Day 16: Airship, Hoofaestus
Starlight had thought the voyage could not possibly get any more unpleasant. On the second morning after the auxiliary power had kicked in, as she formed the shield against the veritable hurricane outside her bunk for the morning trek to the cafeteria, she couldn’t help but laugh at her own naivety.
The ship now actively tried to shake itself apart beneath her hooves. Instead of occasional bouts of rain, the mists now produced a constant deluge, whipped all the harder by the ship’s increased speed. The lightning rods discharged a few times a minute, producing a constant cacophony that had to be shouted over anywhere other than the cafeteria.
Not that she had anypony to speak to. Trixie had been giving her the silent treatment since their tiff two days prior, and the crew of the Hoofaestus had a lot more on their plates in order to keep the ship in one piece.
Still, Starlight had been able to grow accustomed to the endless rolling thunder, and had managed to sleep through the night. She faced the storm from behind her shield almost revitalized, and didn’t even mind Trixie closely following in her wake.
She even managed a friendly wave to Stig as he fumbled with a replacement lightning rod off the port side of the ship. He looked up, smiled, and returned the wave.
Insodoing, he lost his grip on the metal spire, which slipped down to make contact with the rod he was about to replace. There was a blinding flash, and Stig fell from view, trailing singed feathers.
“Stig!” Starlight rushed to the edge of the metal scaffolding to see where he had landed, but the clouds hadn’t caught him – his feathers passed right through the cloud layer and continued falling. She looked around, but nopony other than Trixie, whose eyes were wide and had a hoof to her muzzle, had seen what had happened. She couldn’t even see any other crew members through the mist and rain.
Starlight swore, then flung herself off the edge after him.
Immediately the scent of ozone flooded her nose, and she channeled more energy into her shield. The incoming lightning blast harmlessly splashed around her as she plummeted towards the sea below.
Bright morning sunlight assaulted her eyes as she cleared the storm clouds holding the Hoofaestus aloft. Stig’s ragdoll body fell through the air, but he was already over a thousand feet below her and still accelerating. She dispelled her shield and erased that distance in a blink with a bang.
“I gotcha, Stig,” Starlight yelled as she wrapped both him and herself in her telekinetic field. She tried to gently slow their descent, then saw the rapidly approaching wall of water below them and abandoned subtlety. “Okay, gotta slow down.” She strained against the almighty power of gravity pulling at them both. “Sloooow down.” An overglow enveloped her horn. Still the water loomed ever closer. “Slowdownslowdownslowdownslowdownslowdown–”
They plunged into the Celestial Sea slightly slower than if they had jumped off a diving board, but the cold was still enough to force a reflexive gasp from Starlight. Seawater burned her lungs, and on instinct she blasted back the water with a wall of force. She coughed and sputtered as her hemisphere of air bobbed like a cork on the sea swells.
She looked down just in time to see Stig’s tail slip beneath the surface.
Starlight gasped. “Stig!” Concentration broken, the sea rushed back in and slammed Starlight from all sides, spinning her about. Disoriented, she looked around for Stig in the briny blue, and saw him a dozen feet below, sinking slowly into the darkness. She grabbed ahold of him with her telekinetic field once more, and dragged them both to the surface.
They floated for a moment while she caught her breath and cleared the seawater from her nose, then she levitated them above the sapphire swells. It was a gorgeous day, with puffy white clouds dotting a cerulean sky – aside from the stormy path the Hoofaestus was carving through it, at least.
Starlight’s horn began to ache under the continued strain of hauling both herself and Stig around, so she cast a quick cloudwalking enchantment on herself and teleported them both to a cloud roughly on the same plane as the Hoofaestus, rapidly fading into the distance as it hurtled along. She felt the cloud give a bit under her weight, but it held, and so she released herself and Stig from her telekinetic grip.
Stig dropped straight through the cloud like a stone.
“What in Tartarus–” Starlight hopped off the cloud and grabbed him once again before he got too far away, then brought him up to eye level for an examination. He was soaked to the bone, mane and tail still dripping water. Black burns on the breast and back of his flight jacket marked where the lightning had struck him.
It was then that Starlight realized he wasn’t breathing.
“Oh goddesses, Stig, don’t do this to me!” Starlight felt another surge of adrenaline flood her system. “Medical facilities! The ship has to have – but I don’t know where it is. The cafeteria!” She looked at the distant figure of the Hoofaestus, easily a mile away, as it only just started to come about. “Not fast enough.” She tried to find the outline of the envelope above the roiling storm clouds. “Seventy-five yards aft of the nose cone and thirty yards down, bridge, cafeteria – hnnngh!”
Starlight grimaced in pain as a double overglow enveloped her horn, and with a loud bang Starlight and Stig exploded into the Hoofaestus’ cafeteria. They slammed bodily into the corrugated metal floor and skidded with terrible speed across it, eliciting surprised squawks from the griffons within.
Through the mind-numbing pain of severe magical overexertion, Starlight realized her error in not matching the airship’s velocity with her teleport just as the back of her skull collided with a bolted-down table leg.