//------------------------------//
// Snow Day 
// Story: After the Storm 
// by Jay911 
//------------------------------//

OCTOBER 15, 2015
08:37 AM

"Stormy!" came a faint voice near me.
"Nngh," I said, and squirmed a little under my blankets. My brain, still connected to the dream world, took over my speech. "Not now. Swift's gonna teach me to play the guitar with hooves."
"Uh... wha?"
My dream self played a quick riff. I could feel myself holding a pose, as if I was cradling an "air guitar".
"What's she doing?" the voice came again.
"I should have brought a camera," I heard another voice say with mirth.
With that, I started to realize where and what I was, and pried an eye open. What I saw was the edge of a pillow and some blankets and cushions on my bedroom floor.
Momentarily, a white face dipped down to my level and smiled broadly. "Good morning, sleepyhead," Serge said.
"Gnaaah," I drew out, opening the other eye and rolling over. "What time is it?"
"Eight-thirty," he said, standing up to tower over me again.
"Can we still go out?" came the muffled noise. I turned over to seek it out and found two eyes peeking out from behind a knitted scarf, toque hat, and several other handmade items of protection, like... miniature leg warmers?
"What the hell?" I blurted out, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.
"Jenn made me put it on," the voice said, and I realized it was Randy underneath it all. "Said it was gonna be cold today."
I stood up and shook my head to gain some senses. "First of all, how are you gonna flap your wings amongst all that stuff? Second, if we go anywhere, it'll fly off you, most of it, if it's not tied on or wrapped up tight."
"It's makin' me really warm, too," he said plainly, without protest, but clearly not enjoying it much.
I peeled a layer or two off the colt. "We're hardier than the others when it comes to cold weather, far as I can tell," I told him. "Shouldn't need all this."
"Can you tell Jenn that?" he said, flapping his little wings once they were uncovered. "But later. I wanna go up on the roof right now!"
"Okay," I laughed, searching for my scarf and goggles. "Hang on a second, Maverick."

"Whoa," I blinked as Serge and I finished shoving the roof hatch open.
"Sure did pile up, didn't it?" Serge said.
There was at least two feet of snow on the roof. Randy slalomed between our legs and leapt forward, having to actually climb up on the snow pushed aside by the door.
I stepped up with him. "This is a lot! We need to think about getting it off the roof before we come inside, or it might be on our beds later."
"Good plan," Serge nodded, then joined us. We walked to the edge of the roof, where Randy came to a halt, staring wide-eyed at the deep snow on the ground below.
Somepony had been up before us, clearing a path to the chicken coop and cleaning it off. The garden was absolutely buried - luckily, we'd harvested what we figured we'd lose in the winter, and the hardier crops were left to their own devices. It'd be interesting to see if our farmers had what it took to make things work in such conditions.
"Woowwwww..." a little voice was saying from beside and beneath me.
"Pretty neat to see it all covered with no tracks, huh?" I said.
"Watch this!" he blurted out, and leapt off the side of the building.
I blinked and stared, for that split second before my brain caught up and demanded I do something. By then, it was far too late; Randy, wings buzzing fervently, hung in the airspace out away from the ledge, with nothing below him except 50 or so centimeters of snow covering hard pavement.
Serge gasped beside me as my legs tensed, then reacted, propelling me into the air. Beneath me, Randy was in free-fall, all four legs spread wide like a parachute jumper, scarf trailing behind him, the pom-pom on his toque flapping in the wind. Or maybe I imagined all that in the fraction of time it took me to react.
I actually heard Randy yelling for a moment before he disappeared with a chuff! into the snowdrift. It was exactly like a cartoon - there was a pony-shaped hole in the snow where he'd 'landed'.
I was afraid I'd just watched a kid die, but as I flew down to start searching for his broken body, I heard muffled giggling, which erupted into full-blown laughter as he broke through the surface of the drift, ruining his perfect silhouette, 'swimming' his way to the surface.
"That was fun!" he declared. "Even if I didn't hover."
Maybe for you, kid! I said, trying to get my heart back down into my torso. I tried to settle down on top of the snow, but evidently it didn't behave like clouds do; I sank right through it up to my barrel.
"C'mon!" Randy was shouting up to Serge, who was paler than normal, if that was possible. "It's perfect! We can try to fly and if we don't, just land in the snow! It didn't hurt or nothin'!"
"You're crazy, little guy!" Serge shot back, wide-eyed.
"Fine, be a chicken then!" Randy grinned.
In my peripheral vision, I noticed a figure approaching us from the ground, all bundled up and thrashing through the snow. Jenn, being an Earth pony, was not particularly winded by the effort of walking through the deep snow, so the heavy breathing had to be from fright or shock. "Randy! Where is the rest of your outfit?!" she gasped.
"I didn't need it," he said plainly, looking over his shoulder at me. "I left it in Stormy's room."
"We actually tolerate the cold a lot better than the rest of you, I think," I explained to her. "At least, I don't feel nearly as cold as you look."
"It's freezing out here!" she snapped. "You two are fools."
"We're okay," I said. "I take responsibility for him. Okay?"
She tch'ed and looked him over. "Are you sure you're not cold?"
"I'm perfectly fine!" he proclaimed. "Besides, Stormy's here. She wouldn't let something bad happen!"
As if on cue, I heard from above, "Geronimo!" I'd like to say that I looked up and my ears folded back, eyes shrinking to pinpricks, as a shadow loomed over me, but that kind of thing only happens in cartoons. Near as I can remember, though, I winced and got ready to step aside if need be, and to pull Jenn to safety.
A huge blur flashed past me, merging with the pristine white mass covering the ground, throwing up a giant spray of snow which washed over the three of us like a solid tidal wave. There was a grunt and an "Oof!" from the direction the mass of snow came from, and when the ice crystals finally settled back to earth, an impressive crater was drilled out of the snowpack, at the center of which a sheepish Serge stood, flexing his legs from the impact with the ground below.
Jenn just gave me a sidelong glance with half-lidded eyes, shook her head (and the rest of her, to shed some of the snow that'd been deposited upon her), and walked off.

"So what are we doing wrong?" Serge asked a short time later, while the three of us were up on the roof, shoveling snow over the side.
"If I knew, sir, I'd tell you," I shrugged, then shoved a shovel forward across the roof with my forelegs holding the handle as best they could. My response was grunted out as I exerted force against the snow. "Sometimes I feel like the answer lies somewhere close to the Hitchhiker's Guide's explanation."
Serge gave me a blank look as I dumped another load of snow over the parapet.
"Oh," I said, catching on that he hadn't read the legendary book. "The Guide says the knack to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
After a second, he blinked, then chuckled, shaking his head, as he cleaned another row off next to my last one. "Sounds legitimate," he said. "Maybe I should try that."
"Well, as you know, I picked it up myself when I found I had no other choice but to figure it out," I told him. "Though I don't recommend we jeopardize anypony just for-"
"I wouldn't think of it," he said.
Randy chose that instant to push all the snow off the rooftop machinery shack - right next to where we were standing. I don't know about Serge, but I barely avoided being driven into the roof with my legs all splayed out.
"Oops! Sorry," he laughed as I looked back over my shoulder at him. I shook myself free and stepped back with the shovel to clear the lane I'd already cleared once before.
"Sure you are," I smirked at him.
He creeped to the edge closest to the parapet and looked over at our mound of cleared and deposited snow. "When we're done, I'm gonna jump again."
"Wait until Jenn is looking some other direction so you don't give her a heart attack," I said.
"That's being the perfect role model," Serge said sarcastically.
"Come on! You know we're all gonna do it. That's the reason we're up here in the first place." I pushed another load of snow over the side.
"Yeek!" came a voice from below. I dropped my shovel and hurried to the edge, as did the others, and we all looked over. A blue earth pony looked back up at us from next to our pile of debris.
"Sorry!" I called down to Morgan. "Didn't know you were down there."
"It's okay," she shook her head. "I probably should've paid more attention. When I get working on a problem in my head, though, I tend to filter everything else out."
"Working on a problem?" Serge asked.

Five minutes later, we three were back on the ground again. Randy was on my back, having hopped down off the snow pile after jumping into it. Serge had indeed jumped down again to try flying once more, but he had only marginally better luck than last time (not making quite as big of a splashdown as before).
"We need some storage space for food," Morgan was explaining, "but we don't want it in our living spaces. We could probably get away with it since the mall is so big - normally you'd have to worry about the gases the ripening produce, um, produces, displacing all your oxygen - it's why root cellars are so dangerous - but it's probably better to come up with a better solution anyway. And at this point, the ground is covered too deep for us to dig a proper root cellar - and if this cold keeps up, we're gonna be up against frozen soil in short order."
"Okay," I said, getting it so far.
She looked over to the mound of snow she'd almost become part of. "Ever been inside a real igloo?" she asked.
"Oh!" I nodded, realizing where she was heading. "Do you think it'd work for us?"
"I wouldn't be suggesting it if I didn't," she smiled. "I wish I'd gotten to you before you started cleaning the roof off, though. That would've made building it easier. We could've erected some kind of interior framework out of wood or something like that, and dumped snow on top of it to form the shell, and then take out the framework."
"Nothin' to say you earth ponies couldn't shove it all out of the way and then bulldoze it back on top of the framework, either," Serge smirked.
Morgan's eyes narrowed, but with a friendly smile on her face. "Hey, I came up with the idea. Foremen don't do work."
"Ma'am, I spent 22 years in a union shop," he grinned. "Six of them as a foreman. Trust me, I know exactly what gets the job done."
"Does this mean no more jumping?" Randy piped up from behind my head.
The other two ponies looked at and/or past me and then chuckled.

"But that's the end of my time for this evening," I said into the radio mic. "For anyone interested, we'll try Round Table again at 11 tomorrow morning. Ponytown out."
I powered down the transmitter and shrugged off the headphones, standing up to find a pink unicorn climbing the stairs.
"Evening," I greeted Swift. "What's up?"
"Nothin' much," she said. "I hear the new pony threw her hat in right away."
"Yeah," I nodded. "We formed the igloo today and sprayed some water on it. We'll take a look at it again tomorrow."
"Will it really keep all of our food good for the whole winter?"
"She seems to think so," I said. "I mean, as long as it stays below zero now, I figure. If we have a warm spell in the middle of winter, we could have problems."
"I don't think chinooks exist this far east," she smirked.
"What's that?" I queried.
She waved a hoof. "Weather phenomenon from back home. Never mind. How are your students coming?"
I shrugged and followed her back down the stairs as we headed to the common area. "About as good as I was at this stage. Which means flapping like mad and not knowing why it's not working."
"Just make sure you figure it out without putting somepony in mortal peril," she quipped.
"Why does everypony insinuate that?" I shot back. "I specifically said that's not in the lesson plan."
She giggled a little and we walked on in silence for a moment.
"How'd you get your protégés to learn magic?" I asked. "Maybe I can take some pointers from that."
"Well, Greg already had some of it down pat when he got here," she said. "Rich, though... hmm. Maybe it'd be better to ask him directly. He just said he could 'feel' it when I started explaining it to him."
"That doesn't sound promising, no offense, but I guess I'll give anything a try," I said. "Thanks."
"Anytime, Stormy."

The next morning, I stole away to spend some alone time first thing, curled up on top of the rooftop equipment, watching the sun march its way up the eastern sky, and thinking of my mother and her too-soon departure - even before Ponification.
I wonder what you would've come back as, I mused silently. Would we be able to fly the same skies as pegasi? Would she have been an expert mage like Swift? Or would her love of flowers and gardening made her a perfect candidate for an earth pony?
Or would she not have returned for dozens or hundreds of years, like most of the rest of the world's population?
"There you are," came a voice, and I turned to see Serge coming out onto the roof, Randy on his back.
"Morning," I said with a smile, standing up.
"I thought maybe classes were cancelled today."
"Nope," I shook my head. "Just saying happy birthday to someone."
"Oh," he said, then repeated the exclamation when he noticed my deliberate use of the pre-pony pronoun. "Do you need some time?"
"Nah, I'm done," I said, stretching and opening my wings. "Let's do this. Are you two ready?"
"You bet!" Randy said. "Watch this." He jumped up as high as he could off Serge's back - almost to my eye level - and with furious hummingbird-like wings beating the air, made an only marginally slower than normal descent to the roof.
"Not bad, all things considered," I smiled. "I think I have an idea, though, after talking to Rich late last night."
"Really?" Serge said, raising an eyebrow. "How does he fit in?"
"Not so much him, as his experience learning magic from Swifty," I said. I had hopped into the air and began hovering - something I was subconsciously doing more and more of all the time, I realized, but right now it was deliberate. "First of all, do you accept that doing this is just as much magic as it is the physics of wings flapping?"
"I suppose it has to be," Serge said. Randy nodded, going along with the technical talk that was (literally) over his head.
"Because if it was purely physical, you should be able to do it just by flexing your wing muscles," I went on.
Serge nodded. "I've tried," he said, "You know that."
"I do," I agreed, "but I wasn't putting two and two together before." I zipped away briefly, tore off a chunk of the low-hanging overcast, and pulled it back close to the roof. "What do you see here?"
Serge blinked and stared at me. "Water vapor, condensed."
"A cloud?" Randy contributed.
I nodded. "Yes, but that's just the physical properties of it." I glanced over at the multi-purpose platform-slash-rain-dispenser-slash-lightning-generator-slash-cushion. "Look beyond what you can see."
"Do I need to be blindfolded and balancing on one leg on a post for this?" Serge joked, and Randy giggled.
"You're not far off," I nodded at him, kneading the cloud and causing it to stretch out. "Think about what this does. What I can do with it. Imagine that you can see those properties, visually."
Serge's eyes widened as he - I think - finally got my meaning. He fixed the cloud with a steady gaze, causing Randy to look confused.
"Think of the energy inside it, little guy," I coached him. "This could be a lightning cloud, or a raincloud, or a bed. Or a whole bunch of other stuff. Try to picture how this little fluffball has to change inside to make any of that happen."
Randy was nodding as well, now, kind of mesmerized by the cloud, making me feel a little foolish, as if I'd hypnotized the two of them. Serge, on the other hand, was now looking all around at the sky surrounding us.
"I think you're gettin' it," I smiled at him. "Am I right?"
"Amazing," he breathed, head on a swivel.
"What? What?" Randy demanded.
"You'll get it, little guy," Serge said. "Just... let me try something."
Slowly Serge's wings unfurled, and for a moment he froze there, spread wide and taking it all in. He looked over his shoulders at the appendages expanded against the breeze, eyes still as wide and receptive as they had been for several minutes now.
Without another word, he flapped his wings, once, twice, and again, and then bent his knees and lunged upward. The wings at his sides beat harder, and he hung there in the air, unsteadily, then opened his eyes and looked surprised at his surroundings, and his accomplishment.
"Yay!" I cheered, clopping my hooves together. "All right!"
"Hey!" Randy protested with a thrust-out lower lip, the only pony still in contact with the roof.
"You can do it, bud!" I urged him, dropping my hover and crouching so I still wasn't touching the surface. "You need to imagine the wind under your wings as real things supporting you. Pretend you're balancing on your wings on two big columns, but that they're made of air. Do you get me?"
"Whoa!" he laughed, lifting an inch or two off the ground. "I'm doing it!!"
"That you are," I grinned, resisting the urge to run a hoof through his mane in congratulations, lest it "ground" him and send him crashing back to earth. Turning my attention back to my other pupil, I saw him floating in air right beside me.
"All right!" I said, offering my hoof to Serge. "Congratulations!"
He bumped my hoof in a sort of a high-five, and then flinched as he dipped a little in the sky. As his concentration returned, he regained his altitude.
"I'm doing it! I'm doing it!!" Randy was yelling, flapping madly and dipping up and down as he tried to maintain a constant position. He was trying to 'swim' through the air, but it was having no effect.
I laughed and floated out over the parking lot, holding up my hooves to keep them both from venturing out towards me. Looking down, I tried to grab the attention of anypony inside the building. Finally, Jeff and Morgan saw me, and came outside.
"You guys should see this!" I called down, then drifted back a little more so my charges could come forward - at their leisure, mind you.
"Take it easy," I told them, "and don't forget to 'extend' your support towards the ground after you clear the roof. Ready?"
Serge nodded and moved first. He carefully traversed the precipice, dipping only a foot or two as he crossed into open space.
"Yay!" Jeff called up, stomping his hooves on the ground in a form of applause. Morgan regarded this, then joined in, copying Jeff, as more ponies came out to see what was up.
"C'mon, little guy," Serge said, carefully turning around to face Randy while remaining mostly still otherwise. I turned my attention to the colt as well, as Jenn and Greg joined the rapidly growing crowd.
Randy still made efforts like he was swimming, but subconsciously I have to believe he was altering his wings' movements to command some forward motion. Millimeter by millimeter, he crept up on the parapet, until he could stare out over the edge.
"Just like you did yesterday, but don't hit the ground," I told him. "Do the same thing you're doing right now."
Slowly, he inched forward, and then, as if on a roller coaster, he plummeted downward and forward at the same time, gaining tremendous speed in just a fraction of a second. Jenn and Karin yelped in shock.
Randy didn't have time to be frightened. Instead, his wings - perhaps instinctively? - locked in place for gliding, and his body described a sweeping arc, skimming the edge of the snowpack as he soared back skyward again. Once more, possibly by instinct, he began flapping again, and the glide turned into a powered climb, ascending above us.
I gave chase, leaving Serge to hover where he was and the others to oooh and aaah down on the tarmac. Randy was going higher and higher, but at a rate that was nothing compared to my own speed. I caught up with him in seconds.
"You did it, little guy!" I cheered him. "But let's go down so they're not lonely down there."
Randy looked around, interrupting his hooting and laughing as he realized how high he'd climbed. "Whoa!" he exclaimed.
"Don't forget to hover!" I cautioned him, reaching out to support him as he began to drop. In a second or two more, he did regain his senses, and floated there beside me.
"This... is... awesome!" he gushed, grinning more broadly than I'd ever seen before.
"No doubt," I agreed. "Let's go down and celebrate with the others, 'kay?"
Have you ever taught someone to ride a bike, and then told them immediately to take a break? That was exactly the expression on Randy's face at that moment.
"Hey, don't be like that," I said. "Take the praise when it's offered. Let everyone celebrate with you, and I promise, all three of us'll continue our lessons right away. All right?"
That seemed to lift his spirits somewhat. "Okay," he nodded.
"I'm following your lead, then," I said, waiting for him to make the first move.
He nodded again. "Uh-huh!" he smiled, entering into a jerk-filled dive that sent me chasing after him to make sure he didn't land the way I did the first few (dozen) times.