//------------------------------//
// 9 - A Story 
// Story: Homemade Kites and Whatnot 
// by getmeouttahere 
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	The sunrise brought with it a new surprise when you pushed aside the curtains covering the work room’s bay window. The many trees near the house have started to blossom, with small but brilliant green leaves peeking out from the buds that cover their branches. It seems you’ll have to enjoy your clear view while it lasts, because in a week or two, a shifting wall of green will be the only thing you’ll be able to see from this window. The field beyond will disappear from sight, as if it were a dream, at least until the arrival of autumn and the dancing leaves of red, orange and yellow take to the wind and slowly reveal it once again.

And where will you be when that time comes? You can imagine several possibilities, but life, and the passing of the seasons, always brings surprises. The very fact that you’re now here in this world is a testament to that, just as much as the stories of your past which fill the pages of your journal. As the years have gone by, you’ve come to understand that to live well is to make the most of them, regardless of what they might be, joys and tragedies alike.

Your pen glides across the page, recording the final few lines of your latest tale. This story’s ending was already known, but the conclusion to this new day, and of this new chapter of your life, has yet to be determined. The only way to discover what will be, and what triumphs or hardships will pass along the way, is to keep turning the pages and braving the twists and turns, or lack thereof, that follow.

With a smile, you close the journal, the last word written for now. The empty mug on your desk draws your attention, and you stand and head to the kitchen to refill it. But just as you finish, the day’s first surprise decides to make itself known in the form of a series of frantic knocks on your front door. Curious, you set the mug aside and go to open it, wondering just who in the world would be visiting you this early in the day.

The door swings open with much more force than usual courtesy of a strong gust of air that suddenly travels along the forest path that leads to your porch. It whips the surprisingly bowless red mane of your unexpected visitor around, and tests the strength of the buttons that hold the worn saddlebags she wears closed. Regardless, she doesn’t flinch, golden eyes trained on your own and shimmering with barely contained excitement.

“Mr. Anon! Mr. Anon! I did it! I figured it out!”

Before you can even say a word to her, she rushes past you, right between your legs and into the house. “C’mon, c’mon, you have to see this!” she urges, bolting down the hall and into your work room at a staggering speed that you’ve only seen matched before by a certain pink pony.

Wondering just what in the world has her so wound up, you quickly close the door and follow after her. She hops up into a chair, then on to the table’s surface just as you enter the room, shrugging off her saddlebags and then franticly digging into them. A series of papers filled with various crayon drawings, in addition to some assorted knickknacks and supplies pile onto the table, with the filly standing in the middle of it all, shuffling through them as she searches for something.

“Apple Bloom? What’s going on? What’re you doing here so early?”

“There it is!” she gasps, pulling a specific page from the papers she was sorting through. She trots over to you, holding it proudly in her mouth. “’ook ‘ere!”

You take the paper at her insistence. Much like the others, it’s a crayon drawing of something, with nearly-illegible notes scrawled in the margins and arrows pointing to various pieces. Aside from the presentation, it actually looks really well thought-out, though you’re still not exactly sure just what it is you’re looking at.

Apple Bloom lets out a frustrated sigh when she sees the confusion on your face. She spins around and gathers a few more things from the pile, bringing them over to the table’s edge where you’ve taken your usual seat.

“Here, I’ll show you,” she begins, arranging the items in a line before you. “I figured out how to make a kite that changes size in the wind!”

“What? Really?” you ask in disbelief.

She nods happily. “Eeyup! An’ this is the key!” She points her hoof toward the leftmost object.

It looks like a small length of rope, but upon a quick inspection, you find it’s made of an elastic material, kind of like a bungee cord. With a little pull you can stretch the material a good length, only for it to snap back to its original shape when you relax. It’s nice, but you’re not quite sure how it addresses the problem.

“You’re gonna have to help me out here,” you tell her with a sheepish smile.

“C’mon, this is easy, Mr. Anon!” Apple Bloom giggles. “Look here.” She pulls over the next item, a long wooden dowel rod. “This is the kinda thing we use for the cross spar of our kites, right? Longer ones for the bigger kites, and shorter ones for the smaller.”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Well, what if, instead’a usin’ a big one, we used two smaller ones instead, and arranged ‘em like this!” She pulls over two smaller rods and positions them staggered but parallel to one another, with several inches of overlap between them. “Then we make some guides to attach near the ends so they slide!”

She retrieves two very small rectangular blocks of wood, each with two evenly spaced holes drilled through them lengthwise. She inserts the dowel rods through the holes, and just as she said, they act as guides to keep the two rods evenly spaced from one another while also allowing their free movement back and forth.

“You see? It’s a spar that changes size!” She pulls the rods apart until the two guides meet. “Here’s the spar for our biggest kite!” She pushes them together until the guides reach the halfway point of their respective rods. “And here’s the middle one…” And further still, until the guides are on the rods’ opposite ends. “And the smallest!”

You take another look at the drawing in your hand, and suddenly the myriad of doodles and notes start to make sense. The cross spar is the most important piece in determining a kite’s wingspan, so having one capable of changing sizes would really be like combining all three of your kites into one!

“Hey… this might just work!” you exclaim, lifting the spar to examine it. “We could cut some notches in these, and have some kind of way to lock it in place, and that’d let us adjust the size of the kite to the wind conditions before we launch it.”

The filly chuckles and shakes her head. “C’mon, Mr. Anon, you ain’t thinkin’ big enough! Even if we did that, it wouldn’t do us any good, ‘cause the main problem we have is that the wind’s been so crazy lately! Even if we set it to the right size when we launched the kite, it’s just gonna change on us once it gets in the air.”

You rub your chin in thought. “Yeah… you’re right about that. But in that case, how do we fix the problem?”

“I already told you,” she points to the elastic band again. “It’s this!”

She trots over and takes the contraption from your hands, then carefully attaches each end of the elastic band to the two dowel rod ends closest to the center. The elastic material pulls the staggered ends toward one another, which serves to push the rods further apart thanks to the guide pieces. In the end, it extends the variable spar to its longest size, roughly the same as the spar used on your largest kite. Apple Bloom steps away, then eagerly looks back at you to see if you’re following her train of thought yet.

But in all honesty, you’re still lost. Sure, the elastic band will keep the spar extended, but how is that the solution? You stare at the variable spar for a few more moments before it hits you… you can’t just look at this piece, you have to consider the fully assembled kite around it, as well as how it behaves… in… the wind…

Your jaw drops as the epiphany hits, and you raise your head to see Apple Bloom’s smile beaming back at you.

“You… you’re a genius. There’s no other way to say it. How in the world did you figure this out, Apple Bloom?”

Her ears fold back and a slight blush develops on her yellow cheeks. “Shucks, I… well, I just kinda… thought about it really hard, I guess.” She scuffs a hoof on the table, her embarrassment fading away. “That’s really nice of you to say, Mr. Anon, but… I know I’m not that smart. Sometimes I can get carried away with stuff, and my grades in school ain’t the best. But when it comes to fixin’ stuff, and figurin’ out how things work… well, for some reason, it kinda comes easy.”

You smile, reaching your hand over to ruffle her mane, a task made easier now that her bow is absent. “Don’t sell yourself short. This is really amazing.”

And it truly is. She actually came up with the idea for a kite that adapts to the wind. When a strong wind blows, it fills the kite’s sail, pushing it back. Because the spar can slide, the billowing of the sail will pull the wings in and thus make the kite smaller. When the wind dies down, the natural tendency for the elastic band to contract will force the spar outward, pushing the wings out as well and making the kite bigger!

She solved it, all on her own, and words can’t describe how happy you are for her… how proud you are of her. AJ truly is blessed to have such an amazing little sister.

“Well… I suppose there’s only one thing left to do,” you hum, reaching down underneath the table to retrieve the bag of supplies you stored there last evening. “When you went home early yesterday, I made a trip to town to pick some stuff up.”

You empty the bag’s contents on the table, next to the pile of stuff she brought, and the look of excitement in her eyes at all the new things there brings a smile to your face. You lean on the table, watching for a moment as she pokes around at the supplies and struck with a feeling of amusement by the turn this day’s already taken, before asking the question she’s no doubt anxious to hear:

“Well, what do you say? Ready to build a kite?”

A joyous hop and delightful cheer is her answer, and the two of you immediately get to work.

Your errands in town yesterday yielded quite a bounty for new kite-making enthusiasts such as yourselves, and there was no question that you’d incorporate the new materials into your latest design. The old pine dowel rods were replaced with much a stronger oak you were able to acquire from a carpentry shop. You finally got your hands on some real ribbon courtesy of Rarity, which meant the kite would gain two tails – one on the tip of each wing, hopefully increasing stability in addition to looking nice. And of course, another box of cookies was bought, because building kites was hard work, and you needed a little reward throughout the process…

But the most amazing thing of all was completely unexpected, and also courtesy of the fashionable unicorn seamstress. When you stopped by to purchase the ribbon, she suddenly went to the back of the shop and returned with a spool of fabric unlike anything you’d ever seen before. Instead of being a solid color like the scraps you already had, it seemed to shift and shimmer between several unique shades, in addition to being embroidered with sweeping, airy patterns that made the colors stand out even further. The moment you saw it, you told her there was no way you could ever afford it, but she simply replied that it was a gift courtesy of a friend. The spool was placed in your arms, and she sent you on your way, the ribbon you originally asked for safely tucked inside the bolt’s hollow tube.

Taken together, it truly was an impressive collection of stuff. The challenge now was to make something worthy of it all. Your time spent together with Apple Bloom building kites this week has served to refine your skills to the point where the two of you hardly need to speak to one another to move as a well-coordinated team. You each know what you need to do, what the steps of the process are, and where your strengths and weaknesses lie. The two of you move around the table with practiced ease, cutting, sewing, sawing, measuring, marking and taping like a well-oiled machine.

The difference, this time, is the incorporation of the variable cross spar mechanism in the design. Luckily, you happened to have a hand drill, wood scraps and some sandpaper from an earlier crafts project in storage. Apple Bloom already brought the elastic band with her, so that accounted for everything you’d need. The trick, and perhaps most important of all, was choosing the correct amount of tension for the band. You didn’t know how to really determine that without some test flights, but she seemed to already know what to do about it, so you left it in her hooves.

The morning hours drifted away in the blink of an eye. Lunch was prepared and eaten despite the little pony’s pleas to keep working, and then you continued on, the light of early afternoon shining through the window to help you along the way.

And then, at last, it was finished. The two of you take a step back to admire what you made, both at a loss for words. The shimmering sunlight dances across the fabric, shifting its colors through the spectrum of the deepest reds to the lightest of yellows, and everything in between. The embroidery seems to shine on its own, and the effect is so grand that you can imagine it being hung somewhere in a gallery as a tapestry to be admired and talked about for years to come.

But oh, what a waste that would be, and neither of you would ever allow it, because the proud profile and sweeping wings leave no question that this is an object that yearns to fly. To deny it that opportunity would be a crime. Even as it rests on the table, surrounded by fabric, wood scraps and shavings, tails unfurled but unmoving, it still looks as if it wants to take its rightful place in the sky.

You turn your attention to your partner, finding some amusement in the awestruck look on her face. Again, you can’t help but pat that red mane, asking her, “We’ve gotten a little better at this over the course of a week, huh?”

“Yeah…” she whispers. “It’s just… it’s… it’s amazin’!” She turns to you, beaming with excitement. “Mr. Anon… we’ve gotta fly it! We’ve just gotta!”

You nod. “Yeah, that we do.”

But the moment those words leave your mouth, the sunlight fades away and the glass of the window rattles in the wind, and you shift your gaze outside to see a mass of dark clouds gathering beyond the far edge of the forest.

“Oh no. Not again…” you groan, shaking your head at the sight.

Apple Bloom turns from the window, a cautious hope in her eyes. “Well… I mean, the storm ain’t here yet, right? And it’ll probably bring some good wind! C’mon, Mr. Anon, we can still fly it for a little while! Just until it starts gettin’ bad; it won’t take long!”

Several drops of rain pelt the window not a moment later, increasing in frequency until the downpour begins in earnest. You give the little pony a half-hearted smile, your disappointment at the turn of events nearly as pronounced as her own.

“Sorry, looks like mother nature’s not with us on this one,” you say, turning on a nearby lamp to help illuminate the now much darker room. “But the good news is, with the way these squalls have been lately, there’s a good chance that we’ll still be able to get out there today, even if it might be late. We just have to be patient and wait it out.”

“Okay…” the filly sighs, ears drooping as she slouches in her chair, the sight of which causes you to laugh despite yourself.

“Oh, don’t make that face,” you tell her, standing from your own chair. “I know it’s not ideal, but it’s not like we have to pass the time by just sitting here and sulking.” You walk over to the small end table in the corner of the room, retrieving the red journal that was resting there and holding it up for her to see. “I can’t promise they’ll be good, but I can read you some stories until the rain lets up, if you’d like.”

The suggestion seems to lift her spirits, as she perks back up as soon as you reclaim your seat.

“Yeah… that might be fun. But, are you sure you don’t have any board games we can play instead?”

You chuckle and shake your head. “Sorry. I’ll be sure to get some the next time I’m in town.” Opening the journal, you begin to thumb through the pages, looking for something she’d like. “Ah! Here we go…”

You pass the next several hours telling stories, with the pattering of the rain on the roof and window, as well as the howling of the wind acting as a steady accompaniment. You don’t actually read what’s written on the pages as it is for fear of boring her, but merely use it as a guide, condensing things down and providing your own improvisational narration at times, and even funny voices when called for. The response is just as you’d hoped— smiles, laughter, and rapt attention paid during the dramatic moments. When one story ends, she clamors for another, and you can’t help but oblige her as the afternoon wears on.

And then you reach the end, with all the pages beyond still blank. Yet the rain, though diminished, continues to fall outside. You close the journal and set it on the edge of the table, and you watch once again as Apple Bloom’s smile somewhat fades as she realizes there are no more tales left to tell. You glance out the window to see a promising sign— the storm is starting to break, as gaps in the clouds now allow the late afternoon sun to shine through.

“Hey, looks like it’s clearin’!”

Of course, you’re not the only one who notices. Still, it’s falling too hard, and the wind is far more fierce now than usual. It’ll be a while yet before conditions improve to the point where you could risk a flight.

“C’mon, let’s go, Mr. Anon! We can fly it now, right?” She excitedly hops up on the table and trots to the edge nearest the window and your seat. “We did such a good job on it, it’s bound to fly, even with a little rain in the mix!”

“I don’t know… I think we should give it a little more time,” you answer honestly, preparing yourself to resist the inevitable pout that may result. “But I have one more story while we wait. This one’s not written yet, but I think you might like it.”

She nods in understanding, moving back to her seat with a bit less cheer than before, but still attentive. You cross your arms and lean back in your chair, considering where to start.

“Alright… well, this one’s about a boy. Come to think of it, in this story, he’d be about your age. Anyway, this boy had a hobby he really liked— to build model rockets.”

“Model rockets?” she asks, tilting her head. “You mean… rockets like fireworks?”

“Yeah, kind of like fireworks. Though they weren’t supposed to explode. If that happened you knew you’d really messed up! No, model rockets were meant to fly high into the sky, and then return to the ground safely, usually with the aid of a small parachute in the nose or back.”

Her ears perk up and she adopts an unusually contemplative expression, likely considering how they were made.

“So, this boy liked to build these rockets from scratch. Well, aside from the engines which were really complex. His dad helped with those. But anyway, uh… there was one that he worked really, really hard on. It looked great, and he was sure it would fly really high. The day came when he finally finished it, and just as he and his dad were getting ready to go out to launch it, it started to rain.”

“I know what that feelin’s like…” Apple Bloom grumbles.

You smile. “Yeah. He was so disappointed, because he really, really wanted to see it fly. But launching a rocket in the rain… well, it was a bad idea all around, and he knew that, as frustrating as it was. But then…”

She leans forward, eyes wide. “Then what? Did it stop rainin’?”

“No,” you reply, your smile widening. “No, something crazy happened. Out of the blue, his dad said, ‘Forget the weather, let’s go fly it anyway!’ And that’s what they did.”

“R-Really?” she gasps with surprise.

“Yeah. But it sure wasn’t easy! There they were, out in a field a far drive away from the city, the rain coming down on top of them with only a couple of umbrellas for protection while they were trying to get the ignition system set up…” You shake your head, rubbing your temples, but your smile still bright. “Let’s just say… after the first hour and a half, they were really having second thoughts about the whole thing.”

“So… were they able to get it? Were they able to make it fly?”

You nod. “Yeah, it flew. Not very well, but it flew. All in all, it wasn’t a very good launch, and they weren’t able to tell how it really performed until after they tried again on a different day.”

Apple Bloom’s ears droop again and she slouches once more in her seat. “Oh. So you’re sayin’ they should’a waited. Y’know, I think I get what you’re tryin’ to tell me, Mr. Anon…”

“No, that’s not it,” you say, smiling once more as those little ears perk up again. “The boy and his dad flew a lot of rockets together, but that one, in the rain, was the one they remembered the most fondly. Even if it wasn’t the best flight, the time they spent together, be it the excitement of the drive out, to the misery of setting up in the field, to the waterlogged drive back… it made it all worth it. I guess what I’m trying to say is, despite the circumstances, it became a cherished memory for them both.”

She falls silent and ponders the story while you stand and walk over to the window. The rain has slowed to an almost imperceptible drizzle, and the clouds in the distance can no longer hold back the spectacular sunset now washing over the field. Light streams into the room, highlighting the intricate embroidery of the kite on the table once again. You place a hand over your eyes to help shield them, and focus your attention on the trees at the far edge of the field, and your smile fades as you watch them sway back and forth wildly in the fierce wind. It’s still not safe to fly, and likely won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest.

But the kite isn’t yours, is it? It’s hers more than anything, and she should have the final say. After all, if your life has taught you one thing, it would be that in the end, whatever she decides here will be the correct choice.

With a smile and a shake of your head, you turn away from the sunset and back toward your eager companion who remains lost in thought, at least until you speak once more.

“Well? I’m ready if you are.”