If you’re procrastinating on reading today’s story: You snooze, you lose.

Sleeping Habits
[Slice of Life] • 8,504 words

Rainbow Dash has rather a poor reputation when it comes to her workload. Everypony always thinks of her as the pony who takes three naps during daylight hours, and four on weekends, and always seems to be looking for something to do to pass the time. All of this is true, of course. But ponies seem to think this means that she must not ever get very much work done.

Can the weather captain for all of Ponyville really be as lazy as she seems? Is that the only explanation for Rainbow Dash’s free time and constant napping?

The weather is a full-time job. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And the worst weather happens at night.

So weather ponies have strange sleeping habits.

FROM THE CURATORS: We’ve read (and featured) stories with exotic approaches in a wide range of crossovers and AUs, which makes it all the more awesome to find a fic which can impress with nothing more than a low-key look at the day in the life of a weatherpony.  “This story might — as the chapter title says — cover just over twelve hours, but it packs a lot in,” AugieDog said, while Chris’ nomination focused on one of the elements we found immediately endearing: “By cracky, it’s just a pitch-perfect take on the classic ‘job that looks easy from the outside’. I can appreciate Dash and co.’s quiet exasperation over the Mayor making their jobs that extra bit harder for unrelated bureaucratic reasons, or their frustrated-yet-tolerant attitude towards the Apples’ ridiculous list of demands.”

A large part of our appreciation was the life that it breathed into that job.  “Every time it talks about weather, it’s fascinating,” Chris said, and Horizon agreed: “The loving detail the story gives to the weather work is a joy to read, both as stellar worldbuilding and as a way to round out the core characters’ lives.  And all this from a story about her naps. This fills in the gaps in canon so smoothly, you could drive an egg truck through at full speed.”  He wasn’t the only one commenting on the synergy with the show.  “One of the things that struck me while watching the first two episodes all those years ago was the way our heroines had jobs that they enjoyed and that they were good at,” AugieDog said.  “This story gets that aspect of Dash’s character absolutely right. At this point in her life, she has her sights set on becoming a Wonderbolt, sure, but she still has a job to do in Ponyville, and she’s going to do it as awesomely as she knows how.”

We also repeatedly commented on how the strong and memorable cast rounded out the story.  “Raindrops was a definite highlight; it’s rare to see friends or coworkers bantering like this, written so naturally,” Present Perfect said.  Chris appreciated the protagonist work: “It’s a nice character study of pre-show Dash, which shows and tells her mix of cockiness and insecurity without resorting to grand gestures.”  And Horizon liked them all.  “The character work is uniformly stellar,” he said.  “The dialogue is consistently excellent, and grounds Dash’s character nicely, as well as all the ponies around her.  That helps shines a light on Dash from an angle I’ve never quite seen, and does a fantastic job of illuminating her with it.”

Read on for our author interview, in which Redric Carrun discusses neglected Mario, recolor beginnings, and parental praise.
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