Scootaloo had so many questions. Everything about the town was strange to her. From the concentric rings that formed it to why she needed to be booped—every question seemed to bring two friends. Candela was an interesting pony to meet, though she seemed far more Equestrian than Thestralian, owing to her being a pegasus.

As night fell, however, Scootaloo was called inside from her explorations. "What's up?"

"We're going to be flying north, but first I want all of you to get some practice Dream-flying. There's some guest beds at the end of the hall on your left." Excited to have her "big brother" back, Dream Thunder couldn't help but see how much Lyra and Sweetie were in love. Even when she visited, she didn't see this much of them interacting, but it was obvious they were so besotted by each other that Dream could rest a little easier knowing Lyra had found her special somepony.

Gasping in surprise, Scootaloo bounced up and down a few times. "Wait, right now?!"

"You need to go to sleep first."

Scootaloo froze mid jump and just landed back on all fours with a deadpan look on her face. "So you got me all excited to go to sleep?"

Dream cocked an eyebrow at Scootaloo. "You'd think it would be hard, but I have a trick for helping ponies sleep."

"I still want to see how you handle getting Lyra into a Dream. Tufts said it gave him a headache trying to do it." Trotting after Dream, Scootaloo was engaging on her secret mission. Tufts had instructed her to remember what kind of face Dream would pull after getting Lyra into the dream.

"Well, you understand he's an old bat. It's gotta be harder to do that kind of thing at his age." Dream completely ignored the fact that, technically, Tufts was only eight years old. She opened the back door of the house she shared with her mother and found Lyra and Sweetie talking with Candela on the couch. "Hey, Mum. Are you two ready to get this Dreaming started?"

"I've been keeping them company. Will you be gone for long?" Candela had enjoyed chatting with Lyra and Sweetie, but she knew they were in Thestralia on holiday and didn't intend to spend it all chatting in her living room.

"I told you, Mum, I have some fill-ins covering for me. They might not be able to do it as easily, but working together they can get it done. I'll spend time with them and be their taxi for as long as they're staying." Her other job, that she'd given herself even before Princess Screech had Dreamed to her asking, was overseeing Scootaloo's safety.

Candela let out a sigh. "I'll miss my little filly is all."

"Muuuum…" Walking forward, Dream Thunder embraced her mother and squeezed her in a hug. "I'll miss you too."

"Come on, Scoots, let's get comfortable for this trip. Did you get booped?" Lyra asked.

"I'm too excited to sleep!"

Sweetie walked past Scootaloo and grinned over the filly's back at Lyra. "I heard Dream has a trick to help with that. Truth be told, I'm pretty excited too."

Lyra followed Sweetie and Scootaloo down to the bedroom they were sharing. There was a double bed that would be big enough for all three—not that they'd be on the bed for long. She climbed up on the bed, trying to focus her thoughts to be calm so she didn't mess with Dream Thunder like she had Tufts.

"Lyra?" Sweetie patted the bed beside her. "You look like you're in a daydream already."

"Just trying to get my head calm for Dream. I remember how miserable Tufts looked." Climbing onto the bed with her pack on her back, Lyra managed a yawn. "And here I thought it might be hard to—"

"Sleep." As she said the word, Dream Thunder reached a hoof to Lyra and used the bond between her, Sweetie, and Scootaloo to press her will upon the others too. They never stood a chance against the weight of her power. "Now for the hard part. I hope that old bat was just playing a joke on me."

"STOP DROPPING HAMMERS ON ME!" Dream resorted to shouting as she pulled Lyra forcefully into the Dreaming. Sweetie was already there, as was Scootaloo. "What was with the hammers, Lyra?"

Lyra blinked in surprise, then looked up and shooed a flying hammer away with her magic. "Uh, I don't know? What was happening?"

"When I tried to pull you into the Dreaming, I opened a door into your dream to get you, but you told me it was Being Hit on the Head Lessons. Next thing I know there's an endless cascade of hammers hitting my head, and all I can do is shout ooooh or sometimes wahhh. Every time I managed the latter, you told me I was getting better." Reaching one of her wings up to rub her head, Dream expended energy to shove the pain away.

"I bet it was the wrong room," Lyra said. "You were probably looking for complaints or an argument."

Scootaloo had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing. She'd seen the extra hammer that Lyra had dealt with, and had committed Dream's face to memory so she could tell Tufts about it. That's when she realized she was a bat pony again.

Running around and flapping her wings, Scootaloo screeched with excitement when she actually lifted her hooves off the ground—and each subsequent time. "I CAN FLY!"

Dream gave Scootaloo some time to burn off her initial excitement before she stepped in. "Okay, time for flying lessons."

Having been watching Scootaloo with some fondness, Lyra walked up to stand before Dream. "Pilot Banana reporting for duty!" She almost cracked a giggle when Sweetie rushed to her side.

"Sergeant First Class Cherries!"

Scootaloo quickly rushed over and stood beside Lyra while trying to imitate her stance. "Private Mango, sir!"

"Mango, eh?" Dream marched up and down before her "troops" a few times. "Well, the first—and hardest—part of flying is getting wings. Congratulations, you all passed."

Screeching again in excitement, Scootaloo had to clamp down on her exuberance.

"So, the trick is, you need to throw yourself at the ground and miss."

Lyra struggled not to laugh, she really did, but was ultimately unsuccessful in her efforts to suppress her giggling.

"The second trick is that it isn't just your wings that let you fly. Your forelegs, back legs, neck, and even your tail are important too. Spread your wings and start gliding." With a tickle of her magic, Dream made the ground go away and gave each of them their own little updraft.

Sweetie panicked at first. She hadn't gotten her wings out in time and was falling—but oddly she wasn't actually falling away from the others. More curious now, she spread her wings and felt warm air lift her up and keep her airborne—still at exactly the same height as the others.

Scootaloo was already doing loops and spirals by the time Sweetie got herself level. Each new stunt pulled another screech from her throat. "This is the best thing ever!"

"Okay, good. You've all got the hang of static gliding. It's really very easy to just hold everything out and let your wings do the work. I'll try to keep the winds neutral on our way north. Flapping—you should try that now—is how you get more height and speed. You can flap your wings straight down if you just want height, or row them from forward to back for speed—or you can do a mix of the two for a bit of both." Dream demonstrated each of the flapping styles for the other ponies. "Now you try."

The lesson continued until all three could fly reasonably well for a species they weren't born as—though as could be expected, Scootaloo took to flying much easier than her guardians.

"Right. Now everypony grab a mango or two and let's head north." Spreading her wings and tilting them, Dream Thunder soared over to a waiting mango tree that seemed to follow her and exist wherever she needed it. Of course, being a bat pony meant she needed it practically everywhere.

The moment she saw the tree, Scootaloo's eyes widened and she literally willed herself to home in on one of the mangoes on its branches.

The poor fruit never stood a chance. Four hungry bat ponies descended upon it and feasted on two mangoes each with a lot of excited bat noises that amounted to sighs of delight and screeches when the fruit didn't peel as easily as they'd hoped.

Sweetie managed to shake the fruit-hunger first and blinked a few times as she realized what she'd been doing. "Alright, that was weird. Does that happen every time a hungry bat pony sees mangoes?"

"Come on, you've met Tufts, and Mum isn't far behind him. She talks a good game about not being fruit crazed, but have you seen an apple cake last more than the time it takes to cool out of the oven?" Stretching her wing out, Lyra snagged a third mango and stashed it in her backpack.

"Has everyone eaten what they can?" When a round of affirmative noises met Dream's question, she spread her wings and let out an excited screech. "Come on! Let's go!"

Lyra realized the backpack was gone again, but assumed that was the magic of this particular Dream. Spreading her wings, she confidently flapped her way into the air and took off after Dream Thunder.

The landscape of the Dreamtime flashed by in fits and starts. One moment Lyra could identify Cowwarr and its surrounds, the next she saw mountain ranges, then coastline dominated her view. She was so distracted by the scenery that she didn't see the threat until Scootaloo screamed.

Panic rose in Scootaloo as the bat-like thing tried to grab her a second time. It looked only marginally worse than it smelled, and it smelled like something had long-since died. Its wings were torn and weeping green goop, and they looked to be all sinew and bones with no muscle or guts to them.

Sweetie's blood chilled and she swung around quickly to face the monster. She glared at the pony skull just as the creature wrapped its claws around Scootaloo and disappeared—with the filly in its grip. "Where'd it go?!"

"A namorodo! It grabbed her and pulled her into her own nightmare. Touch me!" Dream Thunder was caught betwixt fury and fear. She stretched her wings as wide as she could and held herself in place with the force of her will. "Hurry!"

Lyra was faster than Sweetie, but they both touched Dream quickly enough and were pulled out of the Dreaming and into a dark and musty place. What should have been a calm and bright dreamscape was twisting itself into a fleshy nightmare.

Shaking her head, Sweetie looked around and spotted Scootaloo on the ground with the monster standing over her. She wasn't an earth pony at this exact moment, but that wasn't going to stop her from entering a crash-dive aimed at the monster.

Her mind racing, Lyra could see that Sweetie was going to hit it just after the thing sunk its fangs in Scootaloo's belly. "Come on, all it takes to be a unicorn is to think I am. I'm a unicorn, and no Dreaming is going to stop—"

Lyra began to plummet. Focusing all her attention on Scootaloo, she executed a dual teleport that sent Scootaloo into the air and Lyra took her place.

The creature was confused. One moment it had its ambushed prey at its mercy, the next it had a new prey. Not particularly smart, it grabbed onto Lyra and pulled her into Lyra's own private nightmare.

It should have been easy. All bat ponies were simple to pull into dreams. The first moment the creature noticed something had gone wrong was when something large and heavy fell on its head.

"You wanted inside my head? You got it. Have another foot!" What looked like a paper cutout of a misshapen foot lifted off the namorodo and crashed down again.

Dream Thunder grabbed Scootaloo out of the air and rushed down to the ground. "Sweetie, I can't go into Lyra's head, but you can. I'll pull you out in five minutes, okay?"

"Why can't—" Sweetie Drops didn't get any more words out before she popped into place in Lyra's dream, only to witness her wife beating the monster around its bony head with a large salmon.

Lyra could feel Sweetie's presence, but it felt a lot more right in her head than even Tufts had. "Hey, Sweetie! Grab a fish and come help me!"

Finding a golf bag full of salmon at her side, Sweetie grabbed one with a foreleg and walked on her back legs over to the monster—then she joined in beating it up. "What's going on? Why did you pull it into your own dream?"

"It's like what Tufts said, my head is strange and not friendly to intruders." Finding her salmon not as effective as she would have liked, Lyra grabbed an old shotgun out of her own golfing bag. After six shots with the thing—and six misses—she only managed to prove that she was the best Upper Class Twit of the Year.

Swapping to a black pudding, Sweetie proved herself at least more competent at connecting blows with the namorodo. "So why can I be in here?"

"You're my straight mare. The love of my life. You're always welcome in—Good shot with that one—You're always welcome in my head." Tossing the gun aside as being useless, Lyra started shouting at the monster. "Ni! Ni!"

Never before had the namorodo faced such fury or been so powerless within a dream. The creature it had latched onto had looked like a wingless bat pony, but now it realized its mistake. It wasn't a wingless bat pony, it was some kind of demon slayer!

With the last of its strength, the namorodo fled Lyra's Dream and escaped back into the Dreamtime. Free of her oppressive mind, it quickly regained a little strength and confidence.

"Figured she'd drive you out of her own head. Stubborn as a sack full of hammers that mare. Why don't you and I have a little chat about attacking fillies and what oblivion feels like?" Dream Thunder gathered her will and focused it down to a tiny dot in the middle of the namorodo. The crackling, dry sounds of its flesh and bones imploding into that point echoed throughout the Dreamtime.

When it reached an infinitesimal point, the namorodo ceased to exist.

Lyra, Sweetie, and Scootaloo all popped back into the Dreamtime at the same instant. Scootaloo rushed to Lyra and dove into a hug with her, then used a wing to pull Sweetie closer too. "What was that?"

Devoid of her bat wings, Lyra held Scootaloo while she looked up at Dream. "I'll second that. What was that?"

"Namorodo. Like a vampire thing. They pull people into their own nightmares and eat them from the inside out until they're nothing more than a husk. We hunt them down whenever we find them, but sometimes they hide in the Dreamtime or the real world to avoid our hunters." Walking closer to her friends, Dream felt conflicted. She wanted to reassure them, but this wasn't the place to dawdle—as had been demonstrated. "We should keep moving."

Sweetie cleared her throat. "We're going to be moving on foot now."

Looking Sweetie in the eyes, Dream realized she was losing an argument she didn't even realize she was having and before she'd even started it. "But that'll take days!"

"This is a Dream, right? Tufts stretched time in our shared Dream so that we could spend tons of time hunting for our trees to make our didgeridoos. Can't you do the same?" Lyra asked.

"Not rea—Well, I—" Dream started and stopped a few times before finally sighing. "Let me try. Normally I bend distance, but I could try to do the same with time."

Satisfied with the change in plans, Sweetie turned to look at Lyra. "How did you get rid of your battiness?"

"Just focus on being who you are. You're an earth pony, Bon Bon, ground yourself and remember what it feels like to be you." Turning her attention to Scootaloo, Lyra picked her up with her magic. "No matter what happens, Scoots, you can believe that I'll always be trying to help you."

"Next time just teleport me away. You don't have to put yourself in danger like that." The time for being stoic and strong was long gone for Scootaloo, she wanted a hug and reassurance, and between Lyra and Sweetie she got both. "I was scared for you."

"You want to ride on my back for a bit? It might not be as comfortable as flying, but—"

"Yes please!" The speed she cut in made Scootaloo blush a little, but she just wanted to climb up on Lyra's back and hide in her mane. So she did.

At first Sweetie Drops had trouble finding herself. There was a lot of bat plastered on around her, but here and there were cracks where her ground-pounding self was visible. She worked at those spots and widened them until the image of a bat pony mare crumbled to dust and left just Sweetie.

"I worked it out, Ly—Oh, getting a ride are we? You two look after each other and I'll deal with any other nasties that show up!" Despite what Scootaloo had told her, Sweetie had no trouble seeing this as a mothering role for herself.

Seeing both Lyra and Sweetie in their natural forms boosted Scootaloo's spirits further. She felt her life falling back into certainty and took strength from that. She managed to smile at Sweetie, a mare she knew had kicked a bugbear so hard it ran away, and felt her worried shakes subside.

Dream Thunder cleared her throat to get the little family's attention. "Alright. I think I've got this worked out. Are you ready to start walking?"

"Please. Guardponies don't walk." Sweetie stomped one of her hooves on the ground and looked around. They were in some kind of forest it seemed, though the trees were all huge and irregularly spaced. "Just point us in the right direction and we'll run there."

"You ready, Scoots?" Lyra asked.

"Yeah!"

"Ugh, walking would really be—I can't even fly in this forest without—You're going to make me run too, aren't you?" Dream Thunder favored flying over running. In her head she tried to figure out a better path that would take them out of the forest they were now in. "Okay, this way!"

The feel of Lyra moving under her was far more comforting than Scootaloo could ever have imagined. She'd grown used to the routine of running with Lyra and Sweetie in the weeks since the two moved into her home that she felt like they really were an odd little family.

Wrapping her bat wings around Lyra's neck, Scootaloo clung to her and tilted her head sideways to listen to the beat of Lyra's heart.

The forest gave way to low scrubland, which was when Dream Thunder spread her wings and started flying again. Her legs ached and she mentally chided herself for not telling Lyra and Sweetie she needed a break, but she didn't want to admit that galloping for hours on end wasn't something she was capable of.

Dream's problem was she had to keep close to Lyra and Sweetie to keep bending time, but unlike bending distance this didn't make the trip shorter for them, it just made it short for everyone else.

The banks of mango trees around Canberra were a sign that they'd almost arrived. A group of circling bat ponies swooped down to intercept the little party and escort them into the center of the city where it was safe.

"Okay. Now I need to wake you all up. Lyra, no hammers." Dream gave Lyra a hard look. "Or feet or pianos."

"What about an after-dinner mint?" Lyra asked, only to feel herself waking up. Yawning, she opened her eyes to see Scootaloo looking right at her. "Hey. How you feeling?"

"Like I slept for a month straight. I miss those wings." Scootaloo looked over her back to ensure she was once more a pegasus. "But that might change."

"You made it!" Robin screeched and bounced on all four legs into the room. "Lyra! Sweetie! It's great to see you both again!" Using her wings and forelegs, Robin scooped up both mares into a big hug. She then paused and looked at Scootaloo. "Uh, hi!"

Scootaloo looked up at the bat pony. She looked younger than most of the others she'd seen, but still much older than herself. "Hi!"

"You must be Scootaloo?"

"That's me. How far did we just come?" Sitting up, Scootaloo found herself grabbed by Robin's wing and pulled into the hug along with Lyra and Sweetie.

Sweetie hugged back her sister-in-law. "You'd need to ask Lyra."

"You know how far it is from one side of Equestria to the other?" Lyra asked.

Releasing her grip, Robin couldn't help but study Scootaloo. She'd already got a little of her story, but it was such a treat to see an Equestrian flier that she got caught staring and blushed. "Sorry. It's just you remind me of Dream when she was little."

"They don't get many pegasi up here, you see," Dream Thunder said.

Scootaloo turned her attention back to Lyra and nodded. "Kinda. Mom and Dad took me for a lot of trips, though I think I slept through a lot of them."

"Well, imagine going from one side to the other about three times."

"Really?!"

"Yeah. That would have been quite the run." Lyra looked over at Sweetie and winked at her.

Looking around the room, Scootaloo turned and narrowed her eyes at Lyra. "How many sisters do you have?"

Standing up, Lyra made a show of counting Dream and Robin before turning back to Scootaloo. "That's both of them. Why, did you have a suggestion for another?"

"So, now we're here, what are we doing?" Sweetie climbed off the bed and stretched her shoulders. "And is there anywhere I could go for a run?"

Dream turned to Robin. "We ran into a namorodo on the way here. It grabbed Scootaloo. You should let the hunters know. I unmade it, but there may be more."

Robin turned to look at Scootaloo then back to Dream. "How'd she—How'd you stop it if it grabbed her?"

"Easy. I threw our sister at it. Poor wretched thing didn't stand a chance." Dream was trying to put the best face on it she could. "I think I'm more shaken up over it than she is. I took my eyes off them for a second, it's not all that easy keeping Lyra in the Dreamtime."

Turning to speak to Lyra, Robin realized the three visitors had left the room. She let out a little screech of surprise and raced to the doorway only to see them standing outside discussing where they would go. "What are you doing? I have your holiday planned to the—"

"I want to try everything!" Scootaloo said.

Sweetie Drops couldn't help but smile at the enthusiasm. "We will eventually, but we should probably check-in with the Equestrian consulate here before we do anything else. They should know we are in the city and doing fin— Oh, are you coming too, Robin?"

"I have a whole day of excitement planned!" Robin looked around the three. "Canberra's famous royal mango trees? Parliament house? The botanical gardens?"

"We'll go see those after seeing the consulate. We're E.U.P. Guardponies, Spud, we should let them know we're here." Walking over to Robin, Lyra put one foreleg around her shoulders. "You've got some time off, right?"

"Y-Yeah."

"Well, come with us. Have a holiday!"

Sweetie: Marry a problem, or marry it's solver?

"Both." Sweetie looked aside at Lyra with a smirk. "Definitely both."

So I do this "Ask X" thing. X can be any pony within the story. You can ask them anything and they will definitely, hopefully reply. Keep the questions appropriate to the age-rating of the stories, and they will answer the best question in the author notes of the next chapter. The more votes a comment has the more likely I will get it to the right pony to answer. Try to keep it to one question per post! They will pick one question per chapter.

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