Silver Glow's Journal

by Admiral Biscuit


February 22 [Nietzsche]

 February 22

I kinda hated to get out of bed, but my wings were gonna get stiff from disuse if I kept on sleeping in, so I nuzzled Peggy and got out of bed real slowly so that I wouldn't disturb her and then put on my flight suit.

It was a crystal-clear morning, maybe just a little bit nippy. I could still see a few stars standing out sharply: the sun hadn't come 'round far enough to wash them out yet, although I knew by the time I got to altitude, they'd be gone.

I was already in the air before I asked for permission, but even as eager as I was I kept my height below the chapel bell tower until after the airplane controller said that it was safe to fly.

Rather than take a long climb off in any particular direction, I thought I ought to stay close to campus, so I started a narrow climbing spiral until I peaked, then I flipped a wing down and did a vertical wing-roll halfway back to the ground, pulled out of my dive, and let my momentum carry me back up.

When I was up to height again, I made a couple of broad circles, slowly picking up speed until I could feel the air begin to respond in a mini-cyclone, then I stopped flapping and let it swirl me around for a couple of revolutions. It petered off pretty fast; I could have gone tighter and made a faster one, but there was the risk of creating a dust devil or a tornado if I got carried away.

Although I'd planned to stay on-campus, I saw a hawk off in the distance and dove down to investigate. The ground was barely lit by the sun, and I wondered what she was doing up in the air so early.

When she saw me coming, she banked down and flew off, and I followed for a bit but not very long. I didn't want to disturb her too much. Singing birds and waterbirds usually like pegasi, but birds of prey generally don't. It takes a while to earn their trust.

That was one thing I was looking forward to in the spring: the birds coming back. They didn't all leave during the winter here, but most of the fun ones did.

One of the strangest things about early-morning flights is how the sun is up when I'm at altitude, but if I land really quick, it's still down and I can watch it rise again. So I did that, circling back to campus and around the bell tower, where I hovered until the sun came over the distant treetops, then I dropped down to about fifteen feet and zigzagged around all the trees in the quad as fast as I could.

A couple of people on the ground saw me and started pointing their telephones at me which I've figured out means that they're taking a movie which will soon trend on YouTube. I didn't mind, though; I decided to give them something really good and descended a bit more and flew right at them, pulling up when I got close.

It was easy to see who the aspiring filmmaker was: one of the students let his telephone down and dodged out of the way (even though I wasn't all that close); the other one followed me, leaning back and turning as I went overhead to keep me in the frame.

I looped up to the roof of Olds-Upton, then angled back down and landed in front of them. First I apologized to the boy who I'd scared, but he said it was alright; it had been really cool to watch. The other one agreed and put away his telephone down and stuck out his hand and shook my hoof. He said that he was named Gates and he wanted to make documentaries and he thought it would be really cool to have a pegasus-eye perspective of what I'd been doing.

I said that I didn't think I could use a camera with my hooves while I was flying, and he told me that there was a special type of movie camera called a GoPro, and he had one and if I was interested he'd loan it to me.

So we decided to do that on Wednesday morning and then maybe again in the afternoon. He said that he'd be getting a better camera than his telephone, and he shook my hoof again and thanked me.

In climate science class, we started talking about climate change, which is caused when the mixture of gasses in the atmosphere changes from one thing to another, which changes the global average temperatures. That was really interesting: Luke had brought it up before but I hadn't been entirely sure what it was.

He started off by explaining how not much more than a dozen thousand years ago all of Michigan had been covered by a thick sheet of ice that was miles thick, and it was the reason that we had the Great Lakes—they'd scooped out low spots and they retreated and melted and then the melting water from them had filled those low spots.

Then he told us that the glaciers had been so heavy that Michigan was still springing back up a little bit. That was hard for me to believe, but apparently there was all sorts of geological evidence and now humans even had satellites that could measure how much the land rose and fell.

I raised my hoof and asked him how the glaciers had formed and he said that it had just snowed a lot for a long, long time and that was basically what caused them.

That was a troubling thought, that things could get so far out of control that glaciers might form and cover everything up, but I guess the same thing might have happened to us if the three tribes hadn't learned to work together and defeat the windigos, so maybe I shouldn't be too critical of the humans' system.

Then in philosophy we started to talk about Nietzsche, and I wished that he'd been brought up sooner. He'd come up with the idea of perspectivism, which said that there were no objective facts or knowledge of a thing-in-itself. That was sort of a rejection of some of what Descartes had said, but I thought maybe it took too much of the opposite extreme. Wasn't it true that if I bucked up on a raincloud, I was going to get wet? Wasn't that a fact?

But I don't think he meant for his philosophy to apply to everything, just things that are less tangible than clouds.

At the same time it was kind of strange to have someone say that there weren't universal truths to discover after all, even if he thought that having a value was as much of a value as what the actual value was (which is confusing, but Nietzsche thought it made sense). Was that a universal truth? Was he wrong about that?

Philosophy is making my head spin. Luckily when class was over I could put it to the back of my mind and concentrate on lunch. It was a fact that after I ate lunch I wasn't going to be hungry any more, at least not for a while.

I was really looking forward to Equestrian class because I hadn't seen Meghan all weekend, and she was a lot of fun to talk to and hang out with. She came as usual with Lisa and Becky, and all three of them greeted me when they saw me and we went in and sat down together.

It was always a little weird to be in class, because I shifted languages and it was actually beginning to feel foreign to talk in Equestrian. But as the class went on, it felt more and more normal, even though I kept getting mentally dragged back out by mispronounced words.

One of the students who'd been reading ahead—a boy named Craig—asked me if it was true that unicorns used their own alphabet and I said that it was. He wanted to know how that would work if he wanted to visit a unicorn city, and I told him that nothing important was written in Unicorn script. That was reserved for spellbooks and the genealogy books that so many unicorns obsessively kept.

He wanted to know if I could teach him Unicorn, and I shook my head: I could barely read it, let alone write in it.

I don't think he was happy with that answer, but I really couldn't help him with it.

After class got out I asked Meghan if maybe some night this week we could go sit in the hot tub again, and she told me that she didn't really have a way to get there unless Becky wanted to drive us, because she'd deleted the Uber on her phone. I asked her why—it had been so useful—and she asked if I'd heard about what had happened over the weekend.

I told her that I had, and then she said that the guy who'd done it had driven an Uber-car, and she just wasn't sure if it was safe to use. She said that until she was confident in what the company was doing to protect riders and drivers, she wasn't going to use it any more, even though it was a bit inconvenient to not have it.

That was a disappointment, but she said that I could come over and use their bathtub again if I wanted to. She also reminded me that Friday night there was going to be a handbell concert and I should come to it.

I said that I would, then we nuzzled and I went off to dinner.

It wasn't anything special tonight, and I wasn't really paying attention to the food anyways; rather, I was counting down the time until I was going to go over to Aric's to spend the night.

When I got back to our dorm room, before I could even get started on my homework Peggy asked me if I was doing anything this Saturday. I told her I hadn't planned anything and she said that we ought to get out of town and go to a ski resort before all the snow melted.

That sounded like a lot of fun, so I told her yes. Then I got as much homework done as I could until it was quarter to nine, and I told Peggy I was going to Aric's for the night. She told me to have fun, and I said I would.

I took my flight suit, so that I could get my morning exercise tomorrow (although I was secretly hoping that we'd stay so late in bed I wouldn't have time) and brushed my teeth and then I was off.

He didn't want to jump into bed right away, so we sat on the couch together and watched a cartoon called Animaniacs and drank some beer. Some of it was kind of silly, but there was also a part with a singing cat named Rita and that was really beautiful.

We finally went up to his room and I just jumped into bed and stretched out on my back. Peggy had told me that was a willing pose for humans . . . maybe having their bellies exposed is inviting. It wasn't that comfortable, and I felt foolish and vulnerable.  

When Aric came in and saw me he snickered, which kind of ruined the effect. I rolled on my side, and then he said I'd actually been kind of cute when I was on my back, so I pushed off with a wing and got back into my sorta seductive pose.

Then he got most of the way undressed and slid under the covers. He wiggled around a bit and then pulled his underwear out from under the covers and tossed it at the wall without me even having to ask.

He leaned up on an elbow and looked at me, running his eyes down my body, then he reached out his hand and started tracing it along the ruff on my belly, right down to where my coat ended. I turned my head to kiss him on the lips and gave his hand a little encouraging push.



Afterwards, I snuggled up against him and stroked his chest with my wing as he drifted off to sleep.