Sunset over Cloudsdale was a breathtaking sight to behold. Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Silver Spoon, and Diamond Tiara all faced west, watching the deep orange sky turn the fluffy expanse of Cloudsdale into a sea of golden cotton.
"Wow," Silver Spoon breathed.
"This is amazing," Sweetie Belle said.
"Pegasi get this kind of view every day?" Diamond Tiara asked.
"Yeah, it's pretty awesome," Rainbow Dash said. She stood with the group of fillies, looking out over the clouds. "Gotta admit, I used to take this view for granted back when I lived here. I guess seein' it for the first time..." She shook her head. "C'mon, we gotta get you girls headin' back down. It's gettin' late and Twilight's spell can't last too much longer."
Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle exchanged a reluctant glance, then turned to Scootaloo. "You gonna be okay?" Apple Bloom asked.
"I'll be fine," Scootaloo promised. She smiled gamely. "See you girls in a few weeks!"
"Take care, Scootaloo!" Sweetie Belle said. She and Apple Bloom hugged Scootaloo, then climbed into the balloon. Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara gave Scootaloo a last glance, then followed.
Rainbow Dash rustled her wings awkwardly. "Twilight should be here to...to pick you up any second," she said. "I gotta get goin' with these girls. Hang in there, Scoots. I'll be checkin' up on you, okay?"
"Thanks," Scootaloo said.
"Bye, Scootaloo!"
"Hang in there!"
"See you in a few weeks!"
"Bye, girls!" As the balloon began to descend with the four fillies in it, Rainbow Dash hovering close by, a flash of magenta magic heralded the arrival of Twilight Sparkle.
"Ready to go, Scootaloo?" Twilight asked.
Scootaloo sighed. "Yeah," she said. She fell into step beside Twilight as the princess led her through the darkening cloud streets. "So, uhh...where am I staying?"
"Princess Celestia and I arranged for you to stay with Fluttershy's parents," Twilight said.
Scootaloo perked up. "Fluttershy's parents? Huh. Wonder what they're like?"
"They're very nice," Twilight said. "They're a lot like Fluttershy herself." With a slightly sheepish smile, she added, "Actually, they're...kind of like the extreme version of her. I thought Fluttershy was the most meek pony in Equestria, then I met them."
"Oh." Scootaloo didn't look too impressed by that.
"But they'll be good for your training," Twilight said. "Mr. Shy has worked his entire life at the weather factory. He's retiring next year. Mrs. Shy does cloud gardening. I think you can learn a lot from them."
"Cool," Scootaloo said.
* * * * *
Dusk was giving way to night when the two ponies trotted up to a squat two-story cloud house with a sloping roof and a ribbon of rainbow encircling the sides and rear of the property. Scootaloo stared at the brick facade of the left half of the house, then at the oddly-sloped roof over the rest of the house, supported by a single cloud column on the south wall. "Pegasus houses are weird," she opined.
Twilight laughed. "It sure doesn't look like anything we have in Ponyville, I'll give you that." She trotted up to the door and gave a brisk knock. "Mrs. Shy?" she called. "I'm back!"
After a moment, the door opened, and a middle-aged pegasus mare with a yellow coat, curled red hair, and large square-framed glasses peeked out. "Oh, hello Twilight," she said in a soft voice. She glanced over Twilight's shoulder and smiled. "You must be Scootaloo," she said. "Fluttershy's told us all about you and your little friends. Come on in!"
"I have to be getting back to Ponyville," Twilight said, cracking a yawn. "While I can still fly."
"You can stay the night if you want," Mrs. Shy offered. "It's really no imposition."
Twilight shook her head. "Thanks, but I've got an early day tomorrow." She stretched her wings. "If I stayed, I'd have to be up an hour before sunrise to get back to Ponyville in time, and I wouldn't wanna wake everypony up." She smiled. "I'll be checking on you when I get a chance, Scootaloo. In the meantime, have fun!" With that, she took off into the night.
Scootaloo watched her go with a pout. "I still say that isn't fair," she grumbled.
"What isn't, dear?"
Scootaloo shook her head. "Nevermind. Just me being grouchy about my not being able to fly."
"Oh. Oh dear." Mrs. Shy worried with her hooves. "Umm...why don't we get you settled in? I've cleaned up Fluttershy's old room for you."
"Thanks," Scootaloo said. She followed Mrs. Shy through the house to a small room on the second floor. It was a little cramped, with a clearly filly-sized cloud bed, a pink dresser, and several shelves with snowglobes and stuffed animals on them. A few framed photos hung on the walls, mostly depicting a young Fluttershy with her family or with—
Scootaloo's wings buzzed as she flittered to the wall, studying one of the photos. In it, a meek, long-legged, embarrassed-looking Fluttershy was not so much posing for as being dragged into a photo with a stubby runt of a blue pegasus filly with a short, choppy rainbow mane and a big, cheeky grin. "Is that Rainbow Dash as a filly?"
"Oh my, yes," Mrs. Shy said. "Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash were...I guess you could say they were good friends." She paused, tilted her head skyward, then added, "Well, it was more like Rainbow Dash decided Fluttershy was her friend and hung around all the time, and Fluttershy went along with it. Oh, don't get me wrong! They were definitely friends, it's just..." She worried at the floor with a hoof. "It was mostly because neither of them had any other friends, and I think Rainbow Dash just latched onto the first filly that didn't mock her and fly away."
Scootaloo's ears wilted. "Really?"
Mrs. Shy nodded somewhat wistfully. "Mm-hmm." She sighed. "Rainbow Dash wasn't very popular as a filly. Not the way she is today. Today, she's practically a celebrity, but back then..." She shook her head.
"Wow," Scootaloo breathed.
Mrs. Shy tilted her head. "You're the filly who looks up to Rainbow Dash like a big sister, right?"
"Yeah," Scootaloo said. "I'm an only child and my parents work all the time, so I'm pretty much on my own a lot. I don't know what I'd do without the Crusaders and Rainbow Dash."
"Oh, you poor thing," Mrs. Shy said soothingly.
Scootaloo fidgeted uncomfortably, then looked around the room. "So this is Fluttershy's room, huh?" she asked. "That bed musta been cramped when she got up in her teens."
Mrs. Shy looked away. "Oh...she'd moved out by then," she said. "Well, mostly."
"Really?" Scootaloo asked.
Mrs. Shy sighed as she looked around the room. "You've seen Fluttershy with her animals, right?" At Scootaloo's nod, Mrs. Shy continued, "Well, after she got her Cutie Mark, Fluttershy started spending more and more time on the ground with the animals. It got to the point where she was only at home for family meal time most days of the week. Oh, she made sure to help with the chores and never let us forget how much she loves us and how important we are to her, but she felt her place was closer to the ground, and we understood that and gave her her space. She wasn't much older than you when she started getting earth ponies to help build her cottage in Ponyville. After that, she spent more and more time on the ground until she was only coming back home on the weekends."
Scootaloo blinked. "So...Fluttershy left home when she was that young?"
Mrs. Shy smiled somewhat sadly. "She's always been such a strong and independent pony, not at all like her father and I. And definitely not like her brother."
Scootaloo tilted her head. "Fluttershy has a brother?"
Mrs. Shy grimaced slightly. "Yes..." She sighed. "Nevermind that. You must be exhausted. Why don't you get settled in? I'll bring you something to eat, then you can turn in for the night so we can get an early start tomorrow."
"Okay." Scootaloo yawned. "Wow, I didn't realize how tired I am." She crawled up onto Fluttershy's old bed and curled up. Before Mrs. Shy even made it to the door, she was sound asleep.
Mrs. Shy smiled fondly, tousled her mane, and glided out of the room.
* * * * *
By the time Scootaloo woke up, sunshine filled the little cloud house. She yawned and rubbed sleep out of her eyes, then headed downstairs, following the smell of oat cakes. "Good morning, Scootaloo!" Mrs. Shy called. "Breakfast will be ready in a second."
"Thanks," Scootaloo said. She headed for the kitchen and sat down at the table. Across from her, a white-maned stallion with a moustache was reading the morning paper. He looked up and smiled at her.
"Good morning," he said. "You're Scootaloo, right? I'm Fluttershy's dad."
"Nice to meet you," Scootaloo said. "So, you work at the weather factory?"
"All my life," Mr. Shy said. With a sigh, he added, "I'm retiring next year, though. These days, making weather is a young pony's game, and my wings are getting stiff and sore in my old age."
"My dad gets sore wings sometimes," Scootaloo said. "There's a zebra named Zecora in the Everfree Forest who makes all kinds of medicines and potions. She's got a pretty good liniment for that."
"Oh, right, Fluttershy mentioned that," Mr. Shy said. "I think she was planning to bring some next time she visits."
Mrs. Shy served three plates of oat cakes with honey and crispy hay, then sat down. "So, Scootaloo," she said, "Twilight says you need help connecting with your pegasus magic."
Scootaloo grimaced. "Yeah," she said. "Since I can't fly, I never really do pegasus stuff. I guess that's why I don't know how to use my own magic."
Mrs. Shy and Mr. Shy exchanged a glance. "Well," Mrs. Shy said with a soft smile, "how does this sound? For the next few days, you can help me around the house and the garden, and I'll help you with some basic cloud shaping?"
"And after that, when you're ready, you can come to the weather factory with me and get a feel for what we do there," Mr. Shy said.
Scootaloo nodded. "That sounds cool." She tilted her head. "How's doing housework gonna help me learn pegasus magic, though?"
Mrs. Shy smiled. "Well, we do live in a cloud house in Cloudsdale," she said. She frowned. "Which reminds me, it's time to deal with..." She looked off in a different direction and made a disgusted face.
Mr. Shy's moustache twitched. "It is, isn't it?" He sighed. "I remember the first time I had Zephyr Breeze help me with that."
"With what?" Scootaloo asked, looking back and forth.
Mr. and Mrs. Shy exchanged a pained look. "W-well," Mrs. Shy said timidly, "we're going to have to deal with a certain...bathroom-related chore today."
Scootaloo frowned. "Cleaning the bathroom? That's not such a big deal."
"Your family lives in a ground house, right?" Mr. Shy asked. "With the kind of indoor plumbing earth ponies and unicorns use?"
"Well, yeah," Scootaloo said.
Mrs. Shy's face twisted into a sickly grimace, the sort of expression one wears when they're about to deliver bad news. "Scootaloo, dear...the plumbing in cloud houses is a little...different from what you're used to..."
* * * * *
Scootaloo stared, wide-eyed, down the "well" bored through the Shy house's foundation underneath the bathroom. Its walls were made of densely-packed, reinforced cloud, and at the bottom...
"Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww," Scootaloo complained, face twisting up into an expression of utter revulsion and cheeks turning green.
"Yes, it's...not very pleasant," Mrs. Shy agreed. "Oh, I hate this chore..."
Scootaloo pulled her head back, took a deep breath, then looked down the hole again. At the bottom, held separate from the well of clouds by a constant static discharge, was a sickly brownish-green mass of what looked like mud mixed with cloud. "So uhh..." Scootaloo gulped. "That's like...that's like, crap, right?"
"Yes," Mrs. Shy said. "And...other things. Basically any waste we make from using the toilet or brushing our teeth or bathing is all packed into that little septic cloud."
Scootaloo's expression became even more nauseated. "You don't like...pigeon-bomb that down on Equestria, do you?"
"Oh goodness no!" Mrs. Shy said with a shocked gasp. She rummaged through the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a box, from which she extracted a crusty-looking yellow object about the size and shape of a bar of soap. "Running low on these, need to put it on my shopping list," she muttered absently to herself.
"What's that?" Scootaloo asked.
"It's an agitator tablet," Mrs. Shy said. "It's...well, you'll see. You might wanna stand back." As Scootaloo moved to a safe distance, Mrs. Shy dropped the agitator tablet down the cloud well, then quickly stepped back to stand at Scootaloo's side.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Just as Scootaloo was about to step forward to look down the hole again, the entire bathroom floor suddenly turned black. With a tremendous BOOM that knocked Scootaloo on her rump, a massive column of lightning lanced straight up out of the well, tearing a hole through the ceiling.
Scootaloo stared, wide-eyed, at the hole. "Wha-what the...?!"
Mrs. Shy flew up and reshaped the ceiling, closing the hole in the clouds. She motioned Scootaloo over to the edge of the well. Scootaloo looked down...
The waste cloud was completely gone. All around it, the tightly-packed eyewall of the well had collapsed into a ragged, fluffy mess. "Whoa," Scootaloo said. She tilted her head. "So...you just blew it up with lightning?"
"Yes," Mrs. Shy said. "Unfortunately, now we have to rebuild the septic well. It's going to take about two hours." She smiled gamely. "At least it'll be good cloud-shaping practice for you."
Scootaloo pulled a face. "Eww, we have to put our hooves in that?!"
Mrs. Shy rubbed her chin with a hoof. "Hmm. Actually, since you can't fly, I might put you on a different task while I do this. Let's go out to the garden..."
* * * * *
The backyard of the Shy house largely consisted of a round brick storage shed with round windows and a path of paving stones balanced on the cloud surface leading up to it, with flowerbeds surrounded by low walls of clouds that looked more like cement than moisture. "Wow, so this is what a pegasus yard looks like," Scootaloo said.
"Oh, it's nothing special," Mrs. Shy said. "I wish we had more space...maybe a little more money, we could really...but nevermind." She led Scootaloo over to nearest flowerbed. "Now, what I'd like for you to do is water all the flowers," she explained. "But you're going to do it the pegasus way." She looked around, then nodded and trotted over to a patch of the yard where the clouds were raised and puffier than the rest of the smooth, even cloud top. "See how the cloud has gotten a little high over here?"
"Yeah," Scootaloo said as she joined her.
Mrs. Shy pushed her hooves into the mass of cloud and gathered up a ball of it, then rolled it around for a minute until she had a hoofball-sized cloud. "What you do is, you gather up some of the cloud that's gotten messy, and you gently guide it over to the flowers, like so..." She wrapped a wing around the cloud, shooing it in the direction of her flowers. "You can also use your hooves, or make a breeze if you can. Err...can you make a breeze?"
"A little bit," Scootaloo said. "I do kinda make my own tailwind when I'm on my scooter."
"Well, whichever way is easiest for you," Mrs. Shy said as they trotted back over to the flowers. She carefully positioned the cloud over the flowers, then turned her back to it. "Once it's in place, you just...!" She gave the cloud a buck; it dumped all its rain onto the flowers. She smiled at Scootaloo. "Think you can do that?"
"Looks easy enough," Scootaloo said. She looked around at the smooth cloud layer that served as the lawn, then at the rough, piled patches of cloud like the one Mrs. Shy had just scooped from. "So this is kinda like mowing the lawn and watering the flowers all rolled up into one?"
Mrs. Shy beamed. "It's exactly like that!" She patted Scootaloo on the head. "Now, don't overwater the flowers. There are four beds total. Give each set of flowers about two clouds. Once you're done, come inside for lunch."
"Yes ma'am!" Scootaloo trotted over to the cloud pile and set to work while Mrs. Shy went back inside. As Scootaloo worked with the clouds, she started humming to herself, building up a rhythm as she hummed, then sang, the latest Countess Coloratura hits. The unruly cloud pile slowly shrank; by the time Scootaloo had watered all the flowers, the cloud lawn was smooth and perfect again.
Scootaloo headed inside and sat down in the living room. Mrs. Shy poked her head out of the bathroom. "Finished?" she asked. Scootaloo nodded. "Alright, I'll go check and see how you did in just a minute. How did it feel?"
"It felt...right," Scootaloo said. "Making clouds, making it rain, it felt..." She smiled. "It felt natural."
"That's good," Mrs. Shy said. "Looks like you're getting the hang of it." She trotted out back; when she came back in, she was all smiles. "Very good job, Scootaloo! Now, let me wash up, and then I'll get lunch started."
The door opened, and a male voice called out, "Hey, Moms! Guess who!"
"...for three," Mrs. Shy said in a slightly strained tone.
A green stallion with a spun-straw mane done up in a bun and a day's growth of stubble sauntered into the room, grinning a huge, self-assured grin. "It's just your favorite son!"
"Hello, Zephyr Breeze," Mrs. Shy said, pasting on a smile. "What brings you by? In the middle of the day? When you're supposed to be at school?"
"Oh, you know, a pony's gotta be where a pony's gotta be," Zephyr Breeze said airily. He espied Scootaloo and tilted his head. "Oh, now come on, Moms! You and Pops didn't go and have another kid while I wasn't looking, did you?"
"Oh, no," Mrs. Shy said with a laugh. "This is Scootaloo. She's staying with us a few weeks."
"That's cool...that's cool," Zephyr Breeze said, his cheerful demeanor dropping slightly. "Of course, if she cramps my style, she's gonna have to go. You understand, right shrimp?" Zephyr Breeze clapped his hooves together. "Now, when's lunch? This pony is starving!"
Scootaloo frowned.