"Huh? Rainbow?"

Rainbow Dash looked up from the fireside, where she was lying flat on her stomach, a quill between her teeth and—though she couldn't see it—ink stains giving her the appearance of a deep, navy mustache. Spike was standing at the bottom of the library staircase, rubbing at his eyes with a claw, an empty mug clenched firmly in the other.

"Hey Spike!" Rainbow said, confused momentarily by the strange sensation of trying to speak around the feather that was clenched in her teeth. "What's up?"

"Not much," Spike said, as Rainbow turned her head back to the parchment in front of her. She hastily began to scribble another sentence on it, trying to hold back any thoughts of 'this is terrible', or 'what point am I even trying to make with this sentence?', because awesome ponies didn't miss Writeoffs. "What are you doing, anyway?"

"Writing contest," Rainbow said, sharply, crossing out a word she had ruined while trying to speak. "The deadline's in about ten minutes and I'm not missing my chance to enter something."

"Oh, is this one of those Daring Do contests you always go on about?" Spike flumped into an armchair beside her, all tiredness suddenly vanished from his expression because dammit I've only got five minutes to go, I can't keep track of all this character business!

"Yeah," Rainbow replied. "And I've spent [i]all day[/i] trying to think of something, but I haven't had any good ideas yet. So I figured I could just write something and send it in anyway, and hope nobody notices that it's heavily rushed, riddling with tense errors, and completely unconnected to the prompt."

For a moment, Spike sat in silence—or the relative silence of the crackling fire and the scritch-scratching of Rainbow's quill on the parchment before her. He let out a yawn (ha! see! I [i]can[/i] remember this stuff!) and dragged himself up to his feet, realising that—for the next five minutes, at least—Rainbow Dash wasn't really going to be up for any kind of conversation. He started his weary trudge to the kitchen, intent on refilling his mug of cocoa.

Five minutes later, and a mug of warm, chocolatey goodness in claw, Spike returned to the front room to find Rainbow Dash sitting, proudly holding a rolled-up scroll in her mouth.

"Hey Spike?" she asked. "Would you mind sending this?"

Spike took the scroll from her, opened it up, and gave it a quick read. It did nothing. There was no message, no theme, no character progression and nothing of any real interest at all. Raising an eyebrow, he looked back up at Rainbow.

"You sure you want me to send this?" He waited for the nod, which came vigorously and far, far too quickly. The submission deadline must have passed; he hoped she'd be okay submitting a few minutes late. Maybe there was a grace period? "Well, okay. It's your funeral."