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

Panting, Dash looked at the front of her vest, back up at the same stupid swamp they'd been trudging and fighting through all day, then at her vest again. "Here? This is the finish line?"

The blue arrow was pointing straight down and flashing with little curlicues like streamers coming out of it, but all that did was make the black water they were both standing in glow a little brownish.

"It is." Flim's voice broke. "I mean, that's what the other customers we've run through a game have said the arrow does when they reach the goal." He waved a wet and wrinkled hoof at the arrow. "But they say it lasts about 5 seconds before they pop back to the booth."

Dash hadn't been counting, of course, but she knew more than five seconds had gone by since the thing had started doing its little dance routine. "So we've gotta wait for AJ."

Flim had closed his eyes. "Unless the whole thing's broken and we're trapped in here forever."

"No!" Dash stomped her hoof with a splash. "I mean, yeah, maybe the thing's broken, but no way are we gonna be trapped in here! AJ and your brother'll get to whatever the finish line is for their race, and that'll trigger the whole thing to—"

"My fault," Flim muttered. "All of it, just like Flam always says. If I hadn't wanted to trick you into forfeiting the game so we could make an ad slogan out of it, none of this would've happened..."

Leaping into a hover no matter how much her wings complained, Dash shouted, "That's not true!" A thought made her land, grit her teeth, and say, "Okay, yeah, so maybe it is true. But not because it was your idea! Because it was just a bad idea all the way around to begin with!"

"Like Flam always says—"

"No, not like Flam always says!" Dash poked the front of his vest hard enough to jostle him. "You're wrong, sure, but Flam's wrong, too!"

"My fault..."

"Will you stop?" Rearing back, Dash grabbed his shoulders and gave him a little shake. "Look! I have bad ideas all the time! I mean, one winter I blew up an entire weather factory trying to stop my pet tortoise from hibernating!"

He started back like she'd stung him. "You what?"

"Bad idea, right?" She didn't let him go and cracked a grin she didn't quite feel. "But the thing is, not only did I learn from that mistake—and all my other ones—so I could move on and try to become a better pony, but my friends also moved on. Once they knew I was sorry and that I wasn't gonna do it any more, they stopped ragging on me and let it go." Another thought made her grit her teeth again. "And, yeah, okay, so we sometimes still bust Starlight's chops for that one time she locked us all in a room and tried to brainwash us into joining her weird cult, but that's totally a special case!"

Flim's eyes went even wider.

Dash kept her hold on him. "My point is, even if you did make some stupid decisions in the past, your friends and family, and especially your brother, they need to let it go and stop being such a jerk about it to you! And you both need to stop being such jerks all the time to other ponies!"

"Jerks?" Anger flashing through the numbness on his face, he tried to pull away again. "We are businessponies, Captain Dash, not paragons of virtue such as you and your compatriots advertise yourselves to be!" He did some more wriggling. "And I really must insist that you release your hold on me at once!"

"No can do, pal." She gestured past him with her snout. "'Cause I don't want you panicking and running off when you look over your shoulder."

"When I—?" He cranked his head around, and while Dash couldn't see his expression, she could tell exactly when he saw the swamp monsters by the way all his muscles went stiff.

"They're slow ones," she murmured into his ear; it was flicking across her muzzle and she was trying to ignore it. "And I don't know if the game'll even let 'em attack us since we're standing on the finish line, so let's just keep calm and—"

"We're doomed!" Flim wailed. "I'm exhausted—my horn'll barely spark—and you're exhausted—you've been walking for the last hour! Those beasts'll tear us to pieces!"

"No, they won't." Dash watched the three monsters slog forward another pace; they were low to the ground and wide, more like cragodiles than the other things she'd been kicking all day. "Because AJ and Flam are gonna get to their finish line, and your machine's gonna kick us all back into the real world."

"What?" He squirmed back around to stare at her. "We can't count on them! We can't count on anypony! We're all alone and about to be—!"

A puff of fresh air wafted over Dash's nose, and white light flashed, completely blinding her.