• Published 25th Feb 2016
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Silver Glow's Journal - Admiral Biscuit



Silver Glow takes an opportunity to spend a year at an Earth college, where she'll learn about Earth culture and make new friends.

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November 1 [Dancing Magnetic Stars]

November 1

When I woke up, I stuck my head up and looked around and Amy wasn't in the room and I couldn’t smell any new scent from her, so I guess she hadn't come back yet. Which meant it was okay to pull the covers down a little bit and nuzzle Meghan's stomach, and kiss her on her not-furry skin.

Then when she started to wake up, I put my head back up on her breast and kissed her chin, and she started rubbing my ears. She said that they were a lot nicer than the fake ones she had. I'd liked them 'cause it was still kind of weird how human ears couldn't move at all. I guess humans have so much movement in their hands and feet that there isn't any left for ears or tails.

Meghan wanted to put them on me, but the headband was too small to fit my head, so she held it right up next to me and figured out how to push the sensor against my forehead while she held the ears. That was weird, 'cause I couldn’t see them but I could hear them whirring and that got my attention so my real ears started to move around and then Meghan started laughing and that was another thing to point my ears at.

Then she put them back on her head again and we couldn't get too frisky 'cause she said they were really delicate, and it was fun to see how they reacted when I teased her with my wingtip and when I nuzzled her breast.

She had to take them off for the shower 'cause they couldn't get wet. So I started the water going and then the two of us took a shower together and when we were finished we sat on the bed and groomed each other and she preened my wings. And she got the loose feather out that had been annoying me.

I should have taken my lab coat and stuff with me last night, so I didn't have to go back to my room, but I'd forgot. So when I got back to the room I put my ear up against the door just to hear if Peggy was having sex, and I didn't hear anything. So I opened it and stuck my head in and Peggy was asleep in bed, draped over her boy, so I tried to be quiet as I got together my things for lab but I think I woke them up anyway. My hooves are really loud on the tiles even when I try to be quiet.

They had omelets again today so I got one and sat down at our table next to Meghan. Christine was eating a bowl of Lucky Charms because there weren't any fruit loops, and when she got up to see if they'd put out any more chocolate eclairs, Sean reached into his pocket and got a couple of conversation hearts and put them in her cereal. They didn't look quite the same as the normal marshmallows but they were kind of close, and he was curious to see if it would fool her.

She didn't notice when she ate the first one, but she did complain that it was too crunchy, and then she picked one out and the milk had made it shrink a little bit so you couldn’t read the original message, but it still said 'fuck you' on the other side 'cause I guess the pen was waterproof. So she threw it at Sean, and said she'd wondered why he was so eager to get to breakfast. And then she asked if he'd somehow made all the fruit loops disappear and he swore that he had nothing to do with that; that was just coincidence. I didn’t think she believed him.

So I kept a good watch on my omelet, 'cause I didn't want it to suddenly have conversation hearts in it.

When I was done eating, I walked across the quad to Dow and then went to the lab and I got there a little bit before Lisa, so I took the notes that we had for the class and went through them to see what we were gonna do today.

We experimented with phase changes, and then Professor Brown said that we were going to finish up by learning about the supercritical state, so he took some solid carbon dioxide which was called dry ice, and put it in a sealed container that we could look into and at first it just looked like there was water with a little bit of ice in it (and the ice didn't float) and then all the ice melted and then he started heating it and explained how at the supercritical point the boundary between liquid and gas would disappear and nobody really believed him until it happened, and it sort of hurt my brain 'cause it just was kind of cloudy and you could see that things were moving around in the pressure container but you couldn't really tell exactly what was happening.

All of us had to write down our observations for that, too, because even though we didn't do the experiment ourselves, it was important data for us.

Before I went back to my room, I stopped at the library and I returned my Alice Walker book and then I asked if I could renew my World War One book again, and they said I could because apparently nobody wanted it. Then I went and looked for more books on poetry, and I found an assortment book that looked promising, so I checked that one out and then went back to my room.

I listened at the door again 'cause I hadn't seen Peggy yet and she might still be spending time with her boy, but I didn't hear anything so I opened the door.

She was there, and she was just wearing a pair of shorts and a bra and she had her portable telephone tucked into the waistband of her pants and the ear-speakers in her ears and she was dancing in the middle of the room. And when she saw me she kind of stopped and I said that I'd dance with her if she'd help me take my lab coat off.

So she unstrapped my saddlebags and unbuttoned my lab coat and I fluffed out my wings a little bit and then she put her portable telephone in a little cradle on top of a speaker so that we could both hear it, and we started dancing together.

And by the time we were both tired of dancing, it was too late to do any labwork, but I didn't feel bad about it at all.

She was really cheerful, so I guess she'd had lots of fun with her boy. The room still smelled like sex, maybe a little bit more than it had this morning, and I thought that maybe she had spent all morning after I left playing with her boy.

The two of us walked to lunch together and they had leftovers from last night's dinner, and even some more Halloween candy and cookies, so I guess they hadn't been all that popular with everyone. I stayed with fish and salad, 'cause that was a good healthy lunch, and once I'd got my food I went over to Cedric and Leon and Trevor's table and I sat down and pulled the poetry book out of my bag and set it on the table and Trevor picked it up and started looking through it.

Cedric thanked me again for rearranging the schedule so that he could have a little time with Aquamarine, and then Leon asked what we'd done for the weekend, so I told them about the play, and he said that sounded really dark, and Trevor looked up from the poetry book and said that the play that Kalamazoo was doing was Rocky Horror Show and that that had cannibalism in it, too.

Leon said that he was making that up, and he shook his head and said that they eat Eddie. And Cedric said that he thought he remembered that in the movie Meat Loaf played Eddie and Trevor said that he did and that was what made it especially funny.

Leon said that he thought the Cubs were going to win the World Series, and I said that Mister Salvatore had said that they weren't, and he said that he just had a feeling in his gut. And I asked if it was ever wrong and he said it wasn't and then Cedric said what about that blonde girl that he'd dated his freshman year that he swore was the one, and he said he was young and dumb then and he should have known better. Cedric said that he'd warned him about her and Leon said that he just hadn't appreciated how crazy she was and that he'd thought that Cedric had been trying to cock-block him. And then he covered his mouth and I just started laughing.

Trevor found us two short poems, and the first one he read, and it was called Euclid and it was by Vachel Lindsay, and it was a poem about math, which I thought was really clever. Then he turned back in the book and said that he had found one for me, and it was called I saw a man pursuing the horizon, by Stephen Crane. And I liked that one a lot, and Leon said that he thought it was just like me.

Well, I said that I'd never caught the horizon yet, but it didn't stop me from trying.

Professor Miller showed us a picture of a quasar that was hiding behind a galaxy, but the light got bent by gravitational lensing so you could see four bits of light that weren't actually where it was and it was called an Einstein Cross. And she said that it wasn't a star but it was actually a black hole and why we saw light from it was because of all the stuff it was pulling into itself.

And then there was a picture of a castle and what it would look like if there were a black hole between it and the camera, which was really weird.

She gave us the formula for redshift, and then explained what we would see if things were far away, or if they were closer, and how to calculate it which seemed kind of backwards when she started explaining it but then made sense when she had finished.

Then she started telling us about pulsars, which were discovered because they emitted radio waves in a pulse. And after they'd been discovered at first people thought that they might be aliens because of the frequency of the signal, but it turned out that they were actually magnetic stars called neutron stars. And they were kind of like lighthouses, 'cause as they rotated they sent a radio signal when they were aimed one way and then you didn't see it when they'd turned the other way, and scientists had figured out that you could use the Doppler shift in the signal to know if it was moving towards you or away from you, and how fast.

And when they found two of them that were orbiting each other, they could measure the precession and the gravitational redshift, and that proved a bunch of stuff that Einstein had thought, so it was really important.

So it was strange to think that somewhere up in the sky there were stars that were making regular radio waves, and when I was flying back to the dorm I looked up but I didn't see any of them.

Since I hadn't done it before, I got out my lab notes and started working on them, and that took me almost until dinner time to make sure that I had gotten all the right answers. Peggy came in while I was looking up a formula and she said that she'd heard about kids looking up the experiment on the computer and faking their results and I said that Professor Brown was really smart and he'd probably know if I did; besides, I wouldn't learn anything if I just pretended to do the experiments.

I'd kind of thought when I was a filly and went to my first cloud lab that we were gonna be making new meteorological science in the lab but what we really did was repeat experiments that had been done dozens or hundreds of years ago, and at first that had been really disappointing but then I'd realized that we were learning the foundations of the science by doing things instead of just reading about them or having somepony lecture us about them, and I think we learned more by doing it on our own, 'cause we actually got to see the principles in action, and that's what I told Peggy. And she said that she wasn't suggesting that I try it, just that it was something that people had done.

Once I'd finished up with my homework, we sat on our beds and talked and I pulled out a feather that had been bothering me since I'd been wearing my lab coat, but I hadn't had enough time to really root for it and it was being clever at hiding, and I found out that it had pulled partway out and then had gotten caught in a couple of others which was why it was so annoying.

They had German food for dinner, which was kind of odd because it was the middle of the week and it wasn't a special day as far as any of us knew. Then Sean said that they'd had a pretty bad meal Saturday night and he wondered if this was what they were supposed to have and somebody had made a mistake, and Reese wanted to know how you could make that kind of mistake, and Sean said that they'd had buffalo wing soup once, and if they'd come up with that any other mistake was believable.

The whole table smelled like the fermented cabbage, 'cause Reese and Anna both had some, and so did Meghan, and that made me kind of lose my appetite 'cause it made my food sort of taste like that, too, so I just poked at my dinner and had a stale ghost cookie for dessert and then after dinner I went back to my room and thought about reading my Bible and then I thought about how I hadn't had a proper flight in a couple of days. So I filled up my camelback and got my flight gear and since it wasn't morning and Peggy was already awake I called on the radio to get my flight clearance from the room.

And she asked me where I was going and so I told her that I was going to fly out to Galesburg, and asked if she wanted me to bring back anything but she said that I didn't need to, and she was just curious.

So I went down to the boardwalk and flew off of it, and then climbed up across the quad and didn't follow the railroad tracks right away because I liked going by the hotel. I guess that all the buildings might have people in them who would look out the windows and maybe see me, but people from the hotel might not know that there was a pegasus in Kalamazoo, so they'd be surprised.

I took a bit of a northerly angle once I passed the hotel and got above the railroad tracks just before the river. And I went over a locomotive that was pushing cars around the yard, and then I was back over the main line and I could see signals ahead of me that were green, and that meant that there might be a train coming along because I'd noticed that a lot of the signals weren't even turned on if there wasn't going to be a train, just to save electricity.

So I listened and looked behind me when I got close to Sprinkle Road, and then I decided that I'd stick to the edge anyway just to be safe, 'cause there were angled slopes on both sides where the dirt came back up to the road. I had to go over a tree and then drop down and bank a little bit to fit, but I knew that trains couldn't get me there 'cause I was on the other side of the posts that held the bridge up.

Then I picked up a little bit more altitude and kept on going, and pretty soon I started to hear the train but it was still a ways off. And each time its horn sounded it was closer to me, and I kept looking back but didn't see it, 'cause the tracks didn't get straight until after Comstock.

And I was well past the big electricity wires and almost to Galesburg before I saw its headlight behind me, and I'd said I was going to turn around, but I was below where airplanes flew and I was curious how long it would take the train to catch up to me, so I followed the tracks around the curve in Galesburg and kept on flying.

I'd almost made it to where the 96 road angles away from the tracks when the train passed under me. It had been able to sneak up 'cause there weren't any roads it had to blow its horn for.

I was high enough up that I didn't get buffeted by the air off the train cars, but I dropped down and landed on the roof of a building that was over the tracks. It was an ugly concrete thing on legs and it had some kind of an enclosed ramp that went down to the ground and it looked like it was some way to load something into trains that went under it, but I could tell it wasn’t used anymore.

I stayed up there and made sure that I kept my hooves under me, 'cause this was a lot taller than the roof over Aric's porch, and I didn't want to fall off. And I took a drink from my camelback and then when the last car of the train had gone by under me I took off again and flew back towards Kalamazoo.

I'd made it past Galesburg and then there was a park on the south side of the road and a car parked right near the entrance which wasn't where cars were supposed to park, but I knew that people liked to put their cars where they weren't supposed to, so it didn't really stick out until I got a bit closer and it looked like Cobalt.

So I flew down and when I got close I could see Meghan was standing outside looking in my direction, and I waved to her and then glided down and landed on the grass next to it. And Peggy got out and said that she had wanted to come out and watch me fly when I wasn't trying to show off, and I guess I did do that on campus a lot. Probably more than I should, but it was fun to play and zip around trees and do rolls.

And since there was a park where we could do that, Peggy drove Cobalt in to where it was supposed to park and I zipped around the trees and did some rolls, and then I flew out over the lake a little bit and I spotted a tasty-looking fish right close to shore, and I was kinda hungry 'cause I hadn't eaten much for dinner, and I almost dove in to get him but then I remembered that I had my airplane radio on one foreleg and my flight watch on the other and I couldn't remember how waterproof it was although it had survived plenty of rainstorms so it would probably be okay.

I waited until he was right close to the shore and dove down and he must have seen my shadow 'cause he got away before I could grab him, and when I flew back up and looked I didn't see him anywhere anymore, so he'd found some kind of hiding spot, which was too bad for me but good for him.

So I landed and Meghan asked what I'd been doing and I said that I was fishing but I was really out of practice and I'd missed and the fish had gotten away, and I didn't think he'd be back. And she said that if I was hungry we could just go to Taco Bell, and I said that I knew but it was more satisfying to catch dinner yourself sometimes.

And then we decided that we'd meet at the Taco Bell on Sprinkle Road and have a snack, although neither of them were too hungry, and then I'd fly back home after that. So they let me have a head start, 'cause Peggy's GPS said that it was six miles.

Well, I beat them there, because I didn't follow the road. I knew about where it was, so I knew the best heading to get there, and I was pretty close; I only had to change course a little bit when I actually spotted the big sign in front of the building.

There were lots of cars in the parking lot, so I was really careful when I landed, 'cause cars didn't always pay attention, and then I waited outside 'cause I thought it would be rude to get my food before they got there. If I’d known what they wanted, I could have ordered it for them and it would have been ready when they arrived.

And so the three of us went in and got our food and sat down at a booth to eat it. I had two bean burritos with sour cream; Peggy and Meghan shared a quesadilla, 'cause they weren't too hungry. Then I went back outside and took off again and I thought about following Cobalt but unless she drove slow I wouldn’t be able to keep up unless she got stopped at all the traffic signals. So I didn't stay over the road, but instead went back to the railroad tracks and followed them through town and all the way to the base of campus and then flew up the hill and landed back on the boardwalk.

I went back upstairs to my room and put away all my flight gear and I read some poetry and then wrote in my journal. I could have taken a shower to rinse off, but I didn't feel like it, especially 'cause I was going to take one in the morning.

When Peggy changed into her sleeping clothes, I was starting to yawn, so I slid under my covers and she asked if I wanted the light turned off and I said that I didn't think I was going to go to sleep right away, but she turned the light off anyways because she's so nice.

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