We traveled east under that rainbow sky towards the rising sun.

Making distance was surprisingly easy. While there weren’t a lot of forests, the endless acres of growing cornfields were perfect cover. Even when we didn’t have those, the country roads were so sparsely used and few and far between that the soybean fields weren’t intimidating to cross either. When a vehicle did occasionally appear while wading through soybean plants, I just got low to the ground and Ruby laid behind me: it was the only tactic you could use in the middle of a field. And I was so dirty and covered in mud that at a distance it seemed to work.

“ ...but then Princess Luna was there instead of Minuette and she wanted me to stand behind her -but I wouldn't. Princess Luna told me I was in a nightmare but even after she told me that I still couldn’t wake up. Discord was still there and she told me to relax and that she was going to cast a spell to make him go away. I asked her to teach it to me and she did. She explained it, but in feeling. Then, we did it together,” Ruby recounted her dream from last night to me. It started like her usual nightmare but it quickly went off script when Luna appeared.

“ ...I was so tired of being scared of him,” she continued after a moment of silence. “I wanted to protect you and our friends and Princess Luna taught me how. I was so angry at him! So angry it hurt. And then… that was it, I think?” she finished.

“Did you know your horn... exploded?”

“No but I could tell something was wrong. I think… I remember you talking to Princess Luna… And there were stars everywhere. I think she was talking to them.”

“I don’t remember seeing any stars,” I said, then remembered she was talking about some kind of shared dreamscape. “What was she saying to them? Was it what I was reading out of the notebook?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear what either of you were saying. You were both holding me too tightly.”

In a way, that’s exactly what we were doing. Walking for hours with someone, there were long intervals of silence where we just enjoyed each other's company. In that particular moment, she couldn't see my face from my back, but I was hiding a smile weakening with grateful tears.

Some time during the walk I had to check with Ruby but she didn’t know where our friends were either. From what I read the night before, Comet Tail was apparently at Carrot’s. I didn’t know about Minuette and Carrot Top though. Without any electronics or means of contacting them, we had to just hope they were okay and that we’d see them again.

I explained about the longest point in the Sonic Rainboom and thinking it was the direction Rainbow Dash went. My daughter agreed with my reasoning, seeing as we had no better lead on where to go besides all the way back to Creighton. Even into the early afternoon the colors in the sky could still be made out. They were especially still clear in the direction we were heading and that made me more sure this was the right direction. We didn’t know what we would find at the end of this rainbow, but we were hopeful for the first time in a while -especially me.

Ruby only rode on my back half the time and I wasn’t going to protest that. Despite how good I still felt from that morning, after walking for hours my legs were getting sore and tired, especially my hind legs. My neck was getting a little sore too, but nothing a little slouching didn’t solve. I was so determined to find more ponies though or find someone who could help us. I wasn’t sure how far we had to go to find that, but every time I needed motivation I just had to look back up at the sky.

Eventually though, we did take a break. When we hit a river we had to find a bridge to cross it. There was ample shade along the river and we decided to stop on a rockier bank to wash the dirt and mud off of ourselves, mostly me. We were finding mostly corn fields now and signs of natural landscapes were starting to appear so I didn't think I needed the dirt 'camouflage' anymore.

The water was shockingly cold at first, but as we soaked it became more tolerable and nice on my legs. Once my dirt was getting runny Ruby dug the loofah out of our bags and, with it wrapped around her fetlock, she tried to gently rub the rest of the mud out of my coat: buddy system.

Underneath the mud was a lot of dried blood. And underneath the dried blood were tender lines etched into my coat. My barrel was mostly fine, just peppered with bare circles of skin in a roughed up coat here and there. My hind legs had messy ‘lines’ to them. The way the fur stopped and started around the relatively unassuming lines made me think of really messy stitching, like a haphazardly fixed stuffed animal.

Well, that’s not too bad, all things considered.

“ ...Mom?” Ruby asked me. She stopped washing my back. I turned around to look at her and she looked back up at me with a pained look on her face. “ ...how badly were you hurt?”

I craned my neck around to see what she was looking at. There was a sharp pain in my neck when I did: I forgot about my sore neck. I couldn’t quite turn my neck around as freakishly far back as I thought I could. Carefully, I tried to look down my back anyway.

I could just make out a long row of indented streaks down my back, like the flesh had been torn apart and healed back. My flesh in the grooves was bare and pinkish. I frowned and slowly turned my neck around the other way. There was a similar claw pattern down my other side.

Yeah, those were some scars alright.

“Huh,” I muttered, feeling a little woozy at the sight. I calmed my breathing. “Maybe... the coat will still grow back?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No,” I said and petted my daughter’s mane. My daughter hugged me back. Admittedly, it hurt my self-esteem a little. I was so used to my purple by now it was unpleasant to see it broken up like that. It also looked oddly... inappropriate. Like I had a torn shirt I couldn’t take off now. “It’s not that bad. It’s not like I lost an eye,” I said, trying to reassure her. I could tell I said the wrong thing because she squeezed me tighter. “Hey now, they’re… battle scars! That’s cool, right?” I held one leg around her back and pet her mane some more.

“Yeah, I guess,” she agreed with a slight smile. “I just feel bad I couldn’t help sooner.”

“Sooner? You literally blew them up! You were amazing,” I reminded her. I ever so gently prodded her horn with the underside of my hoof. It was a lot less hot and jagged than last night. “How’s the horn?”

“It’s... sore. I got dizzy using it this morning,” she explained, trying to look up and see it. “It still works though. I think I’m just exhausted.” I pulled her against me and rubbed her back gratefully. We did it: I protected her and Luna managed to fix her horn. The marks on my body were marks she didn’t have to have.

After a moment she squirmed. “Mom, you’re getting mud on me,” she whined into my chest.

“Okay, okay,” I relented. I let go and we resumed cleaning me off. Once I was washed and rinsed about as well as I could get I turned to my daughter and gave her the same treatment she gave me.

“Do you want me to use the body wash?” I asked her while trying to rinse my mud out of the loofah without losing it in the running water.

“No, I don’t want to contaminate the river,” she explained.

Oh. Of course. I agreed to her reason and just gently scrubbed the mud off her tummy and muzzle. I had her hold out her forelegs so I could wash them and she squirmed a bit at the brushing texture of the loofah. Then I had her turn around and I did her hindlegs. In her fits of giggles she kept whacking me with her tail.

Maybe the scars weren’t so bad if it meant protecting that laugh.

After cleaning her off well enough, and doing a little splashing, we put everything back into our bags and continued along the river’s edge. There wasn’t a towel in our bags so we just dried off the slow way.

Ruby set the pace among the riverside trees. Maybe she was feeling playful or had some kind of instinctive urge to run to dry off. I followed after her, still a little sore but muscles cooled enough I could provoke them into a kind of fast amble. The extra air in my lungs made me feel free, almost wild. I was eager to be able to try galloping again as soon as I could. Especially if I could do it with my little Pinchy.

For now, I didn’t have to break into any kind of gallop to keep pace with my daughter. Her ‘trot’ was more of a fast walk. I was happy to see her try to run anyway. No matter how many times she wiped out, she’d eventually try again.

“At this rate I’m going to have to give you another bath,” I teased her as she got up again. I wondered why it wasn’t so instinctive for her as it was for me: I figured out a gallop once I stopped thinking about it and just listened to the way my limbs wanted to move. My guess was it was just her being more out of practice. Or maybe she was at an awkward stage in her growth. We really were a blend of our human memories and pony instincts like that.

We found a bridge and after several minutes of watching and listening we made a cautious, uneventful crossing. Afterwards we crossed the next few cornfields in a diagonal direction to re-distance ourselves from what was probably a fairly major road.

Back in the cornfields my little gem hopped back onto me. While we weaved through corn roads I heard a slight rumble from my back. I turned back a bit to eye her. It clicked after a moment: food. I was pretty hungry too. Not too thirsty thanks to the river though.

“Hungry?” I confirmed with her as I eyed the growing stalks of corn around us. I wondered if they were edible unripe.

“Yeah. Did you pack any food?” she replied. She didn’t seem to catch what I was considering. Or she did and dismissed it because she knew it wouldn’t be a good idea. In retrospect they were probably coated in pesticides.

“I didn’t. I was hoping you did,” I admitted. “We’ll keep working our way diagonally. Maybe we’ll run into something.”

Ruby laid down on my back. Either tired from her bath and exercise or just tired in general. I didn’t speak up much, just enjoying the sound of our own rustling through the stalks. Her breath was easy for a long time and I thought she had fallen asleep but then she spoke up.

“Mom… ?” she asked against my neck. Her tone carried a bit more of the weight of her full age to it.

“Yeah, Pinch?” I asked, only letting my ears swivel and keeping my muzzle forward.

“I… know who my father is; my pony father,” she announced to me. “Do you know too? Did you figure it out?” she asked me.

I could feel my heart fluttering in anxiety. I had an idea: one idea. It was my only idea because it was the only stallion I could guess and also the only stallion I hoped it’d be, regardless of how little sense it would make. I didn’t want to answer right away but at the same time I was scared she’d just blurt it out if I didn’t. So I braved it and gave my guess first, hoping it was a stupid guess.

“It’s not... Comet Tail, right?” I asked, feeling sweat forming from the anxiety. I imagined my yellow friend. That cute muzzle and the thoughtful expression he’d have while he was thinking. How careful he was with his words and how calm he was. He was my rock as a human and transforming back to being a pony.

Not to mention his smell or those toned flanks.

“We... talked at Carrot’s place, after you went outside to throw up,” she told me. “We were going to tell you eventually but he thinks I’m his.”

“But Comet’s still... gay, right?” I tried to tread lightly both in conversation and through the corn rows. A crazy fantasy of being in a happy nuclear family tried to manifest and I shook it away, not wanting to make myself want something I couldn’t have. Even if I was a horse wife in the scenario, it was still too good of a fantasy. I didn’t want to get addicted to the thought. Especially not with my best friend in a role I didn’t think he wanted.

“He’s a unicorn like me and… he remembers holding you… and in the memory, he was thinking about…” Ruby trailed off and I waited for her to continue until I realized she wasn’t going to.

She was too uncomfortable to say it. That. Comet Tail remembered that? Like with me?

“No. He can’t be. Then he lied: he said he was still gay,” I denied it, my pace slowing to a creep with the weight of this.

“He said you were both really drunk,” my daughter explained to me. After she said that my crawling pace completely stopped.

That fit.

I remembered how much more receptive I was to Nathan when I was drunk. I was downright horny when I was drunk and happy. The difference was the sex was Nathan’s idea though.

If Comet was still gay...

“Did I… force myself onto him?” I asked while suddenly finding my forehooves interesting enough to stare at. I thought I was going to get sick: did I abuse another relationship? Was my human life just a doomed echo of my pony life?

“No. He said it wasn’t a bad memory. He remembers a meteor shower and being young and drunk and... making some choices. I guess you were in estrus and then… I was a ‘happy little accident’,” my daughter ended up explaining to me how she was conceived.

That sounded like me. I remembered what Discord had said: “Well aren’t you an interesting family.”

My best friend throughout high school, who is gay, was the father of my daughter from our previous life. I wouldn’t have wanted it to be anyone else too. He was smart and gentle and always there for me. I was happy I knew who her father was and happy she did too. I wasn’t sure what our dynamic was or if it was supposed to change with this information. I knew he probably didn’t want to be ‘together’ considering the way he was oriented but if he wanted to still be my friend and be someone important in Ruby’s life...

“Do you... like him? Are you- how do you feel about this?” I struggled to form my thoughts. I still studied my hooves, making sure they weren’t going to give out on me from the slight shaking. I felt her nod and then she answered.

“I always liked Comet Tail,” she reassured me. I felt my daughter nuzzle the back of my neck. That calmed me down some. This was okay. She wasn’t angry. “He never felt like a dad though: not the way you always felt kind of like a mom. I think he’s just my biological father and a friend.”

I nodded. That made sense. Not really a dad but a father and a friend.

In a bucked up way, I had another shot with Comet Tail when we were Connor and Brian. I wasn’t interested in a gay relationship though. According to Comet he never thought of me like that either. Maybe somehow he always knew subconsciously that I was a mare? ...or I just wasn’t his type like he said. Probably the latter, honestly.

I started heading directly east for a while, following the rainbow trail so I could just think about all of this instead of focusing on weaving through cornrows.

I carefully peeked back at my daughter and felt a stupid grin forming on my face.

“You’re my favorite ‘happy little accident’. You know that, right?” I asked her. She tried to pout but her smirk gave away how she felt about that compliment.

“Well, thanks for having me,” she quipped.

I probably felt terrible about the whole thing when it did happen, but we all apparently made our decisions, made it work and life continued and then another life happened. I really wanted to talk to Comet about this now. Clearly he didn’t hate me for this or he forgave me and we stayed friends at least. Considering our apparent age and my daughter’s apparent age, Comet and I were probably fairly young when it happened. I wondered if I’d ever know the full circumstances of that part of my life. There were certainly worse situations to get knocked up from.

---

We managed to leave the world of corn fields behind for prairies full of tall grasses and weeds. After smelling almost nothing but corn stalks all morning and most of the afternoon the explosion of new smells was surprisingly mouthwatering. Ruby insisted we couldn’t eat anything too close to the farm fields because of pesticides and fertilizers. I obeyed my daughter’s words of caution but once we were about ten minutes out we decided it had to be good enough: we wanted to figure out what all these smells were. Ruby had asked to get down and we wandered the prairies together for something to eat.

The first thing I found that stood out to me was dandelions. I knew those were technically edible as humans too so I felt safe trying it. The first one I ate, flower and stalk, was bitter but mostly earthy, grassy and, surprisingly, a little spicy and peppery. The petals and top part were oily but faintly sweet. I saw my daughter was eating the leafy parts so I started eating those too. The leaves were definitely the best part. The chew was really satisfying. Or maybe I was just really hungry. Some of them were better than others. After eating a few of them I figured out the smaller, probably younger ones, were less bitter and focused on those. Ruby and I walked and ‘grazed’ together. Hunger had a humbling effect on a person too.

In between dandelions I cleared my palate with some of the generic, safer looking grasses. The texture was exactly what I expected: grass. The flavor was like unwashed cabbage left out at room temperature. I mostly ate it because eating flowers whole was like eating herbs whole: a little overpowering until you got used to it and I was worried it was going to irritate my stomach too much. If I focused on the taller parts of grasses they didn’t taste nearly as dirty as that hay I tried.

We continued grazing as we walked east. The prairie grasses gave way to sparse woods and underbrush. The tall grasses and the nice smelling flowers seemed like mostly safe bets to eat. If I found a new flower that didn’t taste good I just spat it out and continued on.

I wasn’t going to risk any wild berries no matter my namesake. Ruby was pretty sure from a story she read years ago that poison ivy grew as three leaves: two leaflets flanking a bigger center leaf and “usually pointy”. So really, anything we thought we could mistake for an ivy we avoided.

After eating a few leafy things I quickly started figuring out which ones I liked the most. The ones with thicker leaves and softer, more fibrous stems and roots were the best. Soft, crunchy, almost spinach-like. They would be pleasant chilled and lightly coated in vinegar and oil.

“Mom!” Ruby called me over to a particular plant she found. It was a tall grass with a center stalk almost as tall as her that was just starting to bloom white flowers. She bit into the middle of it and tore it free from the ground. She chewed slowly and carefully. While I waited for my daughter to give her review I sniffed the flowering part of the one she bit tentatively myself. The plant had a warm, aromatic and pungent smell. Not a bad pungency though. It definitely smelled like food. The stalks looked juicy and fibrous too: two of the things I looked for most in our foraging. Ruby slowly worked the entire stalk into her mouth and eventually chewed and swallowed the whole thing: flower and all.

“I think it’s wild onion!” she declared then she licked the inside of her mouth for further analysis. “Kind of tastes like a green onion.”

Ruby tore another stalk free from the ground and started chewing so I followed suit. It was pungent like an onion and the oils from the flowers were almost garlic-y. They weren’t terrible at all. The grassy overtones helped calm the otherwise strong flavors down. After my second stalk and Ruby’s third I was pretty sure we were going to eat the whole patch. My daughter demonstrated more restraint than me though and stuffed some into my bag for later.

To go with our saved wild onion we packed some of the nice leafy things and tastier grasses we liked too. It seemed like a good idea to save some of these plants for later: grazing kept our hunger at bay but there was no way we’d get full off of it. Even if we could break down the cellulose or whatever was in the plants for food it just wasn’t calorically dense and we were getting a lot of walking in. We both knew this wasn’t sustainable.

We wouldn’t risk going near country houses to steal anything of substance. Not when we had gotten this far. Especially not after what we had just gone through the night before. We had a reason to avoid anything man-made as well: anything we accidentally grazed near cultivated land or roads tasted foul or chemically.

So we stuck near the wilderness and especially the trees and cover of tall grass. When we were just walking and grazing quietly sometimes we found ourselves among the wild animals. In the fields there were plenty of mice. In the underbrush we saw rabbits and a fox.

The highlight of our quiet hiking and grazing though was meeting a white-tailed doe. We were passing through a smaller grove for more cover and spotted her grazing about the same time she spotted us. I expected her to freeze up or run but instead she seemed as curious about us as we were of her. I approached cautiously and indirectly. When I was a few yards from her, even though Ruby was on my back at the time, I took my eyes off her and carefully bent down to tear up some grass and eat it in front of her, just to establish some trust and show I wasn’t interested in eating her.

That seemed to do it. She approached us and sniffed near my face. With her large, literal doe eyes peering into mine and the way her fuzzy ears were curved towards me I could interpret her expression clearly: curiosity.

I tried to give her a relaxed, closed-mouth smile and hoped the rest of my body language would match my expression and maybe she’d understand I was feeling friendly. I wasn’t sure if she understood it but she didn’t run. Instead she stopped sniffing me and slowly walked around me. I turned my neck to see her inspecting my daughter on my back.

Ruby’s mouth was open in awe. Our deer friend sniffed her mane and Ruby stifled a giggle at her rustling in her mane. What we didn’t expect was for her to tentatively lick my daughter’s horn. A surprised burst of laughter escaped Ruby and she reflexively pulled away from the lick like it tickled.

The laughter surprised the poor doe who quickly backed away, her ears and posture reading startled and alert.

“It’s okay! You just- hey, wait!” I started but was cut off by her bounding away when I started talking. Apparently my voice startled her even more than Ruby’s laughter did. I realized too late I shouldn’t have spoken so loudly or quickly. Oh well. “Well, that was neat.”

“Yeah. She wasn’t scared of us at all,” Ruby agreed. “Did you see that her teats were swollen?” I scanned where the deer went in confusion then I did my best to turn my neck back to meet my daughter’s gaze.

“What does that mean?”

“She’s nursing: she’s probably a mom too!” Ruby explained with glee. She was probably imagining the fawn. It’s a shame we didn’t get to meet it.

“Huh. I didn’t think to check that,” I admitted. “What made you look?”

“Deer give birth this time of the year so I was looking for signs of pregnancy,” she explained. I wasn’t totally surprised she knew something random like this: she had taken a lot of different college classes. Feeling like a conversation again and being in a deer mood I asked her more while I started walking again.

“Always this time of the year?”

“Yeah because they go into heat in the fall.”

“Kinky,” I commented then gave it some more thought. “So deer aren’t ever born in, like, November?”

“Not really. They have to be ovulating and they do that in the fall.”

“ ...huh,” I acknowledged.

Ovulating. I hadn’t even given that any thought. I knew I could, and did at one point, get pregnant and I knew about the whole human female cycle thing, but…

Well, I already asked my daughter about sex once today.

“So, do you know when ponies… ovulate?” I asked my little expert.

“Now apparently.”

“...’now’?”

“Mom… you’re in estrus. You knew that, right?”

I went quiet: not exactly in shame but contemplation. I wondered if that could partially explain why I was so receptive to Nathan. Not that I’d blame any of my actions on horse biology.

“I am?”

“You all are: you, Minuette, Carrot Top,” Ruby dropped this news onto me. “I’m sure because I noticed it started happening to Carrot Top after we all slept in the same bed with Comet Tail.”

“What did you... ‘notice’?”

“The smell,” she said with a tinge of embarrassment. “I’m… shorter and it’s not happening to me.”

If that’s the case then maybe Minuette thought to tease me about Comet Tail smelling really nice because she had the same reaction to him. I wondered if we still liked the way he smelled at other times of the year.

We smelled right now too, apparently. Just Comet Tail wasn’t interested.

“Sorry,” I apologized reflexively. “I... wasn’t going to do anything.” I thought about my embarrassing sexcapades so far. The ‘highlight’ definitely being getting dicked by a human named Tom and enjoying it -the whiskey helped. I definitely wasn’t going to tell her about that one for a while. “ ...not anything more.”

“I know. It’s okay. It’s just weird being able to smell your friends like that.”

“Has... it been bothering you?”

“A little. Nobody was really acknowledging it. I felt less gross after we had our bath,” Ruby admitted. “I was already really frustrated about my magic problem. All the sex smells... just reminded me I was supposed to be a child now. I just felt like a pervert though.”

“You’re not a pervert,” I defended my daughter’s self-esteem. “You just thought you were... missing out.”

”It’s not just that: I… I used to draw clop,” Ruby admitted.

“What?? Like… the real stuff? With horse vaginas?” I knew she had drawn some racy stuff before, she even showed it to me. I could appreciate it for the anatomy and intimacy. Maybe not something I would have hung up though.

“Y-yeah, ‘the real stuff’ with vaginas and penises,” she said.

“You... never told me,” I said, a little hurt. We told each other almost everything.

“I didn’t want my mom to know: either of them. You two thought I was so great,” Ruby explained.

“I would have still thought you were great. I would have just thought you were a great porn artist too,” I promised the filly on my back.

“Would you have though? Would you have encouraged it like you encouraged everything else I did?”

“ ...maybe,” I backpedaled a little to give it some more thought. As much as I hated to admit it, I had a little in common with my human mom as well as my human dad. I didn’t think my sister was really interested in sex though. I didn’t even think she looked at it, let alone drew it.

It would have been an understatement to say I thought highly of my sister. I know I weirded out at least one girlfriend about it. In retrospect that was one of the best things about when Minuette and I dated as humans: she was close friends with her too and understood it was familial love.

“I don’t think I would have thought less of you. Just... differently,” I decided. “Did you make a lot of it?”

“Not a-lot a lot but… enough. It was good money. I didn’t hate doing it either. Friendship is Magic was still something precious to me. It felt like... part of my childhood: characters from the show felt like childhood friends first and foremost. It was just like a ‘puberty’ kind of happened and I started thinking about them in other ways too.”

And then that puberty unhappened. Something Ruby said yesterday clicked more to me and I realized why she was willing to tell me this now.

“So was this part of what you were talking about? The ‘not innocent enough to be a child’ thing?”

Ruby shifted a bit on my back.

“It was what started it. I wanted... this on some level.” I imagined she was gesturing to herself. “When I got it I didn’t feel like I deserved it though: it didn’t fit me anymore. As much as I wanted it.”

‘Deserve’. I know what Carrot Top would say to that: it was a word of guilt; bitterness; injustice. Since she wasn’t here I’d have to try to make her proud.

“It doesn’t matter what we deserve,” I said. “The important thing is what we do with what we have: you’re my daughter and you’re young again! You should enjoy that.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been unknowingly drawing pictures of my adult friends and my mom having sex for years. Can you imagine what you would do if I was actually a child and you found a picture I drew of you and my teacher having sex?”

The concept hit me like a wave: Ruby drawing porn of our friends, Ruby drawing porn of me, and what I would do if she was actually a child when she drew it too: I imagined what I would do if she was the way I remembered her when we were preteens.

I shook my head at the concept. That would be crazy! And hopefully an investigation would occur even if I was a prime suspect. I’d want to know why she had these thoughts and why she drew those things.

“Well… for starters I’d probably take away your crayons,” I said but didn’t know where to go from there. After all, that’s not what happened. A ten year old didn’t draw her mom having sex with her teacher. A teenager drew pictures of ponies having consensual sex and got paid for it. “But you didn’t do that as a child so that’s silly to judge it like that. You did it as an adult ...or a teenager.” A teenager. I suddenly had an idea and dropped the hypothetical scenario. “I just realized something.”

“Hm? What’s that?”

“Teenagers aren’t quite children anymore but not quite adults. They have some childhood left but they’re not innocent, and sometimes even really familiar with sex and violence. Independent… but if they can, they can ask their parents for help… and sometimes their parents can’t help but treat them like a child sometimes.”

Ruby was quiet for a long moment while she thought that through and why I was talking about it. I felt her strengthening her grip around me. I could tell it was a good grip: it was a hug. “That... sounds about right,” she agreed with a shaking voice.

“Okay,” I quietly agreed while checking on the fading rainbow. “Just... don’t draw any more porn of your mom. ...unless the money’s really good and you make me look good.”

“Well, you didn’t think I made all that money selling homemade jewelry on Etsy, did you?” Ruby teased me back. I had to laugh at myself there because admittedly I did. I guess the private listings I had presumed she was doing were more like private commissions. That made me really start to question the specifics though.

“So, you didn’t draw a lot of me, did you?”

“No. Only a few times. It was mostly the mane six,” Ruby calmed my worries.

“ ...even Buttershy?” I asked, hiding my grin by keeping my face forward. Ruby made a short snort sound.

“Especially Flutterby!”

Next Chapter: 26. Moon and Shine Estimated time remaining: 6 Hours, 49 Minutes