It was the end of another week in Falmouth, and everybody was looking forward to the weekend as an opportunity to rest and relax a bit. A week was typically very chaotic, so any chance to just enjoy yourselves without having to worry about what tomorrow might bring was often appreciated.
At the depot, Charles came to a stop in the shed. "You know, Sophie," he said. "My genius terrifies me sometimes."
"Oh, here we go again with talk of your genius," Sophie groaned. "Sticking things together in a different order does not qualify as genius."
"I found a way to speed things up," Charles smiled. "I placed the vans with loads behind the engine to give me more speed!"
"That also means all the trucks are in the wrong order for shunting," Sophie said.
"Did you think this through?" Porter asked. "Because it doesn't sound like it."
"Go and get your teeth whitened."
"I HAVE NOT HAD MY TEETH WHITENED!"
Zipp climbed off Charles' footplate as his engine shut down, and walked outside to see the others sitting about a table.
"What a lovely evening," Hitch said, looking at the sky. "We really should do something together this weekend. We seem to spend so much time with other things that we don't seem to have enough time to just be friends."
"I like the idea, Hitch!" Pipp replied, taking a snap of the sunset and uploading it to Instagram. "But what are we going to do?"
Suddenly, Sunny spoke. "I've got it!"
"Is it contagious?" Hitch asked.
"We've already used that joke!" Ray called from the shed.
"No," Sunny said. "How about... a sleepover at the lighthouse!"
"What a marvellous idea!" Pipp said. "Got any ideas, Izz? You haven't said much all evening."
"I can do some baking in preparation," Izzy said. "We could make it a cultural mixture of all of our traditions. Not to mention have fun in the process."
"So, provided we can find time in our schedules, would tomorrow work?" Pipp suggested.
"Seems fine to me," Hitch said.
"And me," Izzy added.
"Count me in," Sunny added.
Zipp rolled her eyes. "Looks like I'm getting roped into something else."
Izzy was out in town the next day looking for supplies for the cake she was baking for the sleepover, which was going ahead according to a text she had. This was good news, as she liked making food. She just had one more place to get supplies from, which was just around the corner, and so walked there as she hummed to herself.
Just as she was about to turn the corner, however, she walked into somebody. Literally.
"Ouch!" she exclaimed, as she bumped into them. "Oops! Sorry!"
There was no reply. Izzy looked down to see she had knocked Misty to the floor. "Need a hand?"
"Thanks," Misty replied. "Sorry, I was in your way. I should probably be going now, so-"
"Wait a minute!" Izzy said. "Me and the others-"
"The others and I," a passer by interrupted.
"The others and me and I are organising a sleepover at the lighthouse. Wanna come?"
Misty had an idea. Opaline had wanted to see for a long time what was inside the lighthouse. And this could be her chance to find out. "Yeah, sure. OK. That's great!"
A few hours later, Misty arrived at the lighthouse as instructed and rang the doorbell. A few seconds later, Izzy answered it, a grin on her face. "Welcome to Falmouth lighthouse Misty... Misty..." Izzy paused and consulted her memory. "You know Misty, you never told me what your surname was."
Truth be told, Misty had forgotten the answer she had given to Sunny all the way back at Christmas. She looked around for clues. "Lighthouse!" she shouted. "No, wait, maybe not. Stained glass window! No, who's called stained glass window as a surname? Sunset! Sunset!"
Sunny looked confused. "I thought you said your surname was Brightdawn."
"Yeah, that's totally what I meant because I somehow forgot my own surname in the heat of the moment! Silly, huh?" Misty's nerves were betraying her as she entered the lighthouse. Sunny escorted her through the kitchen, which was decked out with stuff, to the main living area. Bowls, plates, and plenty of snacks and crafting supplies were laid out and ready for use.
"Still, it's nice to finally get time to hang out with you, Misty," Sunny smiled. "You always seem to disappear so suddenly from work."
"Do I? Well, I certainly wasn't aware of that-"
Zipp felt something was off about Misty, but put it down to first time nerves. After all, she'd been similarly jittery when she'd first arrived in Falmouth, according to what Hitch had told her.
"Well, let's get this party rolling!" Izzy called.
After starting with a cone decorating session that somehow ended with Pipp having a glitter goatee despite their being no glue on her face, the crew built towers and began removing bits from them to see if they would fall. Seeing as pillows, mattresses, and other such things are not designed for building stable structures, it didn't take much for them to fall over.
Next they switched to board games as the sun continued to set. Izzy insisted on playing The Cones of Dunshire for reasons best known to herself, a game they had to abandon about half an hour in as nobody could understand how the game worked. So they switched to SmallWorld, which is very simple by comparison.
After a quick pause for tea and biscuits, it was time to load up on popcorn and other things. Misty tried some popcorn and seemed to be in a state of nirvana as the flavours and textures were processed by her mind. "This is the best popcorn I've ever tasted!" she exclaimed.
"Family recipe," Izzy replied. "Now, who wants to watch something?"
Zipp won the dice roll for deciding what to watch, so they settled on Plan 9 from Outer Space, and had much fun laughing at the sheer incompetence of the movie.
Sunny checked her watch. "Are you sure we'll have enough time to fit everything in? My watch says it's 10 at night now."
"Time for kareoke then, before the neighbours start complaining!" Pipp suggested.
"I don't have any neighbours," Sunny replied. "We're in a lighthouse, remember?"
"In which case we can make as much noise as we want." Izzy switched on another device she had assembled and began humming. "Ouch. I'm really out of tune."
To solve this problem, she selected some really strange freestyle Jazz backing track and began improvising on a tenor saxaphone she somehow produced from nowhere.
"Fancy joining in?" she said to Misty, in the midst of a break section.
"I don't know much of whatever this music is," Misty said.
"I agree with that. Could we switch to something else? This is sounding a bit weird," Sunny agreed.
After swapping the tracks to pop songs, it quickly emerged Misty didn't know the words to the majority of popular songs, and simply improvised lyrics as she went along. The fact that she couldn't sing in tune didn't help.
After all that had happened, everybody was pretty tired. But there was time for one last tradition. The six gathered their sleeping bags and placed them in a circle, and Sunny began to tell a story.
"A long, long time ago-"
"I can still remember how the music used to make me smile?" Zipp said.
"Sorry?" Misty said.
"It's the opening of American Pie by Don McLean. Good song. You should listen to it."
"Where was I?" Sunny asked. "Anyway, on the coast of England is an Island called Sodor. It has sandy beaches, and is surrounded by blue sea. There are roads, waterways, and lots of trees where the birds sing. The island even has factories, several harbours, and a coal mine. It is also covered in lots and lots of railway lines."
She paused for dramatic effect. "And a long time ago, the island was written about, documented, and preserved in the pages of legend by the work of three men. They were Wilbert Awdry, Edwin 'Teddy' Boston, and Eric Treacy. In fact, they became such experts on Sodor they became known as the Guardians of Sodor, and even started a new field of academic study. It's called Sudriology."
"Sounds like an interesting degree," Pipp said.
"But one day, their writing just stopped. It's believed that something caused them to stop writing about Sodor, but the termination of their writing correlates with the time the Non-Faceless Vehicles started to vanish. It's believed that the two are connected."
"That's not the story!" Misty exclaimed.
Sunny blinked. "That's what's written down in the history books. If you want more details on Sudrian customs and life, I'd suggest reading Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways. Infuriatingly it's currently out of print, but you can borrow my copy if you want."
"No! The story you told!" Misty said. "A long time ago, there was a wise and powerful woman in the ranks of the Other Railway, who wanted Sodor to benefit from the advances of the Modernisation Program. But the Fat Director, and those other men you mentioned, were too stubborn to see that the railways needed to change in order to survive. As a result, they divided the crystals that powered the magic, depowering her and weakening the Other Railway. That's what really happened."
"What?" Pipp asked. "That sounds like one big fever dream."
"It also doesn't match anything we were told," Zipp said. "Where did you hear this version?"
"I may have embellished it a bit, but this was found in some archives somewhere."
Sunny sighed. "Oh well. We can argue about it in the morning. I'll get the lantern from upstairs and set it down here. That way we don't all fall over each other if we get up in the night."
Misty immediately took interest in the lantern the second it was placed down. The central tube glowed with a rainbow like energy. "That's prisbeam magic?!" she thought to herself. "Is that what powers the crystals and allows engines to talk?"
She knew Opaline would be happy if she got her hands on that. So that night, she decided that the best course of action (and to avoid Opaline biting her head off, so to speak) was to 'borrow' the lantern for a bit. Without asking.
But then she thought twice. Even if the others thought she was a bit odd, she genuinely liked them. Stealing from them felt... wrong.
Her heart was torn in two. What to do?
In the end, she settled upon a solution. She took out a bottle from a bag, and opened the top of the lantern. She then tipped a small bit into the jar and sealed it. That was a good compromise.
She, like the others, settled down to sleep. She had a long journey ahead of her, after all, provided she could get away without being spotted.