| Latest revision |
Your text |
| Line 98: |
Line 98: |
| | | | |
| | ==Background== | | ==Background== |
| − | Falling Fog was born in Las Pegasus, the daughter of two Weather Ponies, and from a very early age longed to be a Weather Pony herself. Always small and quiet, endurance was a major worry for accomplishing her dreams, and no amount of flying exercise really seemed to help her overcome it. As pegasi go, she is at best an average flyer, and for some wind-related tasks her limited endurance makes her effectively hopeless. She was hardly a standout...In fact, she was rather easy to overlook. All the same, when things went wrong, she was usually there, encouraging her friends and trying to keep up, determined not to let her size prevent her from helping in any way she possibly could.<br>
| + | (insert background text here) |
| − | | |
| − | One morning, while comforting a friend who had been slightly scorched in trying to help the local weather pegasi deal with a brush fire, Fog manifested a light mist around herself and her friend...Not much in the grand scheme of weather control, but cooling and calming, and particularly noteworthy given the lack of available humidity in the air due to the nearby blaze. Her cutie mark was so subtle that she didn't even realize she had it for a few hours.<br>
| |
| − | | |
| − | Her cutie mark, and the encouragement of friends and parents, kept her going despite a few rather disastrous performances at the Cloudsdale Weather Academy. She barely got in, and she barely graduated. She had great difficulty working with large clouds, and her limiting size and endurance made any sort of serious wind control out of the question. She couldn't conjure clouds to any degree...Except for light mists and fogs. It was only through extreme scholastic efforts and determination to learn all she could about weather theory that she was able to successfully graduate...And the Senior Windmaster who signed off on her graduation chit fully expected her to be a researcher rather than an actively participant Weather Pony.<br>
| |
| − | | |
| − | Her first assignment as an apprentice Weather Pony was in Manehattan. The advantage of being part of a big-city weather team was that every pony's ability could be put to some use: on cloudless days, Falling Fog's mist-work could be built up by better cloud-herders much more easily than starting from scratch. The disadvantage was that in a city where everyone was trying to shine, she only seemed to stand out in her constant struggle to keep up. She was able to do her best work in the early hours before dawn, when it was cool and the dewpoint was lowest, but she was expected to work during daylight hours with the other weather ponies, and (like most Manehattanites) expected to socialize late into the night with the rest of the team. Fairly soon, she was being quietly referred to as 'Falling Asleep,' or (after more than one unfortunate incident) 'Falling Off Clouds'. Never where she could hear it, of course...Except when she did.<br>
| |
| − | | |
| − | As gently as possible, her supervisor took her aside at the end of her apprentice year, and quietly laid out the problem and a proposed solution. She was a dear and her teammates all liked her, but while no-one at all questioned how hard she worked to pull her weight, she really seemed to have difficulty with keeping the pace set by the team. She obviously wasn't getting enough sleep, and sooner or later it would catch up to her, which wouldn't be an issue if she were doing something quiet like gardening, but weather control was potentially dangerous. Falling Fog would almost certainly do better somewhere slower paced, but still challenging, and her supervisor even had a place in mind.<br>
| |
| − | | |
| − | Despite her ex-supervisor's high hopes, in the half year since she arrived at Trot Ridge, Falling Fog has had a bit of a rough time. The local Weather Ponies seem to operate on a more independent basis, working individually to rotate what clouds are available between various farms, and often going long distances to rope and drag back a reasonable number of clouds. Occasionally, they assemble and cooperate to break up really harmful storms during the rainy season...Preventing flash floods that might endanger the town, for instance...But an awful lot of a Weather Pony's time out here seems to be operating alone on their own judgement and as needed. The local weather ponies are almost entirely independent, aloof, frontier types. There isn't really a "team," in the sense double-F is used to and she's feeling the lack, particularly given the local Weather Ponies' assessment of her limited cloud-wrangling abilities.<br>
| |
| − | | |
| − | On the other hand, she's able to create local mists even in the worst of the dry season, when clouds are really few and far between, so she's gotten some appreciation from a few farmers who were more intent on keeping crops alive in general than "rain" in particular. She still does her best work at night, without the sun to burn off the mist and dew, but beyond that, it's quite a change from the constant schedule of Manehattan, and she's desperate for company and something to do to feel useful, particularly during the rainy season.
| |
| | | | |
| | ==Equipment== | | ==Equipment== |
