The first raindrop hit the barn roof like a subpoena from the stratosphere. By the time Ling reached the porch, the storm clouds had arranged themselves into towering legal briefs, their dark underbellies flickering with punitive lightning. The scarecrow judge's burlap face sagged under the weight of contempt charges, its straw fingers disintegrating as it tried to grip a lightning-rod gavel.
"They're demanding emotional reparations for every metaphor comparing tears to rain," Chu Feng said, his voice competing with the thunder's basso profundo objections. He stood knee-deep in a newly formed moat around the farmhouse, its waters swirling with class-action tadpoles. His shadow—still entangled in photosynthetic parole—flickered between building a sandbag levee and drafting surrender terms on a waterlogged legal pad.
Arbiter materialized inside a hailstorm of discovery requests, his suit dissolving into rivulets of liquid jurisdiction. "I merely explained riparian rights to a rogue cumulonimbus!" A lightning bolt licked his left ear, charring the words Material Witness into his collar. "How was I to know it'd weaponize precipitation?"
The Tempest Tribunal
The courtroom materialized in the eye of the storm, its walls spun from freezing rain and regret. Judge Nimbus Lex presided as a rotating wall cloud, her voice oscillating between drizzle and derecho:
"Defendant's unauthorized anthropomorphization of precipitation…" Hailstones bullet-pointed the charges across the flooded fields. "…constitutes meteorological defamation. Exhibit D:"
A waterspout vomited holographic evidence—Ling at nine years old, dancing in a summer downpour while her mother shouted about flash flood warnings. "Willful romanticization of natural disasters!"
Chu Feng slammed a lightning rod into the sodden earth. The resulting electromagnetic pulse scattered the projection into fireflies that spelled FORCE MAJEURE in panicked flight patterns.
"Your honor!" Arbiter's protest emerged as a spectral frog from a mud puddle. "The plaintiff ignores decades of agricultural reciprocity!"
He gestured to the scarecrow judge—now a sentient whirlpool of legal precedents—swirling through the courtroom collecting perjury minnows.
The Defense's Deluge Gambit
Ling waded through the flooded root cellar, her boots crunching over jars of preserves bloated with drowned grievances. Beneath a shelf of pickled precedents, the USB drive glowed like a drowned firefly. Its casing bore Jiang Yue's final commandment: MAKE IT RAIN TRUTH.
When she resurfaced, the courtroom was drowning in its own objections.
"You think water obeys human sentiment?" Nimbus Lex's thunder rattled the barn's remaining teeth. "Your grandmother—"
The drive clicked home.
The Cloudburst Revelation
The storm erupted into ancestral weather patterns:
1937: Jiang Yue diverting a hurricane with moonshine and a harmonica.
2005: Teenage Ling scrubbing flood insurance lies off the moon plow's ledger.
Last night: Chu Feng whispering apologies to drowned earthworms while rigging a jury-float raft.
The scarecrow judge belched a waterspout of pardoned algae. "Irrelevant!"
"Relevant as Noah's receipts." Ling threw the drive into the eye wall. "You want rain? Let's flood properly."
The storm split at its seams.
The Settlement
Dawn found the farm transformed into an amphibious republic:
The pumpkin patch hosted a catfish constitutional convention
Chu Feng's shadow operated a ferry for litigious bullfrogs
The moon plow sang sea shanties to mollify silt deposits
Ling found Arbiter teaching leeches to unionize the neighbor's irrigation ditch. "They're demanding dental plans for bloodletting," he said, grinning through a beard of activist algae.
"Naturally." She tossed him the scarecrow's waterlogged heart—still pumping amendments. "Next crisis?"
He nodded west where cirrus clouds shaped like injunctions gathered. "The drought's countersuing for emotional dehydration."
The Afterstorm
As twilight bled through the retreating cumulonimbus, Ling knelt at the flooded field's edge. Chu Feng's shadow stretched across the still waters, its edges blurred by residual static electricity.
"Think she planned for this?" he asked, untangling a subpoena from a catfish's whiskers.
Ling watched a bioluminescent algae bloom spell ARMISTICE across the moon plow's submerged blade. "She planned for us to swim."
The first stars emerged as notarized witnesses, their twinkling signatures binding the cease-fire. Somewhere beyond the drowned property line, February 30th's laughter rippled through a moonbow shaped like a gavel.
The music box played on—its melody now syncopated with the arrhythmic lap of receding floodwaters and the barn's last intact shingle composing its resignation into the wind.