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// January 22 [Feral Cloud] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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January 22

Humans don't like leaving snow on the pathways and roads. When I got up to exercise, there were people pushing roaring red machines which flung the snow off the pathways and onto the grassy lawns. There were also some humans using more traditional shovels, pushing and scraping it out of the way.

The main pathway (which Peggy says is called a 'sidewalk' because it's beside the road) up the hill was clear and dry. All the steam that they ran under the sidewalk made it warm enough that the snow melted right off.

Obviously, they weren't smart enough to extend this property to all the cement, because the rest of the sidewalks on my route weren't very clear at all. Or maybe they just don't have enough steam for all of it.

One of the things I find most appealing about the route I normally take is how confusing it is. I hadn't appreciated that at first; I'd just started trotting along through a neighborhood with nice homes.

Roads have names, and they have little green signs at all the corners that tell you what the name of the road is. It takes a bit of getting used to; the sign doesn't tell you what road you're on, but what one you're about to cross. When I thought about it, though, it made a lot of sense to do it that way. The pilot of the car would see the upcoming street and know if she was supposed to follow it, or keep on going the way she was going. (Is the word for cars 'pilots' like for ships and airplanes, or 'drivers' like for trains? I'll have to ask Peggy.)

Anyway, I discovered that Academy Street makes a lot of weird turns. You trot to the top of campus and a little bit beyond, and then you have to make a left onto Academy. You follow that around a curve (which is where the little triangle of grass I like rolling around in is), and then you have to make another left turn to stay on Academy St. After that it continues straight westward, until it ends at Dartmouth.

I normally loop around Grove, but this time I thought I'd take Dartmouth all the way out to the main street. Peggy had pointed out a little store there where cars can eat gas and people can buy food.

I was nearly to the main street when I saw Winston (Aric's truck) sitting in the driveway of an ugly house with peeling paint. I thought about knocking, but then decided against it, since there weren't any lights on in the house, and many people aren't early risers. It's because they like to stay up until late in the night and then sleep past the sunrise.

There was another similar truck in the driveway, although it looked a bit rougher than Winston. I wonder if he got both of them from the same place. I wouldn't have gone back a second time.

I wasn't paying enough attention when I got to the main street, and I got a faceful of slushy snow that a big orange truck with blinking lights threw up at me. The snow was heavy, wet, and salty. I'd actually started flying after it before I remembered that we weren't supposed to do that—in fact, we were supposed to stay well clear of vehicles that were moving. I could have caught it, though; it wasn't moving very fast. And then I could have told the pilot what I thought of him pushing a bunch of snow onto a pegasus who was just minding her own business.

The sun was just coming up when I got back to my dorm. Peggy was still sound asleep, so I very quietly put on my vest. I'd noticed that the clouds were low and sparse, and I thought I might try to see if I could wrangle one.

Once I had my clearance, I flew up to a likely candidate. Up close, clouds aren't as substantial as they appear on the ground, especially after they've been around for a bit. This one was a straggler from the storm, and it had spent most of its moisture in the storm. Probably once the sun got all the way up, it would be no more than a memory—but I could use it for a nobler purpose.

The first trick to wrangling a feral cloud is to isolate it. I flew around its boundaries, cutting it out like a sheepdog might. Once I had a feel for it, I began to work my way inward.

This was something we'd rarely practiced. Normally, cloud-wrangling is a team job; you have a couple on the downwind side holding it back, and one on the upwind side ushering it along, and maybe a quartet on the points to force it inwards. With just me, it was going to be a chore.

I'd love to say that I succeeded in the end, but I didn't. I couldn't feel it like I'd felt the snowclouds yesterday, and despite my best efforts, little tendrils of it kept getting loose.

I was over downtown when I finally gave up. I'd made some progress; it was thicker than it had been when I'd started. If I'd had all day to work with it, I would have been able to capture it, but it was all right that I hadn't. The exercise had been good for me, and I now better appreciated the limits of my cloud magic here on Earth.

I'd want to find a denser cloud, and cut off a small portion of an edge. That would be the solution. And not pick a bigger one than I could handle on my own, too.

Just the same, it pained me to go to weather class emptyhooved. And I kept thinking about how the cloud had gotten away because I hadn't been good enough to get it by myself, and I had to keep reminding myself to pay attention to the professor. There would be more clouds, and I was going to find one that I could catch.

Philosophy class wrapped up with Aristotle, and we had to take a test proving that we'd been paying attention to what the Greek philosophers had said. We weren't allowed to use our books, but we could use our notes if we wanted to, and some people were upset about that 'cause they hadn't taken very good notes, but I had so I thought I'd do very well on the test.

After classes, because it was Friday, a lot of students were playing outside, and I joined them. There was plenty of snow for everyone to play with, although we had to be careful to stay clear of people riding sleds down the hill. They couldn't steer very well, and if you got in their way you'd get knocked over.

At dinner, Sean told me that I was famous on YouTube. I didn't know what that was, so he showed me. He said that one of the sophomores had taken a video of me rolling around in the snow and uploaded it to the internet, which I guess not only computers have, but portable telephones as well.

It felt pretty good to be famous. Not that many ponies are famous enough to star in movies, and here I was on an internet television, having lots of fun in the snow. I watched through it a couple of times, and Sean asked if I wanted to comment on the video. I thought about it, but then I couldn't come up with anything that sounded good. And the movie kind of told the whole story, especially since it was called 'Pegasus playing in the snow.'

He told me that later he could come over to my room, or I could come to his, and he'd show me how to download the video so that I could show it to ponies back home if I wanted to. That was really kind, but I felt a bit guilty when I said yes, 'cause I still haven't come over and watched Star Trek like I said I would. And I wasn't that sure that downloading it would help, unless that put it on a filmstrip somehow.

So I told him that I would only let him help me with that after we'd watched a Star Trek movie, and he thought that was a great idea.