The barometer filed its lawsuit in mercury tears. Ling discovered the first droplet at dawn—a quicksilver bead trembling on the kitchen windowsill, its surface reflecting infinite iterations of her face being sued by cumulus clouds. By the time she reached the porch, the farm had become a cartographer's nightmare: hailstones etched with tort reform coordinates pelted the fields, each impact leaving craters that spelled ATMOSPHERE V. LING in braille only thunderstorms could read.
Chu Feng stood knee-deep in a sudden swamp where the cornfield used to be, his shadow—still serving photosynthesis probation—struggling to bail water with a bucket made of outdated weather reports. "The cirrus faction wants royalties on every sunset metaphor," he called out, swatting a mosquito that transmitted class-action notifications through its proboscis.
Arbiter materialized upside-down from a waterspout, his suit now woven from Doppler radar prints and lightning-strike apologies. "I might've explained thermal rights to a heatwave! But only to stop it melting the scarecrow's plea bargains!"
A thunderclap rattled the barn doors open, vomiting forth:
A jury pool of younger/older storm fronts arguing over voir dire
A prosecutor shaped like a sentient hurricane eye with a JD from Hurricane University
The decomposed remains of every weather metaphor Ling had weaponized
The Sky's Lament
The Cumulo-Nimbus Tribunal convened in the carcass of a dead tornado. Judge Stratus Lex presided as a shimmering heat distortion in judicial robes, their voice oscillating between drizzle and cataclysm:
"Defendant stands accused of:" Raindrops bullet-pointed the charges midair. "(a) Unauthorized narrative appropriation of cumulus formations; (b) Gross negligence in emotional barometric pressure regulation; and (c) Willful distortion of…" A lightning bolt illuminated the addendum: "…'partly cloudy' to describe complex psychological states."
Ling hurled Jiang Yue's music box into the storm's eyewall. Its gears ground through isobars, playing a melody that made hailstones weep confessions in Morse code: WE WERE ONCE SNOWFLAKES.
"Objection!" Her voice fractured into seven weather patterns. "Plaintiff lacks standing in any stable climate model!"
Stratus Lex's gavel—a frozen lightning bolt—slammed, birthing a microburst that ate the barn's west wall. "Sustained as meteorologically irrelevant! Exhibit B:" The vortex vomited security footage of Chu Feng whistling during a Category 3 existential crisis.
The Prosecution's Gale-Force Evidence
The trial unfolded through meteorological horror. The prosecution's first witness condensed from morning fog—a dew drop wearing prosecutor's pinstripes and existential dread.
"The defendant's great-grandfather weaponized cirrus clouds during the 1926 Wheat Crisis!" It projected holograms of combine harvesters shaped like biblical plagues. "My client demands restitution for every metaphor comparing storms to… to…" The droplet shuddered. "Emotional turbulence!"
Chu Feng countered by releasing genetically modified dandelions that ate the testimony mid-air. "Your honor, this evidence is clearly cumulo-nimbus!"
The scarecrow judge—now hosting a family of litigious barn swallows in its chest cavity—attempted to bang its lightning-rod gavel but only succeeded in triggering an electromagnetic pulse that erased three decades of weather data.
The Defense's Eye-Wall Gambit
During recess, Ling climbed into the tornado's still-beating heart. What she found would've drowned a lesser farmer:
Childhood summers selling lightning strikes as tourist attractions.
Arbiter teaching blizzards contract law during the Great Frost Arbitration of '09.
The moon plow's secret midnight ritual—carving apologies into frost patterns for dawn to erase.
She emerged clutching a black ice USB extruded by a weeping glacier. "Your honor, I move to introduce Exhibit Zeta."
The drive contained:
The prosecution's deleted browser history (mostly storm-chaser reality TV)
A subpoenaed memory of Stratus Lex binge-listening to hurricane ASMR
Jiang Yue's original blueprints for Ethical Climate Narratives buried under Hallmark Channel patents
The courtroom's barometric pressure dropped. For the first time in recorded history, a hurricane eye blushed.
The Climatic Turn
Ling's closing argument involved a stolen weather satellite, two pounds of liquid nitrogen guilt, and a karaoke machine tuned to the key of remorse.
"You want pure meteorology?" She smashed the satellite into the trial's jet stream, unleashing a downpour of ancestral weather reports. "Let's talk about the Native rain dances you paved for water parks! The slave-trade wind patterns! The—"
A hailstone the size of a plea bargain shattered the defense table.
Stratus Lex's eyewall wobbled. "The tribunal… acknowledges systemic atmospheric appropriation."
The Settlement's Aftermath
The verdict reshaped the skies:
The Barn Silo became a sovereign cumulus nation with voting rights for rogue raindrops.
Chu Feng's Shadow was sentenced to 20,000 hours of community evaporation.
All Precipitation received backpay in atmospheric equity and dental clouds.
The Scarecrow Judge entered witness protection as a cumulonimbus formation over Nebraska.
As Stratus Lex retreated to binge-watch tornado documentaries, Ling found Chu Feng reprogramming the moon plow's guilt algorithms with a lightning rod.
"Next crisis?" he asked, dodging a radioactive rain gauge.
She watched Arbiter negotiate with a battalion of militant sunbeams. "The ozone's suing for emotional depletion damages."
The Calm Between Fronts
Twilight fell like a settled out-of-court agreement. The atmosphere hummed with encrypted apologies as fireflies calibrated new barometric keys above the wetlands. The music box played on—its melody merging with the scarecrow's thunderhead therapy sessions and the moon plow's contented static as it tilled climate guilt into fallow forecasts.
Somewhere beyond the jet stream, February 30th curated a museum of pardoned precipitation, its walls papered with retired hurricane names and snowflake cease-and-desist orders. The audits, as ever, continued—but here, in the meteorological liminality between squall and silence, the balance felt…
Well.
Forecasted.