The Adventuring Type

by Cold in Gardez

Rating: teen
Tags: Slice of Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Rainbow Dash, Comedy
Length: 73002

Rainbow Dash gets bored waiting for monster attacks in Ponyville and decides to find some adventures of her own.

Ponyville has grown boring for Rainbow Dash. Sometimes, an entire week will pass between monster attacks.

What's a mare of action to do when her neighbors are all celebrating apples and hard work? When the weather bureau insists on gentle showers and sunny days, instead of something more exciting?

She has to find adventure, obviously. And when an airship captained by a pegasus pony flies through Ponyville one lazy summer day, dragging a flying iceberg behind it, Rainbow Dash realizes this might be the opportunity she's been waiting for.

But nopony ever said adventuring was easy.

Published 2015-12-24 01:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2021-11-30 01:31:26 UTC

The Orithyia

From her perch in the crow’s nest, a shallow wood platform mounted to the top of the Orithyia’s balloon envelope, Rainbow Dash kept her silent vigil, scanning the vast desert extending out from the airship on all sides.

Yup… yup. Still desert. Plenty of desert out there. She yawned, set her head back down upon her crossed forelegs, and closed her eyes to resume her nap.

Napping was technically against the rules while on watch, but Rainbow Dash suspected that was just a technicality foisted upon them by the heartless airship insurance industry. The insurance industry – barely a week into her new job as iceberg wrangler, and already she had her first enemy. The first of many, probably. An awesome mare like her was bound to inspire jealousy and rivals, and soon the skies would swarm with corsairs and brigands and pirates and insurance agents, all jousting to make their names by taking her down.

But that was in the future. For now the insurance company that insisted she stay awake keeping watch from the top of the ship was her enemy, and she spited them as best she could – with frequent naps.

The Orithyia was cruising at about 3,000 feet, and despite the desert sun the air had a pleasantly crisp tang. The little ship’s propellers buzzed like bees, nearly maxed out, but despite their efforts the laden airship could only average 15-ish knots. Barely enough to generate a pleasant breeze.

Behind them followed the air iceberg. It was a mountain in every sense that mattered, so huge that her little pegasus brain sometimes mistook it for a stormcloud or simply ignored it altogether, seeing the desert and the sky and everything except the massive cliff of ice. The Orithyia was like a gnat against its side, tethered to the icy heap with thousands of feet of rope as thick as her forelegs. The ropes seemed to slim with distance, stretching to wires and then to gossamer threads, invisibly thin, where they met the anchors driven into the iceberg’s skin.

The iceberg radiated cold, like a furnace turned down to zero and then somehow turned down even more until it sucked away heat, drinking it like a black hole. Frost coated the rear half of the Orithyia’s envelope, and icicles built up overnight on the lines tying the ship to the ‘berg. They cracked when the morning sun struck them, filling the air with chimes, and then they fell away into the still-gloomy desert below, tiny missiles that melted before they struck their targets.

At noon, the sun and the iceberg warred with each other. One toasted her coat while the other drank her body’s heat. Every fifteen minutes she had to wake from her nap, turn, and let half her body thaw while the other half cooled.

It was hard work, but Rainbow Dash managed. She was tough like that.

“Ahoy! First Mate Rainbow Dash!”

Rainbow Dash lifted her head to see Nutmeg crest the envelope, hauling himself up the rope net that covered most of the airship’s surface. His wings beat at the air for balance, but as usual he preferred to use his legs to scale the Orithyia’s various skeins rather than fly. He was nimble as a monkey in the ropes, scrambling across them with a fluidity and ease that Rainbow Dash could only admire. The few times she’d tried her hooves in the rigging, she’d gotten so tangled that Nutmeg had to cut her free.

“Mm, ‘sup Nutmeg?” she asked. She stifled a yawn as he picked his way over the ropes toward the crow’s nest.

“You probably saw it hours ago, but Appleloosa’s just ahead,” he said, and pointed with his hoof. Sure enough, the sere dusty expanse of the desert was broken by a wide swath of green growing on the horizon, and she could make out the faint sparkle of the sun reflecting off the river that bisected the valley.

In fact, she hadn’t noticed the town. But seeing as how she was supposed to be the lookout, that didn’t seem like something she should mention. Instead she nodded casually, as though Appleloosa’s presence were the most obvious thing in the world, that of course she’d seen it hours ago, probably even before that back when it was still dark, because her eyes were just that good.

She stretched, arching her back like a cat, and hopped up onto the rail surrounding the crow’s nest. “So, what’s the plan? Do we just, like, land this thing into their orchards?” She glanced back at the iceberg as she spoke.

“Oh, heavens, no.” Nutmeg shook his head. “That’d freeze all their crops. And besides, it’s not the town that’s paying us.”

“Huh? Who is, then?”

“The buffalo.” Nutmeg squinted down at the desert, searching for something, then extended a hoof toward a rising cloud of dust just outside the town. “There they are! Prepare for descent, Miss Dash!”

“Aye aye, cap’n!” She snapped off a smart salute, turned in place, then turned back again to face him. “How do I, uh, do that?”

“Just tie down anything that looks loose, close the ports. Oh, and wash your dishes. You didn’t wash your dishes again this morning.”

Hadn’t she? Dash remembered eating breakfast, but she was always in a hurry in the morning (or noon, or whenever breakfast was), eager to get out and fly her first laps across the open desert skies. The fate of her breakfast plates was a bit foggy. Besides, normally Nutmeg just sighed and washed hers anyway.

Still, orders were orders. “Right! On it, captain!” And with a flare of her wings she vanished over the side, once again the hardest working pegasus pony in the skies.

It turned out there were, like, a million loose things on an airship. Tools, drawers, ropes, dishes, chairs, hammocks, literally every single item that was not already nailed down could conceivably come loose and present a hazard if it weren’t secured.

Fortunately, the Orithyia had plenty of drawers. After a few minutes of trying the ‘proper’ way to secure the ship, she realized just about everything could be tossed into the drawers and locked shut. It was a stroke of genius, but in the interest of humility she decided not to tell Nutmeg the specifics.

She found him at the wheel, adjusting the levers that controlled the airship’s speed and elevation. As long as they were still tethered to the air iceberg the elevation lever (or ‘elevator,’ as he called it) was basically just decoration. Even if they let all the hydrogen out of the envelope, the ship would just hang from the iceberg’s side like a deflated balloon.

The throttle, however, was quite important. Icebergs had a rather chummy relationship with inertia, and unless some very powerful force acted upon them, they wanted to stay put. Nutmeg cut power to the engines, and the constant whine of the propellers faded, leaving a silence that rang in Rainbow Dash’s ears for minutes afterward. Without the airship pulling it forward, the iceberg began to slow, and some tens of minutes later it finally crept to a stop above the outskirts of the town.

Rainbow Dash peered over the railing. Five hundred feet below, ponies and buffalo mixed on the ground, pointing up at iceberg. Foals ran in circles, chasing after snowflakes, and the earth beneath their hooves began to darken and turn to mud as drops of water fell from the melting ‘berg.

“There we are!” Nutmeg exclaimed. “Another successful delivery. Well done, Miss Dash.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Rainbow squinted at the horizon. “Think pirates will attack us here?”

“Well, they never have before, but anything’s possible!” Nutmeg locked the wheel in place and slipped into his climbing gear. It was mostly just a vest with ice axes and crampons and ropes, but he also wore a neat set of spiked horseshoes that gripped the ice and refused to slip.

They walked from the airship to the iceberg atop one of the swaying lines. Nutmeg moved with the grace and confidence of a cat, well-practiced with the high-wire act, but Dash slipped several times and had to use her wings for balance. She tried to play it off as nothing, but her cheeks burned with each misstep.

And why was she walking, anyway? She could fly. She frowned all the rest of the way to the iceberg.

The rest of their afternoon was spent decoupling the iceberg from the Orithyia. The steel rods that anchored the lines into the ice were expensive to replace, and if left behind would eventually fall to the earth as the iceberg melted. Then woe-betide any customer of theirs who happened to be below. So the insurance industry demanded their removal, and Rainbow Dash ruefully decided they were probably right about that one.

Finally there was only one rope left connecting the ship and the ‘berg, and Nutmeg gripped it with his legs. “See you back on the ship, Miss Dash!” he shouted, then swung his ice axe into the glacier, knocking the anchor free. It fell, and he swung hundreds of feet through the air to dangle beneath the airship like a spider hanging from a line. When it stopped swaying, he scrambled up, wings beating at the air for extra lift, and within seconds he was back aboard.

Rainbow Dash watched this from the side of the iceberg. Its sheer wall extended hundreds of feet above and below her, and to either side. It was like resting on the frozen edge of the world, and she felt her heat slowly leeching into the ice. Frost built on her hooves, and she knew if she waited the ice would eventually grow around her, encasing her, and she would stay with it forever.

In the interest of not being entombed in ice for the rest of time, she kicked away with a shower of ice chips. The smaller ones began their slow fall to the earth, while the larger chunks floated in place, bobbing among invisible waves before slowly drifting back to the ‘berg and fastening to it.

Nutmeg was waiting for her on the deck, coiling the last of the lines. His vest was laid over the railing to dry.

“What next?” she asked.

“Now? The best part, Miss Dash! We go get paid.”

There were no spires to tie the Orithyia to in Appleloosa, so they settled for landing the airship on the dusty plain outside of town. Drops of melting iceberg fell as rain onto the envelope, and Rainbow Dash sheltered her head with her wings as they ran for the town hall. Cold mud gave way to baking, hard-packed dirt in the space of just a few steps.

The ponies of Appleloosa were an excitable bunch, just as Dash remembered, and they all turned out to view their new iceberg with enthusiasm. Scarves and fancy hats were passed out to the foals and buffalo, and all the makings of a party were being laid out when Dash and Nutmeg arrived. They were promptly seated at the head table, hard ciders were poured into their mugs, and the rest of the day was a bit of a blur for Rainbow.

When she woke it was to the weak light of the early morning back aboard the Orithyia. She stank of sweat, her mouth tasted like vomit, and there was a huge pile of bits, larger than anything she’d ever seen, lying on the decking beside her hammock. She stared at them for a while, trying to remember just how much an air iceberg was worth.

Nutmeg was working the wheel up on deck. They were a few thousand feet above the earth, and Rainbow stumbled to the prow, leaning into the wind, letting its cool bite chase away the last muzziness left in her brain by all those ciders.

“Ahoy! Feeling better, Miss Dash?”

“Meh.” She spat over the rail. “Getting there. What next?”

“Next is the best part, Miss Dash! We go hunting!”

Yeah, that sounded pretty good. Rainbow Dash smiled, letting the wind pull her mane back, then slipped below decks for a bath.

A Daring Assault

The Orithyia descended through the clouds like an avenging angel. It scattered them, trailing fluffs of cloudstuff from its fins like cotton snagged on a bramble in the woods. A haunting choir of violins and cellos sang the airship’s praises; beams of sunlight chased it down, spotlighting Rainbow Dash as she stood on the prow, chest thrust out, scimitar clenched in her jaws as she prepared her attack.

“Alright, nice and steady,” Nutmeg said. He stood behind the wheel, making minor course adjustments with his hooves. “Nice and slow and steady, that’s how you win this game. Hold on Miss Dash, I’m going to increase power by point-one percent. You might feel a very slight shift as the…”

Whatever else Nutmeg said was lost as Rainbow Dash flung herself from the prow. The wind screamed in her ears as she sped faster and faster, wings beating the air into submission, every muscle locked against the terrible force of her acceleration. Her jaw tightened around the scimitar’s grip to keep it from flying free.

Ahead, the iceberg loomed closer with every passing second. It was white around the edges, fading to a faint sea green in the center, riven all throughout with cracks and crevices and seracs a hundred yards high. A shadow thousands of feet across blotted out the landscape beneath it, and a faint, winding path of frost and snow betrayed the iceberg’s slow progress as it drifted over the valley.

Almost there! The iceberg filled half the world now. Rainbow Dash put on a final burst of speed before flaring her wings, crashing to a stop. Her hooves kicked up a spray of ice chips and sent cracks rippling dozens of feet into the glacial surface.

“Aha!” she shouted. “Take that!”

The scimitar sung with each swing. Ice broke and turned to powder beneath her blows. She stomped and kicked and stabbed the iceberg with all her might, until minutes later, exhausted, panting, she sheathed her sword and sat.

Not bad. Not bad at all. She looked at the little circle of chipped and scratched ice around her and nodded.

A coil of rope landed beside her, and a moment later Nutmeg shimmied down from the airship hovering overhead. “Report, Miss Dash!”

“Objective secure, sir!”

“Excellent.” He pulled a railroad spike from his vest and drove it into the ice with a blow from his hoof. A quick knot of the rope secured the airship to the iceberg, and their capture was complete.

Her first capture! Rainbow Dash found she was grinning and couldn’t stop. “What now, captain?”

Nutmeg shrugged a satchel off his shoulders, setting it on the ice with a metal clank. “Start setting anchors, Miss Dash. Keep them about fifty feet apart. I’ll drop lines from the Orithyia for you.”

Hm. That seemed like a lot of work. Dash frowned at the satchel. “How many do you need?”

“All of them!”

* * *

Hours of backbreaking, grueling work later, Rainbow Dash finally drove the last of the spikes into the ice. Another rope fell to dangle beside her, and she grabbed it in her teeth before the wind could carry it away like the last one. She wrapped it around the protruding end of the spike, tied it off, and finally collapsed onto the ice with a groan.

Around her, dozens of slack lines rose from the ice, all converging on the Orithyia sedately hovering overhead. She heard the thrum of its engines change pitch, and the ropes gradually grew taut, and beneath her the iceberg groaned as the airship began to drag it up higher into the air.

They needed to get it at least a thousand feet higher, Nutmeg had said, in order to crest the mountains to the south. That would probably take the rest of the day.

Rainbow Dash pushed up onto her hooves and brushed powdery ice from her coat. A hot bath sounded like the best idea in the world, perfect for her aching wings and hooves. She took flight, quickly crossing the empty sky between the ‘berg and the Orithyia.

Nutmeg was back at the wheel, fiddling with the elevators. He waved as she approached.

“Good work, Miss Dash. Any difficulties?”

“Nah.” She stretched, her spine letting out a series of loud pops, and she sighed with relief. “Tired and cold, though.”

“Try doing it with one pony! Then you can be cold, tired and lonely, too.”

“Yeah, but then you keep all the bits,” she said. She bounced over to the rail, peering down at the iceberg below. Even from hundreds of feet away it filled half the sky. The rest of the world was a greenish blur along the edges of her vision. “Speaking of bits, where are we selling this one?”

“We’re not.” He pointed at the dusting of frost still clogging her primaries. “Try licking your feathers.”

She blinked at the order but did as he asked. Immediately she spat and made a face. The ice was briny and sour, like drinking the juice from a pickle jar. “Ugh! What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong, per se, but this iceberg formed from seawater, not freshwater. We’re being paid to haul it back to the ocean.”

“Really?” She glanced back down at the iceberg. The greenish color, like frozen sea foam, suddenly made more sense. “Who pays for that?”

“Anypony who doesn’t want saltwater falling on their crops. Ruins fields for years.”

Huh. Reasonable. Rainbow Dash didn’t know much about farming, but she knew how protective Applejack was about her orchard. Having a giant salty iceberg dripping on her apples would certainly ruin her day.

“Cool,” she said. “Hey, listen, I’m gonna soak for a bit. You okay up here?”

“I believe so.” He stepped on one of the innumerable pedals surrounding the wheel, and the deck shifted slightly beneath their hooves. “Try not to fall asleep in there again, hm?”

* * *

If there was one thing the Orithyia had in plenty, it was hot water. The twin gem-fired engines mounted on either side of the hull were cooled with water, and as a result they had more hot water than they knew what to do with. Fortunately, they were also in the practice of hauling millions of tons of ice around with them, so cold water was also in plentiful supply.

Rainbow Dash was aware of none of these specifics. All she knew was that Nutmeg had said she could never use up their hot water, no matter how hard she tried. Obviously that was a challenge, so try she did.

The wood tub was small, like everything else on the airship. Rainbow Dash suspected it had started life as a barrel that somepony had simply cut in half. Their washroom, if one could call it that, was little more than a closet lodged near the fore of the ship on the single level below the deck. There was barely enough room in the tub for her to sit without cramping, so she leaned forward, forelegs crossed on the rim, head resting on her legs, wings splayed out on either side, slowly dripping as they thawed.

She was certainly not asleep when the door opened and Nutmeg squeezed into the room. His coat was streaked with carbon, and he stank of engine grease.

Privacy was a fiction aboard the tiny airship, Dash had learned, so she merely raised an eyebrow at Nutmeg’s arrival. “Your turn?”

“If you don’t mind.” He pressed himself against the wall, leaving just enough room for Rainbow Dash to haul herself out of the tub. Getting past each other was an awkward dance of wings and legs and heads, but with a bit of effort they managed to swap positions, with Nutmeg in the tub and Rainbow Dash slowly dripping dry in the doorway.

“We’re almost high enough. We’ll start toward the ocean tomorrow morning,” he said as he settled into the water. He was a bit larger than Dash, but his wings were small enough that he could tuck them against his sides and fit them in the tub. The water turned his coat a dark brown, and he immediately got to scrubbing at the ashen stains that dappled his legs and chest.

“How long will that take?”

“Just a few days, probably. Then we’ll head to Cloudsdale for a port call. Maybe spend some of those bits.”

That would be nice. Maybe find a bank, too – Dash had never had so many bits at one time that a bank had seemed like a necessity, but iceberg wrangling was turning out to be a surprisingly lucrative field of work. Her mind drifted to the pile of money sitting beneath her hammock in the airship’s single shared cabin.

“Cool, cool.” She snagged a towel from the rack and draped it over her back. It was thin and threadbare and nowhere near large enough to dry her, but at least it cut down on some of the dripping. “I’m gonna get chow started. Oats okay?”

“Oats are fine. Use some of the honey, too.”

Ah, the honey. That she could definitely do. She gave Nutmeg a little salute and vanished toward the galley.

Letters from Home

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I hope this letter finds you well. Things are mostly quiet here in Ponyville. The magical map has activated two more times since you left, and both times it sent Rarity off to Fillydelphia to solve some sort of fashion-related friendship crisis. I’m thinking of having an expert in magical artifacts examine the map for defects.

I’ve arranged with the city to take care of your house while you’re gone. Also, the city has decided to place you in the Weather Team’s inactive reserve squad until your return home. Cloud Kicker will be taking your place as captain.

The rest of us are well. We were all surprised, of course, when you left with Nutmeg, but after a bit of thought I realized why you had to leave. Air icebergs are a new and exciting field of magical meteorology, so it only makes sense that you would drop everything to learn about them and improve your skills as the Weather Team captain. I hope when you return we can spend hours exchanging notes and observations, and if you plan on writing any scholarly articles on air icebergs I will be happy to lend any assistance I can as an editor and proofreader.

I hate to close this letter on a negative note, but there is one bit of unpleasant business I need to address. When you left you still had several Daring Do novels checked out from the library in your name, and as of last weekend they officially became overdue. I understand this is simply an honest mistake on your part, that you were just so excited to study air icebergs that the books slipped your mind.

As Ponyville’s resident princess and, more importantly, its librarian, I can overlook these overdue books for a few days. However, if they are not returned by the end of the week I intend to seek a court order authorizing me to search your house for the books, seize them, and return them to the library.

Aside from that, things are great here. Can’t wait for your return!

Your friend,

-Twilight Sparkle

* * *

Dear Rainbow Dash,

Twilight won’t stop talking about those overdue books. I hope to Celestia they’re sitting in plain sight in your house, because otherwise I think she’s going to tear the place apart looking for them.

I have enclosed a piece of that caramel fudge you like so much. Enjoy!

-Spike the Dragon

* * *

Dear Rainbow Dash,

Darling, you simply must tell us about this stallion who has you so enthralled! Why, to think of it! I never imagined such a romantic gesture from you of all ponies, abandoning your home and your work to chase after a fleeting hope of true love! Oh, I’m getting giddy just thinking about it!

Now, I know you don’t think you need any advice on matters of the heart from me, Rainbow, but please accept these suggestions in the spirit in which they are offered. I may not be an expert in the ways of stallions and mares, but I like to think of myself as possessing a certain sophisticated outlook on such things.

First, do not appear too eager. Remember, you are the treasure here. Be at all times coy with your affections. Give him just enough hints to tantalize. Stay just out of his grasp until he has proven his worth to you.

Second, take every opportunity to demonstrate your finer qualities. By this I do not mean to brag, darling, as I’m sorry to report you sometimes have a tendency to do. What I mean is to show your beau your strength, your courage, your commitment to the job. For Celestia’s sake, try not to take naps all the time, as you are wont to do. Stallions cannot abide a lazy mare, just as mares cannot tolerate a slothful stallion. Make him always feel as though he is ever so inadequate compared with you.

Third, have a care for your appearance. I know living on a tiny airship means there probably aren’t many opportunities to do your mane and hooves, but—

Oh, drat, would you look at that? My cutie mark is glowing. Again! It’s that damn map. This is the third time this week. What more does it want? How many friendship catastrophes am I supposed resolve?!

I really need to ask Twilight to have someone take a look at it. I think it might be broken.

Anyway, darling, ta for now! Do write back if you have any exciting exploits with your new beau!

-Rarity

* * *

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I know it’s only been a few hours since my last letter, but I wanted to follow up with you regarding those overdue library books. Did you remember where you left them? Can we expect you back in Ponyville soon to return them?

Your friend,

-Twilight Sparkle

* * *

Rainbow Dash,

Hey girl, just wanted to drop a line and find out how you were doing out there. Sounds mighty exciting, flying around in an airship, hauling icebergs from one side of the sky to the other. I guess I can see why you’d take off and do that, rather than just stick around in this boring old farm town.

I’m enclosing some apples. Be good, now.

-Applejack

* * *

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I just wanted to let you know that Tank is doing fine. I was a little surprised to wake up with him on my doorstep like that, but I know how much of a hurry you must have been in to catch up with Mr. Nutmeg and his incredibly slow iceberg.

I’ll be happy to take care of him until you return. Please see the included photo of Tank giving Angel Bunny a ride around my yard. You can see how happy he looks.

Take care and be safe.

-Fluttershy

* * *

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I set up a box for your mail at the Ponyville Post Office, so it won’t stack up at your home. I also took the liberty of setting up a special account in your name at the Ponyville Bank to handle any credits or debts you may incur here while you’re gone. It will be very helpful when it comes time to file your taxes!

On an unrelated note, I wanted to ask about those library books again. They’re nearly three weeks overdue at this point, and every night I worry that some filly or colt is going to show up at the library the next day, wanting to check them out. And then I’ll have to tell them, “I’m sorry, but that book is already checked out.” And they’ll ask, “Well, when will it be back?” And I’ll have to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know!”

Can you see how cruel that is, Rainbow Dash? It’s bad enough to go to a library to try and get a book, only for it to already be checked out. But if it’s overdue? The librarian doesn’t know when – or, Celestia forbid, if – it will ever be back!

Fortunately nopony has asked about those books yet, but it could happen any day. It’s not too late to prevent that nightmare from occurring, if you can just tell me where those books are. I searched your house for hours yesterday and couldn’t find them.

On a final unrelated note, I’ve hired a cleaning service for your house. They’ll be paid out of the new account I mentioned above.

Your friend,

-Twilight Sparkle

Game Night

Rainbow Dash was reading in her hammock when the ship’s bell rang the ninth hour.

The sun had set sometime before, and they had strung the ship with lanterns to ward off the dark. Flying at night was dangerous, especially when you were dragging an air iceberg weighing millions of tons behind you, so they usually turned down the engines and let the ship idle in place until the sun rose again.

She set the Daring Do book on her tiny hammock-side table and stretched. Somewhere above, she knew, Nutmeg was setting out the last of the lanterns, walking along the slender spars that extended from the port and starboard sides of the Orithyia’s superstructure. The special ruby and emerald strobes identified them as a vessel to any night-blind pegasi or gryphons who might be flying by.

Nine-bells… time for cards. Rainbow Dash rolled out of her hammock and climbed the ladder onto the deck. She shivered as the first wash of cold air that welled out from the glacier touched her coat, but within moments her thick pegasus blood kicked in and the wind’s cool touch was forgotten.

“Ahoy Miss Dash!” Nutmeg greeted her. He was still out on the spar, a few final lanterns hanging from his vest. Every couple of steps he stopped and hung one from the ropes, until at last he was done and the Orithyia glowed like a Hearthswarming Eve tree. “Interested in losing some more money?”

She snorted. “Oh, it’s on. You’re getting wrecked this time.”

“Uh huh. We’ll see.” Nutmeg poked his head into one of the hatches leading below deck and emerged with the activities chest, which contained all their cards, poker chips, dominoes and other trinkets meant to while away the hours. He took a seat by the wheel, the one spot of warmth on the ship’s exterior, thanks to special charms buried beneath the wood planks. The pony working the wheel couldn’t afford to slip on a patch of ice, after all.

Rainbow Dash had never been one for card games before joining the Orithyia, but the enforced isolation and limited entertainment options available five thousand feet in the air gave her a quick appreciation for the sport. She settled down across from Nutmeg, pressing her belly against the warm wood.

“So, what’s tonight’s game? Gin?”

“Not tonight, no. We’re playing something new.” He removed the wood lid and flipped it over, revealing a white-and-black checkerboard on the underside. “Chess.”

“Chess?” She made a face that summed up all her feelings toward the game. “Do I look like an egghead?”

“No, Miss Dash, quite the contrary. You are the epitome of the modern pegasus athlete.” Nutmeg began pulling out little white and black figures, lining them up on the front and back two rows of the board. Dash vaguely recognized some of them from her times watching Rarity or Twilight Sparkle play. “But chess is a game everypony should be familiar with, especially pegasi.”

“Huh?” Her feathers ruffled unconsciously at the mention of their tribe. “Why pegasi?”

“We’re warriors, Miss Dash. Or we were, long ago. That time has passed, perhaps, but it never hurts to remember one’s roots.” He held up one of the black knights. The lanterns sparkled dimly on its ebony surface, highlighting the flared wings and visored helm the figure wore. He set it down, and the next few seconds passed in silence as he arrayed the rest of the pieces.

“Whatever.” She blew a lock of her mane out of her eyes. The damn thing was getting unruly after weeks in the skies and no barber. Maybe Nutmeg had some shears in his gear? She’d have to ask him in the morning. “So, how do you play?”

Nutmeg spent the next few minutes describing each of the pieces, how they moved, how they were captured, and how to win. The last part required some extra discussion.

“Wait, so, you don’t capture this guy?” Rainbow nudged the white king with the tip of her muzzle.

“No, you checkmate him.” Nutmeg set the king on a black square in the middle of the board, and then set a rook right beside him. “See how my rook can capture your king with my next move? That means I have your king in check.”

“Okay. Do I lose, then?”

“Not yet. But you must get your king out of check, either by moving him…” Nutmeg demonstrated by sliding the king a square to the right. “Or capturing the threatening piece.” He moved the king again, knocking the rook over and taking its spot.

“So how do you lose?”

“Sometimes your king can’t get out of check.” Nutmeg rearranged the pieces, backing the king into a corner and setting the black queen beside it. Behind the queen, several rows away, he set one of his bishops. “Try now?”

Dash frowned at the pieces. No matter where she moved her king, the black queen would still be able to capture it. So she slid the king onto the queen’s square, knocking it aside. “How about this?”

He shook his head. “Do you see my bishop? It’s guarding the square the queen was on, meaning you can’t move your king there either. This is called checkmate, and it means you lose.” He reached out to tip her king onto its side.

She snorted. “Hey, I didn’t lose. That was just to learn the rules.”

He smiled a small smile. “True, true.” He picked up the fallen pieces and set them back into their rows. “Shall we have a practice game, then? White moves first.”

The first game ended early in a rout, as did the second and the third. By the fourth game Rainbow had learned to slow down, taking several seconds before each move to actually consider what moves Nutmeg might make in response. By the fifth game it occurred to her that he was doing the same thing before each of her moves, so in order to plan her moves she had to anticipate his moves in anticipation of her moves, which was… which was giving her a headache.

“This game is complicated,” she mumbled.

“It is!” He grinned. “But you’re doing exceptionally well for somepony who’s never played before.”

“I am?” She glanced at the sideboard, where a few of his captured pawns were lined up against both of her knights, a rook and a bishop. This game was already starting to look like a lost cause.

The next few games passed quickly, rarely lasting more than a dozen moves before Rainbow Dash insisted on resetting the board after some mistake or other. They were several moves into their tenth game when Nutmeg stopped her, just as she touched the tip of her hoof to a pawn.

“Why are you moving already?” he asked.

She removed her hoof. “What do you mean?”

“Why don’t you think for a bit about what will happen after you move that piece?”

She frowned down at the board. It was an obvious move, one she’d seen as soon as he finished moving his knight. “If I move it like that, I can use it to attack your knight next turn.”

“Yes, so what do you think I’ll do in response?”

“You’ll have to retreat. Probably to… here.” She indicated a square two ranks back.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s play that out.”

Rainbow Dash nodded and moved her pawn, just as she’d planned, and Nutmeg retreated with the knight, just as she’d expected. Success!

“Now what?” he asked.

“Uh…” She frowned. “Look for other things to attack?”

“Sure, sure, but look what moving that pawn did.” He pointed to the broken array of pawns on her right flank, no longer neat and orderly and guarding each other. “Pawns are weak and it’s very tempting to toss them away on a quick attack, but that’s not what pawns are for. Pawns are your front line; together they dictate what part of the board you control. And worse, they cannot retreat. Once you move one to attack a knight like that, it opens a hole in your defense that is not easily closed.”

“It’s just a pawn, though. They’re only worth one point.”

“Don’t think about points. There’s no score in chess.” He indicated her rook with the tip of his wing. “This poor fellow is exposed now.”

The next few moves were instructive. Out of nowhere Nutmeg’s queen, an onyx alicorn, swept diagonally into Dash’s back ranks, capturing her rook, knight, and several pawns in short order. It was a massacre. Frustrated, she tipped her king on its side.

“This game is dumb,” she declared.

Nutmeg raised an eyebrow.

A few seconds passed. Rainbow Dash frowned and glanced out at the lanterns hanging from the Orithyia’s spars. A nice, safe direction to look.

“I’m dumb,” she mumbled.

Nutmeg remained silent.

“It’s true. Everyone knows it,” she continued. “Oh, there’s Rainbow Dash. She’s the dumb one. The jock. Bright as a bag of rocks.”

Nutmeg slowly reset the board, not meeting her eyes. Not that he could have – she was still staring off to the side. When he was done he rotated the board, taking the white pieces for himself, and advanced his king’s pawn.

“You believe that?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s true. Don’t you?” Rainbow Dash scowled at the black pieces, then pushed her queen’s pawn two spaces forward.

“Well, I admit you’re still learning how to play chess. But I’ve met very few ponies who could play this game well on the same night they learned how to move the pieces.” He pushed his queen’s pawn forward a single space.

Dash pushed her king’s pawn up one space, mirroring his side of the board. “Yeah, but I’ll never get better. This is a game for smart ponies.”

“Mhm.” He moved out his queen’s side knight. “Tell me, Miss Dash, how much do you know about flying?”

“Everything.”

He blinked. “That’s an audacious claim. And I think flying is more complex than chess.”

She shook her head. “No, flying’s easy. It’s, like, totally natural. Something I was born to do, right? Of course I know all about it. It’s not all sciency.”

“Ah.” He slid his bishop out in a wide flanking maneuver, almost within reach of her pawns. “I know some ponies who would disagree. Can you explain why it’s harder to fly in hot air than cold?”

“Hot air isn’t as dense as cold air,” she replied instantly, automatically. She squinted at his bishop, and decided it posed no threat at the moment. Instead, she advanced her other knight into the middle of the board. “It generates less lift on your wing surfaces, so you need to be moving faster to stay aloft. Hot air also contains less oxygen than cold air, so you’ll wear yourself out with less effort.”

Nutmeg paused, his hoof held an inch away from from his bishop. Eventually he nodded, and retreated the piece to threaten her knight. “And you must know a little bit about the weather, too.”

“Uh, yeah? Hello, weather pony here.” She slid a pawn forward to guard the knight.

“So you claim. Can you remind me why low-pressure systems rotate counter-clockwise?”

“They rotate cyclonically,” she corrected. “Which just happens to be the same as counter-clockwise. And they do it because low-pressure systems draw in air from the surrounding regions, and that air has angular momentum thanks to the planet’s rotation. Angular momentum is preserved, so air moving into the low pressure system from the equator will begin to move in the direction of the planet’s spin, while air moving into the system from the poles will retreat. Acting together, this causes the system to rotate.”

He was quiet for a little while after that. Rainbow Dash studied the board.

“Some ponies would call that a fairly technical answer,” he said. He slid the bishop two spaces to take one of her pawns.

She captured one of his in response. The center of the board was starting to open up. “Eh. It’s basic stuff.”

“Perhaps it is.”

The next few moves passed in silence. Eventually his bishop did take her knight, and one of her pawns took the bishop in revenge. The entire sequence took nearly ten turns, all focused on just those two pieces and their eventual demise. In the end, however, the game concluded as all their previous matches had, with Rainbow Dash’s king tipped on its side. She picked it up between her primaries.

It was one of the weakest pieces on the board, and its design echoed those limits. An earth pony, smaller and shorter than the alicorn queen, with a simple black crown.

“Why is the king so important, anyway?” she asked. “Why isn’t it the queen that matters?”

Nutmeg shrugged. “It’s an old game. I’m not sure if there used to be a reason, or if it’s just to make the game flow a certain way. Not everything has to be symbolic.”

“Huh.” She glanced up at the sky. The moon was hidden behind the Orithyia’s envelope, but she knew it was nearly at its zenith. “It’s late. I think I’m going to turn in.”

“Very good. Thank you for the games, Miss Dash.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She helped him put the pieces back in their spots, then stood and stretched. “Maybe we’ll play again.”

He smiled. “I’d like that.”

Shore Leave

An unfamiliar emotion plagued Rainbow Dash’s heart as they cut the iceberg loose over the Great Ocean.

It wasn’t sadness – she knew sadness. It wasn’t regret either, though as a general rule she was not a pony given to feelings of regret, and she might’ve had some trouble pinpointing that particular emotion on a map. Also, she was pretty sure she didn’t have anything to regret, so that must not have been it.

But still, there was some vague sense of loss lurking in her breast as she and Nutmeg watched the iceberg drift off over the ocean. They’d been dragging it for days, and its briny scent still clung to the Orithyia and clogged her nostrils, and she imagined she’d be tasting it for days to come. Barely an hour had passed since they captured it outside Cloudsdale that she hadn’t wished it gone.

And yet, now that it was floating on its lonely way back over the ocean, she found herself already missing it. Without an iceberg, the Orithyia felt somehow less than whole. Detached from its purpose.

Melancholy. That was it. She was feeling melancholy.

“Kinda sad, watching it go,” Nutmeg said.

“Yeah.” Rainbow Dash waited on the railing as the iceberg shrank with distance. Clouds began to form around it as the warm, moist ocean air encountered its chilly surface, and soon enough the iceberg was lost in the mists. She wondered how long it would survive out there before melting.

“Well, I think we deserve a bit of a break after that,” Nutmeg said. He returned to the wheel and gave it a spin – the Orithyia whirled nimbly in response, its wings and fins twisting to grasp the air and stabilize the ship throughout the maneuver. The Orithyia was a cargo ship in the most technical sense of the term, but when detached from its cargo – a million tons of ice – it was faster and more graceful than any airship Rainbow Dash had ever seen. More like a living pegasus than a waddling construct of balloons and wood.

Rainbow Dash came up beside him. “Where to, then?”

“Cloudsdale. We’ll port there for a few days, grab some supplies, get a bit of rest. Sleep in a real bed, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds kinda nice.” Rainbow hadn’t slept in a real cloud bed in weeks. She’d tried using a wild cloud for a bed her first night on the Orithyia, but they froze too quickly around the icebergs, and there was nothing worse than sleeping on a frozen cloud.

Unencumbered by any icebergs, the Orithyia quickly gained speed. They reached Cloudsdale just before nightfall.

* * *

Cloudsdale was the same unruly ball of floating chaos that Rainbow Dash recalled from her childhood. Cloud neighborhoods orbited the core of the city, floating up or down according to the whims of their residents. Roads existed only in the most notional of sense of the word, with pegasi simply flying straight from origin to destination. The Equestrian Postal Service, as far as she knew, still went crazy when it had to deliver a package in Cloudsdale.

Pink was in this year, apparently. Everywhere she looked, Rainbow Dash saw pink. Pink clouds, pink streets, pink homes, pink waterfalls. Even at night the city glowed pink, its core and tendril neighborhoods shining like some wild creature from the undersea depths. Some holdouts retained their blues or greens and even a few vivid yellows, but for all intents and purposes the war was over. White is dead – long live pink.

Nutmeg docked at one of the public piers, and they spent the next hour securing the Orithyia to cloud moorings. Trash from their journey was collected, the ballast tanks emptied, and the old hydrogen swapped for fresher, lighter gas.

“So, how long are we staying?” asked Rainbow Dash as they swept the last of the trash into a pile on the deck.

“Three nights should be plenty. Did you want more?”

She shook her head. “Nah, Cloudsdale’s, like… eh. You know?”

“Uh…” Nutmeg tilted his head. “I guess?”

She nodded. “Yeah, exactly.”

“Right.” Nutmeg paused, frowned at something, then plowed ahead. “Anyway, I know a nice hotel in this district. Clean and cheap. Interested in splitting a room?”

A month ago, if a stallion had offered to split a hotel room with Rainbow Dash, she would have offered to split his lip in reply. Now, after weeks in the Orithyia and its non-negotiable close quarters, the question seemed silly. Of course they would share a room. Why would a pony need a room all of their own? So she nodded, and they set off into Cloudsdale, chatting all the way about their plans for wasting the money the past three weeks had earned them.

* * *

The Cumulus was not, in Dash’s eyes, the sort of hotel that screamed ‘cheap’ at prospective customers walking by. It had a doorpony and a bellhop. The lobby was four stories tall and lined with actual wood panels, enchanted to keep from falling through the clouds. Hallways on opposite sides of the lobby led to the indoor swimming pool and the attached bar/restaurant. The mare at the reception desk wore an embroidered vest with the hotel’s name on the breast.

She smiled as they approached. “Mr. Nutmeg, welcome back. How long will you be staying?”

“Three nights, Daisy,” he said. He slid a small plastic card across the counter. “Two adults, please.”

“Of course.” Daisy filled out a card with their information. “And we have a letter for your companion.”

Rainbow Dash blinked. “For me?”

“Yes, Miss Rainbow Dash, correct?” The receptionist slid a thin envelope across the desk toward her. “Every hotel in Cloudsdale has one, actually. Somepony is apparently very eager to contact you.”

A cold sweat broke out beneath Dash’s coat. An emergency? Was someone sick? Worse? Her hoof trembled as she tore the envelope open.

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I hope this letter finds you well. I’m sorry it’s come to this, but your library books are now one month overdue. I was unable to find them while searching your house, so I can only assume you took them with you when you joined that nice stallion with the airship.

Pursuant to Ponyville Civil Code section 24.3, I am hereby authorizing—

Rainbow lowered the letter with a laugh. Library books! To think, she’d been worried about library books. What a silly mare Twilight could be. Dash made a mental note to tease her for this obsession the next time she was in Ponyville.

“Er… is everything alright?” Nutmeg asked.

“Huh? Yeah, it’s just one of my friends. She’s a bit eccentric about stuff.” Dash tore the letter in half and tossed it in a nearby wastebin. “I’ll introduce you the next time we’re in Ponyville.”

Their room was on the first floor and they had no luggage to speak of, so they went directly to it. It was, as Nutmeg had promised, clean, with two cloud beds and tasteful prints of bucolic forest scenes hanging on the walls. The bathroom had the latest in cloud arcano-technology, with heated floors, hot and cold water, and a tame tornado in the shower stall.

She hopped onto the nearest bed and immediately rolled onto her back, wings splayed out to either side. A real cloud bed! She felt the aches in her spine and neck melting away. Never again, hammock! Never again!

“Comfy?” Nutmeg settled onto the other bed and began casually preening his wings. They didn’t really need the attention – Rainbow Dash had never seen him fly in their entire month together – but preening was a relaxing process that helped unwind the stresses of the day, so she didn’t begrudge him it.

“Yeah, totally.” She rolled over to face him. “Hey, you said this place was cheap. What gives?”

“There are much more expensive hotels in Cloudsdale, Miss Dash.” He spat out a tuft of down.

“Yeah, but, c’mon.” She waved a hoof around. “This ain’t a motel.”

He shrugged. “I’m a business owner who captains his own airship. I’ve managed my money well.”

“Huh.” Rainbow Dash chewed on her cheek. “So, wait, you’re, like, rich or something?”

“I like to think I’ve done well for myself.”

“Cool, that’s cool,” she said. “So do you, like, get mares chasing you for your money?”

He chuckled. “I try not to make a show of it, Miss Dash. That’s now how I was raised.”

“Yeah, me either.” She paused. “I mean, I guess we weren’t rich, period. But if we had been, I don’t think we’d have made a big deal out of it. Not like some ponies.”

“Oh? You know some big spenders?”

She rolled onto her back to stare up at the ceiling. “A few. Some families in Ponyville have more bits than they know what to do with, and they make sure you know it.”

“That’s how it goes with money.” He stretched his left wing out to its fullest extent, shook it to settle the feathers, and folded it against his side. Apparently satisfied with the result, he shifted his attention to his right wing next.

Rainbow Dash ruffled her own feathers and frowned at the rustle that emerged. Weeks on the Orithyia without access to the normal oils she used had slowly dried them out. Even with regular preening, she knew they would start to itch soon at night. Perhaps while they were in Cloudsdale she could buy a few vials of oil for the ship.

But that could wait. “I’m hungry,” she declared.

“Well, we’re in Cloudsdale. What do you want to eat?”

“You’re the captain. You decide.”

“Hm.” He nibbled on his feathers a bit more. The wait stretched out, and just as Rainbow Dash was about to voice her impatience he spoke again.

“Very well, I decree that we will eat at a nice little Neighponese shop I know nearby.”

Rainbow Dash consulted her inner gourmand and decided, after just a few seconds of thought, that Neighponese would do nicely.

“Great,” she said, hopping off the cloud and onto her hooves. “C’mon, let’s go. I’m buying.”

* * *

The Neighponese soup shop was like most of its kind, more of a stall that had slowly accumulated walls and a ceiling until, with the passage of time, it had grown into the nearby buildings. Ponies sat on stools before the long counter that lined the front of the shop, behind which a cheerful orchid-colored mare ladled soup into steep ceramic bowls for her customers. In the back, clamoring among the steaming vats and sheets of noodles laid out to dry, a small-ish stallion chopped and diced and shredded every imaginable ingredient on his cutting boards, while on his back a tiny colt clung to his mane and watched, wide-eyed, all full of silence and intent.

Rainbow Dash and Nutmeg waited until two adjacent seats were open and squeezed into them before anypony else could steal them. Before they had even settled their wings, the hostess dropped a pair of steaming-hot teacups in front of them, along with two menus.

“So, what’s good here?” Dash asked. She wiped her hooves with the hot towel waiting on the counter for them.

“I like the seaweed and egg with rice noodles,” Nutmeg said. “You can get it with fish if you want.”

“Eh.” Fish was more of a coastal pegasus thing, out the way of Typhoon or Cataract. “Sounds good. No fish, though.”

“Very well.” Nutmeg returned their menus along with their order. “Nothing to drink?”

“This’ll do.” Dash tapped the teacup with her hoof.

Nutmeg nodded and raised his own glass for a sip. For a long moment they were silent, content to watch the chaos behind the counter or listen to the busy street behind them. The sun had set hours before, and the cloudlights cast shifting, soft shadows as they orbited slowly overhead.

“So, you’ve been on the Orithyia almost a month now.” Nutmeg said. “How’s it feel?”

“The icebergs are pretty cool. I don’t think I’ll ever get bored with them.” She took a sip from her own tea. It was green tea, and tasted like sweet grass. “No pirates yet, though. I thought there’d be more pirates.”

“There are a few,” Nutmeg said. He frowned as he spoke, and stared down into his tea. “Raiders, really. Gryphon criminals and the like. They lurk past the borders, in the rim. Once I found an iceberg that drifted in from the north. There was an odd shape buried within, like an occlusion in a gemstone, and when the iceberg began to melt it gave up the ruins of an ancient airship, crewed with corpses, armed with spears and swords and hooks.”

“Whoa,” Rainbow Dash breathed. “Cool!”

He snorted. “Sure, cool. And sometimes I’ve seen unflagged ships, sailing out west near the Great Ocean. Rangey things, loose and built for speed. They run without lights, with baffles on their wingtips to silence their wakes. But they could never catch the Orithyia, and I never took the opportunity to meet with them.”

“Aw!” Rainbow smacked a hoof on the counter. “You shoulda fought them! Smash their ships and bring them back in chains!”

Their soups chose that moment to arrive. They both smiled at the hostess and took a quick, polite slurp from the broth before returning to the topic of pirates.

“I’m just one pegasus, Miss Dash, and the Orithyia is everything to me. Why risk her fighting pirates when there are icebergs to be hunted?”

“Duh? Because!” Dash scooped up a chunk of seaweed with her spoon and slurped it down. “They’re pirates! Somepony needs to stop them!”

“Perhaps, perhaps. But isn’t that what the royal navy is for?

“Eh, maybe.” Dash set her spoon down and picked up the bowl with both hooves to drink the last of the broth. “Why should they get to have all the fun, though?”

“I think they would dispute that fact with you,” he said. “But, hopefully, we’ll never get to find out.”

He forgot to knock on the wood counter as he spoke. Perhaps that is why, a week later, Rainbow Dash finally got her wish.

Pirates!

The Orithyia was making slow progress across the vast grasslands south of Manehattan when the pirates came into view.

They were just a dot above the horizon at first. For once, Rainbow Dash was awake and alert in the crow’s nest, and her sharp pegasus eyes picked the dot out from the clutter and haze as soon as they broke through a layer of clouds.

She watched it for a moment, to make sure it wasn’t just an air whale or dragon or some other common sighting, and when it hadn’t moved for a few minutes she leaned over the edge of the nest to call down to Nutmeg.

“Airship ahoy!” She glanced down at the compass mounted to the rail and did some quick math. “Bearing seventy-five degrees, thirty kilometers!”

“Roger!” Nutmeg’s voice drifted up from below, and a second later she felt the balloon shift as he began climbing up the side. His head popped over the edge, followed by the rest of him clamboring into the nest beside her.

It was a tight fit with the two of them, and Rainbow hopped up onto the railing to make more space. “Way out there. See it?”

“I think so.” He squinted at the horizon, then pulled a small collapsible spyglass out of his vest. It extended with a flick of his hoof, and he held it to his eye.

Her hooves beat a tattoo on the rail. “Well?!”

“Airship. See for yourself.” He offered her the spyglass, which she eagerly snatched away.

The spyglass was small, with a main lens only an inch or so across. The image it produced was tiny and blurred and filled with bubbles, but even so she could discern the basic construction of their guest.

The airship was slender, with two hulls joined amidship by a thin waist. The fore and aft hulls each had their own balloons, equally narrow, suspended above the superstructure. Wings and fins extended on long spars away away from the hulls, dipping ever-so slightly, lending the entire ship the vague impression of a wasp.

The wings beat, and the airship bent at the waist as it turned. It was either heading toward or away from them – they were too far away to tell just yet.

“Huh.” Rainbow Dash handed the telescope back. “Never seen a ship like that.”

“It’s a Zebrican model. Their revenue service cutters used that double-hull for several decades, until they switched to conventional single-hulled corvettes.” He squinted at the horizon. “I’m guessing somepony purchased an old, retired Zebrican cutter and refitted it for commerce.”

“It seems to be heading toward us,” she noted. “You sure it’s for commerce?”

“Ah, no. I’m not.”

“Uh huh.” She glanced down. To the aft, just barely visible below the envelope, the Orithyia’s twin gem-fired engines were chugging away with the contented hum she had long-since associated with their operation. “Are we faster than them?”

“Normally? Absolutely.” He glanced behind them, where half the horizon was blocked by the massive iceberg they were hauling to Los Pegasus. The Orithyia was like a gnat against its side; a barn swallow attempting to carry its entire barn. “Laden like this? Not a chance.”

“Right. Orders?”

“Get some diamonds ready for the engines and prepare for an emergency detachment from the iceberg. Remember how to do that?”

“Yup.” In fact, the emergency detachment procedure was one of Rainbow Dash’s favorite things to practice, as it involved swinging her scimitar and chopping through ropes with vigor and abandon. “Think we’ll need it?”

“I hope not. But hope’s not a good strategy.” The strange airship was visible larger now – obviously heading toward them. “Let’s go, Miss Dash.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

* * *

Preparation only took a few minutes. The engine nacelles were opened, exposing their feed trays, and each had several diamonds in the hopper ready to drop. Rainbow Dash wore her cutlass at her side, and Nutmeg had his truncheon. They were not, she realized with some nervousness, all that well armed.

They’re probably not pirates. Probably just merchants who saw the iceberg and wanted a closer look. She shuffled her hooves on the deck and tried to keep her wings from flaring.

Nutmeg must’ve sensed her agitation. “Stay calm, Miss Dash. Remember, even if they are criminals, there’s nothing we have that they want. Their ship can’t exactly haul an iceberg.”

“Yeah, what if they want to steal the ship?” she retorted.

“Well,” he paused. “We’ll have to make sure they don’t do that.”

The strange airship was barely a kilometer away, now. Close enough for Rainbow Dash to see the individual crewponies. At this distance the ship’s rangey, gangly nature was all the more apparent, like its shipwright had taken the leftover pieces of several other ships and roped them together. The overall effect was one of two or three or even four small airships flying in very close formation, tethered together with lines and the occasional plank.

“Looks a little, uh, shaky,” she said.

“It’s by design,” Nutmeg said. “Maneuverable, resistant to damage. Able to work at low or high altitudes equally well.”

“Huh.” She frowned at it. “Zebras, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Zebras can’t fly.”

“Indeed. Their crews are renowned for their bravery.”

Dash peered over the rail. The ground was less than a mile below them – not very far for a pegasus – but for a pony (or zebra) without wings any altitude above 50 feet was largely academic in nature. All falls beyond that height tended to end the same.

She glanced back at their guest. The crew appeared to be ponies – or, at least, she could make out a few pegasi among them. As she watched one took off from the forward hull and flew a quick orbit around the ship.

“It’s flying an Equestrian flag,” Nutmeg said. “Good sign.”

“Oh? Pirates aren’t allowed to fly Equestrian flags?” She couldn’t help but smile.

“Well, it’s bad form. They seem to be slowing.”

Indeed, the cutter had cut its engines and drifted to a slow stop about fifty meters off their port bow. A dozen ponies of assorted colors and tribes lined their rail, staring at the Orithyia, and after a moment a giant pegasus broke through their ranks. He was crimson, with a flame-orange mane hidden beneath a tall tricorn hat decked out with gold piping. A black eyepatch completed the stereotype.

“He’s just missing the parrot,” she said.

“Right. I don’t like this.” He loosened the strap binding his truncheon to his belt. “Get ready to cut the—”

“Ahoy!” A booming voice from the cutter seized them. They looked up to see the captain shouting. “Be this the Equestrian vessel Orithyia?”

“Is he talking like a pirate, too?” Dash hissed.

“Some ponies just talk that way,” Nutmeg hissed back. He straightened and placed his forelegs on the railing before shouting back. “I am Nutmeg, Captain of the Orithyia. Who are you and what business do you have—”

“Arr! Prepare to be boarded! At ‘em, boys!”

“Damn it!” Nutmeg jumped away from the rail and ran toward the wheel, calling over his shoulder. “Cut the lines, Dash!”

“Aye aye!” Pirates! It was pirates! Dash spun toward the rear of the ship and took off, flying between rope ladders and masts and heaps of cargo netted to the deck. The sword rattled in her teeth as she pulled it free from the scabbard, and she nearly nicked herself with the blade.

The dozen lines tethering the Orithyia to the iceberg converged onto two anchors on the hull, one on each side near the rear of the ship. Cutting either set would enable the airship to maneuver; cutting both would free the ship entirely, though they would lose their prize as a result. Some small part of her railed against that loss, demanding that they stand and fight. That small part of her was entirely drowned out by the hammering of blood in her ears and the frantic, panting hiss of her breath around the scimitar’s hilt.

C’mon c’mon c’mon! She reached the port anchor and planted her hooves. The cable connecting the ship to the bundle of lines was as thick as her foreleg and covered with tar. In practice, it had taken her a dozen swings and nearly a minute to sever.

It went much faster this time. The engines mounted just meters away screamed as Nutmeg drove them to full power, and cable instantly drew tight. Her first swing rattled her head, but cut nearly a third of the way through. Her second swing sliced halfway into the cord, and the strain of the engines began to pull the rest of it apart. It frayed and unwound as she lined up, and her third swing chopped clean through and struck wood hull.

The ship jerked as the line shot away with a thunder-like crack. Rainbow lost her footing and fell to her knees as the deck spun beneath her, pivoting around the sole remaining anchor point. The maximized engines, suddenly free to actually move the ship, began to roar, and the acceleration knocked her back into the rail. Something cracked in her ribs, and her breath escaped in a shockingly painful burst.

That was bad. Worse, she noticed, was the way the Orithyia was swinging toward the iceberg. At least we’re going away from the pirates.

The ship jerked again, knocking her fully to the deck this time. She groaned around the scimitar’s hilt and stood, wondering what they’d hit.

Nothing yet, it turned out. But something new was latched onto their hull – a grappling hook tossed by the pirates. She looked out from the rail to see a line stretching off to their ship, which was slowly growing closer.

“Cut the other line, Dash!” Nutmeg shouted. She could barely hear him over the engines. He gave the wheel a sudden spin, lifting Rainbow Dash’s stomach up into her lungs until the deck settled back down.

Right, the lines! She staggered across the deck toward the tether and raised the scimitar.

“Not so fast, lass!” The pirate captain’s booming voice cut through the roar like a knife, and she felt as much as heard his hoofsteps on the deck as he barreled toward her. “Drop that sword!”

Ha! Nopony gave her orders! Well, nopony except Nutmeg. She spun toward the pirate, the sword clenched in her teeth. “Never!” she mumbled around the hilt.

Behind him, near the front of the ship, four more pirates had boarded and were working to surround Nutmeg. He had his truncheon out and smashed at their swords as they approached. The last she saw of Nutmeg before the pirate captain’s bulk got in the way was his sandy tail vanishing up into the rigging.

“Arr! Have at ye, then!” The captain had a short cutlass in his grip, and he swung at her with a haymaker of a blow. Had it landed it would have split her in two. But he was slow and his blow was slow, and she slipped to the side easily.

“Ha! You call yourself a pirate?” she taunted. Her legs tensed, her wings flared, and she leapt into the air like she was shot from a canon. She barely avoided smashing her head on the underside of the Orithyia’s balloon, and she came down like a meteor, her hooves hammering the captain’s back and knocking him to the deck. The sword flew from his mouth in a whoosh of breath, and she placed the edge of her scimitar against his neck.

“Everypirate stop!” She shouted. Toward the front of the ship, the pirates who had Nutmeg surrounded froze and stared back at her. “Drop your weapons, or your captain gets it!”

“Do it, boys!” the captain shouted. His voice shook, and he pressed his head against the deck, trying to relieve the pressure from the sword’s edge. “Do what she says.”

There was a chorus of grumbling, followed by the clatter of swords, cudgels and nets hitting the wood. Nutmeg kicked the weapons away and ran to the wheel – with a few taps of his hooves the engines shifted to idle, and the Orithyia began to sway in the gentle breeze wafting from the iceberg.

And… that was it? They’d fought off pirates? Dash felt a giggle working its way up her throat. They’d… no, she’d beaten the pirates. She laughed, then gasped as her broke rib reminded her of its presence.

“You okay?” Nutmeg asked. He came up and rested a hoof on her side, pulling it away abruptly when she winced.

She grunted. “Yeah, just a bruise. You?”

“I’m fine.” He glowered down at the pirate beneath her hooves. “Which is more than I can say for you, sir. Piracy is a serious crime in Equestria, and our courts have no sympathy for—”

“Arr, we’re not pirates!” the captain protested. “We be privateers. Ruby! Get the letter!”

“Aye sir!” A small red colt, one of the pirate boarders, saluted their fallen captain and jumped over the side. His wings snapped open to catch him, and he zipped off toward the pirate airship, whose remaining crew watched from the railing.

“Wait…” Rainbow Dash frowned. “What’s a privateer?”

“It’s a form of legal piracy,” Nutmeg said. “It hasn’t existed for hundreds of years, though. I can’t imagine why it would.”

They waited in tense silence for several minutes. The other pirates had regrouped near the bow and frowned at their fallen captain. Nutmeg chewed on his lip. The pirate captain did his best not to breathe. Rainbow Dash was just confused.

Fortunately, the cabin colt returned before things became too uncomfortable. He bore a scroll in his mouth, and at the captain’s urging he handed it politely to Nutmeg, who unrolled it and read it quietly.

Finally, “Huh.”

“Arr, see? Privateers.”

“Wait, what’s going on?” Rainbow asked. “What should I do?”

“Here, just read.” Nutmeg took the scimitar from her and held it loosely. The pirate – privateer? – captain rose to a seated position, but didn’t otherwise move.

This is crazy. Rainbow shook her head and started to read.

LETTER OF MARQUE AND INSTRUCTIONS

To all to whom these presents shall come or may concern, Greeting:

By virtue of the power and authority to me given as her most Royal Majesty Princess Twilight Sparkle and reposing especial trust and confidence in the loyalty courage and conduct of Captain Woolly Bear of the Equestrian Vessel Happy Bird:

I the Princess aforsaid do give and hereby grant unto him the said Woolly Bear this my Letter of Marque and Instructions herewith given hereby authorizing him as captain and commander of the sloop or vessel called the Happy Bird now outward bound unto Cloudsdale to pursue, subdue, take, sink, burn or otherwise seize the Equestrian Vessel Orithyia, crewed by a pegasus pony known to us as Rainbow Dash, pursuant to the collection of several items of civil property, including the following:

A book titled “Daring Do and the Marauding Manticore”

A book titled “Daring Do and the Aquamarine Albatross”

A book titled “Daring Do and the Wondrous Lanthorn”

A book titled “Daring Do and the Lost Lantern of Lith”

Overdue fees totalling 124 bits plus one bit for each book for each day after the signing of this letter until the date of their collection

By my hoof,
Twilight Sparkle

The bottom of the letter was embossed with Twilight’s cutie mark. Rainbow stared at it for what felt like a long time, then looked up at the captain.

“So… you’re Woolly Bear.”

“Arr… aye.”

She closed her eyes. “And your ship is… the Happy Bird? Really?”

“Aye, it be a fine name for a ship, too.”

I’m going to kill her. I’m actually going to kill her. The ache in Rainbow Dash’s side was back, throbbing in time with her pulse. She scowled at the Happy Bird, scowled at Woolly Bear, and scowled at the letter in her hooves.

“Well, you know what?” She tore the letter in half and tossed it back at the pir—privateer. “Not today, captain! Today is the day you lose! Today is the day you’ll always remember as the day Rainbow Dash got away! So why don’t you just crawl back to your little ship, and—”

“Here you go,” Nutmeg said, suddenly reappearing by their side. He had a stack of books in his arms, topped with a small coin purse, and he handed them over to Woolly Bear. “Sorry about the trouble. There’s a little extra in the purse.”

“Arr, it be alright,” he said, taking the books. “I be thanking ye.”

“Wait, no! No Nutmeg!” Rainbow grasped at the books, but Woolly Bear was already off the deck, flying back to his ship. “I need those! I wasn’t done reading The Lost Lantern of Lith!”

Ruby, the cabin colt, paused on the railing. He turned back toward her. “It turns out Fossil Fern is actually Daring Do’s father. In the very last scene, she nearly escapes Cinnabar’s tomb without him, but turns back to help him escape the ghosts as well.”

“What? No, no! Stop!” she wailed. “Don’t spoil it! Don’t… wait, don’t go! Do they survive? Do they escape?!”

Ruby was halfway back to the Happy Bird when he answered. His voice was nearly lost on the wind. “It’s not clear. The last scene is ambiguous!”

“Nooo!!!” Rainbow collapsed against the railing, her face buried in her hooves. The pain in her ribs was a shadow compared with the pain in her heart.

She felt a hoof pat her back between her wings. “It’ll be okay, Miss Dash. You’ll get through this.”

“Yeah, but…” She sniffled, then frowned. After a moment’s thought she stood and shouted over at the Happy Bird, which was casting off the grappling lines that connected their ships. “If you’re not pirates, why are you talking like them?!”

“Arr! It just happens to be International Talk like a Pirate Day!” Woolly Bear shouted back. “It’s fun!”

The rest was silence as the two ships parted, like lovers taking their leave for the final time, and soon the Orithyia was again alone in the sky, drifting alongside its iceberg.

In time, Nutmeg spoke. “Huh.”

Rainbow slumped against the railing. “I… I missed Talk like a Pirate Day, too?”

“Well, you know.” Nutmeg scratched the back of his neck. “You can talk like a pirate tomorrow, if you want.”

She sighed and stood. “It’s won’t be the same, Nutmeg. It won’t be the same.”

And then she went belowdecks to find the first aid kit.

To Fillydelphia

The next three days were relatively uneventful.

Their first order of business was reattaching the Orithyia to the iceberg. They worked slowly, limited by Rainbow Dash’s bruised and bound ribs (one of which Nutmeg suspected might have been broken, but that would’ve meant she couldn’t fly for five to seven weeks, so obviously it wasn’t broken). It took most of the rest of the day, but by the time the sun neared the horizon the severed anchor cables were replaced, and Nutmeg began the process of setting out lanterns for the evening.

When he was done he offered to play chess or gin, but Rainbow Dash was busy sulking, and so had to decline. She slept in the crow’s nest beneath a cotton blanket so she wouldn’t have to share a room with him.

By the time the sun rose the next morning, she realized what a stupid pony she had been. Of course Nutmeg had returned her library books – as an officer in the Equestrian merchant fleet, he had sworn an oath to uphold Equestrian law while sailing the high skies, and that meant enforcing library codes. After the fight he had helped bind her ribs, and offered to detour through the nearest town with a sizeable bookstore to purchase her own copy of Daring Do and the Lost Lantern of Lith, which she had refused because, really, what was the point anymore?

But now, staring at the cool orange sun floating off to the east, she found herself wondering how, exactly, Daring Do had escaped from Cinnabar’s tomb, and she sighed. Perhaps she would never know.

Also, she realized, sleeping in the crow’s nest was amazingly uncomfortable. It made the hammocks feel heavenly by comparison.

Nutmeg was in the galley/kitchen/storage-room/only-room-large-enough-for-them-both-to-sit when she made her way belowdecks. There was a bowl of steaming oatmeal in front of him, and another across the table waiting for her. The faint scent of honey rose from both.

“Good morning,” he said. “Sleep well?”

She sniffled. “No.” Also, it seemed she was getting a cold. Wonderful.

“Hm, you sound a little hoarse.” He set his spoon down and rose to walk over to the kitchen’s hot water spigot. “Want some tea? I have some of the pomegranate left.”

She sniffed again and wiped her snout with the back of her hoof. “Yes please.”

The rest of the day wasn’t so bad.

* * *

The second day consisted of slowly hauling their iceberg ever closer to Los Pegasus.

Nutmeg insisted Rainbow Dash spend the day resting in her hammock. Rainbow Dash insisted on carrying out her normal duties, albeit with a warm blanket draped over her shoulders and a thermos of hot tea, occasionally refreshed by Nutmeg, in her hooves.

They played chess again that night. The scratch in the back of Rainbow Dash’s throat had evolved into a full-blown cough by then, and they passed the games largely in silence. She no longer had to ask again about the rules or how each of the pieces moved, and sometimes minutes stretched out between the turns while she pondered the lay of the board. She thought one or even two moves ahead, and during their last game she found herself considering the entire board, how it was controlled, and for a brief moment something like a real strategy began to bubble in her mind. She turned it over in her brain, awed, and it wasn’t until Nutmeg cleared his throat that she realized nearly ten minutes had passed since his move.

She ended up losing. But for the first time, when the game ended just as many of Nutmeg’s pieces were lined up beside the board as hers.

“Very good, Miss Dash. Another?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Nah, feeling tired. Thanks though.”

“Of course.” He flipped the board over and began putting the pieces away. “You know, we can try to find a book on chess strategy the next time we’re in town, if you want.”

She blinked. “They have books on chess?”

“Uh, yes? They have books on everything, Miss Dash. Well, most everything.”

Huh. No wonder Twilight Sparkle was so good. She’d probably read every book in the world, so obviously she knew all about chess. There was no way Dash could ever read every book in the world – she was a busy pony, after all – but she could read every book about chess, certainly.

The inklings of an idea began to condense in her mind.

* * *

Rainbow Dash’s butt was glowing when she woke the next morning.

She was a bit groggy, even more so than usual first thing after waking. The cold had settled into her chest and snout overnight, and she spent the night tossing and turning, half-awake, floating on the edges of sleep. She dreamed the air was made of hot cotton; she dreamed of spiders in her lungs. She dreamed of nets that bound her legs and wings into a sea of boiling tar, and when she finally woke she found her limbs tangled in the hammock.

It was barely four bells, but there was no use trying to go back to sleep. Her bladder insisted on getting up to use the head, so she grumbled and snorted and coughed her way out of the hammock and up onto the deck, back the way aft, and used the facilities.

It wasn’t until she was done that she realized the faint glow around her wasn’t just from the lanterns – her cutie mark was glowing, pulsing in time with her heartbeat. She stared at it, dumbly, for several moments, until her mind at last made the connection.

“Oh, right, the map.”

* * *

“So, this is an Element of Harmony thing?”

Rainbow Dash sniffled. “Uh huh.”

“It just… starts glowing like that?”

“Yup. And then we go somewhere and solve a friendship problem and get ice cream and go home.” Her nose was stuffed worse than the time she’d broken it while wrestling with Applejack back when they were young teenage fillies, and as a result her words sounded nasally, honky and dumb. Like a… goose pegasus. She frowned again.

“Do you need to go back to Ponyville, then?” Nutmeg had his navigational charts spread out on their little dining table. “I don’t like the idea of you flying like this.”

She waved a hoof. “I’m fine. I’ve flown with worse. I flew from Canterlot to Ponyville and back with feather flu, once!”

“That’s, uh… Isn’t feather flu highly contagious?”

“Oh, now you sound like those doctors. What a bunch of boring eggheads.”

Nutmeg looked like he wanted to respond, but at that moment a bright green flash lit the dim interior of the Orithyia, blinding them and filling their eyes with dancing purple blotches. Rainbow Dash felt a wash of heat on her coat, and the faint scent of sulfurous smoke managed to break through the cupfuls of snot clogging her snout.

Nutmeg cursed and jumped away, sending his stool clattering to the floor. Rainbow Dash, who had seen all this before, simply waited for her vision to return before picking up the slightly singed scroll waiting on the table.

“Sorry, dragon mail.” She popped the seal off the scroll and unrolled it. “Figured this would happen.”

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I apologize if this scroll woke you. As you may have noticed by now, the magical map in my castle has selected you to resolve a friendship problem.

Rarity’s cutie mark is also glowing, and the map says the problem is in Fillydelphia. I think this could be another fashion-related friendship crisis. If so, it will be the fifth one Rarity has been called upon to solve, and I’m starting to think the map might be defective.

Alternately, ponies in the fashion industry might simply be more prone to friendship crises than other ponies. This is an unresolved question in the field of friendship studies, so any information you can gather in Fillydelphia would be very useful to my research.

Rarity’s train departs for Fillydelphia in a few hours, and should be there in three-day's time. She’ll be staying at the High Step Hotel in the garment district.

On a separate note, I want to say how sorry I am that things with the overdue library books came to a head like that. Now that the books are back in the library’s possession and your fees are paid in full, I’ve reinstated your library privileges so you may check out new books whenever you like.

Your friend,
Twilight Sparkle

Huh. Rarity too? Rainbow Dash chewed on her cheek while she considered the letter’s implications. They had worked together in the past, but it was always a fraught partnership. Having ponies like Applejack or Pinkie Pie in the mix to act as a moderator usually helped, but it didn’t sound like that was going to be an option time. Wordlessly, she passed the scroll over to Nutmeg.

He read it with a furrowed brow and watering eyes, and when he was done he passed it back. “So, you have to go to Fillydelphia?”

“Yeah.” She brushed a bit of dusty dragonbreath ash from their tabletop map with her wings. The little model sailboat that marked the Orithiya’s position was only sixty or so miles from Fillydelphia. “It’s lucky we’re so close. I can make that flight overnight.”

“Why go yourself?” he asked. “This Miss Rarity won’t be there for three days, according to the letter. The Orithyia can make Fillydelphia in two.”

She chewed on her cheek. “What about you, though? You need to get this ‘berg to Los Pegasus.”

Nutmeg raised his wings in a shrug. “I get paid either way when I arrive. Besides, I owe you. If you hadn’t fought off those pirates, I might never have made it to Los Pegasus.”

That seemed pretty reasonable. But… “Wait, they weren’t pirates, they were privateers. And they only attacked us because of me.”

“Well, that’s technically true, yes,” he conceded. “But what if they had been pirates, Miss Dash? I’d have been helpless without you.”

Rainbow Dash frowned and considered that logic. It seemed sound, and she was pretty awesome, so it checked out. Finally, she nodded.

“You’re right,” she said. “I guess if you want to come to Fillydelphia, that’d be cool. But I’m warning you. Rarity can be a little… uh, intense.”

* * *

Rainbow Dash’s butt finally stopped glowing an hour or so later, for which she was grateful. It was frankly distracting, and she kept catching Nutmeg sneaking glances in her direction while they worked in the rigging. A lesser mare would’ve teased him about it, but Rainbow Dash was used to ponies staring at her in awe, so she simply smirked and went about her business while subtly stretching and preening and otherwise showing off. She finally stopped when a particularly brazen pose caused something in her ribs to click, and she fell into a pained hacking fest that ended with her wings tangled in the rigging while she dangled upside down. It took them both working together several minutes to get her out.

It took nearly six hours just to turn the iceberg toward Fillydelphia. Most of their flights were like this; slowly accelerating the icebergs, which then tended to cruise along at whatever speed they set on the way to their destination, followed by several hours spent slowing the iceberg down. Assuming Nutmeg did the math correctly, the iceberg would glide to a slow stop right above whatever city had ordered it.

She could already see it, if she looked closely. On a clear day, from her spot in the crow’s nest ten thousand feet in the air, her eyes could easily cut through sixty kilometers of distance. But this was the height of summer, and the humid haze of a muggy dog day turned the horizon into mist. The normally sharp division between land and sky was gone, replaced by a colorless fog, through which she thought she might dimly see the blocky rise of Fillydelphia’s towers. Or perhaps that was her imagination.

The Orithyia’s engines changed their pitch, ramping up from a low grumble to a high whine. The airship shifted beneath her, and it gave another sharp jerk when the lines connecting it to the iceberg drew taut. Behind them, she heard the iceberg creak and groan as it began to inch along their new path.

She was so engrossed in their destination that she failed to notice Nutmeg climb up beside her. She gave a little shriek when he suddenly sat down beside her, followed by a coughing fit that left her snorfling miserably on the rail.

He patted her back. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine.” This cold could not go away fast enough. “Orders?”

He shook his head. “The lines are holding nicely. Engines are purring. I can keep watch if you want to soak for a bit. Might feel better.”

Hm, a nice hot soak in the tub did sound like a winning plan. She fluffed her wings at the thought, but shook her head. “Maybe in a bit. My shift doesn’t end for another hour.”

“Shifts are negotiable with the captain’s permission, Miss Dash.”

“Yeah, but, then you’d have to do my work for me.”

He shrugged.

She snorted. It was meant to be a dismissive snort, the kind Rarity used when she wanted to let Rainbow Dash know she was disgusted by her behavior but not offended enough to go through the effort of speaking, but apparently that took more practice than Dash thought because it ended up sounding like she needed to sneeze real bad.

Words it was, then. “Yeah, no. I’ll finish my shift, thank you.”

“Very well, would you like some tea, at least?”

“Eh, fine.”

* * *

Nutmeg brought them down to around a thousand feet of altitude for the approach to Fillydelphia. Enough for the iceberg to easily clear the tallest buildings, but not so high that they would have to detach the Orithyia in order to dock in the city.

A thousand feet was low enough for Rainbow Dash to make out individual ponies in the streets below. Fillydelphia was a crowded metropolis, proud of its dense nest of skyscrapers and bustling business districts. Elevated train lines cut the city into quarters, which in turn were broken into blocks by thousands of tight streets and broad avenues. Parks and greenery dotted the outskirts of the city, but those slowly gave way to concrete and asphalt toward Fillydelphia’s heart, until in the city center only steel and glass remained.

It was pretty impressive, if Dash were being honest with herself. Not as large as Manehattan, or as exalted in its architecture as Canterlot. But Fillydelphia gave the impression of an engine, or of a wheel spinning wildly around its gyre, growing closer with each turn to an explosion. The city radiated energy, a boundless, uncontrolled enthusiasm for the future that surely, here among these skyscrapers, was waiting to be born.

Nutmeg was at the wheel, making careful adjustments to the wheel and pedals, so Rainbow Dash left him be. They were getting enough attention from ponies on the ground as it was without banging their ship into one of the skyscrapers.

There were other airships in the sky with them, but they all gave the Orithyia a generous berth. Curious pegasi swirled under and around them, and a few even tried to alight on the airship itself. Rainbow Dash busied herself with chasing them away.

Finally, they crossed the center of the city, the spires of the tallest skyscrapers passing a hundred yards beneath their keel. Windows turned opaque with frost as the iceberg flew overhead, and flakes of snow drifted from it in an endless stream, briefly reversing the calendar and bringing a fragment of winter to the city. Pegasi swarmed beneath the iceberg, their wings pumping to keep them aloft in the tremendous downdraft of cold air flowing from the glacier’s surface. Further out, pegasi rode the newly born thermals high into the air.

The High Step Hotel was the tallest building in its section of the city, the ‘Garment District,’ Twilight had called it in her letter. Huge, blocky factories lined the river flowing through the district, and a peculiar stench rose to greet them. The dye works, Rainbow suspected. It smelled like industrial-grade soap.

The High Step Hotel had a modern zeppelin dock on its spire, and Nutmeg maneuvered the Orithyia to within a few dozen yards before cutting the engines. Once they were drifting free, Rainbow Dash grasped a thick anchor line and flew down to wrap it around one of the tall brass pilings that lined the roof. Moments later, Nutmeg came sliding down the rope to land beside her on the walk.

A uniformed dockmaster was waiting for them at the tower’s base. He tipped his hat as they approached, and opened the doors above the reception desk.

“Afternoon, friends!” he called over the wind. “We’re glad to have you docking at the High Step Hotel. Parking fees are one bit per dry ton per day.”

Nutmeg fished his coin purse out of his vest. “Very good. The Orithyia is twenty tons dry. Miss Dash, how long do you think we’ll be here?”

Rainbow Dash stepped away from the tower’s edge. They were still thirty stories up, and their iceberg was attracting quite a bit of attention from the ground. “Oh, uh, maybe three days? Depends how fast Rarity can solve this problem.”

Nutmeg nodded and counted out sixty bits. The dockmaster slid them into a tray beneath the desk, then cleared his throat.

“Of course, there’s the matter of your cargo,” he said. “How much does that iceberg weigh?”

Nutmeg frowned. “Well, I never measured it, but based on its size… maybe four million tons?”

The dockmaster winced. “That will be fairly expensive, then. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather park it outside the city?”

“Wait,” Rainbow interjected. “Is the price based on weight, or mass?”

He tilted his head. “I’m not sure, it’s never come up.” He pulled a thin binder out from under the desk and flipped through its contents, finally settling on an appendix near the back. “Ah, here we are. Fees are based on the dry weight of a ship or attached cargo, which is defined as a ship’s weight after the removal of any buoyant gases.”

“Well, the iceberg masses four million tons, but it’s weight is zero,” she said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t float.”

The three of them turned to stare up at the iceberg overhead, which was indeed floating. A small blizzard of snowflakes drifted down from it, slowly accumulating on the iron tresses around them.

“Fair enough,” the dockmaster finally said. “No charge for the iceberg. Looks pretty, anyway.”

“That it does.” Nutmeg smiled up at the Orithyia. “That it does.”

* * *

“Hi, uh, we have a reservation for two ponies, but we need to add a third,” Rainbow Dash told the hotel receptionist. “It might be under Rarity, or maybe Elements of Harmony?”

The receptionist flipped through the pages of her binder. “I’m sorry ma’am, I don’t see one under those names. Is there another it might be under?”

“Try Rainbow Dash. Or maybe Twilight Sparkle?”

More page flips. “Here we are. Princess Twilight Sparkle, two ponies, for one week, starting tomorrow. Will the princess be with your party? We have a special suite set aside for royalty.”

“Nah, I don’t think she’s coming.” Rainbow Dash spared a glance over her shoulder at Nutmeg, who was standing near the wide picture windows looking out onto the street. Nearly an inch of snow had fallen from the iceberg, and foals outside were tossing snowballs at passing carriages. “Can you get us the room starting today instead?”

The mare consulted another binder. “It looks like we can. Will all three of you be sharing one room?”

“Uh… one sec. Hey, Nutmeg!” she shouted for her partner. “Do you want your own room?”

He trotted over to join them, resting his hooves on the counter with her. “I’m not sure. How does Miss Rarity feel about that sort of thing?”

“Eh, she’s a bit of a priss.” Rainbow turned back to the receptionist. “Better add another room, starting tomorrow. One is fine for tonight.”

The receptionist nodded and made a little mark in her book. “Alright, got it. I can even give you a little discount on the second room, since your iceberg is saving us on air conditioning.” She passed two sets of keys across the counter. “Fourteenth floor, room 1404. The bellhop will be glad to help you with your luggage.”

Twenty minutes later they were up in their room, enjoying the view from midway up the building. Their window faced west, away from the city center, so they had an unobstructed view of the city receding away from them into the gentle hills that lined the far distance.

“Big city,” Nutmeg observed. “Lots of ponies. How will you know which one has the friendship problem?”

Rainbow shrugged. “I dunno. We always just seem to trip over them before. I’m sure we’ll find ‘em, though.”

“Sounds good. Dinner?”

“Yeah.” Rainbow smooshed her face against the glass, trying get a view of the streets far below. The setting sun was turning the falling snow an interesting shade of orange, but the streets below were blue and white in shadow. “Dinner sounds good.”

The Diva Arrives

Rainbow Dash was reading when Rarity knocked on their hotel room door.

After dinner the previous night, Nutmeg suggested they visit one of Fillydelphia’s famed bookstores. For this they had options – cluttered mom and pop shops overflowing with secondhand prints and comic books; high-class depositories more like a private club in their character than a store, with thick upholstered chairs surrounding a tall fireplace; a college bookstore, with long rows of textbooks and supplies of all kinds; and finally the one Rainbow Dash selected: a warehouse-sized book emporium, two floors, with countless shelves of mass-produced paperbacks, their innumerable titles and colorful covers stretching from wall to wall.

Yeah, she could do this. There was even a coffee store inside the bookstore.

Nutmeg made a bee-line for the new fiction section as soon as they passed through the doors, but Rainbow had another target in mind. In the back, next to the foals’ section, comic books filled an entire wall. A special display held hundreds of copies of the new Daring Do comic book adaptation: Daring Do and the Temple of Terror. She ran her hoof over the glossy cover with a quiet “Oooh,” then snatched it up and zipped through the air over to the reading benches.

Nutmeg found her a half an hour later, a short stack of books balanced on his back between his wings. “You know, you’re not supposed to read them in the store. That’s why they’re wrapped in plastic.”

She glanced at the crumpled plastic wrapper she had discarded to the side, then shrugged and stood. “Eh, whatever. I’m buying it. You find what you wanted?”

“I did. Shall we?”

“Yes, let’s shall,” she said. Nutmeg blinked at that, but followed her to the register nevertheless. Perhaps he didn’t expect to her using such fancy language.

One of his books turned out to be Pawn Takes Queen: An Everymare’s Guide to Chess, and it was a gift for her. She accepted it with reverent hooves and held it for a full minute before daring to turn the first page. She’d owned books before, of course – a respectable collection of Daring Do novels and textbooks on flight and weather, but this was her first actual grown-up book. Not assigned by a school, or written with foals in mind. A real book for big ponies.

Rainbow smiled all the way back to the hotel. She devoured the first three chapters that night, and was reading them again when Rarity arrived. Her ears flicked at the noise, and she saved her page with a bookmark (Twilight Sparkle had long-since trained her not to dog-ear a book’s pages) and went to open the door.

She was greeted by an enormous purple hat, with a brim as wide as a wagon wheel and a startling blue quill rising from a scarlet band like a wind-swept flag. The hat tilted back, revealing a white unicorn mare with a smile nearly as broad as her headgear.

“Darling!” Rarity exclaimed. And it was an exclamation – Dash could hear the point appending the word. “You are here!”

“Yeah, I got Twilight’s message.” Rainbow stepped back so Rarity could enter. Behind her followed a bellhop pushing a gold-railed luggage cart that creaked beneath the weight of four suitcases, two smaller valises and a single massive steamer trunk that could have held all of Rainbow Dash’s worldly possessions by itself.

Rarity swept past her into the suite’s bedroom, examining it with a critical eye. Finally, she nodded and turned back to Dash. “I figured you had, but we weren’t sure if you were anywhere near Fillydelphia. Oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself! Where is your beau?” She sidled up to Dash and draped a foreleg over her shoulders, concluding her remarks in a husky whisper.

“Huh?” Rainbow Dash glanced up at her mane. “I don’t wear bows.”

There was a quiet pause, followed by a quieter sigh. “Yes, of course. Silly of me. What about Nutmeg, then? I saw his airship outside.”

“He’s staying across the hall in 1404, but I think he’s up with the ship right now. You mind if he tags along for this friendship thing?”

“That should be fine,” Rarity said. “Though, unless he’s of a sartorial bent, he might be a bit bored. I suspect we’re here to solve another fashion-related friendship crisis, Rainbow, and frankly they aren’t as exciting as you’re used to. Just two mares arguing over how to put together a new line of summerwear, or something equally silly.”

“Joy. Can’t wait.” Rainbow attempted to snort to demonstrate how she felt about the whole thing, but ended up nearly inhaling a snout-full of snot and fell into a coughing fit.

Rarity set a hoof on her shoulder. “Oh dear, are you alright?”

“Yeah, just a cold.” She wiped her nose with her foreleg. “S’fine.”

Rarity removed her hoof.

“Ma’am, where would you like suitcases?” the bellhop asked, apparently having recovered his breath.

“Hm? Oh.” Rarity gave the room a little frown. “Just set them by the other bed, if you please. Anyway, Rainbow, how long have you two been in town?”

“Just the one night. You haven’t missed anything.” She hopped back up on her bed, then watched in silence as Rarity fussed over her luggage before discretely hoofing the bellhop a hoofful of bits. That earned her a deep bow, and shortly after they were alone.

Alone, which meant that any second now—

“So, darling.” Rarity climbed up on Dash’s bed, using her magic to brush away the litter of crumpled tissues that dotted it, then sat down so their sides were just barely brushing. “How is Nutmeg?”

And there it was. “He’s fine.”

Rarity leaned closer, her aversion to Dash’s illness apparently forgotten. “Yes, and how are things between you two?”

Time to nip this in the bud. “He’s my boss, Rarity, and my friend. That’s all.”

“Oh, of course, of course.” Rarity waved a hoof dismissively. “I never meant to suggest otherwise. Just because the two of you spend weeks at a time alone with each other in the cramped quarters of that tiny airship, sharing everything. Confiding in each other with your secrets, trusting each other with your lives as you stare death in the eyes! Oh, among weaker ponies it would be a terrible thing, I’m sure, to be compressed against another’s follies and vices, but for two strong and pure ponies with noble souls it must be a different experience entirely. Who can say what feelings might be kindled in those lonely dark nights, sharing a bunk and a blanket to stave off the cold? What might they discover in the tight spaces between them, where the hairs of their coat mingle and their breath mixes in foggy plumes that drift in the cold, high air? Why, who knows what two such ponies might get up to? So again I ask, how are things between you two?”

Rainbow Dash was silent for a bit. She hadn’t realized Rarity’s lungs could hold so much air. “Seriously, Rares, how long have you been thinking about that?”

Rarity sniffed. “It was a long train ride, thank you very much. A mare needs something to occupy her thoughts.”

“Right. Hey, you wanna go meet him?”

Rarity stood and hopped off the bed. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Cool. Leave your hat here.”

“What?” Rarity balked at the door. “Whyever for?”

* * *

“Isn’t this cool?” Rainbow Dash asked. She had to shout to be heard over the wind.

“It’s, ah…” Rarity shifted her grip on the metal stanchion that braced the airship platform to the side of the High Step Hotel’s roof. “Is it always this icy up here?”

“No, that’s because of the iceberg. I mean, I guess it’s icy in the winter, you know? But not, like, July.”

“Of course.” Rarity shuffled her hooves in the snow covering the grated walkway. Thirty stories beneath them, carriages like ants left dark trails in the streets. “It’s quite the view.”

Rainbow smiled up at the Orithyia. “Yeah.”

* * *

Nutmeg joined them a few minutes later. He slid down the cable anchoring the Orithyia to the Hotel’s mooring mast and fell the last few feet to land on the catwalk beside them. To Rainbow Dash he gave his usual guileless smile, and to Rarity he offered he offered a slight bow.

“Miss Rarity, it’s a pleasure to meet you again. Rainbow Dash has told me such wonderful things about you.”

“Oh, she couldn’t have.” Rarity tittered – yes, tittered, that was the word, Rainbow was sure – and flicked her hoof. “I am just a humble seamstress, Captain.”

“Please, just call me Nutmeg.”

“Very well, but only if you call me Rarity.”

“It would be my honor, Rarity.”

“And I assure you, darling, it is mine as—”

“Okay, I need you both to stop now,” Rainbow Dash said. “We have to solve this friendship thing before the sun burns out.”

Nutmeg grinned at her. Rarity sniffed and tossed her mane. “Always in a hurry, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I’m not in a hurry, I just have other things to do, like flying. Nutmeg, you could be hauling icebergs, and Rarity you could be making clothes. Instead that dumb map has us in Fillydelphia again to solve some silly clothes problem.”

“I think it’s exciting,” Nutmeg volunteered. “I never thought I’d get to help the Elements of Harmony fight evil.”

“Ugh, it’s not evil!” Rainbow stomped on the metal catwalk. “Friendship problems are boring. I guarantee you we’ll find two grown mares acting like fillies fighting over a bracelet, except they probably really will be fighting over a bracelet because this city is obsessed with silly stuff like that. Or maybe it will be a scarf or a hat or some fancy boot and now their friendship is in jeopardy unless we save them.

“As much as I disagree with Rainbow Dash that bracelets, scarves, hats or boots are silly, she is likely correct on the other counts,” Rarity said. “The mares in this city and their little tiffs… well, frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing. But I am nevertheless grateful to have you along, Nutmeg. Oh, and you too, Rainbow.”

“Yeah, yeah. Can we go now?” Dash jumped and flew a quick orbit around the two of them before landing beside the door. Eddies of snow swirled around her.

“Very well, let us be off, then.” So saying, Rarity carefully extended a hoof to the next stanchion, gripped it tightly, then slowly stepped over until she could hug it with her whole body. And then the next stanchion, and the next.

In time she reached the door, and they descended into Fillydelphia.

* * *

“So, Nutmeg, do you mind if I ask a personal question?” Rarity asked.

Rainbow Dash’s ears swiveled back to better hear this conversation. She never missed a step, though, breaking a trail for the three of them through Fillydelphia’s crowded lunch-hour sidewalks. Hundreds of ponies streamed past them, filling the air with their chatter and the melange scent of busy ponies: floral perfumes, sweat, feathers, snow and countless others teased Dash’s nose.

Also, it seemed she could breathe through her nose again. That was nice.

“Not at all, Rarity. Though whether or not I answer depends on how personal it is.”

She could smell Nutmeg easily enough. Years of work on the Orithyia had stained him with its odors – the sharp, fragrant pine tar that waterproofed the hull; the greasy, burned taste of engine oils; the earthen scent of the ship’s cedar planks. She probably smelled like those things herself now.

Rarity’s scent was there too, though fainter. Lilac and cotton, familiar from their years together. She wondered, absently, how they found her scent.

“Fair enough. I was wondering how a pegasus named Nutmeg came by a cutie mark like that.”

“Oh, it’s not much of a story, I’m afraid. My father was an airship mechanic, and when I was a foal he would sometimes bring me to the drydocks in Cloudsdale in the winter when work was light. He collected spare parts from various jobs, and when there was nothing else to do he and I would refurbish them for our own use, or for sale. One day after school, I was crawling around inside an engine and found a cracked fan blade. My father wasn’t around, so I disassembled it by myself and replaced it with a fresh blade. When I washed the grease off that night in the bath, there it was.”

Rainbow was a bit perturbed to realize she’d never asked Nutmeg that question herself – his four-bladed propeller cutie mark seemed like such a natural fit for an airship captain that it wasn’t even worth the question. And she couldn’t remember for the life of her if Nutmeg had ever asked about the tri-color lightning bolt on her flank.

“Not every cutie mark story has to be an epic event,” Rarity said. “It only has to be meaningful for one pony.”

“I thought it was pretty cool, Nutmeg,” Rainbow called over her shoulder.

“Thank you, Miss Dash.”

The next few blocks they walked in relative silence. The iceberg loomed over the city behind them, but they had long-since stepped out of its shadow, and summer returned to the air. Rainbow felt the first trickle of sweat running down her neck, and her wings fanned at her side unconsciously. What she wouldn’t give to be back in the cool sky.

“So, how does this work, Rarity?” Nutmeg finally asked when they stopped at an intersection. The streets around them had thinned, and the shopfronts were a mix of trendy coffee houses, antique shops and boutiques. A few feet away, a cinnamon mare was busy setting manequins on the sidewalk for display. “Do we just walk around until we find friends who are fighting?”

“Well, in the past the problems have all been fairly obvious. I suspect there’s some magic at work, but I’ll leave that question for Twilight.” Rarity paused to fish around in her saddlebags with her magic, and after a few seconds pulled out a folded pamphlet. “But this weekend just happens to be the Summer Sartorial Sensation, the biggest fashion show of the season. If we start searching there, I’m sure we’ll find the problem before we know it!”

“Wait.” Rainbow stopped and turned toward them. “Is this just an excuse for you to see a fashion show on the crown’s bit?”

Rarity huffed. “If you have any better ideas, Rainbow Dash, I’ll be glad to hear them.”

“Maybe we could just ask ponies,” Dash said. She turned to the nearest bystander, a tall grey earth pony stallion with a basket of pumpkins balanced on his back. “Hey, buddy, do you know of anypony with a friendship problem?”

The stallion stared at her in silence for a long moment. “Excuse me?”

“A, uh, you know. A problem with friendship.”

“I have friends!” he protested. An indignant look grew on his face, and the basket of pumpkins trembled ominously.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant.” Dash’s ears began to wilt, but she pressed forward. “Do you know any ponies who used to be friends but started arguing over some small, trifling item three days ago, the kind of thing that could be easily resolved with the help of strangers who bring a fresh perspective to their troubles?”

He stared at her again. Eventually the crosswalk sign turned green, and he walked away.

“Oh, yes, bravo darling,” Rarity said. “Just under a million ponies left. Between the three of us, we should finish by the time Sweetie Belle graduates from college.”

“Shut up,” Dash grumbled. “Just take us to this dumb fashion show.”

And so they went, Rarity smiling, Nutmeg smiling, Rainbow Dash stewing in discontent, until after a few minutes the warm summer sun on her coat lifted her spirits back.

The Summer Sartorial Sensation, part 2

The stallion wasn’t crying loudly.

Not loudly, not like Rarity when she wanted attention. This was soft and understated. Rainbow Dash stopped in place, turned, and was about to give up – imagining that she had imagined it – when she saw him.

The earth pony stallion was on the larger side of normal, and not with muscle. He wore his padding well, though, and his carriage reminded Rainbow Dash for a moment of Pinkie Pie, if she’d been born a stallion instead. His coat was a deeper red than Pinkie’s, though, and his carefully styled ruby mane caught the light and glimmered like a waterfall. On any street he would have turned heads.

But here he stood alone, in the back corner of a booth, his head low as he sniffled. Dozens of hats perched on fake pony heads around him, unmodelled. His display was an island of calm in the storm.

Huh. Rainbow Dash walked over, carefully picking her way around the hats, until she was only a few feet away. Close enough that they could speak without shouting.

“Uh, hey.” She cleared her throat. “Are you, uh, okay?”

The stallion wiped his eyes with the back of his hoof. “Oh! Yes, of course. I’m absolutely fine. Wonderful, in fact! I just had something in my eye for a moment, you know how it is with hats, all these feathers and glitter and—” His eyes, at last, focused on her, and his mouth closed with a sudden clack of teeth. He jerked, jumping upright, and for a moment any trace of sadness vanished from his face. It was like the sun had risen for him, but just as quickly the clouds returned, and his shoulders slumped, and he sat back onto his haunches, his ears wilting into his mane.

“Ah, apologies. I thought you were somepony else for a second,” he mumbled.

Rainbow Dash leaned back. The transition from tears to joy and back to despondency left her feathers unsettled. She struggled for a response and was saved when Rarity arrived.

“Darling, are you looking at hats, now? These are quite nice but I think—oh, hello sir!” Rarity pulled up short, suddenly noticing the stallion hidden behind the hat boxes. “I didn’t see you back… er, I’m sorry, is everything alright? You seem a little, ah, down.”

“Oh.” He cleared his throat. “No, things are fine. Just fine! Why, things have never been better! Here I am, at the greatest fashion show of the year, surrounded by thousands of fellow designers! So what if my best model twisted her hoof last night, and now she can’t wear my designs on the Hatwalk Hysteria tonight? Who cares if nopony sees my best work? At least, at least, I g-got to c-come…” And he broke down again, crying quietly and without shame.

Rainbow Dash looked away. Rarity seemed torn. Nutmeg stepped over and draped a wing over the stallion’s shoulders.

“Hey, it’ll be fine,” Nutmeg said. “I think your hats are wonderful, and there seem to be plenty of ponies looking at them here. And, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”

“Hat Trick. But call me Trick,” the stallion said. “And you’re right, ponies can see me here… but the Hatwalk Hysteria! Thousands of ponies watch! The best minds in fashion judge!! And if you win… oh, if you win… It’s the happiest feeling in the world. I mean, I think it must be. I’ve never won yet myself. And now I won’t this year, either.”

“Well, Mr. Trick, what’s to stop you from entering now?” Nutmeg asked. “Don’t you have a hat?”

“Oh, I do. Here, let me show you.” Hat Trick stood and walked around them to the center of his booth, where a blue cloth curtain kept something hidden. He gripped the curtain with his teeth and pulled it away.

Inside was a hat. But it was not just a hat.

Even Rainbow Dash, who wasn’t much in the fashion department, could tell this was something special. This was a Hat. The epitome of its species. If hats had royalty, this would be their queen.

Her first impression was of the ocean. A wide brim, deep and dark as a sapphire, flowed like a gentle wave. A sea-green ribbon wrapped around the bond, tied with a demure bow on the wearer’s left side. The ribbon seemed more glass than cloth, and as she leaned in leaned in she swore the pattern of the thread shifted like water. Ripples across the surface of a still pond. And high above it all, rising from the band to sweep up the front of the taper and over the crown, was a brilliant ostrich plume, so red it seemed to burn. Yellow and orange sparkles glimmered in the plume’s eye, winking at them.

Rainbow Dash remembered she needed to breath.

“Oh my Celestia,” Rarity whispered. “This… You made this, Hat Trick?”

“I did.” He sighed and stared at his creation. “I spent months on it. The band alone took weeks to design and fabricate. And now it’s wasted. All a waste.”

“I’m not sure I understand that part,” Nutmeg said. He leaned forward to sniff at the hat’s brim. “Surely any model would be delighted to wear this. After all, it must be in contention to win.”

“It’s not that simple, darling,” Rarity said, and Hat Trick nodded as she spoke. “Bespoke items like this are usually designed with a particular model in mind, and besides, even if another model could wear it, they’re probably already obligated this evening.”

“She’s right,” Hat Trick said. “Prism Slash was the greatest model I’ve ever designed for. Her coat is the color of the sky. Her mane is like a rainbow, with every color of the spectrum. This hat… only she could do it justice. And last night she twisted her hoof!”

“Huh. Well, maybe you can save it for next year?” Rainbow Dash asked. “I mean, if she’s got the perfect coat and mane, you might as well… just… why are you staring at me?”

* * *

“No.”

“Hush, darling,” Rarity said absently. Her mouth was full of pins, and one-by-one she carefully inserted them into the brim of the Ocean Hat (as Rainbow Dash had taken to calling it), tightening its fit to hold steady atop Rainbow Dash’s head. “I don’t want to poke you.”

“Then take this thing off and we’ll figure something else out.”

“Come now, Miss Dash,” Nutmeg said. He was seated a safe distance away, watching as Hat Trick and Rarity made final adjustments to the hat’s fit. “I’m no fashionista, but even I have to say it looks wonderful on you.”

“I’m not a model.”

“You model all the time,” Rarity said. “You’ve modelled my dresses, even. And the Wonderbolts! They’re models, when you think about it.”

Rainbow Dash gawked, and it was seconds before she could gather her faculties to respond. “What?! You take that back! The Wonderbolts are stunt fliers, not—ow! Hey!”

“Sorry.” Rarity didn’t sound very sorry. “Pin slipped. I told you not to jerk around.”

“I really, really, really appreciate this, Rainbow Dash,” Hat Trick said. He was breathless, almost vibrating in place as he worked. “I know this isn’t normally your thing, but I think you’ll enjoy it so much! Thousands of ponies will be watching you and wondering who that beautiful, graceful…” He paused for a moment as Rarity whispered something in his ear. “And, uh, awesome mare is.”

Rainbow’s ears perked up. There were little holes on the side of the hat for them. “Really?”

“Well…” He glanced again at Rarity, who was nodding vigorously. “Yes, absolutely. I mean, look at you. How could they not?”

Hm. Dash ruffled her wings, settling them at her sides. “I guess… Nutmeg?”

“You’re certainly sportier than the other models,” Nutmeg said. He glanced down at her ankles. “And a little shaggier, too. Is that a problem?”

“Ah. Well.” Rarity ran a hoof along Dash’s coat. “It’s a little unruly, I suppose. Would you be willing to get a trim, darling?”

Rainbow hadn’t trimmed her coat since joining the Orithyia, and as a result had become something of a wooly pegasus pony. Nutmeg was the same – working on icebergs, flying thousands of feet in the air, the July heat was far less a concern than the chilling cold of the ice or the wind.

Her forelock fell into her eyes again, and she blew it clear with a huff. That resolved it for her. “Yeah, I guess. It’s been a while.”

“Ooh!” Rarity clapped her hooves. “I know just the place! Hat Trick, do you think you can finish with these modifications? We’ll be back in plenty of time for the Hatwalk.”

“I think so, Miss Rarity. And again, I am so, so grateful to all of you for this, especially you, Miss Dash.” Hat Trick carefully lifted the Ocean Hat from Dash’s head and set it back on the blank model. “This will take a few hours, anyway. So don’t feel like you have to rush.”

“We shan’t! Now come, darlings! We have a stylist to visit!” Rarity gave Rainbow a gentle push with her shoulder, nudging them out into the chaos of the convention.

They made their escape, with Rainbow and Nutmeg in the lead. The summer sun outside had fallen behind Fillydelphia’s high skyscrapers while they were inside. Far overhead and to the north, the massive shape of the Orithyia and her iceberg blotted out the sky, bringing an early night to half the city. They paused in the street, gazing up at it quietly, until Rarity’s nagging voice caught their ears, and then it was off to get a trim.

All in the name of friendship. Rainbow kept telling herself that.

* * *

When Rainbow Dash needed a haircut, she normally went to the barber in Ponyville, an aging stallion who was a wizard with scissors, and when he was done her hair actually sat in an approximation of order. It was a colt’s cut, of course, without even a passing nod at the idea of style, and she ruined it the moment she took off, but it was quick and cheap and so what if the other mares sometimes pointed at her and laughed behind their hooves when they thought she couldn’t hear? Rainbow Dash was too cool to care about them.

Rarity did not go to the barber in Ponyville. She booked her appointments a week in advance at the stylist, and spent hours in the chair getting her mane and tail shampooed, trimmed and curled. Her stylist, an olive mare named Under Cut, worked with the precision and fanaticism of a watchmaker. She was neither cheap nor fast, and when she was done nopony pointed at Rarity and laughed.

It turned out they were going to the second kind of place. Rainbow paused outside the doors of the Main Tale Salon. A wood overhang crawling with ivy and orchids shaded the entrance, and bamboo planters held stalks of fragrant zebra grass on either side of the door. It looked exotic. It looked scary. It looked expensive.

“This looks expensive,” Rainbow said.

“Oh, foo. It will be my treat,” Rarity said. She ran a hoof along her own curled mane. “I’m half tempted to treat myself as well, but… no, this isn’t about me. This is about you. And Hat Trick! Oh, and Nutmeg, would you like a trim? I’m sure they could do something for a stallion.”

Nutmeg gave his mane a shake. It was unruly, but stallions could get away with that. It made them look rakish, as Rarity would have said (and often did).

“I think I’ll pass, Rarity. But thank you.”

“Of course, of course. More for Rainbow Dash!” She flung open the doors.

A cream mare with a lavender mane greeted them. Her eyes danced from Rarity, to Nutmeg, to Rainbow Dash, and then finally back to Rarity before she spoke.

“Hm… one of these ponies is not like the other.” She spoke in an understated accent, similar to the spa twins back in Ponyville, but just a tad more hidden. Rainbow couldn’t quite place it. “Welcome to the Main Tale. How can we help you?”

“I’m dreadfully sorry to barge in without an appointment,” Rarity said. “But my friend here will be doing some last-minute modelling at the Summer Sartorial Sensation. Do you think you can help her?”

The mare’s gaze returned to Dash, and this time it was sharper. Rainbow Dash was almost always nude, but now she felt naked, as though everything was being stripped away, assessed, and discarded.

“This will be a challenge.” A smile, so tiny it barely curved her lips, appeared on the mare’s face. “But we have an opening right now, I’m happy to say. Pixie!”

A stallion with the same cream coat and lavender mane as the mare poked his head through the curtain separating the waiting area from the rest of the salon. “Yes?”

“Get the bath ready. We have work to do.”

A Farewell to Fashion

Rainbow Dash’s nose itched.

She flared her nostrils and wrinkled her muzzle, trying to stretch the skin and appease the nagging sensation. It worked, sort of. But then she needed to sneeze, which seemed like a terrible idea with those long, pointy scissors dancing just inches away from her ears.

How many ponies died in mane-cutting accidents every year? Rainbow Dash had no idea, but it was probably a lot. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. She watched in the mirror, hypnotized, as the scissors flashed around her head, raining little bits of her mane down on the sheet covering her shoulders and chest. It built up like colorful snow.

“Hey, uh…” She paused to swallow. “Have you ever killed anypony with those things?”

The scissors froze. In the mirror, the cream mare raised an eyebrow. Rainbow Dash heard Rarity sigh from a few feet away.

“Nevermind her,” Rarity said. “I don’t know where she gets these ideas.”

“Sorry,” Rainbow said. “My nose itches.”

* * *

After the mane-cut came the full-body trim. Rainbow Dash stood on a raised circular platform while the cream stallion walked around her, humming as he ran a pair of electric shears through her coat. The shears hummed louder than he did, so whatever tune he was trying to carry eluded her ears when he wandered away from her head.

Rarity told him to give her the “sporty” trim, which turned out to be the same shearing Wonderbolt cadets received at basic training, though with a bit more care and attention to detail. It was short on the legs, almost down to the skin around her ankles, but except for a bit of cleaning left her shoulders and chest almost unscathed. It would insulate her barrel against the cold of the high sky but not flap in the breeze. They even left the little ruff growing down the center of her chest alone. The stallion said it looked flirty.

Rainbow wasn’t sure she agreed with that, but whatever.

“Looks good, Miss Dash,” Nutmeg said. “Very sleek.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.” She turned in a circle, taking the measure of her new coat. It left her legs cool and exposed. She felt every little eddy of air in the room – the gentle wash of air flowing from the ceiling fan overhead, the steam rising from the sink behind her, even the stallion’s breath. Her wings twitched at the thought of flying through the clouds like this.

“Alright, not bad.” She walked over to a full length mirror and reared up to her full height, her wings outspread for balance. A little bit of oil brushed into the primaries left them with a gemlike sheen.

Yeah, not bad. She could do this.

* * *

“I can’t do this,” Rainbow Dash said.

They were back at the convention hall, in the single large dressing room being used by all the models preparing for the Hatwalk Hysteria. Tall curtains partitioned the area into a dozen or so rooms, which the models cycled through as they put on the last of their makeup and accessories, prior to the grand be-hatting right before they walked out onto the stage.

Rainbow Dash was inside one of these curtained rooms, though not to put on makeup or accessories, much less a hat. Instead she had found a blanket and was hiding beneath it. Peeking out beneath the rim, she could see Rarity’s hoof tapping impatiently.

“Darling, you’ve modelled entire ensembles before,” she said. “I promise you this won’t be any more difficult than that.”

“Are you kidding me?” Rainbow stuck her head out to glare at Rarity. “Did you see those mares? They’re, like, amazing! They’re more beautiful than you!”

Rarity’s eyes narrowed just a hair.

“Deciding, for the moment, not to dispute that because it is immaterial to our current predicament, may I ask why you suddenly care how other mares look?”

“I can’t compete with that!” Rainbow pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders. “Like, if we were racing, sure! No problem! But this, this is the Best Young Flyers all over again.”

“You did fine there, Rainbow. You won, if I recall.”

“Yeah, after you freaked out and nearly killed the Wonderbolts. But I’m not gonna get to rescue you again and pull off a sonic rainboom inside the convention center.”

Rarity’s eyes narrowed further.

“Do you want me to try killing a Wonderbolt again, Rainbow? Because I’m getting pretty close to—”

“Excuse me, ladies?” Nutmeg stuck his head through the curtain. “Hat Trick is about finished with the alterations. Are you ready?”

“Almost done!” Rarity spun, all smiles again. “Just a few more minutes, if you don’t mind?”

Nutmeg paused, his eyes on Rainbow Dash and her little shroud. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but something made him think twice and he nodded instead, vanishing back into the chaos outside the curtains.

Rarity let out a slow breath, then settled down beside Dash with her legs tucked beneath her body. “I’m sorry, darling. I almost let my temper get away from me for a moment. I know that it’s uncomfortable to be put on the spot like this, and I remember how cruel it was of me to try and upstage you at the Best Young Flyers competition. But the thing I remember most vividly from that contest was that, despite your fears, as soon as you saw a pony who needed help, you were the mare who came to the rescue. Not Celestia’s guards or the Wonderbolts, though heaven knows they tried. No, you were the one who leapt into action.”

She wrapped a foreleg around Rainbow Dash’s withers and pulled her closer. “And now, Rainbow? There’s another pony who needs your help. He’s not falling from Cloudsdale, and he’s not going to make a pretty splat if you can’t help him in time, but this is the most important thing in his life right now. If you can help him, if you can find it inside you to put that hat on and get out there, you can be the hero he needs. And, Rainbow Dash? Don’t tell the girls I said this, because I’ll never live it down, but you’re the most heroic pony I know.”

Rainbow Dash was silent. She stared down at her freshly clipped and polished hooves.

Finally, “You really think I’m a hero?”

Rarity’s lips twitched into a half-smile. “Of course. When you’re not napping, that is.”

Rainbow snorted and stood, casting the blanket off. “It’s not napping, it’s conserving energy.”

“As you say, darling.” Rarity stood, trotted over to the curtain, and whispered something through it. A moment later, Nutmeg and Hat Trick stepped through, the latter balancing a large black hatbox on his back.

Hat Trick let out a long, shaking breath. His hooves tapped at the linoleum. “Okay, I think it’s ready. There’s a few hairpins beneath the brim to hold it in place, but nopony should be able to see them.” He paused to look at Rainbow Dash, his eyes travelling up and down her form in a maneuver that would have earned him a black eye in any other circumstance. “Oh, wow. You look great, Rainbow.”

“Awesome,” she corrected. “I look awesome.”

“That works too,” he said. “Now, let’s see if this fits.”

Rainbow stood still while the others fussed with the hat, then fussed with her, then fussed with the hat and her at the same time. Rarity mumbled quietly to Hat Trick while they settled the Ocean Hat on her head, and they carefully teased her ears through the holes in the brim and tugged her mane this way and that. Nutmeg mostly watched, though twice he ran off to fetch an extra hairpin or some spirit glue. When they were done the hat was so firmly attached to her head Rainbow was certain she could fly through a tornado and it would remain in place.

Finally, all three stepped back to look at the whole package. Look, and judge. Rainbow’s wings bristled, and a trickle of cold sweat crept down her spine. Her legs wanted to dance, to escape, but she bid them to be still.

“Well?” she asked. “How is it?”

Nutmeg nodded. Hat Trick grinned. Rarity’s smile never changed.

“It’ll do, darling,” she said. “It will do quite nicely.”

* * *

Rainbow Dash fidgeted in the wings of the main stage. All around her were dark curtains and ropes and spotlights, directed out onto the stage beyond her sight. A dozen other mares shuffled in place beside her. Some buzzed with nervous energy; most were calm. They had done this before.

Well, so what? So had she. And Rainbow Dash was a winner.

“Seventeen, go,” a stagehand whispered, and the mare in front of Rainbow Dash strode through the curtain. A wash of flashes popped out of the night-dark audience, leaving sparkling afterimages in Rainbow’s eyes. Murmurs and light applause followed a few seconds later.

“Eighteen, ready,” the stagehand whispered in Dash’s ear. “And… eighteen, go.”

Alright, let’s do this. Rainbow Dash clenched her jaw, locked her wings to her sides, and bulled through the curtain like it was the tape across a finish line.

* * *

Hats were only a small piece of the Summer Sartorial Sensation. But for a few minutes, on the evening of the first day when the Hatwalk was complete and the judges prepared to announce the winners, the entire convention ground to a halt. The flow of bodies in the aisles between booths slowed like sludge and then froze, and all eyes turned toward the giant display screen hanging from the north wall.

Among the hat-dwellers, the scores were like an anvil ready to drop. Designers huddled in sweating wrecks among their creations, hooves shaking as they stared at the furled scores. Foals absorbed the excitement but not the gravity of the moment, and ran around and through the adults’ legs, shouting with glee but not knowing why.

In Hat Trick’s booth the tension was thick enough to cut with a knife. It gathered around Rainbow’s ribs and squeezed the breath from her lungs. It flowed down her throat like tar.

Rarity and Nutmeg stood to the side. They had smiles on their faces and spoke to each other in low tones. Nutmeg made a sweeping gesture with his hoof, and Rarity laughed. They seemed calm, but Rainbow caught the slight quiver in Nutmeg’s ear, and the way Rarity’s eyes darted incessantly between Hat Trick and the soon-to-be-released scores.

Alone among the four of them, and for that matter alone among the hundreds of ponies crammed among the hats, Hat Trick radiated calm. He smiled gently, and his eyes never left the Ocean Hat, proudly displayed on a dummy at the fore of his booth. The red plume rising from the brim waved like a flag in the hall’s faintly swirling air.

A fanfare of trumpets pealed over the soundsystem. Spotlights lit the north wall like day. Every eye turned toward it.

“Ladies and Gentlestallions!” The announcer’s voice easily broke through the chatter of a thousand ponies. “This year’s Hatwalk Hysteria winners!”

A pegasus hovering beside the furled screen pulled out a peg, and gravity did the rest. The banner unrolled itself down the wall, revealing the winners. Rainbow Dash sucked in a breath and leaned forward, searching for her name at the top.

No, idiot! His name! First? No. Her heart crawled up her throat. Not the next line, either. The world went grey around the edges of her vision. Third? Not even. Her knees wobbled, and she sank to her haunches.

There, fourth. Fourth place. Rainbow Dash stared at the line, her mouth hanging open. The roar of the convention receded like the tide, until it was only a faint mumble.

Fourth. She hadn’t just failed to win, she hadn’t even placed. No medals for Hat Trick, just bitter disappointment and humiliation. Her ears wilted, and she hunched her shoulders like a scolded dog.

There, to her left. An opening in the crowd. She could slink through it and gallop out of the convention center while ponies were still occupied with the winners – they wouldn’t notice her fleeing, and if they did, she was far too fast for them to catch—

“Waha! You did it!” Legs like iron bands wrapped around Rainbow’s shoulders, squeezing the breath from her. She wheezed in Rarity’s grasp. “You did it, Rainbow Dash!”

“What? But—”

“Good job, Miss Dash,” Nutmeg said. He patted her on the shoulder with a hoof. “I assumed you’d do well, of course, but that is outstanding.”

“But…” Rainbow looked back at the scores and read the list again. Yup, still fourth. “But I lost?”

“Lost? Pshaw.” Rarity took Rainbow’s head in her hooves and turned her to face Hat Trick. “Tell me what you see over there, darling.”

Hat Trick was nearly lost in the center of a scrum of ponies. They scrambled around him, cheering, squeezing into wrap him with hugs or thump him on the back. He was crying, she saw – the tears left dark trails down his cheeks – but the smile on his face was large enough for two Pinkie Pies. A few feet away, photographer ponies lit the scene with their flashbulbs, taking dozens of pictures of the Ocean Hat.

“But… he lost?” she mumbled.

“Fourth place isn’t losing, Miss Dash,” Nutmeg said. “And if you’ll recall, he wasn’t even able to compete before you offered your help.”

“Indeed. Fourth place against some of the greatest minds in fashion is admirable.” Rarity gave her another squeeze. “All thanks to you, darling! And me, I suppose, but mostly you.”

“So, uh… really?” Dash’s ears slowly perked back up. “We did good?”

“We did wonderful, darling.” Rarity pressed her cheek against Dash’s, and for good measure reached out to snag Nutmeg and pull him in for a three-way hug. “Just wonderful.”

They stood like that, and Rainbow Dash let herself soak in the roar of the crowd, the cheers, the flashing lights as ponies posed beside the Ocean Hat. She let out a long, shaking breath, and smiled.

“So, is that it, then?” Nutmeg asked. “Mission accomplished?”

“I think so!” Rarity said. She craned her neck to peer back at her flank. “Any moment now, our marks will start glowing, and the magic will be complete!”

They waited a bit more. The hug was starting to become uncomfortable.

“Ah, hm.” Rarity gave her rump a little shake, as though to jog it along. “Well, this is awkward.”

“Yeah, what gives?” Rainbow broke out of the hug and frowned back at her cutie mark. “C’mon, glow! Do something!”

“Maybe we need to talk to Hat Trick?” Nutmeg said. “It’s about friendship, right?”

Oh, yeah. That made sense. Rainbow Dash walked over to the crowd surrounding Hat Trick and pushed her way through. The ponies made way when they saw her, and soon enough she was receiving their congratulations as well. Cameras flashed in her face.

“Hey, Hat Trick!” she shouted to be heard. “You got a moment?”

“Rainbow!” He rushed toward her, and she found herself wrapped in yet another hug. It was becoming a bit of a theme, and not an entirely welcome one. “You did it! Oh, I can’t thank you enough! All of you!”

“Yeah, about that.” Rainbow carefully pried herself loose as Rarity and Nutmeg reached her side. “Do you, uh, feel anything odd, right now? Like some kind of magical friendship thing?”

Hat Trick tilted his head. “Hm. I feel happy. Delighted! I feel… oh, I can’t describe it! Rainbow Dash, you and your friends have turned disaster into the best day of my life! How could I feel anything but gratitude for all you’ve done?”

Rainbow Dash peered back at her cutie mark. Still nothing.

“Well, shoot,” Rarity said.

* * *

“I guess, when you think about it, it wasn’t really a friendship problem,” Nutmeg said. He, alone of the three, still seemed somewhat upbeat over their victory.

“I wore a fancy hat!” Rainbow cried. “I got my hooves polished for this. I hate letting ponies touch my hooves!”

“Oh, calm down,” Rarity said. “So we didn’t solve the crisis we came out here to find. We still managed to do a wonderful thing for that stallion. Oh, and now we get to spend two more days at the Summer Sensation! So really things worked out for the better.”

They had retreated to the quiet, curtained dressing area to plan their next move. Rarity had already drawn up a list of fashion targets for them to hit in the coming days. Just thinking about it made Rainbow Dash’s head ache.

“Why couldn’t it have been monsters?” she whispered. “Monsters are awesome. I can fight monsters.”

“If nothing else, at least we have a story to tell,” Nutmeg said. “And we all made some new friends. That’s worth… say, do you hear something?”

Rarity stopped prattling about fashion. Rainbow stopped muttering about monsters. All three turned in place, their ears swiveling, seeking out the sound.

It was a mare, crying. Rainbow zeroed in on it, pushed through the a partition beside them, and came face-to-face with herself.

She stumbled back. Nutmeg and Rarity gasped. The mare, the other-Rainbow Dash, hiccoughed and ducked away, holding a leg over her face. For a long moment, all three froze.

“Ah,” Nutmeg finally broke the silence. “Prism Slash, I presume?”

The mare slowly lowered her hoof and nodded. She was not, Rainbow Dash now saw, a mirror image – she was an earth pony, for one, and if she weren’t hunched over would have stood several inches taller. Though her mane and coat were the same as Dash’s, her cutie mark was a domino mask, and her limbs were long and slender, her muzzle refined. Were it not for her red, puffy eyes and the inflated cast engulfing one of her hooves, she would have been one of the most beautiful ponies in the entire convention center.

“Er, yes.” Prism Slash sniffled. “How do you know who I am?”

“We’re friends of Hat Trick’s,” Rarity said, stepping forward. “He told us about your accident.”

“Oh.” Prism Slash glanced back at her bandaged ankle. “Yes. I suppose I should be grateful he remembers me, at least. I heard he did well in the Hatwalk, even without me, and, and… oh!” And she broke down again, hunched over, her foreleg shielding her face once again.

“There, now.” Rarity slipped forward and wrapped a leg around Prism Slash’s shoulders. “He doesn’t hold any of that against you, darling. Accidents happen. Why, does he even know you’re here? I’m sure he’d be delighted to see you.”

“No. No.” Prism shook her head. “No, I can’t do that. I can’t let him see me like this! For months I’ve waited, and now it’s too late! I failed him, and now I’ll never be able to tell him how I feel!”

Rainbow frowned. “Wait…”

“How you feel?” Rarity gasped. “Oh! You’re in love, aren’t you! You poor, precious thing! Rainbow, Nutmeg, this must be why the table sent us here! Not to win the Hatwalk, but to bring these two lovebirds together!”

“Hm.” Nutmeg rubbed his chin. “You know, that does seem more friendship-related than a hat show.”

“Exactly!” Rarity held a hoof over Prism’s muzzle, shushing her attempts to speak. “This is wonderful! Why, all we have to do is carefully arrange a plot to bring these two together, and make Hat Trick realize that Prism here is the real treasure he’s been—”

“No. No.” Rainbow stomped her hoof. “Stop that. We’re not arranging any zany hijinks. We’re going to solve this right now.”

* * *

“Hat Trick! Hey, Hat Trick!”

Hat Trick turned toward them. A few stragglers remained, milling around the Ocean Hat, but otherwise he was alone in his booth. The crowds ambled by, slowly filling toward the exits as the convention’s first day drew to an end.

“Rainbow Dash! I was wondering where you three went off to. I was afraid you’d escaped before…” He saw the fourth member of their party and froze. “Prism? But, I thought you’d left!”

Prism limped forward. “I couldn’t leave, Hat Trick. I had to be here, even when I feared you wouldn’t be able to compete in the Hatwalk. And now, look at you! You did better than I ever dreamed, thanks to these three ponies.”

Hat Trick smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I know, but I wish it could have been you, Prism Slash. The only thing that could have made this day greater would be to see you modelling my work.”

Rarity leaned forward. She wrapped a foreleg around Nutmeg and Rainbow Dash and drew them close to whisper. “This is it!”

“Thank you,” Prism Slash said. She stepped closer and cleared her throat. “But that’s not what I wanted to say. These three ponies, they convinced me that I can’t hide my feelings any more. I… I need to tell you something.”

He swallowed. “Yes?”

“Here it comes!” Rarity hissed. Her grip around Rainbow’s neck tightened. Rainbow’s vision began to go grey around the edges.

“All these months, I’ve felt something in my heart,” Prism said. “At first, I tried to deny it, and keep our relationship professional. But last week, when I twisted my ankle and realized I couldn’t model for you, my heart broke! Not because of fashion, but because I couldn’t be at your side. Hat Trick, I… I love you!”

Hat Trick stared at her, his mouth agape. The others held their breaths. Even the crowd seemed to go silent.

“Oh,” he finally said. “Oh! Well. That’s… I… ah, this is awkward.”

Prism Slash seemed to shrink. “It is?”

“Yes. You see, ah…” He cleared his throat. “Well, I thought you knew. I prefer stallions.”

The silence returned.

“Oh. Oh!” Prism Slash blushed. “This… actually explains quite a bit. In retrospect all those magazines suddenly make sense.”

“Yes.” He rubbed his front legs together. “Sorry, I should have been more forthcoming. I didn’t realize you felt this way.”

“That’s fine. It’s nothing.” She waved a hoof. “Water under the bridge. So, friends?”

“Of course. Friends.”

They shook hooves, nodded, then turned and walked away.

Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Nutmeg stood together, wrapped in Rarity’s embrace.

The silence came back again. It lasted a while this time.

“Huh,” Nutmeg finally said. “Didn’t expect that.”

As if on cue, Rarity and Rainbow Dash’s cutie marks began to glow. Images of their marks floated into the air and burst in a shower of magical sparks.

“I hate that table,” Rarity whispered. “I hate it so much.”

* * *

Later, hours later, the three were back in their room at the High Step Hotel. The cold air flowing down from the iceberg high overhead left a layer of frost on their windows, turning the cityscape into a dark, fogged, crystalline expanse just beyond their sight.

Rarity and Rainbow Dash lay on the bed, the Orithyia’s chess board between them. Rainbow Dash slowly set up the pieces while Rarity finished off a tub of double chocolate chunk ice cream in her fuzzy bathrobe. Across the room, Nutmeg sat in the recliner, reading through one of Rainbow Dash’s Daring Do novels.

“Well, at least some good came of this trip,” Rarity said. She tossed her spoon inside the empty ice cream tub and set it aside. “We saw some wonderful fashions, helped a stallion achieve his dream, and repaired a teetering friendship.”

“You made me wear a fancy hat,” Rainbow shot back. She slid her pawn forward two spaces. “And get a manecut.”

“You needed that manecut, darling.” Rarity matched Rainbow’s pawn with her queen’s pawn.

“And I think it looks very nice,” Nutmeg offered.

“See? Thank you, Nutmeg.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Rainbow pushed another pawn out, opening the center of the board. Rarity followed her lead, and for several minutes the only sound in the room was the occasional flip of the page as Nutmeg read.

“I didn’t know you knew how to play chess,” Rarity said after a dozen or so moves. “It doesn’t really strike me as your game.”

“Eh, Nutmeg taught me. He’s better than I am.”

“Ah.” Rarity’s eyes flicked over to Nutmeg, and she smiled. “Perhaps I’ll play him later.”

“Sure, if he wants. Nutmeg, wanna play winner?”

“I’d love to, Miss Dash.”

“Cool.” Rainbow slid her bishop forward, capturing one of Rarity’s pawns.

“Twilight will be excited to hear you’ve taken this up,” Rarity said. She hopped her knight to capture Rainbow’s bishop. “You know, she has a very nice crystal set from—”

“You can’t move that piece,” Rainbow said.

Rarity paused, and a small smile appeared on her face. “Oh, that’s how knights move, darling.” She nudged Rainbow’s bishop, a white marble unicorn, to the side. “Knight’s move in an L-shape, two spaces and then once space to the side. They can go forward or backward, as I am in this—”

“No, I mean, you can’t move that piece,” Rainbow said. “My queen is pinning it.”

Rarity froze and looked down at the board. Her eyes traversed the squares, searching, searching, and then she saw it: Rainbow’s queen, lurking in the back row. It sat on a straight line with Rarity’s king, blocked only by the knight.

“Ah.” Rarity set the knight back in its spot. “Right you are, then.”

The game went on for a little while longer. Then Rainbow Dash played Nutmeg.

Typhoon

“Huh.” Rainbow Dash leaned against the Orithyia’s railing to look over the ship’s edge. “You don’t see that every day.”

“I should hope not. They’re lucky nopony was killed,” Nutmeg called from the ship’s wheel. His ice climbing vest was laden with metal hooks and pitons and rang like a wind chime whenever he moved.

“Did they fire the weather team captain?”

“I think so. At least, the pony I spoke with seemed like she was pretty new at the job. Probably his replacement.” He gave the wheel a spin, and the Orithyia banked gently. “Hang on, I’m taking us over the city.”

Typhoon, the largest pegasus city on Equestria’s west coast, spread out beneath them like a starfish. The center of the city was empty, a vast round oculus that stared down at the seacoast below. Along the rim, countless buildings rose and fell in equal measure, reaching for the sky or thrusting toward the ground according to the whims of their designers. Huge cloudscape arms, bearing whole neighborhoods upon their backs, extended from the center in a loose spiral, curling as the city spun around its axis in imitation of its namesake.

It was a neat city, by any account. Unique. But Rainbow Dash had been to Typhoon before and done the tourist thing, flying laps around the hollow eye in the city’s center, dangling fishing lines from the lower towers to catch sea bass and then trying to eat one raw on a dare from her friends. She only got a single bite into the cold, slimy flesh before spitting it out and tossing the carcass back into the foamy waves below.

Typhoon was pretty cool, in other words, but it wasn’t what held her attention. Her gaze was fixed on the vast white halo circling the city. It was misty around the edges, like fog, but toward the center was so thick she couldn’t see through it to the ground below.

A few days back, their contact told them, a large flying iceberg drifted near Typhoon and got caught in the cyclonic winds that circled the city. Rather than do the sensible thing and summon the Orithyia, or simply move the city to a warmer climate and let the berg melt, Typhoon’s weather manager decided to try something new, daring, and (in Rainbow Dash’s opinion) awesome: they drilled a thousand-foot well into the center of the iceberg, packed it with over four tons of dynamite, and sold tickets for a raffle to be the pony who got to push the plunger. Tens of thousands of bits were raised for the local orphanage.

The actual demolition was not so successful.

Rather than vaporize the iceberg, as they had planned, the explosion converted it from a single piece of ice weighing almost a million tons into a nigh-infinite number of smaller pieces ranging in size from an ice cube to a grand piano. These settled into orbit around Typhoon and slowly dispersed until they formed a uniform disc that, from a distance, looked like a very thin, flat cloud that formed a white bulls-eye around the city. A few larger pieces, including one nearly a quarter the size of the original berg, carved circular channels out of the disc as they tumbled around the city.

The overall impression was of a ringed gas giant, like in the astronomy lessons Dash had grudgingly listened to as a foal. She marveled, for a moment, that a small piece of that class had finally, after years of waiting, become relevant to her adult life.

“So, what do they want us to do?” she asked. They were close enough now that she could make out individual bits of ice in the cloud, zipping by as they circled the city.

“Get rid of it, somehow.” Nutmeg locked the Orithyia’s wheel in place and spun the ship into the wind. The engines cycled down to a quiet hum, barely audible above the wind, and producing just enough power to hold the ship in place.

“Okay.” She stared down at the whirling hailstorm for a bit longer. “Any ideas?”

“Honestly? No. I’ve never dealt with something like this before.”

“Hm.” She chewed on her lip and sat on the deck. The planks were warm, thanks to the enchantments set into the wood. Frost was already building on the Orithyia’s envelope as hot, wet air rose from the sea below the city and chilled as it passed through the remains of the iceberg. Ice would start building on the lines if they stayed too long.

There was plenty of moisture. She could use that. The inklings of an idea began to form in her brain.

“How much are we getting paid for this?” she asked.

“Twice our normal rate, plus expenses. They were pretty desperate.”

“Alright.” She let out a long breath. “Get your snivel gear on. This is gonna suck.”

* * *

Step One was finding enough warm, moist air to create a cloud. As they were over the ocean, this was fairly easy.

Rainbow Dash jumped from the Orithyia and fell through the center of the city, pulling up just above the churning waves. A steady wind blew toward the shoreline, tossing foam into the air. It soaked through her coat in an instant, but her oiled feathers rebuffed the water and cut easily through the spray. She meandered across the surface, dancing around the waves as if they were hills and valleys, getting a feel for the air.

It was thick as cotton. She drank the air as she breathed it. The city, the sky, the Orithyia were all lost in the gray haze high above. The sun was the only bright spot in the heavens, surrounded by a wide halo as its light reflected off the ice crystals in the rings surrounding the city.

She felt an unexpected eddy, and glanced over to see a seagull riding in her wake. Its slender, black-banded wings flexed, and it dove into the waves below. A moment later it emerged with something silver struggling in its beak.

Weather magic wasn’t like unicorn magic – it wasn’t flashy or glowy or loud or all the other things Rainbow Dash associated with Twilight Sparkle’s spells. Weather magic was instinctive, thoughtless. It was an exercise of her will upon the world.

She could feel the water in the air. With her eyes closed, she could see its energy whirling around her, spiraling up from the warm ocean into the cool sky. She bent her wings to bank in a low, wide circle, her feathers just inches from the ocean’s churn, and began to gather the cloud.

It started as a misty blur at the center of her gyre. As she circled it grew larger, denser, darker. She rose, and it rose with her. And still it grew. A thin funnel connected it to the ocean below, an umbilical cord full of water and heat.

By the time she reached the level of the city, her cloud was a hundred yards across and dark as charcoal. It rumbled as it roiled, shaking her chest with hidden thunder.

She brought it above the city, level with the Orithyia. The colder air squeezed it, leeching its energy, and now she struggled to keep it from collapsing. It wanted to rain. It wanted to explode.

Finally, she was high enough. The cloud cast a shadow on the icy disk below. Satisfied, she let her will relax, and like the world’s largest sponge her cloud began to weep. Rain fell onto the countless pieces of ice and began to freeze solid.

She watched for a while, making sure the cloud was stable and wouldn’t go drifting off. Satisfied that it had enough water to last for a few hours, she dove back down to the Orithyia.

* * *

Nutmeg dangled like a spider beneath the Orithyia. A fifty-yard line tethered him to the airship, and a dozen iron grappling hooks hung from his legs, ready to snag larger bits of ice as they drifted near. The battered helmet on his head had already saved him from one apple-sized chunk of ice.

“Ready when you are, Miss Dash,” he called. His breath fogged in the freezing air. “Do be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name!” She had to shout to be heard over the roaring wind and the constant, low grumble of the icy rings just beneath them. “Wait, no. Danger! Danger is my middle name!”

Rainbow Dash’s cloud had been raining for almost an hour, and the ice beneath it was no longer cloudy and white. It was clear, now, and shone like diamonds in the sun. The tiny pieces, rather than bouncing off each other and breaking into ever-smaller shards, froze together. Slowly, slowly, the cold rain undid what the foolish pegasi of Typhoon had done in less than a second. The iceberg was rebuilding itself.

Left alone, the icy disc might have coalesced into a few hundred rocky balls, orbiting the city like a cloud of comets. And, in time, those bergs might eventually crash together, reforming the mountain they had once been. But that would take time – years – and more rain than Dash could imagine.

And so they helped it along.

Rainbow Dash landed on a bergy bit the size of a grand piano. Its surface was slick, half-frozen, and an icy rime formed on her hooves. She clung to the side, feeling the ice seep into her coat, binding her like a lover. She growled and tore herself free, and then drove an iron anchor into the ice with a single, sharp blow of her hoof.

“Got it!” she shouted. Her body shook with cold, lending a tremor to her voice. “G-go!”

The line tightened and jerked as Nutmeg tugged the berg slowed to a stop. Smaller bits of ice, still speeding through the air, shattered against its side, and she huddled in its lee until an opening appeared. She darted away, dodging icy hunks the size of pumpkins and ignoring the smaller ones that bounced off her coat or broke against her hooves.

A hundred yards away, she saw her next prey – a berg the size of a house, spinning lazily through the storm. She pushed through the hail toward it. A crust of pink ice, tinted with her blood, collected on her legs as she shielded her face.

She crashed into the berg’s side and held tight, panting for breath. It leeched the heat from her belly. Cold grew in her chest like cancer. The ice crept around her hooves, and she knew if she waited, it would grow and grow and grow, engulfing her, swallowing her. And in a thousand years, when the berg finally melted, her corpse would tumble to the earth.

So, just for a moment, she rested. The creeping ice sent its tendrils into her coat. How easy it would be, the ice whispered, to just rest. I will take care of everything.

She snorted and pulled away. Bits of her coat tore, sticking to the ice, and spots of blood dotted her legs. With an angry grunt she drove another anchor into the berg and jumped away, her wings snapping out to catch the air.

* * *

It took four days to capture all the ice.

The smaller pieces, the ones tinier than a cherry, melted on their own in the rain. Chunks larger than a pony were slow enough for Rainbow to push into other chunks, and the massive pieces they snagged with anchors and held together beneath the Orithyia. Eventually, their make-shift iceberg grew large enough to block the swirling winds around Typhoon, and most of the remaining bits drifted close enough for the iceberg’s own gravity to draw them in.

The resulting iceberg was not pretty. Most icebergs weren’t, Rainbow Dash felt, but even she had to acknowledge that they possessed a sense of massive grandeur, an immense, stately bearing that overwhelmed her little pegasus brain. They were like the moon.

Their iceberg was not like the moon. It was more like somepony had taken a hoofful of icecubes and squeezed them together until they fused into a bumpy, knobby mess.

Tomorrow, they would snag the ugly mess with ropes and anchors, and start the slow process of dragging it out to sea.

But tonight they rested. The good pegasi of Typhoon gave them a free suite in the city’s most expensive hotel, complimentary room service, and all the hot water they could ask for.

The bathroom tub was large enough for a half-dozen ponies, but Rainbow lounged in it alone. The water scalded her at first, though she knew it was no more than lukewarm. In time, though, the last of the ice melted from her coat and feathers, and she let the warmth soak into her bones.

She was a mess. Cuts and scrapes left by speeding bits of ice criss-crossed her legs. Bruises covered her ribs and flanks. The helmet saved her skull a dozen times, but a particularly sharp piece of ice had split her left ear almost in half. It took a dozen stitches to close wound, and it ached in time with her pulse. Bits of dried blood drifted away from her mane when she dunked her head beneath the water.

Worst of all, at least four primaries were broken. She’d be flying like a goose for weeks until they regrew. The thought left her grumbling even as she relaxed.

Still, pretty awesome. A small smile crept onto her lips.

* * *

Nutmeg was sitting on the bed when Rainbow emerged from the bath. He had the ship’s log open on the covers before him and an ink-stained quill in his mouth. He made a few final marks, and then closed it and set it aside.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Yeah, loads.” Rainbow rubbed her coat and mane with the towel one final time, then crawled up beside him. “I never want to be that cold again.”

“Hazard of the business, I’m afraid. Though, that is the worst I’ve had to deal with.”

He looked like it, too, she noted. Bruises covered Nutmeg’s legs, and patches of his coat were simply missing where too much ice had built up.

“Sucks,” she mumbled. She sat beside him and began preening her left wing. Dozens of fluffy covert feathers fell like blue snow onto the covers.

“I know, but on the other hoof, I’ve never seen this many bits in one place. We can get the engines refurbished with plenty left over. Here, let me help.”

His hoof snagged her right wing, and she froze for a moment at the sudden touch, but then his teeth started nipping her disordered feathers back into position. It was soothing, calming, like letting a friend brush her mane, not that she ever let her friends brush her mane because that was stupid. But all pegasi had fond memories of their parents preening their wings, and adult pegasi were always happy to lend a hoof (or teeth) to the aid of a friend, and in this Rainbow Dash was no different.

Soon enough her wings were back in flying shape, and she gave them a stretch and a final shake to settle the feathers into place. This is how Rarity must feel after a visit to the spa.

“Feel better?” Nutmeg asked. He spat out a bit of blue fluff.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” She crawled over to him and snagged his left wing. “Okay, your turn.”

He flinched – so quickly she wouldn’t have noticed if they weren’t inches away. His body tensed, but after a moment he relaxed. “Careful with your teeth. You might chip them.”

She paused at that, already lip-deep in brown fluff. Curious, she nosed a bit further, and froze when her snout touched something hard and cold.

“What the…” She pulled his wing further out from his body, then ducked her head around to peer at its underside. A metal brace, like a ship’s spar, ran from a leather strap wrapped tight around the base of the limb all the way to the tip. A series of springs connected the metal rods together, and when she relaxed her grip the springs contracted, drawing his wing back into a resting position against his side.

But the limb itself was what held her attention. It was little more than skin and bone. Tendons and ligaments stood out like earthworms in relief. Whatever muscle had once existed had long since withered away.

Nutmeg cleared his throat. After a moment’s silence, he ducked his head and began preening his wing himself.

“Er, sorry,” Rainbow said. A hot flush filled her face, and for a moment the room seemed to float far away. She shook her head and leaned forward again, nipping at his feathers and sorting them back into place. She ignored the cold metal and hollow bones that brushed against her muzzle.

“It’s fine,” he said. His voice was muffled through the feathers. “Spotted fever, when I was a foal. The doctors said I was lucky to survive. They had to fly a unicorn up to the hospital for the treatment.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Don’t be. I was too young to fly, anyway.”

“Yeah, still.” She managed to repress a shudder through sheer force of will. Spotted fever, and the crippling atrophy of flight muscles it caused, was a nightmare for pegasi. Stories about it extended as far back as their written history.

The rest of their night passed in silence. The next morning, they left Typhoon for warmer climes.

To Canterlot

Without an iceberg in tow, the Orithyia flew like a swallow. The angled envelope and gondola sliced through the wind without effort. Her fins, normally outspread to wrestle the air, were now retracted into special sheaths for high-speed flight. The twin gem-fired engines mounted to her stern hummed a content, high note, matched in tone by the wind singing through the ropes. Ponies for miles around heard the Orithyia’s song long before they saw her.

After so many months aboard Nutmeg’s ship, Rainbow Dash had learned to tune the sounds out. All she heard was the rip of the wind as it blasted past, or the creak of the ship when Nutmeg spun the wheel and set them on a new heading. The wood decks groaned in their own language, and she had grown attuned to their whispers and shouts. At night, when she lay in her hammock waiting for sleep to steal up on her, the pops and squeals of the cooling hydrogen and creaking planks was a soft, beloved lullaby that eased her gently into the dark.

They could ignore the insurance regulations that required a mare on constant watch as long as they didn’t have any cargo, so while Nutmeg steered the ship below, Rainbow Dash lounged in the crow’s nest. She’d stolen a few passing clouds and packed them like stuffing into the wood bowl, and now they formed a soft cushion for her nap. The sun was high overhead, and it toasted her belly nicely as she dozed her way to their destination.

She was in the middle of a pleasant dream whose details she couldn’t quite recall when the sound of hooves in the rigging caught her ear. Her eyes cracked open in time to see Nutmeg poke his head over the railing into her nest.

“Ahoy. Permission to join you?”

“Mm.” She scootched to the side, creating some room. “Permission granted.”

He scrambled over the rail and flopped onto the cloud cushion. He rolled around a bit, finding a comfortable position, kicking little bits of cloud fluff into the air. They quickly dissolved, leaving a fine mist that sprinkled her coat with dew.

“This is nice,” he said. “Too bad they freeze around icebergs.”

“S’good,” she mumbled. There wasn’t quite enough room for her to spread out with both of them in the nest, so she kicked her hind legs up onto the rail. It was still tight, but they both fit.

“We should reach Canterlot in a few hours. Before sunset, certainly.” He paused to yawn, then shook his head. “Mfph, far too comfortable up here, Miss Dash. I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep if I stay.”

“Hm?” Her eyes had drifted shut while he was speaking, and when she opened them she wasn’t quite clear how long he’d been silent. “Oh, uh, you need me to pilot for a bit?”

He chuckled. “No, but I’ll need you to start setting the rigging in about an hour for an iceberg.”

“Yeah, sure.” She yawned as well. “I’ll get it in, uh, ten seconds flat.”

Nutmeg was quiet for a moment, and Rainbow thought she caught his eyes drifting closed. But then he groaned and hauled himself back onto his hooves. His wings stretched to catch the sun, and she heard the faint squeal of the springs in his braces. Before that thought could distract her further, he clambered over the side again and vanished down the ropes.

About an hour, huh? She squinted at the sun, yawned, and closed her eyes again.

* * *

They arrived outside Canterlot as the sun dipped toward the horizon. Celestia’s castle, perched on the mountainside, caught the last of the sun’s rays even as the city below fell into the twilight gloom. The tall towers glimmered light pearls against the darkening sky, their ivory sides glowing yellow, then orange, then finally red before the sun flew for the night, and all was equal in the soft glow of the moon rising from the east.

Air traffic grew denser as they approached Equestria’s capital. Streams of pegasi soared beneath them, sticking close to the ground or the few cloud structures that hovered over the city. Pegasi rarely flew so high as the Orithyia – too much effort, though the view was beautiful.

Other airships joined them. From the ship’s rail, Rainbow saw the blinking red and green lanterns that marked their sides. On a clear night the lights could be seen for miles.

This was not a clear night, though. The muggy July air was thick with the promise of rain and sat on her tongue like wool. A gray haze blurred the horizon, broken in places by the peaks of mountains marching into the distance.

“This is like a second home for you, isn’t it?” Nutmeg called from the wheel. “Rainbow Dash, Savior of Equestria?” His words were light but not mocking.

Rainbow sidled over and gave him a gentle shove with her shoulder. “And don’t forget it, you.”

“With you around, Miss Dash, how could I?”

She smirked, but after a few moments of retrospection (a flaw she had never been given to before arriving on the Orithyia), she spoke. “You, uh… I mean, I don’t, uh, brag, do I?”

Nutmeg was silent.

She plowed on. “Like, you remember Rarity, right? She brags a lot. I mean, I guess she doesn’t walk around saying ‘Hey everypony look at me, I’m the most prettiest pony in Equestria!’ but that’s kinda what she’s saying even when she’s not saying it exactly like that. Right?”

“Well, Miss Dash, I—”

“I don’t go around saying ‘I’m the fastest pony in Equestria!’” She paused for a moment and frowned. “Well, sometimes I do, but only because it’s important. Because we’re in some kind of conversation where it’s important for ponies to know how fast I am. Like, when I’m meeting somepony for the first time? That’s important. Or if it’s been awhile since I’ve seen them and maybe they forgot? That’s not really bragging and even if it kinda maybe was it’s not, like, an actual character flaw or anything it’s just part of what makes me so awesome but I guess I’ve been talking a lot and now I’m just kind of babbling so I guess I’ll stop.”

Nutmeg smiled at her, then turned back toward the prow. “Are you concerned about how ponies perceive you, Miss Dash?”

“Duh, no? Who cares what other ponies think?”

He raised an eyebrow at that, though he kept his gaze forward. The spires of Canterlot, dimmer now, were only a few miles ahead.

“I mean, uh.” She frowned and sat beside him. “Okay, I see what you’re saying. You’re suggesting that ponies who brag a lot must do so because they really want other ponies to think good things about them. That they need their, uh… Validation! Because they’re insecure. That’s what Twilight says.”

“Twilight Sparkle says that?”

“Yeah, she says I brag too much.”

“Oh.” He coughed quietly, and Rainbow suspected he might be hiding a chuckle. “Well, I wouldn’t say you brag too much, Miss Dash.”

“Too much?”

He shrugged.

Rainbow waited for him to clarify, to explain that she didn’t brag much at all, or ever, and that it wasn’t really bragging when she did. But Nutmeg didn’t say any of those things, he just stared ahead, occasionally giving the wheel a little nudge that changed their course a few degrees, always keeping in line with the traffic flowing toward the darkening spires ahead.

Oh. Rainbow’s ears folded back, and her posture slumped. “I do brag a lot, don’t I?”

Nutmeg had no answer for that. Or if he did, he kept it to himself.

They proceeded in silence with the Orithyia to Canterlot.

* * *

The morning found them tied up to one of the castle’s zeppelin anchors. Several other airships bobbed around them in time with the wind, and together they looked almost like a bunch of balloons from one of Pinkie Pie’s parties, all straining at the ends of their tethers. Unlike the Orithyia, the other airships were painted in riotous colors, or gilded with silver and gold. They shone like stars in the morning light.

The Orithyia, for reasons Dash had never pursued, forewent such decoration. Her envelope was painted with the muted gray of weather sealant, and the decks were varnished to a loving shine. Other than the Equestrian flag flying from the ship’s stern, there was no gilt or unnecessary color to be seen.

We should paint some racing stripes on her envelope. That would be awesome. She made a mental note to suggest that to Nutmeg the next time they were in drydock.

“All set, Miss Dash?” Nutmeg called out from belowdecks.

“I’m good,” she answered. She glanced at her saddlebags once more.

Nutmeg popped up onto the deck and secured the hatch behind him. “Excellent. You have the note?”

“Yup.” She tapped her saddlebag with a wing. Inside was an envelope from the Typhoon city council, within which was a promissory note for more bits than Rainbow Dash had ever seen in her life.

“Very good. See you on the deck, then!” So saying, he stepped to the side of the ship and jumped over the rail. His ankle snagged the tow line connecting the Orithyia to the tower, and he shimmied down it like a winged monkey.

Rather than emulate his gymnastics, Rainbow Dash did the sensible thing and flew. The wind felt sore against her broken feathers, and she actually wobbled a bit as she came in to land. She disguised it with a bit of a dance and glanced back to see if Nutmeg had noticed.

He hadn’t. Awesome.

The first order of business was the bank. They walked together through the public areas of the castle, winding down the towers and keeps and through the gardens to the main road leading to the city below. If she were alone, Rainbow Dash would have simply leapt off the side of the mountain and glided down to the city in the valley, but Nutmeg couldn’t very well follow if she did that, and it was a pleasant morning for a walk, so she was content to go the earth pony way.

“So, do you have a separate account here?” Rainbow Dash asked as they reached the city’s business district. Their destination, a towering, columned marble building apparently built in imitation of a mountain, was just opening its doors. A pair of guards stood on either side of the stairs leading to the bank’s entrance.

“Not as such. The bank we went to in Cloudsdale is a branch of this bank. We can use the same account at both.”

“Oh, neat.” Rainbow paused for a moment as they passed through the entry. The bank’s foyer was larger than a dragon’s cave, with tall, narrow windows that let in thin rays of morning sunlight. The checkered marble beneath her hooves was polished to a mirror shine. “This place looks pretty expensive.”

“Well, they have to keep up appearances, Miss Dash.”

They waited briefly in line before the cashier’s window opened. Rainbow Dash passed the promissory note through the bars, and then she and Nutmeg had to turn to let the cashier inspect their cutie marks. Finally, the mare nodded.

“Do you want to cash this for bits, or deposit it in your account?”

“Account, please,” Nutmeg said. “Split equally.”

And so Rainbow Dash found herself with more money than she’d ever possessed in her entire life up to that point. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was more than she made most months on the Ponyville weather team.

Was she supposed to start acting rich, now? Walk around with her nose in the air? Ride in an air carriage instead of flying?

“Hey, Nutmeg? What do rich ponies do?” she asked as they walked back out into the streets of Canterlot.

He tilted his head and took his time before answering. “I’m not sure, Miss Dash. The same as the rest of us, I suppose. Follow their dreams.”

“Oh.” Yeah, that made sense.

Rather than head straight back up the mountainside to the castle, they chose to amble through the city’s business district. Shopping was more Rarity’s thing, but even Rainbow Dash could appreciate the high-end stores around them. And for once she actually had enough bits to consider buying something of her own. Something nice, not like the cheap second-hand furniture or plastic shelves she had back home.

Huh. She paused outside a boutique and studied the mannequins in the picture window. One wore a bright yellow sundress, simple in design yet elegant. Nothing she could ever imagine wearing – it didn’t even have holes for wings – but she could, if she wanted to, walk into the store and purchase it right now.

Or, actually, not right now. The store didn’t open for an hour. But whatever. She could come back

“See something you like?” Nutmeg paused by her side, inspecting the sundress as well.

She shook her head. “Nah, just looking. Hey, do you think there’s a bookstore around here?”

“I’m sure we can find one.”

They did find one, and soon enough Rainbow was in possession of two more books: Daring Do and the Lost Lantern of Lith, which she insisted on finishing even though the stupid privateer colt had ruined the ending, and The Board, not the Pieces: A Guide to Chess Strategy. Nutmeg raised an eyebrow at that but kept his peace.

And that was worrisome. What if he’d already read this book? She’d be playing into his hooves! For a moment she wrestled with the urge to fly back to the bookstore and return the book for a different one, but common sense soon won out.

After all, if he’d already read this book, then she’d have to read it just to catch up.

Chess was complicated. But one thought led to another, and soon she arrived at an entirely different problem.

“Hey, Nutmeg?”

“Hm?”

“Are there any stores that sell chess boards?”

* * *

There were, it turned out. They had to ask around, but soon they found an out-of-the-way shop in the city’s Arts and Crafts section, which wasn’t even a section Rainbow Dash had realized existed but when you think about it Canterlot was a unicorn city and they liked stuff like art so in a way it made sense. They wandered past fabric and woodcutting and paint supply stores, and finally reached their destination.

The Flower Peddler was an incongruous name for a game shop, since as far as Rainbow could tell it sold neither flowers nor pedals, but the windows were filled with various boards and cards and little figurines, so it had to be the right place. She muscled Nutmeg out of the way and pushed through the door.

It was dim inside, and her eyes took a moment to adjust from the summer’s brilliance. The rustle of shifting cloth caught her ear, and she turned to see an older stallion behind a wide counter. A felt mat was laid out before him, and several tiny pewter figurines lay on it in various stages of painting and construction. His horn glowed, and the tiny brush hovering before him darted down to dab a tiny spot of color on a pewter griffon’s chest.

“Good morning!” He gave her the kind of smile that all grandfathers seemed to have. “Looking for anything in particular?”

Nutmeg stepped in behind her, just in time to catch the question. “Chess sets, if you have them, please.”

He did have them. A entire section of the shop, which was much larger on the inside than it appeared from the street, was dedicated to “traditional” pursuits, which included chess, checkers, and something Nutmeg called ‘backgammon.’ She sniffed at those odd boards, with their thin triangles and beads, but quickly found herself drawn onward.

More chess boards than Rainbow Dash knew existed filled the tables. Simple painted wood boards, marble and onyx boards, ebony and ivory (real ivory, she realized with a start), and even boards that had abandoned the conventional white and black scheme she had assumed was universal. A scintillating jade-and-aquamarine board caught her eye, and she nearly missed the shopkeeper’s words.

“Was there a particular type you were interested in, Miss?”

“Well, uh, you know.” But of course she didn’t know – she hadn’t given this much thought, a process that had bitten her in the flank in the past and surely would again. “Something nice. Fancy.”

“Mm, well, we have those.” The stallion’s horn glowed, and several boxes floated over. He popped the lid off one, revealing a felt-lined, cushioned interior, on which rested two sets of pieces.

“Oh, wow,” she breathed more than spoke. It was a traditional set, carved in the same shape as the pieces in Nutmeg’s set aboard the Orithyia. But rather than painted wood, these were carved stone polished to a glimmer. She touched a pawn with the tip of her hoof, and her iron shoe rang in response.

“Or these, if you prefer something more unique,” the shopkeeper offered, and opened another box. Inside were figures Dash had never seen before – a row of tiny wyverns, a hoofful of chimaera, timber wolves, and manticores, and four majestic dragons, two male and two female. A monster’s chess set, she realized.

“Uh.” She stared at the new set, and then at several more as the shopkeeper opened them. Spun glass, cast metal, porcelain and other materials she’d never imagined could be used for chess filled them all. “Nutmeg?”

He got the message and stepped up to her side. “These are all very nice, but what do you want a new set for, Miss Dash? To play, or to display?”

“Play.” Duh.

“Very good.” He nosed aside the more esoteric sets. “You want pieces that are easily distinguished and won’t confuse new players. You want something interesting, but not a niche you’ll grow bored with in time. Perhaps a well-crafted but traditional set?”

“Yeah.” Her eyes drifted over the boards again, and finally settled on one off to the side. Rather than the white and black spaces of a traditional board, its checkers were in two shades of blue, a powder blue so light it seemed stolen from the noon sky, and a deep sapphire like a midnight lake. A felt box rested atop it, and she lifted the lid with the tip of her wing, revealing a set of traditional chess figurines carved from stones of the same color and material as the board.

“Say, uh,” she set the lid back down. “Do you think, you know…”

Nutmeg smiled. “I think it’s beautiful.”

* * *

Later, with chess set wrapped and perched upon Rainbow Dash’s back, the two found lunch in a bustling cafe near the riverfront. Working class ponies mixed with merchants and minor nobles, and the air around them filled with conversations as varied as the latest on the annual tornado scheduled for next week, grumbling about soybean prices, and heady speculation concerning political maneuvers ahead of the August parliamentary elections.

Rainbow Dash paid it little attention. Her salad – a simple spinach and arugula mix with pine nuts and dried strawberries – occupied her full attention for the few minutes it survived. Satisfied, she leaned back in her chair, belched quietly, and let out a contented sigh.

Nutmeg was slower to devour his meal, but then, he’d grown up on the ground. Earth ponies and unicorns took forever to eat, Rainbow Dash had noticed. Sometimes she thought they’d spend all day nibbling at their meals if she weren’t there to hurry them along.

“So,” she said. She stopped to try and worm a strawberry seed out from between her molars with her tongue. The damn thing was jammed way up there, and she could feel it whenever she closed her jaws. “What next?”

“After lunch, you mean?”

“Uh huh.” And maybe after dessert, too. If he would hurry up and finish his salad.

“Back to the castle and the Orithyia, then to the drydocks. We’re putting our bits to good use.”

“Mhm.” She glanced over her shoulder at the mountain looming above them. The castle shone like porcelain, and the Orithyia was one of many airships tethered to its masts. “How long’s it take to redo the engines?”

“Just a few days. It’s just a matter if dismounting the old ones and—”

A brilliant green flash, so bright it briefly washed out the sunlight, burst over their table. A swirl of sulfurous smoke followed, lingering for a moment before slowly drifting away in the wind. The customers around them coughed and gagged and scowled in their direction.

“Sorry, dragon mail!” Rainbow Dash said. She plucked the scroll off the table before it could absorb too much vinegar from her bare salad plate. “Sorry folks.”

Nutmeg fanned the air weakly with his wings. “Message from home? Not another friendship quest I hope.”

“Ugh, don’t even say it.” The scroll had a purple wax seal embossed with Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark, and Rainbow snapped it open.

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I hope this letter finds you well. Rarity returned last week and reported on your success in Fillydelphia, but she made it clear that the quote-unquote friendship problem you encountered at the fashion event was underwhelming, and it certainly did not require the personal involvement of two Elements of Harmony. In fact, the way she describes it, a simply worded missive could have solved matters in just a few minutes.

After all the previous trouble we’ve had with the with the magical map, this was the final straw. I called the Ponyville large magical appliances store and had them send a technician. I had to wait four hours for the stallion to arrive, because they could only guarantee an appointment between 8 a.m. and noon. Spike said I should complain to the management because I’m a princess and they can schedule a more precise appointment than that, but I elected to disregard his advice. Just because I’m a princess doesn’t mean I should expect special treatment.

Anyway, once the repairpony arrived he popped the top off the map table and started poking around the crystal gears, and it only took a few minutes to find the problem. One of the geographic actuator control springs was all gunked up with cake frosting. He cleaned it up, added a bit of machine oil, and closed the whole thing again.

Almost immediately it send Applejack to Appleloosa. She left a few days ago, and I just received a telegram saying that she successfully thwarted a changeling plot to replace the mayor and use Appleloosa as a base to stage another invasion of Equestria.

Now, I don’t want to name names, but I have my suspicions about where that cake frosting came from. After Applejack gets back and I check to make sure she isn’t a changeling, you can be certain that we’re going to have a stern conversation with one of our friends soon.

According to the repairstallion, if we have future problems with the map table we should try turning it off and turning it back on again. He said that sometimes helps.

Be sure to write back soon. Rarity said you and Nutmeg are getting along very well. She actually said a lot more than that but this scroll only contains so much space and as a result I’m forced to truncate her observations. However I do look forward to meeting this stallion of yours if you two happen to fly by Ponyville anytime soon.

Your friend,

-Twilight Sparkle

Rainbow Dash read the letter, then – when it was clear it wasn’t an emergency summons by the magic map to save Equestria from fashion again – she read it again, slowly and deliberately. The final paragraph she read a third and fourth time, and afterward she scowled and imagined various uses of mane dye and how they would affect white unicorns with dark purple hair.

“Everything alright?” Nutmeg interrupted her musings. “You’ve been reading that for a while.”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” Rainbow set the scroll down. “Sounds like they fixed the map, too.”

“Well, that’s good. Though, to be honest, I’m glad it sent you to Fillydelphia instead of somewhere dangerous.”

“Eh, I’d have been fine.”

“Yes, but I might not have.”

Hm, that was true. What if Nutmeg followed her on some adventure, and got hurt because of it? That wouldn’t be cool at all. She frowned at the idea and stared at the furled scroll on the table between them.

Finally, “You’d have still come, though, right? Even if I had to go somewhere dangerous?”

“Of course, Miss Dash. You’re a member of my crew.”

Yeah. Yeah, she was. The thought, and Nutmeg’s quiet, easy insistence upon it, brought a smile to her face.

Their conversation drifted off, and they made up for the silence with dessert. Rainbow elected for a fudge brownie, hot from the oven, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and drizzled all over with caramel fudge. Nutmeg went for the comparatively simple mint gelato, and they swapped bites periodically.

The silence gave Dash time to think. And, as usual, that led to introspection, which led to frowns like the one she soon wore, even as she finished the last of brownie.

“Hey, Nutmeg?” she said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking. Earlier, when you said I cared about how ponies perceive me, that wasn’t after I’d been bragging. Yeah, we were talking about whether or not I brag a lot, which for the record I don’t, but you asked me that after I asked you if you thought I bragged too much. Which means, really, you weren’t asking if my bragging was a sign that I cared how ponies perceived me, but rather that I was worried that you thought I bragged too much, and that was the perception I was worried about!”

Nutmeg blinked at her. “Er, say that again?”

“You think I care what ponies think about me?”

“Well, don’t we all?”

“Yes, but…” She poked at her empty brownie plate wish she had saved a few of the warm, delicious chocolatey bites for this conversation. “What if I do, too much?”

“I imagine you’d spend your whole life trying to win adulation and accolades, then.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Do I? Do that, I mean.”

“Maybe sometimes.” He finished off the last of his gelato. “But I wouldn’t worry about it, Miss Dash. We all have our flaws, but we all have our virtues as well, and I think your virtues outweigh your flaws. Besides, if you’re worried that I think badly about you because I think you care too much what other ponies think about you, aren’t you validating your own fears?”

She blinked. “Uh, say that again?”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

Later, as they walked back to the Orithyia, Rainbow still wasn’t sure how that conversation had gone.

It's a Very Bright Castle

Rainbow Dash drifted through the air, borne aloft on a timid thermal that fluttered weakly through her feathers. The warm rising air battled against the field of icebergs floating around her, and for every foot that she rose the temperature grew colder, until ice crept up the edge of her wings, clogging them, weighing her down like lead. She snapped them out with a scowl, shattering the frozen slush and casting sparkling diamonds out into the chilly air to fall to the ground far below.

Flying around icebergs was always a challenge. They chilled the air around them, and as every schoolfilly knows, cold air sinks. The icebergs were like a waterfall, pouring air down their sides, falling faster and faster until it crashed against the ground and exploded outward in a fan that frosted trees and crusted rivers. In a pack of glaciers like this, it took all her wingpower just to stay aloft, and the few thermals she found were a lifeline.

Off in the distance, gathering power over the horizon, she could just barely see a massive storm brewing between the ‘bergs. A bank of clouds, dark as sin, swelled over the landscape. They swallowed the weak sunlight and lit the mountains below with intermittent flashes of lightning.

A stray gust caught her. Ice crystals stung her eyes and ears, and she curled up to avoid the wintery blast. In the space of seconds she plummeted nearly a thousand feet, leveling out halfway between the icebergs and the ground. The falling air was a frozen shower against her back.

“Cold for a morning flight,” Nutmeg’s voice came from beside her. She turned to see him gliding alongside, his wingtip just inches from hers. “Turbulent, too. Can you handle it?”

“Ha!” Her wings beat, muscling the air into submission. Her unsteady flight evened out, and with enough effort she glided through it like cream. “There’s nowhere in Equestria Rainbow Dash can’t fly!”

“Hm.” He dipped one wing, spinning in a lazy, effortless corkscrew. “There’s more to flying than speed, though. Icebergs don’t care how fast you are.”

“Maybe they should!” she shot back. “Icebergs are dumb!”

“Oh? Then how are they catching you?”

Huh? Rainbow scowled at the non-sequitur and was about to challenge him when she slammed into another patch of cold air. It was like hitting a curtain, a layer of cotton that weighted her and dragged her to the earth, an anchor lighter than a feather. She growled and churned the air with her wings, beating it with her hooves, until at last she was level with him again.

But in the moment before she opened her mouth to reply, she glanced back. The icebergs, which had receded away, now seemed to grow closer. They grew and grew, chips of ice the size of houses breaking away as they sped toward her. The air shook from the force of their momentum.

She yelped and spun away, flying faster and faster. The air around her bent, forming a foggy cone around her hooves. Not even the fastest icebergs in the world could catch her! She tilted her head back to mock Nutmeg and—

Nutmeg. Nutmeg couldn’t fly faster than an iceberg. She thought she saw a tiny brown dot in the haze behind her, and behind it the entire world was eclipsed by the face of an iceberg, miles across, racing toward her like a meteor, and

Rainbow Dash woke with a shock. Every muscle in her body jerked, shaking the bed and rattling the mattress springs. She gasped in a quick breath, and for a confused moment the dark hotel room could have been the air miles above the frozen ground, surrounded by icebergs, flying for her life. But then her mind came fully awake, and she settled down into the sheets like a deflating balloon. Her heart hammered for a few more beats and slowly grew calm.

Her head rolled to the side, and in the dim light of the bedside alarm clock she saw Nutmeg’s fuzzy form in the darkness, sleeping in the room’s other bed. He had the covers pulled over his shoulders, like the earth ponies and unicorns he had grown up among. Pegasi reared in the clouds didn’t use such things – they never felt the cold.

The dream was already a fading memory. The last of it slipped out of her mind’s grasp, and for a moment she saw a tiny brown spot, the color of Nutmeg’s coat, against an endless white field. A beckoning sense of horror filled her, and then the last images of the dream melted away into forgetfulness, and she could not remember why her chest ached so.

Silently, so as not to wake him, she floated away from the bed. The air cast off by her wings ruffled the sheets, but only for the moment it took for her to land beside him. She lay down, curled into a ball, pressed against his side, with the thin cotton sheet between them.

It was enough of a barrier for propriety, she figured. They’d managed with less on the Orithyia.

In time, she slept once more.

* * *

“So, how long have we got?” Rainbow Dash asked.

She raised her voice to be heard over the brisk winds that always churned around the highest zeppelin moors in Canterlot. Around them, a dozen airships receded in rows away from them, all bound with stout ropes and anchoring spells to the shipyard’s towers. A narrow, metal grate served as their catwalk, winding up the towers and out along the piers between the ships. Hundreds of pegasi soared around them, laden with tools and equipment and supplies, all destined for the airships under their care.

The Orithyia floated before them, but not of its own power. Dockworkers had spent the past hour sucking the hydrogen out of her envelope, and now the metallic fabric hung like a deflated sock from special cables dangling from a crane high above. Her superstructure rested in a massive airship cradle that supported her weight on felt-covered pine beams. Apprentice shipwrights, younger and scrawnier than the other pegasi, scraped at her exposed hull, removing the flaking varnish and air barnacles. By the time they finished the wood would be smooth and light again, ready for another coat of lacquer.

And maybe some racing stripes? Rainbow Dash pondered the thought. The Orithyia would look nice with some magenta, or maybe a mix of red and blue, or maybe a sliding scale of colors, indigo and blue and green and yellow and orange, with her prow all in bright, blood red—

“About four days to mount the new engines,” Nutmeg interrupted her musing. “By then they’ll be done with the hullwork and replace all the old cables. Figure, hm, a day or so to test the engines? Then we should be set to sail again.”

Four days?! That was, like, forever! Rainbow Dash scowled at the moored ship and the pegasus engineers tinkering with her engines. What were they supposed to do with four whole days?

“That’s dumb,” she said. She stomped a hoof on the catwalk for emphasis, shaking the whole affair. Flakes of rust broke free and began the long, slow drift toward the ground a hundred meters below. “What do we do until then?”

Nutmeg shrugged. “Whatever we want, I suppose. Think of it as extended shore leave.”

“In Canterlot?” She rounded on him. “We can’t take shore leave in Canterlot. I go to Canterlot all the time! Shore leave is for, like, cool places! Saddle Arabia or Cataract or Neighpon. Why couldn’t we get the ship refitted there?”

He shrugged again. “Canterlot is where the shipyards are, Ms. Dash.”

She puffed out her cheeks and blew a frustrated raspberry at him. “The shipyards, the shipyards. We could have just put the engines on ourselves.”

Nutmeg raised an eyebrow and glanced between her and the massive cradle holding the Orithyia. “I think it’s a little harder than that.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Her wings had flared out to make her appear larger, and she forced them back to her sides with a grumble. “So, what do you want to do?”

“Well, I hear there are trains in Canterlot. Perhaps we could go visit Ponyville?”

“Ugh, no. If there’s one place more boring than Canterlot, it’s Ponyville. It’s just boring farming and boring mills and boring houses. Weeks, Nutmeg! Sometimes there are weeks between monster attacks or whatever.”

“Well, that may be true, Ms. Dash. But won’t Ponyville be more interesting if you’re there?”

Hm. Rainbow Dash considered that logic – at first glance it made sense. Anything without Rainbow Dash was likely to be far more boring than anything with Rainbow Dash. Maybe even the poor, boring ponies in Ponyville were getting restless without her! Heck, they probably didn’t even bother to mark the days on the calendar when she was gone.

“Maybe,” she finally conceded. “There’s some cool ponies we could hang out with, I guess.”

“Like Ms. Rarity?”

“I said ‘cool ponies,’ Nutmeg.”

* * *

The train ride to Ponyville was uneventful, as Rainbow Dash expected. She would have been surprised – and, indeed, delighted – if anything of consequence had occurred during the trip, but it was as boring as ever. She could have flown, and would have gotten there faster, but that hardly did Nutmeg any good. So instead she suffered in the passenger car with him, her face plastered to the window to count the clouds as they passed. About halfway through the trip, as the train passed through the foothills at the bottom of the mountains, a server came by with some tea.

It wasn’t very good tea, but drinking tea was better than doing nothing. She fiddled with the empty cup while Nutmeg sat beside her, flipping through the pages of some historical fiction novel with a finely sketched crown decorating the cover.

Damn, she should’ve brought a book.

* * *

The train pulled into the Ponyville station and deposited its passengers without fanfare. Rainbow Dash found herself standing on the wood platform, a few travel items stuffed in the saddlebags on either side of her barrel. Nutmeg had a suitcase with little wheels on the bottom, and he dragged it behind him with the aid of a telescoping handle gripped in his teeth.

“Huh. I thought there’d be, like, ponies waiting for us, or something,” Rainbow said. She gave the emptying platform another long stare, to make sure there wasn’t a welcoming party just now arriving, or perhaps perched in wait behind the newsstand, ready to ambush them as they passed.

Nope, just ponies getting off the train, and other ponies getting on. Near the head of the train, the conductor checked his watch, then stepped into the locomotive. With a blast from its steam whistle and a grumble from its boiler, the train began to edge its way south and west toward Appleloosa.

“Did you let anypony know you were coming?” Nutmeg asked.

“Eh, no. But I thought they might’ve wired ahead or something. Tell everypony I was onboard.”

“Ah.” Nutmeg cleared his throat. “Perhaps the telegraph was broken?”

That was probably it. Rainbow nodded. “Good point. Anyway, let’s drop these bags off, then we can go find my friends.”

Nutmeg followed as she trotted down the stairs into the town square, his suitcase clattering behind him on the cobblestones. “Where exactly are we staying?”

“My house, duh! Oh, man, you’ll love it. Like, I don’t mean to brag, but it’s a pretty snazzy house. Definitely the best in Ponyville, and this town has a castle!”

“Is that what that glare is?”

Rainbow followed his gaze. On the edge of the far side of the town, the afternoon sun had caught on the thousands of crystal panes and angles of Twilight’s castle, all polished to a mirror shine. The resulting reflections sometimes blinded ponies in the streets below, and there had been a few petitions to add drapes to the outside of the castle to cut down on all the sparkle. Rarity had enthusiastically volunteered to design the curtains, but then ponies started asking who would pay for it all, and Twilight said the crown as only responsible for the upkeep of castles, not concealing them – no matter how shiny they were – and then that bugbear attack ate up the rest of the town’s discretionary funds, and now it looked like it wouldn’t be until the new fiscal year before anything could be done.

Rainbow squinted and shaded her eyes with a hoof. “Yeah, it uh, it gets like that around noon or so. But it looks really cool in the mornings.”

“It’s very bright.”

“Yeah, sometimes stuff catches on fire around it, so we have to trim the grass real short.”

Fortunately, as they reached the square, the town’s taller buildings blocked out the sight of the castle, and they were able to blink away the fuzzy afterimage blobs dancing across their retinas. Rainbow resolved to get them each a pair of snazzy sunglasses as soon as possible.

“So, where is this house?” Nutmeg asked. He looked up, as though expecting to see it overhead.

Rainbow looked up too, though she really was expecting to see it. Sadly, the sky above Ponyville was completely empty of clouds, be they houses or otherwise. It was blue from horizon to horizon. Rainbow frowned at the sight.

“Uh, that’s a good question,” she said. “You know they drift, right? Dammit, I should’ve tied it down before I left. It’s probably, like, stuck in a tree somewhere.”

“Should we be concerned?”

“Nah, it’s... hey! Hey, Blossomforth!” Rainbow waved at a white pegasus mare emerging from a nearby store with a basket of candles held in her mouth. Blossomforth’s ears perked up at her name, and her face filled with a smile when she saw Rainbow beckoning her.

“Fainfow!” She set the basket down and tried again. “Rainbow! You’re back!” She gave Rainbow a quick hug, then turned to Nutmeg. Her eyes darted up and down his frame, and her smile took on a coy edge. “And... you brought a friend. Hello, Rainbow’s friend.”

“Hello!” He stuck out a hoof, which she tapped. “Nutmeg. Pleased to meet you… Blossomforth, wasn’t it?”

“Mhm.” She gave him another look, then grinned at Rainbow. “So, welcome home. Here for long?”

“Nah, just a few days, then it’s back to Canterlot. Hey, have you seen my house?”

“Your house?” Blossomforth blinked at her, then nodded as undestanding struck. “Oh, right. Yeah, it was blowing all over town, so finally Princess Twilight tied it to her castle. You know, you really should secure a cloud house before you leave for—”

“Yeah, yeah. Got it.” Rainbow waved a hoof. “I was in a hurry. Anyway, thanks, but we gotta go check on that.”

“Right.” Blossomforth rolled her eyes. “Anyway, good to see you again. And it was really nice to meet you, Nutmeg! I’ll see you at the party.”

Nutmeg waved as Blossomforth departed into the air, then turned to Dash as they trotted through the streets toward the castle. “Party?”

“Oh, yeah, if we’re gonna be here more than a day or two, there’s gonna be a party.”

“That seems a tad excessive.”

“That pretty much describes Pinkie Pie.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

“Don’t worry. You will.”

* * *

Twilight’s castle was exactly as Rainbow Dash remembered it – big, sparkly, all purples and indigoes and hard, sharp angles. It looked, she supposed, vaguely like a tree, if somepony had tried describing a tree to a blind sculptor who took out her aggression over being blind by bashing everything in range with a sledgehammer.

Some ponies said the castle was ‘garish’ or ‘an eyesore.’ They said the colors didn’t match the town’s rustic aesthetic and that, seriously, what kind of designer thought purple crystal was a good match for a purple princess, anyway? And why did it have to be made of crystal when there was a perfectly good marble quarry just a few miles away, and wasn’t white a better color for a castle if you think about it?

To those ponies Rainbow Dash said, “Rarity, no one cares. Besides, your house looks like you stole it from a circus.”

They didn’t talk much for a week after that. Their friendship always was the tensest among the six Elements.

They stopped a hundred meters shy of the castle gate, halfway up the road leading from town to palace. Rainbow’s cloud home drifted gently in the breeze, attached to the highest spire of the castle by a series of ropes that – given her familiarity with the topic after months on the Orithyia – seemed crude and amateurish to her. The whole affair hung over the castle like a party balloon strung around a foal’s ankle.

“Impressive,” Nutmeg said. “Are those doric columns?”

“Yeah. They’re pretty okay, I guess.” Rainbow frowned. “It should have a bunch of rainbow waterfalls, though. Twilight must’ve turned them off.”

“Maybe she was afraid your house was outshining the castle?”

“Hm.” Rainbow tilted her head. “Yeah, maybe. She doesn’t usually care about that kind of stuff, though. Some days I don’t think she even brushes her mane.”

Nutmeg was silent, but Rainbow couldn’t miss the pointed glance he gave to her own head of hair before looking at the castle. When she was fairly certain he wasn’t looking, she patted her mane down in a vain attempt to make up for her own lack of a comb.

They approached the main door, which was closed. Rainbow frowned at this and gave the solid wood a little push. It barely budged, and she leaned her shoulder against it with a grunt. Slowly, then faster as Nutmeg came to her aid, it swung open, and they slipped inside before it could close of its own weight. The echo as it slammed shut set the crystal beneath their hooves humming in sympathy.

“Not very welcoming,” Nutmeg grumbled. He was breathing as heavily as she.

“It’s usually open. There’s a public library in here and everything.” Rainbow trotted into the castle’s massive entryway. “Hey, Twilight! Twilight Sparkle!”

Her call reverberated through the crystal halls, vanishing into silence before returning like a ghost, distorted and haunting. Finally, it faded into true silence, and Rainbow found her mouth suddenly dry.

“Is it always this… empty?” Nutmeg whispered. He stepped up quietly beside her, and leaned so close their feathers brushed together.

“No… well, I mean, I guess. Like, whenever she goes out or something. But she’s kind of a homepony, you know? Like, where else would she be?”

“Well, I—”

A sudden thud caught their ears, as though a large object had fallen in the distance. Given that the sound came from the direction of the library, Rainbow suspected it was a book. Her ears perked up, and she leaned forward as the sound of hooves on crystal drew near.

Sure enough, out of the shadows emerged a familiar eggplant alicorn. In the instant Twilight saw them, her expression changed from tense worry to bright, overwhelming joy.

“Rainbow! You’re back!” Twilight crossed the distance in an instance, wrapping her legs around Rainbow’s chest in a firm hug. “Why didn’t you tell me you coming home?”

“Eh, it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Rainbow said. She eventually extricated herself from the hug. “Twilight, this is Nutmeg, the Orithyia’s captain. Nutmeg, I think you know the princess.”

“I do.” He sketched a tiny bow for her. “It’s an honor, Princess Sparkle.”

“Please, just Twilight.” She gave him a warm smile. “Oh, I feel like I know you already! Rarity told us quite a bit about your adventure in Fillydelphia.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t call it an adventure,” Nutmeg said. “More of an… excursion, though I was happy to help solve those ponies’ friendship problem.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t,” Rainbow said. “Never doing that again. Anyway, what’s with the door? And why’s the castle so quiet?”

“Oh, that, I—” Twilight stopped with a sudden clack of teeth, and she leaned away from them both. Her eyes narrowed, and a bright purple glow spilled out of her horn. It grew brighter and brighter, until it was all Rainbow could see, and she began to turn away and shout, and—

And just like that, it was gone. Rainbow blinked at the sudden darkness, and felt tears rolling down her cheeks. A few steps away, she heard Nutmeg stumble.

“What… What the hell, Twilight?” She scowled at the alicorn, who had the grace to at least appear abashed.

“Sorry, identity-checking spell. Obviously I couldn’t warn you about it because then you would realize I was suspicious.”

“Suspicious about what?” Nutmeg said. He shook his head and continued to blink.

Twilight leaned in. Her wings extended to hook them both by the shoulders and draw them forward, until their muzzles nearly touched in a three-way kiss. Rainbow suddenly realized she was blushing.

“Okay, listen,” Twilight whispered. “There’s, uh, a problem. I think we might have changelings in Ponyville.”

Ah. Changelings – her old nemesis. For the first time since seeing the Orithyia that morning, Rainbow Dash smiled.

Maybe she wouldn’t die of boredom here after all.

Service Call Log #4251

Author's Note

This chapter takes place shortly before To Canterlot.

Service Call Log #4251

“Good morning, thank you for calling Roebuck and Sears, Ponyville’s number one source for large magical appliances! My name is Pink Collar, but you can call me Pink. This call may be recorded for quality assurance. How can I help you today?”

“Hi Pink, my name is Twilight Sparkle. Uh, Princess Twilight Sparkle. I have a magical table that I think might be broken, and I saw in your ad that your company does repairs for magical appliances. Is there any way I could, uh, talk to a technician?”

“Sure thing, honey. I can transfer you to our service department. One moment please.”

[Soft music playing.]

“Service Department, this is Sleepy Leaf. How can I help you?”

“Hi Mister Leaf, I’m Twilight Sparkle. The mare who transferred my call said that you might be able to help with a magical table that’s been acting up.”

“I’m sure we can, ma’am. Did you purchase this table from our store?”

“Oh, uh, no. It came with the castle. You know the big crystal castle that grew out of the ground a few years ago? On the north side of town.”

“Okay, so a third-party vendor. Got it. Did it come with a service agreement or manufacturer’s warrantee?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so. I didn’t see any paperwork like that when I moved in.”

“That’s fine. So, what seems to be the problem with your table?”

“Well, it’s also a map. Like, uh… okay, this is kind of hard to explain. So the table glows sometimes, and a giant holographic map appears on it showing all of Equestria, and once a week or so pictures of my friends’ cutie marks appear on the map telling us that there’s a friendship problem, and we have to go on a quest to solve it. Do you, uh… have you worked on tables like that before?”

“Oh, yeah, those tables were real popular about twenty years ago or so. We sold one model that showed the weather, and you could get one that showed traffic congestion, that sort of thing. You could even set them to show special sales, rare books, anything you wanted. Nowadays everything’s electric, of course.”

“Wait, rare books? Do you still have.... No, focus, Twilight. So, you think you can fix this one?”

“We can try. How’s it acting up?”

“Well, like I said, once a week it shows little pictures of my friends’ cutie marks, but the past few weeks it seems to be stuck. There are six of us, but it keeps sending the same friend over and over out on quests. I thought it might just be a coincidence, but some of the quests it’s sending her on are pretty trivial things that we could’ve just written a letter to solve.”

“Okay. Have you tried turning the table off and turning it back on?”

“Yes, that was the first thing I did. But it’s still sending the same mare out on dubious quests.”

“Okay.” [Sound of keystrokes.] “Are you at the table now?”

“I am.”

“Can you look under the rim of the table and tell me if you see a manufacturer’s sticker with the make and model?”

“One moment.” [Rustling sounds.] “Okay, I think I found… oh, wow, we really need to dust better under here. Okay, uh, there’s a sticker with a bunch of Chineighese characters, and… Hwang-song? Is that a brand?”

“Yeah, they’re a popular discount manufacturer. Mostly do knock-offs of Crystal Empire brands, but the quality’s decent for the price.” [More keystrokes.] “Alright, you should see a number that starts with an ‘S’.”

“I do. S-45-23412.”

[More keystrokes.] “Got it, thank you. Yeah, we can service that model. Would you like to set up an appointment?”

“Yes, please. Do you have any times available this week?”

“We can do tomorrow, actually. I have a window open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.”

“Okay, can you come by around eight?”

“Oh, sorry, ma’am. I mean, we can come by anytime between eight and five, but we won’t know until thirty minutes before the appointment that we’re coming.”

“Wait, so I have to be here all day? I’m supposed to read to a bunch of elementary school foals tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yes ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. I can schedule something more precise, but it won’t be until next week.”

“Ugh. Okay, uh, how about next Tuesday?”

[Keystrokes.] “I have a window from 8 a.m. until noon next Tuesday.”

“Four hours? That’s still a long time. Are you sure you can’t, you know, maybe schedule something more precise? Because, you know, I’m a, uh… You know.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am?”

“Well, I’m a princess. I have a lot of things to do, so I was kind of hoping you could maybe help me out.”

“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t make exceptions to policy. Do you want to speak with my manager?”

“No, that’s…. Nevermind, that’s fine. Eight ‘til noon is fine. I’ll be here. Oh, or Spike will be here!”

“Is Spike an adult?”

“Uh.” [Brief pause.] “Sure, why not? Yeah, he’s an adult.”

“Okay, ma’am, I have an appointment for you from 8 a.m. until noon next Tuesday. What’s your address?”

“It’s the big crystal castle on the north side of town.”

“Do you have a street address?”

“What? It’s the only castle in town. You can see it from everywhere in Ponyville.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, our appointment software requires a street address.”

“Fine, hang on.” [Papers being shuffled.] “It’s, uh, 1600 White Ash Lane, Suite 3, Ponyville, Equestria.”

[Keystrokes.] “Okay, got it. We’ll give you a call at this number about thirty minutes before we show up. Will you be paying with cash or credit?”

“Do you take royal vouchers?”

“As long as they have a princess’s signature, yes.”

“I’m sure I can rustle that up. Thank you, Mister Leaf.”

“Thank you, ma’am. We’ll see you next week. Have a great day!”

[Call ends.]

A Scientific Inquiry

“Okay, listen,” Twilight whispered. “There’s, uh, a problem. I think we might have changelings in Ponyville.”

“You just said that,” Nutmeg said.

“Yeah, but Rainbow looked like she wasn’t paying attention.”

“What? I was too!” Rainbow protested. “I was so listening! In fact, I was already thinking of ways to beat them!”

“Oh?” Twilight tilted her head. “Any ideas?”

“Eh.” Rainbow shrugged. “Not yet.”

“Let’s back up a moment,” Nutmeg said. “Why do you think there are changelings in Ponyville? Have some ponies suddenly started acting out of character?”

“Oh, oh!” A sudden burst of clarity interrupted Rainbow’s thoughts. “Did you find eggs?”

Twilight made a face. “Eggs? Really? That was your first thought?”

“Well, yeah. There were eggs all over Chrysalis’s hive. Remember?”

“Okay, first off, those were pods, not eggs,” Twilight said. “You’ve seen Chrysalis, right? You saw how big those pods were? You really think they came out of her?”

Rainbow did indeed think about that. Then she immediately attempted to stop thinking about it without any success. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut. “Ugh, okay, pods. Did you find any pods, then?”

“No. I have something better than that. I have unimpeachable evidence, Rainbow, that…” Here she leaned forward again, her voice dropping to a whisper. “That somepony we know is a changeling!”

“And what’s that?” Nutmeg asked, his voice just as quiet.

“Uh.” Twilight frowned. “They’re a race of pony-like insects capable of transforming their outward appearance into a variety of—”

“I mean, what’s your evidence?”

“Oh! Right, sorry. This way.”

* * *

Twilight led them through the castle entryway, though the throne room, through the library, through the kitchens and private quarters, up long flights of stairs, through her bedroom to a second library, through that to a secluded, curtained-off study, and finally to a nondescript section of wall composed of the same pale lavender crystal as the rest of the castle. All the while Rainbow kept up a running commentary for Nutmeg, pointing out the magical map table, the root chandelier from Twilight’s old library tree, the special convection ovens in the kitchen that had never been used once in their three years of existence. She had fewer things to say about the private portions of the castle, having spent less time in them, but she made sure to note all the books as they passed. Nutmeg liked books; he would appreciate that.

Twilight’s horn flashed, and a series of loud clicks emanated from beyond the wall. A seam appeared, and large section of the crystal recessed with a hiss and flurry of smoke, revealing a dark hall beyond. Without hesitating for the smoke to clear, Twilight strode into the passage.

“I keep it in here,” she said. “Where I know nopony else can see it.”

They walked in darkness for far too long. Dash felt the crystal ceiling pressing down on her. She began to breath faster, and sweat prickled her coat. Beside her, Nutmeg’s heart began to beat faster. She could feel the vibrations in her wingtips.

Finally, none too soon, they reached the light. The passage opened into a small room loaded with – what else – books. Rainbow would have sighed if she weren’t so relieved to get out of the passage.

“Okay.” Twilight’s horn glowed, and a scroll tube floated up from the small writing desk perched in the back corner. She twisted open the end and tapped out the paper from within. “I got this letter from Celestia this morning. As soon as I read it I knew I had to—”

“Seriously? A letter?” Rainbow rolled her eyes. “That’s your evidence?”

“I knew I had to get to work immediately,” Twilight finished, with only the slightest narrowing of her eyes. She unfurled the scroll, cleared her throat, and read. “Dearest Twilight Sparkle, I hope this letter finds you well. I write to you today on a matter of grave import for yada, yada, okay, here we go. I have long suspected, and recently discovered incontrovertible evidence, that one of the Elements of Harmony is, in fact, a changeling!”

“Whoa,” Rainbow said. “Awesome!”

“What? That’s—” Twilight rolled the scroll back up and scowled at Rainbow. “How can you say that? One of our friends is a changeling!”

“May be a changeling,” Nutmeg said. “Celestia might be wrong.”

A silence followed. Twilight stared at him.

Princess arrested for murder! The headline flashed before Rainbow’s eyes, and she stepped between Twilight and Nutmeg before it could come to pass. “He didn’t mean that, Twilight.”

“Yes I—” Nutmeg began. A swift elbow to the ribs from Rainbow, followed by a slight shake of the head, cut him off. “Er, I mean, what other evidence do we have?”

Twilight stared at Nutmeg for a long moment, then nodded. “So far, just my changeling detection spell. Rainbow’s the only Element of Harmony I’ve used it on, so we just need to get the other four girls here, and then we can move onto the hard part.”

“Is casting the spell that hard?” Nutmeg asked.

“Huh? Oh, no, the spell’s super easy. It’s figuring out what to do with a changeling that’s the hard part.”

* * *

Hours later, as the late evening sun approached the horizon and Ponyville was filled with its warm golden glow, the assembled Elements of Harmony finally met at the castle. Rainbow and Nutmeg greeted the girls at the entryway.

Nearly three months had passed since she’d seen them, Rainbow realized as they waited. Well, all but Rarity and Twilight. She pondered that realization, turning it over in her mind like a pretty shell she’d found on the beach, considering its colors and swirls. She expected a tinge of melancholy there, of sadness and loss, all embedded in the simple joy of a reunion. A homecoming.

But those emotions were conspicuously absent. Or, the sadness was, at least. She was happy to see her friends again, and her heart beat faster at the thought of seeing Pinkie and Applejack and Fluttershy for the first time in a season. But already she was looking past that, to the Orithyia and plying the skies with Nutmeg, to adventures and icebergs yet to come.

So lost in these contemplations was Rainbow that she didn’t notice the girls had arrived until Pinkie Pie tackled her in a flying hug that left them both rolling on the crystal floor just inside the castle’s entrance. She fought back briefly, her mind seized by visions of pirates, but then the sound of Pinkie’s laughter and the cotton-candy scent of her mane and most of all the overwhelming, blinding pinkness of the mare broke through her momentary fugue, and she returned the hug with a giggle of her own.

“Dashie! You’re back!” Pinkie followed this with a hug that flexed Rainbow’s ribs. “Aaaaaahhhhh I missed you!”

“Missed you too,” Rainbow wheezed. “Please let me go.”

“Oop, sorry!” Pinkie hopped back onto her hooves, dragging Rainbow upright along with her. She set the pegasus down and patted her feathers back into position. Just as quick she sidled away, over to Nutmeg, who leaned back with a slight widening of his eyes. “Oh! Oh! Who’s your friennnd, Dashie?”

“I’m guessing this must be Nutmeg, right?” Applejack said. She gave him a frank up-and-down with her eyes, smiled, and stepped forward with her hoof out for a bump. “Heard a lot about you, sir. My cousin out in Appleloosa says your iceberg’s still dropping water on the town.”

“That’s what they hired me for,” Nutmeg said. He returned the hoof bump. “Rainbow tells me you know something about running an orchard.”

“Oh, I doubt she used those exact words.” Applejack grinned. “Nice of you to cover for her, though.”

“Hey, don’t, uh, impugn my good character,” Rainbow said, shimmying her way between them. Something about the way Applejack was looking at Nutmeg set off little alarms in the back of her brain. “There’s enough rumors out there about me as is.”

Applejack raised an eyebrow. “Impewn? You taking vocabulary lessons from Twilight, now?”

“Hey, I’m allowed to read.” Rainbow burnished her hoof on her chest fluff. “Oh, hey Fluttershy. Didn’t see you there.”

“Um, sorry.” Fluttershy stepped out from behind Applejack. “Pinkie looked very happy to see you again and I didn’t want to get in the way. Hello again, Rainbow. And hello, Mister Nutmeg.”

“Hello, miss,” Nutmeg said. “Just Nutmeg is fine, if I’m allowed to call you Fluttershy.”

“Oh, see?” Rarity entered the conversation here, nudging her way into the circle. “I told you he was so polite! Didn’t I say that, Fluttershy?”

“Um, you did. Among many other—”

“And as for you, sir!” Rarity said, directing her fire at Nutmeg. “How have you been? I feel like it’s been forever since we last met! And how did you get those nasty bruises on your legs there?”

“We had to clean up a—”

“We had to fight an iceberg!” Rainbow answered for him, since it seemed Nutmeg wasn’t giving their adventure the weight it deserved. “You girls should’ve seen us! We spent hours flying in a hailstorm, filled with chunks of ice the size of wagons all zipping around fast enough to take your head off! We almost died a dozen times each! It was awesome!”

“It was interesting,” Nutmeg allowed. “But we survived, as you can see.”

“Oh! You must tell us all about it later,” Rarity said. She sidled up to Nutmeg and slipped a foreleg over his shoulders. “You know, it’s said that when two ponies survive dangerous experiences together, it builds an intense bond! Why, my own parents met during the famous Fillydelphia blackout of ‘73! The power went out while they were riding on the train, and they spent almost an hour crowded together, squeezed against each other by the sweating, stinking masses of un-air conditioned public transportation riders! It was only natural after such an ordeal they found themselves inseparable! So, how are things with you?”

“Uh.” Nutmeg glanced around for help. “Fine…”

“Okay, enough of that.” Rainbow pushed her way between Nutmeg and Rarity, ignoring the latter’s squawk. “Twilight got a letter from Celestia that’s probably wrong and now she’s panicking. Everypony tracking that?”

There was a quiet chorus of mumbled agreement. Ponies nodded in instant understanding. It was, by Rainbow’s casual accounting, the fifth or sixth time such a thing had happened.

“So, whatever happens, just stay cool, okay? She’s already really high strung and we don’t want her blowing something up again. Questions? No? Okay, let’s go see her.”

With that, Rainbow led the four mares – and a somewhat confused Nutmeg – deeper into the castle.

* * *

“Girls, thank you for coming,” Twilight said.

They’d forgone the normal throne room for this, and were instead ensconced in Twilight’s bedroom. There wasn’t enough furniture for them all to have a seat, so Rarity and Twilight sat on the bed, Fluttershy curled up in front of the fire, while the others filled in what seats they could. Nutmeg, perhaps sensing his tenuous position there as both an outsider and the only stallion, remained standing near the door.

“Your message sounded really important,” Applejack said. She was perched, somewhat awkwardly, in the chair beside Twilight’s writing desk. “We came as quick as we could.”

“It was.” Twilight took a deep breath. “I received a letter from Celestia this morning. It… well, I’ll be blunt. Celestia says that one of us, one of the Elements of Harmony, is a changeling.”

A chorus of astonished murmurs followed. “Gasp!” Pinkie exclaimed. Rarity half-rose onto her hooves, then settled back down with an obvious exertion of will. Applejack’s eyes widened. Fluttershy merely tilted her head.

“I know, I was shocked too,” Twilight said. “I consider you all my friends, of course, and events over the past few months have taught me that what’s on the outside of a pony isn’t as important as what’s on the inside. Even if what’s inside you is a changeling, which I guess is pretty important… okay, this metaphor isn’t going where I wanted. Bottom line, I love you all, regardless of whether you’re a pony or a changeling or whatever.”

“Aw.” Rarity laid a hoof across Twilight. “Darling, that’s so sweet. And I think I speak for all of us when we say the same.”

“Thank you, Rarity.” Twilight smiled at her. “I say all this because I want you girls to know that there is no judgement here. I love you all! And if any of you, maybe, have had a big secret for the past several years and always wanted to reveal it, but never had the courage, well, this is the time! I promise that we will accept you and care for you and love you just as you are!”

There was a pause. The six mares exchanged thirty-something glances.

“Right now,” Twilight continued. “This is the perfect time. Any big reveals. I promise we’ll all hug afterward. Anything? Seriously? Okay, going once, twice, and… come on, last chance. Seriously, I promise absolutely nothing bad will happen and we’ll still be best friends afterward.”

More silence and glances. Twilight frowned.

“Okay, fine. Magic it is then. Now, we can do this one at a time, or all—”

“Hey,” Rainbow said. “You didn’t give me a chance to reveal myself! You just cast that stupid spell the moment we walked in the door.”

“I know, I’m sorry! I panicked!” Twilight ducked her head. “But I’ve had a chance to think about it since then, and realized this way was best. It’d be so much better for everypony if the changeling just revealed themselves. Really. Right now. C’mon, anypony?”

Applejack shrugged. “Sorry, sugar. What’s next?”

“Next is magic! Now, we can do this one at a time, or as a group.”

“Does it really make a difference?” Rarity asked.

“Well, it’s more dramatic if we do it one at a time,” Twilight said. “And I suppose—”

“Oh! Oh! Do the dramatic way!” Pinkie jumped onto her hooves and bounced. “That’s more exciting!”

“Well, uh… Okay, any objections?” Twilight looked around. “None heard. Now, uh… okay. Just… just have to start, then. Here we go. Here… here we go.”

They waited. On the bed, Twilight took a quick breath. Then another. Then she kept taking them until sweat appeared in her coat and her lips turned gray.

“Darling,” Rarity said. “You’re going to pass out if you keep doing that.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Twilight closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath, holding it in. “Okay. We should, uh, probably start with the most likely suspect. A pony who is, um, better than most at deception. Who… oh, how to say this. A pony who seems like they’re probably pretty good at manipulating the emotions of others. The pony that, if somepony said ‘Hey, did you know that so-and-so was a changeling all along?’ you’d probably just be, like, yeah, that makes sense. We should start with them. Uh, no offense to that pony.”

As she spoke, every eye turned to Rarity. The dressmaker noticed this after a few moments, and her expression darkened.

“Oh. Oh.” She drew her head up. “I see how it is. Why, nevermind the fact that Rarity has helped save Equestria on numerous occasions, or that she’s the Element of Generosity, she wears the most make-up so she’s probably the changeling!”

“Aw, come on, Rares,” Applejack said. “We all helped save Equestria. Twilight’s just saying… Well, we’ve all seen how you treat Spike.”

“What?! I treat him with the utmost courtesy! Why, I daresay there’s another pony who respects Spike more than—”

“Okay, enough,” Twilight said. “Rarity, look at me for a moment?”

“And why should I do that?” Rarity rounded on her. “I’ve half a mind to just get up and—”

A bright flash from Twilight’s horn cut off the rest of Rarity’s tirade. She froze, gawked, then blinked away tears. The others leaned forward, breath suspended in their chests, waiting.

Nothing happened. Rarity dabbed at her eyes.

“Huh,” Twilight finally said. “Well, uh… I knew it! Rarity’s not a changeling!”

“Oh, save your breath.” Rarity sniffed.

“Sorry, sorry.” Twilight wrung her hooves together. “So, um… who’s next?”

“Heck, guess I’ll go,” Applejack said. “I ain’t too worried.”

Twilight nodded. A bright light built in her horn, followed by a flash. Applejack flinched away, her eyes blinking rapidly, and then she chuckled.

“Ta da,” she said. “Still me.”

Twilight nodded, and her eyes shifted to the two remaining ponies. “Oh no… Pinkie, Fluttershy… if there’s anything you want to tell us now…”

Fluttershy remained motionless, a calm expression on her face. Pinkie bounced in place.

“Ooh, me! Do me next!” She raised a hoof. Every strand in her mane seemed to strain outward, expanding, ready to explode.

“Fine. Oh, I’m so sorry…” Twilight’s horn glowed again, then filled the room with a flash. When it cleared, Pinkie remained Pinkie.

“Aw,” Pinkie said. She looked down and seemed to deflate. “Oh, but that means! Fluttershy’s the winner!”

Every eye now turned to Fluttershy. Rarity gasped and held her hooves to her mouth. Twilight seemed stricken.

“Fluttershy,” she said. “Not you… why… why couldn’t you tell us?!”

“I think you’re about to be very disappointed, Twilight,” Fluttershy said.

“I am?” Twilight scrambled away. “Wait… you mean, I’m about to be disappointed in myself, for my prejudiced and unwarranted fears of changelings? I’m about to confront an irrational bias and understand how incomplete my grasp of friendship truly is?”

“Just cast the spell, Twilight.”

“Very well.” Twilight closed her eyes and choked back a sob. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

Another flash filled the room. Time seemed to stand still. Rainbow leaned forward, her wings flared and ready to fly.

Fluttershy remained in the center of the room. She blinked, but otherwise seemed unfazed by the brilliant light. All were silent.

Finally, Twilight spoke. “Huh.” Her horn glowed, and Celestia’s letter floated up before her. “Okay, grave import, shocking discovery, yada yada, aha, ‘one of the Elements of Harmony is, in fact, a changeling!’ She says it right there. Maybe I got the spell wrong?”

“Well,” Rarity paused and nibbled on her lip. “It occurs to me, darling, that you haven’t tested us all.”

Twilight shook her head. “No, I tested Rainbow Dash hours ago. It’s not her.”

“She means, you haven’t tested yourself,” Applejack said.

There was a pause. All eyes now turned to Twilight.

She snickered. “Oh, Applejack. That’s… that’s cute, in a way. Wow.”

“You tested all of us,” Fluttershy said. “Why not test yourself, too?”

“Okay, first off, I think I would know if I were a changeling,” Twilight said. Her earlier distress seemed forgotten, and a smile broke out on her muzzle. “I mean, seriously? Oh, and think about it. If I were a changeling, I’m the one doing the test! All I have to do is make a bright flash with my horn—” here she did so, momentarily blinding everypony present, “—and ta da! Look, I’m not a changeling! It’s amazing! Because none of you can tell the difference between the incredibly elaborate changeling detection spell I created and a simple light cantrip.”

“C’mon, Twi,” Rainbow said. “Just humor us.”

“Yeah,” Applejack said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Ugh, seriously?” Twilight looked around. Finding no dissent, she sighed. “Fine. I just want you all to know how illogical this is. But since you’re my friends, I’m willing to do it.”

Her horn glowed again, brighter this time, as though she were putting extra effort into the spell. She clenched her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, and a bright flash illuminated the room, stealing away all their vision.

“There,” Twilight said. “See? Not a changeling. Now, if we can all focus instead on what else we’re doing wrong, we can figure out who the real… the real… um…”

She trailed off there, for reasons that were immediately understandable to Rainbow Dash. For Twilight was rather distracted by the sight of her own leg, held before her face. It was dark, and glossy, and filled with a few large holes that seemed to serve no apparent structural purpose other than to confuse biologists. She tapped the glossy black leg against her chest, which was equally chitinous, then craned her head around to peer at the armored plates running down her back and the long, membranous wings emerging from her shoulders.

Finally, “Oh. Okay.”

Then Twilight fainted.

Author's Note

With apologies to Kits. (link)

Examined Wisdom

“Everypony seems to be taking this well,” Nutmeg said. His voice was pitched low, intended just for Rainbow Dash, who sat beside him against the wall of Twilight’s bedroom. “Everypony else, I mean.”

The else in this construction referred to Nutmeg, Rainbow herself, and the other four ponies who were not changelings. The changeling – Twilight Sparkle? Rainbow wasn’t sure any more – lay atop the bed, once again wearing an alicorn’s form. She was flanked by Rarity and Fluttershy, who pressed up against her sides and gently patted her mane while she hyperventilated into a brown paper bag.

“Yeah, well, we deal with weird stuff pretty often,” Rainbow said. “This is, like, seven out of ten. Maybe eight, tops.”

They fell into a companionable silence for a few minutes, broken by the constant crinkle of Twilight’s paper bag, her panicked gasps for air, and the quiet murmurs of support from Rarity and Fluttershy. Eventually Twilight’s breathing slowed, and she pushed the bag away from her muzzle.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m fine. I’m... oh no no no nono—”

“Breathe, darling,” Rarity said. “Inhale—good, just like that. And again. There, see? Now, speak slowly, alright?”

“Alright.” A faint sheen of sweat glistened on Twilight’s face, and her lips had faded to a pale gray. Still, her breathing sounded better, and her wings no longer trembled like leaves. “Obviously, there’s a mistake. A mistake with the spell.”

“Twilight, you know we love you, right?” Fluttershy said quietly. Her voice was slow and smooth, rising and falling like waves with each syllable. Hypnotic, almost. Dash had heard, once, that when speaking with animals, they understood your tone if not your words. Hearing Fluttershy speak now, Dash could believe it.

“Remember what you said just a few minutes ago?” Applejack asked. “Something about us accepting everypony as they are an’ caring for them? We ain’t judging you. Little… surprised, sure, but that’s all.”

“You’re still the same bookworm we’ve always loved!” Pinkie added. “I mean, I assume you are. This could always be one of those situations where Twilight Sparkle was replaced by a changeling like Princess Cadence was and now the real Twilight’s all tied up in the dungeon growing slowly weaker as each day passes without discovery. Oh, oh! Plot twist! What if you replaced the real Twilight so many years ago that you actually forgot you were a changeling and really believed you were a pony up until this moment?!”

Twilight grew progressively paler as Pinkie continued, her eyes widening and the tips of her ears wilting into her mane. She started to pant for breath again, and Rarity shoved the paper bag over her muzzle.

“Darling, calm down. Pinkie’s just… being Pinkie.” Rarity scowled at Pinkie for good measure. “None of us believe you’re a changeling infiltrator.”

“But you can’t know that!” Twilight protested. She shoved the bag away feebly. “You have to assume the worst! Everypony has to!”

“I don’t know much about changelings,” Nutmeg said. “But it occurs to me that your reasoning earlier is still valid. If you were a changeling infiltrator, why would you go through all the trouble of bringing us here and casting a real detection spell on yourself?”

Everypony pondered that. Even Twilight seemed taken aback for a moment. For the first time in minutes, her ears started to perk up.

“You’re right, why would I do that?” she said. “This is a pretty simple logic problem, after all. You don’t know if I know if I’m a changeling, right? But if I did know that I was a changeling, I wouldn’t expose myself like this, unless I wanted you to think that I didn’t know that I was a changeling. But what if I suspected that one of you suspected that I knew that you knew that I was a changeling? Then I might’ve exposed myself in this manner to make it seem like I didn’t know that I was a changeling and your suspicions, while correct, were nevertheless groundless because I wasn’t a malicious changeling.”

Oh, this was like chess! Rainbow gasped quietly at the realization. “But what if we suspected that you knew that we suspected that you suspected that we knew you were a changeling? Then exposing yourself like this is exactly what we would expect a changeling infiltrator to do!”

Twilight sat up straighter on the bed. “You’re right! Except I might have suspected that you suspected that I knew that you suspected that I suspected that you knew I was a changeling. In which case, exposing myself would allay those suspicions, wouldn’t it? Because you wouldn’t expect me to do it!”

“Oh my gosh!” Rainbow jumped up on her hooves. Her wings bounced at her side with excitement – the picture was becoming clear in her mind, like a chess board with a dozen pieces all lined up waiting to attack a single square. “If I expected you to suspect that I knew—”

“Okay, stop,” Rarity said. She held the tips of her hooves to her temples. “We’re getting off track here. Darling, we already told you it doesn’t matter, and frankly this little display proves that you’re still the same socially clueless didact we know and love. As far as I’m concerned, we can put this whole thing behind us, and just go on with our lives as nothing happened.”

“Yup. Like it never happened.” Applejack stood and stretched. “Nothing to it.”

“It’s silly to get worked up over,” Fluttershy said. “After all, Thorax and his changelings are so nice. Maybe you could turn all colorful like them, too?”

“I don’t think it needs to be a secret, but if that’s what everypony wants, there’s no better secret-keeper in Equestria than me!” Pinkie exclaimed. “I’m still checking the dungeon though. Just to be sure.”

“Well, if it will make you feel better, we can check the dungeon,” Twilight said. She stood and shook her wings out, then stepped down from the bed with only a slight wobble in her legs. “We just cleaned down there last week, so I’m not even embarrassed about all the clutter that would normally be—”

A quiet chime interrupted her from below, in the castle’s public areas. A moment later, they heard Spike’s voice carry up through the crystal halls: “I’ll get it!”

“Huh. Expecting company?” Applejack asked.

“No, it’s probably a delivery,” Twilight said. “The only ponies I’m expecting are you girls and… oh. Oh. Oh no.”

“Who, darling?”

“Oh!” Pinkie exclaimed. “It’s the cops!”

“Is it pirates?” Rainbow Dash frowned. “Because there was that one time you hired pirates to hunt me down and steal those books from me. Do you remember that? I remember that.”

“Okay, first off, those weren’t pirates,” Twilight said. “They were privateers, which are completely different. Second, they weren’t stealing anything from you; those books were civil property—”

“Wait, what’s this?” Pinkie asked. “You hired pirates without telling me?”

“Privateers, who legally recovered civil property from a debtor. And yes, before you ask, I would do it again, so please consider that carefully next time your books are about to go overdue. Anyway—”

The door opened, bringing Twilight to a stop. Spike popped his head in. “Hey, Twilight. Your brother’s here with Cadence. Oh, hey Rainbow. Welcome back!”

“Hey Spike.” She waved. “How you been?”

“Oh, you know. Same same. What’s wrong with Twilight?”

What was wrong with Twilight was that, at the moment the door opened, she had frozen like a rabbit cornered by a wolf. Her mouth was still open, waiting to complete her thoughts on privateers and overdue library books. Her eyes were wide, though they focused on the distant horizon and not on anything in the crowded bedroom. Her ears fell limp against her mane. One hoof remained raised, mid-gesture, as she segued from one never-ending point to one that would never arrive.

“Eh.” Rainbow shrugged. “She’s fine.”

“Twiley!” Shining Armor chose that moment to arrive. He bulled through the door, sweeping Spike up and depositing the little dragon on his back as he rushed over to his sister and wrapped her in a massive, enveloping hug that left only the tip of her mane visible above his muscled forelegs. Rainbow found her eyes lingering on those muscles longer than they should’ve, and she looked away with a flush.

“Oh, it’s been so long! Weeks!” He gave her another squeeze then set her down, using his hooves to straighten her tussled mane. “We got your letter and came as soon as Candy found a sitter for Flurry Heart.”

‘Candy’ followed a few steps behind. Cadence was looking slimmer than Dash remembered, apparently having made progress in burning off the excess fat from her pregnancy. She was part pegasus, Dash supposed, so she probably had a fast metabolism. The alicorn half-walked, half-floated over to her husband and nuzzled Twilight’s cheek.

“Oh, ah, hey! Ha ha,” Twilight’s mouth stretched out in a rictus of a smile. “Shiney! Cadence! You must’ve caught the early train from the Empire! Thank you so much for coming!”

“Anything for you, Twilight,” Cadence said. “And I see everypony is here! Whatever you were alluding to in your letter must be important indeed. And— I’m sorry, I just noticed your guest. Hello, sir.”

Their eyes turned to Nutmeg. Shining seemed curious. Cadence glanced between him and Rainbow Dash, and some odd look came over her features. She smiled warmly at him.

Best head that off now. Celestia only knew what sort of ideas Cadence could get in her head, especially around Rarity. “Hey Shining, Cadence. This is Nutmeg, Captain of the Orithyia and my business-partner-slash-friend. Nutmeg, this is Princess Mi Amore Cadenza and Prince-Consort Shining Armor. They’re, uh, kind of a big deal.”

“I never thought I’d be in the same room as one princess, let alone two.” Nutmeg dipped his head in a polite bow. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both. Rainbow Dash has told me how you helped her save the world on many occasions.”

“I admit I was surprised when Twilight said that the great Rainbow Dash had taken up as a crewmember for a merchant vessel,” Cadence said. She slid forward, her steps flowing like water in that manner only the most beautiful and confident of mares could master. Dash had tried to emulate it before, of course, but her legs were made for speed, not grace. “I trust she’s proven a valued mate?”

“Cadence!” Rainbow jerked back, mortified. Even Rarity wasn’t this blunt.

“Oh, I’m sorry, isn’t that the term?” She somehow contrived to look innocent. “Crewmate?”

“We try to keep the rank structure informal,” Nutmeg said, smooth as cream. Either he was as oblivious as most stallions, or just difficult to get a rise out of. “I think of her as my friend and partner.”

“Mhm.” Cadence eyed him for another long moment, then turned away with a grin that promised more later. “Anyway, Twilight, thank you for inviting us down. I needed an excuse to get away from the little monster. So what’s so important you needed both of us to jet down here?”

“Oh!” Twilight licked her lips. “Well, uh…”

“Nothing, it turns out,” Rarity said. She slipped a foreleg over Twilight’s shoulder and pulled her close. “We had a little puzzle from Celestia, but it turns out we solved it ourselves! I hope you weren’t too inconvenienced by rushing down here on our behalf.”

“Really?” Shining frowned. “The letter made it sound important.”

“Nope, nuthin’.”

“Um, it was… what they said.”

“I promised not to tell!”

“Girls, stop,” Twilight stepped in between them. “I know you mean well, but Shining is my brother and Cadence is like a sister to me. I… I have to be honest with them. That’s the first step to accepting what I am.”

She turned to her brother and took a deep breath. “Shiney, Cadence, I… whew… ah… okay this is hard to say. I recently found out something about myself. Something, uh, that might be hard to accept at first, and I was thinking of keeping it hidden. But the girls here reminded me that no matter who – or what – I am, there are ponies who love me, and I can confide in them. So, I need to tell you that—”

“Shh, shh…” Shining Armor stepped forward and wrapped his forelegs around her in a gentle hug. A moment later Cadence joined them, and the three sat together as one. “We know, Twilight. We already know.”

“You… you do?” Twilight blinked rapidly, and tears began to well up in her eyes. “But, you never said anything—”

“We never had to, Twilight.” Cadence nuzzled the top of Twilight’s mane. “This doesn’t change anything about who you are. In fact, I think it’s incredibly brave of you speak up like this.”

Nutmeg leaned in to whisper in Dash’s ear. “Should… should we be here for this? It seems very personal.”

“Yeah.” Dash shrugged a bit. “We kind of over-share a lot, though. Don’t ask why it just kinda started a few years ago.”

Back in the center of the room, Shining Armor was starting to cry. “I’m… I’m so proud of you, Twiley. You’ve always been the bravest pony I know. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you, and I will always love you for who you are.”

“We both will,” Cadence added. “And this? This is an opportunity, Twilight! There are so many mares just like you, who have the same feelings you do. And I know that out there, somewhere, you can find one who will love you!”

“Wait,” Twilight said. “What?”

“And, not to be crude, but speaking as a stallion I gotta add something here, okay?” Shining said. “Stallions think that is super-hot. I mean, I don’t because I’m your brother, but most of us? That’s a serious fantasy. So if you’re ever looking for, like, a third wheel, it’ll be easy to find one.”

“Whoa,” Rainbow whispered. “Really?”

Nutmeg tilted his hoof back and forth.

“Stop, stop.” Twilight squirmed out of her brother and Cadence’s grasp. “You think I’m sexually attracted to mares?”

“Well.” Cadence looked around the room. Her expression started to slip, shaded with an edge of doubt. “Aren’t you?”

“No!” She paused. “I mean, uh, that’s a complex question! Like, what does ‘attracted’ mean, exactly? That’s a—” She stopped so quickly her jaws clacked shut with an audible click. She squinted at Cadence and her brother, took a deep breath, and started over.

“That’s not important. That’s not why I wrote you, and it’s not what I wanted to tell you.” Twilight paused, swallowed, and looked around. When nopony spoke, she licked her lips before continuing. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but… I’m a changeling.”

A silence followed. Shining Armor and Cadence stared at her, their expressions blank. But just for a moment, Rainbow Dash saw their eyes dart toward each other. Before she had a chance to wonder what that portended, Shining broke the silence.

“Oh. That.”

Several more seconds passed while everyone digested those two words.

Twilight was the first to react. She spoke so quietly Dash had to lean in to hear her. “What do you mean, ‘that’.”

“Well, uh.” He looked at Cadence again. She shook her head minutely, and he plowed ahead alone. “We, uh, we kinda knew that, too.”

Twilight stared at him. She stared at him so intensely that Rainbow Dash, safely off to the side, felt uncomfortable by proxy. She half expected him to burst into flame any second. From the way his shoulders tensed and his coat sparkled with a sudden flop sweat, he did too.

Cadence slipped into the line of fire. “Twilight, I know you’re probably very confused right now—”

“Growing more so every minute, actually.”

“—but the most important thing to remember is that none of this changes who you are. You’re still the same mare you always were. Just, you know, a changeling.”

“Okay.” Twilight pressed her hooves against her temples, rubbing them in little circles. “Let’s start from the beginning. How did you know I was a changeling?”

“Uh, hello? I’m your older brother,” Shining said. “I was there when mom and dad brought your egg home from the hospital.”

Silence again. This time Applejack broke it.

“Yup, I’m out.” She stood, gave Twilight a brief hug, then walked to the door. “See ya for lunch t’morrow, sugar. Later ya’ll.”

“You knew?” Twilight fumed at her brother. “You’ve known my entire life and you never said anything?!”

“What was I supposed to do? Just one day randomly bring up the fact that my sister is a changeling? Do you know how awkward that would feel? You know I hate awkward situations!”

“Awkward situation?” Twilight was starting to twitch again. Rarity edged closer with the paper bag. “I just found an hour ago in front of all my best friends that I’m a changeling! You know what would’ve been less awkward than that? Learning it from my family!”

“Honestly? I thought you knew already,” Cadence said. “Look, this isn’t a big deal, Twilight. It doesn’t change who you are.”

“Okay, can we go back to the egg thing?” Pinkie said. “I’m having trouble getting past that.”

“It changes what I am!” Twilight shouted. Her wings started to twitch at her sides, and her hooves rose a few inches off the floor. “That’s even more important!”

“No it isn’t, Twiley.” Shining Armor stepped forward, a hoof outreached toward his sister. “Nothing will change the fact that you’re my sister and I love you.”

“Like, was it in a bassinet?” Pinkie asked. “Did it have one of those little paper bracelets the hospital puts on newborn foals ankles?”

“Hush, Pinkie.” Rarity stepped up and set a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder. “Can’t you see how serious this is? It’s no time for jokes.”

“No I really need to know—”

“I can’t believe you never told me!” Twilight shouted. Another round of tears began to well up in her eyes. “My own brother couldn’t be bothered to share the greatest secret of my own life with me! I… I… I think I need to be alone for a bit.”

With that she closed her eyes. Her horn glowed, and a blinding lavender flash stole away Rainbow Dash’s sight. She blinked away the afterimages, and when the room returned, Twilight was gone.

Shining Armor looked stricken, ready to cry himself. Cadence pulled him into a hug and whispered something inaudible into his ears. The other girls looked at the couple, at each other, and at the empty spot where Twilight had stood. Everypony seemed at a loss.

Finally, Rainbow Dash shook herself. She leaned against Nutmeg’s shoulder, a nice, cozy, confidential distance, and whispered. “I gotta be honest, I suspected it all along.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, she’s never showed any interest in stallions as long as I’ve known her.”

“Ah.” Nutmeg looked like he wanted to say something more, but he just shook his head. Finally, he continued: “Should we go after her?”

“She wants to be alone,” Rainbow Dash reasoned. “I think she’ll come back when she’s ready.”

Nutmeg nodded. “Fair enough. Should we go look after your house, then?”

“Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

Ponyville Reprise, part 1

“I like olives,” Rainbow Dash declared.

Nutmeg flipped back to the first page of the cafe’s menu, where the appetizers were listed beneath a series of allergy and trigger warnings. “You’re in luck. They have those here.”

It was their second day in Ponyville, and the afternoon after Twilight Sparkle’s revelatory experience with her family. She had reappeared some hours after vanishing and insisted that she was fine, that everything was fine, that she wasn’t peeved at all at her brother or her parents and no, she liked stallions just fine, thank you, she just happened to appreciate the beauty of the female form as well, and couldn’t they talk about something else like getting ready for their next friendship mission which the table was certain to send them on at any time?

There’d been more. Ponies cried. Confessions happened. It all seemed very cathartic. Rainbow Dash kind of tuned everything out when it was clear everypony was just talking about their feelings and there wasn’t going to be any more dramatic reveals or changeling fights. She could always ask Applejack for the details later. Probably Twilight would take up bead-making or some other culturally significant changeling ritual as a way of connecting with her newly discovered heritage.

They’d spent the night in Rainbow Dash’s cloud house, which was still in remarkably good shape for having been left derelict for a third of a year. The clouds had dried out around the edges, turning brittle and scratchy, and the rainbow fountains were all clogged with rainbow gunk that was going to take hours to clean out. But it still had four walls and a roof and its interior volume was magnitudes larger than the Orithyia’s, so they both had more space than they knew what to do with, but of course there was only one bed so they just ended up sharing that. All the other space just went to waste.

Rainbow Dash scanned the appetizers again. She’d seen the entry for the Olive Sampler Platter already, and the little picture next to it looked appealing enough. “I’ve never bought olives from a restaurant before. Or a store. Or anywhere.”

“Where do you get them?”

“My parents, mostly.” Dash shut the menu and slid it across the table. “When I was a foal we would always have jars of olives around the house. Little olives with pimentos in them for salads, or nice big antique olives for holidays and fancy get togethers. I would always eat so many of them, so many my parents would have to set aside a portion for me and a portion for everypony else. Even today, when I visit them in Cloudsdale, I steal all the olives out of their pantry. But I’ve never bought any of my own.”

“Why not?”

“Well, isn’t that kind of weird? A grown mare buying a jar of olives just so she can chow down on them? Eat them like popcorn? Who does that? That’s not what olives are for. You’re supposed to put them in salads or eat one or two along with the carrots and celery on the appetizer tray.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” he noted.

“And is that even healthy?” she plowed onward. “I mean, how much of an olive’s taste is the actual olive, and how much is just the vinegar and salt in the brine? Do I only think they’re delicious because I’m still a little foal on the inside who loves salty treats?”

“You may be overthinking this.”

“I mean, what would ponies think if they saw that? Oh, there goes Rainbow Dash again, eating olives. You know there’s a clause in our Wonderbolts contract that says we can’t do anything disreputable or ‘of a nature that would cause the public to question the values, morals or judgement of the team’? They made me memorize that part. What if word got back to Spitfire that I was some crazy olive-eating mare?”

“Aren’t the Wonderbolts famous drinkers? That seems worse than having a secret craving for olives, of all things.”

“Nah, drinking’s cool. Olives are weird.”

Their waiter chose that moment to arrive. She was a young unicorn mare, barely more than a filly, probably working her way through college or whatever it was young unicorns did. She smiled brightly at them both. “Hi! Are you two ready to order?”

“Um.” Dash scrambled for the menu again. “Uh, gimme the southwest daisy panini with the mango kale salad. And a sarsaparilla soda.”

“Okay. And you, sir?”

“The same, please. Except water instead of the soda. Oh, and can we get the olive sampler platter, too?”

“Of course. I’ll have that right out to you!”

Rainbow waited until the mare was a safe distance away, then groaned. “Ugh, you had to do that. Now it’s going to be weird. I shouldn’t have mentioned them.”

“Maybe I just wanted olives.”

“No, you got it because I was talking about them. Now ponies are going to see.”

“Ms. Dash, I promise you that nopony cares about your perfectly acceptable love of olives. Do you think the olive industry would even exist if ponies didn’t buy their products? The mere fact that the olive sampler platter exists on this menu is evidence that a great number of ponies enjoy olives on their own merits.”

Dash frowned. “Okay, but you have to eat some, too. I can’t eat all of them or it’ll look weird.”

“I promise to eat exactly half of them, unless there are an odd number of olives, in which case we can fight over the last one. How does that sound?”

She mulled that over. Ponies would still see, and they might talk, but at least Nutmeg would be eating them with her. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. “Okay, fine. But if anypony says anything, I’m outta here.”

“I’m sure they won’t.” Nutmeg glanced around the cafe and the half-dozen-or-so other ponies who’d gathered for an early lunch. “Nice little place. We really should add Ponyville to our list of regular stops.

“Eh, it’s okay.” Rainbow Dash hadn’t even realized the cafe opened before noon, when she normally woke up while living in Ponyville, but apparently most businesses opened their doors shortly after sunrise. Every day! It still boggled her mind, sometimes.

Already the sedentary familiarity of Ponyville was starting to seep back into her pores. On the Orithyia she woke at five bells every morning. It’d been torture for the first few days, almost cause for mutiny, but soon enough her body adjusted and she came to appreciate the sight of the rising sun. Now, back in Ponyville, surrounded by her old haunts, smelling the same scents, she could feel herself drifting back to the old ways. Sleeping in. Napping on clouds. Thinking about work maybe once or twice a day.

She shook herself. “How long are we staying here, anyway?”

He gave a little shrug with his wings. Now that she knew they were there, she could here the faint click-and-whine of the springs in his braces, hidden beneath the feathers. “The Orithyia’s engines should be fully remounted by the day after tomorrow. But I’m in no particular rush. There will always be air icebergs out there, waiting for us.”

“I know. It’s just…” Rainbow set her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her folded forelegs. “It’s kinda boring here, you know? Nothing ever happens.”

“Ms. Dash, just yesterday we discovered that your friend, the Princess of Friendship, is actually a changeling. Then another princess from a foreign land came, and they got into an argument, followed a few hours later by a tearful reconciliation. Also there’s this nice cafe.”

“That’s just Ponyville, Nutmeg. Trust me, it’s nothing special. By this afternoon we’ll be sleeping on clouds wishing something cool would happen.”

“It occurs to me that crewing an airship like the Orithyia isn’t always the most glamorous or exciting occupation. Certainly I’ve never had a princess on her decks.”

“Yeah, but what we’re doing with her is awesome! We’re, like, the fastest thing in the skies, and then when we capture an iceberg we’re hauling a literal mountain of ice across the entire country! How cool is that!” Rainbow Dash was warming to the subject. She stood, her forehooves on the table for balance. Her voice rose with her, gaining volume and intensity in time with her heartbeat. Just the memory of the Orithyia was enough to light a fire in her heart. “Or maybe we’re dodging ice-boulders around Typhoon, risking certain death to save the city! Oh, or fighting off pirates! Pirates, Nutmeg! Do you know how many mares get fight pirates?! Not enough! That’s what we could be doing right now!”

Just the thought had her breathing hard. She could feel the blood pulsing through her wings, every feather standing on end, ready to claw at the air and rocket her into the sky. The little cafe was too small to hold her – she was ready to explode out of it, to retake the heavens and beat them to her will.

Every patron in the cafe was staring at her. She knew most of them – there was Rosebud and Vanilla Wishes and Peppy Pepper – and she welcomed the attention. They all knew her, knew how awesome she was. This was probably as close as most of them would ever come to true greatness, sitting a few tables away in a little cafe while Rainbow Dash, the mare who shook the world, made a brief stop to bring a little bit of light and color and awesomeness to their ordinary day—

“Here’s your olives!” their waiter broke into Dash’s reverie. “I’ll have your sandwiches right out.”

“Aw, jeez, not so loud,” Dash mumbled. She sank back in her seat, ducking her head. “They’re, uh, for him. He ordered them, not me.” She told the mares at the next table over.

“Indeed I did,” Nutmeg said. He peered at the tray, which was divided into nearly a dozen little depressions, each filled with a few olives each of different types. He finally selected a large green specimen, glistening with oil and stuffed with some sort of cheese. He popped it in his mouth and hummed quietly. “Ooh, that’s good. You should try one.”

“Eh.” She glanced around to see if anypony was watching, then leaned forward to pick up one of the same olives with her lips. It was coated with a fine sheen of sunflower oil, dusted with pepper, and the scent of the blue cheese stuffing invaded her nose. The oil was so light, so delicate that its taste was mostly imagination. Her tongue touched the olive’s taut skin, and before she knew what happened she had chewed it down and swallowed it gone. A feral desire seized her, demanding that she lunge forward and devour the rest before Nutmeg could steal them away. These were her olives, dammit, and—

She resisted the urge, squeezing it back down into her heart. “It’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

She shrugged. “Decent. I liked the cheese.”

“Mhm.” Nutmeg went for a darker olive next, a dusky purple kalamata served raw. He worked it in his mouth, then discretely spit the pit onto a little plate.

Wuss. Dash grabbed two of the kalamatas and chomped them down. The hard, stony pits surrendered to her molars, bursting with a hard, bitter, beautiful flavor that flooded her mouth like lava. She hissed in a breath of air between her teeth.

“Now that’s better.” She blew out a breath.

“So you’d rather not remain here for a few more days? It’s no problem if you do. I know your friends mean a lot to you.”

“They do. And it’s nice to see them again.” Dash surveyed the olive platter and finally selected one she’d never seen before, a green cerignola somehow stuffed with an entire almond. The pointed tip of the nut stuck out from the olive like a tortoise’s head. She marveled at it, then snapped it down with a merciless chomp. “But, it’s like… I dunno. They can come see me. No need for me to come back here.”

“It’s your home, though.”

“So? Where’s your home?”

“The Orithyia, of course. I guess I’m like a snail, always carrying my home with me.”

Dash snickered at the image. The Orithyia had as much in common with a snail as she did. She stole another few olives from the plate – a plump castelvetrano basted with fennel, a thyme and bay leave dusted liguria, and a meaty gordal stuffed with capers – and as she was devouring the last of them the waiter returned with their sandwiches.

Did they make olive sandwiches? They should. Pinkie would know. Pinkie knew all about cooking, even if she was a baker by trade. And she could trust Pinkie – Pinkie wouldn’t care about her weird addiction to olives. Heck, Pinkie would probably want to bake an olive-pie for her, a thought that twisted Dash’s muzzle.

“Is your sandwich alright?” Nutmeg asked.

“Er, yeah. Sorry, was thinking of something else for a moment.” She nibbled at her daisy panini and gave a little nod. Satisfactory.

They ate in silence. One thing Dash did not miss about the Orithyia was the quality of food. Almost all canned or preserved or dried. She liked oatmeal, and Nutmeg kept a sufficient quantity of honey and maple sugar and molasses and dried fruits onboard to add variety to their porridge, but at a certain point oatmeal was oatmeal was oatmeal, and the body longed for some variety. Fortunately, their stops were rarely more than a few days apart, and iceberg delivery was a leisurely enough trade that they could afford to detour to settlements for meals at night.

But to have food like this, whenever she wanted? Every single day? It seemed so privileged, so spoiled, that she had to put the sandwich down and stare at it.

Nutmeg noticed. He raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry. Just… thinking some more.” She was doing that a lot lately. Too much. Less thinking, more flying.

She finished the rest of the meal without incident or further introspection.

Ponyville Reprise, part 2

The Friendship Castle was mostly empty when they returned after lunch. Starlight Glimmer’s windows were open, with the curtains billowing out in the wind, so presumably Ponyville’s resident sorceress was somewhere around. Dash pushed open the doors with her shoulder and led the way in.

Twilight was in the library, nestled into a cushion near the check-out counter. A pool of sunlight surrounded her, which momentarily threw Dash’s finely honed sense of orientation for a loop – at that time of day, at that latitude, in a room with those windows, the sunlight should’ve been shining on the walls, not the floor. It was like waking up and finding the clouds upside-down.

The princess looked up and smiled as they approached. Her face was still drawn, and her eyes were red as if she’d been crying recently. But the smile was genuine, if small. Spike sat by her side, apparently trapped there by her wing. “Hello Dash, Mister Nutmeg. Heading back already?”

“Not yet.” Dash stared at each of the windows in turn, trying to find the one that was wrong. “How are you doing that?”

Twilight tilted her head. “Doing what?”

“The sunlight,” Nutmeg said. “It’s… as a pegasus, it’s odd to see.”

“Oh.” Twilight closed her eyes for a moment, and the pool of sunlight fled across the floor and up the wall like a swift, bright centipede. “Localized refraction spell. I like reading in the sunlight, but the sun is always moving. So I made a spell that continuously bends the light coming in through the windows so it shines on my reading spot. That way I never have to move.”

Unicorns. They were all a little crazy. Rainbow stared at the sunlight on the walls as if it was about to pounce on her. “Cool. Hey, uh, so… how are you? I mean, how are you doing?”

Twilight smiled again. “I’m doing better. Everypony’s been so kind and understanding. Shining and I… we talked for awhile last night, about why our parents never told me about my… heritage. I’m probably still in shock a little bit, but I’m definitely better. Spike’s helping me a lot.” She squeezed Spike closer to her side with her wing and nuzzled the top of his head.

“I can’t move,” Spike said.

“Hush.” She licked his spines, like mothers did to straighten their foals’ manes. “You’re comfortable to snuggle.”

“We’re not bothering you, are we?” Nutmeg asked.

“No. I imagine I’ll be out of sorts for a few days. It’s good to have friends around.”

“Cool,” Dash said. “Hey, you mind if we look at some of your books?”

“It’s a library, Rainbow. You can look all you like.” So saying, Twilight stretched and stood up. Spike took the opportunity to make a break for it, scampering across the crystal floors for the exit.

“Thanks.” Dash wandered toward the stacks, then realized that she had no idea what books were where. Unlike the bookstores she’d been to, the library had some sort of academic cataloguing system with letters and numbers and decimal points. She furrowed her brow, then turned back. “Uh, little help?”

Twilight walked up beside her. For the first time, Dash noticed just how tall the princess had gotten – it used to be they could look each other straight in the eyes, but now Dash had to tilt her head back ever-so-slightly. “What are you looking for?”

“Anything on chess.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I need to study so I can beat Nutmeg.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow, then glanced back at the stallion. He was perusing some other shelf filled with large, hard-bound books.

“He plays chess? You play chess?”

“Yeah, but he’s, like, super good. I need all the help I can get to beat him.”

“Hm.” Twilight’s ears flicked. “If he’s a ranked player, you’ll need to learn openings and gambits. There’s hundreds of them, but just learning a few dozen will help hone your skill and give you the edge over most beginners.”

“That sounds like studying.”

Now Twilight’s smile was real. “It is.”

Horseapples. She’d studied before, though, for weather and flight tests. She could study for chess too. Dash took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and nodded. “Let’s do it.”

Twilight led them down the files. Her wings reached out, seemingly of their own accord, to brush the tips of her pinions lightly against the ordered rows of spines like lovers as they passed. She walked without pause, without referencing the obtuse signs on the shelves or bothering to read the titles. She led them down the obscure rows unerringly until they reached a spot near the library’s south wall, where an open window let in the scent of pollen and birdsong. Twilight paused, her horn glowed, and a slender tome floated out of the shelves to hover before Dash.

“This is one I used as a filly,” Twilight said. “It contains 47 openings and gambits, each—”

“What’s a gambit?”

“It’s a…” Twilight paused and tilted her head. Clearly the question had thrown her, as if somepony had asked Rainbow Dash to define the air or wind. “It’s an offer, of sorts. A type of move where one player offers a piece to the other, sacrificing that piece for a better position on the board. Do you understand how positions work?”

“Eh, a bit.”

Twilight smiled. “Well, gambits might be a bit advanced at this point. Just worry about the openings for now.”

That sounded patronizing. Familiar, comfortable patronization. Something ponies loved to do to her. She frowned. “I know how to play.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t. But we all have to start from a base of no knowledge and work our way up. It took years before I felt comfortable playing the old stallions in the park in Canterlot.”

Huh. There were old stallions who played in parks in Canterlot? Dash filed that away for later. “I’ll play you. I’ll play you right now!”

So it was that they found their way back to the center of the library, settling down in Twilight’s weird sunlight pool atop the starburst mosaic pattern in the crystal floor. Twilight dug out a chess set from somewhere in the foals’ gameroom corner of the library. The pieces were plastic and the board a flimsy cardboard thing that folded in half for easy storage. Twilight mumbled something about having a nicer set upstairs, almost as if she were ashamed of making her guest use such a rude set, but Dash had none of it. Swiftly she set out the pieces, taking black for herself in a fit of undeserved confidence, and spinning the board toward Twilight.

“Your move,” she said.

“Nutmeg taught you to play?” Twilight asked. She carefully lifted her king’s pawn with her hoof and set it forward to squares.

“Yeah. He’s pretty good.” Dash matched Twilight’s opening with her king’s pawn, putting it head-to-head with Twilights. The two little plastic earth ponies stared each other down.

“Mhm.” Twilight reached out with her hoof and pushed her queen’s pawn two squares forward, forming a rank with her king’s pawn.

Dash matched the move again. The board was still in symmetry. In one sense the game had not even begun yet, all the pieces perfectly in balance. She could see the board from that perspective easily now. But from another perspective, one she was dimly aware of, the match had already settled down a certain path. Those four pawns, those four weak, insignificant pieces, had already shaped the game to come. She could sense this, like shapes in fog, or clouds at night. She knew it was there but she lacked the vision to understand it yet. This knowledge enticed her and frustrated her.

Twilight must’ve noticed something odd. She stared at Dash in silence, then carefully lifted her king’s knight up, moving it in position to attack.

“You keep using your hoof to move pieces,” Dash said. She mirrored Twilight’s move with her own king’s knight. The board’s symmetry shifted from vertical to radial.

“It’s considered respectful of your opponent,” Twilight said. She slid her king’s bishop out across the board, the first piece to cross into enemy territory. “And also consistent with the rules. Once you touch a piece you’re supposed to move that piece.”

“Nutmeg said that rule’s just for tournaments.”

Twilight smiled. “You’d be surprised how seriously some ponies take chess.”

The game played out quickly after that. Dash attempted to set up a few forks and pins, but Twilight seemed preternaturally aware of every piece on the board and their freedoms. The positions Dash sacrificed trying to set up clever moves slowly caught up with her, and Twilight picked her ranks apart, stealing pawn after pawn without reprisal. And soon enough Dash was caught in a trap of her own making, leaving a rook open to capture when she focused too much on maneuvering Twilight’s queen into a trap. After that, the game fell apart, and Dash soon resigned.

“That was very good,” Twilight said. “You have a good eye for the board, setting up moves with payoffs several moves in the future. But you can’t just focus on capturing pieces. You have to control the board. At the end of the game it doesn’t matter how many of your opponent’s pieces you have – you have to checkmate their king.”

“I know.” Dash frowned at the board. “Pieces are easy to understand, though. They’re, like, right there. You can see them. How do you see ‘control of the board’?”

Twilight shrugged. “Lots of practice. That book will help you, too. It’s a sense you have to develop yourself, but the gambits and openings are like a path through the woods. Another game?”

Dash shook her head. She was already eager to dig into that little volume, to ream out its secrets and devour them. “Nah. You should play Nutmeg, though.”

“Oh? Think he’d mind a match?” Twilight peered over her shoulder at the stallion, who was sitting on a cushion with a paperback open before him.

“He’d love it. Don’t tell him I said so, but he thinks being around a princess is pretty neat.”

Twilight smiled. Her ears flapped like semaphore flags. “Well, then. Mister Nutmeg! Care for a match?”

Het set his book down on the return cart, stood, and stretched. “I was hoping you’d ask, princess.”

The board was reset, and Twilight did something odd. She picked up a white pawn and a black pawn, one in each hoof, and hid them behind her back for a moment. Then she held them out again, curled up, concealing the pieces within. Nutmeg tapped her right hoof hoof without hesitation, revealing the black pawn.

He noticed the question brewing on her lips. “A convenient, informal way to determine who gets what color, Miss Dash. Tournaments have stricter rules, but we’re playing for fun.”

Fun? Ha! Well, it was fun, Dash supposed. But she wasn’t watching for fun. She was watching to win! She settled down by Nutmeg’s side and whispered in his ear. “You gotta beat her.”

He nudged her with his wing and whispered back. “A friendly game.”

“So? You’re allowed to beat friends. I do it all the time!”

“Well, I’m not as competitive as you.”

Twilight watched their whisperfest from across the board. Something about it made her smile, and she cleared her throat. When their attention was back, she pushed her king’s pawn forward two spaces.

The first few moves proceeded about as Dash expected, with each player maneuvering into position and opening lines of freedom for their pieces. It wasn’t until the third move in that Twilight made a mistake.

She moved a pawn up with no cover. It was unprotected, just waiting for Nutmeg to take it with his pawn. None of her pieces could defend it; none of her pieces were within striking distance of defending it. She might as well have just picked it up off the board and given it to him.

He saw it, of course. His eyes fixed on it, then skipped around the rest of the board. Finally, he selected his pawn… and moved it forward, ignoring hers.

“Uhh…” Rainbow fidgeted. Her heart beat like a crazed dynamo, spinning and spinning, wanting to explode. She had to fight to keep her hooves still, not to reach out and pull Nutmeg’s pawn back and force him to make the right move. Her tail twitched like a flag in a hurricane.

He leaned over to her. “It’s a trap. She would lose the pawn, but it opens up more space for her to move and congests my pawns. It’s a common gambit. I chose not to accept it.”

Oh. Ooh. That’s what Twilight meant. Rainbow leaned back and studied the board anew. She imagined what it would look like if Nutmeg had taken the pawn, and for a moment in her mind she saw, dimly as like a lantern through fog, the shapes and paths and avenues it would have opened. The areas of control and areas of denial. She was so lost in the vision that she missed the next few moves entirely.

“Where did you learn to play?” Nutmeg asked. It shook Dash from her reverie.

“My parents got me a set as a filly.” Twilight considered the board for a moment, then moved her king out from behind its protective rank of pawns and into the field of play. A bold move, or a foolish one. A sign that the mid-game had begun. “That was back before I’d manifested any real magical potential. I think they wanted to encourage other gifts. And you?”

“When I was a foal, before I got my mark, my father worked in the airship yards in Cloudsdale. I would spend time with him, tinkering and learning, but some days the job required more skill or strength than had, so I would play in the parks. In Cloudsdale there are stallions – and mares too, though not as many – who sit in the shade beneath the ash trees and play all day long. One day, one of them saw me watching, and he let me sit with him while he played. And I’ve been trying to learn ever since.”

Twilight chuckled. “I’d say you’ve learned to play by now.”

“Only just.”

The board grew emptier with each move. Pieces fell to the wayside, captured or traded or sacrificed, until a few remained of each color. Dash could barely keep track of how the board shifted.

“There is a park in Canterlot where old stallions play,” Twilight said. She moved a pawn – the last one on the board – forward one square. The weakest piece of them all, yet every other piece on the board seemed to focus on it. Its fate would decide the game. “Perhaps every city has such a park.”

“The Mirror Lake Plaza, on Emerald Way?” Nutmeg moved his rook into the pawn’s file. Normally one of the strongest pieces, the rook somehow seemed weak there. It was not the fulcrum. It was secondary.

“You know it?” Twilight looked up from the board and at him. “Well, you must know many cities. Always travelling.” She moved the pawn forward again.

“I suppose I do. But I know Canterlot very well. Before I bought the Orithyia, I lived there for many years, working my way up through the airship yards. As a scraper then a wainwright, then a rope-maker, then a sail master and envelope tender. Finally they let me work the engines, and I made them sing. Sometimes… I think I might’ve been happy there, staying in Canterlot, working the yards. Touching all the engines in all the airships that passed through her docks. But then I think of the Orithyia and all she’s gotten me, and I decide I’ve made the right choice.”

A small smile pinched the corner of Twilight’s mouth as he spoke. “Sometimes, I think back to when I was just a librarian, before these wings and that silly crown and this gaudy castle. Just Twilight Sparkle, unicorn mare, small-town librarian. Sometimes runs errands for Celestia. Has friends. I think I could’ve been happy with that. Before destiny stuck her muzzle in my business.”

“Destiny’s a bitch, isn’t she?”

Dash nearly choked. It was the first time she’d ever heard him mutter a crude word. In front of Twilight Sparkle, no less! “Nutmeg!”

“Apologies, Miss Dash. Something about reminiscing makes me talk like a dockworker again.”

“Well.” She settled her wings. “You should do it more often.”

Twilight grinned. It was the first truly amused expression Dash had seen on her face since the changeling business. “Far be it from me to condone such crass language, but I agree. Anyway, in Canterlot, did you know a stallion named Copper Kettle? He ruled the park like a king. Played one chess game a day, and everypony else would set up informal tournaments to see who got to challenge him. He never lost a match, as far as I know. Drew a few, but never lost.”

“He did lose a few,” Nutmeg said. His voice lost its laughing edge, turning soft. “Not often, and not that I ever saw. But nopony wins every game. He passed away a few years back.”

The sudden turn hit Dash like a punch in the gut. Her head drew back, ears tilting away.

Twilight didn’t respond for a bit. She studied the board, then eventually moved her pawn forward again. It was nearly touching the rook now. “You knew him?”

“He was too old to be a real friend, but yes.” Nutmeg moved his king into position to attack the pawn. “I was fortunate enough to play him a few times.”

“Ah.” Twilight studied the board for a time, then shook her head. “I see no way to win this match. Draw?”

“Accepted.” He held out his hoof, and she tapped it with hers. “Another?”

“Not today, I think.” Twilight looked up at the walls, where the marching sunlight had proceeded around them as the sun moved toward late afternoon. “I’m sorry for being such a poor host, but the past few days have been tiring.”

“Yeah?” Rainbow Dash stood, moved around until she sat by Twilight side, and stretched a wing over her. “You okay?”

Twilight pushed her muzzle under Rainbow’s chin and nuzzled her neck. “I will be. I have good friends to help me.”

Oh. Huh. Suddenly all Dash’s plans seemed quaint and selfish. “Uh, well…”

“I know.” Twilight sighed. “You’re leaving. I don’t begrudge you that. This… I feel a lot better now, Rainbow Dash. Thanks to you two. You’ve done more than enough.”

She swallowed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her head tilted, and Dash could tell she was looking at Nutmeg. “You two take care of each other, alright?”

“An airship crew always looks out for its own,” Nutmeg said. “Especially a crew of two.”

“Good to hear,” Twilight said. She tilted her muzzle up, pressing it against Dash’s ear to whisper. “And a good catch, too.”

Ugh. Dash felt her face heat with a sudden flush. It wasn’t like that. Why did everypony think it was like that? She mumbled something and pulled away before Twilight could embarrass her any more. The princess grinned as she retreated.

At least she had a new book, now. She'd have to mail it back before it was due, though – no sense in tempting pirates twice.

They had a few more stops in Ponyville before departing, but they made it to the train before the onset of night.

Secret Agent Mare

It was odd standing on the Orithyia’s deck while she was in dock. Not just moored to a mast by a rope, which they did all the time; they were actually docked in Canterlot, their hull resting on the felt-padded beams of the airshipyards. The normal motions of the hull as it swam in the air, bobbing in time with the wind, dancing with the thermals, they were all gone. The deck was as still as a stone.

Rainbow Dash didn’t like it. She frowned at the deck like it had offended her. She tried stomping with her hooves, but she was a pegasus mare and pegasus mares were the lightest of all ponies, and not well-equipped for stomping. The wood made a hollow thumping sound but nothing more.

“Everything alright, Miss Dash?” Nutmeg trotted up beside her. He looked down at the deck beneath her hooves. “No dry rot, is there? I just had the planks treated last year.”

“It feels weird. Like it’s asleep, you know?” Rainbow peered up at the airship’s gas envelope. It hung in limp drapings, empty of the precious hydrogen that carried them aloft. Until they refilled it, the Orithyia would not truly live. “Are they done yet or what?”

“Almost,” Nutmeg said. “We don’t want them to rush. Calibrating gem-fired engines is a complex and time-consuming blah that requires years of blah to blah blah blah unless you want blah or blah to blah. And blah if blah blah blah… Miss Dash, are you even listening?”

“Huh?” Rainbow turned. She’d been peering over the railing at the city below. It was weird (again!) to look down without actually being flying herself. For a moment she thought she could understand why some ground ponies were afraid of heights; that the endless euphoria she experienced when flying were due entirely to the control she had. And if that were stripped away, if a pony saw heights without control, well, they might be a bit scared.

No, that was stupid. Ponies who were afraid of heights were stupid. “Yeah, I’m listening. So, are the engines done yet or what?”

He sighed. “Almost. Can you start inflating the envelope? Only to half-buoyancy for now.”

Finally, an actual task! She snapped to attention and saluted with a wing. “Aye, captain!”

Filling the balloon was easier than it sounded. There was a valve near the rear of the envelope. She connected it with a hose to the pressurized hydrogen tanks on the the dock and opened it slowly. You had to be careful with this part – releasing gas from a pressurized tank caused it to expand dramatically, which also caused it to cool a great amount. It could cool so much that the hose could freeze and ice start to form on the metal of the valve. And if the metal cooled too much it could shrink, and that could cause problems with the valve fittings, and then hydrogen might go everywhere and that was never a good day. So she slowly bled the hydrogen into the envelope, until over the course of an hour it slowly regained its balloon-like shape, though wrinkled and sagging and only light enough to lift its own weight, rather than the entire ship.

She was so engrossed in the task that she jumped in surprise when the engines started. First the starboard, then the port engines rumbled to life. The deck vibrated beneath her hooves as their internal workings got up to speed and the oil in their gears warmed. The low uncertain rumble turned into a deep, steady hum that echoed in her hollow bones. The Orithyia came back to life.

Her cheeks hurt. She realized she was grinning like an idiot. She tried to stop, but it was impossible. So instead she lay down on the deck, pressing her ribcage against the wood, letting the ship’s vibrations into her heart. She rubbed her muzzle on the aft halyard rig and didn’t even mind the scratches it left.

“Never gets old, does it?” Rainbow lifted her head to see Nutmeg smiling at her from the ship’s wheel. “Every time they start the engines.”

She stood and stretched. Normally letting anypony catch her in such a silly display would be grounds for mortification and sudden, panicked escape into the sky. But this was Nutmeg. They’d lived together in tight quarters for far too long to feel something as silly as embarrassment around each other.

“Envelope’s about half full.” She knocked a bit off ice from the valve. “Orders?”

“The engines are ready.” He motioned with his nose at the engineer ponies packing up their tools and heading to the ladders. “She’s ready for a test run. Fill her up all the way, if you please.”

Yes! Rainbow did please! They were about to go off again. A heady, giddy glee seized her. “Right away!”

Soon the mooring lines were cast aside, and the Orithyia floated free of her bonds. Nutmeg took the wheel and backed her away from the docks. It was on about evening by now, and the lights of the city were starting to shine. Canterlot glowed like a million jewels beneath them. The shipyards were flooded as always, the brightest part of the cityscape, but as they drifted further away the full extent of the mountainside castle became apparent. Rainbow peered over the port gunwale as the ground drifted further away.

It was beautiful, in its own way. Rainbow was never one for paintings or landscapes, but even she could appreciate the colorful, dazzling mosaic below. Strobing warning lights atop the highest towers sparkled like grounded stars. The streets were rivers of embers between dark expanses of parks and lakes.

A purple flash caught her eye. Her eyes darted toward it reflexively, but it was already gone. Some unicorn magic, no doubt. The city was filthy with the stuff. She shrugged and pushed away from the rail to join Nutmeg at the wheel.

“How’s it feel?” she asked.

“Smooth as cream,” he said. “Ready for full power?”

Rainbow darted to the ship’s prow. Ahead of them the sky was empty for days. “All clear!”

He didn’t answer. Or rather, he didn’t speak; his answer was the ship’s throttle, pushed forward to maximum. The engines roared, shaking the decks. The wind began to slice at them. The ropes whistled through the air. And the Orithyia was once again the fastest thing in the skies.

* * *

Rainbow dreamed her head was on sideways. She kept running into walls. She couldn’t walk straight, nevermind fly. She kept going in circles, weighed down by the fact that the world was spun 180 degrees off true. And because it was a dream, it seemed like the realest thing in the world. She landed on a cloud and clung to its side so gravity wouldn’t fling her into the endless abyss of space. The sun rose below her and the earth was a wall far to the west.

She woke in a confused daze. After several nights of sleeping on a bed, her hammock felt like a net, and she the trapped prey. She flapped and struggled and eventually fell out.

“Uff.” She blinked at the dark space. It was cramped as always, and she climbed out over the crates of supplies. The engines were sleeping still, set as low as they could idle without stalling. Nutmeg was asleep too, hanging in his hammock. It was too dark in the cabin to see him, but she could hear the steady beat of his heart and smell his mix of engine oil and feathers and musk. She crept out quietly so as not to wake him.

The ship held station in the sky far above the great plains west of Canterlot. An ocean of grass waved beneath them in time with the wind. It moved in great waves stretching out to the horizon, lit by the full moon. She stared at the sight for a few minutes, then turned, frowning.

Something was wrong with the ship. It was unbalanced. She walked from stern to prow and back again, placing each hoof on the Orithyia’s midline. No doubt about it, there was something uneven in the hull.

She jumped over the rail and soared a huge orbit around the ship. There were no stray ropes or anchors dangling from her sides. The envelope was even and full. She landed on the very tip of the prow and frowned harder. Some piece of unsecured cargo? No, she’d tied it all down herself. The new engines misaligned? Nutmeg would have spotted that instantly. Engines were in his blood. He knew them better than his own wings. If Nutmeg said the engines were fine, they were.

So what was it, then? The question nagged at her like a burr under her saddle. She snorted and walked to the middle of the ship and extended her wings.

Port. It was to port. She walked to the rail and flapped her wings ever so gently. She started to fly, and stopped just before her hooves left the deck. Down. Up again. The ship began to rock along its long axis, swaying beneath the balloon like a pendulum.

Now she could really feel it. The extra weight was right in front of her, but the deck was empty. Had they used the wrong paint? Heavier ropes tethering the balloon? Nothing made sense. She started to walk forward along the rain and promptly ran into something soft and fuzzy that yelped in surprise.

Rainbow yelped too. She jumped away, wings flared. “Who’s there?!”

“Well, shoot, you found me,” the empty air said. It shimmered and glowed, and when the glow stopped a unicorn mare stood in front of her with a sheepish expression.

“Uh, hey,” Starlight Glimmer said. “Sorry about that. How’d you find me, anyway?”

* * *

The Orithyia didn’t have a brig. It didn’t have much of anything, actually, aside from the engines and some space belowdecks for their hammocks and a bit of cargo. The lack of space for a brig had never troubled Rainbow Dash before, nor had it even crossed her mind, but now it seemed like a glaring oversight in need of remediation.

“So, you know Miss Dash?” Nutmeg asked. He set one of their precious scare teacups on the table for Starlight. Faint wisps of steam rose from it and scented the air with jasmine. “Are you one of her friends from Ponyville?”

“She’s a stowaway!” Dash slammed her hooves down on the table. The teacup jumped and nearly spilled. “And yes, she’s a friend. Or, she was before she turned to a life of crime!”

“Okay, first of all, when you met me I was a power-mad villain intent on ruling the world and enforcing my twisted vision of equality on all ponies everywhere. That was the before.” Starlight lifted the teacup before Dash could threaten it any further. “And second, I’m not a stowaway. I’m here on a mission.”

“Did you sneak on the ship?” Dash asked. “Did you have a ticket?”

“Well, no.” Starlight took a sip. “Ooh, that’s nice. And do you have a ticket?”

“Miss Dash doesn’t need a ticket,” Nutmeg said. He put a hoof on Rainbow’s shoulder and gently pulled her away from the table. “She’s part of the crew. You are not, however. May I ask why you are aboard our ship?”

“I told you. I’m on a mission.”

“From the princess?”

“Yeah, sure. From the princess.”

“Oh yeah?” Rainbow pushed forward. At times like this Nutmeg could be too nice for his own good. “What mission? A friendship mission?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“A secret friendship mission?” Nutmeg asked.

“No, just a regular secret mission. It’s honestly not all that exciting, I just need to use your ship to get somewhere.”

“Oh.” She was right – that wasn’t as exciting. Rainbow frowned. “Where?”

“I can’t tell you that either.”

Nutmeg frowned. “We’re bound for Groveport. Is that where your mission is?”

“Uh, maybe? Where’s Groveport?”

Oh! Rainbow knew this! She dashed across the room to their chart box and pulled out the drawer with the southeast Equestria maps. It was second from the bottom, and she yanked the scroll free and plopped it down on the table. “Okay, we’re about here. Groveport’s this little place here. That dot where the railway intersects the river.”

Starlight peered at it. Her eyes weren’t as good as a pegasus’s, and the little cabin was lit only by a few lanterns. “That’s not a port. Why’s it called Groveport?”

Rainbow shrugged. “Dunno. Just a name, I guess?”

“More importantly, why are you on our ship if you don’t know where it’s going?” Nutmeg asked. “That doesn’t seem like an efficient way to travel.”

“On the contrary!” Starlight’s ears perked up, and she smiled widely at them. Too widely. Her teeth showed, and though Dash knew there wasn’t any malice in her friend, it was easy to remember that Starlight was that pony who’d been a villain not so long ago. “Your ship is incredibly fast! I’d hoped to just stay invisible the whole time and maybe hop off when it looked like you were getting somewhere, but this is even better! Now I don’t have to worry about sleeping out in the cold or figuring out how to use the bathroom while invisible!”

“The head,” Dash said.

“The what?”

“The head. The bathroom is called the head on an airship.”

“Oh. Uh, okay.”

“You know, you could’ve just asked us for passage,” Nutmeg said. “Any friend of Rainbow’s is a friend of mine. We’d be happy to take you wherever you want to go.”

“Ah, but that’s just it.” Starlight finished her tea and set it down. “If you knew I was on board, you’d ask me where I wanted to go! And that would ruin the secret.”

“But…” Rainbow frowned. “We’re not going where you want to go. We’re going where we want to go.”

“Exactly!” Starlight clapped her hooves. “I can’t wait to get there!”

“How do you know that’s where your mission is, then?”

“I don’t know. That’s part of the secret too.”

Nutmeg took Starlight’s empty teacup and set it in the little sink mounted on the wall. “Is there anything about this secret mission you actually know?”

“Well, it involves Groveport. I know that much now. And we can deduce that it probably involves magic, or else why send me to fix it? Like, if there was a problem with a wild animal you’d send Fluttershy, right? So this must be a magic thing.”

“Who sent you? Don’t tell me that’s a secret too.”

“Oh, no, it was Twilight. I recognized her writing.”

“You know, we ought to just let you off at the next stop,” Rainbow said. “How are we supposed to trust a mare who sneaks onto our ship? That’s dangerous!”

“Well, I’m sorry about that. I just felt like I needed to at the time,” Starlight said. She managed to look contrite, her ears folding. “And, you could let me off. You’d be well within your rights to. But, on the other hoof, don’t you want to be part of a secret agent team?”

Hm. Secret agent team. Rainbow rolled the words around in her brain. They settled in nicely, like they’d always had a home there. Rainbow Dash: Secret Agent.

Nutmeg was staring at her. He had that look he sometimes got. “Miss Dash, even if this was a real secret mission, you realize you wouldn’t be able to tell anypony about it, right? That’s the whole point of it being a secret.”

Truth. It hit her like a bucket of cold water. Her dreams of secret agent fame dripped away between her hooves. “Oh. Uh, yeah, I guess that’s true.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The airship creaked around them.

“Well, we’d know,” Starlight said. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

Hm. That bore considering. Maybe some things were worth doing just to impress a few ponies? Or even just one. She glanced at Nutmeg to gauge his reaction. He sighed.

Good enough! She nodded. “We’ll do it.”

The Groveport 'berg

“This is… cozy,” Starlight Glimmer said.

It was the night after their first day together. Starlight had spent hours at the prow, her forelegs wrapped tight around fo’c’sle rail as she leaned over the abyss beneath them. The gale winds had blasted her mane into a wild cottony poof more like Pinkie Pie’s, and her eyes were red-rimmed from the dry air. But she hadn’t stopped smiling the whole flight. It was as Rainbow Dash suspected – every pony wanted to fly, they just weren’t all fortunate enough to be pegasi.

It was a cruel world, sometimes. But at least she and Nutmeg were bringing a bit of joy into a poor ground pony’s life. They could be proud of that.

After a meal of canned rations and a few olives that Nutmeg had brought on for her, they retired to their cabin for the night. And that’s when things got cozy.

Specifically, they were cozy for Rainbow and Starlight, who were sharing a hammock. Starlight was a unicorn and therefore heavier than Rainbow, and as anypony who has ever put dissimilar weights into a hammock before knows, the heavier weight sinks to the bottom. Thus it was that Rainbow Dash ended up on top of Starlight in their shared net. It was, at least, a fortunately cool night at altitude, so Starlight was merely warm instead of sweltering beneath a blanket of pegasus wings.

“Yeah, there’s not much room on airships,” Rainbow said. “It’s all about weight, right? But you get used to it real fast. By the time we get to Groveport this’ll seem totally normal.”

“At least we don’t have a lot of cargo this time,” Nutmeg said. Though it was dark in the cabin, he was close enough that they could speak easily. If she wanted she could’ve reached out and touched his shoulder. “For longer hauls we have to load up the cabin and take down one of the hammocks. Can you imagine three ponies having to share a hammock? That’d be something.”

“I see,” Starlight said. “Can I air an extremely selfish and ingracious thought?”

Rainbow wriggled around to face her. Starlight’s breath tousled her forelock. “Uh, yeah, have you met me?”

“Well, it sounds like you two have shared hammocks before.”

“Out of necessity, I assure you,” Nutmeg said.

“Of course. It also occurs to me that you are both pegasi, and therefore lighter and smaller than I am.”

Hm. Rainbow tried to remember how tall Starlight was compared with Nutmeg. Perhaps a little shorter? But certainly stockier and probably two full stones heavier. “Probably true,” she allowed.

“Might it not be more efficient if you and Nutmeg shared a hammock?” she asked. Then, lower, just to Rainbow Dash, “I’m sure he wouldn’t object.”

He wouldn’t, of course, because he was a good pony and understood the importance of taking care of guests. But still Rainbow shook her head. “Nope, sorry. He’s the captain, and the captain gets the best quarters, even if it’s just a hammock of his own.”

“That’s a little old-fashioned,” Nutmeg said. “If it were up to me, I’d happily offer my guest her own hammock. But Miss Dash continues to insist on proper naval protocol.”

“Airships run on rules,” Dash said. It wasn’t until the words had escaped her mouth that she stopped to consider them and just how alien they would’ve sounded to past-her, the one who just a few months back shirked her Weather Team duties if they involved getting up fifteen minutes before noon. The old her would’ve said something flip, like Rules are made to be broken! without understanding or considering that on a delicate ship like the Orithyia, whose twin gem-fired engines had contained within their thin aluminum cowlings the power to haul millions of tons of ice across the sky, rules kept ponies alive. Rules were important, and respecting the big rules meant respecting the small rules as well. So the captain got the best hammock because that was the rule.

Weird. Rules. Dash let the mental dissonance play out in her head for a few more moments. It wriggled inside her chest, like an itch in her bones she couldn’t scratch. Then she shrugged. The motion set the hammock swaying and rubbed her coat pleasantly against the mare below her. Starlight apparently didn’t realize how warm and cuddly she was. She yawned, closed her eyes, and settled in for sleep.

She woke a few minutes later. Starlight was trying to roll over. Dash flopped along with the motion, and when the ship was still again, she set her head back down on Starlight’s other shoulder. Within seconds she was out again.

Starlight wasn’t, though. After a few minutes she groaned and tried sleeping on her stomach, then her back. Then alternating sides. Each time Rainbow rolled along with her, waking just long enough to reposition herself as a pegasus blanket before falling back asleep.

Finally, Starlight gave up even trying to sleep. “How do you do that?” she whispered.

“Mm?” Rainbow tucked her muzzle under Starlight’s chin so they could whisper together. “Do what?”

“Just fall asleep like that. No matter how uncomfortable this is.”

Oh. Rainbow yawned. “You learn to. Otherwise you never sleep, and I think that causes death eventually? So yeah, go to sleep or you’ll die.” Good talk. Rainbow closed her eyes.

“Okay, wow, straight to death. That’s a little darker than I was expecting,” Starlight said. She squirmed a bit, until her limbs were tangled with Dash’s. “I’m not sure I can fall asleep like this.”

“Sure you can. Pegasus weather teams have to sleep in storms all the time.” She carefully pulled her legs free of Starlight’s and placed them as comfortably as she could, considering their relative positions. “Can you do what I say for a few minutes?”

“Uh, I can try?”

“Awesome. Close your eyes.”

Silence. Dash waited. Finally, when it was clear Starlight wasn’t going to answer, she spoke again. “Are your eyes closed?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. They’re closed now.”

“Great. Now, start imagining all your muscles are totally relaxed. Start with your head. And I mean every muscle, okay? Even the ones around your ears. They’re relaxed too, so your ears just go limp. Then your jaw relaxes, and your cheeks, and the little muscles in your temples. Just focus on all of them and let them relax.”

Starlight grunted quietly. Rainbow gave her a few seconds, then continued. “Now your neck. Just let your head sag into the hammock. Shoulders next. Imagine your legs are just totally dead weight. They’re not holding you up or anything. Everything’s a noodle now.”

Dash slowly talked her way down Starlight’s body. She hit every muscle group, even the weird ones like the intercostals. Finally she got to the hooves, and Starlight’s body felt like a limp puddle of pony beneath her.

“Okay, now the hard part,” Dash said. “You can’t fall asleep if your mind is still thinking of moving. So the key is don’t think of anything. But that’s real hard for most ponies at first, so it helps if you just repeat those words over and over. Focus on them, okay? Focus on the words and nothing else. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.”

Starlight mumbled the words along with her. After a few moments, Dash felt her tighten. “I don’t think this is working.”

“Don’t think about whether it’s working or not. Don’t think at all, okay? Don’t think. Say it with me. Don’t think.”

“Don’t think,” Starlight whispered back.

“Good. Keep saying it with me. Don’t think.”

So they continued. Over and over they repeated the words, mantra-like, until they lost any sense of meaning. They became sounds, as unintelligible as any foreign language. Still they repeated them, slowly slurring them as they forgot what the words don’t think were supposed to sound like.

Finally, after an unknown time, Rainbow felt the last of the tension drain from the body beneath her, and she heard a quiet snore. She continued whispering for a few moments, but nopony replied.

Too easy. Dash yawned again, set her head on Starlight’s chest, and let the darkness swallow her as well.

* * *

“That doesn’t look so big,” Starlight said. She was on the port rail with Rainbow and Nutmeg, peering out at the horizon. “It’s not even as big as a cloud.”

“It’s one of the smaller ones, I’d say,” Rainbow said. “Nutmeg?”

“Hm.” He stared at it in silence for a few seconds. “A standard non-tabular, probably mostly firn with a layer of resolidified ice on the top and south sides. Maybe fifty-thousand tons?”

The object in question was a smudge to the east. The rising sun was behind it, so even Dash’s pegasus eyes couldn’t make out much more than the dimmest details from its dark form. They could only tell it wasn’t a cloud because, unlike the real clouds all around, it held station in the sky, unbothered by the wind. It might have been a stone.

“Yeah, pretty small.” Rainbow nodded. “We gonna go grab it?”

“May as well. I don’t think we’ll find any larger ones between here and Groveport.”

Yes! It’d been weeks since their adventures around Typhoon, and Rainbow Dash hadn’t touched an iceberg since then. All her wounds were healed by now, though her coat was a bit shorter in places where the ice had ripped it away, and of course her ear would always have a thin scar down its length where a sharp chunk of ice had split it in half. Just the thought of wrestling with a ‘berg again set her heart racing in her chest. She bounced on the deck.

“Excited much?” Starlight asked.

“Uh, duh!” Rainbow hopped up on the rail. Her hooves skidded on the polished wood, and for a moment she danced over the void. “You won’t believe these things, Starlight. I didn’t believe it until I really saw one. Then it’s like… Wow! Zoom! Amazing!”

“Uh huh.” Starlight leaned on the railing more carefully than Dash. “If you say so.”

“I do! I so say so!” And then, to prove it, Dash took off toward the iceberg, intent on being the first to claim it.

A few minutes later she came back to get her bag of ice-pitons, and ask Nutmeg’s permission to claim the iceberg. Sometimes she forgot that step when she was excited.

* * *

A pod of air whales circled the underside of the ‘berg, filling the morning with their eerie whistles. She kept her distance. Air whales didn’t usually attack pegasi, but they could be ferocious in defense of their young, and Rainbow saw a few calves shadowing their mothers. Hopefully they would move on without making a scene.

As Nutmeg expected, the south of the ‘berg was glazed with ice from constant exposure to the sun. Easy purchase for her pitons. She started hammering them into into place with her shoes, humming a quiet tune as she worked. Chips of ice sprayed her face and melted on her muzzle.

She grinned to herself. It felt good to feel cold again.

The Orithyia arrived about twenty minutes later. Nutmeg pulled her up about fifty yards short and started dropping lines. Rainbow swooped down to catch them and fly back up to the pre-set pitons. Soon she had enough in place to secure the ship, and she waved for Nutmeg to start the engines back up. The lines slowly tightened, the slack vanishing as the Orithyia’s engines spun up to medium power. Soon they were taut enough for Nutmeg to walk out along them and join her.

“Nice work,” he said. He perched on a rope as nimbly as a spider in her web. “Think those pitons will hold, or do we need an anchor?”

“Eh.” She tapped at the ice. “If we don’t go too fast they should be fine. And I don’t really feel like putting an anchor in, you know?” Anchors were heavy. Damn heavy. Almost as heavy as she was, and sharp to boot. Sinking an anchor into the ‘bergs was probably the most dangerous part of the job, and one she’d gladly avoid.

“Hm.” He sniffed at the ice. “We’ll keep an eye on it. If they start pulling out we’ll use the anchor.”

“Aye captain!” She saluted with her hoof, then zipped back to the Orithyia, where Starlight was waiting. She stood in the stern, between the engines, her forehooves propped up on the aft railing to watch them. Her eyes were wide, and she gawked as Rainbow returned.

Rainbow landed and struck a little pose. Not much of one – maybe a four out of ten. Extended rear leg, flared wings, and a bit of torque to her spine. It pose that looked plausibly natural while still drawing attention to all her best features. She held it, stretched for emphasis, and turned to see Starlight’s reaction.

She saw Starlight’s back. The mare was still looking at the glacier. She hadn’t noticed that Rainbow landed.

Well, that was rude. “Ahem. Hey, Starlight,” she said.

No response. She trotted forward and saw the gawking, guileless expression on the unicorn’s face. She stared at the glacier like a foal staring at her mother while her mother was performing some insane feat of aerial acrobatics and also juggling a dozen flaming torches and somehow still managing to prepare a full meal for her entire family even though Rainbow’s dad was probably going to be late at work again.

Ah. “Neat, isn’t it?”

Seconds passed. Finally, the stunned neurons in Starlight’s brain parsed and responded. “Uh.”

Rainbow took her place beside Starlight at the rail. “You know, the first time I saw one up close like this, I felt the same way? Like, they’re so big! They’re just too big, I think. Pony brains can’t really understand them at first. We seem them and we’re like, Hey, that’s big. And that’s all we can think of! The only other things we’re used to being that size are clouds and mountains and, uh… lakes? Yeah, lakes. So we see them and of course they can’t be real because nothing that big and that heavy could fly, right? So we just kinda stare at them and wait for the real world to start again. But it never will, until you get used to it.”

“Uh.” Starlight blinked and managed to tear her head away from the iceberg. “Sorry, did you say something?”

Rainbow looked at the iceberg and smiled. “Yeah, but don’t worry. It wasn’t important.”

A few minutes later Nutmeg returned. He joined them at the rail to iceberg-watch for a few minutes, and then they went about their various tasks. Starlight stared at the iceberg for hours, until the lunch bell and an empty stomach finally called her away.

Not a bad start to a trip. Starlight didn’t even complain about the immense cold pouring off the iceberg as they retired for the night. Of course, she had a warm pegasus blanket, so what was there to complain about, really?

Nothing, Rainbow Dash decided. Nothing to complain about at all. She went to sleep with a smile on her muzzle.

Haunted House Adventure Playset, part 1

“You ever deliver an iceberg to the wrong town?” Starlight Glimmer asked.

Starlight stood near the prow, her forelegs propped up on the fo’c’sle rail, gripping it tight to lean out over the miles of air between them and the ground. Nutmeg had brought them down over the course of several hours, until they were about level with the cotton-ball stratus clouds that liked to float around seven-thousand feet. On any other day, Rainbow Dash might be eyeing one of those clouds for a nap, or considering how to shape it as an impromptu obstacle course for her flying drills. But on this day Rainbow Dash was an airship crewmare, and that came with responsibilities, and she would be damned if she shirked those responsibilities anywhere that Starlight or (Celestia forbid) Nutmeg might see.

Rainbow considered the question. Not because she didn’t know the answer, but because the very implications of it confused her. “No. How would we even do that?”

“Well, towns all kind of look the same from up here,” Starlight said. She pointed down at the mosaic of fields and forests and long stretches of grassland below them. “Like, we’ve passed over three towns in the past hour. What if one of them was actually Groveport?”

“Like, if the town was in the wrong place?”

“No.” Starlight rolled her eyes. “Towns can never be in the wrong place. They are, by definition, in the correct location. I mean, what if you were up here and you saw two towns way down below that looked the same, and you took the iceberg to the wrong one?”

Rainbow tilted her head. “Well, what if that town also wanted an iceberg? Then wouldn’t it be the correct town too?”

“No, because then the town that asked for the iceberg originally wouldn’t get one. And even worse, they would have to watch the other town, probably a rival town, enjoy having an iceberg while they didn’t! That would be even worse than not having one.”

Right. “So, going back to your first question, we’ve never delivered an iceberg to a town that didn’t ask for it,” Rainbow said. She ticked her points off on her hooves. “Second, even if we did bring one to the wrong town, Nutmeg says it’s company policy to only accept payment on delivery. That way we never run a negative, uh, obligation debt? I think that’s what he calls it. So we could just tell the town that didn’t get the iceberg ‘Sorry, we’ll try to find another one for you.’ And third, why couldn’t the towns just share the iceberg? They’re super big usually and they have enough water for most towns for years.”

“What if they didn’t want to share?”

“Well then I guess they’d be jerks.” Rainbow shrugged. Then, after a moment of thought, “Is that your secret mission? To make sure Groveport shares this iceberg with other towns?”

“I don’t think so.” Starlight said. “Mostly I was just wondering how you could tell towns apart from way up here.”

“Oh, why didn’t you just say so?” Rainbow hopped up onto the rail, balancing on it with her hooves. The Orithyia swayed ever so slightly in response to Dash’s movements, her hull swinging beneath the balloon by a few fractions of a hair’s width. “You see the river below us?”

Starlight gripped the railing hard between her hooves and leaned out over the edge. “Yes! The winding one?”

“Yup. That’s Glassy Brook. We’ve been following it west for the past five hours.” Rainbow walked along the railing to the ship’s prow and trotted out along the wood beam, until she stood at the very tip of the ship. The wind here tossed her mane all askew and tried to peel her wings open, forcing her to into glorious flight. She squeezed them against her side. “You see way up ahead, near the horizon? That long green line?”

Starlight squinted. “Uh, maybe?”

Oh, yeah. Unicorn eyes weren’t as good as pegasus eyes. “Trust me, it’s there. Those are trees growing along the Attlestone River. It’s the biggest waterway in western Equestria and flows all the way to the Peaceful Ocean. If we follow Glassy Brook for a few more hours, it will join the Attlestone, and that’s where Groveport is.”

“So you just go by natural landmarks?”

Rainbow relaxed her wings, letting them grasp a bit of the rushing wind. The air picked her up and tossed her back off the prow to land on the sanded teak deck, just a few feet forward of the ship’s wheel. She shook herself, resettling her feathers, and trotted back to Starlight.

It was Nutmeg who responded. He kept a firm hoof on the wheel, giving it little taps to compensate for the shifting winds. “Landmarks, or stars,” he said. “If there are clouds above and clouds below, or if we’re inside clouds and can’t see the land or the sky, then we use the compass and the chronometer. And we go slow, of course. Nice and slow.”

Too slow, Dash thought. The compass and chronometer were perfectly good for navigating. They could drive the ship at near-to-full speed even in the densest clouds, but of course the Equestrian Airship Insurance Association prohibited such movement. Reckless, they called it. Accident prone. She blew a raspberry at the thought. What did the EAIA know about flying, anyway? Probably nothing.

“Anyway,” she said. “We’ve never delivered an iceberg to the wrong town. And even if we did, it’d still be cool, because, you know, who doesn’t want an iceberg?”

“Our Town never wanted one,” Starlight said.

“Yeah, and look what happened to it.”

Starlight opened her mouth. After a moment she closed it, a thoughtful look on her face.

“What happened to ‘Our Town’?” Nutmeg asked under his breath as Rainbow Dash trotted back.

“It’s a long story,” Rainbow whispered back. “But basically Starlight used to be a power-mad cutie-mark stealing villain who wanted to enforce a demented version of involuntary equality on ponies everywhere, and she ran a town of virtual prisoners as a test for her twisted dystopian vision.”

Nutmeg glanced at Starlight, who was back to leaning against the rail, eyes on the horizon. “You really think an iceberg would’ve made that situation better?”

Rainbow scratched her flank with a hoof. “Well, don’t icebergs make everything better?”

Nutmeg was silent. Then, eventually, he nodded. “Fair enough, Miss Dash. Fair enough.”

* * *

The sun was approaching the western horizon as Nutmeg pulled the Orithyia into position over the fields south of Groveport. Beneath them lay an enormous hill, part of a range that bordered the river and lent the world a wrinkled look from their perspective in the air, like wet-crinkled paper or the bands of an earthworm. Few ponies lived in the hills, and as the iceberg melted it would fall in a perpetual winter rain onto the hill, and there flow toward the town as a tangle of frigid streams to be diverted by the farmers where they chose. The massive shadow of the iceberg stretched out to the east, carving a dark swath across the land all the way to encroaching shadow of night.

Rainbow Dash hurried back to the transom and peered over the aft railing. The engines on either side growled, the gears within shifting as Nutmeg threw them into reverse. The propellers slowed, stopped, then began to spin counterclockwise, bringing the lithe ship to a graceful stop. Behind them, the iceberg continued to drift forward, prisoner of its own inertia.

Dash waited until the iceberg was just a few dozen meters away, and the lines binding it to the Orithyia grew slack. “Right there!” she shouted, and jumped over the railing. Nutmeg cut the throttle, and Rainbow flew out to the iceberg to begin the tedious, cold work of digging out the steel pitons.

“Need help?” Starlight called.

“Nah, I got this!” Rainbow unslung the ice axe from her belt and began chipping at the scaly ice that had built up around the lines. Sometimes the icebergs grew on their windward faces as the Orithyia dragged them through the air, and a full foot of their lines was now buried within the ice. It took Dash almost an hour to excavate all of them, finally severing the ship from its cargo.

Starlight was still waiting for her on the aft rail when she flew back. Frost had built up in the sorceress’s mane, and her teeth chattered. But a smile still stretched out on her muzzle, and she clapped as Dash landed.

That was cool. It was good to be appreciated. She looked around for Nutmeg, but he was nowhere on deck — below, then, carrying out the dozens of little tasks that had to be finished before the Orithyia could land. Rainbow stomped on the deck, knocking out the beads of ice that had built up in the shaggy coat on her fetlocks.

Huh. She glanced at Starlight’s neatly shaved fetlocks and frowned. Time for another visit to the barber? She filed the question away for later.

“S-so what k-keeps the iceberg from just d-drifting away after you leave?” Starlight asked. The muscles in her shoulders shivered beneath her coat. The poor mare needed a blanket. Or maybe just walk to the front of the ship, where the desert clime of Groveport still warmed the air.

Rainbow Dash led the way. It only took twenty-five steps to walk from the transom to the base of the prow, but that was enough to bring back a touch of desert warmth. The ice in her coat began to melt and drip onto the deck. Puddles of water formed beneath both mares and flowed out special grooves that led to the gunwale and the long drop below.

“Usually they don’t move, once we drag them this low,” Dash said. “Icebergs usually only drift if they get caught by high altitude winds. If Nutmeg thinks it might blow away, though, we can use a few lines to anchor it to the ground. Kinda dangerous, though. We try to avoid it.”

Starlight peered back at the floating glacier. “How’s it dangerous? Can the cables break?”

“No, but in twenty years or so the iceberg will melt, and then nothing will be holding the lines up.”

“Oh.” Starlight looked at the iceberg, then down at the ground, still a thousand feet below. “Yeah, that could be bad.”

With the iceberg and the Orithyia now divorced, Nutmeg brought them down to Groveport. The town had no buildings with spires able to dock an airship, so Dash waited until the keel was a dozen feet above a dusty field and tossed their rope ladder over the edge. Then she followed after it, not even bothering to open her wings, just eating the shock with her legs. The dirt was soft and puffed out beneath her hooves. Nutmeg and Starlight followed, using the ladder like boring ponies (though, of course, Nutmeg had an excuse for using the ladder, and Starlight was a unicorn and therefore couldn’t be expected to show as much bravery as Dash routinely did).

“Is this where we discover your secret mission?” Nutmeg asked. He led the trio toward the town, where a small crowd of ponies was beginning to gather. A herd of foals escaped from the bunch and raced toward the iceberg, where snow was beginning to accumulate on the side of the desert hill. A few exasperated parents followed more slowly.

“You’ll learn it as soon as I do,” Starlight offered back. She smiled as they walked the dusty trail and even spun in a circle to take in their full surroundings. “I like this place. Reminds me of the desert around Our Town, you know?”

They didn’t have to walk far before they met the welcoming committee. Although the Orithyia was a small and insignificant thing next to the enormous iceberg that now floated beside the town, enough ponies had seen her land to go and summon the mayor. At least, Dash assumed this was their mayor – a stocky, sandy earth pony mare who looked like she ate anvils for breakfast and had a cutie mark of an axe splitting a log. Her face was crinkled with age, but she wore a huge smile as they approached, and without hesitation trotted forward and wrapped all three in an enormous embrace that expelled the air from Dash’s lungs. Nutmeg gurgled and Starlight squeaked.

“You made it!” the mare announced. She gave them a final, rib-cracking squeeze, then dropped them onto their hooves. “Ah, we’ve been looking forward to this day for weeks! Finally, all the water we could ever want! And those buffalo can keep their damn river!”

“So,” Starlight croaked. She cleared her throat and tried again. “So, this is Groveport, right?”

“Ayup, where else would we be?” The mare grinned and slapped Starlight on the back. “Welcome to Groveport, home of the finest tree nut orchards in Equestria! We’ve got almonds and walnuts and chestnuts and pony Brazil nuts and more pecans than you can shake a cashew at! Why, if there’s a better town for nuts anywhere in the world, I’ve never seen it! Oh, I’m Oaky Wedge, by the way. Mayor ‘round these parts.”

“What about peanuts?” Dash asked.

“Peanuts ain’t tree nuts. They’re legumes.” Oaky Wedge frowned. Then, after a moment, she added, “But ayup, the peanut fields are down south. We do pretty good business with them too.”

“We hope this iceberg will help your town with its water needs,” Nutmeg said, ever the diplomat. Sometimes Dash wanted to poke him in the ribs with her feathers, just to see if she could get him riled up, but of course that could never happen so long as they were captain and crewmare. Starlight, however. Starlight might be able to get him worked up. She and Trixie really were made for each other. “Now, I hope you don’t mind if we discuss the details of our payment?”

While Nutmeg and Oaky Wedge continued in lowered voices, Rainbow Dash fell back to pace alongside Starlight. They trotted down the main avenue, the river to their right, slow and sluggish in the late summer, and the solid timber plankhouses of the town to the left. Most were two or three stories, with actual glass windows and fancy bronze ornaments decorating their pointed roofs, either lightning rods or weather vanes or maybe both, Dash wasn’t quite sure. The whitewashed boards were painted dun by the desert dust, but they showed none of the peeling or cracking Dash expected. Every few houses there was an empty space filled with communal gardens and shaded by enormous palm trees laden down with coconuts.

“So,” Dashed said. She wrapped a wing around Starlight’s shoulders and leaned hard on the mare, steering her toward one of the shady oases between the houses. They stopped beside a burbling little fountain made out of stones carved like desert tortoises. “Where is it?”

“Huh?”

Oh, come on. “The mission,” Dash hissed under her breath. “Where’s the secret mission?”

“Oh!” Starlight looked around, turning around several times to take in the garden and what little more of the town they could see from it. “It’s around here somewhere. They’re always in the last place you look, you know?”

Dash frowned. “That’s because you stop looking when you find it.”

“Well, yes.” Starlight kicked at a fallen coconut, rolling it over. A few tiny sand beetles scurried away from the sudden exposure into the welcoming shelter of a spiny desert fern. “So, to answer your question, we keep looking until we find it.”

“That’s not a real answer.”

“Maybe, but it’s what we’ve got.” Starlight trotted back out into the street, where ponies were gathering along the planks of the riverwalk to stare up at the iceberg across the way. Their voices rose in delight as an icy wind swept down its side, painting the desert below with frost and briefly leaving a frozen glaze on the river’s surface. Confused insects scattered away from the momentary winter, finding safer harbor in the cattails along the water’s edge.

Dash hurried after her. They weaved around the crowd and avoided the foals trying to tangle in their legs. Finally they reached the end of the town, which was really only a few blocks stretched out along the river, and came to a stop.

There, past the edge of the town, where the carefully maintained grasses gave way to the scrub brush of the desert, stood a tombstone of a house. It rose from the dirt like a clattering skeleton, naked and gaunt and sprawling, with planks bleached the color of old bones and dark windows like empty eyes placed high beneath its pitched roof. Wings nearly as large as other houses extended left and right, all fallen into equal disrepair. And from the highest peak of its splintered oak-shingled roof perched a rusted weathervane, a wrought-iron pegasus balanced on one hoof, her wings extended like flags. Ruddy orange stains dripped down from the rusted iron onto the shingles, and in the fading sunset light it appeared almost like a streak of blood.

They stopped at the edge of the road. A lonely desert wind caressed Dash’s wings, floated up the unkempt yard, and blew through the mansion’s exposed timbers. A melancholy howl echoed out from the ruins.

“Okay, yeah, that’s it,” Starlight said. “See? Always the last place you look.”

* * *

They found Nutmeg and Oaky Wedge back on the south side of town. Nutmeg held a promissory envelope in one hoof, and was quietly protesting as townponies loaded bag after bag of walnuts and pecans who knew what else onto his back.

“Really, this is too kind,” he said. His legs were beginning to wobble. “I don’t want to take advantage of your incredible generosity—”

“Oh, ayup, it ain’t nothing!” Oaky Wedge said. Still, she waved off the rest of the crowd, everypony of which seemed to have their own gift bag of nuts ready to offer. “Had a great harvest last year, you know? Nuts for days!”

“Right, well, we deeply appreciate it,” Nutmeg said. He took a careful step toward the Orithyia, then another. “I’m afraid our schedule calls for us to depart soon for—”

“Not yet!” Dash cried. “Remember the thing?”

Nutmeg blinked at her. “What thing?”

“The thing. The secret thing.”

“Oh.” Nutmeg glanced at Starlight. “You, uh, found it?”

“We did!” Starlight beamed that too-confident smile of hers. “I mean, I think so.” Turning to Oaky Wedge, she continued. “What can you tell us about the big house at the end of town?”

“The haunted one!” Dash added.

“What, the old Miller place?” Oaky laughed. “Oh, ayup, I guess it does look a mite haunted, don’t it? But it’s just an old house, empty ever since old mare Miller vanished one night under unexplained circumstances. Nothing more.”

“It’s totally haunted,” Dash whispered to Nutmeg. “Like, trust me on this.”

“How many haunted houses have you experienced?” he whispered back.

“Oh, tons. Every year at Nightmare Night they would build one in Cloudsdale, and for ten bits you could walk through it with the lights turned out and pretend that the Wingless Pegasus was chasing you, and—”

“Real haunted houses, Miss Dash. Not for children.”

“Oh.” Dash frowned. “None, I guess? Well, one now.”

Starlight was still expounding on something to Oaky Wedge. Dash tuned back in to hear the best part. “Trust me, I’m an expert on paranormal matters. That is definitely a haunted house, and the only way for us to, uh, confront the angry spirits within is to spend the night inside!”

“You sure?” Oaky peered down the road and squinted. The dark shape of the derelict home was just barely visible through the dust and evening gloom. “It’s just an empty house, is all.”

“Absolutely sure,” Starlight said. She wrapped a foreleg each around Dash and Nutmeg’s shoulders, pulling them in close. “It’s the only way to put this mystery to rest.”

“Ain’t no mystery, just an empty—”

“Put the mystery to rest,” Starlight said again. Then, pulling Dash and Nutmeg around to face her, “Now, who’s ready for a sleepover?”

Haunted House Adventure Playset, part 2

“Do you smell that?” Starlight Glimmer asked.

Rainbow Dash set her saddlebags down in the center of the room – the lounge, she guessed, based on the skeletal remains of several fancy chairs, an ash-clogged fireplace that dominated most of a full wall, and what looked like the shattered puzzle pieces of an entire liquor cabinet overturned onto the floor. She drew in a deep breath through her nose and let the stale air settle into her brain. She smelled dust, of course, the dust of the desert outside and the dust that had been countless books in the shelves on the wall, now disintegrated with age, and the dust of bare timbers exposed to dry air for decades. And there was sweat too, but that was probably her since she hadn’t taken a bath yet and it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon. Other subtle scents hid beneath the dust and sweat. The sweet touch of charred wood from the fireplace, a birds nest somewhere in the exposed ceiling above, and rust everywhere, rust in the walls and rust in the floor and rust drifting up from the cellar, so much rust that if she closed her eyes and pretended she could smell salt as well, she might as well be surrounded by blood. She opened her mouth to speak, but Nutmeg beat her to it.

“Age,” he said. “Like a room that nopony’s entered for years. Old blankets, forgotten in a closet.”

“Is this what old houses all smell like?” Dash asked. Cloud houses didn’t smell like this. When they got old they just dried out or evaporated, and dried water didn’t smell like much of anything. “Is this why unicorns always buy incense? Because otherwise their houses start to stink?”

“I think it’s more a matter of dereliction, Ms. Dash,” Nutmeg said. “Unicorn homes smell just fine if you take care of them, which this unfortunate house doesn’t seem to be—”

“Okay, it’s ghosts,” Starlight cut in. Her horn glowed, and a circle of dust swirled in the center of the room, revealing dried and cracked timbers beneath. She set her saddlebags down in the swept-out spot, and surveyed the room. “The correct answer is ghosts. It smells like ghosts.”

Rainbow sniffed again. “It smells like dust to me.”

“Trust me,” Starlight said. “Once you know what a ghost smells like, you can scent them from a mile away. This place is loaded with them.”

“How do you know what ghosts smell like?” Nutmeg asked.

“I just… look.” Starlight sat and brushed at her shoulders with her hooves. She tossed her head and studied the walls. “I did some things in college, okay? Some experiments. Every unicorn does.”

Really? Rainbow leaned forward. “Even Twilight?”

Starlight snorted. “Oh, especially Twilight. Trust me, you get a glass or two of wine into that mare, and the stories—okay, we’re getting sidetracked. The point is there’s ghosts in this mansion and we’re going to find them.”

“And this is your mission,” Nutmeg said. It was a statement, but flavored with enough doubt to sound like a question.

Starlight took her time answering. She looked around the deserted room, down the dark corridors leading deeper into the abandoned mansion, at warped floorboards beneath her hooves and up into the holes in the ceiling overhead. Finally, she nodded and answered, “Yes. It’ll do.”

What, exactly, it would do for had to wait. At that moment the front door crashed open, sending a shower of dust and plaster fragments raining down on them from the ramshackle ceiling. Hoofsteps thudded like drum beats on the hollowed-out floor, and Oaky Wedge stomped into the room. Piled on her back were bedrolls and blankets and bags of what sounded like nuts. She dumped them all on the floor, brushed herself off, and joined them in silently surveying the wreck of a house.

“It’s something, ain’t it?” she said. “Old Lady Miller was one of the first ponies in Groveport. Helped build this town with her own four hooves. And when they discovered the nut deposits back in ‘34, she made a mint packing ‘em up and selling them to the big grocers out east. At one point she was the richest mare in town, yes she was.”

“Thirty-four?” Dash did some mental math, and determined that 934 was many years ago. “How long has this place been abandoned?”

“Oh, on twenty years now, maybe?” Oaky Wedge tilted her head. “Gosh, she vanished the same year Saguaro and Canteen eloped up north to Las Pegasus, didn’t she? And now they’ve got grandfoals.” She let out a long, airy sigh that stirred up the dust again. “Feels like just yesterday. Where does the time go?”

“How old was she when she, ah, vanished?” Nutmeg asked. He pulled a bedroll from the pile and spread it out on the floor, using his wings to sweep away the dust.

“You know, that’s a good question?” Oaky Wedge said. “Why, she must’ve been pushing eighty, but she never looked any older than I look now.” She laughed. “Why, ponies used to joke that she must’ve made a deal with the devil! Oh, ayup, she must’ve sold her soul to some hellish, demonic power in exchange for eternal youth! Ah, we were so silly back then.”

Huh. Rainbow Dash glanced down at the floorboards, then down the darkened corridors leading into the mansion’s empty heart. Did they seem… longer? The shadows fuller? Was that ash she smelled in the fireplace, or brimstone? So many new questions.

“That’s… quite silly indeed,” Nutmeg said. “And what were the circumstances of her disappearance?”

“Oh, just gone one night.” Oaky Wedge dusted her coat off and glanced out the window. The sun had set, and only a faint, diminishing glow remained to the west. Soon the stars would emerge overhead. “Nopony every figured out why, or where, or any of those other double-you words. There was a terrible storm, lightning and thunder and winds strong enough to turn the trees upside-down. And in the morning she was just gone.” She swallowed, and for a moment her face appeared drawn. Shadows lined her eyes, and her shoulders sank. “I should warn you ponies, because you strike me as honest and deserving folks. This house has a history. Every year, teenage fillies and colts dare each other to spend the night. They sneak in, and try to be brave, and when the darkness finally falls—”

Rainbow Dash gasped. “They vanish too, don’t they? Eaten by the ghost of Lady Miller!”

“That’s silly, Rainbow,” Starlight said. “Ghosts don’t eat ponies. They engulf them in ectoplasm and digest them externally before absorbing their essences.”

“Oh my gosh that’s so cool!” Rainbow’s wings extended, and her feathers stood on end. “Do you think we’ll see one tonight? Will it try to eat us too?!”

“What? No.” Oaky Wedge gawked at them, then tramped over to the broken window. “Every year teenage fillies and colts dare each other to spend the night, but after a few hours the sun sets and they all get so bored they leave to get ice cream.” She pointed out the window to a well-lit stand across the street, where an earth pony wearing a paper cap was dishing out scoops of ice cream to a line of foals. “But sometimes they wait too long, and the ice cream stand closes, and they don’t get any!”

Rainbow Dash gasped again. “No!” She spun to Nutmeg. “We have to get some now!”

“So, there’s no ghosts?” Nutmeg asked. He brushed away Rainbow’s clutching hooves. “I just want to be very clear on that.”

“Nope, just ice cream,” Oaky said. “The pistachio is best. Some ponies prefer the macadamia nut, but they’re just plain wrong.”

“That’s a relief,” Nutmeg said. “And yes, Miss Dash, we can get some ice cream. We have plenty of bits—”

“Not so fast!” Starlight muscled her way between them. She squared her shoulders and stared at Oaky Wedge. “You make it sound so safe and boring, mayor, but I know the truth! This mansion is haunted by the spirit of Lady Miller, and the only way for us to bring peace to her troubled soul is to successfully spend the night. And that’s what we’re going to do!”

“But…” Rainbow Dash looked between Starlight and the window, where outside ponies continued down the boardwalk, moving toward their houses in preparation for the coming night. “Can’t we get ice cream too?”

“Well, of course.” Starlight relaxed. “I’m not a villain anymore. Let’s go.”

* * *

A half-hour later, they were settled back in the mansion’s lounge, their bedrolls unrolled and blankets folded neatly atop them for cushions. Night had swallowed the world outside. Through the broken window Dash saw a sky filled with stars and mountains painted silver by moonlight. Veils of fog drifted down from their iceberg, wrapping it round in glowing folds, and for a moment Dash allowed herself to imagine that it was not an iceberg but a titanic ghost, the spirit of some enormous being – an extinct volcano, a felled forest, or a lake so poisoned with salt that everything in it died – returned now to haunt the whole world. Then the wind shifted, shedding the fog like the tufts of a dandelion, and the revealed ice glimmered like diamonds in the starlight.

She realized she was smiling. Also Nutmeg was saying something, which meant she should be paying attention. She licked her pistachio ice cream – green, unexpectedly, and sweet – and tuned back into the conversation.

“...and I figured I’d go to jail after that, right?” Starlight said. “Or get turned into stone. That happens to a lot of creatures who upset Celestia. Or just get tossed into Tartarus. But no, Twilight made me her apprentice. Which, really, turned out to be better than revenge anyway.”

“Revenge seems like it must be overrated,” Nutmeg said. He had a dish of peanut butter praline ice cream, and he nibbled at it demurely between sentences. “I’ve never known anyone who got it and was happy afterward.”

“Yeah, they should write that on the tin.” Starlight stared down at her own treat, a bowl of plain vanilla ice cream dusted with maple sugar, sharing space with a chocolate-chip cookie still warm from the oven. She levitated a chunk of the cookie, smeared it with a gooey coating of half-melted ice cream, and floated it carefully into her mouth. Not a drop escaped to stain her coat. “Mm. Anyway, that’s ancient history.”

They’d tried to start a fire in the fireplace, both for light and to ward off the chilly desert night, but the chimney was clogged with creosote and fossilized bird nests, and they all agreed that burning down the mansion within hours of starting their attempt to solve its mysteries would reflect poorly on their skills. So instead Starlight Glimmer set a magical fire in the swept-out basin of the fireplace. It glowed blue and violet, emitted no smoke, and cast only enough heat to keep them pleasantly warm. Dash found herself staring into it for minutes at a time, hypnotized by the shifting colors and flickering lights. No wonder fire had held such fascination for ancient caveponies.

“So, sorry to belabour the point, but I’m not familiar with ghosts. How does this work again?” Nutmeg asked. “We just spend the night?”

“Survive the night,” Dash clarified. “We can’t die. Right Starlight?”

Starlight nodded. “Right. Though, with me here, our chances of dying are very slim. Less than one percent, I’d say.”

“I see. Survive.” Nutmeg frowned. “Should we… set a watch, perhaps? Get weapons from the ship?”

“Mundane weapons aren’t much use against ghosts,” Starlight said. “We’ll have to rely on our wits. And we should try to stay awake, too.”

“We have games on the ship,” Rainbow said. “Cards. And a few chess sets.” Did Starlight play chess? A sudden, feral desire seized her. She wanted to find out. She wanted to win. Her wings fluttered at her side, ready to burst out into the night to fetch their games from the Orithyia.

“Board games are good, but I have a better idea.” Starlight gave her hooves a little clap, and pushed her ice cream dish off to the side. “We’re going to play a parlour game!”

“A what game?” Rainbow Dash peered close at Starlight’s hooves, then her bedroll, to see if she had a board hidden somewhere.

“A parlour game, Miss Dash,” Nutmeg said. “It’s an intellectual type of game. It requires thinking.”

There wasn’t much that required more thinking than chess, in Dash’s estimation. Her feathers fluffed up, ready to challenge Nutmeg or Starlight or both of them at once on that point, but before she could throw down and defend chess’s honor, Starlight was speaking again.

“That’s right,” she said. “After unicorns invented parlours, we needed something to do in them, so we invented parlour games. Most of them are based on discovering things about your friends, or looking at old problems in new ways. If you’ve ever played ‘Twenty Questions’ or ‘Truth or Dare,’ you’ve played a parlour game.”

Oh, Celestia, it was one of those games. Rainbow rolled her eyes. “Boring.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” Nutmeg said. “They can be quite entertaining. And didn’t you think chess was boring, before we tried that?”

Rainbow opened her mouth to deny that criminal insinuation, that bald-faced lie, but a memory of her first night with a chess set on the Orithyia’s deck came back into her mind, as though it were just yesterday. She remembered sniffing in disdain, and saying that chess was a unicorn’s game. An egghead’s game. Not something cool ponies played. And, well, how wrong had she been about that? She closed her mouth and wrinkled her muzzle, and decided to let Starlight proceed. For now.

“Thank you, Nutmeg.” Starlight gave a little nod in his direction. “And don’t worry, Rainbow, I think you’ll like this one. It can be a little… hm… daring.”

Rainbow cocked an eyebrow at her. “A talking game. Daring.”

“Have faith, apprentice.” Starlight settled down on her belly, forelegs folded in front of her. “It’s called Questionnaire, and it’s just what it sounds like. Each pony takes a turn, asking a hypothetical question that everypony must answer. The best questions should reveal some part of a pony’s character, and by the end of the game reveal their true nature. So—”

“Uh, yeah, I’m awesome and hot and the best flyer in Equestria. Am I done?”

Starlight smiled. It was a little thing, a knowing thing, just barely bending up the corners of her lips. “Well, you can use those answers as much as you like. Let me start with a standard question, though: If you had to be a member of another tribe, which would it be?”

Uh. Another tribe? Not a pegasus, that’s what she meant. Suddenly neither awesome or hot or the best flyer in Equestria applied. Her ready responses stumbled out the gate, leaving her wordless. An earth pony? They can’t fly! A unicorn then? They can’t fly either!

Nutmeg must’ve noticed her floundering, for he came to her rescue. “I grew up in Canterlot, you know, around unicorns. The airshipyards where my father worked employed quite a few as technicians. I remember watching them as a foal, and being amazed at some of the things they could do with magic. And, well, I don’t get much use out of these anyway.” He stretched out one wing. It trembled with the effort, and they all heard the quiet metal squeak of the springs in his braces as he folded it back against his barrel. “So I would be a unicorn. And you, Starlight?”

“Oh, easy. Pegasus.” She smiled and looked up at the ceiling, as if she could see beyond it to the clouds and stars above. “Flying’s like it’s own magic, isn’t it? I think all ground ponies wish we could be pegasi, sometimes.”

As well they should. Which made it all the crueler to have to decide to be a ground pony of some flavor. Dash licked her lips. Game. Game, this was a game. It didn’t matter what she said, she wasn’t giving up her wings. This was just a… a test, to see what kind of pony she really was.

“Earth pony,” she said. “Cuz they’re strong.”

“Very good.” Starlight smiled at her. “See? Now we know a little bit more about each other. Not just what our favorite color is, or favorite actor, but something important. Something about our character. Now, I think we’ll let—”

“How do we win?” Rainbow asked.

Starlight blinked. “Well, there is no winning, really. We keep going as long as we’re learning, or having fun, or fall asleep. Or the ghost shows up, I guess. Why?” A small grin threatened to overtake her muzzle. “Ready to quit already?”

Rainbow scoffed. “Pff, right. I never quit! Bring it, sister.”

“Consider it brought! And as I was saying, I think we’ll let Nutmeg go next.”

“Hm.” Nutmeg lapped at his ice cream, which was well on its way to becoming peanut butter praline soup. “If you lost everything but one posession, what would it be?”

“Oh, you’ve played this before, haven’t you?” Starlight said. “A few years ago, when I finished my lessons with Twilight Sparkle, she gave me a mirror covered with pictures of all of us. And in one of the pictures, she sees the camera and is trying to smile for it without being too obvious – and Rainbow you know how awkward she can be, she just looks like she’s choking on her tongue or something. And everything I love about her is in that one photo, and I guess if I could only keep one thing, I’d keep that picture. Or maybe the whole mirror.”

“I’ll allow the whole mirror,” Nutmeg said. “And for me, well, I think it’s obvious. I’d keep the Orithyia, of course. That’s probably cheating, like somepony saying they’d keep their whole house, but I can’t imagine losing her. I think that might break me.”

It would, Dash knew. She’d spent too many hours watching him tend to every detail of the Orithyia’s care – sanding the deck, tuning the engines, checking the gas envelope for leaks, tightening down the cargo, or any of the millions of other tasks an airship required to stay afloat. She saw in each of them how much love he felt for the ship, as though it were a lover and not a contraption of wood and metal and hydrogen. She knew his last thoughts before sleeping and his first thoughts upon waking were for the health of his ship. Losing it… Oh, the thought alone must have hurt him as much as her having to imagine being an earth pony instead of a pegasus. She swallowed.

But Starlight was a crueler mare than Rainbow. A thirsty grin stretched out her muzzle. “Come now, Nutmeg, you know how this game works. The questions ought to hurt a little bit. All the best things in life do.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” He breathed out, composed himself, and nodded. “I’d keep the bell. I could rebuild her again, with that one part. And isn’t there some legend, about a ship rebuilt so many times that only one original piece remains, but still it is the same ship, with the same name and soul? I think the Orithyia could be that.”

Starlight’s grin softened. Just a smile, now. “I’ve heard that legend. And I think the Orithyia would be quite worthy of a modern retelling. Now… Rainbow?”

“The copy of Pawn Takes Queen you got me,” she said to Nutmeg. After a pause, in which they both looked at her a bit too intently, she added, “Because I’m not done with it yet.”

“Was this a book?” Starlight asked. “A… gift?”

“Just a simple guidebook I found in Fillydelphia,” Nutmeg said. He looked down at his ice cream as he spoke. “I’m glad you’ve found it so helpful.”

“Yeah.” A bit of pistachio caught in her throat as she spoke, breaking her voice. She cleared her throat and spoke again, firmer and louder. “Yeah. So, my turn, right?”

“That’s right,” Starlight said. “Remember, a hypothetical question. It should reveal something about a pony’s character.”

Hypothetical. Dash knew that word. Mostly. She couldn’t have defined it, not with words, but she knew what it meant. Not a question about something real, but about what could be, or might be. Something that would hurt a little bit, and reveal a little about a pony’s true character, whatever that meant. She let those conditions tumble around in her head like grindstones, polishing her thoughts.

“How do you want to die?” she asked.

“Ooh, going deep fast.” Starlight rubbed her hooves together. “Alright. I want to disappear! At the climax of some grand battle, maybe, with a blinding flash of light. And ever after, when ponies would tell stories about me, they would wonder if I was still out there somewhere. The mystery would be part of my legend.”

“Suitably grand,” Nutmeg said. “I’ll take the easy answer, though. Peacefully, in my sleep, of old age. Or, at least, not dissolved and absorbed by a ghost.”

“Psh. The wimpy answer, you mean,” Rainbow said. “And I think I already know what’ll happen to me. A new stunt, something nopony has ever tried before. Something so awesome and amazing that ponies will be like ‘There’s no way she can do that!’ but I’ll do it anyway! But the strain will be too much, and I’ll black out or my wings will fold, and they won’t be able to catch me, and… Yeah.” She swallowed. “Like that.”

“Alternately, you could listen when ponies tell you not to do something that insane,” Nutmeg said. “Then you might make it to old age.”

Ugh. Old? Her? She spent a moment imaging herself as decrepit and rundown as Granny Smith. No – never. She shook her head.

“Well, I hope that’s a wish that doesn’t come true,” Starlight said. “My turn again? Maybe something a little less morose. What trait do you want in a lover, but not a partner?”

Rainbow flushed, and took a quick slurp from her ice cream to hide it. She hadn’t thought the game would go down that avenue. But they were all friends here, so she mared up and went with the first thought to cross her mind. “A lover has to be as awesome as I am. A partner has to be a great friend… but maybe not as awesome, you know? That would be crazy.”

“Surely you’ll never have any lovers, then, for nopony’s as awesome as Rainbow Dash,” Starlight said. “Nutmeg?”

“Hm.” He tilted his head. “A lover mustn’t mind that I am always flying away. A partner who is willing to fly with me.”

“Poetic.” Rainbow flicked him with a wingtip. “Practice that much?”

His turn to blush. He shuffled atop his bedroll, then turned to Starlight. His ears danced back and forth between them, though.

Starlight took her time. Much longer than she had for the other questions. Long enough that Dash wondered if she were going to pass on the question entirely. Then, finally, she nodded. “I want a partner as much like me as possible. And a lover as unlike me as exists anywhere in the world.”

“Wow.” Rainbow snorted. “Vague enough?”

“Vague answers are allowed, Miss Dash, as long as they reveal something.”

“Thank you, Nutmeg.” Starlight paused to nibble on her cookie. “Your turn, I believe?”

“So it is. And something a little less risque, perhaps. What is your greatest fear?”

“Uh.” A cold breeze crept up Dash’s spine. She glanced over at Starlight, who had an equally troubled look on her face. “Uh. You first, Nutmeg.”

“Ghosts?” He chuckled. “Fine. Hm. I’m afraid of not being able to fly.”

Starlight glanced at his wings and raised an eyebrow. “I’m… sorry, I thought…”

“There’s more than one way to fly.” He tilted his head toward the window, beyond which their iceberg hung serenely amidst the stars.

“Of course, silly of me.” Her ears relaxed a bit at the passing tension. “As for me… you know I used to do some bad things. Rainbow, you were one of the ponies I hurt—”

“Hey.” Rainbow’s ears folded back, and her muscles bunched beneath her coat. “That was years ago. You don’t have to—”

“It’s fine.” Starlight held up a hoof to stop her. “It should hurt a little, remember?” She took a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway, I hurt a lot of ponies. And I’ve spent years trying to make up for it, learning to be a new pony. A better mare. But my biggest fear is that I did something I can’t fix. That one of the ponies I hurt is out there somewhere, and they never got better from what I did. And no matter what I do, they’ll never get better, and I won’t even know that I ruined their life because by the time I realized how wrong I was and starting trying to fix things, they were already gone.”

Nopony spoke after that. Starlight looked down at her crossed forelegs, while Nutmeg watched her, his face as expressionless as when they would play cards on the Orithyia’s deck at night. Rainbow glanced between them, her heart beating faster and faster as the silence drew out, praying one of them would break it.

But neither did, so she swallowed and spoke. “I’m afraid of losing.”

Nutmeg raised an eyebrow. “Is… that all?”

“Well, you know.” Rainbow rolled her shoulders. Anything to loosen the knot forming between her wings. “Like, losing’s not so bad, I guess. It’s all the ponies watching. Cuz then everypony sees me lose.”

“Everypony loses sometimes, Miss Dash. Most ponies lose most of the time, in fact. There’s no shame in that.”

“Losing…” She gestured with her wings vaguely, trying to explain it that way. “Losing means you’re not as good as you thought. As other ponies thought. It means I’ve been faking it. I’m just an imposter, pretending to be awesome. That’s what it means.” She licked her lips. They were dry and tasted like sugar and pistachio. “Why did unicorns invent this game, again?”

“So we’d have something to do in parlours.” Starlight let out another breath. “And learn more about each other. But, you’re right, we need a lighter question! And it just so happens to be your turn, Rainbow!”

“Um.” Rainbow checked the tank and found it empty. “Uh, pass. Come back to me.”

“Okay.” Starlight smiled, showing her teeth again. “Let’s have some fun. Favorite sexual position?”

Dash flushed again. She knew Starlight was… well, she was Starlight. Perhaps she should’ve expected this. She glanced over at Nutmeg.

His wings jerked at the question. “That’s hardly hypothetical, Miss Glimmer!”

“Fine, fine.” She pursed her lips, then smiled again. “Hypothetical. If you could only have one sexual position for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

He snorted and shook his wings, settling them back into position. “Clever. And any position where I’m doing the penetrating. How’s that?”

“Vague, but satisfactory. And predictable for a stallion.” Starlight grinned. She wasn’t blushing at all. “Rainbow?”

Oookay. Okay. No problem. She fixed her gaze on Starlight’s forehead, just beneath her horn, and didn’t let it waver. “Any where I’m on top. Duh.”

“Could’ve predicted that too. Maybe not such a good question.” Her eyes slid back and forth between them, and finally she nodded. “Well, since we’re declaring vague preferences, I’ll go with any position where I can look my lover in her eyes. How’s that?”

“Weak,” Rainbow declared. She fanned her wings to get a bit of a breeze going – the desert air wasn’t cooling the mansion off as fast as she’d expected. Soon they’d be sweating. “Nutmeg, your turn. Try to make it funny—”

A loud crash interrupted her from within the mansion. Something falling and breaking. It stirred eddies in the dust and vibrated the floorboards beneath them. Before she realized it, Dash was already standing, her wings out and ready to fly.

Nutmeg was only a second behind. Starlight was last, her hooves tangling in the blanket as she scrambled to her hooves. Her horn flashed with a lavender light, filling out the shadows.

“It was in there,” Dash said. Without waiting for the others she trotted through an empty doorway into the next room. It was dark, but her pegasus eyes picked out the details easily enough. A dining room, or something similar – a long wood table resisted the rot and decay that had engulfed the rest of the house. Broken, smashed chairs lay in heaps around it. A chandelier hung at an angle above it all, wreathed in decades of spider webs.

And on the floor, beyond the table, something new. A white sheet, untouched by the dust or the desert or cobwebs. Rainbow trotted over and carefully picked it up. A bedsheet, and somepony had drawn two big black circles on it, about the size of her hoof, and below it a serrated mouth.

“A… ghost costume?” She glanced back at Starlight.

“Uh.” Starlight shifted her weight. “Clearly this is the remains of some prank, probably by teenagers. I bet they use it to try and scare—”

“Are those your saddlebags beside it?” Nutmeg asked. He gestured at a pair of fashionable saddlebags stuffed under the table, each neatly stitched with Starlight’s cutie mark.

“Why… yes! Cleary, some thief stole them while we were getting ice cream, and—”

“Okay, enough.” Rainbow dropped the sheet. “Enough playing along. Starlight, we’re not idiots. We know you planted these. We know there’s no secret mission. We—I know you’re just along because Rarity or one of the girls put you up to it to try and hook me up with Nutmeg. Okay? And I sure as Tartarus know there’s no ghost in this—”

A tremendous roar interrupted her, drowning out all sound and even thought. The house shook from foundation to roof. The chandelier broke free and fell onto the table with a windchime-like crash that Dash could barely hear over the ringing in her ears. The fire in the lounge went out, plunging them into darkness, broken only by the light of Starlight’s horn. Rainbow fell to her knees, drew in a breath to shout, and choked on an abandoned mansion’s worth of dust. She gagged and gasped and tried to cough it out.

The house settled after a few moments. Throughout the mansion came more crashes, echoing dimly, as more furniture gave up the fight and collapsed. Somepony groaned. Oh, that was her. She spat again and tried to breathe.

“Is everypony alright?” Nutmeg said. Rainbow looked up to see him beside Starlight, whose eyes were wide with panic. “Rainbow?”

“I’m fine.” She spat out a wad of dusty phlegm. “Starlight…”

“That wasn’t me.” Her horn glowed brighter, and Rainbow felt an unseen force helping her too her hooves. “C’mon, we need to get out of here.”

They scrambled into the lounge. The magical fire had blown out, leaving only a shower of fading azure cinders that drifted out onto the hearth. But far more alarming was the window – where before they had a clear view of the night and the mountains and the iceberg floating above town, now there was a simple brick wall, mouldered and cracked with age. They stared at it dumbly.

“I didn’t do that, either,” Starlight said.

“Okay, stay calm,” Nutmeg said. “We need to figure out what’s going on, and—”

Something moved on the second floor. The timbers above them groaned beneath its weight. Dust drifted down from the ceiling in a trail that began in the center of the room, and slowly migrated toward the center of the house. A hollow moan, like the wind blowing through old bones, drifted to them from the black corridors.

They both stared at Starlight.

She shrugged. “And I definitely didn’t do that."

Author's Note

There's a ghost! Maybe! Who do you think it is?

A) The Mayor, Oaky Wedge, who impersonates a ghost in order to frighten nosy outsiders away before they discover the terrible secret behind Groveport's nut trade.
B) The Sorceress, Starlight Glimmer, executing the second part of an elaborate nested scheme in which she is deliberately caught faking an amateurish ghost in order to draw attention away from her far more frightening true performance.
C) The stallion selling ice cream at the stand outside, who uses the lure of an authentic haunted house to draw business to his ice cream stand from across Equestria. Specialty flavors include Ghost Pepper, Blood Orange Sorbet and Heeeeere's Brownie!
D) Lady Miller, who after decades of simmering resentment over the town's property taxes, faked her own disappearance and now pretends to be a ghost in order to keep the county assessors away.
E) The Ghost of Lady Miller, cursed to haunt her mansion as a consequence of the devilish pact she swore with Cthubl’lekth the Eyeless, who gifted her with a boundless fortune of nuts for a period of fifty years, after which her soul reverted to him.
F) Nutmeg, somehow?

Post your answers, and see who's right in the next episode!*

*None of these answers guaranteed to be right.

Haunted House Adventure Playset, part 3

Veils of dust drifted down from the ruined ceiling like ancient snow. Rainbow Dash cupped her wings over her head in a feathery umbrella, coughed as quietly as she could to clear her lungs, and glared at Starlight Glimmer.

“This is your fault!” she hissed.

“No, I—” Starlight bit back the exclamation and continued in a much quieter voice. “I told you, I’m not doing this! This house really is haunted!”

“Yes, and it’s your fault that we’re in it!”

“Ladies,” Nutmeg offered in gentle, calming tones, “Perhaps we can discuss the blame later, and just focus on getting out?”

“Right, that’s easy. Gather up.” Starlight’s horn burned with a brilliant indigo light. The drifting dust reflected it back like a million tiny stars, and an electric hum filled the air. Nutmeg and Rainbow squeezed up against Starlight’s side as the glow from her horn reached a brilliant crescendo, and the world around them vanished.

Replaced, a moment later, by an identical world. The same cloying scent of forgotten dust stung Rainbow’s nose; the same gritty, splintered floorboards scratched the soles of her hooves. She spun around, blinking away the afterimages left from the teleportation spell, and frowned at Starlight.

“We’re still here,” she said.

Starlight shook her head. “No, it just looks that way. Apparently I managed to teleport us to an identical-seeming house, probably still in Groveport. That’s why it smells and feels the same, too. Now, let’s just catch our breath and—”

The house shifted again. The long floorboards beneath their hooves crawled out of alignment, their edges twisting and sliding against each other with an ugly rasp. Above, on the second floor, a low, ringing wail rose like an ocean swell, washing over the three of them, drowning them and deafening them to all other thought and sound. It ebbed slowly, fading back into the darkness, hanging on the edge of their hearing. Lurking on the border of silence.

It was a long minute before any of them spoke. “Starlight…” Nutmeg began.

The sorceress didn’t bother to respond. Her horn glowed again, faster this time, brighter, and after only a second Dash felt the weird, disconcerting snap of a teleportation spell. She opened her eyes, already knowing what she would see.

The same room stared back. The empty fireplace leered at them. A covey of spiders, disturbed by the shaking of the house, trembled in their webs.

“Alright, fine. Fine.” Starlight turned to the bricked-up window and set her hooves. A beam of violet light poured out of her horn, striking the bricks with a tremendous crash, and suddenly the whole room was filled with disintegrated clay and gritty fragments of rotting mortar. They coughed and hacked and wiped their eyes all over again, and as one they stumbled toward the opening.

On the other side was another room, occupied by a broken banquet table and smoking fragments of bricks. Tattered drapes hung motionless from the walls, concealing more bricked-up windows. A wide doorway opened out into a black hall on the far side of the table.

Starlight stared through the shattered wall, eyes wide, face expressionless. She let Nutmeg pull her back into the room without protest, and they huddled near the fireplace, where a bit of lingering warmth from the dead fire still seeped into the air. They crouched down, resting on their bellies, and stuck their muzzles together.

“Seriously, what’s going on?” Dash whispered.

“As amazing as it seems, Starlight might be correct,” Nutmeg said. “This house is haunted.”

“Wait, why is that amazing?” Starlight fired back. “I’m right all the time!”

“Apologies. I meant, it’s amazing that this house really is haunted.”

“Hey, don’t apologize!” Dash hissed. “It’s her fault we’re here, remember!”

They both tilted their heads toward Starlight, who managed to look a bit sheepish. “That’s not one hundred percent wrong,” she mumbled.

Something thudded on the floor above them, followed by the musical tinkle of shattering glass. Dash held her breath, every muscle and feather frozen, until the sound faded away. Nutmeg nibbled on his lip.

“We seem to be in a bit of a jam,” Nutmeg said. “Ideas?”

“We could just hide until sunrise,” Starlight said. “This is probably a midnight-to-dawn ghost? If we can survive that long we’ll be fine.”

Hide? Dash’s feathers fluffed out in irritation. The mere idea of cowering in this decaying, decrepit ruin got her hackles up. Hiding was for foals afraid of bullies. She was an airship crewmare; she didn’t know how to hide! She stamped her hooves, raising little puffs of stale dust from the floorboards, and stuck out her chest.

“Better idea,” she said. “We search the house for clues to this haunting, solve whatever stupid mystery is behind it, and put the ghost to rest. Or maybe we just kick its ass, I haven’t decided yet.”

Starlight rolled her eyes. “Okay, first off, you can’t kick a ghost’s ass, because it doesn’t have one. Second, it’s clear that this house has some sort of twisted, non-Pony Euclidean geometry* that loops its halls and rooms together in a maddening labyrinth that would drive a pony insane to try and understand. We don’t even know where to start—”

A loud screech of ancient, rusted metal cut her off as the manor’s front door swung inward. Rather than revealing the desert town outside, or another ruined room cast in shadows, beyond it lay a clean, candlelit parlour, similar in dimensions to their own. In fact, as Dash peered closer, she saw the same fireplace in its wall, plush upholstered chairs, and an upright, unbroken liquor cabinet filled with dozens of crystal bottles. The scent of polished wood and velvet poured out, welcoming them.

“See? Told you. Haunted houses are easy.” Dash brushed past Starlight and through the doorway. The chill of the airy desert manor vanished, replaced by a cozy, Summery warmth. She looked toward the window reflexively, but it only offered a rippled reflection of the room, as though the night outside were so utter and complete that nothing of it could shine through to their side of the glass. She fought down the urge to run over and pry it open – probably if she did that it would break the rules and all sorts of eldritch horrors like werebats and giant spiders and air dolphins would come pouring in, and then they’d have even more problems than before. Better to just solve this haunted house the right way, like Daring Do would.

“This is… nicer,” Nutmeg said. He crept through the door after Dash, nosing curiously at the immaculate furnishings and spending a moment in contemplation of the liquor cabinet. “How it all looked when Lady Miller was still alive, I assume?”

“Probably how she still imagines it. Most ghosts don’t realize they’re dead” Starlight said. She paused in the doorway, halfway between the ruined manor and the time-lost splendour of the ghost’s memory. Her steps left dusty hoofprints of plaster and mold on the deep pile Prench carpets. “Okay, so, this is pretty standard for ghosts, the kind of stuff they cover in Paranormal 101 courses at Canterlot U. Just keep your hooves to yourself, look for clues, and we’ll find our way out in no time.”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about,” Dash said. She hopped into the air and floated across the room, coming to rest by the hallway leading deeper into the manor. Flickering gas lamps, mounted on the walls at regular intervals, filled the space with a gentle yellow light. From deeper in came the scent of tobacco and nuts. She paused at the threshold and licked her lips.

“What would you consider a clue?” Nutmeg asked.

“I mean, it could be anything.” Starlight picked her way around the room, examining the furnishings and drapes closely. “Probably obvious, though. Ghosts aren’t exactly subtle.”

“How about a doll?” Rainbow asked. “Like, if it was just sitting in the hallway, staring at us?”

Starlight said nothing. She trotted over and stopped by Rainbow’s side, staring down at the antique porcelain filly standing about knee-high on the hallway carpet. It was fully dressed in a miniature turn-of-the-century businessmare’s outfit, complete with golden monocle and tophat, with a little cane about the size of a toothpick stitched into its upraised hoof. Green seaglass eyes watching them silently.

Finally, “Okay, that’s creepy.”

Nutmeg came up alongside them and lowered his head down to the doll’s level. His feathers fluffed out, and he snorted quietly. “Lovely. Young Lady Miller’s, I presume?”

“Almost certainly.” Starlight let out a long, shaking breath. “Ugh, that’s probably the last thing you see, right? That doll chasing you before it all goes black! And then a little doll version of you gets added to some playpen upstairs, Lady Miller’s guests for all eternity, and you’re never seen again. Haunted houses love themes like that. I’d bet my left hoof there’s all sorts of doll paraphernalia hiding in oh my Celestia why are you picking it up?!”

Dash hefted the doll in her forelegs. It was lighter than it looked, its porcelain head hollow and the rest of its body just corded fabric stuff with cotton and draped in well-stitched clothes. She gave its little nose a tap with the tip of her hoof, and in the back of her mind thought she heard something squeak.

“Relax, it’s just a doll. And it’s a clue, too, right?” She twisted her torso and set the doll on her back, like she was giving a very little sister a ride. And was it her imagination, or was it holding her mane to keep from falling off? Imagination, yeah. She gave her wings a little flap to make sure they had play in case she needed to fly.

“If you want to hold all the clues we find, Miss Dash, I won’t object,” Nutmeg said.

The hallway led deeper into the manor, or perhaps deeper back into Lady Miller’s memories. They passed rooms decorated in various styles, some of which clearly belong to other houses – Dash recognized the look of a Manehattan penthouse, with wide windows and gilded wallpaper, and the airy, communal dormitory of a filly’s boarding school. Nothing in them screamed “clue!” but nothing else came screaming out of the darkness at them, which suggested to Dash that they were on the right path. Or at least not on the one that ended with them turned into dolls.

In the vestibule they passed a wide, curving stair that led up to the second floor, guarded by a wide wood balustrade whose pillars were carved with pecans, walnuts, chestnuts, buckeyes, and a dozen other nut-shaped reliefs. Above, the empty darkness of the overlook chittered and whispered quiet suggestions in Dash’s ears, half-remembered secrets about small-town desert life. The doll riding on Dash’s back held on a bit tighter.

“Let’s not go up there,” Starlight whispered.

“Yep. Deal.” Dash floated across the vestibule on the tips of her hooves. Starlight and Nutmeg weren’t so silent, setting the floorboards creaking with their steps, but the darkness stayed up on the second floor and didn’t come down to join them.

Beyond the vestibule lay the library, a huge octagonal parlour paneled in high bookshelves that seemed to lean forward over the room, as if they were moments away from tipping over and spilling their contents onto whatever unfortunate pony happened to be reading from them. A collection of farmer’s almanacs butted up against a century-old encyclopedia that warred for space with a wagonload of account books, the kind Nutmeg kept in his cabin to track the Orithyia’s operating expenses. The higher shelves were given over to knick-knacks and gewgaws, the sentimental detritus that always seemed to accumulate in earth pony towns, where everything was heartfelt and precious and a keepsake from great-granpappy So-and-so who did something with the farm. Rainbow took it all in with a single glance and promptly bumped into Starlight on her way back out.

“Nothing in there,” she said. “Just books.”

“That could be important!” Starlight brushed past her into the room. Nutmeg followed, and Rainbow turned back with a suppressed groan.

They spent the next half of forever reading books. Or, Nutmeg and Starlight did, while Rainbow Dash stood guard at the door, which mostly consisted of peeking out into the hallway from time to time while wishing they would read faster. A pile of discarded books grew in the center of the library, heaped there carelessly whenever Starlight decided a particular book held nothing of importance. Hopefully the ghost of Lady Miller didn’t love books as much as Twilight Sparkle did, or they were in real trouble. Maybe they should reshelve them when they were done? There were probably a hundred or more books in the pile by now, she guessed.

Nah, no need to reshelve them. This was all just some ghost’s memory, anyway. Probably it could just remember them back on the shelves and save them all some trouble.

“Huh,” Nutmeg said, breaking the boring silence. He held a slim, colorful volume in his hooves. A foal’s book, deeply out of place in a businessmare’s library.

“Huh, what?” Starlight said. She trotted closer, her horn glowing as she flipped another book into the pile.

“A foal’s book,” he said. “The Dollhouse.”

“Ugh.” Starlight sniffed at the book and wrinkled her muzzle. “See? I told you. Dolls everywhere. It’s a theme.”

Nutmeg flipped back to the first page. Rainbow crowded up behind him and squeezed her chin over his shoulder to see. It was a picture book, mostly, illustrated with charcoals and a few spots of watercolor, telling the story of a poor young filly who discovered a magical world hidden in an antique dollhouse she discovered in the attic of her grandmother’s house, ending with a lesson about resilience and magic or something like that. Dash never got much beyond the illustrations, which included a huge cast of walking, talking dolls, including one that dressed as a businessmare with a tophat and monocle.

“Another clue?” Dash asked. “Want me to hold it?”

“I’ve never heard of a book murdering somepony, so I’ll keep this one.” Nutmeg closed the book and tucked it under one wing for safekeeping. “One more, right? These things always come in threes.”

“They always do for Daring Do,” Dash said. They trotted out into the hallway. The path back toward the vestibule was dark; weak gas lamps lighted the path further west. “And what do you mean, murdering somepony? Have you ever heard of a doll doing that?”

“No, but a doll could murder somepony,” Starlight said. She gave the doll riding on Dash’s back a squinty glance. “I mean, in theory. It has hooves, so it could garrote you with your own mane or stab you or something.”

“Yeah, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.” Dash peered over her shoulder at the doll. It didn’t look like a killer. Besides, it was just a doll. Dolls were no bigger than a baby, and she could beat up a baby no problem. She gave it a little nod, to make sure it knew she was watching, and turned back to the hallway.

Closed doors flanked their path. Dash gave one handle a little rattle, but it was solid as stone. Not a part of this memory, apparently. Ahead, at the end of the hall, a rectangle of light shone through the crack around a terminal door. Its surface was rough, aged, and not at all in style with the rest of the manor – cheap wood planks given a poor sanding and a coat of white paint. She pressed her hoof against the latch and gave it a little shove.

The door swung open soundlessly, revealing a foal’s room. Gypsum walls, coated in playful, fraying wallpaper, held crayon drawings and posters of ancient musicals. A frilly little bed occupied a corner beneath the window. And the dollhouse? No dollhouse. No toys at all, actually. She let out a little breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“End of the line, I’m guessing,” Nutmeg said. He peered around the room and peeked under the bed. Nothing grabbed him.

“I bet this is where she grew up,” Starlight said. “Looks like a farmhouse. Wasn’t rich back then.”

Not much room in here for clues, Rainbow decided. She glanced back at the doll to make sure it wasn’t getting any ideas, then began snuffling around the room, pulling open the drawers and nosing under the bed linens. It was all standard little-filly stuff until she got to the dresser – it was a few inches out from the wall, with no obvious reason for the gap. She pressed her face against the cheap wallpaper and peered behind it.

Yup. “Hey, Starlight, there’s something back here. Think you can magic it out?”

“Thinking is how we do magic,” Starlight said. Her horn glowed, and the entire dresser wobbled as she walked it away from the wall. A moment later a black square, about the size of a book, floated out from where it had fallen.

Not a book, though. A picture frame. Dash and Nutmeg squeezed close to Starlight to see. The black-and-white picture showed an earth pony family, assembled outside a small clapboard rowhouse astride a barn and orchard. Neat stacks of moving boxes were piled around them, all beside a wagon half-loaded with more boxes. The parents were busy loading the wagon, while the filly alone stared at the camera. She clutched a little doll in her arms, a pale porcelain thing dressed in a businessmare’s outfit. Behind them, in the barn, basket upon basket of nuts waited for delivery.

“Her parents were farmers?” Nutmeg wondered. He flipped the frame over, but the back was blank. No more clues there.

“Nut farmers, probably. Itinerant workers, travelling from farm to farm, helping with the nut harvest.” Starlight sighed. “I bet she didn’t have many friends growing up, moving so often.”

“Then she moved to Groveport and struck it rich with nuts,” Rainbow mused. She glanced over her shoulder again at the doll. “And then she died.”

Silence. The others glanced at her.

“I mean, that’s what happens to everypony eventually, right?” Dash continued. “Probably a bunch of stuff happened in between too.”

“Straight to death, again,” Starlight grumbled. She pulled the picture out of the frame and tucked it into her mane. “I suppose I’ll take this one. Anyway, mystery solved, I guess? She was haunted by loneliness, tormented by the nuts that defined both her childhood and her adulthood, and now she haunts the ruins of her desert manor, turning her victims into dolls to keep her company for all time. Pretty standard stuff.”

“Seems like a bit of a reach?” Nutmeg said. “There’s plenty of lonely ponies who don’t turn into vengeful spirits upon death.”

“It’s not physics, Nutmeg, it’s psychology. You can’t apply the same level of rigor.” Starlight squared off against the door and huffed. “Alright, we’re ready. Let’s go confront a ghost.”

Back out in the hallway, the lamps had all changed. Now they lit the way back to the foyer, and as they approached Rainbow saw a radiant glow pouring down from the second floor, where before there had been only darkness. Hoofsteps sounded from on high, and they assembled at the base of the stairs to await Lady Miller’s arrival. The doll on Rainbow Dash’s back seemed to squeeze its little legs tighter around her barrel.

And there she was. With a final crash of cymbals and swell of drums, Lady Miller appeared. Gaunt, almost skeletal, the color washed out of her dusty and ragged coat. Empty eyes stared down at them from a face frozen in a rictus, revealing rows of preternaturally sharp teeth. Trails of smoke drifted from charred nostrils. She seemed to float down the stairs, each hoofstep reverberating in Rainbow Dash’s mind like a cannon—

“Stop!” Starlight cried. She jumped forward to the base of the stairs, just steps from Lady Miller, and pointed an accusing hoof. “That’s far enough, imposter!”

Everypony froze. Even Lady Miller seemed taken aback, her hoof held inches above the final step. Her lidless eyes blinked at Starlight, the coals within flickering uncertainly.

“Uh, Miss Glimmer...” Nutmeg said.

Starlight chuckled. “Oh, you thought you were so clever, didn’t you? Such an elaborate scheme! A deserted house, built entirely within a working, modular manor able to shift its hallways and rooms!”

“Wait, what?” Rainbow said. She spun in a circle, peering at the foyer.

“Don’t you get it?” Starlight said. She turned, waving a hoof at the walls. “Those tremendous crashes we felt earlier? That was the house being rearranged by a complex series of mechanical actuators, turning around rooms and connecting them with different passages! The noises and the magic dampening fields, all just elaborate parlour tricks by some cheap magician hired by our host here! You see, just like this whole house is fake, so is Lady Miller! There never was any such pony! It’s all an act staged by the town, to scare away visitors before they discover the secret behind Groveport’s bountiful nut harvests! And all of it orchestrated by none other than the mayor! Now, off with the mask, Oaky Wedge!”

Starlight’s horn glowed, and a violet light surrounded Lady Miller’s face. She grunted and twisted, trying to escape its grasp. Starlight scowled and poured more power into her magic, panting with effort, and finally she hopped up on her rear legs, grabbed Lady Miller’s face with her hooves, and began to tug with all her might.

“Come on, just a little more…” Starlight grunted. She heaved and twisted, digging the edges of her hooves under the skin of Lady Miller’s jaw. “Oof, this is really glued on well… Aha!” With a final, victorious shout shout, Starlight wretched the mask away, revealing a polished white skull and ember-lit eyes beneath.

The front door banged open, and Oaky Wedge tromped in, a basket of assorted nuts balanced on her back. “Good morning, ya’ll!” she shouted. “I figured you might want some nuts for breakfast, so—oh my, that’s a frightful looking demonic ghoul you’ve got there, yessir it is.”

“Right, right.” Starlight looked down at the crumpled face held in her hooves, and gently laid it back on Lady Miller’s head. She tucked the forehead under the bangs, gently tapping it into place with her hooves, and folded the flaccid cheeks into the wide spaces between her jaw and muzzle bones. The whole affair sagged rather precariously, and Starlight spent a moment trying to slide it into a more stable configuration, less threatened by gravity. “There, that’s fine, just like before. Now RUN! GO GO GO! TOSS THE DOLL AT HER, DASH! TOSS THE DOLL!”

* * *

Later, on the Orithyia as it sped away from Groveport, Rainbow Dash, Nutmeg and Starlight Glimmer huddled by the wheel. They were high enough now to soar above the clouds rolling in from the east, and the mid-morning sun painted the cottony tufts below them a brilliant white. Sitting there, squeezed between her friends and swaddled in their warmth, Rainbow Dash began to relax.

“Nopony’s hurt?” Nutmeg asked.

“I’m good,” Dash said. “Starlight?”

“Never better.” She exhaled a trembling breath. “So that was… a thing.”

“Yup.”

“It certainly was.”

“And the iceberg was delivered, as promised.”

“It was,” Nutmeg said. “Our record is still good on that account.”

“Great, great,” she said. She let out another breath and leaned against Dash’s shoulder. For several minutes all three were silent as the clouds sped by beneath them.

“Now kiss,” Starlight whispered.

They left her at the first railroad junction they could find.

Author's Note

* Named for Pony Euclid, who wrote the famous treatise on geometry, The Elements.

Prologue: The Adventuring Type

“Ahoy! Down there! What town is this?”

Rainbow Dash looked up at the sound, which was odd. Not the sound – that was pretty normal. What was odd was that she had to look up.

In Rainbow Dash's world she was always on top. She was on top in lots of ways – physically, of course, being way up in the sky, but also just all-around awesomer than most ponies. It was hard work being the best, but she managed.

Naps helped. Naps on clouds, like the one the strange coming-from-above voice had just woken her from. She squinted up at the sky, where a huge shape blotted out the sun.

Huh.

She leapt, wings beating, and soared around the strange object. It was an airship, with a slender wood gondola suspended from a gas envelope the size of a house. Sails and planes and rigging and spars protruded from it like a lionfish’s fins. Beneath them, perched on the tip of the long bowsprit extending from the gondola’s nose, was a sandy pegasus with a cedar mane. He waved.

Dash zoomed down to hover beside him (and above him, because she was on top). “Who are you?”

“I’m Nutmeg!” he called. “And what town was this, again?”

Rainbow Dash ignored him and flew a few lazy orbits around the airship. It had a homemade look to it, all stitched and planked together, with no two parts the same. But it was sleek, with narrow wood strakes running its length like blades, and when the wind blew it twisted effortlessly, sails and fins aligning to keep it straight.

She flew back down to the gondola. “You’re a pegasus. Why are you in an airship?”

“Why, for hunting, of course! You need an airship to hunt icebergs. Also, I really would like to know what town—”

“You can’t hunt icebergs!” Rainbow Dash said. A touch of anger infused her voice now. “Icebergs just sit in the water. You’d need, like, a boat or something.”

“Ah, those are normal icebergs. I’m hunting air icebergs!” Nutmeg patted the spar beneath him with a hoof. “They float with the clouds, miles high. Only way to get them is an airship!”

That was dumb. “That’s dumb. And you’re dumb.”

“That’s what most ponies say, before they see their first air iceberg.” He took on a dreamy look and sighed. “They’re magnificent, really. A treasure. Until you see one… hm, you know, you strike me as the adventuring type. Would you like to join me? With the two of us, we could net a big one!”

She rolled her eyes. “Look, bud, I’m busy here, alright? I’ve got stuff to do. Stuff, like, uh… stuff. So why don’t you just go hunting or whatever?” She snickered and turned to fly off, and as she zipped away she called back. “And it’s Ponyville!”

* * *

Nutmeg’s airship was back a week later. He tied up on the spire above the Carousel Boutique. Towed behind his ship was a massive iceberg, easily five-hundred feet across. It bobbed in the air over half the town, shedding cold wind and snow. It turned the ground beneath it into a brief vision of winter, of icy white streets and flurries dancing in the air. Ponies gathered below it to ooh and aah, laughing in delight as their breath fogged in the frosty air.

Rainbow Dash glowered at the iceberg from her cloud. It scratched at her coat, rough with ice crystals, and she scrubbed them away with an annoyed mutter. She hated frozen clouds.

This was Nutmeg’s fault. His iceberg was messing up the weather patterns she had lovingly crafted all summer long. Well, maybe not lovingly – in the brief moments when she honestly examined her performance as weather team captain, a certain laissez-faire attitude toward the weather became apparent. Less charitable observers might call her lazy, but that was unfair. She was the hardest working pony she knew!

Just not at her actual job. She had other priorities, after all.

With a snort, Rainbow Dash kicked away from her icy cloud, scattering it into a million flakes of snow, and went hunting for her quarry.

It was a short hunt. She found him a few minutes later, buying groceries in the market. She landed in front of him with a flare of her wings, scowled and stomped her hoof. “Why are you back?”

“Ah, you again!” He grinned at her. “Ponyville happened to be on the way. Heading to Appleloosa with that beauty.”

Rainbow followed his gaze to the iceberg looming over them. It was a pretty nice iceberg, as far as icebergs went, she supposed. Not that she’d ever seen one before. Towering and white, fading to a deep blue in the center, it was almost the same color as her coat.

She scowled. “It’s dumb.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s dumb,” he said. “And I don’t think you do either, miss. In fact, with those wings of yours, I bet you could be the best iceberg wrangler of this generation. You’ve got that look, you know? I’m heading to Cloudsdale next, rumors of a big pack of ‘bergs harassing the town. Could use some help.”

“Well, I am awesome,” Dash allowed. Then she frowned. “But icebergs are dumb and I don’t need any dumb airship. So, just take your iceberg and get outta here.”

And he did just that.

* * *

It was evening when Dash settled onto her new cloud. It was soft and fluffy and certainly not frozen. A good cloud for planning the next day’s weather, or possibly napping.

Far to the west, Nutmeg’s iceberg was a dim retreating shape, an oddly shaped cloud that refused to blow with the wind. It slowly crossed in front of the setting sun, and its shadow covered her in eclipse. She could still smell the ancient ice, even from miles away.

After an exceptionally brief consideration of the next day’s weather, her thoughts drifted back to Nutmeg. Air icebergs. Pegasi who needed airships. The best of her generation. Only one of those things was not dumb.

Far below, Ponyville began to close up for the night. The stalls lining the market square closed shop, the stores shuttered their windows, and a ghostly silence broken only by the buzzing cicadas descended upon the town. Ponyville was a farming town, after all, and farmers lived by the sun. They would all be up bright and early the next day, early as Applejack, and start bucking trees or pulling weeds or whatever it was that farmers did before Rainbow Dash woke up around noon.

How long had it been since the last monster attack? It felt like months – or weeks, at least. And the stupid magical map in Twilight’s castle kept sending Rarity, of all ponies, off on adventures. Rarity! Rainbow Dash scowled.

Far off in the west, the sun briefly emerged from behind Nutmeg’s iceberg. It hovered on the horizon, bathing her in a brief final warmth, and then it vanished for the night.

Another day done, and ponies abed for the night. Rainbow Dash pondered the lonely streets beneath her.

“Dammit, I’m dumb,” she mumbled. Her wings flared, and she took off in pursuit. "Wait!"

The Summer Sartorial Sensation, part 1

It only took them a few minutes of wandering Fillydelphia’s packed streets to reach the Summer Sartorial Sensation.

The crowds grew denser as they approached the heart of the garment district. Sweaty, naked ponies were slowly replaced by sweaty, clothed ponies, panting in the sweltering summer heat. At the corner of every block, the city had set up large tents that spanned the street, filled with troughs of cold water and spinning fans. Fashionably dressed mobs pulsed and swelled as those outside the tents pushed in toward the shade, while the refreshed and watered ponies inside struggled to escape.

Rainbow pressed closer to Rarity’s side to make sure she didn’t lose the diva. Nutmeg trailed behind them both, keeping to the space they broke in the crowd. Through it all, Rarity offered a constant stream of commentary on the ponies around them. Rainbow Dash listened with only half an ear.

“...a daring choice for a saddle. I’m not sure I would have gone with something quite so risque, but on the other hoof that plume she has on the cantle really does match the bow in her tail. Not something I’d wear around foals or teenage colts, perhaps, but it really does catch the eye, doesn’t it, darling? Now, that creme mare, the one with the powder blue…”

Yup, still going. Rainbow Dash let her attention wander.

Something tapped her side, and she glanced back to see Nutmeg pulling back his wing. He leaned in to press his muzzle against her mane.

“I think we’re under-dressed,” he whispered.

“Nah, we’re fine. Besides, I make this look good.” She fluffed her wings for effect.

“Granted, but I’m not so blessed.”

“Eh, you’re near me. That’s pretty fortunate.”

Nutmeg was silent in reply.

“...and, oh my, is that an off-the-shoulder Grace Felix design? I heard they were all the rage in Manehattan this Spring, but I never had the chance to snag one for myself. What do you think of it, darling? Would it look good on me? Her coat’s about the same as mine – not quite as white, of course. No, it’s more yellow, I think. Is her coat whiter than mine? No, that’s silly. Of course it isn’t. But still, that is a nice design, I’ll have to see if…”

Rainbow Dash’s mind drifted again. A spot of color grabbed her eye, and she turned in time to see an earth pony mare piled high with drapes and folds and pleats of cloth in every color imaginable, all stacked atop her back and neck and shoulders and head like a tower of poor choices. She teetered with each step, and Dash couldn’t decide if the poor girl was simply transporting a dozen different designs, or somehow attempting to wear them.

“...should really talk to her about those shoes. Iron, after the solstice? She just looks silly. I suppose I’m one to talk, though. Some years in Ponyville I don’t switch my shoes either. Nopony there cares. Oh, look, we’re here!” Her voice took on a sing-song tone, and a spring entered her step as she led them toward the mass of ponies streaming through the Fillydelphia Convention Center’s doors.

The inside was no less crowded than the streets outside, though the air conditioning was working at full blast. The sudden transition from the sodden, hammering heat outside to the cold interior was like flying through a snowstorm. Rainbow Dash looked up at the vents, half-expecting to see icicles hanging from them.

“Ooh, that feels nice.” Rarity shivered daintily. “Now then, I’ll go get us registered while you two explore. Remember, look for ponies who are having friendship problems.”

“What do those look like, anyway?” Nutmeg asked.

“Well, you know.” Rarity paused with a small frown on her lips. “Screaming, usually. Or crying. And it’s usually mares. Actually, now that I think about it, every friendship problem in Fillydelphia has involved mares. I wonder why that is.”

“Uh, maybe cuz there’s no stallions here?” Rainbow Dash ventured.

“Nonsense, Rainbow Dash. The fashion industry is diverse and welcoming to all ponies, including stallions. Why, just look around! There’s, um… well, hm…” Rarity spun in a slow circle, her hoof on her chin. Around them, the crowd of mares pushed and jostled their way to and from the registration tables. Finally she stopped, pointing at their third member. “Why, Nutmeg’s a stallion! And I’m sure he feels quite welcome here. Don’t you, Nutmeg?”

“I always feel welcome around you, Miss Rarity.”

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Okay, that’s so stupid I’m not even going to respond. How about we just walk around until our butts start to glow or something, and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

Rarity sniffed. “So vulgar. Very well, then – if you don’t find anything, meet me back here in an hour. I’ll have our passes.”

“Don’t we need those to get in?” Nutmeg asked.

“Oh, you’re a stallion, darling.” Rarity waved a hoof absently. “Just tell them you lost it somewhere and smile. As for Rainbow… hm, tell them you’re modelling.”

“I’m not modelling, Rarity.”

“I know, I know. But you’ve got that look. They’ll believe you.”

* * *

They did believe her. The ‘security’ ponies, who actually appeared to be overweight weather team rejects, believed her so much they escorted both Rainbow Dash and Nutmeg past the entry lines and into the main hall. They smiled at her, smiled twice as long at Nutmeg, then drifted half-heartedly back to the lines they were supposed to be tending.

“Huh,” Nutmeg said. “This is big.”

“Yeah.” Rainbow Dash had to sit down to take in the vast space before them. The hall extended for hundreds of yards to their right and left. The ceiling was high enough that the Orithyia could have easily flown above the crowd with room to spare. Pegasus mares draped in flowing designs glided through the air, their wings beating easily as they soared on the thermals rising from the crowd below.

“It will take a while to search all this,” he said.

Rainbow Dash turned her attention to the convention floor. Huge partitions divided the space into segments, each apparently dedicated to some event or other, much in the manner of a three-ring circus. The chatter of ten-thousand mares (and, she assumed, a few stallions) was a constant, flowing babble. She raised her voice just to be heard.

“Yeah, uh, we should probably stick together.” She paused. “Do you think I’ve got that look?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know, like Rarity said. That modelling look.”

“Oh! Well.” He paused as well, and gave her a more critical look than she was used to receiving from a stallion. “Since you ask, you are quite striking. Your mane, especially, is bound to draw attention. It’s a little… unstyled, at the moment, but that could be fixed.”

“Hm.” She glanced up at her mane. Her forelock, as usual, was doing its best to dangle in her eyes. She blew it clear with an annoyed huff. “Yeah, well, I don’t care about any of that stuff. Not this mare! Now, let’s go find some trouble!”

And so they ventured into the teeming chaos of the Summer Sartorial Sensation.

* * *

An hour later they wandered out. Nutmeg wore a stunned expression. Rainbow Dash’s eyes were glazed.

“Why was she wearing the chair?” he mumbled.

“I don’t—” Rainbow stopped, let out a long breath, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know. I think it was, like, a metaphor for a saddle? Does that make sense?”

“I feel like everything I know about ponies is—”

“Darlings! There you are!” They turned to see Rarity prancing toward them. “Good news! I was able to get us three-day passes, all for the price of a daily!”

“How is that good news?” Rainbow Dash asked. “We’re supposed to find this problem as fast as possible, so we can get out of here.”

“Yes yes, of course.” Rarity flicked her tail dismissively. “And I’m sure we will. But in case we can’t, these passes will make sure we can get in tomorrow. And the next day! Oh! Maybe we can come back, even if we do solve everything today!”

“Yeah, no.” Rainbow frowned. “I’m a busy pony, you know. Right, Nutmeg?”

“Huh?” Nutmeg blinked his way back to reality. “Oh, yes. We need to get back to the air soon.”

“There, see? So let’s just go find this problem, fix it, and we can all get back to what we were doing.”

The next ten minutes were a sullen affair, with Nutmeg still in a daze, Rainbow Dash slowly growing angrier with every incomprehensible display they passed, and Rarity being her usual passive-aggressive self.

They passed dozens of booths and stands manned with the most gorgeous ponies in Equestria, all laden in the most absurd disasters of fashion Rainbow Dash could imagine. Half the ‘outfits’ weren’t even clothes! Ponies wore bits of building material, scraps of metal, mirrored panels, honest-to-Celestia armor, designs stolen straight from rugs, and even some things she couldn’t classify. If she ran into these models in the street (assuming they could even walk) she’d have called for the police.

Rarity, apparently, disagreed. She’d resumed her stream-of-conscious narration, and paused occasionally to inspect displays that managed to snag her attention. They were, apparently, in the avant garde section of the show, with experimental fashions. Designs, Rarity insisted, that weren’t meant to be worn – they were pieces of art, they pushed the limits of what fashion could be.

Soon enough (though not soon enough for Dash) they passed into another quadrant, and the designs took a turn for the normal. Still extravagant, yes, but at least Dash could understand the clothes these models and ponyquins wore. Aisles dedicated entirely to hats stretched away in each direction. An island of saddles floated in a sea of flamboyant dresses. Shoes – more shoes than Dash knew existed – filled every nook and cranny of the show, like they were the mortar holding the blocks of the fashion world together. Here and there empty booths stood, staffed by ponies tearing down old displays or preparing to erect new ones. And all around them, swarming through the crowd and between the booths and in the air overhead, models stood or strutted or flew, heads and tails high, their necks bent imperially, their coats and manes so perfect that Dash, the weather-mare and action pony who couldn’t give two bits about her appearance, felt intimidated by their presence. Even Rarity seemed drab in their shadows.

Rarity didn’t let it faze her, though. Her eyes, if anything, grew more critical, and she sniped occasionally at the designs, though just as often she offered some grudging point of admiration.

Nutmeg roused from his torpor as they walked. It probably helped that more than a few in the crowd turned their eyes in his direction. Although plain of coat and wearing not a stitch of clothes, he was still a fine specimen of a stallion, and Rainbow Dash felt obligated to walk closer by his side, shooting an occasional scowl at mares whose gaze lingered for too long.

She didn’t want him feeling uncomfortable, after all. They might just be coworkers, but life aboard the Orithyia had drilled home the concept that shipmates were responsible for each other.

More hours passed than Rainbow could count. They inched along glacially, the clocks hoarding their minutes like misers counting their pennies. Eternity stretched out before Rainbow Dash, an endless march of garish dresses, shrieking clothes horses and inane babble. Lunch came, offering them a brief reprieve, but then it was back into the breach, and Rainbow despaired. There were hours left to go, and it was only the first day.

It was just after 4 p.m. when they discovered a new venue, a hall dedicated entirely to hats, and Rainbow Dash wanted to cry. She was about to when she heard something unexpected, something so out of place it was like a bucket of ice water poured on her back, shocking her out of the gruel of boredom and despondency.

It was a stallion. And he was crying.

Air Whales and Other Cetaceans

It was around dawn when a shift in the Orithyia woke Dash from a pleasant dream of some sort. She couldn’t recall the specifics, but it was warm and soft and playful and smart and smelled nice. She shook away the last foggy relics of sleep and carefully climbed out of the hammock so as not to wake Starlight.

The Orithyia shuddered as something bumped into it. Rainbow blinked at motion. A few feet away, Nutmeg stirred in his hammock.

“M’wha?” he asked.

“I think we’re touching the ‘berg.” Rainbow yawned. “Lemme go check.”

She pulled herself up the ladder and out onto the deck. The horizon to the east was a smudge of gray just beginning to lighten with the arrival of the dawn. She could barely make out the jagged black silhouettes of the far mountains. Overhead, the stars still reigned. The ‘berg was a huge, dark shape to her left, more felt than seen; it leeched the heat from half of her body and caressed her with its breath.

She squinted at the iceberg. It was over a hundred yards away, bobbing gently at the end of the lines they’d attached. Nowhere near the ship.

The hull shuddered again as something struck it. A low, keening moan filled the air, followed by a series of whistles and clicks. Rainbow sighed and trotted to the edge of the ship. Sure enough, there beside her was an adult air whale cow, rubbing her barnacle-crusted hide against the Orithyia’s cladding. It was too dark to see properly, but it looked and smelled like a baleen of some sort, perhaps twice the length of the Orithyia from nose to tail.

Hooves clattered on the deck behind her. She peered over her shoulder to see Nutmeg emerge from the hatch with a lantern dangling from his mouth. Starlight’s disheveled head popped out behind him.

“Are we hitting ice?” he asked.

“No, air whale.” She trotted toward the bow tool locker to get the deck broom. “I got it.”

“What?” Starlight asked. “What is it?”

“Air whale. Don’t worry, they’re not dangerous.” Rainbow jumped up on the rail, then leapt off, her wings snapping out to catch the air. She flapped into position beside the whale and began whacking it with the fuzzy end of the broom. “Shoo! Shoo! Go on! Get!”

It took a while, but eventually the cow got the message. It lowed at her, shaking the hollow spaces in her bones with the sound, and for a moment reared up like it might charge. But it was an air whale, so of course it backed down, and after a few more minutes of encouragement with the broom it began to swim back toward the ‘berg and the rest of its pod. Rainbow could just barely see their sleeping shapes drifting in the iceberg’s lee, awash in the cold air raining down from it like a waterfall.

By the time she got back to the Orithyia, the sun was getting near the horizon. The sky was pinking up nicely, and the stars had fled for the day. All told, she’d lost less than an hour of sleep. Probably there was a nap waiting for her later in the day. Not a bad trade, if she was being honest with herself.

Starlight was waiting by the rail when Dash returned. Her eyes were fixed on the pod of whales, and as soon as Dash landed the questions began. “What was that? Was that a real whale? Why didn’t you tell me there were whales up here! Why did you chase it away? Why was it touching the ship? Was it dangerous? Was it hungry? What do air whales eat? What—”

“Okay, stop.” Rainbow planted her hoof on Starlight’s muzzle. She trotted back to the tool locker, stowed the broom, and returned. “Okay. It’s just an air whale, no need to get excited.”

“Are you kidding? Did you see how big that thing was? It was bigger than the ship! How is it flying?”

“Magic?” Dash shrugged. “They like to hang out around air icebergs. But they’re attracted to the sound the engines make, so you have to be careful steering around them. Sometimes we even have to disengage the propellers or the whales get too close and then there’s whale all over the place. That’s no fun to clean up. Like, you know how ponies all think whales are super smart? They’re not in my experience. Kinda dumb actually.”

“Uh.” Starlight stared at the idling propellers, then back at the whales. “That’s horrible.”

“I know. The smell is terrible.” Rainbow trotted to the opposite rail and peered over. There weren’t any more whales near them. “Hey, captain! We’re clear if you want to start moving.”

Nutmeg waved in acknowledgement from the wheeldeck. A moment later the engines came alive, their hum filling the morning air and buzzing in her chest like a fuze. The propellers began to spin, and the Orithyia strained at her tethers. Behind them, the air iceberg began to slowly accelerate through the air, leaving a trail of snow and fog in its wake. The whales lingered in space for a few minutes, as if caught in their own inertia, but slowly they oriented themselves and began swimming after the iceberg, until finally the Orithyia, the ‘berg and the pod were all in relative stasis again.

Starlight was back at the aft rail, leaning out over the back of the ship as they powered on toward Groveport. The engines were running at close to full speed, and the gale they threw out shook the ship and made normal conversation impossible. Rainbow had to scrunch in beside Starlight and lean over the edge as far as she could just to shout in the unicorn’s ear.

“We’re a few hours out from Groveport,” she yelled. “Do we need to stop there for your secret mission?”

“Maybe?” Starlight tried to pin her longer mane back so it didn’t whip her in the face. “I guess we’ll find out!”

* * *

The next few hours were uneventful. Nutmeg kept them on course from the wheel while Rainbow ran the various errands necessary to keep an airship the size of the Orithyia afloat. She tightened the lines securing the superstructure to the gas envelope; she cleaned out the mercury filters in the gem-fired engines; she scraped air barnacles from the hull with a chisel and collected them in a bag (they could be sold for good money in pegasus cities). When all those mundane chores were complete, she topped off the lanterns in preparation for the evening, then split her time between Nutmeg and Starlight, chatting with each until she got bored and then switching.

It was nice having another crew member (even if Starlight wasn’t technically part of the crew and didn’t perform any duties). It gave her somepony else to talk to.

It was roundabout noon when Starlight tried to get her attention. This was a bit into Rainbow’s mid-day nap, so it took a while for her to catch on. She grumbled, stretched, and jumped out of the crow’s nest atop the envelope and soared down to the main deck where Starlight was waving for her attention.

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you.” She trotted up to the edge beside Starlight. The engines were just as loud as before, and the whipping winds they kicked out finally started to blast away the grogginess in her head. “What’s up!”

“The air whales!” Starlight shouted. “There’s babies!”

Oh, Celestia. Rainbow tried not to roll her eyes. Of course there were calves – pods always had calves. If there weren’t calves the adults all went their separate ways for the rest of the year. Pods only existed for the calves. She propped her elbows up on the rail and tried to focus on how excited and happy Starlight was, rather than the fact that she could still be napping.

“Babies!” Starlight grabbed her shoulder. “Look! Oh my Celestia they’re so cute! It’s like they’re smiling at us!”

Huh? Rainbow blinked and peered over the edge at the darting, flitting shapes that had Starlight so enamoured. There were at least a dozen, dancing in the wake of the Orithyia, growing closer every second.

Her blood froze. Shock, then terror washed over her. She stumbled back from the railing and scrabbled at the deck for purchase. Her heart panicked. It shook her chest with its frantic beats.

“Those aren’t whales!” she shouted. “They’re air dolphins! Nutmeg! Captain! Air dolphins! DOLPHINS!”

Nutmeg was at her side in an instant. He pulled her up, and spared the pursuing shadows only a moment of attention. Still she heard his breath catch, and felt the cold sweat breaking out on his coat. He was as terrified as she.

“Cut the lines!” His voice was high and choking. “For Celestia’s sake, cut the lines Dash!”

Right. The lines. They had to escape. Rainbow stumbled to the anchor points connecting the Orithyia to the massive iceberg trailing behind them. Her hooves shook as she tried to undo the connections. They were too tight! She fumbled with them in a panicked daze.

“What’s going on?” Starlight asked. She stood just abreast the rail, watching Dash and Nutmeg with a confused look. “What’s wrong? They’re just baby whales.”

Fool! Idiot! Dash would have yelled at her if she had the breath in her lungs. But none remained. She gasped for air. The terror she’d barely held at bay started to wash over her, and she finally pulled out her scimitar and slashed at the ropes. They fell away after two strokes, and she ran to the other side of the ship to do the same. All the while she heard the whistles and clicks of the dolphins growing closer.

“Uh.” Starlight said. “Are we, uh… should I do something?”

“Hide!” Dash shouted around the handle of the scimitar. “Luna’s teats, hide!”

She bashed at the lines with her blade. After several swings the thick rope parted, and they were free. The Orithyia swayed as it suddenly came loose, and Dash nearly tumbled to the deck. Behind them, the air dolphins swooped closer.

“We’re loose!” Dash shouted. “Go, Nutmeg! Go!!”

He heard her. The engines screamed as he pushed them to full power. A giant pressed Dash into the deck as the ship accelerated hard. Starlight screamed and fell over, just barely clinging to the rail. Behind them, the iceberg and the air dolphins receded into the distance. Dash imagined she could hear their angry whistles in the moments before the wind swallowed all sound.

* * *

Later, they went back to retrieve the ‘berg. The dolphins had all moved on, and it was safe for them to recover the lines.

They made it to Groveport the next morning, without any further difficulty. Dash apologized to Starlight for yelling at her. Starlight still didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

“That’s fine,” Dash said. “That’s good. It’s better you don’t know how terrible air dolphins are.”