"Oh! Can we stop here? I saw a thing over there, can we go check that out?" The stallion pointed a hoof towards a very small clearing in the trees, bouncing up and down on his other legs as he looked towards the alicorn, excitement evident on his face.
Twilight's less colourful imitation rolled her eyes. She didn't want to entertain the stallion's doubtlessly nonsensical request, but she knew well she wouldn't hear the end of it for the whole rest of the trip if she didn't. Begrudgingly, she began to walk towards the designated spot. "Okay. What is it?"
Truth be told, she was tempted to shoot the pony in the back and leave him there. But she wanted to avoid the risk of someone coming to look for him and stumbling into her hideout. She'd need to move out of it at some point, she'd always known that, and it looked like the time had come.
She would have been working on preparing her things right that moment if she hadn't been forced to walk with the stallion all the way back to the town. She'd tried to give him directions, of course, and he'd even tried to follow them, but in no more than ten minutes he'd always turned up back where he'd started, lost again and once more asking for guidance.
"It's a puzzle!" the stallion replied, moving some leaves out of the way and staring intently at the wooden stump sitting in the middle of the small patch of grass. "I like puzzles. You still haven't told me if you like puzzles. Scarlet likes puzzles, but she says I've gone crazy. I haven't gone crazy. You don't think I'm crazy, right?"
Eyeing the off-size mare-model clothes the stallion wore, which she'd gotten a better look at after taking him out of the cave, the mare chose not to answer that question. "How exactly is this a puzzle?" she asked, seeing him fidget with a few pebbles on the ground and a tuft of grass slightly taller than the rest.
"Well, this is a lever, as you can see." He tugged onto the grass. "Then there are these buttons here." He tapped the pebbles. "All I need to do is figure out the right combination I need to press, and then it should open. You can clearly see the cables leading to that cut off tree there in the middle."
Twilight's clone reconsidered the idea of actually ending the pony's life, or at least knocking him unconscious and dragging him back to the town. Her patience past its limit, she was about to point out how nothing of what he was saying made any sense, but a sudden cheer from him blocked her. Then came a click, and the tree stump in the middle of the clearing opened up as a small platform rose from it, a bowl on top of it.
"Oh, nice. Soup." The stallion walked towards the bowl and gave a few experimental licks to the contents. "It's still warm, and really good. Do you want some soup?"