AUGUST 13, 2015
05:12AM
I lay there in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling of Ponytown far over my head. There was no sound, except for the Dalmatian snoring lightly nearby. He'd been sleeping in the room of his running partner in the past, but now that she was sharing a bed herself, he apparently felt three was a crowd, and came to where he figured the most comfort was needed.
Everyone else was asleep, and here I was, lying awake in bed, as I had since I was roused from slumber sometime before four. It was a surprise that I didn't wake anypony else up with my shouts, but they were just in my dream - in my nightmare.
Where's the dreamwalking princess now that I need her? I wondered to myself.
I went over the thoughts that were crowding around each other in my head, one more time. Four days. Ninety-six hours. To make a bumper crop, resuscitate a flock of chickens into productivity, and make a herd of cows content enough to provide as well. And come up with a diplomatic plan to avoid getting on the bad side of a grumpy, hungry bunch of people cooped up in a secret, hidden, subterranean lair with superweapons. Sure. Any other miracles you need done?
After lying there for a couple dozen more minutes, I abandoned any pretense of getting sleep, and instead threw aside the covers, unintentionally covering up Buddy as I got up and fluttered my way to the kitchen - avoiding making noise with hooves on the floor.
A couple of glasses of water later, I stood there looking at what we'd accomplished in not quite three months. Six of us had come together, renovated a space into a home, found a means to generate power, and grew our own foods to complement the packaged stuff we'd rescued from our new home and various other locations in and around the mall. With luck, our foodstuffs would be even more 'back to normal' in short order if the animals turned out okay. The only thing that was really still a question mark was a steady water supply - the mains had long given up, of course, and while we had plenty of bottled water from both our own scavenged supplies and the HPI's care packages, we all knew we'd have to provide for ourselves soon enough. There were suggestions that we collect rainwater on the roof (and I had visions of myself stomping on clouds to help that along) or, if we found some way to treat it, draw water from the lake.
Besides that, though, we'd done pretty damn good for a bunch of people who didn't even know one another before the summer, let alone know how to survive without the luxuries of an industrial society surrounding us.
"What are you doing up?" came a tired voice as I surveyed the kitchen. Flinching, I turned to see Swift walking sleepily into the space.
"Can't sleep," I said quietly and plainly.
"Don't fret too much," she responded. "We'll get things sorted out. It's what we do. And y'know what? Even if our partnership with the HPI ends, we can still make things work. We got along fine before they came into the picture."
But they weren't openly vying for the same supplies we are, I kept to myself. If it came to us versus the HPI, what would they do for their needed items - take their chances that some other site near us had what they needed, or come where they knew they could get a working whatever-they-wanted?
"I can tell you're still brooding over stuff," Swift said, coming closer. She gently put a hoof on my temple. "Quit chewing on things up here so much. Give us a chance before you write us off in your head."
"I'm not writing us off," I said, ears folding back. "I'm just trying to be realistic."
"Hey. Is there anything to be accomplished from fretting? Or 'trying to be realistic'?"
I frowned and blushed, looking away, mainly because I knew she had me. "No," I admitted.
"So put it out of your mind. Let us do our best and let the chips fall where they may."
I sighed and tried to put on a smile. "If you say so," I told her.
"There we go. Now, since we're up, how about we go check out the birds?"
I nodded and agreed, and we both walked out of the store, and down the corridor of the mall, lit only by Swift's horn.
"What do you suppose we do about all this?" I said, looking around at the shuttered stores and businesses we'd left virtually untouched since the Event.
"Use 'em as storage lockers?" Swift answered. "Dream big. Each one is an apartment for when Ponytown's population is in the triple digits."
I chuckled a little. "Fair enough," I said. "We'll have to work on our power and water, then."
"We can do it. Stop looking for all the hurdles we have to leap."
I took the hint and shut up for the time being, and we walked towards the exit. Outside, around the back where the loading docks were, we'd fashioned a coop and a pen for the chickens. The roof of the building had a partial overhang of the sidewalk here, allowing for some natural cover besides what we fabricated. The chicken wire was run between two "No Parking - Fire Lane" signs and attached to the wall of the shopping center there, forming a three-sided pen with the fourth side being the mall's exterior wall. A ten-foot-by-eight-foot section at one end of the pen had a roof and plywood sides to give the birds a fully-sheltered place where they could roost and do their thing. It was from inside this coop that some gentle clucking could be heard.
"Mornin', ladies, how are ya?" Swift asked softly, bending her neck down so that she could see in the doorway that led from the pen to the coop. "Is that better than where you were?"
There was some more earnest clucking promptly, and Swift laughed and said, "Yeah, I thought so. Let us know if you need anything."
"Don't tell me you can speak chicken," I deadpanned.
"Oh, no," she laughed again, glancing at me. "But who's to say that Jeff and Karin are the only ones who get to talk to them like they're people?"
"I guess that can't hurt," I shrugged. "But if they start answering you back, I'm out."
"You so would not be," she said accusingly, walking around the outside of the pen, making sure it was still intact and ready for use. "Your mind'd be blown, but you'd enjoy it just like the rest of us."
"If you say so," I smiled.
She turned her attention to the field, jutting out of the parking lot a few dozen meters away. Heading towards it, she said, "This is looking good."
I followed and this time, had nothing to complain about. Stalks of corn were upright before us and about a foot tall, despite having just been planted the night before. Wheat, carrots, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, and other plants were in the other parts of the field, too - I had no idea how it was possible to grow everything so close together. I was never much of a green thumb, but what I remembered from my parents' and grandparents' efforts back home, they had things in specific rows - but never so jam-packed beside one another like we had it in our own plot. And to boot, as far as I knew, the plants grew at different rates and under different conditions. I had to trust our new experts, Jeff and Karin, and the wizardry their earth poniness granted them.
"I hope it's enough to keep-"
"Hush," came the instruction from my friend.
"All right," I acknowledged. I knew she was right - it was just so hard to steer my thoughts away.
Later that morning, after we'd had something to eat, my body demanded a little bit of rest, so I went down for a nap while my fellow ponies took to their tasks. Again I felt guilty for not being involved, but Swift pointed out she and I had done a bit of our share early in the morning, so I was coerced into not feeling quite that bad.
Still, as soon as I woke up, and made sure the chickens were still OK (with Buddy watching over them earnestly), I took off towards the cow pasture.
As I neared, I could see Jeff and Karin milling about in amongst the twenty or so cows that were still there. Then I did a double-take. Wait - wasn't there only about 15 last night?
"What's up?" I said to Karin after extricating myself from the grass after yet another unsuccessful landing. "Besides our head count."
"I don't know," she answered. "Maybe the other five or so heard it through the grapevine and moseyed on in. Maybe we'll have a huge herd here tomorrow."
"Julia, I gotta go. We got cows!" Jeff quipped, cantering over. "And they're all in good spirits, it seems, considering their condition. But we'll fix that soon enough."
"Is that where everybody else is?" I asked. "I thought I saw a dust cloud on the sideroad as I came in."
"Yeah, they took the truck to start getting the milker," Jeff nodded. He gestured to a large diesel generator sitting outside the fence. "For now we're going to run it with this, until I can figure out how to bank enough solar power up here to not need it. Our diesel is still pretty good, so I'm not too worried about that quite yet. I'm hoping these girls won't mind the racket - maybe we'll just run it during milking sessions."
"Sounds good to me," I said, nodding and smiling. "I'm gonna go check out the milker work, see if I can help out up there - unless you guys need me for something here."
"Go on, we're fine," Karin said, waving a hoof. Then she added a smirk. "I'd say 'break a leg', but judging by your landings, I'm afraid you'd take me literally."
"Ouch!" I shot back with a grin as I lowered my goggles, turning to depart.
I found the pickup truck, trailer, and three more ponies exactly where I expected them to be - at the site of the milking machine we were planning to liberate and transplant.
This time, I landed on the shoulder of the road, barely avoiding doing any 'gravel angels' before I trotted into the farmyard. "Hey," I called out.
Swift looked up and waved; Rich just waved, staring instead at a wrench surrounded by a blue glow, adjacent to a wrench that was in Serge's manual grip, the big pegasus lying under the milker where the hoses connected it to the storage tanks.
"Hi," Swift said. "Hey, as much as I hate to encourage your crazy behavior, you might be useful here in a bit."
"Useful's good," I nodded. "What's up?"
"These bins are rancid," she said, gesturing to the poly-plastic twelve-foot-tall tank that sat beside the milker. "We found the cleaning chemicals in the barn and put some in it, but it needs some water to mix with."
"I can handle that," I grinned.
"Not 'til we're out of here," came a strained grunt from beneath the machine. "I don't have much desire to lie in mud."
"You just don't want to mess up your pretty white coat," I teased Serge.
"If you're that concerned about my looks, you can come down here and do this."
"Oh wait," I quipped, "I think I heard a raincloud calling."
Rich interrupted our banter with actual work. "It's almost budging," he told Serge. "Try one more time."
With another grunt and a clank, the inch-and-a-half steel-braided hose finally came free of the machine. "There," Serge barked triumphantly. "One down, five to go."
"Anything I can do?" Swift asked.
"We need to unhook it from the power," Serge declared. "There's a screwdriver in my kit. Storm, you should know what the power leads look like, right?"
"I can manage," I nodded.
"Okay, show Swift which ones to disconnect and tape off. If you can label them, that'd be even better."
"You got it," I said.
Half an hour later, we had the milking machine itself being levitated onto the fresh lawn in the pasture.
"It's not ready yet, girls," Karin was saying, trying to keep the bovines from rushing the entry gate. "We still need electricity and a place to put your milk."
"I'll go back and rinse out those bins," I said, hovering before the group. "You guys are going to stay here and hook it up?"
"Yeah," Jeff said. "With luck, maybe we can run it without the bins long enough to give these poor ladies their relief. That way we don't have to clean the bins again before fresh product is ready. Just give us a shout when you're ready for us and we'll come get them."
"You got it," I said, and shot off.
It was late afternoon by the time the machine was set up and running. While the cows were working their way through it, I dumped a little moisture into their water trough to top it off.
"It's automatic?" Swift was saying, with an impressed voice, when I returned.
"Yup," Jeff smiled. "Whenever Bessie gets an urge, she just walks up, and the machine does its thing. I think we must have stumbled onto some great luck here - the cows' collars are recognized by the machine. They must be from the same farm." It was only then that I noticed each animal had a thin strap around its neck with a small box attached to it - except the calves, of course.
"That's crazy," Swift said. "What are the odds?"
"I know," Jeff laughed. "Once we make sure this works right, we should go back to that farm, and maybe some other farms, and see if we can't find some creature comforts for them. Salt licks, things like that. There's this neat thing that looks like a car wash brush that they can use to give themselves a kind of a neck and back massage - if we could get one of those, that'd surely make them happier."
I tried not to think of sneaking into a cow's den to lean up against a rotating brush for half an hour or so of bliss. "So this is working?" I asked.
"So far, yup," Jeff said. "No milk in storage yet, but it's far too soon for them to produce. Come back tonight or tomorrow and see what's in the tank then."
"Awesome work, everypony," Karin said, clopping her forehooves together. "Thanks for your help!"
"By the way," Rich said with a smirk as we headed for the truck. "Which one's Bessie?"
We were all in good spirits for our supper that evening. All of us had worked through lunch, so we decided to chow down before we tended to the field as our nightcap.
"Feel better now?" Swift asked me as we ate.
"Yeah, a bunch," I smiled. "A lot of weight off my shoulders now that we have stuff working."
"You were worried?" Karin asked.
"She was up all night fretting," Swift said. Gee, thanks, friend!
"You've got nothing to worry about," Karin said with a dismissive wave of a hoof. "We could even probably harvest tonight, most of the stuff, and let it ripen off the vine, and plant again to ensure a bumper crop."
"What does that term mean? Bumper crop," Rich interjected. "I mean, I get the slang definition, but where did it come from?"
"Who knows?" Serge said, dipping his head to his meal. Just before he took a bite, he said, "Not like we'll be able to find out any more."
"That brings up a point," Swift said. "Sorry to give you all whiplash from the change of subject, but we need to document what we're doing and where we're getting the information. And do our best to keep our old way of life at least in memories. The other guys don't have to be the only ones with 'preservation' in their mission statement. Most of you, if not all, know that I keep a journal on what we do. Does anypony object to me making a kind of Encyclopedia Ponifica out of it? Using our stories as reference material? And publishing it to anypony that asks for or needs it?"
There was a round of agreeable noises about the table.
"'Ponifica'?" I asked her, eyebrow raised.
"Give me a break, I was making it up as I went along," she smirked back at me.
After supper and an appropriate amount of time to digest and regain some energy, we went out to address the field and some other things - like cleaning off the truck from its muddy jaunt through several fields. There were clouds on the radar, and I suggested we make quick work of our tasks. Rich and I started with the truck, working it over with a bucket and a couple of brushes, while the rest prepared to harvest the field - as Karin had given it one more once-over and declared its goods almost entirely fit for plucking.
"We need a root cellar," Jeff said out of the blue. "Especially if we're going to let things ripen off the vine."
"What do you need for that? An airtight space?" Serge asked.
"No. Definitely not airtight, but it needs to be cool - underground is often better - and have good moisture content."
"Can we make something down near the lake?" Swift suggested.
"Maybe I'll scout some sites tomorrow," Jeff said. "This batch isn't going to be staying around long enough to worry about, anyway, what with the lion's share of it going straight to the men in black."
The sun was low in the west but not quite close to setting yet. That was why it was a surprise to have its light and warmth suddenly diminish greatly.
I turned to look past the mall and saw the clouds that had formerly been blips on the radar, now grown into thick, dark masses of steel wool in the sky.
"I don't like the looks of these clouds," I muttered, scanning overhead, watching them closing in on several fronts.
"Maybe it'll blow over," Swift suggested.
"I dunno," I said, ears folding back. A lump was forming in the pit of my stomach - not the one that heralded the arrival of an HPI vehicle, but true worry and fear. In the sunlight, which had broken through again for an instant, I could see what looked like thick mist reaching all the way from the clouds to the ground, about two kilometers west of us. I didn't need to be a weather expert to recognize heavy distant rain.
Just then, the rain began to fall locally - first a few drops, then more and more, darkening the pavement as it dampened it. In moments, the skies had opened up and made us feel like we were standing beneath a waterfall.
"Let's just get this stuff picked and inside," Serge said, hurrying to pull plants from the soil.
"I'll be back in a couple minutes," I told them, reaching up for my now-everpresent goggles. "I'm going up to take a lo-"
WHACK!
Everyone flinched. Several of us turned to see what had made the noise, and saw a chunk of ice on the ground.
There was a pregnant pause while everyone stared at the ice. I was the first to recognize it. "Hail," I said.
"What?"
"Hail!" I whirled around as I began to get pelted with little stones of ice.
"Cover the crops!" Jeff yelled in a panicked voice. "Protect them!"
Swift was pulling seven or eight plants at a time from the ground in her magic, wresting the fruit and vegetables from the earth and tossing them to Rich, who was putting them - plants and all - into baskets which he'd moved under the overhang by the new chicken coop. Karin ran up to Jeff and together they tried to come up with a plan. Serge stood over the crop he hadn't plucked yet, spreading his wings wide and taking a beating for his efforts to shield our harvest.
I started to run to the field to mimic Serge, but something occurred to me at that moment, as I spread my wings and felt the air calling to me.
You can start it, I thought to myself, slowing to a stop, the frenzied shouts and cries of pain ebbing away from my perception, being replaced by the sensory inputs of barometric pressure, wind speed, temperatures, and humidity. Does that mean...?
Without another word, I slapped my goggles down over my face and took to the skies.
I angled to get through and away from the hail that was battering both me and the ponies and product below. The air currents filtering through my primaries and secondaries told me precisely where to go in order to be safe. The storm front had no choice but to define itself to me, making its peripheries obvious. It stretched from the Rouge Valley to downtown Oshawa, and from the 407 to the lake and beyond.
This air is saturated with moisture, I realized, feeling more like I was swimming through it rather than flying. Winds were battering me from several different directions at once. Clouds above me were nearly black with fury, and as I focused, I could visualize almost every water droplet falling from them. I blinked in surprise, recognizing their mass, velocity, and even composition - how much was water, how much was dust in the air, and so on.
Then, even more bewilderingly, I realized I could see those droplets changing direction - moving upwards in the sky. Of course, I understood instantly. This is how hail forms. Water is blown higher by strong updrafts until it freezes and clumps together to form ice. True enough, there was a current below me that was sending me continually higher, along with the water around me.
Glancing down, I was startled at how high I'd flown in just a few seconds. The entirety of Ponytown was visible below - my five friends running around trying to save our livelihood, the truck parked beside them - sustaining a shattered sunroof just as I looked at it, and then the windshield erupting in a myriad of spiderweb cracks; wind pulling at the metal flashing around the edge of the building's roof, threatening to take pieces of it away; the radio antenna bending and then snapping from its mount with a coincidental hit from a ball of ice on the U-bolts holding it up, sending it to slap against the side of the building, hanging from its cable.
All the while, I was being beaten nearly senseless by hail of all kinds of sizes going past me in both directions.
"Oh no you don't," I muttered - at least I think I did; any vocalization was lost in the din of the wind and the ice clacking against itself. I looked upwards and strained my wings harder, ascending into the darkness.
Somehow I knew that I could choose which clouds to pass through and which I could land on. It was something inherent to my species - my magic. And from my past experience creating rainclouds, it was obvious that dispersing them would lessen their rage.
Yeah, it may give meteorologists fits and cause them to rail at us "Weather science doesn't work that way!", but all their knowledge and science had a new corollary it had to live with now. Physics and science had to share the stage with magic.
Us pegasi held some of the cards, too.
Forehooves ahead of me, I shot into the thick black mass in a Superman pose, visualizing it blasting apart in my mind's eye as I passed through. Not like me drilling a tunnel through the cloud, but as a shockwave spreading through the whole thing, rippling and pushing the cloud mass next to it further away as well, cascading through the entire front.
It worked, to an extent. It didn't shatter and disperse the entire storm as I'd hoped, but it did cause a large part of it to lessen. I dipped a wing and banked, going at another dark section and pummelling it into submission - or at least a gentle shower instead of a fierce hailstorm.
The temperature of the storm clouds rose - no, more precisely, the clouds participating in the storm were moving into warmer air. The updrafts didn't have the ability to push the moisture higher into the cold climates any more. Because of me.
Thunder rumbled as I flew through the clouds, altering their static charges just by my presence. But black and navy-blue clouds were giving way now to dark grey and even some light grey. I was soaked to the bone, but every bit of moisture taken from the clouds was one less bit that it could dump into the storm.
After several minutes, I felt a strange, warm sensation on my backside, despite the wind and rain. Was I being stung by hail? Struck by lightning? I hadn't sensed either of those elements of the storm in several moments - at least, not in close proximity to me.
I glanced back and did a double-take, then laughed and flew on, continuing to shove the dark clouds aside.
After about ten minutes of hard flying and bruise-inducing battering by the remains of the storm, the sky was under control. I blinked as I realized what I'd done. There was still a decent storm going on, but it had been literally shoved away from affecting Ponytown. Heavy rains showered the nuke plant, the mall across the road, and the lake, and thunder rumbled in the distance, lightning strobing against the clouds, but over the mall that had become my home over the past three-plus months, a 'mere' steady but manageable rain was dropping. The clouds it was emanating from were no longer the color of darkened steel, but simply dirty cotton balls.
I landed on the rooftop, overlooking the garden plot. Even through the yellow tinge of my goggles, I could tell that the lion's share of the crop was salvageable. We could deliver what was needed, no problem. As for putting food in our own mouths, Jeff and Karin would catch us up; I knew they could do it.
"Are you guys okay?" I called out to the five ponies below me.
They all looked up in unison. "That was incredible!" Rich said. "How did you know to do that?"
"How did you do that, period?" Swift wanted to know.
"Never mind us, are you okay?" Karin called up.
I turned on an angle, so they could see the new image emblazoned on my hindquarters - that of a lightning bolt surrounded by three cartoon raindrops.
"I think I know what my name is now," I told them.
Monday came, and so did the phone call from Dr. Baker.
"Good morning," I said, positioning myself in front of the camera, maintaining a neutral expression.
"Hello," he replied. "Forgive me for dispensing with the pleasantries, but what's the news?"
I had Swift tilt the phone's camera away from my face and let the picture it took do the talking - showing basket upon basket of produce, all lined up on the dry tarmac of the old parking lot. The still-damp field was being plowed under again by Jeff, and a muddy Karin was not far behind him re-seeding, but that wasn't relevant to Baker. I walked along the baskets as I talked.
"10 bushels of corn. 5 bushels of wheat. 5 bushels of carrots, 3 bushels of tomatoes, 5 bushels of potatoes, and 3 bushels of various other fruits and vegetables. So I'm told by our experts. I honestly don't know how much is in a bushel, I'm taking their word for it."
Baker looked stunned. "Very impr-"
"I'm not done," I said. "Swifty, keep going." She continued to follow me and stopped in front of some egg cartons. "Thirty-six fresh eggs," I said, as the top carton opened with a yellow glow, showing off a dozen white and brown eggs.
"Eggs??" I heard erupt from the phone incredulously.
I motioned for Swift to turn the phone back to face me. "And if you're willing to give us 24 more hours, we can add abouuut... mmm, 80 to 100 gallons of fresh milk. You might have to pasteurize it yourself, though."
The only way I knew the phone was still connected was that I saw Baker gaping, mouth popping open and closed like a fish. No sound was coming out. Finally, he found his voice. "How did you manage this?" he said. "You said this is fresh? Not reclaimed from a store?"
"I wouldn't give that rotten junk to my worst enemy," I shook my head. "I'd rather dump it all in the lake if I didn't think it'd congeal into a sea monster and rise up to kill us all. This is the real deal. Oh, and as you requested, the stuff we didn't use from the first two care packages put back on a pallet. We've got some shrink wrap left over from the store, so it's ready for the rover as well. The rest of this stuff is probably too much for the rover to take, so we'll move it out to a field - away from us - so you can send one of your flying machines to come get it."
"This is unbelievable. We'd hoped for a total of 20 bushels of produce and the pallet of remainders from the care packages. I don't know how you managed to outstrip our expectations, but congratulations are in order. No... heartfelt thanks."
"You can thank our green thumb couple. Can I call them green thumbs if they don't have any?" I smirked. "And let's call those extra 11 bushels a down payment on a renewed relationship."
"I'm pretty confident you can bank on that," Baker said, laughing a little. "Miss Storm, to say I'm impressed is an understatement. I mean this when I say it: thank you."
I waved to the others to crowd in beside me, and the five ponies stepped in close. "You're welcome," I said when we were all gathered, "from all of us. I know, it may be corny, but it was every pony you can see that made this happen."
AUGUST 18
A little more than 24 hours after the phone call with the HPI, we all sat eating supper after a tiring day of packaging up the HPI goods and effecting repairs from the hailstorm. Our meal was from week-old produce; the stuff we planted after harvesting the HPI crops would still need a few days. But we had fresh milk! I even had one glass 'straight', before adding Quik powder to the second one to turn it into chocolate milk. The powder seemed to still be okay, and I didn't even mind the milk moustache I got from it.
After the meal, I stood up, stretching, and thanked my friends for the meal and the hard work.
"Going to rest?" Serge asked.
"Yeah," I nodded, "but I have something to do, too. Something I'm going to get into the habit of."
"Okay," Jeff responded, quirking an eyebrow. "Kind of ambiguous."
"Nothing secretive," I said with a smile. "Just going over there and talk a bit." I nodded behind me.
"You sure you shouldn't go mess around with clouds?" Rich smirked. "After all, your cutie mark isn't a microphone."
"I've had enough with dark clouds for a couple days," I said.
"Good!" Swift breathed a sigh of relief. "That's freaky and dangerous."
"No more dangerous than falling off a roof," I shot back, as I walked away.
A few moments later, I lay down on the well-worn green carpet. We're going to have to replace this soon. Hopefully we could find something as comfortable, in a similar shade; the green was soothing, so it seemed.
Twisting dials and tapping buttons with practiced ease, I turned on and tuned in several radios at once. The whip antenna had been replaced by a bigger and better array, allowing us to use more radios at once and have increased range for both transmitting and receiving.
We'd sourced some good pedestal mics for the shack as well, with quality components and excellent response. Each of them had a locking transmit button, which I tapped, six in a row, as I prepared to speak.
"Hello one and all," I said. "It's six o'clock PM Eastern, on Tuesday, August 18, 2015. This is Sudden Storm, representing Ponytown. For those of you who haven't heard my voice before, we're a settlement in what used to be Pickering, Ontario, Canada. For those of you who have heard my voice before, I have some news."
"We have food and supplies - more than enough to share. We have electricity, obviously, and shelter. If you're lacking any or all of these things, you are welcome here."
"One other thing we have that we didn't before is answers. Not a lot, but a few. Enough to make a little sense of what's happened. How we can use our new skills and powers to improve our way of life. And what we don't know? Maybe you do. Maybe you have a piece we haven't heard yet. If you want to trade, be it information, supplies, or labor, either direction, we're open to the idea."
"One thing that's obvious now, is that everypony-" I cut myself off, then after a moment's thought, smiled and went on. "Everypony has to work together in order to make this happen. We may never get back to something resembling pre-Event ways of life... but we may not need to. This is a simpler world now. Provide for yourself, your neighbors... your friends. Share what you can, help those who can't, and accept help when a helping hoof comes your way."
"If you have transmit capability, feel free to answer back on this frequency. And we will be broadcasting twice daily, at noon and at six, keeping everypony updated on the latest news and developments. I know you're out there... and I don't intend to let you wonder in the dark any longer."
"So until tomorrow at noon, or sooner if you decide to answer back, this is Sudden Storm, signing off."
I unlatched the mic locks and let all the radios unkey. Eyes darting back and forth across the displays, I watched for the signs of anyone transmitting, but no needles deflected with telltale signals; no LEDs lit up with "traffic/busy" indicators.
No big deal. I knew they were out there.
Eventually, they'd respond in some fashion.
Because the people - ponies - of Earth would survive, and survive together.
It's what we do.