I was completely absorbed in my book about games in Equestria, and had been for a while, when a knock on the front door brought me up with a start. I looked around and noticed that the sun coming in through the windows was throwing a much longer shadow. I must’ve been reading for a few hours. I got up quickly, as the knocking sounded again.

“Coming!” I yelled, trotting towards the door.

As I opened the door, I saw Electric Sky about to knock again, and Shoeshine behind her, waiting patiently on the little path from the street to my door. “Hey, you two.” I said, pulling the door open wider and gesturing for them to come in. “Welcome to my house.”

They stepped through the door, both looking around. I closed the door behind them and then led the way to the couch and chairs around the fireplace. I took one of the chairs, curling up in the rounded low-backed affair, turned so that I could see my guests as they settled on the couch.

“Wow, Rain,” started Shoeshine. “Your house is really nice. I can’t believe you just moved in here. When I moved into my house, I was living out of boxes for months.”

“Yeah,” added Sky, “and she got really annoyed with me when I arranged them into little mazes.” Sky turned an impish grin at Shoeshine.

“Okay,” said Shoeshine, giving Sky a flat stare, “it’s kind of funny when you tell it now, but it really wasn’t when I needed to find my toothbrush the first morning there and you’d moved every box in the place.”

Sky’s only response was batting her eyes with an innocent smile.

“Twilight and her friends were really helpful in picking stuff out. I didn’t really bring much with me when I moved to Ponyville, so no boxes to worry about.”

“That must be nice,” said Sky. “Sometimes I look around my place and at all the things I’ve picked up over the years and think I should just get rid of most of it. I’ve got no plans of moving soon, but I’d hate to have to pack up everything and haul it anywhere. Feels like I don’t really need most of the stuff I have, to be honest.”

“I need each and every thing in my house, thankyou,” said Shoeshine.

“Shine’s a total packrat, if you couldn’t tell,” said Sky, grinning.

“Am not,” said Shoeshine.

“What about that set of pipes and valves you’ve had sitting on your kitchen table for the past month and a half?” asked Sky.

“I’m going to get that all assembled… when I get a chance,” said Shoeshine. She looked at me before saying, “I’ve been pretty busy lately.”

“Uh-huh,” continued Sky. “I happen to know your last kitchen table project sat there for six months before you finally cleared it out, and where is it now?”

Shoeshine’s eyes dropped to the floor. “Not sure,” she mumbled.

“Hah!” laughed Sky. “I saw it in a box in the bottom of your closet the last time I borrowed a set of socks. It was still in pieces, I might add.”

“Wait, you borrowed my socks?” said Shoeshine, her eyes suddenly narrowed at Sky.

“Yeah, a couple weeks ago, remember when we had the flower tasting night? My hooves were cold. You even told me how nice my socks looked.”

“Well I didn’t know they were my socks!” sputtered Shoeshine.

“I never realized you didn’t even realize they were yours. That’s hilarious, Shine.” Sky dissolved into gales of laughter, with Shoeshine glaring at her. “I washed them and put them back. Don’t worry.”

“That’s. Not. The. Point,” said Shoeshine, through gritted teeth, which only made Sky break up laughing again.

When her hooting died down, Sky looked at me and said, “Hey Rain, I think I should be able to call dibs on those socks, if Shine doesn’t even recognize them.”

I didn’t know much about women, well mares, despite being one now, but even I recognized a question with no safe answer. “Boy that sure is some weather-y weather we’re having, huh?”

Sky’s eyes got really big for a second before she snorted another laugh. I even got a grin out of Shoeshine.

“Good answer, Rain. Good answer,” said Sky.

“So,” said Shoeshine, changing the topic, “what brings you to Ponyville, Rain?”

“Um,” I started, realizing I had no answer for that. “I just needed a change of scenery, I guess.”

“Big move, all the way from… where was it, again?” asked Sky.

“Kentucky,” I supplied.

“Yeah, I don’t think I could pick up and move to a whole new place just for a change,” said Shoeshine.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I needed it. Besides, this seems like a really nice place. Everybody I’ve met here has been very nice.”

“Yeah, for the most part, ponies around here are really nice. I hear they’re not so nice to each other in the big cities, but I really like Ponyville. There’s nothing like living someplace kind of quiet and actually knowing your neighbors,” said Shoeshine.

“Yeah, Ponyville is a really nice town. I mean, I grew up here so I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but I’ve always liked it, at least,” said Sky.

“Oh yeah,” said Shoeshine, “I never asked what you did.”

“I, um,” I paused. “I make games.”

“Games?” asked Sky. “What kind of games?”

“Oh, board games, mostly. Some card games, too,” I replied.

“Neat!” exclaimed Sky. “Can we play one?”

“I don’t have any ready yet,” I said. “I, uh, didn’t bring any with me from Kentucky, so I’ve been sort of re-making some of the ones I’d done before, but they’re not ready to play yet.” I stopped, trying to think. “We could try this one game they used to have in Kentucky. You draw something and everypony else tries to guess what it is.”

“I’m not very good at drawing,” said Shoeshine.

“You don’t have to be,” I said. “It’s a party game, its just for fun, not to prove your artistic abilities. Here, wait just a second.” I got up and headed upstairs, grabbing a decent-sized pad of paper and one of my sketching charcoals. I headed back downstairs at a trot, paper and charcoal clasped between my teeth. I didn’t even realize until I was already back on the first floor that I’d just gone down the stairs pretty fast without so much as a stumble. Neat.

“Okay,” I said, laying the pad and charcoal down on the low coffee-table in front of Shoeshine and Electric Sky. “So here’s how you play. Look around this room and pick something. Then you have to draw pictures to make us guess what it is you’ve picked out. The twist is, you can’t draw what it is you picked out. Oh, and no talking while you’re the one drawing, but you can nod or shake your head to tell us if we’re on the right track.” I was thinking of Pictionary, but we didn’t have category cards or enough people to play teams, so I was making up some new-ish rules on the fly.

I continued, “Like if I picked out a salt-shaker, I can’t just draw a salt-shaker, right? I’ve got to try drawing something like a salt lick, or maybe the sea, because it’s salty, but that’s not really obvious, I guess. Anyway, for the second part, maybe I could draw a milkshake, and you two would have to try to put that together into ‘salt shaker’.” I paused. “Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, I get it,” said Electric Sky. “Let me give this a shot.”

“Oh wait,” I said, suddenly realizing what I was missing. I headed for the kitchen and and grabbed the egg timer I’d see sitting beside the stove. “There’s a time limit,” I said as I brought the egg timer back over to the coffee table. “So turn the egg timer over right before you start to draw.”

“Sounds good,” said Sky, then she let out a long breath as she looked around the room. “Aha!” she finally exclaimed.

The egg timer was suddenly enveloped in a yellow glow as Sky lifted it up and turned it over with her magic. Then the glow appeared around the charcoal as she picked it up and started to draw. At first Shoeshine and I just watched, then I thought I saw what was taking shape.

“Looks like a counter-top,” I said. “Counter… maybe a clock?”

Sky shook her head.

“A scale?” guessed Shoeshine.

Sky shook her head again and kept drawing. I saw a stove-top appear beside the counter, then a refrigerator beside that. Electric Sky could actually draw really well.

Finally, I got it. “A kitchen,” I said.

Sky’s eyes lit up and she pointed her hoof at me, nodding happily. She moved on to another drawing. This time it started with a wavy line. A few more swipes of the charcoal brought what looked like a little cruise ship onto the water, but it was tilted up at a weird angle.

“A boat?” guessed Shoeshine.

Sky shook her head. Then she added a little arrow pointing down right above the boat.

“It’s low?” I asked.

Sky shook her head again, and added another arrow beginning where the first one ended, then another right after that, drawing one at a time until she had a little column of arrows pointing down.

“It’s going down?” asked Shoeshine.

Sky flicked her head from side to side. Not a shake, not a nod.

Must be close, I thought. Then said, “It’s sinking?”

Sky nodded enthusiastically.

“The kitchen sink!” Shoeshine suddenly cried.

“That’s it!” exclaimed Sky, jumping in place.

“Okay,” said Shoeshine. “I think I get it now. Let me have a turn.”

Shoeshine flipped the egg timer over and then picked the charcoal up in her mouth to start drawing. She wound up running out of time on her turn. She’d picked a rug, but I don’t think she’d really thought that one through. It took us forever just to get that she was trying to draw a floor, and then she was trying to draw a blanket and get us to guess associate floor and blanket into a rug, but we didn’t pick up on it in time. Still, Sky and I were laughing at each other’s guesses, and Shoeshine was laughing at the both of us.

Now it was my turn. I’d picked out the clock, and as I flipped the timer and picked up the charcoal to draw, Shoeshine stopped me.

“Whoa,” she said. “How’re you doing that?”

“Doing what?” I asked, looking up at her from the paper.

“Holding the charcoal like that?” said Shoeshine.

“Oh hey, look at that,” said Sky, beside her. “I didn’t even notice at first, but I’ve never seen a pony write like that before.”

“Uh, it’s just how I do it,” I said, suddenly feeling kind of sheepish.

Shoeshine hopped down from the couch. “Can I see that?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied, laying the charcoal down.

Shoeshine reached for the charcoal with a front hoof, and ‘grasped’ it, but it stuck flat against her hoof. She frowned, clearly trying to hold it slightly away from her hoof, like I’d been doing before with my ‘fingers’. She stayed that way for a few more seconds, looking at her hoof, before the charcoal suddenly popped loose from her hoof and fell to the table. “I tried to push it away from my hoof, but I just lost it entirely,” she said.

“It’s more like pushing from…” I paused for a second and thought about how I imagined myself gripping the pencil: thumb, first finger, middle finger, “three ways at once.” I picked up the charcoal again in my ‘fingers’ and drew a circle on the page before putting it down again.

“Hmm,” she said, picking up the charcoal again, but it still looked like it was glued flat to her hoof. She shook it a few times, and narrowed her eyes before finally sighing and putting it down again. “Must take a fair amount of practice.”

“According to Twilight, it’s really hard for a pony to do unless they’ve grown up thinking about handling things that way.” I smiled, “You should’ve seen Twilight. She couldn’t get it, either. I think both of you could do it with some practice.”

“You give it a try, Sky,” said Shoeshine, looking at Electric Sky.

“Hah, I’ll pass. You’re already way better at hoofwork than I am because I just do everything with my horn. If you can’t do it, I’m sure I can’t,” she said.

“Fair enough,” said Shoeshine. She hopped back up on the couch before saying, “Sorry I interrupted your turn. Let’s go ahead and play some more.”

I smiled and picked the charcoal back up.

We wound up playing for a good long while, and it was full dark outside before Electric Sky finally brought the game to an end. “Sorry, you two,” she said before she got up for her next turn, “but we were coming over here for some dinner, and right now I’m kind of starving.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, realizing that I was pretty hungry as well. I hopped off my chair and headed for the refrigerator. I popped it open and said, “What would you like? I have, hmmm. I have some field greens, some carrots. Looks like there’s some daisies here. I have some bread, too. We could do sandwiches.”

“Actually,” said Shoeshine, “a field green salad sounds pretty good.”

“Yeah, field greens would be great,” added Sky.

So I grabbed the big bunch of field greens and looked for a few more things to throw in. There were a few radishes and some grape tomatoes in there, as well, so I grabbed them as well. I grabbed bowls from the cabinet, and pretty quickly we had three bowls of field green salad.

“Do you two like any dressing on your salad?” I asked.

“Oh, none for me,” said Shoeshine. “Good field greens are perfect as is.”

“Uh, I’d take some hot sauce, if you have some,” said Sky.

“Hmm, not sure. Want to help me look? Twilight and her friends stocked things, so I’m not sure where it’d be.”

“Sure,” said Sky, trotting over to the kitchen with me and starting to poke into cabinets.

We found some hot sauce, and because I hadn’t tried any Equestrian hot sauce yet, I gave it a little taste. It was nice, not nearly as spicy or vinegary as Tabasco, but with quite a lot more flavor, something more along the lines of Crystal hot sauce from back on Earth. Of course, considering how my tastes had changed, to the point where a field green salad really did taste good all by itself, which I would never have imagined as a human, I wasn’t really sure how spicy the hot sauce was in comparison to what I’d had back on Earth. For all I knew, this stuff might blow Tabasco out of the water, or it might be pretty mild. I’d probably never know for sure, but it was something to think about.

I decided to douse my salad with a bit of the hot sauce. It actually complimented the slightly peppery greens quite well. Although to my new tastes the greens didn’t definitively need anything on them.

“Oh goodness, another one,” sighed Shoeshine.

“Another one what?” I asked as Sky started to grin.

“Hot sauce addict,” said Shoeshine. “Sky here dumps hot sauce on everything. She’d even put it on dessert if I let her.”

“‘S good,” said Sky, taking a mouthful of salad and winking at me.

Shoeshine stuck her tongue out at Sky, and then we all got down to eating. They always say hunger is the best sauce, and that you can tell how good a meal is by how much conversation goes on. In other words, the better the food, the less the conversation. We were all hungry, and I don’t think any of us made a sound until our bowls were picked clean.

“That was great,” said Shoeshine, patting her stomach with a grin.

“Yeah,” added Sky. “And I don’t just mean the food. It was great meeting you and playing… what was that game called, anyway?”

“Well, it was basically Pictionary, but usually you do teams for that and you have some cards that have different words or phrases on them to try to draw out, but I didn’t have any cards, so I sort of made up some rules. So… you could call it kind-of-Pictionary,” I said, grinning.

“Huh, well it was fun. We should do this again sometime soon,” said Sky.

“Yeah,” said Shoeshine. “I enjoyed myself.”

It made me glad to hear that. I’d had a good time, myself.

I showed the two of them to the door, and we said our goodbyes. I really did want to have them over again sometime soon. In years of living in apartments, I’d hardly known my neighbors, but here, in just a couple of days in a new home, I’d already met some people (ponies, but in my head I was starting to think of ponies as just… people) that I hoped would become friends.

I went to bed that night thinking of some games that might be good for parties, because I suddenly found myself wanting to be around other ponies a lot more. How weird.

Author's Notes:

Not much here, just a pleasant little evening, but I needed to get this out of the way before we start rolling towards the end, which I do have mapped out now. :)