Parrothead in Paradise

by PastCat

Chapter 10

The next morning, all six of us packed up for the trip to Diamond Head. We decided to try a slightly different route this time, with a walkthrough of what was left of Ala Moana Shopping Center. We were not planning on any major raiding, but it would give us a better idea of some of the stops we could make in the future. Doc’s unexpected reaction to gemstones meant that one of the things we wanted to check for was jewelry stores. For whatever reason, the sparklies made him happier, so we decided to at least make note of a few sources for future use. I still don’t get why the Guide had so little on Diamond Dogs and their hoarding instincts, but maybe the author had not met enough of them to know everything there was to know. It seemed harmless enough to us, so we let it be.

We made our way down University and towards the beach before turning towards the east and making our way through the pseudo jungle towards Diamond Head. Seeing as our goal was the tunnel, we were each carrying a backpack with snacks, a water bottle, and whatever light sources we could gather. Mostly that was our battered flashlights and a camping lantern that was solar charged from the trailer. With the six of us together, the group was a little more unwieldy, but we did okay. After about half an hour of walking, we stopped to take a break. Trish went into a copse of trees to, ahem, take care of business. We heard her shriek a couple of minutes later.

The five of us rushed into the trees to find out what Trish had run into. She was standing, frozen, at the sight of something in one of the trees. We all averted our eyes away from her; no one likes to literally be scared shitless and she was embarrassed enough as it was. In the tree above her dangled a skeleton that looked distinctly equine. It must have belonged to a unicorn, as the skull had a horn in the middle of the forehead. I carefully climbed the tree to get a closer look.

The pony had been caught between a couple of branches. Based on the angle of the skull, it had probably broken its neck upon landing there. The skeleton was clothed in the remnants of a leather flight suit. Goggles were visible around its head. I reached for the skeleton and caught my talons on something around its neck. I pulled out a chain with a pair of shiny dog tags. A few tugs and the chain broke and I let the identification disks fall into Doc’s outstretched paws. He held them in the light as he tried to read the name “Mary… C. I can’t make out the rest. It’s pretty much worn away.” He shrugged. “Do you think you can get her down in one piece, PH? We ought to do something for her, whoever she was.”

I nodded and did my best to extract the remains of poor Mary from the tree. It was not easy; she must have been there for a while and the branches had started to grow around the bones. Eventually the bones and the leather remnants were on the ground. We gathered them up to give them a more respectful resting place than in the branches of a tree.

The discovery leached the enthusiasm out of the group. We still made the trip to Diamond Head, but instead of joking and talking among ourselves along the way, we walked in silence. Doc and I took up the rear with Mary and her things piled on a large leaf that we were balancing between us. It was not easy to get through the cut path with our burden, but we eventually made it. Adam led us all to the cave. Before we went in, Doc and I decided to bury the remains outside a short distance away. It didn’t take long; Diamond Dogs can dig through just about anything and we didn’t need a large hole. We left the name tags on a wooden marker over the gravesite. None of us wanted to keep them.

We went into the tunnel in silence. The flashlights and lamp were lit by the time Doc and I made it in so we joined the others examining the carved names in more detail. Before long, I heard Emmy exclaim from deeper in the tunnel. “Oh my God.”

“What, what is it?” I heard someone ask; I couldn’t tell who it was in the echoing cavern.

“Listen to this:” Emmy’s horn lit up a lengthy description. “To those who Return to this place, know that you may be in great danger. The sea gives and takes away those who seek to rebuild this place. Those who have been granted the shelter of the highlands are safe from the beings that invade from the sea. Know this, former humans; I was the last of our colony and on this day, one thousand years after the Event that created this new world, I vowed to never surrender to the sea.” Emmy hesitated here; an expression of puzzlement on her face. “The name has been rubbed out.”

“Well that’s not creepy at all.” Nic said, rolling his eyes. “You would think a warning would be more specific.”

“Maybe it couldn’t be.” I said. “After all, if names have power like Emmy said last night, the writer probably didn’t want to write out what the specific name was, lest it attract whatever it was.Or maybe he didn’t know what to call the thing that attacked his colony. I don’t want to know, but we should take it seriously nonetheless.” I said.

“One thousand years … after the Event?” Trish murmured. She was still trembling from her shock outside. She had refused to go back to Base Camp to recover. “If it was a thousand years late when he carved this, and this is the oldest inscription -- it is the oldest right? -- then that means we did not Return until even later. How long were we in limbo then?”

None of us knew the answer to that. Maybe if one of us had been an astronomer who could plot the stars or something, we might have been able to figure out the timing, but none of us could be quite that precise.

Doc was looking at the rock around us, with the carved names. No; not looking; Doc was sniffing the rock. He even chipped a little bit off and tasted it. “I think…” He said, his voice echoing, “well I have a theory any way. I can tell how old each of these groupings is by the rock, or at least by the dust that accumulated in each cut. I might be able to estimate the ages of each group.”

We were stunned. That was new. Doc just shrugged. “One more thing for the Diamond Dogs entry of the book I guess. It is almost like I can… feel the rock and understand what it has to tell me. Every fissure in the surface, every cut tells me something about what happened… and when. I can even tell what material was used to cut these names. Probably a drill bit or something like that. Diamond tipped.” He licked his lips. “Don’t ask me how I know that; I don’t know either. Magic, I suppose.”

I nodded. There was enough of that going around between the wind sense that Adam and I were getting and the way the earth responded to Nic and Trish and Emmy’s horn stuff. It was weird, but what wasn’t these days?

“It will take some time for me to figure it all out though. We definitely will not get anything else from that line of inquiry today.” Doc continued.

The rest of us continued to explore the tunnel. The names were scattered all throughout the structure. We found no other messages, other than the sea monster warning. It was just a bunch of names, hometowns, and species. Most of them were in Latin characters, with the names and such that were not being clustered on the east wall near the entrance. Evidently that particular group had included a number of tourists from China or Japan.

One name we did not find was our mysterious Mary’s. Given where we found her, she’d never even made it to the ground, much less here to Diamond Head. If there had been others with her, they had fared no better. It appeared that the poor unicorn had died alone. It was a sobering thought. No wonder none of us felt like eating lunch.

After a while, the tunnel started to feel claustrophobic. I headed outside, with Adam in tow, to climb up to the observation deck that looked over what was once Waikiki. Feeling the fresh air revived my spirits somewhat and I was eager to open my wings to the wind. Adam was more circumspect, but he too seemed more interested in being outside than before.

We stood on the rickety platform, the wind in our faces. I opened my wings to get the feel of it through my feathers as I made my way away from the cliff face and into the wind. I stood on the edge of the observation deck and looked out over the world below. Without guardrails between me and that view, I felt as though I was the only one out here. The air played around my wings and tickled my feathers. I stretched them out to their full extent and felt… something. A press upwards from below my primaries. I closed my eyes in the hopes of focusing more on that sensation.

I lost myself in the feel of the wind as it flowed around and under my wings. I lost all sense of the ground and the worries I had held there. It felt as though I was experiencing freedom itself. I do not know how long I stood there, lost in that bliss, but a yelp from behind and… below me! Made me open my eyes.

About ten feet below me, I could see Adam standing wide eyed on the observation platform. His mouth was gaping in astonishment. I looked left and right, first at my outstretched wings, then down to see that neither my talons nor my paws remained on the platform. Looking down made me start to tilt downwards, so I hurriedly looked back forward. Maybe it’s like riding a motorcycle, I thought. You turn by leaning. Dad always said that you need to look through your turns and at where you are going. If you look down, that is where you will go. I looked to the right and felt my body adjusting into a slow wide turn. I managed to level out again. There must have been a thermal or something like that, because I was not having to flap my wings. They twitched every so often, as though adjusting themselves to the subtle changes in the air around me. I did another banking turn, this one to the left, and found myself facing the cliff. From this angle, I could hear Adam yelling. Sort of.

“Get… down… Doc… storm... “ I could not hear every word he said from below me, but I could make a few guesses. Besides, there were storm clouds gathering out at sea and I did not really want to see if the Guide’s “cloud walking” worked for griffons as well as ponies today.

At that moment, I was more distracted by another problem: namely that I was not certain how to get down safely. I looked down deliberately this time and closed my wings a little. I had drifted outwards from the platform and the wind had carried me farther than I thought. I flapped my wings to fight it and realized that I would hit the platform much faster than I anticipated. I scrambled to slow my descent as Adam gestured to me towards him. The last thing I saw before I hit the platform was the pegasus’ wide eyes as he realized that my landing was aimed straight at him.

What resulted was one of the most awkward positions I have ever had the misfortune to be found in. What is worse, the sound of my screeching as I tried to land and Adam’s horsey screaming attracted the attention of the rest of the group, all of whom came rushing up the path to the lookout to find out what was going on. I landed on top of Adam, slamming both of us into the platform against the cliff face. By the time everyone else got up there, he was flat on his back, wings splayed out, with me on top of him and both of us face to face. The forced landing had knocked the wind out of both of us, so neither of us could say anything as three ponies and a diamond dog nearly fell off the cliff laughing. Both Adam and I blushed furiously and separated as quickly as we could. It was more of a mad scramble than anything else, but it did the job.

“If you two wanted some more privacy, all you had to do was ask, guys.” Emmy said to us once she had gotten her voice back.

Adam and I glanced at each other and edged even further apart. That nearly set off the others again. “Let’s just head back down before this storm comes in all right?” I grumbled. The others snickered at my discomfort, but we all started back down the path to the interior of Diamond Head. From the corner of my eye, I saw Adam glance speculatively skyward before he brought up the rear of the group. I wondered if he was considering attempting a flight of his own later on. For now, it didn’t matter.

We took shelter from the rain back in the name tunnel. Emmy had not felt anything magical about the place, save for the fact that some of the names had been carved by unicorns. The note in the back passage was still a mystery to us; after all it was unsigned. We had no way of knowing who wrote the warning. So we made plans for the next few days, or at least floated ideas. Emmy wanted to bring the Guidebook here, as she thought it might have some spells or other magic that might interact with anything potentially hostile. Doc intended to return too, in order to attempt to work out via his rock sense the age of each group’s marks. Trish and Nic wanted to explore around the area a bit more, in case there were more tunnels that might be useful to us. If nothing else, they had the potential to provide better shelter than our Base Camp. I still disliked the fact that no trees grew here; how was a griffon supposed to nest underground?

As for me, I wanted to try flying again, but under more controlled circumstances. Adam was still embarrassed about what had happened (as was I), but he agreed to help me make a sort of harness that I could use to anchor myself to the ground while I experimented with flight. I figured that if anyone could rig something like that up, he would be the one due to his experience with building his camera kites. I did not want to say much to him about flying, but I knew deep down that he wanted to try it too. It was at that level beyond the logical one; more instinct than anything else. Adam’s skepticism was being whittled down, little by little, with each passing day and seemingly impossible occurrence. I was sure that I would get him airborne in time. For now though…

“Nothing happened between us. Really.” I said to Emmy and Trish. The pair of ponies had pulled me aside for what they loudly called “girl talk”. Ew. Not my preferential choice for an afternoon of sitting out a larger than usual rain storm.

“Up there? Of course not. Too windy.” Trish said, rolling her eyes. “We just want to find out if you had any… other experiences. Um, you know.” She at least looked uncomfortable. I gathered that she had never had any really serious relationships; I was the same way.

Emmy, on the other hand (claw? hoof?) snorted. “You might be able to fool everyone else, Parrothead, but there is definitely some chemistry going on there. I can see it, and so can Doc and Nic. Neither of them is going to say diddly squat about it unless it goes sour.”

I shook my head. “Nothing is going on. Nothing like that has even been considered to go on. You are a delusional romantic, Emmy.”

“And you are too innocent for your own good,or maybe just naive.” Emmy shot back. “I would bet you my Harry Potter book that he has the hots for you, and you for him. You are just too chicken to admit it.”

“I am no chicken, horn head.” I said. To my chagrin, my wings poomphed outwards, feathers outstretched. I probably looked more like said chicken than I had before.

Emmy laughed, which made Trish laugh too. I tried in vain to get my wings to behave themselves, but it only resulted in the feathers sticking out even more. I grumbled and fussed while trying to ignore the giggles.

Comments

[Dances With Unicorns]

Your entertaining story is as good as many of the better episodes of the cannon series. I hope that your protagonists someday find out why Mary the Unicorn was airborne while wearing goggles and a leather flight suit.