Have you ever stopped to think about a task you perform every day? How about the complexities of keeping your balance while walking, or keeping your cup of coffee from falling out of your aura of magic each drowsy morning, or pumping your wings in an endless cycle of rhythmic pulses as you keep your body aloft in the clouds?
Not many ponies do, most live their lives through a routine of sorts. Waking up, going about their business, and falling to sleep at night. Everypony had something different, but in a way they were all the same. Each lived their work out as a routine. The bakers would knead their dough, the farmers would plow and harvest their crops in season, and the pegasi would align the clouds for the coming of weather.
Thunderlane had a routine. He would wake up each morning to the sound of the same alarm. He would drink the same steaming brew of coffee in the morning to rouse his senses. And he would examine the daily pegasus routine that the weather authorities would send to his doorstep. He would go about his job, moving clouds and spurring the precipitation to begin or not to begin. He would come home each evening prepared to do it all over again the next morning. The cycle never changed, the steps were always the same, the days were routine.
Thunderlane’s eyes shot open, the movement triggered by the familiar alarm that echoed through his mind every morning. He lightly tapped the clock to sleep and rubbed his eyes to wake himself up. The sun was just beginning to peak over the mountains in the east, just like everyday. Just like routine.
He stumbled over to his coffee, ready for it to warm his throat and supply him with that familiar burst of energy, but today was different. The coffee that embraced his throat was not warm, but a frigid mouthful of stale coffee. It was the remnants of what had been made the day before. The coffee pot had failed to run its programmed course for the morning, and Thunderlane was left without his early buzz. This was not part of the routine.
The message came through the creaking mail flap in the door. The post gently floated down to the floor like a feather, but its message was much more jarring.
A massive procession of oversaturated clouds has appeared on the horizon. The weather team will retrieve them today and use them to help rehydrate the ground after the recent drought in manehattan and surrounding areas. The clouds seem to be carrying an extreme electric differential so the resulting storm will discharge a large amount of lightning strikes. All first class operators are to gather and prepare the storm.
Thunderlane blinked at the page, his weary mind slowly piecing together the meanings of the sentences into an understandable message. The drought was over, and a new bout of storms was being prepared to unleash its refreshing rain on the parched ground. This was not routine.
Thunderlane was part of the elite thunderstorm division, and it was his job to personally move the most electrically discharged clouds to their respective locations. The pay was mediocre, but it was his calling. He was somepony who loved a good challenge and that is what his job provided. The training had been rigorous and lengthy, but the end result was more than worth it to him.
Thunderlane struggled against the stiff wind to fly over to one of the dangerous clouds. His grounding suit was already beginning to tingle with electricity as the apparatus balanced itself with the charge of the ever nearing cloud. It was simple, it was routine, push the cloud toward a tall tree and let it discharge its built up energy onto the earth. It was routine.
Thunderlane gingerly pulled the cloud into the stream of wind and toward one of the towering trees in the forest beneath him.
Protocol dictated that a cloud is to be sent toward a target and then avoided for danger of lethal electric shock. A minimum distance was to be obtained before the cloud discharged its imbalance, but that distance could never be precisely determined. The discharge pegasus typically guessed correctly when it came to steering clear. It was simply routine.
Thunderlane let the sparking cloud drift by him and he gently pushed it on its course as if he were setting a small boat adrift in a pond. It was routine.
The time for the cloud to be discharged neared with each passing second. Thunderlane could feel the familiar feeling of the electricity flowing through the wires of the grounding unit. It was routine.
The charge reached the millisecond where the dormant electricity could finally overcome the resistance of the air and the stepped leader snuck its way to the ground. The series of events that followed were routine. The leader met with the tendril from the ground and the bolt struck downward. Another spike struck upward, known as a sprite, and it struck through Thunderlane. In his routine his mind had wandered. His wings had kept beating. His body had floated over the cloud and the sprite had entered his body through his right hoof and exited through his left wingtip. The immediate blast knocked the consciousness from his mind. This was not routine.
His muscles contracted, their nerves stimulated at once to contract from the shock. His body contorted into an impossible position as he plummeted to the ground. The charred hair and feathers flicked off of him as his body grew limp. More lightning discharged from other clouds as the rain floated around his body. His eyes fluttered open in one last attempt to regain the stream of consciousness that had been taken from him. He opened his eyes to see the spire of the tree that his cloud had struck racing toward him. The topmost branch, still charred and hot, stabbed itself through the skull of the stallion, stealing his consciousness once more and for all. This was not routine.
