August 27 [Pikes Peak]
August 27
I think that I was the first one awake, 'cause I was in a different time zone again so it was more earlier than my body thought.
I tried to be quiet so that I wouldn't wake up Peggy, and I went and looked out her windows. Behind their house was the big open pasture that looked towards the airport, and I could see the white and green light rotating around and then I heard the distant sound of airplane engines. I couldn't see the airplane right away but I followed it with my ears, and all of a sudden I saw it come up above the buildings, and it climbed up really fast. It's amazing how something that big can get in the air so quickly.
Now that I knew more about airplanes, I almost wanted to try to fly on one again. Maybe I'd like it better this time.
Out the opposite window, as it got a little bit lighter outside, I could just see the mountains over the tops of the houses on the other side of the road. I wasn't sure if one of them was Pikes Peak, so I'd have to ask Peggy when she woke up.
I heard an alarm go off in a distant room, and pretty soon someone went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. And Peggy was just getting up when I heard a weird rumbling noise under me, and I guess she saw how I jumped out of bed and popped out my wings and she laughed and said that was the garage door going up.
I heard an engine, and then looked out the window and saw a silver car back out and into the street, then the rumbling started again as the car drove off.
Peggy said that her mom had to work, and then she asked if I needed to use the bathroom before she went into the shower, which was nice of her to ask.
When I got back she'd gathered together a pile of clothes to wear, and I asked her if we could see Pikes Peak from her bedroom and she said that you couldn't. She said when they first moved into this house she thought that maybe if she put her face right up against the glass and turned sideways she might be able to see it, but that it wasn't possible because it was almost a straight line from the front wall of their house to the mountain.
She said that if the houses next to theirs were knocked down, then maybe you could see it from her parent's bedroom, 'cause their window faced the right way. Then she took her bundle of clothes to the bathroom with her and I didn't have anything to do until she got back.
So I looked out the window some more, and watched the cars go by on the road behind her house. There was a thin stone wall between everyone's backyard and the road, which was maybe to keep cars from seeing in. I'd learned that lots of people put up walls like that so people couldn't see what they were doing in their backyards, like the one that Meghan's uncle had. Even Sunny Haven had had a big fence around it.
On the other side of her street the neighbor had a fence, too, but I could still see into his backyard from Peggy's bedroom and see that he had some wheels leaned up against his garage and a row of potted plants too.
Once Peggy was done with her shower we went downstairs and she wanted to have cereal but I told her that I knew how to cook breakfast now because Meghan had taught me and she didn't believe me so I made pancakes. And I was just finished up the batter when her dad came downstairs wearing lounging pants and a t-shirt and he saw me standing on the counter holding a spatula in my mouth and just turned around and walked back out of the kitchen.
When he came back in, he was holding a newspaper and I'd gotten off the counter 'cause I was done cooking. And I asked him if he wanted any pancakes and he said yes, then he kind of poked at it with his fork and asked me if I'd drooled in it, and that made Peggy kinda mad.
He rinsed off all the dishes and put them into a machine which would wash and dry them, and he asked how we wanted to get to the top of the peak. He said that there was a road, or we could take a train, or there was even a hiking trail.
We all decided that the train would be the most fun. I wouldn't have minded the trail, and Peggy thought it would be fun, too, but it kind of looked like it might rain today and it wasn't as much fun to hike in the rain. And she said that if we took the train up and it still looked nice, we could hike back down, which was easier anyways.
So she had to get dressed again in hiking clothes, and her dad did, too. And they both packed a backpack full of supplies that they might want and I filled up my camelback with water and she stuffed some granola bars in it and anchovies, too, and then we went and got in her dad's Highlander.
Mountains are sometimes deceptive 'cause they look closer than they really are, and we had to drive for a little while through Colorado Springs and then sorta up into the foothills before we got to a parking lot where we could get on the train.
We had to wait a little while before it came, and so I had time to kind of look around at the tracks. There was a notched third rail down the middle, and John explained that that was how the train drove itself, because the track was too steep for the wheels on the train to have traction. He said it was called a cog railway, and that there was a gear on the train which meshed with the rail in the center.
I asked him what would happen if the gear slipped, if the train would just stop, and he said maybe, or maybe it would slide backwards down the mountain until it got to the bottom or fell off the tracks. And he said that that had never happened, so I shouldn't worry about it.
The train itself was about the same size as a bus, and it was bright red with a white roof and said Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway on it.
When it started moving out of the station, the lady who was driving told us that we couldn't stand in the aisle because if the train had to stop it would stop immediately and send us flying. She said that the flying part was fun until we hit something, and I agreed with her. Flying was fun unless you hit something.
After passing by red barns and another train in a little yard, we got into the forest, and for a long time were just in trees. As we got higher up, there were some shady spots where there was still a little bit of snow, even though it was late August. So that was either left from last winter, or it had fallen over the summer.
We went by another train that was sitting on a siding, and then as we got higher and higher, the ground started really sloping away on the right, and you could see a long ways through breaks in the trees. And then the trees themselves got thinner and thinner until there just weren't any more of them. Peggy said that we'd crossed the treeline, and that trees wouldn’t grow any further up the mountain. She wasn't sure why, though. She said that she kind of remembered from middle school that she'd learned it was because it was too cold for them, and maybe there was too much snow, too. Which I thought was strange, because there shouldn't have been that much of a difference in snow cover over a few hundred feet.
John said that he thought the soil was probably too poor, as well, and maybe the winds blew away trees. He pointed to a few stragglers that were short and twisted and looked more like bushes than proper trees.
Looking to the left, it was just like flying, 'cause Colorado stretched out below us. Although there were a lot of other mountains blocking some of the view, so I couldn't see Colorado Springs from the train.
When we got to the train station it was just a short walk to the very top of the mountain and there was a sign that said the mountain was named for Zebulon Pike, who couldn't find a way to get to the top. And that was kind of humbling to think about, 'cause now even the fat man who had ridden the train with us and was posing by the sign could get to the top, easily. But without the train and road I bet it had been a lot harder, at least for a human.
There were earth ponies who tried to climb mountains, too. And that was something that I'd never really understood, but I guess that they liked the challenge of it.
It was kind of crowded with tourists, which I guess I should have expected. John said that Pikes Peak was the most visited summit in the world except for Mt. Fuji in Japan. Even though there were a lot of people, it was still a great view and people tended to cluster, so it wasn't that difficult to move away from all of them.
We were looking around at the other mountain peaks—there were helpful signs which identified them—when I got the idea that I'd fly to another one. So I pointed at one that was sticking up in the distance and was really easy to identify, and I said that I wanted to fly there. I wasn't sure what the rules were for flying to other mountaintops—did I have to tell the airplane directors that I was? Or could I stay not too far above the trees and be safe like that? I didn't think that there would be any airplanes going between the peaks, but there could have been. But I wasn’t seeing any, so I thought I'd give it a try. And Peggy said that it was probably okay.
I kind of wished that I'd brought my vest and blinking light, but I hadn't thought that I'd need them. I did have my GoPro—I'd almost left that behind, too, but Peggy had suggested that I might want to to take pictures with it.
Flying off the top of a mountain was weird because the air was thinner and I couldn't get as much lift from it, but that didn't matter all that much since the mountain fell away from me. On a cloud, even this high, it's easier, 'cause you can drop off it to get airspeed and then turn the airspeed into lift, but you can't do that off of land. Unless it's a cliff.
Since that peak—which was called Cameron Cone—was a little bit lower than Pikes Peak, it was really easy to get to it. I looked back once and saw that there were a lot of people watching me, so I did a wing roll just for fun and then kept on going. And since I hadn't told any airplanes that might be around where I was, I kept a good watch for them, but I didn't see any.
This one had trees almost to the very top, but I found a nice empty spot right at the peak and landed there.
It was reasonable to believe that there had been other pony tourists to Pikes Peak—if it was that popular with humans, surely some pony had already been to the summit. And anypony could have done it; all it took was buying one train ticket and you were there. But here . . . without a doubt, I was the first pony who had ever put her hooves on the top of this mountain and it was kind of strange to think about that. There couldn't have even been all that many humans who had: I didn't see any signs of them, and I couldn't smell anything that had even a vague human scent to it. A lot of places, people wrote messages on things but there weren't any here as far as I could see.
And even though it was only a short flight back to Pikes Peak, I could barely see any of the buildings and I couldn't see any people at all and in a way I was completely isolated on top of my mountain.
I wished that I'd had some kind of a marker that I could leave behind me, but other than leaving a can of anchovies, I had nothing that I wanted to part with. So I picked up some flat rocks and I made a little stack out of them and unless someone knocked them over, they might be there for years or even centuries. And maybe some day somebody would see them and wonder who had put them there and I suppose they'd never know.
It was odd how I felt so big and so small at the same time. And when I flew off, I looked back until my little rock pile had disappeared completely, then I focused on my flying.
I circled over the top of Pikes Peak before I landed, and when Peggy asked why I said that it was so that I could find them, but it was really because I felt like showing off.
We decided that we'd have a light lunch at their restaurant and then go down the trail, which ended not too far from where the cog railroad started. They had doughnuts which they said were special because no other doughnuts were made at such a high elevation, but I didn't think those would be very good trail food. And they had hamburgers and hot dogs too and I didn't want to eat those, either, so I finally managed to get them to just give me a hot dog bun and I put my anchovies in it and made an anchovy sandwich.
The trail down looped back on itself a lot so that it wasn't too steep, and especially when we were above the treeline I could easily see where it went and thought about just taking a shortcut across it but that wouldn't have been fair to Peggy and her dad, 'cause they couldn't fly.
There were lots of pretty lavender flowers which Peggy said was called columbine and that they had first been discovered on Pikes Peak. They smelled really nice and I wondered what they tasted like and so when nobody was looking I ate one.
It was really sweet.
Even though we were going down the mountain, it felt colder when we got back to the trees just because we were in shade. And Peggy went a little ways off the trail and came back with a snowball and threw it at me because she said it was fun to throw snowballs in the summertime. I flew up and got a pine cone and said that since hooves weren't too good for making snowballs we threw pine cones and she actually believed me.
Every now and then when we found a nice, scenic spot, we'd sit down and take in the view and have a little drink of water. There weren't any other climbers coming up—John said that anyone who wasn't an idiot would start first thing in the morning because the weather often changed quickly, and even though the trail wasn't technically challenging, the altitude gain was too much for a lot of people, since the trail climbed 7500 feet from bottom to top. He said that we'd be coming to a cabin soon that was where burro tours used to take people to the top of the mountain, but that there hadn't been any burro tours since the sixties.
He said it was also dangerous because of lightning strikes, and we should have left earlier to avoid the risk while we were exposed on the slope, but while I'd been flying Peggy had told him that I could sense lightning and resist it, so he thought that we'd be safe.
After we'd passed the former burro camp, we started to see more people on the trail, mostly hiking up, and we also had a group of people on bicycles pass by us going down.
Peggy spotted a little striped chipmunk and we watched him for a while and then she managed to lure him kind of close with a little bit of a granola bar. We didn't think he was going to take it, 'cause he apparently hadn't learned that sometimes humans offer treats, and it wasn't until we'd moved a little ways down the trail that he got bold enough to run up and pick it up off the rock that she'd put it on. Then he scampered off into the brush again and she thought about putting another piece there for him but didn't.
We took a little side-path to a section of trail called The Incline, which was a straight path up the mountain that had originally been a railroad but it had been washed out in the rain. Peggy said that we weren't supposed to go down it, because climbers going down got in the way of people going up, but at the very top we had a chance to look at Colorado Springs, and could also see our destination at the base and when we were looking straight down it looked like it wasn't far at all.
It was steep enough that I think I could have just jumped and held out my wings and glided all the way down and I kind of wanted to try that.
And she saw me kind of calculating it out in my mind and pawing at the ground a little bit and so I told her what I wanted to do and she asked if I could fly back when I got to the bottom. I said that I could, so she agreed to wait at the top. And she got out her portable telephone and said that she wanted to record my launch.
If there had been a wind blowing up the mountain, I could have just held out my wings but there wasn't, and there were also some people that were pretty close and I didn't want to hit them, either.
It was kind of the opposite of the snowboarding slopes, where you weren't supposed to climb up because you'd get in the way of people going down.
I got a little bit of a galloping start when there was an opening and then lifted off from the trail and glided all the way down to the base, picking up speed as I went. And when I got to the bottom I did a nearly vertical climb, rotating as I went, so when I leveled back off I was facing back towards the top of the incline. In a perfect, frictionless world, I'd have had enough altitude and airspeed to glide all the way back, but I had to fly a little bit of the way.
When I got back to the top, John said that the official record for humans was just under seventeen minutes and my round trip had been less than that. But I didn't think it should count, since I hadn't been on the trail.
We only had to walk a little ways down the road to get back to his Highlander, and when we got back home Chrissie had made us all a nice casserole for dinner although it had a little more sauce than I liked. And we told her about our day and Peggy showed the movie she'd made of me flying down the Incline.
Chrissie hadn't gotten permission for me to go to her Air Force base yet, but she said she'd talked to some people and made some progress and that they would probably want my helpers to come with me. Peggy thought that was kind of silly, since it wasn't like I'd be selling military secrets to Equestria. And we thought that maybe if we could think of some kind of demonstration I could do that would change their minds, 'cause people liked demonstrations.
I couldn't think of anything that I could demonstrate besides that I could fly, unless I brought them a cloud. And since they were right next to an airport I probably wouldn't be allowed to, since I'd get in the way of the other airplanes.
We had a nice, relaxing evening and sort of planned out what we wanted to do tomorrow. She said that depending on what the weather was like we could go up into the mountains or shop in Colorado Springs or maybe do both and she said that we'd ought to try and meet up with some of her high school friends for lunch, too. And she said that since I was in Colorado I ought to visit a marijuana dispensary just to have done it, even though I shouldn't buy any.
When we'd gone upstairs for the night, Peggy saw me moving my pillow to the middle of the cot and she asked me why so I told her about the metal rod and she decided that unless I really wanted to sleep in the cot her bed was plenty big enough for us to share, and it was a lot more comfortable than the cot had been.
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No Silver Glow! You're not supposed to chew the marijuana!
There are also some yellow-bellied marmots around the train tracks who like to watch the tourists go up and down the mountain. They're adorable, and almost invisible until they move.
When I rode the cog railway to the top of Pike's Peak, it was in June. Seventy degrees at the bottom, snowing on top. The donuts did not seem super special.
Are you sure it wasn't a...pika?
When I rode the cog train (almost forty years ago), the tour guide said if the train started rolling backwards there were two springs at the bottom that would stop us: Colorado and Manitou!
Was that an error or deliberate?
It's not the fall that hurts, it's the sudden stop at the end.
Two things: One, I wonder if some park ranger somewhere has argued with a pony because the sign says "Don't pick the flowers" but doesn't say anything about eating them.
And two: considering her tendency to snack on any plant within reach, I think we may see stoned SG tomorrow. Or... weren't Special Brownies mentioned in an earlier chapter?
Ah, yes. Messing with the foreigner - a time-honoured tradition. You'd be amazed what people will believe about a country they've never visited.
7681392 And when it started to eat the granola, it became a pika-chew...
One of those nice little paradoxes that comes from being alive.
He couldn't handle that amount of cutenss that early in the morning.
Seems like a perfect situation for Mister Salavadore to show up with that stack of paperwork for a Pony Incident Report/Complaint.
Silver Glow the Ninja
Haha so much flying without her gear.
At the end of the exchange program she gets a list where and when she showed up on radar unannounced?
Have you eaten any? I know how much research you do, the answer has me curious.
I love how Silver is all *cooking horse noises* and Peggy's dad is all "nope, too early in the morning to deal with that level of adorable".
Finally. It was high time for some snuggles again.
*shipping horse noises*
There may be a sound reason SG shouldn't eat marihuana.
Zacora could explain it.
Twister and the TIV. Cool.
Was the cop video not posted?
I recommend the old Jim Croce song "Wildwood Weed" from back in the 1970s. I think there is an old folksong with the same name. This is NOT a cover of that.
7681322 7681569 7681907 7682126
Just for the record, Silver Glow did not eat marijuana that was growing wild on Pikes Peak; she ate a Rocky Mountain Columbine flower, which is this:
calphotos.berkeley.edu/imgs/512x768/0000_0000/0809/0798.jpeg
Rocky Mountain Columbine is edible (for humans, anyway). It's nectar-heavy, makes good jelly or can be eaten raw.
Pikes Peak is 7500 foot climb? Thats easily over 3 times Snowden, the Rack and Pinion Mountain Railway in Wales, UK, which I seem to ahve been up at least once, but many years ago when in the Church Lads Brigade.
Given what else is in that area, Im spurised at the lack of maountain top cabins with suprisingly extensive arrays of TV dishes and Ham radio antenna, unless those electric trees look a lot more natural than the ones the cell phone companies have been sticking up locally.
If you look carefully, cog railways always have the engine push teh carriage, and theyre not connected. This is so the engine can run away downhill, snap the break lines and teh passengers be safe and stranded instead of following Aunt Edith into the duck pond.
I wonder if she could carry a laser tag device. Challenge the US airforce to a game of laser tag vs a jet fighter. An F-15 will have the speed advantage, unless it's going up against Rainbow Dash, but Silver Glow will have the advantage of manouvrability and stealth. She can stop on a dime and hide in clouds, after all.
I did 6k to 7k feet on Mount Hood and that was bad enough. (Though that may be a combo of me not being in climbing shape and the trail being largely a straight shot over about a mile.) Going all the way up Pike's Peak? Might be a bit much. (Yay, trains!)
7681543
I believe SDS (Sudden Decelleration Syndrome) is one of the leading worldwide killers.
7681604
Apparently some friends in college taught a Chinese girl that baring your middle finger was a greeting in the United States. She got sorted out after introducing herself to an on-campus party.
An interesting, but almost unrelated, note: the first college I went to (McDaniel; formerly Western Maryland College) had a healthy population of Chinese exchange students. They would come over through the exchange system we had set up with some place in Africa.
"the rules were for flying to other moutaintops"
I think there is a typo hiding
7681755
There's no problem with her flying without her gear. The entire area around Pike's Peak is Class E and Class G airspace, and outside of the Mode C veil for Denver, so she doesn't need to talk to anybody. It's not night, so she's not required to have lights. She has to talk to the tower in Kalamazoo because she's within the Class D airspace for the local airport, but the vast majority of the country doesn't have any radio requirements.
And without a transponder, there's virtually no way to figure out which returns on a radar she is, barring coordinating her known flight with returns recorded previously. She may not even show up on scopes, because her flight speed is so slow. I was talking to an air-traffic controller once during a tour of ATC facilities who told me that the scope she used filtered out slow-moving returns in some places because the radar would show traffic from the local Interstate. Therefore, to avoid spurious blips they masked slow-moving returns in that area.
Selling military secrets to Equestria...
Humans are so silly.
Her dad's reaction to the SG standing on the kitchen counter was great. And if she had drooled in the batter? Well, if you think of her as a horse, perfectly valid question.
Anyway.
You've already passed 0.5 megawords, now you've reached the 1 kilolike (and one more). Congratulations.
7683039
At his current wordcount of 507,593 words, this story is the 104th longest on fimfiction. An additional 5251 words would put this story into the top 100 longest stories on the site (the 100th is currently Harmony Theory by Sharaloth).
A mere 493 words would make this the 101st longest story.
Why is everybody looking at me like that?
When I hear of Pikes Peak, I immediately think of the vehicular hill climb races. Its impressive to see super powered big rigs going up that hill.
carsbase.com/photo/Freightliner-Century_Pikes_Peak_mp402_pic_37714.jpg
7682192 In my case, I was imagining Silver Glow getting it from one of the mentioned dispensaries. After all, it's green, right?
7681639
Pegasi would beat hooves down any reconnaissance drone other than the fast ones. Just pull up a cloud chair and pull out the binoculars and watch the tiny ants scurry about. Para rescue trooper pegasi. Who needs parachutes when you have wings?
I can just imagine them talking SG into taking a turn in a wind tunnel, so they can study the air flow around a flying pegasus. For SCIENCE!
7681351
I don't remember seeing them the last time I was there, but then I had altitude sickness pretty bad that whole trip, which was too bad. I wonder what marmots think about trains?
7681392
I can't remember if it was Pikes Peak, or somewhere around Trondheim in Norway, but I had a very similar experience when I was younger. There's nothing quite like having a legit snowball fight in July.
It wasn't, but damned if those aren't adorable. Like oversized mice.
7681397
Oh man, that's just perfect!
7681543
That was on purpose.
Something that pegasi probably know better than any other tribe.
7681569
That, or gotten into an argument about whether the sign applies to humans only, becuase why isn't he chasing off the rabbits who are also eating the flowers?
7681604
It's a little less fun these days, what with the internet. But most people are still pretty clueless, and you're right, you can have loads of fun with that. For example, I assume that the only reason that there are musk-flavored Life Savers in Australia is to mess with foreigners.
7681639
That pun literally hurt me.
7681647
Isn't it, though? I get that feeling whenever I'm on the shore of the ocean.
7681725
Of course he can't. He's only human, after all.
"You are in violation of the pony cooking act of 2015, or as it is commonly known, the Horsewife Act."
7681755
In all seriousness, she'd probably never show up on radar, which is the problem. There are no portable transponders, and even if she was carrying a radar reflector odds are that aircraft radar wouldn't show her, because she just flies too slow.
7681770
I haven't--can't get it around here--but I did do some googling to find out what it tasted like.
7681811
Can you blame him? He gets up, expecting it to be a normal day, and there's a pony on his counter with a spatula in her mouth, cooking pancakes.
7681981
No, Meghan hasn't posted it. She stopped the fire video short of that.
7682126
You could take a trip without even leaving the farm. Ah yes, I remember that one. Every now and then they'd play it on the local country station.
7682198
I think that the area around Pikes Peak is a national park, so there aren't as many of them. I'm sure that there are some, though.
I know that the pushing is a safety measure; the lack of a coupler might not be solely for passenger safety, it might just be because there's no need. Could you stop the passenger car on a cog railway grade if the locomotive ran away? I have my doubts, but it might be possible, depending on the braking arrangement.
7682276
I think the two are in such totally different leagues that there wouldn't be a competition. It would be like a competition between a top fuel dragster and a front-end loader.
The jet's got her beat in speed and altitude, easily, but it can't hide in trees or steal sunflower seeds from birdfeeders. Depending on how you set up the parameters of the game would essentially give you the winner without even having to compete.
7682534
I did maybe or three miles up the Grand Canyon once, when I was a lot younger. Not sure just how far it was--we hiked a little ways down from the top and then back up again. Maybe a thousand feet vertical, tops.
Ranks as the #3 injury death, according to the CDC, after accidental poisoning and automobile accident.
cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of_injury_deaths_unintentional_injury_2014_1040w740h.gif
7682635
Correction made; thank you!
7682700
Technically, she's supposed to wear her flight vest and blinking light always, just to make her more visible, because she's not likely the kind of thing a pilot would be looking for. Even when she's not in controlled airspace. It's only when she's below other aircraft's legal minimums that she really doesn't have to.
Yeah, the only way they'd pick her up on Kalamazoo's radar would be if they turned off the filters, and they might wind up picking up cars, birds, and all sorts of other clutter that's big enough to generate a return. Weather radar picks up all sorts of unintentional targets, like bats:
s.w-x.co/bats-sat.gif
Obviously, you don't want your aircraft radar to pick that up, or else you're never going to figure out which are actual airplanes.
7682716
Hey, it could happen. Ten years down the road, the ponies might suddenly have a magitech F-35 that works better than the prototype. Probably with Twilight explaining how they improved the flawed design.
7683039
I think it's safe to assume that if a pony makes you pancakes, there might be a little drool in the batter. Actually, it does make you wonder what, if any, health codes the ponies have when it comes to restaurants and bakeries.
Thanks! Now ever onward!
7683413
Given the delay in responding, I wonder what the ranking by word count is now?
<goes to check>
Looks like about #73, and moving up a space in the next 48 hours.
7683525
Oh man, the things that they run up that mountain. People are freaking nuts.
7683686
Like the Dankery?
Silver has been warned not to eat or smoke marijuana, and since she's a good pony she probably won't.
7684164
Exactly! They might not be all that fast, compared to what we've got, but send one up to a cloud with a full camelback and a few cans of anchovies to snack on, and you've got intelligent eyes in the sky. And someone suggested a few chapters back the idea of S&R pegasi on Earth, which is actually a really good idea and I don't think anyone's done it yet.
7685338
7691790
7734728
I have to wonder how many of those vehicular accidents are from within a moving vehicular, hence a higher count for SDS.
Other airplanes.
Other airplanes.
Confirmed: Silver Glow identifies as an airplane, please respect her life choices.
7735792
Well, I'd assume that a large portion of fatalities in vehicle accidents are caused by sudden deceleration, and there's probably data out there that breaks it down more, but it would take a while to find. If I remember, I can ask my tool truck driver on Monday; he used to be a paramedic.
7739850
Glowie, if you had pants, you'd need a raincloud to put out the fire.
8053769
I bet that there are ponies who throw pinecones. Or eat them.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/12/12/180371__safe_solo_trixie_artist-colon-kloudmutt_artifact_pinecone_trixie+eating+pinecones.png
This would probably be better as:
"it was earlier"
"it was even earlier" (if you wanted that extra emphasis)
I love how Silver humanizes (ponyizes?
) the cars, so these sound a little too normal for her.
maybe, "her dad's car, Highlander."
maybe, "back to Highlander."
8225861
That one's a bit of a Silverism, which is why it's like that even though it's wrong.
She did figure out at some point that all identical cars have the same name, and so she started referring to most of them that way, except for those that she had always called by 'name' (like Cobalt), or the ones that were legitimately named (Winston).
8231128
Yeah, it occurred to me that there is a fine line in this story between honest mistake by author and honest mistake by ESL-learning pony.
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Generally, if it's an obvious typo or missing word or something like that, it's my mistake; if it's kind of wonky grammar, it's probably a Silverism. Hopefully by now most of the typos are gone, 'cause I have a lot of sharp-eyed readers, but obviously they aren't all, 'cause you've found some, and when I was fixing the formatting that got borked after the site update, I found a couple that had never been fixed.
Dude, it's official: You are old
If Future You went back in time & told 20 Year Old You that one day, your daughter's college roommate would be on your kitchen counter, stark naked & making pancakes & your only comment would be "Did you drool on them?", you'd have thought that you were kidding.