The Mailmare and the Astronomer
"Are you sure you're up for the trip?" asked a tall stallion in concern. The Earth Pony removed his blue and red postage cap almost as if he were respecting the dead. A mare, more than half of his age and height nodded vigorously. "In this wind?" Another nod. Apparently, his most faithful mailmare wasn't going to back down from this job.
She saluted, simultaneously pushing her blonde mane from her eyes. "I can handle it, Chief, you bet!"
He sighed in futility. His mouth formed into a gentle smile, and he finally handed the Pegasus her mailbag containing a single parcel within. "I don't know why, but I know you can. Just be extra careful, Derpy."
Her lips parted to reveal white teeth underneath. She placed the bag's strap over her shoulder and tightened it. "I will, Chief!" With that, she left the small postage building for the night, clipping the doorframe with her flank.
Her boss watched as the wind picked her up like a leaf. He rushed out in a panic just in time to see her spin and take off into the torrent of rushing air. "Luna, watch over her."
Derpy fought against the wind with all of her might. She had gone out into much worse before, so this was just a walk in the park. Usually she wouldn't be too concerned with making such a flight for a single delivery, especially on a windy night. Those usually waited until morning when she could see. This particular package was very important, both to the postal service for which she worked and to her personally. Rarely did her schedule ever come into contact with mail going to the Northern Observatory, so it stood to reason she would jump at every chance to get anything up there.
Nopony knew why she only visited when she had to bring the mail. It was just easier to go when one had free time. Sure, there were ponies who asked, but they only got the simple reply of, "Just cuz." There were even times when she had gone out during thunderstorms, adding to everypony's confusion. How she even got there in one piece was a mystery that only she had the means to solve.
A secret lay in the skies above Ponyville she exploited everytime she flew in bad weather. Derpy climbed higher and higher until she found the strip of atmosphere that no cloud or weather condition ever crossed. Ponyville was but a spec when she reached it tonight, having rose with the cool air of the season. Now that the wind was both below and above her, she could enjoy a relaxing flight to the north mountain range.
The moon illuminated the ground below. Its silver light made everything possible to see, even after the lights of Ponyville were no longer visible. She glided northward, flapping occasionally along the way to keep out of the wind. Equestria slowly grew upwards with the elevation until eventually the Pegasus was even with the terrain. Mountains began to pass by. The farther into the wilderness she went, the more they became. Soon a forest of mountains were shielding the valleys from the wind. Finally able to, she climbed with excitement. She was nearly there.
The landscape kept rising and rising like a gigantic ramp into the sky until the largest mountain ever discovered in Equestria shot past the moon itself. Fortunately, Derpy didn't have to go that high. Her destination sat on a large, protected cliff only about a quarter of the way up. The Northern Observatory stood silent in the night. Most of it was darkened, except for the small speck of a window in the dome of its tower. She had her target now. Derpy immediately tucked her wings and streamed right to the window.
Inside the lantern-lit room worked a stallion at a table. He was wide awake despite the late hours. A pair of glasses held in place by his void blue nose helped adjust the vision of his cerulean eyes. He concentrated on the chart in front of him. Around it were hundreds of calculations and several instruments astronomers just like himself used for mapping stars. Every once in a while, he would add a dot here and a question mark there before placing his quill behind his ear.
He glanced out of his window and huffed. The clouds were still out there, taunting him with their opaque properties. One of the notes he had jotted down just before the overcast hit gave him an idea. He quickly grabbed his quill. In his rush, several papers and an empty inkwell hit the floor. He worked through the ditzy mistake, having not even noticed there was now a mess to clean up. The stallion sighed happily. Three hundred stars mapped and it wasn't even midnight. However, the satisfaction was short lived. He was out of calculations and the only way he could get more was to observe the sky, something he would have done in a heartbeat if the clouds weren't blocking his view.
"I'll just go to bed now, I think. Yes, bed—sleep—is essential. It is early. Maybe too early. I might wake up during the day." He shook his head in disgust at the thought. "I'll sleep later. Later is good. Later is best."
The astronomer leaned back in his chair, and promptly fell over. He was too distracted by his thoughts to even notice. The ceiling offered him no assistance with his formulas, so he closed his eyes to ignore it. Outside, he heard the distant howling of the northern winds over the mountain summits. He wondered if it was an omen. Just whether it was an omen, not so much about good or bad. His life was bland right now in the absence of a clear sky. His mind soon wandered off to use his eyelids as mediums to paint detailed pictures of stars, far away and near.
Too enwrapped in his mental art the day…night-dreaming colt failed to hear the faint sound of tapping coming from the other side of the massive observatory. The knocks soon stopped after the mare delivering them noticed the colt inside asleep on the floor. She tried pushing the window inwards, only she gave it too much and tumbled inside onto a table full of observation equipment. Stunned, she lay there in a daze. As she tried to collect her bearings, they only managed to become more jumbled when her weight combined with that of the many instruments around her caused the table's legs to buckle. She was sent, in a louder crash and forward roll, to the floor.
The loud clatter pulled the nearly-asleep colt from the depths of nodding off. He slowly climbed to his hooves just in time to see Derpy frantically rolling among the telescopes, sextants, and filters in an attempt to get off the floor. Curiously, he strolled across the observatory. She still hadn't manage to get up when he arrived, though it wouldn't matter if she did because he would have had the same reaction. He tilted his head to the side and studied her. He blinked three times across the span of twenty seconds, almost not believing she was flailing her hooves around on his marble floor. Sometime later, which could very well have been hours, he decided to lend a helping hoof by first speaking a very helpful word.
"Hello", he uttered calmly.
Derpy stopped immediately. She turned her head up to see the upside-down Pegasus standing over her. She rolled over, finally centering her gravity in her wings and not everywhere else. The mare struggled to focus both eyes on him even though one was enough for now. She smiled. "Hi!" Her voice echoed around the room. The colt followed it until it faded away. Once again looking at her he extended his hoof helpfully.
"Here", he offered simply.
"Thanks!" Derpy grabbed his hoof and jerked herself up, almost knocking the glasses from his face.
Before he could fully regain his posture, Derpy presented him with the package she dutifully delivered. He took it, eying the name Star Gazer in blue ink on the top. He examine every aspect of the small box: size, weight, shape, and the sound the contents made when he shook it. Satisfied, he opened it. Packing peanuts flew in all directions in his wake of crazy digging until he reached the bottom, where a small lens lay. Here he observed the lens, taking much longer now to make sure that the specifications he ordered were applied. Star Gazer looked back up to see Derpy had taken an interest in something besides him.
"Thank you, Derpy." He flew the box to his lit table. "Should any other pony attempted the delivery, I might have not gotten this tonight, or even ever."
Derpy giggled. "Welcome, Star!"
He grinned. Only she called him that. Well, she was the only one he allowed. Usually ponies just called him "Gazer", for he found "Star" too feminine for his tastes. "I take it you want to stay a while, like always?"
She nodded. "I wanna see the stars!"
At this he frowned. "Forgive me Derpy, but I can't show you tonight. The sky. It's overcast and my telescope is merely a reflector, not a radio array. I cannot see through the clouds."
Her disappointment only lasted for three-eighths of a second before she bolted out of the window. He followed her, stopping at the window to observe her moving the clouds from over the observatory to random places below the cliff. Star chuckled. Only Derpy would upset Cloudsdale's forecasts so they could see the stars beyond. It didn't take long before she was back in the observatory, breathing heavy despite the light work. She beamed happily, hoping she did good. She did very well from what she could tell from her friend's grateful applause.
"Astronomical, Derpy Hooves! This deserves a treat! How does…a few blueberry muffins sound?"
"Muffins!? Where!?" She zipped around the observatory at blinding speeds.
"I'll go get them, if you don't mind waiting here for a few minutes."
Derpy slipped on the floor, sliding right up to him on her back. She nodded embarrassingly. He left the semispherical room quickly, knowing what would happen should he be so much as a hair late after mentioning muffins to the gray Pegasus. While he was gone, Derpy got back to her hooves. A snack to go along with the treat of gazing at the stars was more than she could ask for even if she got both every single time she visited.
Star Gazer returned to find Derpy in the seat of his gigantic telescope, either having forgot about the muffins, which was unlikely, or waiting to eat while she looked through it. Whichever it was, he made his way up the few steps to the second level of the observatory. He set the tray of muffins down on the table at the far end of the circular platform that held the telescope. He created a gentle breeze with the help of his wings, wafting the smell of the muffins to the mare. She jumped rolled out of the elevated chair and dashed for the platter. Star let her dig in. He wasn't much in the mood for the baked goods and had an observatory dome to open anyway.
At the other end of the walkable surface of the platform, Star turned a large crank, which in turned rotated hundreds of gears. Derpy listened to the moaning of the ceiling as its doors split away from the end of the telescope it housed. The process of exposing them to the night sky took only a few seconds before a deafening BOOM reverberated through the ponies themselves.
"I've discovered a few new stars since the last time you had peered through the telescope", he said from the vacant chair. "If you're ready, I can show you them now."
"Okay!" The gray Pegasus finished off the last muffin that managed to survive the last few minutes and rushed across to sit in the chair. She slid into the padded seat below the giant reflecting telescope. She looked through the lens, but didn't see anything. To her left, Star was too busy setting the telescope to help her out. Thinking that she was looking at empty sky, she looked into it again. Still, she saw nothing but black blankness. "Star the telescopes broken! I can't see a thing!"
She moved over to let him try looking. He recoiled in shock. "Impossible, no more than an hour ago was I able to see the stars! What could possibly have happened!?" He flew up to the frame of the mechanism, checking the exposed mirrors for any signs of blockage. He landed. "I don't understand…unless…" He checked the eyepiece to find it was covered by a lens cap he put there earlier. He smoothed back his already backwardly smoothed mane. "ID-10T error…"
"What's that?"
"Oh, never mind, Derpy, you should be able to see a star now."
Now that she could look successfully, she peered into the telescope. She gasped, what was in the field of view was a burning white ball. It sent solar flares outwards, as if trying to engulf her in a hug. "It's really pretty!"
"That's Hydrous X-19R. I found it after noticing unusual orbits in the surrounding stars", he explained. Using the list of coordinates he hung near the fine tuning dials of the telescopes, he readjusted it. "You should now be seeing the blue dwarf Terbium 89-2H. I recently calculated that it is the twin star of Terbium 89-2E using infrared readings from the Manehattan Observatory and the Amblesburg Radio Telescope. Apparently some three billion years ago the star split when a nearby star went supernova, creating the two stars we see now."
Derpy listened with great interest to his lectures. She understood a lot of it since he explained each part in detail at some point in her visits. Star Gazer had the voice many university professors longed to have: strong, soft, and definite. She could listen to him for hours, which she ended up doing along with seeing hundreds of stars. The only thing that stopped the sightseeing of the universe was their local star, which Celestia rose three minutes early.
"The night is never long enough", said Star over the sounds of the observatory's closing ceiling.
Derpy didn't respond, for she was too busy yawning. She slept the whole day just so she could make the late delivery and stay over, yet the morning always required her to need more oxygen. She donned her mailbag. "I'll see ya later, Star!"
"Derpy, wait!" the colt called suddenly.
She paused in takeoff to listen to what he had to say. He cleared his throat. "I'm currently waiting on a very important package from Cloudsdale. It should arrive in Ponyville tomorrow evening…I trust only you to bring it here. The other mailmares don't seemed to regard anything marked 'fragile', and everything you bring to me is in the most excellent conditions. Will you please bring it?"
Derpy was filled to the brim with the sense of importance. She nodded breathlessly. "I'll be here no problem!" There was nothing further for either of them to say, so she flew out of the window from where she had come in. She was so happy she barely noticed hitting her head on the way out. All that she knew was that she was going to come back soon.
So this is the reason the update for Kindness is the Cure is delayed. It was getting hard writing for the same story over and over again because it felt like I was over using phrases. I was honestly starting to become stressed out to the point of losing my creative edge, which writing this new story gave back to me.
Trivia:
Star Gazer has only been in development for about six months, though his concept came far longer before that. I wrote him with a split personality, as I'm sure you saw when he was alone versus in the presence of Derpy.
This story came about on impulse as I needed a medium for which to take a break from Kindness is the Cure. Don't worry, I plan to update them both as well as begin posting newer stories frequently, with my first story taking priority.