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// 13 After Ice Moon [The Wayward Pony] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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13 After Ice Moon

I was the last one to wake up, 'cause I was still really tired after crossing over and the train ride and everything else, and then I felt bad for being the last pony to wake up. The sun was already up and we should have been in the air to greet it.

The first thing I really noticed was how quiet it was. I'd gotten so used to the sounds of cars going by that I'd just stopped noticing them at all, but now that they were gone, it was strange to not hear them.

And the air outside was different. It smelled a little bit fresher, but that could have been the sea breeze blowing in and mixing with the smoke from chimneys.

Using the toilet was strange, too. I'd managed okay yesterday but now that I'd had a night to sleep I think that my brain forgot that it was back in Equestria again and I didn't have to use a human-style toilet any more. And it was odd how practically everywhere I turned things weren't the same anymore. The walls looked kind of naked without having the little electricity slots that you could plug things into, and almost every human room I'd been in had had a computer or a television or both and there weren't any of those, either.

When we were all ready to fly, I opened my saddlebags and looked for my flight gear and I started to get worried when I couldn't find it, before I remembered that I didn't need it anymore. I could go wherever I wanted without wearing it and nopony could stop me, and that was actually kind of intimidating. Maybe just because I was used to having to think about other airplanes and helicopters and anything else that might be in the sky that I'd have to watch out for.

It was going to take some getting used to.

We went down the hall and they had an outside balcony for pegasuses to take off and land, or for other ponies who just wanted to be outside and kind of in the air, and when I was right at the edge I was a little bit nervous, just 'cause I thought that everypony else was gonna fly rings around me, but to my surprise when I took to the air I was actually flying faster than anypony else, even though I'd been gone for so long, and I realized that I'd built up a lot of strength while I had been on Earth, 'cause my flight magic hadn't worked as well.

As we climbed into the sky I kept looking down at my foreleg for my pilot's watch to tell me how high I was, and my sister finally noticed and asked me what I was doing, so I told my family about the rules that I'd had to follow, and how if I had been leaving from the college or my apartment I usually wasn't allowed to go over a thousand feet until I crossed over the 131 Highway or got past the airport to the east, and I wasn't allowed to fly through clouds, either, because there could be an airplane inside them that I didn't know about.

So I didn't really get to do much looking around at first because I was explaining everything to them and then when I did get a look at the ground it was really disorienting because there wasn't a grid of roads or wide paths that the electricity wires followed, and there were no towers sticking up with their blinking lights and I felt like I was completely lost without them, and I actually circled back around to make sure that I could still see the inn off in the distance, and that took me a moment to find.

It was really strange to have grown so used to Earth landmarks that I was almost helpless without them now, and I hoped that it was only temporary and my old flight instincts would start working again after I'd been back for a few days, 'cause otherwise I was gonna be a danger on the weather team when the summertime came around. They wouldn't let me go out to sea at all, because they'd be afraid I'd get lost. Maybe I could pretend that everything was all right, but if I did, there was a good chance that I'd die in the first big feral storm that we had, and then everypony would be searching for me and the storm might go on unchecked while they were searching.

Flying while you were disoriented wasn't a very good idea.

But for now I had my family with me and so long as I followed along with them, I'd be safe. I felt kind of like a filly again, though, when just making a short flight from one house to the next seemed like a hundred-mile trip.

We flew around for a while and then we found a nice fluffy cloud that was just drifting along and my sister landed on top of it, so the rest of us followed and I landed a little bit off to the side and it was strange the way it felt, more substantial than a feral cloud and more responsive to me, and I rolled around in the cloud-fluff and made myself a little depression in it and then I took one of the tufts off the edge and bounced it around in my hooves and started working with it and at first I was a bit clumsy 'cause it didn't behave like an Earth-cloud at all but then I figured it out and it was really weird. It felt like I was moving something inside me that hadn't been moved in a really long time and it knew what it had to do but it couldn't quite remember how to do it.

It was almost like if I'd slept badly on one of my wings and it had gone to sleep, and everything was numb and stiff and not working quite right but then after a little bit of stretching and flapping it started to work like it was supposed to again and then an hour later it was really hard to exactly remember how it had felt or when it had changed from being wrong to being normal.

I batted the little cloud-tuft away from me and let it drift off even though I knew it wasn't gonna last too long on its own, and then I stuck my muzzle in the cloud and felt it pushing back against me a little bit.

Then I hopped back up to where everypony else was and looked out over the landscape. It was pretty far away and kind of hazy, but you could see the ocean and even though you couldn't see any of the buildings at all, I could sort of make out where Chonamare harbor was and I felt a longing in my heart for it.

I almost suggested that we could fly there and still be back tonight in time for classes, and if I trusted my wings more I would have, but it was probably a good forty miles away.  So it was better to stay here for now. But I was gonna go back next weekend, even if that meant I had to work extra hard to catch up on all the work I'd missed while I was in Kalamazoo.

Since we were sitting, it was a little bit easier to talk, and so I told them how on a good day I could fly a little ways out of Kalamazoo and then when I was high enough I could see the shore there, too.

And I said how I'd seen both of the big oceans on Earth, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and I'd also seen three of the five Great Lakes which surrounded Michigan, and about the ships that were so big that they could have held our whole village and the harbor on top of them and probably had room left over for another village, too. I said that if they imagined Canterlot Castle sailing through our harbor entrance that wasn't even close to what it had looked like when one of those ships went by.

After we'd rested a little bit, we got up off of our cloud and flew back down to the inn, and we were all kind of hungry, so instead of bathing first, we went right down to the dining room and had breakfast and they had a breakfast barley stew that was pretty good and filling, and we also got a small plate of fish to share.

I told my sister how on Earth the fish came in cans so you didn't have to eat them right away and you could take them with you when you were flying and snack on them then, and they were a little bit too salty but that was nice if you were going to be sweating a lot.

After we'd gotten done eating, mom decided that we were gonna go to the spa and get properly pampered and groomed and I said that I didn't really need that but she said that my coat was hardly groomed and my wings looked like I hadn't preened them in months and that wasn't true at all and it was just 'cause I'd been spending so much time traveling and hadn't really had time to do them right, but she put her hoof down and said that we were going, and it was going to be nice to soak in the hot tub, so we flew through town to the spa, and she insisted on paying for me, too, even though I had my own account at the spa.

I looked around the room but there wasn't anypony I knew from college in the spa today, which was kind of disappointing. But the spa ponies remembered me and they all hugged and nuzzled me and said that they'd missed me and were glad that I was back, and then Bubblecup said that I smelled a little bit different now and she didn't mean it in a mean way. I guess that I still had some of Earth stuck in my coat.

We relaxed in the hot tub for a while, and then we got dried off and stretched out on the benches and let the spa ponies preen us. I didn't think that they did as good a job as Meghan could do, 'cause they used preening brushes and Meghan could do it with her fingers and really feel to make sure that every feather was in its proper place.

But I got a better hooficure than anybody on Earth had ever given me. Sweet Sparkle was really good and she made sure that my hooves were trimmed and filed just right and at first it was a little bit weird when I got off the bench but by the time we were walking back out of the spa, it started to feel right, and some of the little aches in my legs that I'd just gotten used to faded away.

We went to the market to find something to eat for lunch, and we got a loaf of bread and some honey (which was kind of expensive since it was the winter, and the bees were dormant) and a little wheel of cheese and then there was a baker there who had cookies that looked really good so we got a half-dozen of them, too. And we could have flown up to a cloud again and eaten there but I kind of wanted to stay on the ground and just watch ponies go by and get a feel for the market again, 'cause it wasn't anything like human stores.

My family couldn't stay all day, 'cause they had to go back to Chonamare, so after we got done eating lunch we went to college and up to my dorm room, and I opened up the boxes and it was kind of like Hearth's Warming.

It didn't take me too long to find the photo albums and I got them out and we all sat on my bed and I went through them and showed them the pictures of all my friends and some of the things that I'd done. My sister thought that it was really strange that humans weren't very colorful and she said that they kind of all looked the same, and I think that it was kind of overwhelming for them to see so many things all at once, and if I'd explained everything in every picture it would have taken forever.

The one they liked best was a picture of me and the tornado team as we took off looking for tornadoes. I didn't know who had taken the picture; it must have been one of the tornado humans, but it caught us just as we were taking flight, and the whole sky was full of angry, dark clouds, and Merry May and Flanking Line were already in the air with the rest of us all clustered on the road, mostly looking at the sky, and Paradise was adjusting the straps on Skydancer’s equipment package.

She thought that we were crazy to fly in weather like that with all the equipment we were wearing, and so I got to point to the picture and say what each piece was for, although I wasn't sure what went into the instrument packages that Prism Glider and Skydancer had on, but I did know that it could talk to the ground and also measure what the weather was like.

It was kind of funny to look at, though, cause we were all wearing bright vests and had blinking lights and radios and I had my camelback on and my pilot's watch and it looked almost like we were pack mules with wings.

And you could see the front corner of the van we'd ridden in, too, and I told them that it was kind of big for a human car but there were lots of ones that were bigger than it, too, like buses which I said was like a train car that could drive itself around—I couldn't think of a better way to describe it.

My sister didn't believe me when I told her that we'd gotten to ride in one that had a sink in it and one faucet that coffee came out of, and I wished that there had been a picture of it in the album.

I knew when I got back home we were gonna spend a lot more time together going through the photo albums, but there wasn't really enough time to study and explain all the pictures now, and they wanted to get back before sundown, so we all hugged and nuzzled and then they flew off for home and left me alone.

I was getting too good at saying goodbye.

And it was kind of lonely with nopony else in my dorm room but it was also kind of a relief, because sometimes it was good to just spend time with yourself and your thoughts. So I watched ponies out the window for a little bit and then I lit a lamp and got out my journal because it was time to wrap it up. I was back in Equestria and my year on Earth was over, and now it was time to move on.

I was writing in my journal when my roommate came back. She's an earth pony called Denim Blue, and she's kind of my opposite, 'cause she'd got a white coat and blue mane but she's very nice and she's studying math, too, so we can study together.

She was a little mad at me for not coming to see her yesterday when I'd first gotten in and she said she'd been waiting when the deliverypony had brought the boxes, and I told her that I was sorry but I'd been with my family and she said that it was okay. And then she said that we had a lot of catching up to do and that was gonna be fun. I had lots of things to tell her about Earth and she had lots of things to tell me about the person who she'd been sharing a room with and she admitted that it was sort of strange to have a pony again and not a person anymore.

Denim said that she’d gotten used to having to look up at her roommate, and I laughed and I said that I had, too.

Her name had been Julia and she was also studying math, and Denim said that she hadn't really been all that well-prepared for Equestrian math and I told her that humans used completely different symbols and drew some of them out for her and she said that they looked familiar.

And then she got a picture of all of them together for Nightmare Night, and Denim had a gold mask on and Julia was wearing a plaid shirt stuffed with straw, ‘cause she was a scarecrow.  And she had dark hair like Peggy, and stormy grey eyes.

And we had a lot of other things to talk about, but we also both needed a little bit of time to ourselves to sort things out in our heads, so after we went to dinner (and I spent more time talking than eating) we came back to our room and I sat down at my desk and wrote a poem and I read it for Denim and she really liked it.

The Wayward Pony

The wayward pony
Finds herself home
Her travels finished
At least for now.

Like a ship, returning to port
Cutting its prow into the familiar harbor
As it returns to its slip
And the sails are struck.

There is sadness in endings
In journeys finished
In places and friends 
Left behind.

But it is tempered with the joy
Of family
Of old friends, and 
Familiar places.

The seas change a ship
They bend its planks
Twist its keel
Stretch its rigging.

The ship that left port
Is not the same as the ship which returns.
And this is also true
Of the traveller.

Every friend we make
Takes a little piece of our heart
And gives us a piece back
To replace it.

I copied that over to a new piece of paper, and I wrote a little letter to Conrad to go with it, and I put it in an envelope so that I could mail it to him tomorrow, and then I spent the rest of the evening finishing my journal.

It felt kind of strange that my last goodbye would be to my journal.