April 23 [Nature]
April 23
I woke up right away because I was already eager to go trotting with a bunch of people in the run. I poked Aric with my hoof to wake him up and then I remembered I was supposed to tell him about Meghan and my ears dropped 'cause I really didn't want to. He might be mad and then I would spend all day being grouchy because he'd yelled at me or told me I couldn't come over any more and I decided it would take too long anyway and I didn't have a whole lot of time this morning before I had to get to the nature center to race.
Plus he had woken up and had one hand on my rump and that was pretty distracting.
I let him have his fun for a little bit and then when he started to roll towards me, I pushed his shoulder back down with my hoof and straddled his chest and teased him with my tail then stretched out on his chest and let him put his arms around my back.
He usually didn't last as long when I took charge but that was okay. I tried to stretch it out as long as I could, both for him and for me.
Aric knew right where the nature center was so he took me there after we had breakfast. He'd bought some oats because I liked them and he also had some cans of anchovies for me. I liked those even more since Aric made funny faces when I ate them.
It didn't take us too long to find Peggy, and she had already entered me in the race and had a number I was supposed to wear. She had fastened hers to her shirt right over her stomach but it wasn't so easy to figure out where to put it on me.
Aric said I ought to wear it on my tail, and that turned out to be the best idea we could come up with. Peggy went to her car and got a couple of hair ties and looped one around my tail just below my dock and pinned the number to that. It felt weird, but it would work.
Then we went up to the starting area and there were lots of people waiting around for the race to start. Peggy said that they were staggering the starting times so that not everyone would go at once because otherwise it would be too crowded.
There were three groups that went before us, and then it was our turn.
The whole race was a lot of fun. We went from the main building where the exhibits were right out into the wood and ran along there for a little while before we came out on the top of a ridge which the trail followed.
I definitely could have done better on my own, even without flying. But it would have been rude to leave Peggy behind, so I kept her pace. It was still a bit frustrating seeing people who I knew I could outrun passing us by.
She ran a little faster after we passed the last kilometer marker. I think it was her competitive spirit kicking in, encouraged by the fact that some people who hadn't paced themselves that well were tiring out. Then we got to pass some of the people who had passed by us earlier.
Still, we didn't win—not by a long shot. Right at the end we were passed by a man who had started in the group after us, and I really didn't need to look at times to know that we hadn't done all that well.
There was a table at the end of the race which had bottles of water for the runners and Peggy took one and splashed it on her face and head and then drank the rest. She told me that she used to like running more but then she got boobs and it wasn't as fun after that.
When the last runner had finished they presented awards and then had a free picnic but we had to listen to a speech from a woman who told us about what the nature center was about and how we could become members. I didn't mind; it was a nice cool-down from the race.
After we'd eaten, Aric and Peggy and I decided that since we were here we might as well walk some more of the trails. So we started out on one that looped to the north and went through the woods for a while and then turned and went right next to the railroad tracks.
When we got back to the lodge Aric looked at the trail map to see which one we could go to next and I said that I had to go to the bathroom and Peggy said she was going to come with me.
As soon as the bathroom door had swung shut behind us Peggy asked how Aric had felt and I said that I hadn't told him yet. Peggy swatted my head and told me that I was a bad pony that I had promised I would tell him and I said that I was going to and she made me swear that I would tonight before we went to bed.
I asked her if she was mad at me and she said that she wasn't mad, but she didn't think that I knew how much of a big deal this kind of thing could be for people and the longer I dragged it on the worse it could get when it all came out—and she said that it would, sooner or later.
Well that made me kind of mad because she had been the one who had told me I was supposed to keep it secret and maybe I would have told Aric about Meghan or Meghan about Aric but I wasn't supposed to tell anyone and Peggy said that that wasn't meant to be permission to sleep with whoever I wanted to.
And then I felt kind of dumb because I probably should have asked what human relationships were like sooner and it wasn't Peggy's fault and I said that I was afraid I was going to screw up and lose all my friends and she said that my real friends would stay with me and gave me a tight hug and I cried into her shoulder a little bit.
The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon at the nature center looking at the exhibits and walking around another trail and then Peggy said that she was going to get back to campus because she had some important work to do and that she'd be at her desk all night long and all day tomorrow too, and then she headed off to Cobalt.
Aric said that she'd been in a kind of weird mood all afternoon and wondered if I'd noticed as well. I said that I wanted to walk on the hawk trail so we went out that way and when we got to the top there was a little deck where you could see around the whole valley.
I told him that I needed to tell him something, and he sat down and I hopped onto the bench next to him and there really wasn't a good way to start so I told him everything and said that I hadn't meant to hurt him but that I didn't know that it was wrong to do that and then I started crying again because he hadn't said anything yet and I thought for sure he was going to tell me that he never wanted to see me again but he leaned over and hugged me and said that it was okay and he wasn't mad.
Then he asked if it was the Meghan from bell choir and I told him it was and he thought that was really funny and asked if there were any other girls in bell choir that I was sleeping with and I slapped him with my wing. But it did lighten the mood a little bit.
He said that he wasn't going to be the one to tell me that my friendship with Meghan was wrong, and he wasn't going to try and force humanity's morals on me.
Then he leaned over and kissed me and told me that he was hungry and we ought to get something to eat.
We went to Jimmy John's and got some subs and we stopped at the beer store and got some beer and he asked me how I felt about spending the night out in the woods and looking up at the stars and I thought that was a great idea even though it might be a bit chilly. So we stopped at his house long enough for him to load blankets and a mattress which he called a thermorest into the back of Winston and then drove out the same way we had before and turned into the little clearing.
We sat on the tailboard and drank beer and talked and looked up at the moon and stars and he pointed out the constellations he knew and after we'd run out of beer we curled up together under the blankets.
Stats
Page generated in 0.077 seconds
Total duration
1,085 users online
1,674,257 hits today, 2,004,447 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
That should be "woken up and had one etc."
7324688
Corrections made; thank you.
Aww. Aric's a good guy, being very considerate of Silver's perspective. Good to see that that mine's been defused.
Typo. Two in one, even. :P
Aww. But yeah, I think we should have expected Aric to react like that. The guy's
ing a pony, he's going to have a pretty open-minded view on things. 
So... Did she get permission to go all the way or not? Because sex with a mare is still under the friend flag for Silver... but he's ok with her being friends.
Meh, I'll take it as permission.
True 'friendship' 1 / humanity's 'morals' 0
Aric is a one in a million soul, but something tells me that telling Meghan is going to be interesting later on. Like, 'deer in headlights' interesting...
7323729
24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0wxav1H9R1r09mqjo1_400.gif
See Peggy is smart, she gets it and won't put up with the cute pony's shenanigans. Now all we need to see is how Meghan takes it.
Shouldn't it be Jimmy John's?
a great sigh of relief
IDK how Meghan will take this. You would think she would have heard Aric + Silver are together but humans are really good at not hearing what they don't want to know. (Voice of Experience)
So that went well. I get the feeling that Megan will not take this well. This incident would be great for her to discuss in her anthropology class. This is a big difference between pony culture and human culture.
Everything went better than expected! For now. ...there's going to be eventual yelling, isn't there?
Probably helps that Meghan and Silver kept it to snuggling (as far as I can tell).
Well, don't let go of that boy Silver, he is pure gold. (no pun intended)
You won't find many able to put their consideration for your feeling way above their own like this.
7323833 It's not so much the differences in culture as it is how straightforward she is, and how she tends to blindly believe things rather than seeking to understand them on a deeper level. So far, her greatest level of social manipulation has basically amounted to pretending she only took one cookie from the jar when she actually took two.
If an even slightly more cynical pony visited Earth, they'd probably be immediately accepted as an adult by everyone.
I don't know about magical pony biology, but I'd suppose that humans have a complicated courtship because of ours. Human females are fertile year-round, and each could on a yearly basis potentially bear a child or even twins, which will be fairly helpless and needing constant care and supervision for about 15 years. Without a restrictive culture limiting sex, nobody would be able to do any other work but caring for children and foraging for food. Marriage is an excellent method for limiting childbirth, and human societies have embraced the concept wholeheartedly.
Humans are just too fertile to have free sex, and birth-control devices/pills haven't put much of a dent in that.
Aric handled that well.
now i can't wait for the talk with Meghan. When Silver puts all cards on the table so to say...
Well. That went a lot better for Silver than it could have.
I guess we'll see later whether Aric really meant on an emotional level what he said - I'm giving it higher odds than not (he's a college guy with a pony girlfriend), but I won't be sure for another month at least.
7324672 well, like I said, if I catch up, I don't mind giving you a hand. Banerjee also has a book on nonlinear dynamics as well
Now all that's left to do is get closure with Meghan.
7325819 Is "closure" what the kids are calling it these days?
7325819
I fixed it for you.
7325852 Thank you.
7325851 The kids are probably calling it something else. As for myself I haven't been a kid since a graduated back in '90.
7325259
Are you suggesting that less sex (and thus fewer children) happens due to marriage?
7325927
Absolutely! Were it not for society's acceptance of marriage, the population would likely increase by as much as 50% annually.
Well that worked out very well for Silver! I hope she considers this a learning opportunity and realizes how key good communication is in any relationship.
In the words of man name of Chuck, "LOVE IS REAL!"
One thing people seem to be overlooking is age. These days there is more age spread than in my day (early 70s) in college. Still, I get the impression Silver has more life experience than most college kids & is in her late 20s, not late teens early 20s. Silver may be Meghan's 1st affair, certainly her 1st lesbian affair. Silver has a cultural pattern to try for consensus. In the USA that + her small size makes her come off as younger.
7326868
that's more of a science an engineering thing than a math thing. A lot of them turn out to be really insignificant. For example, resolution uncertainty only comes out to +- 0.707 pixels.
I'm going to be working full time so no guarantees, but I'll help if I can
Cobalt sounds like a pony name. I keep having to remind myself that it is Peggy's car.
7324713
Defused for now at least.
7324720
Hey, if I'm gonna mangle a sentence, I might as well do a good job of it.
FWIW, I did debate whether to use 'waken' since it seemed like a plausible mistake from Silver Glow's perspective.
That's one place where site bias comes in. We readers on this site generally assume that boinking a pony is a normal thing, and tend forget that the large portion of the human population doesn't think so. I suspect that if there were actually Ponies IRL and if they actually appeared as they do on the show, than there would be an increase of people who thought it was acceptable . . . but it wouldn't be considered the norm for a long, long time.
7324738
I suppose it comes down to what Silver Glow believes that Aric meant, doesn't it?
7324744
Aren't morals kinda subjective anyway? Like, if you surveyed Americans how they felt about same-sex marriage today and compared it to the same survey 20 years ago, you'd have gotten different results . . . probably even if you surveyed the same people each time.
Maybe. . . .
7324755
I don't even know what's going on there.
I don't always get pop culture references. In my day the internet was a book.
7324776
Peggy can be direct when she needs to be.
Yes, it should. Thanks!
7324777
7324778
Oh yes we are. Well, I am anyway.
7324930
If well-written, a series of pony anthropology lectures would make for some really interesting reading.
Perhaps Silver Glow will yet have her chance to give a class presentation
7325097
There's almost always eventual yelling.
They did, at least by what I would consider it. Although that raises an interesting point; where do you draw the line between cheating and not cheating?
7325133
It's probably easier at a liberal college, though. At least based on my experiences.
7325134
I don't feel that's unrealistic; I think a lot of people are that way, too. Lots of people want the simple, dumbed-down explanation.
And then there are people like me who read NTSB reports for fun because I want to know more about the hows and whys of the failure.
(Although there's a lot of other places where my perception is no doubt blinded by my own desire to get the 'simplest' explanation.)
I don't think so, because I think the 'cute' factor would enter in. Even in the comments, it took some readers quite a while to accept that Silver Glow has already had an active sex life, just as there are people who believe that their girlfriend is cute, innocent, and virginal when that probably isn't the case. (Is it delusion or a lack of curiosity? I don't know.) [As an aside, this is a card which Cayenne may very well be repeatedly playing for her own advantage.]
Silver Glow's appearance is somewhat child-like, and as a result that's what people tend to lean towards when they interact with her.
7325259
I'm not sure that I entirely agree with your statement, but I don't have any good evidence to the contrary.
I think that back in the day, large families existed because children were a source of farm labor, and pragmatically you knew that some of them were going to die before they became adults anyway. One would assume that older children would help raise the younger, thus actually decreasing the workload (somewhat) as you had more.
And I also believe that in Western society, modernization, reductions in infant mortality, and availability of effective birth control have lowered population growth, in some cases below sustainable (not sure that's the best word to use) level. Japan, IIRC, has a really low birth rate, and as a result the average age of their population is going up.
7325293
We'll soon see if Meghan does as well.
7325364
"So Peggy said I should tell you that I'm having sex with this one guy, but it's not every day, so can I come over tonight?"
7325639
That's the key, isn't it? Words are cheap. . . .
7325788
I wonder if it's written so an idiot (me) can understand it? Maybe I ought to get hold of a copy.
It's funny, because I understand some of the stuff he teaches, but then he does something that presumably his students know because they took the classes which are a foundation for these theories, and I get hopelessly lost. Like when he made a matrix and filled it with numbers and variables, I have no idea where those numbers came from.
7325819
;rainbowwild:
7325887
Ooh, that makes you a bit older than me!
7326557
I think that one problem can be even when you have good communications, there are still things that you don't have to say because they're your societal expectations. The more 'apart' the two partners are, the more you can't assume [and in the case of a pony/human relationship, you can't assume anything]. For a personal example, when my parents got married, one was Methodist and the other Baptist, which are largely the same, so both of their expectations of a wedding would be very similar. My brother on the other hand is Methodist and his wife is Hindu, so their expectations of a wedding were very, very different.
7326772
7327079
Life experience varies a lot with upbringing, IMHO. A more rural society is going to have very different expectations for kids than a more urban society, and I think that often urbanites think of rural experiences more as 'life experience,' and perhaps in a derogatory sense. I also know people mature at different rates.
You are correct that Silver has more 'life experience' in the sense that she's had a job with responsibilities, but by the same token she's been pretty isolated in her village and probably hasn't had much 'life experience' outside of that setting. She went to school, worked weather when she wasn't in school, and that was about it. No spring break trips to Europe, her mom didn't sign her up for ballet classes or piano lessons . . . she's got an apprentice's upbringing, really.
Silver Glow is not yet twenty.
Correct on the second.
That's another important point.
7327123
Still, those things are important, depending on what you're measuring anyway.
I appreciate that! There's not a lot of lead-time on the chapters, but if nothing else if I happen to completely get something wrong, just pointing out how I screwed up would be useful.
7336270
Cobalt is a pony name: he's been mentioned in OPP, in fact.
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/1/18/Cobalt_ID_S2E26.png
7336616 One of my friend is doing advanced engineering physics, with some avant-garde lazer stuff. They are at a point where an uncertainty of 20% is considered good.
Awwwwwww!!
Aric confirmed for best human.
I realise this isn't an edited story (at least I did after someone mentioned it in the comments), but isn't the sentence a bit long?
The 'hads's I highlighted not because they're wrong-- quite the opposite-- but they stand out to me because I've run into using them in my own writing and find it makes the flow kind of stagnant. I now try to minimise their use. :T
I stand corrected. Now that is a
muzzlemouth full.Also I'm probably getting ahead of myself by analysing the writing style of a fictional cartoon horse but these things just irk me.
Glad that everything worked out
for Silver.
I found it really weird that he didn't ask any questions... You'd think after such a misunderstanding he'd want to know what was consider "normal" for ponies when it come's to sexuality, relationships and in turn, to tell her whats "normal" for humans... I've bin so enthralled and looking forward to the big climax where thy worked out what the differences in social norms are and find a compromise. then it all amounted to two paragraphs of little substance. He didn't even make it clear if it's ok or not to keep seeing Meghan... I found it disappointing.
sigh, I guess my creative criticism boiled down to this. You should try not to avoid controversy so much. (its frustrating) In other words, I think you take the middle road and the path of least resistance to often. especially when it came to religion.
(The only other story of yours that I've read was "Onto the pony planet" so please forgive me if this story is more... laded bake then your other work.)
A little controversy can spice up a story. if I my make a suggestion, maybe you could have 3 or more characters get into a heated but friendly moral debate, maybe about sexuality or religion. or maybe she could talk to more of her friends about religion, one of her friends being an atheist tells her it's all old stories. (shows her the bible reloaded) that kind of thing.
On an unrelated note, I would like to thank you for giving us such an intellectually stimulating and prodigious story.
...and sorry for posting, what a 100 chapters back from the present. I couldn't keep this to my self.
Those are some of The Words of Doom. Nothing good ever comes from them (Voice of Experience)
Still, she can't be going to tell him that she's pregnant, so it could be worse.
9302079
This is very true.
You say that, but in canon there are griffons and hippogrifs, and it stands to reason that centaurs and satyrs have to come from somewhere.
9307435
Much like Mountain Whiz (R), satyrs come from goats.
9544208
And let’s not talk about where Kirin beer comes from.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2019/1/6/1927785.jpeg
Friends who wouldn't understand aren't friends.
10990615
Exactly!
7336574
Still Aric seems to be a good bean. And even If he's not sold on taking Silver as his one and only, he is making a at least token effort to flexibility.
Peggy means well, I don't want to think that she has any ulterior motives or religious crapola otherwise she'd have had more problems with being roomies with a non-human talking animal alien. That being said, she's kinda prudish now that I think back on it and not very flexible. Her constant fretting and borderline coddling does make me worry a bit.
Silver is not human and it's like a saying about judging an elephant on its ability to climb a tree, she comes from a world that has a wholly different structure than ours so while the human lens is impossible to remove 100% one should as Professor Amy's been teaching, not set everything by YOUR standards.
11556173
He is, although as someone else said, he kind of stumbled his way into the relationship and somehow manages to make it work.
She's a good roomie, but she's of course handicapped by her human upbringing and morals, without totally understanding Silver Glow's. In some ways that's a good thing, in other ways it isn't. For example, being poly might be the norm where Silver Glow comes from, but it isn't on Earth; you gotta let your partners know and make sure they're cool with it and make your decisions from there. Likewise, both Silver and Meghan are sending up major mixed signals, things that are innocent in Equestria aren't on Earth, etc. It's a learning experience for both of them, really, and they've got months to figure it out, hopefully without too much heartbreak on the way.
The problem is, as I alluded to above, Professor Amy's view is fine if you're the tourist in a different culture, but when Silver Glow is in the human world she ought to at least understand how her actions will be interpreted by others, regardless of how it is back home for her. Especially when it comes to things like relationships--if there's any plan of them lasting, everybody involved needs to know the expectations and boundaries.