//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: The Storm // Story: Lost at Sea // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// Lost at Sea Chapter 1: The Storm Admiral Biscuit “I dunno.” Aurora and Monarch skirted the edge of the storm, feeling the angry clouds. “I think—” “This isn't that bad.” Aurora dipped her hoof into the seething mass of clouds. “It's gonna be rough, but we can push it off.” As long as we're not alone. They weren't—a gaggle of pegasi was already swarming around the Chonamare light, and while it was too far to recognize anypony at this distance, it looked like everpony on the weather team was in flight, along with the auxiliary and additional volunteers. Clusters of ponies were gathering, briefly highlighted in the sweeping beam before they, too, moved out over the ocean. “You're right.” Star kicked off the cloud and followed Aurora, moving ever closer to the angry mass of clouds. “Look, everypony's coming out.” “If we can hold the line.” Aurora looked back at her wingmare for a moment. “We've got to get it moving to the east, and then it's gonna follow along.” “Yeah!” Monarch flew up alongside the team leader. “A bit of a push, while everypony's getting in order, and we'll have this.” The thin line of off-duty and auxiliary weather ponies made a ragged line from the lighthouse to the sea, but at least the line was growing more solid faster than the incoming storm. Or at least Aurora hoped. More stragglers were still coming in when Monarch gave the order to start pushing, which would hopefully force the storm off its current path and further out to sea. They'd started before the front reached them, to give their artificial winds time enough to build. Monarch flew up and down the line, shouting orders as the storm began to slowly respond to the weatherponies. Slight adjustments were made, and ponies were shifted left and right in an attempt to increase the effect of the winds. • • • Cloud Climber and Star Catcher were at the very fore end of the line, holding the furthest position north. If all went as planned, the storm would pass to the east of them. Cloud briefly lost focus on her patch of sky as the storm rolled over the defensive line as if it wasn't there. She could see dozens of pegasi dropping out from under it, making quick wing rolls beneath the angry face of the clouds before they flew to their fallback positions. It’s not so bad.  Star Catcher thought.  When she was actually fighting the storm and not just looking at it, her confidence had quickly returned.  It’s not like we’ve got to bust it all the way back to water vapor, just keep it off shore. She glanced down for a second at the angry sea roiling beneath them, stirred up by the storm above.  Even once it was gone, it would take the ocean a while to settle back down. “A little further back and higher,” Cloud Climber shouted above the waves. Star nodded, and the two mares let the gusting winds from the front push them up and back, then they began forcing the storm again, shoving it ever so gently away from the coast. By the time the two pegasi realized that they were too far out to sea, it was too late.  The storm was bigger and nastier than they’d thought, and it roared down on them like an avalanche. There was no more time for talking, only fighting nature’s raw fury.  The storm lashed out at them, and they fought back, each focusing on setting up a counterflow to budge the storm back over the sea where it belonged.  Both of them could clearly see the front of the clouds dimple slightly as it met their unexpected resistance. They had no choice but to move a bit further apart as they worked the front, and they could only focus on the clouds right in front of their muzzles, tumbling and rolling in the complicated air currents. Star and Cloud struggled to hold their positions as well as they could, even though both could sense that they were being pushed back.  Still, they could feel that the storm was beginning to shift to the east, and that was what really mattered. • • • It wasn't until the second time that she heard the horn's call that she realized they were being recalled. She'd completely lost awareness of everypony else in her fight with the storm. When she looked to her right, she realized that a towering cumulonimbus cloud was between her and land. Somehow, it had pushed its way in and she hadn't even noticed. I hope Star Catcher is okay. Cloud dropped down—flying into a cumulonimbus cloud was incredibly stupid—and turned north, intending to skirt around the front of it. The cloud base was lower than she'd thought, or maybe updrafts had pushed her higher than she'd meant to go. At the moment, the cloud obscured the land completely, and it was really hard to tell how high she was with only the ocean below as a reference point. When she got under the front edge of it, she got a better view of shore. She still couldn't see Star Catcher, but she could see a few other pegasi making their way back towards Chonamare. She leveled off and began flying a direct course to land. Once I'm clear of the cloud, I'll climb back up a little bit and make sure that Star's gone off-station. She might not have heard the horn, either. The winds under the cloud weren't her friend. They were pushing her north and down, and she fought back, trying to find a path through the worst of them. Cloud caught a brief glimpse of Star's blue and pink tail before she suddenly got soaked by a monsoon of rain that was immediately followed by a peppering of hailstones. She shook her mane out of her eyes and felt around for the edge of the rainwall—off to her side, it looked a little less intense, so she flew in that direction and was rewarded by clipping the edge of a downdraft that flipped her over before she could even react. Somewhere below her, the ocean was waiting to swallow her up, and not knowing how far below it was was nerve wracking. She twisted around to get her hooves back under her and managed to get upright again, although now she had no idea which direction she was facing. The winds around her were variable and unpredictable, and she couldn’t see anything. If she didn't fly southeast, she'd be fine—she hadn't been in the rain all that long. She could fly off in one direction, and if she didn't get out when she thought she should, she could just make a 90 degree turn, and that would surely be the correct direction. As she flew, the rain and hail lessened, which was a relief. Cloud Climber didn't notice right away when the updraft caught her. She was thinking about the tavern and the warm pot of stew that would be waiting for them, and how she was going to have to admit she'd been caught in the middle of the storm like a foal. But then she realized that it was getting darker and she was in the cloud, even though she should have been clear of it by now. The air currents were strange and unknown to her. She could feel the electricity in the cloud prickling at her coat, and that was all wrong; it didn't have the charge that it should. With rising dread, she began to realize that she had been sucked inside a supercell, which was the king of clouds. She could faintly make out flashes of lightning inside the cloud, and she flew towards a particularly bright one, hoping that maybe she could get out under the bottom of it. It was a good idea, until she got hit by a violent updraft, one that was far too big for her to get out of. At first, she tried to fly against it, but that was no good; the cloud was too strong for her. Then she remembered that it was like a rip tide, and she should instead try to fly across it. Her wings were icing up and it was getting hard to breathe. Half-frozen raindrops and hailstones swirled around her. Her coat crackled with electricity, which arced off onto hailstones as they rose beside her. I'll never make it out of this cloud. But she kept fighting it, and the fear that gnawed deep in her belly that this was it; she was going to use up all her energy and crash into the ocean and drown or else get blown up so high that she'd suffocate at the top of the world. Small hailstones were sticking to her and freezing on, upsetting her balance. Her face was numbing with the cold as she fought on, desperately searching for a way out. Even without looking, she could feel her wings stiffening as the accreting ice began to entomb her mid-flight. The cloud thickened into a mist of death, a thick patch of glare ice that she had no hope of escaping. She had no sense of up and down. Sometimes when she was walking on the beach, she’d see a bit of driftwood caught up right at the water line, tumbling over and over in the breakers, and now she knew what that felt like. Her left wing cramped and the wind caught it and before she could react she was tumbling again and there was nothing she could do as she crashed through the cloud like a giant hailstone.