//------------------------------//
// Six 
// Story: Going Home 
// by Baal Bunny 
//------------------------------//

With a yell, AJ charged down the hallway toward the stone wall sliding up from the sand to block their exit once more. Wheeling around, she lashed her rear hooves against the spot where the green blast of Flam's horn was focused—

And the wall shattered to rubble. "Yes!" she shouted, then following the plan, she threw herself through the jagged opening before another wall could spring into place.

"Roll!" Flam was shouting from somewhere behind her. "Roll! Roll! Roll!"

She hit the sand soft enough, but it was still mighty scratchy against her hide as she tumbled—

Down a hill, she realized, and the clench in her middle loosened. That whole dang maze had been nothing but flat inside!

Quick enough, she reached bottom, a sandy upward slope pressing against her back. Flopping away from it, she found her hooves, sprang onto them, and raised her head.

Blue sky, something she hadn't seen in the couple hours since those walls had suddenly sprung outta the desert and closed her and Flam into the twisting halls of—

"Flam!" she yelled at the thought of him. "Sing out, feller! You here?"

A moan answered from along the curving base of the dune, and AJ scrambled through the sand to find him sitting up and rubbing his forehead. "Surprisingly? Yes, I do indeed seem to be here."

Not wanting to admit that she'd had a bushelful of doubts herself, she shrugged. "Teamwork ain't just a way of scamming ponies, y'know."

His mustache shifted sideways. "Yes, yes, yes." Stretching his legs, he clambered upright, stretched his back, and winced. "Virtue triumphs and all that." He nodded up the hill to the outside of the stone wall, all solid and unbroken. "But how about we put some distance between us and that thing before it decides to change the rules and swallow us up again."

AJ nodded, glanced down at her chest, and saw the blue arrow pointing away from him along the little gully. "Changing the rules halfway through? That'd be cheating, wouldn't it? Or is that something you don't know a single thing about?" She turned and started off without waiting for an answer.

He gave her one anyway, of course, his hoofsteps quick and crunchy as he fell into step beside her. "Cheating, friend Applejack? Other than the little mishap at the beginning of your Portal Popper adventure, how exactly has this experience been a cheat?"

A few suspicions had been bumping around in her head since before the maze had grabbed them, and even as helpful as he'd been figuring a way out, AJ still found herself wondering. "It's just you never answered my first question way back at the beginning."

"First question?" His confusion seemed genuine. "Perhaps the whole 'trying to escape from the sliding stone walls of death' has put a damper on my memory, but I don't—"

"I asked why you'd brung this portal thing to the Ponyville Fun and Frolic Fest when you got a whole resort back in Las Pegasus." She turned and fixed her gaze on him. "A mite peculiar, wouldn't you say?"

He puffed out a breath. "When one is a true entrepreneur, one can never afford to sit still, not even for a moment." His horn glowed, and one of the little water bottles floated from his vest pocket. "But then I don't suppose somepony like you would understand that."

"Excuse me?" And even knowing that he was trying to get her riled to push her attention away from the subject, she couldn't keep the hair along the base of her mane from bristling. "I've gone from the orphaned middle daughter of a couple apple farmers to wunna the six ponies who runs all of ding-dang Equestria! How exactly has I been sitting still?"

Taking a sip from the bottle before putting the cap back on, he looked down his snout at her, his eyes partway closed. "You never strove for any of it, never had an ambition so big and devouring that you threw yourself at it over and over till your sides were rubbed raw and your hooves wouldn't stop shaking." The bottle drifted in its green cloud back to his pocket. "You would've been just as happy with your life if none of your adventures had ever happened. Whereas a true entrepreneur is always reaching." He shook his head.

Outrage nearly burst through the top of AJ's head and blasted her hat off. How dare he come over all high and mighty about ambition when he weren't nothing but a dirty, low-down thieving polecat!

She forced herself to breathe, forced herself not to blow up the way he wanted her to, forced herself to think about what he'd said—

And found a little spark glimmering in her head. "Sitting still," she said, blowing gently on the spark and nursing it into a full-fledged flame. "You can't ever be satisfied, can you?"

He went on looking and marching straight ahead beside her, but AJ saw the corner of his mouth twitch.

"You'll never know a moment's peace, will you?" In an instant, so many things about the Flimflam Brothers made more sense to her than they ever had before. "You can't enjoy a single thing you got 'cause you're convinced there's something better just over the hill."

His eyes tightened.

AJ leaned toward him. "But me, I've only ever wanted two things. And I got 'em both: the finest apple orchard the world has ever known, and the finest friend, lover, and wife any pony's ever gonna have. So you look at my life, friend Flam, and then you go ahead and tell me I didn't work my tail off for what's truly important."

This time, he didn't react at all as far as she could tell, and that suited her absolutely fine. "Now c'mon," she said, upping her pace. "Let's get us back to the real world."