//------------------------------//
// Wipe Your Feet 
// Story: Sweet Nothings 
// by Golden Tassel 
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The morning came, and I awoke to the first light of a new day being cast upon me. The rain had ended during the night, and the sky was clear and bright with vivid red hues along the horizon. A thin mist hovered above the wet ground and made our surroundings seem as though they were only the tops of vast structures poking through the clouds high above. All around us there wasn't a sound to be heard, nor a hint of motion aside from the slow, gentle swirling of the thin mist.

Peaceful and magical as the scene all around us may have been, I had been wandering for long enough to know better than to expect it to last long. Starry had said she would take me to where she had been staying, and I was eager to go somewhere safe. I looked over at her; she was still fast asleep, sprawled out in rather unflattering pose.

I approached her cautiously. "Starry, ma'am?" I pushed on her shoulder gently.

Starry's eyes snapped open and she sat upright, banging her head on the low ceiling of our shelter. "Ah! Son of a . . ." she muttered as she rubbed her head while squinting. "Ugh . . . what's going on?"

"Sorry to wake you, ma'am," I started to say, but Starry held up a hoof and shushed me.

She groaned and lay back down, covering her head with her forehooves. "Keep it down, will you."

I tried again, keeping my voice to a whisper, "Sorry to wake you, ma'am."

"Starry," she muttered.

"Starry. Sorry. It's just that I think we should maybe get moving. It's light out now and—"

Starry held up her hoof and hushed me again. "Shut up, kid. Just . . . shut up a minute." She sighed and groaned softly as she slowly sat up again, keeping one hoof across her face to block out the light while she fumbled around her uniform's pockets for her flask. I sat there quietly and nervously chewed on my lip while I waited for her to tell me what to do next.

She managed to get her flask out and took a drink from it while keeping her eyes closed. After taking a few slow breaths she peeked at me through one eyelid. "My head's killing me. Can you get me the aspirin bottle out of my saddlebag?"

Opening my mouth to answer, I caught a brief glare from Starry and only nodded quietly before leaning over to rummage through her bag. There was a lot of seemingly random junk in there, most of which I wasn't even sure how to describe. I didn't have to dig very deep, though—the bottle she asked for was close to the top, and I pulled it out for her.

Starry snatched it out of my hooves before I could offer to open it for her, and she popped the cap and shook out a tablet into her hoof then chewed it and washed it down with another draught from her flask. She sat there with her eyes closed for a minute before capping her flask and the bottle and putting them away.

Opening her eyes all the way, she took a deep breath and smiled at me. "Thank you, Day. Come on," she said. "Let's get moving."


***


What Starry had called a "short flight" turned out to be an all-day flight. It would have been a faster journey, but I had never had to fly for more than a few minutes at a time inside the stable, and so we had to stop and rest frequently. I was also still exhausted from my time alone in the wasteland before Starry had found me, which slowed me down further.

Starry never seemed to mind, though, and she regularly checked with me if I needed to stop, and she kept her eyes out for safe places to land. She shared more of her food and water with me to keep me going, and eventually, when the sun had made its way across the sky and began casting rich purple hues over the distant horizon, we came in for a final landing.

Starry called it a town, but it seemed as vacant as everywhere else I'd seen so far. There was one large building surrounded by a couple dozen small shacks that looked to have been hastily thrown together from assorted scraps of wood and metal sheets. All of them appeared to be vacant. The large building, however, which we set down in front of, did have an appearance of life to it. I could see a warm yellow light shining through cracks in the walls and around the boards that had been nailed up over what had once been large picture windows all across the front of the building. The second floor looked to have been built more recently than the rest of the structure, though with more care and expertise than the surrounding shacks. Above the door was a broken neon sign whose dim letters read "Mum's Diner."

I followed Starry as she lead the way inside. The interior was spacious, though filled with tables and chairs, with booths arranged along the walls. At the back were two doors, one of which was behind a counter that sectioned off that corner of the room. The place was empty except for a dusty-brown earth pony who sat in one of the corner booths. He was slumped over the table, passed out, with several empty glass bottles scattered around him.

"There you are!" sang a pleasant voice. I looked to see a vibrant green unicorn mare enter from the door behind the counter. Her blue and white mane was styled into long curls that bounced as she reared up to put her hooves on the countertop and smiled at us. "I was starting to worry y'all weren't gonna make it back. Ooh! And you brought a new friend with you!"

Starry took up a seat at the counter, and I sat next to her. The mare behind the counter, who introduced herself as Chrysanthemum, already had a bottle and a glass floating out in her chartreuse aura. She filled the glass and set it down in front of Starry, leaving the bottle as well, and then she turned to me.

"How about you, hon? You look like you could use a stiff drink too."

I shook my head. "No . . . I'm fine. Thank you, ma'am."

She laughed. "Ma'am? Oh, honey, don't be so formal with me. Just Chrys will do fine. We're all friends here. Just don't go and think you can start using your pretty looks on me. I can tell you and Starry got something special going on between y'all."

Starry choked briefly as she nearly spit out her drink with a barely-stifled laugh.

"Wait. You mean . . . you think . . . me and Starry?"

"Well of course! You two belong together, and I should know—it's what I do," Chrys said, getting down off the counter and turning to the side to show off her cutie mark: a pair of roses, their thorny stems curled together around their petals in the shape of a heart. "I'm a matchmaker."

"Matchmaker?" I asked skeptically.

"Well, what did you expect? A talent for hitting on cute young stallions?" She winked. My ears blushed.

Chrysanthemum's giggling stopped abruptly when the lights inside the diner flickered, then went dark. Everypony was quiet for a moment before I heard a resigned sigh from Chrys. "Well, guess the power's out until I can get somepony to fix the generator again," she said, her face illuminated by the soft glow of her chartreuse magic as she levitated several candles and a matchbox out from behind the counter. She pulled out a couple matches, skillfully manipulating them in her aura, struck them, and then lit the candles two at a time while she arranged them around the diner.

"Generator?" I asked.

"Yeah. This old hunk-o'-junk portable spark reactor I picked up in a trade years ago," Chrysanthemum said as she blew out the matches. "Why? You know something about fixing 'em?"

"Well, we had a spark reactor back at the stable; it provided power to run the whole place. I used to work in maintenance, and during my downtime I liked to study it, but I've never actually laid hooves on one . . ."

"They only let the senior engineers work on that?" Starry asked. I looked over at her; the flickering candlelight cast a warm glow across her face and made the shield pinned to her uniform twinkle.

I shook my head. "It wasn't that. It just never came up, is all. That reactor has run perfectly since it came online. Nopony even really thinks about it anymore. I just liked spending time learning about it because it looked like a really challenging puzzle, especially since I couldn't actually touch the pieces."

I saw Chrysanthemum's smile shining in the dim light. "Well, here's your chance, then. Come along, I'll show you where it is so you can get to wor—"

"Hold on a second there," Starry interrupted, tapping her hoof on the counter. "Day, you should always agree on payment before you do work for somepony."

"Oh, Starry, hun, you honestly think I'd try to take advantage of him?" There was a brief pause while Starry gave Chrysanthemum a look that seemed to say "are you seriously even asking that?"

Chrysanthemum laughed. "Well, maybe, but can you blame me? There's so much to take advantage of. Isn't that right, stud?" She winked at me. "But it's true: let's be professional about this." She leaned over the counter in front of me, propping her chin up on a forehoof. "So what's a handsome stallion like you charge for his services?"

My ears blushed. "I, um, I don't know . . ."

"Hmm. Okay, here: you get my juice flowing," she said in a sultry tone, "and I'll set you up with a week's worth of food and water. How's that sound?"

Trying to ignore her innuendo, and not really having any idea if that was a fair amount, I glanced over at Starry. She gave a small nod, so I accepted. "Alright. I'll get your juices flow—" I realized my slip, and instantly my face flushed hotly. Starry nearly choked on her drink again as she started laughing. "The juice—power! I'll get the power . . ." I tried desperately to correct myself, but between Starry's raucous laughter and Chrysanthemum's cheeky grin while she simply stared at me, I knew it was too late to take it back. I slumped onto the counter, hiding my face under my fetlocks. "Just show me where the generator is," I mumbled in resignation.


***


While Starry stayed at the bar, Chrysanthemum showed me to the spark generator. It was outside, around the back of the diner. After checking to make sure I had everything I needed, she left me to take care of it on my own, leaving behind a set of tools she was letting me borrow.

And then I was alone. I sat down and, for just a minute, simply listened to the silence. The air was still. There was no sound of fans echoing through air ducts, no mechanical hum nor squeals. No other ponies. It was never so quiet inside the stable.

I had the faintest twinge of fear in the back of my head that there might be some kind of monster out there in the darkness. Something stalking me, waiting for the right moment to strike. But I put that thought out of my mind with a shake of my head. The settlement around Mum's Diner was wide open; if those sorts of things lurked around here, they'd have some kind of defenses set up. And Chrysanthemum would have said something. And if Grift were stalking me as she had with Rake, there was nothing I could do about it.

Taking a deep breath, I turned my attention to the generator. It had certainly seen better days, but it was basically the same as the reactor in the stable. This was a lot smaller, and probably never meant to last this long, unlike the stable's reactor, but it operated on the same principals, so I was sure I could figure it out.

It had been easy to dismiss the fear of monsters lurking in the darkness. What ended up being much more terrifying, though, was when I opened up the generator. I realized that, despite all the studying I'd done, this was all new to me. I wasn't sure if I could do it, and afraid that if I couldn't, it would mean I'd be useless out here. If I was useless, there wouldn't be a place for me. If there was no place for me, where would I go? What would I do? I wondered if Starry would even still want me around.

The first several minutes I spent just sitting there, staring at the generator's internals. Then I started worrying what would happen if somepony came out to check on me and saw that I hadn't even started yet. I almost started wishing for a monster in the darkness. But I took a few deep breaths and focused on the task in front of me. I could do it. I just had to look at the puzzle. The first step was always to take it apart. So I started taking pieces out, laying them on the ground around me in a careful order, keeping all the bolts and screws and fastenings arranged so that they'd all go back in exactly the same place as they had been.

As I got deeper inside the machine, I started finding where seals had worn out and where belts had gone slack. The generator was in bad shape. There were no spare parts to fix it with, so I had to make do with the pieces as they were. Where seals had broken, I replaced the parts without them, fastening bare metal together as tightly as possible in hopes that it would reduce the leakage. I moved other parts by bending the frame they were mounted on in order to keep the belts tight. I did what I could to make the worn out parts fit together as seamlessly as possible.

In the end, after I closed everything up, I realized how silly it had been to be afraid of working on it. It had been my job for years back inside the stable. I had known what I was doing. I had only needed to remember that.

I ran my hoof along the casing, marveling at all the work that had gone into making such a thing in the first place, and then I decided to see if I'd gotten it working or not. The thing squealed, clunked, and groaned when I turned it on. It was a tired, pained noise, far from the steady hum of the reactor back in the stable. But it ran. For a brief moment, I actually smiled as I listened to it running. I'd gotten it to work. Even if it wouldn't last more than a few weeks, if that long, it was better than nothing.

"I can do this," I said aloud to myself, breathing a sigh of relief.

I felt a sense of pride in my work. It was one of the few things I'd actually enjoyed in my stable life. Unlike the other engineers in maintenance, who'd often show up late, leave early, and would only go out on service calls when they felt like it, I spent as much time as I could doing work. It felt good to fix things, to put them back together into a complete whole. Almost nopony else seemed to appreciate that as I did . . .