"So, lemme get this straight... you guys have four alicorn princesses down there?" Flight looked astonished. "But all of the rest of the planets only ever got three..."

"Well, there's actually five now," Scootaloo corrected. "Princess Cadance had a baby a while back... Heart McFlurry or something? I dunno. But yeah. Five alicorns."

"And you're friends with one of them? That's crazy..."

"Yep, I've known Princess Twilight for years now. Though I didn't really know her all to well until... heh, guess that was about a year ago at this point. You guys got a calendar or anything?"

"I don't think that would really work even if we did," Kevin chimed in. "All the planets go around Solaris at different rates and stuff, so there's not even one unified Bureau calendar and time."

"Heh, right. Pretty weird for me to think about... I mean, until I started talking to Twilight, I went my whole life thinking that Equestria was the only planet. And I also thought that the sun went around us..." Scootaloo trailed off, looking ahead. "Hey, are those some of the berries you mentioned?" she asked, pointing at a voluminous green bush up ahead, to the left.

"Oh, yeah!" Kevin replied enthusiastically. He sped up, leaving Flight and Scootaloo to follow in his wake. By the time they reached his side, Kevin had already picked and eaten several of the orange fruit. "Mmm... I haven't had these in ages."

Flight picked a berry and looked at it in her hoof. "When did you have these, anyway? They sure aren't native around Dienna, and I've never seen them in the market there before."

"Oh, um... I used to go to my aunt's every year in Capricorn, remember? I had to go out and explore in the forest with my cousins."

Flight raised an eyebrow. "'Had to?'"

"Well, the forest was cool. And it had these cool berries, which I'd never seen before. But my cousins? They're a few years older than me, and they used to be such jerks. Haven't seen them in years... heh, not since my parents died, or a year or two before that. I wonder if they still suck..." Kevin trailed off, looking suddenly wistful.

"Prob'ly do," Scootaloo said, chewing on a mouthful of the berries. "Mmm, these are good. Don't think we got anything like this back in Ponyville... and I'd have noticed, believe me. Princess Twilight's friend Applejack was pretty invested in the fruit market."

"Lemme guess," Kevin said. "Apples?"

Scootaloo dramatically jerked her head back in a show of mock surprise. "What?! How in the hay did you guess that so easily?!" she exclaimed. Flight giggled, and Kevin smiled.

"Oh, I dunno. Just a lucky guess." Kevin looked back to the bush. "Y'know, we should probably save some of these, in case Cotton Fluff and Mochi want some. Or us."

Flight nodded. "We can put them in our saddlebags... you guys have enough room?" Kevin and Scootaloo nodded in affirmation. "Good." And then, all three of them started pulling off the little berries from their stems, making sure to focus on the ones that came easily (as those are the ripe ones, after all), and only the occasional orange berry made it into their hungering mouths. It was a bit of a trick to catch the berries in their hooves, so one couldn't blame Flight and Scootaloo both for flashing dirty looks in the direction of Kevin, who was using liberal amounts of magic to pluck from the bush a few salmonberries at a time. He grinned sheepishly whenever he caught one of their glares in his vision.

"Oh, Scootaloo, I do actually have another question if it's not too much trouble," Flight said after a few minutes of silence had passed. The orange filly, who by that point was already a little ways around the circumference of the bush, peered her head around its edge to look at Flight.

"Yeah, what's up?"

"I was just wondering... when we went back to the place where the ship had crashed... there was a name painted on the outside of the ship, in your letters. And it kinda looked like either an earth pony or a pegasus had done it. I was wondering... is that the name of the ship? The... Sweetieblue, was it?"

Scootaloo frowned. "Sweetiebloom, actually. And yeah, that's its name." She shrank back around the side of the bush. "Is that it?"

"Well, I also wanted to know... where does that name come from?"

From around the bush, Flight could hear the filly sigh. Kevin leaned into her ear and murmured, "I don't think she wants to talk about that."

"No, it's fine," Scootaloo said, still out of view. "And I heard that, Kevin. You need to work on your whispering, doofus."

"Heh, sorry."

"Anyway... that ship, the Sweetiebloom... it's named after my two best friends in the whole wide world. We used to have a group in Ponyville... it was just us three, and it was called the Cutie Mark Crusaders. We went on quests to find our cutie marks together, actually... and that we did." Flight heard Scootaloo sniffle. "That we did..."

"Why... why did you leave them behind?" Flight heard herself ask. She didn't really meant to say it; the words just kind of fell out and then she didn't feel like she could take it back.

"No, you have it all wrong... both of them left me long before I left them," Flight heard Scootaloo scowl. "Nnngh... let's talk about something else."

And so Flight and Kevin went back to picking berries but all the while they listened as Scootaloo sniffled from around the bush, out of sight.