Rainbow Dash left the station in a huff. She was angry for a lot of different reasons. She was angry at her body for having to go through this every so often. She was angry at the solution to the problem. She was angry that she had to go through so much effort. She was angry that she had to be dragged all the way to Manehattan.

She hit the streets and headed off in a random direction. The city stunk. She hated it the second she saw it. It wasn’t anything like Cloudsdale. Cloudsdale was heaven compared to this dump. There was fresh air in Cloudsdale. Hell, they manufactured fresh air in Cloudsdale.

This city was all cement and grime and smells from all the different ponies and food carts and garbage and who knew what else. There were more earth ponies and unicorns then pegasus ponies, it seemed to her, and the city was built around them. There was a network of streets going everywhere. There was traffic that you were supposed to wait for if you wanted to cross. Most of the buildings had only a single entrance, and it was on the ground floor. It was nuts.

The other ponies were nuts too. They never even said hello or looked you in the eye. Ponies would just walk right past Dash without even acknowledging her. Sometimes they would even bump into her if she didn’t leap out of their way. They were rude too. They would bark at her if she tried to start up a conversation.

Rainbow Dash just couldn’t figure out how the whole city worked. The more she saw of it the more disgusted she got. She was surprised the city hadn’t collapsed a hundred years ago. This was no way to live. She wanted space; she wanted freedom. Here every pony was crammed in next to each other. They were feeding off their own hatred and frustration. She saw two ponies getting into a heated argument over a single parking spot. It was just because one wanted to back in, and the other wanted to come in straight. It was ridiculous. She almost tripped over a homeless pony because she wasn’t looking where she was going.

The homeless mare was all stretched out on the sidewalk. She was covered in newspaper and filth. Drunk, apparently, or maybe hopped up on whatever kind of awful drugs went around in this dump. Horse tranquilizers maybe, or worse.

Dash kept walking, turning corners more or less randomly. The theory was that she was supposed to find some stallion and screw his brains out. She was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. The city kept getting worse and worse as she walked on. She must have been entering one of those ‘bad neighborhoods’ as they called it. She saw a wheel-less cart sitting on cinder blocks. There was a scummy old tenement building that was all boarded up. One of the plywood boards had been pulled off, and there were ponies climbing in and out of the place. They looked rough. They looked like criminals.

Crime. Rainbow Dash wanted to spit in disgust. They didn’t have crime back in Ponyville. Sure, every now and then there was damaged property, or somebody would take something without asking permission, but there wasn’t anything so bad that it couldn’t be cleared up after a few minutes and an apology. Nobody ever got hurt.

Things weren’t like that here, though. Here there was serious crime. Ponies got hurt, or worse. Rainbow Dash didn’t know who she despised more. There were the criminals, of course, but on the other hoof, the criminals wouldn’t even exist if the ponies of Manehattan didn’t put up with them. The city was an apple rotten from the inside out. The mayor was to blame, and everyone else on down the line too. The ponies who lived here weren’t ponies; they were mice. Cowards being led to slaughter.

Dash couldn’t understand why there wasn’t anyone who would just stand up to the criminals. It shouldn’t be that hard. Criminals were weak-willed and cowardly by their very nature.

There was a scream. Dash snapped out of her deep thoughts. There was a mare across the street. Some stallion was stealing her saddlebags right off her back. There was a tussle. The mare got shoved and fell to the ground. The bag-snatcher took off on hoof. Here was her big chance.

“Hey!” Rainbow Dash screamed. The crook ducked into an alley. Dash ran out into traffic and was nearly flattened by a horse-drawn bus. It screeched to a halt and there were screams and shouts. She ignored all of it and took a big, flying leap over the next three lanes of traffic. She rushed into the alley in pursuit.

Dash only caught a glimpse of him as he turned corners in the maze-like alleyways. She raced over puddles of muck and around over-filled dumpsters. The crook might be able to hide, but he couldn’t run. Not from Rainbow Dash. She was getting closer, and closer.

He turned one last corner, just feet ahead of her, and then Dash knew she had him.

“Hey!” Dash shouted again as she rounded the corner herself. “Stop right there and...” The criminal had already stopped. He had stopped and turned around. There was a smile on his face. It was probably because right behind him there were another dozen of his criminal associates. They were grinning too. They all had the same sort of vest and all the same color. It was a gang. Dash started to back up, suddenly afraid for her life.

“Stop right there and what, Rainbow?” the first one asked. He only called her that because of her mane. He didn’t really know her name, but it unnerved her. She looked up. The alley was way too narrow. The space above was cluttered with fire escapes and laundry lines. She was in serious danger. “Is there something you want to tell us?” he asked. “Is there something you want to do to us? Because I think there’s something we’d like to do to you.”

Dash gulped. She heard the sound of a switch blade being popped open. She heard the sound of someone running up behind her. She turned, but there was nobody there. She turned back to the gang and then all hell broke loose.

Something fell from up above. It landed in the middle of the gang. Dash only caught a glimpse of it as it fell, black and shapeless. There were screams. There were thuds and thumps and more screams. The gang fell in towards the interloper, then fell back out again as they were kicked and beaten and tossed. One by one each of the gang members fell to the pavement unconscious.

Dash only got a good look at him as the last few of the criminals were beaten senseless. He moved so fast Dash could hardly even see him. He was a blur. And then, as soon as it had started, it was over. He stood before her, black as night. No, his coat was white. But his... costume. His costume was black. It covered nearly every square inch of his massive body; the cowl even covered most of his face.

“Are you OK, miss?” he asked in a deep, gruff voice. “Did they hurt you in any way?”

“Um... no,” was just about all she could manage to say.

“Here’s your saddle bag, miss,” he tossed it to her and she snatched it out of the air, dumbfounded. He reached for his strange belt and pulled out some kind of device. “You know, you really should try to stay out of the alleyways, especially in this part of town. It’s a shame, but there are criminals lurking in every dark corner.” It was a grappling hook. He placed it in some kind of hollow tube. There was a loud pop of compressed air and the hook went shooting up into the sky, trailing a long thin wire behind it. It caught on the top of a building, and he fixed it to his belt. He didn’t even have any wings, Dash noticed. He was just an earth pony with a cape. The most amazing earth pony she had ever seen.

“Wait!” Dash screamed, her mouth finally finding words. “Who are you?”

He turned to her one last time. “I’m the Fifth Horseman,” he said. There was a whizzing noise, and the pony went shooting into the air, and was lost of the edge of a six story building.

“Whoa,” Dash whispered.

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