//------------------------------// // August 25 [Doctor Tetsuya's Cloud] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// August 25 Me and Lofty woke up the earliest and I shook Medley awake while Lofty got out of bed and went over to the other room to wake Rocky Storm up. I heard her grumble that it was too early, which was the same thing that Medley had said. There was coffee in the lobby, which was nice. So before we went outside we all got a cup, 'cause it was kind of early. My body was still mostly on Michigan time, but it was so dark that my brain said I ought to still be in bed. And while I was drinking the coffee I was thinking what would happen if we went outside and there weren't any clouds at all? Lofty had to go back up to the room 'cause she'd forgotten her radio, and when she got back down we realized that none of us had our vests or blinking lights, either. It was weird; when I was in a room full of pegasuses and we were all talking Equestrian, I kinda forgot that I was on Earth and needed those things. So we all had to go back upstairs and get them, too. And we had to be quiet, 'cause other ponies were still sleeping. My vest was still a little bit damp from last night and I had to work to get my airplane radio untangled from the collection of wires. It would have been easier if we could have turned on lights, but that might have woken up other ponies. So now that we all had our equipment we went outside and looked up into the sky and you could barely see anything 'cause it was still dark outside. We were gonna have to find a cloud by feel, but it wasn't the first time I'd done that and I was sure everypony else on my team had, too. There was about a half-moon up, which helped a little bit, but we couldn't see any clouds between it and us. At least we had one place to not look. Lofty called the airplane directors for clearance to fly, and when she said that she was Pegasus 3, conducting an experimental weather flight over Shamrock, I could hear a bit of worry in the director's voice, and Lofty had to assure him that we weren't seeing or feeling anything but were just monitoring conditions, which I guess was kind of true. Medley said that Doctor Tetsuya would be mad that we weren't taking any other instruments up with us, and Rocky Storm said that we could go back in and get the equipment packs because they were probably in the conference room and even if it was locked the desk clerk would let us in. She said that was where Prism Glider and Flanking Line went when they wanted some alone time in the middle of the night. We flew up to ten thousand feet, and kind of circled around and spread out a bit and there wasn't a single cloud to be found, which was really disappointing. We should have gone up last night after we got back and brought one down. I think we could have kept it all night as long as a couple of pegasuses were sitting on it. But then Medley said that since there weren't any to be found we should just make one, which was something that I'd never tried on Earth. She said that there was enough humidity still in the air that we could condense it into a cloud, we'd just have to work a big area but since there were four of us we ought to be able to. So we dropped down a little bit to where the air was the humidest, and made a big circle to kind of draw out the boundary, and I was glad that we all had our blinking lights, 'cause we were so spread out. And I was glad that we'd thought to start really early, 'cause it wasn't easy to work in the dark, and it took us almost half an hour to get a cloud nucleus going, but after that it got a bit easier 'cause Medley pushed it along while we got in front in a open triangle formation and started to work extra moisture into it. If there'd been a lake, we could have made a mini-tornado and sucked up a lot of water into the cloud that way. After I suggested that, Rocky Storm said that we ought to use the swimming pool since it was broken anyway and didn't need all its water. But I think that the hotel would have been mad if we emptied their swimming pool, even if it was broken. So we did it the hard way, and by the time the sun was over the horizon we had a cloud. It wasn't that good, and any weathermaster would probably have rejected it, but it was a lot harder to make clouds on Earth in the dark, and I'd like to see somepony do a better job. We dragged it back down to the hotel and we had to kind of peer through a couple of windows until we found the right one because while the doors had numbers on them the windows didn't. I guess they figured that it didn't matter, since they didn't open anyways. We pushed the cloud right up in the lee of the hotel and got it close enough that it made a couple of sparks against the windowframe, then we played a quick game of hoof-wing-horn to decide who got to knock on his window and Medley won. So we all sat on the cloud while she flew over and knocked on the window and Doctor Tetsuya sort of rolled over away from us and picked his portable telephone up from the nightstand and then lifted the regular telephone and then got up and started walking towards the door before he realized that the noise was coming from behind him. It was light enough that he ought to have been able to see our cloud pretty clearly, and he blinked and rubbed at his eyes a little bit and then went right over to the window and just stared at it. Then he tried to say something but we really couldn't hear him through the window, and so none of us understood what he wanted. Lofty flew over to be close to the window, 'cause she spoke English almost as well as I did, and put her ear right up against the window, and he turned off the humming temperature fan box that the hotel rooms had, and when he got done talking she turned to us and said that he wanted us to wait. So we did, and he put on shoes and his suit jacket and came outside and then we could hear him so we brought the cloud down but warned him not to touch it, and he went around it studying it and he asked how we'd gotten it, and Medley explained that we'd made it. And then he did touch it anyways, and jerked his hand back when he got zapped. Well, he said we had to keep our cloud until everybody had looked at it, and a couple of the other tornadoponies that had gotten up early also came down and bounced on it and played with it a little bit and Flanking Line carried some weather instruments over to it, and as the morning went on there were more and more clouds, and pretty soon a couple of other pegasuses had brought down clouds of their own and we'd moved them all to the parking lot, out of the way of all the cars. Stormbreaker was giving a ground-level demonstration of how to break up a cloud, while Rocky Storm and Prism Glider were showing how to put them back together again. Whizzer and Paradise and me flew up and kept bringing down more, and we wound up getting a bunch of other hotel guests watching us, too. We didn't get done playing with the clouds until it was afternoon, and everyone decided that we wouldn’t go anywhere today unless there was a really promising storm. Joey said that there wasn't anything nearby on the radar that looked too worrying, but he was fairly sure that there would be thunderstorms forming in the afternoon, and a couple of us looked at the computer pictures and agreed. We broke up most of our clouds and when we were about to break up the last one, Jo said we all ought to sit on it and she could take a group photograph, so we did, and everyone on our team plus a couple of guests and the hotel clerk also took pictures of all of us, then we decided it would be a shame to break up this cloud, and so we pushed it up into the sky and let it go. We went into town for lunch, and there was a little green building called Burrito Hut, and that's where most of us ate except for Flanking Line and Prism Glider who went across the street to get pizza. There wasn't anyplace to sit down inside it, but it was a pretty nice day outside so we just ate our lunch in the parking lot. Mister Salvatore said that tomorrow we were going to go to Colorado so that I could see Peggy but we weren't going to take the train. He said that Mister Dove was going to drive us to Amarillo and we'd get a car there and take it to Colorado. And he said that I didn't have to get up too early, so I'd have plenty of time to say goodbye to everyone and everypony tomorrow. It was kind of sad that I'd be leaving them because I wouldn't have minded spending the rest of the year with a proper weather team, but then when I thought about it some more I decided that if I had to choose between my friends at college or staying here in Texas, I would rather be back in Kalamazoo, so that made it a bit easier. After we'd finished eating, Joey said that looking at the maps there was going to be a thunderstorm coming in this afternoon and that we ought to watch it, but it was still a ways out. So we went back to the hotel and some ponies went back to our rooms to relax, while I went through the conference room and Lofty and Joey showed me more of the equipment and what it could do. And then he explained what the stuff in the instrument packages were, and there were devices that measured airspeed and humidity and position and pressure and basically everything that humans liked to measure in the air. And Joey also helped me put the movies from my GoPro on the internet. He said that he could put them on YouTube for me, which was really nice of him, but I thought that it would be better if Meghan did it because she'd put the other ones on YouTube. He was kind of disappointed, but he did it. Lofty also told Mister Dove that she wanted camelbacks for her whole team and he said that he'd see what he could do. Mister Salvatore said that I was a bad influence, but I told him that once he'd spent all day up in the sky he'd want one too. The storm didn't come until after dinner, and it was different than what I was used to with Mel, because instead of trying to keep my position and report what I was seeing, Doctor Tetsuya wanted us to let the storm push us along and we had the van and one of the trucks following us. So we drifted along the front of a thunderstorm, and I could see that most of the rain wasn't even getting to the ground. Humans call that virga, when rain falls out of a cloud and doesn't actually land on the ground. My weather instructors didn't have a fancy name for it; they said that it was a mistake when that happened, because when you make the rainclouds and they don't get the ground wet you messed up. Nopony wants a raincloud that doesn't water their crops. We mostly kept our position over roads, and we could see the van on the ground under us. Lofty ordered Velvet Light and Merry May to take turns in the clouds with their wingponies, 'cause they were the ones who had the instrument package this time. And by the time the sun was setting, we'd drifted all the way to Kansas, I found out. Everyone was kind of sad that I'd be leaving tomorrow, and suggested that we ought to have a goodbye party before I left, and so Dusty stopped at a beer and liquor store and we got lots of drinks and Skydancer wanted to start celebrating in the van but Dusty said that we weren't allowed to open any alcohol inside a moving vehicle at all, even if we weren't driving. I thought that was kind of silly; I could drink on the train if I wanted to, even if Mister Salvatore disapproved. But he said that if we drank in the van we would get arrested and go to jail. Once we were back at the hotel, we were allowed, so we did, and Doctor Tetsuya had a few drinks with us and told us what a great job we were doing. And Mister Salvatore got in a poker game with Electric Blue and Prism Glider and Velvet Light and Bill Harding and he did really well. Miss Cherilyn said that he wasn't supposed to be gambling with ponies and he said that he was instructing and that was okay. She said that he was winning actual money, and he said it was instructional and besides the house rule was that the chips were only worth a quarter each and that was hardly real money. She started counting his chips and he told her that you never count your chips when you're sitting at the table. Me and Lofty and Whizzer and Paradise spent a little bit of time talking about storms and after a while Jo and Doctor Tetsuya came over and also listened to us, and I had to help translate some weather terms that nopony else knew how to say in English. I was really glad I'd taken my climate science class and learned them all. Doctor Tetsuya was really interested in how we set up counterstorms and so was Lofty 'cause that wasn't something that she did much being inland like she was. That was mostly a coastal thing, because we couldn't control what came in from over the ocean, so we had to manage it the best we could. The hardest part was the winds—big storms messed with them and if you didn't calculate right, the feral storm would suck up all your hard work and just get bigger. Even though it wasn't our fault when we miscalculated, we felt like it was, and I told him about one time that we'd kept on fighting until the whole weather team dropped out of the sky from pure exhaustion because the storm was so big that it kept on pulling all our clouds in sometimes even when we were trying to position them. It was close to midnight when we finally broke off our party and went back to our rooms, and since there was still some beer left we finished it upstairs and Merry May decided that she was going to order room service but they weren't bringing up any more food for the night so she had to call and order a pizza instead and by the time it got there everypony was hungry so we called and got more. I had trouble falling asleep because I was sad that I was leaving my new friends behind but happy that I was going to see Peggy tomorrow, and also I ate too much pizza and my stomach wasn't happy about that at all. And it turned out that Paradise couldn't sleep either so we both went outside and flew northwest for a while until the lights of Shamrock were a ways behind us, and then we laid on a low cloud and looked up at the stars.