A rainbow flash blinded the pilot as her aircraft shuddered and popped. ‘The hell was that?’ she thought to herself as she tried to blink away her flash blindness, she felt like she'd been staring at a lit flare. The rhythmic humming of the DC-3’s engines reassured her that the aircraft, at least, was functioning after the…whatever it was that had resulted in the bright flash.

She blinked again and her eyes snapped wide open, she saw--'What the hell is that?' she thought as she gritted her teeth and slammed the throttle forward on the number two engine and stomped hard on the left rudder pedal as she hauled the control yoke back and to the left, throwing the aircraft into a hard bank.

The aircraft strained and shook as it was forced into a maneuver it was never designed for to avoid the… ‘coliseum of clouds?’ she thought, unsure of what it was that she had seen. She felt the entire aircraft lurch as the underside of the fuselage struck something. The number two engine stalled out, she cut the ignition and pulled back the mixture. ‘One engine down…not good.’

She cleared the cloud coliseum at the expense of altitude and inertia. She shoved the number one engine’s throttle to the locks as she fought the aircraft, the stall warning screamed in the cockpit, her altimeter clicked down rapidly as the one running engine roared at full throttle.

As she leveled out of the slip she saw a red barn and a grassy field, she could land there, it would be rough but she doubted she was going to keep it in the air anyway; low slow and heavy on one engine, no time to gain enough speed to stop the descent but maybe enough to slow it.

The thousand horsepower engine torqued the aircraft hard to the right as she compensated with rudder, her fingers clumsily slammed down on the starter switch for the number two engine, a last ditch effort to start it back up before she was forced to set down…somewhere. She had no idea where she was, she’d been cruising at eleven thousand feet over the ocean before the flash and found herself under five hundred and no water in sight afterwards.

Reaching over her head she flipped the ignition on and pressed down on the starter switch, the starter chugged as the propeller on the number two engine started to spin, but it wouldn’t fire. Cursing under her breath she feathered the propeller and activated the landing gear, the dexterity in her fingers started to fail her but the stress of the situation distracted her from that fact.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Pegasus five-five-zero, declaring an emergency, have lost engine power and have insufficient altitude to recover, am making an emergency landing, location unknown, setting transponder to seventy seven hundred” she yelled into her radio headset as she hauled back on the control yoke.

The aircraft pulled into a shallow stall and settled onto the ground, rolling along the grassy field with the occasional shudder transmitting through the airframe as she cut ignition to the remaining engine and shut off the fuel control valves.

She leaned heavily on the wheel brakes to slow the aircraft to a stop. The pain in her gut now too much to ignore, she let out a loud groan as she pushed herself out of the pilot’s seat, her vision starting to blur again as she struggled with her harness. An inhuman scream forced its way out of her throat as she thrashed.

Bones were shifting, breaking, reforming; it felt like her entire body was being crushed under a massive weight while being stretched like taffy. Her harness snapped and she crashed out of her chair onto the deck of the plane as consciousness finally left her.

The crowd cheered as she landed on the clouds, a hero’s feat; she’d dove to rescue her friend and in the process created the second sonic rainboom of her life. Rainbow Dash basked in the attention, all of her training had paid off… even if it wasn’t in the way she had originally planned.

The rumble of the crowd continued as she shook a little from the adrenaline still pumping through her, grabbing four ponies out of a free fall of certain doom had taken its toll on her, but she held together.

The rumble grew louder and the cyan mare blinked, the crowd wasn’t making that noise. She pumped her wings and shot back into the air in spite of her exhaustion, whatever it was it sounded angry and she had to see what it was; a great metal monster charging towards her, the stadium, her friends. She turned back and saw that everypony had gone silent and was listening to the same rumble she heard, she locked eyes with Princess Celestia and saw recognition in them.

The alicorn launched herself into the air with a flap of her large powerful wings, flying towards Dash with purpose and speed. The metal beast roared louder as it shot over the top of the stadium, the reflective metal flashing sunlight through the crowd.

Celestia’s eyes widened, “Aircraft? No, not here, not now…” she whispered to herself. She grit her teeth and her horn shone as bright as a star; she let fly a bolt of magic that slammed hard into the plane's wing, arcing across and scorching the sheet metal skin.

“Humans…” she said softly under her breath, legitimately afraid for the first time in a long time.

“It looks like it’s going towards Sweet Apple Acres…” Dash said as she flew over to the princess, “Should… should we do something?”

She stirred with a groan, the pain in her head reminding her of what a tree must feel like when it meets the axe. “Ugh… it’s not a fighter jet… remember that.” She said as she pushed herself to her feet. Her legs felt strange, weak, awkward. She reached to either side and grabbed onto the cockpit door frame to balance herself as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes.

A hoof. There was a hoof at the end of her arm and it was grabbing onto the door frame… somehow. She pulled back but it was stuck, she turned her head to the left and that arm had a hoof as well, which was still stuck to the door frame.

She let out a yelp of panic and let go of the door frame, falling backwards into the cockpit and found herself looking up at a mirror on the ceiling. A light grey horse looked back at her.

She screamed.

The horse screamed.

She stopped screaming, the horse stopped screaming.

She reached up to grab at her face and the horse did the same, pulling at its features as she pulled at her own, it was wearing a headset just like hers as well. She stuck her tongue out and wiggled it around, making strange faces at the equine when she came to a startling revelation.

“I’m a horse.” She laughed in a slightly unhinged way as she sat back up, “A horse of course!” She looked down at her hooves and chuckled softly, "I've still seen weirder shit than this, just wish I could remember when..."

Still laughing in the face of absurdity, the pilot-turned-mare slid her headset off of her head and into the pilot’s seat, reaching up to cut off power from the main battery, wouldn’t do her any good to run the battery dead, not that she could take off on one engine anyway.

“Or fly a plane as a horse, I guess.” She said to herself as she climbed back to her hooves, walking awkwardly on her hind legs towards the door at the rear of the plane, reaching out to grab the edges of the crates lining the side of the walkway every time she started to lose her balance.

She stopped near the rear door and retrieved the brush gun from beside the door, looping the sling around her neck and hanging the rifle from her back, not one to enter unfamiliar territory without being armed, who knew what kind of wild life there was around here?

Judicious application of hoof to the release mechanism caused the sticky latch to release and the door to drop down into a staircase, which she descended with the help of the hand rail “Or is it hoof rail now?” she wondered aloud as she stepped into the sunlight, looking out over the grassy field, "Definitely not Alaska."

'Okay...' she thought to herself, 'No idea where this is, and you're a horse... Deal with what you can deal with, freak out later, right let's go.'

She stumbled over to the engine on the right wing, the one that had failed in flight. At fifteen feet she already had a very good idea of what was wrong, the nacelle was covered in carbon scoring from an electrical strike, a powerful one at that, ducking under the wing she opened up the access panel and frowned, “Magnetos are shot, that’ll do it. I’ve got a spare in cargo somewhere… suppose I could scavenge one off the number one engine but then I’m in trouble if I lose one…”

She sighed and pushed the panel closed “not that I’m not screwed anyway.” She stepped back from the engine and pushed on the propeller with a hoof, it turned, a good sign if nothing else was, she figured. Stepping back she noticed that there was oil running down the right landing gear, likely blew a shock absorber while landing, not surprising and not crippling, fortunately.

She whistled to herself as she checked around the aircraft, making sure nothing was too damaged in the forced landing. She was glad that she could still whistle, this horse thing would take getting used to but it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

“Could have hit the ground at two hundred miles per hour and died on impact” she reasoned.

She heard footsteps in the grass behind her… no, hoofclops. She turned around and then had to look up to meet the eyes of the most angry looking mare she’d ever seen, not that she’d seen an overabundance of angry mares, she was, needless to say (but it’ll be said anyway) intimidated by the sharp looking horn and impressive wingspan of the much larger mare.

She raised her own hooves in a placating gesture as she leaned back against the side of the aircraft, “Don’t suppose you wanna talk about it? maybe over an alfalfa pellet?"