October 11
It was still a little bit dark out when I first woke up, so I snuggled up with Aric for a little bit, and then he woke up, too, ‘cause he had to pee, and when he came back to the room I told him that I had to leave pretty soon so I had time to fly before my lab.
And he asked me how soon, and I told him not that soon, and I rolled on my back and he got the hint, and got back in bed with me.
Before he got on top of me, though, he made me promise not to bite him this time, and I said that I probably wouldn’t, and I kept my promise.
Then he helped me put on my flight gear, and I kissed him goodbye, and I flew out his window and went around to the far side of the birdfeeder to get a snack, and I kept an eye up at the window but he didn't throw anything at me right away. He waited until my guard was down, and he almost got me—I did get hit in the muzzle with the birdfeeder when it rocked, and when I looked up there was another sock coming right at my face, so I dropped down and got a shower of birdseed across my back, 'cause I didn't quite get under the feeder.
I landed and shook off the seeds and then picked up his socks and flew back up to his window and tossed them inside, and he leaned out of the window so that I could kiss him.
I called the airplane directors when I was already in the air, but I was just barely above the trees so it would be okay, and the grumpy man asked me where I was going and I said to the Nature Center, and he said that there wasn't any reported air traffic, so I could fly above a thousand feet if I wanted to.
So I thanked him and started climbing, even though I didn't really have to. And I got about four thousand feet up by the time I was getting near the Nature Center, and I dove down kinda fast. Not a full-speed dive, but pretty fast just the same, and I was going to overshoot, so I flattened it out a little bit and went kind of wide for a turn.
And I came in over the high part of the path about a meter above the ground, and followed the ground partway down, which flattened out my dive even more, then I had to get a little more altitude so I could bank for the turn at the end and not crash into the trees. Then on the stretch next to the river, I flared my wings to slow down some more, and by the time I'd gotten a little bit past the halfway point I was slow enough that I could make a good landing and not have to try galloping as I hit the ground.
I've seen the Wonderbolts do it and every pegasus thinks she can but it's a lot harder than it looks, and I'd given up on trying after the fourth time I got a muzzleful of dirt.
My fast landing had scared off the deer, but they probably would have been scared off by something else anyways, so I didn't feel too bad about it. If they hadn't learned by now that I wasn't gonna try and hurt them, that wasn't my fault. Maybe if I spoke deer, I could have made friends with them.
I alternated between trotting and cantering until I'd done three whole circuits, and then I went and started flying the trail through the woods again, and I was about halfway around when I thought to look at my watch and it was a bit later than I thought, and I guess I wasn't all the way awake again, because instead of flying up like a sensible pony, I took a shortcut through the woods.
Wild woods are usually not a good place to fly in, because of all the sticks and branches and other obstacles which always seem to be less than a wingspan apart. They're good obstacle courses, and a good place to practice really precise flying, but when you're kind of in a hurry, they're about the worst place to be. I didn't think about that until I was halfway through, and I thought that the path was right in front of me but it wasn't, it was just a little natural depression. And I had to go a little bit off-course to get around a cluster of pine trees, and then I remembered that I should just go up and over, so I climbed to the top of the trees and then flew back to campus kinda low, just so I wouldn't have to call up the grumpy man again.
I hadn't made it all the way through my shortcut without brushing against anything, and when I was in the shower, I rinsed off some leaves and short bits of stick, as well as some birdseed that had gotten caught in my feathers.
Peggy helped me get dressed in my lab clothes, and we went to breakfast together. The omelet cook was there, so I had an omelet, and Peggy decided that she'd have one, too.
We got to experiment with entropy, and we mixed colored fluids until they blended together but some of them wouldn’t, or they’d come back apart again, and we had to record our observations on that. And then we also got to do some alchemy as well, and carry out some spontaneous reactions, which was fun.
Professor Brown also let us watch as he used a calorimeter, because he said it was important to know about them, but there weren’t enough of them for everyone to have, so we just had to observe it working and take notes on what it said was happening.
And then he said that he had one more experiment for us, and so we had to go over to the fume hood, and he took a beaker of water and put some silvery metal called sodium in it, and when it landed on the water it sputtered and then caught fire, and drove itself around until it was all gone, and that was really neat to see.
Me and Lisa went to the lounge again to go over my notes for the lab, and when we’d gotten done with that, I asked her if she wanted to be my study buddy. She looked at her portable telephone and said that we couldn’t do it right now, but if I wanted to come over to her room at seven, we could study together for a while. She lived in DeWaters, all the way up on the top floor.
So I went back to my room and got out my notes for math, and I looked them over until lunch, and drew each of the math letters a couple of more times just to make sure that I had them all memorized. Lambda was the hardest one, because it looked a lot like one of our letters.
I sat with Cedric and Leon and Trevor for lunch, and they were all a little more quiet than usual because they were gonna have to take tests this week, too. And they were probably a little bit worried about them.
Cedric and Leon were also both kind of upset by how they’d lost their game, and Cedric was especially because Aquamarine had watched it. But I told him that she wouldn’t think less of him because of that; sometimes you lost and that was that. There wasn’t any point in worrying about it forever.
He said that he thought maybe they’d do better in the next game, but the Leon said that he wasn’t expecting to win. Then they got in an argument about how important it was to win the homecoming game, and I thought it was kind of silly. If the other team was better than them, that’s just the way it was, and I thought it was better to have fun.
Cedric said I sounded like a t-ball coach encouraging the team, and I didn’t know what a t-ball was. So he said it was a ball on a stick that you hit with a bat, and that didn’t sound like much of a sport to me, but I guess it was something that children played.
And then I asked him if he’d told Aquamarine that there was a dance, ‘cause she’d want to bring a nice dress, and he said that he didn’t know that ponies wore dresses. And I told him that I was gonna wear one and he’d better tell Aquamarine or she’d be mad if she had to go to a dance naked.
I didn't expect it, but Leon agreed with me, and insisted that Cedric had to tell Aquamarine, and said that he hadn’t realized how ignorant Cedric was about the things that mattered to women, and he said he was going to have to teach him even if he only had a couple of days, and then he asked if Cedric could dance.
Cedric said that he could, and Leon asked if he could waltz, and he said he couldn’t, then Leon asked him if he knew the box step, and he didn’t know that either, and Leon hit him and said that he had a lot of learning to do.
Trevor thought that we had enough time to read one poem, so he took my book and found one called My Typewriter, and I liked that one. Cedric said that Aquamarine wrote with a quill sometimes, and she was properly authentic because of it. And Leon told him that was another skill he was going to have to learn in a few days.
When I was walking to astronomy class, Anna caught up with me and we walked to astronomy together, and Professor Miller told us about black holes, which were giant whirlpools of gravity. But before we could learn about them, she told us about escape velocity, and she told us that if we threw a football up at ten kilometers per second, it would not come back down, and she said that we should try it as an experiment.
Black holes had such a high escape velocity, that even light wasn’t fast enough to get out. And therefore they were really really dense, to have that much gravity.
They were made from stars that had gone wrong, and humans had known that they must exist for eighty years, but you couldn’t see them because they were black, and you couldn’t tell them apart from the blackness of space very easily.
But you could find them the same way you found planets, because their gravity affects everything around them. And she told us that they might emit Hawking radiation, but nobody knew for sure, and that there was a telescope called the Event Horizon Telescope which was run by the Haystack Observatory which might almost see one in the next couple of years.
After astronomy class, I flew over Dewing and landed on the boardwalk, then went up to my room to get my math books, ‘cause I wanted to study with Sean some more.
I flew over to Harmon and went up to his room, and he was kind of surprised to see me, ‘cause we hadn’t talked about studying together. And he said I should have sent him a telephone telegram or told him earlier. I said that I had meant to, but I hadn’t known until after breakfast that I was going to be studying with Lisa tonight.
So we took turns quizzing each other from the book and from our notes, and I was feeling pretty confident by the time we got done.
I asked Sean if he felt ready, and he sighed and said he wished he was taking the monster class instead. I said that I liked math, because math was fun, and Sean said I should watch Numberphile movies on YouTube.
I didn’t know what that was, so he opened his folding computer and showed me a movie about Wilson Primes, which were special kinds of prime numbers that could be run through a formula that proved that they were prime, and the result was also divisible by the same prime, which was really neat, and there were only three of them that people knew of. James looked really young, but he sounded like he was really smart.
Sean said that they had lots of movies, and he showed me a page where they listed them all, and I wanted to watch another one, so he said that I could but after that he had to go to Christine’s because he was going to help her study before dinner.
So we watched James discuss whether or not the number zero was an even number, And his friend Roger explained how zero got discovered, and James said that zero was even.
After I left, I needed a little bit of a break, to let all the studying sink in, and so I flew around campus before dinner, zig-zagging between trees and hopping from building to building, making a game of touching a hoof to every roof once before I moved on to the next one, and then I went back to my room and as I flew close to Trowbridge, I saw Peggy in there moving around, so I flew up and knocked on the window until she looked out, then I waved at her and after she waved back, I flew to the boardwalk and came in the usual way.
Dinner wasn’t very good again, but at least they had fish. It didn’t look too appealing, but my body wanted it ‘cause of all the energy, so I got a couple of little fillets. And they were overcooked and bony, but I ate them anyways.
Anna noticed that one of the feathers on my wing was kinda sticking out and asked if she could push it back down, and I told her it was gonna fall out. It had felt loose when I was preening, and I think being under the lab coat had worked it almost all the way free.
She asked why it was coming out, and so I told her that I’d just come off my last estrus and now it was time to grow new feathers, so over the next moon they’d be falling out and new ones would come in. And I told her that she could pull that one out and have it if she wanted, so she came around the table and looked at my wing and asked me if I was sure, or if it was some strange pegasus prank.
Meghan said it was true, so Anna grabbed it by the shaft and pulled and it hung up for a moment then popped out, and I twitched my wing, ‘cause it had been stuck in a little bit more than I’d thought, and I had to reassure Anna that she hadn’t hurt me.
And it felt a little bit funny to have that empty socket there all of a sudden. It was almost like it was cold in there because now air could get where it couldn’t before. By the time I was done eating, though, the feeling was gone.
I went back to our room with Peggy, and started gathering up my books, and she asked if I was going over to Meghan’s for the night. I told her I was going to go study thermodynamics with Lisa, and then I’d be back.
So I went across to DeWaters and found Lisa’s room. Her roommate, who was named Jessica answered, and she looked kind of familiar but I didn’t know why, until I remembered that she’d been a dancer in Frelon.
Since she was there, there weren’t any extra chairs, but Lisa said that she could sit on her bed. And she had a big yellow Pokemon plushie called Pikachu.
We studied together for a couple of hours, not only quizzing each other, but also just reading our own notes and chapters in the book to make sure that we were really familiar with everything, and by the time we were done, I was starting to get tired. So I went back to Trowbridge, and Peggy was dressed in her sleeping clothes and sitting on her bed reading through her notebook.
She asked me if I was ready for my mid-terms tomorrow and I said that I was as ready as I could be but maybe I should sleep with my books under my pillow just in case, and she laughed and said that it probably wouldn’t hurt.
I didn’t, because that wouldn’t have been very comfortable. But when I was drifting off to sleep, I did have formulas and equations dancing in my vision.