- "I can't sleep.""You."Maybe Twilight wasn't completely awake yet. "Yeah, I said that.""Can't sleep.""Right... that too..."The librarian visibly considered the fundamental overturn of every known law of their universe."So basically, you're saying Discord's back."
If there's anything Rainbow can do (other than be totally awesome through deliberate effort or just incidental existence), it's sleep. She knows it. All of Ponyville knows it. She sleeps pretty much everywhere (except on ...floors), any time she wants to, regardless of what she should have been doing at the time. There was a time in her life when ponies thought she was going to get her mark in sleeping. She's a sleep expert.
And so when she's hit with her first-ever bout of insomnia, she has no idea what to do with it, especially in the exhausted-fogged mental state which the condition brings, something which makes it difficult to think about the consequences of whatever she might try in the name of fixing everything...
Oh, who are we kidding? She wasn't going to think about those anyway.
Read it here
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Tropes found in this story include:
- Advice Backfire: Twilight makes the mistake of telling Rainbow to go and exert herself until she's tired enough to sleep. Creating a Sonic Rainboom qualifies as exertion.
- Berserk Button: When Rainbow spots Twilight sleeping through the balcony doors, she tries calling out a few things which she feels qualify for this trope in order to wake the librarian up, starting with torn-up checklists, moving on to ignored late fees, and finishing with books misshelved on purpose. None of them work. But when she goes for another category...
- Call-Forward: Several. It's mentioned that the mayor is using a stack of disaster relief forms as her pillow, and Snips & Snails use the distraction of the Rainboom to get outside and meet up, going on a bug-hunting expedition together: it's a chance to sneak away from their families. And Twilight tries to fling her issues away, but most of them stick to the hoof.
- Rainbow also notes that whenever Twilight brings up Star Swirl, everypony pretends to fall asleep.
- Crazy-Prepared: Apparently Rainbow has approximately four hundred pillows (poorly) hidden all over Ponyville, just in case there's a Nap Emergency. However, this is also one of the worst-kept secrets in the settled zone, and her typical response to being challenged on it is "...what pillows?"
- Destination Defenestration: The perhaps inevitable result of pushing an increasingly sleep-deprived Twilight just a little too far, although Rainbow doesn't quite understand what happened."Twilight? Come on, Twilight, let me back in! Just for a minute! You didn't tell me what 'defenestration' meant before you threw me out the window! I need to use the dictionary!"
- Didn't Think This Through: "And the thing about a Sonic Rainboom, something Rainbow was no longer capable of considering within the single-minded, instinctive, reason-banishing state which allowed it to happen at all... was that BOOM was very much a part of the name." And suddenly all of Ponyville is very much awake and likely to stay that way, with more than a few of them considering whether they should be using their unexpected hours to replace their weather coordinator.
- Doorstopper: Once the Forced Sleep plan is rejected, Rainbow asks Twilight for a really boring book and is given Day Court transcripts from the filibuster which attempted to deny the Empire any attempt at an Equestria Games bid. It's described as weighing in at forty pounds. It also doesn't do the job, as Rainbow keeps waking Twilight up for word definitions and explanations of historical references.
- Dream Weaver: It's mentioned that Luna has the ability to make a dream pick up exactly where it left off after somepony was woken up in the middle of it. Also that Twilight's had to ask her to do that six times since Rainbow arrived, and is now possibly out of casual favors with Luna for the evening, and possibly forever.
- Everyone Has Standards: Rainbow makes a point of not waking Spike because he's a young growing dragon who needs his sleep. And because he's prone to firebreathing if poked the wrong way.
- Here We Go Again!: After the Sonic Rainboom wakes up pretty much all of Ponyville, Rarity decides to try and get back to sleep, realizes she's all out of helpful teas, and asks Twilight for a book...
- Failure Montage: Rainbow's attempts to fall asleep through finding a new resting position don't go well. She gives up after trying to replicate one of Lyra's — who's double-jointed to the point of possessing Abnormal Limb Rotation Range, which makes her postures effectively impossible to pull off, at least for long.And for the three seconds she was able to hold it before her hind legs spasmed, her spine attempted to collapse on itself, her neck developed a series of traveling twitches, and her compressed tail made a very sincere attempt to whip her in the face, it was perfectly comfortable.
- Forced Sleep: Rainbow's initial plan is to get Twilight to cast a sleep spell on her, reasoning that it's got to be the "the first, most simple spell ever anypony with a brain would want to learn if they were ever going to be in any fights?" (Wonder where she got that idea...) Twilight is something less than accepting of this concept:"— you want me — to reach into a pony body — creating an overload of fatigue poisons in every single cell from a starting point of absolutely nothing — while simultaneously not just overriding the brain's natural cycle, replacing it — and you think that's going to be easy?"
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Word Of Fanfic Author is that Twilight's overthinking it: projecting the emotional resonance of exhaustion might at least get partway there — but that also requires creating a new spell on the spot, which is known to cause problems.
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- Insomnia Episode: Well, duh.
- Misblamed: In-Universe example: Applejack's immediate reaction to hearing an explosion in the middle of the night is to trot down the hall and confront Apple Bloom. (She has a live-in Primary Suspect.)
- Mundane Utility: Sonic Rainboom = Insomnia Cure
- Also, it turns out that the cloud density manipulation and heat-shifting techniques of pegasus magic can combine to — make a self-fluffing vapor pillow which never, ever heats up to the point of needing to flip it over.
- Noodle Incident: Rainbow can't let one pass in the Day Court transcripts without getting an explanation."Um... yeah. So about this part right here. Where the really stupid pony starts ranting about the Great Hurdle Shortage Of '16. He never gets around to saying anything about what that was. And I'm never gonna sleep if I have to wonder about that all night. So I thought, you know, Twilight's the egghead, she probably knows all about this stuff and so much that she can even tell somepony about it without even having to completely wake up. Because you're just that awesome. In a totally nerdy egghead way. So... hurdles. How does somepony run out of those, anyway? Nopony back then knew what wood and nails were for? Or did nopony invent those yet?"
- Power-Strain Blackout: Rainbow's final brilliant plan. If the magical exertion required to create a Sonic Rainboom normally tires her out, then doing it while she's already exhausted should put her to sleep. Admittedly, it works — but there are certain side effects involved which she doesn't consider, like the fact that she's just created a Sonic Rainboom over Ponyville at three in the morning.
- Primal Fear: The words which wake Twilight up are as follows: "The Princess said it's all your fault!"Sheets exploded. Pillows vaporized. The bed itself went into the air and stayed there, which meant a frantic Twilight, trying to reach full gallop from a sleeping start, ran off it and found no immediate floor waiting to receive her. She still made a fantastic show of sprinting on atmosphere for the two body lengths she got in before the drop.
- And when Twilight finds out that nothing's actually wrong and Rainbow just used those words to jolt her out of sleep, her reaction is a plain statement of "I'm going to kill you." Do not render Twilight's world into dust and ashes in the name of a wakeup call.
- Shout-Out: There's a quick one to Pinky and the Brain."What am I going to do at work tomorrow if I haven't gotten any rest?""The same thing you do every day, Rainbow: try to sneak in a nap!"
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Rainbow's been applying this to her own field in order to figure out how the Sonic Rainboom works, reverse-engineering what was twice achieved on instinct in order to deliberately reproduce it at need. The answer turns out to be in the molding of her aura: a pegasus field doesn't project like a unicorn one (although it can conduct), but it's possible to shape it. Rainbow simply takes every spare thaum she has and puts it in front of her, turning herself into a living arrow aimed at the heart of the impossible. But it's a significant drain on every resource she possesses: she generally needs a good meal and at least a short nap after performing a Rainboom, and overdoing it can easily lead into a Power-Strain Blackout.
- Suicide as Comedy: Crosses over with Black Comedy Burst: rather than continue dealing with Rainbow, Twilight mockingly attempts to suffocate herself with one of her own pillows. It doesn't work because she can still breathe through it.
- Taught by Experience: Rarity has installed a crash cushion at the base of her stairs.
