Twilight, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Applejack had just finished an epic adventure that had extended from an even more epic birthday party. The birthday girl, unfortunately, had fallen unconscious during the celebrations and had been carried back to Ponyville on Applejack's back. Even more unfortunately, she had slipped off the farmer's back and fallen into the river that ran through the town. Now she was gently floating down the river unconscious with her nose just inches above the water. And the most unfortunate, disgraceful, downright not-okay part about this situation was that her friends were watching this, but were just too darned frustrated and worn out from all the effort they'd put into making Rainbow Dash's birthday a success, that they were currently more interested in getting lunch.
"I give up. Wanna go grab lunch?" Twilight asked, eliciting nods from the others.
See?
Perhaps since their epic birthday celebration had involved dressing their friend up as Daring Do and putting her through a series of trial straight out of the first book in the series without revealing to her that she was still in the real world and not in a fictional universe (then whacking her on the noggin to make sure she didn't get wise to their deception), maybe they can be excused for not caring if she drowns. I mean, can you imagine how tired they must be?
As they all headed off to Carousel Boutique, none of them noticed a baby dragon (whose identity shall remain hidden until the author decides to dramatically reveal it) at the edge of the river with a fishing pole dipped in its currents. Before this baby dragon could spot Rainbow Dash in the river, her body sank beneath the water. A few seconds later, the baby dragon (whose name is Spike the Epic) felt a tug on his fishing rod and, sensing that he had a whopper of a catch, started reeling it in as fast as his comically short arms could manage.
What he got shocked him to the core. Dangling by the collar of her vest was none other than his favorite action hero, Daring Do herself. A spot of dye had been rinsed out of her coat to reveal that it was actually Rainbow Dash dressed up as Daring Do, but Spike didn't see it right away. He was too excited by his amazing catch. There was tons of magic in Equestria (really, the country was practically made of the stuff), but never before had he heard of a river from which you could fish fictional characters.
“Oh my gosh, this is so cool!” Spike said as he swung Daring Do over to his fish wagon and deposited her among the three or four smelly fish and the one boot that he had already caught. He packed up his tackle and rod, then grabbed the wagon's handle and started pulling her to the library.
“I'm gonna get you dried up, make you some coffee, and then we're gonna talk all about your fantastic adventures!” he was saying as ponies cast him weird glances. “Oh man, I can't wait to introduce Twilight to you! She's going to be so amazed that one of her favorite book characters came to life out of a magic river! Maybe we can even-” He screeched to a halt. “Maybe we can have adventures together,” he said in wonder.
This idea was so fantastic that it filled him with the same yearning he felt when reading the outlines on the backs of the Daring Do books. He looked back at the unconscious Rainbow Dash/Daring Do and shrugged. “Twilight will just find a way to make it boring. We're gonna have an adventure right now! Exactly like the ones in your books.”
He stopped at the library for just a minute to get a towel to dry Daring Do's coat a little. He also left Twilight a note, telling her that he would be caught in a life-threatening situation so she wouldn't worry about where he was. Leaving the note stashed in a box that was shoved under her bed (with her naughty magazines where she'd be sure to see it right away), he grabbed the wagon again and headed away from Ponyville on the epic quest he was itching to share with his favorite action-adventure hero.
His journey took him far out of town and into some more mountainous terrain near Ghastly Gorge (which actually didn't have any hungry hungry ghost Pokemon, go figure). Daring Do remained unconscious as the wagon bumped and rumbled over the rocks even as Spike pulled it up a sharp incline. They ascended until Spike finally reached the rim of the incline and he sighted was he was looking for.
Down below him within the volcano he'd been ascending was a vast lake of lava, bubbling and spitting with intense heat. There were chunks of rock that could be used as stepping stones if only they weren't scalding hot from being inside a big freakin' active volcano.
There had been many rumors about the possibility of a hidden cave of gems out here, but nopony had the guts or suicidal tendencies to go looking hard enough for it. Spike was confident that with Daring Do at his side, the two of them would find that elusive cave and escape death by a hair's breadth loaded with treasure.
“Ugggghhh, what happened?” Daring Do groaned from behind him.
Spike turned around to see that she'd risen her head and was looking around groggily.
“Daring Do, you're awake. Oh, this is so awesome, now we can start our adventure!”
“What adventure? I just had an adventure and I didn't like it. My whole body hurts, especially my head. I only remember, like, half of what happened.” She was in pain, groggy, and sitting in something that felt unstable.
“Okay, here's what happened,” the baby dragon happily explained. “I was fishing, only expecting to catch some big fish, but then pulled you out of a magic river and into our world! Now we can journey into this dangerous, active volcano and find a hidden cave that's full of gems! It should be hidden somewhere within the volcano's rim. Just like the stuff you do in your books, like a normal day for you. Right?”
Daring Do was shaking her head to get rid of all the cobwebs. She soon became aware of waves of heat rising around her. “No, that's not right. If I went through a magic river into another world, then how come you're still here?” She stared at Spike. “You're Spike. How can you be here if I'm the only one who traversed dimensions, huh?”
Spike was confused for a minute, wondering how Daring Do could possibly know who he was, until the obvious conclusion came to him. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh...this means there's a Spike just like me in your world to!”
“Whoa,” Daring Do murmured in awe. In her head, she was thinking, This means that hallucination I had about Pinkie Pie knocking me out with a hammer so I didn't catch on to the fact that they had dressed me up as Daring Do and forced me through a dangerous situation to make me think I really was Daring Do really WAS a hallucination. I'm actually in the Daring Do universe right now! Except I got here through a river instead of a magic books, that's kinda weird. She studied the excited baby dragon. And Spike is apparently already a character in the books. Man, I'm so jealous.
Meanwhile, Spike was rambling. “Rainbow Dash is gonna be so jealous! I don't even have to pretend I'm your bumbling sidekick, because in the Daring Do world, I already am your bumbling sidekick! This is so radical!”
Daring Do stopped him right there and twirled her hoof. “Wait, back up. You said Rainbow Dash? So this is the universe with Rainbow Dash and the Elements of Harmony in it? This isn't the Daring Do universe?”
“Yeah, that's right,” spike said.
Daring Do stomped her hoof against the floor of the wagon. “So they DID dress me up as Daring Do and force me through a series of dangerous situations to make me think I was her and then knocked me out! I can't believe this!” She settled down a bit and rubbed her chin with her hoof. “Actually, now that I think about it...that was a pretty awesome birthday prank!” Then she got angry again. “Except for the part where Pinkie Pie knocked me out to keep me from suspecting anything. That was not cool.”
“So, wait,” Spike said, trying to figure things out inside his cute little scaly noggin. “You're saying you're not Daring Do? You didn't magically pop out of a book and somehow come out of a river instead? You're actually Rainbow Dash?”
“Yeah, you got it.” She patted him on the head, but Spike got fed up. He threw his arms up and stormed past the wagon.
“Well that's just great! Here I was looking forward to an awesome adventure with Daring Do, and I'm stuck with plain old Rainbow Dash. I'm going home.”
“Whaddaya mean, 'plain old Rainbow Dash?'” plain old Rainbow Dash demanded angrily, standing up fast. “Do you have any idea who you're talking towhoooa, whooOAAA!”
Standing up fast in the a wagon perched on the rim of a volcano had not been a good idea. Although in Dash's defense, she was only just now realizing that she was at a volcano. Now she looked down and saw the lava bubbling beneath her. And she was still trying to regain her balance as the wagon shifted beneath her hooves.
Spike realized what was going on and ran back to grab the wagon's edge in his claws. But Rainbow Dash's shifting caused it to back up into him, ruining his footing and knocking him in with her. With his added weight, the wagon finally decided which way off the volcano's rim it wanted to roll.
Dazed from clonking their heads inside the wagon, Spike and RD sat up together and stared at each other, wind rushing past them. Then they looked as one in the direction their makeshift vehicle was tumbling wildly and saw a great big lake of boiling hot lava rising up to meet them. They could have gotten out of that situation the way Daring Do would have, but this was cold, hard, cynical reality where everything goes wrong. They weren't about to fly outta there since Spike didn't have any wings (useless jerk) and Dash was convinced she was crippled because one of her wings had a fake bandage on it (totally excusable mistake on her part, but only because we ALL love ponies more than dragons). Instead, they grabbed each other with both arms and screamed as the wind tore at their mane and spines and the red-hot molten rock filled their vision.
At the last second, their wagon hit a protruding rock, launching them up into the air like a catapult. They landed with a cartoonish splat on a big rock, faces down. Spike took a few seconds to recover, but Dash sprang up and recovered much more quickly simply because the rock was freaking HOT.
“Ow, ow, ow, ohmygosh, this thing is burning my fur off! Spike let me get on top of ya!”
“Hey, have you been reading my secret diary-GYAH!” Spike cried out as Dash jumped into his comically short arms (did I mention his arms were short to the point of hilarity? I must have. I would also like to take his opportunity to say that Dash isn't very smart).
Dash was glancing around in a panic. She was already scared from being inside an active volcano, but in the next minute her fears increased twofold. The rock they were stranded on decided, since it had two idiots perched on it, that now would be a good time to start sinking. The lava began creeping up over the rock's surface, reaching for Spike's feet and Dash's rump.
“Oh man, what're we gonna do?” Dash moaned.
“Well, you could fly us out of here,” Spike suggested. “That bandage on your wing is fake, right?”
Dash looked at Spike.
She looked at her bandage.
She removed her bandage.
She glared at Spike. “Not a word of this to anypony. Got it?”
“Sure,” Spike said, rolling his eyes.
“No, I'm serious here, dude. If you breath so much as a tiny little hint to anypony that I had a You moment, I will become the jerk to you that everyone seems to think I am and-”
“Dash!” Spike interrupted angrily. “We. Are going. To DIE!”
“Okay, got it.”
Rainbow Dash pumped her wing and held onto spike, easily lifting them both out of harm's way and accelerating up and away from Nature's gargantuan zit. She eased into the air currents and then descended a little, swooping into the familiar valley of Ghastly Gorge itself.
“Haven't we had enough danger for one day?” Spike shouted from her back.
“Hey, you're the one who dragged us into this, you wanted an adventure!” She had him there.
“Okay, fine. But in all honesty today was just disappointing and all I want to do now is get home and-”
A Graboid (oops, sorry, a Quarray eel) suddenly shot out of the canyon wall, snapped its jaws over Spike, and retreated back into its den. Rainbow Dash flared her wings and backpedaled, not sure of what had just happened. She looked around and saw, with a sick feeling, that Spike was no longer on her back.
She was so shocked she just stopped and hovered there, unable to do anything. It had all happened so suddenly and was over so quickly that she could hardly believe it. One second, Spike was on her back, then he wasn't. Because of her negligence. Because of her. That fact took a minute to sink in.
“No...no way. There is no way that just happened.”
But it did, she couldn't deny it. Reality was staring her in the face, and all she could do was stare back into the black hole into which Spike had disappeared. As the shock of the moment cleared away, sadness and regret moved in. Spike was...gone. And it had happened so suddenly.
“Oh, man...Spike, I'm...I'm so sorry. I...I had no idea that was about to happen. I swear I didn't even see it coming. If...If you can ever forgive me, please do, because I don't think Twilight everwill. She's going to hate me for allowing her number one assistant to fall into the jaws of a monster. Please...please forgive me.” Tears were now building in her eyes. “I should have been watching what was happening around us. I'm so sorry, Spike.”
Then the same eel popped back out of the hole and swallowed Rainbow Dash too.
* * *
Rainbow Dash awoke a minute later in complete darkness. The minute of rest had been welcome after they day she'd just had, but now she wanted to know what was going on. She sat up and rubbed her head, moaning. Suddenly, a burst of green fire came her way, making her jump up and instinctively yell, “Expelliarmus!”
“It's just me, Dash.” She finally noticed Spike standing before her looking cross.
“Oh, h-hey, Spike, ol' pal,” she said nervously. “So, uh, how long you been in here waiting for me to come rescue you, because that was totally the first thing on my mind!”
“I look at Equestria Daily's main page, Dash,” Spike said grumpily. “I highly doubt I'm the first thing on anyone's mind when they think of ponies.”
“Right, well,” Dash said, rubbing the back of her head. It was then that she realized her head was providing their only source of light inside this Quarray eel. “Ohmygosh, my mane's on fire!” She started batting it out.
“Dash, no! The dye in your mane is the only thing in here that's flammable!”
“Oh, okay.” Dash stopped trying to put out the fire on her head. “So any plans for getting out of here, Jonah?”
“Oh, always,” Spike said confidently. “Half my job is planning ahead for any disasters Twilight might cause, so I made sure to bring something in case you needed a little boost.” Reaching into his pocket, Spike extracted a metal cylinder. He held it over head head, which somehow cause it to light up for a moment while an electronic da da-da daaa! sounded.
Spike handed to tin to Rainbow Dash. It was a can of spinach.
Dash gave Spike a shining grin. “Spike, dude, you are always a step ahead of the game!” She reached out and grabbed the spinach can, squeezed it like a squeaky toy, and a burst if green vegetable matter sprang up, arcing through the air like a snake-in-a-can prank to land squarely in her mouth.
What happened next knocked Spike back on his tail. A heroic sea ditty came from somewhere to accompany Rainbow Dash's impressive metamorphosis. The fire in her mane burst into a roaring inferno. Powerful muscles appeared on her body, shooting from her shoulders to her legs and rebounding back up to her chest where they rolled up and down the length of her forelegs, which she flexed like arms. Finally, she fixed the air in front of her with a stern glare and blew a jet of steam from her nostrils with the sound of a train whistle.
The sight was so amazing that Spike just sat there and stared. “Holy guacamole!”
Dash marched across the Quarray eel's stomach on her hind legs with her back hunched and her forelegs ready to deliver a pounding. She was muttering in a low, scratchy voice, “Alright, let's bust our way outta this big palooka, thinks it can swallow us, do'ee? He's gotta 'nuther thing comin' er I ain't the fastest flier in Equestria, yeah that's me, this big fella don't know who'ee's messin' with...” and so one and so forth.
Spike quickly followed her, excited by a filly whose body was rippling with muscle. Dash noticed this and turned to him with a smirk. “Liking this, huh?”
“No,” Spike said defiantly, folding his arms. His snout suddenly shot forward and poked Dash in her abs. Spike sighed and relented with the truth. “I keep a picture of you butt hidden under my basket.” He nose shrank back to normal proportions.
Dash smirked again. “That's what I thought, Spinocchio.” Then she turned to take care of business, then stopped halfway to her destination and said, “Actually, why don't I just make you do this?”
Spike looked up at her, annoyed. “What?”
“I'll just make you bust us outta here,” Dash explained, shrugging.
“But you just swallowed a whole can of spinach! You did muscles and the sailor theme and everything!” Spike threw his arms up in exasperation.
“Yeah, but I'll bet some of the people reading this are big jerks who like seeing you get the short end of the stick,” she smirked. “besides, it's fun watching a little guy get'n pushed around by a girl.”
Before Spike could protest, she grabbed him up and started poking and prodding his scaly body, trying to find pressure points. “H-Hey! What do you think you're doing, Dash?!”
“Sssshhh, we're just going to experiment a little, okay?” Dash said comfortingly.
“Stop touching me like that! I don't like it!”
“There, there, I'm not gonna hurt you.” Finally, Dash found what she was looking for. She discovered that she could control the opening and closing of Spike's jaws by twisting his tail a certain way. She positioned the baby dragon in her arms like the Jaws of Life and said soothingly, “Now I know you're a little inexperienced here, but that's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm just gonna reach down here to pump your shaft in a certain way. We're gonna make a bit of a mess, but I promise you that I'll be very gentle. Okay? Let's go!”
* * *
A few minutes later, a Quarray eel burst out of the ground not far from Ponyville, writhing around, it's eyes wild and bulging. A crowd of ponies rushed to the scene and watched from a distance, but none approached other than the mane six, since they're the only important ones.
Suddenly, as the five watched, there came the sound of a chainsaw and the giant beast's side split open as if viciously cut by something from inside., It expelled blood, guts, other icky fluids, and last but not least came two figures. A baby dragon and a pegasus. The five ponies trotted up to the pair.
“Blech!” Dash gagged. “I'm coughing up blood that isn't mine!”
“Rainbow Dash, Spike?” Twilight Sparkle asked, bewildered. “Are you two okay? How in Equestria did the two of you end up being swallowed by a Quarray eel?”
Spike finished coughing madly and looked at her through the nasty dripping from his face. “Twilight...I don't even know where to begin!”
“Well I do.” All attention turned to Dash who had finished emptying her mouth. She got up and went back to the dead Quarray eel to root around in its insides.
When she came back, she caught everypony by surprise by smacking Rarity in the face with one of the eel's giant kidneys.
“You jerks dressed me up as Daring Do and put me in danger!” she yelled, swinging the huge kidney at Applejack and laying her down in one blow like she'd done with Rarity. “And then you left me unconscious floating down a river!” She smacked Fluttershy with it, whose eyes spun around in her head before she hit the ground with all four legs sticking up. “And then I went through all kinds of crap when Spike thought he'd fished a fictional character out of a magic river!!”
At this point she came after Pinkie Pie, who ran for all she was worth while Dash chased after her swinging her big kidney overhead psychotically.
“It was just a birthday prank, Dashie! Happy birthday! Happy birthdaaaayyy!” After she'd chased Pinkie out of sight, the sound of kidney-on-Pinkie pounding could be heard.
A shocked Twilight turned to look at Spike. Her number one assistant glared back at her.
“So, uh...did you at least have fun?”
Spike laid her out cold one one firm punch.
