“Rainbow Dash! You gonna stay in there all morning?” Applejack called through the door.
“Not much longer! I'm on blue!”
Applejack rolled her eyes, thanking Celestia that most mornings she was out of the house by the time Dash got up. It meant that she could usually ignore the surprising ritual Dash had been forced to reveal when she started spending the night at Sweet Apple Acres.
“You still got your tail, too?”
“Yeah, but I can do that in the bedroom.”
One of the things AJ loved about Dash was that neither of them really cared about looking messy. Or she thought she loved that about Dash. It turned out that what she loved was that Dash looked like she didn't care about looking messy, a process that took about as long as AJ's farm chores every morning.
“Why don't ya' just tie it back? I bet even Rarity don't take this long.”
“Rarity doesn't have six colors to keep straight! Besides, Rarity is just trying to look pretty. That's a lot easier than looking awesome. I'm on purple now. It'll just be a sec.”
By “a sec” Applejack knew that she meant at least five minutes to carefully separate any stray blue hairs invading her purple streak, apply mousse, brush out the mousse so it wasn't stiff, use some cream from a jar to scrunch it so it looked just messy enough, then brush the blue and purple streak together so it looked like it flowed. All just to look like she rolled out of bed.
Applejack preferred the rolling out of bed approach for that, herself.
“Ya' know you're just gonna mess it up again when ya' start flyin'.”
“That's the point, AJ. I have to make it look like I've been flying before I start flying. What if somepony saw me taking off, and my mane was all flat and boring?”
“They'd think you just woke up?”
“They would think I wasn't as awesome.”
“They'd be wrong.”
“I'm not about to give anypony the chance to be wrong about my awesomeness. I'll never be a Wonderbolt that way.”
“You do know that your 'awesomeness' don't have a thing to do with how good you are at flyin', right?”
“Sure it does. I fly better when I'm awesome.”
“That don't make a lick of sense.”
“Don't you have chores to do or something?”
“Yeah, I do. Plenty of 'em. But I gotta use the toilet and somepony's been in there for the past ten minutes.”
“Oh, sorry!” Dash said, opening the door with her mane in its carefully crafted state of disarray. “All yours!”
Applejack smiled at her. “Looks good.”
Dash beamed and tossed her head. “I know.”