We ate at a small restaurant in Fargo but I don’t know how to read human yet. It was a place that had lots of good vegetable options and they were sauteed and seasoned like from an exotic country! I ate my fill and a little more which was a mistake we all found out because I started farting after we were driving again in Ford. The weather was very cold because we were moving so fast and two of the windows were down to give us all fresh air.
In my defense, Lilli was farting too but children think it’s funny so she just blamed it on me whenever she let one go. I couldn’t be upset with her because I would have done the same back home, and often did. It was just revenge for her.
I expressed my nervousness with Written Letter and our driver whose name is <Carl>. I like that better than the rough translation to our language that means Dirty Window Cleaner, because he was a driver and didn’t seem like one to clean windows.
We passed the first exit into the city from the speedway and it was named after the street number of 32nd. I was very excited, we all were. Even Written Letter was excited and she seemed almost too calm the whole trip. I didn’t realize until we were slowing down how fast we were going and looked around at the scenery again and it was a lot flatter than any other part of our trip up to that point.
We began to drive through the town and it was a lot like Vanhoover, in a way. A lot of snow and businesses with carriages going between them without many ponies trotting on the road at all. No, not ponies. I have to think differently, people. And they walk or run, they don’t trot or gallop. They have hands and feet and seemingly can do anything they want to, as long as they put the effort in.
Short of actual magic, that is. I noticed, also, that my wife is the only unicorn on our trip and I hope she doesn’t feel outcast. The rest of us are earth ponies, after all. We’ll support her, either way.
We went through too many turns for me to keep track of before we slowed and were shown where the local police station was and where our house was right after that. We were close enough to gallop there in a few minutes from our house. It was a duplex and we were going to have one half to ourselves while the other was housed by a family that had been there for many years.
Ford stopped and then we all became very scared and nervous because there were several people in cold weather human clothes standing around and we had to wait while the Helpers went to talk with them. They held up signs and first we thought they were welcoming us but then we didn’t know if they were telling us to go home because there was a lot of red on a banner that was behind them above our doorway into the house.
There was a people with a microphone in her hand and was talking to another people with a big box on their shoulder and we were told it was safe to come out. I went out first and had my family wait until I was ahead a bit, too see what was going on. Our pendants did little to translate all the people’s questions. They were news reporters, mostly. There were some people there that waited by the door with welcome baskets and it was a very warm welcome on such a cold day!
After we had all answered a couple questions like our names and what we were going to do first now that we were here, we were going to learn about our new home was what we said, we went into the house and it was humid and warm. Perfect!
We unloaded all our bags into the living room and spend a while exploring the house. It was two stories tall with a basement that was used for storage by the previous tenants but I thought it would make a nice place to have a small indoor garden and a place for stallions to gather and gossip.
I wondered what I was going to do for money since we weren’t going to live off the stipend, but Amber was most qualified to work here because magic was alike fingers in some ways, plus she is smarter than I am because unicorns are just smarter sometimes. I am better at some things, too. But not at math, science, astrology… all the unique stuff that unicorns are natural at. I guess I can find a job cooking or washing dishes, but I think I need a change. I’m an earth pony and I maybe can get a job doing something with the ground or as a guard for someperson important.
It turns out I was wrong about a lot of things, already. It’s early winter here, not spring. It’s colder than Vanhoover and is far more bleak feeling. Even the peoples outside seemed only happy to see us, not to experience the world around them. I don’t know why, but I think making friends on the streets isn’t going to happen until summer time and until then we’ll have to learn how humans socialize.
We’ll have to learn as we go and set rules appropriate for our foals to follow. I know they’re old enough to not be considered foals, but they’ll always be our foals, no matter how old they get or what choices they make.
I was embarrassed to ask, but I wonder what the rules about sex are here. I know they’re different across our world, so they’re certainly different here. It’s a law, I’m certain, that clothes have to be worn at all times so I might have to find a tailor that will make enough clothes for us. There’s so much to do, I now realize, that I should have been told about before we crossed over.
Our helpers are only helpers, not foalsitters, and we don’t need to be foalsat, we’re old enough to run a business and buy a house, we can certainly figure this weird planet out.
Anyway, after we picked our rooms, since Amber and I wanted some space to ourselves and the children picked the room across the hall we all had an extra room that we decided to use for grooming and relaxing. There are spa’s in town here, but they’re not made for ponies. Either way I’m scheduling a session and we’ll see how they do. I need a good grooming and my hooves have been a bit sore since we got here. The lack of ground and more rock had made me stomping more than usual. I guess I should get some shoes put on, especially if it’s supposed to start snowing soon.
I don’t see it getting too bad, though because with all their technology I’m certain the humans control the weather as well as pegasi do back home.
Dinner was our vegetables and fruits we brought with us. It seems that there was a limited travel permit for us to bring a traveling meal since that’s how we do it in Equestria. They accepted our traveling customs so I accepted theirs and we all wore our scarves and boots to supper. The helpers and everyone said that we hadn’t needed to so we took off our boots but left on our scarves.
It was messy for Lilli and Timber because they kept wiping their muzzles on their scarves so when we were done we scolded them and asked where the washing basin was. THere was a machine for doing laundry called a washer machine and all we had to do was put the scarves in and tap the soap button on a bottle on a shelf above the washer and it dropped liquid soap into the basin and we closed the lid and pushed a button to turn it on and then that was it!
Human’s have it so easy, it’s like they do have magic of their own through technology in ways ponies have yet to even imagine. There was nowhere to hang the clothes outside because the cold, but there was a drying machine and our helpers said they’d stay a whole day with us to answer any and all questions they could as well as teach us some basics on their technology.
Amber adapted very quickly while the children played in their room and Blueberry tried to connect his portable Stratonet connector thing to the earth Stratonet, but he was told the human Stratonet was different and needed to be set up still because they didn’t know we used Equestria’s version of it since it was still so new.
We had a computer, that’s what they’re called, in each of our rooms and we only had to talk to them and they would even talk back to us in human since there wasn’t an Equestrian translator inside it, I guess.
We all took turns talking to it and it would write everything we said like we all had magic and Amber was very impressed. She got her own telegraph they call a fohn and she used her magic with it and it has human numbers on it and pushing them in order telegraphed her VOICE to another fohn in the kitchen! It was more convenient than the Stratonet communicators.
It was so much fun to talk to each other from all over the house we could have just played with that but it needed to be plugged in or the battery would die.
We learned that the shiny black space on the wall wasn’t a portal to somewhere but was called a telegraph vision, or TV for short. It showed us plays and all kinds of things and it was amazing. Lilli said the helpers took a picture of us watching the TV all at the same time and when I asked them if they had they said they had because it was the cutest thing they’d seen in awhile.
Other than that the rest of the night was uneventful and we just got ready for sleep in our beds. There was a bed in each room large enough for my whole family to sleep on but we still split into our own rooms and the helpers slept in the extra room between our rooms and they didn’t sleep together because that wasn’t human custom. Merry got to sleep in the bed and Brint got to sleep on the floor and they were happy that way.
We all have our own notepads to write in to learn our human letters and they’re not too tough, it seems. It’ll be easier than learning unicorn, that’s for sure.