To Soothe the Neurotic Beast

The last major clue that Fluttershy needed came unexpectedly during teatime.

She and Rarity had been invited to the Golden Oak in a rare lull in Twilight's otherwise-busy schedule. It was a brilliant spring day—buttery warm sunlight shone down, but with enough of a cool breeze to keep everything the perfect temperature. Spike had apparently, after finishing his morning chores, declared it "perfect napping weather", and retreated to his bed upstairs.

Fluttershy frowned minutely into her teacup, as she peered over its rim at Twilight. The three of them were seated around the table on the ground floor of the library. Distracted as Twilight was in conversation with Rarity, and hidden as Fluttershy was by the teacup and the fall of her long mane, she was confident in her subtlety.

Well. As confident as she ever was about anything.

Nevertheless, she was noticing another in what she had come to realize was a series of odd behaviors from her bookish friend. Namely, that while she appeared to paying close attention to Rarity, there was something just the tiniest bit... off in her gaze. Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes minutely more vacant than they should be.

Had Rarity been talking about the latest drama out of Manehattan's fashion scene, or why Fix Stitch's latest line was "an absolute travesty, you understand of course", that might be expected. Fluttershy knew that Rarity didn't actually expect participation from her conversational partner during such diatribes, merely that they nod and agree in the right places.

But today, Rarity was describing in detail the way that a particular stitching technique worked, and the interactions that it had with the fabric she was using. Twilight was normally enraptured by such discussions, being a student of the school of Everything Interesting whose purview included effectively everything. The more intricate and detailed, the better.

So, Twilight's apparent disinterest was... off. Fluttershy wasn't quite sure what else to call it. It was something she'd noticed several weeks ago, and had made a mental note to keep track of. Ever since, she had kept it in the back of her mind, and quietly attempted to narrow down both the nature of her friend's strange behavior, and its cause.

Two odd pieces of behavior had emerged once she'd begun looking for them.

The first: as she was doing with Rarity now, Twilight had developed an uncharacteristic habit of lapsing into inattention. Fluttershy had noted it happening on multiple occasions with Rarity, Pinkie, and Mayor Mare, but not even once with Spike, Lyra, the twins at the spa, Bon Bon, or Big Mac. The time of day, or day of the week didn’t seem to make a difference.

The second, and much stranger: occasionally, she would blush brightly, and excuse herself in the middle of a conversation. She would apologize and quickly teleport away, and simply be gone for the rest of the day. This usually (but not always) followed a bout of the previously-noted inattention.

"—you agree, surely, Fluttershy, dear?" Came Rarity's voice, piercing Fluttershy's musing.

"Hm? What was that, Rarity?" Fluttershy turned to Rarity and raised her head above her teacup to indicate polite attention.

"Oh, I was just telling Twilight about the piece I'm working on at the moment. I mentioned that I'd showed you the sketches, and asked if you agreed that they were stilling missing that little..." Rarity waved a hoof in the air negligently, "...je ne sais pas they need to make them just pop."

Fluttershy nodded. "I remember. Um, I thought they were very good." Rarity inclined her head, and raised a single eyebrow, and Fluttershy blushed and turned away. "...well, okay. I did think that they weren't quite as good as some of your other pieces."

Rarity leaned back, satisfied, and crossed her forelegs with a satisfied grin. "You see? Still missing something. In fact," she said raising a hoof, "why don't I show you, Twilight? Perhaps I simply need the opinion of the 'pony on the street', as it were. With both Fluttershy's and my background in tailoring, perhaps we're simply too close to the problem..."

Rarity turned to the overstuffed saddlebag leaning up against her stool, and began digging through it for her sketchbooks. As she did, Fluttershy glanced over at Twilight to gauge her reaction.

The alicorn had lost the glazed look in her eye and was paying Rarity her full attention once more. That was interesting. When Rarity had been speaking about something that Twilight normally found interesting, her attention had wandered. But during this pause in the conversation, the spell had been broken. If Twilight was preoccupied by something, it would make sense that a change in the conversational flow would temporarily make her focus. Could that be what had happened here?

A huff of frustration to her left had Fluttershy turning to look at Rarity. "I know it's in here somewhere. I distinctly remembering taking it this morning! My apologies, girls, it seems this poor bag is a bit, ah, over-engaged. Just a moment longer..." With a decisive motion, Rarity shifted the bag away from her stool, and bent fully over, nearly burying her nose inside the saddlebag.

If she hadn't been on high alert for it, Fluttershy would have missed it. As it was, it was only long years of practice at listening for tiny changes in breathing and vocalizations in small creatures that enabled her to detect it at all.

First, Twilight gave a little gasp. Then, she stopped breathing. Fluttershy carefully—carefully!—glanced at Twilight without moving her head. Twilight was staring intently at something, her pupils blown wide, biting her lip slightly.

Fluttershy followed her gaze to find... Rarity's rear. The unicorn had bent over completely upon her stool in her quest for her sketchbook, and her flanks were visible, waving above the table edge, with her tail lifted high into the air to help balance in such a precarious position.

From her right, where Twilight was seated, Fluttershy heard a forceful exhale, though it was muffled, as though Twilight was trying to conceal it. It was immediately followed by a strange, soft sound that Fluttershy couldn't identify. As if something had tapped the underside of the wooden table, but gently.

Fluttershy peered at Twilight out of the corner of her eye. If her suspicion was correct, Twilight was about to—

"Oh, shoot, I'm really sorry girls! I just remembered that I have to take of something! Gottagobye!"

--followed by the telltale pop-sizzle! and magenta flash of a teleport as Twilight vanished. And, as Fluttershy predicted, Twilight had been blushing absolutely beet-red before her departure. However, there were two key pieces of information that she'd never been close enough to notice before.

First, the magical flare of a teleport hadn't just encompassed Twilight. It had been easy to miss, because unless Fluttershy had been looking for anything out of the ordinary, she would have dismissed it, if she'd seen it at all.

There had been a separate flare of magic that wasn't connected to Twilight at all, centered on the table's underside just in front of where she'd been sitting.

Second had been the briefest whiff of a scent that, while slightly different in texture than she was used too, was an unmistakably musky smell that she most commonly associated with certain mammals in the springtime.

Certain male mammals.

Fluttershy narrowed her eyes in suspicion. All her clues were beginning to point in a very particular, very strange direction. Before she had met Twilight, such a thing never even would have occurred to her. But simply being associated with the magical mare had exposed her to a great deal of strangeness, both of the arcane variety and the merely mythological.

"Aha!"

Rarity straightened and held her sketchbook aloft triumphantly. Startled by the exclamation, Fluttershy flinched and tumbled off her stool.

"Here we are!" she cried. Then she blinked, noted the sprawled Fluttershy and the missing Twilight, and frowned. "Oh," she said, "Did I miss something?"

Later, safely at home, Fluttershy was contemplating what to do with her newfound suspicions.

She had read enough of Rarity's beloved mystery novels to know that she had to assemble all the information she could before she jumped to any conclusions. While she felt certain of her current conclusion, she knew that she needed something more compelling than odd behavior, and a brief scent. This was something that was troubling her friend—she wanted to be sure. She owed that to Twilight.

It was impossible to befriend Twilight Sparkle, and not learn new things. Some of those things were strange and frightening, but others were mundane and useful.

One of those things was how to test an assumption.

Fluttershy was fuzzy on the specifics—Twilight had been waxing philosophical, and Fluttershy had been listening more to the sound of her voice than actual words—but she knew that one of the most important parts was performing a test to verify your assumptions.

Which was all very well, but now she had to come up with a test that had a chance of proving anything. And in order to do that, she would need to...

...oh.

Oh dear.

Fluttershy collapsed onto her sofa and covered her face with her forehooves. "Oh no... Angel Bunny, I'm not sure if I can do this..."