It was a gloomy Saturday in Ponyville. The weather team had arranged a big storm for the afternoon, and were cautioning ponies to be well indoors before then, so Cheerilee had nowhere to go and nothing to do.
She liked these days. As long as she finished grading papers in the morning, she had a perfect excuse to curl up by the fire and not move for the rest of the day. There would be no school business, no visitors, no noisy scenes in the square. She flipped open the novel she had been reading in her precious spare time, took a sip of tea and a bite of a wholesome wheat bun, and sighed happily as she relaxed for what felt like the first time in ages.
Somepony knocked on her door. As she stood to answer, Cheerilee thought about how nice it would be if she could ever finish this book. "Who's there?" she called out.
"It's me, Rumble!" a small voice outside answered. "My brother sent me!"
As a teacher, it's my duty to help any foal who comes to me in any way I can, the maroon mare thought, halfway through barricading the door. "Just a minute," she said as she began to disassemble her work.
Soon, the door swung open and a gray pegasus colt with a greasy mane stepped inside. Rumble was the brother of the hotheaded weatherpony who happened to patrol Cheerilee's neighborhood. She briefly wondered why Thunderlane would send his little brother to see her about anything when he himself would be just overhead.
"Did he say what he wanted?" she asked. "And… what's that on your chest?"
Rumble looked down as if noticing for the first time that there was a piece of paper pinned to his chest. "It feels like pain," he replied, carefully removing the pin. "I think it's a note for you." He held the paper up to her. Curious, Cheerilee took it and began reading.
Hey, coach, this kid is just too stupid. I need to get rid of him for the afternoon so I can actually do my job. Can you give him some extra lessons? Maybe you can teach him weather or something, I don't know. Just make him less of an idiot.
Cheerilee sighed. This wasn't even the right end of town. The coach lived closer to the Cloudsdale air lane. How had Rumble misidentified his destination so badly?
"Teach him weather?" she mused idly. "Maybe it's Thunderlane who needs extra lessons…"
"You're going to teach me weather?" Rumble repeated. "Yeah! I'm gonna be a weatherpony!"
"What?" Cheerilee blinked. "No, no, Rumble, I can't—I mean I really can not do that, you should go to—"
"Weatherpony, weatherpony! I'm gonna be a weatherpony! Just like my big bro… uh… ny!"
Rumble's chanting was suddenly drowned out by a crack of thunder. The teacher's hoof slowly caressed her forehead. That was the signal to stay indoors. She was stuck here with a colt who had no idea he wasn't supposed to be here.
"I'll be the best weatherpony ever, just you watch! I'll make a tornado right now!"
It would be wrong to throw a foal out into the storm. Cheerilee reflected on this as she slowly lowered him to the ground and shut the door.
"Now listen, Rumble, I don't think that's a good idea," she explained calmly. "You're nowhere near being ready for that kind of performance." And the last thing she needed was a hyperactive pegasus flying around and slamming into everything she owned.
"Oh, right, basics first! I should start with rainmaking!"
"No, that's not—you shouldn't be making any kind of weather yet," she informed him. "You'd be a danger to yourself and others. You need to know what you're doing first."
He nodded slowly.
"I can't actually teach you how to make weather anyway, since I'm not a pegasus, but even before that, what you really need is some basic education. You can't do anything with the weather until you know a little bit about it."
He nodded slowly.
"I recommend studying your science and history after school every day. Once you understand the needs of the ponies around you and how weather systems work, your coach will probably be glad to take you under her wing and train you to be a great weatherpony."
He nodded slowly.
"Do you understand what I'm saying?"
He thought for a moment. "You mean you'll teach me science so I can do lightning like my brother?"
The teacher frowned. She wasn't quite sure when she had volunteered for that particular duty. In fact, she would very much prefer to avoid it. "I only said that you would need to learn those things," she clarified.
"Right! And it's so nice of you to do it! What are you going to teach me first?"
Cheerilee had the sinking feeling she wouldn't be able to escape from this. "Alright," she breathed wearily. "I just made some wheat buns, so come sit down and we'll talk about it."
Rumble followed her excitedly. As soon as they sat down, he popped a bun into his mouth, chewing happily. Meanwhile, Cheerilee began attempting to sort out a lesson plan in her mind.
"I guess for tonight, we'll just do a basic overview of the most general mechanics of pegasus magic," she decided. "You can do most of it by instinct alone, but it'll help immensely if you know how it works." She cleared her throat. "For starters, you have flight."
"What?" Rumble's eyes widened at that statement. "Flight is magic? But I thought we just used our wings like birds!"
"Oh, no," Cheerilee clarified, "birds are able to fly because they have hollow bones that make them lighter, but a skeleton like that couldn't support a pegasus. Even if it could, it would make even minor injuries life-threatening. Instead, a pegasus's wings act kind of like magnets. Every time you flap your wings, the magic in them reacts with atmospheric magic to pull you up."
The colt whistled in amazement. "Okay, so how do—"
"Please, one thing at a time." Cheerilee gestured to the rain that now beat at the window. "As a pegasus uses their wings, small amounts of magic escape, which can affect weather patterns. That's why, when there hasn't been a storm recently, it's not just the volume of rain that increases. In order to use up the excess magic, the wind blows harder and lightning strikes more often. And that's why we absolutely have to stay indoors on days like today."
Rumble blinked, then raised a hoof. "So then how do they know how big a storm has to be?"
Thinking about it, the mare shrugged. "I can't say I know firsthoof, but apparently they have very strict procedures. They have to test samples of clouds from all over town."
He scratched his head. "Wow, that sounds a lot more complicated than I expected!"
"Yes, well, that's why the lead weatherpony has to work so hard to keep everything organized." Cheerilee nodded. "It's not easy, but it's necessary. Without rain, all the plants would dry up, and without lightning, all the clouds would just kind of explode. Your brother complains about how strict management is sometimes, but he understands how important it is, and I think he knows implicitly that it's worth all the hassle."
Rumble stared out the window in awe for a few minutes, seeming to even forget about the bun in his mouth.
Relieved, the teacher stood up and trotted over to her bookshelf, selecting an appropriate book on the subject and opening it up. "So that's the basic principle of how flight and weather interact. But there's more to it than that. Magic isn't just concentrated in one spot, it's spread through your entire body, and pegasus magic creates a selective barrier when you touch a cloud that allows you to interface with it." She found the page she was looking for and set it down in front of Rumble, showing him a diagram of the layer of magic between pegasus and cloud to help him understand what that meant.
"Um..." He looked at it a bit, tilting his head, then shrugged. It seemed this was a little too complicated for him.
Cheerilee rubbed her chin for a moment. "It's like a magical cushion," she offered. "Without it, the cloud is just water and dust, but once it's wrapped up in that magic, it's like a big fluffy pillow. And that same magic can flow between you and the cloud, which is how weatherponies tell the cloud when to release rain or lightning."
Rumble's mouth formed a little "o", and Cheerilee guessed that he must have understood that at least a little. She patted him on the head. "Do you get it now? That's more or less how pegasus magic works."
"I think so," he said. "So now that I know how my magic works, I can command the weather through total inner mastery, right?"
Cheerilee shook her head. "That was only lesson one, Rumble. There's still a lot more you need to learn. But we'll have to get to that another day, after I've had time to prepare a lesson plan." She held up the teakettle. "Would you like some tea while we wait?" she asked.
The evening passed mercifully uneventfully. Rumble didn't try to make any tornadoes, and whether it was because he took what the teacher said about not being ready to heart, because he was processing the lesson, or because he was placated by wheat buns, she counted it as a victory. When the storm finally cleared up, Cheerilee escorted him home.
On the way back, she considered her lesson plan. There was work to do.