November 2

I woke up early and even though I'd just gone flying last night, I wanted to fly again, and I thought that I'd go south along the 131 Highway this time. Maybe all the way to Schoolcraft but that was kind of far for a flight before class, unless I flew really fast, or had a good tailwind both ways.

So I put on my flight gear and went out to the boardwalk and called the airplane directors and Dori said that I was up kind of early this morning and when I told her I wanted to fly south she asked if I was migrating and then started to laugh. But she gave me permission and said that if I stayed on the west side of the 131 Highway I could go all the way up to the bottoms of the clouds.

I flew off the boardwalk and after I'd made it all the way across the parking lot I was high enough to easily get over the trees. And I aimed mostly for where the 131 and 94 Highways crossed each other, 'cause that was a good triangular leg and I knew right where it was.

I focused a little bit more on speed, 'cause I really wanted to make it all the way there and back again. And I calculated in my head how long each leg of the journey ought to take if I really wanted to make the time, and what my waypoints were going to be and when I should get there, and that way I'd know if I had to turn around early.

The downside was that I was pushing myself a little bit harder to make it, so I was a little bit tireder than I ought to have been when I crossed over the 131 Highway and climbed a bit higher in the hopes of finding better winds. At least I knew that when I was lower, they were blowing from the southwest, which would help me on the way back.

I concentrated on keeping the straightest course possible, but I also had to stay on the west side of the 131 Highway, which curved to the west to get around some lakes, so I had to choose between the shorter flight path or the more favorable winds.

As I was flying, I was picturing the sky as a big three-dimensional vector field and thought about how I'd figure out the force acting on me. I was pretty sure that in principle it was the same as a two-dimensional vector field, but there was just another axis so it got more complicated.

I wasn't smart enough to figure it out in my head, so after a little while I turned my attention back to flying.

There was a traffic signal at the beginning of Schoolcraft, and that was my goal, so as I was getting closer I kept looking at my watch to make sure that I was going to make it on time. And I would, but only just, and I was gonna have to rush my shower, and if the winds were against me on the way back I was going to be in trouble.

I started my descent when I was near the signal, and made a big, broad turn which crossed right overtop of the intersection, and when I was east of the 131 Highway I was a bit too high, but I was losing altitude pretty quickly and that helped me pick up some speed, but I couldn't keep up that pace forever, and when I leveled off I slowed back down again.

Since the winds were better for me lower, I dropped under a thousand feet and aimed almost directly for Kalamazoo College, even though I couldn't see it yet. But I'd flown this way enough times to know where it ought to be—that was why getting a good idea of your whole territory was important.

I was a little bit behind when I crossed over the 94 Highway on the way back, but not too much, and I was only ten minutes late when I landed on the boardwalk.

I was also kind of tired.

So I went inside and took off my flight clothes as quick as I could and then I did have to wait for the shower 'cause Kat was in there and that meant Peggy was next, and she came into the bathroom before Kat had got out, and said that I hadn't woken her up and I told her I was sorry and I'd flown further than I should have.

And she saw all the lather on me and let me take the first shower, so I was really quick and just mostly rinsed off all the lather and didn't use any shampoo or conditioner. And then I shook myself off and let Peggy have her turn.

I didn't groom as well as I should have, either, 'cause Peggy was kind of rushing, too, since I'd slowed her down. And when we got to breakfast, I didn't think that I had time to wait for an omelet, so I had some shredded wheats and scrambled eggs.

Then I had to leave early 'cause I'd been in such a hurry to get breakfast that I'd forgotten about my lab stuff, and I needed that so I could meet with Lisa after class. I'd just left it on my desk yesterday and never put it with everything else.

I wished that I could just jump out the window and fly from there, and now that it was getting cold and the window wasn't open all that often, Peggy probably wouldn't miss the screen if I took it away so I could get out. The window was a kind of tight fit, though.

I made it to class with a couple of minutes to spare, and I sat down next to Lisa, and Professor Brown told us more about colligative properties. And he reminded us how everything had to have the same alchemical potential through its phases.

Then he taught us Raoult’s law, which was about mixing things like sugar in water, and how it changed the vapor pressure and I wondered if that was why you really needed little nucleuses for water to condense on before it would rain.

And he showed us a composition graph which was like the phase graph, but Professor Brown warned us that above the coexistance line—which was also called the bubble line—it would be all liquid, but you couldn’t know what was under it. And when you reversed it, the line was called the dew line and that’s where the liquid started to make droplets, and then above that line you didn’t know what was there. So it was two different ways to look at it, and then he said that we could mix the two diagrams together, and he made two x-axises but then it was the end of class and we didn’t learn how to use it.

We met in the lounge and went through all of the notes I'd taken and the calculations I'd done, and Lisa checked through them to make sure that they were right, and then she put them in her bag and I asked if Jessica was going to be in her room, so that I could find out about cheerleading for sure, and she said that she should be, so we went over to her room together.

And Jessica was there and suggested that I come with her to the practice tonight because the coach had thought it would be a cool idea but didn't know what I could do or how I might be able to work in a routine. And that was after dinner, and it was in the low building at the bottom of campus, so I said that I would.

I did my thermodynamics homework until it was time for lunch, and then went to the dining hall and got a little bit more food than I usually did, 'cause I hadn't had enough for breakfast, and I got lucky 'cause they had some of the tasty scrod again so I made a little pile of fillets on my plate and then filled the rest with salad and was a happy pony.

Me and Sean walked to math class together after lunch, and Professor Pampena taught us how to tell if a vector field was a gradient field, and it was pretty easy because if the field was defined and differentiable everywhere then it was a gradient field, and he showed us the looping vector field that we’d looked at before to see if it was a gradient, and it wasn’t.

And so the next thing he taught us was how to find the potential, if we had a gradient field, and we could do it by computing line integrals, and that was a lot of fun because we got some really long equations to figure out, which looked complicated but they really weren’t so difficult to solve.

Or we could also use antiderivatives, but he said that we had to be careful how we did it. He said that it was kind of tempting to differentiate both equations but if we did we’d get a different constant and if we tried to mix them all together it wouldn’t work right.

He finished up class by telling us about curl, which measured the rotation of the vectors on the field, and drew the looping vector field again and showed us how to calculate the curl in that.

We went back to Sean's room and did our homework together and then he showed me two new Numberphile movies that were about puzzles, and these had different people who were explaining things. One was about pebbling a chessboard with clones and whether it was possible for them to all get out of prison and I thought it must be, but then Miss Stankova explained how it was proved that it wasn't. And then the other one he said reminded him of me, and it was called the Knight's Tour on a chessboard, and was where the knight visited every space on the board only once. And that one was explained by Brady, and there were two kinds, one that was open and just ended, and one that was closed where the knight could move from her last place to the one where she'd started from and do it again. And since there were so many possibilities, he showed how you could make a semi-magic square with a Knight’s Tour.

There was a gentle rain outside when I went back to my room, and it was really nice to be in, so I got my Bible and went back outside and flew to the porch behind Dewing so that I could have enough cover that my Bible wouldn’t get rained on, but still be outside.

2 Corinthians was a second letter, and Paul said that he was sorry he hadn’t been able to come after all, so I guess it was written a while after the first. And he said how now the words of faith were written on hearts and not stone, and then when I got partway though I got the idea that maybe the Corinthians hadn’t wanted to see Paul, ‘cause he said that they had opened their hearts to the Corinthians but the Corinthians had withheld their affection.

But then in the next chapter he was happy because they had repented, so maybe it was another letter that was later, and they had just taken out the dates when they put it in the Bible. And he said that the church at Macedonia had been more generous, and that he was going to send Titus to get it from the Corinthians.

And Paul also said that they shouldn’t think he was timid, and he boasted about how many times he’d been in prison and how many times he’d been beaten and I thought that was a little braggy, but maybe the Corinthians didn’t know. Sometimes during Winter Wrap-Up, we’d have some pegasuses who had never seen or fought feral weather and they thought that since we had a little town and not so many farms that it would be really easy for us, and I guess we kind of bragged when we told them what it was actually like fighting a feral storm.

Plus you always had to tell a new weathermare the first time she went out to fight a feral storm that it was going to be worse than she imagined. So maybe Paul was justified in boasting a little bit.

The rain kind of came and went, and when I was back in my room I turned on my computer and studied the weather maps to figure out if there were going to be any severe storms and I didn't think that there would. But I decided that to be on the safe side, I'd take my flight gear with me whenever I left the room, so I packed it all in my saddlebags and I strapped my weather radio on my foreleg so I would have it in case Mel called me.

And I also sent him a telegram on my portable telephone and he sent one back and said that he didn't think that the weather was going to be bad enough tonight to need to be watched, and I'd kind of thought the same thing, but I made sure that he knew I was ready in case it changed.

I guess Anna and Reese hadn't seen my radio, 'cause they were really curious about it at dinner, and so I told them how I watched storms and then Sean found the movie that Cyndi had made and showed it to them, and Anna said that I was crazy.

Meghan said that that wasn't crazy and she had a better movie and so she got the one of me fighting the tornado with the tornado team, and they had a hard time believing that that was what we did back in Equestria. Although there usually weren't feral tornadoes in any settled area, 'cause everypony tried to make sure to not let that much energy build up in the atmosphere and any weathermare who was so bad at controlling her territory that feral tornadoes sprouted up would lose her job.

But when there was lots of feral weather, they could happen, and frontier teams had to deal with them. I'd never thought to ask, but I bet everypony on the tornado team had a lot of experience working near feral weather.

There were still a few Halloween cookies left and so I had one and it was pretty stale. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Christine said that she'd taken one at lunch and after she'd taken one bite out of it she'd decided she didn't want it anymore and tried to give it to a squirrel, but he didn't want it, either.

I had a little bit of time to relax in my room before I had to go practice cheerleading, because they didn't practice right after dinner. And then when I got up to go Peggy asked if I was going to Aric's early and I told her that I was going to go cheerleading and then after that I'd go to Aric's. And I remembered to take my saddlebags with all my flight gear.

So when I got down there I found Jessica and she introduced me to the coach, who was called Sandra, and while they were warming up and stretching out she asked me some questions about what I could do and it turned out that flying was the most useful thing that I could do. I could also wave around pom-poms if they were strapped to my forelegs.

Sandra didn't think that there was any way that I could do any of their normal routines, but she said that we could make a special one for me and then I could also do some of the other cheering routines but she thought that I'd be more effective as an extra rather than trying to match everything else that the team was doing. And she said that if she had all summer, maybe she could come up with some routines that I could do in unison with the girls, but she didn't think that trying to introduce significant new choreography right at the end of the season was too smart, and I thought she was right, even though it was a little disappointing.

But at least I'd get to do something.

So we spent the first half of the practice with me watching what the cheerleaders were doing and trying to keep up and match their positions and mostly failing miserably. Ponies just didn't bend like cheerleaders did, although it was at least some consolation that ponies could do things that they couldn't.

And I did see Sandra's concern—I would have just looked silly trying to do the same thing that they did.

Then in the second half she had them practice throwing me up into the air, 'cause they did that to each other but when they tossed someone in the air, she came right back down and I didn't have to if I didn't want to.

I could have just flown up but it was more fun to be thrown, and it took us a little bit to figure out what the best positions were for everyone, but we got it eventually. The hardest part was figuring out where to put my hind hooves so I wouldn’t hurt their arms or hands. And once I got into position, I had to be careful to not move too much, until I was clear of them.

When we took water breaks, I checked my portable telephone just in case Mel had called or sent me a telegram, but he hadn’t.

When we were done practicing, a bunch of the girls went to the locker room to change clothes and I would have gone with them except that I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

I went outside and I could hear thunder way off in the distance I thought, so I flew up to investigate. I still hadn’t heard from Mel, so I thought I might be imagining it. But when I got up above the trees I could see flashes of lightning off to the west, too, so I landed again in front of the gym and put on my flight gear, then I called Mel on my radio and it took him a little while to answer. When he did, he said that it was a really gentle thunderstorm so he hadn’t called me.

It was still my duty to be up there, ‘cause sometimes they started out gentle and then got bad, so I took off and started flying towards Mattewan. I didn’t think I’d get there before the storm did, but I could give him reports on the way.

I got permission from the airplane directors while I was in the air, but since I was under a thousand feet it was okay.

I followed Stadium Drive out because it was the fastest way, and I hadn’t gotten too far past the 131 Highway before the storm caught me.

I climbed up to the bottoms of the clouds, and it was a pretty gentle thunderstorm. There was lots of lightning in the clouds but it didn’t have enough energy to get to the ground, so it just flashed around inside the clouds. And there was hardly any wind and the rain wasn’t any heavier than it had been when it was just raining before.

By the time I got to the gas station, the storm had stopped and it didn’t look like there was too much more out to the west, so I sparked off on a lamppost and then landed next to Mel’s truck, and he gave me a ride back to campus.

I should have had him let me off at Aric’s house instead, but I didn’t think of it until I was back in my room. I knew that he’d probably be out at the theatre late tonight, ‘cause the play opened tomorrow and so anything that they needed to fix had to be done tonight. And I thought he’d be really happy if I was there when he got home, and I thought about having Meghan join me, but then I thought that maybe he would be happier if it was just me, especially since I’d spent Monday night with just Meghan.

So I flew back to his house and I hung up my flight vest over the back of his desk chair so it would dry out, and then I got in his bed. It was kind of strange to be there all by myself, ‘cause the house made some strange noises as it settled and I’d probably heard them before but never paid them any attention.

I thought about trying to stay awake until he got home, but I knew it might not be until really late, and then I’d be super-tired, and I’d wake up when he got in bed and we could have fun then if he wanted to.

Next Chapter: November 3 [Accretion Discs] Estimated time remaining: 17 Hours, 13 Minutes