The Aftermath
Twilight was vaguely aware of her surroundings. She was pretty sure that she was lying down, but couldn't be certain. For all she knew, she was balancing on only her forelegs with the rest of her body in the air. She thought that there were voices around her, but couldn't tell what they were saying, or even what they sounded like.
She tried to recall how long she had been in this state, but time seemed to be nothing but an abstract concept at this point, and memories were just not sticking.
Eventually she got tired and slipped back into unconsciousness.
Twilight wasn't entirely sure when she regained the ability to form memories again, but she could now. She tried to open her eyes to see what was around her, but oddly found that she wasn't able to. She felt... something wrapped around her head that was restricting her ability to open her eyes. She briefly wondered if she was blindfolded for some reason.
As Twilight became increasingly aware of her surroundings, she guessed she was on a bed of some sort, with a blanket covering her. She wasn't sure how she ended up here, and the last thing she remembered before now was... She was in that town with all the cattle. She had gone out to do some magic scans of a storm, and ended up getting hit by the tornado.
Twilight grimaced as she remembered the wind slamming her into two trees. If she had gotten as hurt as she felt, and wasn't still in a lot of pain, and was lying down, she was probably in a hospital of some kind.
Paying more attention to her surroundings, there didn't seem to be anypony around. Maybe it was late at night? The thought made her feel tired again, and she failed to hold down a yawn. Shifting into a slightly more comfortable position, she eventually found herself drifting off once again.
When Twilight next came to, she was vaguely aware that her left forehoof was held slightly aloft, and somepony appeared to be holding it there. It took Twilight a moment to remember how to move her hoof, but when she finally did, the pony holding it gasped and dropped it.
"Twilight? Are you awake?" Twilight heard her wife ask.
Twilight tried to respond, but her mouth was far too dry to form any sounds beyond a few grunts. In the end, she decided that nodding her head would be good enough to let her wife know she was awake.
"Oh dear Harmony, Twilight, you have no idea how worried everypony was about you," Celestia said as she gently embraced her wife. Twilight found it odd that Celestia was treating her so gently. Usually her wife wouldn't hold back and give bone-crushing hugs, so being treated as if she could break at any moment was more than a little jarring for Twilight. "Stay right there, I need to inform the doctor that you're awake. I'll be right back, I promise."
Twilight tried to respond with 'I don't think you have to worry about me running off', but all that came out were a few groans and coughs. While she was waiting for Celestia to get back with the doctor, she tried to move around a bit, but still felt fairly sluggish.
Eventually, she heard two sets of hoofsteps approach her bed. "Princess Twilight, are you awake? Princess Celestia informed me that you seemed lucid."
Twilight nodded her head, and tried to say 'water', but what came out was more of a 'wah-ah'.
"Did you say 'water'?" the doctor asked, and Twilight nodded again. "There's some on the table next to your bed. You can have some if you're feeling well enough to sit up, otherwise, we're going to have to stick with the IV line."
Twilight tried to shuffle herself into a sitting position, but was unable to do so. For some reason, her hind legs just wouldn't listen to her. After a couple moments of struggling, Twilight felt her wife's magic encompass her and gently prop her up into a more upright position.
"Could you please hold out your hoof? I don't think you really want to spill it all over yourself reaching for it." Twilight did as she was told, and felt a smooth glass object be placed into her hoofs. Gingerly, she brought it up to her mouth and took a sip. The water was just about the most amazing thing she had ever tasted before, and felt heavenly as it slid down her throat. Once she had drank all of it, the glass was slowly taken from her grasp.
"Are you able to speak now, Princess?" the doctor asked.
Twilight cleared her throat and made another attempt at speaking. "I think so," she said slowly.
"Excellent. I have a few questions about how you're feeling, and then we can talk about what the future is going to look like for you." The doctor asked a few questions about pain in various parts of her body. Twilight was mostly fine, a little sore, but overall not too bad. The thing that worried her though was that she wasn't able to feel her hind legs at all.
"Okay, well, things do seem to be getting better at least," the doctor said. "Now, we're going to talk about your condition. I am obligated to tell you that there's nopony else in the room other than you, me, and your wife. I also must gain verbal permission from you before discussing your condition with another person in the room."
"I want Celestia here," Twilight said, reaching out to where she thought her wife was standing.
Twilight heard a few hoofsteps as Celestia moved to where her hoof was outstretched. She then heard a quiet thud as her wife sat down and grasped Twilight's hoof in her own once again.
"Alright then, let's start with the most pressing matter, your eyes. It looks like they got scratched up fairly badly, as you had a massive gash all across your face that cut into your eyes a bit. Luckily, the damage was not too catastrophic, and we think you might be able to see again one day, but we're reasonably certain that you're going to need glasses from here on out, and even then, your vision won't be what it once was."
Twilight had a hard time processing this. Her vision was going to be permanently affected. Would it affect her ability to read? Would she ever be able to see her wife's face again? "How sure are you that I'll be able to regain my vision?" she asked tentatively, suddenly finding herself very afraid of the answer.
The few seconds it took for the doctor to respond was one of the scariest moments of Twilight's life, even worse than when she was inside the tornado. "Well," she eventually said, "we'll never know for sure until we get those bandages off your eyes, but if I had to put a number on it, I'd say there's around a 70% chance you'll be able to gain some amount of vision."
There was a 30% chance Twilight would be blind for the rest of her life, and the thought terrified her. "How long will I have to keep the bandages on?" she asked.
"Most likely a month or two," the doctor responded. "We're going to be keeping tabs on how your eyes feel, and depending on a few different criteria they could come off as soon as five weeks, or as late as ten. We just can't be certain about that this far out."
Twilight almost started crying then and there. She was going to be completely blind for a month, possibly longer. And that's if she ever regained her vision at all. What stopped her was her wife squeezing her hoof and gently nuzzling the sides of their head together.
"Okay," Twilight said once she had calmed down, "I'm ready to continue."
"Please don't feel like you have to rush anything here, Princess. You can take all the time you need to take in the information. We also have a few counselors on staff to help ponies with potentially disabling injuries come to terms with the changes in their lives."
If Twilight was able to, she would have blinked in confusion. "Where are we, right now?" she asked.
"We're in Canterlot General Hospital, Your Highness," the doctor responded.
"Canterlot? But that's so far from Bull Town. How did I end up here?"
"Well, when the search party found you, they were able to bring you back to bull town for some initial care, but you were rushed to a hospital in Las Pegasus fairly quickly after we got the news. You spent a few days there before your condition improved enough to move you closer to home," Celestia responded.
"A few days?" Twilight asked. "How long was I out for?"
"You were unconscious for a little over a week."
"A week?!" Twilight asked.
"I'm afraid so, Your Highness."
The doctor let Twilight process the information for a bit, which she really appreciated. "What else is there?"
"Your legs were broken fairly bad, the bones were fractured in at least 3 places on each leg. You're not going to be walking for a long while, unfortunately. We're guessing you'll be walking on your own four hooves in six months to a year."
"Will I walk again?" Twilight asked.
"Oh yes, definitely. The damage was bad, but nothing that cannot heal with time."
"Okay," Twilight responded. "Is that all?"
"Unfortunately not. In addition to a few dozen cuts and bruises that should heal by the end of the week, your wings are in... bad condition. Several of your feathers appear to have been entirely ripped out of your wings, and the ones that remain are too damaged to be of any use. I'm afraid you're going to have to wait for all of your feathers to grow back before you can start flying, and that'll take up to three months from now."
"Okay," Twilight responded. Truthfully, she wasn't too broken up about her wings being non-functional for a while. She spent most of her life as a unicorn, and only had her wings for the better part of a decade by this point. Going without them for a while would be a lot easier than if her horn had been damaged. "Did anything happen to my horn?" Twilight asked.
"Nope, your horn is in excellent condition. Magic shouldn't be an issue for you. If you have any more questions, I'd be happy to answer them, otherwise I'll leave you here."
Twilight thought for a moment. "No, I think that's all, thank you."
"It's my pleasure to help," she responded. "There's a button to the side of your bed that you can use to call a nurse should you need anything and there's nopony around. I'll leave the two of you here for now."
Twilight heard the doctor's hoofsteps pause at the door. "Would you like me to send your... dragon friend in?" she asked.
"Do you mean Spike?" Twilight asked.
There were a few moments of silence before the doctor responded with a "If you mean the small purple dragon with the green spines, then yes."
"Yes, I would appreciate that very much," Twilight said.
Twilight heard the door open, and the sound of lighter footsteps rapidly came towards her.
"Twilight!" Spike yelled, scampering up onto her bed. "Are you okay? Are you hurt? Is there anything you need?"
"Spike, please, give her a moment to gather her thoughts," Celestia said.
"I'm... not doing too well at the moment, Spike," Twilight said through grit teeth. "I messed up badly. I didn't know what I was doing out there, and..." Twilight was struggling to hold back tears at this point, afraid of any damage they could do to the healing process. "I'm so stupid!"
Celestia and Spike both took Twilight's shuddering form into a hug as they held her through the tears she could no longer suppress.
Twilight's eyes fluttered open. Like she did every morning ever since she was released from the hospital, she reached over to pull her wife close. Humming in quiet contentment, Celestia also reach out and pulled Twilight into her grasp. The two stayed like that for a good few minutes of snuggling before reluctantly parting.
Celestia left the bed to raise the sun from her balcony, and Twilight sat up and rubbed the last bits of sleep from her eyes. She lit up her horn to grab her glasses from the nightstand. The two months she had spent blind had done wonders for her spatial awareness, though it was but a small blessing from the mountain of pain she'd had to endure as a result of her little tryst with the tornado.
Her optometrist had suggested contact lenses, but Twilight favored the thick rimmed glasses because they did a better job of covering up the large scar that spanned her face. That, and Celestia thought she looked cute in them.
Once Celestia had come back into the room, she climbed back into the bed and began to preen Twilight's wings. Preening wasn't something Twilight used to enjoy very much, but now that her wings were back in perfect condition, preening was a reminder that she was healing, and wouldn't be so dependant on her wife soon. Although she would miss Celestia doting on her at every opportunity, she was eager to be back on her own four hooves.
After Celestia had finished working on Twilight's wings, she helped Twilight into her wheelchair, and brought her into the bathroom. Twilight did her business while Celestia brushed her teeth, and then the two swapped.
Soon, the wives were down in the castle's cafeteria, eating breakfast with a very sleepy Luna as they discussed their work. Apparently, a new horror movie had come out, and Luna would be stuck with helping foals— who were probably too young to have seen it— work through the nightmares it gave them for the foreseeable future. Celestia was dreading a day full of meetings with heads of business, who always seemed to want to weaken workplace safety regulations, no matter how hard Celestia shot them down. Twilight would be giving a public lecture on the results of her research on tornadoes at the Canterlot Weather Academy.
The three princesses bid each other luck (or a good sleep, in Luna's case) and went their separate ways. The rest of Twilight's morning was a rush of preparations, between making sure the visual aids she had brought were working, going over her lecture a few times, and making sure she looked her best.
Later in the afternoon, Twilight wheeled herself out in front of the audience who had come to hear the first time she would be speaking publicly about her encounter with the tornado, and it was packed to the brim. Even though she was in the large auditorium the academy hosted its more popular classes in, there wasn't a single seat left empty. More ponies still were sitting on the floor, and some were even on makeshift benches that were hanging from the ceiling to provide even more seating for pegasi.
Once the applause had died down, Twilight got into her lecture. Mostly it was about the technical aspects of tornadogenesis, and how she was able to build portable machines called Atmospheric Condition Surveyors, or ACS's, that used ambient magic to take atmospheric data and provide predictions of where severe storms would be. The laboratory test results had come in with 90% accuracy for 3 days into the future, and was even more accurate for shorter time frames.
Twilight very much doubted that anypony but the professors and graduate students understood much of what she said, but that was fine with her. If there were ponies willing to learn more about the magic of the world around them, she wasn't going to complain.
Twilight had scheduled some time for audience questions after the lecture, and as soon as she announced she would be doing so, nearly everypony in the room had a hoof raised. After looking around for a bit, she called on a pegasus who she noticed had been diligently taking notes during her lecture.
"If these ACS's you've created are able to accurately predict where severe weather might manifest, have you given any thought to ways to dispel storms that have already formed?" the pegasus asked.
"That's something the team has considered, but working with a scan of only one storm really limits how much you can do," Twilight responded. "We're hoping that the ACS's will provide us more data to work with, and use for more accurate predictions, and eventually maybe prevention. Unfortunately we just don't have enough information to have anything other than wild speculation on how to actually fight these storms. As such, the best way to save lives is by getting advanced warning out to ponies in danger of these storms so they can make sure to seek shelter."
The next pony Twilight called on was a young earth pony who looked as though he had only just become a stallion. "Can you talk about what happened when you actually went out to scan the tornado?"
Twilight cringed. She knew that many ponies would be curious about how the tornado had managed to do more damage to her than any of the villains she had faced before. She chewed the inside of her lip for a moment as she thought of how to answer the question in a responsible manner. She didn't want to glorify her experience and inspire more ponies to try to copy her, but she also didn't want to terrify any of the foals that were in the audience.
"I... don't want to sugarcoat any of what I went through. I nearly died many times, and only survived because I'm an alicorn, and even then I was nearly killed. I want to be as clear as I possibly can be here: tornadoes are dangerous. Please keep informed of the ACS's predictions, and don't put yourself in harm's way. The only reason I'm going to tell the story is in the hopes that you all will learn from the mistakes I made, and be able to make better decisions than I did."
The entire audience leaned forward, suddenly paying the utmost attention, unwilling to miss a single detail. Twilight guessed she could probably have heard a pin drop from the back of the auditorium.
"The first mistake I made was that I went in without an escape plan. In any dangerous situation, you should always have a plan to get out if things get worse, and I didn't. I went in overconfident that my magic would be enough to get me out of any situation, but I was wrong and I paid the price."
The audience gasped at the implications. Twilight Sparkle, the most magically talented pony to ever live, was not strong enough to fight the tornado. Twilight could see quite a few of the audience members shudder.
"My next mistake," Twilight continued, "is that I wasn't paying close enough attention to my surroundings. The first major surprise I had was when a smaller tornado that was orbiting the larger one— which we call a 'satellite tornado' by the way— nearly hit me from behind. If I had been paying more attention to what was going on around me, I would have been able to get out of the way. Because I didn't, I ended up distracted long enough to be directly in the sights of the larger parent tornado. The other major surprise came after the larger tornado had passed. Tornadoes have 'tails' which feed into them, providing more air as the tornado itself sucks the air up into the storm. We've called these the 'rear inflow jet', but sometimes refer to it as the 'ghost train'. These are just as dangerous as the main tornado, and should also be avoided at all costs."
Twilight wasn't sure how to feel about the myriad of ponies who had started taking notes. On one hoof, she was glad they were taking safety seriously, but she was also worried that the information she was giving out would cause the ponies to be overconfident and put themselves in danger. There wasn't much she could do about that now, so she continued with her discussion on her mistakes.
"My third mistake was that I didn't try to leave when I had the chance. The tornado I was observing became obscured by rain, and I lost my ability to track it. There was a region of the storm where somepony could see what looked like a wall of rain, but it was actually hiding the tornado inside of it. Some of the team members called this the 'bear's cage', where the tornado is the proverbial bear hiding inside. I should have tried to leave the moment I lost sight of the tornado."
Twilight took a breath to gather herself. "I want to be very clear. What I've just told you is nowhere near enough information to safely view a tornado. There is no truly safe way to observe one, and my hope in going over the mistakes I made is that it benefits ponies who find themselves unwittingly in the path of one. Please don't risk everything just to be able to look at one of them."
Twilight fielded a few more questions from the audience, mostly from some of the professors and students of the weather academy asking questions about the findings of her research.
Once the time she scheduled for the lecture had ended, she left the stage and made her way back to the castle. Some reporters had tried to intercept her to ask some more detailed questions about her story with the tornado, but she shot each of them down. She was still unsure if she had been too forthcoming about what had happened back at the academy, and was definitely uncomfortable giving as much detail as the media would have wanted from her. As far as she was concerned, the only ponies that needed to know the details of what happened were her immediate family, and her closest friends.
When Twilight arrived back at the castle, the sun was beginning to get low in the sky and she was completely exhausted. She briefly contemplated trying to get some work done, but figured it would probably be best to take a nap before dinner. She didn't want to make any mistakes while working on such an important project, and didn't trust herself to get things right given how tired she was. She wheeled herself up the newly installed ramps up to the bedroom she and Celestia shared, and eased herself out of the wheelchair and into the bed. She yawned as she gently laid her head onto the pillow and brought the blankets up around her with her magic. Her eyelids slowly closed as she drifted off to sleep.
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Currently trying to fix my car, but I want to commend you for this wonderfully creative story idea, especially the surprising combination of that description and the romance tag. And thank you for blessing us with the Twi-nado cover art!
11421788
Thank you!
It would've been nice to see a bit of dialogue between Twilight and Celestia on the tornado's aftermath since Twilight getting injured or worse was the crux of their large fight that comprised the entire first chapter. However, the danger displayed as Twilight literally stood against (and inside!) a tornado was very real and engaging while keeping in that bit of nutty MLP whimsy. Twilight expressing her regret for her recklessness and responsibility to share what she learned with others was a solid way to cap off this story - a tornado Pony Service Announcement.
Also kudos for giving Fimfic more Twiliestia.
11421829
Thanks for the kind words!
I had originally planned for basically everyone Twilight knew to yell at her for being reckless and getting hurt while she was in the hospital. I ended up cutting it because it would get repetitive, and that Celestia would probably be more focussed on Twilight’s recovery than bringing up the fact that she was right.
I was DYING while reading this and ironically enough, I had Storm Chasers by Little Cloud Games up on my monitor lol
this was amazing!! You’re one of my favourite writers and I’m so glad I got a new story to enjoy
11422554
Thank you so much!
Do you really think people are that stupid to think they can go out and chase tornados just from reading a fanfic of a Allicorn chasing after tornados? If your going to chase tornados, atleast read or watch a very detailed explanation on tornados and how to avoid them, most people who chase tornados usually has millions of dollars at there disposal to have certain equipment to decrease the risk of dying or getting injured, usually a vehicle that can withstand all types of storms.
Also great story.
11864798
Maybe a little.
Thanks!