Lutscintorb

by Mary Sue

Loud Awakening

The following morning started with the stagecoach exploding.

It happened like a wooden barrel rupturing at the seams. The panels tried to fly apart, but the trim and metal framework held firm and more or less kept the stagecoach in one piece. Still, it tried desperately to burst. A brilliant blue and pink flash of light sent a thumping shockwave across the surrounding meadow, as if a thundercloud had gone off spectacularly from inside the carriage. Trunks and miscellany not tied down went flying, and the hinges on the door snapped and threw it open. Some of the panels separated along the seams and the ones that didn’t had bolstered new cracks. A rear wheel had even popped off its axle and the windows that weren’t cracked slid out of their frames.

As for Whiskey, who decided to fall asleep on the carriage, he was rudely tossed up into the air and, accompanied by his surprised scream, landed somewhere in the tall grass with an unceremonious thud. Sharp Tack woke up with a start, alarmed and mystified to catch his friend at the peak of his arc and then fall out of view. He scrambled to his hooves and made it to check on his friend.

“I’m alright!” Whiskey declared, jumping to his hooves. One of his legs then gave out and he staggered forward, yelping. Sharp Tack took another step and Whiskey tried to wave him off. “I’m fine!” he reiterated. “Go check on the bloody unicorn!”

“Forget her!” Sharp Tack said, coming up to and supporting his friend. “Where’re you hurt?”

“It ain’t broken,” Whiskey said, taking his leg back. His right side took the brunt of the impact, and was covered with scrapes and one big nasty bruise. “I can walk just fine,” he added, and then started limping towards the stagecoach. “Go check on the damned unicorn, already! Hard to demand a ransom when the girl’s dead!”

“I know, I know!” Sharp Tack said, turning and running back towards the smoking carriage. “How in Epona’s sweet name does this even happen?”

He made it to the stagecoach, which in addition to the immediate area, was radiating with the distinctly pungent smell of ozone. He grimaced, finding the door blasted open and hanging off one of its hinges. The straw, the wood, the iron bars: they all had been scorched black by the unmistakable discharge of unfiltered mana. The mare lay in the middle of it all, unmoving. Her perfect fur and mane had been tarnished by light burns and the lingering soot. The horn cap had been shattered, resting in loosely held together bits at the base of her horn. A dark blast mark resided at the tip of her horn, evidently the source of the explosion.

Sharp Tack leaned in and checked the mare’s pulse. He murmured something low that was as much a curse as it was a prayer, and started to drag her out into the fresh air.

Whiskey finally arrived, waving away the thin smokey haze and wrinkling his nose at the smell. “She alright?”

“Still out cold,” Sharp Tack said, "but she's alive." He took her out and set her down in the grass over beside the campfire. He pointed out horn. “Looks like the horn cap overloaded.”

“No, that’s not... no!” Whiskey said with a gasp. “There was like two weeks’ worth of room in that thing! I double-checked! No way that thing filled up overnight! It’s literally impossible!”

Sharp Tack turned and barked, “Yeah well did your dense mind pick out one of those two full ones by mistake?!”

“Absolutely not!” he snapped back. “And even then I’m sure to leave a couple days’ of room so they don’t tap out. You know how volatile those things can get!”

“Obviously!” Sharp Tack shouted, throwing a hoof at their smoldering stagecoach.

“Maybe it was cracked! Somehow!” he offered. “It’s not my fault!”

“Well she sure as hell didn’t do it!” Sharp Tack yelled. His mind raced for more things to say, to maybe uncover the real cause of the explosion by simply screaming and marching around in a circle, yelling angrily at the world and fate at large.

Whiskey looked down at the mare and with little else on his mind, sighed. He quickly checked her for injuries. Fortunately, she only appeared to have soot stains across her fur. Had the horn cap been any stronger, than it probably would have burned her more severely, if not cracked her horn. He playfully slapped her on the cheek to try and wake her up, but of course that didn’t work.

“She’s lucky to be alive. If the filly wasn’t comatose before, she sure is now,” he said dryly. He glanced up at the broken carriage and asked, “Now what?”

Sharp Tack stopped, took a look around at the stagecoach and the debris strewn about, and gave a defeated sigh. “I’m sure we can fix it,” he said. “But anything we do will be temporary. We’ll need to stop somewhere in Portsmouth and see if we can get it repaired, but it’ll have to be someplace we can trust on account of our... modifications. And that’s going to be expensive.” He groaned at the situation. “It might be cheaper to just buy a new one. But then we’ll need to modify that before we can pick up our shipment, and that isn’t going to be cheap, either.”

Whiskey pinched the bridge of his snout. “Great. So we’re set back what, half a day to get this thing moving again? And maybe a day or two while in Portsmouth?”

“Probably, and at least a thousand bits coming out of the boss’s pocket,” Sharp Tack added. He moved towards the unconscious mare and looked down at her, furrowing his brow in the early morning sun. He said, “This filly better be our big break.”

Comments

[JustAnotherTimeLord]

Oh man, they aren't prepared for what's in store. I can tell already that those two will go through hell and back before they find any sort of payout from this mare.

[Emotional Flight]

Epona

In Gallo-Roman religion, the god of horses. Appropriate.

[Revan]

This is going to be epic.