//------------------------------//
// Scattered Showers 
// Story: The Coming Storm 
// by Jay911 
//------------------------------//

AUGUST 1

"Morning," Rich said as he went past me.
I grunted a hello and frowned at the weather radar computer, as I had for the previous two days. Where were southern Ontario's famed afternoon thunderstorms? If the HPI people had figured out a way to control the weather, and were depriving me of the one thing I could enjoy in this form, so help me, I'd-
"You sulking again?" Swift said, following Rich to the warehouse side.
"It's not sulking," I complained. "It's disappointment laced with frustration."
"Sure, sure, Stormy. When you're done disappointment-laced-with-frustrationing, you're welcome to come watch Rich learn. He's getting along nicely."
"Hmph," I grumbled. Rub it in, why don't you!
Serge was apparently part of the train of ponies going past me. "You still think you'll be able to do that, huh?" he said to me.
"It's not a question of 'think'," I shot back. "I've done it before. At least the cloudwalking part. The problem is, Mother Nature isn't playing nice."
"Should I be praying for rain?" he smiled. "Or at least cloud cover?"
"It'd be appreciated," I said, turning away from the computer. "I guess you're going to watch the magic show?"
"I'm intrigued," he admitted. "Trying to open my mind to this. It's... a kind of a struggle for me."
That took most of the wind out of my angry sails. I fell into step with him as we walked towards the warehouse. "I don't think I've ever asked you about it before," I said softly. "So I don't know how to bring it up now. I take it you're... a religious person?"
"To put it one way, yes," Serge smiled. "My faith in our Lord is being tested these days, but it's still there."
"I see why all this might be a challenge," I admitted. "Especially when whatsisname called magic 'thaumic radiation'."
He held the warehouse door open with a foreleg. "I'm trying to keep an open mind, like I said. So for now I'm just observing."
"Gotcha," I nodded. "And thanks." I went inside the back room of the store, looking at the tall metal racking that once held acres of product for sale. What we hadn't used up already we'd consolidated in an easier-to-reach area, and chucked most of the rest out the loading dock into the dumpster (and around it - well past overflowing). Finding an empty spot to perch, I leapt in that direction, scrambling up once I reached the shelf. It seemed like there was lots of 'hang time' on my jumps these days - I wondered if gravity was changing along with the Earth.
Serge chose to sit on the floor below the racks. Before us, Swift was bouncing a basketball up and down in her magic. Thirty or forty feet down the aisle, Rich stood, staring at it.
"Remember, don't focus too hard," Swift said, casually dribbling the ball while she talked. "There's a fine line between being 'in the zone' and going past it."
"Right," Rich nodded. "I'm ready."
Swift lobbed the ball at him, and the yellow glow vanished; then, faintly, a blue hue washed over it. It stopped in mid-air feet from Rich's face, which lit up.
"Yes!" Swift exulted. "Good job. Can you dribble it?"
Rich looked at the ball, then the floor, then the ball again.
"Don't overthink it," Swift said. "What do you do when you bounce a ball by hand? You just let it fall, then catch it when it bounces back up to you. Do the same thing."
Rich blinked in realization, then his magic field diffused. The ball dropped to the floor, bouncing up not nearly half as high as it had fallen, so he wasn't able to catch it.
"Well, you have to push it down with some force," Swift laughed. "You've played basketball, right?"
"A little," Rich said, pursing his lips. "In grade school." He commanded the ball to rise again, then gave it a telekinetic shove. Releasing it, it bounced, and then he caught it again on the upswing.
"There ya go!" Swift grinned. "Now just do it over and over."
Slowly, Rich got the hang of turning his magic field on and off repeatedly. In short order, he was dribbling - hardly Harlem Globetrotters worthy, or even Toronto Raptors worthy, but he could bounce the ball repeatedly. Every now and then he tried to bounce it off the wall for a change.
"Over here," Swift said, hopping up to her hind legs briefly to wave her forelegs like she was 'open'.
Sticking his tongue out as if it gave him extra concentration, Rich commanded the ball to fly away from him; he flung his head back and forth like the ball was tethered to his horn and needed its motion to make the trip. Swift caught it easily and dribbled some more, between her legs, under her barrel, and so on.
"Back atcha!" she shouted, and flung it at Rich.
He was so mesmerized by her moves that he clearly wasn't expecting it. I gasped as his magic field failed to materialize, and a sharp PSSHT! sound was heard.
When I looked back up, I almost made that same sound myself, covering my smirk with a hoof.
"Awww," Swift said. "That's not how you're supposed to catch it. You okay?"
I heard Serge snerk beneath me, and almost let loose with one of my own. Rich was standing there with a punctured basketball draped over most of his face. One eye peeked out from beneath the deflated ball, looking nonplussed. He said, "I bet there aren't any unicorn soccer players for this exact reason."
"We've got more where that came from," Swift laughed, walking over and retrieving the ball from his horn. "You were doing good for a while there."
"I'm just glad we weren't using bricks," he quipped.
I hopped down and over to where they had ended up. "You looked good for the first part there," I commented.
"Thanks," he smiled. "Still getting the hang of this whole thing."
"You'll make it," Swift said. "At least you have a teacher. I had to figure this all out by myself."
"How did you manage that?" Rich wondered aloud.
"Trial and error, and lots of practice," she said. "Stormy helped."
This time, I couldn't hold it in. "Pfft, if you can call it that," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"I fell off the roof and she caught me. On the first try, too!"
"You think it was the first try," Swift laughed.
Rich and Serge looked at one another and laughed nervously.

"What're you guys all laughing about?" Jeff said with a smile as we came back in from the warehouse.
"Just stuff," Swift said. "Making any headway?"
"This is like seven War and Peaces back to back," he said, leaning back from the tablet computer. "It's like reading the phone book, but with much more interesting information."
"Like browsing Wikipedia?" Swift said.
"Yeah."
"TV Tropes?" I queried with a grin.
"Hey, let's not get too crazy," Jeff smirked back.
"How did magic lessons go today?" Karin wanted to know.
Rich put on his 'miffed' look. "I have a lot more learning to do."
"Aw, you'll get it. I couldn't barely get mold to grow back home, but with what Jeff's shown me, we'll have a bumper crop of vegetables every few weeks. If I'm that good with the land as an earth pony, then a unicorn is going to have no trouble with magic. I really envy you, actually."
"You do?"
"Yeah! Zipping things around all over the place without having to carry them, having your own built-in flashlight... heck, I'll bet you guys could do all kinds of things like energy bolts and teleportation with enough practice!"
"Keep dreaming," Rich smiled.
The lot of us separated at that point. I went over to the radio room to sit and spin the dial through the bands, something I did once or twice a week. With luck, I might stumble across something new, hopefully not from us or the HPI.
The HPI. Human Preservation Initiative. To hear them tell it, they knew about the whole 'Collapse', as they were calling it, years in advance. The explanation for whatever happened was buried in the documentation Jeff was currently reading, but the gist of it was that something in the makeup of the universe changed, and caused Earth to be bathed in something they were calling thaumic radiation - otherwise known as magic.
Any technology sufficiently beyond comprehension... I thought to myself, horribly mangling the quote. The idea was still there; magic was a force in the universe, just like gravity, light, and so on. The situation we were in was not unlike the apocalypse stories I'd read - well, before the apocalypse - where Earth was caught in a solar flare or an electromagnetic pulse. But instead of electronics fizzling out and sending us to a new Stone Age, it was humanity that very nearly fizzled out, and while it was definitely a new Age, the jury was still out on how it would work out.
There was no doubt that 'thaumic radiation' was magic, at least as far as the layman - laypony? - was concerned. Swift had long said that every one of us had magic within. Even those of us who couldn't levitate things had ability beyond normal; Karin had hinted at it moments before, talking about her and Jeff's uncanny ability to make things grow despite all the odds. And then there was Serge and me.
Don't think about that, I told myself, shaking my head. It'll come eventually.
Lying on the floor and rolling the radio dial under my hoof, I listened to the static coming through the headphones. I closed my eyes and, despite what I'd just admonished myself, wandered mentally to a place where I was lying on a cloud, the hiss becoming the sound of a constant breeze blowing past.
Oh wow, napping on a cloud would be incredible, I told myself. Like lying on the fluffiest feather bed in the world. And the breeze and the sunshine would make it feel like heaven...

"Storm."
I jerked awake, looking around. The headphones slipped off, the band falling over my eyes.
"Pfhwha?" I managed.
Serge was on the stairs to the radio room. He looked bemused at my splayed-out position on the green carpet. "You in for lunch?" he said with a smile.
"Oh. Yeah. Thanks," I said, removing the headphones fully. "Be there in a sec."
"No rush, we're just getting started. Gonna try that pizza idea."
"Now I'm for sure in," I smiled.
Serge smiled and nodded, then turned and went down the stairs again. I turned my head back to the radio, then blinked and moved my head a little further to look out the windows.
Wow. It's raining.
Maybe Mother Nature had been listening in. Or maybe her agents in black vehicles and armored suits. Either way, a strong downpour was pounding the pavement outside.
The clouds weren't very low, though, so I would have to wait for another time. Still, the rain was good to see; our crops in their tiny little individual gardens needed it, and it would wash away a lot of the dust that had been accumulating all over everything.

"So what are we trying on here for toppings?" Jeff asked as I arrived at the kitchen table.
"Whatever you want," Swift said. She was rolling out the dough with her magic and a rolling pin, while Karin was carefully opening tins of tomato sauce by hoof. "It's going to be an experiment."
"Cheese is a must," I supplied, sitting down.
"Naturally," Karin said, indicating a package of shredded mozzarella - apparently part of our most recent care package.
"Tomatoes," Rich suggested.
"Mushrooms?" came from Jeff.
Several other non-meat ideas came up from the crowd, and Karin was hurrying to collect all the items. She paused to watch Swift try to spin the dough in the air like a traditional pizza cook.
"Hey, you should be doing this, Serge," Karin said, and Rich laughed.
"I'm not dextrous enough, not now anyways," he shot back. Swift apparently wasn't perfect either, but managed to keep the dough corralled enough to salvage it and put it back on the prep counter.
"What's that about?" Jeff wanted to know, meaning the banter between the three newcomers.
"Serge is just my nickname," came the explanation after a few moments. "For my love of pasta and my looks ... well, before this happened." He gestured to himself. "My coworkers gave it to me. Said I looked like the typical Italian laborer. And since my lunch was always leftovers of my wife's beautiful lasagna, or tagliatelle, or ravioli..."
He fell silent as the memories washed over him.
"Sounds like you should have some suggestions for us, too," Karin prompted, to try to pick him back up.
"Bah, I doubt we have the ingredients," he said.
"You'd be surprised," Jeff spoke up. "Between what we've been growing and the care packages, we've got some pretty interesting stuff. And if it's something we don't grow now that we can, just say the word and I'll give it a shot."
Serge smiled and gave it some thought.

I have to admit, the pizza experiment was a success. As someone who always ordered a meat pizza with extra meat, I had always pigeon-holed pizza into the same category as hamburgers or steak in my mind, and I guess it went off the menu mentally when we learned that pony digestive systems didn't like meat. It was definitely emotionally buoying to learn that we could salvage some of our past favorites this way.
As we were finishing up our lunch, Swift glanced outside at the rain still coming down. "Been watchin' the skies, Stormy?" she said.
"Cloud cover's too high right now," I replied. "Maybe something low will float by when this washes through. Besides, I don't wanna smell like wet dog."
"I'm telling Buddy you said that," Karin joked.
"You do that," I shot back with a smirk.
"I really hope we get some low cloud soon," Serge contributed. "'Cause I really have to see this to believe it."
"Yeah," Rich agreed.
"I'm gonna bet you can come up with me," I said, nodding to Serge. "We'll have to try it."
"Oh, 'we', will, will 'we'?" he said, an eyebrow raised.
"Yes indeedy," I grinned back.

"So," Karin said, flopping down beside me on the radio room carpet after lunch. "Show me what all this is."
"Hi," I said to her. "You interested or just wasting time on a boring rainy day?"
"Yes," she smiled. "Now talk."
"Okay," I shrugged, smiling back. "This is my little listening post. It started with this ham radio over here, which Swift and I set up to try to find out if there were other survivors, in the early days." Early days! Listen to me. "When it became obvious we would want to both send out our 'come join us, we have cookies' message and listen on other channels for distress calls and other transmissions, we put all these other radios in. Probably got over a hundred thousand bucks of gear in this little space. ...Not that bucks mean anything any more, I guess."
"I'm glad you said it before I did," she smirked.
"Yeah," I nodded. We'd have to come up with a barter and trade system or some kind of commerce system - if we encountered anyone else, that is. "This one with the red tape on the knobs is tuned to the HPI's channel. Red for don't touch - we don't want to bump it off-frequency and lose touch with them."
"Duly noted."
"The rest of these are scanning various frequencies or waiting for us to find something worthwhile to listen to, then I'll program them." I tossed a hoof towards the usually-dormant laptop computer in the corner. "About all that thing is good for these days, without an Internet."
"Tell me about it! I'm going into Facebook withdrawal," Karin laughed.
"I'm maybe not that bad," I smiled. "But I do miss the interaction. I guess there's nobody left to talk to anyway."
Karin nodded, her grin fading as she looked to her hooves, lowering her chin to them.
"Sorry," I muttered, feeling as though I'd put my hoof in my mouth.
"Nah, it's okay," she said. "I walk myself into that trap a dozen times a day, thinking of my mom, my dad, and my brother."
"Can I ask a personal question? How old were you at Ponification?"
"Seventeen," she said. "Just finishing up my last year of high school. Ready to go into the paramedic program."
I nodded. "I figured. Don't get me wrong - you just seem like a..." I trailed off before I wedged another hoof in there.
"A kid?" she queried, a faint smile coming back. She looked up at me from the carpet. "I don't mind you saying it. It's what I am."
"'A kid' would hardly care for Jeff like you did when he was injured," I protested. "Or pull her weight so strongly around here like you do. Our produce, um, production has almost doubled with you helping him out."
"I worked in a farmers' market for the past two summers," she explained, "and a greenhouse each winter. But there's something strange about the soil here. It just thrives."
"It thrives when you and Jeff work it," I pointed out. "You work your Earth pony magic on it."
She scoffed. "I do not have magic," she said.
"Of course you do. All of us do now. Haven't you been listening to Swift? Didn't you feel a black hole inside you at the airport?"
"...Yes," she admitted, shutting her eyes at the memory.
"Just because you and I can't throw fireballs or lift things with our minds doesn't mean we don't have magic," I told her. "In a way, I actually pity the unicorns for their plain, pedestrian, mundane methods of using magic."
She blinked and looked at me as I paused, falling silent, ears twitching.
"What was that?" she asked.
"Just waiting to see if I heard someone screech 'I heard that!' from across the store and start dragging me towards the rafters," I smirked.
Karin giggled. "Does she really do that?"
"She threatened me with it once. But don't tell anyone else. I like the looks on your faces when I act like she's done it lots of times."
The earth pony beside me laughed out loud that time. "You're weird... I hope you don't mind me saying that."
"I'm a purple-haired talking pegasus," I pointed out. "I'm the epitome of weird."
"True," she giggled again. "So. Let's talk about your magic. I've heard you say you can't fly yet. But you keep threatening to take Serge up on a cloud?"
I nodded. "If the stupid blinking weather will ever co-operate, I'll show you all. I figured it out by accident one time, and don't ask me how I knew to try it out - I just did. It's like walking on a waterbed, kind-of. But don't you try it yourself - Swift put her hoof right through a cloud trying to follow me."
"So we each have our own specialties," Karin supposed. "Unicorns can do magic magic, I mean, 'traditional' magic, wizard and sorcery stuff. Earth ponies can make crops grow like crazy, are strong, run really hard and fast, and not get tired doing it. And pegasi can walk on clouds and maybe fly?"
"Now you're catching on," I nodded, hoping the latter part of that wouldn't become a fib.

An hour or so later, Swift and Rich were practicing in the common area. Instead of games of catch - with balls or bricks - Swift was having Rich do some simple levitation practice, moving around boxes of stuff, and picking small items from piles of larger ones, including items hidden or buried beneath others.
As I walked into the room/area, Karin and Serge were watching, and Swift was giving a mini-lesson. "The trick is to see 'through' the other things," she said, extracting a Minion plushie from beneath a pile of other toys. "Don't say to yourself that Stuart is 'under that pile somewhere'. Visualize Stuart through the Mr Potato Head and the Optimus Prime and the Strawberry Shortcake doll. Make them transparent in your mind."
"Right," Rich nodded.
Stuart went tumbling goggles-over-feet over Swift's shoulder as she discarded the poor Twinkie-colored plushie. "There's a Darth Vader helmet somewhere in the pile. Find it without disturbing anything else."
I sat down as Rich put on his concentrating face. Jeff came in at that moment and began watching with intrigue, and after a couple of false starts, Rich was able to extract the black mask from the pile.
"Nice!" Karin hooted, clopping her forehooves together.
"You have only begun to discover your power," Swift said in a low tone. "Join me, and I will complete your-"
"You set this up to do that quote," Serge laughed.
"I plead the fifth," Swift shot back, smirking.
"Well, I just had a weird moment," I said, unable to contain myself any longer.
"What was?" Jeff wanted to know.
"Well, first of all, I just talked to somebody on the radio. And not the HPI."
"What?!" "Seriously?" "You did??" came a disjointed mishmash of voices not in any way resembling a chorus.
"Yeah, on low band," I nodded. "Probably one of the longest DX - er, I mean distance contacts - I've ever made. Western Manitoba."
"Wow," Serge echoed.
"Yeah," I answered him. "It was scratchy and fading in and out, but I managed to pick out that it was a single pony, a mare. And she's going to try to make a steam engine work, and is getting it on the rails and underway."
"Unreal," Swift commented.
"Sounded like she was planning to head towards the GTA... so we may have a guest eventually."
"I hope you wished her luck," Karin suggested.
"Even just getting the switches right will be a chore," Serge said, his past as a trackman coming to the fore. "Hopefully there aren't any stalled trains in her way."
I shrugged. "We never found any cars that were occupied, or crashed after being, shall we say, suddenly unoccupied. So is it safe to assume that trains that had people in them at the time of Ponification vanished too?"
"Sounds like sound logic," Rich nodded.
"I... guess my car did, didn't it?" Karin said, looking around. "If what you guys've said is true and I jumped through time. And it came back with me."
"Does that mean..." Jeff said, thinking on it for a moment. "That people will eventually start reappearing as ponies, with their cars and trucks and airplanes and such, where they were when Ponification started?"
We all looked around ourselves uncomfortably, then realized the store would have been closed and empty in the middle of the night, so there was little chance we'd encounter a new crowd of shoppers-turned-ponies materializing in our living room, so to speak.
"If anypony knows, they're not telling," Swift said.

"Yes!" I exulted, pumping a hoof as I looked out the windows.
"What? Oh!" Swift said, interrupting her lessons with Rich, noticing that the rain had finally stopped. "Yay! You guys are in for a show."
I galloped for the roof hatch stairway, with Jeff and Swift ushering the other three to follow. Shouldering the hatch open, I popped out onto the roof, wings wide in excitement as the fog drifted lazily here and there.
Jeff was the first up the stairs behind me. "Hey, we have to repaint that," he said, pointing to the "x3 (+1)" in yellow on the tar-and-gravel surface.
"Is she crazy?" Serge said, emerging just after Karin, who was right behind Jeff. I was busy at a full run towards the layer of vapor that was adjacent to the loading dock side of the building's roof.
"She'll be fine," Jeff smiled. Rich and Swift came out last and the three newest members of our group gasped as I leapt into the air and lunged for the low-flying cloud.
With a start I realized I was about to overshoot the stupid thing - something in the currents aloft must have given me extra lift. I tucked in my wings and angled for the greyish-white fluff, catching it and sticking fast - stopping almost hard enough to somersault me. I bounced from pair of hooves to pair of hooves, front to back and side to side, playing with the cloud like it was a trampoline. I turned, grinning, to see several mouths agape.
"See??" I laughed. "Easy as pie!" I continued doing acrobatics, bouncing and flipping in the air, doing loops and spins even a master trapeze artist would have had trouble with.
"Unreal," someone said.
"You!" I thrust a hoof at Serge, calling him out. "Get up here!"
"It's not possible," he said, shaking his head.
"No," I shot back, grinning some more. "It's necessary."
Swift and Karin urged him to trust me, and he tentatively took a step or two forward, like he'd been told to take a leap off a bridge with no bungee cord to arrest his fall.
"Are you-" bounce "-going to let me-" bounce "-have all the fun?" bounce
"You're a lunatic," he muttered, peering over the parapet of the roof.
"That may be, but I'm still standing on a cloud," I smirked at him. "You want to lie awake in bed tonight wondering if you could have done it too?"
I stopped bouncing so that I could take his hoof. He was standing with all three remaining hooves on the thin cement parapet, one foreleg outstretched towards me.
"Have faith, Serge," I said softly to him with a wink. "I won't let you fall."
He looked at me again and made contact with my extended hoof. With his other foreleg, he reached out to put it on the cloud, and as soon as he did, it failed to go through, and met with the unfamiliar semi-firmness I knew myself all too well.
He blinked and gave a shove with his foreleg at the puff of vapor, as if to test its ability to hold him; unfortunately, it behaved like pushing against an air mattress lying in a pool - the entire cloud began to drift away from the building. With two hooves on and two off, Serge froze in panic.
Oh no you don't! I remember thinking, and tried to pull him up onto the cloud with all my might. He was, though, as described earlier, a mite bulkier than the average pony. That is not to say Serge was fat; more so he was 'stout'. A big guy, so to speak. And mousy little Stormy wasn't going to just haul him up by one hoof. I squeezed my eyes shut, bore down and called on all my strength to sort this out.
Gasps erupted from before me. I felt Serge's hoof start to slip from my own, and began to panic. Pouring on the willpower, I tried to keep my grip, but gravity was having none of it. The white pony slid out of my grasp and began to shriek.
I kept my eyes shut, not wanting to see the gory outcome of my failing to keep my promise to him. The shriek, however, was cut short, accompanied by a bump, and continued gasps, but now instead of in front of me, they were from below.
Opening first one eye, and then the other, I found myself twenty-five feet above the roof of Ponytown, Serge safely sprawled on his back on the proper side of the parapet, and the other four ponies staring up at me, hovering above them.