[Witches' Horses] Swallow's Tail
Title: smelling smoke
'Verse/characters: Swallow's Tail; Taarstad, Sascha, Helena, Petrovich, others
Prompt: 91C "echo"
Word Count: 976
Notes: incorporates much of no horses in Eljúdnir. This is several days after names.
Realistically speaking this is a thousand word sketch for an eventual five thousand words. >.>
If he didn't know horses weren't actually capable of it, he would have sworn the horse just sneezed. Full, explosive backfirin--uh, oh.
"Um, Helena--" he was starting to say into the pickup when the door slid open and Aleksandr jerked his dreadlocked head in a 'come here' gesture he almost knew.
"Get up there, kid," he rumbled, pointing to the head. "I'll be on the other end."
He ran.
Helena was just about spitting at the biggest control board, obviously trying to figure out what was wrong but having only very, very basic knowledge of how horses worked.
He reached over her shoulder, carefully, and flipped the horse onto her backup systems, flicked the engineer's pickup on as he caught at a handhold as the gravity dropped. "Sascha, there anything on fire down there?"
"Some smoke, no visible fire yet," came a reply as Helena slid out from between him and the panel, watching him with curious eyes as she hooked herself to a wall out of the way.
He checked the panel, looking for out of place more than for anything specific, found about seven possibles. "Alright. We're showing low on ice, something may've clogged the feeder. Air looks okay, so do the coils--"
"Thank the lightning saints," the Captain muttered from the horse's neck. He didn't have time to look over, but Helena nodded, still looking thoughtful. After a moment he could hear the Captain's hands on the handholds going down the neck.
Hauling himself down and around to get a look at the underside of the panel, "Oh, that's not good."
He raised his voice, "Sascha, we've got a short that popped at least two breakers and it smells kind of smoky down here. How bad's it look down there?"
"Been worse," Sascha replied, as a more human sneeze echoed behind him. "Backups look okay on this end, too, we're tracing wires--OW."
There was a brief interval of that not-Russian cursing, before "Found it," the Captain said over the pickup. "Stripped wire, got too hot and melted onto another one."
" . . . is Sascha all right?"
"He found the wire with his bare hand. Blister, no charring, he'll be fine."
Sascha rumbled something in the background, the cadence reminding him of someone consigning something to the lower reaches of Jötunheimr, to be gnawed over by ermine.
"Can we limp by for three days?" Helena asked softly, and he pulled himself out from under the panel to look a question at her.
"Vladimir-Suzdal's outermost terem," she explained, and something cold gripped his gut. They'd probably leave him there, hostage duty done.
Without a card to said he could ride, an imperfect grasp of the main language, no place to stay, and no one he even had a name for.
"We'll keep tracing," the Captain replied, fortunately deaf to his sudden terror. "Let us know if anything else shows up."
It took three hours to figure out where everything affected lay, but in the end it was obvious they wouldn't be found adrift, given to the winter by mechanical failure, and he switched the coils back on.
He tried desperately not to make a nuisance of himself in the days remaining, offering to help patch things, clean the dishes (though Sascha had to tell him how, the machine they used completely foreign). He was a hostage, and he couldn't afford to think of them--and the horse--as something to get used to.
That didn't keep him from automatically responding when any of them called him by his farm's name, falling in a half-step behind and to the side of whichever of them needed something.
So when the Captain said "Taarstad, you're with Helena, go pick up at least a spare spool," he trailed automatically after her, down out of the horse and into a terrifyingly foreign cacaphony of voices, goods and colours.
She didn't seem to mind overmuch that he stuck tightly to her heels, watching the market with wide eyes, though she did glance back from time to time to place him.
She knew the market, nodding greetings to sellers and shaking her head when a few looked at her with inquiring eyes. It wasn't until she stepped into a half-room, waved him over to a shelf full of salvaged chips and half-broken mechanisms that she even really paused.
"Ah, Elena, how nice to se--" the shop's tender broke off when she nailed his sleeve to the table he was sitting at with a knife she pulled out of nowhere, slid up close to hold another knife at an angle to shave with at his neck.
"I told you what would happen the next time you couldn't be bothered to pronounce my name correctly," she told the man in a chilly tone. "I even know you can say it. Come on. 'Helena'. Hel-en-ah, not 'Elena', or 'Ilyana'."
The man swallowed carefully, skin shifting against the blade's edge. "Your pardon, Helena. What brings you here?"
"I need three spools of insulated wire," she replied calmly, pulling away to drop something that sparkled on the table by the man's sleeve.
"Mm. I have only two." He examined the something sparkly with a loupe after she freed his arm. "Two and a timekeeper, for your lovely horse?"
"Two and change," she corrected. "I know better than to put a standard timekeeper in my horse."
Her name was echoing oddly in his head, the syllables repeating over and over, as she and the tender argued back and forth a little more, then two spools of wire and a length of cable were handed over. He used the cable to rig a way to carry the spools with his hands free, still thinking about her name.
It wasn't until they were nearly back to the horse that the mental thunderbolt hit.
'Verse/characters: Swallow's Tail; Taarstad, Sascha, Helena, Petrovich, others
Prompt: 91C "echo"
Word Count: 976
Notes: incorporates much of no horses in Eljúdnir. This is several days after names.
Realistically speaking this is a thousand word sketch for an eventual five thousand words. >.>
If he didn't know horses weren't actually capable of it, he would have sworn the horse just sneezed. Full, explosive backfirin--uh, oh.
"Um, Helena--" he was starting to say into the pickup when the door slid open and Aleksandr jerked his dreadlocked head in a 'come here' gesture he almost knew.
"Get up there, kid," he rumbled, pointing to the head. "I'll be on the other end."
He ran.
Helena was just about spitting at the biggest control board, obviously trying to figure out what was wrong but having only very, very basic knowledge of how horses worked.
He reached over her shoulder, carefully, and flipped the horse onto her backup systems, flicked the engineer's pickup on as he caught at a handhold as the gravity dropped. "Sascha, there anything on fire down there?"
"Some smoke, no visible fire yet," came a reply as Helena slid out from between him and the panel, watching him with curious eyes as she hooked herself to a wall out of the way.
He checked the panel, looking for out of place more than for anything specific, found about seven possibles. "Alright. We're showing low on ice, something may've clogged the feeder. Air looks okay, so do the coils--"
"Thank the lightning saints," the Captain muttered from the horse's neck. He didn't have time to look over, but Helena nodded, still looking thoughtful. After a moment he could hear the Captain's hands on the handholds going down the neck.
Hauling himself down and around to get a look at the underside of the panel, "Oh, that's not good."
He raised his voice, "Sascha, we've got a short that popped at least two breakers and it smells kind of smoky down here. How bad's it look down there?"
"Been worse," Sascha replied, as a more human sneeze echoed behind him. "Backups look okay on this end, too, we're tracing wires--OW."
There was a brief interval of that not-Russian cursing, before "Found it," the Captain said over the pickup. "Stripped wire, got too hot and melted onto another one."
" . . . is Sascha all right?"
"He found the wire with his bare hand. Blister, no charring, he'll be fine."
Sascha rumbled something in the background, the cadence reminding him of someone consigning something to the lower reaches of Jötunheimr, to be gnawed over by ermine.
"Can we limp by for three days?" Helena asked softly, and he pulled himself out from under the panel to look a question at her.
"Vladimir-Suzdal's outermost terem," she explained, and something cold gripped his gut. They'd probably leave him there, hostage duty done.
Without a card to said he could ride, an imperfect grasp of the main language, no place to stay, and no one he even had a name for.
"We'll keep tracing," the Captain replied, fortunately deaf to his sudden terror. "Let us know if anything else shows up."
It took three hours to figure out where everything affected lay, but in the end it was obvious they wouldn't be found adrift, given to the winter by mechanical failure, and he switched the coils back on.
He tried desperately not to make a nuisance of himself in the days remaining, offering to help patch things, clean the dishes (though Sascha had to tell him how, the machine they used completely foreign). He was a hostage, and he couldn't afford to think of them--and the horse--as something to get used to.
That didn't keep him from automatically responding when any of them called him by his farm's name, falling in a half-step behind and to the side of whichever of them needed something.
So when the Captain said "Taarstad, you're with Helena, go pick up at least a spare spool," he trailed automatically after her, down out of the horse and into a terrifyingly foreign cacaphony of voices, goods and colours.
She didn't seem to mind overmuch that he stuck tightly to her heels, watching the market with wide eyes, though she did glance back from time to time to place him.
She knew the market, nodding greetings to sellers and shaking her head when a few looked at her with inquiring eyes. It wasn't until she stepped into a half-room, waved him over to a shelf full of salvaged chips and half-broken mechanisms that she even really paused.
"Ah, Elena, how nice to se--" the shop's tender broke off when she nailed his sleeve to the table he was sitting at with a knife she pulled out of nowhere, slid up close to hold another knife at an angle to shave with at his neck.
"I told you what would happen the next time you couldn't be bothered to pronounce my name correctly," she told the man in a chilly tone. "I even know you can say it. Come on. 'Helena'. Hel-en-ah, not 'Elena', or 'Ilyana'."
The man swallowed carefully, skin shifting against the blade's edge. "Your pardon, Helena. What brings you here?"
"I need three spools of insulated wire," she replied calmly, pulling away to drop something that sparkled on the table by the man's sleeve.
"Mm. I have only two." He examined the something sparkly with a loupe after she freed his arm. "Two and a timekeeper, for your lovely horse?"
"Two and change," she corrected. "I know better than to put a standard timekeeper in my horse."
Her name was echoing oddly in his head, the syllables repeating over and over, as she and the tender argued back and forth a little more, then two spools of wire and a length of cable were handed over. He used the cable to rig a way to carry the spools with his hands free, still thinking about her name.
It wasn't until they were nearly back to the horse that the mental thunderbolt hit.