“Sun's up, Astraeus! It's time to get to work!
A few expletives escape my lips as the surprise knocks me out of the firm but warm bed I was in just moments ago. I look up to see my host, an old smiling mare, looking down at me. “No time to waste. Have some breakfast so we can head out.”
The old mare trots out of the guest room I was sleeping in and I have a second to think about last night. After Celestia finished The Gauntlet, Starswirl brought me to stay with an acquaintance of his, Smart Cookie. I recognized the mare as Apple Jack’s character in the Hearth's Warming pageant episode. She introduced herself as the secretary of Chancellor Puddinghead, leader of the earth pony tribe.
When Starswirl teleported us into her living room, she had dinner ready and waiting. After we ate, the old stallion teleported away and left the two of us to clean up while Cookie quietly listened to the story of how I arrived in pre-Equestria. With the relaxing evening we had last night, I hadn’t expected her to wake me up at the crack of dawn for whatever work she had planned for me.
I trot out of my room to see my host waiting at the table with a plate of hay and flowers along with some kind of juice.
“Good morning, Cookie,” I sleepily mutter as I sit down and start eating. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“You're very welcome! Now since you're staying here, I hope you don't mind pitching in with some of the work I have to take care of.”
“Of course not,” I say as I take a swig of what I realize is carrot juice and omit how some warning about my dawn wake-up call would have been nice. “What kind of work?”
“Once I sort out some business with the Chancellor, I need to help run the seed distribution. That’s where we give everypony their share of seeds to plant once the pegasi wrap up winter. So we’ll strap a cart on you and have you bring seeds over to sheds at a few plots of land. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
***
After breakfast, we enter Chancellor Puddinghead’s office. The stallion looks a little older than Clover, and as his name suggests, he wears a comically large bowl of presumably pudding on his head. He doesn’t pay too much attention to me during his verbal avalanche at Smart Cookie.
“Cookie! I can’t stress this enough. WE. HAVE. THE. FOOD!!! Why should the unicorns control all the wealth?”
“I’m not saying they should, Chancellor, but when they control the mines that-”
“I don’t care about that! They need what we grow way more than those sparkly rocks and shiny metal they force us to use as currency.”
I wonder if the pudding is edible.
“But you don’t get to make up the price of food,” Cookie says with a tired sigh. “Ponies are allowed to sell-”
“I know that! But what if just one thing cost way more and we just grew a bunch of that?” the Chancellor, who might actually make pudding every morning for his own headdress, says while digging through a pile of papers on his desk.
“Are you still on about your carrot bill? You already have a few of us doing it to help you out but-”
“Look!” the stallion with the edible hat declares as he displays the paper he was looking for. I can just make out the title: The Mandatory Carrot Juice At Every Meal Law by Chancellor Puddinghead. “I finished my final draft! It’ll be put to a vote later this week!”
“There’s no way that’ll pass, sir. You can’t just cause inflation of Carrots like this!”
***
After about 30 more minutes of arguing, a very frustrated Smart Cookie leads me over to the tribe’s main seed barn. During the walk she kept talking about the economics of produce and the stupidity of her boss who was elected for his “out of the pudding cup” thinking.
When we arrive at the massive seed barn, which should have been described as a multi-story warehouse painted red and white to look like a barn, the old mare gets right to work and starts organizing the throng. My new acquaintance and host begins sending families on their way with giant sacks of seeds with an impressive speed for someone as old as her.
As soon as she notices a family that looks like they need help, she sends me to carry a cart with half of their seed supply. Once I’m strapped in and feeling like I can manage the heavy burden pretty well, Smart Cookie then tells the two fillies they can ride in the cart and assures their parents that I don’t mind the extra weight at all even though I’m convinced my back will fail me after a few steps. The damn little ponies, who introduce themselves as Juice and Jam, are too excited for me to tell them to hop out.
The family turns out to be really friendly; I guess free manual labor brings out that side in people ponies. All four of them pepper me with questions that I have to keep dodging. I can’t exactly tell them that the farm I live on isn’t a farm at all and is literally so far away it probably can’t be quantified with distance. So I opt for, “I’m a traveler. I’ve been away for a long time and I only recently got back.” Thankfully that satisfies them enough to move on to other questions that I have an easier time giving vague non-answers to.
After a walk that had to be at least half a dozen miles, we arrive at their farm. Surprisingly, I managed to pull the seeds and fillies without too much of a problem once we got moving. I unload the cart and get ready to head back for my next job when the mare tells me to wait right where I am. She rushes into the house and emerges a minute later with something wrapped in parchment. “Here, take this, Astraeus. It’s half an apple cake I made last night. It’s the least we can do after ya helped us out.”
The mare’s husband, Cranberry, sees me get ready to protest and adds, “Take it. You’ll regret not having one of Red Delicious’ cakes, especially since you probably didn’t get good home cooking while you were away.”
I relent and thank them for the cake. I say goodbye to the family, but the Jam takes it upon herself to invite me to stop by for dinner sometime. Cranberry is quick to echo the statement and tells me that, “It’s good to be around ponies when you’ve been away from your tribe for so long.”
I head back to the mega-barn with a warm feeling in my chest and a cake in my cart.
The day continues on like that until sundown. Even though every muscle in my body aches, chatting with so many different families really helped lift my spirits.
Helping out the earth ponies seemed to ease some of my worries about being in this children’s show world and pretending to actually be a pony. Although part of that worry was replaced with an unexpected homesickness for my own family.
***
My daily routine has been relatively similar these past few days. No contact from Starswirl or Celestia yet, but the former said it’d be a while before he got everything setup to send me home and honestly, I haven’t minded helping out the earth ponies.
As I head back to Smart Cookie’s house from my last job of the day, a strong gust of wind buffets my cart and me. I continue on, eager to get some sleep after my long day when I get hit with another gust of wind from above…
I look up to see a dark figure, almost like a shadow, soaring overhead. The young not-yet-princess of the night darts off in a direction away from the main hub of the earth pony territory.
I let out a sigh and change my path to follow the mare. I figure she probably didn’t blast me with air to just say ‘hi’ and then leave.
By the time I reach the spot where Luna landed, a clearing on a hill in a lightly forested area, the dark blue mare smirks at me, “So I see my sister decided to make you do hard labor, even though she claimed you were innocent.”
“This was all the old ma-er stallion and Smart Cookie.” I say between exhausted breaths. “Now why didn’t you just come down to walk with me?”
“I can’t be seen in the enemy’s territory.”
“What do you mean enemies?” This area belongs to...
“The earth ponies,” Luna replies casually. “Not you of course,” she quickly corrects, although it does nothing to settle my bristling fur. “If I’m caught, they’ll think I’m spying on them.”
“Are you?” I ask tersely.
“Well, it’s more like recon mostly, but yes. It’s natural to want to get information about your enemy,” Luna says with a slight frown. “Although, that’s not my assignment tonight.”
“Then what is? You have the night off and wanted to make sure the big bad earth ponies didn’t attack me?” I snap and Luna recoils a bit in response. I surprised myself at that. Why am I getting so defensive all of a sudden? “Sorry.” Sure the earth ponies have been nice to me these past few days, but none of this is my problem.
“No,” Luna scowls as she squares her shoulders and tries to stare me down. Since I’m a solid head taller than her and she doesn’t have a weapon pointing at me like before, it doesn’t work. “I’m trying to warn you Astraeus. I was sent to track some unruly weather last night, and it looks like we’ll be getting a strong end-of-winter blizzard this year. You don’t know what this world is like so I want to make sure you don’t take this lightly.”
“Oh. Thanks, Luna,” I mumble.
She nods. “The past few years, we’ve had some of the worst winters in my life, but this one hasn’t been too bad. This storm though… it looks like what should have been all this season’s bad weather combined. It may hit after winter wrap up and cause us to have to do it all over again.”
Oh shit! Time to pack up and move to Equestria. Although in terms of immediate starvation… “What does that mean for the crops? Seeds get planted as soon as the snow is gone.”
“Don’t worry Astraeus.” Luna says through what feels like a forced smile. “If the Commander thinks it’ll be bad, he’ll issue a weather warning before wrap up starts.”
The two of us sit in silence for a while, peacefully watching the night sky. Then the someday Lunar Princess mutters, “I won’t apologize for not believing your story without Celestia’s verification, but I shouldn’t have acted so coldly towards you.”
Slightly dumbstruck, I don’t know what else to say other than, “Thanks, Luna.”
We settle back into our nice calm. That is until my companion begins rifling through her saddlebags to pull out a notebook, writing quill, and, “A telescope?”
Luna nods as she sets it up on a wooden tripod, not breaking the silence. She starts a repetitive process of looking through the brass telescope, flipping through pages in her journal, and marking down some scribbles. It’s almost hypnotic watching the dark blue mare get lost in her work like this.
“Astraeus.” I’m pulled out of my revere when she speaks up. “Do humans watch the stars where you’re from?”
“Yeah,” I reply. “I actually wanted to take an astronomy course myself. On Earth, we have some telescopes the size of large buildings, and-”
“Really?” the pegasus asks with awe. Her eyes now locked on me instead of her instrument.
I spend at least the better part of an hour telling Luna about Earth, and at her urging, focusing on everything from observatories to horoscopes as she continues tracking the night sky. It should have been obvious that this topic would be what finally gets the moon mare talking, even if it’s just to ask me more about various star related human things.
“So how do these planetariums display the stars indoors without magic?”
“I really don’t want to get into how projectors work,” I say with a slight groan. It’s hard enough to avoid talking about electricity. I do not want to accidentally launch these ponies into a medieval industrial revolution when I leave. “But it’s not actually looking at the stars directly. That’s why it works during the day or when the clouds are out.”
“I wonder if that could ever be accomplished here,” Luna says longingly.
“Why don’t you ask your sister? Isn’t she powerful enough to magic you up an indoor star light show?” I realize my companion is being oddly quiet. “Luna?”
“Sorry, just realized I lost track of time. I need to report to my CO as soon as possible.”
I try to get a word out, but Luna’s packing skills outpace my ability to form words. The next thing I know, she’s flying off, camouflaged by the night sky.