Bluegill Brine was asleep when the cold started. In the jury-rigged aquarium in the bright tower, the fish slept through the early morning routine of the ponies that lived there. To her, all the sounds outside her glass walls were naught but ripples and babble, punctuated by the occasional snap! of a camera flash going off.
Brine yawned, stray bubbles floating out of her mouth as she stirred. She wasn’t certain what had awakened her, perhaps the dull thud that she had come to associate with the door closing as ponies left. Izzy always slammed it the hardest, her magic reflecting her enthusiasm. Brine poked her head out of her enclosure, the house was…empty. That was odd, normally Sunny would stay and wait for her, help her dress herself. She must’ve been in a hurry. The seapony dove down into her tank and retrieved her helmet, already full of water. The new one from Loud Factory was much better than the lamp cover she had scavenged from the waves. It had a little box of machines in the back that bubbled air in, keeping the water fresh. All they asked was for her to press her fin into some black dust and then leave a hoofprint on a paper covered in words. They’d helped with her new legs too, but Brine had rebuilt them herself in the end. Those were more personal to her, partially telescoping stilts that strapped to her waist, around her tail. All powered up, she heaved herself out of her pool and onto the tiled floor. With a swaying waddle, she propelled herself towards the door. Her friends were all busy, and she wanted to know why.
The door opened, a whistling wind stirring the air. Brine didn’t feel the cold, not after a lifetime spent in the reef. The only hint at all that something had changed was the gray pallor swimming through the sky, and the bundles of fabric adorning ponies’ necks and ears. Brine shrugged, shut the door, and went a’searching. Surely Sunny was simply at her smoothie stand? She hadn’t checked the clock, but it should have been early.
Sunny was not at her smoothie stand, not that Brine noticed. Her eyes were facing upwards, awe like a thrashing minnow in her pupils as the first crystal flakes fell. She’d seen snow before, down in the bay, but it had always melted as it touched the water. Now a flake landed on her bubble helmet and stayed there, every geometric leaf reflecting her dazzling smile. She flopped with joy, gurgling and grinning. More flakes were falling, building up in fuzzy snowdrifts. Ponies were sticking out their tongues to catch them, and Brine wanted nothing more than to do the same. Even still, she wasn’t foolish enough to take off her helmet, and she knew it would melt as soon as it touched the water, no matter how cold it was.
Other ponies were chasing the larger flakes, and Brine quickly joined in, wanting to see them plaster to her helmet like starfish on the reef bed. More and more the flakes stuck to her helmet, growing in a curious way. The glass rippled with angular geometries, prisms and perfect reflections, but as they grew and grew, soon all turned white. Prancing unsteadily now, Brine was noticing that it was colder than she was used to after all, the wind ripping the heat away from her furless body, and it was getting harder and harder to see where she was going. With a panicked gurgle, she careened straight into a snowbank as her stilts slid on the ice.
WHOOMPH!
Brine gurgled sadly, disappointed in herself, and firmly stuck in the snow. It burned like salt on her skin. She wiggled and thrashed, her stilts slipping on the ice. She sighed, saddened and stuck. She’d have to wait for somepony to help her out. Surely somepony would see that she wasn’t just playing, right?
Time passed, and Brine began to feel very, very scared. Her bowl was so cold, and she felt strange feelings travel down her spine, trembling shakes she couldn’t control or stop. She tried to call out, but the snow muffled her squeaks.
Suddenly, she felt hooves tugging on her tail fins, and then on her flanks. She gurgled, trying to look around, to twist away, memories of reef sharks bubbling to the surface.
The hooves pulled again, stronger this time. Brine whinnied in fear as she felt the connection between her neck and her helmet tug at her scales, suction barely holding on. All she could see was white. The snow surrounding her, or the ice creeping across her screen, she didn’t know.
She heard a scraping noise, closer to her head. Then another tug, followed by more scraping, before the white colour of the snow seemed to somehow intensify. Light was once again filtering through the ice and glass in a way that was altogether beautiful and nerve-wracking. It helped not that her scar was pulsing as her kind saviour brushed against her neck as they cleared away the snow.
When Brine was removed from the snowbank, there was not much sound at all. Her helmet was still covered in sticky snow, the inside frosted over. There were, however, many feelings. The feeling of shivers sending her body into spasms, the feeling of relief and safety, the feeling of unseen hooves lifting her up and laying her over something warm that was moving. The feeling of pain, again in her scar as her body lay on top of another moving body that was taking her someplace safe. The feeling of love for her rescuer, and hope for the future.
Outside of Brine’s snow globe, Sprout Cloverleaf felt wracked with guilt as he carried the fish he had once injured on his back, trotting as quickly as he could to his house before her helmet’s oxygenator froze over completely. There were other feelings too. Panic, of course, for the health and safety of the outsider guest, but hope as well; for old wrongs to be set aright. Penance for his short reign of inequine intolerance.
By the time Sprout kicked the door to his home open, the machinery of Bluegill’s support system was creaking, gears freezing over and mechanisms stuttering in time with her shivering twitches. He dumped her into his bathtub and turned on the water. Hot and cold at once, what mattered first was volume, and speed. The white rush from his faucet mixed air into water, a low tech oxygenator as Brine’s helmet thawed alongside her. Sprout left, looking and scrambling for anything to improve the situation. He was in a panic. Brine was in bliss. Warm water licked at her scales, ice sloughed off like dead skin, and bright and beautiful colours filled her vision. After so long being stuck in a void of white, the patterns of green leaves and yellow tiles were as beautiful as the rainbow light of the bright tower to her. With a happy burble, she stuck her head above the waterline of the now filled bathtub to see who had rescued her.
She didn’t recognize the brick red stallion, not enough to know by name anyways. He’d been there, when she was given her helmet in exchange for lines on a paper. He’d been there, away in the corner, watching. Now she was in his house, seeing inside the mind of a pony that built her life-giving machine. There could be no words, or thoughts, other than wonder. He worked at Loud Factory, and his home reflected his occupation, gears and gaskets and grime interspersed with green, ferns and vines.
Sprout cleared his throat. “Hey…can I have your helmet please?” He seemed so unsure of himself, like he was the one intruding in her home. With a sucking hiss, she pried it off of her, holding it out on unsteady hooves. He took it, doddering off to the sounds of clanking metal and shuffling boxes.
Brine submerged herself in the tub again, floating around. Present but not there. How long had she been stuck in the snow? She didn’t want to move. Tired now. She was fine with just watching, and listening. She heard the sounds of metal and fire, the scrapping of boxes across the floor, the tinkling of dropped washers and muttered profanities. Sparks popped and steel screamed. Eventually, the stallion came back, dragging a cart by his teeth. Her helmet rested on top, surrounded by tools she didn’t know the names of and boxes full of materials. A lot of them resembled jaws, metal pincers holding various parts of machinery together. The plastic box at the back was gone, a new jumble of wires and pieces in its place. He was adding parts, fixing something Brine couldn’t quite understand what was broken. She let out a questioning gurgle, trying to inquire.
“Oh, I’m adding something. The electronics were failing from the cold, and we mostly expected the water to stay inside the helmet when we designed it and-” He continued, delving into ever more technical explanations as the sunlight began to dim. Brine listened as well as she could, until a different sound demanded her attention.
*Growwwwl…*
“Shoot. I lost track of time, haven’t offered you anything. Here, lemme…”
He rushed out of the room, leaving Brine alone, confused, and hungry. She let out a “Yap!”, the closest she’d gotten to a real word. Much like the dogs around Maritime Bay, it meant she wanted something.
The red stallion returned, a scrap of slimy kelp in his wet hoof, held away from his chest. He was cold, had no time to put a scarf on. Almost slamming it into the tub, green magic grew from his hoof and shot into the aquatic sprout. With a groan it grew, sprouting into a long and tangled green rope that floated on the surface of the water. Brine couldn’t believe her eyes, clapping her hooves happily before diving down to eat. It tasted sweet, full of new growth and magical freshness.
As she ate, he returned to tinkering. There was a box in the room, one Brine had somehow overlooked. It was pink, with a bow on top. Something that was meant to be opened by the recipient, not the gift giver.
No, Sprout thought. It isn’t the right time, or circumstance. Maybe next year. He opened the Winter Wishday’s present and began installing the auxiliary defroster to the front of Brine’s helmet, a little box that should be inconspicuous underneath her chin. Black wires, both inside and out, stretched like a shadow of a spiderweb through the glass, integrating the heater along the underside. It shouldn’t get in the way of her vision even when she was looking downwards, and provide even heating without scorching her neck.
Some clicks of plastic sliding into place, followed by twisting screws and a tap with an engineer’s hammer for good luck, and it was done. Solid earth pony construction, refurbished after enduring a stress test out in the wild. No design survives first contact with the enemy, Sprout thought, but the helmet should be improved in every way from the hastily constructed diver’s helmet it had begun as. The sign of goodwill had been more important than the quality of the mechanism itself for the original. Maretime Bay was supposed to be a welcoming place to ponies of all kinds, even those supposedly found only in legends.
Brine watched the stallion finish up his work, gulping down the last few blades of kelp. She wished she knew what all those tools did, how her helmet actually worked, what a wire was. Watching could only get her so far, but the wonder remained steady. Brine gurgled as the stallion walked towards her, offering her the helmet, now changed. Better. She took it in her hooves and filled it with water before putting it on. The seal hissed as it closed, and bubbles floated and popped behind her head as the oxygenator activated.
“Here, like this.” The stallion reached forwards to flip a switch near her throat, brushing against her scar. She squeezed her eyes shut, only to open them again. She felt warmth, rather than searing pain. The machine was working, like a mechanical hug. His smile was half anxiety, half relief, and touched by the same pride Brine had felt when she had first assembled her helmet and mobility wheels out of debris from the Bright Tower. It was the pride of an engineer for a successful project.
“There, ready for the walk back?” Brine could tell he didn’t really want her to leave, and she certainly was fine with staying in this workshop of wonder. However, it felt late and she still had no idea where Sunny was, or anypony for that matter. Brine glanced out the window and glubbed with fear. She didn’t know when, but at some point the sky had lost all colour, only a black sea flecked with snowflakes like sand in a wave.
They left together, shocked by the intensity of the storm and the darkness of the sky. Snow was piling up high, and Brine’s telescoping legs were quickly getting stuck as the road filled in. Sprout hitched Brine onto his back and ran, as fast as he could safely move. Ponies still dotted the outside, shivering in their hats and scarves, teeth chattering as they squeak out “Frosty Shivers” in traditional greeting.
Sprout sprinted up the hill, chest heaving as he struggled through snow piles that were steadily rising. Brine held on tight, one hoof pressed firmly against the switch for her helmet heater. As the cold wind screamed against them and her tailfins shook, she couldn’t bear the thought of being without heat for even a second.
By fate or by earth pony magic, Sprout could force open the frozen door to the Lighthouse, max out the furnace, and slip Brine into her pool before even looking around to see that the house was uncharacteristically dark.
Brine shivered in her aquarium, looking around for answers. Where had her friends been all day?
Sprout looked around, but found nopony. He stayed with Brine, neither of them speaking, for what must’ve been an hour, before sleep claimed her and exhaustion him. With a whispered goodbye, Sprout snuck out of the darkened lighthouse and walked back to his home. The storm had stopped, the snow already melting down. The freak cold was gone.
The door creaked open, and Sunny and her friends walked in, yawning and exhausted. Brine was bubbling in her aquarium, and after a quiet celebration, the ponies got ready for bed. Empty boxes were exchanged with a giggle, there had been no time for presents for themselves, a whole day spent appeasing everypony else. One by one they said goodnight, until only Izzy was left.
“We went the whole day without ya, didn’t we fishy? Real sorry, but Sunny was in such a rush, and we’ve never celebrated Winter Wishday with so many families before.” She nudged a small box onto the lip of Brine’s aquarium. “Warm Wishyhoof, Brine. I hope you like your present.”