The wild grass tickled her frogs. That’s all that was in sight, really: grass, from here to the horizons, over the highest hills and the lowest valleys where no building, no errant structure, jutted out for miles. She looked up, up, and up, and not even there could she find an obstruction. No clouds. The sky was white and the moon blue. None were the reason why she was ecstatic, however. A soft breeze ruffled her coat. It was pushing her, almost lifting her off her hooves, guiding her towards the lip of the cliff like an encouraging mother bird. She imagined it must’ve been blue, too. The only sound was her own ragged breathing and racing heartbeat. These weren't behind this indescribable emotion of hers either. Something rustled by her side. Wings. Had she always had them? She must've, since she knew exactly how to use them, how to hold them, and how to fold them. She could feel the tingle of electricity at their extremities, aching to be put to use once more, the pinions, the darker shaded primaries, the hundreds and hundreds of tight-packed feathers in each filly-sized appendage bristling at the thought. She’d been flying, and not just sort of—like a stiff breeze short of stalling—or gliding, or hovering, but actually flying. It had been everything she’d ever dreamed of. “Good afternoon, Scootaloo.” Scootaloo jolted up. A moment before she'd thought she was alone. Now, all she could think about was how she was going to explain her totally cool and not-at-all girly peals of laughter over flying to one of the co-rulers of the Nation. “Princess Luna!” Scootaloo exclaimed, her eyes slowly widening. “Is this a dream?!” Luna waved. Her hoof passed over a grassland where Scootaloo could have sworn a green knoll had been mere moments ago. “Indeed it is. Though I must say, I wasn’t expecting to meet you here at this hour.” Scootaloo had the decency to look abashed— she’d had to do that often in the past. “I take it that you’ve been enjoying this new dream of yours?” ”You can say that again!” Scootaloo said, wings buzzing. Being almost twice her own size, however, this meant they merely flapped a few times at a leisurely pace. “I haven’t had this much fun since Cutie Mark Day Camp!” “Splendid!” Luna looked around, an expression on her muzzle that clearly stated she was evaluating what she was seeing on some arbitrary scale. “I see the Tantabus is doing good work.” “Wait, [i]the Tantabus[/i]?” Scootaloo stopped subconsciously preening her wings. “I thought you got rid of it?” “Not rid, repurposed,” Luna said. “The Tantabus was never supposed to be malevolent. It was only a means to an end, one that I freely admit was misguided.” She lifted a forehoof. A butterfly perched upon it, it's impossible number of gossamer wings condensing and dripping in an out of existence. “Cool.” Scootaloo gushed, poking the oozing insect and receiving a crystally [i]*ting[/i] as a response. “So what’s the Tantabus like, now?” The butterfly burst into clear flames. Out of the smoke dozens of others flew out, their hues fading into the misty air, like snowfall in reverse. Luna winked with her eyebrows. “Anything you want it to be.” Scootaloo blinked, turned around, and looked over the edge the cliff. Gone were the grassy valleys and canyons. Gone was the gentle slope of the hilltop she had been standing on. In the general sense of the word an ‘up’ may have existed, as well as all cardinal directions, but it was obvious there was much, much less of that than its polar opposite. The cliffside, which normally would have led to the foot of the mountain, was paved with the most incorrectly facing runway possible, leading down the vertical drop for far as the eye could follow. If she were to jump, and ever came across the ground, she knew it would have been too soon. “I wish other ponies were as easy to please.” A sigh came from somewhere behind her. Luna trotted into her view and smiled knowingly. “You take on somepony we both know, I see.” Scootaloo blushed. “So is that why you’re here?” she tried to change the subject. “To make sure the Tantabus doesn’t go all nightmare on me?” “Not exactly,” Luna said slowly, seemingly weighing her words. “But you shan’t worry your young mind over such matters.” The breeze picked up, ushering her closer to the lip of the cliff. This time, Scootaloo did see wisps of a regally blue aura in it. But something in Luna’s voice reminded Scootaloo of something she’d often heard from the mouths of well-meaning adults, who just never seemed to quite understand. “Are you sure?” “Positive. Now go, and perform this ‘Sonic Rainboom’ everyone keeps gushing about.” Scootaloo gasped and went beet red again. “You can read my mind?!” Luna smiled, though from the obvious strain she had tried her hardest not to. “Your mind runs on one track, young one.” “To be fair, I kinda wanna see it too.” Scootaloo, once again, looked over the edge. The area had changed again, the ground now being at a visible distance from her patchy knoll, with a vast open square filled with attentive colorful creatures in the middle. Her eyes roamed for a split second before coming across the one closest equine to her—the one dangling from the edge of the hill right in front of her—and stared into his pupiless purple eyes. “Hey Scootaloo. Long time no see, huh?” “Thorax?” Scootaloo’s eyebrow shot up all on its own. “What are you doing here?” The Changeling King pranced in mid-air. “What am[i] I[/i] doing here? I’m having a [i]whale[/i] of a time.” Despite there being no sea nearby, Scootaloo could distinctly hear a wailing whalesong somewhere in the distance. Thorax grinned all the harder. “It's so good to see you! Oh, and you too, Princess Luna!” “Yes. Quite,” Luna replied absent-mindedly. Her eyes were stuck staring intently at a spot somewhere in the outspread crowd. “Please excuse me.” She took off abruptly, chasing after something white, big, and that had a multi-coloured mane. Scootaloo looked back and forth between the crowd, which she now realized were all changelings, standing mindlessly around, and Thorax. “So, you like it here, too?” “Of course! The Tantabus is awesome!” Thorax beamed brighter than a laser-pointer. “It lets me practice my assertiveness, and the changelings are none the wiser!” He poked Scootaloo on the side. “So how did you figure it out?” “Figure what out?” “You know.” Thorax made a descriptive waving motion with his forehoof. “The test. The one by Big Blue Bertha?” he added, when he saw her confused look. [i]“Big Blue Bertha?”[/i] Scootaloo snorted. “That’s what Discord calls her.” Thorax nudged his head in the direction Luna had flown off. “It’s really simple, it’s actually—” “Thorax.” ‘Big Blue Bertha’ had apparently returned, and was now standing right beside him, glaring. “I seem to recall my sister explicitly stating you were urgently needed elsewhere.” Thorax cringed. “Oh, right.” In a blink of an eye he vanished, taking the crowd and the bucolic highland with him. The Princess pursed her lips when Scootaloo turned to question her. “What test was he talking about?” [i]Princess[/i] Luna—since in that moment it would have been easy to forget she was royalty—closed her eyes, and sighed as if she’d been hit. “I cannot tell you.” “Why not?” “Because that would ruin the test.” Scootaloo looked at Luna befuddled. “What kinda test even is that? Cheerilee never gave us tests that we didn’t know we were taking...oh.” Scootaloo smacked herself in the head. “It’s one of [i]those [/i]kinds of tests. Twilight’s told us all about the times Celestia made her...” Luna lifted a forehoof to interrupt. “I’m not testing you, Scootaloo. This test is quite unlike any other; one that many are set to fail or require copious amounts of time to solve—it took Thorax days. All I can say is that despite being made for good there is an inherent flaw to Tantabus’ design, and [i]it isn’t at all your concern[/i],” she emphasized, subtly hinting towards the open air again. One thousand and one days worth of Crusading for a Cutie Mark came to Scootaloo’s mind, but she thought of none of them. Instead she went with what she usually ran with. WWRDD? And the answer most certainly was not ‘give up’. “Okay,” Scootaloo said resolutely. She began to understand why Luna’d claimed she had a one-track mind, when she realized her wings were already outstretched. “If I don’t know where the problem is, I will just have to go find it!” She shot off. No other word could have quite described it, despite there never being any gunpowder or hammer, let alone any need for a trigger. She blew into the great expanse, into vast nothingness, and found herself surrounded with pure bliss. But all she could see was open air. There were no clouds, there was no ground. There were no hills, and there was no sound. She landed back where she’d left off not much later, her wings sagging, wanting to pull her back up. “There is nothing here.” She scuffed her hoof on the grass, until an errant thought gave her pause. “Wait a minute. Can't I just imagine myself fixing the problem? Since this is a dream?” “You could,” Luna admitted. The alicorn hadn’t budged from her spot. “If you knew what it was.” “That doesn’t help.” Scootaloo paced absently. “How am I supposed to fix a problem that I don’t even know?” “That.” Luna’s forehoof pushed into her chest and stopped her from trotting in circles. “Scootaloo, [i]is[/i] the problem. Known unknowns and unknown unknowns.” Scootaloo got a look on her face like somepony had just told her that flying was just falling and missing the ground. “The what now?” “Things you are aware you don’t know, and things you aren’t. Especially the latter,” Luna elaborated. Scootaloo's lips mouthed the words as she ran her mind through what had been said. “Well I know there is a problem,” Scootaloo said, “doesn’t that mean I already know what I’m missing?” Luna shook her head. “You are aware there is [i]a[/i] problem. For all you know, there could a dozen others, you know nothing about.” “Okay, so how do I found out what problems there are?” Luna didn’t answer. Scootaloo plonked herself on her plot, and laid her head on her forehooves. Her wings beat of their own accord, her brain too occupied to care. [i]Flap Flap FLAP![/i] Scootaloo suddenly careened to one side. Her wings, being apparently cognizant of her frustrated emotional state, proceeded flap too hard once, sending her sprawling on her side. Scootaloo hummed thoughtfully. She got up, flapped her wings, and landed on her side again. She repeated the process several times before putting a hoof to her chin. “It doesn’t hurt.” Few things in life can look more daunting than an alicorn’s bemused stare. “You wish there to be pain in your dream?” “Well… no,” Scootaloo admitted. “It’s just, why [i]doesn’t[/i] it hurt? “I see.” Luna said. “Have you ever hurt yourself before?” Scootaloo barked a laugh. “Well, I mean, yeah. Just not quite like [i]that[/i].” The thought alone made her cringe. “Landing on a wing probably [i]hurts[/i].” “It does.” Luna pursed her lips. Social cues aren’t hard, so long you don’t inquire anything from a tight-lipped alicorn. “I fail to see where you are going with this, however.” “I mean,” Scootaloo looked around for help, finding only thin air. An idea struck her. “You said it yourself: everything here is how I imagine it to be. The ground, the sky, the runway.” Yeah, [i]the runway[/i] was back. Scootaloo got the thought to rename it ‘the Run-Down’. “I can imagine whatever I want, and whatever I do, becomes real. “But if I stay here I will never know what any of it [i]really[/i] feels like. [i]Known whats-its and you know[/i]. For all I know I could be completely wrong, and there could a [i]bazillion[/i] things better that I would not think to imagine.” Her gaze swept above, landing on the horizon. “There's more to life than just what's inside my head.” Now, there was no breeze. No sound. She stood atop her mountain spike, a smile having climbed its way to her muzzle. The pony’s opposite her, however, had only grown more and more grim. “Scootaloo.” A beautifully plumed royal wing reached out and enveloped her. The motion was too rushed and stiff to feel reassuring, but Scootaloo got the notion that it wasn't her it was supposed to comfort. “I wish I had learned that when I was as young as you.” Scootaloo squirmed in the uncomfortable hug, but only so she could wrap her own wing around her. They separated and Scootaloo could breathe freely again. “You're free to stay here in the Tantabus for as long as you desire.” Luna's wings spread, ready to make her leave. “Know that you are always welcome here.” “[i]Alright![/i]” Scootaloo hopped up and somersaulted in excitement. She eyed the ledge hungrily, pausing just short of jumping. “But wait, how do I get back here again?” “That’s easy.” Luna winked. “All you have to do is—” [i]“Wake up!”[/i] Something nudged her insistently. Something that was calling her name, repeating the three syllables [i]ad nautilus[/i] (or however Sweetie Belle says it should be spelled) and all-around managing to make her wish she was blind and in a coma. Scootaloo yawned, her eyes slowly fluttering open. The light burned. She tried to cover herself with a wing, but was surprised to find the appendage far too short and stubby for that. “Phew, for a minute there, I thought you'd ever wake up,” the raspy voice continued. Everything was checkered in red and white. Holding the colours in place were piles upon piles of papers. That’s when Scootaloo remembered what had made her fall asleep in the first place. She tried to inject her voice with enthusiasm, and failed miserably. “As if I'd miss out on spending time with the most awesome sister ever.” “Oh, really?” Rainbow Dash was looking at her an eyebrow cocked and loaded. “And here I thought I just caught you catching z's.” “No.” Scootaloo sputtered and muttered. “That's different. Schoolwork's boring!” Dash about to object, but chose to glance at all the homework piled up on every corner of their picnic blanket at the last second. “Okay, I'll give you that.” She bit the end of her red pen again. “But somepony's gotta do it. Twilight made you a tutor, and we need everypony we everypony.” Dash pushed aside a note of tiny scribbles, and muttered under her breath. [i]“She should really lay off on the essays.”[/i] Scootaloo moaned, and reached a hoof into a pile. Had she not recognized the chicken-scratch (or in this case, gryphon-scratch) she would have had a hard time parsing together whose paper she was even supposed to be grading. She’d gotten halfway through page one (there was something on the back as well, and not just doodles), before realizing she’d maybe read around ten words total. Her head sunk to her chest. Although it was fading, Scootaloo could still feel the spark of excitement at the tips of her primaries. No. Where they [i]should have been.[/i] “Rainbow Dash?” Scootaloo asked carefully. All the times she’d faked a quiver in her voice, it now came unbidden. “Can we go flying?” [I]“Ugh,”[/i] Rainbow retched, almost ripping the worksheet. The either eldritch runes or doctor’s prescription for some embarrassing medication, looked back at her. “Look, Scootaloo.” She sighed. “I told you: we all have to pitch in. We can go flying when we are do—” Rainbow stopped dead. She’d barely laid her eyes on Scootaloo when it all happened. The pen fell from her mouth, and she shook so little it was almost imperceptible. Then, it seemed, finally the most rash pegasus in Equestria took the time to learn social cues. She scooped Scootaloo up in her wing and started trotting off, a grin on her face. “...By which I mean yeah! We've earned a little break.”