Rainbow Dash could only imagine how awful she smelled. Her body was drenched in sweat, old and new, dried and still glistening. The smell of salt and the smell of sand clung to her mane and tail, along with the odor of crushed leaves and bits of grass that stuck to the hair on her body. Her hooves were covered in dirt and mud, though she had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t all dirt and mud. The wildlife on this island was awfully busy, and it certainly didn’t have anypony to clean up after it.
The three pegasi had spent the entire afternoon trying to cover the moon door, and it was much, much harder than she’d first anticipated. Unlike actual trees back in actual Equestria, the palm trees here didn’t provide a lot of material for them to easily cover the door with. There were no branches to hew off of the trees and use to simply drag a bundle of leaves in front of the door. There were only palm fronds, and each frond was connected to its parent tree individually. It meant that it took them so much extra effort for so little in return, for once they got the palm fronds off of the tree, they’d have to weave them together to form something solid and strong enough to cover the door and still stand up under its own weight. It wasn’t like they had much they could use to hang the fronds over the door.
So the three pegasi worked together as best as they could to quickly erect an effective shield over the door. Rainbow Dash had, of course, volunteered to do all the hard work, namely breaking off palm fronds and dropping them into a pile in front of the door. Champagne attempted to strip them down and weave them into a sturdy mat that would block most of the moonlight, and Stargazer smeared mud over the mats to further proof them against the moon. After a few hours of work, they’d managed to get nearly half of the door covered, but there was precious little time left to finish their job before the moon began to peek through the trees.
It was ultimately too much for Rainbow to take. Groaning, she simply let go of the palm tree she’d perched herself in and fell over backwards, landing safely in the pile of fronds she’d dumped at the foot of it. Her whole body ached, she was hungry, and she felt like if she fell asleep, she’d never wake up. “This is stupid,” she said. “This is a stupid idea. Who came up with such a stupid idea?”
“I’m pretty sure you did, Rainbow,” Stargazer said. He sighed and looked down at his mud-covered hooves. “I’m sitting down here playing in the dirt because of your plan. If you’re complaining about it, maybe I should have done so sooner.”
“It’s just…” she gestured over her shoulder to where the door was situated, not bothering to actually crane her neck around. “This clearly isn’t working. There’s no possible way we can get this thing all covered by the time the moon hits tonight. Not with these stupid palm fronds.”
“Do we really have any other choice?” Champagne asked. “I’m weaving as fast as I can, but it’s very hard to make something that will stick together.”
“If there were some tarps and stuff, that’d be perfect,” Rainbow said. “But we didn’t bring any with us, and I don’t think the pirates really had anything like that back at their camp. I don’t really want to go looking around, though, because seriously, eff that. I’m too tired.”
Champagne and Stargazer glanced at each other. “I never thought I’d hear Rainbow Dash complaining about how tired she was,” Stargazer said.
“Especially after how much she tries to push poor Prench mares to keep up with her,” Champagne added.
Rainbow tilted her head back until she could glare at the two of them, albeit from an upside down position. “Meh.”
The other two pegasi put aside their work with sighs and looked up at Rainbow. “So what do we do now?” Stargazer asked. “Do we just give up on this?”
“No, but there’s gotta be a better way to do it,” Rainbow said. “At the rate we’re going, we’ll never make it in time. It’s just taking too friggin’ long.” She frowned up at the sky. “We’re not gonna get it done with this stupid tree stuff. We need to improvise something more. Something better. Something… something only us pegasi can do.”
Her voice trailed off, leaving Stargazer and Champagne to glance at each other. “Uh… what do you mean, Rainbow?” Stargazer asked. “We’re the only ones out here, so of course it’s only something we can do.”
“Maybe we should have brought Ruse with us,” Champagne said. “His magic could have covered this door somehow.”
“We don’t need Ruse!” Rainbow indignantly stated. Glowering, she merely pointed up to the sky. “All we need are those!”
Stargazer and Champagne craned their necks back. “The clouds?” Stargazer asked. “You want to cover the door with clouds?”
“Yeah!” Rainbow said. “We can work them! We’re pegasi, after all! It’s what we do!”
“We tried moving those clouds when we tried to open the tomb,” Champagne said. “They wouldn’t budge. How do you expect to move them now?”
Rainbow spun about until she was sitting on her haunches and looking down at her companions. “Because I broke the enchantment with my rainboom, remember? I blew it to pieces. Those clouds up there are mostly natural now. They’re not magically summoned and held in place by some sort of old ritual. They’re just clouds, and long before we had a weather factory, us pegasi could only move what nature gave us.” She pointed up at the sky again. “They might not be nice artificial clouds, but they’re still clouds. We can still move them. And if we just tear off a chunk big enough to cover the door and pack it down, it’ll last through the night. Then we can finish our more permanent solution tomorrow when the sun comes up again.”
“It could work,” Stargazer said. “So long as we can actually work with the clouds.”
“Well, we don’t have anything to lose by trying,” Rainbow said. “It’s not like we can waste time on it if we’re already wasting time with this stupid affair.”
She stood up and spread her wings, quickly launching herself into the sky. “Come on, you two, I’ll need your help for this!”