“You want a room NOW? Good luck with that!”, the hotel room clerk said to Fluttershy, “I bet you every hotel in town is booked for the race.”
Fluttershy looked dejected, of course this would be a problem, she should have seen it coming. The same scene took place in a few more hotels until somebody actually gave her a good idea.
“You need a place to stay for the race, dear?”, an old lady in the lobby of a particularly shabby hotel said, “Why don't you just by a tent-cloud and dock it in the Cloud Forest? A lot of young ponies do it.”
The Cloud Forest was particularly lonely at night. The small, luminous mushrooms that grew around the edges only provided just enough light for you to see how truly alone you where. Fluttershy dived further into her sleeping bag, trying to shut out the world. But the shrieks of nighttime birds and the low white-noise rustle of the wind forced her mind back to reality. She couldn't think inside of a sleeping bag, her mind simply didn't work that way. It was too small and artificial. She took a jar of fireflies out of her backpack and gently tapped the glass.
“Buzz buzz hrmm buzz?”, a small squeaky voice said from the inside of the jar.
“I can't sleep”, Fluttershy said to it, “I want to go for a walk, could you please shine for me?”
“Buzz! Buzz!”, the voice commanded and soon the jar shined brightly.
“Thank you, Mr, Crazy Diamond”, Fluttershy said, Crazy Diamond was the name of the chief Firefly.
“Buzz!”, Crazy Diamond replied.
The forest was a neon-blue haze, and that fit the state of her mind a little better at least. This part of the forest was not safe to fly in, and she made her way trough the old decrepit walkways that somepony put up ages ago. Nobody seemed to have used them for at least decades, if not centuries, not a lot of ponies went this deep into the forest. She tried not to look down as she walked over the aged sky-bridges, or else vertigo would not be far behind. The night was cool and restless, like the main character of a Cyberpunk story.
She had hoped that the exercise would tire her out, mentally if not physically, but that didn't seem to be the case. Her mind was still spinning, and if anything, wandering trough the forest made her more awake. Between the luminous mushrooms, the birds and the rustlnig of the wind, it was like trying to relax by walking trough an empty dancefloor in a nightclub. If she didn't get a good nights sleep, she would be in terrible shape for the race.
“Perhaps I should just fly home”, Fluttershy said to herself.
But she couldn't. For her, the Pigeon run was not about being the best or the fastest, it was about setting a goal for yourself, and then fulfill it. If she went home now, she'd disappoint a part of herself.
But it just wasn't the same without Rainbow Dash. If it wasn't for her, she probably wouldn't have come in the first place, Cloudsdale wasn't exactly her sort of town. She let out a small unheard sigh.
“I guess if I've stayed this long, I can stay a while longer”, she thought to herself, “and the race is the day after tomorrow anyway....”
She made her way back to the tent, asked Crazy Diamond to turn down the lights and slept a troubled sleep.
At about the same hour of the night, Rainbow Dash had trouble sleeping as well. Tam-a-line had invited all her pony friends to celebrate her lat
est batch of Peppermint Rush. The music kept pounding from downstairs, Livinr0dents song “My Life is a Cloud”. (Which made frequent use of air siren samples...) Rainbow Dash tried to shape the cloud she used as a pillow into a pair of earmuffs, but the intrusive low-frequency bass-line seeped in and de-tuned itself between her ears. Eventually she gave up trying to shut it out and went downstairs.
Her living-room looked like what would happen if you emptied a bag of skittles on a large bass-speaker turned on its side, strew cotton around it and played a Dubstep track. She had ponies from the rough side of Cloudsdale lounging around her living room, going trough her stuff and raiding her kitchen. The best that could be said about it was that they kept the place MOSTLY intact, at least cloud-furniture are easy to mend if broken...
“Rainbow!” Tam-a-line said, “come and join the party! I'm sorry about the table, I'll try to replace it, I swear!”, she made an attempt to fasten one of the legs to it, but it just turned into smoke.
“Don't worry about it”, Rainbow Dash said, “just... TRY not to break anything else. And I can't join, I need some rest before the race!”
“Oh, I'm sure you can manage”, Tam-a-line said, “you're a trained athlete, aren't you?”
Rainbow dash plowed trough the room towards the stereo.
“Yes”, she said to Tam-a-line, while she dialed the volume down.
There was a disappointed sigh from some of the dancing ponies in the room.
“And as a trained athlete”, she continued, “I know I need to sleep before a race, so could you PLEASE take this a party somewhere else?”
“Well, keep it down, don’t worry Tam a line said. By the way, could you stay here a few more days before the race? I don’t want to impose on you, but this place is GREAT for business!”
It almost seemed as if the words “last straw” flashed in Rainbow Dash’s eye for a quarter of a second.
“No”, she said, and her voice had an unusually sharp tinge, “I'm not gonna stay here for after the race, when the pigeon run is done, I am out of here!”
“Please? You should at least let me stay until this batch is sold, It's too risky to move”
“and what if I don't?”
“Well... then I can always tell the guard ponies about where to find a large quantity of illegal candies...”, she said in a low voice, “But don't worry about it”, she said in her normal voice, “Now go have a nice sleep. I promise to tell them to turn the music down...”
It didn't really matter much that she had turned the volume of the music down, though. The ponies where still talking, loudly, and she couldn't turn those people down unfortunately. And in the end, it didn't matter, because eventually, one of them turned the music back up anyway! She hit her pillow a couple of times and then turned over, forcing herself into sleep.
“Fluttershy`?” The clerk said, “I haven’t heard that name..”
She's pink and yellow, very demure, don’t speak up much....”, Rainbowshine described.
“Yeah, I remember her!”, the clerk remarked, that's the crazy mare who thought she could get a room just a few days before the race! Yeah, I've seen her around here...”
“Where is she now?”
“I dunno, probably went camping, lots of ponies do that if they can't get a room before the race.”
Rainbowshine looked defeated as she walked out of the lobby. This part of the street was adjacent to the Main Street, which meant it had the same impressive neoclassicist architecture, but with slightly less hustle and bustle. Outside, Derpy was waiting on a cloud shaped like a park-bench.
“So?” Derpy said, “did you find her?”
“Yeah”, Rainbowshine said, “she somewhere out in the Cloud Forest, we'll never find her!”
“Well, she's gotta come to town eventually, right?” Derpy said, “If we stick around, she might come. In any case, it is a really nice day, and there's so much of Cloudsdale I haven't seen yet, like the shops, the Marblehoof Library, The Weather Factory, the Owl Temple...”
That was not a terribly bad idea, they had to keep to the central streets if they wanted a chance, however slim, to bump into Fluttershy, though. But it gave them quite enough time to explore local watering holes and landmarks, at least.
They looked at the Mighty Atmospheric Obelisk (that was its official name), but it was honestly a slightly disappointing sight. It looked good on a postcard, but you didn't really need to see it in real life. Because big or small, it looks pretty much exactly the same. The real treat was that some anonymous street artist had carved roman numerals on the ground around the Obelisk, which made it into a giant sundial.
Afterwards they went for a trip to the Albedo Museum of Climate Engineering, where Rainbowshine nearly exposed her inner geek again as she rhapsodized about the great mares and horses that made the Weather Patrol what it is today. They went casually strolling down the Main Street, admiring the massive pillars and attempting to avoid the pushy salesmen who at that point before the race had abandoned all pretense and set up an actual outdoor bazaar right in the middle of the street. But still not a glimpse of Fluttershy.
“Should we give up and go home?” Rainbowshine asked Derpy.
“What?”, Derpy said, “Go home without first buying some ice cream? That's madness!”
“Okay”, Rainbowshine said, “I know a place where we can get really good ice cream!”