on the cooler backpack containing some kind of food product, and zips past five different houses with little more than a rainbow trail and a business card (sometimes two, or seven business cards, because she was in a rush and took too many). She delivers to five houses at a time, then returns to the restaurant to pick up some more.
Total time: 55.6 seconds average per 5 deliveries.
As she delivers the last box of sushi, her pager beeps again, but she decides to head back to the warehouse for a quick break. Since she’s an independent contractor with her own personal accountant and union advocate, she can pretty much work on her own terms.
She goes to the misting station to cool off. She zips into her office and takes another sip of her now-cold chamomile tea.
27.7 seconds later, and her pager buzzes again.
Occasionally, Rainbow Dash makes a mistake. Later that afternoon, an old lady yells at her for knocking over her lawn ornaments. She apologizes and puts it back up for her, but the lady insists that “no, no, you’ve got it all wrong!” She hobbles over in her walker to give her “a good talking to, missy,” but Rainbow Dash’s pager beeps again, and she breathes a sigh of relief as she heads to her next job.
Later that afternoon, a spoilt rotten kid standing outside an Everfree Hills mansion scolds Rainbow Dash for delivering his third iPhone of the month in 47.2 seconds. “You call this Ten Seconds Flat delivery!? Huh!?” Then the worst part is the parents come out—one holding a glass of sherry, the other holding a well-groomed Pomeranian—and scold her for the late delivery as well.
She tries to explain that there was a backlog, and that ten seconds flat delivery is not guaranteed, even for Premium members. But apparently they have all the time in the world to scold her, but no time to listen to her.
Rainbow Dash can’t hear her pager beeping while they yell at her, and she ends up showing up 167.2 seconds late at the hospital to pick up and deliver a heart transplant.
She keeps slapping herself for not dashing off sooner.
Even though she probably can afford it, she promises to herself that she’ll never buy a house up in the Hills. Cause then, she’ll be the one holding the glass of sherry. And the Pomeranian.
Luckily, the sickening thought is quickly eclipsed by the next few jobs that appear on her pager. She picks up at the warehouse, delivers to a home; the warehouse, another home; the warehouse, an office building; a genomics laboratory, the university where Twilight just got full professorship; the county courthouse, the county prison.
She takes a deep breath.
Rainbow Dash finishes her shift at 5:30. More mentally exhausted than physically exhausted, she puts on her coat, one sleeve at a time, and drives home. She watches the angry faces in the cars next to her as the freeway fills up bumper to bumper. The traffic report rambles on about 35-minute delays on the turnpike and 30 to 40 cars deep at the toll gate.
Rainbow Dash just leans back and turns up the volume on her “Best of Glenn Miller” CD. She thinks about the liver transplant recipient that would be able to live for many long years to come, thanks to her split-second delivery. And a smile creeps up her face.
When she finally gets home, she slips off her Spandex uniform and leaves it lying on the floor. After closing the windows to avoid embarrassment, she takes a “frou-frou” eucalyptus bubble bath in the master bathroom, with a rubber ducky and lavender scented candles. She slips into a loose spa bathrobe. She goes into the kitchen and begins to prep her dinner.
Tonight’s dinner is osso buco with pappardelle pasta. Preheat the oven the 400, which takes about 15 minutes for this particular oven. Cut the vegetables into 2” cubes. Season the meat with rosemary, garlic powder. Brown the meat on the skillet. Combine the vegetables, meat, add herbs. Then bake for 120 minutes in a Dutch oven.
When it’s almost ready, start to boil the water for the pasta. Once the water boils, the pasta will take 12 minutes to cook. Rainbow Dash stares at the pasta pot filled with cold tap water, listening to the hiss of the gas stove.
She watches little bubbles slowly effervesce from the water.
Every minute is beautiful.
Hospitals, government officials, and banks have relied on Rainbow Dash’s super speed for years to deliver transplant organs, sensitive documents, and cash.
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Author's Note
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