//------------------------------// // Ground Zero // Story: Surviving Sand Island // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// Rarity came to some time later. All her senses were dulled by pain and vertigo, making her vision blurry, her hearing muffled, and her tongue feeling like cotton in her mouth. The only smells her nose could pick up were dust and blood, and an overwhelming number of aches obscured the rest of her senses. But in time, everything came back to her, little by little. Her vision sharpened first, revealing thick foliage and vibrant, leafy undergrowth around her. Birds and other creatures sang their songs and cried their cries to the jungle. The ground around her was moist and muddy, and her body was decidedly not impaled on wood or other shrapnel. Sure, everything hurt, but that was better than dying. Once she made sure she could feel all her hooves, Rarity rolled onto them and stood up with a grimace. Numerous cuts and scrapes decorated her body, many of them still slowly oozing blood. By that, she figured she must’ve only been unconscious for a short period of time. Moving and breathing hurt, so she must’ve cracked a rib or something in the fall. But, speaking of the fall, where was she? Where was the wreckage? Rarity’s brow furrowed in confusion as she took in her surroundings. This wasn’t a sandy beach near the spires holding the wreck in place. There wasn’t even any wooden debris to be seen. How did she get so far away from the wreckage? That was when she realized her horn hurt like nothing else. Wincing, she put a hoof to her horn and felt a minor crack running from the tip to about a quarter of the way down her horn. It wasn’t completely split and cracked like after surviving the shipwreck, but it would still put her out of action for a day or two until it mended. And seeing as how it was cracked, not chipped, Rarity knew that only overloading her horn could have caused the injury. Once more she looked around at her unfamiliar surroundings, at the dense jungle of swaying palm trees. If the wreckage and debris didn’t bring her here, then she must’ve brought herself here. And that hypothesis lined up perfectly with the injury to her horn. “Did I teleport?” she muttered aloud to herself, her words sluggish and dazed as they rolled off of her doughy tongue. “Did I somehow teleport myself here?” It was the only explanation she could think of as to how she ended up so far away from the wreckage. And it wasn’t entirely unheard of for unicorns to cast spells they didn’t know in desperate situations. Twilight had once told her that if a unicorn willed something hard enough, sometimes their magic could make it happen. And willing herself not to die in the cascading debris of the wreckage could certainly be a strong enough impetus for her magic to teleport her someplace safe by sheer force of will. She coughed and immediately doubled over in pain. Apparently, it wasn’t a very good teleport, and she figured she must’ve fallen fifteen or twenty feet to the ground after she managed it. But then a cold feeling settled in her gut. “Gyro,” she murmured, whipping her head back and forth. “Where’s Gyro?” Chewing on her lip, she quickly found the sun and used that to orient herself on the compass rose. “Oh no, oh no, oh no…” She charged off to the northeast, figuring that eventually she’d have to find the wreckage if she went in that direction; the island was only so big. She didn’t think she could’ve teleported herself to another island entirely. Even Twilight would struggle to do something like that. But the longer she was out in the jungle alone, the more and more she worried that something nasty would find her before she could find Gyro. But ultimately, she was right, and she recognized the rocky spires from before sticking through the canopy. She hadn’t teleported herself all that far, maybe only a thousand feet, but that was a thousand feet more than she’d ever teleported before. And now that she was out of the trees, she had a clear line of sight to the fate of the wreckage her and Gyro had explored. The entire thing had been smashed to pieces in the fall. What was once a roughly solid and single piece of hull had been reduced to splinters and shattered fragments scattered across a beach. Steel supports stuck out of the sand, scattered between rocks and stones that the collapsing wreckage had scoured off the side of the mesa. And there was no sign of life anywhere. Not even a single set of hoofprints in the sand walking away from the wreckage. Rarity wasted no time galloping up to the wreck, or at least trotting as fast as she could manage with her cracked and bruised ribs. “Gyro?” she shouted to the sea of debris. “Gyro, where are you? Please… please don’t be dead. You’re a hardy earth pony, you surely must have survived the fall!” She instinctively tried to fling some debris aside with her magic, but a crack of pain to her skull and the oozing of raw, scalding blue mana down her horn put an end to that attempt. After a moment to set the dizziness aside, Rarity wiped the trickle of evaporating mana off her horn and wandered into the debris field herself. “Gyro!” she shouted, trying to make sure the earth pony could hear her even if she was buried under a ton of wood and steel. “Gyro, are you here?!” A cough and a whimper caught her ear. “Rarity…” a voice croaked. “Is that you?” Rarity immediately spun in the direction of the voice and bounded over some debris. “Yes, darling, it’s me. Are you alright?” She spotted a rigid section of hallway that had survived the fall and started clearing away the rubble preventing her from accessing it. “Hold tight, I’m going to get you out.” “I… I…” A grunt and a gasp of pain emanated from the debris. “Help…” “Almost there,” Rarity assured her, and with a yell and a heave, she yanked aside the last piece of paneling blocking the entrance. A gray, fuzzy body lied crumpled against a steel container not too far away, and Rarity managed to stick her head into the wreckage and bite down on Gyro’s short tail to drag her out. “Yoush your legsh!” she commanded through clenched teeth as she struggled to drag the mechanic out of the wreckage. Gyro’s forelegs pushed against the wreckage, but Rarity noticed that her hind legs remained splayed out to the sides and didn’t move. “I… I can’t feel my legs,” Gyro said in a worried voice. That took on a scared shift moments later when she wailed it again. “I can’t feel my legs! Celestia, no!” Rarity momentarily stopped pulling out of shock. Did Gyro break her back in the fall? She immediately redoubled her efforts and managed to drag the mechanic out into the sand. If Gyro had broken her back, if she’d lost the use of her hind legs… The mechanic immediately contorted her body to the side and grabbed her right rear leg with her hooves. Tears matted the hair around her blue eyes, and innumerous cuts, scrapes, and bruises decorated her hardy earth pony frame. All of that was nothing to her cries of despair as she held onto her leg like she was cradling a dead foal. “I-I can’t f-feel it!” she shouted. “It won’t move!” Gyro’s fear steeled something inside of Rarity, and she advanced on the gray mare. “Lie on your stomach,” she ordered her. “I need to look at your spine.” Gyro sniffled and shuddered but did as she was told. “I lost my legs,” she cried. “I-I lost my l-legs! What am I if I can’t walk? I’m an earth pony, I have nothing!” “You’ll walk,” Rarity promised her. “It might not be that bad. Try to wiggle your hooves. Can you wiggle your hooves, darling?” The engineer’s face contorted into concentration, but her legs remained still. Rarity thought she saw them twitch once, but she couldn’t be sure. With a gasp, Gyro dropped her head to the sand. “I-I can’t…” Rarity sucked on her lip and put her hooves on Gyro’s back. “Tell me when you can’t feel my hooves anymore.” When Gyro nodded, she started at the base of her neck, pressing down on each vertebra in turn as she moved along the mare’s spine. She made it about two-thirds of the way down the mare’s back before she felt a bulge in her spine. Pressing down on it, she shot Gyro a worried look. “Can you feel this?” Gyro shook her head from side to side. “N-No…” “Then I think we found the problem.” Rarity swallowed hard. “I think one of your vertebral discs ruptured or something. I’m… not a doctor, to say the least, so I don’t know what exactly is wrong.” “Can it be fixed?” Gyro asked in a tiny, fragile voice. “I don’t know, darling,” Rarity murmured. “This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have made us go investigate the wreckage.” “Well…” Gyro tried to put a smile on her muzzle. She failed. “A-At least Rainbow has to have h-heard that, right?” “Her and whoever else might be on this island.” Gulping, Rarity looked around. “We need to go someplace hidden and see who investigates that noise. I’m sure the entire island chain could hear it.” “You’ll have to carry me,” Gyro whimpered, using her forelegs to lift her torso off the ground. “I-I can’t move on my own…” “I will,” Rarity said, and dipping her head, she managed to heft Gyro onto her aching back. But as she shifted the engineer’s weight and started looking for an easy way out of the debris field, worry and fear gnawed at her from the inside. Just what was she going to do now?