As inexorable as the turning of the seasons, the clockwork mechanism ground on toward its appointment with the destiny that had been set for it. Gears turned and whirled as mechanical energy bound in a tightened spring slowly released its stored energy as motion that moved from one part of the clockwork to another through a series of gears. Hours passed, and the mechanism ground on until at long last one gear moved to a point where it allowed a pin to move and the device performed its function.
“Stupid alarm clock,” Jessica said, reaching over a hand to smack the button on her old-fashioned wind up alarm clock. With the Hydro crews still working out the snarls in Brightly’s power grid, it was the only way to make sure she would be up in time for work. She paused for a moment, staring at her hand.
“Damn,” she said, to no one in particular. Getting up and out of her bed, she made her way to her shower, which required no electricity to run. The water heater however, did, and her whoop of surprise at the cold water rattled her windows. After an absolutely as short as possible shower, Jessica sat on her bed wrapped in a couple of towels. She looked out at the rising sun, toying with a feather that had come off her wings overnight, deep in thought.
Unheeded by the musings of the young mortal, the sun continued on its eternal course, rising over the small town. Bereft of the modern guides of artificial light, electric clock and driving cell phone, the people of the town began their daily routines as ancient circadian rhythms and ingrained habits both conspired to wake people in the town. People and ponies both.
“Hey, wake up,” Rowan said, shoving her hooves against her sleeping sister. “We gotta get up, time for school.”
“Mrph… go away,” Romy replied, never having been a morning person. Unfortunately for her, Rowan was used to her sister’s attempts to imitate a log first thing in the morning and knew what to do. Moving to the upstairs bathroom, Rowan scooped up a damp washcloth and came back to the bedroom.
“C’mon, get up or I’m gonna lick your feet,” Rowan said, hiding the washcloth below the level of the bed.
“5 more minutes…” Romy mumbled, turning over and her purple mane with its grey highlights flopped to the other side of the pillow.
“I warned you,” Rowan said, and lifting the covers she wiped the damp cloth against the sensitive frog of one of her sister’s rear hooves in a “licking” motion. The effect was immediate and explosive.
“Eww!” Romy shouted, sitting bolt upright and pulling her hooves into herself. “Tell me you didn’t do that!”
“Nope,” Rowan said, smiling and holding up the washcloth.
“I’m gonna get you for that!” Romy declared and sweeping a hoof, flung her pillow at her sister with considerable force. The soft missile struck its target and bowled Rowan over, knocking her to the floor with a “thump.”
“Oh yah?” Rowan declared, and she grabbed the fallen pillow with her magic and tossed it right back at her sister, who intercepted it with an upraised hoof.
“Hey!” their mother yelled up from below. “Do I have a couple of girls up there or a herd of stampeding wildebeests? Time for breakfast kids.”
“I’ll deal with you later,” Rowan said, turning and flipping her black mane dismissively at her sister.
“Oh yah?” Romy asked, bounding out of bed to follow her sister, hooves clomping on the wood floor.
“Yah,” Rowan said, pausing so her sister could catch up, and the two shared a quick hug. “Morning, sis.”
“Morning. Looks like another pony day,” Rom said, smiling.
“Oatmeal’s getting cold, kids,” Jean called up to her slow moving daughters.
“Oatmeal, again?” Rowan groaned. “I hate oatmeal.”
Across the street, another pair of pony siblings were not as quick to wake, despite their mother calling up for them a number of times. Their father had left an hour earlier in the pre-dawn gloom to take care of tasks that had been backing up at the farm for days. Ernie Harding had good hands helping him, but they needed someone to coordinate all their jobs and that someone was him.
“Kylara and Zak,” Lynn Harding said, in her best “Mom” voice as she stood in the upstairs hallway. “It is way past time to get up. With the power still out there’s no school today, but that’s no reason for us to break our regular routine. Up you get.” The definitive declaration was greeted with silence from the bedrooms on either side of her.
Puzzled by the unusual lack of response, Lynn opened the door to her daughter’s room. It was scattered with the usual mess, compounded by Kylara’s learning to move around as a pony. What was unusual though was the muddy smear on the window sill, along with a pair of muddy hoofprints on the floor. Frowning in thought, Lynn walked over to her son’s room, where her equally unconscious son had slept on through her rousing calls. There was no smear on his bedroom window, but there were a couple of dirty hoof outlines.
“You two are grounded when you get up,” Lynn said, shaking her head and smiling as she thought of how hard it must have been for them not to want to leap into the sky at a moment’s notice. “Well, maybe not grounded, but you two are helping me around the house for the rest of the day. I’ll let you sleep for another hour, then I’m coming back up with a bucket of water.”
Near the town along the road to Carmanah Lake, the line crews had been busy all night long. The first goal was to simply get service restored to the town, after that niceties like replacing the actual poles could be entertained. To that end, the three line crews had spent the night leapfrogging over each other, just to reconnect the lines that led from the dam to the town proper.
“Okay, last one guys,” Tim “Tummy” Kielops declared in satisfaction. He was a self-described “BFI” or “Big Fracking Indian.” He stood six foot five inches, weighing in at over 340 pounds of beer gut overlaying massive amounts of muscle. He could lift an entire power pole by himself and swarm up it like a chipmunk once it was up and steady. He worked hard, played harder, and loved his job.
Connecting the breaker on the transformer he looked toward the nearby town, and saw lights coming on in some of the homes. With weary pride he started to attach his tools back to his belt and began to make his way back down the pole. Only twenty-six more known breaks in the lines to fix, and after that came replacing the six broken poles they had come across. He and the other crews had a long, hard job still ahead of them, but the end was in sight. Not too mention that remote pay, plus hazard pay, plus overtime was going to buy him a lot of beer and nice steaks when he got back home.
“You called?” Shaushka asked, getting out of the borrowed truck and squinting at the mid-morning sun. The mayor of Brightly had been more than willing to lend her the vehicle as long as it helped her and her crews get the power on faster.
“Yah,” said the power engineer. She was a woman of medium height, wearing a heavily smudged coverall with “Frye” on the front, but “Kaylee” written on the back. “We’ve just finished our initial assessment of the dam, and it’s not good.”
“Bloody hell, how bad is it?” Shaushka asked, biting her lip. She did not need any massive complications for her first job as a supervisor.
“About as bad as I’ve ever seen,” Frye said, opening the door to the interior of the dam so they could step inside.
As they entered Shaushka could feel the temperature around her drop immediately, and she could see several other power engineers moving around and checking on things. The engineer led her to the small, dusty office in the dam that doubled as a control station. The office had a truly ancient desk in it, on which were laid out a series of folders. Reading the headers, Shaushka noticed that they were maintenance logs. She also noticed the date on what appeared to be the newest one and frowned.
“March 1999?” Shaushka said, puzzled. “Is that the last time there was a maintenance crew out here? That would mean the dam has…”
“Gone nearly twenty years without any maintenance,” Frye said, clapping a hand against some of the metal-clad monitors. “They don’t make them like they used to. A more modern power generating system would have packed it in years ago. As it is, we probably got here just in time.”
“Wait, how does a dam, a major piece of infrastructure, go without seeing a maintenance crew for twenty years?” Shaushka asked, picking up a folder at random and leafing through it.
“I’ve got a couple of suspicions, but I won’t know for sure until I dig into the records in the database,” Frye said, then sighed. “As for the manual floodgate controls, all I did was confirm what everyone had already guessed. The weather seals are gone and water simply rusted the entire mechanism into uselessness.”
“Can they be fixed?” Shaushka asked, feeling her hope of a simple repair and heading back to Vancouver evaporating.
“Not a chance,” Frye said, shaking her head. “We’re looking at a full replacement here, just of the manual systems though. But that isn’t the worst of it though.”
“What is?” Shaushka asked, knowing that her hope of going home anytime soon had just gone completely.
“Fred, get up here with that bucket!” Frye yelled out the door, before turning back to Shaushka. “We pulled something out of the inspection port for the Number One turbine that made our hairs stand on end.”
“What?” Shaushka asked. “I’m not a power engineer, I’m just a jumped up tech. You’re going to have to use small words to explain it to me.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re actually listening to me, and that’s more than most managers or supervisors do,” Frye paused, as another power engineer, also in a pair of dirty, soggy overalls came in and plopped a five gallon bucket onto the desk. Something like an oversized dryer filter was sticking out of it.
“What is that?” Shaushka asked, as the other engineer left.
“It’s the final filter from where water from the penstock reaches the turbine,” Frye said, lifting the soggy frame out of the bucket a bit.
“Is it supposed to have big holes in it?” Shaushka said, then turning red as she realized the obvious answer.
“No, it’s not,” Frye said, choosing to ignore her supervisor’s embarrassment. “It’s supposed to be a single sheet of filter material to catch debris before it hits the turbine blades.”
“Well, the turbines are working, aren’t they?” Shaushka asked, double checking the gauges and noting the steady output of power.
“They are… for now,” Frye said, frowning. “But who knows what twenty years has done to those turbine blades, especially with holes in the filters.”
“Is there anything I can do about it?” Shaushka asked, sensing this is why Frye had asked her here in the first place.
“Yes, I need your permission to shut down Number One turbine so I can do a complete inspection,” Frye said, looking Shaushka in the eye. “When that’s done, I want to spin it back up to speed and do the same for Number Two.”
“What will that do for the town’s power?” Shaushka asked, mentally thinking of the explosion this information was going to cause back in Vancouver.
“The dam has two generators,” Frye said, putting the dead filter back into the bucket. “I can take either one offline, and still have more than enough to power Brightly and anything else in the area. I just need your okay to get started.”
“How long?” Shaushka asked, having already decided to okay the engineer’s request, but she knew she was going to be asked questions and needed to have some ready answers.
“For a quick inspection of the turbine, I can have a report for you by this time tomorrow,” Frye said. “To be honest though, what I really want to do is tear the turbine and generator apart and check absolutely everything.”
“Okay, go ahead. Do it, at least the first part,” Shaushka said, nodding. “I’ll let head office know. Anything else I need to know right now?”
“Ya, tell them to get a big purchase order ready,” Frye said, gathering up the folders as a batch. “If even half the things need replacing that I think do, this could wind up costing a couple of million, easily.”
John Wilcox launched another cast of his fishing lure into the ruffled surface of the lake waters near the dam. Fishing had been good and a couple of fat trout were already in the small cooler beside him. As he slowly reeled the line back in, he saw the tall lean woman who his background information said was the team supervisor heading out of the dam and heading to her truck. He could tell what she was saying from her posture, waving arms and rapidly moving lips were definitely not those of a happy person.
He took his time reeling his line back in, noting the spray of gravel from the truck as it left the parking lot. He packed up his gear, and returned it to his campsite before grabbing his camera, ever present audio recorder and a wet bag that clinked as he lifted it. He then walked toward the dam’s door, clipping his press badge to his shirt as he did. He was just getting to the door when one of the engineer’s came out carrying an old school lunchbox.
“No questions, please,” the man said, his overalls having the name “Scotty” stenciled on the front.
“I wasn’t going to ask about the dam, but I’m hoping I could get some background information about what the firefighters managed to do here,” Wilcox said, smiling his best reporter smile. “They pulled off a bit of a miracle and I’d just like to get a little in-depth information.”
“Oh,” said Scotty, taken by surprise. “Um, I guess that would probably be okay. I’m just about to have lunch though.”
“No worries,” Wilcox laughed. “I can ask questions while you eat. I’ve got cold cokes that have been sitting in the lake all morning.” He held up the wet bag and the clink of glass inside made the engineer’s eyes widen.
“You’ve got coke in glass bottles?” Scotty asked, his voice holding a mix of wonder and desire.
“Sure do,” Wilcox said, gesturing over to the picnic tables in the dam’s public rest area. “Glass bottles do a better job with the flavour, don’t they?”
“Damn right they do,” Scotty said, as the two walked over and sat down at the table. “So, what did you want to know?”
“First off, Scotty. Is that you real name?” Wilcox asked, quirking an eyebrow. “And if it is, have you ever said, ‘Captain, she cannae take no more’?”
“It’s a team joke,” Scotty said, with a chuckle. “We all have the names of famous fictional engineers on our coveralls. I got ‘Scotty,’ and we have a ‘Kaylee Frye’, a ‘Don Channing’, and a ‘Lucas Wolneczak’ too.”
“Nice,” Wilcox said, pulling out a notepad and a pen. “Anyway, I got took around the area before you folks got here, and one odd thing was that ran across a whole bunch of small hoofprints.”
“Well, we are pretty much out in the wilds,” the engineer said, waving his hand around to take in the nearby evergreens. “I’d expect animal tracks.”
“Oh, I get that, but these were definitely the tracks of small horses, and considering where I found them I’m guessing that Montcalm and his team supplement their lack of manpower with some service animals,” Wilcox said, studying the engineer’s face for any reaction. “That would make a great side story. Just a thing about the little horses they use to help in critical situations.”
“I can see that,” Scotty said, pulling out a pair of sandwiches and passing one over to the reporter. “Okay, how can I help with that?”
“WelI, I haven’t seen them anywhere, and fire hall apparently has no facilities for animals,” Wilcox said, accepting the sandwich and passing over a cold glass bottle. “Have you seen any little horses anywhere?”
“Not even a bit,” Scotty said, frowning in thought before pausing to take a bite of his sandwich. “You know, there is a farm near town though. I remember seeing a sign for it as we drove in. I think there was a someone’s name on the sign too. ‘Harding’ I think it was.”
“That actually makes sense,” Wilcox said, taking out an old bottle opener and popping the caps off both bottles of coke. “The logical place to keep horses would be on a farm, and there is an ‘Ernest Harding’ in the fire department.”
“Glad I could help,” Scotty said, taking a deep swig of the dark liquid and sighing with pleasure at the taste. “You know, you’re not what I expected from a reporter.”
“I find I do better at my job by being a decent guy,” Wilcox said, smiling. “Would it be okay if I went along the outside of the dam taking some background shots? I won’t try to go into the dam itself, and I’ll stay on guided walkways.”
“Ya, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Scotty told him, taking another thoughtful swig of coke, and Wilcox did his best not to hold his breath as he recognized the expression. “If I told you something, can you keep my name out of it?”
“Of course,” Wilcox said, cheering inside. “I can refer to you as a deep background source.”
“Okay, that works,” Scotty said, nodding. “Short form, the insides of the dam are screwed up something fierce. Near as we can tell it’s been almost twenty years since the last time the dam saw a maintenance cycle.”
“What?!” Wilcox said, almost managing to keep himself under control. “How does something like that happen?”
“We’ve got a couple of ideas, but nothing firm yet,” Scotty said, before chugging back the last of the cold soda and giving an explosive belch. “Anyway, I’ve got to get back to it. Tell you what, meet me here for lunch tomorrow and I’ll let you know if we’ve figured anything out.”
“Appreciate it,” Wilcox said, gathering up his things and not pushing the engineer harder for information. “I’m going to do that walk around now, and maybe bike to town in a bit if I get the chance.”
The two shook hands briefly and Wilcox walked along the dam’s structure, snapping pictures as he went. Of particular note was the twisted off stub of the shaft that had held the wheel to close the floodgate manually. He was careful not to remove a flat protective cap that someone had put over the shaft to prevent accidental impalements.
“Research note,” Wilcox said, into his voice recorder as he bent down to look closely at the shaft. “Check on how much twisting force a three centimeter thick steel bar can handle before shearing off. Could be a good key to how hard the VFD had to work to get things done.”
From his position he spotted some long hairs that had been caught in a crack in the concrete. Pulling them free, he tucked them into a ziploc bag and spent a minute studying the long brown and red hairs in the sun’s light. A thought occurred to him and he began to slowly go over the rest of the dam, looking for more of the long strands. After several minutes of searching, he found another snagged clump, these ones being black and light grey.
“There we go,” Wilcox declared to the lake, as he tucked his latest find away. “Shouldn’t be too hard to track down horses with these kinds of colours.”
Brian Cummins was not having a good day. The fire chief/mayor of this one horse town wouldn’t talk to him after yesterday’s press conference, and he knew that meant there had to be some sort of secret behind whoever “Seeker” was. No one reacted like Montcalm from something that was minor. Seeker was a story, and Cummins would eat his press card if he was wrong about that.
The problem was that Brightly was way out on the edge of nowhere. With little to no internet access, barely anyone in town was on social media, which was almost always a great place to get information or leads, at the least. Without that vital, modern tool, he felt like he’d been thrown back to the dark ages of report. He may as well be pounding out a story on an old manual typewriter for all the good his laptop and cell phone were doing him.
Brightly was so small in fact that there was no place to rent a car, and no one had wanted to let him borrow one. There were exactly three taxis in town, but all of them had been snapped up by reporters who had thrown obscene amounts of cash at their drivers. It had taken him all morning, he’d finally managed to get a local to drive him around a bit. He might be out in the sticks, but money still talked here.
“Okay, pull over here,” he said, to the driver of the beaten-up pickup truck. “This should be the place.” The driver obediently pulled over at the top of a street that descended down from the intersection.
“You’re not gonna mess with these people are you?” the driver, a local pottery artisan, asked. “Because if you are, this is the wrong street to do it on.”
“I’m just going to ask some questions, that’s all,” Cummins said, pausing as he was about to open the truck door. “Wait, there isn’t some gang or something down here is there?”
“No, but on that side of the street,” the man said, gesturing a clay stained arm toward a pair of houses about halfway down the block, “there’s the Harding place. Everyone knows you don’t push Ernie Harding into a corner. His next door neighbor is the town mechanic. He could break you in half… after he bench presses you.”
“I just want to find out who this Seeker person is,” Cummins said, hand raised placatingly. “What else should I know?”
“Well, across the street from the Hardings lives the town witch,” the potter said, with a completely straight face.
“What?” Cummins asked, incredulous. “Did you say, ‘witch’?”
“Yup, I sure did,” the man said, waving toward a house that looked almost like an oversized log cabin. “The Pedersen woman is a bona-fide wood witch. Does spells, potions, you name it. Buys a lot of small jars from me. Makes some damn good teas.”
“Would you say she knows a lot of people?” Cummins asked, sensing a lead on the elusive Seeker.
“Definitely,” the potter said, nodding. “Either knows them or knows of them.”
“Okay, thanks,” Cummins said, passing over a brown hundred dollar bill over to the potter. “That’s for your time and the information.”
“Well, in that case, I’ve got something else you might want to know,” the man said, pocketing the bill. “Pedersen and the mechanic are supposed to be an item. If you can’t find one of them at home, try the other place.”
“Thank you,” Cummins said, passing over another bill, and getting out of the truck. Paying informants promptly usually paid off in the long run. If nothing else, they would try to get you more information for more money. “Stick around for a bit if you can. I’d like a lift back to the hotel when I’m done.”
“Okay kids, let’s get you outside,” Lynn Harding said, to the four pony children in the rec room with her. “But no going airborne, no magic and no funny stuff. Got it?”
“Aww, Mom,” Zak said, pleading. “We just went for a little flight last night.”
“You two are lucky that I don’t put your wings in little pockets until you learn to use them responsibly,” Lynn said, giving an evil grin to her son as a thought came to her. “You know, it’s actually sort of nice that I can use the word ‘grounded’ literally, with you two now.” Zack and Kylara both visibly gulped, their wings and ears both drooping. Rowan and Romy both wisely said nothing, being more than familiar with their own mother laying down the law.
“Sorry, mom,” Kylara said, her voice small. “I just wanted to…”
“I know,” Lynn said, letting her usual smile break out once more. “Now, out you go. Your parents want to see if you react to the sun the same way you did the other day.”
The four ponies walked out into the backyard and into the rays of the early afternoon sun. The effect was immediate and profound. All four young ponies stopped almost as soon as they were all the way into the sunshine, and stood there, faces upraised to the sky with their eyes closed and faces peaceful.
“Kids?” Lynn asked, bending low. “You okay?”
“Doin’ good, mom,” Zak said, his voice carrying an odd tone of wonder to it. “Sun feels good.” Lynn checked the other three pony children, getting equally semi-absent responses. All four children seemed perfectly happy to just stand there in the sun absorbing the heat and light coming from it.
“I hope Arnold remembered that he was supposed to do this with Billy as well,” Lynn said, watching the children and making sure no one disturbed them. The children were just beginning to blink and move around again in a normal manner when she heard someone knock loudly on her neighbor’s door.
“Hello the house,” Lynn could hear a strange voice call out from Arnold’s place. “Is there anyone home, I’d like to speak to Seeker, please.”