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// November 20 [Night Flight] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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November 20

I'd wound up on the outside of the bed again, which I didn't mind because it meant that I could push the covers back to keep from overheating. If his room hadn't been heated, it would have been a nice temperature for me, but they would have been cold. Aric had a lot of hair on his body but it wasn't enough to be a proper coat. And Meghan had hardly any at all.

Even though it was still a little early, I started teasing Aric with my wing, which woke him up, and he looked at me and said that I was insatiable, and I said that he couldn't talk, 'cause he was hard, and then I rolled over so my rump was pressing against him and it didn't take any more convincing to get what I wanted.

We tried to be quiet and not move too much so Meghan wouldn't wake up, and it worked, 'cause she didn't until Aric got out of bed to go to the bathroom.

And she was kind of mad that we hadn't woke her up, so I let her have Aric all to herself when he came back, while I went downstairs and figured out how to make the coffee machine make coffee. It was a little more complicated than the one at the hotel, but not too much more difficult to use.

While it was brewing, we took a shower together and even though it was warmer in the house than it had been yesterday, Meghan thought it was still too cold to go to Aric's room without clothes, so she dried off in the bathroom. He thought it was too crowded in there, so he went to his room, and I stayed in the bathtub to give Meghan room to dry off.

After we'd gotten groomed and they'd gotten dressed, we decided that we'd go to Nina's for breakfast. Everyone got omelets and toast, and I let Aric have all my hash browns, 'cause I didn't like them all that much, and because the omelets that they had were lots bigger than the ones that they made at the dining hall, so it filled me up.

We stopped back at his house long enough to get our things, and we decided that we all ought to sleep in our own rooms tonight so that we'd be well-rested for our finals, especially since Aric didn't have one in the morning so he planned to stay up late and finish working on one of his assignments that he really should have finished sooner.

Aric drove us back to campus in Winston, and we kissed him goodbye and then went up to our rooms. And I put all of my class books and notebooks in my saddlebags, and then went to meet with Crystal Dawn again. When I got to her room, I also sent a telephone telegram to Lisa, to tell her that she could join us if she wanted to.

We'd studied for about an hour before Lisa sent a telegram back, and since we were still studying, I said that she should come over.

So then the three of us worked together until it was lunchtime, and when we finally put our notes and cards away, I told Crystal Dawn that I was proud of how much she'd improved in the little time we'd spent studying together, and Lisa thought so, too.

I went to lunch without taking off my saddlebags, and they had leftovers from yesterday's dinner, but I didn't mind too much, 'cause the scrod was still pretty good, although not as good as it had been when it was fresher.

Me and Sean and Anna figured out when we were gonna study, and it was a little bit complicated to figure out, 'cause they both had study groups for other classes that they were supposed to go to, so we had to plan around that. But we got it figured out: I was gonna study with Anna first and then Sean before dinner.

Peggy told us that her project was done but now she was a little bit worried that the professor might not like it. Christine said that anyone sensible would like it, because it was fun to watch, and I said that she was putting glitter in it, too, and that was fun.

Anna told her that that would make a huge mess, and Peggy shrugged and said that as long as it was a visually interesting mess, that was all that mattered.

I had a little bit of time in my room before going to Anna's, so I finished writing my letter to my sister, and then I sealed it up and put it in my saddlebags so that I could mail it at the mail hut later. Then I wrote in my journal until it was time to go to Anna's room.

She lived on the bottom floor of Crissy, in a suite like Christine had.

Her bedroom had half the walls covered with art that she'd drawn herself, mostly just pen and pencil sketches. It was mostly make-believe humans like elves and dwarves and fairies, but there were also a few monsters. There was also a plastic drinking cup which was filled with paper flowers, and she said that she made them when she was bored, which is why they were made out of playbills and not colored paper.

I thought that they were really pretty, so she gave me one, and I tucked it into my saddlebags carefully because it was really fragile.

We sat down on her bed and got out our astronomy, and spend the next hour reviewing the formulas and vocabulary one more time, and then looked through the pictures in the book until we were both certain that we knew what all the objects in space looked like, and then it was time for me to go to Sean's room and study calculus.

So I went up the hill to his room and I had to wait a little bit before he got there—he said that his last study session had been a little bit longer than he'd expected, and he hadn't wanted to be rude and leave early.

I hadn't minded, 'cause while I was waiting in the hallway for him to arrive, I'd had a nice conversation with a woman named Allison, who was a freshman that said she was going to get a degree in social justice, and I wasn't sure what that was, so she explained how it was making sure that everyone got equal rights, which I agreed was important.

Of all my classes, I think that I was the most prepared for the math class, 'cause there hadn't been any tables of elements that I'd had to learn, or things above the sky that I'd never dreamed of, and a lot of the formulas were pretty self-evident if you sort of took a minute to think about what you were trying to do, but it was still good to have the review, and our textbooks had other problems in them which we had never done as homework, since the answers were printed in the back. But that was good for us, 'cause we could practice them and then see for ourselves if we'd gotten the correct answer. I could have done that on my own, but it was more fun to do it with someone else, and since it wasn't homework, we both worked through the problems together, which let us discuss how we were going to solve them if there was more than one way, and why we needed to use the solution we'd found.

And since it was tradition, once we'd finished with our math, we watched a couple of short Numberphile movies. The first one was a foolproof test for primes, called the AKS test. And James explained how mathematicians had used a Fermat test which was good, but not always right, while this one was always right but not as fast.

After that, we watched Matt Parker try to make a magic square and fail. He said that nobody had ever found a true magic square made up of square numbers, and there was a prize for the first person who did, which I thought was a pretty clever idea because it would make people interested in trying, like he had. And then he got a little mad at the end, 'cause Brady decided to call his imperfect square the Parker Square. I thought he should still be proud of it, because I couldn't make a magic square.

I went back to my room long enough to take off my saddlebags, and I put my math and physics textbooks on the desk, because after dinner I was going to try to draw the math letters one more time, just to be sure that I could get them all right, and then I was going to fly around some.

Sean had been right; they had a Thanksgiving dinner, and they'd made the dining hall all nice, too. There were cloths on the tables, and candles, too, and they'd turned down the lights. They had their omelet cook cutting off pieces of ham and turkey for people who wanted it, and then they had all sorts of other Thanksgiving food, and I decided that I'd try most of it, and even without trying any of the meat, I still managed to completely fill my plate with the different kinds of mashed potatoes and green bean salad and cheese grits and a dinner roll and a little bit of cranberry sauce, and it was all really good.

Everyone at the table had plates loaded with food, and nobody was complaining about any of it for once, except that Reese said that we were all going to eat so much food that when we got back to the dorms we'd just fall asleep and then not be able to finish studying and we'd all fail our classes and have to come back an extra year, and Christine told him that it was worth the risk.

I was pretty full by the time I'd finished my plate but everyone said that I couldn't skip dessert, especially because it turned out that the pumpkin pies and sweet potato pies had actually been properly made—Peggy said that they had never before had actual, home-made pies for dessert and it was some sort of a miracle. And they were really tasty. I had a little bit of each one, just small slices because if I ate much more I wasn't going to be able to fly at all. I'd just be stuck on the ground, flapping my wings uselessly and trying to get airborne.

After dinner, I was kind of sleepy, just 'cause I was so full, and my room was too hot and I almost fell asleep while I was practicing my math letters, and if I had I would have swallowed my clicky pen.

So after the third time my head dropped and made a mess of my math letter, I got up and went outside and rolled around in the snow a little bit which cooled me off a little bit, but also just moving around some really helped wake me up, at least enough to finish up practicing all my math letters.

Then I put on my flight gear and went outside for an evening flight. I got permission from the airplane directors, and I left from the balcony and flew north of town, towards the Nature Center. It was a beautiful night, although it was overcast so I couldn't see any stars, which was too bad. But all the lights of Kalamazoo looked really pretty, and the snow-cover on the trees and ground, too.

It was a little odd to not have my usual landmarks to navigate by—everything looked a bit different by night, and once I got out of town, there weren't so many lights to help me, and either the moon hadn't come up yet or else the clouds were covering it completely. I wasn't sure which, because the Earth moon didn't follow the same rules as the Equestrian moon.

There were tables of when it would rise, and I guess I could have observed it and predicted it using the formulas that Professor Miller had taught us, although if I was going to make my own lunar chart I ought to have started working on it a lot sooner. I couldn't even remember when I'd last seen the moon in the sky. It wasn't yesterday, 'cause it had rained or snowed or been overcast all day long, and it hadn't been Friday, 'cause there had been the storm that I'd flown in, and I couldn't remember if I'd noticed it on Thursday before I went to bed or after I woke up.

I thought that it probably comforted humans to know that it followed rules of the universe which kept it in the sky and kept it predictable, and I wondered if Luna stopped helping our moon if it would just orbit harmlessly on its own. Or what if Celestia stopped moving the sun? But those were worrisome thoughts, because when I was a filly they had stopped moving, until Princess Twilight got them moving again. And everypony had lost their cutie marks, and their magic too, and it was a really scary time until they all came back again. I didn't like to think about it, even though I'd been too young to have a cutie mark to lose.

My navigation was a little bit off, 'cause I was following lights on the wrong road, but once I got close, I saw the big snow-covered prairie patches, and I angled off to my right to fly over them.

The deer were grazing below me, even though it was dark and they should have been asleep in their beds. So I was glad that I was high enough that I wasn't scaring them off, and I went northeast along the river a little bit before dropping down and coming over the trees that way.

And I had to be careful not to fly too close to the trees, 'cause it would have been easy to accidentally get tangled in their branches in the dark. Then when I was reaching down for my landing, I realized that I couldn't see the path at all, but I could kind of guess where it was, because there weren't lumps of grass sticking up where the path went, but nobody had been around it since it had snowed, so I guess I was going to be the first.

I turned my blinking light off, and then just waited for the spots in my eyes to disappear, 'cause I hadn't been able to turn the light off without looking at it. And then I could faintly make out the path in front of me, from the lights of the city reflecting off the clouds, so I make my way around it, first at a walk, because I could take my time and make sure I was actually on it, and then the second time around I trotted, since I could follow my own hoofprints.

I didn't want to go any faster than that, although I could have—it was really easy to see the disturbed snow where I'd been. But too much exercise might actually wake me up, and then I'd have trouble falling asleep when I got back to college, plus I didn't want to go to bed all lathered up, and I didn't want to take a shower tonight, either.

So I slowed back down to a walk until I got to the top of the hill, and then I just stood there for a few minutes, listening to the distant noises of the city and the closer noise of a car driving by on Westnedge. If I focused my ears to the east, I could hear the river gurgling along the bank, and the wind making the trees creak and groan, and I also heard the distant howl of a dog or maybe a coyote.

Then I turned my blinking light back on and took off, but I didn't go back to college. I flew north and west, all the way to D Avenue and the 131 Highway, and then I followed the 131 Highway south. I saw a tow truck with its lights blinking on the side of the road, trying to pull a car out of the ditch. It must have gone in yesterday, 'cause the car was pretty well covered with snow, and it hadn't snowed at all today.

It was probably smarter to work at night anyways, 'cause there weren't so many cars on the highway, and the truck wouldn't get in anyone's way.

I went south, past Main Street, and all the way to the railroad bridge, and then I turned to follow the tracks back to campus. And even though it was a little ways off, a gust of wind brought me the smell of donuts from the Donut Mill, and for a moment I thought about going there and getting a snack for me and Peggy, except I'd eaten a really big dinner, and two pieces of pie, so I didn't need more food today, even if it did smell really good.

I kept high, just to make sure that I didn't run into any wires by mistake—the only other way I could be sure to avoid them was to go so low that I was at train-level, and that wouldn't be smart, 'cause a train could sneak up on me.

I could see the top of Stetson Chapel's bell tower by the time I got to Howard Street, so I angled away from the tracks and flew a direct path over Western's campus to get to it. And I mostly glided the last bit and then when I got over the quad I forgot that humans aren't used to looking up for ponies or other humans when someone who was pulling his sled up the hill turned around and saw me coming and dived to the ground while all his friends at the top of the hill laughed at him. But I felt bad, and I landed and gave him a hoof up.

He was drunk and laughing, too, so he wasn't mad at me. And I used my wing to help brush the snow off his jacket and pants, and we walked up the hill together.

They convinced me to join them and try sledding, so I turned off my blinking light and tried, and I stood up like I would on a snowboard which wasn't how they were doing it at all, but it worked until the sled slowed down and I didn't. But I did manage to get my wings out quick enough to get clear of it, although I hit the bow of the sled with my hooves, and when I turned around I saw that I'd flipped it upside-down.

All of them thought that I'd done it on purpose, and wanted me to do it again, so I grabbed hold of the tow-rope the sled had, and carried it back up to the top of the hill, and then I did the same thing again, only this time I went down with my wings already out, and cleared it completely. And then I said that I was going back to my room and they were kind of disappointed.

The flying and trotting and sledding had done me good, and by the time I got up to the room, my mind was clear of any distractions, and I looked at all my books and thought about studying some more, but I felt like I was as ready for the finals as I was going to get, so I took off my flight gear and stretched out on top of the covers.

Peggy set her book down on her bed and asked me if I wanted to have one drink for luck before tomorrow, and I said that I probably shouldn't, but I did anyway because she made me a white Russian. When I get back to Equestria, I'm going to have to teach Zucche how to make them.

She asked if I was ready for my finals, and I nodded, then asked her if she was ready for hers, and she said that she hoped so. And she said that she was too old for all-nighters, so she was just going to hope that when tomorrow came, she'd studied enough.

I asked her if she wanted to get up early and trot around the neighborhood, and she had to think about that for a while, until she decided that morning exercise might help her focus on her test, so she said that she would like to go trotting with me. So before she turned the lights out, she looked for clothes that she could wear for tomorrow that were clean enough—she said that she wasn't going to do any more laundry until she got back to Colorado Springs.

And once she'd found them, she took my glass and her own and rinsed them out in the little kitchen that was down the hall from our room, so they wouldn't get mold overnight, and then she turned out the lights and we went to bed.