How Does One Rain?

I am but a cloud, floating from place to place.

And I have one simple question to ask.

How does one rain?

I procrastinated on answering this question for a long time. Sure, knowing how my form worked would be helpful…maybe, but not knowing was fine too. Whenever I thought about raining, it rained, as long as I had water. Easy peasy. No information required.

However, the world had begun to change rapidly ever since the moon shattered. The overall mana capacity had decreased, and the circulation of mana from dense to less dense areas slowed down.

The change was catastrophic for the people below. Most people used mana with pure brute force rather than efficiency. This wasn’t normally an issue since the surrounding mana helped contribute to the spell and replaced whatever was lost. Without the moon though, anything that used mana was much less effective. Many spells that people used became obsolete, with a few of them becoming almost impossible to activate. In addition, their inventions required a decent amount of mana to work, so centuries of progress was lost in an instant.

I was fine at the moment, but what about thousands or millions of years from now? I wasn’t a normal cloud, and my rain was far from normal. There was no guarantee I could keep on raining whenever I thought about doing so. Or maybe I would disappear, lost to the winds until the world ended.

So, time to figure out how I rain.

There were many different types of clouds in the world. Most clouds rained water; however, there were quite a few that rained down all sorts of things.

One forest had acid rain storms a few times a year. The showers were usually quite weak, barely singeing the skin, but sometimes they could turn a forest into a swamp for a few days. The plants adapted by using the acid to dissolve any old layers. The beasts living there developed acid resistant skin.

Another place had a large mountain range. A cloud there rained balls of dirt that rolled down the mountain side. These balls would accumulate the dry runoff, growing larger, until they hit the ground with the force of a meteor, creating relatively shallow craters.

Each type of cloud likely utilized mana in some way. I had just to figure out how.

…

…hmmm, I have absolutely no idea! People barely understand how regular clouds work, much less clouds that rain acid and dirt.

Well, let’s just start with water, since that’s the easiest to figure out.

From what I heard from other people, water cycled through different stages. A water source would be heated by the sun, or suns depending on the day, until the water turned into vapor. The vapor would rise into the sky, slowly cooling down until it turned back into water. These water droplets would then gather together to form clouds, growing larger and larger until they became too heavy. At that point, the water fell back to the ground to repeat the cycle again.

Of course, this description was probably an oversimplification of the whole process. Or it could be completely wrong – it was a theory crafted by the observations of people. However, it was more than enough to start from.

The important part was getting the vapor to turn back into water, so I would need to go higher. As a cloud, I would have normally been around that area already, but I tended to hover closer to the ground to get a better view of the people below. It was much easier to stay low than to use more mana at a distance.

I rose into the sky, using a line of mana to keep track of the vapor in the air. The pressure wave rushing through my ears was quite distracting, so I disconnected my ‘ears’, or whatever it was that let me hear. I could always reconnect them later.

It wasn’t long before I noticed tiny droplets of water all around me. However, the droplets were a lot smaller and more prevalent than I thought. Tens of thousands of tiny droplets stuck to the mana, creating a thin layer barely visible without enhancing my vision. That was good, but also way too many droplets to start with. I wanted to observe at most five, maybe ten, to start and see how they formed clouds.

I thinned the line of mana, trying to decrease the number of droplets, but it was much harder than I expected. It was almost as hard as trying to see that chairperson move. I had to precisely control the flow of mana, connecting some, excluding others. It was working though, somehow.

Best not to question it. Let’s leave the weirdness of mana to someone else.

With the mana sufficiently ‘thinned’, I tried to find some droplets.

…

…

…

Where are they?!? The mana didn’t seem to be hitting anything. Sometimes I saw something zooming past, but nothing ever hit the mana.

I tried increasing the thickness bit by bit, and…

Plip.

There it is!

Slip.

And there it goes! I managed to touch a droplet, but it slipped right off the next moment. The water stuck to the mana before, so the line was probably still too thin. I once again increased the thickness gradually…

Plip. Plop. Plip. Plop.

…

…?

It’s sticking! Once the mana was thick enough for around a thousand droplets, the water stuck around, growing steadily larger. The more droplets there were, the more stable it became. The droplets continued to grow around the mana line until there was just under…some amount. Likely the millions, but I wasn’t counting that high. And then…

Nothing happened!

Yep. All I had was a bunch of water surrounding my line of mana. No clouds whatsoever. Agh! Sometimes I wish I could read those books people carry around! Am I too high? Or am I not high enough?? How is somebody supposed to figure this out?!?

Well, I wasn’t getting anywhere with this, so I stopped enhancing my vision and prepared to–huh? Isn’t that…a cloud? In front of me, where I was just staring, was a small wisp of a cloud. I enhanced my vision again, seeing the water droplets surrounding the mana line. I stopped and saw a cloud. I’ve been looking too closely the entire time???? AGH!!!!!

So, clouds can form when water sticks to mana. Does that hold true for all clouds? Wait…couldn’t I have just looked at a cloud to figure out how it forms?

…

Anyhoo… I flew up next to a nearby cloud, using my mana to take a zoomed-in view. There were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of droplets floating around, doing their own thing. Focusing on a few, I saw a few droplets sticking to mana; however, the majority seemed to be stuck to some piece of…dirt? Sand? Whatever it was, it wasn’t mana. That meant having mana as the core of the droplet was likely the cause behind the weirdness with my rain.

If I thought about it, that would definitely explain a lot. Mana could induce any kind of phenomena within the world. It wouldn’t be surprising that yellow clouds could form from acid droplets or brown clouds from dirt. Mana wasn’t affected by physical objects, so it could easily function as a core.

In my case, I was probably casting some kind of spell with the mana unconsciously, similar to how I normally use it. As long as something stuck to mana, it could potentially form a cloud. Potentially, since I only had two anecdotes and one confirmed test to work off of. I needed to try different types of droplets to confirm.

Hmm…what about mana? That seems a bit far fetched since the core is already made of mana, but maybe…

…

…

…huh.

It works, somehow.

Sooo, what’s that going to do? Unlike the other kinds, mana droplets seemed like a combination of infinite possibilities. Spells that healed wounds could rain down through fireballs. Creatures could pop like a boolean. A tsunami could wash over a desert.

At this point, I was completely sidetracked, but that was how crazy mana droplets were. Absolutely anything could happen.

I’ll have to test it some–

Poof!

Okay, what’s hitting me now?!?

I turned around, only to come face to face with a massive rock slowly lumbering away

…that works.