Bi-pressure: Out of the Closet
I knew something was wrong with my Wonderbolt uniform the moment I tugged it off the hanger, and it snapped back at me like a triggered rubber band.
Sure, it was aerodynamic and made me rainboom-capable even after I put on a little weight, but the tightness was a high price to pay. “Ugh, I hate this part…”
It didn’t care. It never cares. Wonderbolt flight fabric is basically sentient and always chooses violence.
I slipped a foreleg in. Or tried to. The sleeve got halfway up my leg before clinging like I owed it money.
“Oh great,” I muttered. “You shrank. Why‽ I clearly overheard Sorin say that it shrinks in the cold, and I washed you on extra hot.” I supported my chin with a hoof. “He was talking about the uniform… right?”
I yanked harder. The sleeve yanked back. I growled. The zipper growled back. “Resistance is futile!” I was the one resisting…
When I finally wrestled the suit on, I had achieved a look somewhere between “elite athlete” and “compressed sausage.” My coat tingled from how tight the furtight bodysuit was. Standing still felt uncomfortable and if I tried to move, my clothes touched me even more.
Most ponies would’ve stopped right there. But most ponies aren’t me. Only one of all the ponies is me. I’m unique like that.
Most ponies also don’t take cloud-clearing patrol in the middle of the night to earn extra bits in order to pay off the debts from repairing the Cloudsdale factory I clogged up.
Most Wonderbolt mares also don’t need a large uniform size. And neither do I! I can’t possibly be fat if I can squeeze myself into a small-sized uniform, right?
I remembered how a blast of freezing air stabbed me directly in the kidney earlier, and the forecast was an even colder front rolling in. I made a decision.
A terrible decision.
“…I’ll just put on another one.”
When making a bad decision, I always double down. Quite literally this time around. Since the first uniform had already forcefully flattened me, the second shrunken uniform shouldn’t feel too tight. My math told me so and the fact that I’ve always failed math was completely irrelevant. Completely. Irrelevant.
The second uniform slid on even worse. It suctioned around the first like a clingy ex-marefriend. Every movement made a muffled squelch from the trapped air pockets. The chest was so tight it felt like I was cosplaying as my own internal organs.
I looked at myself in the mirror. A piñata stuffed inside another piñata stared back at me with utter desperation in her eyes.
“Perfect,” I said, lying to both of us. “Warm. Cozy. Totally… breathable.”
I was sweating from the exertion and tried to walk to the edge of my home-cloud to catch a breeze.
Nothing happened. It was as if I was frozen in place.
Subconsciously, I knew that if I moved even a little, the fabric would pull at my hair and press even more in the areas I didn’t want to be touched. My legs didn’t just refuse to move; they sent a politely worded, itchy letter to my brain saying they were on strike until working conditions improved.
I narrowed my eyes. “Fine. Be that way. Who needs legs anyway?” Without moving any of my trapped limbs, I repositioned my stiff self using only my wings.
As I performed a landing crouch upon touching down at the edge of the cloud, the entire double-layered suit compressed around me like a hydraulic press with no workplace safety measures.
I heard a wheeze.
It was me.
I wheezed.
But I wasn’t going to back down. I’m Rainbow Dash. I make bad decisions all the time!
A cold gust of wind hit me—
—and did absolutely nothing.
I was so insulated my body perceived summer instead of winter.
I started my patrol by circling a soft cloud, as if its softness could overcompensate the unsoftness of the force pressing from all sides on my… everything.
The process of getting dressed already exhausted my energy supplies and I was getting sleepy. Actually, dizzy might have been a better word since my brain lacked any oxygen because breathing felt like a chore under the relentless pressure.
I passed out on the insulated cumulus in my insulated, double-layer clothes.
I dreamed of a supernova sunrise burning me alive.
But it wasn’t sunrise that woke me up. Neither was it the sweat inside my personal sauna. And neither, neither was it the attire that would under any other circumstances require a safe-word.
What actually woke me up from my oxygen-deprived delirium was a snowball.
It slammed into my muzzle—too heavy, too wet, and absolutely illegal by Equestrian snowball standards.
I jerked awake, rolled right off the cloud, and plummeted like a disgraced anvil straight into a snowbank. Face first. Wings trapped. Dignity was left somewhere above cloud level.
Skipping the tight facemask before patrol proved to be the worst mistake yet. With nothing to protect the exposed neckline, the suits didn’t stop the snow like they were designed to do—they scooped it.
When I hit the drift, the elastic collar flexed wide under the force into a large gape, and the packed snow surged inward with the force of my landing.
Snow drifted without any resistance along my sweat-soaked fur. Inside, it spread EVERYWHERE! Down my chest. By my ribs. Along my legs. Between them… Every movement dragged it farther, grinding icy slurry directly into my coat like I’d been flash-packed for long-term freezer storage.
And the thing about wet fur is… it doesn’t insulate. It conducts.
As I wiggled under freezing shocks all over my body, the neckline closed under double elastic pressure, trapping all the snow inside. Two layers of tight bodysuits pressed it through my coat to the skin like rubbing salt into the wound. And the trapping tomb of snow taunted me with, “There’s more where that came from,” as it shoved itself in my mouth and ears.
Something tapped my flank. Not snowball this time but a hoof. A guilty one.
“Rainbow?” A muffled Fluttershy’s voice made me perk up both ears from the snow. “Oh goodness—I didn’t mean to startle you… I just hoped we could talk…”
I pulled my head out of the snow and spat out a mouthful of winter. “Brr!” I shivered. “My bodysuits are filled with snow.”
“Bodysuits?”
“I wanted to be warm, so I squeezed myself into two of them. It’s not weird, okay?”
“It’s weird,” she said simply.
“They’re pressing all the snow into my coat.”
“Why didn’t you wear the mask as well to protect your neckline?”
“Agh!” I threw her an angry look. “Because I don’t want to be touched by tight fabric.”
She looked me up and down along the body, fully wrapped in two layers of tight fabric. “I see…”
I hoofed at my zipper, but two layers of rubber over my hooves made the grip impossible. “Ugh! So cold.” I gave her a narrow glance. “Why didn’t you just fly to me if you wanted to wake me up‽”
Fluttershy pawed at the soft, white ground. “I shouldn’t be seen here with you right now and especially not flying.”
I smirked from inside my compressed-snow armor. “Aw, c’mon. Why’d you ground me then if you don’t even want to see me?”
“No! I mean… I did want to see you, but not like… oh dear…Let me just…”
Fluttershy leaned closer to brush snow from my mane. Her wings were tucked tight against her sides, feathers puffed from the cold. She inched in closer. Her eyes dropped to the tangled twin zippers running down my chest.
Fluttershy bit her lip, thinking hard. “I can help you get out of the closet-worth of clothes.”
Get out of the closet? How does she know I’m still in the closet? She must have noticed me glancing at her flank one too many times.
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“Don’t… mind…” My heartbeat decided to test new rhythms. She was acting out my wet dreams exactly.
Fluttershy leaned in. Warm breath on my neck. Mane brushing my cheek. She gently gripped the top zipper with her teeth and tugged. One foreleg anchored itself around my shoulder while the other leaned on my chest for leverage. Her closeness made me shiver. Or maybe it was the snow in my bodysuits that was the cause of my body shaking.
“I wanted to talk to you about something…I’ve always wanted to… embrace the pegasus inside,” she murmured around the zipper. “You know what I mean, right? You’ve done it, and I want to do it too.”
My wings flared. Everypony thinks Wonderbolt uniforms are cool, but Fluttershy seemed to think of them as gift wrapping. And I seemed to be the gift. It was really happening. She thought of me the same way I secretly thought of her.
A distant “Fluttershy!” call cockblocked me from a distance.
She blinked and leaned her head back, dropping the zipper from her mouth. “Oh no. He’s looking for me.”
Discord. Of course. Worse timing ever… If he saw us together, tangled in half-unzipped uniforms, he’d surely think I was stealing her.
Fluttershy shuffled back. “I shouldn’t be out in the cold with you. He worries. I really shouldn’t let him find me here…”
“It’s okay.” I brushed a hoof on her shoulder. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“Uh, what?” She glanced at me, then back to the distance. “Gotta go.” She ran behind the bushes onto the path.
The shadows twisted. A ripple of warm air formed and Discord stepped out, wearing a Hearth’s Warming scarf long enough to lasso a thunderhead.
“Oh, it’s just you,” he said, sounding equally relieved and annoyed. “Rainbow Dash, right? You’re vibrating…”
Before I could retort, he snapped.
The world blinked.
