Chapter 7
For the second time that day, Jacob followed his instincts instead of his senses and buckled himself into the copilot’s seat. Harley cast him one frustrated look before she vanished out the door and snapped it closed. Jacob unclipped the helmet from the back of the chair even as a dull roar rose from above them, the unmistakeable sound of rotors as they started to spin.
“What the buck are you still doing here?” Rainbow asked, flipping down the polarized visor. She went to work on the controls like a skater on fresh ice, not even seeming to see them as she worked. The ground jerked and they pitched forward, yanking free of something. “You a pilot?”
“Studying to be an architect, actually.” He plopped the helmet down on his head, and found it brought with it a barrage of sound. Screams of pain, shouts and orders, none of which he could understand. He pushed the mic up and out of the way, just in case it might catch some of his words. “I’ll shut up and not get in your way.”
“Celestia help you if you don’t.” She glared at him with icy anger, then pitched them violently forward off the cloud. So much for preflight checks, or any checks he knew. They shot forward faster than he would’ve believed such a massive object could even travel. The room full of seats had made this thing look like a large business helicopter, but the sudden angle and violent acceleration told another story. No commercial craft could’ve survived the mistreatment Dash gave them.
Jacob was true to his words and only watched as they made their way out of town. He couldn’t tell the distance, but it looked like they were heading towards the middle of a barren, disused field. Sandy desert would’ve been unbroken were it not for several little flashes of light far below. Teleportation? He half expected a flight of fighter jets to shoot them down, but nothing like that happened. They landed without incident about a hundred feet away from the struggling crowd.
“Now, get out.” Dash pointed at the door emphatically. “Take a proper seat this time, or I’ll leave you stranded on a cloud.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He removed the helmet and hurried out about the time the outside doors were slammed open and he got a good look at the crowd.
Well, not much of one. There were only about ten people, none he actually knew. All had strange eyes and hair, though that was not his first concern. Jacob offered his hand to help the first climb up into the helicopter, and found the person he helped was bleeding and could barely stand. The whole crowd looked like that, and seemed very much like a group in shock. A few moments later the last of them made their way past him, and he slammed the door shut.
“You know any first aid, kid?” Harley’s voice, offering him a pair of gloves and a mask. “Turns out we’re the only ponies on our feet.”
The ground lurched as they took off. Several of the injured fell over, moaning. Jacob took the gloves, and put them on along with the mask. “I’m, uh… I got my First Aid merit badge…” He shivered, glancing out the little window at the empty desert. “Where’s the rest of my club? They should’ve been together right now…”
Harley’s voice was grim. “I count eleven ponies in here, us exempt.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “There should be twenty-one.”
He suppressed a whimper. He needed to know what had become of his friends, but he couldn’t rightly insist on answers when his inaction might kill someone. Of course, if their injuries were that severe, there wasn’t much he could do. “I take it you’ve got a first aid kit somewhere?”
She lifted a steel box from beside her, then clanked it back down again. “You’ve already got a better one.”
Someone hurried over from the other end of the aircraft as they continued their ascent: Twilight. She was wearing a flight uniform similar to the one Rainbow had been wearing earlier, and had bright purple wings Jacob hadn’t seen on her before. She also had a wand of her own. She exchanged a greeting briefly with the one who had brought the rescue team and flown them up to the helicopter, though she didn’t use English.
After a few harsh words exchanged, she turned and met Jacob’s eyes. “Do you still have…”
He held it towards her. “You want this back?”
“No.” She barked something to Harley, again in that language he couldn’t speak. Harley responded sounding bitter, bowed, and set the box down. Then Twilight approached him. “You did pretty great with fire. How about some healing magic?” She nudged him along towards whom he could only assumed was the most severely injured of the lot. The man, maybe forty, had taken at least two bullets to his chest and was seeping dark blood. His breaths only came raggedly.
“You should have Harley do it.” He gestured back towards her with the wand. “She’s better with magic than I could possibly be. She can teleport and everything!”
“Harley can’t do healing spells,” she said, as flatly as though she were commenting on the weather. “So she’s going to triage things along the line until we can get to them. Medicine isn’t my special talent, but there was a required course in the Academy…” She dropped to her knees on the plush carpet, and he did the same on the victim’s other side.
Jacob’s horror had no description. Blood so thick he had never smelled before, let alone seen the ruin that high-caliber rounds could make of a person. As Twilight removed scraps of cloth, he had to look away to keep himself from vomiting. He squeezed the wand hard to keep himself from running away.
Once at Boy Scout camp Jacob had been a few feet away from a friend who cut off his own big toe with an axe. The blood, the screaming, the sound of the blow as it fell, had given him nightmares for weeks. He might have trouble sleeping for years after this. Not only that, but his own friends weren’t even here… except for Eric and Danielle, who he only sort of knew. The two of them huddled together in two of the seats, too shocked and horrified by what they saw to even react intelligently.
“You going to be okay?” Twilight’s voice again, cutting through the fog.
He shook his head. “I’ll still try. Even if I don’t think I can be any good.”
“You can.” Twilight slipped something out of her pocket and into her free hand: a knife, with an obsidian blade and a handle wrapped in glittering metal wire. “Just do what I do. Watch carefully.” He jerked reflexively away from her as she cut a little into one of her own arms, just deep enough to draw a few drops. She let them fall onto the gaping wound in a way that made him gasp again.
“Mixing blood is really, really bad,” he muttered, mostly by reflex.
“Bleeding to death is worse than bloodborne diseases,” she responded, resting her wand just above the injury. She started speaking. It wasn’t English, yet somehow Jacob found the words had meaning anyway. “Our blood together, to give life where it was taken. Injured soul, listen and stay.” What began as a feeble glow from her wand became a brilliant purple flame, so bright it echoed in her eyes. “Be whole.”
Her wand flashed, and suddenly the injured man was gone. Filling some of that space were the torn wreckage of his clothes and… a pony. Jacob almost didn’t believe what he saw and very nearly screamed. He slid back, dropping his wand and beginning to hyperventilate. It was an adult unicorn from the look of it, belly bloody and greenish coat missing in places. There was no more wound.
“Hey.” Harley’s voice was clear. He felt one hand on the back of his head, forcing him to look at the pony. Look until the shape stopped blurring. “Hiding from the truth makes it worse, believe me. I should know…”
Another few seconds and he could think straight again. Amidst so many shocks, poor Jacob was very close to his limit. A little more stress and he might very well curl up into a catatonic ball and not move again. “Okay. I think… I’m good.” Harley scooped up the creature in her arms, carrying him away.
In this case, Jacob was grateful not to have to look for long. Even so, he had noticed one thing about the creature that had seemed a little different from the show: he had been small, much smaller than he expected. So much for counting pixels on Angel, or any of the other estimates the fandom had used.
The sight of blood and death dismissed such an absurd thought, and he followed Twilight to their next patient. “You weren’t supposed to see that,” she muttered, sounding frustrated. “But you didn’t have a breakdown, right? You still with me refugee?”
“Yes.” He glanced briefly at Harley’s retreating back. “What happened just now?”
“Everypony who came here from Equestria has an illusion just like that. There are several ways to kill it—too much magic too fast is the easiest. You saw the same thing start to happen to mine last night, when I had to fight without a wand.”
“Excuse me, Princess…” The patient between them had bright orange hair, and red-brown eyes. She also had a broken wing and a pained expression. “Maybe teach later and heal now before I bite my tongue off?”
“Sorry.” She blushed, then handed him the knife. “Do what I did.”
“Uh… I’m not sure if I know what you did.” He looked down at the patient: the woman was in her mid-thirties and looked like someone who had spent her whole life in the military. She also had a bullet in the shoulder that had apparently missed her collarbone but kept going through her wing. “I don’t even remember the words!”
Twilight gestured meaningfully at the knife. “Start with the blood, get a little in the wound. No bond between ponies goes deeper than blood.”
“I’m not a pony.” He wiped the blade on his tee-shirt anyway, preparing it.
“No, but blood is the same thing for us as it is for you. Don’t worry, it won’t be enough to hurt her.”
“But I’ll be enough to hurt you if you don’t hurry up.” She glowered up at them both, one hand gripping the leather cushion of a nearby seat so hard it had already torn in a few places.
He obeyed, feeling a brief sting of a sharp blade, then squeezing a few drops down into the woman’s shoulder. She didn’t react to the bizarre practice, only looking impatient. “Now what? Hold the wand up, and… could you give me those words again?”
“No.” Twilight answered flatly. “Memorized spells come with patterns, diagrams, raw materials. When you can’t memorize, you use this instead.” She tapped her chest, right above her heart. “Creation is dust, magic is the only truth. Use the same will that let you see a pony for what he was and heal Spitfire here.”
That didn’t sound very helpful. Still, the longer he held the wand above her wounds, the more he felt the need to act. He had already mixed their blood, after all. “What happened to my friends?” he asked her, his voice level. “Did you fight for them?”
“Y-yes,” she croaked, clutching at her wounded shoulder with her other hand. Blood soaked into her flight-suit, soaked into the carpet so thick it pooled. She might still bleed to death if they didn’t act quickly. “Couldn’t… their weapons… never seen them before! They killed so fast…”
It was a vague answer, but enough. Twilight said that magic was willpower, well… he could get some willpower to help someone who had fallen trying to save his friends. Even if she failed. Of course, he didn’t know the strange language these people used, so he couldn’t do what Twilight had done. He felt silly, but just spoke in English, holding his wand just above the wound. “Take my blood and breathe,” he commanded. “You have felt enough pain.”
It wasn’t as miraculous as what happened with Twilight’s spell. His patient didn’t change back into a pony, or have all her wounds magically disappear. She sighed and fell limp, relaxing at last. Still breathing, but no longer bleeding. It was enough.
Fatigue hit him harder than it had the night before, and he slumped backward against the wall of the helicopter. He felt a brief pain as he smacked against the metal there. Yet in that pain, there was also understanding. For just a second he saw through the illusions, through matter itself even to what was beneath and the damage torn in threads of fate. No injury was severe enough to obscure the pattern that belonged.
“Sorry.” Jacob shook himself once, rolling up his sleeves. He didn’t give Twilight her knife back. “Let’s help the rest.”
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Good to see Jacob's kind of getting into the swing of things.
7426424 Look, I'm a Brony as well, but I'm a feminist Brony. Why should a whole fandom's followers be named by the designation of the male of that group?
7426440 Hmmm...Well we needed to call ourselves something...and Harmoknights is copyrighted...
7426497 I know how lame this sounds, but how about: Pony Fans?
7426440 Because that's what the fandom originally was. Take your feminism away from this place, we have no desire for your sexist views. Also he litterly just said the term "bronies" is a non-gender specific noun, so that makes it not just the male fans.
7426570 Ehh...Brony is easier to say...sides most of the women I know would roll their eyes at you for making femism sound like what Starlight Glimmer was selling rather than real Equality....
Well, I wonder....
Where's Pinkie Pie?
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Look, I agree it's kind of wrong that 'brony' becomes the broad, gender neutral term and 'pegasister' the exception. That kind of 'man as default' language is everywhere in our culture, and it's subliminally sexist. But if it makes you feel any better, I heard a theory that 'brony' was actually not originally a portmanteau of 'bro' and 'pony'. The first pony-related subheading on 4chan was /b/pony/. The word then ostensibly came from running the 'b' into the 'pony' with an added consonant to avoid saying 'bony' instead. Thus, that was the 'brony forum'.
Though I would argue that the male-sounding name as the moniker for all adult fans isn't so bad, because the vast majority of them are men. When the adult women need to be referenced by name, we do have a word for that. Do we use it often enough? No. But do you really want to go around saying 'Bronies and pegasisters'? That kind of drives a wedge between them. Yet we need a name that separates the adults from the kids, because the little kids are not so much involved in the community at large. At this late stage in the game, it'd be unlikely we could form such a deep affection for a new name that encompasses all the adult MLP fans.
7426570 Ponies at Heart? Equestrians? Subject of the Princesses? I got nothing.
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Celestia's words echoed. "My little ponies. There's a time and place for everything, but not now."
Also, cool chapter!
I'm kinda liking the whole 'stumbling through magic' bits... very fascinating to me, in a way I can't quite articulate.
Hmph, I know this might sound a little... off, but do any of you have access to a... uh, crap, what was it?
"Perhaps access to a level 13 CVTD would be helpful. Even a level 8 would help a lot."
Yeah, that. Looks like its meant to be worn, has a weird glowing core? Anything like that?
"I don't think they have such a thing. Or even know its purpose."
Well that's bollocks. We can't just sit here and watch!
"Actually, we can."
Uh, no. That ain't right.
"Unless you want to sacrifice the Window to get over there and get your butt handed to you, I suggest you sit still, or make yourself useful and retrieve a snack for me."
Ugh... being a Watcher sucks. Couldn't I be in Intervention?
"What's the Intervention's Code?"
Uuuuuuuuuugh... fine. But if they break out any Crosser or Looper tech-
"Then Intervention will deal with it. Let the ponies do their thing. They got this."
And how do you know?
*Unamused look*
... fair point.
somehow this seems familiar....
.
I have been in Boy Scouts for six years and can count the times I have used an ax on an outing on one hand. Never at the summer camps, and like twice on weekend camps. I've damn near lost my thumb on a knife before, at summer camp. Okay maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but there was a lot of blood and I've got maybe a centimeter long scar on my left thumb. Good times, man. Hurt like hell, but the shttiest experiences are the most fun when you look back on them.
Okay, when obsidian shatters, it shatters so sharply you literally wouldn't feel it if it cut you. I know of a kid who cut himself on a shard of obsidian in class once. My teacher said the hunk of obsidian he passed around the class (he passed a bunch if rocks around in that class, even diamonds at one point) got bumped against a desk and when the kid passed it off, he cut himself and didn't realize it until his desk was literally soaked with blood.
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I would far prefer 'Pony fans', though for my own reasons, unrelated to gender. I grew up in the seventies in the UK and we never named fandoms, you were simply 'a fan of...some franchise', so the whole practice seems bizarre to me. Also the word 'Brony' just sounds a bit stupid.
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Do you even see the irony in your own words? I mean, given the nature of the show and its genesis. Just curious. Also I note the use of the word we, who exactly do you presume to speak for?
This story is fucking awesome.
Heyyy, Spitfire!
Also this went from 0-500.
Going a bit fast...
7543092 Yes.