The town's weather coordinator was old.
It was impossible to tell what color his coat had originally been. At some point in his youth, there would have been the true hues: she refused to believe he had been born old, even with so much evidence right in front of her. But then the gray flecks would have begun to come in, there might have been some white around the muzzle, and for most ponies, it usually stopped there. With this pegasus elder, flecks and white were all there were, but for the forever-bright colors of his mark. It gave him the appearance of a poorly-worked cloud sculpture which had seen a mug of spectrum tea tossed into it. He was so far past the typical retirement age as to be on the verge of retiring from everything, including breathing.
His name was Passing Shower and Rainbow, upon hearing it spoken aloud for the second time, was barely able to keep from laughing again.
"Is something wrong?" the elder -- eldest? -- no, there was always the Princess for that -- asked.
"No," Rainbow half-snickered.
"Nothing funny?" The words seemed to be oddly sharp.
Rainbow, still thinking of jokes about ponies trotting under especially hasty pegasi, choked back the last of it. "No, sir." 'Sir' seemed like a good idea, especially since his age meant there wasn't much time to say anything longer.
It got her a slow nod. "All right. Now this is your first day with us --" a longer head movement indicated the seven other hovering members of the central weather team "-- and I'm a little surprised to be seeing you for the first time. I understand you arrived several days ago?"
"I was working on my house." Did she need to say it again? Well, just to be sure. "Sir."
"Even so," the stallion said, "I would have expected you to come over and introduce yourself. As everypony else here did."
Eight ponies looking at her.
"I had fountains," Rainbow told them.
"Fountains," Passing Shower repeated.
"I had to be there for the delivery," she tried. "I didn't want anypony else flying off with them before I got them mounted... sir?"
Eight ponies staring now.
"All right," the senior finally said. "So you haven't received anything more than the briefing packet which the Weather Bureau would have given you at dispatch. You also don't know how we do things here. We stick to the schedule, Miss Dash."
His wingbeats slowed. Eyelids sagged. The vault-maned pony on his left quickly coughed.
There was a surge of alertness, and then misty irises were looking at her again. "We -- where was I?"
"Schedule," that neighboring stallion quickly said.
"Yes. Thank you, Thunderlane. Schedule. We stick to the schedule. We perform our jobs as dictated by the Bureau. Without theatrics. Without deviation. Without question. Without trying to turn our duties into some form of --" with open disgust "-- performance art. If you stick to the schedule at all times, you can't go wrong. And as the Bureau has assigned you here, I can only hope that, upon review of our record, they have assigned us a pony who is fully capable of maintaining that."
She didn't know why the Bureau had assigned her to Ponyville. There had been an interview: a lively one, only partially conducted in the actual offices. Instead, after a short opening talk, Stratus had taken her out into the Sphere, the bubble of permanently-perfect weather which surrounded the main buildings. They'd flown as they'd chatted about casual things. He had gone through a few unexpected changes of flight path, spontaneous twists and spirals: she'd done her best to keep up, then started trying to predict him, and ended with attempts to make him follow her. She thought she'd made a good impression, she was certain she was going to be part of the Cloudsdale team --
-- and then the Bureau had told her she was going to ground.
Not Cloudsdale. Not Las Pegasus. Not Windicity. Not any pegasus settlement. Ground.
She hadn't been able to say anything upon seeing her assignment packet. She couldn't seem to find any words now.
Passing Shower regarded her silence, matched it for a while, then shrugged.
"Daily assignments," he finally said. "Thunderlane, restaurant district. Keep that thermal drifting."
Awkwardly, the stallion coughed again.
"Yes?" their coordinator sharply asked.
"We've been getting -- more requests. To divert the air around Mr. Flankington's. Redirect the smells..."
"Is it on the schedule?"
"...no."
"Maintain the thermal drift," Passing Shower ordered. "And nothing else. Miss Dash, we had a minor breach from the Everfree overnight --"
The what? Most of the briefing packet was still in her living room and there might even come a day when the more boring parts of it were read, possibly even for more than two minutes before the inevitable nap began.
"-- so you will be cloudbreaking."
The next word simply escaped.
"Cloudbreaking?"
She missed all of the tone. "Is there a problem?"
Nopony missed any of hers, especially not with echoes threatening to fill the sky. "It's my first day! I should be showing you what I can do! Anypony can cloudbreak! Cloudbreaking is boring!"
Eight ponies staring at her again and unseen by their coordinator, seven did so with a mixture of concern and pity.
"What you did," the senior slowly said, "is get yourself assigned to Ponyville as a first posting. As a pony who never attended a single semester of weather college. A pony who somehow got into the Bureau directly after secondary school. This indicates one of two things. Talent -- or connections. I find the two to be mutually exclusive. Talent must be proven. Connections will become apparent soon enough. Be assured I have many of my own."
Rainbow was staring at him. She couldn't seem to stop.
"But they must have told you about me --"
Thunderlane coughed again and somehow, it cut her off.
"One new mare," the elder stated, "is like any other new mare."
"But..." What's wrong with him? "...I want to prove myself! I can't do that with cloudbreaking!" Knowing she was repeating herself, hoping it would get through, "Anypony can cloudbreak!"
"Yes," Passing Shower replied. "And therefore let us hope you can. Cloudbreaking, Miss Dash. At the Acres. Nothing more."
She wanted to fly away. Burn off the anger in a burst of speed. But she couldn't, because the rule was that everypony had to stay until all the assignments were given out. All she managed was an aggressive form of hover, moving in the tiny space like a feather caught in a freshly-born dust devil. And even when he finished, she couldn't leave.
Five days of construction. Just about none spent with the briefing packet until it had helped her slip into the nightscape. She had no idea what or where the Acres were.
In Rainbow's estimation, cloudbreaking would have been about six times more boring than advertised, except that nopony ever would have been stupid enough to try selling the product. Not unless their name happened to be, just by way of example, something which put images concerning short bursts of disturbingly yellowish rain into listener minds, and then there probably would have been a full campaign. And because that pony was stupid, it would have been run in architecture magazines.
She fumed all the way through the first stages, conducted while Sun was still in the early part of being raised. Then once she could see a little better, she got to spot all the vagrant vapors which had swarmed into the area for the purpose of giving her something to take it out on. Clouds puffed away on impact after furious impact, followed by taking a few minutes to truly disperse the moisture and prevent things from coalescing after she left. That was the hard part, and she angrily decided that Passing Shower believed she would have forgotten about it.
After a while, she had just about all of the work done, enough to let her get a clear look down.
Huh. So those are apple trees.
Well, it wasn't like she hadn't seen apples before. She saw apples in Cloudsdale all the time, being eaten. They were imported, because just about anything edible was. But apple trees -- that was new. And there were more colors of apples than she'd ever seen before, even when she factored in for store shelves. Large and healthy and appearing to be perfectly edible. Even from her current altitude, Rainbow could tell those were some quality apples.
Quality, calorie-providing apples.
She'd been cloudbreaking for -- she glanced in the general direction of Sun -- too long. Way too long. (She needed to find ways of speeding something that basic up.) But it had been long enough to burn off the last of what the leftovers had provided her, and there were apples down there...
Somehow, Rainbow found herself flying a little lower than she strictly should have been for finishing off the last few strays. Lower still. There was an awkward moment when she tried to slip below the canopy: the trees had been spaced so that there could be a degree of sunlight streaming between them, but some of the branches grew way out from the -- trunks? Was that the word? -- and it took a little maneuvering to slip through the gaps. Wood scraped her right shoulder as she neared the fruit, and she winced at the contact.
It wasn't as if she'd never touched wood before. There was Gilda's ranch, and of course there was all sorts of (imported) furniture in Cloudsdale. But that was refined wood. This was the natural stuff, and it was scratchy and rough and -- weird.
Still, wood produced apples, so it had that going for it.
Rainbow hovered in front of a particularly large red specimen, maintaining an altitude of about ten times her own height above the ground. Flying among trees. It took a few wingbeats to adjust for what all those branches -- and it was trunks, wasn't it? Yeah, trunks -- were doing to the atmosphere, but she managed.
Her neck craned forward. Her mouth opened.
"HEY! What the buckin' Tartarus are y'doin' with mah apples?"
Rainbow's first mistake was glancing down.
In soon-to-come retrospect, she should have just finished the stretch, plucked the apple off the stem, and made for the sky at top speed. Instead, she looked towards the voice as her mind desperately tried to translate the accented words into something vaguely resembling Equestrian, and saw who the new arrival was. A mare, maybe a year or two older than Rainbow, muscular in a way Rainbow never saw on any pegasi. A fairly long blonde tail (with some extremely thick strands) was lashing hard enough to repeatedly jolt the rope loop at the end. She couldn't get a good look at the face: there was a hat brim shading most of it.
But she could see the pony's flanks. Just a hint of the mark was visible from her angle, just enough to give her the color. It wasn't really where she was looking. Rainbow's attention had been caught by the places where things weren't.
The two ponies stared at each other, as best they could, until Rainbow's brain finally offered up a possible interpretation of the sentence.
"Eating it," Rainbow answered.
"Not with mah apples y'don't," the orange mare shot back. "Y'ain't paid. Y'wanna drop the bits out of those little saddlebags right now, that's fine: let the money fall, Ah'll call it fair trade. But if'fin you're jus' gonna snatch food for yourself when y'think nopony's lookin', then you an' me, we got a problem."
Rainbow had already decided the mare had many problems, and most of the smaller ones were linguistic. At least one of the moderate issues, however, was a total failure to recognize reality. "You can't sell this one!"
The other pony reared back a little, just enough to let Rainbow get a brief glimpse of green eyes and furious face. "An' why not?"
"Because," Rainbow pointed out with perfect logic, "you can't reach it!"
Dead silence, which Rainbow considered appropriate for marking her total intellectual victory.
-- and ruined. "Say what now?"
"Look," Rainbow reasoned, "you don't have wings. There isn't enough room between the trees to push a ramp that's long enough to get up here. Nopony can climb. So unless you use pegasus harvesters --"
"-- which Ah don't," the mare broke in, her voice oddly soft.
"-- then these apples go to waste! There's no way you can get them down! Isn't it better to let me have one than just let it rot on the -- vine? Branch? Branch. Maybe that's even really bad for the tree when that happens! In fact, just to be nice, I can come through here every morning and just take a few problems out from under your hooves --"
"-- y'believe this," quietly came from below. "Y'actually believe every word you're sayin'."
"-- as a courtesy. Just a little favor from the Weather Bureau." Rainbow put on her best smile. "So how about it?"
"No way t' get the apples down," the mare evenly said. (In that same near-retrospect, far too evenly.)
"Yeah!"
The orange mare looked up. Regarded the leafy canopy, the unusable apples, and Rainbow's hovering position.
"Hold that pose," the mare said. "Ah wanna remember you jus' the way you were."
To which Rainbow said the only thing she could have.
"Huh?"
The orange pony spun, seemingly pivoting on a single forehoof. The powerful back legs came up, and hooves lashed towards the trunk.
There was a sound of impact and somehow, it felt louder than thunder.
Rainbow blinked.
"What was that for?"
The groundbound mare, not even bothering to look at Rainbow, lifted her right foreleg, pointed it straight up, lowered the limb, and began to silently trot away.
Rainbow, her attention called towards the blocked sky, looked up, and saw branches trembling. Fruits vibrating on their stems. Shaking as if about to drop away from the tree.
Then the first one did.
Rainbow blinked. Worse, she did that instead of moving.
"Oh, horse app --"
Rainbow didn't know a lot about apples, beyond what it was like to eat them and now, the price a pony might pay for trying to take a free one. But judging by the density of the impacts all over her back, head, neck, and wings, she wasn't sure the highest specimens had been quite ripe yet.
The majority of the ones which had bounced off her hit the ground first. Rainbow impacted second.
"Don't come back," the earth pony softly ordered. And without ever glancing at the devastation, she quietly left.
Most of the final strays got broken during Rainbow's rush to get away.