December 10
When I woke up I snuggled with Aric and Meghan for a while and dozed back off but then I woke up again and it was light out and they were both still sleeping, so I got up and went to the window and watched outside for a little bit and I must have been really focused on the outside, 'cause I didn't hear Aric waking up, and only noticed him when he came over and stood next to me so that he could look out the window, too.
I kind of wondered if anyone down below could see us clearly and he said that he didn't think so because the windows were tinted and the lights were off in our room, so probably all they'd see was a reflection of the sky and maybe they wouldn't even see that because of the snow that was still coming down. So then I thought that maybe it hadn't counted when they'd flashed the train and he said it was different at night, 'cause the lights on in the room would make the window easier to see through, and I didn't really understand how that would work, but I believed him.
Aric was disappointed that our room didn't have a coffee maker, and then Meghan said that we ought to just order room service. Aric told her that that was expensive, and she said it didn't matter because we weren't paying for it and then I started to wonder who was. Aric thought about it and decided that probably it was covered by my expense account or something like that and since it was near the end of the year anyways there was probably extra money in there that I hadn't used.
Then Meghan said that he was probably right; the program had the host nation sponsoring the students and paying all their expenses, which I knew too, because I hadn't been allowed to bring any money with me.
And she said that right now there were probably people in Equestria staying at fancy Manehattan hotels and ordering room service so it was okay if we did too.
So I got out of bed and brought the menu back and sat between Meghan and Aric so we could look at it, and it was what I'd come to know as standard human breakfast food.
We decided that we could share some, 'cause the eggs I wanted also came with sausages that I didn't want, but Aric said that he'd eat them for me. And there was also a blueberry muffin that sounded really good that Meghan and I wanted to share, and we decided we'd get extra coffee so we could have seconds.
Aric got up and used the telephone to order the food and then he got back in bed and said that it would be about a half hour before the food was ready and he wasn't sure what we should do until then, and I told him to get back in bed 'cause I had an idea what we could do.
It made it a little bit more exciting not knowing when the waiter was going to bring our food, 'cause at any moment there might be a knock at the door, and we weren't ready when there was. Meghan yanked the covers over herself and told me that I should go to the door and get our food because I was used to being naked anyway and they'd just pretend that they weren't there, and I said that I wasn't sure that I could carry it all myself and the waiter was gonna know, 'cause the two of them made a pretty big lump in the bed, and anyway did we really care if he did.
Aric said that he'd do it, so he got out of bed and put on his pants and he opened the door real quick and got the tray and then brought it in and set it down on he desk and then started lifting the lids off the food to see what we'd gotten and both me and Meghan thought he shouldn't be getting distracted with breakfast, so we got out of bed and she reached around his waist and took his pants back off and then the two of us herded him back to the bed so that we could finish.
And then we relaxed in bed together a little bit until Aric got up and started bringing our food over. There was a little table next to the bed where we could put our cups of coffee so they wouldn't spill and it was kind of hard to eat food in bed without making a mess, but it was also fun.
The shower that they had was a little bit bigger and had a sliding glass door like my balcony, and it even had a really fancy showerhead that let you change how the water came out of it which was nice but the little bottles of shampoo that they had provided weren't enough. Meghan and Aric each needed one and I could have used about ten of them and he said that we should call them and order some more, but I thought it was okay if I didn't get all the way clean, 'cause I hadn't gotten too dirty yesterday, and I didn't want to bother the hotel people again. It was my own fault for not thinking of it earlier; we could have had it brought up with breakfast.
After they'd washed off we stayed in the shower and let the bathroom fill up with steam and then I went down to the far end of the shower and started trying to condense some of the steam into a little cloud. There wasn't really enough room in the shower for me to get a decent cloud together but I managed to pack enough steam together to get one that was a little bit bigger than a football, and then I started to see how much I could put in it before it became completely unstable. The hot water gave it a lot of energy and all the air currents in the bathroom kept bouncing it around until it got heavy enough that it kept wanting to fall and I sort of had to work to keep it aloft.
Since I'd made it myself at ground level, I knew that it would have the same charge as everything else in the room did so Aric and Meghan could safely touch it, so I let them pick it up and hold it and play with it. It didn't respond too well to humans and I had to keep a hoof on it, 'cause otherwise it would have just disintegrated in their hands.
Meghan said that it felt kind of tingly and I thought that maybe she was feeling my magic in the cloud 'cause I was actually having to work pretty hard to keep it together. Aric thought it felt more like a vibration like a machine or something and he said that it was really weird, and he wanted to know if clouds in Equestria felt like that all the time.
I said that it felt normal to me, except that it was taking a lot more magic than it ought to to keep the cloud intact, especially when he started to squeeze it, and then I had to take it back away from him and let it recover a little bit before it was happy again, and then I let them play with it some more until I started to feel a little bit tired from maintaining it, and then I told them that I was going to let it go and I didn't know what it was going to do when I did.
It had lightened up enough that it could float again, and it drifted on a little air current around the shower and both of them kind of moved around to stay out of its way, and then it got stuck on the glass wall of the shower and that was the end of it, 'cause it picked up too much condensation and just dissolved which was a kind of sad fate for it, but it had never been enough of a cloud to really amount to anything, and I couldn't have opened the window of the hotel to let it out.
We got out of the shower and dried off and then sat back on the bed to figure out what we were going to do for the rest of the day. Aric said that unless I wanted to stay up super-late tonight we would have to do our Lord of the Rings marathon tomorrow, which was okay by me. I said that I'd like to see Caleb and Lindy and Trinity today and we could go Pokemon hunting with them or play in their backyard, 'cause it was still snowing, and we had to go back to the apartment to find out how the alarm worked, too.
Then Meghan got up and went over to the window and looked down on the streets below and said it was really pretty watching the snow fall and the people go by below us and she thought that it was kind of like being in a cloud.
It was almost lunchtime when we got dressed and we didn't have anything to take home with us, 'cause we hadn't packed anything, and we went downstairs and I gave the clerk the plastic key back and then we went across the tube-bridge to the parking lot building and we had to go all the way to the top because Aric had parked Winston on the upper floor. Meghan thought that was kind of silly because there had been lots of other parking spaces on the floors below, but Aric said that Winston didn't like being inside because the only time it was in a garage was when it was being fixed and he thought that if he'd parked it on a lower level it would have broken just so he could fix it.
She didn't think that was true, and I wasn't convinced either, but it was nice to be on the top floor and have the open sky above me after being inside. I could have just flown out and then landed up there and I had thought about it but then I would have been leaving Aric and Meghan behind, so I'd walked up with them.
There was nobody else up there, 'cause everyone else had parked their cars on the lower floors, and you could see where the snowplow had had to go around Winston—even though there was more snow on the ground covering up the pavement, Winston was on a little snow-island all by itself, which was surrounded by a ridge of slushy snow.
Aric brushed Winston off and scraped off the windows and then we all got in and he decided he wanted to see if he could get all the way down to the bottom without starting it, which was going to be hard because it was facing the wrong way.
He tried to turn it around once it had rolled a little bit but he didn't get far enough around and when he saw that he was going to hit the wall, he had to stop and then start it long enough to get Winston pointed downhill again. And then he turned it back off and coasted down all the floors until we got right to the last one and he let the clutch out so that Winston would start itself, and I thought that was pretty clever.
We didn't have to pay for parking, 'cause we'd stayed at the hotel and had a little paper card that the clerk had given me, so Aric gave that to the attendant in the booth and then we drove back to my apartment, and Mister Salvatore was still there. He did look a little bit tired, but he smiled when he saw me and he showed me how the alarms worked. They were pretty simple to use; they were just little boxes that went by the doors and had keys that went in them that you could turn. There was a green light when it was okay to open the door and a red light when it wasn't.
He said that it was probably unnecessary and he thought that maybe he'd overreacted some but since he hadn't known what was going on he'd thought it was best to be safe. And Aric asked him what else they knew, and he said that so far they still hadn't found the suspects but now the police were sure that it was a robbery gone wrong, and they'd also figured that the bad guys had left Kalamazoo and they probably weren't going to come back.
Then he said that he'd worked up a schedule for my vacation to Florida, and that we could go to Chicago on the train on Tuesday and then we'd take a train to Florida and we'd visit the beaches and a spaceport. He said that Gusty was going to fly down later, because she got out of school really late, and so it wouldn't be until Saturday that we got to see her.
And he said that I'd be back in Kalamazoo before Christmas, and then he crouched down and gave me a hug.
I saw that they'd thought to refill my bird feeder, which was nice of them, and thinking about the birds having their meal made me think that I was hungry, too, and so Meghan got out the leftover quiche and warmed that up so that we could have it for lunch.
After we'd eaten, Aric and Meghan wanted to go back to Aric's house to get new clothes and I wanted to fly some, so we agreed that we'd meet at his house in two hours, which would give me enough time to fly around the city a little bit, so I put on my flight gear and I was going to go out the balcony but then I remembered that I couldn't turn on the alarm if I went out that way, and if Mister Salvatore came back and saw that it was off he'd be mad at me.
Aric said that he could turn it on for me, so I went out on the balcony and kissed him and Meghan and then I called the airplane directors and told them that I was just going to patrol above town and I'd stay out of the way of airplanes, and the grumpy man said that there weren't going to be any for a little while but I should be careful because of the low visibility and I promised that I would. Then I kissed Aric and Meghan one more time and took off.
I thought that if I stayed under 500 feet, nobody could get mad at me, so I went along Stadium Drive until I got to downtown and I had to circle the Radisson and find the room we'd had, even though we weren't in it any more, so I flew by outside and then I followed the railroad tracks until I got to the river and I turned and went east along it for a little ways, until I got to the dam, and then I went south, and once I crossed the 94 Highway, it was almost all farms and fields and woodlots, although I did fly over one neighborhood of moveable houses that wasn't too far from the highway.
I knew that the airport was off to my right, but I couldn't see it because of the snow. When my watch told me that it was almost due west, I dropped down a little bit because there was a runway that pointed kind of in my direction and I wanted to be sure that if there were any airplanes coming along I'd be clear of their wake. But I didn't see any or hear any and probably I was far enough out that they'd still be pretty high above me.
When I got to Long Lake, I descended until I was right above the water and skimmed across the top of it, and then I had to climb on the other side so that I'd clear the trees and wires, and then I dropped down over Austin Lake.
There was a bit of a clearing in the trees at the end of it and so I didn't have to climb as high, and I zipped right over a road and then descended to the next lake—there was a whole chain of them—and turned northwest, 'cause I knew that I was getting close to Portage Park which ran alongside the railroad tracks, and I was going to follow that back to town.
I'd just gotten to the celery flats when I heard dogs, and then I saw a team of them pulling a sled behind them come out from the trees and so I had to turn around and get a better look at that. They were all hitched up like a team of horses might be, and on the back of their sled was a person holding the reins, and so I slowed down and watched them go by, and I wasn't going to land and distract them but my curiosity got the better of me and I did.
And their drover stopped the sled and the dogs got a little bit out of order trying to sniff at me, and I found out that she raced dogsled and she was training up for the Iditarod which was in Alaska and was the most important dogsled race in the whole world. So I asked her if she thought she'd win, and she said that she didn't think she had a chance but it was still going to be amazing even if she came in last.
So I wished her luck and she got her dogs moving again and I watched until they went around a little curve and I couldn't see them anymore.
When I got back to Aric's house and told him what I'd seen he didn't believe me at first, but Meghan said that she'd seen her around before in the summertime on a sled with wheels, and that it was Libby who also worked overnight at Kalamazoo College as a security guard. And it was funny because I thought that she was familiar but since she had been all bundled up in winter clothes I hadn't been sure, and I couldn't really get her scent all that clearly over the dogs'.
We walked over to Jeff's house together and it didn't take too long for the kids to come out to play with us. Trinity and Lindy both gave me hugs and Caleb bumped my hoof, and we decided that we were going to have a snowball fight and after a little while it turned into everyone against Jeff and Aric, which wasn't as unfair as it seemed, 'cause they were both pretty clever at hiding and then jumping out and throwing a barrage of snowballs at us and that went pretty well for them for a while, but then I decided I'd fly up into the tree that they were hiding under and start knocking snow down onto them which they didn't think was very fair, and then after that we stopped throwing snowballs and decided that we were going to go to Echo Valley, which was a sledding hill.
That was on the other side of town, near Galesburg. And Jeff offered to take us all in his van, which was a really nice van called an Odyssey. It was a little bit crowded with sleds and the seven of us, but I didn't mind and Trinity and Lindsay liked sitting on either side of me, 'cause they could pet me and play with my mane. Trinity decided to braid a little bit of it, but she didn't have any elastic bands to put in it, so it was kind of a loose braid that was gonna fall out later.
Echo Valley was kind of like a ski hill, but a lot smaller, and there were lots of people there playing on the hill—some of them were riding round tubes but most people were on some kind of a sled. Jeff didn't have enough for everyone to have their own, so Aric and Meghan made a few trips down but then mostly just watched everyone else having fun.
I tried going down once standing on my hooves and I made it halfway down before the sled hit a bump and knocked me out and so I had to fly down and grab it, then I towed it back up the hill and after that I rode down with Lindy or Trinity instead of going by myself. And I also got to fly around and bring their sleds back to them, and I carried Trinity up the stairs a couple of times, too, and we stayed at the park until it got dark out and the kids were tired out, and then we rode back home and Trinity fell asleep and Lindy had to wake her up when we got back to Jeff's house.
We walked back to Aric's house and then had a late dinner there, and then drove over to Tiffany's so that we could get some drinks for tomorrow and then we went back to my apartment for the night. It was still snowing and the wind had drifted it up almost a foot on one corner of the balcony, and I thought it was neat to be looking into a little snowdrift like that.
Meghan and Aric pulled the futon mattress back out into the living room so that we could share it, and we turned out the lights except for the Christmas tree and all piled onto it and snuggled up under the blankets and watched the snow falling outside.