[Perspective: Arrell]
Two thirty-eight.
I looked away from my watch for what felt like ten to fifteen minutes. I looked back.
Two thirty-eight and four seconds.
I sighed. The process repeated.
Two thirty-eight and seventeen seconds.
I smiled. Time was speeding up.
Sleep is normally something that evades me like a pro dodgeball player dodging a ball – yes, I'm redundant – but ever since arriving in Equestria, I'd been able to fall asleep like any normal person would. Convenient too, since I was now a dimension away from my sleeping pills.
But tonight, I found myself sitting in a lit room, staring at my watch, waiting for my eyes to suddenly tell me they want to be shut. We'd be leaving for Stalliongrad soon now that I was feeling better. Normally I'd go to bed at eleven PM, fall asleep twenty minutes later, and wake up whenever the hell I felt like it – usually around noon. I had become a lot more lethargic since the whole Rancid Windigoes incident, likely due to my body needing plenty of rest after so many sleepless nights and being sick.
But this time, I had gone up to my room at eleven after saying goodnight to everypony, plopped onto my bed, and lay still for two hours. My eyes didn't want to close, and I didn't know why.
At about one-thirty I got up, pulled my Tetris device out, and played that for a bit. That got boring and my hooves stopped working quickly enough, so I put that back just before two o'clock. Since then I had just been pacing or sitting on my bed.
Part of me wanted to go talk to one of the others, but I knocked that idea out of my head. Waking somepony up at almost three in the morning to help you get to sleep isn't exactly a way to get on their good side. Even Asylum would probably just glare at me and go back to sleep.
I began feeling an urge. It was a weird urge, one that I hadn't had since being a human. I wanted to work. I wanted to be productive, even if it was on something pointless. Usually I'd solve this by writing, editing videos, or solving random physics problems, but I didn't have a way to do any of these. I started trembling slightly as the prospect of doing absolutely nothing for another eight to ten hours hit me hard.
Slightly freaking out, I quickly trotted out of my room, not making too much noise but also not deliberately keeping quiet. I made my way downstairs and out the front door, only realizing when I stepped out onto the now only slightly snow-covered grass that I could've used the window. One facehoof later, I had begun walking in..."circles".
I say "circles" with the quotation marks because, really, I was just walking in random shapes. Figure eights, squares while moonwalking, triangles on my hind legs, and whatever the hell shape you'd call staggering around like a drunk after angrily smashing my head against a tree for two minutes straight.
In other words, what I usually do when I'm tired and have a lot of open space.
Apparently I was making a lot of noise, because I heard a door open. On instinct, I activated my camoflauge...which was more or less just absorbing myself into the snow beneath me, taking its form. I learned I could do this not too long ago, but given how it only works with snow and ice, it isn't very useful.
Watching from the ground, I saw False step out of the house, a robe wrapped around her. She looked both confused and irate, and she started looking around for the source of the noise that woke her up. I stayed motionless until she gave up and went back inside.
Maybe I should go somewhere else, I thought as I reformed. Snowflake Woods seems good. I can make noise there and nopony will hear me. I'll just come back here if I get tired.
With this plan in mind, I headed for the trees, hoping that I'd just walk around for a while and then get tired enough to come home.
[Perspective: False Front]
Yawning, I opened my eyes as the light from the sun greeted them. Normally I'd have been up hours earlier, but nothing was planned for the day, and I was allowed more rest than I normally got. I was honestly the most active out of the five of us, and always up first to get everypony on track, so I enjoyed being able to sleep in.
Asylum was apparently already awake, as her bed was empty. After cleaning myself up, I went downstairs to see Risk and Nimble playing cards. That was normal enough, but what bugged me was how neither Asylum nor Arrell were around. Usually they both liked having company...when the latter wasn't being depressed, anyway.
"Where are the other two?" I asked. They shrugged. "Whatever. They'll turn up."
I made to step outside, but ended up having the door smack me in the face as it was thrown open from the other side. I glared at the intruder, only to see that it was Asylum. As if on cue.
"You guys have to see this!" she cried, flapping her wings excitedly as she floated a couple feet above the ground. Before we could respond, she flew back outside. I followed her, both worried and intrigued. Risk and Nimble trailed behind me, having had to put their cards away before getting up.
We ran after the light yellow pegasus for a few minutes, and I realized she was taking us into Snowflake Woods. She was forced to land, as the tree branches and leaves made it harder both for her to navigate and us to keep track of her. We trotted along at a brisk pace for another ten minutes or so, then she stopped. The rest of us did as well. I was about to ask what was going on when I heard somepony talking.
"...using the example of the Fat Man atomic bomb, which had a blast yield of 21 kilotonnes, or 88 terajoules..."
I raised an eyebrow. Asylum put a hoof to her mouth, silently telling us to stay quiet, and crept forward. The rest of us followed.
"...were it compressed into a space of 0.54 feet cubed, it would make for an effective grenade, if not for the likely chance of getting caught in the blast..."
Soon, we came to the source of the voice: Arrell. Standing in the middle of a giant snow-covered clearing, pacing and talking to himself.
"...therefore making the answer 31.5691 terajoules!" He had apparently finished his train of thought, and he smiled, writing something into the snow on the ground.
I did a double take when I realized that the entire clearing had writing in the snow. All sorts of numbers, letters, and equations, with circles around what appeared to be final answers to various questions.
In one part of the clearing was a long series of numbers and bits of data that eventually led to the conclusion of taking three hours, four minutes, and fifty-one-point-four-two-zero-seven seconds to travel from Smooth Grove to Stalliongrad at top flying speed. Another section had exact information on how many sheets of glass a twelve-pound ball broke when dropped from a certain height, followed by exact answers as to how many sheets would be broken instead with certain variations on ball weight, distance from the ground, glass thickness, and more. The area that Arrell had just apparently finished up in held all sorts of random data about nuclear weapons that went right over my head, culminating in how strong an explosion would be needed to destroy all of Snowflake Woods.
I gaped.
Arrell, having apparently not noticed us, sat down with a sigh and looked over his work. For a moment, nothing happened, but then he facehoofed.
"I did it wrong again!" he cried. Groaning, he summoned up a cold breeze, and everything pertaining to nuclear weapons and explosions was replaced with fresh snow. "Let's try again..."
"What the hell?" I finally got out. Arrell snapped his head over to us, looking startled. His normally white eyes looked a little bloodshot, and he was blinking a lot.
"Oh...hey there." He sighed, which turned into a yawn. "I couldn't sleep, so I came out here to do some walking. My mind wandered, and I started trying to figure out when would be a good time to leave for Stalliongrad if we wanted to get there by noon on whatever day we leave. And...well, this happened." He gestured to all the writing in the snow. I also realized that there were carvings in some of the trees...and piles of leaves that were arranged a little too specifically to be natural...
My eye twitched. "You...did this...overnight?"
"Yeah. Couldn't sleep."
"...math. And physics. And science. And...and...HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL THIS STUFF?!"
He looked at his writing, then back to me. Back to writing. Back to me. He shrugged.
I stood there, twitching for several tense moments, before falling over as everything went black.