“You think Cotton’s gonna be able to find her?” Kaylee asked, looking worried. She had followed Scootaloo off away from the clearing, over to where she had spoken with Mochi not long before.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be fine,” Scootaloo replied. She had sat down next to the stump and lowered her saddlebags to the ground, rifling through them intently. Kaylee was a little confused at what she was doing, but didn’t ask; instead, she sat on the opposite side of the stump and just listened. Listened to the adult ponies talking somewhat loudly back at the clearing.

“Of course we accept her and we’ll call her whatever she likes, but—”

“But what, Later? Why’re you making there be a ‘but’ involved? Just call her the right thing, and there’s no drama.”

“Mochi...” Clove replied, exasperated. “Of course it would be wonderful if it were as easy as that, but what about her friend? This has just opened up a needless split in the group. It just wasn’t a good time.”

“Wasn’t a good time?! Was there ever gonna be a good time? She was obviously hurtin’, or else she wouldn’ta come out and said it in the first place.”

“I mean... she could have waited until we got back to Dienna,” Later replied, her tone cautious. Kaylee could almost picture the mare, leaned back, trying not to set Mochi off. “Maybe until we’re out of danger, so that something that might cause a rift wouldn’t happen just as we need to stick together.”

“Ugh, you ponies,” Mochi replied. She said something else, but Kaylee tuned it out as she closed her eyes. She appreciated what Mochi was saying—she really did—but she supposed that Later and Clove did have a point; if she hadn’t spoken her mind right then, Flight wouldn’t have run away. Why couldn’t she have just waited? She’d already waited a long time—years—so why was waiting just a little while longer so difficult?

It didn’t really matter, of course. It had already happened, and everypony already knew. Kaylee sighed, and looked over to Scootaloo. The orange filly across the stump had stopped digging through her bags, having apparently found what she was looking for: her journal, which she placed open on the surface of the stump, and a graphick that she held between her teeth. Kaylee watched as Scootaloo’s eyes scanned the page for a few moments before stopping on a word—one in that odd script of hers that seemed so familiar and yet so foreign all at once. Scootaloo leaned over and erased it before beginning to graphick in another word in its place.

Just as Kaylee was about to ask what Scootaloo was doing, the pegasus looked up. “Say, how do you spell your name, anyway?” she asked, somewhat muffled from the graphick held between her teeth. “K-A-L-E-I-G-H? K-A-L-E-Y?”

Kaylee blinked. “Erm, no... it’s ‘K-A-Y-L-E-E’.”

“Sweet, thanks,” Scootaloo replied, grinning as she looked back down and sketched out what appeared to be six letters. From there, Kaylee watched as Scootaloo repeated this process over and over, finding a certain five-letter word and replacing it with a six-letter one.

“Wh-what are you doing?” Kaylee asked, even though she had a pretty good guess already.

“Just correcting a few mistakes I made,” Scootaloo replied, not even bothering to look up. “Pretty silly now that I think about it, but hey, nopony’s perfect.”

Kaylee rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to do that, you know. Really.”

Scootaloo looked up and nodded. “I know. But I want to. Can’t have this stupid journal be wrong, can I?” She paused, and her face scrunched. “At least not about that.”

Kaylee shrugged and just kept watching as, mesmerisingly, Scootaloo erased, wrote, erased, wrote, and flipped the page a dozen times more.