//------------------------------// // Air ← → Earth // Story: A Series Of Egotistical Events // by Estee //------------------------------// The plan had been brilliant. (Well, of course it had been brilliant. It was her plan.) The ultimate goal was to join the Wonderbolts, and there were certain requirements for that. There was a written application, and the more recommending signatures you could attach to that, the better. Then there was a practical tryout session which moved across the continent on a schedule which was posted years in advance. If you passed that, you got into the Academy, and if you got through the Academy... (Not 'if'. 'When'. She had to remember it was 'when'.) But it all took practice. Moons of it. And the thing about being out of school (she'd just graduated and summer heat was already starting to fill the air as she took off from her new house, moving under Moon's light) and aiming to be a Wonderbolt was that you had two routes: you either found somepony who would sponsor you and dedicated all your time to training, or you found a job and practiced when you could while losing most of your hours to boring work. And sponsors were hard to come by. Sponsors, in fact, generally took the form of parents who were perfectly content with continuing to pay the bills, and while Rainbow's family had been happy to back her dreams all the way through school and accepted them as a reason for why certain boring courses had just barely been passed, she'd been ready to go out on her own. She was sure of that. Completely ready. No regrets or anything -- -- anyway, she'd had the idea in her third year of secondary school. Practice -- training -- meant being in the air as much as possible, using techniques every single day. Having hours to work on stunts. There were several professions which lent themselves to that: things where it was possible to essentially get paid for training because you were doing stuff which was going to help you in the long gallop anyway. Some occupations had been rejected. Couriers certainly stayed in the air more than anypony, but they didn't get to use much in the way of techniques and -- well, Rainbow had to admit this one: she wasn't an endurance flyer. She was fine over the course of a normal day (which naturally included at least one perfectly normal nap), but she wasn't the sort of pegasus who could fly from Sun-raising to Sun-lowering at three-quarters of top speed, get a few hours of sleep, and then do it all again tomorrow. Also, couriers had to deliver things exactly on time and naps sort of got in the way of that, or so she'd discovered just before being unfairly fired from her third summer job. Going out for the minor league stunt circuit would certainly get her work, but the crowds would be tiny, and the thing about getting into the circuit was that it could be really hard to get out. But being part of a weather team? Unless there was a major seasonal shift in progress, they seemed to work for just a few hours per day. Sure, there was emergency stuff to do when the weather systems outside Cloudsdale tried to intrude on the settled zone, but that hardly ever happened and it would just be more practice. Work a few hours per day, get a full salary for that scant amount of time, maybe take a little nap to recover her energy, and then she could practice until Moon was brought into the sky. Paid to practice, with work itself being more practice. Use techniques during her paid hours, zip about the atmosphere in the most elaborate ways possible. She was essentially getting her employer to sponsor her, and that party would never know what they were really paying for... Rainbow grinned to herself, and then very carefully didn't report for her first day of work -- not yet. It was still early and there were a few things she wanted to do. They mostly centered around food. She wound up landing. She hadn't wanted to, but the town's streetlights were oddly low-level: at night under waning Moon, you really only got a good look at things when you were on the ground and -- trotting. It was as if the local planner hadn't thought about ponies who might want to take a full aerial survey. And the buildings were all so -- small. They didn't vault a dozen stories into the dark -- -- the sky is the wrong shade down here -- -- sky. They didn't have multiple entrances at different altitudes. There was frequently just one door, and that was always at ground level. When there were two, the other would be at the back or side of the structure. Wood refused to seek heights which vapor easily conquered. It was just... weird. Rainbow trotted for a while, down mostly-empty streets, past a few ponies heading for the train station. A careful sniff of the air failed to detect much of anything edible. There was a rather prominent bakery, and there was also a parade of unhappy ponies dejectedly marching past the Closed sign. It had been closed since Rainbow had arrived in Ponyville, and the sign on the front door told her that the family vacation wasn't going to wrap up today either. She was stuck with leftovers from the previous night's raw bar stop, and while that would get her through the earliest parts of the morning, it wouldn't put her much past it. So she had to search and so far, her search wasn't coming up with anything. This was so much earlier than she'd been awake before this, nothing seemed to be open yet, and clearly the only thing she was going to find in the direction of the tracks was the train. Where does the weather team eat? Maybe they all have breakfast at their homes. But her kitchen was just about empty. She didn't know the town yet. She didn't even know where to look for anything. She'd spent five days landing just long enough to pick up those few shipments which had been left on the ground below her home. Arrive in Ponyville early, start molding, have everything done by that first day of work. She'd spent on furnishings (mostly delivered) and food (whatever was close), slept at her construction site (technically illegal) and bathed in a swimming hole she'd overflown on her way into town (perfectly legal and, after being caught on her third day, oddly face-flushing). She could have found anything in Cloudsdale, known just which floor to land on for her shopping, visited the eateries which served the weather team as one of them. In Ponyville... Her hooves felt weird. The street felt weird. It was like visiting Gilda's ranch, only with a ridiculous number of cobblestones added. Gilda's family raised their animals on dirt, for the most part. (Some were above the ground, and a few were under it. Rainbow, as claustrophobic as the average pegasus and considerably less willing to admit it, had only entered those sections on teasing dares.) There wasn't any real stone, curves of ridiculous density poking into her hooves where clouds would just cushion and almost push you into the next step, the very world waiting to launch you into flight. Stone was just -- there. There was green around her, in most of the places where the stone wasn't. Plants growing. It had been the same when she'd visited Gilda. She was used to green, at least a little. But it had been one of many changes during her summers: travel from Cloudsdale to Protocera, live with griffons instead of pegasi, green and brown instead of white and -- mostly other shades of white. She knew the ranch. She knew what it was like to live with griffons. But this was Ponyville, and -- -- she was on the ground. So many ponies were on the ground. It wasn't a pause in their travels, with no clouds around to perch on. It wasn't visiting somepony or vacation tourism. They were on the ground because they had to be. Because there was no other choice at all. There were times when it felt like she was staring. At fully-exposed sides with no feathers covering them, the vacuum-filled places where limbs should have been. At cones and tiny spears of something not quite bone. And she'd seen that before, of course: she'd been to ground with her parents. A few times. She'd seen the -- other ponies. The ones who couldn't enter Cloudsdale without the aid of a strictly temporary spell. (There had been a few such high-altitude sightings, mostly at sporting events and festivals. That was when she had truly stared, and her father sometimes reminded her of the very first, where a very young filly had broken down in tears of pity for the pony who must have had the most horrible accident imaginable. She'd had nightmares about accidents which could steal a pony's wings. Sometimes she still did.) There were pegasi, here and there, for Ponyville was a settled zone which hosted all three races. (She paid special attention to every one she saw, and didn't see what she was afraid to spot.) But there were so many more of the -- others. Ponies trotting because trotting was all they knew, all they were capable of, and Rainbow... Clouds billowed. Clouds gently shifted. Clouds comforted and massaged and helped. Stone...