February 2
When I woke up again, we were there! Meghan woke me up by gently shaking me and for just a second, I couldn't think of where I was, but then the familiar scents of the girls and the car brought me back.
I stuck my head up and looked out the window. We were in a gas station parking lot—the gas station is called Sheetz, which I'd never heard of before, but that was because we were in a new place.
I stretched out as well as I could inside the car, and then Lisa got out and opened the door for me, and I set hoof in Punxsutawney, which is not pronounced how it's spelled.
I got a better stretch out on the ground, and we went inside for some gas station food and drinks. Becky said that they have good coffee, and their doughnuts were pretty good too, and it was just the kind of thing to have on a road trip.
I wasn't so sure, myself. I would have preferred something green that would give me energy throughout the day, rather than the oversugared doughnut and slightly overdone coffee (although they had little containers of french vanilla flavored cream which at least made the coffee more palatable) but it did wake me up.
On the other side of the road were railroad tracks and a river, and the river had a weird structure in it. I was curious what it was, and wanted to get a better look, but just then a long train hauling a string of dirty black cars loaded with coal slowly made its way along the tracks, blocking my view. I thought about flying over the train and getting a look, but the girls were getting back in the car and I didn't want to be left behind. I didn't think Peggy or my helpers would be too happy if I had to call them and tell them that I was lost in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania.
Becky drove us to Gobbler's Knob, which is where the prediction was to be made. There were lots of people there, and I also saw a couple of pegasuses off in the distance, hovering over the crowd. They were a little ways off and we couldn't really make our way through the crowd very easily, and it would have been rude of me to fly off to go greet them.
I could see why they were, too—standing on my hooves, I wouldn't see all that much. So I told Lisa that I was going to fly up a bit if they didn't mind, and they said it was okay.
We weren't there for too long before some men in long coats and top hats came onto the stage, and they made a few speeches, and then a man with glasses picked up this big fat groundhog and held him up so that everyone could see. Then he put him down on a little platform that looked like a tree stump, and the groundhog sort of sniffed around and then the man picked him back up again.
Then one man on stage picked up a sign that said 'No Shadow,' and other held up a sign that said 'Think Spring,' and that was pretty much all that there was to the ceremony—an announcement of what the sign had said by the official herald, all said in rhyme. It was very much like a part from a play, rather that what I'd consider an official announcement. (The rhyme said that the groundhog had a hoverboard, but Meghan later told me that wasn't true; there are no hoverboards.) Lots of people cheered for that, and then the ceremony broke up.
I asked Meghan how accurate the woodchuck's prediction was, and she said he was right about half the time.
Well, I'm no foal; with those terrible odds he might as well be guessing. But it was hard to imagine why so many people would come out to see a groundhog guess when spring might come. What do animals know about spring, anyway? We wake them from their winter hibernation and bring the birds back north. Why would they have to concern themselves with seasons?
I was about to ask her why we'd come, but then I saw how happy the three of them looked.
Then Lisa asked me what I'd thought of the event, and I told her it had been interesting. She asked if we did anything like that, and I said that we did not. I told her that we pegasuses had been tending to the weather since even before the tribes were united and Equestria was formed.
That kind of gave her pause, and she fell silent. I thought that maybe I'd insulted her somehow—maybe this ceremony was more important to her than I'd thought.
We walked back to the car in silence. Becky pushed the little button she has that wakes the car up, and the lights flashed and the door locks clicked. Lisa put her hand on my door to open it for me, and then dropped her hand and crouched down so that she was face-to-face with me.
She asked me what the weather was going to be today, which was an odd question.
I looked up at the clouds, and kind of felt the air on the ground, then I told her that I would have to fly up to altitude and see a pressure map, and I could tell her with a high degree of confidence. Ninety percent accuracy, for sure—better than that groundhog. And if human weather wasn't so feral and I knew the area well, I could be almost a hundred percent certain, even if I didn't know the weather schedule at all or if there were feral storms that came in.
And then she asked me about the rain and the snow, if I could predict that. I said that I could, as long as I had unfettered access to the sky and a few maps and a little bit to work it out on paper (I can get a good, quick back-of-hoof calculation in my head, but just one pegasus can't monitor a whole weather system). I told her that I'd taken advanced classes on feral weather, and been posted on the seaboard for two summers in a row in weather school and now I worked with feral weather all the time in Equestria. (Lisa didn't appreciate what an honor that was—only the best pegasuses work in coastal zones.)
Then she asked me what happened to us—how we'd lost our sense of wonder. And I asked her what she meant, and she said that the weatherman would make a prediction, and people would discuss it, whether it was going to come or not, and if it did if it would be like the weatherman said it would be.
I thought that sounded like poor management.
Lisa said that I couldn't imagine what it was like to hear the weather forecast on the radio and then go to bed hoping that school would be canceled the next day, or how it felt to look up at the sky hoping to get home before the rain started. She said that the weather forecast was more like a lottery and sometimes your lucky number came up and sometimes it didn't.
Well, I couldn't argue with that—that was all true. And it was important! How could farmers know what to plant if the weather wasn't right? How could they schedule markets and fairs and school plays if they didn't know what the weather was going to be? On the few occasions where there was an unplanned storm because somepony messed up, it was really inconvenient, and everypony had to work harder to deal with it.
But when I told her that she looked kind of sad. She opened the door for me and I hopped up in my seat.
We drove for a bit in silence, and I just thought about what Lisa had said. And then I told her that I thought it was pretty amazing that Becky had Focus, which had taken us this far with only a few stops for gas and none for water at all. And that they had these stores that were full of so many things, and the tall skyscratchers and big bridges and everything else that they had built, and we didn't have anything like it at all. I told her that we didn't even have Taco Bells, and she thought that was really funny.
Then Meghan said that one of the most important thing about visiting a foreign country was seeing what was odd to you that was an everyday thing to everyone who lived there all the time, and I said that she was right. Everyone had been amazed by the cloud I'd brought down, but if I'd done that back in Equestria nobody would have been all that interested. And I said that if Becky brought Focus to Equestria, there would be so many ponies crowded around it that it wouldn't be able to go anywhere.
Lisa said that maybe she was wrong, but she still thought it was kind of sad that ponies weren't surprised by the weather, and that we ponies didn't have to rely on the predictions of a woodchuck.
When we finally got back to campus, everyone including me was completely exhausted. I trudged back up the hill to our dorm room and collapsed into bed, even though it was hours before I normally went to sleep.
I'm in my 60s. I can remember before satellites, when weather predictions were really inaccurate. Now, predictions are fairly accurate for at least a day or 2.
One more difference between Earth & EQ. In EQ, they've got a market set up where you haggle over prices. IMO, outside of (maybe) the big cities, you probably don't see set price stores. I'd bet that is a bit of a shock.
Also, a friend of mine was telling me about Mexico. There, if you are in a line & start talking to a friend people just pass you & nobody thinks twice about it. Here, you take your life in your hands doing that.
Growing up, I had a mother & 3 sisters. + various girl friends over the years. I can't believe I forgot. I'd bet the rent money, on EQ girls don't shave their legs or use Nair but Silver's roommate does one or the other.
I grew up in western Pennsylvania. It is pronounced:
Bone Amy
Versailles rhymes with fur sales
Bob wire
Jew Anita
House ton (well, those 2 are New York)
Punks a tone knee
At a sci fi con onetime I pronounced Moorcock's stories as Mell Kneebone. I was told they were pronounced Mell Nib Oh Neigh. I replied "Then why did he spell it Mell Kneebone?" Crushed by the force of superior logic, they went away.
I'll have to check with a guy at work who came from a town near Puxty, I always thought it was pronounced more or less like it was spelled - Puxatawny, basically. But western Pennsylvania is full of towns that ignore the established rules, esp. French place names. Thus there's a Du Boise with a spoken "s", a North Versailles with a spoken terminal "s", and I'm told you can tell who are the locals in Lemont by who calls the hamlet "Leemont".
As for the girls' worries about wonder... it's been my observation that beauty and wonders are creatures of perception and attention. Busy and experienced individuals pretty much have to have optimized the distracting elements out of their observational matrices in order to operate at peak efficiency in the work day, and it isn't easy to turn that off when the day is done. Children who are still learning to see and the elderly who have no need for efficiencies are both traditional observers of wonders and beauties.
None for water! Oh my god, that's adorable!
What does she think a car runs on, steam? Although if she DOES think that she's got to be pretty impressed. As I recall your average steam train will go through water faster than coal... Or at least need to restock water more often.
Wow, I had not expected a discussion of wonder to come out of this. While I'm not sure I agree with Lisa about the importance of weather's randomness, I can understand how she might think ponies are unimpressed by everything until she realized that they're just fascinated by different things.
7074079
Ouch. Those pronunciations would drive me mad, I have to say. Since I took a year of Latin I have trouble not pronouncing Caesar with a hard "C".
Awesome as always mate! Can't wait for the next entry!
Ok, yeah, thw guy I know from neighboring Brookville says locals call it Punksy, or if they're being formal, Punkseetawny.
I can kind of understand where Lisa came from, but it still comes off as... well, kind of dumb. Yes, a sense of wonder is a precious thing, but unpredictable weather is not a glorious thing of delight and childhood innocence. It's annoying at best and dangerous at worst. Or she just doesn't grasp how mundane weather is to a pegasus. It's like a human marveling at the wonders of bipedalism.
Or I'm just more jaded than I thought.
Now this I like. Nice insight into pony culture and an interesting look at odd Americwn customs from a new perspective. Excellent work!
I've always found this to be a really strange sentiment when put to someone for knowing about how something works. "You understand it? Oh no, that takes away the magic of not knowing!"
It seems to me like either a failure of imagination or curiosity. The questioner has no curiosity about the details of something like Silver's explanation of how she'd calculate a weather forecast, and can't imagine anyone else finding it interesting either, so they act as though Silver has lost something by learning!
In reality, learning something tends to open up new questions about deeper facets of the subject that you don't know, or new ways to appreciate it. Silver's meteorology professor really gets that - I bet he'd appreciate being able to understand the weather on the level Silver does, and find the wonder in it...
Oh hush Lisa
Nice chapter. There were other pegasi there? I'm surprised she didn't go and say hi.
Lisa, you have a box in your pocket that lets you access a staggeringly vast amount of information nigh-instantly AND talk to distant people in real time, even if they're on the other side of the planet. You don't gauge an entire people's sense of wonder based on one thing which you find wondrous that they don't, or vice versa.
I'm not a pegasus, don't understand weather that much and yet I still find the groundhog day to be ridiculous. Where is my sense of wonder you ask? It is marvelling at how fantasticly complex and beautiful life can be, it is appreciating the beauty of sceneries, pondering philosophical question, enjoying learning and discovering new thing and loosing itself into wonderfull works of art.
It would be a very sad day if I limited my sense of wonder at trying to guess the result of a roll of dice.
7074121 ponies don't have internal combustion engines. The closest they have is some weird magic hybrid engine made by Flim and Flam Bros.
To be fair, cars do use coolant and battery acid and various other liquids but those rarely need topping up.
7074242
I don't think that sounds jaded. Not having a reliable weather forecast sucks. Then again, I refer to the lottery as a tax on those who are bad at math, so maybe I'm just cynical too.
I may not wonder how weather works, but I can still stare in awe at a good rainstorm for a few minutes. I'd probably have felt insulted had I been in Silver's position. People telling me that knowing how something works takes the wonder out of your life is one of the things that really grates on me, as my sense of wonder is what has always drawn me to math and science. On a related note, have a comic!
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/beauty.png
Lisa is a mean lady. :<
Lisa should travel to Canterlot for the Summer Sun celebration, watching the sun get suplexed should explain where ponies get their sense of wonder.
I am actually rather firmly in the pony's camp in this one. Unpredictable weather is both a pain to deal with and a hazard. Too much rain and erosion of the top layer of soil washes crops away. Too little and you get a drought. Too much of either or both and you can get a famine without out sourcing from a more fortunate region. Rather annoyed they take the matter so lightly but my compliments to the writer as it is an accurate portrayal of how a lot of people think seeing as they have little reason to worry about such things on a regular basis.
7074121
I doubt she has any detailed knowledge of IC engines so that's likely.
7074373
7074242
The counter for that statement wasn't even that hard, ponies are only fairly sure the sun is going to rise tomorrow, and not even necessarily from the east. To them every day (or night) is a wonder and they know what it's like to go without it. Silver Glow is just too sweet to feel offended I think.
I know what the sequel to this story will be.
And then you come along to remind us that the lack of perspective cuts both ways: none of the humans can grasp what it's like to be born with the ability to literally touch the weather.
The means with which to effect one's will is the first pivot in the gradient from awe at what you cannot change to perfunctory acknowledgement of the mundane to the abiding fascination with depths that reveal unplumbed depths.
It's like cars.
Cars to a kid are something like a power fantasy. It's all *vroom vroom jump crash*, like Hot Wheels and Hollywood race fantasies. Once you have one of your own, for most people, it becomes an object that moves you to the places that allow you to ensure it receives an uninterrupted stream of refined prehistoric hydrocarbons. But some people push beyond that, digging into the arcana of the engine compartment or in the joys of skilled driving with high-performance machinery.
Their sense of wonder hasn't disappeared so much as tempered, refined, transcended what "normal people" recognise.
7074273 And equating Trump supporters to the KKK...
There we go. You lose.
Sure it is, it's just that it's not spelled the way it is pronounced, sort of like Gloucester.
Did it offend Lisa in some way that Silver Glow took the groundhog day tradition and the fact that humans can't control weather so lightly? If that's the case, then I can understand Lisa's standpoint. Silver still hasn't truly grasped the concept of humanity's inability to control the weather.
I mean yeah, to Lisa that seems like the whole trip would have been a waste of time for Silver.
That would have pretty much killed the mood if she did ask that.
Basically, it seems Silver Glow can never truly understand how humans look forward to the changing of the seasons and the different weather people enjoy. She often shows that and it makes her seem ignorant and closed minded to others. It seems she let a little of that ignorance off onto Lisa. Lisa seemed to take it as "unconcerned ignorance" and it brought her spirits down a bit. Lisa tried to put into perspective for Silver with that theological question, but it didn't quite work.
That's what I got out of it. I could be wrong.
7075858 I think you are mixing thing up here. Sure, Silver's grasp on human culture is still not very good, but from her perspective, the Groundhog Day's ceremony was very weird and not at all connected to weather.
And when you think about it, that superstition is very strange, what does the shadow of some random animal at some random point in time have to do with anything?
And from what was shown so far of Silver's attitude thoward weather, I think she understand even better then us what importance the different season hold and how important it is to change the weather.
Didn't Silver just said that she found it interesting?
7074086
Yeah, I thought that was funny because Asia was a large consumer of dairy products in its history (before Europe). Also, would the difference between being lactose allergic and lactose intolerant be your immune system attacks lactose and being unable to process it?
7075966
Sure she may have found it interesting, but this is what made me think she would ask why.
All in all I guess I'm just looking at it differently.
7076165
Dairy allergies are due to reactions to the dairy proteins (i think, not a doctor). A histamine reaction of the immune system. Lactose is a sugar. One that unless you have the enzyme lactase in your digestive tract you can't digest so it will give you the shits. Sort of like eating way too much xylitol (another indigestible sugar) would.
7076321
Yes: Bernie Sanders. The way the race is shaping up, backing anyone else is as good as casting the vote for Clinton.
7074502 totally agree. And great comic choice.
Ponies go out to watch dragons migrate, or the Breezies, and run races to knock the leaves off trees, or stand in a field to watch a meteor shower, or party all night to watch their princess raise the sun...
I think the pony sense of wonder is exactly where it needs to be.
7075246
Where to begin? Godwin law doesn't work that way. (Though by implying it does you are equating the nazis and the kkk, and that traditionally implies that you lose.) But since you've forgotten, you were the clever chap who said that mindless hatred and trumpesque policies never happen unless members of their target demographic has already committed acts of terrorism. Oh wait. Except they do.
7075223
I still occasionally wiggle my car back and forth when I'm driving and in a good mood. I probably shouldn't, because people (and cops) can't tell the difference between happy driving and inattentive driving, but I do.
Yay, car!
Was a little surprised she didn't talk to the other pegasi.
I think you wanted a comma instead of a period after 'kind of sad'.
Lisa is very interesting in this chapter. She comes off as sad, yet at the same time arrogant and 'holier than thou' (for lack of a better term).
This type of prefacing statement, and especially her actions beforehand, shows to me that she is attempting to reach Silver on a personal level. The act of coming down to Silver's level to talk to her reminds me of how someone would lean down to look a child in they eye before telling them something important.
First off Lisa can stick her sense of wonder and shove it up her . . . well this statement is a bit disparaging and demeaning to Silver. Just cause Silver isn't enamored by the Groundhog (who in all honesty is nothing more than a pest and should be dealt with accordingly) does not mean she has no wonder! Maybe the fact that Silver has been in a sense of wonder over so many things makes her reaction a bit of a shock to Lisa.
Regardless she really didn't like the answer that she got. Maybe it is Silver's rejection of the ritual? The weather is cool but not knowing what it is going to be like can really suck from time to time. Turn on the news and look at the natural disasters that sweep the globe and you can see that. Tornadoes, flood, hurricanes, heavy/unexpected snow, dust storm, and even heavy rain. The weather kills people and causes literally billions of dollars worth of damage a year. Not to mention all the consequences for crops and the food supply worldwide.
Maybe the weather is something important and special for Lisa, but her entire attitude here (and worse the way she presents it) comes off as childish and petty.
After a week or so break from reading, I've come back and my predictions for the next chapter are...
"February 2
When Meghan gently shook me awake, I had the strangest feeling. I think the humans call it déjà vu."
7074079
The app on my cell phone must be from the 60s, then. It's frequently wrong. Last week, when the weather went from "Spring" to "Winter" just for the hell of it, my phone simply stopped giving any forecast.
We're gonna assume that Silver Glow was warned about that. But I have mentioned that in other stories before.
I dunno if that's actually covered in the movies (presumably not; I don't remember seeing it), but it gets brought up in my story Social Bathing.
My favorite Michigan pronunciation that confuses outsiders is that you have Mackinaw City, which holds one end of the Mackinac Bridge. Both are pronounced exactly the same.
7074100
Ask him what that structure in the river near the Sheetz is, too. It looks like it might be an old bridge abutment, but I couldn't tell from googling.
Agreed, although I don't think it's limited to kids and old people. Just a couple weeks ago at work, I was looking at a throttle body assembly off a Buick and marveling at all the different parts that were built at different factories, then it was assembled at yet another factory and shipped to an engine plant, where it was installed on an engine that was then shipped to another plant to put installed in a car. That kind of boggled my mind to think about how many people it took to get that part into my hands.
7074121
From what we've seen of pony tech, steam engines are about the extent of their engine technology. And you are correct; steam locomotives needed to stop far more often for water than fuel. That's why some railroads devised systems where they could re-water the locomotives on the fly.
7074132
What impresses one person bores another, especially when you are dealing with different cultures. I bet most people living in New York City don't really even notice the skyscrapers any more; every time I see pictures of the city they boggle my mind.
7074160
I used to live (briefly) in Lafayette, IN, and there was a town nearby called Russiaville. It was pronounced Roosaville.
7074242
Some of that probably depends on your experience with weather; if you've never experienced any particularly dangerous weather, you wouldn't think to be wary of it. But Lisa was thinking more of the thrill of expectation before a snowstorm or maybe a thunderstorm if you like them, not the roll of the dice a hurricane or tornado is.
Which is pretty amazing when you stop to think about it.
The best solution for that is to just pick something up at random and examine it all over. Doesn't matter what.
7074351
Thank you!
7074373
Agreed! I find that a lot when I'm researching stuff for my stories--I'll get a basic grasp on how something works, and then I'll get curious and do some more digging, and all of a sudden new facets of a thing I never appreciated before open up. And that's been my experience with almost every job I've worked, as well: rather than becoming a mundane thing, it's led to a deeper understanding of technology or the service industry or whatever.
7074408
I forgot: I wrote the chapter in two sittings, and missed it when I read back through before publishing.
7074418
It's freaking amazing, isn't it?
Heck, this story is being read by people on nearly every continent, and almost certainly in some countries I couldn't even find on the map. That's freaking amazing, too.
7074458
Well, Groundhog day is kind of ridiculous, but it's still a significant cultural event in America for some reason.
7074490
In theory, never, unless there's a leak. Engine oil's still the only one which is consumable, and that's not supposed to be.
7074502
Would you still be in awe if you had pushed the clouds into place and then kicked them to get the rain going? If you'd been doing it for years, and your parents had done it, and their parents before them, and so on? That was the side that Lisa was approaching it from.
7074561
I could see that being a popular destination for humans, although they'd probably think that she just timed it very well.
7074956
You raise a good point. I live in farming country, so of course the weather is a big deal. Back when I was in high school, there was a lot of flooding and heavy rains, and I remember pointing to a submerged field and jokingly calling it "Lake Crop Failure." But of course that isn't funny to the farmer, and in a place where there isn't as much food security as the US, that field could mean the difference between a town having enough to eat or not.
7074982
That's a very good point.
More that she's never been accused of not having a sense of wonder, so she doesn't know how to respond.
7075223
Yes.
7075282
7075858
It's not so much that; I think that ponies enjoy the changing of the season as well--but for them it's a particular day on the schedule, while for us it's kind of a mystery. Early winters, late springs, cool summers, etc.--we never really know what we're going to get on any given day or any given year, and even the forecast is not much more than an educated guess. If the Ponyville weather schedule says that Winter Wrap Up is March 21, than that's when winter gets wrapped up, and there won't be any more snow until the first official day of winter.
I don't know if that explanation helped.
7077157
I think so, too.
7077709
I just play loud music and drive fast. Not as much as I used to, but every now and then. . . .
7078020
She was supposed to, but I forgot to put that in.
7080050
You're spot on with the actions and Lisa's POV.
It's really a lack of understanding by Lisa. When you think about it, the weather is one of the few things that mankind hasn't really managed to exert any control over. We can dam rivers, reclaim floodplains, dig enormous open-pit mines, build tens of thousands of miles of interstates and so on, but we can't do a single thing about the weather except hope for the best. From that point of view, a person who wasn't terribly familiar with Equestria might believe that they have 100% tamed their planet and live in some kind of boring utopia, where everything is done by the schedule.
Reminds me of Fallout New Vegas where people there pronounced Caesar as Kai Sar.
7074373 7074502
Thank you, thank you. Incidentally, that's why I swore off Walt Whitman after reading 1 poem by him when I was in grade school. He expressed the same opinion about the night sky as Lisa did about weather. Even in grade school, the young scientist in me knew how retarded his opinion was.
I love this part where a human lectures a pony about being too scientific-minded. "Excuse me, which of us two comes from the place where the sun is literally raised by a magical princess every day?"
7096738 It's more or less after Kaiser which I think means Emperor. Someone correct me on that one.
7139971
Kind of odd for a poet, IMHO. Even the most mundane thing is interesting when you look at it just right.
7278021
7659246
According to Wikipedia, the word kaiser comes from Caesar, and means emperor in German. So I guess that Kaiser Caesar is a thing in German.
That is such a Silver Glow comment
Oh? Innnteresting.
She was still the first one to get her flight license, though!
(Oh, and, you totally wrote "pegasi" )
An error margin of 50%
Why does nobody tell Silver Glow that all of this is just folklore?!
It's the same with the God thing. Sheesh. Just tell her to treat it as folklore. It's the safest way to go into the subject of religion.
Right! A poem, inspired by the Groundhog! Here's to you, silly ponies and rodents of respectable (but still not unusual) size!
Concerning the Value of Groundhog Day
By Nyerguds
Oh it's just a tradition
Based on old superstition
You won't risk extradition
By finding it dumb,
So just make it your mission
To avoid all derision
Go ahead, make a wish and
Enjoy all the fun.
But in case you are fishin'
For some truth in the vision
Of a groundhog's decision
As it sees the first sun,
Then I'll make the admission
There is not much precision
In the assumed position
Of that old groundhog's bum.
(With salutes to Tom Lehrer, whose style undoubtedly influenced this )
8023595
Yup, tourists.
That she was. Pegasus 1. (and ornithopter license #1 as well)
Fixed, thank you!
Well, the woodchuck doesn't have a degree in meteorology. That's probably why.
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/93/50/1e/93501ef93877ae78a83deec2dfc2455b.jpg
Also, the woodchuck shouldn't drive trucks
They kind of assume that she knows. Which is a really dumb thing to assume.
At least Peggy was smart enough to not touch that with a ten-foot pole.
Thank you! Quite a lovely poem, and I did read it in Tom Lehrer's voice (well, as well as I can do with his voice, that is.)
8025491
Y'know, having looked up that pronunciation of "Punxsutawney", it's actually a lot closer to how it is written than I expected.
How much truck would a woodchuck drive if a woodchuck would drive truck?
...hey! Get out of there, damn critter!
It's been waaaay too long since I wrote, well, anything, really. I'm just happy inspiration struck