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// June 23 [Fighting Practice] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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June 23 

I woke up late, and my wing muscles were stiff and cramped and my feathers were also all out of place, 'cause I guess I hadn't done a very good job of preening them at all.

I would have gotten laughed at for them being in such a sorry state back in Equestria. Luckily, nobody was here to make fun of me. Although I wouldn't have minded another pegasus. Sometimes after really bad storms, when we'd drag ourselves home, some of the weather apprentices would help preen our wings while we were napping.

I slid off the futon and plodded into the bathroom and climbed over the edge of the bathtub and that was when I remembered that all the water fell through the drain and I couldn't stop it, so my plans of taking a hot bath were already foiled.

That was too bad, because that would have been the best thing to relax my muscles, so I started to think of what I could block the drain with. I knew if I got a pretty good seal around it, the water would stay in the bathtub like it ought to, so it was just a matter of finding the right thing. A lot of bathtubs in Equestria had rubber plugs, but I didn't have one of those, and even if I had, it wouldn't have fit, because there was a grate that arched up.

It was full of little holes to let the water out, and maybe you were supposed to put something in all of them. If that was so, it was dumb.

There wasn't anything in the bathroom that would work, and I thought about what else I had in the apartment but the best I could come up with was a washcloth. I didn't think it would stop the water from going out, but it might slow it down some.

Then I got the bright idea to use some of a plastic bag, because I had a couple that my groceries had come in. So I got out of the tub and put the washcloth in the plastic bag, thinking that the bag would seal against the drain and the washcloth would help it.

My idea worked well enough, I had to hold it in place with my hoof until the water came up to my fetlocks, but after that it stayed in place as long as I didn't move around too much. And so I stretched out in the soothing hot water, wishing that the tub was wider so that I could stretch out my wings, but even with them mostly folded the hot water really helped relax my muscles.

I stayed in there until the water started getting cold, then I pulled my makeshift drain-cover off and let the water drain out and went out onto my balcony and stretched out my wings and shook off, then started preening myself right.

By the time I was done, I felt a lot better. I still had a lot of stiffness in my wing muscles, and I thought I'd do a little short flight to work it out, but I wanted to get something to eat first.

I had to get waffle batter—that got added to my list, along with a proper bathtub plug—and I was going to have oatmeal, but my kettle didn't work. At first I thought it was broken somehow, but then I remembered that the electricity was probably still gone. Opening the electric icebox proved it was; the helpful little light inside of it didn't come on, and it wasn't all that cold inside, either.

So I ate the rest of my carrots and then I flew off the balcony and did a treetop patrol of the neighborhood—high enough that I was above all the wires, but low enough that I didn't have to ask anyone for permission to fly, and that I could easily land if one of my wings cramped up.

I did know how to glide down from any altitude with a hurt wing, but it was a lot less pleasant to have to fight a muscle cramp all the way down from cloud-level.

I saw that the tree had been cut up to clear the road, and the wires that it knocked down had been put back up on their poles, but I guess that alone hadn't made the electricity work again.

When I'd landed back at my apartment, I stretched my wings again and then was going to check my Facebook but my computer didn't work either without electricity. Humans have a lot of really neat stuff, but I guess one strong storm can make it all worthless.

I cleared off my desk and made another dreamcatcher for my next-door neighbors; I thought that they might like to hang it in their bedroom and hopefully it would bring good dreams to all three of them. I put three different feathers on it, the smallest for Trinity and the biggest for Caleb and I was pretty happy with it when it was done. I'd give it to them if I saw them playing outside today, or tomorrow when Jeff was having a party in his backyard.

When I checked my mail, I found that I had a letter from Peggy. She said that she was having fun back home in Colorado and that the first thing she'd done once she had gotten back home was go on a short vacation with her parents and she sent me a picture of her standing at the very top of a mountain, which she said was called Pikes Peak. It was really beautiful, and it was right up with the clouds. I hadn't seen any views like that when I was on the train, and I knew that when I went to visit her, we'd have to go there.

And she asked me how my trip had been, too. So I wrote her a letter back telling her all about it, even the part where I got lost in the forest, and I also told her about the storm last night. I wished that I'd had some pictures to send to her, but I didn't, so hopefully my words were good enough.

Then I folded it and put it outside for my mailperson and then read a couple of Kipling poems. One of them was about a storm at sea and it made me think of the lashing I'd gotten last night and of the breakers rolling on Lake Superior, or the storms back home and how harsh the sea can be when it's angry. And there was another one about how hillmen like their hills and not the sea, and I knew some ponies who wouldn't set hoof on a boat because they didn't like the movement, even if the harbor was completely calm.

There was a third poem that followed those and looked really interesting called The Undertaker's Horse, but I had to go to meet with Liz, and then right after that I was going to go to practice-fight, so I had some more vegetables for dinner and then I took my glaive and flew off to Kalamazoo College.

Liz and I talked about the kings some more, and she was able to use her computer to show me a chart of when each man was king, and that helped me a lot. I wish I had known about it sooner, and she said that she had found it last night after talking to me because she remembered that was kind of confusing.

And she told me a little bit more about the history of the area, and I told her how before unification, all the different pony tribes had fought with each other and then when things started getting bad the pegasuses and earth ponies made a pact and that had worked out pretty well because together we were stronger than the unicorns and pretty soon we had pushed them back far enough that the earth ponies could start to grow enough food for both our tribes, but then after a while the land went bad and even they couldn't fix it and then winter came and it didn't leave, no matter how hard the pegasuses tried to drive it back, and then things just got worse because everyone was fighting for what little food there was.

Liz said that she imagined that the tribes in the Middle East fought for the same reasons.

Then she said that after the end of Chronicles, I might like Ezra, because it was mostly about rebuilding and finding your way back. And she tapped her fingers on the desk and looked over at my glaive and I asked her what she was thinking about, and she sighed.

She said that since I hadn't asked she had been thinking of not telling me but that wouldn't be right, because I was an adult and so she asked me if I had heard about Orlando. I told her that all I knew about it was that it was a city in a state called Florida and it had a kingdom for an imaginary mouse. And then she told me how a self-proclaimed ISIS terrorist had decided to go into a gay nightclub and kill and wound over a hundred people.

Liz told me that every religion had extremists, and they tended to take a very narrow part of their scriptures and make them the most important thing, and then they would lash out at the people who they thought were their enemies. And she told me that the most dangerous people were the ones who were preaching a gospel of fear and hate, because they would goad some of their listeners into violence on their behalf. And she told me that even some people who called themselves Christians did that—she said that if I listened to the news that I might hear people claiming that Islam was a religion of hate, but as often as not those who said it were haters themselves.

Well, that was a lot to think about, and I thanked her for meeting with me and we agreed to meet again next week at the same time, and then I took my glaive and went down the hill.

There were a lot of people at the bottom of the hill, and I wound up not remembering too many names, 'cause I was still kind of tired from last night. Karla was there; she was kind of short and bulky and had a thick braid all the way down her back. She came right up when I landed and introduced herself and then told me that I couldn't use my glaive because they had padded weapons, and I said that I had known that already.

It was kind of fun to watch people putting on their armor—it was the first time I'd seen people help each other dress, but I guess they had to because even for them there were a lot of fasteners that were hard to get to, and it just looked like it was easier with help (although there were some people who dressed themselves).

And Stellan came, too, and like he'd said he would, he had a padded glaive for me to use.

I wound up really interrupting their practice, because everyone wanted to watch me, and I felt kind of embarrassed at first. Stellan and Karla both wanted me to show my moves kind of slow, and so I slowed them down as much as I could so that they could see what I was doing, but that also meant that I fumbled it a lot. I'd never thought about how hard it was for my instructors to do the moves slowly so that we could learn them.

But that was good for me, 'cause I was really out of practice, and when I was done there were a couple of things—mostly diving moves—that both Stellan and Karla thought were too dangerous to try in practice, but they said that everything else was okay.

And then because she thought it was only fair, she sparred with Stellan. She had a quarterstaff, which is basically a stick of wood, and he was using a sword which he could hold with one or both hands.

Both of them called out what they were doing at first, but then they kind of got into it and forgot and sped up a little bit and it was a little hard to follow, but I got the idea.

Then Stellan said that he would practice with me, and since I didn't have any armor, he said that we would move very slowly.

We probably spent an hour figuring out each other's fighting style, and then we sped it up a little bit. Karla said that Stellan would only defend himself and not attack, while I was free to try and hit him. I thought that was a little unfair, but he said it was okay, and then he said I could move at normal speed, and I wasn't allowed to hit his helmet.

It turned out that a lot of the moves I knew were pretty ineffective against him. We hadn't really gotten much teaching on how to fight someone who just stood there, and the best tactic I knew was ambush from a cloud, and that wouldn't work when I couldn't do a diving attack or bring down a cloud.

But I still got some pretty good hits in and I even managed to knock his legs out from under him once.

After that, he did a few attacks on me, and he moved really slow on purpose, so I was able to defend almost all of them. Even so, he did manage to get me in the withers once, and even though his sword was padded, it hurt.

Stellan and Karla ended the night by fighting one more round against each other and this time they went at their normal pace and I could barely follow along. She could use both the head and the butt of her quarterstaff to hit him, and block in the middle, too, and she wound up winning after she managed to knock the sword out of his hand.

It was starting to get dark, so they picked up all their gear and took off their armor and I flew home and put my glaive away and I could see by the little blinky lights on my internet box that the electricity was back on and I thought about turning on my computer and visiting Facebook for a little bit but I was really tired, so I just went to bed instead.