July 29
Me and Meghan had kind of a rushed morning, 'cause as soon as I woke up I could feel the incoming storm in the air. I got out of bed and checked my portable telephone, and I hadn't gotten a call from Mel yet, so they weren't right on top of us, but I knew that they were going to be.
Meghan got out of bed right after I did—I guess she doesn't like sleeping past her alarm as much when I'm not in bed with her—and she looked at her telephone and then showed me a picture of Michigan with stormclouds off to the west, but they were still a ways out so we had some time at least.
She looked at it again while I was brushing her hair after her shower, and said it was getting closer and just then my portable telephone chirped at me, and it was Mel, who said that he would be at my apartment to pick me up in fifteen minutes.
So I had to send him a message back that I wasn't at my apartment but I was at Meghan's, which was where he'd taken me last night.
Well, we had enough time to eat breakfast, and then I heard Mel's truck come into her driveway, and I kissed her and said that I'd see her tonight.
The thunderclouds were still a little ways off in the distance when we got to our spot, and I had plenty of time to fly up and test the radio.
The first couple that came through weren't anything too dangerous, and I'd been up in the air for almost an hour before things started to get interesting. We'd passed the time by me trying to teach him the names of clouds in Equestrian, and even though it was hard to get the pronunciation right over the radio, I think we both learned some stuff from it. I know it helped me remember what humans called certain cloud formations.
The next storm front led with a heavy downpour, but it tapered off right as it passed, into a moderate rain, and it kept up like that—mostly moderate but occasionally heavy—for the next hour. The lightning rate stayed about the same through most of it. I couldn't tell for sure when it was really heavy, because it was hard to hear and hard to see, so I had to assume that it was keeping to the pattern.
It tapered off to almost nothing and I had a little break before the next set of clouds came over, and I'd had my eye on them because even with the limited vision I had below the cloud deck, this was darker and there was a lot more rain coming out of it.
It was a lot nicer to be watching storms during the day, because I didn't get caught out by sudden gusts or downpours. So I was ready for it when it hit, and for a couple of minutes it was really intense, then it tapered back off to a moderate rainfall.
When it had finally tapered off and I couldn't see any more stormclouds off to the west, I curved around and landed, and when I got in Mel's truck I was surprised to see that it was almost noon. Time flies by really quick when you're doing something.
He dropped me off at my apartment, and I hung up my vest so that it could dry off a little and then took a nice shower and had lunch, then sat out on the balcony so I could preen my wings. The clouds had broken up a little so that there was some sun, although it wasn't enough to get me all the way dry.
After relaxing in the papasan for a little bit, I put all my flight gear back on and put my GoPro on my head so that I would have it with me, and then I took off again, this time heading to the maker's building.
There were more cars in the parking lot than there had been last time, which made me think that they were all busy with something.
When I got inside, there was a group of them clustered around a computer, and I could see that they were either watching a movie or playing a game. I was kind of curious what they were doing, but then Karen called me over and said that she wanted me to try my harness on.
She said that it was kind of like a breastcollar harness, but the normal human style wouldn't work on me because I had to be able to put it on and take it off by myself. So what she'd done that I thought was really clever was make it so that it attached to my camelback straps, and then there was another cross-strap which was held in place by a long velcro strip that kept it all stable and in place.
I could pull the strip tight with my teeth, and then hold it in place with a hoof and it would stick, just like those little burr-balls that stick in your coat. And even if it came unfastened in flight, I wouldn't lose the GoPro, it would just move around more than it should.
Well, they wanted me to test it out, and they also wanted me to test the rope, too, since there were some scattered clouds that were following after the storm.
So I asked the airplane directors for permission, since I was going to have to fly up pretty high to get it. It was the grumpy man, and I had to explain to him twice that I was going to go up and try and get a cloud and then tie it to a tree.
Finally, he said that it was okay, but I needed to keep listening to my radio and be sure not to drift closer to them, which I said I wouldn't—the wind was going the other way anyhow. So I looped the rope around me and then Karen said that I ought to have my GoPro on, because that way we could look at the movie it made and if my harness needed to be adjusted, she could do that.
She attached it to my breastcollar, and I flew up and looked around for a suitable cloud that was drifting away from the airport.
I found one that looked about the right size, and flew up to it and circled it to get a good sense of it, and then I started working the edges in and compacting it down some.
It took me a little while to get it shaped up, especially since I had to keep moving it back against the wind, so I didn't drift off too far. And then came the next tricky part, which was tying a loop in the rope while I was in the air.
I'd learned a fair bit of ropework from sailorponies, and while I'd never be as good at it as they were, I finally got it tied and then I draped the rope over the cloud so that it was about centered, and let the free ends of the rope hang.
I hadn't wanted to tie the knot while I was on the ground, because I knew I'd have to drape the rope and then bring the ends together. In hindsight, though, I could have.
I was glad that I'd gotten lots of rope, because the cloud had a pretty respectable girth.
I took the free end and flew over to the loop-knot, then slipped it through and pulled it tight. And just like that, I had a cloud on a rope.
The other thing I hadn't thought about that I probably should have was how I was going to tow the cloud. I could hold the rope in my teeth and pull the cloud backwards like that, but it wasn’t that easy to fly backwards.
There was a really clever knot that sailorponies used when they were tying up their ships: it was a couple of loops of rope and if you made it right, you could toss it over the end of a piling, and it would pull itself tight and not let go, and I could have done that around a hoof. I didn't, because I knew if a sudden wind came up, the cloud had a lot of sail area, and I'd be going wherever it went, whether I wanted to or not.
So what I did instead was to tie a slip-knot around my hind hoof, and I left the free end of the rope long enough that I could untie it by just pulling with my mouth if I had to.
That made for a really weird flight back, 'cause I had the cloud tugging against one hind leg, and it put me really off-balance, and my tail kept hitting the rope, too.
I don't really think about my tail all that much when I'm flying, but now I couldn't help but think of it every time it hit the rope.
I needed to be careful coming into the parking lot, because the cloud was hard to control, and I knew that if it touched any of the electrical wires around that would be bad, and then I also had to warn everyone not to touch the cloud or the rope.
There was a dead tree next to the parking lot that looked pretty sturdy, so I flew over to it and wrapped the rope around a branch, then unhooked it from my leg and wrapped it more securely around the branch, so it wouldn't go anywhere, and flew up to my cloud and landed on top.
I knocked out a little hollow on the top of the cloud and lay down in that, and that was nice. If I put my head down right on the cloudstuff, the little ridge blocked my view of the ground and I could imagine that I was floating freely in the sky.
The rope felt kind of funny against my belly—it was almost like sitting on a cold piece of metal, but my body heat didn't warm it up at all; it stayed cold. I hadn't noticed that when it was tied to my leg, but then that had been such a strange position to be in that I probably wouldn't have noticed.
It would have been nice to spend the rest of the afternoon up there, but I knew that the people on the ground were probably still watching, and Karen was waiting to find out if my GoPro mount worked, so I got up off my cloud and landed.
Well, they had a lot of questions about the cloud and how it worked and how I could bring it down like that and I couldn't answer all their questions as well as they wanted me to, but there was some stuff that I just know but can't explain. It would be like me asking how to walk on two legs—someone could tell me the principle of it, but I wouldn't know how to do it from that.
They also wanted to know how long the cloud would stay up there and I said that I didn't know and we'd go inside and see how the GoPro worked and then when we came back out we'd find out if the cloud was still there.
So Karen put a cable in my GoPro and got the video on her folding computer, and we all watched it, and she thought it looked pretty good. It wasn't quite a pegasus-eye view, but it was close.
The part where I shaped the cloud didn't come out well at all, 'cause mostly all you could see was the cloud. But everyone was satisfied with the mount, and I said that it hadn't been in the way at all, and then Karen had me take it off and put it back on again, just to show that I could, and we were all satisfied with how it worked.
When we went out into the parking lot, the cloud was still there but it was looking kind of raggedy. I got up on it, and I could feel that it had lost a lot of its moisture while I was inside, 'cause I hadn't been around to keep it under control. It sort of firmed up again under me, but it wasn't the cloud it had been anymore.
So I thought that it would work okay if I was lying on the cloud, but it wasn't going to keep a cloud tethered outside my room for any length of time unless I was holding on to the end of the rope.
I hadn't really thought of a good way to get the cloud back off the rope, either, so I wound up just going up there and breaking it up, which turned into a mini-rainstorm in the parking lot before it was gone. Then I just untied the rope from the tree and picked it up off the ground.
Well, before I left, Conner suggested one more improvement, and that was instead of my loop-knot that I'd made, he tied on a clip called a carabiner which was a clever little aluminum clip that easily snapped over the rope and came off pretty easily, too. There was a spring on it so that it wanted to go closed, and then a separate little security sleeve to make sure that it wouldn't open when you didn't want it to.
I was really happy with what they'd made for me, and I thought that their price was very good. They said that if I thought I needed anything adjusted, to just come back and they'd fix it, and then they helped coil up my rope and put it on my back. That was another thing that the carabiner turned out to be useful for—it clipped onto the strap of my camelback, and held the rope in place.
Meghan was already at my apartment when I got home, and after I got out of my flight gear we went over next door to have barbeque with Jeff. We brought the rest of the beers I had left to share with everyone, and Meghan had brought six of her own also.
When I was telling Meghan about my rope, a couple of neighbors overheard us and after the second time I'd told the same story I was thinking about bringing down another cloud to hang over the party, but with all the wires around I thought maybe it would be too dangerous. What I needed to do was practice over a lake until I got a really good feeling for how the cloud was going to behave, before I tried it somewhere as confined as Jeff's backyard.
I also got to race across the backyard a couple of times carrying Trinity, which was lots of fun for both of us.
Both Meghan and I were a bit tired out by the time we finally left Jeff's barbeque, but not quite tired enough to go to bed, so we sat on the futon and talked and snuggled a little bit—I rested my head on Meghan's lap, and she pet my mane and scratched my back. I burrowed my head under her shirt and kissed her stomach and pressed my head up against her chest and then I got kind of tangled up under her shirt and she thought that was really funny.
We didn't fold down the futon until after, and that was only because we both had to use the bathroom before we fell asleep.
I can't think of any funny commentary for this error. It's too boring.
7606851
It's funny you should say that, because this is an interesting error: I wrote this chapter in three sections, out of order (much like Silver Glow might have), and that is where two sections got joined.
It's fixed, thank you!
Let Mel reach his own conclusions.
Jolly well!
Wouldnt a cloud cargo net work better than a rope? Sort of like what they use in the older hydrogen balloons?
Wonder what they were watching on the display, as this date is out alighned with current?
So far with the thunderstorms, so good, no full on lightning storm or outright supercell as yet?
Farewell Rosetta. You may have illuminated much of the unknown, but your position as a beacon on the shaols of the deep was not to be. So long, and thanks for all the science.
"No mister Policeman, it is not illegal; I got permission from grumpy ariplane director guy to get that cloud!"
7606989 "....Wouldnt a cloud cargo net work better than a rope?..."
Yeah, but if you pull it too hard, you get all these cloud-noodles all over the sky and... well, we don't want that happening again, do we?
Stupid skirts, always getting tangly.
I can just imagine the usual crowd of YouTube comment posters competing for the most stupid way to call that video a fake...
7608577 Chicago, Michigan, it's all Yankeeburg to me friend (whoops, I forgot actually)
7589939
Indeed. Although I hadn't made the connection yet despite my mind going there almost every time I visit Taco Bell. ( or Walgreen's until last year.)
I managed to catch up after getting distracted by some of your earlier stories. Sam & Rose, the pony at a police station and the road trip to Trotcon were are all delightful morsels of literature. Then I stumbled on the Celestia In Your Bed stuff. Man, did that lead me down a rabbit hole. Thank you for sharing.
Be Well, Admiral
I notice that the sex was far more meaningful when she was with Aric.
It seems to be a wham bam thank you pony scenario when they les out, and it's barely a foot note in her journals.
7608658
In story; I get the sense that she won't go into too much detail in writing but will if speaking with her closest friend(s). I believe another factor is that Megan is her first female; human OR pony. That's important if she realizes it or not.
Out of story; I do believe our esteemed author is maintaining the fic's rating.
7608501 First.
7609642
No, no, no, no... As an Admiral Biscuit, your transformation sequence is a Dragonball Z screaming, burning halo, bulging muscle power up.
(Though, I thought we'd already determined you were a certain adorable, sexaholic, wears-too-many-flying-accessories, blue pegasus mare.)
7609809
I messed up, it was green hat.
In Cantonese 金魚佬 "Goldfish Guy" means a child molester and 戴绿帽子 or "wears a green hat" means a cuckold in Mandarin.
7609863 Before we get into the ethics/morality of property--it being a cloud also raises a minor safety concern in that at that point god only know what she could do. From our perspective lightning may not be out of the question.
7610155 Pony at the CERN, rigth?
Admiral
Your comment about Gusty's future TV appearances got me thinking. What will be her next show? My 1st thought was Hollywood Squares but IRL that went off the air in 2004.
Some type of Survivor show or maybe Big Brother. Reality TV doesn't pay much, but it's good exposure.
Or maybe play an alien on a sci-fi show (talk about type casting)
Thinking about "What is the weirdest thing she could be cast as?
Monster on Power Rangers
Substitute for the robot on a live action remake of Super Book
7609561
you sound like my friend. He routinely has problems that i can't even figure out how they exist. For example, his Nvidia settings won't open and he can't re install.
Most things flow from high to low concentration, which is what I was talking about. Electricity is a decent analog for how magic might behave, but I'm putting it down as a 5th fundamental force that we just haven't discovered.
I'd still call it an abuse. They weren't breaking any laws and weren't doing anything dangerous, but the cop still just made them leave.
I love keeping fish and I'm pretty good at aquascaping and stocking although I started my tank before I really learned so my tank never looked great. I get what you mean about getting to complicated. I had a CO2 injection system, a valve broke and I lost about $100 of fish.
Personally I love Discus, but i love the effect of large schools of small fish (not to mention that discus are like $60 a pop and they are schooling). Plus there's more you can do with the aquascaping with small fish.
This is a Discus in case you haven't seen them
dlgdxii3fgupk.cloudfront.net/myaquariumclub.com/components/com_mojo/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/xkissing-discus-fish-brandon-alms.jpg.pagespeed.ic.xLjVvVzKw6.jpg
7610396 I've even seen a doe teaching the behavior to her fawns.
a would like to watch a Pegasus work with a cloud some time. as if that will ever happen.
Cant wait to see the results of her camerawork!
7609575
Oh, yeah, that was definitely the Model I:
oldcomputers.net/pics/trs80-expansion.jpg
Everything was a separate component, with its own power supply (so you'd better have a power strip handy) and power switch (which you had better turn on in the right order, or else!), connected together by a bunch of ribbon cables. My father and I spent the better part of a Fort Wayne, Indiana winter in the garage, building a custom computer desk for ours, just to get all those cables and power cords out of sight...
(Kinda wish I still had it, too. Seeing as how I still have the computer, I can't help wondering what happened to the desk... but I suppose moving at least seven times in the intervening four decades gives more than sufficient opportunity for things to wander off. )
7606883
They're best friends.
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/6/68/Lyra_and_Bon_Bon_sugarlump_rump_S5E9.png
Hmm, I usually manage to not misspell chapter titles.
Usually.
7606989
Probably, but it's a pretty tall order to find someone who can braid rope, never mind make a net the traditional way. In canon, we've seen them moving the clouds with a rope tied around the middle.
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/6/60/Pegasi_bringing_the_snow_clouds_down_from_Cloudsdale_S5E5.png
An unspecified YouTube video.
No superstorms yet, although she's been up in storms with wind gusts of up to 60mph.
7607129
Or if she's really feeling mean: "You want it? Here, take this rope."
7607188
That's one way to flunk out of weather school.
"...and then we had to spend all afternoon chasing loose cloudlings."
7607506
Obviously, the best solution is to not wear clothes.
7608501
Oh yeah, no doubt. Or all the other dumb shit commenters say on YouTube videos. One point in Silver Glow's favor is that it's four hours long, with no edit breaks or second takes in the whole video, which would be a hell of a thing to fake.
7608579
It's okay; I don't really know the difference between any of the Gulf Coast states.
7608649
I don't remember the Walgreen's reference, but I do think about the movie when I go to Taco Bell.
And now we do have self-driving cars. Man, the future is now.
Oh, man, the pony in your bed meme . . . that's the new Twilight Sparkle eats a Peach. That'll never get old.
7609345
7609881
No, no, no, no... As an Admiral Biscuit, your transformation sequence is a Dragonball Z screaming, burning halo, bulging muscle power up.
Oh, this?
i.ytimg.com/vi/r2fJOn4hFvY/maxresdefault.jpg
7609900
Whew. I don't wear green hats, so I'm all good.
7608658
7608707 nailed it on both counts--she's not graphic when she writes in her journal, and I also have to maintain the rating. I'm already pushing the limits, according to the mods.
7609976
Lightning is totally not out of the question. Or freezing rain, normal rain; the cloud itself might be cold enough to cause frostbite if you stick your hand in it for any length of time; if she was really creative, she could probably drown someone with it even.
7610279
I'm gonna have to check that out. Meanwhile, look what I found!
derpicdn.net/img/2016/5/3/1145470/large.jpg
7610281
Probably something short, since she hasn't got all that long before college starts again for her. (Silver Glow will start later than her friends.) Although if Jenny was okay with it, I suppose she could do a college student reality show. She wouldn't like that too much, though; she's kind of shy when she's off-stage.
Maybe a Night of the Lepus remake, starring one pony instead of rabbits.
7610515
I wish the deer out here would learn that.
7610529
Wouldn't that be amazing? To just see her flying around one, cutting it off from the others, forming it up, looping a rope around it, and bringing it back down to Earth. . . .
7610397
Maybe we could get a job trying to break foolproof technology.
One of my tool distributors occasionally gives me tools to break, in fact.
Yeah, I do think that it would count as a new fundamental force. I prefer the idea that it's something that humans could theoretically access, since that makes the logic of stories like that much easier to work with. It's less of a big deal when the human is stuck in Equestria with no possible way back.
They were trespassing. Granted, that's kind of a BS bust, but the fact is that they were on private property, so at least the cop's got that much justification.
My favorite fish to watch in general were the zebra danios--they weren't very flashy, but they were always moving around. Also they're idiots. I had one of them swim up the siphon when I was draining the tank and get stuck, so I had to blow him back out, and he was swimming upside down for a while before he recovered.
I also had one tank wht a yo-yo loach and he'd chase the beta and the molly, but he was such a bad swimmer he had to sneak up on them. That was entertaining.
7610684
In terms of the quality of the filmography, it's kind of terrible. In terms of getting a sense of what it's like to be in a storm, though . . . she's flying in stuff that would probably crash a small plane, and which would give a jet pilot second thoughts. (And, in case you're interested, a couple of jets have been brought down by storms, most memorably an TACA jet that lost both its engines due to water ingestion, and the pilot managed to glide it to a safe landing on a levee.
7610887
Ah, that brings back memories. I spent many happy hours playing text-based RPGs on it and some Tank Commander game.
7623346
I dunno. I'm still waiting for my Mattel hoverboard, my flying DMC-12, and my self-adjusting sneakers.
Or Twilight's Bathroom Is Full of Semen, or Rainbow Dash Is Sitting On You, or...
I think you mean ”led” (past tense). Apologies for the nitpick, but I find that errors take me out of the story. And I love this story, so I want to keep it flowing nicely.
8218469
I did, thank you!
No worries--I love that readers take the time to comment on the typos so that I can fix the ones I missed. If you're reading through the comments, you'll see that King Moriarty found lots of mistakes in the text.
It's what I get for publishing without an editor.
I'm going to assume that she misinterpreted a flat "what" as him not having heard her properly, because even knowing that the aircraft in question was a magical horse wouldn't have stopped that from being my response to such a request.
"Pegasus 1, please be advised that I still don't believe that you actually exist, and are really an hallucination."
🎵Carabiner Queeeeeeen
Now we're sharing the same dream🎵
11070716
That is entirely possible.
He could also be professional enough to have not keyed the mic before his flat 'what?', maybe a frantic mental attempt to parse out what she just said with his knowledge of what aircraft tend to ask for, and finally just asking her to repeat her request.
11332164
Pretty sure by this point he's met her before. Doesn't mean he doesn't still wonder if he hallucinated it, though.
There's got to be some very musical pony singing about all the mundane Human things she uses and sees.