//------------------------------//
// Cloudburst 
// Story: The Coming Storm 
// by Jay911 
//------------------------------//

AUGUST 8

I found Karin, Rich, and Swift all in the common area. The unicorns were practicing, and Karin was reading the tablet.
"Hey," I said. "Any of you guys free to spare a hoof for a minute?"
"We can break for a bit," Swift said, gesturing for Rich to do precisely that. "What's up?"
I lifted up a contraption grasped in my hoof. "Need a little advice and maybe a bit of manual labor to help me jerry-rig this."
"What is it?" Rich asked.
"A radio headset," I said, lifting up the headband and placing it on my head - though it was obvious that it was ill-fitting. "I want to set it up so that I can do stuff and talk on our local channels at the same time, without having to carry a radio designed for human hands. This has voice-activated control, but as you can see the headband's too big and the mic hangs way out past my muzzle. I can't cut bits out of it, because then I'd have to re-wire it, and it's not designed to do that. So I need some thoughts on how to shorten it up."
"I wonder if we could fold it over telekinetically without it losing its strength," Swift mused, indicating the metal headband part. "Kind of in a flattened S, so that the extra length is overlapping itself."
Rich nodded. "Is the mic boom rigid? If it's not, if you can bend it, I wonder if we could curl it a little bit to take some distance out of it too?"
I smiled. "I knew I was coming to the right place. The other issue I'll have is, this headset still has to hook on to a radio, and I need a way to hold onto it without having to actually hold onto it. Kind of like those bicep straps that people used to hold MP3 players with."
Karin looked up. "Actually, that exact thing may do the trick. I think I saw some in the junkpile. Let me go look." Before I could interject, she got up and dashed off.
"Let's try that magic idea," Swift suggested, telekinetically taking the headset from me and handing it to Rich. "You give it a shot."
"I have a few spares," I said, "so don't worry about wrecking it."
Swift bapped my chest with a hoof. "Don't judge him before he shows you what he can do!" She watched as Rich picked up the device.
Tongue stuck out in his usual expression of concentration, Rich bent the thin, curved piece of metal over upon itself, somehow avoiding snapping it. Then, he did the same again a few centimeters away from the first fold, bending it back the way it originally was, and shortening the whole thing by the same few centimeters' distance.
"That might work," I said. "May I?"
The device floated in a blue haze over to my extended hoof, and then fell onto it.
I raised the headset up and put it over my head, positioning the earphone cushion in my right ear, and putting the other end - with no earpiece on it - ahead of my left. The boom mic was still in the wrong position, but the headband was a good, snug fit.
"That's pretty damn good," I said. "Thanks!"
"Still got to figure out the microphone," Rich said, taking it back. "Leave it with us for a bit, please?"
"Sure," I said gratefully.
Just then, Karin galloped back. "Is this too small?" she asked, offering a neoprene sleeve on a cardboard backing.
"Let's check it out," I said, taking it from her. I ripped the cardboard off and tossed it aside, then wriggled the sleeve up my right foreleg.
"Looks decent," Karin said with an approving expression. "Too snug?"
"No, I think it'll work, actually," I nodded, more and more happy by the moment. "Thanks!"
"How many more of those do we have?" Swift asked, clearly thinking of the ways she could exploit the little accessory.
Karin grinned. "A dozen or so," she said. "It's mighty disorganized over there. Maybe we should clean up the junk pile so we can find stuff that turns out to be not junk."
"You're hired," I said at the same time as Swift, who winked at me.

Later that morning, I went out for a flight and to clear my head. Over the past few days, some interesting things had happened, and I needed to digest it all.
First off, though it'd been my idea, or at least I'd been the one to put it in motion, the working arrangement with the HPI was a strange, uneasy situation. I had the feeling that my friends worried that the quasi-military outfit weren't being entirely truthful with us. Personally, I thought it was partly legitimate and partly related to the predator-prey effect, especially with their magic-canceling fields in operation.
Second, we'd communicated with other colonies, at last! I was over the moon - well, not literally, of course; but I was overjoyed when we finally started picking up more radio transmissions. Besides the group from Manitoba that came through on the train, we'd learned of at least a couple more groups out there. One was relatively close - Kingston, just a couple hours up the highway. The one guy who talked on the radio said he was a thestral - I guess that's a batpony of all things - and had a regular pegasus pony kid with him as well as another earth pony stallion. They planned to try to stick it out on their own, which I considered a good idea, provided they had the resources. The more of us that were spread out, the better chance other survivors had of finding somepony near them to be their safe refuge, so to speak.
I was flying further than I'd gone before - by air, at least. I had driven virtually the same route a week or two before, with Swift beside me, as we fled what we thought was a gunship attacking us. I even followed the same route, musing that I was passing through the same space that the anti-magic energy had just a few days earlier; I felt lucky that there was no residual effect lingering in the sky.
The overall feeling of flying was still thrilling me to the core. Everything about it was nonsense, and didn't belong in a sensible, science-respecting world. However, science now had to share the stage with magic, and magic was helping me do what I now found I loved. The wind rushing through my wings, feathers ruffling and mane fluttering, was the thrill of a lifetime. The forces as I turned and banked, rose and dropped, made themselves known in muscles I never knew I had before my wings finally took me aloft.
Flying under the tree canopy was absolutely insane - less than fifty feet off the ground, going faster under my own power than I had ever dreamed possible. I'd have been scared if the concept of traffic was still a reality, because i was flying down the centerline of the old, disused concession road I'd hurtled down in the car, but I knew precisely where all the still-operating vehicles in this part of the world were, and Not Here was where.
"Don't fuck it up, don't fuck it up," I muttered to myself, preparing to bank and then land. Landings had not been my forté so far. The meeting with the train ponies had been embarrassing at first, since I'd tumbled onto the scene, having been up for a flight when they pulled in to Pickering. I had to learn that I wasn't an airplane, and miming a gallop as I neared the ground wasn't the way to transition from flight to hooves-on-the-ground. I really had to look for the NatGeo book that Jeff had gifted me a few whiles back, on North American birds. That still likely wouldn't teach me how to land, but it wouldn't hurt.
But this is going to, I winced as I came in for a landing still going about forty kilometers an hour. Despite what I'd just told myself, I found my legs scrambling, like a dog about to be tossed into a pool. Through some sort of miracle - maybe Luna was smiling down on me - I scrambled across the gravel parking lot still upright, but banging my hooves against lots of small rocks, and coming to a stop just before I would have hit the wooden post and wire fence that separated the parking lot from the hiking trail.
"Like a glove!" I cheered to no one in particular, trotting around in a celebratory circle a couple times as I shoved my goggles up onto my forehead. Once my heart had dropped down to somewhere near a low multiple of my resting rate, I sauntered over to the beginning of the hiking trail, looking down the overgrown path I'd hiked and biked several times in my youth.
Settling into a trot, I started walking down the path, happy to be 'out of the house', so to speak, and enjoying the fresh air. Were it not for my changed form, I might have been able to believe I was in the world of my past, before the Event. The world around me, with no distractions, deadlines, or other interruptions, just me and the wilderness.
And, apparently, a squirrel, who began to dart across the path about ten meters in front of me, then stopped and stared.
"Hi guy," I said cheerily, in a good mood for a change.
He chirped and carried on, us both going our separate ways.
Shortly thereafter, while heading down past the creek, I saw my second fellow trail-user. A grey rabbit loped onto the dirt path, stopping to sniff the air and sit there staring in that peculiar 'I'm right here but I'm not looking at you' pose that some animals seem to adopt.
"I don't have any carrots," I said with false apology in my tone. "We ate 'em all last week."
The grey bunny was joined momentarily by a snow-white one, and then both of them hopped slowly down the trail ahead of me.
"If you guys think I'm going to break into a musical number," I laughed, "you're out of luck. Disney packed it in a few months ago."
The rabbits disappeared around the bend, and I smiled and sighed, enjoying myself. My mind was drifting back to some of the times I'd traveled this trail in my youth.
There used to be cabins down here somewhere, I recalled. Sue and I would hang out with our friends and pretend we had our own little town.
And now, my mind chased those thoughts with others, you're the leader of your own town for real.
"I'm not a leader," I said to myself, shaking my head, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. But if I were to be truthful to myself, I knew that everyone looked to me for answers and suggestions for all our daily doings.
But I rely on them just as much, I protested internally. They're as much my support as I am theirs.
I huffed out another sigh, angry at myself for allowing the real world's problems to intrude on my walk. I forced my mind to clear itself and enjoy my surroundings.
The path was indeed growing over, but not too badly - it was still easy to follow the trail. The rabbits had gone out of sight - likely on some route that didn't include the track that humans had chosen to wear down over the past 50 or so years - and again I was by myself.
At one point where the foliage beside the trail thinned out, I ventured off-path and checked out the creek. Interestingly enough, it was thriving - much more vibrant and full of life than I remembered it. It was a miniature stream now, with fish actually swimming back and forth, and the sounds of frogs, water-based insects, and such up and down the bank.
Mother Nature takes back what was hers, I mused, watching a brook trout swim by.
Carrying on, I crossed another small creek over a boardwalk, again finding my brain calling up memories of a lifetime gone past and times enjoyed in this place. I wondered if I would be the last sentient creature to wander here, or if 'ponykind' would repopulate the Earth enough to make outings like this commonplace again. (I steadfastly refused to let thoughts of 'repopulation' and what my assumed chore in that would be; I had even less interest in thinking of that than I did being 'mayor' of Ponytown.)
With a start, I recognized the widening path turning into the parking lot on the Taunton Road section of the hiking trail. I'd been so wrapped up in my thoughts, I hadn't noticed I'd walked the whole thing. Or at least one leg of it.
I don't have to go back for my car, I smirked, realizing I could continue further. I hopped up and fluttered into the sky, crossing the road and trying to remember where the next leg's trailhead was.

A couple of hours later, I finally emerged at the southernmost terminus of the hiking trail, in much better spirits than I had been in weeks. Galloping along the third concession road to get some speed to take off, I noticed clumps of mud and dirt popping free of my hooves to tumble onto the tarmac.
Better wipe your feet before you go inside back home, I thought with a smirk as I took to the skies. Or Swift will tear you a new one.
Noting the patchy cloudy sky, I had an idea, and angled upwards to find a suitable cloud. When I had my sights set on one, I alighted on it with ease.
Why can't you land that smoothly on, well, land? I wondered to myself. Did it have to do with descending? It was always easy for me to flap a few times and reach up to perch on something slightly higher than me - a cloud, a roof, a ledge, the bed of the pickup truck, and so on. It was going down that gave me grief.
I let that thought slip away as I ground a hoof into the cloud, hoping that I could scrape the mud and gunk out of my hooves with them. Why not? Nothing else about how I was able to stand and walk on puffs of water vapor made sense.
Instead of cleaning myself, though, I found that I was pushing the cloud's vaporous body together - condensing it. The whole thing shrank the more I kicked at it.
Intrigued, I made wider and wider sweeps with my leg, 'gathering' bigger swaths of cloud with each pass, like I was clumping snow together for a snowman. However, instead of a large ball of white, it was getting greyer and greyer - and not from the brown dirt in and on my hooves. The cloud was actually getting denser by the second.
Eventually it reached a tipping point, and the fluffy, puffy vapor went from feeling like walking on a borderless feather pillow to making squishy, squelchy sounds beneath me. Eyes wide and taking it all in, I gave the side of the cloud one more kick, and it promptly let loose, deluging the area below it with a mild rain.
"You've got to be kidding me," I whispered. The cloud slowly faded from the navy-blue color it had taken upon compression, to a dark grey, then a dull grey, then an off-white, and if I'd left it long enough, I'm sure it would have been as white as new-fallen snow.
I had hopped over to another nearby cloud, though, a larger one, and flying beside it, shoved with all my might. At first, the cloud simply drifted across the sky in the direction I was pushing, but after a couple of false starts, I was able to figure out how to keep it stationary and make it condense.
Soon enough, I had it down to a third of its original size, and almost completely black. Once again, the lightest touch caused water to burst forth from the shape, pelting the ground below.
That. Just. Happened.
I grinned and went to look for a third cloud, to continue exploring my new skill.

"Where've ya been?" Serge asked when I came into the kitchen a couple of hours later.
"Out for a walk, and a fly," I said.
"Why are you soaking wet?" he queried, after getting a look at me. My coat was still damp, and my mane and tail as well, but I wasn't dripping on the floor wet.
I smirked and shed my goggles. "Got caught in a shower," I told him.
"It's been sunny all day here."
"Localized," I clarified, hanging the goggles over the sink to drip dry.
"Uh-huh," he said after a moment. "What do you want on your pizza for supper?"
"Surprise me," I said, grinning as I cantered away.

"Hey," I called out as I entered the back room. "Is it safe to come back here?"
"Sure," Swift answered. "We're over this way."
I turned left and headed towards the roof stairs, finding her and Rich near them, working on levitation, but of a sort I'd not seen yet.
Swift was enveloped in a blue glow, and Rich a yellow one, both floating in midair about ten feet off the ground, facing one another.
"Holy..." I said, blinking.
"Don't break my concentration," Rich said, concentrating hard. Both ponies bobbed in the air like corks on a sea.
"Turn me around," Swift requested, and slowly rotated along her vertical axis to face me. She blinked. "Did you just come out of the shower?"
"Sort of," I smiled. "Rolling my own. Figured out something new about clouds."
Swift tilted her head a little. "You're messing with weather now?"
"I think it's my prerogative, if my magic lets me do it," I countered. "Unless you happen to have a manual on how to be a pegasus pony you've been keeping from me."
"I think she has a point," Rich said as he tried to swim through the air, to turn and face us.
"Hush up or I'll make you walk on the ceiling," Swift grumbled.
"You're just jealous that I'm finally getting somewhere with my magic," I smirked.
"Um, hello?" Swift said, waving a hoof at her and Rich. "You got a long ways to go, rookie."
"I'm a fast learner, just like your star pupil," I shot back.
"Do I need to turn a hose on you two?" came a voice from behind us. I spun to see Jeff standing in the doorway quirking an eyebrow, and Karin beside him, face full of mirth.
"We were just joking around, Dad," Swift laughed.
"Don't send me to bed without any supper," I pleaded, playing along.
Jeff rolled his eyes and turned away.

About an hour later, we were enjoying our dinner meal together in the common area.
"This is good," Rich said between bites. "Thanks, Serge."
"No problem," he responded. "It's too bad I had to use prepackaged cheese, though. Real cheese is much better."
Jeff brightened, remembering something. "Hey, when that other group was here, we talked about that kind of thing."
"So we did," Serge nodded, looking to me. "You said you had some ideas, if I recall."
I nodded back. "Like I said then, we can probably make a chicken coop here, but I have my doubts that cows will have the space - and the grass - they need anywhere near Ponytown. It might be necessary to have a field up somewhere out of town."
"Up where we played baseball?" Karin asked.
"Exactly," I said, pointing to her. "There's lots of farmers' fields there and plenty of ways we can get cows out there. And I'm sure you two can figure out a way to make them proper pastureland."
"Who knows, Stormy," Swift said, cracking a grin. "Maybe you'll get your cutie mark in animal husbandry."
My ears flattened and my expression darkened. "Don't remind me of that." One of our recent guests had revealed that she had shared some dreams with Luna as well, and learned of the proper terms for various nuances in our lives. One such official description was for that of what Swift and I originally called a 'butt picture'. Don't make me say it. Really.
Everyone was laughing while I was glowering, and then Jeff spoke up. "Too late to work at it today," he said. "How about first thing in the morning?"
There was a smattering of agreeable noises, and then Rich said, "Do you have any idea where to find any animals that have survived this long on their own?"
That was a good question. We looked at one another, trying to think of it. "I guess we'll find out tomorrow," I shrugged.
"Hey, maybe Jeff can find the herd he gave the slip to when he was hiking here," Swift joked. Everyone else looked confused, but Jeff adopted a wide-eyed look of terror.
"No," he whispered. "They'll be out for my neck for abandoning them. I'll have to go into the pony protection program. Grow out a mustache, move to another city and change my name - to one of those silly ones you two use."
Again the group erupted in laughter.

AUGUST 9

"Everypony ready?" Swift called back through the open rear window of the pickup.
"We're good," Serge said for himself, me, and Rich. Swift was interfering - I mean, riding with - Jeff and Karin in the cab. Behind us, we had the flatbed trailer hooked up.
Jeff took the truck out onto the road, heading north, as we had most other times we'd gone out for a drive. We bypassed Brougham, the town with the field we had our eyes on, for the time being, and went another few kilometers up the road towards the village of Claremont. There, we found a Co-Op store - but this was not the typical grocery store type you might have seen in other places. This store was a farmers' co-operative, selling things that farmers, ranchers, and gardeners might find useful.
Jeff and Karin went bananas as soon as we got in the door, lamenting that we should have come sooner. They were both running all over the place like they were on a shopping spree, loading countless items into carts. The rest of us did some browsing while they got it out of their system.
"What do you think?" Swift said, levitating down a John Deere baseball cap from a shelf and settling it on her head. "Now do I need a tuft of wheat sticking out from between my teeth? And a habit of saying 'ya'll'?"
I laughed. "Only if you're going to sit on a tractor," I said. "But if you're doing that, I want a straw cowboy hat."
"Cowpony hat," she said. "We've been over this, remember?" She started looking around the store for one.
"You people are nuts," Rich observed, and Serge sagely nodded beside him.
"While everypony is going loony," I said to them, "let's see if we can find chicken wire, and wooden stakes. Plywood we can make a coop out of might be nice, too, but we can get that closer to home if we need to."
The three of us set off to locate the coop equipment. When I got back with the wooden stakes and an industrial staple gun, Serge had found a couple rolls of chicken wire and already had it on the trailer. Jeff and Karin had two full shopping carts - each! - and Swift was helping them pack it into the truck with her magic.
"No sheets of plywood, boss," Rich said. "But like you said, we have some at home."
"Right," I nodded, inwardly wincing at being called 'boss'. "What about the cow pasture... I wish there was a book we could consult." I rubbed my chin with a hoof. "I guess we use the existing fencing..."
"You know, if the cows have gotten as smart - proportionally, I mean - as Buddy has, you might not even need fences. Just gather 'em up and tell them to hang out there," Swift suggested.
"Now that's something I want to see," Serge said. "Go over here and eat this grass."
"Grass seed," I said, and would have snapped my fingers if I had some. "Let's get several bags, or boxes or containers or whatever. A field's a big area to cover."
"On it," Rich said, darting into the store.
"We can feed them with corn from the garden," Jeff contributed, "but a water trough is probably necessary."
"Milking supplies," Karin chimed in.
"All good ideas," I agreed, as Serge went to follow Rich. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves though. We can probably hold off on milking appliances and storage for now, until the cows are ready."
"We still have to find some cows and some hens," Swift pointed out.
"I know, we'll do that next," I said. Looking over to what was being loaded into the bed of the truck, I asked, "What is all that stuff, by the way?"
"What isn't it?" Karin smiled. Looking closer, I could see why she said that - hoes and rakes and manual seeders and fertilizers and all kinds of products designed to make your green thumb even greener were floating from the carts into the pickup.
"Cool," I said.
"So, what else do chickens need? Anypony?" Swift asked.
"Don't they want warmth inside the coop?" Karin said.
I frowned. "We really need a book, or Google. Jeff, get on that. Rebuild Google by nightfall, please."
"Uh, yeah, no sweat," he deadpanned. "Want redundant servers too?"
"Whatever will let me type in 'how to build a chicken coop' and get results is fine by me."
"Sawdust," Swift said while failing to hold in a laugh. "And straw. Mix them for the floor. Straw for their nests of course. Yes, they want heat and light in the coop, but we can get that back at Ponytown. Food and water too."
"There's likely all sorts of feed across the road," Karin suggested, nodding towards the outbuilding flanked by a silo. "Does it go bad if it's been sitting for months?"
"Only one way to tell," Jeff responded. "Not sure what we'll do if the chickens and cows refuse."
Rich came back out from the store, with three large bags of seed draped over his back, and three more caught in his magic field. "I feel like a rented mule," he said.
"Of course you aren't," Swift reassured him, taking the bags from his magical grasp and setting them in the pickup bed. "Renting implies you're getting paid."
Suddenly there was a loud scraping noise from the outside of the store. It repeated a few seconds later, and we walked over to see what was going on.
As we rounded the corner, we almost bumped into Serge, who was backing up while pulling two stacked-together, large bathtub-sized galvanized steel troughs towards us, the handle on one end of one in between his teeth.
"Oook wha I pound avound vack," he said.
"Any more of them?" I asked. Jeff hurried to help with the other end of the troughs.
"'Vout hav a vozen," Serge said, nodding with difficulty.
Swift looked to Rich. "Up to trying to move some heavy stuff?" she asked him.
"Let's go," he said, trotting that way.
I couldn't help but laugh as Jeff and Serge went one way, and Rich and Swift the other. Karin looked at me and smiled.
"Seems like this project is going well," she said.
"I'm glad," I acknowledged. "We should have thought of this sooner, but that's the only thing that I can say bad about it."

By noon, we had all the stuff loaded on the truck. And I mean all the stuff - there was barely room for us all to ride any more.
I elected to give up my seat by flying - come on, you had to see that coming. Jeff said almost exactly that when I leapt into the air upon leaving the feed lot.
From there, we went to our chosen field. It had been most recently planted with wheat or some kind of grain crop, judging by the stubble, but we'd sort that out in short order. With all six of us trampling the stubble down while we walked along spreading grass seed, soon the field looked like a flat expanse of dirt with seed strewn everywhere.
"Now we wait for rain," Jeff said, wiping his brow.
I grinned. "You're partly right," I said, lowering my goggles onto my eyes and shedding the seed bag.
"Oh no, look out," Swift warned, and I didn't hear the rest as I shot into the sky looking for clouds. If this was going to work, I'd need more than just a couch-sized puff like I'd experimented with the other day.
It took about fifteen minutes to gather the necessary moisture into a dark cloud. Pushing it over the field and giggling madly, I hollered out, "Here comes the rain again!" and began stomping on the top of the cloud as hard as I could.
After a few moments, it began to drip, and then the drip turned to a steady stream - or, more precisely, many steady streams, as the rain pelted down from the cloud onto the soil below.
Some of my friends stared in surprise and disbelief. Others dodged the deluge at first, but then when they realized it wasn't going to harm them, got underneath and enjoyed a shower along with the field.
After I got the cloud draining, I began to shove it about, making sure the water covered all the areas we'd just laboriously spread seed upon. Laughing my head off, I couldn't help but think that this life was going to be fun after all.