It was around noon when Rainbow walked into the throne room. Her friends were already waiting, a little impatiently, for the colorful pegasus. "What's up?" She asked, knowing full well why they had serious looks.
"Traces of dark magic were found around the castle last night," Shining Armor answered, causing Rainbow to feign shock. "The guards followed the trail to a crack in the wall, we are currently trying to make it wider so we can investigate." The Guard Captain looked a little worried, but who could blame him? A pony thought long dead was really alive and in his home. "Maybe you three should go and looking around town, see if you can find any clues."
So the mares and baby dragon set off. "We should split up," Twilight stated, "Rainbow you take the Southern District, Pinkie the Western, Spike you take the Eastern, and I will take the Northern District." Spike saw a flaw in the plan, but didn't know whether he should speak up or not sense Twilight was the one giving he plan. Luckily for him Pinkie spoke up.
"What if we see the mystery pony? How do we get your attention? *GASP* I can give you each a mini party cannon! That way if one of us sees the mare we can blast her! She would be really confused and think we were throwing a party, but really we would be helping to arrest her!" She looked like she was about to continue when Rainbow put of hoof in her mouth.
"I don't think that will work Pinkie Pie. Just yell something, I'm sure the nearby guards will come running." The others saw the logic in this (which was weird sense it came from Rainbow Dash) and set off to search their respective districts.
Dash was lazily flying over the south end of the empire as she was instructed to. She didn't bother looking for clues, knowing the only ones she left were we magical essence. "I gotta remember how to not leave that behind," She thought aloud to herself. Her ear twitched as she heard laughter from a few blocks away. The blue mare landed silently on a rooftop and watched some foals play-fight.
They were pretending to fight King Sombra. "Stop you evil king! Or I will be forced to defeat you!" A white earth pony filly with a red mane yelled. She was speaking to a dark blue unicorn colt, his brown and black mane hanging down in his eyes slightly.
"Never!"
"This let's fight! Cm'on guys!" The little filly was now instructing two more foals to help her. One was a yellow pegasus filly with a blue mane and the other was a blue pegasus colt with a yellow mane. Dash would never admit it, but she had a soft spot for foals. She chuckled quietly to herself as the foals wrestled. It didn't take long for the unicorn to be pinned down by his friends. He gave up and they went running down the road to find something else to do.
After a couple laps around the Empire Rainbow Dash flew back to the castle. Her friends were disappointed to hear she didn't find anything. She started to wonder when she could tell them. Or if she could tell them without being arrested, or worse, killed.