July 10
We both got up before Jenny and we were going to run out and play in the grass again but then Aquamarine said that we ought to try the swimming pool. She thought that we might as well use it, since we were here, and so we went between the buildings and up to the gate around the pool. There was a big white board that had lots of rules. It did say no horseplay, and neither of us was really sure what that meant but we didn’t think that it applied to us.
The water smelled funny, because humans like putting things in the water to help keep it clean. It wasn't harmful as long as you didn't drink a lot of the water.
The pool had a shallow end and a deep end, and a little barrier of buoys tied together with a rope to separate the two halves, and there were chairs where people could sit and sun themselves when they weren't in the water, although with the way the buildings were around the pool you wouldn't get a whole lot of sun-time.
I jumped off the edge and did a duck-landing, and Aquamarine just sort of flopped into the water, and we both figured out at about the same time that the shallow end wasn't really shallow enough for our legs to comfortably touch the ground.
That was okay, though.
She was a better swimmer than I was. There were some pegasuses that were good with swimming with their wings but I wasn't one of them. And at first, 'cause I hadn't been swimming in so long, I held out my wings to keep me level, which was just like having a sea-anchor on each side of me.
When I remembered to keep them tucked in, I did a lot better.
Once she'd gotten to the far end of the pool, she taunted me by saying that she thought I'd grown up on the ocean, and when I got to the edge I reminded her that it was above the ocean, not in it. I'd never claimed to be a seapony.
She let go of the side and dove to the bottom of the pool then popped up in the center, her mane completely over her eyes. So I guess she'd forgotten how to come up without blinding yourself.
Aquamarine stuck her head back under and shook her head to get her mane clear then came back up above the water with a challenge in her eyes, so I let go of the side of the pool and dove down, too. Underwater, my wings were a real asset, 'cause I could move a lot of water with them. I just had to be careful to not get carried away, 'cause that's a good way to get wing-strain.
She went down, too, and we did a little dance underwater, circling like dolphins, and then we came back up for air.
Pretty soon we were having all sorts of fun. I could tow her underwater pretty quick if she bit my tail, and in the shallow end I could stand on her back and she could flip me all the way out of the water, and once we got our timing figured out, I could do just a single flap as I came up, then tip nose-over-tail as I went over the buoys and use that turning momentum to carry through in a dive and come up back in the shallow end, next to her.
So that was a lot of fun and pretty good exercise for the morning. We finally got out of the pool when her vision started to get a little blurry from the chemical they put in the water, and I saw that they were a bit bloodshot. So she looked at my eyes and they were fine, 'cause the water couldn't get through my third eyelid.
We didn't have towels with us, so we both shook off on the deck around the pool before going back to our room. Jenny was in the shower so we had to wait for her to finish, and since we didn't want to get our bed wet we just stood and dripped on the carpet.
Both of us were getting a bit chilly, 'cause the room had an air cooling machine that blew air in and the buttons were small and flush.
I'd opened my bags to try and find something to poke them with when Jenny came out of the shower and looked at the two of us—I'd found my pen for my journal at the bottom of my bag—and wanted to know why we were both soaking wet and why there was a bra with all of my flight gear.
So I told her how Meghan had put it in my bag so that I could carry it home for her and then I'd forgotten I had it, and Jenny rolled her eyes and said that cleared it up and then she said it looked like Meghan had bigger boobs than she did.
It was nice in the bathroom; all the steam from Jenny's shower was still hanging around, and we didn't have to wait for the water to warm up at all.
Aquamarine wanted to know more about Meghan, so I told her how we were sleeping and showering together and how she was learning to preen my wings and she was teaching me how to cook and how much I liked spending time with her. And I told her about our adventures together, both being on television and how I'd gone horseback riding.
She said that was something she wanted to try, too, so I told her how Meghan had practiced with me before we did and said that I thought that had been a really smart thing to do but I still hadn't been very good at riding a horse because I couldn't get it to go where I wanted it to.
Aquamarine said that she'd been going by the pastures on her way back from the greenhouses and one time she'd even gotten up her courage and when nobody was looking she'd jumped the fence and spent an hour in the pasture with them and she'd gotten in a bit of a dominance fight with one of the mares but the rest of them hadn't been any problem.
We got dried off and when we got back out in the main room Jenny was dressed in her cargo pants again and she was nice and filled up my camelback for me while Aquamarine and I were brushing each other's manes.
Once we were ready, we packed up all our things and put them in the car then checked out of the motel. Jenny drove us to the park and we had to get new fetlock-bands then we went over to the big tent where they were having the pancakes with pirates.
That was a lot of fun because the pirates were really silly. Right after we sat down, one of them took a pancake on the tip of his sword and everyone chased him around the tent until they finally caught him before he could eat it, and another one of them kept trying to put pepper down the barrel of his gun because he said he thought it was gunpowder.
There was a blonde girl who folded up a newspaper-hat for the pancake thief, and she stole his hat and put the newspaper-hat on him instead, and he kept wearing it even though it was too big for him.
Jenny said that she thought the breakfast was meant for children, but I was having fun and so was Aquamarine, and besides there were plenty of seats for everyone.
Before we left they told us that we should watch their morning play which was called Down and Out on the Barbary Coast, and we said that we would. The pepper-pirate said that he was in it.
We were just getting down towards the river when we heard a loud honking, then the bell for the drawbridge started to ring. Since all the ships were already at their docks, we weren't sure what was coming but as it opened I saw a big black lake freighter slowly coming upriver.
Everyone stood and watched as it went by, and it was a good reminder that as big as these ships were, the newer ships were so much larger. It was called Buffalo and it was from Wilmington, Delaware.
You could feel the ground moving a little bit from the pulsing of its engine. And there was a crewman up in the bow, watching where the head of the ship went, or maybe just looking down on the tall ships as he went by.
We lost sight of it when the next drawbridge upriver closed, and I wondered where it was going. Jenny said it was probably going to Saginaw, and she didn't think that it could go any further up the river than that.
We visited a couple of smaller ships first, which were called the Appledore IV and Appledore V, which both were from Bay City. And right in front of them was another small ship named the When and If, and the woman at the dock told us that it had been built for General George Patton, who had wanted to sail it around the world after World War Two was over. But she said that he never had; he'd died in Europe before he could return home.
Jenny looked at the swords again until the play was about to start, then we sat and watched the play, which was pretty funny. In the end all of them fought with swords until both of the older pirates were defeated, and the younger pirates ran off with their treasure to get married.
We had a snack for lunch at the booths, and got more elephant ears and kettle popcorn and then we took one last look around before crossing over the river to see the last few ships that we hadn't seen yesterday.
Both of them were from Canada; one was called the Playfair and the other was the Pathfinder, and we took a tour of each one of them and then we decided that it was time to go back to Lansing.
On our way out of town, Jenny wanted to stop and take a picture of the city hall, which wasn't very far from where she'd parked. It was a big, grey, stone building with a red roof that looked kinda like a castle, with a clock tower on one end.
We took a different route out of town, crossing over a pair of bridges that joined on an island, and that took us back to the 75 Highway, and from there we reversed our course back home.
We stopped for dinner in a town called Durand, and she found a restaurant called Nick's Hometown Grill, which was really near the railroad tracks and right as we were getting our food, we heard a train horn and Aquamarine and Jenny looked at each other and laughed and said it was just like being back in their apartment.
It was maybe another half hour after we left Durand that we finally got back to East Lansing, and Jenny parked her car in long car-pavilion which she said was called a carport and had been included with their lease. And the bottom floor was all little stores; there was a restaurant and a coffee store and something called Spartan Net which I thought might be a fishing store but Aquamarine said it was for computers instead.
Their room was on the corner, and it had a balcony which looked over a triangle-field between the road and the railroad tracks, and you could also see through the trees a bunch more fields across the tracks and Aquamarine said that those all belonged to Michigan State, and they experimented with crops in them.
The inside was really nice and new, and a lot nicer than my apartment. Everything in the kitchen was sleek and shiny chrome, and they even had a microwave oven. Along the windows, there were tables with lots of plants in them which were all Aquamarine's. She showed me one baby tree that she'd found in a drainage ditch without any leaves and wrapped in an old plastic bag and so she'd dug it up and brought it home to nurse it back to health and then she was going to plant it near the railroad tracks once it got a little bit healthier.
We spent the rest of the evening sitting in the living room and talking. Jenny showed us some pictures on the computer of her working at a blacksmith's forge, which was really neat, and she showed us a twisted knife she'd made for practice. She said it wasn't very good at all and would probably serve better as a tent-peg than a knife, but she was still proud of it because it was the first thing she'd made all by herself.
Aquamarine looked at her Facebook, and Cedric had sent her a picture of him working on a house. He said a friend had taken it, and you could tell it was kind of candid; he was walking away from a big flat truck that was just out of focus, and had a stack of mill-wood on his shoulder.
I asked Aquamarine if she'd written him any letters, and she kinda turned her head away and Jenny leaned over and whispered that they talked on the telephone a couple of hours each week.
And then she had some pictures of her biology experiment, which just looked to me like a shelf of potted plants. But she said that her professor was getting really good data from them.
Aquamarine and Jenny had two different bedrooms and I thought that was kind of odd. She said that Jenny liked it that way, but it did feel kind of lonely sometimes. She'd put her bed up against the wall between the two bedrooms, and she said that helped.
She wanted to know if I ever felt lonely in my apartment, and I told her that I did sometimes but I had lots of birds outside that kept me company, and Angela and David were only a short flight away, plus Meghan came over or I went to her apartment.
My ears perked up as I heard a train, and I went to the window to watch it go by. Aquamarine said that the day after they'd moved in, someone had ignored the lights and gates and tried to get around the train and their car had been completely smashed by it, and the train had sat across the road for three hours until it could go again.
I could still see some ruts at the edge of the triangle-field, and she said that was where it had gotten pushed by the train. She said that the guy in it had survived but that the fire department had to cut the car apart to get him out of it.
She used her computer for a little bit, and I wrote in my journal until it was time for bed, and then the two of us snuggled up together.
7557150
Ah, you mean something like… development in a magic-free environment would lead to a biological reliance on conventional physics and chemistry, which aren't guaranteed to function the same way in a magically saturated environment like Equestria. I guess I can understand that.
Biscuit, you got some 'splainin' to do...
Or as long as you don't miss your chemical balance.
Or as long as you don't stay in it too long...
Don't worry, you get use to it very quickly.
And after a few years you get so use to it you can sleep in a tent near a very busy TGV line.
People are stupid, never try and beat the train. Glad to know that the person survived.
7557188 I'd guess an adaptation to keep wind and dust out of her eyes in high speed flight. Or extreme weather.
D'aww.
7557194
I don't think any historical group truly disappears without a trace, or else we wouldn't know of them at all, but maybe you're talking about the Hittite skip, where they disappear out of the historical record in Anatolia for three centuries and then reappear as a successor culture in northern Syria? It's an oddity, and one of the most compelling bits of evidence of the theory that the Late Bronze Dark Ages were almost entirely an imaginary construct of archaeologists stapling together evidence and timelines in a false manner. This theory also accounts for the supposed nonexistence of archaeological evidence of David's kingdom in Palestine, erases the supposed era of Greek illiteracy between the fall of Mycenae and the rise of the archaic Greek city-states, and a number of other oddities such as the Hittite skip. It all goes away if you abandon the dating scheme tied to linear Egyptian dynasty lists, and take into account that a number of the supposedly sequential Egyptian dynasties in the period in question were actually concurrent and rival powers in Egypt.
Or possibly you're talking about that island - Thera I think? - that blew up in the late Minoan period in the Aegean and people spin stories about how it must have inspired Plato's story about Atlantis. Which since it was another of his utopian fairy tales, I don't see why it had to have been inspired by anything at all any more than More's Utopia was based on anything in particular.
Someone should make a Clipper replica and call it, We Can Get It You, Wholesale.
Someones messing with teh clocks again, the journey back being far quicker than the one out.
Another experiemental farm? Im trying to remember what they came up with at teh one local to me, just the other side of the valley, tha Mum said something about living there or in land building maybe before it became the research facility in 50s.
Its getting to the point where to have a level crossing, you need massive grates accross teh rails to drive over, that then drawbridge open to act as walls. Then youll still get people trying to jump the gap.
7557188
Nictitating membrane
She's part bird so, why not?
I miss elephant ears. Down here in the south, the last time I saw them was around 20 years ago.
Swimming. Now there is something i miss.
IIRC (it was 40 years ago), there were a number of civilizations around the world. Then, the most devastating weapon ever made was developed -the war chariot. With it, barbarians collapsed every civilization on Earth (only time that ever happened)
Cretan Linear A was an island civilization & they got taken out by a volcano at about that time, making a clean sweep.
It has been theorized Plato used this as a basis for Atlantis (he made it 10,000 years back & it should have been 1000)
As for "Ponies x ancient Greeks". You'd have to pick
1 Which gods? Uranus, the Titans, or Jupiter's bunch
2 Which humans? They believed that the Earth was destroyed and repopulated several times and the various races were VERY different
If you've ever seen "Class of the Titans", it's not the 1st time Saturn killed off the human race. Is the 1st time Jupiter tried to save them.
7557259
7557322
I admit, I'm most intrigued by it being a third eyelid.
7557396 She's got a pair of regular eyelids, and underneath that is the membrane. Funny thing, by the way. Vulcans from Star Trek also have a third inner eyelid, although in their case it's implied to be opaque, or at least only semitransparent. They evolved the trait because Vulcan is a desert planet with much harsher sunlight than Earth; it protects their eyes from the glare.
7557396
Because usually, an eye has two eyelids: an upper and lower eyelid which close to cover the eye. Therefore, the nictitating membrane, which also covers the eye, is the "third" eyelid.
7557330 That's because we've advanced our fried fair food technology. We started with candy bars, and now we'll deep-fry anything and dust it with powdered sugar!
7557298
Skirts is the most prolific fanfiction writer on the internet. He's also been doing it for YEARS. Before MLP he wrote the longest teen titan fanfic.
Just because you don't vomit words onto a word processor and set keyboards on fire with how fast you type doesn't mean you don't write fast and to be honest Skirts would probably say he's jealous of the quality that you write every day.
You're both amazing authors and write more than an average person will in their school careers. Don't think any less of yourself.
7557150
"One bijection between mathematicians and Big Macs coming right up, sir."
THAT'S RACIST!
Also this explains Silver's fixation with them.
Maybe she should call Cedric and ask if he wants to snuggle and/or help her practice riding.
Squee, more Pegasus Facts
("To unsubscribe, answer the following security question: The best kind of pony is:
- A) pegasus
- B) pegasus
- C) pegasus
- D) all of the above")
They could join a circus as the flying pony sisters (Silver: Hey I'm the only one flying here!)
More additions to Pegasus biology, it's looking increasingly like ponies were built at some point given their different forms.
Maybe, although I wouldn't be surprised if he had his shirt off showing off his guns to his filly.
It's fun that earth ponies seem to treat plants as pets, I guess Applejack wasn't to far out there with her treatment of Bloomburg.
7557780
I was about to say "except for the ones they eat" but then I remembered I grew up on a cattle farm.
I take it she has the transparent type underneath her main eyelids like a bird has when flying?
sooo wrong and so right at the same time hahaha
7557780
... this gives Fluttershy's "I would like to be a tree" a little subtext (see also: "it's so nice to be the pet for once").
Aquamarine's swimming skills raise some issues about how buoyant earth ponies are, in the previous chapter Jenny said that Aquamarine is heavier than she is despite presumably having less volume (or is Aqua that robust and Jenny is thin) so is she still lighter than water? Or does she naturally sink?
On the same issue Silver's hollow bones might make swimming underwater harder as she's tend to bob up (not sure have penguins and other diving birds do it).
Ouch. I saw someone fail to beat a train once, fatally. The progressive press I was working on had glitched, and I was standing at the open loading dock for some fresh air. I will never forget the screech as the front half of the car was shoved along in front of the train.
"Then an upset man from the motel came out and told us that horseplay wasn't allowed. I was confused, and before I could say anything Aquamarine replied, 'but, we're not horses, we're ponies'. That just made the man more upset, which I was sorry for."
7558806
I did get the feeling earth ponies are denser than people. People are slightly denser than water.
The bones of a penguin aren't filled with air and extremely light, but heavy and filled with marrow.
7557182
Yeah, that's basically my thought. Obviously, it's not a guarantee it would work that way, but it seems like it might, which is why I like to have things work at least well enough on both sides of the equation (but not so well that one side is absurdly OP).
7557188
As a couple of other people have pointed out, she has a nictitating membrane, which helps keep her eyes clear during extreme flying. Or swimming, as the case may be.
7557205
Exactly! Perfectly safe.
I've never had the privilege of living near a super-active rail line (and certainly not a TGV), but I live about 50' from a state highway, and the only things I really notice any more are cars with bad exhausts, motorcycles that are going too fast, and ambulances.
7557233
Yeah, I don't understand why people even try. But they do.
7557259
Both, actually.
7557284
7557316
MSU--formerly Michigan Agriculturical College (and I still sometimes call it "Moo U") has huge research fields and other research facilities. I don't know what all they research there, but I would think basically everything from animal husbandry to turfgrass. My ex-girlfriend was researching blind chickens for a while. I think that's what she got her PhD doing.
There have been some experiments with bollards that rise up to stop cars.
7557322
Some mammals have 'em too. Manitees, dogs, beavers, polar bears. . . .
If you've got one, you can stick a hoof in your eye and not cause damage.
7557289
Well, disappear without a trace was a bit of hyperbole. Obviously, if they vanished and didn't leave anything behind we'd never know they'd been there.
I think it was Thera I was thinking of. I remember there was one Mediterranean civilization that was pretty advanced and then got completely wiped out by a volcano.
7557330
They still exist up here, I think.
If you're crafty in the kitchen, there are recipies online.
7557331
?
Do you not have bodies of water where you live?
7557365
I've only got 20 years between me and Greek Civ, and I don't remember that much of it.
Ah, well. Good thing that I never tried for a career as a historian.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what I remember, and what I was thinking of.
I have no idea. This is why I haven't written the story yet; my ignorance of ancient Greek culture is profound.
7557429
That's not a huge stretch; apparently polar bears have them so they don't go snowblind.
7557462
Ah, the carnival food arms race. It will ultimately end with deep-fried butter, dusted in sugar, and put on a stick.
It's possible that's already a thing.
7557490
That sounds so obscene.
7557480
Maybe I should ask him!
7557492
I know!
Breasts are the best pillow. That's a scientific fact.
That would be an interesting phone call.
7557780
Actually, that would be an interesting circus act.
I've thought about writing a story to that effect. Not just the ponies, either, but everything, and then the makers lost control of their world.
That might not impress her--she can probably carry as much as he can. She's built for hauling things.
It's kind of in their nature, I think.
7558019
7558097
Yes, she does. To protect her eyes from wind, dust, and water.
7560309
Deep-fried butter already exists, but it isn't served on a stick or dusted with sugar. The butter inside the dough melts, of course. It basically tastes like fried bread covered in butter.
7558361
"Okay, fine, you're bigger than me so I won't graze over here. Happy?"
7558377
And she does have a tree costume. . . .
7559154
I've gotten lucky and haven't seen that yet. Did pick up after a number of wrecks, some fatal, when I was driving a tow truck.
7559858
It would probably be okay if actual horses were just sitting on the recliners, catching some sun.
The guy at the motel's going to be a little bit upset when he goes to clean the filters for the pool. "Why is there all this hair in here? And blue feathers . . . what the hell?"
I'm not sure that they are. I suppose it depends on the person. IRL horses float really well becuase of all the gas in their digestive systems.
That's interesting about the penguins. I never knew that. I suppose since they can't fly anyway, light bones wouldn't be any advantage.
7558806
Combination of factors going on here. Aquamarine probably has more volume than Jenny, for starters. She's obviously not as tall, but she's a lot more bulky around the barrel than Jenny is. When I did my Science experiment, it turned out that ponies probably weigh between 106 and 152 pounds. Star Scraper did a little bit of a different experiment and came up with slightly different results (141-311 pounds), which was assuming that they had human density (I did not assume that).
IRL horses float pretty well, due in part to all the gas in their bellies.
writinghorseback.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ChincoteagueHorsesSwim-168-500x333.jpg
I also prefer to think that the ponies are more differentiated in size than we see in the show. So Aquamarine's probably built a little bit more like a draft horse, and Silver Glow's shorter, thinner, and less bulky. I know that Hasbro has them all the same size, but I don't like that. It just doesn't seem logical to me.
I think that the ponies float naturally, but they can dive. It wouldn't come naturally to an Earth pony, and their legs aren't really that great for diving, but we've seen ample evidence in canon that ponies in Ponyville play in the water. For a pegasus, it might be easier, becuase they can use their wings underwater and it's some of the same principles as flying, only in slow motion.
They could potentially increase their buoyancy by swallowing air, and they could reduce it by releasing air. Which means maybe you don't want to be in the locker room with the Equestrian diving team before they go out to compete.
Besides the marrow in the penguins (which I didn't know about--I learned something new!), all the birds I can think of that dive either use their above-water momentum, or else they've got webbed feet which I assume are pretty good for propelling them underwater.
It may be more complicated than that, though. I seem to recall loons can swim a pretty respectable distance underwater.
7560329
See also Days of Wasp and Spider.
7560347
And in the case of MLP pegasi, that's helium.
(I never get tired of linking that. )
7560742
Such good stories, "Days of Wasp and Spider" and "Final Solution" are. The combat sequences really get your blood pumping. The world building... So much is casually explained.
"So, wait, Luna just learned a spell to mentally link to others for teaching purposes? Wait a sec..."
7560309
The Minoans. I think they got wiped out when Santorini blew.
They still left traces though.
7561578
Beside all the foreshadowing, there is also so much superconductor/nanotech porn.
Shoo be doo. Shoop shoo be doo.
7561578
There's an Alistair MacLean novel called Santorini, and that's how I know the name of that volcano.
7725019
Silver Glow, seapony. That would be cute. Maybe next time she's in a bath or the hot tub she ought to start singing.
7727999
If I'd remembered, I would have amended that post.
It was the Minoans. Santorini didn't end their civilization, but certainly hurt them badly. It might have been the event to put them on the decline, though there are apparently pockets of people inland and up in the mountains of Crete who may never have been truly conquered in the later years, therefore descending directly from the Minoans.
cdn.meme.am/cache/instances/folder640/58400640.jpg
I had to comment on this immediately. *goes back to reading*
OH, So Silver Glow came to Durand and didn't stop to say hi to me?
Rude.
8757864
I legit considered having her meet you.
8757864
I'm reminded of something in a story I may get around to writing one day. I needed an excuse for a character to be in Japan in order for other things to work, and visiting their father at a military base made as much sense as any. Naturally, there's a brony author also present as a fourth speaking role in that chapter (the others being the main character, their father, and the out-of-universe reason for the whole setup, a kuchisake-onna with surprisingly good English)
Nictating membrane?
*squeeeeeeeeee*
A + C
5ever
11217260
Yes, exactly. A good thing for a pegasus to have.
Legit the perfect pair. You know perfectly well that the two of them are going to grow old together.
Superfluous "if".
*delighted sigh*