“Oh, yes, these books are home.”

Spitfire’s smile grew and grew as Starlight Glimmer’s turn at reading Men at Arms got to the part where Sam Vimes, commoner bordering on commonest, was forced to attend a party of the city’s wealthy aristocracy as part of the build-up to his marriage into their ranks.

Cherry Berry, on the other hoof, found herself squirming on her haunches.

She’d spent years in close proximity to a queen who, on her good days, showed brief and fleeting glimpses of something that might, in a good light, resemble a decent pony, but who on her bad days was only restrained from being worse than Tirek by her own paranoia. She was on greeting terms with three princesses and a reasonably close acquaintance (and sometime rival) of a fourth, and knew all their major foibles and failings. But despite it all, Cherry Berry had always had the faith of most ponies that Celestia and her ministers and nobles were wise and benevolent ponies who always sought the best for all Equestria.

So several pages of nobles being ignoble shook one of her fundamental views of the world to the core, even if they were fictional, even if they were on a world that rode on a turtle instead of her own. “Spitfire, I just can’t see it,” she said.

“You never went to Celestia’s ball before Twilight and friends did, no?”

“Excuse me,” Starlight muttered, “might I continue, please?”

“No, I didn’t,” Cherry Berry said. “I only went once, after the moon landing.”

“I saw before Twilight broke the ball,” Spitfire said. “Shake hooves with Prince Blueblood, pretend not see where he looks. Shake hooves with dukes and counts and rich ponies and don’t see them turn up noses at working ponies. All so rich. All so… so good parents, good blood. And only a couple not greedy, petty dummies.”

“I don’t see it that way. The capital ponies I meet are just ponies, rich or not.”

“There reason why changelings fly all joy-ride flights.”

“Excuse me!” Starlight Glimmer said. “Do you want to end Story Time early today? No? Then stop interrupting! We can discuss this all at the end like we usually do!”

Spitfire took her usual short turn, and then Cherry Berry read the section about Vimes and Carrot in a murdered dwarf’s workshop.

About midway through, Dragonfly spoke up. “You know, I kind of understand that. It always feels weird using a tool that belongs to somebody else.”

“Oh really?” Mark asked. “Was that why you were so eager to mess with my tools the first couple hundred sols?”

“That’s different!” Dragonfly protested. “I thought they might be all neato keen alien tools, with mysterious alien properties and functions.” She snorted and added, “And all I got was your electric screwdriver and the sample probe. We have power drills back home.”

“Well, forgive my species for not having improved on the hammer!” Mark said. “And I’m sorry that hydrospanners were too much trouble for NASA to ship up here! Speaking of, where’s my half-inch ratchet wrench?”

“I told you,” Dragonfly said, “it’s in the tool box in Rover 2, because the only things that take your half-inch sockets are on the rover.”

“I looked there.”

“Excuse me,” Cherry Berry protested. “Maybe you two could do this not during Story Time?”

“Sorry.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you. Continuing-“

“But it’s just as weird having someone else using your tools as it is to use someone else’s tools.”

“Even weirder. It’s like your hoof is on some other bug’s leg, and you want to-“

“I said later!”

Silence, in stereo.

“Continuing. Rubbing his head with one hand…”

It was Mark’s turn again when the book got to the visit of Detritus the troll and Cuddy the dwarf to the Alchemist’s Guild, complete with exploding billiard balls.

“Now this,” Fireball said with feeling, “feels like home. Feels like the job.”

“I can’t count the times I’ve walked into Twilight Sparkle’s lab and had to duck the instant I opened the door,” Starlight Glimmer said.

“It’s like they took the changelings who work in vehicle assembly,” Cherry Berry said, “and gave them chemistry sets and a budget.”

“Except without the old griffon to keep them in line,” Dragonfly said. “Do you think he’s enjoying his retirement?”

“With as much as we paid him, he ought to be,” Cherry Berry replied.

“Come to think of it,” Starlight added, “these people remind me a bit of Sunburst, too. And Minuette, come to think of it. And, well, every experimental potion brewer I ever met.”

“Leonard of Quirm,” Spitfire struggled to pronounce the name. “Think he minotaur?”

“The way they talk about him, sounds like he’d fit in with our bulls,” Cherry Berry agreed.

The conversation paused for a moment, and Dragonfly took the opportunity to ask Mark, “Aren’t you going to ask us to shut up, too?”

“Why?” Mark asked. “For me this is much more interesting. For one thing, if your space programs are run like the Ankh-Morpork Alchemists’ Guild, it would explain so much about how you got here.”

“Hey, that’s a bit mean,” Dragonfly said. “Accurate, but mean.”

“It not just space program,” Fireball said. “All pony science and magic like that.”

“All of it?” Mark looked at his visitors. “How do you still have a planet?”

“Immortal princesses,” Starlight Glimmer said. “It really works, I’m telling you.”

Finished the second bracket for supporting the rover saddlebags. We need eight in total for the load we’re going to put in them. The jumbo batteries will ride in loops outside the brackets, so most of their weight will be borne by the brackets. The cold-resistant food and other stuff will ride in pouches between the brackets and the rover body. Based on our best estimates, the roof will bear about a ton of weight, or about double its rating on Earth. In Mars gravity, it’s less of an issue, so long as we don’t slam down off a cliff or something.

It’s good to be working with my hands. Dragonfly and Fireball are assisting me on this, and I think they’re glad of the work, too. Working with the plants ceased to be interesting for anyone except Cherry ages ago, and we’ve cut back D&D sessions to once per week to keep us from getting tired of it too quickly. The Whinnybago is almost done except for testing, which we can’t do until we’re done with the cave farm. We’re almost out of the solvents and reagents for the chem lab, so geology science experiments are pretty much over. Boredom is beginning to be a serious problem, so any busy-work seems like a treat now.

Take Starlight Glimmer. She’s waiting until Sol 360 to do the repulsor enchantment, because she wants to use the batteries she’s reserved for making more batteries to do that job. We won’t be able to take many more batteries with us than we already have due to weight and space issues, so using them to make the things that will throw the MAV hard enough for us to meet Hermes makes sense. But in the meantime she’s got down time, so she’s thrown herself into the Save the Cave project.

Today she made a bunch of new sunlight relay crystals in the deeper parts of the cave. The idea is that the sunlight channeled through also contains heat, so the more light the inside of the cave gets, the less dependent we are on running water.

Which brings up a question that, in retrospect, is so obvious I’m surprised you, historians of the future, haven’t shouted it loudly enough for me to hear it here in the past: “Why didn’t you think of this before? Starlight made all the other crystals with almost zero magic, so what took so long?” And the answer is, we didn’t think of it, what with making batteries, sealing the cave, getting rid of methane, reviving Sleeping Ugly, and Starlight falling over and nearly dying half the time she casts spells. You know, petty unimportant little distractions like that. But we still should have thought of it, especially when we saw how efficient the original lighting crystals turned out to be.

We’ll have to monitor the temperature inside the cave closely over the next couple of weeks. The ultimate goal, of course, is to shut off the water heating system altogether. We’re nowhere near that point.

Of course, heat is just one of the many problems. But Starlight is exploring another avenue: the rainbow crystals. After all, we know two things about that random enchantment- it stores magic energy, and other enchantments can be added on top of it. That means, in theory, the rainbow crystals could be used to power other things, like for example a way of circulating water more reliable than condensation dripping off the cave ceiling. (Which it doesn’t do, by the way; the cave roof is high, but not high enough for the temperature to be that different. Also, the life support box’s air circulation keeps the humidity down quite a bit.)

About the only person who doesn’t have something to occupy her time is Spitfire. She tends to hang around Starlight like a vulture, waiting for our adorable little four-legged power tool to blow a fuse again. She doesn’t complain, but it can’t be rewarding.

I wish I could think of something she could do to be useful. Maybe I could reactivate the MDV improvised flight sim. We disconnected its power after we stole a third of the Hab’s electrical storage to install in the Whinnybago, but we might be able to spare the juice for some flight sim runs.

(Speaking of, it would be nice if NASA settled on the MAV modifications so they could send us an updated flight sim program before we leave here for Schiaparelli. Cherry Berry got very good at flying a stock MAV in the sims, but we’re going to be riding to rescue or doom in the kludge from hell. It’s not the same thing.)

Ah, well. The others have pulled out the computers for a network hearts tournament. Guess I’ll join them. It beats watching more CHiPs. (And yeah, I know Ponch is meant to be a lousy cop with a heart of gold, but he’s the only one in that department who doesn’t have a giant redwood up his ass… )

Author's Notes:

If you didn't know, the nitrocellulose billiard ball was actually a thing on Earth at one point in the early twentieth century, when demand for pool balls outstripped the ability of humans to massacre wildlife in a brutal and wasteful fashion for their ivory. (I know, hard to imagine, right?) The Earth version of exploding pool balls weren't nearly as showy as the Discworld version, but I just wanted to remind those of you who are Pratchett fans that he got TONS of material from real life.

And for those of you who aren't fans: there's a part in a book where a group of alchemists test artificial pool balls. The result, according to the rule of billiards printed by Hoyle, is a miscue.

I really am producing a lot of filler here, but that's because the crew's life is filler right now. They're finding things to fill the hours while they count the days. I begin to have sympathy for Andy Weir making the 150-sol time-jump. And if I edit this down to a proper book, I might end up doing the same.