Gyro frowned as she sat at the edge of the swash, blue eyes scowling over the ocean. Water dripped from her mane, her muzzle, and nearly every inch of her body. She looked like a drowned cat. Considering her treatment at Rarity’s hooves, it wasn’t too hard to believe.
Rarity hummed to herself as she worked. She’d taken a coconut husk and had turned it into a makeshift loofah to scrub the grit and filth out of the mechanic’s smoky gray coat. Gyro gently rocked back and forth as Rarity worked, deadpan expression glued to her face the entire time.
The husk floated over to the water, where Rarity washed it out in the foam of a wave. “I would’ve expected you to be more thankful,” Rarity said. “You were positively filthy!”
“I would’ve liked it more if you’d just let me go to the water and wash myself out instead of throwing me in,” she grumbled. “You could’ve asked nicely.”
That much was true, Rarity knew, but her instincts had taken over upon smelling that concentrated, revolting smell. “You had all day to wash yourself out yesterday after spending who knows how long living in your own filth. If I didn’t do something, I would’ve feared that you’d start spreading the plague.”
“Gee,” Gyro grumbled, “thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it too much, G,” Rainbow said from where she lounged a little further up the white sand. “That’s just Rares overreacting and crap. Dirty things scare her.”
“Then I’m amazed you’ve lasted this long,” Gyro said to the unicorn.
“Salt and sand cannot be avoided, no matter how much I try,” Rarity said. “But we can at least stay clean.”
“She’s focusing all her energy she would’ve spent on complaining about the sand into her hate for you being dirty,” Rainbow chimed in. “Don’t take it personally.”
Rarity set aside the makeshift loofah and grabbed their brush and comb. “If only we had soap or shampoo,” she muttered to herself. A white hoof pointed to the waves. “Go wash off in the seawater and then I’ll brush you down.”
Gyro grumbled, climbed to her hooves, and staggered down into the water. “Being dirty doesn’t bother me,” she said as she splashed into the waves. “I’m a mechanic. I’m usually covered in coal dust and grease for days on end. There’s a saying that you’ll never find an airship engineer with a white pillowcase.”
Rarity’s face twisted through several different levels of revulsion and disgust. “That’s… you can’t…”
“Pfffhahaha!” Rainbow hollered and slapped the ground. “Good job, girl, you broke her!”
“Serves her right.” Gyro lowered herself to her stomach and let the next wave splash over her. She blew a cloud of droplets from her nostrils and shook out her short mane before returning to Rarity’s side. “Can we hurry this up? The water’s really cold and I don’t have any fat left to stay warm.”
Rarity blinked and wiped some sweat from her brow. “…Right. This should only take a few minutes, and the sun will take care of the rest. Plus, a gray coat like yours will help you hold and retain the heat.”
“Good, because I’m pretty sure it’s almost as hot out here as it is in an airship’s boiler room and I’m still shivering.” She closed her eyes and tried to still her shoulders while Rarity gently went over her coat with the brush. “You got any food? I need to eat.”
“You always need to eat,” Rainbow teased.
“I mean…” Gyro pointed to the gaunt spaces between her ribs. “Can you blame me?”
“Not at all.” Rolling back onto her hooves, Rainbow turned around and trotted back toward their campgrounds. “I hope coconut and fruit sounds good, because that’s pretty much all we got.”
“I’ll snack on some of the grass around the spring later if I want something different,” Gyro called back just before Rainbow disappeared through the tree line. After a moment, she chuckled and added, “You girls haven’t found any mushrooms around here, I take it?”
“If we did, I certainly wasn’t going to eat them,” Rarity said. “Who knows if they’re poisonous or not.”
Gyro shrugged. “I mean, I’m not a farmer, but I am an earth pony. We’re all connected to the earth in some way, even if I prefer to be flying above it. We’ve got an eye for this stuff.”
“Forgive me if I’m doubtful,” Rarity said. “I know many earth ponies who are terrible at gardening. One of the models I regularly hire for dress shoots can’t keep a flower alive to save her life. Or the flower’s. I learned to simply give her a bottle of wine as gratitude instead of a bouquet, because the daisies would be pushing up other daisies inside of a day.”
“Alright, fair, I’m probably full of shit anyway.” She sighed as Rarity set the brush aside and started to comb through her mane. “Still can’t help the craving, though. I can’t believe we got on this stupid topic last night.”
“You were the one who brought it up, if you recall correctly,” Rarity teased.
Gyro’s eyes rolled in their sockets. “Yeah, whatever.” Then her ears perked and she smiled at Rarity. “About last night…”
Rarity felt a tinge of blush entering her cheeks even before Gyro asked the inevitable question. “Yes?”
“Did you and Rainbow… you know?”
The seamstress allowed herself to smile briefly. “We did.”
“And…?”
“Well, if I can tell you one thing about it…” Rarity licked her lips and savored those memories from the night before. “What she lacks in experience, she makes up for in passion.”
“Really?” Gyro looked back in the direction of the camp in case Rainbow happened to be walking through the trees right at that moment. “I would’ve thought a mare like her would’ve had some practice.”
“I never said that,” Rarity said. “Just that I know more than her.”
A splash of color began moving through the trees, and both mares dropped the topic as Rainbow started making her way over to them. “I’ll ask you about it later,” Gyro said with a wink.
Rainbow stopped next to the two and put down a basket full of food. “We need to harvest more coconuts,” she said, sitting down and joining them on the sand. “We’re running out.”
“We’ll take care of that tomorrow,” Rarity said. “Today, we should focus on finishing our new hut. Can you tell what the weather will be like, darling?”
The pegasus frowned and stuck her nose to the sky. “Clear for today, but I don’t think it’ll hold,” she said. “There’s clouds moving in. It’ll probably start raining by midday tomorrow.”
“Then we certainly don’t want to be caught out in the rain with only half a hut,” Rarity said. She pulled a few star apples out of the basket and started working on them. “Let’s eat breakfast and then get it taken care of. Gyro, you can simply take it easy. We don’t expect you to do any heavy lifting yet.”
“Good.” The mare started tearing into her meal, swallowing juicy fruit in large gulps. “License to be lazy, I love it.”
“Yeah, enjoy the break while you can,” Rainbow said. “Soon we’ll probably need those muscles for something.”
“What muscles?”
“You know what I mean.”