//------------------------------//
// Special Moment 
// Story: Welcome to Batstralia 
// by Damaged 
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Language check. Anything wrapped in < > in this chapter is spoken Equish, everything else is in English.



"Where are we going?" Misty Rainfall trotted along after Rosetta Stein. On the other side of the teenager, Robin was bouncing along.

"<Can you stick to Equish? I need to practice more>." The fifty-dollar bill was burning in Rose's pocket, she couldn't believe how much she had gotten for just one day of babysitting. "<We're herded up to the mine; Dave said he would get us a price on all the gems we had found, ant pay us for them>."

Robin cut in. "You messed up with <herded> instead of <headed>, and <ant> instead of <and>."  

"<Thanks>." Rose shook her head for what she thought was the thousandth time. "<I am getting better, aren't I>?"

"<Of course you are, I could barely understand your Equish when you first started>." Misty ruffled her wings. "<Dave is your dad, right? Will he give us a lot of bits for them>?"

"<Hey! We found them all>!" Robin's exclamation was surprisingly abrupt. "<I mean, we get to keep them, right Rose>?"

"<We can share>." The actual money, Rose assumed, wouldn't be much. "<If Misty helps us with them we can give her a bit>." She looked to the pegasus and winked.

"<You're a lot nicer now>." As blunt as a tree branch, Misty studied Rose's face. "<You used to be really… standoffish. You wouldn't talk to anypony unless they talked to you first>."

"What?" Startled, Rosetta dropped back to English. "What do you mean?"

"<Are you acting like this because of Mike>?" The moment Misty asked, she got her confirmation in Rose's blush. "<He is a pretty amazing big brother>."

"<Yup>!" Robin seemed to feel obliged to support Mike as well. "<When he isn't being a booger, anyway. But he doesn't act like a booger since we moved>."

"He's different…" Rose shook her head, and tried to shove her speech back into Equish. "<He's different now? What was he like before>?"

"<A booger, mostly. He had a girl he seemed to like>," Robin shook her head and screwed up her face at the prospect, "<and he hung around with his city friends. I think that's why Mum made us move>."

The revelations were interesting to Rose, and she wanted to poke Robin for more, but didn't want to push her too far. "<So a real booger, huh>?"

"<Yeah! He would stay up late, sneak out to be with his friends, or his girlfriend. One day he came home and talked to Mum in his bedroom. It took ages, and I heard them both crying. Then Mum stomped out and told me we were moving>."

The first conclusion Rose came to was that Mike had gotten the girl pregnant. It had to be it, and she was in half a panic about it, missing most of the Equish Robin said next. "Uh, I missed that."

"I said, 'Mum said something really loud when she was talking to Mike in the room… with the door closed.' " Robin looked annoyed at having to repeat herself. "Something about pills, I think."

Rose was nine kinds of shocked at the "confirmation" of her hypothesis. Clearly Mike had been with a girl, she was off her pill, or hadn't started, and he got her pregnant. It made a strange amount of sense to her. "Well, nothing like that's going to happen here." Rose was suddenly proud of the fact she was on the Pill, and her cycle was regular as clockwork. "<Anyway, Dave will be waiting for us. Last one there is a rotten egg>!"

Misty was kind enough to keep pace with the humans until the last hundred meters. She stretched her stride out and hit a gallop then, and left the two behind her like they were standing still. "Yay! I win!" She reached a hoof out and gently poked the side of the ute.

"Beat them fair and square." Dave O'Brian climbed out of his car, surprising Misty. "Here come my budding miners now." He waved to Robin and held out an arm to Rose. "How's my girl doing?"

Blushing as she leaned into the welcome hug, Rose quickly pulled back. "We're here to get our pay!" She glared up at Dave, matching his wide grin with her own.

"Spoken like a real miner." Dave gave Rosetta's shoulder a weak punch. "Alright, don't tell ya mother about this…" He reached into his pocket and pulled out a rubber-band bound pack of yellow notes. Fifty dollar notes. "Three-hundred and fifty. The gems are worth a lot more, and I wish I could pay you ten times this, but if we sold them as large and well cut as we find them there would be police here inside a day."

Rose stared at the wad of yellow notes. "Alright, but if we get more…" Her mind ran numbers. They had worked for two weeks finding the small pile of gems, and it had worked out to three-hundred and fifty dollars. She trembled a moment, something feeling really strange around her legs. In a split moment, Rose saw a future where this was her living. She was buying and selling gemstones she had cut from the ground herself, and she loved every back-breaking hour of it.  

"Hey, Rosey? You okay?" Dave waved his hand before Rose's face. "Shit, I don't want to take you back to the doc, but I—"

"I'm fine!" Rose was almost shaking in excitement. She wanted to shout about what she had seen, she wanted to tell everybody she saw that she knew what she was going to be with a certainty that she couldn't begin to understand. Diving against Dave's side, Rose hugged her mentor. "You're the best!"

Unable to fully describe her feeling of "rightness," Rosetta clung to the closest thing to a father figure she had known to date. She felt great, amazing even. She wanted to yell at the top of her lungs and tell the world she, Rosetta Stein, knew what she wanted to do with her life.  

"Hey, where is my cut?" Robin's voice cut through the moment like a rusty, blunt knife cuts through fine silk. "Rose! You said I could have half!"  

Rose didn't ignore the tug at her arm. The part of her that celebrated how certainly she knew her place in the world was absolutely sure that she should distribute the money properly. "Hey, calm down squirt. I got paid fifty for taking care of you runts today—"

"We're not runts!" Misty cut in and flapped her wings a little in agitation.

"Yes you are. Here." Rose passed fifty dollars to Misty, and split the other three-hundred into two stacks of one-hundred and fifty. "And yours, squirt."

It was pretty obvious Robin didn't care about being called "squirt," not when she had more money than she had clearly had in her life. "Woo! Payday!" Robin bounced in place. As if her mother had just nagged her, she froze and looked up at Rose. "Thank you, Rose."

"You worked hard, same as me." Rose ruffled Robin's hair. "Let's grab the bus into Traralgon, have some lunch there, and buy some stuff." She froze at Misty's look of worry. "What's wrong with that?"

"I don't think I should really go that far from town. What will happen if everypony sees me and freaks out as much as Ms. Joyce did?" Misty ruffled her wings and looked down.  

"That's actually a good point." Rose reached out to Misty and ruffled the filly's mane just as she had Robin's hair. "Okay, no trip to the city. Let's go and get something nice for lunch, at least." Turning back to Dave, Rose waved. "See ya tonight!"

"Reckon I will!" Dave waved goodbye to the girls, and grabbed up his safety gear, ready to get back to work.