My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

Mission Log – Solar Day 276

Spent hay harvest day at the caves today. The yield is more than the last time, but still far less than the results of the previous cuttings. We just weighed the harvest and the final result was 372 kilograms. This much food, supplemented by just a little potato, was enough to last us until we reached Schiaparelli until the final launch.

Of course, this does not mean that we will completely abandon these plants later. Fresh food (even though we were sickened by the smell of potatoes and alfalfa) was always better than stale food. And the presence of plant life can also help recharge ponies' magical batteries. So we will continue to farm and harvest until the cave and pod farms come to an end, or until we leave. But we have had a surplus of food since then. From now on we have enough food to last us off this broken ball, plus seven days in space. As for the future...if we can't figure out a way to meet Hermes for seven whole days, there will be no point in taking any longer.

Aside from the harvesting, which took about an hour and a half—and we were getting really good at putting hay into the sampling buckets—it was an ordinary day. In order to give you a sense of our current daily life with severely limited EVA activities, the following is roughly our daily schedule.

0600, or local dawn - wake up, clean yourself up as best you can without soap, breakfast (five potatoes for me).

0800 - Daily housekeeping of the habitation module. The ponies use their spacesuits to water the potatoes in the habitat while I do maintenance on some machine. At the same time, we will also pay attention to the Pathfinder conversation, so that if NASA has something urgent to inform us, we can see it in time, such as the relative positions of the Earth and Mars or the many wonderful uses of hematite.

0900 - Prepare EVA to go to Cave Farm.

1000 - Arrive at the cave farm, hug the dragonfly's cocoon, start the magic coloring machine and feed the dragonfly a few minutes of daily ration of rainbow lollipops, and do farm work. Finally there is a chapter from The Lord of the Rings, which take turns reading aloud as an English practice.

1200 - Exit the cave and return to the Hab. A few others go inside first; since my spacesuit is more durable and has spare parts to replace if necessary, I stay outside for a while to clean the solar arrays and complete some odd outdoor chores.

1300 – Lunch. Mine was four potatoes with a little alfalfa tea. (However, Berry recently picked some leaves from cherry saplings and tried to make cherry tea; the taste was surprisingly good against the blandness of boiled hay.)

1430 - Reading time. Starlight spent an hour tutoring a few others in English while I wrote the various reports that would eventually be sent to NASA about farms, geological experiments, and the like.

1530 - Watch TV. Various cheesy sitcoms and outrageous action movies from the s.

1800 - Dinner. Whether I like it or not, I still have to stuff in five potatoes. (Hint: Of course I don't want to. Now all the condiments have been used up, except for the magically collected salt.)

1900 - Playing D&D. Starlight is building her own campaign in order to take over the role of castellan, but in the meantime I'm going to let King Slash, Pickle Flower, Wipecake, and Schmugger complete their campaigns first. Tonight is probably the last one, because they met the Lich King yesterday. After seeing the Lich King dispelling the magic of the pavilion and killing it instantly, all sentimental thoughts about peace negotiations were immediately thrown out of his mind. What followed was a merciless war. Ponies can be really scary when they get angry, not to mention that the dice always go their way. Finally, a dwarf war hammer hit the opponent's phylactery directly, ending the battle with a roaring war cry, "Avenge Mr. Darcy, take my hammer!"

(Don’t ask me why the pavilion is called Mr. Darcy. Even though I was there when it happened, I still have no idea what happened before and after.)

2300 to 2438/0000 - Bedtime.

This is our schedule, or daily punishment, as the case may be. Hopefully we will soon be able to break this boring cycle of day after day. The second attempt to break the dragonfly out of its cocoon is officially scheduled for solar day 284 - eight solar days away.

Hope it will be successful by then. The radio parts depot modifications for Rover 451 were completed two solar days ago, yet there was no way I would have made any progress on the mobile home project without the help of Starlight and/or the Bug. And although we still have plenty of time - our planned departure time is solar day , which is still half an Earth year from now - it is far less generous than before.

On Mars, time has never been our friend.