***Tuesday, Day 11, Morning***
A storm is brewing on the horizon.
We all stand on deck facing the enormous bank of clouds that is our foe. The dark shapes of the clouds are constantly rolling over each other like a boiling grey ocean in the sky. The entire storm is like a slowly rotating disk. Arcs of lightning can be seen every few seconds lighting up the otherwise dreary scene. The winds are the first we feel of its power.
As the wind picks up again Rainbow Dash cries out, “We have to land this thing! There’s no way we’ll be able to stay in the air if we get any closer!”
Applejack, one hoof on her hat, points down while looking over the railing, “There’s a space behind that rock over there! Let’s get down there before the ship starts actin’ like tumbleweed!” We look past her at what could be described as a small mountain.
In short order we’ve managed to anchor down the ship on the far side of the rock and deflate the balloon to keep it from dragging us off. Blue stands on deck with his eyes on the sky as the rest of us finish strapping down the last few things.
Twilight walks over to Blue, “Can you tell what type of cloud we’re up against?”
Blue closes his eyes and shakes his head, “Sorry, I can’t tell from here. I need to get a sample to have a better guess.”
“I’m on it!” Rainbow dashes off without another word leaving us all watching in momentary shock before yelling for her to get back.
Rainbow starts out strong, but she seems to have to fight the wind more and more the closer she gets to the edge. She homes in on a tuft of cloud barely hanging on to the rest of the mass and snaps off what little is tethering it to the main body of the storm. We all let out a little cheer as she starts bringing the cloud back but our voices die out as we see the clouds shift behind her as if in response to her taking a part of it.
The clouds seem to condense into each other for a moment until a solitary bolt of lightning shoots out straight toward her. We all shout out a warning just in time for her to turn and dodge to where instead of hitting her in the back, the bolt only singes her tail. We open the cabin door and she rushes inside with the small cloud that is just smaller than her whole body. We quickly shove the cloud under a large bell jar that we had found in the cargo hold.
The mini cloud simply hovers there as Fluttershy makes sure Rainbow didn’t get hit by anything, Blue looking between his notes and the cloud a few times before shutting the notebook and putting it in his bag in the corner.
He starts speaking as he turns back around, “We got lucky, seems Fluffers is going for pure numbers and not strength. This is a standard Everfree cloud, luckily not one of the rarer more dangerous ones. They’re harder to destroy than normal clouds, but with Fluffers own toughness…” he trails off.
Rainbow tells the others how it was tougher than she thought it’d be to separate the cloud but it was only a small piece she had to destroy. As she tells them this, I take a long look at the cloud and see something that gives me an idea.
“Blue?”
“Yeah?”
“To clarify, you said that Fluffers was almost immune to normal pegasi weather techniques but the Everfree ones are not nearly as tough?”
“Yes, generally the darker a cloud the harder it is to get rid of hence Fluffers being almost black.”
“Well, observe here for a moment,” I gesture towards the window, “It appears to me that while the core of the storm looks to be as resilient as you describe Fluffers to be, as they near the perimeter of its rotation, the clouds become several shades lighter. It’s a bit of an assumption, but I would guess that perhaps the clouds on the outskirts are viable targets as of now.”
Rainbow and Blue come to the window as I step away and give their weather experienced eyes a glance at what I see. They turn back to us and Blue walk up to our little sample cloud.
“If what I’m about to do works, I think we have a good chance of winning.”
He pulls back a hoof as if to punch the cloud while moving the jar off it with a wing. However, as soon as it’s clear the cloud darts for the exit. Unfortunately for it, the door was still closed so it merely bounced off and starts ricocheting around the room. While everypony else ducks for cover Rainbow simply stands up.
“Calm down guys, I got this.” She then dives on the cloud slowing it down… only for it to keep going but now with the added mass of a certain rainbow maned pegasus to hit us with.
Applejack manages to crawl over to her saddlebags and lasso her rope around both rainbow and the cloud with Hydro helping her pull it in and tie it to a chair. After that’s done AJ gives Rainbow a look that anypony pony could easily translate to ‘You got this huh?’
Blue walks back up to the cloud and pulls his hoof back again, this time we have time to see the wind gather around his hoof before he punches the cloud in its center, dissipating it to momentary wisps of air before simply ceasing to be. Blue smiles at us as we begin to plan.
***
We begin our three team battle against Fluffers.
Blue and Rainbow are on offense. Blue is tasked with separating the clouds bit by bit from the main body and pushing them away. His wind powers allow him to generate harder hits necessary to tear through the clouds without having to use too much more energy. Rainbow’s job is to take each cloud fragment that Blue takes off and keep them from reforming by bringing each of them away from other clouds and bucking them to make them poof out of the battle.
Applejack, Hydro, and Pinkie are the distraction team. Without them, Fluffers would simply keep shooting lightning at our two flying pegasi and he would either get lucky or they would drop their guard, either way, not good. Which is why these three are on the ground distracting Fluffers by making targets of themselves. Pinkie seems to almost always know when to dodge so we aren’t too worried about her. Hydro and Applejack end up doing some nice double teaming always trying to split Fluffers attention from one to the other so that he never has a chance to focus too long. Unfortunately, Fluffers gets smart and starts using his wind to topple trees and throw terrain at them. That’s where team three comes in.
Team three has two subdivisions, the first is made up of Twilight, Volt, and Rarity. These three are playing defense. Rarity is focusing on deflecting all but the largest debris from the distraction team, her eye for detail making her an excellent pony for this job. Volt is on lightning duty, his familiarity with electricity and lightning itself make him ideal for either redirecting the lightning with his magic or in desperate situations being a temporary lightning rod. He doesn’t completely shake off these strikes but it’s better for them to hit him than the pegasi or any other pony for that matter. Twilight is on heavy duty defense, it is her job to defend the ground troops from the larger objects like trees and boulders as the winds picks up even more. She is also the emergency teleport for all of us should we need to fall back quickly.
The second subdivision is myself and Fluttershy. We are playing support, myself lending a constant casting of Res to the other three unicorns up on the mountain, anchoring them so they don’t get blown off. I also deflect some of the debris I manage to see that slips by the others occasionally. Fluttershy is on medic duty, whenever one of us takes a good hit or when either Blue or Rainbow needs to take a break, Fluttershy will set up a landing pad of mattresses if it’s the pegasi and for everypony she has the first aid kit and supplies standing by. I assist her whenever time is of the essence or she needs me to grab something she needs.
This fighting goes on for hours, that is just how massive of a scale this storm is. As time goes on both we and Fluffers seem to be weakening, though while we cut down his power he never gets tired. As we near the last few clouds outside the dark core we all have our share of injuries and fatigue.
Blue and Rainbow have to stop frequently for breaks now, small singes on their coats a testament to some close calls that we couldn’t prevent in time. All of the earth ponies, including Pinkie, are reduced to short spurts of speed to dodge, their mere presence enough to distract Fluffers now. Each of them with cuts, though none too bad thanks to teleports from Twilight and aid from Fluttershy. All of the unicorns including myself are bone tired from excessive spell usage, probably have massive headches tomorrow as well. Fluttershy is doing what she can with our remaining supplies, we aren’t going to run out yet, but neither can we keep this going if we start using them excessively.
As the final stray cloud is stripped off the core and destroyed we all let small miles slip out for a moment. Just when we do this though we here a rumbling from inside the core itself, the very air seeming to shimmer for a moment as a large buildup of electricity can be seen arcing within the core. We are all slow to react as dozens of lightning bolts shoot out in all directions from the core, lucklily Twilight casts one last teleport to take us all back to the ship before she collaspes on the floor of the cabin. We looks to see the last of the bolts coming from Fluffers before they cut off suddenly as if he used up too much of his power and finally has to go dormant for a while.
We all breathe a sigh of relief at this welcome sight. We each drag ourselves to our respective beds for much needed rest before the final battle. Volt drops Twilight off in her bed and heads to his room as I pass Fluttershy on my way to mine. In my fatigued state I nuzzle her a little before heading to bed; she herself seeming too tired to mind and she actually smiles a bit. As I lay down I think of what is to come. The core is still there but at least now Fluffers is small enough to not be nearly as much of a threat to towns, at least for now. Given a few days it is likely he will gather more clouds, so we must finish this tomorrow.