//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2 : Still Waiting 
// Story: Crash Landing: The tale of 3 Kerbals 
// by Jebediah Kerpony 
//------------------------------//

01:23 am
Twilight's Home

Twilight sat anxiously on her couch on the ground floor of the Library she lived in. Her mane was a mess, she had dark, purple bags under her eyes and there were about five empty cups of coffee lying on the desk beside her. She was a mess. She had stayed up far too long again. She just had to wait a few more hours now.

Spike woke up to a blinding light hovering over his eyelids. He opened his eyes to see golden light spilling into his bedroom through a gap in the slightly ajar door. 'Is Twilight still up?' he thought to himself.  'She probably fell asleep on the couch. She'll probably need a blanket.' He thought. So Spike got up out of his basket and went over to a cupboard. He grabbed a blue, quilted blanket from it and went to check on how Twilight was doing.

He arrived at the bottom of the stairs to see Twilight, unconscious on the floor beside the couch, snoring quite loudly. He was surprised he didn't hear her earlier but wasn't surprised that she was asleep. 'The snoring might have been a factor in waking me up at this time.' he thought. He then walked over to Twilight and took away the empty cups. 
"Really Twilight, you have to stop trying to pull all-nighters like this, it can't be good for you." He said under his breath. After clearing away the remaining cups, he grabbed the quilt from the bottom of the stairs, brought it over to Twilight and began placing, but then...

'DING DONG!' 

Literally a millisecond after the doorbell was pressed, Twilight sprung up from the floor and galloped over in record time. This launched Spike way into the air and he came crashing down on a bookshelf, knocking everything off of it.
"IT'S HERE, IT'S HERE!" Twilight exclaimed. She threw open the door to collect her package from...Pinkie Pie? 
"Uhh...Pinkie, are you the delivery pony?" she asked.
"No silly, although I would like to be a delivery pony, that would be awesome. I could deliver mail and packages and cake and sweets and muf..fins....and...ca....mmm...." she began drooling.
"So your not here with my package then?" Twilight said in a disappointed voice.
"Nope!"
"So why are you here Pinkie?"
"I brought you a midnight madness snack muffin!" She grinned widely. And with that, Twilight collapsed on the floor, completely stripped of any energy that inhabited her during her short lived adrenaline rush.
"Gee, what's up with her?" Pinkie asked Spike. 
"She's been waiting to get her new Optizoom Telescope for about a week now. It was supposed to arrive two days ago but nothing has come of yet." He replied. 
"I get it now!" she said. "Hey, do you need a hand cleaning those books up?"
"Uhh, yeah. That would be awesome!" Spike said. He would never turn down a chance to relieve some of the weight on his shoulders. Pinkie picked up Twilight, who was snoring louder than thunder, and placed her on her back. She then took her up to her bed. Spike took this opportunity to go to the toilet.

After he was finished, he checked on Twilight through a slit in the door. She was sleeping there peacefully, probably having a nice dream. Spike smiled. It felt good to see that his 'mum' so to speak was safe. He pulled himself away from the door and walked down the flight of stairs to the ground floor. 

When he got down, he was absolutely stunned to see the place completely spotless. Not one book out of place, not one piece of furniture slightly angled and the place looked like there was a shimmer of polish on everything.
"H...ho...how did you do that so fast?" he asked, still stunned.
"It wasn't that much stuff. I only arranged the books by the authors surname, fixed a crack in the shelf and closed the curtains." she said gleefully.
"In under 3 minutes?" She just nodded. Spike just about fell over from speechlessness.
"Okay Dokey Loki, I gotta go Spike, Bye! she said.
"Wait. Don't you want something for doing that?" He shouted out of the door. But when he got to the door, he could already see Pinkie Pie flying through the sky, higher than the clouds. Over by the window he could see one of her classic Pinkie Pie Cannons just lying there, smoking slightly from the most recent blast. 'Classic Pinkie' he thought. He also thought that by now he deserved a well earned nap. So with that, he locked the front door, headed upstairs and climbed back into his basket. He pulled up his covers and fell sound asleep. 





Lyra Heartstrings was a strange pony. She was always collecting abnormal objects and adding it to her collection of 'great things' as she proclaimed. Tonight, she was up near the border of the Everfree Forest digging for lost artifacts of an ancient civilization which she called 'The Kyans'. She had found a variety of objects relating to this ancient civilization. These included a giant red ruby which read the letters 'KS...' and a blurred out letter; a weird meteorite shaped rock with glowing green cracks all over it and a rusty helmet that was about the size of her own head, but a lot taller and thinner. It also had specks of red and white in some places. She had no way of linking these three objects together, but they just felt...connected. She was determined to dig up more evidence to show her friends so she grabbed her shovel at started digging. 

After 2 solid hours of digging in random areas, Lyra was almost ready to give up when hit something. 'CLANG'. Something metal. She began to dig faster and faster, revealing more and more of this strange, black metal embedded in the ground. After another 5 minutes of digging, she began to see imprints in the metal. 'Maybe this is their ancient language' she thought. 'Or maybe a statue to a god they worshiped. She cleared the last piece of dirt and saw something that surprised her. There was a picture of what looked like a monkey, with a circular hat that had 3 stars on the left side. At the bottom, it read one word in plain equestrian. 

SQUAD

'What could this mean' Lyra thought. 'Squad, is that their god or something. It would be weird to worship a monkey.' Lyra then spent the next half an hour trying to lift the giant metal object out of the ground but to no avail. After pausing due to exhaustion, she began thinking about the object. She didn't want anyone else to know about this thing. They might take credit for finding it after all her hard work. So she got a bunch of leaves and twigs and covered up the hole in the ground. She would definetly try to get that out soon. But not tonight. She was too tired for that.

And with that, Lyra went home for the night. Little did she know that the objects that she had in her possession were related, and all came from a distant solar system. This solar system also housed a race of small, adventurous kerbals, and her town was about to be visited by them. 

Soon.