//------------------------------// // May 29 [Sunday Morning: Kalamazoo Valley Museum] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// May 29 I woke up with a pounding head, full bladder, and Aquamarine’s head on my back. And when I managed to get my eyes all the way open, I realized that we were both down at the wrong end of the bed and there was a pair of feet over on the other side of her. I didn’t know who they belonged to and I had too much else on my mind to worry about it. I tried rolling and twisting to get Aquamarine off me, but that didn’t work—I wound up getting more tangled in the bedding. Fortunately, she woke up and got out of my way. We got out of bed without stepping on feet or disturbing the mystery sleeper—which was Brianna—and I got my shower things and also raided Peggy’s drawer for a couple of aspirin. I thought she’d understand; besides, it was her fault that my head hurt anyway. She knew I had a weakness for White Russians. It wasn’t fair how much better Aquamarine looked than me. I knew she’d had at least as much to drink, maybe more, but she was still fresh as a daisy. Which was a good thing; I might need her to hold me up in the shower. I set the shower basket down on the little bench and took the first toilet stall and at least I felt a little better after I’d peed. Being in the shower helped, too. I don’t think that rain (or showers) can really rinse out being drunk, but there were some ponies who swore by it. Either by upbucking a raincloud, or using the earth pony method of dunking your head in a barrel, it was supposed to shock you into soberness. It helped a little bit, I guess. I let the water beat on me for a bit, then moved aside so that Aquamarine could have a turn in it, and after a couple of cycles I felt at least mostly awake, so then we washed each other and since there weren’t any girls waiting for their turn, we really took our time. We shook off inside the shower, and then went back to the dorm room to finish drying off. Not much had changed while we were gone. Brianna was still sleeping in my bed, Sean and Christine were in a lump on the floor, and Peggy was all alone in her bed. Both of our desks were littered with empty bottles. Even the vodka bottle was empty. Once we’d gotten groomed, I asked Aquamarine how she felt about a nice walk around the neighborhood. A trot would have been nice, but we’d just got out of the shower, and I didn’t want to take another one. Earth soap takes too many oils out of the skin and coat if you’re not careful with it, and that can cause problems. She thought it would be a good way to finish waking up, so I left a note for Peggy under the vodka bottle saying where we were going. We talked while we walked, which was nice, although a little strange. I was used to mostly having my own thoughts while I was exercising in the morning. I think that’s why we went further than I usually do. After we went by Aric’s house—which I pointed out to her (and Winston wasn’t in the driveway, so Aric must have spent all night at the theatre working)—we kept on going west on Main Street a few blocks, which I’d flown over and driven before, but never walked. That gave it a new perspective, and we both admired the odd mud-brick style house on the south side of the road. She told me about her apartment and how much nicer it was than the dorm room, but it was kind of quiet compared to what she was used to, except when trains went by. Then it was pretty loud. And she said that her professor had told her several times that he was getting really good data from her experiment. He wouldn’t tell her if it was a success or not because he claimed that would bias it, but she was fairly sure it was. He’d had her help him with a paper on an earlier, shorter version of the experiment she’d done, and by every measurement her plants had been bigger and stronger and healthier than his. I told her a little bit about what I’d done with the weather, although there hadn’t been much, but she was proud that I’d become an official Skywatcher and said that she didn’t think that anypony else had done that yet. I didn’t think so, either. When we got back to campus, we went right to the dining hall. She couldn’t use her student card, and had to use a money card (hers said MSUFCU on it and mine just said VISA, but otherwise they were the same). We took turns at the waffle-maker, which was still working, and got a big plate of fruit to share. She got some coffee and I got orange juice and we sat at my usual table and continued our conversation from the morning. We were almost finished up when Peggy and Christine and Sean showed up. All of them looked a little worn-out from the night: Sean only had dry toast on his plate, and he just sort of picked at it. Christine had her Lucky Charms cereal, and Peggy had a few strips of bacon and some eggs because she said a greasy breakfast was the best way to recover from a night of drinking. Aquamarine asked what we were going to do today, and Sean suggested going back to bed and waiting to die, so Christine threw a marshmallow star at him and it stuck on his forehead and he just left it there and pushed his toast aside and then put his head down on the table. None of them looked like they wanted to do anything too active today, so I thought that go-karts was probably out, but there were a couple of museums that sounded interesting. I thought of other places I’d seen on my flights around town, and then I asked Peggy what karaoke was, ‘cause I’d seen it on a sign. She told me it was singing, which sounded like it might be fun. I said that there was a little place on an island called Moonraker that had karaoke and Sean looked up and said that was a titty bar. I didn’t know what that was, so Christine told me, and I thought that would be interesting, then Peggy said that she wasn’t going to be the one to drive a pair of ponies to a topless bar. So maybe I’d have to ask Aric later. The Kalamazoo Valley Museum got the final vote, so after everyone was done eating and getting dressed, we met up in the Trowbridge parking lot, and all got into Cobalt. It was a little crowded in back, since there wasn’t enough room for both Aquamarine and I to lie down and still comfortably leave room for a third, but we got around that by having Christine sit in the front and move the seat all the way forward, which left a nice spot on the floor I could curl up in, sort of. It wasn’t very comfortable, but we weren’t in the car for too long. We went to the mummy display first, because that was as good a thing to see as any. There were lots of little signs around explaining how the mummy had come all the way from Egypt to Kalamazoo, and how they had figured out how long ago she had died, and that was really interesting stuff. They had used machines to look inside the wrappings and see what was there, and they’d found out a lot about her from that, like that she’d had arthritis and bad teeth, and they’d even made a bust of what she’d probably looked like thousands of years ago. After Christine read that she wanted to know why Aquamarine didn’t have canine teeth like I did, and so we explained how not all earth ponies have them and almost no unicorns do, but most pegasuses do. Then we went on to an exhibit called Seasons of Southwest Michigan. That was really neat, because unlike the mummy, everything there could be touched. There was a big tube of lightning that would jump at your hoof or hand when you put it on the tube—it didn’t hurt, but it made you a bit warm—and there was also a bigger tube that had a little tornado inside. I galloped around it really quick in the opposite direction that it was rotating, and managed to slow it down a little bit. I think I would have done better if I could fly and if there wasn’t a tube keeping it contained. They also had a sand-table where you could use a fan to make little sand dunes and then collapse them, and another that represented earthquakes. Christine made a little sand-tower and then the earthquake knocked it down. Next we went to an exhibit called Science in Motion which Sean said was for kids, but that didn’t stop him from playing with everything he could get his hands on. Me and Aquamarine had the most fun with a device called a generator that you could power yourself, and once we’d figured out how to work it with hooves we had our own little competition which she won easily. They also had a really neat section on the human body, and we both learned a lot from that. A lot of what went on inside humans was the same as ponies, but not all of it, so it was kind of fun to compare and contrast. Humans don’t have a cecum at all. There was a machine that could measure your heart rate, too, and that was fun to play with. Sean had the highest and Aquamarine had the lowest. We would have stayed longer, but the museum closed before we could see everything. I thought it would be fun to come back later, though.