October 25
When I woke up, I was stretched out on Aric's chest, and Meghan was curled up against the wall. I could feel Aric pressing up against me and I thought about waking him up the fun way, but then I thought that maybe Meghan would be mad.
I couldn't help teasing him a little bit, though, and when I started moving around, it woke up Meghan, and so I leaned over and kissed her good morning, and she started to work her way out of bed and that woke Aric up, and I had to get off him so that he could move over and let Meghan out of bed.
She went to the bathroom and Aric pulled the covers up over himself and said that he was going to sleep in some more because he was expecting a late night at the theatre tonight and probably for the next two weeks, and he wanted to get sleep while he could. He said that they were behind and he shouldn't have come to Durak last night but he had anyways. Then he said that he could go downstairs and get some coffee for us if we wanted, but I said that he should stay in bed.
He stayed awake while Meghan got dressed, and we both kissed him goodbye, and I almost went out the window before I remembered that Meghan couldn’t do that.
While we were walking back, I told Meghan that I'd thought about waking him up by mounting him, and she said that I should have, because she thought it would be really funny and it was every guy's dream anyways, and she was sure that it would make him really happy, and she admitted that she was kind of curious about how far you could go with a guy in the morning before you woke him up.
I said that I'd be disappointed if I didn't wake him up.
I told Meghan that I was going to fly around a little bit and then I would come over to her room for a shower, and so I went up to my room and had some hay and then filled up my camelback and put on my flight gear and went down to the boardwalk.
The grumpy man gave me permission to fly if I stayed low on this side of the 131 Highway, so I took off and flew along the treetops until I got to the Nature Center, and it felt like it had been so long since I went around my usual trail, I thought that I would do that. So when I got close, I flew out and over the river so that I wouldn't scare off the deer, and then I came over the trees and the deer looked up at me and then went back to grazing.
I landed on the trail and started trotting to stretch out my legs, and when I got to the top of the hill I broke into a canter on the descending trail. And I kept up my pace as I rounded the end of the trail, and then I galloped along the river, all the way to the junction, and then I slowed down to a trot to get back up to the top of the trail.
I trotted all the way around the trail once and then went back to a canter, and when I got back to the junction I took off and started flying through the trail in the woods, and to make it more fun I flew as close to trees as I could.
When I made it back around, I climbed out over the trees and flew back to campus, then landed on the boardwalk and went inside.
I stopped in my room long enough to take off my flight gear and then went down the hall to Meghan's room and knocked on her door quietly until she opened it. I nuzzled her hip and she petted my back even though I was covered in lather.
The two of us went into her shower, and I got in and turned it on while she got undressed, just so I could rinse myself off, and then she got in the shower with me.
We took turns washing each other, and then I got to pick out her clothes while she was drying off. So I found her a nice shirt and pants and a lacy pair of panties and a silky silver-grey bra, and then I brought it into the bathroom for her, and she said that she really liked my choices.
I should have brought my lab coat, but I had forgotten it in my room, so after she was dressed, we went to my room and got my lab supplies and then Meghan was helping me put my lab coat on when Peggy came back from the shower and she was surprised to see Meghan in our room. And Meghan said that she could go back out in the hall and wait while Peggy got dressed, but she said that she didn't care all that much.
All three of us went to breakfast together, and they had omelets, so I got one, and Meghan thought it looked really good so she got one, too.
After breakfast, I walked across campus to the science building and went downstairs to the lab. Professor Brown had us doing alchemical reactions under different temperatures and pressures and it was kind of complicated to set each experiment up and we had lots of data to record, so even though I couldn't use any of the potions, I had a lot of observing and recording to do, and that kept me busy for the class.
It was kind of frustrating in one gas experiment because it was hard to tell when everything had reacted since there wasn't any obvious change in the gas. Our temperature solution had changed colors so we knew that the reaction had happened, but our gas just stayed gas, and so I recorded a lot more just to make sure that it had reached a stable point and I wasn't missing anything. I knew that with clouds, sometimes it took a while before they started to do things like rain, and sometimes they were so stubborn that even when you jumped up and down on them they didn't change too quick.
Me and Lisa went to the lobby and I took off my saddlebags and set them on the table then took off my lab coat and put it in my saddlebags and rubbed my belly where the button had dug in. And I took off my sparkly scrunchy, too, and put it on my foreleg to keep it safe.
Then I got out my notebook and we went over the notes I'd taken, and I promised Lisa that I'd do all the calculations today and then give them to her tomorrow.
So I went back to my room and worked on calculations until lunchtime, then I packed up my books for astronomy. And when I got there they had leftovers from last night but since I'd liked what they had last night, I didn't mind having it again, even if the scrod was a little bit dryer than it had been.
Reese said that his parents had decided not to come out for Parent's Weekend after all, and Christine said that was because they didn't love him any more. She said that when he tried to go home for winter break, he'd find out that they'd turned his room into an office or something to prevent him from coming back, and they'd probably give him a horrible cot to sleep on or something, and they'd make sure that he had the coldest room in the house.
Sean said that when he'd gone to college, his parents had moved without telling him, so when he got home for winter break, they didn't live there anymore and he'd had to spend the whole winter break as the guest of Jehovah's Witnesses that tried to convert him.
And I said that sometimes when it was really stormy, my house drifted away while we were at school, and so me and my sister had to find it again after school. That was one of the problems with living in a cloudhouse; it wasn't always where it had been when you left it.
Well, it turned out that everyone else had been lying and I'd believed them, but cloudhouses did drift around, and there were a few young mares who hadn't gotten the knack of putting them in the right place so that they'd stay who had lost their homes at sea. And maybe somepony in Prance one day had found a new home that drifted in from the ocean.
I didn't remember until me and Anna were walking out of the dining hall to astronomy class that I was supposed to have sat with Leon and Trevor and Cedric. And I felt really bad about that, so I had to stop by their table to apologize to them.
Professor Miller told us more about black holes, and she said that we were going to talk about ones that were the same mass as the sun, and that later we'd talk about the supermassive ones. And she first had to tell us more about how space-time worked, and how you would see things if you rode along on a photon, which was a particle of light. And there were space-like intervals and time-like intervals which had to do with how far light particles moved and how far things physically traveled. And she also wanted to write down her equation in polar coordinates, too, so I was glad that I was figuring them out for math.
And it took her half the class to just explain all the math that we needed to know to begin understanding them, but that was important so that we'd be able to understand what happened near black holes. And she said that you couldn't actually test that inside the Schwarzschild radius, because it wasn't possible to see anything across it.
Then Professor Miller started telling us about the things that we could observe that demonstrated general relativity, and the closest thing that humans had found first was the planet Mercury, and they'd predicted another planet because of problems with Mercury's orbit. But there wasn't really one there after all, and it wasn't until Einstein figured out general relativity that it could be explained.
She didn't tell us how that helped people find black holes, 'cause I guess that was for the next class, but I could guess how it would, because the problem with black holes was that you couldn't see them but I bet that you could see things that orbited near them and you'd see if their orbits had problems.
Even though I should have been doing work, my wings were restless, and I decided that I'd be a bad pony and spend the rest of the afternoon flying, so I went back to my room and put away my astronomy things and I didn't normally fly in the afternoon so it took a few minutes to get permission to fly, and then I took off from the boardwalk and zoomed low over the quad, picking up enough altitude to just scrape over the top of Hoben.
I turned at the railroad tracks and followed them through town and then I decided when I got to the railroad intersection, I'd go south, just to see where the tracks went.
They wound through town, sometimes alongside a creek that I think was called Portage Creek, and I knew that I'd be coming to the trail through the woods that was by Meghan's uncle's house, and then I saw Meijer off to my right, which was near where the trail started.
I had to dive down some to get under the 94 Highway, and I went parallel to the tracks just in case a train was trying to sneak up on me. And then I kept heading south, and they turned and ran alongside a road for a little while, and then they got out of Kalamazoo and I followed them all the way to Schoolcraft, where they crossed another set of railroad tracks.
I looked up and down both sets of tracks but the ones I was following curved a little bit and I couldn't see all that far, so I got some more altitude and then I could see further, and I saw a train coming in my direction that was a few miles away.
And even though Aric said that I shouldn't, I knew that it had to be going back to Kalamazoo, because there was nowhere else it could go, so I circled around and waited for it to come under me.
It had to stop before it got to the train crossing, and I didn't know why until I heard a train horn off in the distance, and pretty soon a train loaded with stacked boxes roared by on the crossing track. And I watched it until it was past, then remembered that I was thinking of riding the train that was going back to Kalamazoo, so I flew down its length looking for a good place to land, and I finally found a gondola that was empty inside.
The train had started moving while I was looking, but it wasn’t going very fast, so I didn't have any trouble coming in for a landing. And at first it wasn’t too bad, but as the train got going faster and faster, it got really bumpy and I had a hard time staying on my hooves. Plus I was thinking about how what I was doing was against the rules, so I couldn't stick my head over the edge to see where we were, and I wasn't sure I could fly up fast enough to get clear of the box car that was behind my gondola. So mostly all I could see was the top halves of trees and then when we got closer to Kalamazoo, I started to see buildings, too.
I had paid enough attention on my flight over to know when we were passing under the 94 Highway, and I looked out the side a little bit after that, because I knew that we were passing through the little forest and there probably weren't going to be any people that could see me. But before I expected it, we went across a road and I was looking right through the windshield of a car that was waiting into the surprised face of the driver.
I was getting worried that the train would keep going fast and I couldn't get off, but then I started to hear a banging getting closer to me and I should have braced myself, because I got knocked off my hooves and got a scrape on my leg when my gondola slowed down all of a sudden. And it was a good thing that it had ends on it, because if I'd been standing closer to the front of the car, I might have rolled all the way off of it.
But the train started to slow down, and then I heard a constant thump-thump that was moving towards me, too, and I spread out my hooves and braced, and pointed myself at the front of the train, expecting to be thrown off my hooves again, but it was just the noise the train made as it went across the crossing in Kalamazoo that was right near the train station. And I thought that it was going slow enough now that I could fly out, so I went up and to the side, to make sure that I didn't get hit by the box car, and I got a little bit tumbled by the turbulence off of the box car but it wasn't even close to getting me.
Anybody who had been looking would have seen me fly out of the gondola, and I was already trying to think of an excuse in case Mister Salvatore or Miss Cherilyn found out, but I couldn't think of anything that was believable, so I thought I'd just have to admit that I'd been a bad pony and hope that they weren't too mad.
I hadn't been paying attention to time when I was on the train, but when I landed I looked down at my pilot's watch and saw that I'd missed dinner with my friends.
So I landed right by the dining hall and turned off my radio and blinking light and then went in to get some food. And I looked around for someone I could sit with and I finally saw Lisa and Jessica eating together so I sat down with them.
Lisa wanted to know what had happened to my leg, so I told her that I'd fallen down and she was satisfied with that. And then I asked Jessica if I could cheerlead, because I thought it would be fun, and she said that she'd have to ask their captain, but she thought it would be fun if I did, but she said that it wasn't easy and I'd have to practice a lot until I got it right.
I didn't mind practicing, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to know how to do human cheers.
I went back to my room, and Peggy wanted to know what I'd done to my leg, too, and so I told her the truth, and she said that I was an idiot, and I didn't think she was wrong. Especially since Aric had also told me the same thing. So I guess I'd got what I deserved.
And when I looked at my portable telephone, I saw that I'd gotten a message from Miss Cherilyn, and my ears fell, 'cause I thought that she had found out, and I didn't want to call her back but I had to, so I did and I told her that I was sorry and I wouldn’t do it again, and she had no idea what I was talking about, so I had to tell her, and she yelled at me a little and I deserved it. And then she said that the reason she was actually calling was to tell me that we would be leaving early Saturday morning to go see Gusty's play, and this time we'd be taking Sienna and we'd have Aquamarine with us and then pick up Cayenne in Chicago.
We'd be getting back home late on Sunday, so she said that I needed to make sure that I had all my homework done or to bring it with me, and then she told me not to do anything stupid like ride on trains again. And she got a little bit more sympathetic when I told her that I'd cut my leg and she asked if I needed a doctor to look at it and I didn't think that I did, 'cause it hadn't bled too much.
Peggy didn't have any homework that she had to do and I didn't, either, so she opened up our door and Ruth and Kat and Rebekka came over and we played euchre for a while, and me and Peggy came close to getting skunked one time, and Ruth was getting excited because she said that she wanted to see me gallop down the quad wearing pants.
I wasn't totally against the idea, and I told her as long as she rolled up the cuffs and let me wear a pair of pants that my tail would fit through, I'd do it, and she said that she was going to get some from her room, and I said that I'd only do it if we got skunked, and then I played both bowers to win us a game and stuck my tongue out at her.
When everyone had finally gone home, it was really relaxing to go to sleep in my own bed, and even though I missed snuggling and sex, I hadn't gotten as much sleep as I ought to have over the last few days, and I was asleep almost as soon as I lay down.