A Near Miss

The next day, Near Miss was up bright and early to clean out her old apartment. She didn't have all that many belongings, so emptying the one room apartment into her new caravan went quickly. Once she was done, and had returned her key to Sufficient Repairs, she strapped herself into the caravan's pulling harness and... realized she had no idea where she was going to go. After pondering for a bit, Near decided to ask the traveling magician who had sold her the caravan if she had any suggestions for a first trip. And so, Near Miss started on her second trip to Ponyville in as many days.

As Canterlot began to thin into the surrounding countryside, and the sounds of ponies gave way to sounds of nature interspersed with the occasional squeak from her caravan, Near Miss began to ponder her next steps. After becoming bored with thinking about walking, she started to contemplate her future. Near knew that with her caravan, she could park almost anywhere and stay as long as she wanted, but that seemed somehow empty, and really trashy. If only she had somewhere in particular to go, or some quest to complete, it would make her life much more bearable. Just then, she heard a noise above her, and as she looked up, she saw two entangled pegasai falling into a nearby tree. Once she had passed the tree, with nothing else to do on her walk, Near levitated a book out of her caravan and started reading.

As dusk began to fall, Near realized that she would eventually have to find a place to park her caravan for the night. She had already passed several small campsites of the kind that travelers and traders tended to use at night, and was delighted to find another one just as it got too dark to travel on the unlit road. The campsite she had found was rather simple, a small roundabout around a fire pit, with an unmanned 'honor system' stand selling firewood. After parking her caravan, she headed to the fire pit to find that somepony had politely deposited their leftover firewood in a small pile next to the pit.

As it was nearly Neighvember, the night was rather cold, so Near decided to start a small fire to cook her dinner. The wood next to the fire pit was somewhat wet, and getting it to burn was rather difficult, so after a few minutes of trying the standard lazy unicorn way (shoot horn sparks at it 'till it burns) Near decided that the problem could be readily fixed by adding more oxygen. With a quick spell, Near concentrated the oxygen in the air to near purity around the log and, for good measure, even forced quite a bit of the concentrated oxygen into the log itself. The extra oxygen contributed greatly to Near Miss's next attempt to get the log to light, to the point that when her next stream of sparks hit the log, it violently detonated, knocking Near onto her back, and scattering the rest of the firewood. Ears ringing, Near Miss absentmidnedly rubbed her briefly glowing cutie mark before she decided to eat her canned soup dinner cold and then went straight to bed.