Lightning Dust dropped the dense pile of hastily scribbled essays on Rainbow Dash’s couch. Nearly a year ago she was still performing with the Washouts, dodging the reporters and newspapers that kept mentioning her fiasco in Ponyville. Nearly a year ago, she tripped up and some happy-go-lucky reporter from a radio station got the story of how she put a flightless filly on a rocket. Nearly a year ago, she had to stoop so low as to ask Rainbow Dash for a place to stay.
She just had to open her big mouth. When she begged Rainbow she’d do anything just to get out of talking to Svengallop, she didn’t think she’d be saddled with school work. She looked at the first essay at the top of the stack. It read:
Socialization Between Equestrian Youths Within Competitive Sports.
Lightning Dust made a face of disgust at the thing, she couldn’t remember the last time she had to write an essay. Why exactly did Rainbow ask her to help grade papers? Just by looking at the front page, she bet she didn’t know about half the words the kids had written about.
But, if it meant not putting up with Svengallop’s annoying voice, it was worth the trouble. Anything would be better than listening to him nag on about something she was already going to do. Rehearse this, practice that, double-check equipment, triple check equipment, even alone she could still hear him swirling around in her head.
“Such a jackass,” Lightning Dust muttered, blowing her mane off her face.
She checked the Wonderbolt-themed clock hanging on the wall. There were three more hours of tests before school was over. Rainbow had asked her to take the first set of essays back for grading, but what now? They were supposed to do the grading together.
Lightning looked around Rainbow’s home. There was a bookshelf stocked with Daring Do books, along with encyclopedias of sports history and textbooks from the school. Meanwhile, the kitchen was stocked full with cider. It was a lot. Maybe even too much.
She grabbed a bottle and sat back down by the stack of essays. She might as well get a head start on reading and figure out what in the world those kids were learning.
Rainbow Dash was back right on time, clutching a fresh new bundle of essays in her hooves as she flew through the front door.
“Yo Lightning, you still around?” she asked.
Lightning Dust shot up from the couch with a page stuck to her face. “Huh? Whossat?”
“Whoa, dude,” Rainbow chuckled, “have you been reading those all this time?”
Lightning Dust peeled the page off her face and scanned it over. It was the concluding remarks to one student’s essay about pressure and social anxiety in sports teams that emphasized success over improvement.
“Uh... yeah.” She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear the grogginess from her head. “I don’t know half the stuff they’re talking about, so I figured I’d need extra time.” Around her were Rainbow Dash’s copies of the school’s textbooks, the corners of their pages folded to mark the places she had used to even understand the essays.
She piled up the essays she had finished and compared them to the original stack. “Looks like I got about a third of the way through.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” Rainbow mused, plopping her pile of essays down across from Lightning before flying to her kitchen. “Wait, did you drink my cider?”
“Yeah, just two bottles though, you have like fifty in there.”
“And they were for me!” Rainbow came back carrying two bottles, with a third already held in her mouth as she siphoned its contents. She spat the emptied bottle out and it bounced off the magically dense walls of clouds and dropped into a trash bin.
“How do you think I get through all this grading?” Somehow, she finished her second cider before Lightning had a chance to answer.
“I-I think you have a problem,” Lighting muttered in a mix of awe and horror as Rainbow finished the third bottle of cider.
“Yeah yeah, whine about it later. Starlight’s going to ride my flank if I don’t get my tests graded before this weekend.”
“Oh really?” Lightning gave a sly smile. “Didn’t know she was into that.”
Rainbow Dash snickered. “Yeah? Who knows? Maybe I am too.”
Lightning opened her mouth, flustered as she tried to think of something to say to that. Thinking of nothing, she decided to try and change the subject.
She started by asking Rainbow about her class, trying to get tips on how she wanted the essays graded. But as she got further and further into the papers, Lightning realized she had less and less to ask about. They were all about sports. And she realized that even if she didn’t understand all the arguments that the students were writing about, she knew enough about athletes to get the picture.
Still, that didn’t mean she could finish grading the papers on her own. “I don’t even know what ‘social reproduction means,” she said, putting another essay into her quickly growing pile for Rainbow Dash to double-check.
“I’ll worry about those parts. Just keep doing a good job so I don’t have to spend as much time on them.”
Rainbow Dash got up and stretched her legs, gliding off to her fridge for a refill of ciders. The pile of empty bottles was rising even faster than the finished papers.
“Hey, why don’t we put on some music? You seem pretty focused, a little tunes won’t distract you, right?”
“Nothing distracts me,” Lightning mumbled, her mind occupied by some of the ideas in the students’ essays. “My mind is a steel trap.”
A sneer spread its way across Rainbow’s face and she quietly glided up behind her, suddenly pinching her hooves around Lightning’s waist, who recoiled immediately and retreated to the opposite end of the couch.
“What are you doing?” Lightning yelled.
“Ha! I knew it,” Rainbow puffed up her chest, “didn’t want to say anything, but I noticed you were looking a bit… how do I put it?” She motioned to her sides, making a puffed gesture. “Guess touring around doesn’t give you time to work out as much, huh?”
“What? I’m not,” Lightning paused and looked at herself. “Alright, maybe a couple pounds, but I could still fly circles around you! I’ll do it right now!”
“Oh, not this again,” Rainbow snickered and turned away, deflecting the challenge and instead taking a CD player off a bookshelf and swapping the discs out. “I’m just pulling your tail,” she said as she hit the play button and the CD began to whir around in its receptacle. “Isn’t it boring going around in circles trying to be rivals? I mean, if you really hated my guts you wouldn’t be helping me out.”
“Anything to get away from Svengallop.”
“Yeah, sure.”
The CD player crackled as the first song in the album, “Wild” by Neon Bees, began to play.
“Here we go again, we’re getting closer now, we’re more than friends,
So take it easy on me, I’m aware you’re never satisfied.
Here you go again, you’re getting wild while we play pretend,
More like an animal and I’m afraid of what will come tonight...”
Rainbow kept the volume low, enough that the two of them could continue to read. But Lightning’s focus was gone now. She flicked her eyes back and forth between the essays and Rainbow. She had that same smug look on her face a year ago after the Washouts dropped her to save their flanks from a PR scandal.
Going to Rainbow for help was just about the most humiliating thing back then. So what was she doing now? And why did it feel so normal? Lightning looked around as if trying to see through an illusion, but it was all really there. And then a slow fog of surrealness floated around her as she imagined where she’d be in another year. And the year after that.
Rainbow’s words struck a chord in her. The Washouts were supposed to be different, her chance at a new start, but everything repeated itself back then. Now she had a real fresh start with new friends, plus Svengallop, doing something completely different. What was going to stop it from being like the Washouts?
“I do want to be friends,” Lightning eventually whispered, burying her gaze into her pile of essays. “I just don’t know why you want to be. I figured you’ve just been messing with me for shits and giggles.”
Rainbow turned her head and, for a moment, held her eyes wide open in a frozen, stunned expression. “Do I really seem like the kind of pony who’d— actually, never mind. I don’t want that question answered.” But she smiled and reached across the couch and pulled Lightning’s head up. “We were friends before. I just want to go back to that.”
“Go back?” Lightning stared and then shook her head. “No, I don’t want that. I wasn’t a good pony back then. I wasn’t good to you, and I definitely can’t reverse all my mistakes.”
Rainbow’s smile faded. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“But I would like to move on and have something new,” Lightning finished her thought. She reached her hoof out and pressed it against Rainbow’s. “Not rivals for life?”
“Hehe,” Rainbow giggled. “That’s a start. Not rivals for life.”
A knock at the door interrupted them.
“Huh, I’m not expecting any pony,” Rainbow mumbled as she flew over to answer. Standing outside under the just-risen light of the pale moon was Luna and Starlight.
“Hey, is Lightning Dust around?” Starlight asked. “We’re looking for Svengallop and I wanted to ask her if she saw him today.”
“Yeah, she’s just inside.” Rainbow let them both inside but paused as a third pony followed closely behind them. Even under the dim light of the moon, her fiery red and yellow mane shined like a blaze.
“Woah there, who’s this?”
The mare turned and looked at her weirdly. “Huh, this feels weirder than I thought. Sorry for just showing up out of nowhere, but trust me, it’s much stranger for me than it is for you.”
Rainbow looked to Starlight and Luna for an answer.
Luna simply sighed and shrugged. “What can say that won’t sound crazy? Rainbow, Lightning, meet Sunset Shimmer. She plays the guitar, going to be Starlight’s replacement, and I took her from another dimension. She’s here now, don’t make a big deal out of it.”
Lightning Dust simply blinked blankly at Luna. “I’m sorry what?”
“Like she said,” Starlight replied. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll explain everything to the band later. It’ll be fun.”