//------------------------------// // March 2 [New Atlantis] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// March 2 My tail confused me when I first woke up—it slapped against my leg like a length of rope, and I jerked awake right away and kicked off the covers, then felt like a complete foal. At least I didn't wake Peggy up. Flying with it took a bit of getting used to as well. I could get better speed, but lost just a bit of maneuverability. A lot of serious fliers will trim their manes and tails for their kind of flight, and some even clip their wings just a touch. That wasn't for me, though. I would put up with a slight loss of top speed in order to look good. The sound of sirens which were pretty close by caught my ear, and I listened around until I knew which way they were coming from, and flew off in that direction. Pretty soon I heard another behind me, too—a different sound—and I looked back and saw a red fire engine coming down the street behind me. It passed under, and I followed along behind it. I lost sight of it when it turned a corner, but I could still hear the siren echoing above the buildings, and I cut the corner to catch back up. When I got to the next road which I think is called Ravine Street, the fire truck was just around the corner, attending to a smashed car; there was another one with its side doors all crushed in sitting just off the side of the road. I stayed around and watched for a little bit. A big white van which is called an ambulance arrived, and a couple of people got out of it and checked on the drivers of the vehicles. The fire truck left, because there wasn't any fire for it to put out. Right next to where the cars had crashed was a big fenced-in place called Weller's that had lots of damaged cars behind the fence, so either this was a very dangerous intersection, or it was a lucky coincidence that they had collided right here. I would have liked to stay around for longer, but I had to go to class. The climate science professor announced the upcoming field trip to Grand Rapids, and asked for a show of hands to see who wanted to go. I raised my hoof of course; Crystal Dawn and Luke did as well. I'd be with friends, which was nice. All in all, eight people said that they wanted to go, which was about a third of the class. At the end of class, he gave us a fun bit of homework: a map of a made-up continent called New Atlantis. It had major geographic figures marked, and he'd put all the important information about the different layers of air, directions of prevailing winds, and so on on it. There were ten places named, from the big city of Gotham to the little town of Smallville, and each of those had monthly average data for them. Our job was to figure out what the monthly averages would be for ten other places on the map, based on that information. I couldn't wait to get started. I could already see that Goldopolis was in an unfortunate location; even without running the numbers, it was probably going to be pretty arid. I was dreading Sartre, but he actually made sense this time around. He talked about how not only does man influence the universe, but the universe influences man. Well, there was a lot of the Earth that I'd seen wasn't controlled at all. The planet zoomed around its Sun in an uneven number of days, and the moon made her rounds out of sequence with that. The weather was feral; all the humans could manage were a few puny contrails here and there, and sometimes seeding rainclouds to make them rain a little sooner than they would have done, and probably all that accomplished was leaving the people downwind short of their rain. So that was all the universe influencing them. But I guess at the same time they were controlling it. They made fields and roads and sidewalks where they wanted—almost all the major roads in town ran in nice, straight lines—and they made Arcadia Creek run underground as it went through the city, because they didn't want to see it. They couldn't fly, so they made airplanes to do it for them. They made spaceships and satellites so that they could go far far above the Earth and look down at it. And I'd overheard Gertrud telling one of her friends that in Switzerland, they were finishing a tunnel that ran under an entire mountain range so that the trains wouldn't have to go over it. She said it was fifty-seven kilometers long. When I saw Meghan, I thanked her again for braiding my tail—I'd been careful in the shower so I didn't have to take it out of its braid. Becky and Lisa thought it looked really good, too. Lisa asked me what I'd thought of Harry Potter, and I said that I'd liked it. I said that I kind of felt like Harry did sometimes; there were so many things here that were strange and almost magical, even though I knew that humans didn't really have magic. Lisa said that our world seemed like that to them as well. Our conversation got interrupted by class, but later on when everyone was doing group work and I went around to their table, Lisa asked me what the strangest human invention I'd learned about was. I said it was a microwave. She asked if I was sure, and I nodded. Then I told her about how most cooking is done on wood stoves although there are some unicorns who know warming spells. Cloudhomes don't have access to either, so we're used to eating our food cold or raw, although it's always a nice treat to go out to a restaurant and get hot food (and it's really nice that the college has hot food for every meal). But the idea of a little box that you can put food in and a few minutes later it's hot even though the inside of the box isn't hot was just unbelievable, and kind of scary. She told me that all the dorms had microwaves in the lounges, and I said that I knew that, but I was afraid to use it because I worried I might use it wrong and let the microwaves escape. Meghan laughed and said next time I came over, we were going to make microwave popcorn together, and she'd make sure all the microwaves stayed in the box. I told her it wouldn't be until after the weekend, because Peggy and I were going to a ski resort, and I had to go back to the makerspace tomorrow after class to make sure that everything for the snowboard had been built and worked. When I got back to the dorm after dinner, I got out my New Atlantis map and started working on it. My computer is able to do math, but it was a lot faster and more familiar to use my weather wheel when running the calculations. Peggy came in when I was finishing up estimating the weather for Pleasantville. She'd never seen a weather wheel before, so I showed her how it worked. She thought it was really cool, but didn't quite understand everything I was doing with it. I got almost finished up with it—there were a couple of places where I was going to have to run some more numbers, but mostly it was pretty basic stuff. The water budget is one of the foundations of all weather work. Then I got my flight gear together and flew off to Aric's house. I thought about taking the weather map, too, but I probably wouldn't have any time to work on it. When I got there he was out in his driveway, working on Winston. It didn't look like he was having much fun. But he let me help him, and I think it went faster with the two of us. I held his flashlight in my mouth and aimed it so he could see what he was doing. He was replacing a black thing on the back of the engine that he said was a distributor, because it distributed sparks to the spark plugs, and that was called the ignition, and it made the gas burn. It took him several tries to get it right—there were a bunch of marks that all had to line up in order for it to work like it was supposed to. He finally got it right and then he had to put the wires back on, and then the air intake, but once all that was done, he could start the truck. He had a little blinky light like my flight strobe, and he used that to line up a yellow stripe with a groove on a metal plate, which he said was called the timing. When he was done and had put away his tools, I told him how I wasn't going to be able to come over Friday or this weekend because Peggy and I were going on a trip to a ski resort.  He said that that sounded like a lot of fun, and maybe I ought to see if I could borrow the camera that Gates had.  So I told him I would.