shoutfire | someone left a cake in the rain

[Her books?!

Anyway, putting the books away might be a little trickier than she'd anticipated; in front of the shelves, where the floor used to be, there's now a wide slab of stone and twisted metal sprouting tall enough to brush the ceiling (and, incidentally, shedding a fair amount of dirt onto the area she just cleaned).

In front of that, Ed draws himself up to his full, comparatively unimpressive height and points towards the door.]

OUT!

[Rainbow Dash looks at the stone and metal thing, then looks at the books she's holding.]

Now look at this mess! I guess I'll have to SWEEP AND MOP, too!

[She shoves the books onto convenient protuberances on that horrible cthonian barricade, then looks around for something to start sweeping.]

Gotta pay back the favor for cleaning my window, ya know! Equivalent exchange!

[Predictably, he bridles.] Screw that!

[And since he clearly hasn't made enough bad decisions today, or ever, the next one on the list involves trying to bodily tackle a pony. In a room which, possibly despite Rainbow's efforts, has furniture strewn around everywhere.]

[She... did not see that coming. Down she goes, as they crash into a chair which then tips over backwards, spilling them onto the ground in a tangle of limbs (five natural legs, one arm, two wings, and a couple of metal extras), feathers, fur, rainbow mane, golden braid, red coat, and flailing (almost certainly mutual).]

[Plenty of flailing! On this end, at least, it's purposeful - he's frantically pulling away, trying to disentangle his arms. ...Ignoring the fact that he's the one who threw himself at her in the first place.

As soon as both of his hands are free, even for an instant - clap!

Mind, the couple of seconds it takes for him to do that and squirm into a position where he can actually touch what's left of the floor are a couple of seconds he isn't completely focused on what she's doing.]

[That moment of slipped concentration is all it takes for her to stop flailing and pull off a real move -- to wit, flipping around him to wrap one foreleg around his neck in a choke hold. Not that she's actually choking him, just aggressively asserting her authority!]

[He's yanked backwards, letting out a strangled yelp of surprise (apparently that works both ways! Who knew?) - but not before the floor underneath both of them hisses and flares into life. In the blink of an eye, a series of sturdy iron bars erupt from the blue-white glow at their feet in a perfect circle around them, fast enough to puncture clean through the chair still lying forlornly off to Rainbow's side, stopping only when they hit the ceiling. A few dislodged flakes of plaster float down.

This was not quite the plan. And it's kind of cramped in here. There's barely enough space for him to twist round and shout at her properly... not that he could with a foreleg around his throat. He tries, though.]

The hell did you do that for?!

[~~Good thing it's him and not an average-sized human being, or this would actually be painful.~~]

[Trapped! Rainbow jerks back -- sorry Ed -- but just mashes against the bars of the prison! She whips her head around, looking for an exit --]

[But there isn't one, and here's Ed pinned up against her, still all tangled up.]

[The whole situation sinks in for one long, dark second... and then Rainbow begins to snicker, and then to giggle, and then to outright laugh.]

[He'd rub his neck if he could actually reach it. That kind of hurt. Jerk.]

What's so funny?!

[But never mind that; he's gone right back to trying to extricate himself. It's more of a challenge this time round, what with the lack of space.]

Pfft, come on, Ed, you gotta admit this is pretty funny! We got caged up while fighting over cleaning!

[The pressure on him reverses -- rather than pulling with her foreleg, she's leaning with her body, almost companionably. She's well aware they're not untangling themselves easily, the way this prison has boxed them in.]

[The extra weight isn't making it much easier for him to work his hands free...]

Yeah, and whose fault is that?

Both of ours.

[Still giggling, she loops her forelegs under his shoulders, then half-flaps, half-leans to help buy him some freedom.]

[He can't really contest that, but since he's in this kind of mood, he grumbles under his breath anyway.] You didn't even need to come in here...

[He claps and presses his hands to the nearest couple of bars. Considerably slower than they burst out, and with hardly a sound other than the crackling of the transmutation itself, the entire circle retracts smoothly into the floor.]

[She doesn't let go so easily -- instead, she pumps for altitude, then turns a backflip -- with him still in her grip, and her still laughing. She's strong, and her grip is firm -- she won't let him drop.]

I really wasn't trying to pull any pranks or anything. Just help you out when I saw you needed it. I'm sorry.

Ghh...!

[Sure about that? Because the moment she hoisted him up, and especially when she did that backflip, he went back to flailing pretty damn hard. Hard enough that he apparently didn't hear her just then...]

HEY! [She clonks him lightly with a hoof.] Listen to me when I'm apologizing to you, dummy!

[It doesn't hurt, but it stuns him just long enough to temporarily distract him from his struggling. He cranes his neck round.] What?!

I SAID I'M SORRY!

[Rainbow, yelling that might not be the best idea. But after she's slammed those words into his brain at volume, she moderates her tone.]

I'm sorry I got so worked up. I was just trying to help you by cleaning your window. I didn't mean to cause a fight.

[He gives her the best sidelong look he can manage from this unconventional position. Hey, if she apologised first, that means he's won, right?

Then again, from this vantage point, it's even easier to observe just how badly they've - well, how badly he's trashed this room, mainly.

Seeing that, he has to chuckle a bit too.]

Nah... it's okay. Maybe I overreacted a little.

[...what do you mean, understatement of the century?!]

[Rainbow... just isn't as stubborn as Ed, as much as she will never ever admit that fact. So yeah, technically he won, but to her mind they'd both tied when they both got trapped.]

[She sets him back on the floor, surprisingly gently, back to giggling again.]

We both did. Come on, let's pick this place up.

[Safely grounded in more than one sense, he immediately decides to act as if his technically winning actually matters - there's a vague air of superiority about him as he picks his way over to the previously impaled chair. Not that said air is much of a change from normal.]

Just ask next time. [He thinks about this, and adds:] If there is a next time.

Okay, you tell me what nice things I can do for -- THE LAUNDRY!

[Rainbow flashes out the window with a low jet roar, plowing into the cloud outside. Clothes fly everywhere, and for a minute it seems like disaster, but the pegasus spins into a whirlwind around them.]

[She spin-dries them for just a minute or two, then zooms back into the room, making a sharp vertical turn just as she shoots over his bed. The clothing her wake has dragged behind her smacks into the wall, then falls in half-neat piles onto the sheets.]

[Rainbow pokes her head down, upside-down, to finish her sentence.]

So what CAN I do to surprise you with nice things then?

[With the chair and floor repaired, he's about to move onto the bookshelf, when suddenly upside-down pony at eye level.

Some part of him wonders, not for the first time, when the hell that stopped being completely weird.]

Whatever you want, if you're that set on it. [Shrug.] But you don't have to do anything.

I know.

[Rainbow giggles a little into her hoof again, just because -- well he's so bad at friendship sometimes!]

Well, you sure did get clean laundry out of all of this!

[Sometimes?]

I'm telling you, it was fine before. I don't even know where you got the idea.

[Clap.]

...But thanks, I guess.

[Although that might be the least heartfelt-sounding expression of gratitude possible short of an explicit "screw you", he did hold off on it until the noise from his shelf transmutation was loud enough to mostly drown it out...]

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