If Rainbow had ever needed extra proof of Twilight's total nerd status, all she needed to do was consult the library's totally inadequate periodicals section.
Newspapers: as many as anypony could reasonably be expected to stand, plus forty percent. Colt and filly activity magazines, which were mostly suitable for making younglings laugh at things no colt or filly outside the cartoonish pages had ever thought to do: Hoofglints was known in Ponyville as the one thing which had never given the Crusaders a single idea for a fresh mark-finding attempt, and all efforts to make the publication into their lone reading material had failed. There were hoofball magazines which Rarity made an art form out of pretending she wasn't reading, celebripony gossip rags because most of the town expected them, and the paper-incarnated coma inducer that was the Thaumaturgy Review. But Twilight never stocked anything good. Scientific journals and speculative fiction collections, Day & Night Court transcripts went next to international politics coverage -- anypony who wanted their own brain to implode from the sheer pressing weight of boredom would always be at home in the tree, for the whole five seconds they might survive. But nowhere on any shelf would they find the coolest magazine in the world, the one which justified the existence of the whole concept, and Rainbow often sighed when she glanced at that portion of shelving, wondering if the librarian would ever catch on.
Although... well, honestly, when Rainbow thought about it, she and Pinkie were probably better off.
It wasn't as if Pranksters Alibied was for just anypony.
They were camped out in the oddly-warm attic at Sugarcube Corner: spring was beginning to make its pegasus-assisted phase into summer, and the heat of the bakery drifted up to mix with the still air. Pages were being flipped, one after the other, and none passed without commentary. And under normal circumstances, some would draw derision, a few brought excitement, and every last one would be inspected carefully to see if it could become part of a plan. Summer would be the heart of prank season. They had to stay current.
But with this issue...
Pinkie sighed. "How about -- this one?"
"There's no way to detach the bell clapper without getting caught," Rainbow groaned. And also no way to talk the police captain into believing she'd just been putting in a little volunteer time on polish. "Just flip it." Pinkie's snout dipped in, nosed the page into moving, and Rainbow carefully peered down. "Hey! I just bet if we go in together on that one, way into Luna's shift, we could --"
Pinkie shook her head. "The cannon has guards now. All the time."
"Oh. Right." Rainbow rolled her eyes. "Thanks a lot, Scootaloo. Okay, what's next?"
Pinkie nosed the page. "Um..." And winced. "...that's it."
"What do you mean, that's it? We can't be through the whole thing already!" Seventy pages, and not a single viable prank? They had all been things they'd done before, or stuff which was effectively impossible to execute, plus a few things which had been -- preempted. Possibilities which had seen an odd number of local security measures spring up a mere two days earlier, well before Rainbow had remembered to check her mailbox.
(She had briefly entertained the concept that the Mayor and police chief were getting their own copies of the magazine, but quickly kicked it away. They weren't anywhere near cool enough.)
"Well... there's still the International section," Pinkie admitted. "But you know what that's like."
Rainbow frowned. "No, I don't."
The blue eyes became questioning. "You don't?"
"I always skip it. What's the point? It's not as if we can plan on being in any other nation during prank season. We never know when we're gonna get a mission, forget about where it'll send us, and just about everything's been in Equestria anyway, so --"
"-- no, that's not it," Pinkie smiled, although the specimen was a slightly weary one. "They're pranks which some of the other species are playing. It's kind of fun, honestly, but -- just for looking at. Because it's really really hard to make some of them work. Even if you order the supplies --"
With instant excitement, "-- you mean like griffon pranks?"
Carefully, "Yeah, and all the others..."
"I knew Gilda was holding out on me! How many moons has this section been in there? Years? And I never got a look at it before now? It's a conspiracy!"
"It's always been at the back. You've just been skipping ---"
"-- not anymore!"
Rainbow's snout darted in, flipped --
-- and there it was.
It was beautiful. It was glorious. It was refinement, advancement of technique, innovation. The page almost looked liquid, seemed to radiate cold, and as for the colors...
Rainbow took a deep breath, and the air itself seemed richer.
"...what is that?" she reverently whispered.
Pinkie took a closer look, frowning with concentration. It had to be concentration. There was no other way anypony could ever look at that page and look unhappy.
"It says they're called water balloons."
Rainbow slowly breathed in the name of her personal savior. "Water balloons..." Took a closer look herself, started to read the details --
"Yeah," Pinkie said, and started to lean in with the open intent of nosing over to the next page.
Rainbow stared at her.
"Pinkie?"
Who stopped. "Yes?"
"What are you doing?"
"...checking for a prank we could use?"
Outrage. "You just passed one! That was perfect! What's wrong with getting ponies wet out of nowhere? That's a classic, and when you think about the advancement...!"
Pinkie tilted her head slightly to the right. "Rainbow... you're a pegasus. All you need to get ponies wet out of nowhere is a cloud."
"Yeah, but... ponies look for clouds now. Especially during the summer. Some of them just go around looking up the whole time. And sure, it's kind of funny to watch them trot into stuff, but... maybe I've done the cloud routine a little too much, you know? Everypony expects a cloud. But nopony is gonna be expecting a water balloon --"
"-- it won't work," Pinkie firmly said, and tried to turn the page again.
She couldn't. Rainbow's left forehoof was on it.
"And how do you know they won't work?" Rainbow flipped the page back. "Just look at those minotaurs! Throwing the balloons at each other, their fur is all soaked, and that's dye in the balloons, Pinkie! They're painting each other different colors! Oh, if I can just get Rarity with something that's gonna clash..."
"I know."
"You know water balloons won't work."
Pinkie nodded.
Challenging now. "How?"
The baker gave Rainbow a long look, then silently glanced down her own left flank. The curly tail twisted in, encircled the mark.
The words were an explosion. "Aw, come on! That's not literal, Pinkie! It just stands for general party stuff! Your talent isn't about balloons any more than Fluttershy's stuck with nothing at the cottage but butterflies!"
"But I work with balloons," Pinkie explained, and her words felt oddly -- cautious. "Every week, every moon, Rainbow. I know what they're like. I know that when you saw that page, you saw a new kind of prank. But I saw balloons."
"But it says --" Rainbow glanced down, refreshed her memory of the holy text "-- you can fill forty in under a minute! Do you know how long it would take me to round up forty clouds? It's way over ten seconds! And unless I can get one ready for a total downpour, it wouldn't have the same impact, plus there's the fur dye --"
"-- and I know how balloons work! Plus I saw minotaurs, Rainbow. It's the International section! You really really have to look at what they're doing, and think --"
Her words were cut off by the impact of a huff-driven sleek body hitting the floor, barrel first.
"So you're not going to do it."
Pinkie shook her head.
"Fine," Rainbow grumped. "Turn the stupid page. And -- I'm taking the copy home with me. So I can... look at it some more. Maybe I'll spot something we missed. Or get a better idea later."
And now those blue eyes had narrowed.
"Fine."
"Great," Rainbow agreed.
"Okay."
"Perfect," Rainbow confirmed.
"The ordering address was in the lower right corner."
"Did they want a prepaid voucher, or were they okay with a -- I totally don't know what you're talking about," Rainbow lied.
She spent the rest of the session making plans, and was sure Pinkie hadn't noticed.
Water balloons...
Oh, the joke was going to be on somepony. And they would never see it coming.
Rainbow loved Spike like the little brother she'd never had and probably wouldn't have wanted to put up with, but the little dragon had a fundamental flaw: his trick only worked in one direction. All it took to instantly get her order off to Mazein was a simple hoof-tap on the scale-covered shoulder and quiet request -- but for the resulting package to come that far... well, that took her into summer, with far too much of it spent checking to see if the stupid box had shown up already, accompanied by frustrated mutters about whether she should just go out and try to meet it halfway.
But eventually, it came, and seemed oddly -- small, especially for the size of the order she'd placed. Rainbow had purchased more than a thousand balloons, for a full summer (or somewhat less so now) of pranking required an adequate level of supply. She grumbled to herself as she worked the box open, wondering if she'd been shorted out on her order, or if the shipment had been divided into multiple boxes and the rest of her stockpike was still half a moon behind...
...and then the flaps came up.
"Huh," Rainbow said, and decided it covered the situation.
It helped to think of it as staring at the base of a tail, a hollow base with odd curving ridged lines along the interior. After that, you had equally-hollow strands of sparse tail hair branching from that base, probably around forty of them. And at the end of each... the balloons. Which were tiny. She wasn't sure she'd ever seen ones that small before...
However, the colors totally met with her approval.
Balloons inflate. These just inflate with water. She grinned to herself. And... yeah, there it is: that's the dye powder shifting around in there. She'd ordered half dye, half plain: there was something to be said for a good basic splash. What are those little bands at the balloon neck for? Ah, doesn't matter: I can work that out. So they're small enough that I could have the whole thing in here... let's see... Her head dipped into the box again and again: teeth carefully clenched the base of each artificial tail, piled it on a nearby outdoor bench. Yeah! They're all in here! And -- paper. What's that supposed to be, a copy of my order? No, wait -- instructions? She instinctively snorted at the sheer level of insult. How stupid do minotaurs think ponies are? Who needs instructions on how to inflate a balloon? You put water in it, and the balloon inflates! Forty at a time! And with that, the sheet was head-whipped into the wind, never to be seen again.
It was a hot day. Just the right amount of hot. And she had over a thousand water balloons, a prank Ponyville had never seen before, just waiting to be kicked all over the settled zone...
Rainbow grinned.
Okay. Let's get the first group filled.
She went inside her house, took six minutes to clear the dishes out of her sink (without actually cleaning them, because that clearly would have been a waste of time), and pressed the tail base against her faucet. Which she had to do with her nose, because she couldn't get her head oriented the right way and needed her forehooves for nudging the water taps.
Liquid came out, hit the tail base, and knocked it into the bottom of the sink.
She tried it again, with near-identical results. (The water hadn't gone into her snout on the first try.)
A flurry of experimentation followed. She attempted to hover over the sink, just about as close to upside-down as she could manage, tail base pressed between her hooves while her mouth worked the tap. She loaded up the sink again, just enough to press the base against her faucet, and then got the water going. She worked with every combination of legs, head, and teeth she had available, eventually compiling a comprehensive and mostly unintentional scientific study.
* Base pressed against faucet, high water pressure: base knocked out of whatever grip was being used. Water might go spraying everywhere. Or rather, it might if it didn't have such an unnatural attraction for her snout, although it occasionally took a break in the name of variety and went into her eyes instead. It didn't help that the base was noticeably larger than the faucet: sometimes, when she managed to keep it against the water for a whole two heartbeats, spray would go fountaining up around the edges. (There should have been no way for that to find her snout. And it didn't. Going into her ears was just so much easier.) And she couldn't keep faucet and base united long enough for the balloons to start inflating.
* Base pressed against faucet, low to moderate water pressure: the liquid flowed down the hollow strands into the balloons, filling them to teardrop shape. Also size and total capacity. And since there wasn't enough pressure present to actually inflate anything, all further water just dribbled over the top, where it generally had an easy path to going down her throat, or into her snout, or just got onto the dishes she hadn't quite cleared out the second time, giving them more of a cleaning than they'd had in the weeks since she'd found herself at the last usable one again.
* Base pressed against faucet, water at the maximum pressure available because surely blasting a few gallons into the whole thing in something under a second had to work...
* Every part of her kitchen dripping with water, trying to catch the random drops in the base: too slow. Also, not enough pressure. And trying to keep the wet base between her soaked hooves didn't help.
After a while, she went outside. Further experimentation proved that it was functionally impossible to have all the water in a cloud jet out from a single tiny precisely-aligned section, along with using up just about every cloud in the area. Several frustrated jumps concluded the trial, along with taking out most of a distant compost heap.
And then she loaded up her saddlebags with dripping, uninflated ozone-scented balloons, and reluctantly flew down to the one place in Ponyville which might be able to help.
Ratchette squinted at the ridges.
"It's threaded, Rainbow," the mechanic said. "You're supposed to screw it on."
"Screw," Rainbow slowly repeated.
The steel-and-copper pegasus nodded. "It's the only way to have it hold long enough at the proper pressure. It's a good design, really."
"A good design? A good design would have practically filled itself while it was still coming out of the box!" Frustrated, "And who's got a faucet with a screw at the end? Is that something only minotaur homes have? How do they expect anypony to --"
"-- no," Ratchette quickly broke in. "It's a pretty universal size: it has to be. You can just attach it anywhere a hose would go. Or even at the end of a hose, if it's double-threaded. But Rainbow, this is still a minotaur thing. I've had some time to look at the design, and honestly, I think you might be better off --"
"-- a hose?"
Ratchette nodded.
"I don't have a hose. I'm a pegasus. I don't need a hose. Why would anypony have a hose when they could just ask a pegasus to drop by?"
"Rinsing things off," was the immediate reply from a pony who was generally considered to be about six extended high-pressure drenchings from being able to enter Rarity's shop without triggering a faint, and she nudged the now lightly-stained tail base across the workshop table towards Rainbow. "So just find a hose. Now when it comes to getting it on, I've got a tool I could let you --"
"-- hoses." Rainbow snorted. "Okay, fine: rinsing things off. I get that. But do you know what I see? Ponies watering stuff. Plants. Gardens. Why do we even have a weather schedule if ponies are just going to go around doing their own watering?"
Ratchette, who often became oddly shy in the presence of Rainbow's deepest thoughts, hesitated.
"Some plants need more water than others."
"Then they can just put in a request --"
Carefully, "-- and... sometimes the pegasus who's scheduled to trigger the rain is -- delayed. Or late." With increasing speed, "Or fell asleep somewhere. Or got distracted by a new stunt on her way to the watering and completely forgot about everything else."
Rainbow stared at Ratchette for a few seconds.
"Seriously?"
"I -- fix a lot of hoses, Rainbow..."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"I'm glad I don't know any pegasi like that." Although she'd have to confront the rest of the weather team and see if she could identify the culprit. "So any hose base will do?"
"Sure -- but if you don't have the right tool --"
But the sentence was lost in the usual clatter of jostled (with some falling) ceiling-hung tools produced by Rainbow speeding out of the fix-it shop.
She landed at Sweet Apple Acres, behind the newest version of the barn, right where a post-Crusade Apple Bloom was frequently sprayed down in an preliminary effort to get rid of whatever the most recent failed quest had put into her coat, which always turned out to be something other than a mark, and frequently worked out to 'tree sap'. And sure enough, there was the faucet mount for the hose. Along with the hose, currently attached.
Rainbow looked around. Nopony in sight, which wasn't surprising during the summer: everypony would likely be working in the orchards all day. Well, it wasn't as if the family would object to her using a little water and in thanks, she'd even hold off on pranking any of them with the water balloons, at least for a few days. But the hose was attached, which meant she needed to free it up, and --
-- no, she didn't, because the other end had threads on it, and it looked like the tail base would just fit...
Rainbow grinned to herself, then placed the tail base in front of the hose, nudged it forward until the two made contact.
"Now," she whispered to herself with a prankster's delight, "I've just gotta turn it."
Her hooves pressed on both sides of the base and tried to roll the thing between them.
Nothing happened.
She tried again. The base shifted by about a sixteenth of a rotation, rounding up. Way up.
Rainbow leaned forward, got her forelegs out in front of her so she could get a better look at what was happening, and made another attempt. The first threads intertwined. She shifted her hooves for the next attempt. The threads fell away.
"Oh, come on!" It was still a whisper. It also wasn't a particularly happy one. "How is anypony supposed to..."
She regarded the hose for a moment, then looked around the Acres. There was a shading tree branch not too far above her, and the hose was more than long enough to reach it...
It only took seconds, and then the hose was dangling straight down, with the end about twice Rainbow's height over the ground. She grinned again, put the base in her mouth, and then oriented her flight so that the screw end was facing the hose.
Which meant she was flying -- sort of sideways.
Which was admittedly something she'd done before. Plenty of times. During stunts. For, at most, three seconds per stretch, and generally the three seconds before something started to go horribly wrong, which was in no way associated with the fact that she'd been flying sideways. But still, all she had to do was get the threads intertwined, then fly around and around in a really fast circle until everything was screwed together, and then --
-- it took her some time to try and reconstruct the thought, and as with that one feather, portions of it remained embedded in the tree trunk.
Okay. Between the hooves. In a tight spiral.
Okay. Sticking forward out of that little gap between branches. Which means I'm only going around in a really, really localized wheel formation, which has to stay exactly in position near the tree. Nothing which isn't going to rush the blood into my head and make me pass out before I finish, and it's not like my tail's going to whip into the branches over me and get me tangled because I'll be going too fast for that.
Okay. That was the last splinter. Now maybe if it's sticking straight up...
Okay. That was the last apple. Now maybe if I... hey, wait a minute...
OKAY!
Zecora stared at her from the doorway of the hut.
"Again, please say: this I do pray. Your explanation I wish repeated, before any action is completed. Your reasoning I did not follow: exactly why did you want to borrow...?"
Rainbow eagerly nodded, perfectly happy about the extra chance to go over the details of her brilliant plan. "The Poison Joke cure. Oh, and some Poison Joke, if you've got any, just to keep me from having to search. I kind of need a lot of both. I'm going to be using them one after the other. A lot of times."
"And the purpose of this... plan? I cannot see just how you can --"
"-- it's about momentum angles, Zecora! When the Joke was hitting me, my wings were sort of inverted, right? I was flying in ways I'd never flown before, ways I've never flown since because my joints were back on the right way! But I was just thinking... that if my wings were inverted again, then I could sort of fly -- sideways! Upside-down! In circles tighter than anypony's ever flown before! So I use the Joke. I thread the screw and load up the balloons! And then I use the cure and take the base off, and then I use the Joke and load up the next group, and I just keep doing that over and over until the whole batch is done! So do you have it ready, or is it gonna take some time to brew up? Because I've already used a lot of time on this, and Rarity's got a spa appointment later, I really don't want to miss her when she comes out --"
"-- so this plan you did compose -- to attach your base to a hose?"
Rainbow beamed. "Yeah! It's lateral thinking! Because it'll help me move laterally! But don't worry about stomping your hooves or anything -- unless that's part of the brewing process? I really don't know what you do in there. But if there's anything you need me to get for you, ingredients or extra cauldrons because I'm guessing you're gonna be making a lot --"
Zecora turned and silently trotted back inside.
"So... um... I'll just wait out here?"
There was a rummaging sound.
"Are those new masks? I think they're new masks. Cool masks. Anyway, about how long is this going to --"
The zebra stepped into the doorway again. There was an object in her mouth. It had a threaded circular end which was the exact size to match the hose, pinching clamps around that portion, and a long side-stretching mouth crank which took up most of the doorway's width.
She spat it out. The metal fell into the dirt in front of Rainbow's hooves.
"Your tool," Zecora said.
Rainbow looked at it for a while.
"...or I guess I could use that. If, you know, the cure is gonna take so long to brew that I won't get a chance at doing it the cool way. Um... Zecora..."
The zebra was staring at her again.
"...you sort of... broke off there. I didn't hear a rhyme, so that means there's gotta be more words. You can't leave me hanging!"
Zecora took a deep breath, said two words, and slammed the door in Rainbow's face.
And Rainbow flew back to the Acres, internally muttering to herself all the way.
I could so totally talk the way she does if I wanted to.
And better than she does it.
Seriously, 'tool.' And then she goes for just about the easiest rhyme there is. Lazy...
And fuming.
She could have just said 'You cool.'
The tail base and hose had been threaded together. It had taken a little more time than Rainbow would have liked, due to a little confusion on Lefty-Tighty Righty-Loosey. But it had happened, and Rainbow smiled to herself as she hovered next to the branch-dangling hose.
All right. Just about there. If this next part doesn't take too long, I've still got plenty of time to intercept Rarity. Now, I know this takes a decent amount of water pressure... She flew over to the tap. So I've just gotta open this full blast. Ready? Of course I'm ready. I'm always ready. So. Ready!
She twisted the tap.
Water flowed. Nothing sprayed out of the perfect join between threads. The balloons inflated.
Rainbow had just enough time to see that they weren't going to be all that large: just about the right size to put in her mouth, assuming she was willing to strain her jaw a little. Nowhere near as big a splash as she ideally would have liked, but there were a lot of balloons and she just had to figure out how to use them in groups. But the material stretched in something just over a second, the sudden weight forced the balloons to go oblong and droop low on the tail strands like the world's weirdest cluster of bright red grapes, the necks stretched --
-- she had just enough time to figure out what the bands around the necks were for: when the balloon came off the hollow hair, the band would snap tight and keep the water inside. It was sensible, really. And when the balloons fell off the tail, they would burst upon impact.
Which, hanging twice her own height off the ground while bearing a weight they'd never known before, they did. All forty at once.
So that part sort of worked. Which was good to know.
Rainbow said a few words to mark the acquisition of her knowledge and, since there was a chance Apple Bloom was somewhere in listening range, all of them were in Griffonant.
She briefly entertained the idea of a personal speed test: turn the tap on one end, then fly to the tail piece and get it unscrewed before the balloons could fall. This was rejected, mostly because while she was sure she'd have no trouble with the distance even after factoring in the extremely short space available for acceleration and deceleration, the mouth crank was just too slow. Instead, the hose was brought down from the branch and coiled near the tap, so she could keep an eye on the balloons. It still took some trial and error before she found the balance point which allowed her enough water pressure to inflate them, but not quite enough to send them shooting off the tail. More portions of the Acres wound up covered in water and thin rubber, but the water was good for the plants and she was sure nopony would notice a little extremely colorful rubber all over the place, especially when that risk was compared to the time required for cleanup.
After a while, she had the process mastered, and filled just enough to theoretically put her saddlebags at capacity: two hundred and forty balloons, with the unused portions hidden in the barn until she could come back for them. Six clusters of tail hairs and multicolored grapes, with only forty of those being pure water: she was running behind schedule and wanted to open summer with the more amusing ammo.
Slowly, carefully, she clenched the tail base of the one dye-free group between her teeth and lifted, just a hoof-height or so at a time. And once the balloons were fully vertical, they gently slid off the strands onto the ground.
Rainbow grinned. She was entitled.
"Okay," she whispered. "Loading up..."
She put her head down, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, a balloon between her teeth --
It took some time to spit out all of the rubber, or at least what she was dearly hoping had been all of it.
"Oh, come on!" Nothing in the article had said anything about all these problems! The minotaurs had just filled the balloons, and picked them up in their big hands, and thrown them! What was she doing wrong? She was just using -- equivalents, and since ponies were just as good as minotaurs except for where they were so obviously better at the important stuff like flying, she shouldn't be having any trouble at all! Hooves were equivalent to fingers, right? And hands, too! Just like kicking was equal to throwing! So instead of throwing, because she couldn't, she'd just kick the balloons at her targets!
She kicked a balloon, just to prove it, and sure enough, it burst on impact. Against her hoof.
And she could have screamed. She wanted to stomp around that little water-soaked portion of the Acres, breaking every balloon there was. But she didn't, because this was for a prank. She was Rainbow Dash. She could make it work. And she not only still had thirty-eight filled dye-free balloons to practice with, but she could load up more at need.
Rainbow's head patiently dipped down.
Again.
Again.
Again...
She felt she'd lost too much time at the Acres -- no, knew it as soon as she was clear of all the tree canopies and could get a glimpse of Sun. But she was also more than capable of making that time up in the air, and Rainbow sped towards the spa at her best sub-Rainboom pace.
Oh, she had it now. Once every part of the manipulation process had been mastered -- something which had taken far too many balloons, but she still had her two hundred -- she'd emptied her saddlebags, gently dragged the dye-filled ones across the ground, placed them over empty mouths, and then let gravity fill them, gently easing the saddlebag edges up at need. As for getting them out of the bags, putting them between her hooves or into her mouth without having the thin rubber burst -- well, that was what all the practice had been for, and she was sure she hadn't swallowed more than the water, or at least not much more...
It didn't matter. The prank was ready.
She came at the spa in a great curve, approaching from behind. There was no point in trying for cloud cover: Rarity just might be looking for a cloud. Instead, she camped out on the roof, head peering down over the edge --
-- and there was the designer. Just starting to emerge -- but with her head tilting back, calling her thanks to Lotus and Aloe, making that next appointment. It gave Rainbow just enough time.
Her head went back, flipped open the lid of her left saddlebag. A single bright yellow balloon was carefully extracted, held with utmost care in her mouth as she took off, hovered, began lining up the angle...
"...and next week as well!" Rarity merrily called out in a perfectly relaxed way, elaborate mane and tail styles gleaming under Sun, the white coat glistening with health. "Until then! And once again, thank you for restocking my favorite bath salts!" Turning her head to a slightly different angle. "No, please take your time to finish up: don't rush on my account! I will meet you at the Boutique...!"
Oh, here it comes...
She couldn't grin. Not with the balloon in the way. But the inner version was good enough.
"Bombs away," Rainbow whispered.
Or tried to. That couldn't really be done with a balloon in the way either.
But it was more than enough to release it.
The little yellow object plummeted, hit the ground, and burst. The splash of dye coated a little section of road, stopping about a hoofwidth away from Rarity's right foreleg.
The designer looked down.
Then she looked up.
Rainbow froze.
"Um," she said, and considered it to be a distraction to keep Rarity busy while she quickly lined up a better excuse. "Wow! Did you see that? Somepony's dropping stuff! I'd better go look for --"
"Interesting," Rarity said. And she smiled.
"Huh?"
The designer was looking at Rainbow's laden saddlebags. "I said it was interesting, Rainbow. And I meant it. Something new, I see. And the new is almost always welcome, is it not? Judging by the rubber I saw on the stones, that was a balloon, yes? And I can certainly smell the fur dye. Much different from a mere repeated cloud drenching sending me back into the spa for yet another restyling of my coat and mane. Even as part of a prank, I will still applaud your attempt to embrace innovation."
Rainbow exhaled. "That's... kind of cool of you, Rarity."
Calmly, "I rather thought so." The smile was still there.
"I didn't think you'd take it that well. Because -- you know -- fur dye. Even if I did go with something really soap soluble, it's still bright yellow. And you had to see the other colors --"
" -- however," came the patient interruption, "when compared to your previous tactic... Rainbow, I am truly sorry to tell you this, but I'm afraid I happen to perceive a... design flaw."
Rainbow blinked.
"Seriously?"
"Yes," Rarity smiled. "Not in you, of course. In your new item. There is a certain lack of improvement in play here. A reversal, really."
Rainbow frowned. "You mean something more than what a pain in the tail it is to load them up? Because you wouldn't believe what I went through to load them up, and after Zecora..."
"Yes," Rarity repeated. "A significant design flaw."
And Rainbow knew that Rarity was often detail-oriented, spotted little things which the others missed. She had to have seen something real, and that meant Rainbow had to know. "What?"
Rarity's horn ignited. Soft blue glow surrounded the lids of Rainbow's saddlebags, flipped them open, delved within --
-- and then she found herself at the exact center of the sphere. A sphere composed of one hundred and ninety-nine glowing dye-filled balloons, precisely spaced so that there was no way to exit in any direction without impacting at least ten of them.
"The average unicorn," Rarity calmly smiled, "would have no small amount of difficulty in grasping a cloud."
Rainbow immediately saw the logic in Rarity's argument, and acknowledged it in the only way she had.
"Um," Rainbow said.
The sphere collapsed inwards.
The dripping candy-red, bright yellow, and dye-blue pegasus stained her way into the spa, slowly making her way towards the largest available (and occupied, at least until the police captain finished scrambling out) tub while Lotus and Aloe watched her in horror. But they weren't the only ones watching, for there was still another pony visible in the spa, one currently moving between treatment areas, and Rainbow spotted her just in time.
"Not a word," she growled. "Not one word..."
Pinkie didn't say anything. Instead, she silently shifted her tail against her right flank, let the curls encircle the balloons. And smiled.