JUNE 13
Life in our little corner of the world got pretty decent, all things considered, once Jeff got to work. His skillset was quite useful around the place - between establishing our power sources (with which I helped), fortifying our outer walls, and making a proper entry and exit instead of the busted-out door I'd created, things changed a lot in the first couple of weeks he was there.
Saturday marked the third week since what 'we' were calling P-Day - Ponification Day. Naturally that name was Swift's idea. Besides what was mentioned above, a lot had gone into improving our home. The sidewalk that surrounded the mall had trees embedded in the sidewalks, in dirt covered with iron grates so people couldn't spread it around. We - okay, Jeff, who must be the Clydesdale of ponies for how strong he seems to be - pulled those grates up and the trees out, stirred up the ground (do you know how hard it is to operate a roto-tiller with hooves?), mixed in some soil from the garden center, and started 39 little gardens around the perimeter of the mall.
In case those didn't pan out, we also tried some hydroponic gardens inside the garden center. That took some of our power to run the lights and such, but we figured it'd be worth it.
Jeff was an interesting fellow. He was obviously still using his human name - which was Jeffrey Peter Reynolds, for what it's worth - but showed some (marginal, limited) interest in coming up with a 'pony name'. I think it was more to play along than anything else. Strangely enough, he wasn't getting needled about it daily like I was. I eventually did acquiesce to using Stormy, but only because 'hey you' would have been even more annoying. I didn't intend to put up with it forever, but I needed to come up with something that fit. Like Swift's name. That fit her to a T. Why couldn't I have that kind of luck?
For that matter, why couldn't I get my stupid wings to work? After three weeks of trying, I finally could get them to close on command, and could open them stutteringly at will, and seemingly instantly when I didn't want or expect them to - the 'poofing' that seemed to happen when I was surprised or angry. Made me feel like one of those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that had webbing that spread wide around their head to intimidate prey.
Sadly, I was no predator and thus had no prey. Unless you counted bananas (which are stupidly hard to peel with hooves, might I add).
The ham radio was one of the lucky items to get permanent power once our solar and wind farm was in operation. Jeff helped me run the cable to (and from) a better location, and we found a real desk mic we wired in so we could just step on its push-to-talk key in order to transmit - that made it a lot easier to use the thing.
It was put close to the windows of the store, on a platform we built in the corner, kind of a second story or mezzanine. It was the more professional version of my ladder-and-plywood spotter's stand, with a carpeted floor, a mini-fridge, and a couple of blankets to cover up with. And a staircase! No more clambering up a ladder I couldn't grip.
Our bedrooms were no longer ad-hoc tents either; instead we'd made oversized cubicles of sorts. It would have looked right at home in an Ikea store, to tell you the truth. Three walls and no ceiling - our bedding and personal effects piled in each little cubby.
There were still only the four of us (Buddy got his own room, of course), but we made four more rooms over and above that, optimistically. We didn't pick up any other signals of note, though, at least nothing we could make out. Every now and then, atmospheric conditions or strange bounces would give us snippets of conversation - in the old world, this wasn't uncommon, even across the entire continent. I just wished we could answer them back and tell them they were heard, and weren't alone. I know I'd wanted to hear that reply from somebody - anybody - when we first started broadcasting.
We never heard any signals from towards Moncton, New Brunswick. The cellular networks were long since memories, too, and this depressed Jeff for a few days at one point. I think he had the same kind of BSOD that I did when getting to Sue's house, just at a lesser level. I'm happy to say he got through it, with our help.
"Ponytown, this is Swift, come in, over."
I reached over to the radio and stepped on the mic key. "What the hell is Ponytown?" I asked, dreading the answer.
"You're sitting in it," Swift answered as if it was the dumbest question in the world.
I sighed - off-air, though. "Go ahead with your message."
"Can you ask Jeff if we'd have a use for any more generators? I just found the mother lode."
I sat up, alert. Swift was out in the SUV, obviously; we'd agreed to do semi-regular 'patrols' to see if we could find supplies, survivors, and threats, in that order.
When I succeeded in summoning Jeff, he borrowed the radio to ask what Swift meant.
"I'm at one of those industrial rental places. They have those big trailer-mounted generators that can power a whole block. Five of them. And two big semi ones if we could find a tractor."
"That's amazing," he replied. "You can never have too many backups. Bring what you can back with you; don't worry about the bigger ones. If we need them, we know where to find them."
"Gotcha."
"I should have thought of those first, instead of the little consumer-grade junk," I apologized to him when the radio call was over.
"Not a problem," he said dismissively. "What you did worked out fine. But if you want to redeem yourself, I have a bit of a project I think is right up your alley."
"Oh really?"
Fifteen minutes later, I was fully engaged, so to speak, in the task.
"Yeah, we can do this," I said eagerly. "It'll be molasses-in-January slow compared to the Internet, and no error correction, but we can do it."
"What do you need?"
"Well, obviously a computer, or several. Connections from them to some spare radios, and then we kinda just pick a frequency and use it."
Jeff had read up on some of the things one could do with ham radio gear. One of the bazillion things he'd dragged halfway across the province in his wagon was a full download of several useful websites, something a couple of guys at university had done in his sophomore year, which he figured was a good idea. And the idea he had me working on was to link several computers together in a network, replacing the defunct Internet with communications across radio frequencies. (Yeah, I know all wireless computer communication is across radio frequencies, cut me some slack.) We'd employ packet radio concepts - where each piece of data sent or received would be sent in a burst of electronic 'noise', at least to the human (or pony) ear, but be decipherable by the equipment we were linking together. It was kind of like the dial-up modems of old, but even simpler than that, as we would be pushing data across a single frequency - one way at a time, or 'half duplex' as the terminology goes.
"I don't know how you don't have a butt mark in computer science and radios," Jeff smiled as I put things together.
"Mayveh... ham on a fecon... *ptui*," I said, spitting out the cable I had between my teeth. "Maybe it's not my 'destiny' like the pictures you two got."
"For that to be true, wouldn't there have to be something you were better at than this?"
I blushed a little at the snuck-in-sideways compliment. "Thanks," I smiled. "If there is, I don't know what it is."
"Maybe you haven't found it yet," Jeff shrugged.
"I guess," I said, more to go along with the conversation than anything else. "Okay, now to find an open frequency. Shouldn't be too hard." I dialed the spare radio to the telemetry part of the ham band, more by reflex than anything else, and froze when my ears twitched.
"What's that?" Jeff said, turning towards the speaker himself.
"I... don't know," I admitted. I'd almost skipped past it, and turned the knob backwards a little to fine-tune the signal in. Whatever we were hearing was a definite man-made (...sigh, I guess I'll admit it could have been pony-made) signal, and not noise or interference. It was not analog voice - a signal you can pick up just with a basic radio - and didn't sound like digital voice (needing a special decoder) to me, either.
"Could it be a message?"
"Probably a safe bet," I said, heading over to the 'radio perch' to use the base station. On the way I snagged a set of over-the-ear headphones from the remnants of the electronics section and ripped the package open with my teeth. Fitting the headphones on my ears (and trying to find a place the headband wouldn't be in the way), I jacked into the radio and tuned the frequency. There was the signal, clear as day.
I shook my head after listening to it for a moment. "I have no idea what it is," I said. "I don't recognize the format. We could try to plug in the computer and decode the few types it can figure out on its own, but this signal doesn't... I don't even know if it's voice or just data, or how to decode it. On top of that, it might be encrypted, and if it is, we don't have the computer power needed to break most encryption."
"But who do you suppose it is?"
"Could be anyone," I said, sitting back and shedding the headphones. "Other survivors sending a message with a broken radio. Somebody crossing a telemetry radio with a ham rig because they don't know what they're doing. Or a gas line or oil well somehow came back online and is sending its data to a master station that isn't answering."
"Or it could be... Them."
"'Them'?" I said, quirking an eyebrow and looking over my shoulder at Jeff.
"You know. Black helicopters. Secret three-letter agencies looking in on their ant farm."
I rolled my eyes. "You've been hanging around Swift too long. I'm not playing Scully to your Mulder."
"In all seriousness," Jeff said, smiling, "don't you think some form of the government must have survived?"
"If they did, they're doing the right thing by hiding," I replied, lifting a foreleg like I had a clenched fist at the end of it. "To leave all the survivors to fend for themselves and hide away on their own would be unforgivable."
"Good point. Besides, if the math follows what we discussed the other night, I'm probably the only sentient being that made it out of the NCR."
"NCR?" I echoed.
"National Capital Region," Jeff clarified. "Ottawa."
"Oh, right," I nodded. "I was thinking of a different NCR." When he didn't react, I said, "Did you ever play video games?"
"A few, but apparently not the ones you're thinking about, because I've never heard of the term NCR in a game."
"Looks like I might have to get you into a few more," I smiled.
Just then, the radio crackled once more. "Ponytown, Swift requesting permission to approach."
I sighed and stomped on the switch again, rolling my eyes. "Are you going to make me start using that stupid name?"
"Yes! To both of them!" Swift shot back, laughter in her voice. "I'm comin' in."
"You did well for never having driven a trailer before," I commented when we got to the auto bays, where we were storing our generators, mechanical gear, and the SUV, the latter of which was neatly parked outside the bay, with an attached, trailer-mounted 100-kilowatt generator tucked inside the building.
"Or did you magick it into the bay?" Jeff said with a smile.
Swift lifted her chin high and might have blushed a little. "I have no idea what you are on about."
"We could just check for tire tracks on the floor," I mused. "Anyway, find anything else neat?"
Swift looked relieved that I was changing the topic. "As a matter of fact, yes," she responded brightly, opening the rear side door and picking up some items (in her magic, of course). Buddy bounded out of the passenger side at the same time.
"Is that ... fresh fruit?" Jeff said in bewilderment, eyebrows threatening to raise high enough to detach.
"How did you get that?" I asked.
Swift set down the three bushel baskets between us. "I can't take all the credit. And I'm not sure how fresh you might consider some of this. Buddy picked up on the sound before I did, and once we got there, started zeroing in on the scent, I think."
"What sound?" I wondered aloud.
"We found a cold storage warehouse, still sealed up and operating," Swift beamed, then gestured to the trailered generator. "In fact, that's how I got this. Two of those big semi-mounted ones with two tankers full of diesel are parked at that place. There was a heavy-duty, high security fence around the place, and no signs identifying it. A couple of defensive points with guns, too, but nopony was there. I don't know if somepony else is using it as a survival bunker and we just missed them while they were out - but I didn't see any signs of life. Anyway, there's plenty of food stored there. And on the semi-trailer generator, I found a plate that said 'for customer service' and gave an address. So I drove there."
"Good thinking," Jeff said. "And I'm already thinking of a way we could make use of some of those generators. Let's go back there later on. I hope you saved the address?"
"You bet," Swift nodded. "So, what have you two been doing while we were out scavenging?"
The four of us began walking back into the building proper. "Stormy and I started planning out a communication network," Jeff said. "Using the computers and the ham radios, we can send at the very least text messages."
"Cool!" Swift said. "I've been missing my phone. Going into withdrawal."
"We also heard a messag-"
"You what??" Swift cut me off, turning to face me. I stepped a little back and felt my wings spread out in surprise.
"Let me finish," I said, folding up again. "It wasn't a voice message or a recognizable signal, but it was definitely something more than just random noise. I'm gonna try to DF it later-"
"DF?" came another interruption, this time from Jeff.
"Direction finding," I said. "If I mess around with antenna positioning and shielding, I should at the very least be able to get an azimuth - which direction the signal is coming from. Anyone else got questions to interrupt with?"
Buddy just stared back at me.
"Okay then. If we know what direction it's coming from, it might help figure out what it is or who's sending it."
"Could it be from Toronto?" Jeff asked.
I sighed; this had been a sore point between the three of us (yes, three; as much as Buddy was in our group, he didn't get an equal vote on the tasks we chose to do). "Maybe," I acquiesced. "It's entirely possible that we're just now getting signals all of a sudden from there, despite total silence for the past three weeks."
"Nopony's disagreeing with you," Swift said, clearly just as tired of the subject as we all were. "You don't want to risk going into the city unless or until we have more people to back us up. It's a sound argument."
"Fair enough," I said. "I just didn't want to get into this all again."
"Let's just drop it," Jeff suggested. "Swift, do you want some help making that into a meal?"
"Give me some time to figure out what I'm going to make, and I'll call for you," she smiled, taking the bushels of food into the kitchen.
After supper, I was sketching out plans to make the computer network that Jeff had suggested into something better - closer to full-duplex, or two-way, simultaneous communications, and supporting more things that we were used to having like perchance Skype, or something along those lines - even just voice and still picture transfer would be better than nothing.
Jeff had also hinted at his other idea he'd gotten when Swift had returned home; it involved going to a few select cellular tower sites and putting a generator at each. We'd have to be diligent about refueling them, but if we chose the sites right, we'd get a semblance of a communications network again. That semi-scuttled my side project, though the tricky part was the telephone exchange part of the equation. None of us knew how to get the phones back to being phones again - presumably there was some kind of ground station where the wireless side of things went into computers and networks and linked up with terrestrial or 'landline' networks. That would be hard to figure out just from guesswork. The cell sites we could just pick almost at random - contrary to popular belief, the fact that there are multiple cell towers on every block of a city street isn't because the signal doesn't reach that far, it's that we had so damn many things trying to use the system. Think of your average pre-Event (I refuse to use 'ponification') person. Telephone, tablet, laptop, oh and your car has OnStar or something like it too. That's four connections to the network from just one person. Keep in mind the average businessperson might have two or three phones (one for work, one for home), and multiply by a couple million people, and you start to understand why we need towers upon towers. So anyway, with only three of us (again, Buddy might be a valuable member of the group, but so far he hasn't asked for an iPhone) needing connections, we figured we could get away with just a half-dozen towers around the area. We probably could have just picked two really close to the mall, but we wanted flexibility for when one or more of us were out on scavenger runs. Then... we doubled the estimate, because what if some survivor was wandering like Jeff was when he found us, and suddenly noticed full bars on their phone after days and weeks of no signal?
Anyway, sorry for the technospew. As mentioned, I was drawing and doodling ideas for how to use what was at hoof - dammit, now she's got me doing it - and what we could make of it. The best thing I could say of it all? I was getting pretty skilled at writing and drawing with a pencil in my mouth.
At once, startling me, I heard sudden movement in the 'hallway' between my bedroom and the others'. I got to my hooves, folded in my stupid wings again, and caught just a glimpse of Buddy sprinting for the doors leading outside.
"Buddy? Buddy!" Swift called out, running to the edge of her room and looking in the direction he'd run.
I was at the room's edge/hallway in a flash as well, but Jeff rushed past both of us. "Stay put," he insisted.
I frowned a little and rolled my eyes, and Swift knew what I was on about - neither of us were interested in being the damsels needing protection. Still, Jeff was stronger than both of us put together (if you tied Swift's horn behind her back - well, you know what I mean), so it only made sense that he go see what Buddy was now growling about at the doorway.
I went over to the mezzanine and scrambled up its stairs, snagging the binoculars' strap in my teeth as I went, flipping them through the air and catching them with my hooves as I squatted by the glass, peering outside at what had Buddy's fur on edge. The early evening dim light made it hard to see, but I was sure I could spot something moving out there.
Swift scooted to a stop beside me. "What is it?" she asked.
"Can't tell," I answered. "Lots of them, though." I stole a glance over to the radio to be sure it was turned on and turned up; I'd've kicked myself forever if we'd missed someone calling for help who got ambushed just outside our door.
Buddy leapt up at that moment, slapping his forelegs down on the crash bar on the inside of the door. It shoved open and let him outside, despite Jeff's best efforts to restrain him. The stallion's hooves only swiped at empty air.
From the few seconds our reinforced doors were open, I heard two things. One was Swift yelling, "Buddy, no!"; the other was a loud cacophony of barking and growling.
"Turn off the-" I began, but stopped when I realized it was futile. We'd put all the lights in the store on the generator, and just left them on all the time. We had no real means of turning them off except to go to the switch panel and mess around. And if I remembered correctly, there were multiple switch panels in different places. Furthermore, we hadn't bothered with exterior lights because we were always inside by night time. So we were left with very bright lighting on our side of the glass and very dark conditions on the outside. A significant tactical error.
I tossed down the binoculars and mashed my face against the glass, shielding my eyes from the light with a hoof, trying to see what was going on outside. "Did Jeff go out?" I asked Swift, and got no reply. I wasn't going to take my eyes off what I could see, though, which was a number of dark shapes writhing and lunging near the front doors.
The shapes stopped darting back and forth and began facing off against one another. Or, more precisely, one against all others. I imagined that the one was Buddy, but still couldn't tell exactly what was attacking him.
Then, all of a sudden, the lights along the front half of the store went out, and I realized why Swift hadn't answered me - she'd dashed off to the back room to throw breakers. As my eyes began to adjust, I could finally tell what was going on outside. It wasn't supernatural beasts or monsters, but a pack of about ten dogs. I could see a pair of Dobermans, a couple of retrievers or pointers, and a mishmash of others. They all looked about as emaciated as I thought they'd be after three weeks of not being fed by humans.
Buddy was indeed squared off against all the rest. He was growling and snarling, and the Dobermans were snout-to-snout with him, just as angry. The rest of the mob were yipping and barking randomly, but one bark from one of the Dobermans with its head turned back to face them silenced them all.
Buddy barked a few more times and appeared to ... nod? Or point, with his head? ... towards the other side of the street. Some questioning sounding yelps and yips came from the crowd, and he barked once more, then held his ground fast.
Slowly, the other canines backed away from the building, all but the Dobermans. One stared at Buddy with a look that I swear looked like utter contempt for a few moments, then they too turned and disappeared into the night.
"What was that?" Swift asked as she returned from resetting the lights.
"As far as we can tell, Buddy was facing off against a pack of dogs," I said, still peering outside to try to see which way the animals departed, but between the lights coming back on and the total darkness outside, they disappeared in moments.
"Is he okay??"
"So far, he seems to be," Jeff said, having let him back in and begun checking him over. "Other than a few light scratches and maybe one bite, he's fine."
"Thanks, pal!" Swift said, hurrying to the dog's side and rubbing his head with a hoof, much like a human might have skritched behind Buddy's ears. He clearly enjoyed it, leaning into the affection. "We'll have to try to find you a steak or something later. At the very least a big ol' bone."
"Did it look to anyone else like he was communicating with them?" Jeff asked.
"Kind of," I nodded. "In fact, remember the place he found with all the dog food? Across the street? I think he sent them over there."
Realization crossed Swift's face. "They were hungry! That makes sense. And rather than let them break in here and take everything from us, you told them where to find their own stash. I'm real proud of you, Bud."
"Indeed a good job," Jeff agreed (and I nodded). "Let's hope they spread the word."
JUNE 21
"Guys, I need a second computer."
Swift's declaration at breakfast threw us both off.
"What? Why?" I asked. We'd put three of them on a poor-man's (...don't make me say it) network, as I think I said before, primarily for communication between the three of us, and secondarily to review data that Jeff had thought to download from the Internet and bring with us. "Don't tell me you broke the first one."
"No!" she shot back, sticking her tongue out at me briefly. "I want a dedicated one for my writing."
Jeff just quirked an eyebrow. He began to make a crack about fanfic authors, but Swift interrupted him.
"Hear me out," she insisted. "It's a simple reason. I started writing about us, but I think I need to get serious and write about us." She spread her forehooves wide at this last word.
I stared at her for a moment, and Jeff came to the rescue of my uncomprehending mind. "Oh! Humanity as a whole," he said.
"Exactly!" she nodded, pointing at him with a hoof. "It's getting pretty plain to see that there's very little of it left, if anything. We need to store archival copies of all that you saved from the 'net-" she nodded at Jeff "-and everything we can find or save starting right now. And then I'll write about... well, everything. Assuming that we're not the only ones left, there will be people in the future who would benefit from knowing what life was like before Ponification."
"For once, I agree," I commented. "I can probably cobble together another working laptop if we can spare the power for it."
"Shouldn't be a problem," Jeff nodded.
"Thank you," Swift beamed. "And everypony in the future who will read about us thanks you."
Our little ... commune? Home? Survivors' encampment? (please don't make me call it 'Ponytown') ... continued to evolve and improve. By that I don't mean that we brought in any other survivors, unfortunately - as depressing as it was, we seemed to be the only sentience in radio range. Either that, or others were hearing us, and chose to ignore us for some reason.
Speaking of radios, on my 'survival patrols', I chose to hit as many professional radio shops as I could, until we had a veritable showroom of top-of-the-line equipment in our 'radio room/crow's nest'. Unless the signal we'd encountered was encrypted (in which case we'd need to know the key), what we had acquired should have been able to crack it.
Frustratingly, the signal - which seemed to be decently far away after all, fading in and out at random as it did - defied all attempts to capture or decode it. I even recorded it to computer and broke it up into individual beeps and boops, as much as I could, and read up on cryptography to try to see if it was some obscure code, but I was stymied so many times that I wanted to throw the computer out of the window.
Maybe it's a red herring, anyway, I told myself more than once. Like I said to Jeff when we first discovered it, it could be something as inane as an automatic process that we started picking up due to weird atmospheric conditions or something related to the fact there weren't seven billion people generating signals to drown this lonely little chirping out as background noise.
One thing we did put together, which was no small feat I might point out, was weather radar. We found a radar station and gave it power - they're pretty well automated, so it wasn't like we had to be meteorologists or computer science graduates (oh wait, I'm 1 for 2 in that regard) to make it work. From there, one of our bashed-together link radios/computers brought the signal back to our place, and from then on (save for a couple of times when we neglected to run spare diesel out to the radar site), we knew what to expect of the early summer weather - which was unpredictable and dangerous enough with a news station weather team spoon-feeding it to us in advance. Looking at blotches of color on a map screen was nowhere near as good, but it'd have to do.
I have to admit that I took advantage of the radar for my own gains, too. Trying not to be seen studying it one night, I saw favorable conditions forming, and at the right time, said, "I'll be outside for a bit."
"Okay," Swift nodded distractedly as she drummed away at her 'saving history' computer with magical touch-typing. "Stay close and call out if you need us."
"I will," I promised, and headed for the roof hatch.
Being the last week of June, the early evening was still illuminated by the sun, as bright as any late afternoon. It didn't take any effort at all to spot the low cloud bank rolling in from the lake.
"Come to mama," I muttered, watching it impatiently.
It approached, and I swallowed a lump of hesitance that grew in my throat, then jumped up at a precise moment.
I stood on the top of the cloud, my mass slowing the whole thing until it was creeping along at centimeters per minute. I had plenty of time to mess around with this one!
I took a few tentative steps, and found that like my last experiment, this was just like walking on an ultra-soft bed. I got up the courage to trot, then eventually gallop, and was running all over the top of the cloud bank.
When I skidded to a stop, it bunched up under my hooves like a loose carpet. I stepped aside and smoothed it out and the cloud returned to 'normal'.
I reached out with a hoof and scooped some cloud aside, making a little hole in the top of the vapor body.
Cloud storage, I smirked, then giggled.
"Ha! I told you there was something weird going on!" I heard Swift say. I turned to face the roof, folding my poofed-out wings in, and saw her and Jeff standing ten feet below me, staring up in wonder.
"How are you doing that?" Jeff wanted to know.
"I, um, dunno how it works," I admitted. "I just know I can do it."
Swift pawed at the edge of the cloud closest to her a few times, and only succeeded in spreading the vapor out like dissipating smoke.
"I don't get it," I reiterated, reaching down and gathering it all back up into a little ball. As I compressed it beyond its original density, it grew darker and eventually burst into a miniature rain cloud, irrigating a four-inch-wide section of the building roof. "This is only my second time trying it."
Jeff also tested touching the cloud and found it stubbornly behaved as clouds normally should for him as well.
"Leave it to you to break physics," Swift quipped. "This is why we can't have nice things."
"Hey," I shot back, playfully yet still feeling my wings poof out in anger. "I'm not the one who seemingly invented magic-"
They both looked up at me as I stopped talking. "What?" Swift finally said.
I was staring wide-eyed at the world around me, then looked back to my wings as if the answer to what I was experiencing would be shown there. Then I turned and faced into the breeze, urging the feathered appendages to extend further, and my eyes got even wider.
"Crap," Swift said. "I think she needs to be rebooted. How do we get her down from there?"
"I'm okay," I said in a hushed tone. "I'm just... wow."
"Wow what?" Jeff asked.
"I can ... feel it," I said. "Three kilometers an hour from this direction." I stabbed at the air directly in front of me with a hoof. "Around ... well, lower pressure than normal. Really humid. Twenty-six degrees."
"What?" Swift said, giving me a weird look.
"There's a heavier air mass coming in from across by Rochester," I said, gesturing in that direction while looking back and down to her. "Probably going to be a strong shower. In the next couple hours."
"You can tell all that from standing on a cloud?"
I shook my head bewilderedly. "This is something else," I said. "Another thing I found out last time I was up here was I could feel the air currents and almost sense what was happening with them. But I've never tried it with my wings out."
"So you're a pony weather vane?"
"Shut up," I mumbled at her. "Are you saying your super-duper magic doesn't let you sense all this?"
"The thing you and Jeff put together lets me sense all this," Swift countered. "You know, on the computer screen downstairs."
"I can't tell," Jeff contributed. He peered southeastward. "But it does look kind of dark over on the horizon."
"I'm coming down," I said, folding in my wings and hopping from layer to layer until I could leap back onto the store roof.
Swift looked at me with an expression crossed between thinking I was crazy and thinking I was the most exciting pony she'd laid eyes on. "We're all going to go back inside, I'm going to make some hot chocolate, and you are going to tell us everything, and I mean everything."
"I don't know how much more I can explain," I said, "but okay."
Swift went in first, and Jeff was ushering me through the hatch, intending to follow me inside. As I stepped through, I looked over my shoulder to take one more look at 'my' cloud. Free of my presence, it was light enough to once again lift off and rejoin the others in their march across the local sky.