A Series Of Egotistical Events

Chapters

Inspection Infliction
Air ← → Earth
First Impressions Are Something Or Other
Research & Delusionment
Shut Up And Dance With Me
(No) Fire! (No) Fire!
On The Issues Involved In Trotting Beneath Hasty Pegasi
Grounded

Inspection Infliction

Technically, it wasn't Rainbow's first house.

When her magic had originally reached the point where it had been possible for her to start working on cloud constructs of her own, she'd done what any number of pegasus teens ultimately tried, especially for the ones who wanted to pretend they were fully the masters of their own lives and having somepony else still paying all the bills just showed how complete their mastery was. Not that Rainbow had really gone through that kind of rebellious stage: having the greatest parents in the world helped there. But she'd still gone out and put together a swagger-lair, because it was a chance to practice the skills she was assuredly going to need after she left home --

-- home was west: she could feel that, it took an effort not to feel it --

-- and besides, she could so totally beat that measly one-story effort which Watership was just barely making hold together: the one where his balcony had nearly drifted off while he was still on it. She was better than that, and the best way to make sure everypony knew it was to prove it.

Swagger-lairs tended to be basic. Just about everypony could manage a bedroom, or at least a carved-out hollow which passed for same. More than a few screams rang out across the clouds on the first nights when a new resident discovered that plumbing didn't magically arrange itself. In Rainbow's case, she had great parents, and so her father carefully instructed her on some of the finer points of the technique: varying the density in different sections, making sure there was enough moisture for a proper support weaving, and -- molding. Molding was essential, because that was what made a structure stable, resistant to further changes made by anypony except the owner. A lair which hadn't been properly molded could be freely manipulated by any pegasi who were in the neighborhood and were in the mood for a really good prank, like the sort of thing where you carved the floor of somepony's bedroom out from under them and then pushed their sleeping bodies all the way to the outskirts of Cloudsdale. Or better yet, left them blissfully asleep just above the school's front doors right up until the moment the first bell went off --

-- anyway, Rainbow had practiced. She'd known from the start that she would be making her own house. It would be hers.

Admittedly, there were ways in which it pretty much had to be. One of the things about the molding technique was that any cloud structure needed a pegasus resident in order to remain stable. It was possible to transfer something to a new owner or even take over a place which had been fully abandoned, but buildings which had been empty for too long -- well, in pegasus real estate, there were generally three categories for condition: Like New, Fixer-Upper, and Free Building Material Rapidly Drifting Apart Here! One of Rainbow's teachers had said it made pegasus archeology into a frustrating pursuit, and she'd written those words down in her notes in order to properly forget them five seconds after the exam ended.

But when it came to molding, she'd truly studied. There had been hours spent paging through architecture magazines, looking for aspects she could incorporate and then outclass. And shortly before the completely unwelcome intruder had arrived, Rainbow had wrapped up five days of pushing, prodding, and molding, just about the only things she'd done at all since crossing the new settled zone's border...

She was completely sure she'd never used so much magic over a long stretch in her life. (The single Rainboom had taken more out of her, but that had been a one-surge feat and -- she was still trying to figure out how she could get it back.) And in trying to follow the intruder, the high-snouted pegasus who was sniffing to herself as she stomped around Rainbow's new home, testing the floor, poking at the walls, looking for weak spots which Rainbow was sure didn't exist -- well, the just-concluded effort had left her staggering slightly, at least during those moments when the intruder was focusing completely on those totally perfect walls and Rainbow felt free to let all four knees sag.

It seemed to take a lot of effort to straighten again when the intruder glanced back at her, and no effort would have made Rainbow's labor-soaked feathers preen themselves.

(She was also a little shaken, far more than she should have been. She'd seen something the other day, and it was very much still with her. Back with her, after having spent a long time away.)

"The molding appears to be -- adequate," the older mare finally said, a split-second before her left forehoof made one final stomping attempt to create the lie. She wasn't looking at Rainbow. She was staring at the closest wall as if willing it to break apart under the force of her gaze.

Rainbow fumed. It wasn't adequate. It was perfect. The first pony to visit her new home, and it was an intruder marching around, taking notes, sniffing and stomping and judging her...

She hated being judged, especially when she knew she'd done everything perfectly and everypony else was just making stuff up.

"Yeah," Rainbow said, because to say much of anything else would have quickly led to some rather interesting vocabulary.

"The outdoor fountains are also adequate." A long pause. "That is to say, they are adequate in their support. Don't you find them to be more than a little -- ostentatious?"

"...yeah," Rainbow eventually replied. "They totally are. Completely ostentatious and everything." They'd been so ostentatious as to almost call out for her to blow most of her decoration money on them. She'd practically heard them from four store aisles away, and they had addressed her by name.

The mare finally turned. Sienna fur shifted around her nostrils as the high snout produced another soft snort.

"Your plumbing," the mare declared, a faint note of surprise suffusing the superiority-clogged voice, "is actually in order. Including the evaporation stations." And back to pure I'm-Better-Than-You, a tone which made Rainbow itch to make the mare prove it. "You do understand that you will need to clean out what's left of the -- solids -- every so often, when capacity is reached? We hardly wish to inspire any jokes about passing beneath pegasi residences or worse, beneath any particular pegasus."

That made Rainbow blink. "Isn't there a pucky crew?" They came by once a season, at the very end of that season's last moon, they were a more reliable way of telling when there was about to be a major weather team effort than looking for the flocks moving out of the Weather Bureau --

"There would be in a pegasus settlement," the mare replied. "If you insist on maintaining a sky residence in a mixed community with very few cloud homes, you must expect that Town Hall's civic maintenance budget will first account for the majority of residents. This is Ponyville." Her feathers rustled. "And so you will clean up after yourself. Do you understand?"

"...yeah," Rainbow finally said, still wondering if there was any possible way to close her own nostrils.

"Very well," the mare said. "In that case, Miss Dash, I am both fully prepared and --" the tiniest of smiles briefly played over thin lips "-- surprisingly somewhat pleased to present you with --"

Rainbow forced herself to wait. To be told she'd been perfect --

"-- a conditional fail."

Her mouth fell open. Some of the more interesting portions of her vocabulary, all learned during summers spent on Gilda's ranch, began to rush towards the gap.

"I failed?" The only thing keeping it from being a full scream was the lack of energy.

"Conditionally," the town's building inspector sniffed. "The residence is safe to occupy, at least when it comes to its molding. Your techniques are fully adequate. But --"

"-- but what?" Getting ready for some of the foulest curses now, and slamming her teeth together would substitute for the clacking of a beak.

The mare took a slow breath.

It wasn't an answer. "What did I do?" What did this bitch of a mare think Rainbow had done?

"You have," the older pegasus said, "no fire alarm and suppression system."

Rainbow blinked.

"It's a small detail," the mare shrugged. "And it is the sort of thing which the young do tend to forget in their first true constructs. As the rest of your residence is adequate, I am prepared to let you occupy it -- for now. But I will return for a fresh inspection in --" She nosed the pad which was attached to the severe blouse by a long flexible spring, flipped through several pages. "-- hmmm. The earliest date I have available is one week from today. However, I encourage you to purchase and install tomorrow morning."

"I'm a pegasus," Rainbow said, just in case the other mare in her living room had somehow managed to overlook that.

"Yes," the mare said. Her feathers rustled again. "As am I. Looking beyond my wings, I was rather hoping that the fact of my being within your residence instead of having fallen to the vacant lot beneath it would have given you the hint."

She missed most of the sarcasm. "I can put out fires. Any pegasus could --"

"-- yes," the mare calmly agreed. "Small ones, certainly, started with conventional materials. Any pegasus could do that --" and with a surge in volume "-- when they are awake. Miss Dash, ponies sleep through fires. They sleep because they are tired, because the fire starts in another room, because the fumes fill the air and keep them asleep, and the next time they open their eyes is in the shadowlands. You will install a fire alarm and suppression system. It will be here when I return. If it is not, I have the authority to evict you from this residence and keep you out until either such a system exists in this residence or the house has dispersed. I could block you from sleeping here tonight if I so wished, and I am only allowing you to occupy this structure because your adequacy in all other aspects has been established to my satisfaction. I would, however, discourage you from attempting to cook tonight. You have forgotten one simple thing, just one when others overlook so many. Correct it."

The curses jammed together in Rainbow's throat, leaving only silence to fall out.

"I have the authority to approve this house," the mare told her. "And once the single flaw has been corrected, I will do exactly that. Good day, Miss Dash. Sleep well. Eat something from the raw bar: we have a fine vegetable medley available three blocks away, and they are open until ten. And install what you have missed." She turned, began to trot away.

One desperate syllable broke free. "I -- !"

A glance back. "Yes?"

Which was when the thought finally made it through.

She can approve my house.

That means she can condemn it.

It's my house...

"I'll... I'll..." Trying to buy time, seconds in which she could force her heartbeat back to normal, "...Miss...?" She vaguely recalled the mare introducing herself shortly after Rainbow had opened the front door, and she definitely remembered dismissing the name as being completely unimportant.

A small snort informed Rainbow about the mare's impression of her memory. "Cruelneigh," the older pegasus replied. "Mrs. Cruelneigh." (Rainbow briefly questioned the romantic standards of a pony she'd never met.) "I would hope you would remember that for our next meeting, and perhaps even keep in mind that my entire extended family is in government service. The Cruelneighs, the Bleaknickers, the Harshwhin --"

"-- I'll install the stuff," Rainbow forced out. "But I can't do it tomorrow morning. I've got my first shift tomorrow, and they want me there early. I have to wait until after that."

It got her a small nod. "Understandable. When you can, then. I shall see myself out." The mare looked away, resumed her trot towards the door --

-- paused.

Facing away, "Miss Dash?"

The word had been working so far. "Yeah?"

"Do you know what 'ostentatious' means?"

She took her best guess. "Cool?" Silence. "Radical? ...awesome?"

Mrs. Cruelneigh snorted. Trotted away.

Rainbow stood stock-still in the middle of her living room (still so empty, waiting for her first pay voucher to arrive before she could add more of the essentials), thinking. Fuming. Mostly fuming. And there was something else under the anger, a feeling she didn't want to acknowledge just yet.

She'd been judged. And in that judgment, she'd been found wanting.

Inadequate.

(Also, ostentatious. Whatever that meant.)

Eventually -- after far too long, more time than it would have taken on any other day, and totally not after she took one quick look at her bare kitchen to make sure the lone burner was turned off -- she fell asleep.

Air ← → Earth

The plan had been brilliant. (Well, of course it had been brilliant. It was her plan.) The ultimate goal was to join the Wonderbolts, and there were certain requirements for that. There was a written application, and the more recommending signatures you could attach to that, the better. Then there was a practical tryout session which moved across the continent on a schedule which was posted years in advance. If you passed that, you got into the Academy, and if you got through the Academy...

(Not 'if'. 'When'. She had to remember it was 'when'.)

But it all took practice. Moons of it. And the thing about being out of school (she'd just graduated and summer heat was already starting to fill the air as she took off from her new house, moving under Moon's light) and aiming to be a Wonderbolt was that you had two routes: you either found somepony who would sponsor you and dedicated all your time to training, or you found a job and practiced when you could while losing most of your hours to boring work. And sponsors were hard to come by. Sponsors, in fact, generally took the form of parents who were perfectly content with continuing to pay the bills, and while Rainbow's family had been happy to back her dreams all the way through school and accepted them as a reason for why certain boring courses had just barely been passed, she'd been ready to go out on her own.

She was sure of that. Completely ready. No regrets or anything --

-- anyway, she'd had the idea in her third year of secondary school. Practice -- training -- meant being in the air as much as possible, using techniques every single day. Having hours to work on stunts. There were several professions which lent themselves to that: things where it was possible to essentially get paid for training because you were doing stuff which was going to help you in the long gallop anyway.

Some occupations had been rejected. Couriers certainly stayed in the air more than anypony, but they didn't get to use much in the way of techniques and -- well, Rainbow had to admit this one: she wasn't an endurance flyer. She was fine over the course of a normal day (which naturally included at least one perfectly normal nap), but she wasn't the sort of pegasus who could fly from Sun-raising to Sun-lowering at three-quarters of top speed, get a few hours of sleep, and then do it all again tomorrow. Also, couriers had to deliver things exactly on time and naps sort of got in the way of that, or so she'd discovered just before being unfairly fired from her third summer job. Going out for the minor league stunt circuit would certainly get her work, but the crowds would be tiny, and the thing about getting into the circuit was that it could be really hard to get out.

But being part of a weather team? Unless there was a major seasonal shift in progress, they seemed to work for just a few hours per day. Sure, there was emergency stuff to do when the weather systems outside Cloudsdale tried to intrude on the settled zone, but that hardly ever happened and it would just be more practice. Work a few hours per day, get a full salary for that scant amount of time, maybe take a little nap to recover her energy, and then she could practice until Moon was brought into the sky. Paid to practice, with work itself being more practice. Use techniques during her paid hours, zip about the atmosphere in the most elaborate ways possible. She was essentially getting her employer to sponsor her, and that party would never know what they were really paying for...

Rainbow grinned to herself, and then very carefully didn't report for her first day of work -- not yet. It was still early and there were a few things she wanted to do. They mostly centered around food.

She wound up landing. She hadn't wanted to, but the town's streetlights were oddly low-level: at night under waning Moon, you really only got a good look at things when you were on the ground and -- trotting. It was as if the local planner hadn't thought about ponies who might want to take a full aerial survey.

And the buildings were all so -- small. They didn't vault a dozen stories into the dark --

-- the sky is the wrong shade down here --

-- sky. They didn't have multiple entrances at different altitudes. There was frequently just one door, and that was always at ground level. When there were two, the other would be at the back or side of the structure. Wood refused to seek heights which vapor easily conquered. It was just... weird.

Rainbow trotted for a while, down mostly-empty streets, past a few ponies heading for the train station. A careful sniff of the air failed to detect much of anything edible. There was a rather prominent bakery, and there was also a parade of unhappy ponies dejectedly marching past the Closed sign. It had been closed since Rainbow had arrived in Ponyville, and the sign on the front door told her that the family vacation wasn't going to wrap up today either. She was stuck with leftovers from the previous night's raw bar stop, and while that would get her through the earliest parts of the morning, it wouldn't put her much past it. So she had to search and so far, her search wasn't coming up with anything. This was so much earlier than she'd been awake before this, nothing seemed to be open yet, and clearly the only thing she was going to find in the direction of the tracks was the train.

Where does the weather team eat? Maybe they all have breakfast at their homes.

But her kitchen was just about empty.

She didn't know the town yet. She didn't even know where to look for anything. She'd spent five days landing just long enough to pick up those few shipments which had been left on the ground below her home. Arrive in Ponyville early, start molding, have everything done by that first day of work. She'd spent on furnishings (mostly delivered) and food (whatever was close), slept at her construction site (technically illegal) and bathed in a swimming hole she'd overflown on her way into town (perfectly legal and, after being caught on her third day, oddly face-flushing). She could have found anything in Cloudsdale, known just which floor to land on for her shopping, visited the eateries which served the weather team as one of them. In Ponyville...

Her hooves felt weird. The street felt weird. It was like visiting Gilda's ranch, only with a ridiculous number of cobblestones added. Gilda's family raised their animals on dirt, for the most part. (Some were above the ground, and a few were under it. Rainbow, as claustrophobic as the average pegasus and considerably less willing to admit it, had only entered those sections on teasing dares.) There wasn't any real stone, curves of ridiculous density poking into her hooves where clouds would just cushion and almost push you into the next step, the very world waiting to launch you into flight. Stone was just -- there.

There was green around her, in most of the places where the stone wasn't. Plants growing. It had been the same when she'd visited Gilda. She was used to green, at least a little. But it had been one of many changes during her summers: travel from Cloudsdale to Protocera, live with griffons instead of pegasi, green and brown instead of white and -- mostly other shades of white.

She knew the ranch. She knew what it was like to live with griffons. But this was Ponyville, and --

-- she was on the ground.

So many ponies were on the ground.

It wasn't a pause in their travels, with no clouds around to perch on. It wasn't visiting somepony or vacation tourism. They were on the ground because they had to be. Because there was no other choice at all.

There were times when it felt like she was staring. At fully-exposed sides with no feathers covering them, the vacuum-filled places where limbs should have been. At cones and tiny spears of something not quite bone. And she'd seen that before, of course: she'd been to ground with her parents. A few times. She'd seen the -- other ponies. The ones who couldn't enter Cloudsdale without the aid of a strictly temporary spell.

(There had been a few such high-altitude sightings, mostly at sporting events and festivals. That was when she had truly stared, and her father sometimes reminded her of the very first, where a very young filly had broken down in tears of pity for the pony who must have had the most horrible accident imaginable. She'd had nightmares about accidents which could steal a pony's wings. Sometimes she still did.)

There were pegasi, here and there, for Ponyville was a settled zone which hosted all three races. (She paid special attention to every one she saw, and didn't see what she was afraid to spot.) But there were so many more of the -- others. Ponies trotting because trotting was all they knew, all they were capable of, and Rainbow...

Clouds billowed. Clouds gently shifted. Clouds comforted and massaged and helped.

Stone...

First Impressions Are Something Or Other

The town's weather coordinator was old.

It was impossible to tell what color his coat had originally been. At some point in his youth, there would have been the true hues: she refused to believe he had been born old, even with so much evidence right in front of her. But then the gray flecks would have begun to come in, there might have been some white around the muzzle, and for most ponies, it usually stopped there. With this pegasus elder, flecks and white were all there were, but for the forever-bright colors of his mark. It gave him the appearance of a poorly-worked cloud sculpture which had seen a mug of spectrum tea tossed into it. He was so far past the typical retirement age as to be on the verge of retiring from everything, including breathing.

His name was Passing Shower and Rainbow, upon hearing it spoken aloud for the second time, was barely able to keep from laughing again.

"Is something wrong?" the elder -- eldest? -- no, there was always the Princess for that -- asked.

"No," Rainbow half-snickered.

"Nothing funny?" The words seemed to be oddly sharp.

Rainbow, still thinking of jokes about ponies trotting under especially hasty pegasi, choked back the last of it. "No, sir." 'Sir' seemed like a good idea, especially since his age meant there wasn't much time to say anything longer.

It got her a slow nod. "All right. Now this is your first day with us --" a longer head movement indicated the seven other hovering members of the central weather team "-- and I'm a little surprised to be seeing you for the first time. I understand you arrived several days ago?"

"I was working on my house." Did she need to say it again? Well, just to be sure. "Sir."

"Even so," the stallion said, "I would have expected you to come over and introduce yourself. As everypony else here did."

Eight ponies looking at her.

"I had fountains," Rainbow told them.

"Fountains," Passing Shower repeated.

"I had to be there for the delivery," she tried. "I didn't want anypony else flying off with them before I got them mounted... sir?"

Eight ponies staring now.

"All right," the senior finally said. "So you haven't received anything more than the briefing packet which the Weather Bureau would have given you at dispatch. You also don't know how we do things here. We stick to the schedule, Miss Dash."

His wingbeats slowed. Eyelids sagged. The vault-maned pony on his left quickly coughed.

There was a surge of alertness, and then misty irises were looking at her again. "We -- where was I?"

"Schedule," that neighboring stallion quickly said.

"Yes. Thank you, Thunderlane. Schedule. We stick to the schedule. We perform our jobs as dictated by the Bureau. Without theatrics. Without deviation. Without question. Without trying to turn our duties into some form of --" with open disgust "-- performance art. If you stick to the schedule at all times, you can't go wrong. And as the Bureau has assigned you here, I can only hope that, upon review of our record, they have assigned us a pony who is fully capable of maintaining that."

She didn't know why the Bureau had assigned her to Ponyville. There had been an interview: a lively one, only partially conducted in the actual offices. Instead, after a short opening talk, Stratus had taken her out into the Sphere, the bubble of permanently-perfect weather which surrounded the main buildings. They'd flown as they'd chatted about casual things. He had gone through a few unexpected changes of flight path, spontaneous twists and spirals: she'd done her best to keep up, then started trying to predict him, and ended with attempts to make him follow her. She thought she'd made a good impression, she was certain she was going to be part of the Cloudsdale team --

-- and then the Bureau had told her she was going to ground.

Not Cloudsdale. Not Las Pegasus. Not Windicity. Not any pegasus settlement. Ground.

She hadn't been able to say anything upon seeing her assignment packet. She couldn't seem to find any words now.

Passing Shower regarded her silence, matched it for a while, then shrugged.

"Daily assignments," he finally said. "Thunderlane, restaurant district. Keep that thermal drifting."

Awkwardly, the stallion coughed again.

"Yes?" their coordinator sharply asked.

"We've been getting -- more requests. To divert the air around Mr. Flankington's. Redirect the smells..."

"Is it on the schedule?"

"...no."

"Maintain the thermal drift," Passing Shower ordered. "And nothing else. Miss Dash, we had a minor breach from the Everfree overnight --"

The what? Most of the briefing packet was still in her living room and there might even come a day when the more boring parts of it were read, possibly even for more than two minutes before the inevitable nap began.

"-- so you will be cloudbreaking."

The next word simply escaped.

"Cloudbreaking?"

She missed all of the tone. "Is there a problem?"

Nopony missed any of hers, especially not with echoes threatening to fill the sky. "It's my first day! I should be showing you what I can do! Anypony can cloudbreak! Cloudbreaking is boring!"

Eight ponies staring at her again and unseen by their coordinator, seven did so with a mixture of concern and pity.

"What you did," the senior slowly said, "is get yourself assigned to Ponyville as a first posting. As a pony who never attended a single semester of weather college. A pony who somehow got into the Bureau directly after secondary school. This indicates one of two things. Talent -- or connections. I find the two to be mutually exclusive. Talent must be proven. Connections will become apparent soon enough. Be assured I have many of my own."

Rainbow was staring at him. She couldn't seem to stop.

"But they must have told you about me --"

Thunderlane coughed again and somehow, it cut her off.

"One new mare," the elder stated, "is like any other new mare."

"But..." What's wrong with him? "...I want to prove myself! I can't do that with cloudbreaking!" Knowing she was repeating herself, hoping it would get through, "Anypony can cloudbreak!"

"Yes," Passing Shower replied. "And therefore let us hope you can. Cloudbreaking, Miss Dash. At the Acres. Nothing more."

She wanted to fly away. Burn off the anger in a burst of speed. But she couldn't, because the rule was that everypony had to stay until all the assignments were given out. All she managed was an aggressive form of hover, moving in the tiny space like a feather caught in a freshly-born dust devil. And even when he finished, she couldn't leave.

Five days of construction. Just about none spent with the briefing packet until it had helped her slip into the nightscape. She had no idea what or where the Acres were.

In Rainbow's estimation, cloudbreaking would have been about six times more boring than advertised, except that nopony ever would have been stupid enough to try selling the product. Not unless their name happened to be, just by way of example, something which put images concerning short bursts of disturbingly yellowish rain into listener minds, and then there probably would have been a full campaign. And because that pony was stupid, it would have been run in architecture magazines.

She fumed all the way through the first stages, conducted while Sun was still in the early part of being raised. Then once she could see a little better, she got to spot all the vagrant vapors which had swarmed into the area for the purpose of giving her something to take it out on. Clouds puffed away on impact after furious impact, followed by taking a few minutes to truly disperse the moisture and prevent things from coalescing after she left. That was the hard part, and she angrily decided that Passing Shower believed she would have forgotten about it.

After a while, she had just about all of the work done, enough to let her get a clear look down.

Huh. So those are apple trees.

Well, it wasn't like she hadn't seen apples before. She saw apples in Cloudsdale all the time, being eaten. They were imported, because just about anything edible was. But apple trees -- that was new. And there were more colors of apples than she'd ever seen before, even when she factored in for store shelves. Large and healthy and appearing to be perfectly edible. Even from her current altitude, Rainbow could tell those were some quality apples.

Quality, calorie-providing apples.

She'd been cloudbreaking for -- she glanced in the general direction of Sun -- too long. Way too long. (She needed to find ways of speeding something that basic up.) But it had been long enough to burn off the last of what the leftovers had provided her, and there were apples down there...

Somehow, Rainbow found herself flying a little lower than she strictly should have been for finishing off the last few strays. Lower still. There was an awkward moment when she tried to slip below the canopy: the trees had been spaced so that there could be a degree of sunlight streaming between them, but some of the branches grew way out from the -- trunks? Was that the word? -- and it took a little maneuvering to slip through the gaps. Wood scraped her right shoulder as she neared the fruit, and she winced at the contact.

It wasn't as if she'd never touched wood before. There was Gilda's ranch, and of course there was all sorts of (imported) furniture in Cloudsdale. But that was refined wood. This was the natural stuff, and it was scratchy and rough and -- weird.

Still, wood produced apples, so it had that going for it.

Rainbow hovered in front of a particularly large red specimen, maintaining an altitude of about ten times her own height above the ground. Flying among trees. It took a few wingbeats to adjust for what all those branches -- and it was trunks, wasn't it? Yeah, trunks -- were doing to the atmosphere, but she managed.

Her neck craned forward. Her mouth opened.

"HEY! What the buckin' Tartarus are y'doin' with mah apples?"

Rainbow's first mistake was glancing down.

In soon-to-come retrospect, she should have just finished the stretch, plucked the apple off the stem, and made for the sky at top speed. Instead, she looked towards the voice as her mind desperately tried to translate the accented words into something vaguely resembling Equestrian, and saw who the new arrival was. A mare, maybe a year or two older than Rainbow, muscular in a way Rainbow never saw on any pegasi. A fairly long blonde tail (with some extremely thick strands) was lashing hard enough to repeatedly jolt the rope loop at the end. She couldn't get a good look at the face: there was a hat brim shading most of it.

But she could see the pony's flanks. Just a hint of the mark was visible from her angle, just enough to give her the color. It wasn't really where she was looking. Rainbow's attention had been caught by the places where things weren't.

The two ponies stared at each other, as best they could, until Rainbow's brain finally offered up a possible interpretation of the sentence.

"Eating it," Rainbow answered.

"Not with mah apples y'don't," the orange mare shot back. "Y'ain't paid. Y'wanna drop the bits out of those little saddlebags right now, that's fine: let the money fall, Ah'll call it fair trade. But if'fin you're jus' gonna snatch food for yourself when y'think nopony's lookin', then you an' me, we got a problem."

Rainbow had already decided the mare had many problems, and most of the smaller ones were linguistic. At least one of the moderate issues, however, was a total failure to recognize reality. "You can't sell this one!"

The other pony reared back a little, just enough to let Rainbow get a brief glimpse of green eyes and furious face. "An' why not?"

"Because," Rainbow pointed out with perfect logic, "you can't reach it!"

Dead silence, which Rainbow considered appropriate for marking her total intellectual victory.

-- and ruined. "Say what now?"

"Look," Rainbow reasoned, "you don't have wings. There isn't enough room between the trees to push a ramp that's long enough to get up here. Nopony can climb. So unless you use pegasus harvesters --"

"-- which Ah don't," the mare broke in, her voice oddly soft.

"-- then these apples go to waste! There's no way you can get them down! Isn't it better to let me have one than just let it rot on the -- vine? Branch? Branch. Maybe that's even really bad for the tree when that happens! In fact, just to be nice, I can come through here every morning and just take a few problems out from under your hooves --"

"-- y'believe this," quietly came from below. "Y'actually believe every word you're sayin'."

"-- as a courtesy. Just a little favor from the Weather Bureau." Rainbow put on her best smile. "So how about it?"

"No way t' get the apples down," the mare evenly said. (In that same near-retrospect, far too evenly.)

"Yeah!"

The orange mare looked up. Regarded the leafy canopy, the unusable apples, and Rainbow's hovering position.

"Hold that pose," the mare said. "Ah wanna remember you jus' the way you were."

To which Rainbow said the only thing she could have.

"Huh?"

The orange pony spun, seemingly pivoting on a single forehoof. The powerful back legs came up, and hooves lashed towards the trunk.

There was a sound of impact and somehow, it felt louder than thunder.

Rainbow blinked.

"What was that for?"

The groundbound mare, not even bothering to look at Rainbow, lifted her right foreleg, pointed it straight up, lowered the limb, and began to silently trot away.

Rainbow, her attention called towards the blocked sky, looked up, and saw branches trembling. Fruits vibrating on their stems. Shaking as if about to drop away from the tree.

Then the first one did.

Rainbow blinked. Worse, she did that instead of moving.

"Oh, horse app --"

Rainbow didn't know a lot about apples, beyond what it was like to eat them and now, the price a pony might pay for trying to take a free one. But judging by the density of the impacts all over her back, head, neck, and wings, she wasn't sure the highest specimens had been quite ripe yet.

The majority of the ones which had bounced off her hit the ground first. Rainbow impacted second.

"Don't come back," the earth pony softly ordered. And without ever glancing at the devastation, she quietly left.

Most of the final strays got broken during Rainbow's rush to get away.

Research & Delusionment

She was starting to feel a little -- off. Not quite woozy, nowhere near dizzy -- there might have been some difficulty in judging those states while within one of bruised semi-concussion -- but a place where she could feel those two conditions waiting for their chance. And so she landed, because that was one of the things flight camp made sure you knew: there were situations you couldn't fly in and when they began to threaten, you had to touch down. Running low on energy was one of the things nopony messed with.

Pegasi had high metabolisms: that was just about universal for the race. If you flew a lot, then you needed to eat more, rest more. You took in calories, you burned them off, you ate again and then you napped while your body processed the fresh fuel. Rainbow needed food, and perhaps needed it more badly than the orange mare had understood. Flight was magic, and magic took power -- at least two kinds of it.

She was trotting when she entered town. Trotting across ground, then the bridge, and that was followed by cobblestones. She was sore everywhere she'd been hit, and just about everywhere she hadn't been was where she'd hit. The only places which seemed to have escaped were the very bottom of her hooves, and now the cloudless world was taking care of that.

Rainbow tried not to moan aloud, kept her focus on moving forward. There was food somewhere. It was late enough in the day for just about everything to be open, at least in Cloudsdale. Ponyville, even with its sudden desire to punish her, probably wasn't going to close every shop just to make her feel bad. In fact, there was a really big one just up ahead --

-- she blinked a few times, forced her eyes to focus on the words.

Barnyard Bargains.

(And there was a moment when ground faded, vapor swirled in and the sky changed to its proper shade. She pushed that vision away, and then she desperately wished to have it back.)

I know Barnyard Bargains. I know the one in Cloudsdale. And they're supposed to be just about all the same inside. I can find anything in there. I'll know where the food is, and -- the fire stuff.

I'll know about something.

It was an oasis, and Rainbow rushed towards the mirage of comfort.

She stared at the price tag. Blinked a few times, then read it again.

That's wrong.

It was the lack of food. She was seeing numbers which weren't there. Fortunately, there was an easy cure for that: Rainbow pulled her tiny cart to the checkout section, paid for the small bag of candy she'd already found (and just where it should have been), then spent a few minutes sucking on the sweet before returning to the Devices & Wonders section.

There wasn't much to look at in that area. No Barnyard Bargains did much with enchanted items unless they were basic, time-proven, or in seriously high demand: convenience stores took the major pieces and Rainbow was vaguely aware that some places covered experimental stuff, mostly because she'd once seen some pictures of the larger explosions. But fire stuff fell under all three stock categories, and so there was a section of shelf which held what she needed.

She looked at the price again, through sugar-boosted eyes. Counted her bits again, compared the numbers.

Everything she had left in the world, times two.

I thought...

...I put aside enough for food. That was all I needed to reach my first pay voucher. I could spend everything else, and those fountains were just so cool -- ostentatious? -- cool. I could afford the fountains. And now I need the fire stuff, I can't return the fountains because they have to be mailed back, I won't have money for two weeks...

How long to get a letter home, ask for help? Could her parents send her funds in less than a week?

No. It didn't matter. The fastest method of contact would cost her the bits she needed for keeping herself fed, and she'd already learned about the true cost of taking free food.

Would Passing -- Mr. Showers give me an advance?

She'd known him for less than a day, and that was more than enough to give her the answer.

If I don't get the fire stuff, my house...

She couldn't steal it. (There was a moment when she thought about it, if only as a fantasy, and still more when the consequences for getting caught played on the inner cinema screen.) She couldn't pay for it. There were banks, but she felt that was the sort of thing where paperwork and time got involved. And when it came to personal loans, she didn't know...

...no. Not her.

I saw her from the air the other day, when I was going out for lunch. She was easy to spot. She always had that really full tail, even in flight camp, or at least the start of it. Those fur and mane shades. She's taller now, not so -- stretched. But it was her, I knew it was her. I came to a place I'd never been and there was a pony I'd met before. A pony I --

-- I didn't know, nopony told me what happened until I got back, I'd just found my mark and then the counselors found out we'd gotten away from them because we all knew they would have stopped the race if they learned we were having one, but they found out what happened to her and she was okay, but she almost wasn't and I --

-- I didn't mean to. I never meant to.

Her parents pulled her out of flight camp. I nearly got sent home. The only reason they let me stay is because nopony could figure out just who knocked her over. Who made her fall.

Who nearly... killed her.

I still don't remember any impact. I don't think it was me. I...

...maybe -- maybe she doesn't even remember me. Couldn't pick me out of a crowd. I'm not the only prismatic in Equestria. There's got to be other ponies with my fur and mane colors out there. Maybe she --

-- we're in the same settled zone.

I can't talk to her.

I don't think I can ever talk to her.

No money. Becoming a criminal was out. What was left?

Rainbow silently arched her neck, nosed the box she couldn't afford, moving the price out of sight. It brought a side panel into view, and the lower right corner bore words she should have expected: Made In Cloudsdale. The reading almost made her feel dizzy, and she went for the candy again.

Of course it's made in Cloudsdale. If it's magic involving heat, a pegasus has to create it. Unicorns make devices and pegasi create wonders. I flew by the factories sometimes on the way back from school, if I wanted to do the loop-friendly route. And if it wasn't Cloudsdale, it would have been another pegasus settlement, because that's the only way to --

She stopped, examined the thought more closely.

Pegasi make wonders.

I know one pegasus in this settled zone really, really well.

And I know she's good. Under pressure, she's the best. She just has to prove it to everypony else.

Fire stuff should be basic...

"No eating in the library," declared the yellowed mare. (Not yellow: yellowed, like paper which had been out in the sun for far too long.)

"But it's just sweets!" Rainbow protested. "It stays in my mouth! Completely in my mouth. It won't touch the stupid books or anything!"

Near-white eyes blazed.

"You're a new patron," the elderly unicorn said. (Rainbow was starting to wonder if the entire town was being run by old ponies.) "I know I've never seen you in here before. So you don't know the rules. And the first rule is that there is no eating in the library. Ever. So if you want a book, you will step outside, spit out the candy into the proper trash receptacle, and then come back. With the understanding that if I find you eating, you will be kicked out."

Rainbow stared at her.

"And now you know that rule," the librarian stated. "So are you going to follow it?"

Five minutes. Five minutes tops to find the book she needed and get out.

"Yes," Rainbow said. And she meant it, at least for that value of sincerity which would hold up for five minutes.

"Thank you. Outside, please."

It wasn't a particularly large section of the library: less than a shelf. Much less. It was small enough that it took considerably more than five minutes to spot, because it wasn't as if Rainbow was familiar with how libraries were laid out: not for those inside vapor, and certainly not for anything kept within a tree. But at the same time, it wasn't as if she was going to ask the librarian for help. Wandering around until she saw the right thing sufficed.

There were only a few books on the subject: considerably less than Rainbow would have expected, given how vital the information seemed to be. And to top it off, most of them were in bad condition, worse than anything else she'd seen in the library. The majority were at least moderately scarred, and some of the wounds appeared to be electrical.

She had to squint past a particularly ill-placed scorch mark in order to make out the words on the largest spine.

Wonders-All: Home Enchantments For The Enterprising Pegasus!

Rainbow pulled the thick book off the shelf. There was a lot of text on the back cover, which mostly concerned saving money or starting a home business or whatever the author had meant to say in the place where the blackening completely took over. The front showed a pegasus who was beaming as she sat with her wings stretched out across mounds of bits. Several wonders surrounded her and every last one looked to have been professionally made, except for those where the book's damage made it seem as if they'd been professionally arsoned.

Pages were hastily flipped. And sure enough, there it was. Fourth chapter.

I knew it. Fire alarm and suppression system! They can be made outside a factory! Thoughtfully, Of course they can. Somepony had to make the first one, and that was probably back before factories were invented. So all I have to do is take this home, read it, and then I enchant...

Rainbow proudly carried the book to the librarian's desk, gently setting it down. It left the inside of her mouth tasting like overcooked peach skins.

"To go, please," Rainbow beamed.

The librarian slowly looked her over.

"You're new," she said. "Are you new to the library, or the settled zone?"

"Ponyville," Rainbow honestly answered.

"And how long have you been here?"

It felt like an odd question. "This is my sixth day."

The mare nodded. "You may apply for a library card in twenty-two more. After one full moon has passed. That is library policy."

Rainbow's house evaporated before her eyes.

"But --" she quickly began, and found she'd started too soon to have a second word ready. "But --!"

"To make certain," the librarian continued, "that nopony leaves with any of our precious volumes because they just happen to be passing through town. So that we know where they can be found. One moon of residency, and then you may apply."

"...but...!"

The near-white eyes slowly went over Rainbow's trembling form. (She hadn't felt it when she'd started shaking. She couldn't seem to make herself stop.) The yellowed features softened.

"You know," the elder mare gently said, "that you can just read it here."

Rainbow forced herself to pick the book up again, carefully carried it to a quiet corner. There seemed to be ponies watching her as she moved through the tree. Well, that made sense. Not only was she new in town, but in Rainbow's extremely expert opinion, she was well worth looking at. Most ponies with taste would take a moment to check her out, and the fact that all four knees were shaking while her wings vibrated at two completely different tempos had nothing to do with it.

She settled down with the book, began to read. And really, it didn't seem all that complicated. You needed a housing (which couldn't be too large, or too small, and wood was right out), and you needed some copper because when a pegasus wanted the inherent magic of their body's field to conduct into the inanimate, copper was just about an absolute requirement. And there was a way which the wire had to be bent, shapes it needed to be in for some reason, but those were illustrated. Basic stuff.

But then there was talk about the magic itself. How you needed to be capable of shifting heat by yourself, and Rainbow qualified there: it wasn't her best technique, but nopony was going to be hired by the Weather Bureau if they didn't know something more than the basics. However, that was followed by paragraphs about feel. Spending time in the presence of a sample for the wonder you were trying to make, that was supposed to help. Learning how the enchantment registered on that vital sixth sense. Trying to duplicate. Manipulating your own field here and there, pushing and prodding, until the feel which surrounded you was just like the feel of the wonder. And then allowing your magic to conduct outwards, giving some of your own energy to the copper, and then the new creation would possess a power of its own...

But by that point, her vision was starting to blur. She needed more than just candy and she wasn't even allowed to have that much, not in here, trapped inside cold wood instead of being perched on welcoming vapor. Rainbow's body was demanding calories and she was in an isolated part of the library, completely out of sight, surely one careful movement would get past scrutiny which didn't exist, buy her enough time to finish reading...

She did it. No librarian screams rang out and she gratefully sucked on the sugar, trying to keep her cheek movements at a minimum. Forced herself back into focus as boring, repetitive words droned across her inner ear. Words she needed. Something she absolutely had to pay attention to.

The sugar helped, as far as it could. But her body needed more than sugar.

A hoof gently nudged her shoulder, and Rainbow blearily opened one eye.

"Dear," the librarian softly said, "you fell asleep. I'm not used to ponies taking naps in my library. If you're that weary and need the book so badly, I suppose I can make an except --"

Which was when Rainbow's head came up, and the last bit of undissolved sweet tumbled out of her half-open mouth.

"-- GET OUT!"

So as it turned out, there were places on her body other than her hooves which hadn't been hurt by either apples or impact, and the process of being kicked out of the library covered pretty much all of them. But because it had been a first offense, she had only been banned for a mere week.

However, she'd read the book. (Well, most of the relevant section.) She knew what she was supposed to do. (Of course she knew.)

She was sure she could remember the diagrams: the shapes had been funny enough to stick in her head. She'd read all about conduction and feel and there had been something about sensitivity, plus she thought she'd seen a paragraph containing the words critical overtap just before she'd found herself flying with the all-time Wonderbolts team again, but that had been in the section which didn't seem to be so much about how you made the fire stuff as what it did when it was operating, and she already knew about that: it detected and suppressed fires. And when it came to critical overtap, Rainbow felt as if she'd already spent all of her time in Ponyville in being criticized and she was totally sick of it, so that could go get chained in Tartarus. Anyway, it wasn't important how it worked. It was only important that it worked.

She forced herself to move, when every hoof hurt. She found a restaurant hosted by a kind-faced dark green pegasus who offered to let her taste-test his newest recipe at no cost, and so wound up paying absolutely nothing for the contents of the subsequent illness. Once the scent of vomit had faded, she picked up fruit on the wind, followed her nose to the town's open-air market, and then veered away before the mare running the apple cart could spot her. That put her at the bakery, which was still closed...

Eventually, she found a place selling dumplings, and went for as many as she could manage. After that, it was back to Barnyard Bargains, because the book had advised her to spend time in the presence of a sample wonder. It left her standing in that one section of aisle for as long as she could stand it, or rather, right up until a staff member passed her for the fourth time with the same 'I am about to ask what you're doing staring at that box, and then you might get to explain yourself to the police' expression on his face that she'd seen on the last three employees.

It hadn't been easy. She'd never really tried to extend her senses like that, not for a wonder. It was different with living magic: just about every young pegasus tried to figure out techniques before they were formally instructed in them, especially when it came to the cool stuff like lightning. (And just about every young pegasus who had just reached casting age found that for no apparent reason, all of the adults had stopped doing cool stuff around them.) But to try and puzzle out a weaving which was being channeled through the inanimate, something which might not even be fully active within the box because that would run down the charge, and then there was just trying to conduct her senses through that box...

She'd tried to refine her focus, concentrate on nothing except the contents. It hadn't been easy: Rainbow wasn't used to trying for extended periods of deliberate tunnel vision, and the stares of those passing by kept interrupting her. Still -- it had felt as if there was something, sensations too complicated to be produced by a dumpling-fueled imagination. She'd done everything she could to memorize those feelings, right up until the moment her second kick-out of the day appeared to be on the edge of certainty, and then she'd left at what she felt was a completely normal trot. It certainly would have been a normal trot for anypony who wasn't having that much trouble with her hooves.

After that -- well, the housing wasn't an issue: just about anything could serve as the housing, and she wasn't going to be particularly fussy. But such things had a cost -- copper wire certainly did -- and she still had to be careful about taking too much away from her food money.

Fortunately, there were ways to potentially bring such expenses down, although it helped if you weren't dealing with any orange earth pony mares and remembered to ask first.

When she finally found it, the battle-scarred fix-it shop (a building which really would have been better off as a cloud, as the entire structure seemed to have shifted about two hoofwidths off its original foundation and couldn't simply be pushed back) turned out to be managed by a slow-moving unicorn named Mr. Tinker. He was a pony who had certain reservations about letting anypony rummage through his garbage. He also happened to be a stallion who, in Rainbow's judgment, had an eye for well-lofted wings, and while he was far too old and boring and slow for her (and why were so many ponies slow?), she was more than willing to add a few strategic feather twitches into the conversation.

"I'm not sure you understand," the unicorn tried again. "Yes, I keep some copper wire around, and there's even some in the trash. I have to strip it out of malfunctioning wonders, to make them safe for shipment to the nearest qualified repair facility. Some ponies just keep bringing me things by mistake. They don't understand that I'm a device mechanic."

"But you have some!" Rainbow reminded him. (She wanted to get out of the dirty shop. She wanted to preen. She'd been wanting to preen her wings for hours. She was sure there was some dirt stuck among the flight feathers.) "And you're not using it!"

"It's from malfunctioning wonders," he weakly said. "I'm sure the thaums discharged once it was removed, but I have no way to know. And when it comes to the housings --"

"But I'd know!" Rainbow quickly cut in.

"-- they're just about all from the same kind of source --"

"It doesn't matter! I'm not going to be using them for anything dumb! I'm just going to make some --" and her imagination desperately tried to stay within what was turning out to be a rather complicated spontaneous stunt "-- art!"

He wasn't looking at her wings any more. That was okay. Some ponies liked eyes too.

"Art," the stallion repeated.

"Yeah! Because --" with her neurons starting to feel the gravity pull of the spiral "-- I just moved here! My place is really empty. It needs some touches. Inside. Like you see in the magazines. Because I mostly spent on fountains and I put those outside. If they were inside, like in the bathroom, they might splash the floor. And then it's the evaporation pull to the stations, plus it might get into the pucky trail and I really don't want to clean out prismatic pucky once a season, especially when there should really be somepony who does that for me. So I thought I'd just take some old housings and a little wire which nopony was using, bend them around a little, put them on the wall, maybe in a frame, and then it's art!"

He was now looking directly at her mark.

"I can make art if I want to," Rainbow said.

The unicorn sighed, and his grease-stained fur shifted along the thin body. "Miss -- Dash, was it?"

"Rainbow," she tried.

"Even with things which are completely discharged, something that's been enchanted once before... I'm not even sure, when it's a wonder instead of a device, if there's any residual --"

There would have been more words, but they died on his tongue. The cause was heatstroke, and the temperature continued to rise.

Rainbow briefly tilted her head away from her left wing.

"Please?" she asked, and then her tongue went back to preening.

Shut Up And Dance With Me

She wasn't entirely sure of what had just happened. Having an eye for a well-lofted wing, well, that was just taste. But to just spontaneously have a pony's hind legs go out from under them like that because somepony was preening... anyway, she had the supplies in her saddlebags, along with an open invitation to come back any time she wanted to try making some more art. Plus when she was this low on funds, it was always nice to know when somepony might be willing to buy her dinner.

With Sun descending and the temperature beginning to dip into boringly-scheduled summer coolness, Rainbow landed in front of the main entrance to her house. She automatically checked the door. The complete lack of Condemned notices reassured her somewhat, and she went inside.

Housing (a short hoof-height light blue cylinder, to be capped off by an eventual dome) and wire were carefully arranged on the living room floor, and the molding readily accepted the presence of something inanimate which she'd personally brought into the residence: just one more tenth- bit of evidence as to how perfect she'd been. (Food was left on the only table she currently had, waiting for later.) After that -- well, much to her surprise, Mr. Tinker had been willing to lend her some basic tools, things which would let her put angles into the wire without using her teeth and what she'd expected to be some rather uncomfortable hoof and tongue work. Copper certainly twisted easily enough once it had been stretched into wire, but she needed to match the bends in the diagrams (which she was sure she remembered accurately, especially since she had been flying through some of them in her dream) as precisely as she could.

There were other things which needed to go inside the housing, but they were surrounding her: portions of cloud which she'd personally molded. They would serve as the internal support structure, and having her unique field residue on that portion of the wonder was supposed to boost the whole thing. In the end, it was almost a little like assembling a jigsaw puzzle: something Rainbow had always disregarded as boring because it took too long to flip all the pieces over after spilling and besides, if anypony really wanted to know what the finished result looked like, all they had to do was glance at the top of the box. But with this... for puzzles, somepony else had created the picture and then broken it on purpose, mostly just to irritate everypony who came after them. For the wonder, there was a master pattern which she needed to follow, but it was her work in the end. Her creation. She'd never really created something physical before, and it was a strangely intriguing process.

She made sure to put a little spiral at the very tip of one cloud piece, just to make everything hers.

Everything was arranged within the open housing, compared to calorie-deprived diagrams which had been fixed in her mind by sheer mental force. Rainbow was sure she had it right.

But that was just the physical construction. There was another hoofstep to come.

She closed her eyes. Concentrated as she put her left forehoof forward, lightly touched the single exposed end of wire.

That's... weird.

There's no power here. I'd know if there was, and the residue faded a long time ago. But it's like...

It was like having somepony brush against a wing and then when she turned around to see who had done it, there was nopony there and her wing still felt like somepony had brushed up against it. It was like trying to remember something she'd never done. It was like being in the presence of a --

-- they're all made up. Every last one of them is made up.

Concentrate.

I can sense my field. Where it's strongest, where it's a little weaker. Most of it stays around my hooves and wings. Some in my skin, always.

Unicorns project. Earth ponies... something, I guess. Pegasi conduct.

There was no display of light when the magic began to move: that was something limited to those with horns. It took a pegasus to feel the casting taking place. But there were other signs, for those who knew what to look for. There had been more diagrams in the book, ones she'd paid close attention to. Angling of the wings. When to flap and how quickly. Lift this leg, lower it as another came up, while keeping that one hoof in contact with the wire at all times.

For a pegasus, magic was movement. For Rainbow, movement was life.

Let the power move forward. It wants to flow along a conducting route, and copper is our metal. It knows us. It's been with us from the -- whatever was on that history test I sort of passed. It flows, but it never separates from the source. There's always a channel back to me.

Changing that is supposed to be the hard part.

Her wings kept moving, legs shifts added to a small toss of her mane. To an observer, it would have come across as a silent dance conducted with a partner who had never learned a single step.

I'm moving heat. I'm moving little things from one place to another, from where they don't need to be to where they're needed. I can sense how much heat is around me. I'm weaving. I felt the magic inside that box, and I just have to adjust my field until it feels exactly like that, and then...

Does the wonder see things?

Did it think about what it was seeing?

She didn't know. She'd never thought about such things before, and she didn't have time to truly think about them now.

(There was a thin shimmer around her body now, a light heat haze moving over her skin, one where the temperature itself never reached her. She never saw it. Everything was focused on the growing weave.)

She danced. The magic danced with her. There was a song resounding within her, a rhythm born from the heartbeat of the air. Her tail swayed, her wings suggested lift without ever quite reaching it, her ears twisted as she listened to sounds which could only be heard by the soul.

Rainbow gave of herself, and the magic went into the wire, flowed through all the twists and channels before returning to her. She was teaching it. Taught the copper what it was like to dance, when it had never moved at all.

But that knowledge wouldn't stay with it. Thaums went out, lost something for their travels, returned. Her field conducted, and when she took her touch away from the contact point, just about everything she'd given it would be hers again. The wonder would be silent, motionless, and never remember what the dance had been like, or even that dancing had once been possible.

Rainbow's field conducted. It didn't project, or whatever it was earth ponies did when they grew plants, which was probably something. There was a continuous channel. There was company. Air moved naturally when there was atmosphere to support it, water flowed fastest in rivers, heat danced best in flame.

The book said... there was something about... strength. That I won't be weaker in my own magic forever because I do this. But the enchantment will still take -- something? I think it said I'd be tired for a while, like anytime after I use a lot of magic. But I just have to eat, and sleep, and then I'll be fine. With internal frustration added to deep offense, The one nap I got to take today was interrupted.

Oh, and there was something about what could happen if you did it wrong. But I couldn't read the part under the header through the scorch marks and it doesn't matter because this isn't snout-tilting adequate. It's not ostentatious, whatever that is, unless it's something really good. It's just perfect.

We're dancing. (Her body shifted, swayed, feathers spread to catch the air.) You know how to dance now, because we've danced together. I felt how your sister danced, the one waiting in the store for somepony to take her home. I learned her dance. I taught it to you.

You have to remember.

Remember.

And with the second-greatest effort of her life, Rainbow's soul reached out for the connection -- and severed it.

The magic tried to surge back towards her, return to the only home it had ever truly known, found no route remaining. Heat glowed at the tip of the wire. The pieces of cloud inside the cylinder flushed grey, flashed into black, surged to white again. And Rainbow's eyes finally opened as all deliberate movement stopped.

She stared forward at nothing for a moment, while hooves thudded into vapor and every wing joint unfurled into full droop. Then her eyes rolled back, just as her tail went down and somehow managed to drag her body with it.

The captain of the all-time Wonderbolts team took a moment for offering congratulations before they all began their nightscape flight. Rainbow decided it had been very classy of her to do so.

(No) Fire! (No) Fire!

In legislated theory, Rainbow was just old enough to drink, and therefore was also just old enough to legally have direct experience of what waking up with a hangover was like. In reality, having to wait two more years had taken a distant second place to being at a totally kick-flank party where the host's parents had never bothered to put a lock on the liquor cabinet, and -- she remembered most of what had happened after that, plus all of what her momentarily not-quite-as-great parents had said once they'd caught her stumbling through her bedroom window, just before they'd grounded her for a week and put a lock on the medicine cabinet.

It still gave her a point of comparison, and so she learned that waking up after an enchantment was much like waking up with a hangover. The central difference was that instead of feeling like something had recently died on her tongue, it felt as if her own tongue had become thoroughly sick of Rainbow and huffily marched off to find better quarters, words with more syllables, and probably somepony who knew what 'ostentatious' meant.

Ugh.

That didn't seem to sum up the miasma of dense exhaustion pressing into her fur.

Urk.

Somewhat better.

Bleargh.

Perfect.

She forced her eyes open, and found that she'd collapsed facing the open housing. Her second major series of movements involved forcing herself forward enough to seal it. The initial set was reserved for the food, and she quickly learned she would have been better off taking home something suitable to the raw bar. Rainbow didn't cook, but she'd wanted to celebrate having her house ready to pass inspection through actually using her kitchen for the first time, and so had mostly purchased things which required some degree of heating. It meant she went with just enough bites to get her on her hooves, and then she sat down again until her floor no longer appeared to be shifting any more than it should.

A moment was spared for wondering just how the factories operated when their employees had to be scheduled for regular fainting breaks.

Maybe it's just like that when you do it for the first time. Like flying the Junior Overlander in your first eligible year. It gets easier.

Once a few of the calories had found their way to the proper locations, she looked at her clock. Still under Moon, but not all that far away from Sun. She wanted to go back to sleep, but to do so for even a nap would risk being late for her second day of work. It seemed to be a little too early in her career for that, and so Rainbow decided there were things she could do before heading out for her shift. Besides, she'd find a place to catch a nap later. Ponyville had horrible restaurants and mean librarians and stallions who gave you weird looks when you preened in public: asking for one good place to nap seemed like fair compensation.

There were things she could do, and the first was to mount the completed wonder in the living room ceiling, where the vapor partially enveloped and accepted the little burden: the final result was only slightly larger than her snout. The second was to once again extend her senses, try to feel what she had wrought --

-- huh.

It doesn't quite feel like...

...actually, what did that store one feel like yesterday?

She'd been out for hours and as with exam cramming, certain amounts of information seemed to have vanished upon contact with the paper or in this case, the floor.

I'm not all the way back yet. I need to eat more, and my fur feels like I fell through that swamp preparation test at school again, and my feathers feel like they're still in there.

She wanted to shower. She wanted a bath, but she hadn't installed one yet. Magically, the arrangements were pretty much the same, but a shower just required an enclosure to stand within and baths meant wrangling a tub up to house level, along with being able to pay for one. The shower would have to suffice. Wash, then eat, and if there was any time left after that, she was sure she could think of some other things to do. Checking the wonder might have to wait until after she'd gotten back to Barnyard Bargains and had a fully-alert fresh impression to compare her results with.

Not that she was really worried. Rainbow was sure she'd done things correctly, because obviously the enchantment had stayed within the housing. She'd danced. Dancing like that was actually... kind of cool.

Rainbow staggered towards the bathroom and, with the automatic movement of somepony who hadn't even begun to adjust for the total lack of parents who might come down the hall, closed the door behind her. The shower was quickly set for maximum heat and, after an extra moment of consideration, minimal water pressure. Rainbow generally enjoyed showers which felt as if they were kicking the dirt off, but it had been a bruising day in several respects: a hot mist seemed best.

The water ran down her wings. Some of it soaked into feathers: more streamed towards her legs, where a portion saturated her fur and the rest was reabsorbed by the floor, once again becoming part of the clouds. It was how that part of the room's molding technique worked: liquid which came from the bathroom was returned to it. There was some moisture loss overall: she would walk out with a portion of that, and still more was filling the air as steam. Rainbow loved a hot shower, hot enough to be a single tail strand away from the border of scalding. It was something which sent billows of false fog through her Cloudsdale home whenever she'd exited that much larger bathroom, and her mother had often mock-grumbled about how practicing weather systems on the second floor was taking things a little too far.

Her parents wouldn't be complaining about that any more.

Home is west...

Eventually, she felt cleaner. She certainly felt wetter. Moderately more alert, which brought her to the point where she remembered that all of her (mostly-used, all unwashed) towels were currently in the bedroom. A soft groan announced the arrival of chill knowledge, and her dripping form exited the bathroom as the usual plumes of steam filled the air --

-- and that was when the rumble hit.

It was a familiar sort of rumble: the warning sound produced by a wild zone cloud which was on the verge of setting itself off. It was the low thrum of power waiting to be unleashed, and it was coming from the very walls of her house. Walls which were starting to flush grey.

Rainbow froze. The grey rushed across her walls, and the rumble just kept on coming.

That's... not supposed to happen.

Molded houses don't turn into thunderheads. Not on their own, not when they've been done right...

She said I was adequate! That the only thing missing was the fire stuff! This shouldn't be --

The invisible ice broke, and droplets went in all directions as her wings flared and she flew through her house, trying to see what was wrong, attempting to feel it, find the problem before things got worse --

-- and there it was.

The housing mounted in her living room ceiling was vibrating. The grey was darkest immediately around the supporting vapor, closest to black. And as the steam dispersed into the cooler air, hot and cold forever battling in the eternal war which cost troops from both sides, the sound slowed. Her walls began to fade into white again, and once the molded hue had fully reasserted itself, the rumbling stopped.

Rainbow stared at the housing. And then she laughed.

"So that's how it works!" she crowed to the air, needing to tell somepony about her triumph and finding nopony there at all, no mother smiling or father longing to go out and show her accomplishment off to the other parents. She could only tell the air, and so she told the atmosphere everything it might want to know about her total previous (and current) lack of doubt. "It works!"

Because you wouldn't expect a pegasus to make something which could talk: that was a unicorn domain. But the alarm still had to be sounded, and so it did that by the most natural means available: the sounds any cloud could make when conditions were right. If somepony managed to miss that -- say, during a really good party, one where the floor would have been shaking a little anyway, or so it had appeared after the third bottle came out of that cabinet -- there was a color change to serve as an additional level of alert.

Rainbow beamed at the little wonder, proud of it. Proud of herself, because she'd proven that she could do it and if there was nopony around to see it just yet, then Mrs. Cruelneigh would return in less than a week. Rainbow could tell her, right after the official approval had been passed over. Just to watch her face.

But...

...okay, I take hot showers. I know that. Mom and Dad know it. Mom complained about it a lot. But... that hot? There's only so far you can push water before it starts to hurt, and even that's short of a fire. Our home alarm never went off when I got out of the bathroom. Not even at school when I was cleaning up with the rest of the team.

It works. But maybe it's a little... sensitive?

That was something the town inspector was probably going to test for. Actually, given what she'd seen of that mare, she felt it was something which would definitely be tested for, which further meant it was something Rainbow's house could be failed for: the most minor, petty, stupid of reasons...

...no. She was going to be okay. She'd worked the enchantment. She'd just been a little -- off. She wasn't entirely sure what she'd done wrong (and trying to review her effort-fogged memories from the enchantment left her not entirely sure as to what she'd done, period), but if she could create the wonder, then she could adjust it. Go to Barnyard Bargains after her shift, get a fresh impression, and then make shelf and ceiling match. It wasn't a problem, and it would be even more of a non-problem after she had a proper breakfast.

Rainbow, still dripping onto the floor (a floor which did not automatically absorb the water, because that wasn't part of the molding for this section), landed long enough to collect the food which was still waiting on the table, then headed for the kitchen. She only had the lone burner, but that was more than enough for a simple heat-and-eat.

This time, it felt as if it took significantly more time before the walls stopped rumbling, perhaps because the vibrations were throwing off her clock and making it tick along at half the normal rate.

The burner. I didn't even have it turned up all that high...

Rainbow took a deep breath, forced herself to go outside under Moon, flew to the edge of her house and looked down.

She had neighbors, if not of the sort she was used to. There was no other molded construct nearby. Instead, there was a wood house on her immediate left, and another across the ground-level street from her residence. Directly below wasn't a problem: that was just a vacant lot because it seemed as if a lot of ponies didn't like living right under a pegasus residence, possibly because of the shade. But she did have a few neighbors, and she hadn't lived among them long enough to know if their lights were supposed to be on at this hour.

The rumbling was... loud. More than enough to wake a sleeping pegasus and alert them to the danger. Loud enough to be heard outside...

Another deep breath. None of the oxygen seemed to get past her ribs.

She was starting to feel -- stressed. Her muscles were tight, her wings shivered against her sides, her skin felt as if it was shrinking from too much time in the water, compressing her from the outside-in. And that was just a stupid way to feel. She had no reason to be stressed. She would come back to her house after work and adjust the wonder. Everything would be fine.

Rainbow repeated those thoughts a few times, let them vibrate in her head to create a reassuring massage which worked from the inside out. It didn't seem to be happening.

Well... actually, she did still have some time before she had to leave for work. Time which could be used to relax, and it was a form of relaxation she hadn't been able to indulge in for over a week, because she'd initially been traveling and after she'd arrived, she hadn't had an enclosed space to work with. Admittedly, it was a form of relaxation which tended to make her a little sweaty from a very local source of heat, but there was also plenty of time for another, colder shower and since the towels were at her next destination anyway...

*RUMBLE*

Rainbow stared up from the bed, furious eyes fixed on her rapidly greying ceiling.

"OH, COME ON!"

On The Issues Involved In Trotting Beneath Hasty Pegasi

She just barely made it to work before the morning assignments were given out, and knew her boss wasn't happy about it. Rainbow found out just how very unhappy he was during the five-minute dressing-down he provided (with only two near nod-offs) concerning his personal inspection of her first work site, along with a detailed list of every stray she'd missed. That part went on until the rest of the team was awkwardly shuffling during their hovers, while Rainbow waited for him to start giving each scrap of cloud its very own name. The only miraculous part was his never mentioning the incident with the earth pony, who apparently hadn't filed a complaint. But he'd already been angry with her, provided with an excuse she'd left in her first-day wake, and then she'd very nearly been late...

It couldn't be helped. Rainbow had needed every scrap of time she could scrounge in order to create one of the fastest -- and the single largest -- weavings of her life. The weather schedule had arranged for a hot day, and all she truly knew about the wonder's issues was that its activation threshold was far too low. Without her inside making direct (and sometimes subconscious) microadjustments to the temperature, even the smallest degree spike which got past the standard techniques could potentially set off the alarm. Over and over again. She suspected the local police would be investigating long before the constant rumbling reached its third hour, they might even summon the building inspector to determine what was wrong, and she could return to find mist dissipating over the furnishings which had been abandoned in the vacant lot below. Whatever was left of them.

She'd never made a heat shield that large. She wasn't sure how long it was going to hold, and she was sure that if Passing Shower happened to fly by her house at any point before he returned, he'd treat it as an unscheduled alternation. (There was also the possibility of a coworker spotting the change and reporting her: she hadn't made any friends, was barely starting to get a tooth clamp on names.) Another dressing-down was the least of the possibilities there. And then she'd had to regain the energy lost in creating the shield, she hadn't planned on eating that much and her food budget was starting to reach the point where the next step would be grass.

Rainbow desperately hoped for an assignment near her house, leaving her as the only pony using techniques in the area. It would have allowed her to check on whether the weave was holding, minimized the chance of outside discovery. She wound up on the outskirts of the settled zone, cloudbreaking again. Passing Shower had created every one of the clouds himself, declared it to be a milk run for a filly who wasn't quite ready to finish nursing yet: his exact words, with so many of the pegasi around her cringing in matching concert as the sentences pummeled vulnerable ears. And then he told her about every last consequence should he find any leftover strays again.

She couldn't check on her weave. She had no way of leaving the work site which didn't create a chance of being spotted, not when the only clouds in the area had been created as a punishment detail. All she could do was cloudbreak as fast as she could, and then faster still, constantly glancing over her shoulder to see if any angry pegasi were coming towards her. Occasionally, she would remember that there was now a new direction from which trouble might arrive and look down. And all the while, her thoughts looped in on themselves, a constant near-begging to the Princess to let her have a break just this once, at least this once, more than once would be nice because she was going to be a Wonderbolt and having additional breaks on standby wouldn't hurt, but the best way to provide a little reassurance of that future's approach would be to help her now.

There were far too many clouds, and she got through them all at a speed she'd never known. Techniques were altered on the fly in order to disperse the moisture faster. Experimental tight spirals served as vapor-killing drills. She'd never thought that there might be so many ways to do cloudbreaking, and she wasn't thinking now. It was all precious instinct, reason pushed out of the way so that her body could do the necessary without thought slowing her down.

It didn't take all that long to finish. It took far longer than she'd wanted it to, and she sped for her house. There was no time for examining a sample at Barnyard Bargains, not yet. She had to see if she'd been discovered, because the work site was too far out for any rumbling to have reached her. It was possible that everypony was just waiting for her to return, and if she'd somehow made everything hold, she had to refresh the weave...

...which was holding.

It wasn't holding well. In pegasus sight, she could spot where some of the threads were beginning to fray, for heat-shifting had never been her strongest technique. But It had held. There were no police waiting at (or below) her home: just normal traffic trotting by, with nopony else in the air. At least for the moment, she was safe.

The original weave had been created under Moon. The touch-ups had to be rendered beneath Sun, making it all that much more likely that somepony would spot her. Rainbow quickly became acquainted with the finer details of her left shoulder, because she seemed to spend most of the time looking over it. (It needed grooming. The fur was in an oddly uneven lie.) Still -- it didn't seem as if she'd been spotted, and that left her free to go inside.

The wonder was still nestled within the white ceiling. Small, light blue, and quiet. No vibration at all.

All right. This is -- comparison. Compare and contrast. She vaguely remembered having put that phrase on an exam paper: she couldn't recall the year or subject. I need a reminder of what the right weave feels like. Fly down to Barnyard Bargains. I can probably get an hour before they start staring at me again. Maybe half an hour because I'll be in the same aisle two days galloping. Then come back and try to adjust this.

Actually...

Wouldn't it be faster if she got a sense of this one first? Then she could fly into the store -- trot: there was actually a sign up asking that pegasus customers trot, it was insult disguised as theft prevention -- and she'd have the first part of the comparison ready to go. It might speed up the contrasting part, which could only make the repair go faster.

Rainbow took off, hovered close to the ceiling. The small dome did nothing.

Careful. Not too close. Don't start to sweat. I can reroute any heat which reaches it if it starts to react, but probably not before I get a rumble. I can't put a shield directly around it right now --

-- she facehoofed, just a little too hard, and in doing so, found the true last remaining uninjured spot on her body.

I could have put a heat shield directly around this instead of doing the whole house.

She'd done all that work when less than a minute would have sufficed, leaving her with no risk of discovery at all.

It... doesn't matter now. I'll do that before I go to ground. (She still couldn't do it now: she would be trying to feel the wonder through her own weave.) At least I found out I can create one that big all by myself. That's got to be good for something, sometime...

Right now, it was mostly good for making her feel stupid.

She inspected the wonder. Her creation, so much less than adequate. Memorized its feel, made the tiny shield, went out and undid the huge one. Back to ground.

Rainbow trotted back into the store, feeling every step. Every gaze.

This time, she'd gone the extra gallop, or at least the additional rotation. It had occurred to her that if a manufacturing location was written on one side of the box and the company logo plus picture of the contents was on another, that left four other sides to work with. And sure enough, there was some promotional text covering the remaining surfaces. One of those little paragraphs concerned the threshold adjustment feature, boasting that it allowed those pegasi who enjoyed grilling peppers indoors to do so without concern. It meant there was a way for the wonder's owner to raise the threshold, when that of her creation was far too low.

Rainbow had then followed that up with another realization: if there was a way to adjust the threshold, then the purchaser had to know how to do it. That suggested instructions.

A little careful tooth work, some nibbling around the edges, a lot of glancing in all directions, and she'd had the lid up. Getting the paper out of the box was more complicated, but she'd extracted it without knocking more than three, five, maybe ten other boxes over, it had given her some time to look at the contents, but then she'd heard hoofsteps approaching and it had taken all of her speed to get everything closed up before the middle-aged brown earth pony with the worried eyes passed her for the second time. Twice had been too many, and the concern had chased her out of the store.

But she'd thought she'd seen enough. She still had a chance, and she found a smile as she entered her house again.

(Well, it could be claimed as having been found. There was no way she was going to admit to the actual effort involved.)

Hovering again, close to the wonder. She removed the little weave, then began to mentally review what she'd rememorized. The feel.

Okay. I can feel where it's off now. (She didn't have time for the shame, and pushed it away to await her in the nightscape.) But I don't know which threads do what. I just -- tried to duplicate it. I didn't think about what I was copying.

So the first thing is to figure out exactly which part of the weave is the current threshold setting, and the best way to do that is to -- set it off. More hastily, Just for a second.

That part was easy. She just had to gather some of the thermal energy in the living room into a small hot spot, then increase the temperature degree by degree. Probably fractions of a degree, based on what had happened in the bedroom. When she saw a thread react as the rumble began, then she'd know where the first adjustment had to be made.

The box said the normal low end for the threshold is one hundred and forty degrees. Hot enough to singe fur during extended contact with a solid surface, shortly followed by wounding the skin. It was possible for the air to get that hot -- say, above a grill -- without doing direct damage, and that was why thresholds could be adjusted: keeping normal cooking from setting off the walls. But it still wasn't an environment a pony should try to live in for long. This isn't anywhere close to that. It's closer to body temperature. For a pegasus, that's a hundred and two. Her metabolism ran a little faster, and so she burned a little hotter to suit. Start there.

Her forelegs began to move. The temperature in most of the living room dropped, and that energy was gathered in to make a tiny ball of increasing heat just in front of her snout, a miniature (and underpowered) Sun which was only visible to pegasus eyes. The room's normal temperature, with Rainbow in the house to power the waiting techniques, was seventy-five degrees. She just needed to make one little area slightly warmer than her own skin.

Eighty-seven. Ninety-two. Ninety-six... This part was easy: she'd gathered more than this at higher speed when delivering a prankster's hothoof. Rainbow was actually trying to take her time, slowing down the increase rate as the little ball got close to her body temperature: she needed to see exactly where the threshold was. One hundred and one -- and maybe a third... a half...

Watching the light-invisible Sun. Looking at the dome.

One hundred and two. Point one. Point two. Point three --

The rumble hit her ears before the color change was registered in sight, the deep sound almost painful at close proximity.

-- there! That's the thread! I saw it surge! Now I just have to dissipate the ball, and then I --

The grey was surging outwards now, faster than she'd ever seen it change before. There was absolute black around the wonder's base and a heartbeat later, there was near-night in her living room. The rumble kept getting louder, and her forelegs abandoned the pattern which would have dissipated the heat ball, went up to futilely press down on skull-flattened ears. The heat stayed where it was, and the walls kept getting darker and darker as the sound of something getting ready to happen spread throughout the house, Rainbow knew her neighbors could hear it, she was starting to wonder if all of Ponyville could hear it while her parents looked to the east and wondered if that distant noise had anything to do with their daughter, the power of that rumble was making fur and feathers vibrate as her mane was shaken into something more suited to a post-crash state and one more thread within the wonder surged --

-- and then it was raining.

Actually, that was something of an understatement. There was a downpour in progress, and it was all taking place inside her living room. She could barely see through the curtains of water which fell past her, and 'barely' was only during the brief moments after blinking rivers away from her eyes.

"Oh," Rainbow said, completely missing the stun in her own voice. "So that's how it works."

It made sense, really. She lived in a state where she was surrounded by water at all times. Water put out the majority of fires, at least for those started in normal ways with conventional materials. So when the threshold was breached, the wonder eventually tapped into the moisture of her home and began to channel it to where it believed the fire was. The shower functioned in the same fashion, only at a much slower rate of pull and without any of the visual or sonic effects. This was just her everyday personal washing up being conducted with far greater force.

So it taps into the house. She looked around. Actually, right now, it's mostly tapping into the living room: I think the black's a little lighter over there. Down. And the floor isn't absorbing it back, because this isn't the bathroom and the molding isn't set for anywhere near this kind of moisture. So there's water pooling on the floor, and water soaking all my stuff, and -- water, which is probably cooling the hot spot a little as the drops pass through. And suddenly, there was a benefit to not having brought in all that much stuff yet: that much less to dry out.

For her part, there was no point in trying to flee the room. Everypony would have heard the rumble, and it wasn't as if she could possibly become more soaked.

I didn't even know a technique could channel water this fast. Is this how much it's supposed to be conducting? She wasn't even sure there was this much to work with in the entire room, much less the --

-- and she heard it, as one table leg suddenly dropped by a hoof-height, with her morning leftovers sliding off and falling partially into the floor.

The moisture creates the support matrix.

The wonder is pulling out all the moisture because it's trying to put out what it thinks is a fire, faster than the normal molding can replace it from the air.

And when there's no more moisture --

Her couch tilted right.

-- there's no more cloud.

There were several reasons why Rainbow would remember the exact moment when the floor vanished for the rest of her life, and having spontaneously realized what 'critical overtap' meant was not the least of them.

She dove. She had just enough acceleration to get ahead of the couch and put her right shoulder into it, redirecting its angle into something which would bounce towards the back of the vacant lot. Several of the ponies who had begun to cluster at ground level, all summoned by the rumble, stared at her in shock while the scant remaining furnishings which had once made up her living room splintered around her. One of the tiny pieces flew towards her left foreleg, and Rainbow learned about the other thing wood could do.

"Run!" she screamed, taking off again so she could wave both forelegs at the spectators, as if trying to push them from so many body lengths away. "It's all going to come down! I'll deflect what I can, keep it away from everypony! And there's going to be pucky! Just run, before the fountains come down! Please, you all have to --"

-- and with enough heat carried away by the cascade of water, the downpour stopped.

Rainbow went silent, all at once. Looked up, saw that nothing more than the living room floor had vanished, although some of the walls had thinned out quite a bit. Looked around and saw all the watching, staring, stunned ponies, including some of the new arrivals: the ones whose chest straps bore the badges of Ponyville's fire department. A glance towards the back of the group found Thunderlane, who had been assigned to work that part of the settled zone. And finally, flying in at her best speed from the west, Mrs. Cruelneigh.

Slowly, Rainbow touched down, forced herself to trot to the very edge of the house's gutted shadow. And when she was just short of the sunlight, she sank down, belly and barrel pressed against the hard, unwelcoming ground, and waited for the end.

After a few seconds, two members of the fire department helped her up and led her away, with the town inspector trotting close behind.

Grounded

This mare wasn't that old. She was somewhere up there, well ahead of Rainbow in the race to finish the years, but it was hard to gauge the lead. She had a fairly young face, but a really old mane and tail: two things which added to the dignity granted by cravat and glasses. Rainbow supposed it happened that way sometimes and distantly wondered if the early color change was more common to earth ponies, mostly because it was something else to think about.

The office was wood, and darker than the ones in the fire department and police station had been.

"I read the transcripts of your interviews," the mayor stated. Her voice was in a neutral state: no detectable charge in any direction, positive or negative. It could wind up going anywhere.

Rainbow didn't say anything.

"Everypony feels you were telling the truth," the mayor added. "The complete truth. Perhaps because you felt you had nothing left to lose through doing so."

There seemed to be no words left.

"I would like to ask you a few questions," the older mare said.

She waited.

"Ponies began to move towards your home when the rumble grew that deep," the official went on. "It's instinct. Possible fire: many ponies will close in, see what they can do to help. And when you came out, believing your entire home was about to evaporate -- you didn't go back inside. You didn't try to save a single possession. You simply screamed at everypony to get clear, trying to keep them safe. Declaring your intent to stay in the area of what you believed would be plummeting debris so that you could keep it from bouncing into anypony else. Why?"

"...I don't know." She was mostly looking at the floor. Wood. Cold. Hard. Unforgiving.

Silence.

"Very well," the mayor continued. "I'll accept that. Second question: did you know Passing Shower wants you fired over this?"

"No." Although it was easy enough to guess.

"Third. Mrs. Cruelneigh. I received a copy of your inspection report, in which she labeled the vast majority of your efforts as -- and I want to quote this exactly -- 'adequate'. Did she say anything to you?"

"She told me I needed the fire stuff --"

"-- about your house. The creation of it."

The next words burned her. "She said just that. It was adequate." A long pause. "And my fountains were ostentatious."

"I see." Toneless.

"What..." She might as well ask. It wasn't as if she had all that much more time in which to do so. "...what does 'ostentatious' mean?"

"Gaudy," came the answer. "Loud, but in the visual sense. Designed to attract attention without any regard as to what that attention might be."

"...oh." Nowhere near cool at all, let alone radical or awesome. But she still liked them...

"And lastly," the mayor concluded, "you are currently hovering. Not very high. A hoof-height or two. But rather than stand on my floor and face me directly, you are hovering. Why?"

And truth was all that remained.

"My hooves hurt."

"You were injured during the incident? More than the splinter which the medics treated?"

"No. I..." She didn't think she'd ever felt so tired, and she'd passed out on the floor from magical overexertion a night/lifetime ago --

-- no. There had been one day which had been worse than this, as a younger self waited outside the offices at the flight camp. Waiting to hear whether the counselors had decided she'd been the one to nearly kill somepony. The same soul-dragging weight of dread and self-loathing, only with the mass of a near-corpse at the other end.

I never saw her again. I didn't think I'd ever see her again for the rest of my life, that the last pony she'd ever want to see was me, and she lives here. Maybe that means it's a good thing I won't.

Her name was...

"-- Miss Dash?" And then, just a little more softly, "Rainbow?"

It was as if somepony else was speaking, her words reaching her ears from unimaginable distance. "...I... was born in Cloudsdale. I lived there my whole life, except for vacations. I had this one friend... I'd spend summers with her, with her family, far away. But even then, there were clouds. It was almost always clouds. And now there's ground, there's ground all the time, and... my hooves hurt. Hooves aren't supposed to hurt..."

She heard the tiny sigh. She couldn't make herself look at the source.

"You're not the first," the mayor quietly said. "You won't be the last pegasus who comes down and has to -- adjust. I can't say I see it all the time: most of the pegasi who live here have done so for a while. A few who move in have spent significant time at lower altitude before joining this settled zone. But every so often, we get a truly new arrival who finds there's more to Equestria than sky and vapor. That there are trees and rocks and two whole other races of ponies, just waiting to be discovered. It's something of a shock, I imagine. Learning that the most foreign country imaginable rests directly below your hooves."

"How..." She barely got the words out. "How do ponies adjust?"

"They live among us," the mayor told her. "They talk to us. They make friends with us. And some of them hover for a while, because their hooves hurt."

Silence filled the office, added its weight to everything pressing against Rainbow's fur.

"I -- said the wrong thing to an earth pony yesterday."

"Did you." Neutral again.

"It was stupid."

Without any real question in the mature voice, "Was it?"

"And then I destroyed my house..."

"The floor in one section, yes," the mayor passively agreed. "The rest is currently maintaining, although I have some of the local pegasi trying to assist with that. With the key word being trying, because until they joined forces into a true team effort, they were having quite a bit of difficulty in getting past your molding. Officer Swoops said it was like trying to break into a bank vault, and I'm slightly concerned about her choice of comparison."

"What..." She swallowed. "What happens now?"

"Now?" More papers shuffled. "You go to Barnyard Bargains, where Mr. Rich has agreed to let you have a proper fire system on credit. Please pay him promptly when your first pay voucher is cashed. After that, you could begin to work on repairing your home, but all of the questioning has brought us under Moon and I would prefer for you to wait until Sun has been raised again and your work shift is concluded. By the same token, I'd rather you didn't try to sleep there tonight. Thunderlane has offered his couch, but if you're uncomfortable with spending a night near a stallion you've barely met, my husband and I have guest quarters in the attic. I understand from reading the transcripts that you can't possibly afford a hotel right now, so please consider at least one of those offers. Now, when it comes to your food situation --"

The shock was something more than electric. "-- what?"

"'What' to which part?" Marigold Mare politely asked.

"You -- you said Passing Shower wanted to fire me!"

"No, Miss Dash," the mayor corrected. "I said he wanted you fired, because he has no actual power to do so. The Weather Bureau can take direct control of each settled zone's teams, hires new employees and suggests assignments. But ultimately, those teams work for their settled zones. Some of the discretion for firing somepony rests with the Sphere -- but the majority lies with the mayoralty. And I see no reason to fire you for something you did in your own home, while off the clock, where Passing Shower has no authority at all. Now --" a short pause "-- this is not something he's particularly happy about. Rather the opposite. He is, quite frankly, probably going to make the effort of his recent life to turn yours miserable, which would be more work than he's put in on anything for some time. But when it comes to firing you, I review all of his requests, and I will speak to you regarding any accusations he might make. Do you understand?"

And the words had left her again.

"If there is something in your eyes which is making you blink so much," the mayor offered, "the restroom is out the door and down the hall to your left --"

"-- I understand." She didn't believe it. She was waiting to wake up in the hospital with a severe concussion from all the furniture which had fallen on her head.

"Good. Please also understand that there are no criminal charges. You were the only pony hurt, and not badly. I do hope you've come to understand why some books tend to be -- injured, and are thus better left unread." She sighed. "I've been tempted to remove most of that shelf's contents from the library, but there are ways in which censorship is worse. And should something else occur, Mr. Rich is the sort of pony one can approach with a second reasonable request. I hope you'll keep that in mind. So. Take a moment to consider your night's lodgings. Sleep on any changes you might wish to make during the rebuild, which will be inspected after its conclusion. And..."

Another pause, and it was a long one.

"...Miss Dash -- are you aware of why you were assigned to Ponyville?"

"No." The nightscape was going to start breaking up any second now.

"Passing Shower," the mayor said, "has gone beyond the point when he should have become Past. He is beyond the age when most ponies retire, far beyond -- but that great seniority has allowed him to build armor made from connections, which he also uses as weapons at least twice per week. He cannot force me to fire you. But at the same time, I would have some difficulty in firing him. Despite his being so set in his ways and lax in duty, inflexible to the point where he might serve as our last true bulwark against a storm. He is exactly the wrong weather coordinator for Ponyville, and he cannot be casually discarded. But some of his connections have moved out of the Bureau, with others passing into the shadowlands. He has less and less to call on with each passing moon, and in time..."

There was a small shrug.

"When a rather frustrated member of the team who'd been lectured for improperly trying to divert a wild storm outside regulations simply quit on him, I sent a letter directly to the Bureau," the older mare told her. "I asked for youth and inner fire and a pony who would do whatever was necessary to make things work. And Stratus -- sent me you. Why is that, do you think?"

Rainbow, still waiting for that first stinging blow from daylight, had no answer.

"Do you know," the mayor asked, "how many ponies who work from that Tartarus-freed book actually manage to create something which even partially functions?"

"...no."

"Nor do I," the mare declared, and a thin smile played about her lips. "I imagine it's around the same number for which Mrs. Cruelneigh grants a ranking of 'adequate'. Step outside my office, Miss Dash: I need to put some of these papers away, and then if you're coming with me, I'll wait until you're finished at the store, then lead you to my home. I recognize that you're still learning the town. But I recommend memorizing the path to Town Hall, and through the building to this room. Because I expect that even beyond those occasions during which you report any attempted abuses of Passing's position to me, you'll be using it more than a few times. And should you be bound for Thunderlane's, good evening to you."

The attic had been nice. Nothing fancy, but... nice.

Passing Shower had been furious, and he'd expressed that fury by putting her on a two-pony team with Thunderlane (who'd also offended him -- somehow) and sending them both out over the wild zone, spending hours checking for encroaching storms. It gave them time to talk, and she learned that he had a brother, while her nose told her he spent far too much on mane care products. She also learned that the entire team had spotted her injuries and naturally assumed apples had been involved, then tried to change the subject.

After that, they separated: he had something planned in Canterlot and Rainbow was heading into town, where she -- wanted to spend a little time on the ground before she started repairing her home. She needed to learn something about what she was flying over, after all. About the ponies who hadn't sent her back. And if her hooves were going to stop being sore, then they probably needed a lot more experience with the dumb cobblestones, which meant they were going to see some non-cloud walking until they got that experience and quit complaining about everything. So there.

She came in on a west-to-east approach, and so spotted the incredibly full tail as its owner moved up the initial arc of the bridge, just barely keeping the long fall off the rock. Then she saw coral-pink mane, soft yellow fur, and swallowed hard.

She's trotting. I can get ahead of her before she ever sees me --

The same settled zone.

For however long we're both here.

And then she was in front of the shapely form. Rainbow hovered just over the bridge's apex, directly above the keystone, and forced every word.

"I... I don't know if you remember me..."

The yellow head tilted up. Just enough mane fell to the side for the exposure of a single eye.

They looked at each other for a while, caught by a frozen moment in the heart of summer.

"...yes."