October 16
It was my portable telephone which woke everyone up this morning, and Aric had to get up to find it. I'd put it in the bit pocket in my dress, just in case Cyndi called, and I'd kind of forgotten it was there.
He got it and answered and he said that it was Mel, and he wanted to know if I was going to come stormwatching and I started cursing the stupid storm for being so early, then told Aric to tell him that I would, and we'd be out there as quick as we could.
By then Meghan had woken up, too, and it was kind of chaos as everybody used the bathroom and got dressed and I told Aric I'd meet him by Winston, and galloped to my room and then grabbed all my flight gear as quietly as I could, but I still woke up Peggy and told her where I was going, and she told me to be safe then laid back down in bed.
I didn't have time to put anything on, so I held it all in my mouth and charged down the hallway and one flight of stairs, then crashed out the balcony door and took off. Aric was already in Winston and Meghan was standing by the door, waiting for me.
I jumped up inside and Meghan got in after me, and we took off down Academy Street, bouncing over the bricks.
There wasn't much traffic, which was good. And Aric really pushed Winston to go, while Meghan helped me get my flight gear on. She hadn't even gotten all the way dressed herself; she'd put on a sweatshirt and shoes but was still wearing her sleeping pants.
I'd seen the clouds out of the corner of my eye when I flew over Trowbridge, but Aric and Meghan hadn't until he turned onto the 94 Highway, and they were right in front of us, a towering pile of angry black thunderclouds.
He was going faster than he should have, and he came up the exit ramp in Mattewan really fast and then slowed down really late and I had to brace myself on the dashboard when he stopped. Then he pulled into the parking lot next to Mel's truck and an Escape with the WMMT logo on the side.
I didn't want to be rude to Cyndi, but I didn't have much time to talk, 'cause I could see that the storm was moving in pretty quickly, so I told her what I was going to do and that I could answer more questions afterwards and probably Mel could, too, since we'd been working together for so long.
I called the airplane directors and told them that I was going to be up at the stormfront, and Dori told me to be careful because it looked really bad on the weather radar, and I said it looked really bad to my eyeballs, too.
Then I took off and I circled around so that me and Mel could check our radios, and the man with the camera kept it focused on me, and when we were satisfied and I started to climb, I'm sure that he was still recording me.
So I stayed a little bit closer than I would have normally, which meant that I wasn't going to be able to give Mel as much warning, but I didn't think he was going to mind.
I felt the pressure change just before the wind hit me, and I went tumbling through the sky 'cause I hadn't expected it. Then I got right side up again and flew into the wind, and at first I didn't make any progress, but then I broke through and started getting close to the clouds.
I didn't need to touch them to know that they were bad news; they were towering above me, tens of thousands of feet in the air, and I think that if they'd come later in the day when the sun had warmed things up, they might have been able to make tornadoes.
I could smell all the ozone in the air as the storm rumbled and grumbled in front of me, and for just a moment I was right in front of the clouds, and on my left it was sunny and clear, and on my right it was dark and black, and I was alone in the no mare's land between the two, and then I dropped and let the storm come over me like a wave.
For a few minutes, I was soaked by rain but the ground far below my hooves stayed dry, because it took time for the raindrops to make it all the way down. I'd seen how far behind the front the rain was because it was pretty clear on the 94 Highway—there was an advancing line of wet pavement trailing behind the front.
I flew out in front of it long enough to tell Mel what I'd felt and seen so far, and then I let it come over me again, and whatever had stayed dry on my first trip under the cloud got soaked this time around.
The leading cluster of clouds were still building strength and didn't have much lightning in them, but the next ones along did, and I did my best to report where I could see it hitting and how frequent the flashes were, but I couldn't see all that much through the rain. I'd lost the ground, so I was relying on my watch and rough estimations. It was times like this that I kind of wished I'd gotten a bigger navigation map, but my forelegs were already cluttered with equipment.
There were a couple of times that there was enough lightning in the air that I completely lost communication with Mel, 'cause all my radio would do was make static, and by the time it had finally lightened up a little bit, I'd lost some ground position that I hadn't been able to make up, but my watch had kept me mostly where I needed to be. As long as I could keep the bearing and distance roughly the same, I knew I was pretty close to where I needed to be.
He said that the worst of it had passed, so I started coming back down and I lost a thousand meters of altitude before I could vaguely make out the ground, and it wasn't until I'd gotten even lower that I saw the gas station and their big sign, and then I knew where everything was, so I'd already aimed for my landing point before I could see it, and only had to make a minor change as I got closer.
I'd come around so that I was into the wind and I let it help bleed off the forward speed from my descent, which is something that airplanes also know how to do. And I aimed for a lamppost and I was close enough to see that the man with the camera was looking at me again.
I had a moment to think that maybe I shouldn't spark off on lampposts, but they were so convenient and trees weren't because of all the little branches and you had to get closer to them because they didn't conduct as well. And then it was too late, and I reached out my forehoof and a bright blue spark jumped off and the light flickered for a moment and then it was okay.
It was still raining, but it was a gentle, soaking rain. And before I went to talk to Cyndi, I checked the maps on Mel's folding computer, and we both agreed that the bad part of the storm had passed and that there wasn't anything else coming behind it, although it was going to be raining for a while before it stopped.
Then Cyndi gave me a cup of coffee and told me to take a breather and then she had a lot of questions for me. So I sat down on the pavement which was still soaking wet but so was I so it didn't matter.
And when I'd finished the coffee, we had to move around so that the background was right, because that mattered to the man with the camera, and I thought it was kind of silly, but I guess he knew more about making movies than I did. And she had me explain all my gear and then what I did, and what we did in Equestria and it was lot longer of an interview than I'd expected.
She asked me how it felt to be up in the sky alone, and I admitted that sometimes it was kind of scary, especially because I didn't have a wingmare and the storms were too big for me to have any real effect on them, but it was my duty, and she thought that was odd, but I said that this is what pegasuses are born to do.
And after she'd gotten done asking me questions and the man with the camera had turned off his light and put his camera back in the Escape, she asked me if she could have the movie my GoPro had made, and said that she'd give me credit. She said that they hadn't been able to get much footage of me actually up in the storm, which made sense—if I couldn't see the ground, than they couldn't see me. So I said that she could, and we went to the Escape and she attached it to her folding computer and then got the movie out of it.
She said that they'd have a teaser knocked together by the evening broadcast and tomorrow morning they would show the whole segment, and then she said that I was a very brave pony, and she thanked me for my time.
I was starving and soaking wet and a little bit cold, and even though it was raining, Meghan got out of Winston and helped undress me but we hadn't had time to get any towels, so she took off her sweatshirt and let me wear that to help warm up.
I wanted to go into the Speedway and get some food, but Aric said that if I could hold on a little bit longer we'd get better food, and so he drove back into Kalamazoo on Stadium and we stopped at the doughnut mill. It wasn't a breakfast that would stay with us, 'cause doughnuts were quick energy, but I was too hungry to care. And after I'd had a giant cinnamon roll and another cup of coffee, I felt a lot better, even though I was still pretty wet.
Meghan said that we ought to warm up in her uncle's hot tub, and me and Aric liked that idea, too, so when we were done eating he drove across town and followed Meghan's directions to get to her uncle's house. Aric parked Winston in the street in front of the house and Aric asked Meghan if it was okay to use the hot tub, and she said that her uncle didn't mind. I said that we'd used it a bunch of times before, and so Aric shrugged and we went into the backyard.
We got undressed and got into the tub. Aric had just his underwear on and Meghan wore her panties and shirt but she could have taken off the shirt since when it got wet it became almost invisible.
Aric was a little bit uncomfortable at first, which I thought was kind of funny because he didn't seem to be uncomfortable at Sunny Haven except around Natalie. But after we'd sat there for a while and I'd warmed up and the hot water had relaxed all my muscles, he started to seem less distracted.
Both Aric and Meghan were really interested to see what Cyndi made, and Aric promised that he would find a way to record it tomorrow. And he said that we could probably go to their internet page tonight and see the teaser, because that would be the kind of thing that would make people want to watch. Meghan said that the footage from my GoPro was probably going to be what made their segment, because humans didn't get many pictures from that close to storms, and I said that if we could equip all the weathermares in Equestria with cameras, they'd get all the movies they could ever watch.
Both Meghan and Aric agreed that if you equipped a bunch of ponies with GoPros, it wouldn't matter what they were doing—people would watch. He wasn't sure why there weren't more movies from Equestria, and Meghan said it had to do with the export regulations and there was a lot of stuff that people and ponies were still negotiating, and that ponies didn't have very good infrastructure either, but she heard that National Geographic had funded a major expedition to Equestria, and that next year they were going to start a television series.
She said that she'd heard one of the big problems film crews had had was that they couldn't get trucks full of equipment into Equestria.
Then we got quiet for a little while because a couple of deer came out of the woods and started grazing right at the edge of the trees. Aric said it was kind of strange for them to be out during the day, and I thought maybe they were hungry and getting ready for the winter, and maybe they hadn't had a chance to eat earlier when it was pouring down rain. I didn't know if deer would graze in the rain.
We finally got out of the hot tub when we started to get hungry for lunch. I got out first so that I could shake off and not get either of them wet, and then Meghan and Aric got out and she gave him a towel and used another one to dry her legs off.
She turned away from Aric and took off her t-shirt and then put on her sweatshirt, and stretched it down as far as she could before she took off her underwear and put on her lounging pants, and Aric kind of did the same thing, and then he said it felt really weird to be wearing his Dockers without any underwear.
If there had been sun out, I would have liked to relax on the benches for a little bit and let the sun dry me off, but it was still completely overcast, so I couldn't do that. So Meghan dried me with her towel, and then she hung them up in the little closet that they'd come from.
We got back in Winston and drove back into town, and Aric said that we'd ought to stop for some real food somewhere and I wanted to go to Taco Bell, he wanted to go to Jimmy John's, and Meghan said she wanted a hamburger.
So Aric said that we could decide between us, and Meghan laughed when I changed my vote to Jimmy Johns, so we went there.
I thought that I ought to check on Jenny and Aquamarine, 'cause I felt like I'd kind of abandoned them, so Aric dropped us off at our dorm and said that he was going to go home and get new clothes and maybe take a nap, because he was really tired from getting up so early. And Meghan said that a nap sounded like a good idea, and she didn't know how I was so awake, and I said that it was all the flying around I'd done in the morning. So we agreed that we'd meet up for dinner, and then I went back to my room and Meghan went to hers.
I hung up all my flight gear and then I tried to figure out where Jenny and Peggy might be. I thought maybe they would be at Christine's, and Aquamarine was probably still with Cedric, and then I decided that they would probably come back before they left, and I really didn't have anything to do so I laid on my bed and preened my wings and then I went flying around campus looking for Jenny and Peggy.
I didn't find them all afternoon, and it was really funny how on such a small campus two people could disappear so completely. And I'd pretty much given up when I finally saw the two of them walking across the quad, and so I landed next to them, and Jenny said that she was getting ready to go and she'd sent a message to Aquamarine.
Peggy wanted to know if I was coming to dinner, but I said that I would be going out with Aric and Meghan to dinner, and then she asked me about the storm so I told her all about it.
Jenny had everything packed by the time Aquamarine came back, and we nuzzled before she left. She said she'd had a really fun weekend, and Jenny had too. And we both thought that Gusty would have a play soon, and we should go see it, and maybe we could also spend some time in Chicago with Cayenne.
Peggy helped carry their bags to Jenny's car, and we all hugged and nuzzled one more time before they left, and when we were walking back I asked Peggy if she'd found a boy at the dance, and she nodded, but she wouldn't tell me who.
Meghan came by my room before Aric showed up, and when he arrived we decided that we should go to Olde Peninsula together, and Aric said that since they had lots of beer and it was pretty cheap, we'd be better off walking instead of driving. I offered to not drink and drive Winston back, and he said that was a kind of tempting idea, but he wasn't being serious, and besides he'd walked from home, so he'd have to go back to get Winston.
So we walked through town and had a really nice dinner together and all of us drank more beer than we should have, and when we were done eating none of us wanted the evening to end so quickly, so we went down to the little boardwalk that was by the river and sat there and talked for a little bit, and when we started to get cold, we all cuddled up together until Aric said he had to pee, and he went down under the railroad bridge where we couldn't see him.
While he was gone, Meghan asked where I was planning to sleep tonight and I said that I didn't know and it was hard to decide.
She said that Amy would probably be back, which meant that she couldn't have Aric over, but it would be okay if it was just me, and I said that I wasn't sure if Peggy would be happy with the three of us in our room, either, which only left Aric's house if we all wanted to stay together, which I wanted to do. And I asked if that meant she was ready and she said she wasn't sure and we'd just see what happened. She said that she was getting more comfortable with him but she didn't think that tonight was the night and I didn't either, but maybe I'd feel different later.
So we walked back to his house, and he said he'd found the teaser on his computer and bookmarked it, and we watched it and Cyndi said a lot of wonderful things about me. And there was a little short clip where you could just see my blinking light right in front of that big storm front, and it looked kind of intimidating from their view on the ground, and I guess that was what Mel saw every time I went flying in storms.
And Meghan went off to the bathroom to pee and when she came back she said that she wished that she'd thought to bring some sleeping clothes, and Aric said he probably had a pair of lounging pants if she wanted to wear them but they'd be too big, and she was welcome to borrow one of his shirts, and so she thought about that and then said that she'd appreciate that, so he rummaged around in his dresser until he found a fuzzy pair of pants and a grey t-shirt, and she went back to the bathroom to change, and while she was gone Aric took the opportunity to take off his clothes and put on a clean pair of underwear.
He asked her if she wanted the inside or the outside of the bed, and she said that it was his bed so he ought to get to decide, and so he said he'd take the outside again because he'd feel really bad if she fell out.
So she got in bed and put her back up against the wall, and I got in and snuggled up against her and she put her hand over my back and then Aric turned out the lights and joined us in bed, and he put his hand across my back, too.