-He’s a Strange One-

Dark, greyness surrounded Rainbow as she lay on the ground. A looming sense of emptiness filled the air, and it felt like something heavy had taken a seat inside her chest.

Wherever she was, it was damp, and humid. She opened her eyes to find a surprisingly mildly lit … place. It wasn’t a room, or if it was she couldn’t see the walls or the roof. Mist, or fog, hung in the air like a heavy blanket, making it hard to breath and slowing the air. The floor was simply covered in dunes of colorless dust, a layer deep enough for her hoof to sink into it softly. Several sharp and blocky rocks drifted in and out of her vision, half hidden by the fog and partially sunken into the dust beneath her.

Carefully, Rainbow pushed herself off of the floor. Her movement shifted the dust, clouds of the grey powder flying in small eddies around her in the thick air. Some of it drifted into her nose, making her cringe as she resisted the urge to sneeze. It was a disgusting smell, too.

It smelled like burnt rotten eggs, not a good combination. That smell hung in the air just as heavily as the fog. Or was it mist?

But, in all honesty … Rainbow was bored. Every rock looked the same, all the dust looked the same. For some reason, the need to not move had also overtaken her. It almost felt as if a simple movement would bring down that sense of dread, or justify it.

And just as she was starting to become used to it, something new scraped through the air. Claws on stone. It was unmistakable, the scrape and screech of something sharp against something that shouldn’t have any give. Her eyes caught the yellow and orange glow from sparks in the corner of her eye.

She spun around, kicking up more of the putrid dust. “Hey! Who’s there?” she yelled into the fog, a small shake in her voice betraying her. When no response came, she slowly started walking toward where she heard the sound. Each step threw up a small puff of dust, her hoofsteps being muffled by the ever-present layer of dust.

She froze again, another, haunting, sound stretching out of the gloom around her. That’s what it was now, with that sound slithering through the air. She knew it all too well, and it still sent shivers up her spine.

Scales slithering across stone.

It’s a very distinct sound, and different from a garden snake slithering across a path. It’s a sound like sand falling against your head on the beach, so much similar to that that Rainbow could practically feel the sound. It called out to her like some sick chorus, making every hair on her body stand on end.

She never would have admitted it if somepony asked, but she was terrified. She had only heard that sound once before, when a dragon had nearly covered Equestria with its smoke. She had really regretted kicking him in the nose, and she still got shivers thinking about that day. It had been a very impacting experience, in more ways than one.

She turned toward the noise, this time behind her again. Her heart pounded in her chest as she caught sight of a colorless tail drag out of sight into the fog. The fanned, webbed end flipping up more of the dust as it slithered out of sight. Her breathing was starting to come faster now, her chest pounding with her heart and her lungs working fast.

Very suddenly, her breathing became the only sound, unsettlingly loud in the oppressing silence around her. The air felt like it was getting even thicker, and hotter. She felt smothered, even just standing there.

Another scrape pierced through the silence behind her, violently shattering the stillness. Rainbow spun around, a scowl decorating her face. It instantly dropped off her face as she stared into the glowing eyes that shone out of the cloud of fog before her. Huge yellowed scleras, and ember red irises dug through her.

A huge, colorless, scaled claw rose out of the mist as an almost undetectable smile spread over the mostly hidden face. It loomed over her, each one of the claws as long as one of her arms. A sickly, mocking, wheezing laugh echoed out of the fog, the claws flexing and shifting the heavy air around them.

The claw fell.

She screamed.

~~~

Her eyes snapped open, staring blankly at the flat ceiling above her but not really seeing anything at all.

The scream still echoed through her head, never actually making it out of her throat. A machine made a fast-paced beeping noise to her left, nearly a flat tone at how fast it was going. It actually took several seconds for her to realize that it was her heart setting that pace. It slowly started to slow as she controlled her breathing, countless hours of anaerobic training kicking into action habitually.

As she calmed, details of her environment started to reveal themselves. The ceiling was tiled, a repeating pattern of dots poked into them. A rail curled around a short perimeter, a pale blue curtain hanging from it and hiding whatever was outside. The shape of a window shone onto the curtain, adding its muted light to the small area.

She turned her head, the rough cotton of the blanket and sheets rubbing uncomfortably on her neck. She was tucked tightly into a bed, the metal frame sticking up from the end of it. Beside the bed, a table and a cart sat to the side. A few wires and tubes ran under her blanket, and she could feel the dull pull from them where they attached to her foreleg.

On top of the cart, a small machine beeped. A magical display showed a wobbling line, illustrating Rainbow’s heart rate by one of the wires that connected her to it. A tall pole came out from the back, seemingly attached to the cart even though she couldn’t see how. A small bag of water hung from it, one of the tubes leading under the loose cotton blanket.

With sore muscles slowing her and making her grimace, Rainbow pulled off the blanket. She scowled at the puke green color, carefully revealing her cyan forelegs that lay outside of the sheets. Underneath it she could see where the tube and the wire connected. The wire led to a padded anklet above her hoof, carefully measuring her pulse. The IV drip connected near the crook of her arm, held in place by a piece of medical tape.

She groaned inwardly. Not another visit to the hospital! This time she didn’t stop the groan from crawling out of her mouth. She unhooked herself, the annoying beeping being less tolerable than the single tone that stopped after a few minutes. She didn’t know, or care, if it would give the doctors a scare.

She slumped back into the bed, having sat up slightly to take out the IV tube and to disconnect herself from the machine. A spike of pain lanced up her back, intense and flaming up through her wing and her shoulder. She shot back up into a seated position immediately, twisting around to look at her back and the wing pinned to her side.

“Gah!” she choked out, barely able to make any other sound as the sight of her wing filled her vision. There was a blood soaked bandage wrapped around one of the bends of her right wing, and several of her feathers were missing. A dull ache pulsed alongside her heartbeat, which was starting to get faster again.

She gingerly reached up a hoof to touch the bandages that wrapped around the forward plane of her wing, flinching as her hoof only brought about more pain. She managed a very uncool whimper as she pulled her hoof away.

Rapid hoofsteps cut through the silence of the room, muffled as they approached from behind the curtain and supposedly a door beyond that. A door slammed open, the hoofsteps suddenly growing louder. Without even so much as a warning, the curtain around her bed few open.

A unicorn stallion stood on the other side, panting slightly with one hoof still clutching the side of the curtain. He had a shock of red mane that was cropped short, almost military short but long enough for it not to be. His coat was a mint green, not unlike most hospital color schemes. His eyes were a much darker green, almost blending in with the rest of his coloring. He was stocky, and well built for a unicorn.

The exhaustion on his face suddenly disappeared, replaced by a cheeky grin that seemed almost too wide for his face. “Oh! You’re awake! Had me worried for a second there,” he said. He was loud, not to a point of shouting, though. It was almost like he was trying to talk to her from across the room with the volume he used.

He wasted no more time standing and staring at her. The unicorn dropped the curtain and walked around her to the foot of her bed, a clipboard lifting up in an almost clear, dark green glow. “My name’s Doctor Clean Cut, but you can just call me Doc if that’s easier. You must be recovering well if you’ve gotten the strength to sit up, that’s nice,” he noted, a pen detaching from the clipboard and scribbling on one of the papers on it. “Blood loss isn’t always fun to recover from, especially with the blunt force trauma on your abdomen added on top of that,” he said distantly.

Rainbow paused for a moment, almost hypnotised by the strange faces that the doctor was making as he scribbled on the clipboard. “Blood loss? ‘Blunt force trauma’?! What in the name of Celestia happened to me?!” she yelled. She almost jumped up, but the same magic that held the clipboard pressed her back down with surprising force.

“Three days out hasn’t done your memory well has it?” the doctor asked with a grin as he finished scribbling on the clipboard for the moment. He set the board down on the bed below her hooves, walking back around to her side. “You got cut up, fell a ways. And I think something pushed you if the bruises were any indication,” the doctor said, surprising less loud in his explanation. “You’re in the Canterlot Royal Hospital, by the way!” And then it was back.

Rainbow cringed at his volume, laying her ears flat against her head. “How did I get here? And what about my wing?!” she asked, shooting the doctor a scowl.

He scoffed, rolling his eyes. “It’ll be fine, and you’ll get away with hardly a scar. You’ll be back in the air by the end of the week, at least. However, a couple of the arteries along your humerus were cut up in a bad way, and you lost quite a bit of blood. But what’s really interesting is how you got here!” he said excitedly, practically hopping in place. “You wouldn’t believe what condition the pony that brought you here was in! He was practically a fountain with all the blood that he spilled on the floor and all over you ...” the doctor rambled, he continued to talk for awhile. A brief mention of a dragon flickered across her perception, but only for a moment.

Somepony carried me in here? she thought, fighting through her memories to try and think of who it could possibly have been. She could remember flying up to Canterlot, she was doing a routine practice session with the other trainees for the Wonderbolt program. If she had passed a few more tests, she could have been put into the reserves. But other than that, she couldn’t remember even getting to the practice fields.

Her thoughts suddenly were interrupted by the underside of a green hoof gently overtaking half her vision. The doctor had leaned up and was pressing his hoof to her forehead, tutting under his breath as he checked her temperature. She heard him mumble something about tricky pegasi before he pulled his hoof away.

How could a pony be so loud and then so suddenly quiet? she thought to herself.

 The doctor pulled away after a moment, turning to the clipboard as it sprung back to life and the pen started scribbling again. A tongue depressor was suddenly presented to her. “Say: Aaaah,’” he instructed, hovering the wooden device in front of her lips.

Rainbow complied, opening her mouth wide and letting the doctor press down her tongue and peer down her throat. He hummed again as more scribbles scratched themselves onto the clipboard. “Any significant pain or soreness? How’s your throat feel?” he asked as he pulled away.

Rainbow smacked her lips a few times, trying to rid herself of the taste from the wood device that the doctor disposed of in a small trash can across the room. “No, it’s fine. What’s my throat got to do with anything?” she asked incredulously.

“You were snoring,” he said flatly, turning back to the clipboard as he intently scribbled on it again.

“I was not!” Rainbow said, scowling down at the doctor from her perch on the bed.

“Well, you didn’t get your own room for being a national hero,” the doctor muttered cheerily as he finished scribbling with a flourish of his pen. The clipboard returned itself to the foot of the bed, hanging from a small hook there. Rainbow growled at him, but refrained from chewing out the doctor, who only smiled wider.

“As far as I can tell, you can go home tomorrow. No flying though, and you should check with your doctor in Ponyville in a week or so,” the doctor said happily. “But I’d like you to stay for at least one more night so we can change your bandages again and let you get a little more rest. Something wrong? Headache?” he asked as Rainbow started to rub at her temples.

“I’m starting to get one,” she grumbled, glaring at the doctor angrily. Any time in a hospital was boring, and she didn’t want to ask for a Daring Do book if she wasn’t going to get the chance to finish it.

“I’ll take that as a n-”

A deep bellow shook through the room, cutting off the rest of the doctor’s statement. The whole room seemed to jump and shake, the two ponies there certainly did. Rainbow jumped up and fell straight out of her bed and onto the floor, new lances of pain driving up her body and into the base of her skull.

“Aha! The guest of honor is awake as well! Perfect!” the doctor beamed as the roar ended. “Do you think you want to see him? Not everyday somepony saves your life after all,” he said, leaning over the bed to look at her with his ever-present grin. She could still hear the ‘guest of honor’ screaming, nearly drowning out the doctor, as loud as he is.

“Wait,” Rainbow said carefully, pushing herself up to her hooves despite the loud protest from her limbs. “‘Saved my life’?” she asked incredulously, seeing the doctor nod. He had already started for the door just outside the curtain. She quickly followed, limping her way behind him. All of her muscles hurt, making her walk funny. And just standing had made her woozy.

“You weren’t the only pony injured in the attack,” the doctor said over the ruckus coming from down the hall, his voice easily projecting over it. “As far as I could tell, he took a hit for you,” he explained as Rainbow fell into step behind him. He walked at a brisk pace, what Rainbow would have called a fast walk for anypony other than herself. The room with all the noise was on the left at the end of the hall, where the hall turned sharply to the right.

“What the hay is going on in there?” she asked, more to herself than the doctor. As she spoke, a lamp flew through the open door, shattering across the floor. Thankfully, it being the middle of the day, the lamp had been unlit. The clear oil in the lamp leaked out from its base, pooling onto the floor without anything to hold it back.

“I was afraid this would happen, especially with somepony as big as him,” the doctor mumbled picking up his pace. How the doctor was able to walk any faster was surprising, Rainbow was practically at a light trot by now. Whoever this doctor was, he walked with a judicial determination toward the room at the end of the hall.

Before they reached the door, Rainbow’s curiosity overcame her. She rushed forward, darting around the doorframe and taking in the scene before her.

Three Royal Guards were swarming around the single bed in the room, obviously struggling to hold down its occupant. The other pony in the room was a clean white unicorn, her horn glowing a light blue to match the tone of her eyes. She was shuffling in place, a large needle filled with some concoction or another floating above the struggling stallions as if she were trying to squeeze it in between them to the stallion underneath.

Parts of the room had been completely destroyed. There was a smashed table on the other end of the room, a distinctly pony shaped dent in the wall above it. The curtain that had once hidden the bed from sight was ripped off of its rail, laying bunched up in a corner of the room where it had been kicked to. The sheets of the bed had been kicked off, bunched up and tangled in the hooves of the guards trying to hold the pony to the bed.

The guards were having an intense amount of trouble holding down the other pony down, hiding his features from view. As she watched, a grey hoof shot out of the fray, landing squarely on one of the guard’s chin and nearly sending him reeling to the floor. While Rainbow didn’t understand a word of what the pony was shouting at the guards, she could definitely tell that it was colorful.

Rainbow shot forward, leaping up and grabbing the needle out of the unicorn’s magical grip. “What’s up with the freaking monster needle, dude?! And would you guys CALM YOUR FLANKS!!!” she yelled, waving the comically large needle in her hoof. Her voice cut through the noise like a knife through hot butter, and silenced the room almost instantly. That’s better, she mused to herself with a small smirk.

All eyes had turned to her, ears pointed directly at her as well. She had their absolute attention now. The guards shared a few glances, carefully releasing the pony on the bed and taking a step back from him. They stayed close though, wary of another outburst. But she was finally able to get a good look at this ‘Hero.’

His coat was the first thing she noticed, not a single color like most ponies’. It was grey, very grey, but splashes of black and darker greys covered his back and even bled over onto his wings. His coat was lightest on his chest and around his stomach, growing darker near his unshorn hooves. The black and darker grey stretched down his muzzle as well, a distinct area around his eyes untouched by the darker colors. It almost looked like he was wearing a mask.

His mane was black, shot through with small locks of grey that gave it an almost salt and pepper look. Or a backwards dalmatian look, depending on how it was perceived.

But he was covered in scars. Fur in various places on his chest, shoulders, and even his neck was thinner, revealing the previous wounds marks. If she had to draw anything from them, it would either be that this stallion had a large amount of bad luck. Or that he was some sort of fighter. Some of the scars were far too neat for them to be from anything other than the leftover of a direct attack.

Three golden colored rings sat high on his right foreleg, clinging tightly to the bulging muscles there. Two white spikes pierced through his left ear, clicking together occasionally when his ear flicked at a small sound. A bandage wrapped around his barrel, practically soaked a deep red along his right side, almost black in color.

His eyes were another thing entirely, green but muted like the rest of his coloration. She swore she could see other colors swimming in them, but whenever she tried to fix on it, it disappeared into the greyness.

It was almost like this entire pony had been grayed out by some artist, to simply be stuck into the background as an afterthought.

The entire time she had been taking him in, he had been doing the same. It felt different for some reason though, like he was sizing her up for a fight. Everyone in the room was still looking at her, waiting for her to continue. But now that she had their attention, she wasn’t really sure what to say. AJ’s way better at doing speeches than I am, she mused, desperately wishing she had the farm-pony with her as back up.

“Alright, let’s just stay calm. Alright?” she said to the room, truly in absence of what to say next. The grey stallion squinted, like he was trying to read something very small and was having trouble making it out. He mouthed a few words that she couldn’t recognise and tilted his head to the side. “Now, somepony please explain what’s going on in here,” she said carefully, looking around at the other ponies.

“I-I was j-just about to give him an injection, f-f-f-for the pain,” the nurse behind Rainbow stuttered, shaking in place as the spotlight suddenly turned to her. “A-a-a-and then he woke up, and st-started yelling, and …” she said, trailing off as Doctor Clean Cut glared at her from across the room.

“Luna’s moon, who told you to do that?” he said in an uncharacteristically angry tone, more of an accusation than a question. The nurse shook visibly, trying to stutter out something but was cut off by the doctor. “Don’t give me excuses! His chart clearly says that he’s to receive no injections or medications of any kind. Go back to the supply closet, take EVERYTHING off the shelves, re-examine them all and then re-label and re-shelve them! Go! Toot sweet!” he yelled, practically hopping in place with anger.

The nurse squeaked out a frighted yelp and fled the room past the doctor. “And don’t even think about leaving that room until you’re done!” he yelled after her. The doctor cleared his throat as he turned back to the room, fixing a tie that wasn’t there with a hoof. His horn lit up as he took the needle from Rainbow with his magic, dropping the entire thing into a basket labeled with a biohazard symbol.

“Uh …” Rainbow uttered, taken aback by the doctor’s sudden change of tone. Perhaps he wasn’t somepony to get on the bad side of. Considering how the nurse reacted under his glare, he might have been going easy on her with that punishment. “Those bandages aren’t … they’re not looking so good, Doc,” she managed, pointing back toward the stallion.

“... not … so good?” a deep voice said, drawing Rainbow’s attention back to the stallion. He was looking at her with a confused expression, tilting his head to the side as his eyes darted over her. It surprised everyone in the room, they were the first words he had actually spoken in Equestrian since he woke up.

“So you do speak Equestrian,” Rainbow said, a small smile coming to her face. She had started to get worried when he had been spouting what amounted to basically gibberish to her. She had wondered if he was actually sane.

“Do … speak,” he said carefully, frowning at the words. “Not … Ee-quest-tree-an,” he sounded out the word carefully, letting it roll around on his tongue for a moment. He looked back at her, as if asking for confirmation from her of something as he muttered something in a staccato gibberish.

“Oh,” Rainbow said, tilting her own head in confusion. If he doesn’t speak it, then how’d he tell me? she thought with confusion. “Why don’t we just get those fixed up, okay?” she said to both the stallion and the doctor. She looked toward Clean Cut and nodded toward the nameless stallion as a silent signal to ‘get going.’

He jumped as he realized that he was needed, his horn lighting up as a few things shifted out of the debris in the room. A sterile needle in a bag floated up alongside a spool of thread in its own bag, sifting out of the destroyed table’s splinters. A roll of gauze found its way to him, a small vial filled with a thick green fluid floated up beside it.

Clean Cut carefully approached the stallion, blanching almost imperceptibly when the stallion’s attention turned to the doctor. When the stallion made no move toward him, other than offering a look of recognition, the doctor came up to his side.

“Oh my, my, my,” the doctor muttered under his breath as he looked at the soaked bandages. Clean Cut gingerly lifted up the stallion’s arm with his magic, holding it in the air so that he had full access to his patient’s barrel. His magic carefully tugged and pulled on the bandages, half the job being already done by his struggle earlier.

The stallion’s gaze moved to the revealed wound as the doctor finished and took a step back to see it for himself. Rainbow’s breath caught in her throat and she had to struggle to keep from losing whatever was in her stomach all over the floor.

It was by no means easy to look at, yet both the stallion and the doctor examined it with mirrored professionalism. But Rainbow was almost ready to run out of the room as fast as she could. There was a limit to how much blood and gore she could stand, even if it was a little higher than most ponies’.

To her, it looked like a part of his side had simply been ripped off. There was so much blood that she couldn’t tell what was supposed to be inside him and what wasn’t. Three large slashes trailed up his barrel, perpendicular to the ground should he have been standing. She could actually see one of his ribs peeking out from the folds of ripped flesh. The edges were jagged, the stitches that had been there pulled apart and ripping where they had joined it.

“Just look at what you’ve done to yourself,” Clean Cut scolded, the small bags containing the thread and the needle ripping open as they assembled themselves. Clean Cut mumbled something about dumb luck and wings, but Rainbow wasn’t able to hear much of it before he started to stitch up the stallion.

The doctor was quick to work, eliciting a few hisses and grunts from the stallion as the flesh was stitched back together. The doctor spread the strange fluid over the closed wound, rewarded with a sigh of relief from the patient as he rewrapped him. His magic gathered up the mess, hovering it over to the same biohazard basket and stuffing it all inside.

“Now,” the doctor said, returning to a more serious tone and lifting a hoof to accentuate his point. “No. More. Moving.” He punctuated each word with a waggle of his hoof in the stallion’s direction. “If you pull out those stitches again, I’ll cauterize it,” he finished, pointing down at the now covered wound with a serious expression.

The stallion seemed to understand well enough, nodding in assent to the doctor. Clean Cut let out a loud sigh through his nose before turning back to Rainbow with his smile returned. “I’m sure that you two have so much to talk about. Him saving you and all. So I’ll be off, ask the guards for anything, you know where your room is, bladdity, blabbity, blah,” he said as he walked out the door, his green toned magic easing it closed.

The stallion turned back to her, a blank expression on his face as he simply looked at her. “Uh … So … What’s up?” she tried, mentally slapping herself. He’s in the hospital, same as you, bird-brian. There’s nothing going on!

The stallion tilted his head to the side as she spoke, listening intently to each word. After a moment he tried to say something. “W- … Wing? … Okay?” he asked, one of his hooves moving up and tentatively tapping one of his own neatly tucked wings before pointing at her.

He looked like he was struggling with his hooves, almost like he was angry that they were there. If the way he glared at them was any indicator. Rainbow looked back at her wing, a small grimace coming back to her face as she was reminded why she was in a hospital.

“Yeah, not too pretty, is it? But it’s cool, I guess. Doc says I can get outta here tomorrow, doesn’t look like you’re gonna be as lucky, dude,” she said, turning back to him to find another inquisitive stare.

“Cool …” he said, feeling out the word like he had most of the others. “... Cool? Wing is cool?” he asked with a confused glance at her. When she responded with her own confused look, he pointed down at the blankets that had fallen from his bed. He motioned with his hooves for her to take them.

“Oh, no,” Rainbow said, taking a step closer to him so that she could try to explain. “I’m not cold. I just meant that it’s fine, that’s all,” she said, seeing him nod. It was strange since he still had his head tilted to the side as he listened to her talk. She was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with his neck.

In fact, now that she was a little closer, she could tell how big this stallion really was. He was huge! He barely even fit on the bed, and she was pretty sure that it was sagging under him. She was pretty sure that if he could stand, he would tower over her.

Is this guy a guard? she thought, glancing over at the earth pony guards that had spread across the room. Each one was almost as large as the stallion, but none of them seemed to have the same amount of muscle that he did. And there wasn’t a scrap of fat on him, unlike the guards, who seemed a little more than well fed.

“You know … I never got your name,” she said after a moment. Realizing how long she had just been looking at the stallion. His ears perked up, and he seemed to sit up a little higher when she said it.

“Name?” he asked, looking at her again with confusion.

“Here,” she said, taking a seat next to his bed and lifting a hoof to point at her chest. “Rainbow Dash,” she said clearly. She moved her hoof around, pointing it at him while raising her eyebrows in question. He seemed to grasp what she wanted after that, tilting his head to the other side in thought.

“Name … hmmm …” he said. One of his hooves lifted up to scratch at his ear, the small spikes clicking against each other as he disturbed them. “... Coalback,” he said confidently after a moment, looking at her with a small smile. “My name is Coalback,” he repeated. He paused in strange places, and he butchered a word or two, but he said it clearly enough.

“Great, dude!” she said, lifting her hooves up in a small cheer. She almost felt like she was treating this guy the same way she sometimes had to treat Derpy, and it made her feel a little guilty. He just didn’t speak the language, he wasn’t dead in the head. “So your name’s Coal-back,” she said, rolling the name off her tongue. He nodded, slowly becoming more excited.

He shifted into a slightly more comfortable position on top of the sheetless bed and lifted a hoof up to tentatively point at her. “Rainbow Dash,” he said carefully, enunciating the word.

“Yes,” she confirmed, rewarding herself with a small hoof pump. She was actually talking to somepony who spoke a different language, and doing it pretty well. I bet Twilight would probably like to talk to somepony in another language. I wonder if she knows what he’s speaking?

“Coalback,” he said, turning his hoof to point back at his own chest. She nodded at him as he shifted excitedly again. “Can Rainbow Dash ... help Coalback?” he asked with a friendly smile, using his hoof to point to her and then to himself.

“Help with what, dude?” she asked, almost startled by the sudden swing in topic.

“Show Coalback to say good,” he said slowly, perhaps trying to find words that would let him show her what he wanted. He looked a bit frustrated as he did, sure that he wasn’t using the right words.

“You want me to … teach you how to speak Equestrian?” she tried, working off what he was giving her. He wanted to ‘say good,’ so maybe he meant that he wanted to learn how to speak it better?

“Yes!” Coalback said excitedly, nodding happily. He said a few more things in that staccato gibberish, but stopped after a moment to listen to Rainbow’s response.

“Okay, sure,” she said after a moment. “I’ll teach you Equestrian … Just don’t expect me to do a good job,” she added as an afterthought. She had always hated her Equestrian classes in school, and now it looked like she was going to have to remember everything she’d ever been taught. “The descent into eggheaded-ness has begun,” she muttered quietly to herself.