She was raising a hoof to knock when the door swung open, bathing us in warm light. Velvet blinked at the empty space in front of her, then looked down to see the filly in the doorway.

She was pink. Garishly pink! It was oddly like looking at the face in the giant billboard, only much, much (much!) smaller. And younger. And a very imperfect match. It was hard to tell in the light, but she seemed wrong somehow. My eyes first lighted on a rough scar on her head, like she’d recently fallen headfirst, possibly at very high speed, and scraped herself up rather badly. The first guess that popped into my head was that she had jumped off the roof of her barn. Trying to fly? My eyes moved to her sides, looking for wings, but she was indeed an earth pony. Then my eyes caught her bare flank. She was young, but not that young. She stood less than a head shorter than me. I knew what it was like to strive for a cutie mark that wouldn’t come; my heart went out to her. She had waited longer for hers than even I had, and was still wait... no, wait.

The wrongness snapped into focus. (If I’d still been on Mint-als, I would have realized it immediately!) Her coat wasn’t actually her coat.

She’d painted herself pink!

I looked to Calamity and Velvet Remedy. From their expressions, they had seen it too, and it didn’t sit well with them.

Fo:E - Chapter Nine: The Moral of the Story