My Cousin is Having a Baby and She Needs My Help
Rainbow Dash’s cloud-door was unsuitable for slamming, but at least it was opaque. More importantly, it was located thirty feet above the ground, and had a cloud-porch that only a pegasus could stand on. Rainbow Dash took care to close it extra shut, first by sealing the cloudstuff to the frame as usual, then by fastening the never-before-used deadbolt, then finally by sliding the living room table across the floor until it was sitting flush against the wall.
The walls were made of a type of semi-solid cloudstuff that was notoriously bad about acoustics. As such, the next few seconds of silence were extra silent.
Then Rainbow Dash lunged at Fluttershy, and Fluttershy felt warm wetness against her shoulder as Rainbow Dash wailed a series of syllables that probably contained “I’m sorry” at some point. Not that it mattered, because Fluttershy wasn’t angry at Rainbow Dash. She was just… scared.
Very, very scared.
Applejack coasted to a gradual halt in the shadow of Rainbow Dash’s house.
“Do you hear that?” muttered Rarity.
“Hear what?” replied Applejack, but before the words even left her mouth, she heard it—a strain of raised but indistinct voices piercing through the house’s porous walls.
“Are they… shouting at each other?” Rarity said, biting her lip and placing a hoof to her chin.
“Nope,” Applejack said darkly. “I think they’re crying.”
“Well…” Rarity said, lowering her voice as if worried that it might somehow carry all the way up to the house, “what should we do?”
Applejack stared up at the house, pondering an answer. Then she puffed out her chest and loosed a full-force bellow.
“RAINBOW DASH! FLUTTERSHY!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Applejack saw Rarity wince. Applejack ignored Rarity and shouted again.
“Hey! We jus’ want to talk! Whatever it is, you c’n tell us!”
The top of a pink-maned head poked out, looking down from over the edge of the cloud.
“Oh… th-thank you, Applejack and Rarity, we’re very thankful for your support, but—”
Muted shouting sounded from the house. Fluttershy disappeared from sight with a “we don’t need any help packing!”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it!” Applejack yelled.
No answer.
“Fluttershy! Come back out, darn it!”
Rarity gingerly patted Applejack on the shoulder. “Honestly, dear, yelling louder won’t—”
Applejack turned a 180 in place and trotted back the way she came, snorting a sullen “hmph.”
Rarity fell into step alongside Applejack and spoke up with a singsong lilt. “What now? We tried it your way. Perhaps now you’ll reconsider my idea to—”
“We’ll go and talk to Twilight,” Applejack grumbled. “But I have a feeling she ain’t gonna like your idea any more than I do.”
Rarity raised a hoof and knocked at the door to the library. To her surprise, it swung open under the force of the first knock.
“Twilight?” Rarity said as she slipped through the open door. “Didn’t you say you were gonna help Pinkie clean up?”
Twilight was sitting at the library’s reading table with three open books in front of her, lined up in a row. “Pinkie told me that you two would need my help more than her. She didn’t say it, but I think it was her Pinkie Sense acting up. How did it go over there?”
“Not real well,” said Applejack sourly.
Rarity stepped forward, reared up to rest her hooves on the table, and fixed Twilight with her best serious look. Surely Twilight Sparkle, whose Element represented the magic connection between friends, would understand…
“I think the only way is for you to use a scrying spell.”
Applejack’s hooves landed on the table next to Rarity’s. “An’ I told her that this ‘scrying’ thing is only one letter off from ‘spying.’”
Twilight’s eyes flicked to Applejack’s frown, then back to Rarity’s intense stare.
“Um, actually it’s two letters, but… Rarity… Applejack has a point. Are you sure it’s right for us to spy on them like this?”
“Told ya so,” Applejack muttered.
Rarity turned an eye toward Applejack, then pursed her lips together into a pout. Oh no no no, those two had another thing coming if they thought that Rarity would back down so easily.
“Rainbow Dash was crying! Why, she was openly bawling; you heard it better than me, you said so yourself! Don’t you think it’s it our duty as friends to help, whether Rainbow herself thinks so or not?”
Twilight’s eyes widened just the slightest amount. “She was… crying?”
“Yeah,” Applejack said, turning her eyes toward the floor. “Ain’t no doubt about it. Cryin’ hard.”
Twilight closed her books, levitated them into a neat stack, then pushed them aside.
“Rarity, there’s a prism in the top shelf of the storeroom. Would you fetch it for me?”
Rarity trotted off toward the library’s storeroom. She waited until she was out of sight to allow herself a whispered, victorious “Ha!”
“My goodness, she looks even worse than she sounded,” said Rarity. “The poor dear…”
The floating projection from the glowing crystal on the table sharpened, and the image came into full focus. Rainbow Dash was sitting on a mess of rumpled sheets, heaving with sobs, her face buried in Fluttershy’s shoulder.
“Is she okay?” Applejack said, leaning closer. “Consarn it, I wish we could go up there!”
Rarity tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Well, she certainly had a lot of that punch...”
Twilight shushed them both as the crystal emitted a distorted warbling sound, followed by the sound of Rainbow Dash’s scratchy, full-force bawling.
"I'm s-sorry, I'm so sorry oh my gosh I'm sorry..."
Unlike Rainbow Dash, who was melting into Fluttershy's like a discarded garment, Fluttershy was as stiff as a coatrack and staring into the distance with her lower lip held tightly between her teeth. "There, um... there, there."
Rainbow pulled her face back from Fluttershy's shoulder momentarily, so that she could fix Fluttershy with a teary stare and shake her poor yellow friend by the shoulders. "We gotta leave! We gotta leave, like, right now, before we see them again and I tell them even more!" And then she fell back into Fluttershy's shoulder again. "Oh Celestia, I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid!"
"Well, you did your best..." Fluttershy kept her eyes averted even as she ran one hoof down Rainbow Dash's back. "Even though, well, maybe you shouldn't have had all that punch..."
“And th-th-they asked about our parents! I couldn’t—” Rainbow Dash sniffed loudly, and it sounded like she was doing so through a thick coating of mucus. “I c-couldn’t come up with anything! Nothing! Nothing at all!”
"Nobody's perfect... it's okay... maybe it won't matter so much when--"
"And what I said about raising foals! Oh Mother, did you see Applejack's face?
Fluttershy stiffly patted Rainbow on the back. “It’ll be okay!” she squeaked. “It’ll all be okay! Once we get to the Skyborne Dance you can ask some friends for lines for that.”
Twilight gasped faintly. Rarity glanced over at her, but turned her eyes back to the projection when Rainbow Dash managed to let out another sentence between her fits of hysterics.
“W-what do I tell them? I can’t tell them! They’ll know that I blew our cover! I’ll go down in history as the stupid l-l-loser who--”
The image winked out, and the crystal dulled from the inside until it was milky and opaque.
“That’s all for now,” Twilight said. “The crystal needs to recharge for an hour.”
“The poor dears,” Rarity said quietly.
Applejack rubbed both her temples. “Why couldn't they just tell us what's wrong? For Celestia's sake, we just want ta help...”
“And what they said about their parents, and the Skyborne Dance,” said Twilight. “We’ve known them for so long, and…”
Rarity tilted her head at Twilight. “Have you ever heard of this Skyborne Dance?”
“Only rumors. We know that it’s a festival for pegasi who were born in the clouds.” She slipped the bottom book of the stack free with her magic, and fanned briefly through the pages, staring hard at them as they flicked past.
Rarity stared at the crystal, even though it had fallen silent and was quite inert. So many questions, so few answers, and coming from such dear friends who had been hiding so many secrets… “Some secret, ancient ritual, perhaps?” she speculated. “A relic of the ancient pegasus tribes?”
Twilight shook her head. “No, the books don’t make it sound that way. But either the pegasi never gave anypony a straight answer about what happens there, or nopony who got one ever wrote it down.”
Applejack leaned over the table, trying to stick her head between Twilight and Rarity. “I'm sure this is all real interestin', but does this dancing that they’re off to do have anythin’ to do with the fact that those two ran off in tears when we tried to ask about their parents?”
Neither Rarity nor Twilight Sparkle offered an answer to that question for several long seconds.
Rarity's hoof struck the table with a low clop. “It’s decided, then. Applejack and I will follow them.”
Applejack immediately wheeled around to fix Rarity with a glare. “What, spying on them once wasn’t enough?”
Twilight made a move as if to speak up, then closed her mouth when Rarity spoke over her.
“All we’re doing is taking a little trip up to Cloudsdale!”
“So that we can sneak around and follow them, right?”
Twilight turned back to Applejack.
“Sneaking? We are going to Cloudsdale with a noble and important mission! Just because we happen to be there at the same time as them…”
“I’m not THAT dumb, Rarity, and neither are those two!”
Twilight’s head twisted again, and kept turning rhythmically between her two friends at every step of their verbal tennis match.
Rarity pursed her lips. “Did you see the distress Rainbow Dash was in?”
“Rainbow Dash is a big pony, an’ she can talk to us when she’s darn well ready. Like when she’s sober, maybe!”
“She looked pretty bad either way,” said Twilight.
“You have such faith in Rainbow Dash’s ability to know what’s good for her,” said Rarity.
“You just want to sneak into this Skyborne Dance thing!”
Twilight turned back to Rarity. Rarity did her best to hold Twilight’s attention for a bit longer this time, lest the poor girl hurt her neck.
“I admit to being curious, but that’s beside the point! This could be the most important thing we ever do for them! Need I remind you that we are mending families?”
Ah. A direct hit. Applejack hesitated for a single, critical half-beat. “Well, yeah… but…”
Rarity leaned toward Applejack and laid on the pressure. “Even putting our friends’ parents aside, it seems to me that Rainbow Dash owes us all some answers, whether she thinks so or not!”
“Well, what makes you think we’re gonna find those answers up there?”
“There’s clearly some sort of purpose to this trip of theirs, or Rainbow Dash wouldn’t have gone through so much trouble hiding it from us!”
“It’s true,” said Twilight. “They didn’t tell us about the Skyborne Dance.”
Some of Applejack’s fire returned as she shot Twilight a look, then raised a hoof to thump it against the top of the table. “What if it turns out this dance has nothin’ to do with anythin’ at all? We’ll just go up and snoop on ‘em for no reason?”
“Well, we have to try!” Rarity huffed back. “I, for one, refuse to see such close friends in such distress without doing something about it!”
Applejack opened her mouth, but then her glare melted into a vaguely forlorn, distant gaze. “Rainbow… if only we could just talk to her…”
Rarity rubbed her chin several times, then narrowed her eyes into a look twice as serious as the one she had used on Twilight. “My dear Applejack, I would like to propose a compromise. We will go to Cloudsdale together, and if at any time you deem our presence in Cloudsdale needlessly invasive, then we will both return immediately to Ponyville, and we will apologize to our pegasus friends at the nearest opportunity.”
Applejack turned her eyes toward the ground, and her frown deepened. “I ain’t sayin’ yes just yet. What’s the catch?”
“You will help me investigate this Dance for one day.” Rarity straightened, holding her head high as she dictated her terms. “However invasive it may seem, however uncomfortable the truths we find, we will spend at least one day exploring this matter. After that, you may decide whether or not our outing will continue.”
"One day?"
Rarity nodded. "One day. Then, and only then, we can abort our mission at your sole discretion."
"Um," said Twilight.
"Deal," said Applejack. "We go for one day." She raised a hoof, spit on it hard enough to cause a visible splash, then extended it toward Rarity.
Rarity instinctually recoiled away from the spittle-covered hoof being extended toward her. She edged carefully past it, then patted Applejack on the shoulder. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement.”
“…So!”
Twilight, on the far side of the table, cleared her throat.
“Two sets of Shimmer Wings, then?”
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Can't wait for more
THE SUSPENSE!!!!
Aah I must get more!!! This is sooooooo awesome!!!
Keep up the awesome job!!!
Oh my god I'm so nervoucited for the next chapter!
No offense but....
WHEN IS MORE COMING!!!!! I AM DIEING HERE!!!!
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It's actually already written! I wrote a blog post about this I promise it's not dead, the unpublished words are already more than the published words!
D:
4358964 so does that mean we'll hopefully get an update soon?
4358971
Absolutely. Hopefully. Read the blog post.
4359658 just did, well I know I have another awesome chapter to look forward to soon hopefully