Power Outage
Admiral Biscuit
Most pegasi, even if they weren’t weatherponies, felt some pull towards the sky whenever weather rolled in. A desire to get in the sky, to move around the clouds to where they were needed the most, a chance to dance in the winds and feel the storm’s strength. Especially on Earth, where weather was always feral.
Moonlight Zephyr wasn’t like most pegasi. As the pressure started dropping, she started yawning; by the time the first drops of rain were falling, her eyes were drooping; the first flash of lightning found her fast asleep on the couch, her muzzle tucked under a wing.
Wind gusts rattled the house and thunder boomed; her ears would occasionally twitch but other than that, she was out like a light.
•••
Luke got home just as the storm was wrapping up. Off to the west, the sky was clear, and the rain had tapered off to just a gentle drizzle.
He’d had to detour twice due to trees or branches down over the road, and the traffic lights had been out at a few intersections. Most of them hadn’t rated a police response yet, which meant extra caution—not every driver knew that they were supposed to stop at non-functioning traffic lights.
Luke got a first look at the house as he turned into the driveway. No trees down in the front yard, which was good. However, the porch light was off, which almost certainly meant the power was out. No surprise there. After he opened the front door, he flicked the switch for the foyer lights just the same, and they didn’t come on.
No surprise.
A quick trip around the house showed the cause—one of the trees in the backyard had lost a huge limb, and it had yanked the wires out of the house. There didn’t seem to be any other damage.
He checked on Moonlight—she was sacked out on the couch. With nothing else to do, Luke started gathering flashlights and oil lamps: better to find them while it was still light out rather than struggle looking for them later.
Once that was accomplished, he got out his phone and reported the outage to the utility company. They probably already knew, but it was better to make the call than to assume a truck was on the way.
•••
Moonlight Zephyr didn’t know that the power was out, even though the house was quieter than usual; none of the machines that made up a modern life were functioning. Any niggling questions at the back of her mind were ignored in sleep fog and the after-rain smells.
She yawned and stretched, then hopped off the couch and headed for the kitchen—she was always hungry after a nap.
The house was well-stocked with food, most of which could be eaten as was, but which could be made better with all the clever appliances in the kitchen. Cooking wasn’t her forte, but she had learned how to microwave things, and she’d also learned how to make smoothies. Proper ones, smooth and silky and delicious.
She dumped her ingredients into the blender and pushed the button, and nothing happened. Moonlight Zephyr frowned and pushed a different button with the same result. “Luke?”
A moment later. “Yeah?”
“The blender doesn’t work.”
“Oh yeah.” He came into the kitchen. “Power’s out.”
Moonlight pushed the button on the blender again, which still did nothing, then looked at the power cord, which was securely plugged into the wall. “Why is the power out?”
“A branch fell on the power line in the backyard, brought it down.”
“How am I supposed to make my smoothie?” Moonlight abandoned the blender and her unblended smoothie and trotted over to the kitchen window, put her hooves up on the counter, and peered out the window. “I don’t see it.”
“You can’t from here,” Luke said. “You can see it out my bedroom window, or walk around the house—don’t get close to it, it’s dangerous. We have to wait for the power company to put it back up.”
“How long does that take?”
“I don’t know. It could be a couple of days, depending on how many other people are without power.”
Moonlight Zephyr dropped back down to the kitchen floor, her hooves landing with a resounding ‘clack.’ “I’m not going to wait a couple days for my smoothie, I can fix it.”
“No, you can’t. It’s dangerous.”
“There isn’t as much electricity in your wires as there is in a thunderstorm,” she said. “If it was dangerous birds couldn’t sit on the wires.”
“Absolutely not.”
His words didn’t dissuade her—she darted around him and galloped to the front door, threw it open, and then flew over the house to the backyard.
•••
The weatherhead on the house looked like an electrical outlet, and the wire lying on the ground looked like a power cord. It was a simple concept, and Luke was just being silly about not plugging the house back in. He doesn't think he can do it because he hasn’t got a high enough ladder. I don’t need a ladder.
She landed next to the end of the sundered wire. There wasn’t a plug on it, just torn insulation, frayed conductors, and torn electrical tape. The grass had scorch marks on it from where the wire had arced when it had come down.
It wasn't arcing any more—obviously, all the electricity had drained out of it. Moonlight Zephyr understood the principle; if she unplugged a cord from the wall she sometimes got a tingle from the electricity, but when she went to plug it back in, she didn’t.
Luke had been silly about her plugging things in and unplugging them. He worried about the strangest things.
Still, at the back of her mind there was a lingering feeling of doubt. The sockets in the wall always had electricity in them; it didn’t drain out on the floor.
Maybe his house worked more like a thundercloud that had lots of electricity in it which would last until it was depleted, until the charge between the cloud and the ground had been equalized. The wires that attached would always keep that potential maintained, in a similar manner to cloud-ropes.
Moonlight flew back up to the weatherhead just as Luke made it around the house. “Look, all I have to do is put these wires back together again.”
“No, it’s too dangerous, just wait for the power company to come out and fix it. That’s their job.”
“This’ll be easy,” she insisted, and flew back down to the severed wire.
“You have to listen to me,” Luke started, just as she grabbed the wire in her mouth.
He winced and simultaneously took a step both forward and back, instinct and knowledge colliding; he was already struggling to remember what to do if somebody or somepony was getting electrocuted. Is pushing the wire off with a stick safe or not?
Moonlight shifted her grip, dropped her stance and hopped as she extended her wings, the power line trailing up behind her like a malevolent snake that was temporarily neutralized. The wire was still low enough he could grab it and pull her back down.
Instead, he stood petrified as she got it into position and started twisting the ends together, watching in horrified fascination. Any moment there’d be an arc flash, but there wasn’t; she got the cable tied to the pole somehow and then went to work on the wires.
Luke was still working on processing what he’d just seen when she glided back down, landing at his feet. “It’s kind of tied off. The wire rope won’t hold on for long, I need something else to secure it with. And there’s some kind of sticky insulation that was wrapped around the wires, do you mind if I look in your tool kit?”
He nodded without really registering what she’d asked. The wire was up and she was no worse for the wear. It wasn’t burning his house down anyway.
How much did pegasi know about electricity? He’d been given to understand that ponies didn’t have electricity, and yet she’d seemed to understand how to make it work.
•••
Moonlight returned with a roll of electrical tape in her mouth and a length of rope around her barrel, every bit the equine electrician. She flew back up and fluttered around the weatherhead; in no time at all the wires were taped off and the cable was securely fastened with a rope-based splice and a second rope loop just in case the splice wasn’t good enough.
This time when she landed, all the tension finally left Luke’s body. She’d been right, she could fix it, and he fervently hoped he’d never have the opportunity to see her try again.
“So . . . how do you know how to do that, anyway?”
She shrugged. “Used to work on a ship, setting the sails and fixing the rigging when it broke. Easier for a pegasus to get up there, don’t need the rope ladders.”
“No, I mean the electricity.”
“It works just the same as an extension cord, it’s not that hard to figure out.” She hip-checked him. “Now I can have my smoothie.”
•••
The lights in the house weren’t on, and the smoothie remained unmade.
“But I fixed it.”
“The line must be down somewhere else, too.”
Moonlight looked out the window and then back at her still unblended smoothie.
Luke sighed; he could already tell where this was going to go. “Power lines are dangerous. It’s enough voltage to kill you. You were lucky that the line to my house wasn’t energized.”
“I know what I’m doing.” She turned and slapped him with her tail and then started trotting to the front door.
“You don’t,” Luke protested. “You can’t—”
She pressed down on the handle and there was a moment where he could still have stopped her. A moment he could have grabbed her tail or wrapped her in a bear hug, even a last moment as her wings unfurled and she took flight where he might have grabbed a hoof, and then it was too late. She was in the air, her head tracking the power line away from the house.
It would serve her right to be electrocuted. Closing the door and doing nothing was an option. Not a good one.
He could follow her in his truck, and maybe talk some sense into her when she found where the line was down.
•••
Luke had never really paid all that much attention to electrical distribution infrastructure. Utility poles and their associated wires and other accessories were commonplace enough to fade into the background, something he saw every day but never thought about.
Now that he was following a pegasus who was following the line, he did think about it, he did pay attention to the wires going hither and yon, eventually culminating in a substation or a power plant somewhere—how far would she follow it back?
He’d never tried driving while tracking a pegasus who was following a power line. It was the kind of thing that felt like it would be easy until he was doing it, and then he discovered the difficulty of splitting his focus and just how many trees could hide a low-flying pegasus.
Every time he lost her, he glanced at the sky and his rearview mirror, pulled to the side of the road, and watched for her to reappear. Logic said that she’d keep following the line until it was down, and he’d see where it was down, too.
Luke hadn’t accounted for circuit breakers on poles. He was scanning the sky for her and then caught a glimpse of motion in his side mirror; she was examining a transformer and the lines coming out of it.
In hindsight, it was obvious that there would be circuit breakers in utility lines, but Luke had never thought about that. He saw her fly in and grab a bar with her forehooves; a moment later she pushed it up into its contacts.
In the rapidly-darkening sky, the arc as it made contact was nearly blinding; not only did he catch it in the mirror but it also illuminated the inside of the cab. Luke blinked spots out of his vision, scanned the reflected image of the sky for Moonlight.
It took him a heart-stopping few seconds to find her: she was flying back in the direction of the house.
Luke checked for oncoming traffic and as soon as the road was clear did an awkward three-point turn, wishing as he occasionally did that his truck had a turning radius of less than forty acres.
•••
Moonlight arrived home before Luke, expecting that now everything would be fixed. To her disappointment, instead of glowing brightly like they normally did, some of the lights were an odd brownish color, some had a faint reddish-orange tinge at the base of their globes, and some weren’t working at all.
There were other things in the house which could be tested, but those things were more expensive than light bulbs, and since something was wrong with the electricity, it probably wasn’t safe to turn them on.
She stuck her nose against an electrical outlet, feeling the electrical tickle. It didn’t feel right at all.
The contactor only fit one way, she thought. No way I could have gotten that wrong. The wires into the house might have gotten mixed up; it was obvious how the bare cable was supposed to attach. The other two had looked identical, and she thought that since the house ran on alternating Pixii electricity it wouldn’t matter which wire went where.
That might have been a mistake. Or something else was still wrong. I saw lots of branches and trees that had fallen down while I was flying; maybe one of them fell over a wire somewhere else. If it didn’t tear the wire down, like it had at the house, what else might it do? Could it drain some of the electricity through it, not leaving enough to light the lights? Or was it simply a fault with her repair on the house—would it be smart to switch the wires first and then see what happened?
Moonlight was still pondering this when Luke came through the front door. She met him in the living room, and pointed to the dimly-lit ceiling light. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Brownout,” he said.
“What’s that?”
Luke shrugged and motioned around. “There’s not enough power—it’s supposed to be a hundred twenty volts, but it isn’t. Haven’t seen one since I was a kid.” He looked at the desk lamp and then turned it off. “LEDs really don’t like it.”
“How do I fix it?”
“I don’t know.” Could a downed line be delivering some power, but not enough? Luke watched one of the incandescent lights—it was flickering.
“Do you think I hooked the wires up to the house wrong?”
“It’s AC, it shouldn’t matter. Maybe if they’re not making good contact.”
Moonlight fluttered her wings and then looked out the window. “I twisted them back together pretty good, they should be.”
“You should really wait for a pro.”
“Not gonna happen, I know I can fix it.” She reached up and booped him with a hoof, “I’ve just got to find the problem.” Before he could protest, she headed back outside.
Begrudgingly, he followed along, rationalizing as he went. The first time the power had been out. He hadn’t known that, and she might not have either. It would have protected her; unenergized power lines weren’t a danger.
And the big circuit breaker on the pole? That would have been designed to touch, right? Maybe with gloves, but her hooves could protect her, she was flying—what would happen if she shorted herself to the conduit on his house?
How do you perform CPR on a pony?
She was circling the pole like a vulture, studying the lines. He arrived just in time for her to touch her repairs, briefly getting close enough to the ground to arc the line—a flash and a few falling sparks, and then she backed off, shaking one hoof.
Moonlight dove down and landed in front of him. “There’s the same electricity coming in as there is inside. More or less.”
“Are you okay?”
She shrugged and lifted her hoof. “Arced off part of a shoe nail, not the first time it’s happened. Feels funny.” She wiggled her horseshoe to make sure it was still secure, and then her eyes went back to the line, following it to the pole where it joined the main circuit, then back down to the branch lying on the lawn. “There’s got to be something else wrong.”
“It’s getting dark; you’ll never find it.” But she might; a tree down was a pretty obvious thing to see, even in the last light of the day.
“It comes from somewhere and follows along the wires; eventually I’ll get to the source of it,” she insisted.
“That’s at least a whole city away, maybe further. There might be a distribution center closer.” Luke frowned—like so many modern things, he never really thought about where they came from so long as they were available. Somewhere, the high tension lines dropped into a substation, and the lines branched out to his house from there, but he didn’t know where it was. The thought of her flying into one of those and messing with things terrified him. Even if she didn’t electrocute herself, who knew what she might accidentally do to the power grid?
“This time, I’ll drive,” he offered. That way he could keep an eye on her and maybe talk some sense into her before she did anything really dumb.
•••
Moonlight had the window down and her head out so that she could better see the power line. When it crossed the street, she put her hooves up on the dash and pressed her muzzle against the windshield, then decided that wasn’t a good enough view and climbed out the sliding window in the rear of the cab, standing atop the toolboxes with her forehooves on the cab roof.
Luke wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d suddenly taken flight—she was impulsive, and unlikely to announce that she’d seen something that she wanted to investigate.
He flicked on the bed light which illuminated her belly. He watched in the rearview mirror as she shifted, looking down at this sudden new light source, and then returned her attention to the wires.
They were a thing that had always been there, and he’d never really paid that much attention to them. They faded into the background, their operation and the logic of their routing a complete mystery. Why did they cross back and forth across the street sometimes? Was that a hint to the order in which houses had been constructed, or was the soil just better for power poles on one side of the road?
He knew what pole-mounted transformers were, but he didn’t know what the industrial gray-green locker mounted on a pole was for. It had a red light on it—was that a new thing or had it always had that?
Were they on a wild goose chase? The problem might be one block over, or in someone’s backyard. One of the transformers might have burned out, gotten fried by lightning, something that they’d never see. Utility workers knew where the lines went, how the electricity flowed, and when they knew who’d lost power they’d know what to check.
And then he rounded a gentle curve in the road and saw it. A tree had gone down, half the road was blocked, and there were plenty of electrical arcs from the ditch.
He didn’t see the broken telephone pole; he was concentrating on not crashing into the tree.
Luke heard Moonlight’s hooves scrape across the roof as he slammed on the brakes. He swerved into the opposite lane, caught a glimpse of her belly in the rearview mirror as she slid across the toolboxes, and then he was crunching across branches, hoping none of them punctured anything important. Like a tire, or worse, the radiator or the oil pan.
The left wheels dropped off the hard shoulder into the gravel, then the ditch tried to suck him in. He jerked the front wheels back too enthusiastically; the rear slid into the dirt and then grabbed as the front wheels bounced back up onto pavement.
He was diagonally across the road, cursing himself for not expecting this, and then he remembered that Moonlight had been riding his toolboxes.
And she still was; she poked her head through the rear window. “You okay?”
“I was going to ask the same,” Luke muttered. “Sorry about that.”
•••
Moonlight hadn’t been paying attention to the road in front of them; she’d had her attention focused on the power lines. She hadn’t been expecting the truck to try and buck her off at all.
She’d slid forward on the roof and lost purchase with her hind hooves, then the truck had started to go sideways and her instincts had kicked in; with the generally forward motion the Ford still had and the slipstream over the cab, just sticking out her wings had been enough to generate enough lift to get her off it.
Inspecting the power line was a priority, but so was quelling Luke’s worries, so once the truck came to a stop she landed back on the toolboxes and stuck her head through the sliding window.
Once they’d both been assured that the other was okay, Luke backed the truck around the tree as she watched from the bed. He didn’t have any flares or traffic cones, but parking on the shoulder and leaving his headlights pointed at the tree would serve as a warning to others.
•••
Moonlight flew out and studied the damage. It was obvious that the spitting, sputtering power line was the cause of the problem—nearly all the lines had come down when the tree had shattered the pole.
One set of lines was still in the air, the ones off the very top of the pole. The rest had been dragged to the ground.
She wrinkled her muzzle—she could still smell the ozone hanging thick in the air.
There was no hope of fixing the pole. Even if she knew how to put the wood back together, she couldn’t lift it.
The lines couldn’t stay on the ground, either; they leaked out too much electricity and might be dangerous to someone who came to remove the fallen tree.
She didn’t need to touch the line to feel the current arcing out of it; she could feel it in her wings and her hooves and her fur. Not nearly as strong as a proper thundercloud, but with almost limitless potential. Both the water and electric charge in clouds were limited, and when they were gone, they were gone. A power line was more like a hose attached to an infinite electrical reservoir somewhere.
Flying up to the higher line confirmed what she already knew—that one carried a lot more voltage: it was pricklier.
Part of the crosstie was still attached to it; it had broken off when the pole came down. It caused the wires to twist and occasionally get close enough to arc, sending a blue flash up the line. That would have to be fixed, too.
Moonlight studied the trees around her, looking for thick branches. She didn’t think that simply draping the wires over a branch would be a good solution—they’d move around and maybe short against each other.
But Luke’s truck had rope in it, and she could suspend the wire from branches. That was almost like a proper pole.
•••
He was on the telephone, reporting the downed line and fallen tree, so she just opened up the toolboxes on her own. They had big buttons on them and the lids sprung up when the button was pushed.
She had the coil of rope in her mouth when he ended his call and she considered telling him what she was going to do, but decided he’d probably try and stop her if she did and that would lead to a stupid argument about how dangerous electricity was.
It might be dangerous, but not getting her smoothie would be tragic.
Moonlight flew up and circled over the broken crosstie, judging which limb would best serve to stabilize it.
Before deciding on her course of action, she needed to know how conductive the rope was. Especially when it was wet. She spooled off a long enough section to cross two of the three lines and dropped it on them.
At first, nothing happened, then she saw a tendril of electricity leap out—a leader—and course its way along the line. That was almost immediately followed by a blinding flash, and then the rope was gone.
Too conductive. She looked at the crosstie again—it was still going to be useful after all.
•••
Her rope sling was crude, but effective. The crosstie couldn’t twist anymore, and that kept those two lines apart. They were draped up well clear of the ground, and she’d only gotten shocked a few times—enough that Luke had stopped wincing every time it happened.
For the third high-voltage line, she wrapped a clove hitch around its insulator—the stub of crosstie that was left wasn’t very useful—and tied that to the tree as well.
That was only some work done; she still had the other lines to deal with, the ones that were on the ground.
She started in the middle. Tying the rope around the wire was a challenge; all the arc flashes made it hard to see what she was doing, and on her first attempt the rope melted. Moonlight frowned—proper rope barely burned, and it certainly didn’t melt. Human rope was stupid.
Part of the problem, she decided, was that all the arcs were concentrated in one spot, since she was grounding the line as she picked it up and worked with it. If she stuffed the rope under the wire quickly, it wouldn’t have time to melt, and then she could fly one end up to the tree, tie it off, and pull the wire up with the other end. Not as good a solution as she’d wanted, but she had to work with the tools she had.
Her theory was correct, and while it might have been more work than she wanted to do, it was an effective solution.
Once the wire was off the ground, the rest was just busy-work. Trees moved more than power poles—she’d stood on both. Extra supports were needed to make sure that the wire couldn’t move around too much and hit things it shouldn’t.
•••
The last cable was easier in a technical sense. It wasn't leaking out electricity or sparking all over the place. It was fatter and heavier and she was getting tired—this was a lot of effort to get her smoothie.
Everybody will be able to make smoothies when I’m done. Or watch TV or browse on their computers. The thought motivated her; a lot of people were going to be happy when she finished her work.
•••
She landed for the last time and after she’d given Luke what was left of his rope, the two of them admired her work. It wasn’t as neat and planned out as the rigging on a ship, but it was no less effective. All the wires were back up in the air like they should be, and she’d tied them off in such a way that none of them could hit any other lines.
A distant strobing light caught their eyes, and both turned. “State Patrol,” Luke said. “Probably, they said they were going to send someone out . . . I don’t think we should say anything about the power line.”
“Why not? I fixed it!”
“That might not exactly be legal.”
“That’s dumb.”
•••
It wasn’t the highway patrol. It was a volunteer firefighter in his pickup truck. He had cones and flares and a chainsaw, and neither Moonlight nor Luke made any mention of the power line repair. His concern wasn’t with the wires, just the tree and the potential for an unwitting motorist to drive right into it.
She and Luke left as he started up the chainsaw, both of them wondering if her repair had actually worked. As they turned into the driveway it was obvious that it had: the porch light was glowing brightly, a beacon in the darkness. Luke waited for Moonlight to hop out the window before rolling it up and shutting off the truck.
She waited for him before trotting into the kitchen and triumphantly pushing the button on the blender; with a hearty roar it sprung to life and started making her smoothie.
Moonlight poured it into a glass and savored it—she’d earned this smoothie.
TWO DAYS LATER
It was Derrick’s second call in the area. He’d gotten the first dispatch the morning after the storm; a group of houses had lost power and the most likely cause was open breakers. Lines had touched or maybe lightning, and then the system had worked as designed.
However, when he got to the pole with the breakers on it, they were all closed and a quick check showed that the power was flowing as it should.
At the time he didn’t think much of it; there was lots of chaos after a storm and plenty of work to do. That he didn’t have to do anything here would give him more time for another call—he cleared the ticket and drove on. Dispatch had gotten something wrong. Wasn’t the first time, wouldn't be the last.
He might not have remembered the call, until he’d been dispatched to another problem on the same circuit, this time a broken pole. It had been called in just after the storm by first responders, and there hadn’t been any further reports of power outages. Maybe a car had hit it and damaged it, and the fire department had shored it up.
Derrick didn’t miss the stub of a utility pole because he was panic dodging a downed tree—that had long since been cleared off the road. His attention had been directed elsewhere.
Most people didn’t really pay that much attention to power lines; they were just there. Derrick did; that was literally his job. Even before he saw exactly how the lines had been hung, he knew that the catenary was wrong.
And then he spotted the ropes in the tree.
“What the—”
Author's Note
Click HERE for story notes!
