A Long Time Coming
An excerpt from The Ultimate Expeditioner's Handbook:
For the sake of padding out the page count and making this treatise appear more substantive on a bookshelf, as well as allowing us the pleasure of using a larger, more tasteful, typeface on the spine, the next thirty or so pages will feature the letter "a" many times over. Should you not wish to read this, you may skip to the end.
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• • ❖ • •
Rainbow Dash eyed narrowly the pale pink leaf in her hoof. Like the dozens of others scattered about, it was small, elliptic, and at the moment, rather mundane. The remaining Tatzeldrakes had all fled shortly after her frenzied arrival for whatever reason, leaving Rainbow Dash free to investigate the area.
She flipped the leaf over a few times, noting the powdery yellow residue rubbing off onto her hoof, as if the leaf had been lightly coated with a fine dust of pure gold. It felt soft like flour, and smelled sweet and soothing like nothing Rainbow Dash had smelled before. She brought the leaf to her mouth and gave it a tentative lick, only to find that it tasted of dirt. Curious to see if anything would happen, she tore it in half. Nothing did, so she discarded it.
Looking around, she could find nothing else worth investigating, which meant that was everything Rainbow Dash had to go on. Rarity was gone, vanished into thin air, and the only clue as to her whereabouts were some leaves that smelled kind of nice but tasted like dirt.
With a groan of frustration, Rainbow Dash took to the skies and began searching. Just like before, she scoured the ground, looking for any specks of white through the trees below.
It occurred to Rainbow Dash that maybe it was wrong of her to feel frustrated. She had every reason to feel the way she did, considering she’d been just a few feet from swooping in and saving Rarity when she’d vanished right before her eyes, but for all she knew, those leaves could have done something totally horrible to her.
She knew she should be worried. But… she wasn’t. Not really. She didn’t feel like Rarity was in any danger. And not just because the leaves were pink, a colour not frequently affiliated with malevolence, though that played a big part.
Right now, her gut told her Rarity was going to be okay, and Rainbow Dash often found that her gut was smartest organ she had. Still, she decided it would be a good idea to ask Fluttershy if she had read anything about magical pony-teleporting leaves in that book with the impossible-to-pronounce title.
Rainbow Dash came to a hover, stopping her search momentarily. She’d been so focused on saving Rarity that she’d completely forgotten about what had happened that morning, the complete disaster that had transpired.
Every embarrassing detail flooded into the forefront of her mind. Everything she’d said. Everything Rarity had implied. Everything Fluttershy might have overheard. How was she supposed to explain any of that to her?
She shook her head. She didn’t want to think about any of that right now. Rarity was still missing, and for Rainbow Dash, that was as good of an excuse as any to push the unpleasant thoughts aside to be dealt with later. She resumed her methodical search, slowly fanning out as she covered more and more of the area around Rarity’s last known location. The tedium was only broken when she spotted a tiny yellow speck in the distance pop up from beneath the trees. It looked like she was going to have to think about it after all.
Fluttershy quickly spotted Rainbow Dash, who looked to have not yet noticed her. In truth, Rainbow Dash was just happy to put off meeting up with Fluttershy for as long as possible. It had happen eventually, and she would be forced to confront Fluttershy about… well everything, but the present seemed like a great time not to.
Rainbow Dash was so focused on trying to look like she hadn’t noticed Fluttershy that it took her by surprise when she heard Fluttershy’s voice right behind her.
“Rainbow Dash, where’s Rarity?” Fluttershy asked as she drew even to Rainbow Dash. Her eyes only fleetingly fell upon Rainbow Dash’s cyan coat as she spoke, and never did she try to look her in the face.
Rainbow Dash, for her part, did the same, trying to disguise her reluctance to look Fluttershy in the eye as searching for Rarity. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Fluttershy echoed, a tinge of fear in her voice.
“Not gone gone. She just… vanished. There were a bunch of pink leaves, and… I don’t know what happened, she’s just gone.”
“Pink leaves?”
“Like I said, I don’t really know what happened. Rarity passed out, some pink leaves came out of nowhere and started swirling around her, and then she just... disappeared. That’s all I know. I was hoping you might know something about them,” Rainbow Dash tried to explain, but it only lead to a barrage of questions from Fluttershy.
“She passed out? What happened? Is she alright?”
Instead of answering the questions directly, Rainbow Dash decided it would be best to start from the top.
She told Fluttershy about the weird half-wolf half-lizard things that had been chasing Rarity, and the blinding light spell Rarity had cast to escape. She told her about how Rarity had passed out soon after casting her spell, and the pink leaves ostensibly responsible for Rarity’s disappearance. She even slipped in the fact that she had knocked out one of the tatzeldrakes with a flying kick to the head but found herself in no mood to brag about it at the moment.
“And that’s pretty much it,” Rainbow Dash concluded. “That book about this place didn’t say anything that might help us find Rarity, did it?”
Fluttershy shook her head. “It talked about some things that sound a bit like what you told me, but nothing that would help.”
“Dang,” Rainbow Dash groaned.
“I hope she’s alright.”
Without a word of response, Rainbow Dash resumed the search for the missing mare, Fluttershy taking off after her.
• • ❖ • •
Hours passed as Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy searched for Rarity. Few words were spoken between the two, and the only ones that were were about the task at hoof. At no point did either pony mention the events of the morning prior.
It was painfully awkward for Rainbow Dash, and she assumed the same was probably true for Fluttershy, but she knew that, in time, everything would return to normal between her and her friend. Just as it always did, no matter what the issue was.
“I think we should head back to camp and get our things.” Fluttershy meekly suggested. It had been over half an hour since either had said anything.
Rainbow Dash’s response lacked her usual liveliness, and came out sounding almost mechanical. “We still haven’t found Rarity.”
“I know, but I don’t think she’s in the area. We’ve been searching for so long, if she was around here, we probably would have found her by now.”
“So, what? We’re just going to give up then?”
“No.” Fluttershy looked down, a distraught crease in her brow. “We all agreed ahead of time to keep heading toward the mountains if one of us were to get separated, so that’s what we have to assume Rarity is doing. If we keep heading there as well, we might run into her on the way. If we don’t, we can wait there until she shows up.”
Rainbow Dash thought over Fluttershy’s suggestion and concluded that it did have some merit to it. “Okay,” she relented, “but if she’s not there when we get there, I’m not going to just sit around and wait for her to show up.”
• • ❖ • •
Rainbow Dash took point on the walk to the mountains, continually searching for Rarity to keep her mind off the fact that Fluttershy now knew of the crush she had wasted so much effort concealing from her. Rarely did Rainbow Dash spare a glance back at Fluttershy, and she only acknowledged her company when necessary. None of these things however could suppress the overbearing elephant-in-the-room feeling.
Fluttershy held no illusions that Rainbow Dash was doing anything other than avoiding her, despite the fact that she was keeping pace just a few feet behind her. And when Rainbow Dash did speak up, her tone was emotionless and distant, a hollow echo of her usual brash self.
Eventually Fluttershy mustered the courage to speak up with hopes of tearing down the conversational wall between them. “Rainbow Dash?” she said, swallowing.
“Hmm?” Rainbow Dash replied. She kept her attention ahead, not slowing her pace or deviating from her path in any way.
“We’ve been walking for a while, and neither of us have had breakfast…” Fluttershy tentatively came to a stop, fully expecting Rainbow Dash to shoot down her suggestion. “don’t you think we should stop to eat?” she said, cowering behind her mane.
Rainbow Dash stopped. She began to turn around but halted halfway. “We’re almost to the mountains. We can eat there.”
With that said, she carried on.
As time passed it became clear the mountains were not a short jaunt away like Rainbow Dash had assumed. Grudgingly, she acceded to Fluttershy’s wordless protesting and stopped, dropping hers and Rarity’s bags and relishing in the sweet relief the simple action brought.
“Alright, this is taking longer than I thought. I’m up for lunch if you are.”
Fluttershy gave Rainbow Dash a shaky smile as she removed her own bags and began digging through them for food supplies. “If you want, we can just have a couple of granola bars and keep going…” she offered. It wasn’t what she wanted, but Fluttershy was nothing if not accommodating.
“No. We already skipped breakfast and probably lunch by now, too. And It’s not like it really matters when we get there anyway.”
It was impossible to tell, but Rainbow Dash was stopping solely out of compassion for Fluttershy. She would have preferred to keep going, to stay hungry simply because it helped to distract her from her uncomfortable reality, but doing so would be unfair to Fluttershy.
Fluttershy prepared the same thing for them as she had the previous day: PB&J tortillas and granola bars. When she finished, she handed Rainbow Dash her lunch and began nibbling on her own.
Fluttershy didn’t seem to have any intentions of starting up a conversation while she sat quietly, eating. It was obvious that she wanted to say something. She occasionally glanced Rainbow Dash’s way, but her eyes never lingered for more than a second before nervously darting off to look at something else.
Seeing how awkwardly Fluttershy was acting, Rainbow Dash was beginning to think it might be in her interest to take the initiative and be the one to say something first, just to make things slightly less awkward. If she simply addressed what they were both thinking about, then immediately shut any further conversation down, Fluttershy might not press the issue.
So with that plan in mind, Rainbow Dash ate as slowly as she could bear, keeping her mouth perpetually full as an excuse not to speak. She wanted to be the first to say something, but she still wasn’t in a rush to do so. Eventually she ran out of things to shove in her face, meaning that she had no other choice than to do that which she dreaded.
“So, uh… read any good books lately?” In a display of remarkable willpower, Rainbow Dash managed to not smack herself for saying the stupidest thing she could have imagined at that moment. She wasn’t sure where the idea for idle chit-chat had come from, but it wasn’t what she had planned on.
Actually, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t really planned anything past saying, 'Listen, ‘Shy, about earlier…' She figured everything would just sort of flow from that point.
Now that she really thought about it, she was starting to think she was a really stupid pony.
“Not really,” Fluttershy stated simply, hardly looking up from her lunch.
For better or for worse, Rainbow Dash was committed to the topic now, but Fluttershy wasn’t giving her much to work with. She reached over into Fluttershy’s bag to pick out one of the books inside. “What about this one?” she asked, holding up The Ultimate Expeditioner’s Handbook.
Fluttershy shook her head. “That one’s not very good at all." She wanted to stop at that, but this was something that had actually been bothering her. “Honestly, I stopped reading it for the advice after the first couple pages, but it's so strange that I kept reading anyway. I still don't understand what would make somepony write such a thing. And not only that, but the last half of the book is just the letter ‘a’ over and over. ”
Rainbow Dash disbelievingly flipped open the book and leafed through the pages. She saw that the last half was, in fact, wholly composed of first letter of the alphabet. “Wow. What a rip off. You didn’t pay for this did you?”
“No. I got it from the library.”
“Was Twilight there when you picked this one out?”
“She was, but she was sick, so it was just me who picked it out.”
“Yeah, I remember you telling me about this now...”
With that topic thoroughly exhausted, Rainbow Dash used the lull in conversation to say what she had intended to in the first place. As much as she didn’t want to, she felt it was long overdue.
“So… uh… as soon as you’re done eating we can get moving again.”
Or perhaps not.
• • ❖ • •
Rainbow Dash marched onward through the forest with Fluttershy in tow a few paces behind, things seemingly having reverted back to the way they had been for much of that morning with neither pony saying much, and both avoiding eye-contact.
“Rainbow Dash, stop… please.” The sound of Fluttershy’s voice was just as much a surprise to Rainbow Dash as it was to Fluttershy herself, who had been trying to coax the words out unsuccessfully since they had stopped for lunch.
Rainbow Dash slowed to a stop. She took a deep breath and prepared herself for the worst before turning around, the action feeling more like facing a firing squad than a friend. The crestfallen frown and forlorn eyes she was met with cast a far stronger plea than anything the shy pony could have said.
“Rainbow…” Fluttershy dropped her gaze to her hooves, unable to hold the eye contact. “I… I don’t want to pretend this morning never happened,” she stammered, nervously rubbing one leg against the other.
Rainbow Dash shuffled around as she tried to throw together a response. “Fluttershy, it really doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It matters to me,” Fluttershy muttered, chancing a peek up at Rainbow Dash
“Well, I really don’t feel like talking about it, so just drop it. Okay?”
Fluttershy hesitated before ignoring the command. "Was it true what you said?"
"Like I said, it doesn't matter." Rainbow Dash made to turn back around, but the hurt in Fluttershy’s voice when she next spoke stopped her halfway.
“Rainbow, you promised you would tell me!” Fluttershy begged. As well as being offended by Rainbow Dash breaking her promise, she found it hard to not be insulted by Rainbow Dash’s insistence that something she cared a great deal about didn’t matter. “And if none of this matters, then why have you been treating me differently?”
Rainbow Dash sighed and turned her head to look at anything other than Fluttershy.
“Well?” Fluttershy’s voice shook, a clear sign to Rainbow Dash—who wasn’t looking—that she was on the verge of tears, if not already crying.
Rainbow Dash stayed quiet.
“Was it true?” Fluttershy repeated. She doubted the answer was no, but she needed to hear it said.
As far as Rainbow Dash was concerned, there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t make things worse.
“Rainbow Dash!” Fluttershy begged.
“Fluttershy, it's nothing!”
“It's not nothing and you know it!”
Again Rainbow Dash was quiet.
“Was it something I did?”
Even knowing Fluttershy for so long, it still came as a surprise to Rainbow Dash that she was trying to blame something which was clearly not her fault on herself. She didn’t even know what Fluttershy was trying to ask by that. What was ‘it’? Before Rainbow Dash could think of anything to say, Fluttershy had already moved on.
“If you won’t tell me, then please at least promise me that we can stay friends.” Fluttershy reached up to wipe away the little beads of liquid forming at the corners of her eyes. “Please…”
Seeing Fluttershy how she was pained Rainbow Dash. There was a wrenching in her chest which served as a reminder of why she'd kept her secret so long.
“Fluttershy, you're the closest friend I have ever had, and we’ll never not be friends. I just… I need some time to think.”
“About what?” Fluttershy walked closer to face Rainbow Dash.
“I don't know!” Rainbow Dash nearly shouted, instantly regretting her outburst. Sighing, she allowed her head to drop. “Listen, all that really matters is that it didn’t start that way. I didn’t become your friend for any other reason than because you were a good friend to me, alright?”
Fluttershy heaved a sigh. In all the years she’d known Rainbow Dash, that was the closest thing she had ever gotten to an answer about why they ever stopped spending time together, but that just went to show how poorly these conversations had gone in the past. "No. No, that's not alright. We used to spend every second together when we were fillies until one day when we just stopped—when you stopped. All of a sudden you always had an excuse to not be around me. You always had other plans."
“I’ve already said all I have to say,” Rainbow Dash interjected.
“Well I’m not okay with that, Rainbow,” Fluttershy asserted, tears running down her cheeks, matting her fur. “I’ve put up with you either avoiding the question or just plain lying to me for years now, but I’m not going to anymore!”
The volume of Fluttershy’s voice didn’t amount to much but Rainbow Dash knew that, for her, it was shouting. The anger and pain in each word stabbed into Rainbow Dash’s heart like red-hot nails.
And the worst part was that she was right. Fluttershy deserved an explanation. “Fine,” Rainbow Dash quietly relented. “Yes, everything I said back there was true.” She breathed deeply. Every word was suffocating, but with the first out of the way, pushing on felt much less daunting. “And I never wanted to avoid you, Fluttershy. I just…” she trailed off, not knowing how best to put it.
Fluttershy hesitated before urging Rainbow Dash to continue. “You just what?”
Rainbow Dash took on a solemn, thoughtful appearance, her eyes unfocused as she rummaged through the deepest reaches of her mind, and only when she was ready did she speak up. “You told me once that I was the first friend you ever had.”
Fluttershy nodded.
“Well, I don’t know think I realized it at the time, but, in a way, you were kind of the first friend I ever had, too. The first real friend I ever had. And I didn’t want anything to ruin that.”
Fluttershy titled her head, cocking an eyebrow. “What about Gilda? You were friends with her before we even met. And you always seemed so excited whenever she would come to Cloudsdale.”
“Well… yes and no. Me and Gilda got along, and we were ‘friends’ but we weren’t really friends, if that makes sense.” Rainbow Dash sat down, letting her saddlebags fall off before taking another deep breath and continuing. “It always felt like I was putting on a show when I was around her, y’know? Like I couldn’t be the real me around her. I had to be this little piece of me that was cool enough to hang out with her, and everything else just wasn’t allowed when we were together. And if that wasn’t enough, like you mentioned, she was gone for most of the year anyway. Which, now that I think about it, probably wasn’t such a bad thing, because I’m not sure if I could have handled Gilda year-round, but whatever, that’s not really the point.
“At the time, I thought Gilda was the best friend I could ever ask for. Because at least with her I didn’t have to worry she was going to turn around and stab me in the back like the other ponies I was ‘friends’ with back then,” Rainbow Dash snarled. She had begun to rub her temples with her hooves. “I just accepted that all ponies were like that, and that’s how friends acted towards each other. If you showed the smallest vulnerability, they would turn their backs on you and make fun of you. And compared to that, I guess Gilda was a great friend, but I still couldn’t be me. She never made fun of me, but she still wouldn’t accept anything that didn’t fit her idea of cool.”
Rainbow Dash’s eyes flicked about as if she just noticed she was still in the present. They momentarily passed over Fluttershy who had been listening intently to every word, and was waiting for Rainbow Dash to continue. “Anyway. When me and you became friends—real friends—I didn’t have to put up with any of that stuff anymore; no faking, no pretending, just me and you being me and you. I didn’t want there to be anything to take away from that. And I thought that if you found out that I had started to sort of… y’know... like you...” Rainbow Dash said quietly, trailing off, the words accompanied by a tinge of red on her cheeks. “I thought that it would make things too awkward between us or that you might assume that was the whole reason why we were friends in the first place, and our friendship was just a way for me to get you to like me.”
It was Rainbow Dash’s turn to look pleadingly at Fluttershy. “But that's not why we became friends, and it was never about that.”
Fluttershy sat down next to Rainbow Dash with an air of trepidation about her but forced herself to look directly at Rainbow Dash when she spoke. “I don’t need to hear you tell me that our friendship was real. Nothing in the world could make me doubt that.” Rainbow Dash gave her a weak smile, but it was crushed almost immediately after. “But what I don’t understand is why you decided we couldn’t be friends anymore.”
“Yeah…” Rainbow Dash muttered. “I didn't mean for that to go on for so long and I’m really sorry that it did... but I just couldn’t take it anymore, ‘Shy.”
Fluttershy cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
Rainbow Dash sighed. “I didn’t actually decide that we couldn’t be friends. It’s just that… any time we were together, I was constantly worried that I would slip up and you’d find out. It killed me to just be in the same room with you, and eventually it got to the point where I hated spending time with you,” she ranted. “and I hated myself for that...”
Rainbow Dash drew lines in the dirt in front of her to let out the nervous energy practically bursting at her seams, wishing that her cheeks would stop broadcasting just how embarrassed she currently was. “It just got to be too much, so I stopped going around you. It was just supposed to be a short break. I thought that if we stopped spending time together for a little while, the feelings would go away and things could go back to normal, but I guess that ‘little while’ ended up being a pretty long one.”
Rainbow Dash adorned an especially uncomfortable look. “And then when I finally stopped having those feelings, It’d been so long that I just didn’t know how to start things back up between us. I mean, what was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, I know I haven’t really talked to you for, like, a couple of years now, but let’s hang out later’? It wasn’t until Twilight came along and the six of us became friends that I thought I might have a chance at fixing things between us.”
Rainbow Dash ran a hoof through her mane, letting out an exasperated breath. It had been a marathon of an explanation.
She could have kept going. There were little things that had gone unmentioned, little things that might have given Fluttershy a clearer picture, but they were still just that: little things.
“So... I’m sorry. I never wanted things to happen the way they did. They just kind of played out that way.”
Rainbow Dash felt hooves wrap around her, surprised to find Fluttershy hugging her.
It wasn’t long before Fluttershy nervously pulled away, the gesture feeling a bit too intimate for the time being, all things considered.
Rainbow Dash cocked an eyebrow. “What was that for?”
“It was difficult, what you just did. And I appreciate you doing it.”
Though she now had what she wanted, Fluttershy found that the explanation had done little to ease her mind, or the feeling in her gut that had been bothering her since that morning. She reasoned that it must be because of how worried she was about Rarity.
Rainbow Dash got to her hooves. She was beginning to get antsy. “So, can we get moving now?”
When Fluttershy nodded, Rainbow Dash took to the air. “I’m going to scope out the path ahead before we get moving again.” she called down to her, deftly ascending through the treetops, dodging and weaving between branches before breaking out into the open sky.
More than anything it was an excuse to get a little space from Fluttershy, but assessing what lay ahead was still a worthwhile endeavour nonetheless, so Rainbow Dash got to it.
Directly ahead lay their destination. Towering above everything else on the island, the twin peaks made for an iconic fixture of the landscape. It had been easy to misjudge just how large the mountains were from a distance. For Rainbow Dash, seeing them up close felt almost surreal. The sheer cliff-faces abound littered with trees and other plant life clutching to the stone for dear life had a way of giving even Rainbow Dash, a pony rarely grounded, the slightest case of acrophobia.
From her vantage point, Rainbow Dash could also see that the forest which they had been traveling through thinned as it drew nearer to the massive landmark, meaning the walk ahead would be an absolute breeze. Not that the going had been very tough to begin with. As far as Rainbow Dash could tell, it looked like they’d be there in less than one more hour of walking.
It crossed Rainbow Dash’s mind that they could fly the rest of the way, but she didn’t see much point in trying to expedite the process. She didn’t expect Rarity to have beat them there so getting there faster would only mean waiting longer for Rarity to show up. If she showed up. And until then it would be just her and Fluttershy with only words to fill the time.
Surprisingly, Rainbow Dash didn’t dread that thought as much as she thought she would. Scoping out the landscape had been her unsubtle excuse to slip away from Fluttershy for the time being, but now that she had had a little time to digest everything, she supposed that, all things considered, it really hadn’t gone that bad. She had been ashamed and embarrassed admitting the things she had, but now she felt… well, not exactly good… but she at least felt a little better. Maybe this would turn out to be a new start for her and Fluttershy.
Before heading back down, Rainbow Dash spotted something she had almost overlooked. Out near the horizon above the ocean were dark clouds—stormclouds, violently swirling and churning, gathering energy and water from the ocean as it skated overtop. Being not only a pegasus, but also a weatherpony, Rainbow Dash could tell that the storm was headed their way. She’d need to let Fluttershy know about it. All they could really hope for was that it would blow over before the airship came back to pick them up.
On the ground, Fluttershy was running mental circles. She had finally gotten Rainbow Dash to tell her what she wanted to know, but for some reason it had done nothing to placate the uneasy feeling in her stomach. If anything, it just made her feel more troubled, so it couldn’t be that she was just worried about Rarity. She repeatedly asked herself why that might have been, but each time was as fruitless as the last. It also occurred to her that she had sorely neglected her cataloguing of the island’s wildlife for the whole morning, which only made her feel worse. There could have been dozens of critters she’d missed and wouldn’t see again. She had gotten so swept up in her own personal concerns that she had completely forgotten the reason for her being on an island in the middle of the ocean in the first place.
Fluttershy continued musing about the myriad of things on her mind until something caught her eye. Down through the branches overhead, fluttered a rain of unnaturally-coloured, deep-blue leaves. They were the colour of a moonlit sky... and they were coming from where she had last seen Rainbow Dash.
“Rainbow Dash?” she called.
No response came. The only sound was the pitter-patter of the leaves, one-by-one, hitting the ground.
She tried again, louder. “Rainbow?” The situation was all too similar to what had happened to Rarity.
All around her the trees jostled in the wind, but still she heard no sign of Rainbow Dash. Despite this, Fluttershy found herself hesitant to fly up and check for herself, afraid that her suspicions might turn out to be true. She called out once more.
“Rainbow?” Fear clutched at her throat, making the word that came out an unsteady whimper, nothing Rainbow Dash could have heard even if she was up there.
Fluttershy’s bit her bottom lip. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest and her
breath beginning to quicken. Her eyes, like her thoughts, flicked about franticly. Soon the pressing need to know for sure overtook the paralyzing anxiety keeping her grounded, and she took to the air and ascended through the tree cover. When she emerged, she found nothing of any comfort. There was nothing there to find at all.
Rainbow Dash was gone. And Fluttershy was alone.
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Very enlightening.
6423515
The standard response from the P.R. for The Ultimate Expeditioner's Handbook reads as follows:
Well this has taken a ...different turn than expected.
The awkwardness between the two pegasi was so well done, I wound up reading the whole thing in their voices
I really want another chapter so I can find out what has happened to Dash. Surely she will fly in and save Fluttershy at the last moment.... Right?
6424416
If there's one thing I consider myself to be an expert on, it's awkward situations.
And I'll try to get this next chapter done in a more timely manner to answer those burning questions of yours.