Iron Mare

Rainbow Dash suddenly felt herself pulled back from the depths of unconsciousness. She took in a deep breath through her nose, filling her lungs with cold damp air before exhaling it through her mouth. There was a steady beeping coming from somewhere to her left. Slowly, she began to take deep and steady breaths, hoping that she would be able to stay awake this time. Closing her mouth after taking another gulp of air, she felt a foreign object resting along the bottom of her mouth. Moving her tongue along her teeth, Rainbow Dash discovered that the object was long and tubular; it was almost like a straw but much more flexible, trailing all the way out of her mouth.

Her eyelids slowly started to creak open, allowing her to scan her surroundings. As her vision began to clear, she tried to make out the various shapes around the room. To her left was a heart monitor that appeared to be a decade old, and to her right was a small box of some kind continuously emitting a soft electrical hum. The room was completely dark, save the faint light of a dimming candle next to her.

Bringing her hooves up to her face, Rainbow Dash rubbed her eyes and pushed away stray strands of her mane from her vision. She brought her hooves up to the tube in her mouth and began to tug at it. While she was pulling, she suddenly felt something shift inside of her stomach. Rainbow froze in horror. With shaking hooves, she tugged at the clear tubing once more, and again she felt the movement on the inside of her stomach. Her eyes widened as she felt the tube slide along the bottom of her jaw. She continued to pull it out of her mouth, feeling it slide upwards through her body and back out of her mouth.

"Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh!!" She cried out as the neverending snake of a tube slid out of her.

With one last pull she finally managed to remove the tube from her innards. Gagging, she threw it across the room and looked away, shivering at the thought of what had just happened. As she lay curled up on what she presumed to be a bed, he heard the sound of moving hooves from where she had just thrown the tubing.

"Wh-who's there?" she asked in a shaking voice.

The sound of the hooves stopped as she spoke. Rainbow Dash held her breath in fear at whomever or whatever had put her here. Across the room, Rainbow could make out the dark silhouette of a pony leaning against the wall. She then heard a soft, yet heavily accented, voice from the shadows.

"Leaving that bed is most unwise. Resting 'til you can stand is what I would advise."

"Who- who are you?" Rainbow called out into the shadows.

"Fear not, young pony, for I am a friend," came its soft-spoken reply. "One who has spared you a most grisly end..."

The shadow began to cross the room towards her. The dark mass stepped into the dim light of the candle next to her. Rainbow watched as the figure revealed herself; her body was covered in stripes and her mane pulled up, almost like a mohawk. In her incapacitated state of mind, it took a moment for her to realize that the strange looking creature before her was a zebra .

"You're... you're a zebra..." she said weakly.

"But of course I am, and I'm not alone. Many of us call these great fields of sand our home," the zebra said.

"Where... where am I?" Rainbow Dash asked, noticing how dry the inside of her mouth was.

As if she could read her mind, the zebra walked to a small table at the foot of the bed and grabbed a pitcher in her mouth. She reached under the table and sifted through the contents with a hoof. A moment later, she pulled out a glass, which she then filled with water from the pitcher in her mouth. She gave the water to Rainbow Dash, who merely stared at it, skeptical as to what might be in the glass other than water.

"I give you my word there is just water in this glass. I cannot imagine-" she began.

"Where. Are. We?" Rainbow cut in through clenched teeth.

"Ah yes. You wish to know the whereabouts of this place. I see you are quite unaware from the look on your face. We're in the depths of the planet where the sun cannot shine. We are both trapped in the bottom of a mine."

Rainbow put a hoof to her forehead, taking the glass of water against her better judgement. Sipping it, she looked down into the cup. The water inside was clear for the most part, but she was still wary of what it might contain. As she continued to sip it, she noticed that her chest was covered in bandages that had been wrapped around her body. What really caught her attention, however, was a pair of wires leading into her chest and under the bandages, one red and the other green.

Using her hoof to pull one up to her face, she noted that the end not leading under her bandages led somewhere off of the bed. Rainbow Dash's eyes followed the wire trail away from her body until they ultimately led her to the small humming box next to her.

Her heart stopped for a moment and the world around her seemed to freeze for several seconds. She looked back down and stared at the bandages covering her chest. Suddenly, she reached her hoof up and began pulling at the white fabric, ripping and tearing it away from her. Layer after layer of the cloth were peeled away until finally her bare chest was exposed. Rainbow's eyes widened in shock at the ghastly scene on her body. There, on her chest, was a series of cuts and slashes scattered all over; in the center was a circular metal device of some kind where both wires ended.

For a moment, Rainbow Dash sat there on the bed, her eyes locked on the device embedded into her. She couldn't say a word as she touched the metal ring with a hoof. Once the tip of her hoof made contact with it, her breath quickened and deepened.

"Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" Her scream echoed throughout the walls of the cave and carried on even after she had run out of breath.

It had taken half an hour for Rainbow Dash to recover from her panic-induced frenzy. She had screamed for nearly ten minutes, barely stopping to even take a breath; it had take. another twenty minutes for her to stop thrashing her body.

After what felt like hours, she merely sat on the mattress and looked at the floor below. A small fire burned in the center of the room, which was completely silent save the crackling of the wood. The zebra was standing over a cauldron she had set above the flames, a bubbling liquid inside.

"What.... what the hay is this thing?" Rainbow asked in a low, monotone voice.

The zebra turned to look at her before turning back to her cauldron.  "They brought you to me in a ghastly state. I got right to work, no time to wait. There was no guarantee you would come out well, as your chest was filled with the ruby's shrapnel," she answered. "I had little supplies with which to make do, but I worked best I could in order to save you. The result was not pleasant, but it would have become worse. But I fear my blessing of life may turn out to be a curse.

"You see, I removed all the shards, I was doing quite well, until the whole process went straight to Hell. In the midst of the loosely-named 'operation,' your heart stopped beating, a severe complication. Your breathing grew shallow, your vitals grew worse, I feared it was the time that you ride in a hearse. I-"

"Wait, wait," Rainbow interjected. "Are you telling me that... my heart stopped, and... I was dead?"

The zebra began to stir the boiling liquid in front of her with a large wooden spoon. She slowly and silently nodded her head, not glancing up from the cauldron.

"No matter what I did, your heart would not pump. I tried all I could but could not give it a jump. Then a radical idea dawned on me, and I got positive results through basic energy. It was a dangerous and radical, I was taking a chance, but I had come so very far that I had to advance. I needed a means to keep you alive, for your body and soul to once again thrive. So I devised a potion, of my own personal brew, and enchanted a dragon's scale, which I inserted into you. In a way, that scale now runs your heart. It is not a permanent solution, but a good place to start."

"Okay, so let me get this straight:  My heart stopped... and you found out, I don't want to know how, that as long as there was some kind of energy powering it, it would still beat. So you put a spell on a dragon scale, and now this... thing, is like a battery for my heart?" Rainbow held up a wire with a hoof and motioned her head in the direction of the little humming box.

"Think of it as a simple cup, designed to hold magic until it is all used up. It holds the potion I brewed to enchant the scale, but if you are not attent, it is prone to fail. For the potion to keep working it must be refilled, and if you fail to do so you will likely be killed."

Rainbow Dash simply sat there, looking bewilderedly at her strange striped companion. Shock and disbelief were plastered onto her face, her eyes unblinking. She stayed like this for a moment before her eyes lit up and she gave a sarcastic smile.

"Yeah... right," she chuckled. "A dragon's scale is inside me and if it comes out, my heart is gonna stop. Sure... I believe you. Now really, where are we?"

She began fiddling around with the device. She gave the wires a small tug and pulled them away from the box, causing the humming noise to cease. Immediately she felt her chest grow ice cold, like everything inside of her had stopped and shut down in the blink of an eye. Every single noise seemed to echo itself five times over as she slowly slid down from the bed to the floor.

Through the echoes, she could barely make out what she thought to be the zebra's fading voice shouting at her. She struggled to catch the smallest breath; her head began throbbing and her eyes strained. The world slowly started to blur and her eyes rolled into the back of her head.

In the span of 24 hours Rainbow Dash had been knocked out and pulled back into the world several times. Had it not been for the zebra reconnecting the two wires back to the metal circle buried in her chest, she would have gone out for the fourth time in just that one day. Had she not been there, it was very likely that Rainbow would never have woken up again. It was the second time the zebra had saved her life.

She lay flat on her back in a daze, looking straight up at the ceiling of the cave. At first, she was unable to believe it (or perhaps simply didn't want to), but her heart was actually being powered by what was essentially a battery. The idea of her entire life being in the balance of whether or not she was able to keep a little machine inside of her powered was still fresh in her mind. It was awful; everything she had ever worked for in her life, her inventions, her friends, her father's final creations and the Dash family legacy would end right there with her. It wasn't just shocking; it was terrifying. It was too much...

Rainbow Dash felt a lump in her throat growing in size. It wasn't long before she felt the first tear slide down her face and an even shorter time until she completely broke down. She cried. For the first time in years, Rainbow Dash, the mare famous for being so headstrong and never backing down from anything, was crying. She dug her face into the flat pillow she was resting her head upon and continued until her eyes were dry of all liquids.

She felt a hoof come to a rest on her back before sliding down. Rainbow Dash looked up from the pillow and saw the zebra standing next to her bed, stroking her wings as a mother would.

"What am I supposed to do?" she asked, her nose still a bit runny.

The zebra merely sat there silently for a moment, thinking of what to say next.  "In my old village we always liked to say, 'What doesn't kill you now will make you stronger another day.' I cannot imagine that you have ever felt worse, but maybe one day you’ll be blessed through this curse," she said in the best maternal voice she could muster.

"And how wou-" Rainbow's question was cut off by a pounding on the other side of the cave.

The zebra suddenly pulled her hoof away from Rainbow's wings and stood up straight looking with unblinking eyes in the direction from where the pounding had come. Rainbow Dash pulled her head up and looked in the direction the zebra was staring. Across the room there stood what she assumed was a metal wall of some sort; with the candle being the only source of light, it was quite hard to tell. As the pounding began again, it was accompanied by a low growling and what sounded like... a barking?

"For both of our sake, I beg of you," she heard the zebra whisper above her, "lay there still and simply do as I do."

Mere seconds after she said this, there was the sound of sliding metal on the other side of the door. A moment later, the door swung open and three dog-like creatures stepped in. Each was holding what looked to be a gun on their backs. What Rainbow Dash thought most strange about their weapons was the fact that each one looked strikingly similar to the saddle-mounted ones given to soldiers in the Equestrian Military; the only difference was that the heavy plastic straps which would normally hold them in place on a pony's saddlebag had been removed. The dog-looking creatures made their way into the room and approached the zebra.

Rainbow's eyes never moved from the one leading the other two in as he stepped up to her striped companion. After looking into the zebra's eyes for several seconds, the dog began to let out a series of soft growls and woofs. It took her a moment, but Rainbow realized that the dog wasn't just making noises; it was talking to her. Her suspicions were confirmed when the zebra turned her head over to her.

"He says they have spared you for a task that they wish done. He wishes you to build a weapon greater than any gun. The one you introduced to the world today, that rains death from the sky into the bloody foray," she said. "He says he wants you to build what you called the Rainboomer."

Rainbow's eyes shot open and she jumped up to her hooves.

"No," she said firmly, a look of anger in her eyes. "No way!"

The zebra merely looked at her with a somber expression in her eyes before letting out her own set of awkward-sounding growls and grunts to the dog. The creature in front of them turned to look at Rainbow Dash. They each glared at each other before the dog turned and barked orders to his cohorts, who stepped forward and grabbed Rainbow by her forehooves and began to pull her away. They threw a sack over her head once again.

Rainbow's vision was hindered almost to the point of blindness by the sack but her other senses were still hard at work, doing their best to make sure she knew what was going on. As she was dragged and pulled through the cave, she made sure to count each individual step and the number of turns she had taken. The small box was tucked snugly under her right wing as she was pushed along. The sack was suddenly yanked off her head, forcing her to squint her darkness-accustomed eyes at the sunlight's abrupt appearance.

Looking around, Rainbow Dash could see dozens of the dog-like creatures, all doing something or other. She could have cared less what they were doing; what she did care about, however, was the disturbing fact that everywhere she turned, there was a weapon of some kind. But they weren't just basic guns or makeshift explosives like one would expect.

They were HER weapons.

"Dash Co." was plastered on the side of each mechanism and every box of shells or bullets. There were Mini Bomb Rubies, Modified Saddle Guns, Dragon Breathers... you name it and it was there.

She was suddenly thrown to the ground and felt two of the dogs pinning her down. The barrels of multiple guns were pointed directly at her face. She struggled against them but could do little to fight the combined mass of the dogs. One of the guns clicked above her as the barrel was pressed up against the side of her head. The dogs above her all snarled and growled as her face was buried into the sandy earth underneath. The box became dislodged from its place under her wing and fell to the rocky surface of the ground.

Rainbow watched helplessly as one of the dogs lifted it up using its paws. It held the small object and examined it, as if trying to understand its purpose and workings. After a moment, the dog sniffed the wires and came to the conclusion that whatever this strange device was, it was important. Using its free paw, the disgusting creature began to tug at one of the wires leading into the metal container that held the vital Dragon's Scale.

"No! Wait!" cried Rainbow in a panic. "Okay! Okay! I'll do it! I'll do it!"  As if understanding what she had said, a toothy grin grew across the dog's face as it dropped the wire.

Rainbow Dash's heart sank as she realized that she was in a lose-lose situation. Betray Equestria by giving these monsters a weapon that would ruin the lives of others or die a slow and painful death. A death that would wipe away any chances of her finding out how and why these creatures had her inventions at their disposal. There had to be a way to weasel out of this one; the only question was how.