'Twas a Moderately Well Lit and Mostly Cloudy Evening(Open)

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Thunderlane scratched his chin and looked up into the slightly darkening sky as pegasi flew about; moving, changing, replacing, and bringing in storm clouds. He scanned the sky from the center of town, occasionally whistling and pointing at a few places where clouds needed to be swapped or placed. Only occasionally did he glance down at his list to compare what they were supposed to have with what they actually had. If the cloud cover wasn't perfect, the lightning strikes would be completely unpredictable as opposed to a little variant. The dark furred pegasus bit his lip lightly, tapping a hoof on the ground. It was rare that they ever got their storms exactly as they expected to, but this particular batch was shaping up to be a little more difficult than he expected. The numbers were falling a fair bit outside the expected norms, which threatened the balance for the whole storm. Any other city on Equestria could spread the cloud cover more thinly to erase the problem but, well, this was Ponyville. They had the Everfree.

Thunder sat himself down and rubbed the back of his neck, gazing at the paper, then at the sky, then back at the paper. His brain turned over and over, trying to figure out just what they were going to do. At the moment, his best hope was that they could get 30 more clouds from the bunker, but that would put them at a solid 15% overage, and it was unlikely that they had been sent quite that large of an excess. His eyes flicked to the ponies bringing in the clouds, and he started counting. Seven, eight, nine...twenty-one, twenty-two...And one final pegasus floated down and reported that all the clouds were present. Thunder sighed and nodded, and the weather pony headed out again to help the others. With a grimace, Thunder set about trying to jerryrig a fix to their dilemma.

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Argentum had found a nice spot in the middle of town, out of the way, to watch the going abouts of ponies as he read. The fading light of the evening gave him just enough to read by, until it was suddenly covered up. He blinked, knowing he sun didn't just decide to fall that quickly, so he looked about, and saw the Pegasi scrambling to put clouds out and about. He blinked a few times, looking through his Ponyville Notes, and not finding anything about this event. He put his books away, and looked around, finding a Pony that seemed to be organizing the whole thing. Argentum watched him carefully, wondering what the grimace was about. Argentum stretched his wings and gave a flap, lifting himself slowly toward the Pegasus. "What's all of this about?" He asked, his voice friendly, despite the line sounding angry. "Er, I mean, what are you doing? It looks almost like you're forcing the weather." He tried to correct himself, then quickly silenced himself, waiting to hear the explanation.

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"What's all of this about?"

Thunderlane looked up from the book and, turning to see who was speaking to him, started responding.

"Well, we're pegasi. Weather's our thing, we gotta-WOAH!" He jumped back a few feet and caught himself in the air, trying to steady his floating as much as he was trying to calm his heart down. Dragons were not a thing that showed up very often in Ponyville. Well, one did, but this wasn't Spike. Unless Spike had grown to several times his own size, changed color, and completely forgotten everything he should have known about pegasi.

The further talking calmed Thunder down a little. Clearly, this dragon wasn't going to try to eat him. Yet. But he also must be new to these parts. "Er...Yeah, sorry. One of the things Pegasi do is control and balance the weather. It helps ensure the wellbeing of the plants and animals, keeps unpredictable lightning strikes down to a minimum, and means that we can give plenty of notice before a big rainstorm so no one can be completely caught off guard. Name's Thunderlane, by the way." He extended a hoof, only regretting doing so after he realized that pulling it back would be considered very, very rude. "I'd tell you more, but I've really gotta work out how to get this cloud cover right, or else we might end up with a lightning imbalance." He looked back down at his book, flipped a page, then back up at the sky again, muttering to himself about needing better bookkeeping higher on the chain and something about a noncompliance report.

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Argentum hovered for a few moments, listening to the Pegasus speak. He pulled a journal out and jotted down a quick few notes about what Thunderlane was saying. When he heard the introduction, he quickly put his book away and reached out to shake the hoof, gently grabbing it with the fingers of his hand, making sure the claws didn't touch the hoof, and gently shaking it. "Argentum. Silver Dragon from Winters Rest." Ari introduced. "So... by arranging weather yourself... you make sure ponies stay safe, and the plants stay growing? That's really interesting." Argentum said, genuinely intrigued. "Winters Rest just has snow... And it's not even from Clouds, most of the time. It blows in from the mountains, and stays because of the Glacier. The Ponies there say it's where Winter takes its Summer Vacation." Argentum looked around, glancing at what Thunder was trying to deal with, and figuring out cloud cover. He wasn't sure what could be done, but giving a quick sweep of the area he, figured he might as well see if he could spark some ideas in the Pegasus' head. "Well... You've got quite a few over the lake, if you move some of the clouds away from there to fill in what you're missing in town? The lake would still get water from Runoff, and you'd cover your bases here..." Ari offered.

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Thunderlane couldn't help but grimace. It wasn't that the dragon was necessarily wrong, he just wasn't furnished with all the the data yet.

"Here," he said, floating a little closer. His work was probably the only thing that could get him to ignore the fact that he was talking to a dragon at that particular moment. Well that and nerd stuff. But his work was pretty nerdy when it came down to it. He flipped through the notebook and stopped on a pair of pages that had two different maps drawn on them. The first was a roughly circular town, with a variety of markings in red which looked rather like a terrain map. He pointed to this one first. "This is a standard town setup, these markings represent water and lightning density in the clouds that need to go in the given area. With a town in the open like this, it's generally pretty easy to deal with discrepancies. You just make your area a bit smaller or larger and the numbers tend to balance out."

"This," He pointed at the second page. There was still a circular-ish town, but fairly close to the edge of the town there was a large, thickly outlined shape cutting across the entire page. "Is Ponyville. And that," he pointed at the discrepancy. "Is the Everfree forest. We don't have any control over the weather there. If clouds even float over the treeline it can spell trouble. When we put together a storm, the clouds tend to spread, so relocating too many clouds into town can actually push some of them into the forest, and nobody wants that." He sighed and looked back up. "And we've got an overage of rain as it is. What we're trying to do is balance out the lightning strikes and keep them predictable and, most importantly, safe."

"You sound like you've got the idea of it though. It's just that the forest throws a wrench into the works for all of this."