Fastest Fall in Equestria
I Love a Rainy Night
Rainbow Dash: Dave looked really worried, and who could blame him? Uncontrolled weather is freaky, and dangerous, too!
"Oh, geez, R.D.," he said. "I should've checked the weather before we went out." He put his back against the door frame of the restaurant, peeked around the corner, then grinned at me. "Okay," he said. "Quickly! Between the drops!"
With that, we started our mad dash to the bus stop, laughing like fillies. The bus stop itself provided a lot less shelter than it looked like, and the whole "run between the drops" plan worked about as well as you'd think. (It didn't. Heck, I don't think it'd work in my own body, let alone Mike's.) The wait for the bus was thankfully brief, and the bus ride itself was made kind of awkward by Dave's insistence on us not discussing anything "weird" while we were in public.
Soon enough, we were back at his apartment, with Dave lounging on his couch while I played with his computer some mo-- I mean totally doing awesome fact-finding on the interwebs, because I am awesome at every single thing I attempt. Every. Single. Thing.
"The hay is this?"
"What are you looking at, there, Dash?"
"Well, I wanted to see what you humans do to manage weather, so I figured I'd do a search on the googler thing, and it took me to this weather command place or whatever..."
"Weather-dot-com?"
"Yeah, that one. And... this is not what weather looks like, Dave. This is not what weather looks like at all."
Dave came up behind me and the jerk started laughing at me. "Oh, jeez, you found the Doppler radar display," he said, which was about as helpful as Twilight's explanation of who she was dressed up as for Nightmare Night.
"Who is Doppler Radar, and why is her display just a big green blob with red blotches? Is that her cutie mark?"
Dave, helpful as ever, laughed even more.
"Seriously, Dave, you are no help at all..." I frowned. "Fine," I said finally, when it looked like his laughing was going to continue unaba... unbai... nonstop. I clicked on his little searchy thingy and typed in "doppler radar". First thing I found was "National Weather Service Doppler Radar Images" so I figured this Doppler Radar pony -- er, person -- was a weathermare. Woman. Man. Whatever. So I clicked on it, and got a stupid blue map.
"Okay, help me out here, Dave."
"All right, all right," he said, apparently having laughed enough for now. "Okay, what you're looking at is a map of places that have weather radar. Radar stands for... um... something to do with radio, I forget. But what it is, is that radio waves are sent out from a radar dish, and they bounce off things in the air and come back to the dish, letting the equipment know there's something there."
"That's... pretty neat," I admitted.
"Right. So, Doppler radar uses the Doppler effect to figure out how fast things are moving..."
"Annnd, I'm lost."
Dave sighed. "You ever go flying past a crowd really fast, and notice how their cheers start off high pitched, then get deeper once you pass them?"
"Hay, yeah!" I grinned. "Twilight says it's because the sound waves are shorter when you're moving towards them, and that makes the sound high pitched, then longer when you move away, which makes them low pitched."
"Actually, the soundwaves don't change length -- unless they were coming from you -- but in a nutshell, that's the Doppler effect. Well, Doppler weather radar uses radar to determine where clouds and rainfall are, and the Doppler effect to determine how fast they're moving, and in what direction."
"So these green blobs are clouds?"
"Yeah, the color represents how much rainfall is coming from them."
"So whose job is it to set these storms up, anyway?"
Dave frowned. "Nobody," he said. "It's all down to natural processes. We understand how it works on a large scale, but there are too many tiny variables to even try to change things beyond a little cloud seeding now and then."
"You can't seed clouds, silly. The seeds fall right through!" I grinned. "I know, 'cause Derpy tried once, figured she'd get extra-watery watermelons from it."
Dave facehoofed. Er, handed. Whatever the term is. What do I look like, an Equestrian-to-English dictionary? "You know what? Forget it. Forget I mentioned cloud seeding and take it as read that Earth doesn't have magic, so we can't control the weather."
I frowned. "You don't have magic," I said.
He nodded. "Not a bit."
I pointed at the computer, then at the TV, then at that most magical of household appliances, the microwave. "You don't have magic?" I said again.
"No magic at all," he said again.
"Then how does any of this stuff work?!"
He grinned. "Honestly? I can only tell you the basics on most things. That's why I let you assume magic in the first place, it's easier than trying to explain things. As the Internet has often said: it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit."
I shook my head. "So, basically, this is like... the Everfree Planet."
Dave laughed. "Yeah, pretty much. So, let's take a look at that doppler map."
"Where are we on this?"
He pointed to a spot just in front of the center of the storm. "Right about there," he said.
"Sweet, look how fast that's moving! We'll be clear in ten seconds flat!" I ran over to the window and watched the storm totally fail to move past.
Dave laughed again. "That's time lapse," he said. "That image shows how much the storm's moved over the past fifteen minutes. So we've got more like an hour and a half, which still isn't that bad." He frowned. "Too bad, we could use a bit more rain than that."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, Texas is in the middle of a drought, and enough good storms will take care of that."
"Well, duh," I said. "That's why my job is so important to Ponyvi--" I stopped. Oh buck me in the flank, I'd forgotten my job! There was a storm building over Everfree when I was flying around earlier, and without me there to take care of it, they'd have to trust Derpy to take care of it. I can just hear her now, saying "I don't know what went wrong" while the town is wiped out by a flood while whatever isn't underwater burns from lightning strikes.
I mean, Derpy's a good mare and all, but when she gets excited, well, she tends to overdo things. Couple that with her being, well, Derpy, and you have yourselves a portable, pegasus-pony-shaped disaster. And let me just settle the name debate right now:
Her name is Ditzy Doo. The whole "Derpy" thing started in Flight School, when she was trying to go through a ring course and managed to miss every single ring. When she got back to the starting line, Coach Thunderhoof was about to mark her down, when she looked up and we all saw her eyes doing that thing they do, and she just grinned and said "Sorry, Coach, my eyes just went all derpy on me." And thus was a nickname born.
Twilight thinks I'm being mean when I call her that, and when Derpy says she doesn't mind, Twilight gets all defensive and tells her it's okay to tell people when they're hurting her feelings, which just makes me wonder what the fillies in magic kindergarten used to call her. I know she's got issues about kindergarten...
So yeah, she's Ditzy Doo, but she doesn't mind if friends call her Derpy. It's all in tone of voice. Like, if Pinkie Pie were to start calling me Rainbow Crash, I wouldn't mind a bit, but those jerks who used to call me that back in flight school? Not cool. But now I just hope Twilight doesn't think I'm being mean when I call her an egghead.
Because that would totally suck.
And...
Oh my Celestia, I AM A TERRIBLE FRIEND.