The Autumn after Nightmare Night
In the weeks after her first Nightmare Night visit to Ponyville, Princess Luna found herself spending more and more time in Ponyville with the bearers.
At Sweet Apple Acres, Luna spent several nights under the moon with Applejack, assisting with the autumn harvest. Although slim, Luna could buck an apple tree just as well as Big Mac. In the crisp night air, she listened to Applejack hold forth on the last thousand years' advances in agronomy and agrimagic.
It was, sadly, the magic resonance of the Princess of the Night on those trees that would attract the vampire fruit bats that next summer.
Luna's visit to Rarity started with a discussion of modern fabrics, turned into a discussion of the year's fashions at Court—Luna had watched the Grand Galloping Gala from a dark balcony, and remembered every gown—but then turned to a discussion of sewing, and specifically sewing machines, and ended with Luna disassembling Rarity's sewing machine, interrogating Rarity on the inner workings of every mechanical assembly, and with Luna failing to reassemble the sewing machine, and leaving an apology and a large purse of bits for Rarity to summon a repair pony from the manufacturer.
The mare from the sewing machine company took one look at the piles of parts and recommended Rarity buy a new one, but she took the parts back to her depot as spares in exchange for a five percent discount.
Luna then spent a night at the Cutie Mark Crusaders' clubhouse. Wearing a new crimson cape with gold silk lining, Luna told the sleeping bag-ensconced Crusaders stories of her own cutie mark, and Celestia's, and tales of monsters and pirates, wars and battles, hydras and ursas, and other monsters not seen by any living pony in centuries.
The Crusaders did not sleep that night, and barely slept the next night, huddling together in terror. The CMC's guardians found the two days of cowering terror, however, quite relaxing.
Visiting Sugarcube Corner, Pinkie taught Luna to bake cakes and pies, and Luna taught Pinkie the thousand-year-lost art of flat frybread. Luna wiped her eyes as she remembered similar times spent with her own mother, who had died while Luna was trapped on the moon, and to whom Luna had never said goodbye. Pinkie kneaded a loaf of dough and as the leavening puffed it up, Luna cried, "Witchcraft!" and blasted the loaf to the moon, the backblast of the spell leaving Pinkie covered in char and grit.
It took three weeks before a loaf of bread would stop spontaneously teleporting itself out of that kitchen.
After a long high-altitude flight, Luna and Rainbow Dash snuggled up together on a particularly soft cloud under the full moon, Dash sleeping peacefully and Luna, with her eyes closed, luxuriating in the simple pleasure of being so near another pony as they shared their warmth against the late-autumn cold.
At the library, Luna and Twilight spent several nights huddled over ancient tomes, translating Ye Olde Ponish into modern, Twilight teaching Luna modern curse words and Luna teaching Twilight the ancient. They laughed together, for the writers of the olden days were far less polite than modern, merrily discussing bodily functions and romantic liaisons in language that required giggling and blushing to translate.
Spike covered his head with a pillow and tried to sleep.
Luna made an exception and spent a day—rather than a night—with Fluttershy.
At the break of dawn, Luna carried a heavy burlap bag of birdseed from the storage shed so that Fluttershy could refill her various feeders. Songbirds swirled around them and Luna grinned as Fluttershy flitted into the air and cavorted with her friends before landing back on the ground and extending her wings. More than two dozen birds alighted onto her, across her wings and down her spine, before Fluttershy walked them to the feeders to break their fast.
"Eat well, my friends!" Fluttershy called in her tiny voice.
"You are too kind," Luna said, and used a hint of levitation to wipe fresh bird droppings off Fluttershy's left wing.
"Oh, it's nothing, really," Fluttershy said.
They returned the burlap sack to the shed and Luna carried a second, heavier, sack of fish food to the pond. (Luna tried to calculate Fluttershy's possible income from her work boarding and grooming the town's pets, and could not calculate a number that matched, much less exceeded, what she spent in animal feed alone.)
Fluttershy scattered fish food about the pond and then took a large pitcher of pond water back to her shed.
Luna put the sack of fish food onto its shelf. Fluttershy, now wearing safety goggles and a lab coat, transferred water from the pitcher to several racked test tubes, and then dropped brightly colored chemicals from reagent flasks into the test tubes.
"What are you doing?" Luna asked.
"Checking the water. With the colder weather, the biological filter I've established might not be as efficient as it was over the summer. I need to monitor the pH, the ammonia, the nitrite and nitrate, as well the general and carbonate hardnesses, to keep my friends healthy and safe."
Luna nodded sagely, pretending she understood so much as a single word of the explanation.
Fluttershy glared at the test tubes. "The pH is dropping and the carbonate is almost depleted." She grabbed a scoopful of white powder from a barrel labelled Buffer and flew over the pond, sprinkling the powder back and forth.
Landing next to Luna and tucking her wings, Fluttershy said, "There! That should keep the pond safe for a whole moon."
"And what next?"
Fluttershy grinned and then looked down, hair falling over her face. "Just a few last morning feedings." She grabbed a number of corn cobs from a bin and flew out of the shed, toward the middle of her open grassy yard. On short poles were several wooden platforms, and she removed well-gnawed corn cobs from horizontal nails on the platforms and replaced them with the fresh cobs.
Fluttershy landed next to Luna, and they watched the feeders from a distance.
A ground squirrel hopped from the trees and sat on its haunches, sniffing the air. Shyly, carefully, he crossed the yard and climbed one of the posts to the platform and nibbled on the fresh corn.
"And squirrel feeders, too? You are indeed too kind to the woodland creatures, Fluttershy," Luna said.
"Oh," Fluttershy replied with a dismissive flit of her wings. "It's not a squirrel feeder."
Luna raised an eyebrow. "But a squirrel is eating from it as we speak."
An ear-splitting shriek cut across the cottage's grounds. Feathers flashed and wings flared. A ruddy red-tailed shape stooped from altitude. With a flash of talons and a rodent's scream of pain and horror, the shape flapped heavily into the air and then landed on one of the highest branches above the two ponies.
Fluttershy looked up at the feeding shape and smiled. "It's a hawk feeder."
Author's Note
My main hobby is bird watching and bird feeding, and I consider attracting a hawk to be top score.
