Caxe-2 is a cloud. In the morning it spends its time tumbling on the ground until it finds a will to haul itself back up in its seat in the sky. Caxe-2, unlike its cloud compatriots, derives dissipation, rues evaporation, and holy detests precipitation. This means Caxe-2 is far more reliable, and among its friends it has garnered a certain level of trust on the order of kiloyears.

As it so happens, the locals that live near Caxe-2 experience ever color over the course of a single day. Caxe-2 always starts at blue, cooled from the static nighttime air. Then the photons come in and start to knock everything about. An event on one crease of the cloud can shudder right through to the other side through a chain of pings, atom shoving atom and telling it to get going, the throng is on a move. After the good part of the morning, a technicolor event is born. Forecastologists of the last century have tried to capture its pigment dynamics inside plots and numbers, sometimes tossing in exponents to make a curve extra steep when it needs to be. None have had success in determining the color arc that Caxe-2 will perform. Caxe-2 is alive.

All four hands needed to be on the steering wheel for this part. The cracks in the road opened and closed like a trove of tit-feeding clams. Even with heavy cognition installations, the bus got a real headache trying to parse the mess that rolled before it. Biology was deferred to here, and so the bus driver was woken up and put to work, her arms requested for infrastructural support.

An interesting note: to wake up Wilo, one needs to hammer his head a minimum of one-hundred times against a headboard. The bus seats weren’t interested in the modern idea of comfort, fabrics detested them. Wood kept the sitter observant. Wilo proved a challenge against this design choice. But the clams on the road spurred into action and vibrating Wilo to conciousness.

He sat up and looked out the window.

A man and a smaller man were there off in the distance, each had a long stick in its hand and sent it hard against the ground. Once the large man hit, the small man followed. It’s two-tone thrum like a gollum spurred into a spontaneous joyous skip. There the big man hit, then the small man brought his down. Wilo let his brain invent a sound to fit their dance.

The two figures were far enough away that they held in Wilo’s window for some time, until a blue puff came up and swallowed them up. The puff stuffed more of Wilo’s field of view into its gob. A gob with no lines or holes to tell is where it began and where it became stomach. Then very quickly the window, the bus, and its conscious occupants were delivered a blue smiting. As thick as custard, nothing but blue that just dribbled out slightly a foot in each direction, was all there was.

“Five minutes. We’ll be at Caxe-2 shortly, please get your rain gear ready. I mentioned that Caxe-2 was an adamant rebellion of the precipitation process, but that still doesn’t mean it won’t leak a little.”

Wilo looked up to the front of the bus where an old lady was harnessed to the ceiling and pacing up and was using a zip railing to trot up and down the aisle, attending to questions or just inspecting the interesting faces of the tour group. She came up to Wilo. Her eyes were embezzled with the light of green micro-runes, a liveliness that contrasted her frailness. She squished and curled all that dropping flesh into a smile. Parts stuck to itself like clingfilm, little pockets of age here and there. And then she moved one seat down to the next patient, delivered to them an identical facial squeeze.

The ground ate a good inch of Wilo’s foot, slurping it up with mossy teeth and brown schlup full of little stones and bugs. Instead of waiting a hundred years for his foot to be digested, Wilo stepped his next foot forward and continued down the hill. The occupants of the bus delivered onto that hill a sympthony of shlips, shlops, and a spattering of glops, with their footfalls.

“This way please! This way!” The old woman, now donning welly boots that ended at her waist, waved a stick with a light on the end. “Welcome! Welcome. Caxe-2 is all around us. Isn’t it mesmerizing?” She paused to open her arms. “We have about, oh, one hour until it begins its ascent. That’s enough time to get to the center and really get to see what this little cloud has to offer. Follow me!” She began a trot, how she was navigating the enveloping blue, Wilo was unsure. He tracked the blinking blue light of her stick.

The most that the journey offered was hills up and hills down. The brown schlup added to the weight of each footstep, making the trek more taxing than usual. Little dew drops grew out of the surface of the group, politely spaced and specular, like good dew drops should be. Wilo’s beard dripped. Wilo’s eyebrows dripped.