Twilight Sparkle stands behind the reference desk of Golden Oaks Library, studying her day planner. Neat rows of hornwriting spell out the weeks ahead of her. Beside that is a checklist, most of its contents transferred to the organizer. Publication schedules for popular titles, confirmed spa visits, and group outings with friends all migrate into their appropriate boxes. The day planner is her life, spelled out in neat little lines.

Her eyes are mostly open but with brows lowered. She holds her ears up and forward, indicating attentiveness, and she keeps her lips lightly curved in a toothless smile. It's a look meant to signify warmth and gladness without the tensions that would indicate mania or desperation. At least, that was the gist of the descriptions in the art books she studied as a filly. It's a comfortable expression for her; she practiced it in the mirror for years.

Spike does not practice his expressions, but the one he wears is familiar nonetheless. His eyes linger hungrily on the grandfather clock, watching the pendulum sway back and forth, ticking away the seconds towards five. His emerald ridge quivers with nervous energy, and his lips curl back into a rictus of anticipation. He shuffles back and forth from one leg to the other, occasionally wringing his claws or tapping them against each other.

Twilight pulls her attention away from her weekly schedule and focuses on the dragon. "Spike," she says in what she's sure is a gently supportive tone, "we're still open for another three minutes."

"Oh, come on, Twilight!" the dragon whines. He clenches his claws into fists and stamps one foot in impatience. "Nopony's come through that door in hours!"

"All the more reason to be ready in case somepony does!" Twilight cheerfully ripostes. Deep down, she knows the likelihood of anypony actually coming by on a Hornsday afternoon after lunch is near-infinitesimal. Not zero, but unscheduled visits after lunch drop sharply on every day but Hoovesday and Canterday. Canterday is obvious: it's everypony else's weekend, but the library is still open. Hoovesday's consistent jump in patronage is a mystery, one that she occasionally entertains solving.

Hornsday, however, is neither. Spike is probably right that closing the library two minutes early is unlikely to disrupt anypony's last-minute reading plans. At this point, though, it feels like she'd be violating a principle. The posted hours for the library were eight to five when she moved into Golden Oaks, and it simply never seemed appropriate to change the time. Even just adding an explicit hour for lunch to ensure she ate on schedule seemed at the time like a dangerous precedent. It smacked of shifting around the rules willy-nilly to suit her tastes. The idea was... uncomfortable.

The minute arm of the clock face snaps one closer to five, and Spike lets out a low whine. "Twilight...."

Twilight looks at the clock, then her assistant, then back to the clock. Her practiced smile slides into an impromptu frown. She bites her lip and rubs one foreleg against the other. "I don't know, Spike."

She does her best to turn her tone up at the last minute, to make doubt into teasing, but the dragon turns away from the clock and fixes his eyes on her. His brows are raised in the middle, but drooping at the sides. His snout is turned up in a smile, but the corners of his lips are pulled tight. He draws in a deep breath and lets out an exaggerated sigh. "Okay, Twilight. You win."

Pity. Twilight Sparkle recognizes his expression from the art books. She's seen it on the faces of her parents, her teachers, even Princess Celestia when the diarch didn't think her student was looking at her. The idea of something being out of place or behind schedule gave her a visceral sensation like a hoof scraping across a chalkboard. Even something as simple as watching her brother color outside the lines of a drawing made her cringe. She'd made great strides over the years in dealing with what her family called her special traits, but they had never truly gone away.

She knew the look they gave her when they thought she was going through one of "those issues," one also paired with a physical response. A blush spreads across her cheeks and forehead. "No, Spike, you're right." She draws in a deep breath and shoves a mental hoof into the voice insisting that she's breaking a rule. "It's close enough to—"

The front door snaps open on its hinges and bangs against the wall, exposing the slim figure of Rainbow Dash shaking out her wings. "Hey, Twi, you still open?" The pegasus strides into the library and gives a nod to the dragon. "Hey, Spike."

Ignoring Spike's groan, Twilight jumps out from behind the desk, eyes alight and horn still shining. Flush with vindication, she grins hard enough to make her cheeks hurt. "Yes! I knew it! I knew it!" She dances from hoof to hoof in self-congratulation, spared the agony of violating the sign. "Yes! Please, come in! What can I help you find?"

Rainbow Dash takes a step backward, lips curling in a grimace. "Uh... maybe I should come back later—"

"No! I mean, one moment." Twilight clears her throat, takes a deep breath, counts to three, and lets it out, then glides her expression back to practiced comity. "Spike and I were just debating closing a little early, but there's no need since you're here. Were you looking for something specific? The next Daring Do isn't going to be out until summer, but I've been collecting a list of similar authors I think you might enjoy, if you're—"

Rainbow Dash holds up a hoof, still slightly withdrawn. "I'm actually here about a book on strength training if you've got one."

Twilight's eyes widen slightly. "Oh! Athletics! Of course we do." She turns and trots towards one of the shelves that lines the walls, then stops and looks back over her shoulder towards her friend-cum-patron. "Oh, wait. What kind of strength training?"

"Hunh?" Rainbow tilts her head to the side. "What do you mean, what kind of strength?" She unfurls her wings and gives a hard downward thrust, sending a circle of wind out from around her that ruffles the pages of the open books around the edges of the room. "Strength!"

"Yes, but what kind of strength?" Twilight repeats, trying to keep the expression so recently on Spike's face off of her own. "Are you talking about speed or endurance? Is this for a sprint or a marathon? With equipment or without? Pegasus-specific or pony-in-general? Front, back, or whole-body? Are you trying to beat Applejack in—"

For a moment, at the mention of the farmer, Rainbow grimaces and her wings unfurl against her sides, then snap tightly closed again. To anypony else, the microexpression would have gone unnoticed. Probably Rainbow Dash didn't even realize she'd made it. For Twilight, it's enough to briefly derail her from her speech. Twilight coughs to cover her pause and finishes her sentence. "... in a wrestling match, a race, or a bucking contest?"

Rainbow Dash leans forward, cocking her head to the side. "How come you know so much about this stuff?"

Twilight lifts her head and lets her smile slide from glad into the tiniest bit of smug satisfaction. "I study all my friends, so I can help them out in situations exactly like this one. It's why I knew you'd love Daring Do so much, and why I'm trying to get you into the Quartermane series. It's old, so you have to forgive how the zebras are portrayed in it, but Daring Do is obviously based on him and Wild Ride's an excellent author."

Rainbow nods slowly. "Y-yeah, okay." She pauses for a few seconds, then shakes her head and chuckles. "You're such an egghead, Twi."

Twilight ignores Rainbow's acknowledgement of the obvious. "And you haven't answered my question. What's your scenario?"

Rainbow pulls back again. "My what now?"

"Your scenario? Your reason for needing a book on strength training?" Twilight forces down the urge to sigh exaggeratedly as Spike did earlier. Spike. "Oh, sorry, one second." She turns to where her assistant had been watching the clock a few minutes ago. "Spike?" He's already gone. "Spike!"

"Yeah?" The dragon's voice echoes out from the kitchen. "I'm making a snack before I head over to Rarity's."

Twilight rolls her eyes but smiles. "Okay! Try not to get underhoof, though, okay?" She doesn't wait for the dragon's response, focusing back on Rainbow. "Sorry about that. So, if you tell me exactly what you're looking for, I can help you find the book that's right for you."

"Hunh." Rainbow Dash considers and takes to the air. "So, there's this technical trick in open flight competitions called a Golden Sun, which is one of the hardest tricks you can do, 'cause you're holding yourself up without moving your wings." She spreads her wings wide to demonstrate, holding herself stock still in mid-air for a moment before dropping back to the ground. "I can hold it for two and a half seconds, but to really show off, I need to be able to do at least three, and if I can do five it'd blow everypony away. The Cloudsdale Open's coming up, and I've got an idea for my finishing pass on the technical, but I need that move to do it."

Twilight chews briefly on her bottom lip, rolling Rainbow's words around in her head, extracting the essence of her needs. Golden Sun. Strength. Aloft without flapping. She pulls her focus inward and taps one forehoof against the floor, and the front door of her memory palace spreads out before her mind's eye. It's a technique she found in a book on feats of memory, useful for organizing her thoughts, mapping hierarchies of knowledge into physical locations, using spatial awareness skills to enhance her natural recall. Her own hall of memory once looked like Canterlot Castle, but has expanded vastly beyond the original grounds, built to house the structures of her thoughts. Into the depths of recollection, she dashes forward, hooves drumming against the ground as she races through her thoughts.

Rainbow Dash's voice comes to her as she searches. "Uh, Twilight? You... okay?"

"One moment," she mutters. "One moment." Motion without effort. Pegasus physiology. She runs into the biology hall. Distribution of alicorn. She waves one forehoof, and walls shift and slide, creating a fresh hallway leading to thaumatology. Just within the passage, she hangs a portrait of Rainbow Dash, then trots down the newly formed hall. At the far end, she stops short, staring at a picture of Pinkie Pie. Her eyes snap open, forehooves banging against the ground. "That's it!"

Rainbow scrunches her muzzle. "What."

Twilight jogs over to the stacks and begins scanning titles, head craned to read the spines of the books. "The Golden Sun sounds a lot like the exercises unicorns are taught as foals for sensing magical resonances. Pegasi don't stay aloft just because of your wings; you're too heavy to fly that way. You'd have to have the wingspan of a dragon to pick yourself up, and you couldn't use them if they were that big."

"Yeah, and?" Rainbow flaps her wings a few times, as if to prove her wrong, but she remains on the ground. "What's your point?"

"The point, Rainbow Dash, is that you don't need strength training. You need mental training. Do you remember Pinkie's Pinkie sense?"

Rainbow's expression passes readability, kinked and bent. "Twilight, you lost me. I'm not an egghead. Explain like I'm a foal, okay?"

Twilight's sigh of exasperation finally leaves her, and she mashes a hoof to her forehead. Then she remembers that Rainbow Dash is still in the room, and she straightens herself up. "Sorry. Okay, listen. All ponies have a certain amount of a certain naturally occurring material called alicorn that's responsible for their magical talents. Got that much?"

Rainbow nods, but her eyes are narrowed and her lips are a tight line. "Alicorn? I thought that's what the princesses were."

"That's right. The compound is named after them. That amulet Trixie had was probably made of the same stuff, which is... kind of creepy when you think about it." Twilight shoves aside that sudden connection as superfluous. "The point is that in unicorns, it manifests in the horn, in pegasi it forms the bulk of the wings, and in earth ponies it's mostly in the hooves and limbs. With me so far?"

"Right, wings." Rainbow nods again, then looks at her wing. "Wait, you're saying my wing is made of the same stuff as your horn?"

"Yes, though it's obviously in different formations." Twilight pulls down one book with her magic, then flips through the pages before putting it back. "I suspect that Pinkie sense is actually due to an overabundance of alicorn in some kind of weird distribution that makes her incredibly sensitive to magical currents. Anyway, it occurred to me that when you described the Golden Sun, it sounded a lot like the magical centering exercises I used to do as a filly."

She grabs another book, then stabs a hoof at the page. "Ha! There it is." She turns the book and holds it up for Rainbow to see. "Magical Meditations for Everypony."

Rainbow ignores the book for a moment, peering at Twilight curiously. Then she takes the text in her forehooves and settles down to read through it. "Routine meditative practice not only benefits unicorns' control of magic, but pegasus flight and earth pony strength, as the fully-charged alicorn helps reinforce each pony's natural abilities." She closes the book and looks down at it. "Hunh."

Twilight puffs herself up in pride. "Just another job well done for an egghead librarian. Bring that to the counter and I'll check you out." Check you out. She starts walking to the desk, but then freezes mid-stride; the unintended double-meaning only makes her awareness of Dash's relationship history more embarrassing. "I mean... well, not that I'll... that is, I'll help you check out that book."

Having made the pun, though, she can't help but do just that. Rainbow Dash isn't a classic beauty in the way that Rarity or Fluttershy is, but every line and curve of her form is clearly built for a purpose. Her chromatic mane and tail—a naturally recessive trait and interesting in its own right—hang unkempt, as though the pegasus had better things on which to focus than appearance. Her muscles are taut and smooth, visible beneath her coat when she moves, lean and lacking any body fat. Her wings aren't large, but they're expressive, constantly in motion as she talks. Every motion seems intentional, deliberate. The sense of intent that hovers like a cloud around Rainbow Dash is... intriguing.

Rainbow Dash's eyes follow Twilight's, glancing down at herself, and then back up to her. Her eyes half-lid, and a slow, languid smile spreads across her muzzle. Her expression is... not one in the art books. "Checking me out, hunh? I like the sound of that."

Twilight's cheeks redden. "It was just a slip of the tongue, Dash."

The pegasus grins more widely. "Sure it was." She smirks and trots—no, prowls—over to the counter, her flanks swaying slightly with every hoofstep. "You're kinda cute when you blush. It's adorkable."

Rainbow's full attention and the compliment that follows make Twilight feel light-headed. Is she hitting on me? She takes a step back from the counter, trying to put space between her and the thought, but part of her mind is already turning the concept over, examining it from every angle. Rainbow's the only friend she has who reads anywhere near as eagerly as she does, and she's obviously smart, even if most of her attentions are on her physical skills. That thought starts leading to others, but she pushes those aside. That they arise at all, though, says at least part of her is interested in the idea. She feels like butterflies are dancing in her stomach, but it's not a bad feeling.

Twilight tries for a coy smile, ducking her head so she can look up at Dash through her bangs. "Now you're just trying to tease me. That's not even a real word."

"No, it totally is," Rainbow counters. "I just made it up. Seriously, though, I'm no good with the mental stuff, but if that's what I need, I can't think of anypony better to help me figure out it. I could use your help. Let's make a date of it. I'll come over Canterday night. We'll order a pizza, we can read Quartermane, and you can show me how to do those meditations." She blinks and waves a hoof in front of Twilight's face. "Hey, Twilight, you okay?"

Canterday is pasta and salad, not pizza. I feel like I've just realized that you're really attractive, and I feel weird that I hadn't really noticed before. I haven't practiced basic meditation in years. I really want to test that theory about Pinkie, but I said I would give up on figuring out how she works. I wonder what Princess Celestia would say about this. I hope you don't like olives and I have to pick them off. Wild Ride was the wrong example; I should have picked Barrowwright and his Land of Discord series. "I—I'm fine. It's just... it's complicated."

Rainbow Dash chuckles. "I've heard that word a lot today. It's not complicated. You say yes. We go on a date. If you enjoy it, we go on another. If you don't, we go back to being friends. What do you say?"

She looks down, lifts the date stamp and chunks it against the card in the book. As she sets it down, she passes the book across to Rainbow Dash, letting her hoof touch the pegasus' for a moment before pulling away. Her fur is coarse, but clean. "Yes."

"Alright, it's a date. See you Canterday." Dash tucks the book under one forehoof and lifts off again, then sails for the front door. "Thanks for the book!" Then she's gone, back into the skies.

Twilight slowly steps out from behind the reference desk and makes her way to the front door. With her magic, she gingerly flips the sign from Open to Closed, then makes her way back to the checkout desk. She flips her day planner to Canterday, and picks up a quill in her magic. She scratches out the reshelving plans. Next go the mixed greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers from her shopping list. Finally, she adds a single note: date.

Then she walks slowly up the stairs to her bedroom. She curls up on the bed and lets out a cracked squeal, a bright rainbow scrawled right across all her neatly-drawn lines.

Author's Note

Thanks again to Horizon and to my coltfriend for prereading. Horizon's been instrumental in helping me keep a setting bible.

The sexy times come soon, honest.