Discovering the Sky

“Fluttershy, Fluttershy, Fluttershy can hardly fly!”

The rhyme was obnoxiously catchy, and Rainbow Dash was annoyed with herself for remembering it. What kind of punks had to pick on the worst flyer in the class? Dash grit her teeth, trying to block out the chanting and listen to her instructor explaining the day’s special run. Something about mitigating natural weather--but it was hard to think over the group of three taunting Fluttershy too softly for the instructor to hear but just distinctly enough to piss everyone else off. Group of three. To go after Fluttershy. Well, that was fine--they were admitting that Fluttershy was the highest they could aim for. Those punks weren’t worthy of filing Dash’s hooves.

Well, they were punks, but they had a point. Exactly what Fluttershy was doing at a hardcore flight camp like Junior Speedsters was a total mystery. Rainbow Dash had been watching her, but so had everypony else; Fluttershy was impossible to miss in air-current tours when she got blown so far off course that assistant instructors had to peel off and rescue her.

Tests were the worst of it by far. Fluttershy’s embarrassing lap time was already bad, but then there was the fact that out of four safe-fall tests, all graded on a scale of ten, Fluttershy’s combined score was five. Either Fluttershy or her parents had screwed up big time by expecting this camp to do the poor filly any good, and Rainbow Dash hoped that whoever it was would realize their mistake soon and pull Fluttershy the hell out of where she didn’t belong.

“Fuck, Ray-bow, watchu ‘tink, da storma dey wen’ trow at ‘chu? Hoo-oo brah, I tought you was one dead humpa’!”

“You know me better ‘n that, Chaser.” Rainbow Dash made a show of using a single wingbeat to send a gust at the table that she nearly tipped Cloudchaser’s drink over. “Horizon threw the hardcore stuff at me ‘cause she knew I was the only one who could handle a stormer like that.”

Without even looking, Cloudchaser stopped her drink by thumping one of her rear hooves onto the table. “Fff. Watevahs. Da firs’ swoop, I saw you wen’ get tossed. Lucky you din’t get smeared!”

“Nothing lucky about me getting tossed! I didn’t come within twenty spans of that cliff!”

“You wen’ got tossed good, sis. Saw you wen’ flip like one leaf!” Cloudchaser wore a smirk worthy of Rainbow Dash’s own expression. Chaser was quite a bit older--one of the oldest at the camp, actually--which suited Rainbow Dash just fine, because the older students were the only ones who could stand up to Dash’s lap time and cloud control.

“Yeah? Did you see me recover from that toss and pound a five-point combo in the time that you did three?” Rainbow Dash punched the air, as if she was getting another crack at the wicked storm cloud she’d been handed as a test that afternoon. “Some cloudhumper you are!”

Several heads at other tables suddenly snapped towards Dash and Chaser. Neither the rainbow-haired filly nor her wind-tossed friend took any notice.

“Hoo, for real, goin’ talk li’dat?” Chaser leaned forward until her face nearly touched Rainbow Dash’s, planting her forehooves on the cloud surface serving as their table. “‘Kay den, whatchu call da kine inna monin’, huh? Wen’ clip so much da markas mah sistah wen’ double you!”

“Yeah, twice my score and twice my finish time, too! I could dust Flitter any day of the week!” Rainbow Dash wouldn’t admit it, but that one stung. She’d earned the name Rainbow Crash, and she’d particularly deserved it that morning when she bumped nearly every marker that she was supposed to be avoiding on the obstacle course.

The other tables started to empty out as the boasting and ribbing escalated. Along with being the only one in the younger class who could compete with the older cloudhumper’s wicked diagonal sprint, Rainbow Dash was also the only filly capable of brazenly meeting Cloudchaser curse for curse.

“Watch me! I’m gonna be the first in the class to get my contrail down, just like I’m gonna be the one who rips a Sonic Rainboom!”

“Hoo-oo! You hear dat one?” Cloudchaser folded her forelegs across her chest and leaned back on her cloud tuft. It was a hypothetical question, of course--the lounge was completely empty. “Get one fuckin’ cloudhumpa’ ova hea who--”

Chaser’s words caught in her throat as a shadow fell over their table. Horizon Flash was hovering over them both, and she didn’t look amused by Chaser’s language. “Excuse me?” she said icily.

“Uh, I was jus’ talking wit’ Ray-bow...”

“That didn’t sound like just talking, Cloudchaser.”

“Um. Sorry, instructor. I wasn’t... I didn’t mean to offend anypony.” Cloudchaser’s thick cloud-creole disappeared almost completely as she hung her head. “I really was just talking to Rainbow...”

Instructor Horizon shook her head. “You use those kinds of words in Manehattan, you’ll get beat up. I’m just warning you, Cloudchaser. A lot of students came by my office just now to tell me how offended they were.”

“Why would I want fo’ live Manehattan?” Cloudchser’s accent came right back as her attitude soured. “My flock stay cloud-born alla way back, fuckin’ six dames Cirrus Crossing. You tink I goin’ live wit’ mudfuckas--”

“EXCUSE me?” Horizon Flash was glowering with twice the force of the storm she’d thrown at Rainbow Dash earlier that day. Cloudchaser looked down at her drink again.

“Sorry, Instructor. I... I didn’t mean it...”

Cloudchaser ended up getting banned from the lounge for a week, and Rainbow Dash quickly grew bored of sitting with her own classmates. Whenever the little fillies got into boasting matches, Rainbow Dash usually didn’t even bother joining in. The one time she did, it was to one-up Misty and Moonbow’s argument over who had a better lap time. The table fell silent when Rainbow Dash announced her own fastest lap. That quickly became a theme--Rainbow Dash had the singular ability to shut down any argument over who in the younger class was better at this or that.

So, instead of going to the lounge after evening roll call, Rainbow Dash took to exploring.

On good days when the training was light and her spirits were high, she would sneak out of her bunk, choose a direction, and fly out as far as she could. Dash had grown up surrounded by the dense cloud-structures and artificial weather patterns of Cloudsdale, so to her the amounts of space between cloud-structures was insane.

The open sky of the Junior Speedsters camp was an entire new world of freedom to her, and she flew out into that world with wide-eyed fascination and awe. The danger of flying without limits through the vast, empty sky only made her hungry for more. There were unused obstacle courses, contained weather simulators, assorted solid-cloud structures ranging from the size of a toolshed to the size of a house... the camp seemed to go on forever, and with every little expedition Rainbow Dash discovered something new.

So, what with all the adventures, Even Rainbow Dash knew that it was her own damn fault when one trip ended up getting her completely lost. The sky was starting to darken and there were no familiar structures around to guide Dash back to her dorm. The worst part was that the hours of flying long distances from cloud to cloud and building to building tired her out quickly. Her wings ached, she started to grow short of breath, and worst of all, no matter how far she flew, she never knew if she was getting closer to familiar territory or farther from it. She rested on top of buildings and stray clouds, trying to regain enough strength to fly onward just a little bit further, but with every gap crossed, her rests got longer and the distance she could fly got shorter.

By the time the stars were out, Rainbow Dash could hardly even move her wings. At one point, she found herself drifting helplessly beneath the cloud she’d meant to use as a rest, with nothing beneath her but a clear sky all the way down to the ground. She flapped desperately, trying to keep from sinking further, and somehow she managed to climb high enough to flop onto the cloud, utterly spent and unable to fly another foot. She gasped for breath, then groaned that breath out as she folded her cramped wings and buried her face in the cloud.

She was scared. She didn’t know what to do. There was probably nothing she could do. The cloud she was trapped on was cold, and small, and isolated. Rainbow Dash curled up in a ball and nested deeper into the cloud, trying not to let herself face the reality of how exposed she was and how alone she was. She started to cry, but she fell asleep from exhaustion before panic could set in.

An instructor woke her before dawn the next morning with a painfully bright flashlight and equally painful shouts of “Found her! She’s over here!”

Rainbow Dash woke with a start, rolled to her feet, and nearly cried again in relief. She nuzzled happily against the junior instructor’s leg even though she had no idea who he was, and he curled that leg around her.

“Scared us all to death,” the older stallion muttered. “Everyone was afraid we’d have to expand the search to the ground.”

Those words sent a shock of nausea through Rainbow Dash’s gut. Every foal raised in the clouds grew up hearing the stories of little ones falling to their deaths because they were too weak to fly out on their own.

Rainbow Dash knew she was going to be in big trouble. She was already thinking of how she would try to lie her way out of it. For now, though, she just hugged the instructor’s leg, trembling from cold and glad to have been found.

That day, while the rest of her class was doing warm-ups, Rainbow Dash was sitting in the director’s office. Through her haze of sleep deprivation, she would dimly remember being told that she would be expelled if there were any more incidents like that one. Before the director even told her that she could leave, she collapsed onto the floor and fell fast asleep.

In the end, though, all the drama suited Rainbow Dash just fine. She later learned that every staff member in the whole place had been mobilized in the search, and as a result, every single instructor in the place looked up with a raised eyebrow after they read the name Rainbow Dash off the roster. The students heard the whole story in no time, and soon Rainbow Dash became known as the troublemaker, the little rebel with a penchant for adventure and self-endangerment.

So, of course, Rainbow Dash did everything she could to deserve that title once it had been bestowed. She kept her promise never to fly out and and explore the camp on her own again, but that almost didn’t matter--now that she was being watched all the time, she took every opportunity to show off.

Her obstacle course clear time suffered as she added stunts to the routing, and her safe-fall score went from the best in class to the worst when she started using them as excuses to play one-pony games of gravity chicken. Rainbow Dash became more than a tough little flier with wingpower beyond her years--she became a badass, and she wanted to make sure there wasn’t a pony in the whole camp who didn’t know it.