Pooka Friends

Beautiful, cute commission by the lovely Patricia, better known as   Thank you, my friend!

Ellie and her fellow pooka, Primula, take a picture after a long fun day of enjoying each other's company.  The fast friends are quite different from one another,  though they both come from two-mother families... 

A lovely moment to remember, taken just before their unexpected and messy demise*:

 

The sun beat down mercilessly on the wastelands as the buggy sped across the cracked ground and dunes of sand.  The interior of the small continent of Oceania was inhabited only by the remnants of the original aboriginal culture, and by the wild tribes of orcs and goblins who crossed from Erythria centuries past.  The Erythrian settlers wisely built their settlements around the verdant coastline, abandoning the Outback to savage tribes and the strange creatures of the DreamTime.   It was no place for a civilised man… but this was where their search led them, and the four intrepid explorers relished their scouting mission.   

The wind whipped though their hair as the dune buggy sped along, the ramshackle little outrunner hurtling along at a breakneck speed.  The older man – chaperone to three young women in their teens, smiled as he looked about him.

“That was quite the scrap, what?   Those ork blighters certainly know how to put up a fight…!”

“Yeah, that robot of yours totally rocks, Rimu!”  the heavily-tattooed driver shouted above the roaring wind, enjoying the feeling of hot wind and sand in her face.

“Orks nil, killer robot… several dozen?”  Ellie chuckled at her pooka friend.  Primula pouted slightly. She had been keeping a confirmed count.

“Forty-seven,” she said in her calm little tone. ”If we count the rocket launcher kills.”

She blinked, watching her animated little kitty-helpers dash about the gun turret and cling on excitedly as the car sped along.

“They messed with Mister Zero,” the young girl said flatly. “Nobody messes with Mister Zero…!”

“Rather proud that you managed to knock up this jalopy from the innards of all those ork carts we found,” AJ commented, impressed.  “Certainly a chip off the old block, Primula… Warms an old man’s heart… And now, here we are, following that lead Ellie found in the Technocratic Union’s secret laboratory, investigating the reports of strange creatures sighted, and the queer steam apparatus the local tribes are said to be using…!”

Primula frowned at her grand-father.

“Opa.”

He looked a little sheepish.

“Oh, there I go, I’m spouting exposition again, aren’t I?” he admitted.

 

In the front of the buggy, Fran glanced back over her shoulder.

“Y’know, Ellie, the old dude is kinda fit, for an older guy…” she commented.  “I mean, he’s pretty trim and dapper… And that outfit, with all the straps an’ buckles an’ all? Kinda kinky, if you ask me…”

Ellie rolled her eyes.

“I don’t think he’d be interested,” she admitted.

“Oh, that…!” Fran mused.  “Well, yeah, but who’s to say he knows he likes girls if he’s only tried guys? I could… what do they call it…? ‘Turn’ him…”

Ellie rolled her eyes again.  She knew better than to argue.

“Eyes on the road, Franster,” she muttered.  “Bridge coming up…”

“I see it…! Hey, shit, what the hells, I’m gonna take this sucker at Mach 5! Hey Rimu, let’s see if this kit-bashed pile of crap you made handles as well as Betsy – “

Fran stamped down on the accelerator, and whooped as the buggy shook to its bolts. The little ‘plushies’ squealed happily.

“Faster- faster!” they trilled.

As the buggy hurtled towards the rickety, narrow wooden bridge across the rocky gorge, Ellie reflected that they hadn’t seen anything living for the past hour.

Until now.

Inching its way laboriously across the wooden slats was a small, fluffy creature, with white fur and large, dark round eyes. It looked up, puzzled, as the buggy hurtled towards it.

“OH FUUUUUCKKK>>>!!!!”

Fran squealed, ramming on the breaks as fast as she could.   The buggy whined in protest, as the central axle strained, then snapped clean in half, as both sides of the vehicle careered off the bridge into the ravine below, belching smoke.

The little fluffy creature ambled to the edge of the bridge and looked down, an expression of bewilderment on its fluffy face.

'What the fluff…?' it thought.

 

 "AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”  Ellie mewed, as she span, head over heels, into the clear blue skies.

AJ righted himself in mid-air, the nine coloured spheres chiming and wheeling about him, as he defied gravity’s cruel grip.  He saw Primula calmly gesture, as the plushies clung to her, the smaller one clutching the tail of the other, as she dropped through the air at an alarming rate.  And at her gesture, something clawed out of what Holly called ‘hammerspace’, taking on bulk and form… A circular, bulbous frame, spawning long, multi-jointed limbs with claws and tools and nozzles, the base of the sphere belching smoke and flames, keeping it upright.  The spider-like tin thing, steam pouring from its vents, almost delicately plucked the pooklet and her plushies from the air, and dove towards the canyon bottom, where it deposited them – the little girl calm and unruffled, the kitty-helpers excited and animated.  

“Thank you, Mister Zero,” Rimu nodded simply.

AJ had to make a split-second decision who to save.  Hoping their driver would be all right, he swam through the windy tides to scoop Ellie out of the air, and alighted gently beside his grand-daughter.

“My hero!” Ellie giggled shyly.

“AAAAAAGGGHHHHFUCKYOUFUCKIMFUCKINGFUCKCUNTSHIT –“

The torrent of profanity ended abruptly as Francesca Sawyer hit the canyon floor with a sickening sound.

 

“Ouchie,” Rimu said in her calm tones.

Ellie ran over to help her with her Heather Balm, and AJ with his Life Sphere.

Her slim little body shattered, limbs at a disturbing angle, the feisty little tattoo-lover clambered out of the hole her impact had created.

“When my bones knit, you’re all dead,” she muttered darkly.

“Oh dash it all, I’m so sorry!”  AJ apologised, helping her natural regenerative powers with a  surge of magick. “I, um, I thought you were… ah…! Um, indestructible, Miss Sawyer…?”

“Ugh,” she muttered.  “Okay, now I’m completely off men!”

 

They regrouped at the canyon bottom, with AJ and Ellie consulting their map.  Ellie called up the maps on her little gadget, and compared it with an overlay of the area conjured by the archmage. 

“Looks like we’re close…” Ellie muttered, shaking her head.  “This is where the base is supposed to be…”

“That’s some coincidence,” Fran muttered through gritted teeth. 

“I’m not sure if I believe in those,” Rimu mused.

“Everything is connected, aye, and happens for a reason, true…” AJ mused.  “Call it ‘synchronicity’ then, more than happenstance…”

“Maybe we should go look for the little seal,” Ellie murmured.  “It must be really scared…”

“Over here…!” Rimu called.

The ‘plushies’ were falling over themselves to get Rimu’s attention, gesturing to a crack in the canyon bottom, a narrow cave leading to a winding passage in the dry red rock. 

“Spiders and flies, aye?” AJ chuckled.  “All right, let’s bite… Now, let’s all be in order, gels… After me, one at a time…”

AJ slipped into the dark cavity, his glowing spheres illuminating the narrow path before them. It seemed to be some kind of a mine, the narrow cracks opening up into a disused shaft with abandoned carts lying silently along crude iron tracks. 

“But what were they mining here…? And why? The plot thickens…!” Rimu muttered, like some gumshoe detective, seemingly to herself.

"I’ve a bad feeling about this…!” Ellie muttered.

 

The mineshaft opened into another chamber,  a narrow decline leading to a small cavern area.  The scent of chemicals was in the air.

A tall, slender figure waited in a dim pool of light, oddly familiar in its bearing, being lanky and swathed in shadow.  From beneath a dark hood, leered a hideous face – no, a grotesque party-mask of some kind, ugly and grimacing.   

The figure muttered to itself, as if giving orders to some unseen servitors.

“Keep looking.  The QT/KT model was hiding out here.  It’s gotta be close, yeah? It can’t have crawled far…”

The voice was accented, the thick parlance of the Oceania settlers.

“Looks like our guests showed up,” the stranger muttered.

“Ho, mountebank!”  AJ hailed him, frowning, his manner accusatory.   “Might you be the dastardly antagonist we have come here seeking, the mastermind behind the fiendish schemes heretofore only ominously hinted at?”

“Yer what, mate?”  The masked man grimaced.

“Are you with the bad guys?” Fran translated.  “I was, um, like, gonna ask that myself…!”

A sneer now, human lips half-glimpsed beneath the hideous mask.

“Bad guys? Nah, cobber. Yer got it all wrong.  Ye can call me ‘Outback Jack’…!”

He smirked as he looked about him in the gloom.

“It’s cute how y’all think yer the heroes of this little adventure… but yer not. I’m the damn hero.”

“Opa.”

Rimu pulled on AJ’s sleeve and gestured about her.

“Explosives, Lots of them,” she said with her usual detached aplomb.

As they glanced to the side,  they could now see that in the darkened gloom, there were heaps of crates, barrels of gunpowder.  There were stacks of dull red tubes lashed together with twine, bundles of dynamite. The barrels were marked with three ominous letters: ‘T.N.T’

“That means ‘tri-nitro-glycerine’,” explained Rimu calmly.

“Oh, gee, thanks, nerd girl,” Fran grimaced.

“Welcome ta the Wastelands, cobbers,” Outback Jack muttered unpleasantly.

 

And then there was a burst of foul-smelling brimstone, and a flash of hell-fire, a spark of devilish light… And as the hooded figure vanished, swallowed up by shadow, the spark caught light, jumping from one mound of explosives to the next.

“Oh, fuc – “

Fran never finished the sentence; caught flat-footed, they could only look on as the cavern erupted in a crescendo of violent explosions, obliterating everything within it… … including all four intrepid explorers…

 

 * Disclaimer: They are Faey, so they get better when they die   AJ has 'Destiny', which gives him extra lives, and Fran's just flat-out indestructible... Though she was annoyed that the others just 'popped back' when she had to regenerate from a pile of red smeary gloop...

Fran here, on the right: maelora69.deviantart.com/art/S…

AJ and Ellie here (Primula's mom on the left): maelora69.deviantart.com/art/S…

Primula here, with her parents:  maelora69.deviantart.com/art/W…