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// NEXT TIME ON IOTA FORCE 
// Story: The Crystal Caves of Confuzzlation (Iota Force Issue #6) 
// by The Iguana Man 
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The River Freeser wasn't something that many geographers or potamologists gave much thought to. It wasn't especially large, long or special as rivers went and was only really a consideration to the small town of Ponyville, through which it wound. There weren't even any other towns along its length as, only a few miles past Ponyville, it joined up with the much larger River Bronco.

The only potentially interesting aspect of it was that, as its name suggests, it originated in the Everfree Forest, at the top of a small mountain there. And even then, if one were feeling both curious and brave enough to study rivers in the Everfree, there were larger, more impressive and more interesting ones within its borders.

No, the Freeser wasn't much of a river. But it was a river. That was an undeniable fact.

A long distance away from said river, a train chugged its way along the tracks towards Ponyville, though not with any plans to stop there. The train contained no passengers, instead being entirely filled with freight bound for the Crystal Empire.

Among the many assorted items being taken there were a few large crates, each one looking far heavier than they actually were. To look at them, one would think they would need to be hauled along by two or more burly earth ponies or heaved onto large carts when, in fact, they had been loaded onto the train two at a time by a rather slight pegasus, who hadn't even strained his wings to keep himself aloft as he did.

The reason for this was that the massive amounts of rockets contained in each one weren't simply filled with propellant, but also with concentrated pegasus magic, making them weigh almost exactly the same as air. The rockets weren't anything special – merely a means to alter the weather if one lacked a full force of pegasi to do so. In theory, one could use them to create powerful, dangerous changes to the weather, but it was very unlikely – the reason they weren't used more often than weather teams was that they were imprecise and lacked the fine control a living pegasus could exert. This not only meant they couldn't feasibly be used to create precise weather conditions, it also meant that, due to the wild and chaotic nature of weather magic, the changes they created tended to be rather minor, as the contained weather clashed with the existing weather and largely cancelled each other out. It would take an expert weatherpony to use them to make massive changes to the weather and, if such a pony were around, they could just make such changes directly.

So, the rockets were difficult to use to make massive changes to the weather. However, they could theoretically do it. This was also an undeniable fact.

There was a pegasus filly perched on a tree branch above the tracks the train would be passing over. This was, once again, an undeniable fact, as any observer, of which there were none, could attest, as could the filly herself.

However, she could also attest to something that no observer could – that these three facts were intimately connected.

Admittedly, this made them in no way special, as the nature of the world meant that everything was, in some way, connected to everything else and, most notably, everything in the world interacted with everything around it in infinitesimally intricate patterns. The filly knew this for a fact – she couldn't stop herself knowing it no matter how hard she tried and she never understood how no other being could see these patterns.

However, the three facts in question, she knew, were connected in a way that was both less direct and larger at the same time. They weren't interacting yet, but they soon would be:

Devices capable of creating huge amounts of rain, a river running through a town of ponies... and a mind capable of combining the two.