//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4 
// Story: Watching the Watchers 
// by Ryvaken 
//------------------------------//

Daring Do wiped her brow for the umpteenth time. Was that sweat or humidity? Stupid jungle temples. Ugh, didn't matter. There were more important things to focus on. Ancient earth pony ruins were big on traps and low on subtlety. She gave it two, maybe three chambers before reaching the boiling lake of lava.

Rainbow Dash glanced at Sweet Apple Acres. Still nothing. She turned back to her book, a worn and dogeared thing that had clearly suffered its way through the trenches of fandom and the hooves of an athlete.

Daring paused to examine a mural in the corridor wall. The pigment has long since worn away, but pre-Equestrian earth ponies always carved the image before painting over it. Before her was an unmistakable carving of Celestia, wearing the heavy armor of an earth pony general. The alicorn's wings were folded and she tilted her head up, minimizing the horn atop her brow. Daring smirked slightly. Celestia and Luna in warrior garb were common elements of ruins of all three tribes, of course, but in an earth pony temple? She reached out with a hoof and pushed gently on Celestia's steel-shod foreleg.
Click. Daring smirked more widely. "Always trust the ancient earth ponies to be reliable and predictable," she said. Then the floor gave way under her.

Rainbow glanced down from her cloud again. Nothing. She turned back to her book.

Daring flapped her wings idly. "This is what they protect the Golden Schnitzel with?" she snorted.

"Rainbow!"

"YAAAH!" Rainbow screamed, jumping up, her back arching as she tried to twist around to see who snuck up on her.

Twilight smirked and lighted gently on the cloud. "Am I getting better at sneak attacks?" she asked.

Rainbow stared at her friend for a moment while her brain struggled to process....stuff. "Um, yeah," she finally said. "I mean, a bit. I wasn't scared though!"

"Right," Twilight said. She was still smirking.

Rainbow scowled as she landed back on the cloud. She settled back down over her novel and motioned for Twilight to take a patch of cloud for herself. "So what's up?"

"I need to ask you about pegasus magic," Twilight said, sitting down.

Rainbow frowned. "You mean for..." she cut herself off and glanced down again.

Twilight followed Rainbow's gaze right to the bat orchard of Sweet Apple Acres. She looked away quickly and sighed. "Have you been here long?" she asked.

Rainbow tapped her hoof against the cloud. "Um, maybe three chapters?" she offered.

Which at the rate Rainbow read could mean hours. Rainbow was playing sentry for the Federals below. Subtle. Twilight tried not to react but couldn't stop herself from scrunching up her eyes and lifting her hoof halfway to her face. "Ergh...no, this is just my own personal thing" she said with forced cheerfulness. "You know that talk we had yesterday about weather magic?"

"Yeah," Rainbow said easily.

"Well I did some research," Twilight started.

Rainbow dropped her muzzle back into Daring Do.

Twilight rolled her eyes and closed the book with a brief glow of her horn. "Rainbow," she teased.

"Egghead," Rainbow sing-songed back.

Twilight bit back her counter-retort. "Do you want to know what I found out?"

"No?" Rainbow asked hopefully.

"Too bad. I read everything I could find on pegasus magic and field projection."

"Since yesterday?" Rainbow asked, impressed despite herself.

Twilight nodded once, sharply. "And it didn't make any sense at all." She gestured at Rainbow's book. "I can't even figure out that!"

Rainbow blinked. "Reading? I thought you'd mastered that already."

Twilight fumed. "Rainbow, your book is lying on top of a cloud!"

"And?" Rainbow asked.  She grinned slowly. "Wait, Princess Egghead struck out? All that brainy research power and you didn't find any of this stuff?"

Twilight narrowed her eyes. "The pegasus nomenclature is completely different from unicorn magecraft. I can't figure out what the articles meant. Except for a few in Cloudsdale Monthly."

Rainbow froze, her grin staying on her face but no longer looking quite so sure. "You, uh, you get the CM here? I mean, journals are boring. Of course you'd read them. Egghead."

"Yes," Twilight purred. Payback was unbecoming of a princess, but this was between friends after all. "The library has a complete collection."

Rainbow licked her lips and tried to find words in a suddenly very dry mouth. "Um, how complete? Not that I care or anything."

"Complete enough," Twilight said. Victory is sweet. "Prisma Sprint?"

Rainbow hung her head. "Ponyfeathers."



"But why the pen name?" Twilight asked over the whistle of a kettle.

Rainbow turned down the heat and picked the kettle up gently in her teeth. "If sumphomy fown ouf I ve a laufinsock."

Twilight waited for Rainbow to pour the tea before responding. She took a moment to look around. It wasn't often she saw the inside of Rainbow's kitchen, after all. The cloud floor was nicely firm underhoof, far more than the natural clouds that she was used to. No, Rainbow's cloud house was made from cured and toughened cloud made from long, long exposure to pegasus magic. It was one of many things Twilight was realizing she didn't know about magic. "If somepony what now?" she finally asked.

Rainbow set the kettle back down on the stove and sighed dully. "Found out," she continued, "then I'd be a laughing stock. It's not exactly awesome to nerd out like that."

Twilight bit back her first response and sipped at her tea. She grimaced slightly and saw that Rainbow was bringing out cream and honey. Rainbow quickly dumped what Twilight thought was an unreasonable amount of both in her own cup, spilling the not-quite-brown-anymore liquid. Suddenly the mottled pattern on the tabletop made perfect sense. Twilight took both and worked to fix the misbegotten fluid Rainbow had served her. "Then why publish in the first place?" she asked.

"I dunno," Rainbow muttered. "I had a whole lot of paperwork to take care of after Winter Wrap Up. I figured if I just changed a few words I could submit it to a journal, maybe help somepony out that way."

"But how did you learn all this?" Twilight pressed. "After you got kicked out of flight school-"

"I didn't get kicked out!" Rainbow snapped. She snorted and shook head angrily. "I quit. I knew everything they were going to teach me anyway."

"And then?" Twilight pressed.

"And then...I kinda found out joining the Wonderbolts wasn't going to happen overnight. I had to actually do something to get their attention first. So I started looking for jobs where I could fly a lot." Rainbow grinned. "Weather manager of a little town on the border of Everfree? I figured I could set some records for longest runs without a wild weather disaster and catch their eye that way."

"How'd that turn out?" Twilight asked.

Rainbow sighed and downed her tea in one gulp. Twilight doubted she could actually taste it, or would have cared to. "Turns out the records were a few years longer than I thought. So I'd have to get creative. Do as much as I can. Do it as cheap as I could, or as fast, or both, or something. Anything to get Cloudsdale to notice that somepony special was in charge."

"You are somepony special," Twilight started.

Rainbow cut her off with a raspberry and a waved hoof. "You don't need to convince me. I've already made the reserves, remember? It worked." Rainbow shrugged her wings. "But back when I was starting, yeah it was all bluster. I started taking special classes, the kind where it's all done by mail."

"Correspondence classes?" Twilight asked.

"Yeah, those," Rainbow nodded slowly. Twilight realized Rainbow was staring through the wall above her head. "They sent a lot of books. Not like Daring Do. Thick things with tiny letters. Lots of pictures, they helped. I'd remember what they looked like and try and do what they told me to when I found things that looked like stuff."

Twilight bit the inside of her muzzle to keep from laughing at Rainbow's utterly worthless description of what she had tried to learn. She was lost in the past, but Twilight was insanely curious about how a weathermare who could barely get through a sentence ended up making scholarly articles on weather management. "Did you learn much?"

"Only that the books were worthless," Rainbow snorted. "Just like flight school, but ten, no, twenty times worse. Stuff that didn't make sense, stuff that didn't work as good as following my gut. Proper methods of cloud management my cutie mark, I bet they were written by eggheads that hadn't even seen a cloud. So I dumped 'em."

"The books?"

"Nah, the classes. Burned the book. Celestia that felt...good?" Rainbow blinked and remembered who she was talking to. "Uh, I mean, um, I returned the books to the publishers with a strongly worded letter of dissatisfaction?"

Twilight grinned. "Why Rainbow, when did Applejack teach you how to lie?" she teased.

Rainbow rolled her eyes. "Okay, fine. Big bonfire, some evil cackling, Pinkie lent me a giant stone head to overlook the whole thing. Happy?"

Twilight blinked. "Giant stone head?"

"Pinkie Pie, remember?"

"Excellent point. So you did the weather your way."

"Yeah," Rainbow sighed happily. "Worked great when it was just me on a shift, but nopony else wanted to do it my way. They couldn't see the right places to buck or pinch or push or pull. It was like the sky was full of Derpy."

"Rainbow," Twilight chided.

"There's a reason Derpy isn't on the weather team, Twilight," Rainbow said with a roll of her eyes. "Great flier, sure, but that mare is a menace with clouds. Anyway, I finally lost it when we missed a full week of rain and had to hit Ponyville with a monster storm."

"Was that when Applejack and Rarity had a slumber party with me?" Twilight asked.

"Maybe?" Rainbow shrugged. "I was chatting with Fluttershy and she asked what had happened and I just unloaded on her. And she let me. And by the time I was done, you know what she asked me? She asked me why I didn't just tell my team what I screamed at her. So, long story short, I whipped the Ponyville team into shape, and someone wrote to Cloudsdale that we were being awesome. One thing led to another and ended up making that article."

"Rainbow, that's incredible," Twilight said honestly. She leaned forward. "You have to tell me more."

Rainbow frowned and flicked her eyes in the direction of Sweet Apple Acres. "Is this about," she started.

Twilight cut her off. "My research project?" Rainbow's cloud house wasn't protected from scrying. The Federals could be watching, and Twilight wasn't ready to give away their secrets. "Kinda, but mostly this is just me. I'm the Princess of Friendship, I'm an Alicorn, and I've studied magic for as long as I can remember, but I only just realized that the only magic I've really studied is unicorn magic. Did you know that pegasi were the first potion brewers? I never thought about it, but a lot of my supplies come from Cloudsdale."

Rainbow frowned. "Twilight, I am awesome with all things flying, but I don't know anything about potions or that nerd stuff."

Twilight stomped a hoof on the cloud below her. "You know about this," she pointed out.

Rainbow rolled her eyes. "Well yeah, but what kind of pegasus doesn't know how to work a cloud?" she asked.

"Me," Twilight said simply. She saw Rainbow's eyebrows shoot up. "Rainbow, I never went to flight school or took a class on weather. I've never worked a cloud with my own hooves. All I have is what you've taught me, and that's all been about flying."

"Yeah, but I screwed that up," Rainbow shot back. "I had you flying like a duck out there."

"That's not your fault," Twilight insisted. "And yesterday, you were the one that figured out what I was doing wrong. Your articles were the ones that made sense. I need somepony that can talk about advanced weather magic that I can actually understand." Twilight was laying it on a little thick, of course. She knew that, with focus, she could learn the jargon pegasi researchers used to describe their magic. But Rainbow's only exposure to high level magic talk had been Twilight herself. 'Prisma Sprint' had used unicorn terms and plain language in her articles. It was a unique vocabulary, one Twilight would have recognized instantly if the idea of Rainbow being a published researcher wasn't completely absurd.

Rainbow stared at the empty cup in her hooves for a long moment. "Okay," she said finally. "I've never left a pony hanging. I'm not going to start now. What do you need, Twilight?"





Rainbow stood firm atop a cloud. That was nothing unusual in and of itself, but the stern expression was new to the pegasus's face. "What is a cloud?" she asked her student.

Twilight brightened. She knew this one! "A cloud is a collection of water vapor that has condensed into a-"

"Wrong," Rainbow cut her off. "A cloud is power and magic and rain and lightning. It is wind and heat and snow and hail. It is beauty and destruction and life. A cloud is raw potential."

Twilight hesitated. "That's...poetic," she said at last.

Rainbow blushed lightly. "Yeah, well, sometimes around here the egghead answers don't work good. Cloudsdale sends out nice, easy, normal clouds, but Ponyville has to deal with Everfree clouds. Ya gotta think of them as something different. Of course, that's why we get so many more rainbows."

Twilight blinked. "What do Everfree clouds have to do with rainbows?"

Rainbow Dash facehoofed. "Ugh, this isn't going well. When you simplify a cloud, all the excess magic or whatever comes out as rainbow extract. Cloudsdale makes the stuff by the barrel, but we get a couple gallons every month by pacifying an Everfree cloud. It's hard work, but if the 'team doesn't have much else to do it cuts down on the weather budget. Even with the extra ponyhours."

Twilight scowled and shook her head. "I never even thought about what rainbows were made from. Even at the weather factory, it was all just 'ooo pretty' and 'Pinkie is random.' So they're just a pretty byproduct?"

"Pretty much," Rainbow nodded. "They've got a few egghead uses, so we can sell it if we want, but around here there's nothing like a super bright rainbow to perk everypony up after something blows in from the forest." Rainbow craned her head down to stare at her forehooves and calmly twisted one into the cloud. "This cloud is an Everfree cloud, Twilight. I've got it under control, but it's still a wild cloud. And you're touching it right now. What do you feel?"

Twilight's eyes widened. "Fear, nervous, anticipation, pan-"

"Not like that," Rainbow groaned. "Do I look like Rarity? What do you feel about the cloud?"

"Oh." Twilight's ears drooped and she tried to grin. "Um, it's soft?"

"Close your eyes," Rainbow instructed, rolling her own.

"What?"

"Close your eyes. Breathe slowly. Yknow, relax and stop thinking about everything else. Just focus on the cloud, okay?"

Twilight's ears perked up as she complied. "At least you're not telling me to open my mind or listen to the magic within me or something."

"No, I want you to listen to the magic in the cloud. Or don't give me that look, you're the one that started talking weird. Close your eyes! Now feel the cloud at your hooves however you want and tell me what you feel."

"Um," Twilight stuck out her tongue and furrowed her brow. "Well, it's soft. Springy. Tense? Yeah, tense. Like it's pushing or being squeezed or pulled or...something. Anticipation maybe? Like it might blow up all at once and it'll be big and dramatic and we're standing on a floating bomb that will destroy all of Ponyville and!"

"Twilight!" Rainbow shouted. "Breathe! Relax! You're projecting into the cloud!"

"Huh?" Twilight asked. Her eyes shot open and she stared at her hooves, which were surrounded by tiny droplets from across the spectrum. "Rainbow?"

"Yeeaaah," Rainbow Dash drawled, "you pushed a bit of that egghead freakout of yours into the cloud and forced some rainbow out of it. You weren't doing too bad before that."

Twilight's ears drooped again. "I ruined this cloud, didn't I? It'll turn into a raging storm now."

"Pretty much," Rainbow agreed. "Don't worry about it, Twilight. I've got the cloud under control, and I'll buck it into a million pieces when we're done."

"But I still wasted the cloud," Twilight mumbled.

"Wasted?" Rainbow asked. Then she sat down laughing. "Oh, that's a riot, Twi! This cloud was supposed to have been bucked hours ago!"

"What?" Twilight yelped, wings shooting out.

"Yeah, Twi. You think anypony can just handle a cloud first try? We all start with training clouds nopony'll miss." Rainbow wiped a tear from her eye and coughed out a final laugh. "Only thing different is you get an awesome wild cloud, not one of those lame foal-safe things Cloudsdale sends to the flight camps."

"Oh," Twilight said. She grinned a little at herself. "I guess I was being a little foalish wasn't I?"

"Just a bit," Rainbow teased. She stretched out on the cloud and lounged comfortably, still grinning. "Ready to give it another shot, or should we take a nap first?"





It took Twilight three more tries before she could get a feel for the cloud without projecting her own intent into it. Four tries after that and she was able to sense Rainbow's field holding the cloud in place. She managed to create a field of her own in only one try.

"But I couldn't sense your magic at all after that," Twilight grumbled around a mouthful of hayburger.

"You'll get there," Rainbow promised. "It's really hard to read what a pegasus is doing by hoof alone. Heck, there are even some Wonderbolts that can't pull it off."

Twilight wasn't sure what cloud reading had to do with stunt flying, but decided not to question it. "But I could read you at first," she complained.

"Yeah, but that was when I was being really loud and obvious about it," Rainbow said matter-of-factly. "I was making it real easy, that's all." She frowned at Twilight, who was pouting mid-chew. "Don't feel bad, Twilight. You're doing awesome. This stuff takes years to learn, and you've only been at it for hours."

"I guess," Twilight muttered. She unwrapped her second burger n her magic and paused. "I was wondering. What would happen if a weathermare made the same mistake I did? Ruined a cloud by projecting into it, I mean."

Rainbow snorted. "Her pay would be slashed to cover the costs of fixing it, including all the overtime. Live weather is no place for school."

"But couldn't you just cut away the bits she touched?" Twilight asked. "Some of those clouds are huge."

"Doesn't matter," Rainbow said. "We're not dealing with bricks and sticks, Twilight. No matter how big it is, it's still just one cloud. You weren't thinking about it in pieces and you didn't change just a piece of it. Maybe if we'd split it in half, the other chunk wouldn't have been messed up, but I've seen stranger. Especially with Everfree clouds. It's not worth the risk of somepony getting hurt."

"Identity," Twilight breathed quietly. The last crumbs of her hayburger fell from her lips, which were hanging weakly in shock. She shot to her hooves, ignoring the rest of her lunch. "You're describing identity!"

"Uh, sorry?" Rainbow tried. "Um, Twilight, maybe you should tune down the crazy?"

Twilight's head snapped around and saw ponies staring at her. "Oh. Right." She calmly trotted out of the building, Rainbow floating behind her in her magic. "Rainbow, to the palace! We have research to do!"

Rainbow squirmed in the purple field, stretching her neck out to try and reach her tray. "Can I at least finish my fries first?"




"Oh, darling, I can't tell you how much I've been waiting for this! Ever since your coronation you've needed a whole new wardrobe!" Rarity practically pranced around her boutique, summoning up swatches of material and measuring tapes to swarm Twilight. "Now I have a good idea what matches your coat but I haven't had a chance to test your feathers and you'll note your pinions are slightly closer to heliotrope than lavender." Twilight blinked and stared at her feathers in confusion while Rarity rambled on. "Oh they'll absolutely clash with what I have ready. This will never do." She banished the swatches and retrieved a second set, along with spools of thread. "Perhaps something patterned. Subtle but repeating, maybe iterating?"

"That's actually what I wanted to ask you for," Twilight managed to get out. "I need a supply of fabric for an experiment I'm running."

Rarity stopped dead mid-prance, the whirlwind of fabric frozen in midair. "Could you repeat that, please?"

"I said I just needed some fabric?" Twilight repeated, cringing slightly.

"I see. That's what I thought you said," Rarity said primly. She gently put away all the supplies she had pulled out, everything floating back neatly into the bins and drawers from whence they came. "I can certainly see why you came to me. After all, I do have a full supply of textiles and nothing to do with them."

Twilight smiled sheepishly. "Sorry, I know it's not really your thing, but that fabric you made for the Manehatten show was really incredible and I need that kind of precision. I came to you because you're the best."

Rarity smiled back, mollified. "Yes, well, thank you darling. What is it you need exactly?"

"Did you ever study sympathetic spellwork?" Twilight asked.

"Yes, actually," Rarity said. "A dash of magic in the dress really helps give it that special flair. But the fabric can't channel the magic alone, even if I anchor it to gems, so I employ sympathetics to the owner. Why?"

"I'm trying to get a backdrop for a spell that won't corrupt the result," Twilight explained. "Plain white canvas should do the job, but an extra pattern layered into the weave to redirect the magic back where I want it would really help."

"White?" Rarity mused. "Hmm. I have some bolts of canvas for saddlebags, of course, but plain white...I will need to check. It's not a color one usually looks for in an accessory that is likely to pick up dirt so frequently. What is the pattern?"

"Oh, you remember that last experiment, the one that tripped the castle's alarm?" Twilight said lightly. "That provided the pattern."

Rarity drew in a slow breath. "I see. Well, I can certainly understand why you seem so eager to move to the next phase of your experiment. If I don't have enough canvas on hoof I will put in an order express." She paused dramatically and tapped her hoof to her muzzle. "I suppose I could stop by the castle tomorrow to pick up the pattern, make sure I remember it properly. Lunchtime?"

"Sounds great," Twilight said enthusiastically, trotting for the door. "I'll have Spike fix something special."

"Yes," Rarity murmured into the empty boutique. "I'm sure you will."





"Y'want me ta what, Twilight?" Apple Bloom asked doubtfully. "Why me?"

Twilight carefully lowered a small, cloth-wrapped branch to the filly. "Applejack said you'd learned some whittling," she said.

"Well yeah, bu' I cain't do nothing fancy!" Apple Bloom protested.

"It doesn't need to be fancy," Twilight assured. "But I do need you to do it. It's a magic thing."

"I dunno," Apple Bloom said slowly.

Twilight glanced at Bloom's flank. "There might be a cutie mark in it."

Apple Bloom froze and for a moment Twilight wondered if somepony had broken into Starswirl's collection of time spells. "Could ya say that again?" she asked with quiet, casual indifference.

Twilight winced. "There might be a," she started again.

"CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS BRUSH MAKERS YAY!" Apple Bloom shouted. She snatched the branch from its fabric wrap and galloped away.

Twilight glanced at the scrap of cloth she was still holding and raised a hoof to her mouth. "Remember, do it yourself Apple Bloom!" she called. "Let the other girls get their own branches!"





"So they scraped away most of it, but Applejack wants the whole orchard to get three rainstorms this month. Big ones," Rainbow grumbled, looking over a stack of papers. She was in her office, an undecorated room nestled deep in town hall's most boring office spaces, with a rather stunned looking Twilight. "Partly to wash off the rest of the tree sap, but mostly as an apology to Maxine, Gloria, and Hoofchester. Something about losing half their branches. What gave the Crusaders such a crazy idea...Twilight are you okay?"

"You have an office?" Twilight managed.

Rainbow rolled her eyes. "Hey, I have to keep the weather schedule somewhere. If I let this egghead stuff near my house it would fall out of the sky out of sheer lameness."

Twilight stared at Rainbow. "An office. That is yours. In Town Hall. How have I never known about this?"

"I only come here in disguise," Rainbow said flatly. "And most ponies just track me down when they need something done to the schedule. You're the first to actually try being official and junk."

Twilight shook her head. "Wow. Okay. I can deal with this. This is not the strangest things about my friends that I've ever learned."

Rainbow pressed a hoof to her face and groaned. "Twi, you wanted something about the rainstorms?"

Twilight shook her head. "Uh, right. I need some rainbow extract from the clouds that will be over Sweet Apple Acres."

Rainbow frowned. "Those clouds specifically?" she asked. "Extract's extract. We don't usually separate it by the cloud."

"This is one of those egghead uses you mentioned," Twilight told her. "I'm going to be using sympathetic links to target a matrix. One of those links is identity. You know, how changing a bit of cloud changes the whole cloud? I need to be able to use that. So I need extract from the right clouds, and no others."

Rainbow turned to a file cabinet and opened it up, revealing a mess of papers at all angles except straight. She hauled out a few overstuffed folders and hoofed through a stack of loose sheets, which Twilight could tell were four different colors and three different sizes and should probably not have been a single stack. "Okay, we'll need to talk to Clear Skies to make sure that batch stays separate. She's on cloud wrangling that week."

"Can you take over for her?" Twilight asked. "It would help the experiment."

Rainbow looked at Twilight with one of the most severe expressions Twilight had ever seen. "Twilight, you're asking me to cut into her work hours, and a lot of overtime for a job this big. That's a lot of bits I'll be asking her to give up on. This experiment worth all that?"

Twilight nodded slowly. "It's part of that big experiment I've been running. The one the Princesses are watching. Yeah, it's serious."

Rainbow sighed. "Should have guessed." The clouds over the secret alien spy base. Of course it was related to that "experiment." "I'll talk to Clear Skies, see if I can swap shifts with her. Maybe throw her a night shift over the school. How much do you need, anyway?"

"Not much, just a few ounces, but it needs to be pure," Twilight said. She bit her lip. "I know it doesn't sound like much."

"Don't worry," Rainbow promised, slamming the file cabinet mostly closed. "You'll get quality stuff, or I'll eat my own tail."

"Thanks," Twilight breathed with a bright smile. She turned to go. "Hey," she called back over her withers, "I was going to get the girls together for a lunch next week to show you the end result. Can you come?"

Rainbow's grin was a bit forced. "Wild yaks couldn't keep me away."