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// Chapter 2: Headcount 
// Story: Twilight's Dawn 
// by Dinkledash 
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Dear Princess Celestia,

I haven’t had a conversation with anypony for two weeks now, except for Owliscious, but he doesn’t really count.  I am talking to myself more and more often.  I am going to have to bring some ponies into my life, perhaps a few of the older ones such as Apple Bloom or Scootaloo.  Sweetie Belle still isn’t talking.  One of the few fillies showing some gumption is Diamond Tiara, saying she should be in charge of the others because her father is the richest man in town.  She has no father and there is no town, but at least she’s taking charge of some things, putting other colts and fillies to work and keeping them too busy to think on their fate, even if she is still deluding herself.  Her friend Silver Spoon has tried to drown herself twice already, but the sea ponies have become very proficient at rounding up the suicide attempts.

We had our first storm today.  I gather from the sea ponies that it wasn’t a bad one, and the Ark being the size it was, I suppose we could have been tossed about more and made sicker, but we were in no danger.  It was a bit of a distraction from this routine of bored depression that we have settled into.

We ponies are not a seafaring race, as a rule.  All I know of the sea comes from books.  Our ship was built in 6 weeks by a gang of carpenters, most of whom had never seen a boat, much less built one.  Rusty Nail was the chief builder and his experience with boats came entirely from the making of children's toys.  The ark leaks like a sieve, is too broad across the beam and is top-heavy, forever threatening to capsize. I've had all of our stores that can survive the damp taken down to the hold, but even so, our center of gravity is dangerously high; only the efforts of the sea ponies have kept us afloat so far and I fear that in a serious storm, there will be nothing they can do.  But I am inarguably the best choice for captain, because I am the only choice, and this is the only ship.  

The final headcount is 126 fillies and 117 colts.  That’s about half of the children in Ponyville and Canterlot.  So many families fled in panic and didn’t bring their children to the sanctuary… I don’t suppose that it is possible that some of them were missed by the enemy, is it?  And what about Manehattan and Fillydelphia?  I know the hammer first fell in the Crystal Empire.  That’s where the worldshield that protected us from incursions from space was weakest, but we never heard from the other big cities before the horde arrived.  In a way we were fortunate that the heart was on loan to the Canterlot Museum of Magic, else it would have been lost along with all the crystal ponies.  Were there other arks?  Did anypony else escape?  I would have thought that if that was part of the plan you would have mentioned it, but now that I think of it, if we were captured and didn’t know the rest of the plan, we couldn’t have told them anything.  I will dare to hope for more survivors.

A quick update.  The sea ponies called me to the deck to show me a seacoast near the horizon.  There were fires burning there as well.  By my calculations, that would have been Manehattan.  Nothing too surprising about that, I just hope that they managed to save some few, as we did.

The children are starting to get very tired of oats and dried apples.  I shall try to make some time to transform some of the supplies into something more appetizing.

Applejack’s apples were the best apples.

Your faithful student,

Twilight Sparkle