"It's all done! I didn't have that much - the library has copies of most of the important books, and I'm not really a 'clothes' pony so all I have is one dress for special occasions. Speaking of special occasions, do you want a ticket to the Grand Galloping Gala? The Princess sent me six."

"Mmm... maybe," he says. "Who else are you inviting?"

"Cordy and Streak and Brightblaze and Guiding."

"If a bunch of them go, then I'll go too," he says. "And a bunch of them probably will. But if you find somepony else that you want to invite and they really want to go, I don't mind giving up my ticket."

"Okay. Maybe if nopony else on the list is interested I'll just sell the tickets. I'm not all that excited about it either, although I guess I could visit my parents as long as I was in Canterlot since that's not my default location anymore."

"Somepony else will want to go," he assures her. "I know Streak and Blaze have family in Canterlot too, and Guiding and Cordy both like parties."

"Oh, okay then." On to the twins' tower!

Blaze is, predictably, in. You can tell by the clanging sounds.

Knock knock!

"Hi! D'you wanna go to the Grand Galloping Gala? I have tickets."

"Ooh," she says. "Cool! Sure! Wait, can Streak come too?"

"Yeah, of course. I have plenty. You're just the one who answered the door."

"I'll go ask her what she thinks! Come in if you want," she says, and leaves the door half-open while she dashes inside to put her boots on (the missing plate having been replaced a few days prior) and blaze out the window.

Clarity comes in to see what has been the subject of tinkering lately.

"Cool." Clarity unpeels a couple of tickets and floats them over.

"Awesome, thanks! You're the best, Clarity!" Spontaneous hug!

Awww! "You're welcome!"

Hug hug yay!

"I'm going to ask Guiding next and then Cordy and if they also want to come that'll be everypony."

"Joy too?"

"Spotted him first, already asked."

"Cool," she says. "I guess I'll let you get on with it, then!"

Guiding also wants a ticket! She loves parties!

Sebastian the raccoon is sitting beside the sign that says Cheery Cherry Orchard, nibbling from a bowl of fresh cherries. When he spots Clarity, he waves and makes an inquiring noise.

"Hi, Sebastian. I'm looking for Cordy."

He nods and points toward the farmhouse.

To the farmhouse. Knock, knock!

"Clarity! Hi! Come on in!"

"Hi! I have tickets to the Grand Galloping Gala. Want one?"

"Ooh, definitely," she says. "I'll trade you a muffin." (There is a plate of them cooling on the kitchen table.)

"Ha, nopony else traded me anything. No takebacks." Clarity floats a muffin and offers her penultimate ticket.

"I promise not to shake you down for my muffin under any circumstances," giggles Cordy.

"Good, that would get," Clarity takes a bite, "messy, probably."

"I can only imagine." She takes her ticket and finds somewhere to put it. "So how have you been settling in?"

"Pretty good. I'm all unpacked."

"Excellent. Enjoying the library? Getting along with your junior librarian?"

"Blueberry's very helpful. I barely have any work to do. I should probably ask the princess if I actually have a budget and, like, pay her."

"I'm sure she'd appreciate that. And I suspect if you do, she'll spend some of it populating your library with more books."

"Well, that would be an awfully efficient use of my budget, then, assuming I have one."

"Yes, yes it would," Cordy agrees.

Om nom muffin nom. "What are you up to?"

"Baking. And now that that's over with, I'm going to pick up Seb and do the rounds checking on local creatures. But there's no big rush on that; I have time for a chat first."

"Would I spook the creatures if I came along? I'm curious."

"I can tell you when to be quiet or hang back; should be no problem as long as you can do that," shrugs Cordy.

"I can do that."

Clarity follows her. "Are the critters getting muffins too?"

"The ones who eat muffins, yes."

"What do the ones who don't eat muffins get?"

"Various things that they eat, or nothing if they prefer to get their own food."

"Makes sense. What kinds of things live around Ponyville, anyway?"

"Hummingbirds, butterflies, bats - fruit bats especially; they have a whole section of the old apple orchard to themselves - bears, mice, squirrels, beavers, raccoons, bunnies... that's most of the common things. Plus a few hawks and an eagle."

"I didn't know there was an old apple orchard."

"Yeah, before my family moved here, it was called Sweet Apple Acres. Crash started planting cherry trees before I was born, and helped them along with magic, and now the working parts are mostly cherries except for the zap-apples and one regular apple field that had some of the best trees. But the west orchard was full of fruit bats when we got here and it seemed like a waste to chase them out, so we just let them have it."

"What's a zap-apple?"

"They're a kind of magic apple. The zap-apple trees bear fruit at unpredictable times, and you have to get it all off the trees in a single day or the remaining apples just disappear, but they make the most amazing jam if you know the recipe. Which we do."

"I didn't know there were magic apples. How unpredictable is unpredictable?"

"There's no pattern to it at all, you just have to pay attention to the signs so you know when to get ready for the harvest - they usually don't grow during winter, but it's been known to happen."

"I'd like to see them, if there's enough time to let ponies know when they're coming."

"You can even help with the next harvest, if you want! We usually hire anypony who wants to help, because we'd never be able to get it done with only the two of us."

"Sounds like fun! Especially if they don't, I don't know, explode when levitated; I'm not nearly coordinated enough to buck a tree."

"They do not explode when levitated!" she promises.

"Good, I wouldn't be much help if they did. Unless exploding them is part of the jam recipe."

"Hi, Seb," echoes Clarity. "What's weird about the jam recipe?"

"I think the part that stands out the most is painting polka dots all over the kitchen."

"...How does this influence the jam, exactly?"

"Beats me. Something about the magic. Makes a noticeable difference, though - no-polka-dot batches have less kick, and the colours aren't as bright."

"I am really curious about the technical functionality of this magic apple and will probably not be much help actually harvesting them after all, I'm going to be magically poking them if you'll let me."

"You can go look at the trees anytime you want when they're not bearing ripe fruit. When they are bearing ripe fruit, I'd rather you help harvest if you're going to be on the field at all. But if you want to buy some zap-apples to magically poke, or even grow your own zap-apple trees somewhere that's not the main zap-apple field so you can experiment on them in peace, I won't stop you."

"Oh, are they relatively easy to grow? I'm not, except literally speaking, very green-hoofed."

"You put some seeds in the ground and the next day you have a tree. The only reason most ponies don't have their very own zap-apple trees is because they're inconvenient to have close to your house or in public areas - too zappy."

"When they're bearing, or all the time?"

"Particularly when the apples appear, but they've been known to zap things at other times too, if you bump into them too hard or if there's lightning nearby."

"Could I grow a little one in a pot and keep it under a wire basket?"

"You can try! But I don't know if the seed'll sprout a smaller tree just because you put it in a pot. It might not, and then you'd have a broken pot and a full-sized zap-apple tree to haul away."

"Sounds inconvenient. Can I try sprouting one in a pot in the field of them, and then if it's huge all I have to do is make sure it's sitting neatly in the ground?"

"Sure. I'll set aside some seeds from the next harvest for experiments."

"Yay!"

Cordy giggles.

"I'm very fond of magic. It's not quite my literal special talent, but it's close enough that I can almost pretend that it is."

"What is your literal special talent?"

"It's sort of hard to put into words - I usually sum it up as 'clear thinking', and the next question is 'why a bell', and my standard answer to that is 'clear as a bell'."

"Gotcha. Matching talents to cutie marks is kind of a hobby of mine," she says.

"What's yours, why a spiderweb?"

"I always have trouble explaining it, which might be part of the reason for the hobby," she says. "But it's about - interconnectedness. The most obvious part is being able to understand and talk to any kind of creature that can communicate at all. But that's just the surface, the practical effects. I think my special talent might really be... not quite 'making friends', but something close to that."

"You are good at making friends."

"It's one of my favourite things!"

"Were you befriending somepony when you got your cutie mark?"

"Actually, I was heading off a stampede of terrified squirrels."

"...Huh."

"I did make friends with some of them," she adds. "After I got them calmed down and fed them some cherries."

Clarity giggles. "I got mine when I was working on my final exam at the School for Gifted Unicorns."

"Nice!"

"Mm-hm. I'd been going about it the wrong way and then I just - backed up and reexamined the problem and then it was easy."

"That happens sometimes."

"Mm-hm. I was very pleased with myself."

"I think that's a common feature of ponies getting their cutie marks!"

"Have you ever wondered why so many ponies have names and cutie marks that are alike?" Clarity says. "I mean, not everypony, you don't, but my parents didn't know that much about me when they named me - Bell isn't even a family name - and then poof."

"I wonder that a lot," she says. "My two basic theories are that ponies' personalities tend to turn out to match their names, or that cutie marks are predetermined and what somepony's parents name them is somehow influenced by what their cutie mark is going to be. But I've never seen any strong evidence for one or the other particularly."

"Yeah, it's pretty much got to be one or the other, or maybe a 'sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, sometimes neither' situation. I'm tempted to guess that in my case it's the name matching the predetermined cutie mark, because if I were being steered to match 'Clarity Bell' I'd probably be the musician people tend to mistake me for."

"But on the other hand, if you start out with a personality that might not have that much to do with your name and get steered toward something that fits, you could end up with things that fit oddly. Like 'Clarity Bell' for a clear thinker."

"It's a weird fit either way. My personality's been pretty stable since I was a very little pony, though."

"'Steering' might not be the right word. It might be more like... your personality's going to be a certain way when you're born, however it would've turned out if you didn't have a name at all, and then when you get your name it gets tweaked to fit. I guess that's testable, but I'm not going to kidnap a lot of baby ponies and raise them with no names or weird names just to see what happens."

"Oh goodness," giggles Clarity. "Yeah, this is the kind of thing that can only be studied anecdotally or maybe statistically if you find a way to quantify it."

"If I ever get my hooves on some free time and a lot of census data that includes cutie mark pictures and personality surveys, I might just try it. But that's a big 'if'."

"There's a little census data like that, but not a lot. Bell Curve - no relation - went through what I think was the entire town of Kimblewick, but Kimblewick only has about a hundred ponies living there and he didn't follow up."

"Probably not enough to really get anywhere with, then."

"Yeah, it'd be a big project. And it'd be interesting, but I'm not sure what we'd do if we knew. Name our foals after things we wanted them to grow up to be if it were that direction of mechanism, I guess, but that probably wouldn't always turn out like you'd expect anyhow."

"Yeah. I think I'd still want to know, though, even if it wasn't going to be directly useful. It's just such an obvious coincidence."

Clarity nods. "Well, maybe someday somepony will pick up the project and pick at it long enough to draw conclusions."

"We can only hope!"

"Aww, ducklings," says Clarity, as they approach a pond. "Do ducks get muffins or something else?"

Clarity supervises the ducks, more interested in their cuteness than in what they have to say.

They are quite cute. One of the littlest ducklings decides to oversee this meeting from on top of its mother's head, but finds itself unable to balance there and keeps falling back into the water.

"Awwww!"

"Friendly bears?"

"Friendly enough. I wouldn't recommend antagonizing them, but they're not going to try to eat you if all you do is show up and watch while I talk to them."

"Okay. I'm not going to - I'm not even coming up with anything slightly tempting for bear-antagonizing purposes."

"Good!"

"Unless they're antagonized by weird things? I don't know much about bears. Animals in general, really, beyond common knowledge."

"Nothing you're likely to do by accident. They're pretty laid-back. Yelling at them or making snide remarks would be a bad idea, that kind of thing."

"How much do critters understand when ponies who aren't you are doing the talking, anyhow?" wonders Clarity.

"It varies. Seb's basically fluent," the raccoon smiles, "and the bears have a pretty good vocabulary, but bees tend to understand almost nothing but tone of voice and hummingbirds have trouble with verbs."

"Verbs? Why verbs?"

"They don't pick up or remember them as easily, and they confuse them for each other. I'm really not sure why. It might have something to do with verbs being more complicated to recognize, because they have a bunch of different forms, and nouns just come in singular and plural and most other words don't vary at all."

"Huh, I guess that makes sense. I've considered getting a pet of some kind, but never actually did it - there was never quite enough reason to or a critter that seemed very much like it needed to live with me."

"Yeah. Sebastian's a good fit with me, but I don't think I'd want to get a pet just to have a pet."

"How did you get Sebastian? Or - meet him, whatever the right word is."

"He lives nearby. We hit it off the first time we talked, and I asked if he wanted to learn how to read and write, and he said sure, and it went from there."

"Hi, Clarity! Did you invite everybody yet?"

"Yep! Everypony's coming, so I suppose you are too. And then I went with Cordy on her rounds and now I'm starving."

"The cafe just around the corner does a really good daffodil and daisy sandwich, and I bet they're not busy at this time of day, sound good?"

"That sounds great!"

"Hey, can I ask you something?"

"Sure," he says agreeably.

"You seem to be the only dragon in Ponyville, and I never ran into one in Canterlot, either. Where'd you come from?"

"Well, I don't exactly know," he says. "Princess Celestia gave me to my parents as an egg. I don't know where she got me."

"Huh, she never told me about that. How old are you?"

"Sixteen and a half."

"So where do your parents live, then?"

"Canterlot. They're nice ponies, but I don't really have a lot in common with them."

"That's a pity."

"Yeah. It's okay, though. Everything's been great since I moved to Ponyville."

"It's really nice here."

Om nom! "My mom adores Canterlot because there's always something to do and all her friends are there, and my dad likes it fine too - I think he might have liked a smaller town if he'd been born in one but they're both native Canterlot dwellers and he wouldn't want to move. I found it kind of - easy to get lost in. There's always something going on, all right, and it'll just sort of - go on even if anypony in particular doesn't show up. It was sort of anonymous. I got invited to things but I mostly didn't go because it didn't matter."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. I kind of liked that about it. Although it was different in the circles my parents ran in - with the high society types, everypony who's anypony knows who's who and who came to what. They didn't really take me to events like that, though, because, you know," he shrugs, "dragon."

"I guess Canterlot is a big city and I just never ran into you wherever you were turning up. I know almost nothing about society-type events. The School for Gifted Unicorns operates under Celestia's administration but it's not exactly - formal balls and titled ponies. I guess the Gala might be, though. And she gave me six tickets so - considering - I kind of assume dragons are welcome at it."

"I wonder who all else tends to show up at it. I wonder if I'll know anything about what to say to them. I suppose I can just tell the story about the Elements again, since that's probably why we'll be there at all. I didn't get tickets last year even though I was the Princess's student back then."

"You'll probably do fine," says Joy. "Especially with all your Ponyville friends there."

"Yeah, I suppose if everything else is inaccessible I can just talk to you guys."

"Yep!"

She finishes her sandwich. "Do you know if your parents are going?"

"They'll be going. I haven't heard from them about it or anything, but I know them. They'll be going."

Clarity peers at his face and - can't quite think what she's supposed to say.

He shrugs, and produces a smile. "Anyway, I hope you have fun there. I hear the food's really good!"

"I've heard that too." She floats a stray daisy petal to her mouth and chomps it out of the air.

Joy giggles.

"Do you know if the chocolate cake here is good, or should I just go home and have an apple for dessert?"

"Their cake is great!" he assures her.

Joy goes for a slice of cake too. It is truly excellent cake.

Nom nom nom. "How'd you learn to cook?" Clarity wonders. "I'd have invited you to borrow my kitchen if the library had one, but it doesn't really, everything I keep around there is stuff that's good raw."

"It just seemed interesting, so I tried it. And I was right! It's interesting!"

"I can do a little bit, but Morning - that's my mom - did most of it at home so most of what I know are the steps in longer recipes that were easier to do with me helping by magic. She makes good homemade hayburgers."

"Ooh," he says. "Those are easy to do okay, but hard to do really good."

"Morning does them good! I've never had better at a restaurant. She gets them really crispy on the outside. Maybe when we're in Canterlot for the gala I'll bring you all to my parents' house and see if she'll make a batch. I'll write them tonight." Clarity makes a note of this.

"That sounds awesome."

"Yeah. She'll be glad that I've made friends, too."

"Having friends is pretty great!"

"Mm-hm! Morning has tons. Argent - my dad - doesn't have so many, but still some. He goes and nets riverberries with them. It's excruciatingly boring."

"Well, it's probably fun for them, or they wouldn't do it."

"They just sit there, nineteen minutes of twenty. They don't even really talk, they just wait for riverberries to drop off the bushes upstream because they're too prickly to go pick. I mean, a unicorn could do it and Argent is one, but only if you're willing to maneuver the berry very carefully for like ten minutes each through the gaps in the branches, it's actually faster to net them from the water."

"Well, are they tasty?"

"Oh yeah. You dust 'em in sugar and lemon - or make smoothies - they're great."

"Good thing there are ponies who like netting them, then, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I'm glad Argent likes it, I just didn't have a good time when I went along."

"Makes sense. I can see how it could be boring. Could be relaxing, too, though."

"When I want to relax I read."

"Maybe I'll try netting riverberries sometime and see how I like it."

"I bet Argent would take you if you wanted."

"Maybe I'll ask him, if you introduce us!"

Joy produces some bits mysteriously from behind his back to cover his half of the meal.

"I'll go write to my parents and see what I have in the way of a library budget now, I think. Then reading. Thanks for the restaurant pointer!"

"No problem!"

"I was just exploring, but now I've lost track of where I am relative to anything I've already got understood," sighs Clarity. "How could you tell I was lost?" She hadn't been exactly panicking.

"You were walking and looking around you in a way that I recognized as lost. If you walk between those buildings there, continue on for a while, and then turn right after you pass the cafe, you'll find yourself in sight of the main street," she says.

"Do you just sort of watch everypony all the time in case somepony makes a wrong turn?" asks Clarity, noting the directions.

"I watch everything all the time, to see what I find out. Sometimes what I find out is that somepony is lost."

"...Should I let you get back to it? I'm still figuring out how much of other ponies' time it's okay to take up."

"It's not what I'd call an urgent task. I do not mind spending some time with you."

"Okay, cool." Clarity starts in the indicated direction, taking careful note of landmarks. "What other kinds of things do you notice? I bet ponies who've lived here for a long time tend not to get lost, and I think that's most of the ponies here."

"I notice who is in the market and what they are buying or selling. I notice how the plants in town are faring and which ones could use more sun or more water. I notice who is out and about and what they are doing."

"I can guess what you do about the plants, but what about the rest of it?"

"Sometimes nothing. The things I find out are not always useful. But perhaps I see somepony who is disappointed that the asparagus stall sold out before they arrived, and I can tell them that a different stall is also selling asparagus that day. Or perhaps I see somepony who is debating whether or not to bring their umbrella on a walk, and I can land and ask their route and tell them the immediate schedule for those areas."

"You can tell if somepony's trying to decide about an umbrella from up in the air?"

"Perhaps not with perfect reliability, but yes."

"How do you do it? This sounds awesome. Even if I don't get the aerial vantage point, I like knowing things."

She smiles slightly. "Well - it's really just looking at things," she says. "Seeing them properly. And then drawing conclusions from what I see. If somepony is fretting indecisively in their doorway and scanning the sky for clouds, and I see an umbrella behind them, it's likely that they are trying to decide whether or not they need it. If two ponies are approaching the same crossroads from different directions and neither is looking where they are going, I should land and warn one."

"Huh. I'm usually thinking about other things too much to figure them out like that - I'll be walking down the street trying to compose a report on friendship for Celestia, I should send the first one in soon, or I'm trying to learn my way around and can't interpret things like that at the same time. That's impressive multitasking."

"I have considerable practice," she says. "I'm curious about your report on friendship. What notes have you gathered so far?"

"Well, I'm hoping to stick to more or less one theme per letter, in case the rate of new observations drops off after a while and she expects the reports to keep up a the same frequency, but possible topics include the one I just mentioned - that is, how much time ponies should spend with their friends and how to ask about it - and something about what friends do together, and something about how talking about past history can make them feel closer, and something about presents in general like the tickets or how Cordy always winds up feeding me something, and I might have a couple other things written down but I don't have the right notebook with me."

"Cordy likes to distribute food," she says. "I have noticed that. She once told me that it's because it's a simple friendly gesture she happens to be well placed to make."

"It's nice of her. It makes me think of tasty things whenever I think of her."

"That may also be an intended effect."

"It's a very clever one! I'd take the idea but I'm not - well placed to."

"You could do something similar with books, but I think fewer ponies enjoy those as much."

"Yes. And they probably wouldn't read them right away while visiting."

"Also true."

"But it's an idea, anyway, as I get more acquainted with the library stock I should consider issuing book recommendations."

"Are you finding it a pleasant partnership with Blueberry?"

"She's very helpful! Which is good, because being a librarian would really be a full time job for one pony, and I have other things to do, but with her helping I can pick up what's left in my spare time. If the mayor gets back to me and says I have a budget I'm going to pay her."

"She is a very capable pony. The library is in good hooves."

"Extremely precocious. I was precocious too, but not that much."

"She is very unusual, yes. I'm sometimes surprised that she does not yet have her cutie mark."

"I heard Cordy's story about hers and the squirrels, yesterday. How'd you get yours?"

"At the same time as my sister. She was testing her first set of flight boots and accidentally created a sonic rainboom. I observed the direction and distance and immediately realized she must have done it, even though I hadn't known she was working on anything at the time."

"...That's funny, I saw a sonic rainboom out the window right before I got mine."

"And a sonic rainboom is what scared Cordy's squirrels. Interesting coincidence, isn't it?"

"Rather. Maybe lots of ponies were sort of - prompted by it. It was sort of relevantly inspiring; I was trying to do the magical equivalent of brute forcing my final exam and then it sort of reminded me that magic can just interact physically with the world."

She smiles. "It's possible that it prompted a lot of ponies. But I think I'd want to know why, if that turned out to be true."

"Yeah, it's not a known feature of rainbooms, or if it is, it's not documented well enough for me to have found it when I looked them up after the event."

"So, effectively, not known to you. Hmm. I can't readily think of any explanations," she says. "That doesn't happen often."

"Rainbooms don't, or you not thinking of explanations doesn't?"

"I suppose that, technically speaking, sonic rainbooms are rarer than me not being able to think of an explanation for something."

Clarity giggles. "But that isn't what you meant, is it."

"It isn't!" she agrees.

"Wouldn't it be funny if Guiding got hers the same way? I guess Joy would be left out anyway, though."

"Naturally, yes."

"Want to go to Guiding's house and ask her?"

"I think that would be interesting."

Clarity has figured out where they are at this point, and does know the way to Guiding Star's house. There she trots.

"Hello," says Streak. "I've just been given cause to wonder how you got your cutie mark."

"Huh, did I never tell you? I was messing around with magic and then I had my first vision and I knew something cool was going to happen, so I ran to tell everypony to go out and see it! And they did, and I had my star."

"And what was the cool thing?"

"Was it by any chance a -"

"Sonic rainboom!"

"...For future reference, I really don't like being interrupted. But that's interesting!"

"That makes five of us, with Joy obviously not applicable. I do not have an explanation for this," says Streak.

"It could be lots of ponies, but if it is just us five it's very strange. Who else is around our age and might have gotten their cutie mark at the same time?"

"Uuuum, me and Cordy came in to school with our marks after the same weekend, but everypony else in our class either had them already or got them later. And Ponyville's a one-room schoolhouse kind of town."

"Blaze and I didn't have many close friends our own age, but I believe I would have noticed if an unusual number of nearby ponies got their cutie marks at the same time that we did, and I remember no such thing."

"And I was behind most of the sorts of ponies that were in my cohort at the School for Gifted Unicorns, if not actually the last. Huh."

"A mystery."

"Yep. Maybe I'll write the Princess and see if she knows anything, but I'm not sure a question like that will be a priority. I can tuck it into a friendship letter maybe."

"That seems like a reasonable strategy."

"It's cool how you're personally friends with Princess Celestia!"

"...I'm personally acquainted with Princess Celestia, but it's more of a teacher/student kind of thing, I think. Assignments and reports, not - chatting about things."

"Oh. Well, still, you can just write her letters."

"I can write her letters, yes. And I could usually get in to see her in person if I wanted when I was still in Canterlot. That just doesn't guarantee that she'll pay attention to me over the hundreds of other things competing for her attention - or tell me why, if she does ignore me. I didn't know at first why she was telling me to go make friends when I was trying to warn her about Nightmare Moon."

"...that seems irresponsible of her," says Streak.

"I mean, she gets lots of credit for it actually working," says Clarity. "It did actually work, and in that sense it's reasonably like you telling me to let go without explaining that I was going to land in a tree. I imagine if I asked her she'd say something about wanting me to make friends - authentically, instead of just recruiting ponies to go on a quest with me. Maybe the Elements wouldn't work if it was just quest-recruitment."

"I suppose. But I prefer explanations, where possible."

"Me too," Clarity sighs.

"But it all worked out pretty great, I think!"

"True. Still."

"Sure. I definitely get wanting to know what's going to happen!"

Clarity giggles.

"And what has happened. And what may happen. And what could have happened but didn't. And why. I like knowing all sorts of things."

"All good things."

"Doooo you know what my last customer wanted, Streak?"

"Hoofball attendance."

"Doooo you know if my neighbor walked her dog yet?"

"She has done so once today so far."

"Aaaand what'd I have for breakfast?"

"Dandelion salad."

"Ding ding ding!"

"Do you do this often?"

"Sometimes!"

"It's fun."

"I know the future but only by magic, and she can figure out the past without any!"

"It's pretty impressive."

She grins.