There were some things which Rainbow had only learned about the Wonderbolts through becoming the newest member of the squad. (A member who was being drastically underutilized and apparently still had some things to prove, but still a member.) Even a superfan who studied every last recorded aspect of the team was going to miss the details which never reached print. And as it turned out, the few ponies who'd managed to sneak up on the practice sessions at Phantom Stadium had omitted a number of notes. The stuff which you could only pick up from experience. Through actually flying with them, as a sort-of-recognized part of the formation. The tail part, since she was consistently stuck at the back.
But you could still learn a lot from there. Just by way of example, there was the smell.
She'd been actively dreaming of being a Wonderbolt since her first year of primary school, to the point where the air shows had effectively sent up a permanent performance in her nightscape. And none of those dreams had ever included that smell. Rainbow was eagerly awaiting the next appearance of Luna within her dreams, just so she could get a chance to talk about that lack of inclusion. She still wasn't entirely sure whether she was supposed to be complaining about the lack of full authenticity or thanking the alicorn for sparing her, but it was definitely gonna be brought up.
Oh, there were other details to consider, especially when you were stuck at the back of the formation during the practice session, had been there for hours, and frankly had very little else to do. Take the storm cloud contrails which so many Wonderbolts could generate in flight. (Rainbow was still working on that.) What absolutely nopony had bothered to mention was that the little streaks of static which bloomed along the grey trails were just over the voltage line which a pegasus could safely ignore. Come into contact with any such trail, and she was going to get a shock. And she had to pay constant attention to exactly where they all were, because being at the back meant the vapor streamers were always coming directly towards her.
The shocks weren't exactly pleasant. And those jolts, as annoying as they were, actually represented the secondary part of the problem. Because a pegasus had to choose whether to let a cloud be solid or vapor on contact, and a Wonderbolt needed to be capable of changing their mind in a hurry. Certain routines involved bouncing off the less electrical variety of contrail, or using your own momentum to do some molding on the fly: creating giant city flags in the air was considered to be a polite way of greeting any performance venue. So she needed to keep a close eye on every contrail because some of them were going to shock her, while others represented a hastily-woven airborne fence which never left her enough space to slip between slats and if she wasn't careful, she was going to take a cloud to the snout.
Rainbow was stuck at the back of the formation. (That was where all the rookies supposedly started, and she didn't get it. She was better than that. Spitfire knew it.) And even on a relatively warm spring day, practicing at low altitude over the flickering outlines of Phantom Stadium... it was cold at the back. She was getting the wind backwash from everypony else's wings, brought to her by a slipstream which she wasn't allowed to escape. Her uniform didn't seem to be insulative enough, her feathers felt as if they were frosting over, and her snout just wanted to be somewhere else entirely. Ideally, on somepony else. Somepony who wasn't stuck flying at the rear.
Because that was one of the things nopony told you. That when you were at the back, the view never changed. (Unless metallic uniform trim flashed light into her eyes: in that case, she spent a few seconds hoping the view came back and didn't suddenly include a rapidly-approaching section of ground.) Everypony else got to watch trees and clouds and distant flickers of empty benches whipping by. Rainbow had to pay constant attention to the contrails and movements of those ahead of her. It meant she mostly got to constantly stare at assorted versions of Wonderbutts. Which was frankly all the more reason for putting Rainbow in the lead, because that at least meant anypony behind her would be getting an awesome view.
It was cold at the back and after she'd been there for a while, she nearly started to actively wish that it would stay that way. Because something else nopony told you was that a bunch of highly-trained athletes, practicing for hours and hours at low altitude while wearing insulative suits... well, they were gonna sweat a lot. Rainbow knew exactly how much everypony was sweating because she was at the back and the slipstream courteously carried every notification directly into her nostrils. And those highly-trained athletes were almost constantly working out groups of muscles, stressing a number while asking others to save their efforts for a few seconds. It meant they stopped considering the actions of certain other muscles entirely.
It was cold at the back, and that was almost good. It was the slipstream-carried bursts of warm air which she had to watch out for.
There were certain things you could only learn about the Wonderbolts through being part of the formation and if you were very unlucky, that would include what some of them had consumed for breakfast.
Thirty Wonderbolts had been running formation drills for hours and Rainbow, as the rookie with the most to learn, had been included in most of them. But it was at the back, always the back...
A high-pitched whistle just barely reached her ears. The ponies in front of her automatically began to slow. Rainbow just barely managed to feather off some speed before her view of Wonderbutt became both much closer and decidedly more intimate.
"All right, that's it!" Spitfire called up from ground level. "Everypony come in for a landing and start a cooldown trot! We're done for the day!" A day which had started at almost the exact moment of Sun-raising, because somepony had also failed to mention that the Wonderbolts got up way too early.
The newest member managed to repress most of the relieved sigh. Her skills were centered around speed, not endurance -- and they'd been going for hours. A cooldown trot... she usually didn't do trots unless she absolutely had to. But even with ground involved, just getting the chance to let her body slowly relax after extended effort... that sounded perfect.
She touched down. (Still at the back.) Plodded along behind the others, circling the interior perimeter of Phantom Stadium as the group's collective speed slowly dropped. Or rather, circling the perimeter's current version, which had been set for Baltimare.
The Wonderbolts' ground-level practice facility technically didn't exist. Phantom Stadium was created by a group of unicorn-enchanted devices, and each projected a static illusion showing a portion of empty ground-based performance venue. (Insubstantial audiences were harder to create.) Put them all together and it produced an unreal, silent ghost of an amphitheater, where the dimensions could be adjusted to replicate the next tour stop and anypony who lost control would plow through intangible seats. It gave them a few more seconds to stabilize before harshly contacting ground, and you usually lost all of that saved time to having Spitfire yell at you. Again.
So most of the time, as far as most ponies were concerned, Phantom Stadium was just a clearing. It took pegasus senses to spot that the atmosphere itself had been adjusted. Careful layering of pegasus techniques made weather control that much easier, allowing the Wonderbolts to practice in all kinds of conditions. Something which Rainbow frankly didn't understand because with so many skilled pegasi on the team, performance conditions in any venue were effectively guaranteed to be perfect -- but Spitfire, when questioned on obvious absurdity, had just said "You never know." And then the captain had put Rainbow on laps. Again.
The rookie trotted along, keeping her head down. Sweat beaded up from saturated fur, soaked into the uniform. A less-than-helpful breeze reminded her that the process was taking place in bulk. She glanced forward at one point and found herself with a perfect view of Misty's backside. It was probably a pretty enthralling sight for somepony who hadn't been staring at it for hours.
Being a Wonderbolt was work. Hard, exhausting, oddly smelly work. But it was still Rainbow's dream --
"And that's it!" Spitfire called out, doing so at the exact moment when Rainbow's strained muscles finally began to relax. "Everypony, strip out of your uniforms: don't want to bring that stench into the facility, now do we? Leave them here for the laundry service!"
There was some laughter. Rainbow wearily tilted her head back and right, searching for the first zipper --
"-- Rainbow," her leader said, and the rookie's attention instantly focused in that direction.
"Captain?" Rainbow asked. Praise, it's gotta be praise after I was up there for so much time, she's going to bring me forward in the next formation or maybe it'll even be the lead --
"You're the laundry service."
Which was when the other twenty-nine Wonderbolts truly began to laugh.
The newest member found all four of her legs freezing in place. It was something which normally would have just proven the superiority of wings, except that the best limbs possible didn't seem to be doing anything either. And the squad was laughing, her lofted ears were catching every last decibel and it felt so much like they were laughing at her...
"The Wonderbolts have a laundry service!" Rainbow frantically argued.
"Yes," Spitfire patiently agreed. "We call them 'rookies'. Clean the uniforms."
"There's cleaning devices and wonders at the Academy! I know that! I used them!"
"Yes," the captain repeated. "But you're getting a washboard --"
"-- I had to keep getting the dirt stains out of my uniform after --" The laughter was getting louder. "-- it doesn't matter why, there's enchantments and machines and other ponies --"
Wave Chill, who was four ponies ahead of her in the cooldown circle, carefully turned. Trotted back towards her, with his own laughter silenced, and stopped a single body length away. Looking her over with patient eyes.
"Crash," the older Wonderbolt gently said, "we all go through it."
The rookie found herself staring at the ground again.
Right. It's like the nickname stuff. Hazing. Fitting in through shared suffering. Everypony has to do it.
'Everypony' felt sort of different when it was including her.
"Washboard," Rainbow wearily echoed.
"And a tub," Spitfire said. "And soap. Plus some drying lines to hang from the trees. You'll do it here. We'll come down to check on you in a while. See how it's coming along."
The rookie forced her head up again. Looked around the flickering, empty, and dry confines of Phantom.
"What about water?"
Spitfire simply looked up. And then she looked further up.
"I'm trusting you can get water," the captain said as she relentlessly continued to survey the clouds. "Do a good job, Crash. I want those uniforms clean. It can take a lot of care to manage something menial. Precision. Dedication. So impress me."
Rainbow, trying to push aside the last of the laughter while facing what already felt like hours of pointless, boring work... mostly heard the last part.
"Impress you," she wearily said. "Yeah."
All around her, sweaty Wonderbolts began to strip down, without mercy.
And then she had the flickering stadium to herself. If you didn't count the large wooden tub with the ridged washboard hooked over the inner edge, and a pile of sweaty, stained, and outright stinking Wonderbolts uniforms.
Nopony had ever told her about the truly glamorous parts of the job. But to be fair about it, she probably wouldn't have believed them.
Impress Spitfire.
Through doing laundry.
Somehow.
What did Rainbow know about laundry?
She didn't wear a lot of clothing. The majority of Rainbow's laundry was bedding, and anypony as dedicated to the perfect snooze as she? That pony was going to make sure there were clean sheets. So when hers got dirty, she changed them. She had a closet full of fresh blankets, each of which had been selected for comfort, thread count, and the ability to block out the sound of an alarm clock. Rainbow also had a second, scentproof closet, because the dirty ones had to be kept somewhere. And when she could no longer actually close it, she bundled everything up in a huge sack and flew the reeking mass down to the Boutique.
...well, it just made sense. A mare who practically had a phobia when it came to acquiring dirt was naturally going to own multiple means for getting rid of it and be an expert in the actual process. And besides, Rarity usually didn't yell at her for more than twenty minutes. Washing all of the bedding would have taken a lot longer than that.
However, there had been a time in Rainbow's life when Rarity hadn't quite been her friend yet. That mini-era possessed some significant overlap with the period she'd spent away from her parents, and regrettably coincided with the duration of her temporary ban from the spa after Lotus and Aloe had caught Rainbow trying to sneak her bedding into the sauna's towel load. A micro-epoch which had seen her forced to clean up after herself and as any Ponyville resident who'd caught her fleeing from their lawn-based crash site could attest, Rainbow was at least mildly allergic to the mere concept.
But you couldn't be a weather coordinator if you didn't understand a few things about water.
It was a solvent. Not the most potent, and that was a good thing: nopony needed their essential hydration to effectively contain multiple doses of internal acid. But if you gave it enough time, working with enormous cumulative quantities... you could effectively cut through nearly anything. A trickle constantly moving across rock would eventually create the gap for a stream. The river would follow and if you really let it keep going, there was the chance to get a canyon. There was just a certain issue with sticking around long enough to see the results.
For water to cut through rock... that was thousands of years. But asking it to loosen dirt was a little quicker. And you still needed to speed that up for fabric, because dirt sort of latched onto stuff. Like fur. And soap made the water more effective.
Rainbow wasn't completely sure how. She knew Rarity had screamed the details at her a few times, generally during lectures on why the pegasus needed to get her own personal washing and drying wonders. But Rainbow hadn't really been listening at the time. Most of what she learned from Rarity came via reluctant osmosis, which meant Rainbow knew the exact date of every major party on the Canterlot social schedule and was regretfully aware that garnets were on the outs this year.
But with a washboard...
She had to soak the uniforms in soapy water. After that, each one would be hoof-pressed against the washboard's ridges. Squeezed between keratin, rubbed up and down the board. Forcing the water through the fabric. Then you rinsed the uniform, got a look at how much dirt was left, and repeated until it was clean.
One uniform at a time.
Thirty times.
Every Wonderbolt had done it. In fact, doing it meant you were a Wonderbolt, and that wasn't a status Rainbow was prepared to forfeit. Certainly not over laundry.
Impress Spitfire.
She looked up at the clouds. Went aloft to arrange the first burst of water, and then wearily got to work.
There were things you only learned about the Wonderbolts through being one of them. Similarly, it was possible for Rainbow to gain an education about her squadmates through examining their uniforms. Checking for the wearer's name inside the collar had already allowed her to identify every last one of the ponies who didn't use deodorant.
At least three of the stallions were effectively addicted to musk enhancers.
One uniform had a lot of food stains. She didn't need to look at the collar to identify it as Soarin's.
The next uniform...
Are those food stains?
She lowered her snout. Sniffed at the discolorations, and immediately regretted everything.
Oh.
Well. Yeah. Everypony knows that after the shows, ponies come up to you. Fans. Some of them want to -- do it.
And now I know there's a few who want to do it while the uniform is still on.
Rainbow instinctively looked at the nametag. The regret doubled.
...and I thought Hasty Fling was her nickname because --
-- just wash.
Laundry was almost exactly like torture. Except for the part where the pony who was about to put Daring Do into the vise showed off everything meant to bring pain while explaining exactly how it worked. That was usually interesting, especially when a post-escape Daring wound up using a few on him.
The washboard was slow. Multiple rinsings were required for each uniform, and most of what the drenchings did was allow her to discover more dirt. She was also pressing down on the cloth with hooves, and that meant going too fast risked damaging the fabric.
You couldn't even do it while hovering. There wasn't enough leverage. So that put her on the ground. Reared up on her hind legs, pushing with the fore. Over and over, while her hooves became sore.
Plus there was a cake of soap, and she usually had to place that in her mouth.
(There was also a mouth guard, but it leaked a little around the edges.)
Rainbow was bored. Ponyville residents knew what could happen when Rainbow became bored. The Wonderbolts, however, lacked a certain amount of rapidly-approaching Fundamental Experience.
She got through two uniforms. Three. Five.
She was bored.
How am I supposed to impress Spitfire with a washboard and soap?
Then she was Dangerously Bored.
There has to be a better way of doing this. Something faster. Bigger. More impressive.
Rainbow began to think.
And there was nopony around to stop her.
She couldn't use waterspouts. Or rather, she'd wanted to, but it wasn't practical. Rainbow understood that it didn't have to be on the scale of the transfer operation: just something a single pegasus could manage -- but every waterspout required a foundation source. Some quick scouting around Phantom discovered that there really weren't any true rivers to work with and even if there had been, the laundry was gonna land somewhere. And probably get all dirty again from the impact. Rainbow was intimately familiar with the cruel things which could result from ground impact and getting dirty was among the least of them.
Still... the core idea was there. Doing laundry was about pushing water through fabric. The spout would have been pushing with more force.
Pushing water through fabric.
How do the enchanted wonders at the spa and Boutique do it?
She tried to remember what Rarity had screamed at her. This required quite a bit of sorting.
Heating the water is supposed to help. I guess hot water sort of moves faster. Internally. But she said some things do better with cold.
And...
...agitation.
Get the water moving. Get the uniforms moving against the water. Speed and force. That helps everything dislodge the dirt. Water can have a real kick when it's moving fast enough and now you're kicking the stains.
Agitation.
Rarity keeps telling me that I agitate things all the time.
How do I make something do it for me? All I've got is clouds and water and air --
Rainbow looked up.
It took more effort than she'd initially suspected. But it was her idea, and once Rainbow started putting in the work on a stunt (because this was now totally about turning laundry into its very own stunt), she tended to keep going. A washboard was boring. Rinsing stuff by hoof and mouth risked a coma, and Rainbow liked the kind of naps where she could count on actually waking up. Creating an effective stunt was problem-solving.
And in her own way, Rainbow was very much a scientist. She just didn't always believe in things like trial stages, slow advancements of theory into proof, or the kind of safeties installed in a lab which allowed it to remain intact beyond the first mistake. For Rainbow, science was very much a matter of asking 'What happens if I do this?' Followed by doing it. And if the results looked good, then science had clearly happened.
However, if there wasn't much left in the aftermath, then science needed to happen again until science got it right. Possibly at a somewhat higher speed and, after she'd measured out the original blast radius, with a head start.
There were devices and wonders which did laundry. Something which required forcing water through fabric.
Clouds were made of water.
She supposed it was a reasonable sort of question, at least when it came from those who hadn't grown up in the sky. 'When you bring something solid into your house, why doesn't it just fall through the floor?' And the answer was found within the realm of pegasus magic. If Rainbow personally carried the inanimate across the threshold, then the cloud molding of her residence accepted its presence. She had to be careful not to bring in too much at once: doing so could be draining, and decorating a new place was a multi-day process. But the enchantment was effectively automatic.
Every uniform was owned by a Wonderbolt. And without those pegasi being present, it meant the fabric treated clouds as being solid.
She could hollow out a cloud and stick some uniforms in it. That was easy enough. But the cloth just sort of... sat there. And for proper agitation... she wasn't completely sure (and found herself momentarily berating Rarity for not having provided more screaming lectures, because any gaps in Rainbow's education were now clearly the unicorn's fault), but she felt that you needed to have the cloth moving against the water as much as the water moved against the cloth. It probably had something to do with balance. A lot of stuff did.
So she wound up having to adjust the enchantments on things she didn't personally own, and that had to be worked out from first go. It was the only way to make a uniform move around within the cloud when she wasn't personally wearing it --
-- okay. So that was definitely a success.
Reacted to the cloud like it was vapor.
So now I just have to go back to ground and pick the uniform up again.
Not like I wasn't gonna wash it anyway.
Which brought her to the really hard part of the process: finding a way to make the uniforms treat the interior of the cloud as vapor, while the borders acted like a solid...
She'd been practicing formations for hours (and always at the back). Flight was magic, and magic used energy. She'd already been tired, and now she was essentially trying to modify techniques on the spot. The effort was wearying. But it still had to be easier than washing thirty uniforms by hoof. She was sure of that.
Besides, she'd come this far.
...okay. Those ten are staying in place. Rainbow didn't always believe in trial stages, but she did understand a few things about capacity. It was a big cloud -- but her modified washing drum pocket didn't hold all that much. Now I've just gotta get the agitation going.
Which meant placing some more of her own energies into the cloud. Encouraging the water to get moving. A touch of internal wind currents might also help, but she had to make sure they didn't disrupt the cloud. It was best to arrange for the water to do nearly all of the work.
Rainbow made contact with the vapor. Molded the drum shut, then pushed --
-- I smell ozone. And the cloud is getting darker.
Maybe don't push quite that much --
-- electrolysis.
She examined the word. Turned it over in her memory a few times and hoped to spot the tooth indentations which would identify an origin point.
Rarity and Twilight! For getting stains off shoes, and some of the lab stuff in the tree's basement! I've seen them cleaning stuff, usually right after I came through and seriously, there was no need to grab my tail with glow and make me watch. I would have come back to help. Eventually.
Electrolysis takes stains off metal. The uniforms have that metallic trim on the bolt lines.
A little electricity is fine.
So pretending to almost listen while those two are losing it for no reason actually sort of pays off. Who knew?
Water was definitely moving around inside the cloud now, and the accompanying soft crackles just meant it was really working. But now she had to consider the soap. Having a cake of soap inside the cloud didn't feel right, because there were ten uniforms and just the one cake. There wasn't going to be enough interaction.
She was getting tired. But she'd also been forced to taste the soap several times, and that provided a degree of motivation.
It didn't take all that many stomps to render the cake into pieces. Then she kept going until she effectively had powder, repeated the process with three more cakes, and that was carefully seeded into the slightly-shaking dark cloud.
...gonna need to drain. There's going to be dirty water flying around in there. And then I'll have to rinse. How do I set that up?
The first part of the answer was actually fairly simple. She wrangled another cloud, made sure it was loaded, and placed it above the fast-trembling original. But there was also the question of getting rid of the dirty water, and she didn't want to do that by hoof: there was at least one more major step to the laundry process and she'd realized that it might be going on when the washing cloud needed to be dumped. So another careful piece of magic put the dark cloud on an effective timer. It could get rid of the dirty water on its own.
She examined the results. They looked fairly plausible and in the realm of Rainbow's personal definition of science, 'could work' was an effective substitute for 'will'.
Looking good!
And sort of white again. Here and there.
...foamy white.
Well, clouds always looked kind of foamy. They were clouds.
Rainbow looked down at the flickering edges of Phantom. Irritably considered that everything would feel that much better if she just had a few ponies around to applaud her genius, and creating illusionary versions couldn't be that hard. (She'd have to ask Twilight.) Hoof stomping was motivation, and she was tired. Applause created a push.
She created an audience in her head and pretended they were cheering. It wasn't the same.
The squad is coming down to check on me. When they do, they'll see it all.
Spitfire will see how I set everything up. Nopony else in the world would have tried to do it this way.
I'll impress her. And when she's impressed, she'll have to give me the formation lead.
She briefly considered eating a lot of spring grass on the morning of her first apex position. Just in the name of vengeance --
-- all in due time. She needed to set up her next cloud pairing. Make sure they were ready to go. (There was only so much water to work with in each, and she didn't want to reuse a dirty cloud.) And while the first one was going...
Stage Two was obviously going to be drying the uniforms. And she'd been thinking about that.
It was a relatively warm spring day, and Sun was bright. It was also slow. Hanging wet uniforms along the line and waiting for a distant Princess to effectively give her an assist -- that was going to take hours. And pegasi were the ones who enchanted the wonders which served as dryers, because that was just a matter of getting the air heated and moving.
However, there was also a question of containment. She didn't have a metal drum, and using a cloud would just get everything wet again.
There were five reasonably-clean uniforms to experiment with. (Rainbow's current plan was to put them through the cloud cycle anyway, just so everything would receive the professional treatment.)
Hot air. Movement. And momentum. I think the water sort of spins out --
-- spinning...
The active cloud crackled. Several tiny pieces of white drifted towards the ground, and Rainbow ignored them all. She was too busy grinning.
It couldn't be a tornado. Any weather coordinator worth the job knew that the air inside the funnel was cold. You could get a significant temperature drop near the core, and freezing the water inside the uniforms felt like a bad idea.
Tornadoes were cold. But dust devils were born from heat. That was what she needed. Only without the dust part, because that was going to be really counterproductive.
It was a relatively warm spring day. But even for the species which could channel, disperse, and focus heat as a necessary part of weather control, it wasn't warm enough -- and even if it had been, Rainbow was rapidly reaching the stage where she had to save some strength for the next push. Using the local resources and concentrating that heat wasn't going to be enough. She needed to add more energy to the system. And frankly, you weren't a Bearer if you couldn't start a fire. All of them were capable of starting fires, and that even held true for the ones who weren't cool little dragons. The hard part for the mares was doing it on purpose. Oh, and there were occasional issues with putting them out. But if Rainbow was found rapidly moving away from that, she was just on her way to get a helpful cloud. No matter what anypony said. So there.
It didn't take long to clear and ring a patch of ground for the blaze: getting rid of the grass gave her a much-needed light snack. Concentrating the local heat into tinder provided the first bit of flame, and it spread from there. Hot air quickly began to waft into the atmosphere, and then she had her resource. A fresh sirocco.
She briefly considered talking about to Spitfire about siroccos. It would be a lot more comfortable for whoever wound up at the back of the next formation if they were all using hot air. Plus they could bring in some sand. Sand siroccos were sort of cool to look at and even if you wound up having to wash granules out of your fur after, the traditional Wonderbolts goggles would finally be doing something.
The fire crackled. The cloud was also crackling, but that got lost in the first sound.
The next part was going to be easy.
...the next part was a little harder than she'd wanted.
Okay: she could get the funnel going. A dust devil didn't need a very big one. And carrying the wet uniforms in her mouth, followed by head-tossing them into the active core -- that was easy enough. But then she thought about checking on the first wash cloud because the initial load was probably close to finishing, diverted her flight path, and --
-- she didn't reach the cloud. She didn't even get a good look at it. The sensation produced by having a wet uniform smack into her rear had Rainbow's full attention.
-- right. It's hard to make a funnel maintain unless I'm circling it. And for a dust devil, that's gonna be a lot more really tight circles.
She reeled somewhat within the air, spread her wings for the hover just in time. There was an odd dizziness centered around her ear canals, and it was beginning to softly roar.
Maybe I'm overdoing it. Hours of formations, and now all of this --
-- no. Almost got this set up. I can make the funnel maintain for longer if I need to leave it for a little while. I've just got to push more energy into it.
She gathered up the scattered uniforms: the last required trotting into the illusion and picking it up from under the intangible mezzanine. Reminded herself that she'd been planning to wash them all again anyway. This was just making sure her dryer worked. The fire was the heat source, the sirocco gave her warm air and when it came to the funnel, she was the containment.
Perfection.
She ignored the still-darkening cloud. Missed the intermittent plummets of white, because she was completely focused. Locked in. The funnel had to be created and maintained. That was what she had the strength for, and so it was exactly what she was going to do.
The squad will be here soon. They've got to show up.
And when they see everything I've done...
They came in from the east. There had been a mutual agreement to swoop in from the section of the illusion which rose the highest, trusting it to give them a little visual shielding. They were going to surprise her. Because in the expert opinion of everypony who'd done it before (which was every last Wonderbolt), they'd left her out there long enough to get through about half of it. And when there had been hours of deliberately-sweaty practice, on a day where everypony had carefully forgotten to pack their deodorant... well, half was enough.
The squad would relieve their rookie. They would rescue her. And then they would treat her to a very late lunch, which she probably needed rather badly.
They came in from the east, moving towards the west. It gave them some shielding.
It also put Sun in their eyes, and none of them truly saw what was going on until they cleared Phantom's highest insubstantial ridge.
Twenty-nine Wonderbolts landed, and did so out of formation. There was something of a group thud, because that was what happened when the discipline of an entire squad was disrupted by raw shock. Even Spitfire found her tail going into the grass.
The captain ignored it. She was rather more concerned with everything else which was going into the grass.
There was a rather unusual cloud above both Phantom and the majority of the squad. It was jet-black, except for all the places where it was white. The white foamed at the top and leaked out in a few places around the edges.
One tiny portion of white detached from the whole and casually drifted down. Soarin spotted it first, judged the trajectory, moved slightly to the right, and stuck out his tongue to catch the snowflake --
"-- YUCK!"
Every snowflake was unique. When the Factory didn't provide that status, nature would. But they all had a few things in common. For starters, they would form around a tiny grain of dust, or one of pollen. It was the core of every crystal. Having one crystalize on a heart of soap changed a few things.
There was a fire, merrily blazing away within a well-cleared ground circle. There was also a dust devil close by, with blue and metallic gold whipping around its core. And circling it over and over, completely unaware of the crackling mass overhead, just barely having spotted the squad because the group was only visible during a tiny part of each too-tight passage, was a heavily-sweating, almost completely exhausted, and now smiling rookie.
"Hey!" the cyan half-blur called out. "About time you all showed up! I'm just about ready to take the first load out!"
Twenty-nine Wonderbolts, accompanied by their captain, did their collective best to stare at the rookie. There was some difficulty being encountered in the tracking.
Thirty minds struggled to find words and, in the presence of Rainbow's usual brilliance, they cumulatively wound up at the usual result: dead silence.
"Pretty cool, right?" the blur managed, with most of the syllables carefully timed to pass between hard-panting breaths. "You don't have to say it! ...actually, I don't hear anypony saying anything. But my ears have been weird for a while now, and -- anyway, it's not just cool! It's impressive! And if you're really impressed by something like this, then just think about how impressed you'll be once you see me in the formation lead --"
"CRASH! GET OVER HERE!"
The rookie heard her captain's order, and immediately responded.
There were multiple advanced magical talents on the squad, and they all felt the push: a surge of remaining energy being directed at the funnel. And then the rookie was moving towards them, dumping momentum along the way.
The sleek cyan form slowed. The sweat and froth covering her flanks did not, and kept moving in her original direction.
Technically, most of the resulting splash landed first. Portions simply soaked in.
"WHAT IS THIS?" demanded a now-rather-damp Spitfire. "YOU WERE JUST SUPPOSED TO BE DOING LAUNDRY! CLEANING THE UNIFORMS! WHAT KIND OF --"
"This is the laundry!" declared the proud rookie, and did so as her body and six limbs began to sway above poorly-planted hooves. "The cloud washes, and you wouldn't believe what I had to do in order to get that set up! The dust devil dries!"
Thirty sets of eyes stared at her. The cloud crackled again.
"Also," the rookie added, "I was thinking about siroccos. For the routines. Do you know where we could get a lot of sand?"
There was one more crackle. The funnel, which could only receive what little strength had been left to give, deformed at the center.
The cloud dumped.
It dumped out water and soap, in a single tremendous torrent. It dumped into Wonderbolt fur and feathers, because a squad locked that deeply into stun had no hope of getting away in time. It doused everypony in whitewash, making eyes sting as mouths desperately tried to spit clear. And it did so at the same instant when the funnel came apart, flinging two of the uniforms in the general directions of Hither and Yon. A third went into the fire, the fourth continued to express its magnetic attraction towards the rookie's backside, and the last one went into Spitfire's face.
That fifth slid down after a while. Hitting a soapy surface encouraged that sort of thing.
The spent cloud made a noise: something not so much thunder as burp. A slightly-imperfect weave parted, and six uniforms fell. Two of them landed between captain and rookie.
Both mares looked down.
"I think," the tired rookie postulated, "those dark streaks are really deep stains which got brought to the surface. By electrolysis. I should run them through again. Or the dirt could spin off in the dryer."
Technically, there were four more uniforms coming down. This took a little longer. The pieces tended to drift.
There were thirty pegasi who could have said something. Anything. And yet silence reigned within the illusion, until the rookie dethroned it.
"Any resemblance to electrical burns," the swaying mare decided, "is just coincidence..."
The silence retook command for a while. If you discounted the thud.
Eventually, somepony spoke.
"She fainted," High Winds unnecessarily observed.
"She's exhausted," Spitfire softly said. "Completely."
"So... what do we do?"
"Two of you," the captain directed, "are going to carry her in a hoof press. After you dry her off. And yourselves, because nopony is carrying anything until all the soap is off. Then you'll get her up to Medical. The rest of us are going to put out the fire, and then we'll all get a really good look at that cloud. Plus the one drifting on its left, because I'm pretty sure she tampered with that and I want to see what was done before it goes off."
Orders were followed.
The rookie started to snore.
Eventually, the second cloud went off anyway. But it hadn't had all that much soap loaded and the only pony under it was Silver Zoom, so the squad considered the result as a win.
Spitfire closed the medical bay's exit door behind her. It had the benefit of putting her out of sight for anypony within, plus it trapped the rookie with a significant number of echoes.
Soarin, who'd been waiting in the hallway, took a breath.
"I heard most of that," he admitted.
"I imagine the Academy heard most of that," Spitfire tightly stated.
The second-in-command cut directly to the point.
"Why is she still on the squad?"
"Because she can think of things like that," the captain told him. "Think of them and then find ways where they start to work. We need that."
Eventually, Soarin nodded.
"And why do we need to have somepony constantly watching her from now on?"
"Because she thinks of things like that," Spitfire sighed. "And I'm almost sure that if her foalsitter of the day sounds the alarm in time, we can shut her down. Or at least clean up afterwards."
The stallion measured his squad seniority against what little was left of his captain's patience, and found the equation came out to a smile. "Phantom looked pretty clean already --"
"-- oh, shut up."
