//------------------------------// // Fall // Story: Unnatural Selection // by Karkadinn //------------------------------// Fall “What is WRONG with you?! You can't just go eating somepony else's food!” the blue pegasus yelled, getting right up in Twilight's face and shaking her as though that were the only thing wrong out of the many, many things that had gone wrong today. A wave of immense guilt filled the unicorn, her guts already churning unpleasantly from both physical and emotional turmoil. She thought about how she'd violated Fluttershy's trust, perhaps irrecoverably, and forced the poor butter-yellow pegasus to venture forth in the dangerous wilderness for no gain whatsoever. She thought about how it would affect Spike, too... of all the ponies he'd met previously, Fluttershy was the only one he talked about with a sense of trust, and it was so obvious why. Could she even lose Spike over this? A particularly painful roil of her innards made even the angry pegasus raise eyebrows, and thankfully had the side effect of getting Twilight's mind off of all this irrelevant sentimentality. What mattered was that she'd endangered the experiment, very unprofessionally, and now the Princess might not trust her anymore. She might even get sent back to... magic kindergarten! It was entirely possible, nay, probable, nay, CERTAIN that if she failed the Princess in so drastic and blatantly irresponsible a manner, there would be no choice but to banish her back to the dreariness of the classroom, where the teachers thought she studied too much and the other students kept being bothersome by trying to get her to go to parties! It was a fate worse than death and worst of all was imagining that look on the Princess's face. That look of disappointment. She'd only seen it once. Never again. Never again. “You've got to help me!” she begged, grabbing the pegasus with stoned over hooves. “Please, I've got to make this up to Fluttershy somehow, it's jeopardizing the conditions of the study, and I've got to get Sweetie Belle and my emergency food supply back! They're lost out there and they could be hurt and it's all my fault and the Princess won't want me as her student anymore if I don't take care of this RIGHT NOW! And I CAN'T,” she went on as the pegasus took a breath to interject, “because I'm a CRIPPLE, maybe forever, but that's okay, I can be crippled forever as long as the experiment isn't a total loss, so... so....” Her words ran out but her mouth kept moving vaguely as her brain steamed and fizzed with empty desperation. She had to say more. What else could she say? Could she draft the pegasus for a search party? Did she have the authority to do that? Would even the mere attempt make her unworthy of the very responsibilities entrusted to her, did the Princess expect her to take care of this herself? It was her responsibility, right? But did that mean that it was wrong to ask for help, or.... “Whoa, whoa, relax kid, you're gonna pant your lungs out if you keep this up,” the pegasus finally said with more than a little amusement, anger softening into mixed skepticism and sympathy. “Look, why don't you tell me what's going on and I'll help. What does the Princess have to do with anything and how do you know Rarity's kid sister?” Twilight slowed her hyperventilation down gradually, eyes turning to her hooves. “Oh, yeah, don't worry about that,” the pegasus added, following her gaze. “As long as they don't stone ya all the way, it wears off in a couple hours or something. You're not gonna be a cripple. But still, you shouldn't've ate Pete or whatever its name was. That was not cool.” Well, that was one problem solved. And just about a million left. Whoo. Twilight sighed and slumped down awkwardly. “I know, I'm sorry. I'm Princess Celestia's student, Twilight Sparkle. I'm here on a research expedition with my emergency food supply.” A thought suddenly occurred to her. “Uh... you wouldn't happen to be Rainbow Dash, would you?” How many blue pegasi with rainbow manes could there be, anyway? “Oh, I see you've heard of me.” The pegasus literally puffed herself up, striking a pose with wings flared. One feather drifted loose and vaguely upwards, catching in the modest web of what Twilight strongly suspected was a brown recluse spider. “Have you been following my epic hunts? I keep meaning to get some egghead to publish 'em in a paper or something, but you know how it is when you're livin' large, no time for all that deskwork stuff....” “Um, yes, that is exactly how I've heard of you,” Twilight said with a smile she hoped wasn't too obviously desperate. “I heard you catch more deer than the next ten Ponyvillans combined!” She had heard no such thing. “Hah! Try the next fifty!” Rainbow Dash bragged, getting even puffier, if that was even possible. “So you lost your food, huh? What's Sweetie got to do with it and where's Fluttershy?” Rainbow Dash lowered her wings and frowned slightly, a shadow passing over her face. “You didn't let them go alone anywhere, did you? Not that that's not totally okay,” she added quickly. “It's just, you know, Fluttershy isn't really an 'other ponies' kinda pony.” “Well, Fluttershy went into the Everfree Forest to get some medicine.” Twilight tactfully omitted who the medicine was for, figuring that Miss Dash had reason enough to be mad with her already. No sense in burning bridges before you had to. “And I think my food supply and Sweetie – she's volunteered to be one of the variables for this experiment – followed her when I wasn't looking, they just vanished all of a sudden, and then I got... well.” She clunked her very, very heavy hooves against the floor. “You know.” Rainbow Dash nodded. “Right! No problem. Stand up, will ya?” “Um, okay, but I'm not sure if I can walk like WAAAAHHH!” Twilight squealed as Rainbow Dash more or less rammed herself directly under Twilight's body from the side. “What are you doing?!” “Quite squirming, you're making it harder to fly!” “Why are you trying to fly with me on top of you?!” “Look, do you wanna find Rarity's sister and Fluttershy and your food, or not? C'mon, you can be an extra pair of eyes, and nopony's faster than me. We'll have everypony back where they belong in ten seconds flat.” “That is statistically very impro-” “Ten seconds flat,” Rainbow Dash repeated firmly, and just like that, they were off. Twilight had flown before, in balloons, in chariots, she'd even been levitated by Princess Celestia's own magic on a number of occasions. None of that compared to this. Rainbow Dash clearly disobeyed every rule and guideline about safe flying that Twilight had read from classic pegasi aerodynamic literature, blasting past – and in some cases, through – branches and clouds and pine cones and grass and bushes at speeds that were far worse than breakneck, they were breakeverything. The air was razors, and she learned quickly not to breathe through her mouth (or spend too much air on screaming in terror). She could barely squint through her tear-filled eyes to see anything, and what little she did see was a mad blur of colors that made no sense. Things brushed past them or broke from their passage in a quickly-undecipherable patter of cracks and slaps and whacks, almost too fast for her to tell when or where she'd been hit. And even though she'd maneuvered around to clutch still-petrified hooves around the neck of her 'vehicle,' there was no mistaking that she was on a wild, wild ride that she had absolutely no control over. Through the chaos of air, though, she did manage to catch bits and pieces of Rainbow Dash muttering to herself urgently. “Nope... not there... not there... maybe here... no, maybe over there... come on, come on, where are ya... quit hidin' on me!” “Wouldn't-” Twilight tried to say, and choked on wind after the first letter. She tried again, speaking mostly through her teeth. “Wouldn't it help if you went a little slower?” “Slower? Why would we wanna... go slower?” Rainbow Dash asked, absentmindedly swallowing an unlucky flying insect mid-sentence. At least, it had probably been an insect. Twilight had just seen a tiny black smear in the sky for a split second. “Because I can't help you scout if you're going too fast for me to see anything!” Twilight got out with, to her satisfaction, a reasonable degree of irateness. “Oh. Right.” They stopped so suddenly that Twilight actually flipped upside down over the pegasus's neck hollering in terror. Fortunately the pegasus had quick enough reactions to bolt forward enough to get her seated again before gravity got involved any more than it already was. By a quick glance, they were some thirty feet above the ground, right in the middle of all the branches of the forest. No wonder she hadn't been able to see anything! “You could use a little self-control, ya know,” Twilight said maybe a little more harshly than she meant to, her mood aggravated by her seemingly boiling intestines and the rapidly-intensifying sting of objects past having whipped against her skin at speeds no unicorn was ever meant to traverse. “Hey, I have tons of self-control!” Rainbow Dash said back angrily, huffing, her entire body tensing under Twilight in offense. “Uh, yeah, I mean, I am on the weather patrol too, I know more than just getting food,” she added more contritely. “But yeah, not real used to having passengers, sorry. So what's this experiment you're doing with Sweetie and Fluttershy? You're not poking them with electrical things or anything are you?” “I wish,” Twilight replied with a pout as they glided along at a much more reasonable pace, zigzagging through likely-looking paths and openings in the wild plant life. “But actually we're leaning heavily on psychometrics at the moment. We – I mean I am testing two separate theories regarding the potentiality for the spontaneous manifestation of magical artifacts relating to harmonious interplays of emotion, and the possibility of discordant parasites exerting a psychosomatic effect on the subject's brain through the digestive system. I know, it sounds farfetched, but-” “I have no idea what the hay you just said.” “Oh. Well, uh...” How would Spike say it? “I'm trying to find out if ponies can create magical objects of being nice to each other or are infested with bugs that make them hungrier than usual.” “Huh. Sounds like a buncha weird egghead stuff to me,” Dash said disinterestedly, pausing to snap at a nearby songbird and getting nothing more than a few tail feathers for her trouble. “Are you sure they're out here? I don't see anypony.” “I didn't hear them in the AAAH I'M SLIPPING!” Twilight interrupted herself, clinching a tighter hold on the pegasus's neck after a particularly steep turn around a large tree. “Relax, we're fine,” the pegasus snapped back in irritation, flapping down to a barely more controlled swoop. “Fine?! I almost fell!” Twilight half-shouted, feeling especially vulnerable between guilt over killing Petra, tension over what Dash would do when she bumped into Spike, the stone hooves, possibly being sent back to magic kindergarten... everything. “I won't let you fall,” Rainbow Dash said almost coldly. It didn't seem like a characteristic tone of voice for her. “I didn't say you would, just-” “I said I won't let you fall, alright?!” Dash yelled so loud that assorted concealed wild animals made an assortment of aggravated wild sounds, fleeing in all directions in a radius of branch ruffling. “Okay,” Twilight conceded, not wanting to fight. “Maybe we should check back at the house, though,” she added after a very awkward pause that had had nothing in it but Dash's pants and wing flaps and the beating of their separate pulses eerily close to each other. “Just real quick, so we can make sure they didn't climb on the roof or something crazy.” “Yeah, that Sweetie's a little ninja pony sometimes, especially when she's around her friends. Is your food thing a total pain in the flank too?” “He has his moments. Um... Rainbow Dash, wasn't the house that way?” “No way, it's totally this way! Right past this tree here and over this rock and... huh, okay, maybe it was over here and...” Twilight let the pegasus zip around and corkscrew like a madmare for a bit while she kept herself busy trying to think of a magical spell to suppress despairing groans. This was the worst day she'd had this year that hadn't had magical chaos beings in it, by far. “Man, it's this forest!” Rainbow Dash finally burst out, rubbing her hooves into her head angrily. “It's all twisty turvy and junk! I swear the trees are makin' faces, laughin' at us! But I'm only turned around because you got me thinking about our path the wrong way. Maybe if I got straight up and-” “BEES!” Twilight screamed, thrusting a stony hoof up at a dark hanging hive. “BEES?!” “BEES!” Rainbow Dash reacted fast enough to avoid colliding with the hive. Unfortunately, Everfree Forest bees were apparently very, very aggressive, and that resulted in another five minutes spent purely running away from insectile buzzing doom. Safety came at the cost of the complete abandonment of whatever was left of their sense of direction. It was nothing but oddly unfamiliar species of trees everywhere, and creepy critter sounds like mutant frog-owls croak-hooting, and dark shadows with glowing eyes in three separate colors. They panted together and collected what was left of their wits. Rainbow Dash couldn't exactly cling back on Twilight in their current positions, but she was sure looking like she would if she could. Don't say it, Twilight. Don't say it. You've got enough things between you as it is. And remember what the Princess told you about your sarcasm issues. “So... when you said ten seconds flat, you actually meant you were going to get us totally lost in a dangerous untamed wilderness in ten seconds flat, I guess.” “We're not lost! I know right where we are!” “Which is?” “In the Everfree Forest.” Twilight Sparkle glared at the back of Rainbow Dash's head as the pegasus stared resolutely ahead, willing the air between them to burst into smoldering flames of frustration molecule by molecule. Glared and glared and glared until those blue ears and rainbow-maned head finally drooped. “Okay, I'm sorry, alright? But seriously, I get, uh, turned around here all the time, it's no big deal unless we run into like a manticore mom protecting her kids or something. Or the nests of eyeball spiders. Or the really big timber wolf packs. Or those vines that suck out your bones and build webs out of-” “As fascinating as the local wildlife is, can we please focus on a productive search pattern?” Twilight broke in a trifle desperately, hoping to stop her companion before she got to the part that inevitably involved snakes in some fashion. “Oh yeah, sure. Lessee, if we turn left here and go all zig-zaggy, we ought to cover a good bit of ground without missing anything, right?” Twilight nodded wearily and they went onwards. Was it her imagination, or was it getting darker? It couldn't be, it was far too soon for evening to be approaching. Then again, the Everfree Forest did seem to behave by its own rules, for all she knew, that included chronology too! “So how long've you known Fluttershy?” Twilight asked her ride after a while, partially to gather potential research data, and partially to keep the creepy animal noises from freaking her out too much. “Ever since flight camp. Hey, when Flutters left, she took her medicine with her, right?” “Her medicine?” “You know, the tea stuff.” Oh, right. Tea. Twilight's brow furrowed as she tried to remember... had Fluttershy taken any tea with her, or not?. “I can't remember,” she admitted. “She was only planning to be gone for a little while, is it really important?” “No, no, it's fine,” Rainbow Dash said lightly, but it was a strained lightness, like a spiderweb flexing under the weight of a sparrow. “It's totally fine.” There was a momentary quiet, during which Twilight tried to read the facial expression of the back of a pony's head. Didn't work so well. “Sweetie, you out there?” Rainbow Dash called, just a little concern leaking past her bravado. “Sweetie Belle?” Twilight joined in, considering the risk in using Spike's name and wondering if it were better to forewarn the pegasus or just let her find out as a surprise. Nothing but bad choices. Calling out for the 'missing' ponies (ironically, most likely less missing than the two of them, by this point) didn't get any results other than an unnerving increased interest from the local critters, so they quieted back down and stuck to searching by sight. Twilight set up a very basic echolocation spell that she was just barely able to manage from her awkward position, bouncing the humming pulses of purple firefly light between tree trunks and vines, finding only things that she really rather would not find in the process. Spiders should not get that big. “Yeah, we've been hanging around each other for years, she's pretty cool,” Rainbow Dash broke the silence this time, warily, her voice absentminded as she focused the bulk of her attention on keeping them moving through a decidedly unsafe hunting ground safely. “I dunno what kinda stuff you're expecting to get out of her for your experiment, though, she's not magical or anything... unless you count how she talks to critters all the time, I guess.” “She seems to like to talk to them more than eat them,” Twilight offered. “Like pets. And one of the artifacts I'm looking for is supposedly the embodiment of kindness, so....” “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. It's dumb though. I mean, she doesn't eat enough. You saw her. Nopony can live like that. I'd get it if she just had a few special pets or something, but it's like everything's a pet to her. I bring her stuff all the time, and she still just....” Rainbow Dash's voice trailed off and she shook her head in wordless frustration. “Even when she eats it, she just looks so sad.” “I wonder if she's always been this way, or if something changed her,” Twilight mused aloud. “Sweetie, the other research subject, seems to be perpetually... enthusiastic, but I don't know if that alone is enough to qualify her for generosity. But we need more data points and that's just what Fluttershy is. If only I could have talked to her a little longer!” “She's always been kinda weird. But...” Twilight felt the muscles of the pegasus beneath her stiffen subconsciously. “...she didn't really go crazy over the whole critters thing till she, um, had an accident back at flight camp. She... had a little fall off a cloud.” “Wow, that must've been terrifying for her! It couldn't have been that high, though. I mean, she doesn't have any scars and she's not exhibiting any visible traits of mishealed bones or any other long term injuries....” Rainbow Dash's body remained stiff as a board, wings the only thing limber about her as they flapped the two of them between vaguely ominous tree after vaguely ominous tree. “Yeah, I guess. But nopony could find her for days and days. I dunno the details but they think she hit her heard. I, I was gonna help look for her, but they wouldn't let me. And I had stomach cramps real bad anyway.” Stomach cramps. Something about that struck a dull note in the back of Twilight's mind, but she couldn't quite figure out why. She managed to snatch a leaf with a small tree lizard on it as they passed it by, and she chewed and swallowed the squirmy little thing thoughtfully. “So ever since then she's been interested in animals?” “Yeah. Like I said, not really a other ponies pony.” Rainbow Dash hesitated, the whoosh of her wings the only sound for a second. “The pony who first found her... I dunno the deal, exactly, but apparently she and Fluttershy got into a fight. I saw the pony after, a little bit, and she was covered with bites.” “I have a little trouble picturing Fluttershy as a bitey little brat as a filly,” Twilight admitted with a nervous giggle. “Not like that. It was... look, never mind,” Rainbow Dash interrupted herself, tone switching from dark to light in an instant. “Anyway, she takes that drink now to keep her nerves calm and stuff. It's no big deal but she needs it at least a couple times a day or she gets all... twitchy.” “So, long term neurological problems could be a factor. That's interesting. Maybe I can talk to her physician. Do you know what the medicine's called?” “Yeah, it's called none of your beeswax. What does any of this have to do with your experimenty stuff anyway? Like I said, Fluttershy's not magic or anything, s'not like she's a unicorn. And just because she acts a little, a little different doesn't mean she's got a bug in her or something gross like that!” “I didn't mean it like that! I'm just trying to gather background information, that's all. Why are you getting so upset?” “Oh, I see how it is. You think Rainbow Dash is too busy being cool and catching dragons and cockatrices and phoenixes to have any time to get her friends' backs, right? You think I'd just abandon a buddy, even if she's a total wimp, so you can come down from Canterlot and poke her with your weird unicorn needles and electrogizmos?” “Sweetie Belle broke most of my electrogizmos anyway! Look, I don't know what exactly is going on with Fluttershy and why you're so edgy about it, but this research expedition is bigger than any one pony. I'm not trying to learn more about Fluttershy because I think she's sick or anything, I just want to get an idea of how she thinks, what drives her to act the way she does. Does she really only eat vegetables all the time?” “I bring her stuff, you know, jerky, bacon bits for her – blech – salads, burgers, hotdogs, protein shakes... y'know, real food. And that Rarity chick takes her out to restaurants sometimes and makes her order something fatty. But you have to watch her like a hawk or she'll just pick at it and move it around her plate and not eat a single bite.” The pegasus lifted her head up and tilted a hoof up at her brow. “I don't see any more bees or killer vines or anything, I'm gonna try and look up over the trees again, okay?” Twilight followed Rainbow Dash's eyes, noting a perilous tangle of thorns, five-foot-wide venus flytraps and countless crisscrossing branches thicker than their hooves, the sky itself thoroughly blockaded. “Those branches look pretty thick. I think it'd be-” Safer. So much safer. “-faster if you put me down first.” “Awright, but nothing better get you in the half of a half of a second it'll take me to scout around!” No point in bickering even on something as important as chronological math, such things were clearly beyond the able-bodied but less than studious pegasus. “Nothing's going to get me. I hope,” Twilight added to herself in a dark mutter, setting up a telekinetic force field bubble around her as she was set down not-very-gently on a patch of mossy rock. The very instant Rainbow Dash started to drift upwards, a flood of rain struck down through the branches with every bit of the effortlessness that the rays of Princess Celestia's own sun had somehow failed to muster. It was a violent downpour like liquid spearheads, immediately plastering Twilight almost totally to the ground. Rainbow Dash, visible as a blob of blue in the midst of gray, tried to continue ascending for just a moment, and then gave up, landing so fast and awkwardly that she nearly cracked her head – on Twilight. “Oh, for the love of Celestia's-” Twilight's glare pierced the rain as the rain had pierced the trees, brief but filled with unspoken promises. “Uh, Celestia's very nice mane,” Rainbow Dash continued growlingly, causing Twilight to nod approval. “Could this day possibly get any worse?!” “Don't jinx it! Come on, let's find an outcropping to huddle under or something!” As nasty as the rain was, Twilight had hopes that it was localized and hopefully short-lived. They might've been practically drowning in air right now, but the day in Ponyville and even at Fluttershy's cottage on the outskirts of the forest had held no such ominous weather. Chances were good that it was just the Everfree being the Everfree, and poor Spike and Sweetie and Fluttershy wouldn't get drenched like them. Sweetie and Fluttershy. It didn't matter if Spike got wet. It wouldn't hurt the meat. It was fine. It was fine. And if she couldn't help but picture his eyes staring at her, huge and sad as his little body shivered from cold, that was just part pf the problem of spending too much time with him. She should never have taken him on this trip. Or gone on this trip, for that matter. They did better than an outcropping, although it was at the not insignificant cost of Twilight's previously unscraped kneecaps and Rainbow Dash's previously unbruised fetlocks. Plodding through the rain that quickly fell so hard and so consistently that they no longer felt much beyond their own chattering teeth, they found a nearby cave that was shallow, dry, stable, and most importantly empty of any traces of life. The two of them quickly got very close together in the very back of the cave where the rain could only reach by way of sound, a steady roar like the ocean in their ears broken only by the regular rise and fall of the howling, whistling wind. “Wasn't even a storm scheduled for today,” Rainbow Dash said after enough silence to make things awkward again (if they had ever stopped being awkward in the first place). “Pff.” “Everfree weather is wild, like the forest is, remember?” Twilight looked at her equally drenched companion carefully. A pegasus trying to look cool while also being evasive and very, very wet did not, in fact, look very cool at all. She just looked absurd. “You do hunt here all the time, right?” “Oh, yeah, yeah! It just slipped my mind is all.” Twilight nodded, figuring it better than saying any of the many things that were on her mind, and sighed, slumping against the back of the cave, dirtying her coat with the granules of muck mixing up with the rainwater, and not caring. She pulled her front hooves up and looking at them, blinking some water out of her eyes even as a seemingly endless supply of it continued to drip from her mane. The petrification seemed like it was wearing off. Already, she was getting some feeling back in her lower ligaments, and could flex her legs more than previously. Petra's dying curse had not been a lasting one. Fluttershy was going to be so upset... She sighed heavily, and couldn't even hear it through the rain. “This is really lame. And boring. Which are pretty much the same thing, right?” Dash called, half-yelling to make herself heard even though they were practically cuddled up against each other. Dash's body did indeed have the streamlined muscle tone of a regular hunter, so it wasn't all fibs. “Yeah, we're not exactly having a barrel full of laughs here.” “Wanna tell ghost stories?” “We can barely hear each other and you want to tell stories?!” “How's this?!” Rainbow Dash brayed right in Twilight's ear, causing the unicorn to wince, ear flicking back reflexively. “Uh, sorry, this better?” she tried again, lowering her volume. “Yeah, I guess,” Twilight responded, lifting her mouth up briefly to Dash's ear. “Kinda awkward though.” “Filly, every single thing about this situation is awkward, but ya don't see me cryin'.” To punctuate the point, Dash shook off her mane. Twilight chose to believe that the fact that that got her even more wet was completely unintentional, for the smallest of self-delusions were the rock-solid foundations of sanity. Realization struck Twilight like a thunderbolt at the exact moment an actualthunderbolt crashed down unnervingly close to them, causing her to jump so high she almost smacked her head. She had completely forgotten that Spike had said the pegasus had been in his Discord-inspired dream too. The little dragon had just assumed that her placement had been erroneous because of how things had turned out with Rarity, but a sample of one was worth exactly nothing from a scientific perspective. Here she was in a perfect position to psychoanalyze a potential candidate for an Element. And best of all, Rainbow Dash had no escape route. Not that Twilight could really understand why ponies would want to escape from science anyway. She couldn't come off too strong, though. Dash seemed like the kind of pony who might take a question personally or clam up if the wrong thing was said. Where would be best to start? Probably Fluttershy, as another prospective Element-Bearer. Eking out any potential contact with other candidates was also important. “So, you've known Fluttershy for a long time, what would you say her defining attribute is?” “Wussiness,” Rainbow Dash replied without hesitation. No, don't grind your teeth in frustration, Twilight Sparkle. That was your fault for asking such a vague question. Proper investigation demanded vocal precision, just like her few unbusted instruments required regular calibration. “Okay, what about positive attributes, though?” “Oh. Niceness, I guess,” Rainbow Dash said after a pause. “I'm always having to get her to stick up for herself 'cause she doesn't wanna be rude or loud or anything like that. She'd let a pony walk all over her without me around to show her how it's done, lemme tell ya.” A pity bragging wasn't an Element of Harmony. Could this pony go even five seconds without boasting? It was starting to get annoying. Twilight pushed aside the irritation as an offense to objectivity and moved on. “Yeah, that sounds about right. What do you think she'd say about you if I asked her that question?” “Oh man, what wouldn't she say about me! I'm the best hunter, best flier, best fighter, best wrestler and best everything else you ever thought of in Ponyville or anywhere else!” “Well of course you are,” Twilight replied with all her steadily rising venom hidden behind a careful smile and a tone of voice she'd learned from the Princess for dealing with salesponies who wouldn't take no for an answer, “but does Fluttershy really care about all that stuff? You're probably friends because of deeper, more personal qualities shared between you two, am I right?” Deep pink eyes locked onto hers momentarily before shifting away, all of Rainbow Dash's bluster immediately killed in favor of a serious rigidity that left her looking (and feeling, they were so close together) more like a gargoyle watching over a tower than a pony. “Yeah, sure, whatever. We're friends 'cause we just are, okay?” Rainbow Dash said, her voice wooden and clumsy. “Can we talk about something else?” Twilight knew what the polite thing to do was, and she knew what her investigations required her to do, and those two things were not the same. She considered how much trust the Princess would lose in her if she came back from all of this empty-hooved. She considered how much trust she most likely had already lost from Rarity by putting her sister in danger, or Fluttershy by killing that stupid faux chicken dinner. She had gone out of her way to be nice to Rainbow Dash even when Rainbow Dash hadn't returned the favor, but this... was too important. She had to discover something important out of this expedition, maybe not for the reasons Spike thought, but she was invested now, darn it! “Rainbow Dash, I know this is a really strange situation to have a heart-felt talk about your life in, but I could really use any background information between you and Fluttershy that you'd care to give. I mean, did you know, for example, that one of the relics I'm looking for is the embodiment of loyalty to one's friends? You and Fluttershy are two totally different ponies and yet you've been hanging around each other for years. You've kept her from retreating into a shell, fleeing from pony society to spend her time with those animals, even though she's your polar opposite temperamentally. That's pretty impressive loyalty if you ask-” Dash jerked up abruptly and said something that was drowned out by another boom of thunder. “What was that?!” “I said, shut the hell up!” Rainbow Dash yelled clearly, leaving Twilight staring with her jaw hanging vaguely open. The pegasus walked closer to the jagged mouth of the cave, heedless of the rain drenching her face. It took Twilight a very long while to figure out that not all the water dripping down the pegasus's face was from the rain. “Loyalty, yeah right! I'm a pony so loyal I knocked my friend down off a cloud and then stuffed my face instead of going to help her! She could've been smashed a pancake and I just, I just....” Rainbow Dash shook her head angrily and stomped a hoof, putting such force into it that she powderized the moss directly beneath into a small green cloud. “Toldja we shoulda talked about something else. Go find your 'harmonious emotion' junk with some ponies who aren't jerks like me. I'm goin' out to find a squirrel or something, be back in a sec.” “Rainbow Dash!” It was folly to hunt in these conditions, let alone in a place like this. And Twilight, for her part, would feel substantially less safe without anypony else around. Twilight rushed towards the pegasus, but Rainbow Dash was running off, as much fleeing from her as anything else, right into that nigh-solid mess of cascading water. Only a few feet and Twilight already couldn't see her anymore. “Rainbow Dash!” “RAINBOW DASH!” Twilight let out a scream of rage she couldn't hear through the weather and brought both still-petrified forehooves down on the ground. This was not an intelligent move on her part, causing her to slip and stumble down on her side into over an inch of solid water that was barely distinguishable from the air at this point. Spluttering, spitting mud out of the side of her mouth, she dug in with her back hooves and tried to regain her balance, but only found loose dirt that gave way with all the slipperiness of stereotypical quicksand. Only by the third try could she actually get to her feet. And at that point she realized that, in her wild flailings, she'd completely lost her sense of direction. No, she wasn't lost. It was okay. Don't be scared. She was a well-equipped adult unicorn with years of learning at the hooves of the best teacher money couldn't possibly buy at her disposal. She'd just calm down, take a deep breath – spit out the water she had inadvertently almost drowned herself in by taking a deep breath – and then walk in a slow circle, gradually increasing it to a spiral. She couldn't possibly miss the cave. Even a foal like Sweetie Belle couldn't possibly miss the cave after just a few paces. “Rainbow Daaash?!” she called out again hopelessly to distract herself from the lump in her throat. Pace after careful pace she took, trying to memorize the ground by the feel of it under her hooves even though it was all just mud and rock and water. It was just a little rain, rain never hurt anypony. It wasn't like she was Fluttershy after a fall off a cloud as a filly, helpless and hopeless in a strange world she didn't understand. She was Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia's personal student, and she wasn't going to let a foul day make her panic and run around screaming like she'd just seen a murderer. Through the curtains of rain, she bumped into something solid. Something yielding. Twilight stopped and stared, and caught an outline of long mane and the front of a pony, a ghostly thing. Wow, that rain had really done a number on Dash's mane, hadn't it?! She was going to yell at that pegasus so much.... Lightning flashed, and instead of Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle saw Fluttershy drenched in rain, the one eye visible through the mane widened with a shrunken iris. In her mouth she clenched and gnawed on a hooved leg, and through the rain there was just enough visibility to see small tufts of white fur on the nearest patch of it. The rain washed away a lot, but didn't quite seem to be able to reach the grooves between Fluttershy's teeth, still red from worrying at the flesh. Twilight screamed.