“Seriously? None of you?”
Rainbow looked at them in disbelief. There was a quiet moment as they looked between each other, entire conversations in a single glance. It was Applejack who spoke first, with the reluctant tone of a pony acting because no one else was. “Look. Being entirely frank, I’m old. Twi’s got this. The new Bearers she’s got, they’ve got this. Give the map to them, and if it ain’t fictionalized, they’ll take care of it.”
“Are you serious? AJ, I know we’ve had our differences, but this could be Equestria itself at stake! I’m not gonna let some foals handle it.”
“Those foals, as you call ‘em, have only saved Equestria a dozen times over by now, but sure, let’s give it a go ourselves to give Rainbow Dash have one last hurrah—”
Rarity stepped in. “Forgive me, but I fear this is becoming less than productive. Dash, you know I hate to take sides, but she has a point. It simply isn’t our time, darling. And, not to be undelicate, but Applejack isn’t the only one who’s gotten a bit, well, past her prime. We all have, save for Princess Twilight. You’ve more than earned the right to make this somepony else’s problem.”
Inside, Rainbow scoffed. Hated taking sides, sure, until AJ said something. Then it was all, “you do have to consider,” and “not to make too fine a point of it, but,” until Rainbow got frustrated, said something too quickly, had to quickly loop back around and around again until she managed to say what she meant, and gave it all up in a huff.
Pinkie was only slightly better. She could already see from the lack of her characteristic bounce that Pinkie wasn’t with her, here, though at least she stood up to Applejack on occasion. At one time, Rainbow had known the mare so very well, so very closely, but nowadays that felt like nothing more than a faded dream. Their distance had grown sharp, jagged, and mean since those old days. Every time Dash tried to put forward something of substance, AJ seemed unable to resist digging her hooves in and pulling in the exact opposite direction.
And Fluttershy, looking at the ground, her hooves, off to the side at a tree that had suddenly gained some irresistible quality to it in the time since Rainbow had told them about the map, was, as always, her very best friend.
She still avoided confrontation like nothing else. “I’m staying out of it, Dash,” she’d said when pressed, so politely but very, very firmly.
Looking at the other four faces, set against or away from her, she knew she’d lost this one.
It was time for drastic measures.
“I have drunk more cider than any of you,” Rainbow said that night, bringing another frothing mug to her lips, and very carefully spilling most of it on the packed earth under her. “I’m going. Equestria needs one last Dash.”
Pinkie’d decorated the barn with a minimum of streamers this time, and the music was pretty low-key, but it was still a comfortable atmosphere, especially with the buzz of what she’d consumed over the night under Dash’s fur. Less than usual, much, much less, but enough for the rest of them to dismiss her as the stumbling drunk she tended to become at this time of night.
“That’s nice, Dash. Another mug?” Applejack said, sliding one over to her side of the table.
“Later,” Dash said. “I’m on a mission.”
She stumbled out into the night, shouldered the door open just enough for her to slip through, and leaped into the air.
“That fool mare forgot the map,” she heard Applejack say behind her with a snort.
Hah. Rainbow’d already put it in her bags earlier in the day, before ‘grudgingly’ hoofing over a box containing a detailed, hoof-drawn series of more conventional maps pointing the way. She’d been half considering not even doing that, but a few hours after Fluttershy’s quiet insistence, she’d given in and told them to just give her some time to think about it while she hastily made up a replacement in parchment and ink, a secret compromise which gave everypony what they wanted. She wasn’t afraid of admitting she missed the nostalgic taste of danger, adventure, and mystery, and if she failed, her friends were free to put the new Elements right on her tail. If they managed to get to the prize before her, with her head start, she’d give them her own personal endorsement in front of an entire crowd of ponies if they wanted it.
She did wish Loyalty still responded to her call. The gem had cracked just a little, a barely-there hairline fracture right after she and AJ had broken it off all those years ago, but as time wore on and they failed to mend the rift, it only grew. The Elements had grown less and less effective until they barely worked at all, though Rainbow always clung on to the belief that they’d find a way to fix things between them.
Then, one day after a particularly nasty spat, the details kept carefully away from her conscious mind, the gem materialized against her neck with a nasty crack, split in two, went gray, faded, and crumbled into a fine powder.
She’d kinda of stopped trying, after that.
The past was the past. Rainbow had an adventure in front of her, a challenge to meet and six young ponies empowered with Harmony’s might racing against her. She had three advantages. One, her head start. Two, she was operating alone. Going solo, she didn’t have to stop and wait for the slowest member of the group to catch up. Three, experience. She didn’t call the younger generation foals to insult them. They had the skill and the moxy, Applejack had her on that point. Not just any pony—or dragon, or changeling, or hippogriff, or yak, or griffin—could be an Element. That didn’t mean they were on her level, though.
She nodded to herself, taking the map from her saddlebags and placing the black, reflective rectangle on one of the more level rocks, ears twitching at the hoots and chirps of the late night around her. She nudged an indent on its side, at which point the surface lit up, chiming pleasantly.
Twelve seconds later, she had a map of the entire world spinning before her, a flat, magically null version of the holograms unicorns were starting to use in schools as teaching aids. As an artifact, it was considerably less flashy than most, reminding Dash mostly of a simpler, portable version of that table Twilight had in her crystal castle way back when, before those enormous crafts of glass and metal came from the stars and erased it from orbit.
“Point me at the alert, the urgent one,” she said. The spinning map of the world faded away, replaced with a simple arrow, pulsing red.
Make that four advantages. The original map was responsive like a professional navigator, while the new Elements would have to actually read Rainbow’s hoofwritten directions. She couldn’t bring herself to feel bad about that. It’d get them there, even if it took them a few minutes to parse instead of a push of a button and a single spoken sentence.
She gathered the map into her bags and set off into the air once more, adjusting her course a fraction of a degree as she got back on target. If only the thing were less vague about what each alert actually meant. She couldn’t fault its guiding capabilities at all, but when it came to literally anything else, the thing was as dumb as the rock it was made out of.
The night wore on ahead of her, her flying steady and even, age not slowing her down despite what anypony else might say. If they’d come with her, they’d be making a miniscule fraction of her time. Being realistic, they wouldn’t even have set out until morning at the earliest.
Still, Rainbow couldn’t help but wish her friends were with her.
