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// October 30 [Earth Ponies Make the Grass Grow] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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October 30

Aquamarine woke me up, 'cause earth ponies are better drinkers than pegasuses. And I had a headache and a dry mouth and I was a little too hot and I really didn't want to move, but I knew that I couldn't stay in bed all day, so I staggered to the shower and turned the water on cold and stuck my head under it and that helped wake me up some.

I wasn't quite ready to actually to get in the shower, so when I felt a little bit better I turned off the shower and then had a couple of glasses of water to drink and Aquamarine filled the coffee maker and started a cup for us to share, and while it was brewing we sat in the chairs that were by the windows and looked out at the cars driving around on the dark streets below.

There were a few people walking around, too, and we tried to think of where they might be going so early in the morning. They couldn't be bakers, 'cause bakers would already be at work, but there were lots of other places that people could be going that we could only guess at, and it was kind of a fun game to see if we could figure it out. Even though we probably got every one of them wrong.

When the sky started to get light outside, we drank our cup of coffee and then took a shower together and groomed each other and went downstairs to find the room with breakfast. They had a waffle maker and it worked, which made me really happy.

And when we were done eating, we thought it would be nice to take a plate of food up to Cayenne, so that she didn't have to come downstairs to eat it but the woman who was watching over the food said that we weren't allowed to and that we could only eat food in the room and if Cayenne wanted any she'd have to come down and get it herself.

But we pleaded and begged and eventually she decided that we could, even though we weren't supposed to, and we got her a nice plate with a waffle and scrambled eggs and an English muffin with lots of butter on it, and Aquamarine carried it on her back, 'cause she was better at balancing things back there than I was. It was a lot trickier than it looked, and unicorns were really lucky that they could just carry whatever they wanted in their aura.

I helped hold it in place while we were in the elevator, 'cause it kind of moved unpredictably, and I wished that we'd had one of the metal dishes that went over the food and helped to keep it warm, 'cause it was probably going to get cold before she could eat it and wouldn't be as good.

As soon as we were back in our room, Aquamarine set the food down on the desk and started another cup of coffee and I shook Cayenne awake and she swore at me and I said that we could put her in the shower again, and that got her out of bed.

And after she'd gone in the bathroom to pee and run some cold water over her face, she ate her breakfast and drank her coffee, and she had some aspirins in her suitcase and she had a couple and so did I.

We offered to help her in the shower if she wanted help, but she said that she'd be okay by herself. And she said that we were terrible for waking her up so early, and then she said that she was glad we'd brought her breakfast, 'cause it had helped settle her stomach.

I sat on the bed and preened my wings, 'cause neither Aquamarine or Cayenne was any good at that, and Aquamarine was laying on the bed on her back, just looking up at the ceiling, and it was kind of an awkward moment, but then Cayenne came out of the bathroom and Aquamarine asked her if she'd got an answer back from the sex toy company yet and at first she hadn't remembered that she'd sent them a computer letter, so she opened up her computer and looked at what she'd written and she was kind of embarrassed 'cause she said that she sounded like a filly trying to get a first date and it did sort of sound like that. Me and Aquamarine thought it was funny, but she said it wasn't because maybe they'd read the letter and wouldn't want to because she sounded like a drunken idiot, but I said that the pictures looked really good and maybe they would focus more on that and less on what she'd written.

She said that she hoped so. And she hoped that she could get her helpers to take her if the company said that they could, and then she got kind of enthusiastic again and said that it would be really neat to think of everyone buying a toy that looked like her, and she hoped that they'd also take pictures and put them with the toy and let her write a biography and I thought that was a sort of strange thing to want, and she said that I woudn't really understand because I was a pegasus and we weren't that big on leaving a legacy, and I said that wasn't true but we just cared about other things and the sky would be really boring if we just set clouds in place and they stayed there forever.

We had to pack up our things before we went downstairs to meet Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, 'cause we wouldn't be coming back to the hotel after we left, and it was kind of surprising how much stuff Cayenne had got out of her bag even though we hadn't spent a whole day in our hotel room. Me and Aquamarine hadn't had to get out much except for our brushes and shampoos.

Once she'd gotten packed, we looked over the room one more time to make sure that we weren't forgetting anything, and then they went in the elevator and I flew down the stairs and they beat me to the bottom, but only 'cause I had to make lots of turns and go slow in case someone else was in the stairs.

Miss Cherilyn gave our keys and their keys back to the clerk while Mister Salvatore got the van ready, and we drove to a little coffee shop to meet Gusty and Nicky for breakfast. We could have gotten tickets to see the play again, but we all thought it would be best to let other people have our seats, especially since the play was so popular.

We just had coffee, 'cause everyone had already eaten breakfast, and we all decided that we were gonna meet in Chicago sometime after Thanksgiving but we didn't know when, yet. And Cayenne said that she wanted to go to Florida if she had the chance, because it was supposed to have really nice beaches. Gusty said that there was a big resort there called Walt Disney World that we could see, too. And she thought that it would make for a nice trip in the winter time when it was all snowy and gloomy but I was looking forward to the snow 'cause it was fun to play in.

After a little while we decided that we wanted to walk around, 'cause we'd all had too much coffee and Gusty was starting to get nervous and fidgety since it was getting close to time for her to go and get ready for the play, and so we drove back to campus, and I gave her the sweatshirt that I'd bought. And she thanked me and said that it was a little too warm to wear it right now and I said that she didn't have to but when it got colder she might want to.

She didn't want to go too far from the theatre because she was worried that she might lose track of time and be late, and Miss Cherilyn promised her that she would make sure that she was on time to the theater.

So she gave us a little tour of campus, and we ended up at their botanical gardens. They weren't as pretty as they would have been earlier in the year, since almost everything had gone dormant for the winter, but Aquamarine really liked it just the same and she kept getting distracted looking at the plants, and then Gusty would tell her what they looked like when it was in bloom and it was funny to think how Aquamarine probably could picture in her head what it looked like every season of the year but to me it was kind of barren.

Too soon it was time for Gusty to get ready for the play, so we walked back to the theatre together, and we all hugged and kissed and told her to break a leg even though we didn't really want her to.

The three of us all got in the back seat of the van, and Mister Salvatore told his GPS where he wanted to go, and it took it a moment to figure it out and then it told him to drive to a road, which I thought was a good first step.

Cayenne wanted to see if she'd gotten a computer letter back, but she couldn't use her folding computer in the van, so she used her portable telephone because that could get computer letters, too. And I asked if mine could do that, too, and she said that it could and she'd show me how once she was done.

And she hadn't gotten a letter back from them, and she started to pout, 'cause she thought that maybe they had decided to ignore her letter, but Aquamarine reminded her that it was Sunday and maybe they didn't look at their computer mail on Sundays, since real mail didn't arrive on Sundays.

So she said that she hoped that that was true, and then she put her portable telephone away and I reached over the back of the seat to get mine out of my saddlebags and there was an app that looked at my mail, and she showed me how to set it up and that was pretty convenient that I could look at my computer letters wherever I wanted to. I could even write them if I wanted to, because if I pushed the right place on the screen it let me talk and it would put down whatever it thought I had said, but I had to talk really slow 'cause it was kind of dumb at figuring out what I meant.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Mars Cheese Castle, because Mister Salvatore said that we were legally obligated to since we were in Wisconsin. And then he said that he was going to have beer for lunch and that Miss Cherilyn was the designated driver for the rest of the trip.

Cayenne didn't like it too much 'cause she didn't like cheese, but me and Aquamarine did, and they even had free samples of the different cheeses but we couldn't have too many or we would have ruined our appetite for lunch, so we just picked the ones that looked the most interesting.

Almost all of their food had cheese, too, and we got some squeaky cheese curds and me and Aquamarine got grilled cheese sandwiches, and Cayenne just had a salad and said that she didn't understand how we could like fermented milk so much when there were lots of other good things to eat.

And Mister Salvatore said he didn't understand how ponies could really live without eating delicious meat, and Aquamarine said that there were plants everywhere but you couldn't just find hamburgers growing wild in a field and that she found it hard to understand how humans had ever survived and thrived on just what they could catch and that they were so bad at it that they had to keep their animals penned up so that they wouldn't get away, and she said that she could keep a farm without a single fence if she wanted to. And so then the two of them started arguing about where she could grow things and Mister Salvatore lost the argument because she could grow something that she could eat anywhere.

So then he asked me what we could grow on clouds, I said that we didn't have to because there were lots of wild plants to eat and rivers and ponds with fish in them and crabs by the seashore and also any earth pony would be happy to give us some food in exchange for the right kind of weather and Miss Cherilyn told him that he hadn't had a chance trying to debate an earth pony.

We went through their gift store before we left and they had lots of cheese and also cheese-hats, which were something that people in Wisconsin wore although I'd never seen anyone actually doing it and thought that maybe that was something made-up for tourists.

In the parking lot, Aquamarine had her head down and was kind of lagging behind the rest of us and I didn't know why until she stopped at a crack in the pavement that had some grass growing through it and she told Mister Salvatore to look and then she put her hoof down right next to the grass and then gently brushed it through the stumpy blades and a moment later it grew a couple of inches taller and she nipped off the very tops of it and then told him to try that with a hamburger, and he sighed and said that he couldn't and she'd won, and that made her really happy.

Then she told us in Equestrian that it had tasted terrible, and pushing a plant like that wasn't good for the plant and that usually they didn't taste very good when you did but it had been worth it to prove him wrong.

And he said back that he also knew Equestrian and he'd heard what she'd said, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

Miss Cherilyn did drive us the rest of the way to Chicago, and I could tell that Mister Salvatore was getting a bit restless 'cause she didn't drive as fast as he did. And we stopped at Cayenne's dorm and helped her get her bags out of Sienna then hugged her and told her to let us know if she got a model of her vagina made, and she said that she would.

We moved up to the middle seats for the rest of the ride, 'cause the view was a little better and it didn't feel as bumpy in the middle. And instead of going along the lake like Mister Salvatore had, Miss Cherilyn reversed our route, and we went back to the 94 Highway, and we stayed on that so we didn't have to stop and pay to use the road.

When we were going through Chicago, Mister Salvatore told us that the Cubs had lost their game last night, and he said that there were going to be a lot of sad people in Chicago after they lost the game tonight and he hoped that Cayenne wasn't a Cubs fan. I didn't think she was, because she hadn't said anything about them.

I'd liked going along the lake, and the scenery along the 94 Highway was a lot more boring, and Mister Salvatore said it was a little bit slower route as well, and Miss Cherilyn reminded him that driving through Chicago at five was going to be slow no matter what route you took.

When we crossed into Michigan, Mister Salvatore called Aquamarine's helpers, so that they could meet up with us, and it was getting dark by the time we finally got to Kalamazoo. Aquamarine wanted to at least give Cedric a hug before she had to leave, so we convinced Miss Cherilyn to stop at Hoben and Mister Salvatore had to call Aquamarine's helpers again to give them new directions, and Aquamarine called Cedric and he was waiting for us when we arrived.

She got up between the seats and nuzzled Mister Salvatore before he could get out of his seat, and then Miss Cherilyn, and he got her saddlebags and mine out of the back of the van, but she ignored hers so that she could go hug Cedric and kiss him before she had to get in her van and leave.

And the two of us nuzzled and then she got into her van and Mister Salvatore got back in Sienna, and the two drove off together.

I flew back to my room and talked to Peggy for a little bit and then I went down to Meghan's room and the two of us decided to go to Aric's for the night even though we knew that he wouldn't be home yet. And so she packed some clothes in her duffel bag and then the two of us walked through the neighborhood to his house, and I told her about how Cayenne was trying to get a toy made that looked like her, and Meghan thought that was really funny and said that she'd have to look at their internet page to see when it became available.

I told her that she hadn't found out yet if they were really going to do it, but Meghan thought that they would. And then she said that she thought it would be weird to know that people were buying silicone replicas of her and I said that I kind of thought so, too.

All the lights upstairs were off, but the lights in the basement were on and Angela's Alero was parked out front so I guess that they were home. And Meghan said that she thought we should be sort of sneaky, which I thought was silly. I was sure that they were used to me walking on the floor above them 'cause of all the nights I'd spent here, but she took off her shoes before going inside and tried to walk extra-quiet. She might have got away with it, too, except that the stairs were kind of creaky.

I helped her get undressed and we both got in bed and she said that she felt like she was being extra-bad when we were in his bed without him, and we'd just started when I heard Winston turn into the driveway and I thought that maybe we should wait until he came upstairs, but she said that it would be fun to pretend that we didn't know he was coming, and it was hard to argue when she was under my tail.

I was facing the door, 'cause it was more comfortable for Meghan to rest her head on the pillows, and I looked up when he came in and he saw us and started getting undressed right away so that he could join us.

Afterwards, Meghan said that she hadn't expected him back so soon, and he said that now that they were just doing partial dress rehearsals and the lights were all hung and the cues all programmed, it was pretty quick, but he said that tomorrow was a full dress rehearsal and it would run really long because the actors would forget their props and take longer to get into costume than they should, and he told me he wasn't going to be able to be at Durak tomorrow, but if we wanted to we could come over, and Meghan said that we could.