//------------------------------// // Chapter 31: Holding out for a hero // Story: Brightly Lit // by Penalt //------------------------------//     “Hey Jean,” Lynn Harding said, as she entered the back door of her home.  “Jessica is airborne and on her way. Jean?” Lynn froze as some sixth sense pricked the skin of her forearms, warning her of danger.  Looking up the hall, she saw flickering purple light being reflected off its walls.     “Jean,” Lynn called again, moving forward cautiously.  “Are you okay?”     “S-stay away.  I c-can’t control it,” Foxfire called back, in a voice that scared Lynn clear down to her bones.   Lynn had heard all kinds of emotions from her neighbor over the years, but this was a new sound.  This was terror. Mind-numbing, soul-deep terror, for herself and others. Hearing that sound from her friend gave Lynn’s feet wings, and she hurled herself around the corner and into the main room of her home. “I’m—” Lynn began, words cutting off as she looked at her friend mere feet away.   Jean Pedersen, now Foxfire, was wreathed in a smokey indigo mantle of power.  Her mane and tail were flowing parallel to the ground in an unfelt wind, and filled with twinkling fairy lights that bobbed and weaved.  Glowing white eyes turned toward Lynn and locked onto her human form. “Get away,” Foxfire said, her voice becoming preternatural.  “RUN!  I can’t hold it back much longer!”   Lynn ran into her kitchen, desperate to find something to help her friend with.  While she was doing that, the out of control power coursing through Foxfire attracted someone else's attention. That sudden current in the aether, Luna thought to herself, pausing in her interminable drilling for the surface.  That is a unicorn, coming into their own. But such strength! Never have I felt a foal surge with such raw power. Unless… This is no foal at all, but a unicorn grown.  I must aid her as best I can. For Foxfire, everything was in flames, as wild, out of control, purple fire seared her insides. She could feel the magic that had bound itself to her using her mind and soul as kindling, threatening to burst forth to destroy everything and everyone she loved.  It was all she could do to keep that raging storm bound inside of her, and with luck it would burn her up before it ran wild. Peace child, said a calm voice, spreading a soothing blue coolness over Foxfire’s fiery mind.  It will be well. Please, Foxfire said.  I need help. You can control this, the voice said, its coolness spreading.  Breathe, focus thy mind on thy family and friends. Anchor your mind to harness your strength. Foxfire listened to the voice.  It was ancient and wise, seemingly everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  She filled her thoughts with images of her Rowan and Romy. Of the strong new presence in her life that was Arnold.  The firm support of her friends and neighbors. As Foxfire’s mind calmed, so too did the roaring blaze within her. The fire dwindled and dropped, changing from a terrible inferno into something that warmed and comforted. “Goddess?” Foxfire asked, wonderingly at the presence she felt in her mind.  “Are you one of the goddesses?” Others have called me such in the past, the voice said, and Foxfire could hear amusement in those cool tones.  But you may call— “OMNI VINCI AMOR!” Lynn Harding yelled, hammering down the lever on her kitchen fire extinguisher and hosing down her friend with a spray of cold white powder in an effort to save her. With the link between them shattered by the sudden well-meant physical assault, both Luna and Foxfire were knocked unconscious by the psychic backlash of their sundered joining.  Foxfire collapsed to the floor of the living room in a powder coated heap. Luna however, had been holding herself in mid-air at the top of the shaft she had been drilling. When she fell unconscious she also physically fell over a hundred feet, ricocheting off the rocky sides of the shaft and passing back through the portal to Equestria.     Medevac was doing quite well for it being her first true flight.  Her previous experience with the air had been limited to hovering a few feet off the ground.  Now, a full thousand feet up, the pegasus bulled her way through the air. Not for her the speed and grace of Darter, nor did she have Skylark’s power of flight.  What she did have though was a need to get where she needed to be, to where she was needed to save a life. It was enough. “I’m here,” Medevac said, folding her red and white wings as she landed on a beach of pea gravel.  Both Darter and Skylark looked at her with undisguised relief and Medevac was reminded that she was working with children.  Brave children with incredible abilities, but children nonetheless. “I can’t wake up the woman,” Skylark said, one of her wings touching a middle-aged woman who had obviously taken some kind of blow to the head.   “She’s breathing, right?” Medevac asked, in a calm voice.  “No major wounds?” “N-no,” the young mare said, with a tremor in her voice.  “Just her head is banged up.” “Triage,” Medevac said, taking a breath.  “Leave her be for the moment, while we deal with the bad injury first.”  She turned to where Skylark’s brother was still holding a belt tightly against a man’s thigh. “He hasn’t woken up either,” Darter said, anticipating Medevac’s question.  “But there’s all kinds of blood.” “Right, I’ve got this,” Medevac said, her amazingly prehensile wings opening up the saddlebags of her harness.  “Darter, keep holding that belt in place. Skylark, keep monitoring your patient and let me know if anything changes.” “Okay,” both young pegasi responded, almost as one, their voices growing more confident now that an adult was in charge.   In the meantime, Medevac got out a pair of scissors and began cutting away the pilot’s pant leg to expose the wound.  The man had a deep long gash in his lower leg, and as the pegasus turned to get a better look at the damage she laid her open wing over the man’s torso and gasped in shock. Through her wings she could feel everything.  Feathers that were sensitive to the slightest breeze gave a tactile image of the body they lay on, and the structures beneath.  Medevac saw wondrous beauty there. The ebb and flow of air, the slow movement of secondary fluids, the gentle function of liver, kidneys and spleen, and through it all there echoed the drumbeat of life.   It was not a steady, calm beat however.  It was an urgent pounding, a call to battle as a fortress under siege rallied its troops in defence.  Medevac twisted her wing slightly, sliding it lower down along the pilot’s body, and she felt it. The functioning beauty of the body under her feathers was marred.  There was an ugliness that had forced its way into the perfection of life and threatened to end it. The body under attack called to her for aid, and Medevac felt her soul respond in answer.  She would answer the cry for help, she would mend the wound, tend to the sick. She would act to preserve and protect life.  This is why she was here, in this place, in this form. So that she could save this life, and all the other lives that would come to her in all the years to come. “What’s she doing?” Skylark asked, in a very quiet voice.   All she could tell was that Jessica, now Medevac, had laid her wing over the man her brother had pulled from the plane and then had stopped talking.  The bigger pony still hadn’t said a single word, but her wings were in constant motion over the wound while her forehooves kept the area clear. “She’s not thinking,” Darter said, in understanding.  “She’s doing. Like with the sandwiches.” “Keep an eye on the woman,” Medevac said, absently.  “Darter, keep watching for Kevin.” Medevac’s wings kept moving with an ease and skill that impressed the two more experienced pegasi.  Despite both their orders and the ick factor at what Medevac was doing, Darter and Skylark were both fascinated at what was happening.  They had never dreamed that feathers could be used almost like individual fingers as the older pony cleaned and then carefully began to suture the wound closed. So, it was with some surprise that they heard the crunch of gravel from the rescue truck’s inflatable boat land on the shore near them.  Kevin Banta jumped out of the boat and walked over to the trio of ponies with quick strides while carrying a pair of large boxes filled with medical supplies. “How are they?” he asked, setting the boxes down and moving to check on the still unconscious older woman. “I haven’t checked on the woman,” Medevac said, her concentration on what she was doing.  “I’m almost done with this wound. We’re going to need an airlift to get them out of here.” “Right, I’ll call it in,” Banta said, checking the woman’s pulse and breathing.  “She seems okay, just out cold. No way to check for brain trauma though. We’ll airlift them both just to be on the safe side.” “Sounds good, and done,” Medevac said, stepping back.  “This will hold for now, but he needs a proper hospital.  Good work kids, you saved lives today.” Skylark hid her face behind a wing at the praise while Darter puffed up a bit and smiled. “Okay, chopper is about twenty minutes out,” Banta said, as he finished talking with Chief Montcalm a minute later.  “You three need to get going and HOLY SH-” A pillar of rainbow coloured light seemed to erupt from the ground beneath Medevac, lifting her up and enveloping her.  The power of Equestrian magic wrapped itself around the new pegasus, welcoming her in its chromatic embrace. Medevac felt nothing but joy and deep satisfaction as something within her seem to lock into place at long last.  Words, storied and powerful, rolled out from her as she said the ancient oath: “I stand in the cause of Life.  I will heal the sick, mend the wounded and comfort the dying.  I will not judge, lest I be judged, and I will give my service to any who call on me for aid.  I will pass my knowledge to others, as it was passed to me, doing honor to those in whose shadow I walk.  This I swear by Apollo, the Physician and Asclepius, the Healer.” “Huh, whazzat?” Dr. Carlson said, the fading light show and the wash of healing magic over the area reviving her to fuzzy awareness. “Just a light,” Banta said, making sure his body blocked the woman’s view of the ponies on the beach.  He turned his head away from the groaning woman and hissed, “Get out of here, you three. Chopper’s on the way.”  Darter, Skylark and Medevac needed no further urging and took to the air, climbing up and away. “Hey!  You got your ‘Mark of Power’,” Darter said to Medevac, who looked back on her flank.  There, standing out in stark contrast to her cream coloured fur, was a scarlet rod with a pair of wings and a single snake twined around it.   “Wow,” Medevac said, and a feeling of fresh joy washed through her, until she turned her head back forward and looked down. “Fire One,” Medevac said, keying her mic as she looked down at the man in the campsite who was looking back up at them as they flew past.  “We have a problem.”     “We’ve got a couple of problems,” Darrell Montcalm said over the phone a few minutes later. ”There’s a reporter who’s been camped out at the dam.  We’re pretty sure he saw the whole thing.”     “How sure?” Lynn asked.   She had spent the past half hour cleaning fire extinguisher dust from her living room, and was nowhere near done yet.  She had carried her sleeping unicorn friend upstairs to rest, and Jean’s steady breathing hadn’t changed a whit when Lynn had literally vacuumed her friend clean.   “Almost 100 percent.  On the plus side, this Wilcox fellow is pretty reasonable from what everyone has said about him and I’ve got a feeling we can have a discreet chat with him,” Montcalm said, before continuing.  “We’ve got a bigger problem though.” “What’s that?” Lynn asked, a feeling of dread coming over her.   “I can’t raise Rowan, Romy or Billy on the radio,” Montcalm said, and Lynn could hear the worry in his voice.  “Last I heard from them they were on one of the old logging roads following a trail of prints they had found.” “Oh hell,” Lynn swore, glancing upstairs.  If there was any single thing in all the world that was guaranteed to push Jean Pedersen into a rage, it was something happening to her kids.  A couple of years ago a forest firefighter had made the mistake of mocking Romy’s lisp within Jean’s hearing. Her calm and cool neighbor had changed from friendly neighborhood witch to “Momma bear locked on kill” in about half a second.  To this day, residents of Brightly swore they saw crackling electricity wreathing Jean in a halo as she had backed the big strong man into a corner through the sheer power of her protective fury. That alone would have been enough on its own to cement her legend in local folklore, but it was what happened next that had marked her as someone you did not cross.  She didn’t threaten the man, didn’t shout at him, didn’t grab a weapon. She just leaned forward and whispered a few words in his ear. The fellow had gone pale as snow, dropped to his knees in front of everyone and started begging Jean’s forgiveness.  She had just looked down at him with grim satisfaction, before turning around and walking away. And that was before Jean had become a power packed unicorn.   “Don’t worry about, Mr. Mayor,” Lynn said, with a confidence she didn’t entirely feel.  “I’ll tell her about it.” “Okay,” Montcalm said, only the tiniest bit of relief in his voice.  “Tell her, I’m sorry, and we’ll keep at it until we hear from them.” “I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Lynn said.  “With their fur they’re probably well equipped to handle the temperature.  I’ll talk to you after I wake Jean and let her know.”         Darkness was beginning to come on swiftly to the little pond on the side of the mountain, and Tim Kielops was not looking forward to what was going to happen over the next twelve hours or so.  He’d been able to make himself a crude lean-to with the materials on hand, but try as he might he just could not get a fire to start.     Part of it was due to a lack of proper fire starting tools.  Like a blowtorch. It was about what he’d need to start a fire around here.   There was a distinct lack of anything like dry wood in the area. Tim had wandered as far as he’d dared to in his search, looking under logs and on the supposed dry side of trees.  He’d even tried whittling his way into a few branches. Even there he found soaking wet, or at least damp, wood.     He was just about to settle down to try to make the best of it, when he heard large splashing sounds coming in his direction from the steep little canyon that held the stream that fed the pond.  Expecting something large, annoyed and with big teeth, he snatched up an improvised spear he had made while whittling away for some dry wood to burn. “There he is!” shouted the lead attacking figure as it emerged from the canyon, splashes highlighting its hoof falls. Outnumbered three to one, Tim prepared to sell his life dearly to the onslaught of wild, savage... cute, colourful, little ponies? “What the hell?” Tim asked, standing up from his crouch. “What the hell are you? No wait, you can’t be real. I’ve gone hypothermic and never noticed. Can you even do that?” “Hey! You shouldn’t swear around kids,” Shield Maiden said to Kielops, who was holding a big pointed stick and wearing the expression of someone who was very much in doubt of their sanity at that moment. “Oh great,” Tim said, rolling his eyes. “A hallucination is giving me a lecture about bad language. Maybe I ate a magic mushroom or something, or rubbed up against some.” “We’re real,” Iron Hoof said, as the trio came around the pond to the rock shelf Tim had been setting up his little camp on. “We’re the Power Ponies, from Brightly. We’re here to rescue you.” “Okay, now I know I’ve lost it,” Tim said, dropping his stick and sitting heavily down on the rocks. “Cute pony kids, come to rescue me. Well, if this is how I’m going, at least it’s nice.” “We are too real, Mister,” Seeker said, coming right up to the incredulous power lineman. “Touch me. I’m real.” “What the hell,” Tim said, noting the glare he got from the bossy pony of the batch.  “Fine, what the heck. Better? Gingerly, he reached out and laid his hand on Seeker’s back. He touched it, and jerked his hand away, having expected not to encounter anything. Tim looked at Seeker, who smiled and gave him a nod of encouragement. Once again, a tough calloused hand stretched out and touched soft fur. “Ho-ly Crap,” Tim said, his face splitting into a massive grin and he swept Seeker into his arms for an equally massive hug. “YOU’RE REAL!” “Duh! We told you that already,” Shield Maiden said, laughing a bit at the big man who was holding onto her sister like she was the most important thing in the world. “Fire One, this is Iron Hoof,” Iron Hoof said into his radio. “We’ve found him. We found him.” Only static greeted the announcement. “Fire One?” Iron Hoof said, repeating the radio call. “Are you there?” There was still no reply. “Mr. Mayor?” Shield Maiden said, trying her own radio. “Are you there? Can anyone hear me?” “I think I know why you can’t get through,” Tim said. He’d stopped hugging Seeker, but hadn’t let go of her entirely. “I’ve had a few hours to think about why going downhill didn’t get me back to town. I think we’re on the far side of the hills and they’re blocking the signal.” “You mean nobody knows where we are?” Seeker said, eyes widening and a little fear creeping into her voice. “You kids, uh ponies. You’ve got radios, right? When was the last time you checked in with whoever you’re working with?” Tim asked, pulling Seeker back into his arms for a comforting hug because dammit, good men hugged scared little kids and told them it’s gonna be okay. Ponies or not. “A couple of hours ago,” Shield Maiden said. “We told the fire chief we’d found your tracks and were following them up a road.” “Okay, so they know which way you guys were going,” Tim said, petting the pony in his arms in what he hoped was a reassuring fashion. “When you don’t check in with the other searchers, they’ll know something was wrong and backtrack.” “Tho they are gonna find us?” Seeker asked, snuggling into Tim’s lap like a very oversized cat. “Definitely,” Tim said, in his most reassuring voice, while he rested a hand on her back. “But they probably won’t get here until tomorrow. You guys wouldn’t happen to have anything to eat on you would you? Or maybe something to start a fire with?” “Check my saddlebags,” Seeker said. “I haven’t really checked what we have.” “Good idea,” Shield Maiden said, reaching around to open up her bags. “Iron Hoof...” “On it,” said the strong pony of the three, and in the next few minutes a small pile of items was created beside Tim so that Seeker didn’t have to move from her spot in order to see everything. “Okay,” Tim said, assessing the revealed supplies. “Three identical sets of stuff, which means we have threes of everything. So, a dozen granola bars, three bottles of water, three small medical kits, three of those dinky foil emergency blankets, three sets of extra radio batteries and best of all, three chemical lights and three road flares.” He grabbed one of the lights and cracked it to life. The dim green light spilling out was already brighter than the fading daylight. Tim could feel the warmth beginning to leech out of him except where Seeker’s warm furry body covered his own. Things were looking up even so. “Any of you kids been in a survival situation?” Tim asked the ponies, who had all gathered around him instinctively so that they could be closer to the light. “We’ve all been camping before,” Iron Hoof said, speaking up. “And Seeker and Shield Maiden’s mom has taught me a lot about the woods, but nothing past that.” “Okay, I’ve probably got more experience than you kids, is it okay if I call you ‘kids?’ Or do I call you ‘ponies,’ or what?” Tim asked. “Either is fine,” Shield Maiden said, having snuggled up beside the big man so that her nose was nearly touching her sister’s. “Alright. Anyway, I’ve got more experience, so I probably know what to do in this situation better than you three do,” Tim said, his left arm over both Shield Maiden and Iron Hoof’s backs while his right was over Seeker. “Problem is, I’m banged up a bit and can’t move that well. Truth is, my leg is pretty seized up now. So I need you guys to be my hands and legs so that we can get through this night together.” “What do you need us to do?” Iron Hoof asked, and the eager expression all three ponies wore warmed Tim in a way that a mere fire never could.     Princess Luna regained consciousness seeing the concerned face of her sister staring down at her. “Luna,” Celestia said, relief in her voice. “Thank goodness you’re awake. Twilight won’t tell me what’s going on, but I’ve managed to piece together some of it. You’ve been through the portal haven’t you?” “Not so loud,” Luna said, touching a hoof to her aching head and was startled as she felt something metallic around her horn. “Sister, why am I wearing a horn sheath?” “The doctor says you’ve got one of the worst cases of magical backlash and thaumic overwork he’s ever seen,” Celestia said, her expression firming up. “That sheath stays on until the doctor says you can channel magic again.” “I have to get back,” Luna said, trying to get up. “There was a unicorn. She was surging. An adult unicorn, Celestia.  I have to be sure she was able to bring herself under control.” “No,” Celestia said, pinning her sister back onto the bed with trivial effort. “You’re staying here until you’ve rested and explained everything to me. You channel so much as a spark and I’ll... I’ll glue that sheath to your horn, or even mount it to a bridle and strap it on you.” “You would never—“ Luna began, then stopped as she recognized the resolve on Celestia’s face. “You would. To protect me, you would. Wouldn’t you?” “I love you, Luna,” Celestia said, leaning close. “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to keep you safe. Please, tell me what you’ve been doing on the other side of the portal.” “I’ve been to the other side,” Luna began, then paused for a moment in thought. “Do we even know the name of that other world?” “If memory serves, Lee Ung called it, ‘Canada’,” Celestia said. “So, my sister, whom I love. Tell me, what have you been doing in the world of Canada?”