“Hurry up with those storm clouds there, purple guy!”
Skywarp paused in the process of pushing a line of little gray clouds forwards with his forehooves. He leaned over the clouds and shouted back, “First, my name is Skywarp, all right?” Folding his forelegs, he continued, “Second, I’m pushin’ these slaggin’ clouds as hard as I can! What do I look like, an Auto… I mean, a truck?”
The boss… what’s-her-name… the light-blue pegasus with way too many colors in her hair gestured at the other flying horses around them. “I don’t see anypony else complaining!” she snapped back. “Now get a move on! We need to get this storm built before sundown!”
“What’s the big deal about this storm anyway?” Skywarp grumbled, reluctantly getting behind the cloud train and pushing it forwards. “A little evenin’ shower every three days was fine before.”
“No, it wasn’t!” the boss pony- Rainbow Dash, that was it- shouted. “We missed a scheduled afternoon squall last week, and now the main weather office says we have to make up for it with a real soaker! But since it’s summertime, any big storm we build is gonna turn into a thunderstorm, so we have to assemble it really carefully to make sure it doesn’t get out of control! Got that?”
“Whatever,” Skywarp grumbled.
Rainbow Dash swooped down closer to Skywarp. “Look here, Skywarp,” she said, “I don’t like your attitude. Everypony else is doing more work than you are- with a lot less mouth!” She pointed at other ponies around them- the cutesy, colorful, and mostly female weather team- each quickly taking rainclouds from the trains being pushed in by the male pegasi and slotting them into place in the sky like puzzle pieces.
Skywarp hated puzzles.
“Look, why don’t you be a little more like your friend Thundercracker?” Rainbow Dash shouted, pointing to the other Deceptipony currently pushing an even longer train of stormclouds towards the center of the worksite. “Does his job, doesn’t complain, asks smart questions, listens to the answers! He could have my job someday, when I become a Wonderbolt!”
“Good for him,” Skywarp said sarcastically. “How many more of these we gotta get?”
Rainbow Dash took a quick look around the skies above and below them. “You get one more stack after this,” she said. “With the ones Thundercracker, Thunderlane, and Star Hunter are bringing in, that should do it.”
“About slaggin’ time,” Skywarp mumbled as he pushed the row of clouds alongside the others waiting to be put in place. As he flew back towards the depot where some other feather-dusters had dumped all the clouds from someplace called Cloudsdale, he took a moment to glance at Thundercracker, who pushed his stack through the air with a quiet little smile.
Huh! Look at him, all smug and happy.
Well, I’ll fix that.
Doubling back to the center of the work site, Skywarp swiped one of the cloudlets he’d just delivered. He triggered his special talent, and in a flash of light he went immediately from the staging area to a point in the air just in front of Thundercracker’s path. With one careful nudge he deposited the cloudlet slightly below the level of Thundercracker’s travel, and then with a second blink he was away, nowhere near the stumbling-cloud but still close enough to watch the fun.
The leading cloud of Thundercracker’s train hit the top of the one Skywarp had left behind. It pushed backwards into the rest of the cloudlets getting pushed in a perfect row by Thundercracker. The line, unable to move forwards, bowed up…
… and then the cloud train burst apart, scattering in every direction. Thundercracker flopped forward in the air as the resistance to his pushing vanished, accidentally shoving the last couple of clouds under his control away and out of his reach. He tumbled down through the sky for several seconds before recovering his balance, flapping back up to the same level as the rest of the weather team.
As he rose, his eyes locked onto a single target, made easy to spot by the volume of his laughter.
Skywarp saw the glare in Thundercracker’s eyes and only began laughing all the harder.
Before anything could happen, Rainbow Dash swooped down and put herself between the two. “Whoa, whoa whoa! Not cool!” Glaring at Skywarp, she asked, “What do you think you were doing?”
“Just a harmless little prank!” Skywarp grinned, totally unashamed.
“Yeah, well, pranks are good and all,” Rainbow Dash said, “but not when we’re on the clock! And not when we’re doing something as dangerous as this!”
“Hey, it’s clouds!” Skywarp snorted, flicking one of the scattered cloudlets away with a hoof. “Clouds! What’s so dangerous about clouds?”
The blue pegasus before him narrowed her eyes. “Did you not have weather where you came from or something?” she asked.
“Not much.” Thundercracker spoke up before Skywarp could speak. “And what little we did have we stayed away from when we could. Nasty stuff.”
“Right, so you should know better, Skywarp!” Rainbow Dash snapped.
Skywarp bit back a snappy comeback line. If he asked this lump of talky meat whether she had ever tried to fly through rain composed of concentrated sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, he’d have to explain what kind of place would even have those. Megatron had ordered all the Decepticons not to breathe a word of their actual origins… and if he heard that Skywarp had gone to babbling about Cybertron weather, the results wouldn’t be so funny.
“Now you pick up all these clouds, AND the ones you were going to go get,” Rainbow Dash demanded. “And then get back here so I can give the briefing for tonight!”
“What about tonight?” Skywarp asked. “Our shift ends at sunset.”
“Not anymore it doesn’t,” Rainbow Dash said. “You need a lesson in just how serious weather pony work is! So you’re gonna join me in watching over this storm tonight to make sure it doesn’t get out of control!” She leaned forward, anticipating the next words Skywarp was about to say, and shouted, “Or you don’t get paid for today! Got it?”
Skywarp grit his teeth- why should he get this kind of treatment from a fleshling?? But, with visions of an angry Megatron still firmly in his head, he nodded and said, “Yeah, I got it.”
“Good!” Waving a hoof around her, Dash commanded, “So get to it! Celestia’s not gonna keep the sun up forever!”
As Skywarp flew over to the nearest cloud, Thundercracker hovered over to him. “So, was it worth it?” he asked.
“Oh, hex nuts to you,” Skywarp grumbled. “And get that smile off your faceplate.”
“I wasn’t smiling,” Thundercracker said.
“Just slag off, will ya?”
“Sure thing,” Thundercracker said. “I’ll just go over here where I can watch. I always enjoy watching you do something useful, Skywarp. It happens so seldom.”
That’s another one I owe ya, Skywarp thought, but he kept it to himself.
“Cloud Kicker! Parasol! Thunderlane! Ready on the thunderhead?”
A chorus of Ready echoed through the clouds surrounding the little cluster of weatherponies in the center of the storm.
“Sunny! Flitter! Cloud Chaser! Ready with the wind?”
A voice from below shouted, “A few gusts are escaping! Hurry up or we’ll lose it!”
“Okay!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “Everypony out of the storm… NOW! HIT IT NOW!”
Thunder rumbled through the enormous conglomeration of cloud material, and static discharges rippled around the gathered ponies.
“Out! Out! Out!” Rainbow Dash led the way, plowing a pony-sized gap in the clouds. The other pegasi, including Skywarp and Thundercracker, followed in her wake, flapping quickly to get away as the little gap in the storm closed behind them. Unexpected updrafts rocked them back and forth, shoving them forwards or backwards, with one gust slamming Thundercracker into the cloud wall hard enough to make him grunt.
In a few moments they were out, all the pegasi gathering around Rainbow Dash as she hovered over a stratus cloud trailing off the back of the storm. The clear skies above the storm glowed orange with imminent sunset.
“All right,” Rainbow Dash said, “we got the job finished just in time. I just hope the ponies on the ground got everything secured. We’re gonna have heavy winds tonight, and you don’t want loose branches or other things blowing around in that!”
“We gave them plenty of warning, Dash,” Thunderlane said. “Can’t do anything more than that.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll still blame us when a window gets broken,” Rainbow Dash said. “So be ready for that, okay? Now,” she continued, looking over the rest of the team, “this storm is gonna blow itself out overnight. But it’s summertime, and we’re close to the Everfree Forest, so if we don’t watch it it could get out of control and really ruin some pony’s day. So I’m gonna need a few of you to stick around tonight and make sure that doesn’t happen!”
“I gotta go check on little bro,” Thunderlane said.
“My brother was running the shop by himself today,” Parasol said. “Sorry, Rainbow.”
“No sweat, guys, I understand,” Rainbow said. “Anyway, I got one volunteer already. Isn’t that right, Skywarp?”
Skywarp’s gaze remained locked on the scud-cloud below. “Yeah, whatever,” he mumbled.
Thundercracker raised a hoof. “I’d like to stay,” he said. “But I need five minutes to tell Megatron where we’ll be tonight.”
“Oh, yeah, you guys are part of the new guard detachment, I keep forgetting,” Rainbow Dash said. “Well, hurry back. You’re gonna get soaked, though.”
“I can go tell him!”
“Sit down, Skywarp!” Rainbow shouted. “You’re not going anywhere if you want a paycheck!”
Skywarp slumped in midair, growling softly as Thundercracker dove through the stratus below and into the storm.
A blonde pegasus with a violet coat flapped forward. “I’d like to stay on,” she said. “I can always use some overtime.”
“Really, Cloud Kicker?” Rainbow Dash asked, raising an eyebrow. “I thought your night life was full as usual.”
“Nopony can have a date lined up every night of the week,” Cloud Kicker shrugged. “But at least I get dates. Unlike some ponies.”
“Hey!” Rainbow Dash shouted. “I get all the dates I’m looking for, all right? Leave my private life out of this!”
“Whatever you say,” Cloud Kicker said, smiling a little less than sweetly.
“Okay,” Rainbow Dash said, calming down a little. “With me that makes four ponies, two rookies and two experienced. I think we can get by with that. Everypony else, good job, and see you in the morning.”
“Should we bring you a pillow and blanket?” some pony asked.
“Get outta here, willya?” Rainbow Dash roared. The other pegasi, except for Skywarp and Cloud Kicker, flew away laughing.
“So… what are we supposed ta do?” Skywarp asked.
“I’ll explain when your friend gets back,” Rainbow Dash said.
“He ain’t my friend,” Skywarp mumbled. “I just gotta live with him.”
As it turned out, the job of storm night watch wasn’t all that complicated.
Skywarp hovered far above the storm, watching it under the light of the full moon. So long as he could do that, things were fine. So long as the storm remained parked where it was, over Ponyville and the farms immediately surrounding it, nothing needed to be done. And so long as the winds, which were pretty strong now that he stopped to think about it, so long as they didn’t get any stronger everything would be considered under control.
But an unwatched storm was like an unwatched energon reactor, or so he understood it; it probably wouldn’t do anything, but it could get out of control and blow up in hugely entertaining ways. (Rainbow Dash had used the words “horrible destruction”, but Skywarp knew what he looked for in entertainment.)
It was their job tonight- Rainbow Dash, Cloud Kicker, Thundercracker and himself- to watch the storm and keep it… ugh… non-entertaining.
If the storm got too tall the electricity inside might turn into lightning ground strikes. A few of those were inevitable in a storm of this size, but they needed to be kept as few as possible, so if the storm grew too tall it was their job to knock the cloud down to a more manageable size. Likewise, if the storm got too wide, they had to go down and trim it by hoof until it covered only the area due for the rain. Doing this, incidentally, would keep the winds under control, so they didn’t have to worry much about that.
The real danger lay in allowing the storm to build up into a thunderhead, or worse, a super-cell. Left unattended, with plenty of summertime heat still radiating out of the ground, the rainstorm would grow so tall pegasi couldn’t fly over it safely, clear up to the tropopause, forming a flat top when it couldn’t grow any more. Convection currents that tall would create wild out-of-control winds and massive static imbalances, leading to gigantic lightning strikes and possibly even wild tornadoes.
All of which sounded great to Skywarp. That kind of storm had lots of energy in it. He was pretty sure Starscream or Soundwave or Shockwave had invented equipment to mine energon from that kind of storm at some point. Or maybe it was the humans- yeah, that would probably explain why they’d been fighting the Autobots over it in the rain. Whatever. Skywarp hadn’t really paid attention to anything more than finding a target to shoot at. But even without Autobots, watching people get zapped by lightning or thrown around by a storm was loads of fun… so long as it was never him.
But that was if things went wrong. If things went right, Skywarp would spend it sitting around on another cloud or flying patrol around the storm, bored out of his circuits. He wouldn’t even be able to see ponies getting soaked, both because it was night and because he was supposed to keep above the storm.
Skywarp found a scrap of cloud that had broken itself off the main storm and sat down on it. He still wasn’t used to being able to stand on what his sensors insisted was nothing more than half-condensed water vapor. But it was a lot more comfortable than roofing beams or hammocks. A little chilly, but Skywarp didn’t mind that.
He carved out a little wallow in the top of the cloud, settled himself down, and closed his eyes.
HHHOOOOOOOOOOOONK!!!
Skywarp bolted upright and kicked out hard enough to disintegrate the cloud scrap, leaving the sky clear beneath him… except for Rainbow Dash, who looked up at him with what looked like an airhorn clutched between her forehooves.
“Up and at ‘em, rookie!” she shouted. “If I don’t get to nap, nobody does! Now give me two laps around the storm! And I’ll be watching! Move it, move it!” To emphasize her point, Dash gave the ex-Seeker another blast of the air horn.
No paycheck is worth this slag! Skywarp thought.
But he began flying anyway, Rainbow Dash practically on his heels.
Skywarp sat on another bit of cloud, this time not inclined to take any naps, no matter how late it was getting.
That stupid Rainbow Dash had at least left him alone after several laps around the storm. Then there had been the lightning strike- which sounded loud to him, but which Rainbow Dash had said was to be expected. That hadn’t stopped her from gathering the others and getting all four of them to trim down the top of the storm. Skywarp had got a nasty shock from that… which had been kind of weird, because getting an electric shock in an organic body felt nothing like getting struck by lightning in either robot or jet mode. Not that either was pleasant, but the tingling sensations of electricity going places it was never meant to go… uuuggggggh.
Skywarp hoped that moron Starscream found them all a way home real, real soon.
Anyway, after that one bit of activity, things had settled down, and Skywarp was bored again. Not that he was going to let on; something told him that somewhere out there Rainbow Dash was waiting for another chance to un-bore him.
Think I’ll take that airhorn of hers and install it right up her exhaust manifold, he thought. Teach her to think she can boss around a Decepticon…
“How you holdin’ up, Skywarp?”
Oh, great. And here comes a Decepticon who just loves to be bossed around. “Thundercracker, haven’t you got some memory-cable-knitting to do?” he snapped.
“Figures,” the teal-winged pegasus grunted. “Give you one of the most incredible and interesting experiences any Transformer has ever had, on a carbon-steel platter no less, and you don’t like it.”
“Of course I don’t like it!!” Skywarp shouted. “I’m in the wrong body, I’m doin’ the wrong job, and I’m in the wrong slaggin’ UNIVERSE! You want me to like it? Go find me an Autobot to play with! That’d liven up my life! This? This is lame geek stuff, and you know it… geek!”
Thundercracker’s mouth turned up. “I guess I should be grateful I’m not lame,” he said.
“Give me a chance,” Skywarp said. “I’ll get there.”
“But even you ought to be able to see the potential,” Thundercracker said. “Yeah, it’s manual labor. But a little manual labor produces enough potential energy to recharge hundreds, thousands of Decepticons at once! If we could do this kind of stuff on Cybertron, we could revive the whole planet! Get all our old war buddies outta stasis! Maybe even end the war once and for all!”
“Great,” Skywarp grunted. “Sounds great. Go have your geeky fun. But I signed up to hurt bots and break things. That’s all I’m interested in. If you ain’t got some of that for me, slag off.”
Thundercracker grunted. “Whatever,” he said. “Just don’t fall asleep. This storm isn’t over yet. And we’re organic now. It hurts a lot more when we take a hit.”
“Yeah, I know that,” Skywarp snapped. “If you don’t wanna find out first-hand, scram.”
Still shaking his head, Thundercracker flew off.
Yeah, Skywarp thought to himself. Good riddance, too.
That mood lasted all of ninety seconds before he thought, I’m bored again.
Grumbling, he picked himself off his cloud and began flying a patrol himself. It was still boring, but at least he was flying. Flying always beat being on the ground. The ground was for suckers.
“Hey there, big boy.”
The tone of voice was half the reason Skywarp froze in mid-flap. The other half of the reason was that the voice was coming from about five centimeters away from his right ear. The freeze only lasted a moment before gravity reminded him that magic had its limits, and the forces of physics were more than happy to reassert themselves in its absence. He flapped his wings frantically to compensate, mumbling, “Um, yeah, hi there…” He trailed off as he realized he couldn’t think of the female pony’s name. Unlike Rainbow Dash, who the weather squad seemed to talk about all the time, this one…
“Cloud Kicker,” she said, filling in the gap. “You’ll get to know me if you stick around Ponyville very long.”
“Oh, yeah,” Skywarp muttered, not adding, I hope we leave tomorrow. “What can I do ya for?”
“Well, as it happens,” Cloud Kicker said, giving Skywarp a little distance to hover freely while she circled around to face him, “I’m between boyfriends right now. You know how it is, fun for a little while, then just such a drag, you know?”
She had just described Skywarp’s attitude towards all other intelligent life forms, more or less, except that “fun for a little while” for him meant “fun while I’m playing with them, otherwise slag ‘em.” Clearing his throat, he said, “Yeah, I know.”
“And I think it’s a shame,” Cloud Kicker continued, slowly working her way closer again to him, “a sweet filly like me spending evenings alone, without a big strong stallion to keep me company…”
Oh.
Though Cybertron was a world of robots, for whatever reason its inhabitants had genders and subroutines designed to bring those genders together. In Skywarp’s case those subroutines had gone long, long unused, mostly due to Megatron’s attempts to erase everything female from their homeworld. But now, for the first time in millions of years, he recognized Cloud Kicker’s tone for what it surely was.
On the one hand: stepping out with an organic? Eyuck!
But on the other hand: hey, I’m a really cool guy! And no chickbot can resist a mighty Decepticon warrior! Only a loser would let this one get away!
Idiotic pride won over idiotic bigotry. When Skywarp opened his mouth, his voice came out in his suavest, most persuasive tones. “Yeah, it really would be a shame. Wanna do somethin’ about it?”
“I thought you’d never ask!” Cloud Kicker grinned. “So how about you introduce me to that hunky two-tone friend of yours, huh?”
“What.”
Cloud Kicker missed the change in tone. “Is that a thing where you come from? Because I’ve never seen a pegasus with wings and boots a different color from their barrel! And I’d really like to take a closer look, you know?”
Even transformed into an organic form with a disgusting squishy organic brain, habits of thought from Skywarp’s mechanical origins persisted. A simple logic tree opened in his mind in an instant, running so quickly his conscious mind wasn’t really aware of any of the steps:
Romantic advances rejected. Accept? Y/N …. Y
Error: rejection is acceptable only from stronger non-Autobot life forms
Is lifeform in question both stronger and not an Autobot? Y/N ….. N
Reset to previous branch
Romantic advances rejected. Accept? Y/N …. N
Plan A: wreck the slag out of the offending life form ….
Error: slag-wrecking of life forms prohibited by order of Megatron
Plan B: …………….
Error: Plan B not found in memory banks
Plan C: find someone permissible to slag-wreck
……..
Execute Plan C
“You wanna meet Thundercracker, huh?” Skywarp hissed, not much louder than the winds whipping around him. “Fine. Watch this!”
Blowing past Cloud Kicker and going into a steep dive, Skywarp plunged into the heart of the storm. He hadn’t really been paying attention to the lectures he’d been given about how weather worked. He hadn’t cared. But he was pretty sure a couple dozen quick teleports up near the top of the storm would churn things up and make something happen.
He blinked in and out, in and out, in and out, not bothering to count, barely bothering to pick a destination for his teleports. Teleportation had just been his function; he’d never questioned it nor asked how it worked, and it had never backfired on him in millions of years of use. He wanted to be somewhere? He was there. No worries, no hesitation, no second thoughts. Just jump, jump, jump, jump.
The top of the storm flashed with teleport after teleport, Air imploded and exploded with each hop, adding turbulence to the already unstable upper layer.
Right, Skywarp thought. Just a few more, then I teleport behind Thundercracker, kick him into the sludge, and then punch the cloud until it makes lightning. That’ll show him to show me up like this!
Had Skywarp been paying more attention in weather pony training, he might or might not have been able to recognize the clues that a major electrical discharge was imminent. In any case, since he hadn’t, he couldn’t. Thus, his uneducated guess as to how many teleports he could make turned out to be excessively optimistic.
Thus he got the surprise of his life, to put it mildly, when he came out of a teleport and immediately got plastered with a massive discharge. Electricity poured through him in an eternal instant of pure pain.
Skywarp couldn’t hear his own scream.
Fortunately for him, Thundercracker and Rainbow Dash both could, and they pulled his unconscious body out of the storm before it could finish falling through to the ground below.
The light of a new day shone down over a Ponyville strewn with scattered tree branches blown here and there by the storm’s winds. It shone on the ponies cutting up and moving away the tree-top which had been split off by lightning and left to crash into the crown of the Golden Oaks library tree.
It also shone through the east-facing windows of Ponyville Hospital.
Skywarp lay in bed, fast asleep, strapped to the bed to keep him from injuring himself further. Much to Thundercracker’s surprise, the doctor had reassured him that pegasi recovered from injuries like this quickly, and that in a week or two Skywarp would make a full recovery.
Megatron, when called in to discuss the case, had approved with a smile. A week or two of confinement to a bed, with nothing to alleviate his boredom, was to his mind the perfect punishment for embarrassing his fellow Decepticons. That having been decided, he’d gone back to his morning guard patrol, leaving the details to Rainbow Dash and Thundercracker.
“Look, I don’t care what your boss says,” Rainbow said after Megatron left. “You’re a good worker, but I can’t have Skywarp on my team. He doesn’t want to do the work. He can’t pay attention to anything. He doesn’t care about the lives of anypony around him. And he’s basically just a stupid, useless jerk! I’ve gotta let him go.”
“Fine by me,” Thundercracker said. “Except that if you fire him, you’ll be giving him what he wants.”
“You’re not wrong,” Dash agreed. “But it’s not just about him. We could have got hurt rescuing his useless flank. And three of my friends almost got hurt by that lightning bolt!” She shook her head. “No, as soon as he’s out of that bed, he’s out, period. You can go with him or stay. Your choice.”
“I’m staying,” Thundercracker said firmly. “I want to learn everything I can about this weather pony business. But I also gotta keep an eye on him. Who knows what he’ll do if he’s left on his own?”
Rainbow Dash thought about that for a moment. “Okay, you have a point there,” she said. “He can stay on a little while longer. But only until you find something else for him to do! And until you do, I have to give you both the crappy jobs, because that’s the only way I can keep you two together.”
Thundercracker nodded. “No problem,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of practice doing stuff I hate.”
Rainbow Dash looked at the still-unconscious Skywarp. “I just bet you do,” she said.
In the hospital bed, Skywarp smiled in his sleep and mumbled, “Sure got you, ‘Cracker… gotcha good…” He wriggled a little in his bandages and restraints and settled back into a deeper sleep.
“Seriously,” Dash said, “get him outta my weather team as quick as you can.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Thundercracker said obediently, as the two of them left Skywarp to his dreaming delusions.