The sun goes down, the silent growth of another sea, which the stormy ocean of the wind cannot disturb - the sea of darkness. It begins to gather in the bottom of hollow places. Deep valleys, and pits on the hillsides, are wellsprings where it gathers, and whence it seems to overflow, till it buries the earth beneath its mass. It sweeps over the mountain, gradually submerging the colossal mass. It rises up to the heavens and into the stars, and lets them shine down through the waters of the dark, to the eyes of all below. High on the mountainside, in the exact centre of an immense ruin, a small pool of light remains, emanating from a large bonfire, and illuminating the excavation site before it. A team of strange, spider-like mechanical robots dig relentlessly, gears spinning and emitting steam at random intervals, as they delve deeper into the ground. Two ponies stand at the edge of the pit, one a unicorn, the other an earth-pony. Both wear cloaks, with the hoods pulled up, hiding their faces in shadow. They watch silently as the automatons scrape away at the dirt. Suddenly, the discordant clang of metal striking metal is heard. Upon striking the object, the robots freeze. “They’ve found it! I told you my calculations were correct Dr Blade! It’s right where I said it would be!” the earth-pony shouts excitedly. The unicorn whips round to face his companion. “Silence! If we are discovered, the plan will fail even before it can begin!” He hisses angrily. His companion cringes at his master’s words. The unicorn glares furiously at his lackey for a few seconds, and then turns back towards the pit. “Bring it up”. He orders. The strange machines obey his command without hesitation, grabbing the artefact and dragging it up and out of the pit.

The device seems to glow slightly, and gears, cogs and wheels can be seen spinning madly within its protective casing.
“Interesting… Very interesting.” Blade muses. “Even after all this time buried in the ground, it continues to function normally.” He quickly locks the device onto the back of one of the automatons. This done, he whips around to face his companion for a second time, and declares crisply “Now, It appears that I have no further use for you…you have suddenly become a liability.” He raises a hoof, revealing a large, pistol-like device attached to the inside of his foreleg, and points it squarely at his minion. The earth-pony takes a step backward in surprise. The pistol cracks once, and the earth-pony falls, face-first into the ground, blood pouring from a gaping wound in his chest, his eyes wide-open, and his face a frozen mask of horror. Blade turns, and leaves the earth-pony lying in a rapidly widening pool of his own blood. The robots follow him as he climbs into a waiting airship. The engine roars into life, the mechanical spiders climb on-board, and the airship ascends into the clouds, driven by the whirling propeller. It sails away into the night, as a low rumble of thunder announces the approach of a distant storm.

Rainbow Dash came swooping down out of the sun like a suicidal angel, all rage and mirth. The rotor of her autogyro whined and snarled with the speed of her dive. Then she throttled up and the blades bit deep into the air and pulled her out, barely forty feet from the ground. Laughing, she lifted the nose of her bird to skim the top of one skywalk, banked left to dip under a second, and then right to zoom over a third. Her machine shuddered and rattled as she bounced it off the compression effects of the air around the skyscrapers to steal that tiny morsel of extra lift, breaking every rule in the book and not giving a damn. Pegasi made excellent pilots, due to the fact that they had a natural tolerance for the G-forces involved in powered flight. Sitting upright in the centre of her flying machine, she let the inertia push her back into the seat. Eight-foot-long titanium blades extended in a circle, with her at the centre like the heart of a flower. This was no easy machine to fly. It combined the difficulty of flight with the physical demands of operating a mechanical thresher. It took all her strength to bully her machine into position while the g-forces tried to shove her away from the controls. She was flying straight and true toward factory alley, a street that was only feet wider than the diameter of her autogyro’s blades, due to the size and location of the massive chimneys that blew thick, black smoke all hours of the day. The margin of error for a pilot flying between the chimneys was so small that one wayward twitch could result in a painful and sudden death as the aircraft collided with one of the chimneys. With her autogyro tilted forty-five degrees, she roared down the alley, her prop wash rattling the windows and filling them with astonished faces. At the intersection, she shifted pitch and kicked rudder, flipping her gyro over so that it rolled over forty-five degrees the other way. The engine coughed and very nearly stalled, then it roared back to life again as she zoomed upwards and into the sky. She laughed out loud as she realised what she’d just done. Five months ago, a committee of the best flyers in the Metropolis had declared that such a manoeuvre couldn’t possibly be done. She’d just proved them all wrong. Dash grinned with triumphant satisfaction. She started suddenly as her radio squawked and crackled into life as she was pinged by tower control.

“Rainbow Dash. Your flight authorisation has been cancelled. Return to HQ.”

Reflexively, she jerked the throttle back, leveling out. “What?!”

“Repeat: Return to Ops. Await further orders.”

“Aw hell. I hear you control. Dash out.” She sighed inwardly as she whipped the machine around and headed back the way she had come, although at a much higher altitude and a slower pace than she’d originally planned...

Next Chapter: Chapter 2 Estimated time remaining: 14 Minutes