Chapters "AJ?"
"No, Dash." Just keep walking, AJ told herself.
"But are you looking at it?"
"Can't hardly miss it." The booth stood right at the end of the midway, after all, its sign twice the size of any other at the Ponyville Fun and Frolic Festival.
"Then how can you say—?"
"No, Dash."
"Gah!" The sunny afternoon sky went all shadowy, Dash splaying herself across it, her wings flapping fast as a hummingbird's and her legs waving every which-a-way. "You said it again!"
"Eeyup." AJ tried to keep her steps firm and resolute, her gaze focused on the roller coasters, merry-go-rounds, and Tilt-a-Whirls filling the field past the row of games. Not that it was gonna do her a speck of good, she knew. Nothing in the wide, wide world of Equestria was cuter than Dash when she really wanted something, her eyes all wide and pleading, her ears all perked and quivering.
Imagining the picture, AJ couldn't help but sneak a glance—
And Dash's lower lip, stuck out and trembling, pretty much did her in. She came to a halt in front of the booth, and it took a fair amount of willpower to stop her from scooping Dash right outta the sky and peppering her all over with kisses.
But still, her last tiny sliver of self-preservation prodded AJ to ask, "Maybe it's you don't see the sign, RD?"
"You bet I do!" Dash flipped around till she was hovering with her back hooves pointed at the ground and her front hoofs gesturing to the booth. "'A unique competitive opportunity!'" she said, reading the largest and to AJ's mind the least-important words. "'Pit yourself against a friend in the most magical and mysterious maze known to Ponykind! Race through the terrain of a completely unknown alien world without ever leaving the confines of this booth! Like nothing you've ever experienced before!'"
AJ waited for her to keep going, but Dash just spun back, her face all teeth and sparkling eyes. "You and me! Racing through a place where no pony's gone before! And it's only twenty bits for the two of us!"
"Uh-huh ." AJ made her own gesture toward the booth. "And the part there where it says 'Flimflam Brothers, Proprietors'?"
Dash blew air through her lips. "You've really gotta learn to let stuff go, AJ."
It took a few seconds for AJ to find her tongue. "Let stuff go? Y'mean stuff like the way them consarn Flimflams are trying to cheat either me or some other innocent ponies every single time I meet 'em?"
"Oh, now, friend Applejack!" sang out an all-too-familiar baritone.
It was followed immediately by a slightly higher pitched, "We're legitimate businessponies! Ask any of our satisfied customers!"
The two of them had popped up on either side of the little arched doorway under the sign, and past them, AJ noticed for the first time a black box as big as two ponies sitting in the center of the booth, colored lights flashing from different places all over the box. "Resort owners par excellence! " Flam announced, his mustache curling upward with his grin.
"Entertainers without peer!" Flim added.
"Purveyors of games of skill and chance to all and sundry!"
"Saturdry, too!" Flim stuck a front hoof toward his brother.
Flam clacked his own hoof against it. "Which just happens to be today!"
"Your lucky day!"
"A day that, I daresay, neither you nor Captain Dash will forget for as long as you both might live!"
Dash was absolutely vibrating in place, the breeze from her wings plenty strong enough to bat AJ's bangs around. "Captain Dash?" AJ asked, aiming her words like pebbles at Dash's fool head. "You mean the brand-spanking-new leader of the Wonderbolts who oughtta be setting a good example for all the little fillies and colts by not falling for some hucksters' slick line of patter? That Captain Dash?"
"Hey!" Dash settled to the ground with a stomp of all four hooves and shoved her snout against AJ's. "Maybe the example I'm setting has to do with not backing away from challenges! Maybe it has to do with facing down the unknown!"
"Unknown?" Try as she might, AJ couldn't keep from raising her voice. "Ain't a single thing unknown here!" She did stop herself from stomping, though, by waving at the brothers again. "They're gonna try to cheat us! That's as sure as Twilight setting the sun tonight!"
"Then perhaps," Flam said, sliding out of the booth like he had butter on his hooves, "as a show of good faith, we can make you a no-strings-attached offer?"
Flim slid right beside him. "For the price of merely ten thin bits, we will send the two of you racing through adventure courtesy of the Portal Popper XTE!"
Flam tapped a hoof against their sign. "Half our regular price!"
"And," Flim went on, "when you've experienced the undeniable thrills of this game like no other and you find yourself agreeing that it has indeed been a unique competitive opportunity, then and only then will we ask you to furnish us with the other ten bits."
"After all!" Flam's grin seemed to have more teeth in it than a pony's really ought to. "An individual such as yourself, friend Applejack, world-renowned for her honesty and integrity, would surely be willing to pay the advertised price for a service should that service turn out to be worth her time."
"Which it is." Flim had sidled up to Dash. "Even knowing the life you two have led and the mighty deeds you've done—"
"This—" Sidling up to Dash's other side, Flam dropped his voice to nearly a whisper but still emphasized each word. "This is like nothing you have ever experienced."
If Dash had been vibrating before, she was now practically a blur. "AJ?" she more squeaked than said.
With a sigh, AJ reached into her kerchief for her coin purse.
"It's simplicity itself," Flim was saying while Flam buckled AJ into a bright green vest; he'd already got Dash fitted out with a similar outfit, and AJ had just grinned all over watching Dash trying so hard to hold still.
"At your right shoulder"—Flim's words made AJ look down at the circle of silvery material on the right side of the vest's chest piece—"you'll see the tracer. Once you enter the game, a blue arrow will appear floating above that circle and point unerringly toward the race's goal line. There will certainly be obstacles to overcome—hills to climb, lakes to traverse, windstorms to avoid—but for as long as you're in the competitive arena, the arrow will be your guide."
"Awesome!" Dash breathed the word, and while AJ had been hearing her say it for more than a dozen years now, it still gave her a sweet little shiver every single time.
"And on your left shoulder," Flim continued, AJ shifting her gaze to the red circle there, "is the forfeit button. Should anything go wrong—"
"Not that anything will," Flam piped in.
"Or if you find that the game has set you too difficult a challenge—"
Dash snorted.
"Merely touch this red spot to be whisked immediately back to the here and now—"
"Hold up." As much as AJ wanted to stuff a couple hooves into the slickers' snouts to make 'em shut up, she was trying real hard to be neighborly for Dash's sake. "Don't your sign say something 'bout us never leaving this here booth?"
"It does indeed!" Flam waved at the big box with the flashing lights. "The Portal Popper XTE utilizes the latest in magical technology to sweep you into an alternate world that exists only within the confines of its dedicated system."
"What?" Dash leaped into a hover. "You mean it's not real?"
"Of course it's real, Captain!" Flim pressed a hoof to his striped vest front. "Once you've entered the Portal Popper XTE, its world becomes your world and your world becomes its. My brother and I could attempt to explicate the complex array of spells necessary to achieve the effect if you'd like, but—"
"You said portal?" Swooping over, Dash squinted at the big black box. "Like that mirror Twilight's got? Or the ones Starswirl's always fooling around with?"
"Precisely!" both the varmints crowed together, and Flam went on. "This device builds upon the principles first discovered by the great Starswirl the Bearded and greatly expanded upon by your dear friend and our dear princess, Twilight Sparkle! So, while the world away to which you will be whisked is entirely a magical construct, it will be every bit as real as, say, the course through Ghastly Gorge or the training ground at Wonderbolt HQ. A true test of skill, luck, speed, and endurance."
Dash's head swiveled from him to AJ, her grin again practically swallowing all her other facial features.
Consarn magic... It took AJ a little effort to keep her voice steady. "Sounds like a mighty tall order for ten bits."
Flam's magic doffed his straw hat. "We aim to please!"
A good, solid glare, though, took no effort at all. "Well, I aim to hit , something y'all might wanna keep in mind." AJ shifted her shoulders inside the vest. "So how 'bout we get this fiasco started, huh?"
Her grin curdling, Dash got a little glary, too. "Are you gonna keep on being a sourpuss during this whole thing?"
AJ took a deep breath, blew it out, let herself smile, and said the most honest thing possible. "Long as I'm with you, Honeycomb, I know I'll be having a good time."
"Off you go, then!" Flam's horn started wavering with green light, and over on the other side of the box beside Dash, Flim's horn did the same. "Remember: follow the blue arrow on your right shoulder to reach the goal, and use the red button on your left should you need to end the game prematurely!"
"But—" AJ began, more questions coming up her throat about what exactly was likely to happen here. But before anything had a chance to reach her lips, both brothers were firing beams of magic at the black box, and white light flooded everything around AJ.
The glare of the white light puffed away from Dash like a morning fog, and she couldn't keep herself groundbound. Springing into a hover, she spun in place to do some quick recon—a mix of mud and water giving off a swampy smell, air warm and heavy with moisture, shadows thick in the dim light drifting down from tree canopies above, the trees themselves big and dark and stretching up like pillars every dozen paces or so.
She had to grin. So flying wouldn't give her an advantage. Completing her circuit, she opened her mouth to tell AJ that she might stand a chance in this race after all—
And found herself staring at a wide-eyed Flim—or Flam: she'd never been sure which was which. This was the one without the mustache, anyway. "What're you doing here?" she blurted out.
He blinked, the greenish light of his horn the brightest spot anywhere within sight. "I...I don't know."
"You don't know? " Dash stared at him "How can you not know?"
Shrugging, he swallowed so hard, Dash could follow it moving down the inside of his neck. "Well, when Flam and I, uhh, acquired the Portal Popper XTE, it didn't come with a manual. After weeks of careful study, however, we were absolutely certain we'd ascertained the proper procedure for operating the game, so we brought it to Ponyville to reveal its wonder to the masses." His words flowed out every bit as flowery as they always did, but his eyes kept shifting back and forth at every splash and slithery sound out in the trees.
Dash sighed. "You mean you stole the thing, thought you knew how to work it, aimed it wrong, and now I'm stuck in here with you instead of Applejack."
Flim's snout wrinkled. "First, we didn't steal the Portal Popper: it was left behind at the resort by a guest who fled without paying his bill, so our ownership is entirely legal and unquestionable. Second, after offering the Portal Popper as a special add-on attraction to our Premium Club members, we've tested it more than two dozen times without a single problem."
"Whoa." Dash would've dropped to the ground it it hadn't been fetlock deep in brownish-gray water. "You experimented on the ponies staying at your hotel?"
"They volunteered." He shrugged. "And their membership in our Premium Club exempts us from any liability." He waved at her right shoulder. "My third point, however, Captain Dash, is that we have two options for removing ourselves from our current dilemma: we follow the tracer in your vest through this no-doubt charming landscape to the game's finish line." The grin that jerked across the big jerk's face didn't fool Dash: he was half a heartbeat away from matching Fluttershy in the cringing and cowering department. "Once we reach it, we'll be instantly transported to the fairgrounds whence we began."
"You hope." She couldn't stop her own grin from spreading at the beads of sweat glistening along his forehead. But she couldn't deny the little blue arrow pointing to the right that flashed above her shoulder either. "And what's the other way to get back?"
"Touch the forfeit button." He waved at her left shoulder, a tiny scowl tightening his quivering lower lip. "We went through all this before Flam and I activated the device, you know."
"Yeah, yeah." She glanced down at the big red button on her vest. "Of course, if I do that second one, it'll technically mean I lost, won't it? That'd make a nice sign to put over your booth: 'Play the game that beat the great Rainbow Dash!'"
His eyes went wide. "I...I assure you, Captain Dash! That thought never even began to cross our minds!"
Dash cocked her head. "'Our minds'? As in 'you and your brother'? As in 'I'm not the first pony to bring the idea up'?"
He froze, and the low, grunting moan that sounded off to Dash's left made him jump sideways, his straw hat flying off.
"Yep, yep, yep." Dash smacked her lips. "It'd serve you right, me leaving you here to play with whatever's creeping around out there till I find the finish line."
The quiver spread from his lip to his whole snout.
"But y'see, Flim?" She stepped closer to him in case she had to swoop them both away in a hurry. "I've pretty much proved any point I ever needed to prove, don't you think? Leading the Bolts, saving the world a dozen times, being part of the council that rules Equestria, getting to wake up every day beside the second-awesomest mare ever born..." She waved to the darkness. "I do this sort of stuff now for fun, not because I need to show anycreature anything anymore. And without AJ, there's nothing fun here. Nothing at all."
Grinning, she slapped her vest's forfeit button—
And nothing at all happened.
"Not in the face!" Flam was shouting.
And for all that AJ wanted nothing more than to stomp that dang mustache now that she had the stinker down on his back in the sand, she lowered her hoof slowly instead and pressed it to the area below his bow tie. "Start talking then," she growled.
His own hoof came shakily up and tapped the forfeit button on her vest, something she'd already done six or eight times. "I don't understand it! This has never happened before!"
They'd only been in this desert for a couple minutes, the sun straight up overhead, but AJ swore she could already feel sweat forming under the brim of her hat. "Like nothing we ever experienced, huh?"
"It's not—! This isn't—!" He was shaking under her. "The machine always takes just the two players in! Always!"
Again not really wanting to, AJ backed off and let him clamber to all fours. "I reckon y'all got a panic button on the machine itself?"
He stopped brushing sand from his sides and snapped his head up. "Yes! The reset switch! All Flim has to do is flip it, and—"
"And since he ain't done it yet, seems a fair bet him and Dash got sucked into some other game." She had to keep fighting down the urge to grab him and shake him. "Don't it?"
Every bit of excitement drained from his face. "But we've never had more than one pair in the system at once! I don't...I wouldn't have thought it possible!"
AJ gave a little snort. "We got all kinds of firsts going on today." Pushing away every other thought—no use crying over spilled cider—she glanced at her right shoulder. The blue arrow was still hovering above the silver circle there, pointing away from her and past Flam off into the low dunes that spread out around them in all directions. "Reckon we better start walking."
"But..." Flam had gone even paler than his usual custard yellow. "If the forfeit button doesn't work, might that also mean—"
"No!" Two big steps brought her snout to snout with him. "That ain't an option, so don't you even say it!"
He shrank away, his usual hair oil smell suddenly sour with fear.
The stink made AJ stop, step back, take a breath, and say in the most reasonable manner she could manage, "Maybe if we get to our goal, that'll snap all of us out. Or maybe if Dash gets to hers. Or maybe it'll take both of us reaching our finish lines. Or maybe somepony back at the fairgrounds'll notice you and your brother ain't in your booth. Or maybe Pinkie's twitches'll tell her something's up." She nodded in the direction the arrow was pointing. "All we can do is follow through to the end."
A couple heartbeats went by, Flam's breathing the only sound she could hear. "My brother," he muttered then, "has such brilliant ideas." He shook himself. "But yes, Ms. Applejack, by all means let's go grasping at straws. And since you have the compass..." Sweeping a hoof toward the horizon, he gave a big, phony grin. "Ladies first."
AJ moved past him. "Stick close, though. Y'all said something 'bout obsticles in here, seems to me."
"Of course." She could hear his teeth grind as he fell in alongside her. "It wouldn't be any fun otherwise, would it?"
The chuckle AJ puffed out was even phonier, she reckoned, than his grin, and they plodded off through the sand. At least it wasn't too loose and shifty and the dunes weren't too steep. The sun seemed a mite warmer than strictly necessary, her mouth getting drier and drier, but the worst part, she discovered quick enough, was the quiet. Usually on the dull parts of adventures—riding trains or walking to get wherever the problem was—she could talk with the girls. Now, though, all she had was this scalawag...
Minute followed slow, plodding minute, and the chuff-chuff-chuff of their hoofsteps finally drove her to ask, "So what's this all about? Resort business too slow for you? Or is Las Pegasus not nearly as exciting as the Ponyville Fun and Frolic Festival?"
He blew air through his nose. "We've been doing marvelously well, thank you. We only came to Ponyville to...uhh..."
When he didn't go on, AJ looked over. Flam was peering upward into the distance ahead. "Is that," he asked, adjusting his hat and narrowing his squint, "something flying?"
"Dash?" Heart surging, AJ spun around, movement definitely visible in the sheer blue sky above the dunes in the direction they were traveling—
But there was more than one of 'em, she could see right away, and none of 'em looked at all like a pegasus. Wrong size, wrong-shaped wings, too many legs... "Looks like bugs to me."
"Bugs?" was all Flam got out before the things swooped past, about a dozen critters longer and thinner than parasprites and coming in three different colors, near as AJ could tell: red ones that had little flames squirting out the front, green ones puffing little clouds of gas out the back that curled her nose like the compost heap at home, and blue ones with little clear packages nearly as big as themselves clutched to their thoraxes.
These last ones dropped their packages into the sand beside her, then followed the others back into the sky and out of sight as quick as they'd appeared. "Are they...eggs?" Flam asked, and AJ found herself wondering if they might hafta fight their way through some sorta bug army.
But the packages just kept lying there, and looking closer, AJ found she couldn't stop an actual laugh. "This machine of yours." She nudged one of the packages with a hoof. "It got a sense of humor?"
"Humor?" Flam sounded like he wasn't sure what the word meant. "I fail to see how—"
"We just had a honest-to-goodness bunch of fire flies go past." AJ waved in the direction the bugs had gone. "Them green stinky ones? Let's call 'em blow flies. And them blue ones?" Wrapping one of the packages in the crook of her fetlock, she flicked it cap open with her other hoof, sniffed the clear liquid inside, and drank it down, the water as pure and refreshing as any she'd ever tasted. "Bottle flies." She rolled a couple of the remaining packages in his direction and tucked the rest into her vest. "Yep. I reckon Dash woulda loved this."
"Gah!" Dash whirled into another roundhouse kick, bursting the last slime monster with a crunch and stink like rotten watermelon. "This is supposed to be fun? "
Flim, panting in mud up to his fetlocks below her, wiped sweat from his horn. "We're still not sure how the Portal Popper picks the characteristics of each individual game, but—"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Though she had to admit that she'd enjoyed smacking down the first batch of slime monsters. And the second. And the third. After the sixth group, though, without AJ there... "And what's going on out at the fairgrounds, huh? Hasn't anypony noticed how long we've been gone?"
"Who would notice?" He glanced at her vest and started forward again through the murk.
Looking down, Dash saw the blue arrow pointing straight ahead the same as it had been for an hour or however long this had all been happening. "So you think AJ and Flam really did get sucked into some other race course?"
He wrinkled his nose. "Hopefully one more pungently aromatic than this."
She drifted down so she was flapping along at about his eye level, her legs drawn up to avoid the mud. "And this is really the first time you've tried this yourself? After all the ponies you've run through it?"
"Perhaps you've noticed, Captain Dash, that I am not an adventuresome pony by nature?" He was limping just a little: Dash noticed that plain enough. "I've striven my entire life in pursuit of that which will make my life more leisurely. Battling slime monsters is not a means to that end."
"Then why you and me?" Not that she cared, but she had to do something till the next attack. "I mean, yes, you brought me here to try and trick me into forfeiting the game, but why not rig it so Flam came in with me instead of you?"
Flim chuckled. "He's better at bamboozling your marefriend."
Dash couldn't keep her ears from folding. "What's he doing to AJ?"
"Leading her along the very fine line between calling the authorities and bucking him in the face. Or he would be if everything hadn't gone wrong." His chuckle coughed into a sigh. "He'll find a way to blame me for it, too. He always does..."
"Really?" Dash gave him a glare. "'Cause it's seemed to me, watching you guys work, that there's plenty of blame to go around between the two of you."
"And yet?" Something harsh crept into Flim's smooth voice. "Nothing that happens to us is ever his fault. To hear him tell it, if we'd merely followed his plans since the beginning of our careers, we'd be wealthy gentlecolts, never lifting a hoof again except to gesture for the servants." He was stomping through the mud now. "But because I insist on having input, I doom us every day to mediocrity and failure! That's what my dearest brother seems to believe, at any rate!"
'Too much information, buddy,' Dash wanted to say, but considering that he was already upset, maybe she should try something less harsh. "I never had any brothers or sisters myself, but what I've seen from AJ, Mac, and Apple Bloom, I guess things can get a little tense sometimes."
"The Apples," he muttered, Dash having to prick up her ears to hear him. "Yes, the whole 'dead parents' thing, and yes, the whole 'dirt poor' thing, but what they've got, if I could have it, I'd be so...so..."
"Whoa!" Spots as bright as fireflies were going off in Dash's head, the answer to a question she'd been wondering about for years. "That's why you're always trying to swindle AJ or whatever! You're jealous of her!"
Flim startled back like he was waking up. "I'm most certainly nothing of the kind! The very idea! It's...preposterous! Utterly absurd!"
But Dash had never been surer of anything in her whole entire life. "Look, Flim, I totally get it. I mean, yeah, my folks're great, and I loved growing up as their kid." She poked a hoof at him while making sure that she didn't actually touch him. "Just don't ever tell them I said that, all right?"
"Captain Dash, what are you trying to—?"
"The three of us were a family, sure, but..." Dash let the memory flow over her: the first time Fluttershy had taken her out to Sweet Apple Acres. "I didn't know what a family could really be till I got assigned to the Ponyville weather team and met the Apples. There's something magic about them and that place." Narrowing her eyes, she gave him about half a glare. "And don't try to tell me you don't know what I'm talking about! You wouldn't keep coming back there if you didn't feel it!"
Fortunately for him, he kept quiet; Dash was pretty sure she would've belted him if he'd tried to interrupt. "There's nowhere like it in all of Equestria, and not outside of Equestria, either! Just the way the air moves over it, it...it's like it's hugging the trees, nuzzling the leaves and branches, giving every perfect, gorgeous piece of fruit a long, lingering kiss." Dash had to swallow against the lump that wanted to form in her throat. "And AJ's the best and most beautiful part of all that. She's all I could ever want: her laugh and her eyes and her hooves and her shoulders and her hair and her thighs and her—"
Her throat did close up this time, her face awash with heat at the thought of what she'd been just about to say out loud. Turning away from Flim so he wouldn't see her blush, she caught just a flash of some expression on his face. Not anger or jealousy, but...sadness maybe?
"Yes," he said, and the words seemed to tremble just a little. "Well, the sooner we get to the goal line, the sooner you'll be back with her."
"Exactly." Without another word, she dropped, rolled, whooshed between the mud and his belly, and scooped him up onto her back. "So hang on! We're getting outta here!"
With a yell, AJ charged down the hallway toward the stone wall sliding up from the sand to block their exit once more. Wheeling around, she lashed her rear hooves against the spot where the green blast of Flam's horn was focused—
And the wall shattered to rubble. "Yes!" she shouted, then following the plan, she threw herself through the jagged opening before another wall could spring into place.
"Roll!" Flam was shouting from somewhere behind her. "Roll! Roll! Roll!"
She hit the sand soft enough, but it was still mighty scratchy against her hide as she tumbled—
Down a hill, she realized, and the clench in her middle loosened. That whole dang maze had been nothing but flat inside!
Quick enough, she reached bottom, a sandy upward slope pressing against her back. Flopping away from it, she found her hooves, sprang onto them, and raised her head.
Blue sky, something she hadn't seen in the couple hours since those walls had suddenly sprung outta the desert and closed her and Flam into the twisting halls of—
"Flam!" she yelled at the thought of him. "Sing out, feller! You here?"
A moan answered from along the curving base of the dune, and AJ scrambled through the sand to find him sitting up and rubbing his forehead. "Surprisingly? Yes, I do indeed seem to be here."
Not wanting to admit that she'd had a bushelful of doubts herself, she shrugged. "Teamwork ain't just a way of scamming ponies, y'know."
His mustache shifted sideways. "Yes, yes, yes." Stretching his legs, he clambered upright, stretched his back, and winced. "Virtue triumphs and all that." He nodded up the hill to the outside of the stone wall, all solid and unbroken. "But how about we put some distance between us and that thing before it decides to change the rules and swallow us up again."
AJ nodded, glanced down at her chest, and saw the blue arrow pointing away from him along the little gully. "Changing the rules halfway through? That'd be cheating, wouldn't it? Or is that something you don't know a single thing about?" She turned and started off without waiting for an answer.
He gave her one anyway, of course, his hoofsteps quick and crunchy as he fell into step beside her. "Cheating, friend Applejack? Other than the little mishap at the beginning of your Portal Popper adventure, how exactly has this experience been a cheat?"
A few suspicions had been bumping around in her head since before the maze had grabbed them, and even as helpful as he'd been figuring a way out, AJ still found herself wondering. "It's just you never answered my first question way back at the beginning."
"First question?" His confusion seemed genuine. "Perhaps the whole 'trying to escape from the sliding stone walls of death' has put a damper on my memory, but I don't—"
"I asked why you'd brung this portal thing to the Ponyville Fun and Frolic Fest when you got a whole resort back in Las Pegasus." She turned and fixed her gaze on him. "A mite peculiar, wouldn't you say?"
He puffed out a breath. "When one is a true entrepreneur, one can never afford to sit still, not even for a moment." His horn glowed, and one of the little water bottles floated from his vest pocket. "But then I don't suppose somepony like you would understand that."
"Excuse me?" And even knowing that he was trying to get her riled to push her attention away from the subject, she couldn't keep the hair along the base of her mane from bristling. "I've gone from the orphaned middle daughter of a couple apple farmers to wunna the six ponies who runs all of ding-dang Equestria! How exactly has I been sitting still?"
Taking a sip from the bottle before putting the cap back on, he looked down his snout at her, his eyes partway closed. "You never strove for any of it, never had an ambition so big and devouring that you threw yourself at it over and over till your sides were rubbed raw and your hooves wouldn't stop shaking." The bottle drifted in its green cloud back to his pocket. "You would've been just as happy with your life if none of your adventures had ever happened. Whereas a true entrepreneur is always reaching." He shook his head.
Outrage nearly burst through the top of AJ's head and blasted her hat off. How dare he come over all high and mighty about ambition when he weren't nothing but a dirty, low-down thieving polecat!
She forced herself to breathe, forced herself not to blow up the way he wanted her to, forced herself to think about what he'd said—
And found a little spark glimmering in her head. "Sitting still," she said, blowing gently on the spark and nursing it into a full-fledged flame. "You can't ever be satisfied, can you?"
He went on looking and marching straight ahead beside her, but AJ saw the corner of his mouth twitch.
"You'll never know a moment's peace, will you?" In an instant, so many things about the Flimflam Brothers made more sense to her than they ever had before. "You can't enjoy a single thing you got 'cause you're convinced there's something better just over the hill."
His eyes tightened.
AJ leaned toward him. "But me, I've only ever wanted two things. And I got 'em both: the finest apple orchard the world has ever known, and the finest friend, lover, and wife any pony's ever gonna have. So you look at my life, friend Flam, and then you go ahead and tell me I didn't work my tail off for what's truly important."
This time, he didn't react at all as far as she could tell, and that suited her absolutely fine. "Now c'mon," she said, upping her pace. "Let's get us back to the real world."
Panting, Dash looked at the front of her vest, back up at the same stupid swamp they'd been trudging and fighting through all day, then at her vest again. "Here? This is the finish line?"
The blue arrow was pointing straight down and flashing with little curlicues like streamers coming out of it, but all that did was make the black water they were both standing in glow a little brownish.
"It is." Flim's voice broke. "I mean, that's what the other customers we've run through a game have said the arrow does when they reach the goal." He waved a wet and wrinkled hoof at the arrow. "But they say it lasts about 5 seconds before they pop back to the booth."
Dash hadn't been counting, of course, but she knew more than five seconds had gone by since the thing had started doing its little dance routine. "So we've gotta wait for AJ."
Flim had closed his eyes. "Unless the whole thing's broken and we're trapped in here forever."
"No!" Dash stomped her hoof with a splash. "I mean, yeah, maybe the thing's broken, but no way are we gonna be trapped in here! AJ and your brother'll get to whatever the finish line is for their race, and that'll trigger the whole thing to—"
"My fault," Flim muttered. "All of it, just like Flam always says. If I hadn't wanted to trick you into forfeiting the game so we could make an ad slogan out of it, none of this would've happened..."
Leaping into a hover no matter how much her wings complained, Dash shouted, "That's not true!" A thought made her land, grit her teeth, and say, "Okay, yeah, so maybe it is true. But not because it was your idea! Because it was just a bad idea all the way around to begin with!"
"Like Flam always says—"
"No, not like Flam always says!" Dash poked the front of his vest hard enough to jostle him. "You're wrong, sure, but Flam's wrong, too!"
"My fault..."
"Will you stop?" Rearing back, Dash grabbed his shoulders and gave him a little shake. "Look! I have bad ideas all the time! I mean, one winter I blew up an entire weather factory trying to stop my pet tortoise from hibernating!"
He started back like she'd stung him. "You what? "
"Bad idea, right?" She didn't let him go and cracked a grin she didn't quite feel. "But the thing is, not only did I learn from that mistake—and all my other ones—so I could move on and try to become a better pony, but my friends also moved on. Once they knew I was sorry and that I wasn't gonna do it any more, they stopped ragging on me and let it go." Another thought made her grit her teeth again. "And, yeah, okay, so we sometimes still bust Starlight's chops for that one time she locked us all in a room and tried to brainwash us into joining her weird cult, but that's totally a special case!"
Flim's eyes went even wider.
Dash kept her hold on him. "My point is, even if you did make some stupid decisions in the past, your friends and family, and especially your brother, they need to let it go and stop being such a jerk about it to you! And you both need to stop being such jerks all the time to other ponies!"
"Jerks?" Anger flashing through the numbness on his face, he tried to pull away again. "We are businessponies, Captain Dash, not paragons of virtue such as you and your compatriots advertise yourselves to be!" He did some more wriggling. "And I really must insist that you release your hold on me at once!"
"No can do, pal." She gestured past him with her snout. "'Cause I don't want you panicking and running off when you look over your shoulder."
"When I—?" He cranked his head around, and while Dash couldn't see his expression, she could tell exactly when he saw the swamp monsters by the way all his muscles went stiff.
"They're slow ones," she murmured into his ear; it was flicking across her muzzle and she was trying to ignore it. "And I don't know if the game'll even let 'em attack us since we're standing on the finish line, so let's just keep calm and—"
"We're doomed!" Flim wailed. "I'm exhausted—my horn'll barely spark—and you're exhausted—you've been walking for the last hour! Those beasts'll tear us to pieces!"
"No, they won't." Dash watched the three monsters slog forward another pace; they were low to the ground and wide, more like cragodiles than the other things she'd been kicking all day. "Because AJ and Flam are gonna get to their finish line, and your machine's gonna kick us all back into the real world."
"What? " He squirmed back around to stare at her. "We can't count on them! We can't count on anypony! We're all alone and about to be—!"
A puff of fresh air wafted over Dash's nose, and white light flashed, completely blinding her.
A couple blinks cleared Dash's eyes to reveal the most glorious sight she had ever seen and would ever see staring at her from across Flim and Flam's carnival booth. "Dash?" AJ asked, her voice quivering.
"AJ!" Dash launched herself straight into her marefriend, every bit of the fatigue she'd been feeling just plain gone.
Not that she was worried about hitting her too hard, of course. AJ caught her as solid as an oak, held her close, and kissed her so deeply and thoroughly, Dash forgot everything else in the whole wide world except for that taste and that touch and that scent.
Then AJ was pulling away, those amazing lips quirking into one of her gentler smirks. "Reckon you musta had nigh as much fun in there as I did."
Dash took a second to get her breath back. "Can you say 'none at all'?"
"Can I ever." Those lips moved close again, and Dash stretched her neck to meet them, lost herself once more in their warm perfection.
"Still!" Flim's voice folded Dash's ears, not a trace of its earlier uncertain anywhere. "Happy reunions all around, and stories to tell the grandfoals before the fireplace on a winter's evening!"
"Indeed!" Flam sounded every bit as exuberant as always, too. "And think of how proudly you can tell your friends that you beat the Portal Popper XTE even when a malfunction had swept you away from each other!"
Spinning away from AJ, Dash was about to ask him how exactly the scam they'd been trying to pull had been a malfunction, but she couldn't miss the twitch that tugged the corner of Flim's eye.
'Cause this'd be one more mistake, wouldn't it? One more scheme gone wrong that Flam could keep jabbing and jabbing and jabbing into Flim, especially if Flam learned that Dash had figured out what they were up to...
Not that she owed Flim anything, the jerk. Except maybe to show him how this stuff was supposed to work.
She spun back to face AJ. "You were right," she said. "This was really a bad idea."
AJ shrugged. "You've had worse. And I gotta admit: with the right company, this sorta thing might actually be fun."
"Really?" Flam's mustache squirmed above his smile. "Then would you say, friend Applejack, that, despite the unfortunate magical glitch, the experience was all that we advertised it to be?"
"What? " This time, Dash didn't just spin; she shot across the booth till she was practically snout to snout with Flam. "You're really gonna ask us for the other ten bits?"
Flam sat back and slowly spread his front hooves. "I'm merely going to ask that Applejack honor the terms of the bargain we struck on this very spot not that very many hours ago." Something in his eyes went as hard as a lightning strike. "Was this or was this not a unique competitive opportunity?"
"You crooks!" Dash cocked a foreleg back, ready to smack him right in the middle of his smug little face—
Except a strong but gentle hoof touched hers. "It ain't no thing, Honeycomb," AJ said into her ear. "Step on back, now, will you?"
Another spin brought her around to AJ. "But—!"
"Please?" And there was absolutely nothing Dash could do when AJ gave her that look and put that little chuckle in her voice. Absolutely nothing...
Glaring at Flam, she flapped back a couple paces, and left AJ still standing in front of the big jerk. All she had to do was open her mouth, too, just tell AJ the truth about everything they'd been through today, just blow the whistle on whole thing, just—
Just hang Flim out to dry....
AJ had dug her coin purse out of her kerchief. "Ten more bits, I b'lieve, will satisfy things?"
To Dash's ears, she drew out the word 'satisfy' to give it a weird sort of emphasis, and Flam's lips tightened when she did it, too. He didn't say anything, though, just sat with his mouth a little sideways while AJ took one bit at a time in her teeth and set them on the counter around the edge of the booth. The music and the shouting and the crowd noise washed over Dash pretty heavily; she hadn't noticed it since they'd come back, but the silence between Flam and AJ made her realize that the festival was still going on all around them.
When she'd set the tenth bit on the counter, AJ gave Flam a good long look, and Dash, who considered herself an expert when it came to AJ's face, wasn't as all sure what kind of a look it was. It wasn't angry and it wasn't smug and it wasn't sad...though it was maybe more that last one than the other two. Was she—?
Was AJ feeling sorry for Flam?
AJ turned away, then, nodded to Dash, and said, "C'mon, Honeycomb. Unlike some folks, we got a home we can head on back to."
Flam winced a little, and Flim had his face turned away as if he was looking at something else out on the midway. 'Serves them both right,' Dash wanted to think, but she couldn't quite feel angry or smug about the whole weird situation, either. So she just said, "You guys take it easy, all right?"
They didn't answer. AJ came up beside her, her smile looking as tired as if she'd bee bucking apples all day. Dash pressed her shoulder to hers, draped a wing across her back, and walked in step with her out of the booth.
